In many instances my initial question was, “Where do you want to go with this idea and what are you creating?” Oftentimes, my Shapr’s friends could not clearly respond and this, initially, left me somewhat confused. If I was confused from the start, how would their customers (or potential customers) react?

Compelling vision and mission statements have the ability to provide clarity and direction with regard to why a business exists, what purpose it serves and what value it brings to its stakeholders. Not being able to clearly articulate this can obviously make it difficult to get people on board with your ideas. 

Ashley Thompson, the owner of Pressed, a retail store that features uniquely curated and beautifully crafted products, believes that creating a clear vision helped her differentiate, “I had a hard time communicating what made us so unique. Now that I can tell people what our vision and mission are, it makes it so much easier for people to understand why we do what we do. We also needed it as a team. It is so easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day operations and to forget why you started doing this in the first place. Recently, I have been using it a lot to make decisions as well. We are growing so fast and as I make these bigger business decisions, I can see if it aligns with our vision and mission. It keeps me focused so I’m less likely to grow in the wrong direction.  Every choice I make should be getting us one step closer to our vision.”

Her work as a startup leader required her to place a high value on the need to create a vision and mission that inspired her people, “Now when I feel like I am losing sight of my ‘why’ I can look to our vision and mission to remind me why I started doing this in the first place. We also like to have it in front of our whole staff, because it’s a reminder to them that we have this big vision to fulfill. It gives us something to work towards.”

What is the difference between a vision and a mission?

In this video Bruce Johnson simply explains the difference between both:

• Vision is the reason why you exist as a business, your purpose/cause and belief. Vision is about seeing something in the future, the ideal state, that is quite difficult to achieve but is doable. Something people should get excited about it to say, “I want to be part of that.” A vision statement should be clear and simple but inspiring.
  • For example, Ikea’s vision is, “ To create a better everyday life for the many people. ” It describes why the company exists. The statement is short, clear, simple, inspiring, and broad. It doesn’t even mention what company delivers in the statement.
• Mission, on the other hand, is about what you do that has a connection to why you do it. It defines it.
  • For example, Starbucks’s mission is, “To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.” The statement is short and simple. It answers the questions, “who, what and how.”

What is the process to creating a mission and vision statement?

The process of creating vision and mission is usually very creative and involves a lot of critical thinking and planning. The vision and mission prepare the business for the future and challenges the current state, whatever it may be.

An outcome of a clear mission will enable leaders to make decisions that aim to meet a common vision. Clarity on vision and mission will establish guidelines for defining work, tracking progress, and help not to derail during the company’s growth. Internally, it will help define performance standards and build a framework for ethical behaviors. Externally, it will serve well as a marketing tool and connect customers, suppliers and outside partners.

Typically, the process of vision and mission development has been relegated to senior leaders, sometimes with the help of a consultant. The downsides of the traditional approach are that it is usually done over a session or two, assumes most of the critical thinking would be done prior to the sessions (i.e., homework), and usually does not involve feedback and input from employees or other stakeholders, which may result in less buy-in.

Vision development is a critical thinking approach about where you would like to take your business in the next 5-10 years or further. It should be clear, simple and inspiring. Simon Sinek explained that asking the why questions are so important for the business to communicate from inside out rather than outside in, “Instead of telling people how you do it, tell them why you do it.” From there, clearly articulating what success for your organization will look like you will begin to understand the gap between your current and desired, future states. Once this is complete, you can gather feedback from your employees, loyal customers, suppliers and vendors.

The end product could be anything- a song, video, picture or simple statement that can easily be communicated to others. It can be helpful to engage a third party facilitator to help to move the process along in an objective manner by asking the right questions at the right time.

Key topics to consider when developing your Vision and Mission:

• Company’s reputation
• Primary customer and products, word of mouth
• Core values
• Industry respect
• Employees, their motivation, and how are they performing their work and serving customers
• What works well, what doesn’t, what needs to be improved
• Competitive analysis in your industry, including barriers

Ashley Thompson, the owner of Pressed, is happy that she has gone through the process of vision and mission development and she says it makes a big difference now, “Going through the process I learned I didn’t have as great a grasp on our vision as I thought I did. It really made me take a deep look at what success looked like to me.  I thought I knew but when I started going through the questions I realized I had never really set the time aside to think through a lot of these questions.  I had gotten so wrapped up in just keeping our doors open and our store profitable I didn’t know what our vision was anymore. The fire that got me started was gone and going through the process helped me find that again…Finding that again also helped me pass that on to our staff. Now our vision and mission is something we all have in common, it really has united us as a team.”

I like this quote from my favorite book by Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, “There is no greater misfortune in the world than the loss of reason.” For companies, a reason is their vision and writing a vision statement and mission statement is only the beginning, it needs to be continually restated in the organization. When people share the same vision, they are connected by common ambition and caring. In the end, what really matters, whether you, as aspiring entrepreneur, and your people know where your venture is going and have a buy into what you are doing as an organization. But most importantly, do not lose a sight of why you are doing what you are doing, your reason, purpose, belief, your vision.

