New Year's Resolution
Rod Hozack
Partner @ Oliver Wight Asia Pacific | Releasing Huge Trapped Value Through Integrating Businesses
It is good to be back publishing online again and it is that time of year that we are thinking about New Year's resolutions. My journey over the past few years has been one of health distractions, finishing a book, and navigating Covid-19, but it feels good to be sharing my experiences of life, business, and the universe, once again.
I hope everyone has settled on their New Year's resolutions and are now working on executing them effectively. The process I go through to set my New Year's resolutions stems back to my profession sporting career and it might be helpful for businesses to contemplate adopting a similar process. It has been brewing over the last couple of years, and stems out of a few tough years with health issues -- three major surgeries, two major infections, and enough drugs to kill an elephant, and to add "insult to injury", my last two Christmases, were spent recovering from Covid-19, and so for two years in a row, our Christmas plans to catch up with family and special friends, have been spoiled.
However, I am still going forward, and I do not mean in a just coping or still breathing sense; but going forward with an improvement mindset to achieve goals and be an inspiration to others. There were times, lying in a hospital bed, consuming copious quantities of drugs, struggling to get out of that bed, that life was not so rosy, but more on that and my New Year's resolution, later.
As a professional athlete, at least once a year, it was expected that everyone would go back to basics and start all over again -- it was a formal resetting process. If I had an injury during the season, I would also do a reset mid season. I learned that this technique was also used by Jack Nichlaus and if it was good enough for arguably the best golfer ever, it was good enough for me, and probably should be good enough for your business too!
Every year, over the Christmas layoff period, I would deconstruct my approach, starting with my grip, then my footwork, then my swing, then revisiting watching the ball, and then most importantly, checking in on my mindset, ready for the new squash season. The fascinating thing was that no matter how much I focused on these things during the season, it was not until I deliberately set time aside to observe and re-build those fundamentals, that I realised just how laxed I had become over the previous year.
The same is true in business. It is just human nature to take short cuts, feel that "good enough, is good enough", and over time go backwards in discipline and focus, not realising that it is the sum of the parts that synergises to produce something greater than those individual parts. Subtracting, or being less rigorous in one aspect, will compromise the synergy of the whole. So, at least once a year, businesses should be checking in on the discipline and integrity of core processes. For example, how disciplined and tight are the following processes in your business:
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Ask yourself the question: "If key people were to leave today, would those processes survive unscathed?" If the answer is "No" or "I don't know", then read on. This is not to be confused with the annual strategy and business planning processes. Those are about defining where the business is heading and to help them be really good plans, they should be built on solid foundations, which is what I am talking about here. It is making sure the building blocks are solid enough to support the strategic growth aspirations.
The mindset reset is the most important because without it, a reset is not going to happen anyway. When I was doing my annual reset as an athlete, the mindset part was based on the basic sports psychology techniques at the time, such as visualisation, managing "self talk" to turn negatives into positives, and controlling negative emotions. They might have been basic techniques, but they were very effective.
Today's positive psychology techniques has extended this to recognising, not suppressing, negative emotions, and working to understand why the negative emotions are arising in the first place. It is also driving people to spend more time on what is working well and why, and less so on what is not, unless that item is mission critical to be competitive. Ellen Langer points out in her new book, "The Mindful Body", you must focus on objectively observing differences and changes. "Objectively" means not applying any judgements. Incidentally, Ellen Langer coined the term "mindfulness" and argues that to be mindful you only need to do two things continually, and they are:
In business, an annual refresher education session and policies and procedures update are essential for people to understand what has changed over the year and not letting knowledge wan over time. For example:
Finally, as an athlete, it was critical to check in on where I was "right now". Not where I want to be; not where I have been at various points of time in the past; but a realistic view on now! This was a critical assessment of wins and losses -- who beat whom over the last 12 months, and what the learning was from each encounter, especially with regards to my strengths, and less so on my weaknesses, unless those weaknesses were leading to losses. This then formed a valid foundation for being able to set a realistic set of goals from then on, and out for the next couple of years.
From a business perspective, at Oliver Wight we call this demonstrated performance. This is a critical mindset shift for most businesses who tend to build those strategic aspirations and business plan goals into plans right from the beginning of the year, not considering that to achieve those aspirations, it is going to take time and effort, and without the starting point being a realistic assessment of demonstrated performance, the glidepath to improvement is going to be invalid before even starting the year.
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Supply people tend to understand demonstrated performance better than other functions, in that it is a fundamental process (AKA rough-cut capacity planning) for assessing the feasibility of the supply plan to meet the demand plan. It does however apply to all other departments, such as how well are milestones achieved on time for new product launches; how well sales are forecast and whether there is bias of either consistently over or under selling to forecast; how close are the updated financial projections to actuals; how well the right people can be recruited at the right time, etc. As I used to say when I was an athlete, "You are only as good as your last win.", so in business you are only as good as what you have recently demonstrated. Building plans on unrealistic performance is a recipe for disaster.
What has this got to do with my New Year's resolution and business performance? Everything. When my health started to be a concern I took the view that I can not do anything about it except go along for the ride, so I just observed the medical procedures, without judgement, until such time as I was back in control. The reset was understanding that my performance potential was different to the past -- neither better nor worse than before. Then the reset expectations are based on a solid understanding of the integrity of the fundamentals, and setting realistic glidepaths for improvement based on that different starting point.
So, what are my New Year's resolutions? They are: 1. to be fit, 2. to be healthy, and 3. to be an inspiration to others. Without going into the details; "being fit" is the training programme and competition goals from that new starting point; "being healthy" is the diet and lifestyle plans; and "being an inspiration" is the client work and publication plan, starting with this article.
How can this be applied to business? This is the cruncher. Most business do not even know they are in a dire position with regards to their core processes, let alone know the pathway to recovery and best practice. As a couple of clients have mentioned recently, "We did not realise just how bad it was, until we had a number of people leave the business, and core processes collapsed overnight!" A potent quote from "Complexity Theory" explains this well, "The unexpected becomes the expected, and then becomes the norm."
This was in reference to major disasters such as the space shuttle explosions and the year on Everest where many people died after a period of relative safety. In other words, without a process for continual renewal, complacency and over confidence will take over from good process fundamentals and discipline, and you will not know the consequences until it is too late!
The application in business is that at least once a year -- not necessarily at Christmas, but at a quiet time for the business -- and after every major set back, formally check in on the fundamentals:
The challenge is for management to understand and drive the message that "good enough, is good enough!" will only lead to just participating in the game, but never consistently winning.
Based on this, what do you think your company's New Year's resolutions should be?
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to taking up where I left off a couple of years back with more insights into business ... stay tuned.
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Rod Hozack, Partner Oliver Wight Asia Pacific ????
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