Operationally Speaking

Organizational Engineering is critical to business success. Defining leadership roles, responsibilities, and measurement process. Organic Growth and staff development or recruiting for growth. Establishing culture in a high performing business. Establishing KPI or Key Performance indicators and getting buy in.

According to Wikipedia, "the conative is one of three parts of the mind, along with the affective and cognitive. In short, the cognitive part of the brain has to do with intelligence, the affective deals with emotions and the conative drives how one acts on those thoughts and feelings." Since business exist and prosper solely as the direct result of their people's actions, it's obvious that the conative strengths of each and every person who belongs to an organization matter a great deal.

So for each job within an organization, there is a specific set of conative characteristics that would make a person particularly well fit for that job. In this episode, I will share with you I used these conative strengths, in one specific practical case, to support a client in creating a particularly strong entrepreneurial organization--so strong that they manage to execute a successful M&A transaction!

Your constraint is limiting your profits. But despite this fact, companies often focus on the wrong things – like cost cutting, product costing or cost accounting, and efficiency. If you really want to maximize profits your focus needs to change. You and your competitors all purchase the same raw materials and equipment, while hiring from the same labor pool. To truly be better, to increase profits and to gain market share you must THINK differently. We’ll discuss what that means and start challenging your thinking!

A publicly-traded company that doesn't have an office? A first fully distributed company delivering products and services based on distributed software platforms? Is this the model for the emerging entrepreneurial businesses of the next decade? Scaling up revenues through higher individual performance?

For most entrepreneurs, starting a business is the worst job you could ever possibly have. It's hard work, and it never ends! Maybe you started your business because you were really great at something, and now you can't stand doing it. Well, consider the possibility that for your business to truly flourish, you don't have to do everything by yourself. Maybe, you could make a bigger impact and be even more profitable if you built your company around the people working there, and not just around you.

A thriving workplace is one in which employees feel connected to the purpose and mission of the organization and can contribute in meaningful ways. What does it take to create a thriving workplace that attracts top talent, and engages and retains the workforce?

There are different types of CEOs. Most are baby boomers. Most will have to sell their business in the next 10, at most 20 years. While in business, the CEOs who spend a significant amount (25%+) of time IN rather than ON their business – experience ‘pain.’

THIS PAIN IS ENTIRELY AVOIDABLE. Typically, most CEOs that spend this amount of time in, rather than on the business do not have a second-in-command or a strong enough right-hand in their business. A few signs that a CEO should consider hiring a Chief Operations Officer are poor work/life balance, inability as an organization to see tasks through completion, a leadership team (or lack thereof) that is unwilling to make tough decisions when it comes to letting go of under performers and holding staff accountable.

Organizational Engineering is critical to business success. Defining leadership roles, responsibilities, and measurement process. Organic Growth and staff development or recruiting for growth. Establishing culture in a high performing business. Establishing KPI or Key Performance indicators and getting buy in.

Entrepreneurs often fail to make the time to work “on” their organizations; learning how to protect competitive work from the every day “necessary” work; and to build organizational models that can scale. Mismanaging growth, entrepreneurs “bolt on” people and functions to keep up, unwittingly bloating costs as fast as they take on new revenue. Organizing by design means intentionally configuring the organization’s assets to match its strategy, and to build in scalability to match growth.

Like all others humans, leaders behave in certain ways in certain situations. Often, they display

simple behavioral tics – bad habits they repeat dozens of times a day in the workplace, and which ultimately diminish their ability to lead. What are some of these leadership challenges faced by entrepreneurial leaders? What are these behaviors that sabotage leaders' leadership? How can they be addressed, and by who?