The post Why Articulating A Clear Vision Is Critical For Entrepreneurs? appeared first on gothamCulture.

Think about the Internet. Most of us weren’t even aware of it until the mid 90’s, but where would we be today without it? Although I type here from the comfort of my office chair, my office is at home and I rarely need to venture into NYC thanks to technology. My office material comes from Amazon.com and my calls are handled over a VOIP platform. All driven by the web.

Knowledge management is a similar area you’ve probably never paid attention to. Maybe you haven’t heard about it yet, but knowledge management is already affecting how you live and work.

At home, no one owns an Encyclopedia Britannica anymore. We find that information elsewhere, like Wikipedia. When we’re on the go, as long as we have our smartphones, apps like Yelp, Waze, Groupon, Instagram, and YouTube are allowing us to contribute to and draw from knowledge management.

Can you see the commonality?

• Providing information to a group expressing interest in the topic
• Harnessing feedback from that group to further refine the content
• Further educating the group, turning them into subject matter experts
• Creating a “center of gravity” for experts and information alike

What is Knowledge Management?

The definition of knowledge management is how an organization creates, shares, uses, and manages information. It refers to improving the organization organically by making the best use of the knowledge at its disposal.

Imagine being able to extract the lessons learned from every piece of work in the company portfolio. Or finding what you’re looking for without rifling through folders or needing to ask dozens of coworkers. Wouldn’t that make your daily work life easier?

In the simplest variant, a Knowledge Management system consists of the following:

• A simple internal process to capture company knowledge
• A Community of Practice (internal experts) to review information that comes in
• Technology to support this process and the Community of Practice

The good news is this: Your company is probably already halfway there and you didn’t even know it! At work, are you using a Microsoft SharePoint server, cloud storage, or a shared drive for people to store documents instead of on individual desktops? Maybe you use Adobe EchoSign to quickly sign documents electronically? And it’s not just technology and software. Simple changes to staffing and process workflow can have equally large impacts (and should be considered prior to software purchases anyway).

The Benefits of Knowledge Management Systems

Now for the bad news. Knowledge management may provide large benefits, but you’re not going to get there overnight. You’re going to have to approach this step-by-step. To implement knowledge management the very first time, adhere to the following process:

1. Develop your problem statement / define the problem you’re trying to solve
2. Isolate a portion of your organization that you think is either interested in or is competent to brainstorm solutions to this problem. This becomes your initial network
3. Create a call to action and brand your campaign / get your entire organization on board and get them interested!
4. Develop a simple process to capture ideas (suggestion box/feedback card/website)
5. Solicit ideas/review ideas with your initial network
6. Implement quick wins & offer praise to the problem contributors

Organizational learning and development becomes more difficult to manage as your company grows. Without managing critical information, team members may take important pieces of tribal knowledge with them when they leave, new employees are forced to learn their roles without any guidance, and a tremendous amount of time is wasted learning and relearning the same processes in inconsistent ways.

But as an organization matures, it forms stronger linkages between leadership, culture, and strategy to allow for longer-term operations planning and enhanced daily operational performance. So why not start considering knowledge management to help support this?

Knowledge management helps gather the power from your entire organization and use it to incrementally improve your daily operations. It enables organizations to learn more intuitively, allowing companies to innovate better through knowledge-sharing organizational structures, processes, and tools. By making their jobs easier and providing a platform to learn new skills, you can engage your workforce by making their work more interesting and relevant. That effort ultimately leads to a series of advantages which, day by day, helps your company stack up better than your competition.

The post Knowledge Management: Did You Know? appeared first on gothamCulture.

I’d never been LEGOLAND before, so I had an opportunity to experience the park with zero expectations — minus the lingering concerns of crowds and hour-long lines that any parent faces with two days in a theme park.

Not only did our family have a great time; we spent most of our flight home reliving the details. And as we put the pieces of our trip back together, I began to deeply appreciate LEGOLAND’s approach to building an exceptional customer experience for their fans.

Now, I’m not naïve enough to believe these brands haven’t taken painstaking efforts to craft the experience to have a certain effect — which usually includes me spending money. Most competitive businesses today understand that cultivating exceptional customer experiences is critical to customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

But how do they do it? How do companies empower their employees to engage customers in ways that create unique, authentic and unscripted experiences?

Building Employee-Driven Customer Engagement

You may not know it from all the colorful LEGO décor, but LEGOLAND California is owned by Merlin Entertainments plc, a global leader in location-based, family entertainment. The British company operates more than 100 attractions, 13 hotels, and 5 holiday villages in 24 countries. Its locations attract more than 63 million visitors and employ about 27,000 employees.

A while back, I wrote about my experience at Disney World. I was particularly impressed with the story of how the janitorial staff, in an effort to turn their somewhat thankless jobs into a way to delight Disney’s customers, began to fill their rubbish cans with water and paint well-known Disney characters on the walkways.

