Making Sense of Growth, Failure, Sensemaking & Codes

1. Business Growth CEO Conference
2. Why We Fail: A Checklist
3. Sensemaking…Making Sense to Challenge the Status Quo
4. An Epidemic?of Success and Comparison
5. “Attention K-Mart Shoppers!”?(one last time)
6. From?Morse Code to Bar Code
7. Econ Recon

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Vistage Business Growth CEO Conference

Friday, November 8,?9 a.m. CDT (Virtual)

Creating a thriving business requires a solid foundation, a clear strategic plan and a focus on elements that increase your company’s value.

Understanding your business’ worth, maximizing it, and leveraging the right resources are essential to achieving the best possible outcomes.?At the Business Growth CEO Conference, you’ll have exclusive access to experts who will help you in building a scalable, high-value business with simplicity.

To boost your learning experience, you have the option of 2 dynamic Breakout Blocks, each offering sessions across three tracks:

1. Foundation & Preparation:? Discover practical tips to elevate your business’s efficiency and bring together the team that forms the foundation for your best results.
2. Growth Levers:? Uncover strategies to enhance your company’s worth by homing in on the right growth initiatives and exploring fresh avenues to accelerate success.
3. Selling & Exiting:? No matter where you are in the transaction cycle, learn how to secure the best possible outcome, tailored to your unique vision.

Featured Speakers: Futurist Lisa Bodell and Vistage Speaker & Strategy Consultant?Marc Emmer .?Bodell is a well-known futurist, and many Vistage Members have taken their strategies to the next level after hearing Emmer’s insights.?

Non-Member Registration: The event is open to non-members C-Level Executives, business owners and direct reports to a CEO with an interest in Vistage membership.? However, before registering,?please reach out to me[email protected]?for a Guest Voucher Code that you will need to register. I’ll provide further instructions when you do.

Why We Fail:? A Checklist

There seems to be no end to the books and articles with prescriptions for success.?

As valuable as they may be, ?it should be asked whether we are giving enough headspace to understanding?why we fail.

Mark Manson, (author of bestselling book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a ____) ?thinks much of failure can be attributed to what he calls?“strategies for reluctance” and sums them up in a compelling blog post 10 Reasons Why You Fail.

We all have times in our lives that feel like a train wreck. Maybe if we have an honest conversation about the reasons why, we could get back on track.

This list may help.

?Sensemaking…Making Sense to Challenge the Status Quo

Kevin A Fee believes that 4 essential skills are necessary for entrepreneurial success:

• Sensemaking?
• Inventing?
• Introducing?
• Distributing?

Sensemaking is least understood of these skills. Sensemaking is?the process of making sense of an environment or information by organizing data until it is understood well enough to make reasonable decisions.?It can also refer to the process of giving meaning to collective experiences.

Fee uses the experience of the three founders of NVIDIA (Jen-Hsun Huang from LSI Logic and AMD, Chris Malachowsky from Sun Microsystems, and Curtis Priem from IBM and Sun Microsystems) to explain the role that sensemaking played in their roadmap behind NVIDIA.

Take a retrospective look at their early decisions and actions to gain some insight into their sensemaking process as they founded and grew the company. Consider how you can make a new sense of in your organization to challenge the status quo.

An Epidemic of Success and Comparison

The War for Talent is not likely to abate anytime soon. Uber Coach Marshall Goldsmith (author?of “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There ”) spoke to over one hundred young future leaders and concluded that that there are “two major social trends are creating challenges for both of them, as young professionals, and for you, as their leader:”

The culture of?success?and the culture of?comparison.

These trends present challenges by themselves and can?reinforce each other in ways both positive and negative. We live in a culture that worships success, and when augmented by the speed of social media and other communication,?the result can catalyze an unhealthy comparison to others that may affect your team members in negative ways that will find their way to your workplace..?

Goldsmith writes that the resulting “anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicide are now described as being at epidemic levels, especially among the young and educated. The birth rate is now the lowest in the developed world. As an example of the comparison culture, South Korea leads the world in cosmetic surgery.”

In a short article in Chief Executive magazine, “Coping with Cultural Catalysts” Goldsmith?explores these phenomena and offers a few prescriptions. ?