At LEGOLAND, customers are invited to interact directly with their Model Citizens (LEGOLAND employees) throughout the day through the process of trading Minifigures, the iconic LEGO people that come in a million different configurations. Any customer, at any time, can approach a Model Citizen and trade a Minifigure (with all parts attached, of course) for one that the employee has on their brick badge (name tag), or in display boxes that they carry, for free.

“Our Model Citizens play an important role in creating an engaging environment for all our guests at our LEGOLAND Parks, helping enhance their interactivity with the park and in turn delivering them an experience they won’t forget,” shared Merlin Entertainments’ CEO, Nick Varney.

The Minifigure trading program is worldwide at all 7 LEGOLAND Parks, but originated at LEGOLAND California in 2013. Model Citizens have trading stations in retail and food and beverage locations across the Park and there’s a ‘Tip Board’ in the Beginning (first section of the Park) along with a trading station for guests starting their day.

This simple activity doesn’t cost the company a dime (in fact, parents often purchase Minifigures for their children to trade) and it provides a unique and unscripted opportunity for employees to engage and develop deeper connections with the customers they serve.

The Benefits of Employee-Driven Customer Engagement

Customer engagement may be designed and encouraged by the company, like at LEGOLAND, or they may develop in a more organic, grassroots way. Either way, the benefits are undeniable.

According to Gallup research, fully engaged customers represent an average 23 percent premium in terms of profitability, revenue, and loyalty compared with the average customer. In hospitality specifically, fully engaged guests spend 46 percent more per year.

But the benefits of customer engagement reach far beyond revenue alone. Investing in a culture of exceptional customer experience can also:

• Increase customer promotion and referrals to your product or service;
• Increase the likelihood that they will return and repurchase;
• Increase employee engagement as they see the impact of their work and feel empowered;
• Enable peoples’ creativity, allowing them to shine in ways that improve the experience and benefit everyone involved;
• Tangibly reinforce the notion that employee input and ideas are not only welcome, they are valued.

Customer engagement isn’t a single grand gesture. Much like opening that new LEGO set, it often means unpacking and organizing all of your customer touchpoints, identifying opportunities for new pieces to fit, and building new ways to improve the entire customer experience from beginning to end.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

The post The Building Blocks of Exceptional Customer Engagement at LEGOLAND appeared first on gothamCulture.

Many times we forget that the new year is a good marker to go back and re-visit our existing policies and procedures. What worked and what didn’t? What could work better?

For instance, at gothamCulture we try to use our budgeting process as a means to re-examine how we do business and how our use of resources supports our overall strategy. We re-visit our employee handbook and procedure manual to make sure we are doing things the way they are outlined, helping to avoid the ‘because we’ve always done it that way’ excuse that leads to process for process’ sake.

In addition to constant touchpoints with our team, we also try to get the big ideas on the table from the field staff and make sure the operational team is seeing things from their perspective. This helps keep the entire team aligned and ensures our field team is getting the support they need to focus on their work.

A good tool some organizations use is a ‘sandbox’ concept, where they actively try out new processes before setting them in stone. Again, your operational team may think it’s the best idea in the world until it gets out to the field team and falls flat, or worse; distracts the team from what’s important.

Regardless of the tools that you choose, use this opportunity to:

Confirm that your marketing materials are all updated (don’t forget your website and online presence).

Update all the dates in your manuals, policies and other employee-facing materials.

Re-align where you are going to devote your resources in the coming year. Stress-test past practices to make sure that they are the best practices for your team.

Re-think (or confirm) your internal processes and policies are effective (great communication touchpoint with your team and shows that they have a say in how your organization functions)

We invite you to use the new year as an opportunity to review how you work, what tools you need and what new things you might try. Take the time to keep your policies fresh, relevant and support the operational and strategic goals of the organization.

The post Getting Your Operations House in Order for the New Year appeared first on gothamCulture.

It sounds like a good idea until you realize the change will involve 5,000 employees in those departments. Oy! Now that’s some way to bring in the New Year! In addition to a solid organization design strategy (hint-hint, stay tuned for my next article), you will also need a change management strategy and plan in order to transition the entire organization to a shared services model.

A change management plan is like Google Maps. Google Maps gives you a roadmap for how to get to your destination and shows you obstacles you may face along the journey that could slow you down, such as a traffic jam, a stalled car, or a train delay. The components of Google Maps make you aware of the risks and tells you what you should do differently to avoid problems.

A change management plan includes a stakeholder and change impact analysis, a communications strategy, and a training plan. A stakeholder and change impact analysis will help you assess risk by identifying all of the key stakeholder groups, how they will be impacted as a result of this change, and what will the organization, and those stakeholders will need to do differently as a result. The communications strategy will help build the foundation of ongoing dialogue by ensuring stakeholders understand what’s changing, why, and how they’ll be impacted. And a training plan will help you determine key skills that require training, who needs the training to gain/refresh their skills, and finally the training format.

Stakeholder and Change Impact Analysis

The stakeholder and change impact analysis will account for all the stakeholder groups and the obstacles they may face during a change. Initially, you must map out all of your stakeholder groups, i.e., senior leaders, vice presidents, and line managers. These are all of your key players that must be engaged along the way so that you don’t upset anyone during the journey. It is critical to determine how each these stakeholder groups will be affected by the change.

Here’s an example to help illustrate what is a stakeholder change impact analysis. Let’s say the head chef of your favorite restaurant decides to change its classic chicken dish from roasted chicken to a pan-seared chicken in peanut sauce. This is a big change because the roasted chicken has been a staple of the menu. Sadly, however, the oven roaster broke, making it impossible to make the roasted chicken.

The implications of changing a menu item like this could be met with resistance from employees and customers alike. In addition to creating an explanation for customers; the restaurant will have to identify people (stakeholder groups) that will be impacted so it can determine any risks, and then develop a mitigation strategy. In this situation, those key stakeholders are the head chef, the line cooks, waiters, the maître d’, and customers.

After the change, all line cooks will need to know the recipe, and how long it will take to cook the new menu item. Waiters will need to answer questions about the new dish, like whether it contains peanuts. The maître d’ will also be impacted because he or she may have to adjust seating times if the dinner service is shorter or longer as a result of the change. And finally, customers may be expecting the roasted chicken, and the restaurant may need to explain why they changed that menu item.

What the example above illustrates is that by determining your stakeholder groups, you can then determine how they may be impacted as a result of the change. Understanding the impact will help you map out risks between the current and future state.

Once you’ve mapped out the risks, two vital tools to mitigate them are a communications strategy and a training plan. The communications strategy will help you determine what you will say to stakeholders, and how you will say it.

Communications Strategy

A communications strategy is important because, without it, there is a big possibility that the change effort will fail. A communications strategy facilitates the change process and—at a minimum—ensures employees know what’s changing, when the changes will occur, and how they’ll be impacted. When done well, communications strategies tell a story to humanize the change for the people who may be impacted. Great communications strategies build a system that facilitates an ongoing dialogue between stakeholder groups in order to engage them.

Some goals of a communications strategy include:

• Increasing awareness and understanding of the changes ahead
• Improving positive attitudes about why change is critical
• Getting buy-in for change by sharing a compelling story
• Giving employees an opportunity to provide feedback

Back at the restaurant where the head chef has changed the menu item, our stakeholder groups are getting antsy. “Why is this change happening? And what do I tell the customers?” This is where consistency is critical. The worst thing you can do is give inconsistent reasons for why the menu change happened because it will ruin your credibility. And, it’s important to plan communications goals for each stakeholder group because each has different needs.

While the big picture reason about “why” the menu changed is consistent across all stakeholder groups, each group will need different details. For example, the customer will need to know there was a new addition to the menu, why there was a change, it’s price, and that it contains peanuts in case they are allergic. The waiters need to know how long it takes to cook the new dish in order to space the dinner service between appetizers and the main course. They also need to have answers to questions that they may get from customers (FAQs), such as “Why is the roasted chicken not available?”

In this case, your customers (end-users) should not need training because most know how to deal with this kind of change (the one exception being the unruly 3-year old that has learned the restaurant ran out of chicken fingers—but luckily that’s their parents’ job).

Training Plan

A training plan provides the training goals, recommendations for who needs training, the skills that training will help to solve, and goals that help solidify what success looks like. A training plan starts with the stakeholder and change impact analysis. It  reviews what changes will happen to each stakeholder group and uncovers what skills each of those stakeholder groups will need after the change. The training plan can then serve to fill the skills gaps that were identified in the stakeholder and change impact analysis.

The training plan should:

• Align with the change goals
• Lay out benefits that trainees get as a result of training
• Focus on the stakeholder’s needs
• Have desired outcomes as a result of training

In addition to meeting these objectives, a training plan (like a communications plan) also needs to show how it will accomplish its goals and what training delivery methods will be used.

Back at our restaurant, we have identified the key stakeholders from head chef to the customers and how they’ll be impacted. We also developed a communications strategy has the information they need to ensure the customer is happy. And now it’s time to train the line cooks. They must learn how to cook the new chicken dish, and prep in order to prevent a loss of efficiency. We’ve identified our primary goal: As a result of the training, line cooks will be able to efficiently and effectively prep and cook the new chicken dish within 35-minute time frame.

Training will be led by the head chef. He will provide a live demonstration with a breakout group so the line cooks can practice before the dinner rush. After the training was finished, the head chef evaluated the team and now feels confident because, during training, they improved their prep time from 15-minutes to 10-minutes, and were able to cook the new dish within the allotted 25-minute time frame.

So there you have it, an overview of the critical pieces of change management. To sum up, your stakeholder change impact analysis helps you assess risk by accounting for all of the stakeholder groups impacted by the change, and how those groups will be impacted. Once you know all the changes, you can develop a communications strategy to help stakeholders buy into the change. And finally, you design and implement a training plan to fill any post go-live skills gaps.

The post The Three Pillars of Every Successful Change Management Plan appeared first on gothamCulture.