“Attention K-Mart Shoppers!“(one last time)

“Attention K-Mart Shoppers!” The last K-Mart superstore in the US closed its doors this past Sunday in Bridgehampton, NY.??

It’s sobering to realize that thirty years ago it was?a major retailing presence with nearly 2,500 stores in the US. Founded in 1885, it had over a century of remarkable success until a decline that it never found a way to arrest set in.

Various strategies were employed to save it including filing the largest retail bankruptcy in history in 2003, another bankruptcy in 2018 and a failed merger with Sears. Unexpected competition from the likes of Wal-Mart and Amazon delivered additional blows.

K-Mart is not alone in failing to meet the challenges faced by many retailers in recent decades.??Just this year, Big Lots, Jo-Ann Fabrics and True Value have closed or filed for bankruptcy, joining the ranks of many other retailers who have failed or struggling to survive and reinvent themselves.?

Bill Gates once warned that “Success is a lousy teacher."? Find out?What killed Kmart ?

From Morse Code to Bar Code

Retailing is more than just the goods offered for sale. It’s also about the shopper’s experience including store location, store layout, lighting and the checkout experience. Many Boomers will remember checkout lines especially in grocery stores before the introduction of UPC (universal product code) scanners. Checkers had to look at each item, find the price and then punch the correct amount into a cash register. Checkout delays drove retailers crazy when they considered the lost profits and customer dissatisfaction.

To the rescue, a young inventor name Joe Woodland. Sitting on a Florida beach one day,?he was drawing lines in the sand with his finger and realized that he could create a “Morse Code” to identify any item by varying the widths of the lines, as Morse had done with the lengths of a signal with dots and dashes. Woodland and a partner received a patent for the concept in 1952 and built a crude prototype scanner utilizing a 500-watt bulb?but had to wait for the laser, a new technology introduced in 1960, to make their vision a practical reality.

In 1972, the first operational UPC scanner and check stand was turned on at a Kroger Store in Cincinnati. “More check stands were installed and a comparison with other Kroger stores told an undeniable and very promising story: the bull's-eye bar code hit the target, with superior sales figures. But this was just one store in a nationwide grocery and supermarket business worth billions. If the laser and bar code were to revolutionize the checkout counter, they would have to be near universal.”

“The History of the Bar Code” ?and its adoption in retail and other sectors is a worthy investment of your time to?understand the circuitous path that innovation must often traverse before wide-spread adoption, and payoff, is assured.

Econ Recon

The Economy that Wouldn’t Die! ?Sounds like a title for a monster movie for Halloween? Fortunately, a good economy is always welcomed and the recent announcement of third quarter GDP is a welcome message. Economist Brian Wesbury pulls the numbers apart for you but warns, as is often the case in any good monster flick that the beast (a recession) will likely return: ?“Add it all up, and we get a 3.0% annual real GDP growth rate for the third quarter. Not a recession yet, but that doesn’t mean that the US economy is out of the woods.” Find out why GDP Growth (is) Still Solid.

I will be distributing the Vistage data on #SMB CEO sentiments on the economy and more.? If you are not on my distribution list and want to receive the PDF, send me a quick email ([email protected])

While we’re discussing GDP,? check out ITR Economics?recently upwardly revised GDP forecast. Finally,?in?ITR’s latest FedWatch post , Brian Beaulieu shares positive date on the?growth of the money supply, consumer expectations and interest rates.

Inflation Simplified:? The resurgence of inflation after forty years of stable prices is a central issue in this year’s election and how you vote may be a function of who you think is responsible for it. Before you draw the curtain and pull the lever on November 6, why not take a minute for some clarity on where inflation really comes from. Economist Brian Wesbury offers one of the better explanations I’ve seen for the phenomenon and I hope you’ll take a few minutes for his one-page primer?“Inflation Simplified.”

Thanks for continuing to read the Make A Difference (MAD) newsletter. I appreciate you and wish you a productive week.

Sue Tinnish, PhD,?Vistage Chair, Facilitator, & Executive Coach

Find me easily at: 847.404.7325, [email protected] , Twitter:?@STinnish, LinkedIn: www.dhirubhai.net/in/suetinnish , Website: https://vistage.com/chairs/sue.tinnish