These issues will only become more pressing as populations grow. According to UNICEF, about 70 percent of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2050. That urban growth means our need for dependable, efficient infrastructure is also on the rise.

At the same time, however, the U.S. has become less capable of tackling such challenges. Decreasing federal investment has shifted the financial burden to local and state policymakers. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the United States a D-plus rating in its most recent infrastructure report card, estimating it will cost the country about $3.6 trillion to improve its score by 2020.

The bottom line? We have a massive gap between what we spend on infrastructure and what we need to spend to bring our systems up to snuff.

 America’s Homework Assignment

In its 2013 report card, the American Society of Civil Engineers prescribed three steps to solve the problem:

• Increase leadership in infrastructure renewal.
• Promote sustainability and resilience.
• Develop and fund plans to maintain and enhance our infrastructure.

While those steps might seem straightforward, the United States is still struggling to make progress. So what’s holding us back?

Simply put, the sheer size of the task in terms of planning across numerous complex, interrelated aspects of infrastructure is daunting. As a whole, it seems impossibly overwhelming.

Consider what happened with the most expensive and notoriously flawed highway project in U.S. history: the Central Artery/Tunnel Project in Boston, better known as the “Big Dig.”

By the time it was finished, the Big Dig was eight years behind schedule and had exploded in cost from $2.6 billion to nearly $15 billion. The project was designed to reduce traffic on Boston’s existing highways, but it ultimately contributed to congestion because it failed to address the root causes.

Failures like the Big Dig have brought nine factors to the forefront of the infrastructure conversation: capacity, condition, funding, future need, operation, maintenance, public safety, resilience, and innovation. Any project must address these nine considerations — no small feat — before it’s executed.

Where do we even begin? Infrastructure in America is frighteningly complex, and merely planning a major infrastructural overhaul can take decades.

Let’s start by asking ourselves: How do you eat an elephant?

The answer is simple: One bite at a time.

Taking the First Bites

The three solutions I mentioned earlier from the American Society of Civil Engineers report largely call for stronger strategic planning. As the old adage goes, “A failure to plan is a plan to fail.”

Essentially, our first bites of this gargantuan task involve careful planning. The undertaking involves five essential steps:

1) Scenario Planning

We need to start by planning and testing around the “knowns” of our existing infrastructure, whether we’re talking about transportation or any other agency. Before we can move forward, we need to know where we stand.

The next iteration of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ report card is still a year away, but the 2013 and 2009 reports provide context for our current situation. Those reports actually show some improvements, as the grade rose from a D in 2009 to the most recent D-plus. The $1.6 trillion funding gapmentioned in the report shows we still have plenty of room for improvement.

2) Black Swan Modeling

Once we understand the “knowns” of our situation, it’s time to tackle the “unknowns.”

Black swans are used as a metaphor to describe events that are entirely unpredictable. Planning for black swan situations involves looking beyond history and data to think about events we have never experienced before — both good and bad.

This exercise helps us consider the potential of surprises before they ever occur. The fact that something has not happened before does not mean it never will. Black swan modeling helps us take these possibilities into account ahead of time.

3) Innovation of Thought

Part of effective strategic planning — and successful black swan modeling — involves thinking innovatively and considering ideas that are outside the box.

This might require partnerships among academia, industry, and government to identify ideas that truly push conventional boundaries. These might involve crowdfunding to cover project costs, a modern Works Progress Administration, or other radical initiatives.

4) Public-Private Partnerships

Collaboration between public and private entities opens the door to creative solutions by uniting our best thinkers to solve infrastructural problems.

Consider the recent $1.5 billion partnership between private investors and the New York/New Jersey Port Authority that arose from efforts to replace the aging Goethals Bridge. The project is expected to create more than 2,000 construction jobs and inject about $872 million in economic activity into the area. Public-private partnerships can help ensure that a project receives both the funding and manpower necessary to succeed.

5) Big-Picture Thinking

Successful infrastructure updates require big-picture thinking. Federal policymakers must look at infrastructure as one piece of a much larger plan.

The Boston Consulting Group researched the role the private sector can play in improving well-being. The group found that progress for countries or cities needs to be measured by more than a single metric — gross domestic product growth, for example. The study found any progress should factor in the Sustainable Economic Development Assessment model, which is built around sustainability, economics, and investment. We must realize, for instance, that environmental stewardship and economic growth are intimately connected with infrastructure renewal.

We Have to Start Somewhere

Rebuilding our infrastructure is not something that can be put off indefinitely. Every commuter, family, politician and business leader depends on infrastructure to go about their daily lives. Fixing these issues should be among our top priorities.

The initiative might seem daunting, but getting started simply involves taking a few steps — or bites. As we saw from the Big Dig, those nibbles shouldn’t be taken without extensive planning. From there, it’s a matter of implementing a well-crafted strategy.

But one thing is certain: We must get started soon. This elephant isn’t going to eat itself.

This article first appeared on Govloop.com.

The post 5 Ways To Make Infrastructure Planning More Manageable appeared first on gothamCulture.

There are several barriers that can keep an organization from adopting Lean. This article will cover 2 of them: Lean history and corporate biases. I will also show how to make an office environment Lean.

Lean History

Your ability to optimize something depends largely on what your history has been.

For example, the United States has been awash with cheap gasoline for most of the past century. Europe, however, has always had higher taxes on fuel since WW2 to fund war reparations and major infrastructure repairs. Fuel prices in Europe today range from 2-5x the price for US petrol. With that in mind, how do the US and Europe generally monitor vehicle fuel consumption?

In the US, we track miles per gallon. At one point, I’m sure 10 mpg might have been a good measure. Today, extremely efficient vehicles are 42 mpg or more. But I ask you, what is the ideal? The mpg metric is not transparent and therefore, not in line with Lean thinking. In Europe, by contrast, mpg is not used at all. They track “liters consumed per 100 kilometers”. 10 years ago, vehicles requiring 15 Liters per 100 km were commonplace. Today, very efficient vehicles consume 5 Liters per 100 kilometers, showing that fuel efficiency has tripled within 1 decade! This L/100km equation shows optimization potential in a way that mpg cannot.

It all comes down to perspective and transparency to see where waste exists.

Corporate Biases

Another big reason a lean initiative won’t get off the ground is because of a general corporate bias against Lean thinking.

Let’s face it—Lean was developed in production environments and nowadays fewer of us work in factories than ever before. “We’re different here!” some would say. So if it wasn’t developed or piloted in your own area, it’s easy to write it off as part of the ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome.

Corporations and cultures can become like animals, taking on a life of their own with groupthink prevailing. Again, history plays a role here. For example, if a manager has progressed through his or her career by working a series of difficult jobs in order to be promoted, they feel the next generation must be willing to sacrifice the same or more to get ahead.

With most organizations being hierarchical, having pyramid shaped corporate ladders, it’s easy for workers to see the “up or out” principle is alive and well. Therefore, organizations can become ingrained in their thinking, waiting for leadership to address problems even though the workers who face the problems daily may be best equipped to mitigate them.

But, rocking the boat and empowering people to do their jobs better isn’t always a senior manager’s top priority. This is not to downplay the typical manager out there who certainly has to work hard to stay relevant within the organization; it’s just easier to dictate what needs to be done than listen to suggestions from the shop floor because workers lack the top-level view.

In the end, corporate biases like these can create a lot of wasted resources. There’s a difference between being BUSY and being PRODUCTIVE. It’s about time companies start to appreciate that.

Lean Office: The Final Frontier!

Office spaces are the final frontier of lean. Lean within factories has started to mature and the concepts are relatively easy to grasp. If you can make an office think Lean, then you can replicate Lean anywhere.

With this in mind, the necessary steps to create a Lean office are the same to create a Lean factory, although the wastes you find look very different:

• Specify Value

Know who your customer is and what they consider value-adding.

• Map the Value Stream

Start with the first touch point, and work all the way to the final customer. How long does it take to add value? Identify everything else as waste.

• Establish Flow

Remove wastes and harmonize the time to produce through workload leveling and standard work. Eliminate bottlenecks as they appear and shift.

• Implement Pull

Once a flow has been created, start to produce only what is needed to the customer’s tact. Do not do extra. Build quality in and eliminate rework.

• Work to Perfection.

A lean journey is never complete. Reexamine, refine, re-implement.

It’s important that companies today seize the initiative to make office environments lean, as the transformation to more remote work environments will prove to be disastrous otherwise. Offices are flooded in waste, even more so than factories! The heart of Lean methodology is to decrease waste, so we must have the proper metrics in place to measure the effectiveness.

Take stock of the wasted resources in your office. How do you specify the value of an email exchange? Or on a company meeting? If your company sets low expense approval levels for managers (say $500), for example, yet you regularly host corporate meetings with 20 people for 1 hour, is this the most efficient use of resources? Instead of chasing costs, I propose that Return on Invested Capital is the single best top-level metric available today.

If the goal is a relentless pursuit of perfection, then a lean journey is never truly complete. My advice is to stop looking for silver bullets! Look for what is proven and works—discipline. Start measuring what is valued by your customers if you’re not already doing it. Remember Deming’s words, “If it can be measured, it can be improved.”

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The pilot program had not yet specified a methodology or data to be collected, and its outcomes are unlikely to be scalable. To avoid missteps like these, federal agencies need a change management strategy that involves gathering evidence, meticulously outlining goals, and testing iteratively.

To bring organizational change to life, follow the ADDIS model. The acronym comprises the following steps:

Assess: Use surveys, qualitative data collection methods, and stakeholder facilitation to gather a detailed understanding of the situation.

Dialogue: Through a series of targeted conversations, map out your organization’s desired behaviors and performance expectations. This communication is necessary to align all stakeholders to a clear goal.

Design: Based on previous steps, meticulously plan your organization’s change efforts with detailed documentation and scheduling to sustainably drive all departments through to completion.

Implement: With plans aligned and finalized, roll out the changes with touchpoints at the individual, departmental and organizational levels. Coaching will ensure optimal performance at each step.

Sustain: Periodically reassess leadership behaviors and cultural health, as these are the keys to a program’s success. Work environments are dynamic, and leaders must adapt and stay on course to achieve the desired results.

The ADDIS model aligns with the iterative concepts of agile development and beta testing. To implement long-term change, proposed interventions must be applied in smaller organizational areas or with trial stakeholders during the “dialogue” and “design” phases. Test these interventions, learn from successes and failures, and determine when your change strategy is ready for a full rollout.

Seeing ADDIS in action

One municipal transportation agency used the ADDIS model, which began with a rigorous assessment of its organizational culture and a plan to improve safety behaviors throughout the organization.

Using quantitative and qualitative metrics to assess change agents’ perceptions, the data collected during the “sustain” phase revealed what worked well in the agency and pinpointed areas for continued growth.

More than 40 percent of respondents to a leadership feedback survey said they understood the key role they play in advancing the agency’s mission. An additional 27 percent reported an increase in the overall awareness to the challenges and goals of each department, while 25 percent said they have a better understanding of how they relate to the needs of each department.

These findings indicate that after following the five steps of the ADDIS model, agency stakeholders are aligned to specific individual, departmental, and organizational goals. To keep this momentum, the agency must continue reinforcement, strategic planning, and open communication to ensure accountability for these goals.

Planning For ADDIS On a Federal Level

For any agency, planning is crucial to ADDIS application and management. The following elements will help clarify roles, ensure all proposed activities are completed on time and on budget, and keep the appropriate stakeholders engaged throughout the process:

1. Scoping conversations: Before developing an ADDIS project plan, meet with the project’s internal sponsors and other team members to ensure everyone is aligned with its scope, key activities and milestones, and detailed timelines.
2. Learning needs assessment plan: To fully understand organizational needs and desired outcomes, develop an assessment plan that outlines what is required to meet agency objectives.
3. Measurement and evaluation plan: Identify which metrics to capture and track throughout the life cycle of the project to gauge its success and ensure its impact.
4. Communication strategy and plan: Stakeholders should feel like something is being done with them, not to them. Keep them informed and engaged throughout the process using a robust communication plan.
5. Project kickoff meeting: Conduct a brief session with internal sponsors and stakeholders, and share draft versions of any plans. With all parties aligned to the process and its goals, you are ready to implement your change strategy.

Through ADDIS, federal agencies can develop a deep understanding of the changes they face and the best way to execute them. With rigorous testing, well-established goals, and continued assessment, federal change management doesn’t have to be as difficult as it looks in the news.

This article originally appeared on Federal Times.

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A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Sandbrook got his start as a leader in the cavalry, serving 13 years before leaving the service in 1992 to take a job with a building materials company.

Working his way up through the ranks in this brick and mortar industry, Sandbrook found himself eventually leading a company with a P&L of $5B and supervising over 22,000 employees across North and South America. In an industry known for hiring senior executives from the native countries where the companies are owned, Sandbrook understood that his options to move to a CEO role would be limited.

But, there he was, 19 years later, facing one of the biggest challenges of his professional career.

Bill found himself at the helm of a new Board and CEO of a struggling building materials company in a down construction market. And despite getting 3 months of reprieve from creditors, banks kept knocking on the door “offering” the support of their turnaround teams.

With only 3 months of runway to turn things around, Mr. Sandbrook had to act quickly.

Sandbrook and his team knew that they had to make some pretty significant plays in short order, but they were limited in their options since the concrete business works off of backlog. Meaning, most of their near-term work was already price-locked.

Sandbrook took to the field to get a full understanding of the situation, spending upwards of 90% of his first few months in the trenches of the operation. After this assessment, several key decisions were made that helped steer the company back into the black.

Here are several key lessons we can learn from this incredible turnaround:

Empower your people to make decisions that drive the business. Sandbrook discovered a culture at U.S. Concrete where field leaders were not given the authority to make critical— or even seemingly minor—decisions. For example, gravel trucks in quarries would sit idle, awaiting a part that would cost the company only a few thousand dollars. “The quarries were producing no product and the equipment was just sitting,” Sandbrook explains. But field operations were required to go through corporate for any and every decision.

“This lack of decision-making authority in the spirit of keeping the operation running smoothly created a culture where managers just began to sit back and let corporate figure it out,” says Sandbrook.

The decision was made to immediately empower managers in the field, many of whom had both decades of experience and deep operational knowledge to make sound decisions at the local level to help drive the company’s performance.

Connect all employees to the core business. Historically, U.S. Concrete was headquartered in Houston, over 200 miles from the nearest operating facility. High office space costs and the physical disconnect from the operation created many barriers. The decision was made to relocate the headquarters to Euless, Texas right next to one of the operating facilities. This move represented significant cost savings in terms of fixed facility costs for the headquarters as well as tax credits.

Sandbrook knows that people want to be a part of a confident and winning team. “When they are, they feel more ownership, they make better decisions, they are more productive, and they enjoy their work more.” The decision to relocate headquarters reconnected the corporate employees, who had never spent time in the field, to the operations side of the business, reducing friction between the two groups.

Acknowledge what you are and what you’re not. In order to get the team working together, they had to acknowledge the fact that concrete is not a sexy business. “It’s brick and mortar work,” says Sandbrook, “we’re not a tech startup.” The employee base had to acknowledge that they were a roll-up-your-sleeves company. Pretending otherwise wouldn’t get the company back to where it needed to be.

Focus on the real stakeholders. Instead of creating a dynamic where employees were required to hold a lot of meetings and prepare endless presentations, Sandbrook did his best to minimize such behavior. “Leaders need to understand that their behavior drives cultural norms. Requiring people to spend all their time preparing and delivering presentations just make people better at giving presentations. I am not the stakeholder people need to be focused on.”

“Rather,” he continues, “we all need to be focused on our real stakeholders: our customers and our shareholders.”

As his three-month reprieve from the banks came to an end, Sandbrook and his team were able to show the start of a successful turnaround and were allowed to continue with their plan.

By his own admission, timing is everything, and the upswing in the construction market added additional wind to U.S. Concrete’s sales. Still, the economy was not the only thing driving the company’s growth from $7M EBITDA to $141M EBITDA and lifting the stock price from $2 to $65 in a few short years.

Lessons Learned

When asked what leadership lessons helped shape his approach, Sandbrook replied, “The military provides you, as a young leader, with a structured process and approach to decision-making. Developing the ability to process multiple inputs and to make multiple decisions effectively requires leaders to work on several fronts at once.”

He goes on to explain that up-and-coming leaders should consider the following as they work to establish themselves in today’s business world.

1. Listen more than you talk. Take the time to listen to your team. Spending the time to sit down one-on-one with your employees and hearing about their day-to-day experience can uncover some powerful insights that would otherwise never come to light.
2. Don’t take yourself too seriously. We are all working in the best interests of the company, but oftentimes, leaders can unintentionally create a barrier between themselves and their team members if they let the power go to their head.
3. It’s okay not to have all the answers. No one has all the answers, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t find them out. Even when you can’t immediately solve a problem, taking the time to show up and research a solution will help establish trust among your fellow team members.
4. Seek out the opinions of others. Leading is a huge responsibility, but you’re not alone, and an outside perspective can help alleviate some of the pressure. Having a mentor or access to a mastermind group to help you think through tough decisions can make all the difference.
5. Avoid managing for the short-term to serve yourself and your compensation package. In today’s business environment it’s not uncommon to see executives making decisions that positively affect business performance in the short-term in order to lock in their personal bonuses. This is problematic when trying to make decisions that are better for the business down the road.
6. Understand the impact your title can have on others. The more senior you become in an organization, the more you must understand the impact of your words and behaviors on others. “There is really never a time when you can let your hair down,” Sandbrook explains. “Your people are always watching what you say and do.”

U.S. Concrete is not a Silicon Valley startup. They aren’t the pioneers of the latest revolutionary product that will redefine our very way of life (although they are conducting some interesting R&D in their industry). Still, they have achieved an incredible turnaround under the leadership of Bill Sandbrook.

No matter what industry you’re in or what you sell, we can all agree that leading a company through change is never an easy task. But stories like these can inspire us all to push through even the darkest of storms, and to steer the ship to calmer waters and strong tailwinds.

This article first appeared on Forbes.

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Strategic planning requires hearing from all levels of the organization; leaders, managers, co-workers, and employees. And at the end of the day, key stakeholders have to agree on the final mission, vision, and a set of objectives to align around and track priorities. When more stakeholders have input into the plan, then they are more likely to drive the implementation. That’s why collaboration is critical.

But if it were that simple to be collaborative, everyone would be doing it. So why don’t we?

I believe there are two main reasons: First, it takes more time. And second, it requires courage.

It is costly to collaborate because collaboration is time-consuming, and time is money. It’s easy, however, for a small group of employees to write a plan, but once it’s finished, you have to implement it. If the people you’re writing the plan for, don’t buy in, implementation will be a long, and expensive road. If you take the time to get employee buy-in the beginning, you’ll spend less time, money and energy, having to sell it at the end. That is why it takes courage, energy, and will to be collaborative.

It takes courage to collaborate, and a willingness to be vulnerable. No one likes their ideas publicly trashed, and when it happens, it is painful. But that’s what it means to be a leader. As a leader, it is critical to hear the opinions of your bosses, peers, and staff. And initially, they may not like your ideas. But when you build mechanisms for two-way feedback, it allows you to respond to feedback, and it keeps your finger on the pulse of the organization. When you build a strategic plan that aligns with your stakeholders’ needs, it will have more buy-in, momentum, and support from a broader audience.

The workplace is not a true democracy (and nor should it be, otherwise the business world would look more like the U.S. Congress). But I do believe it is critical to assess how much support a plan has, and we can get there by asking employees their opinion, and give them opportunities to be a part of the process. How should we be collaborative during strategic planning?

Stakeholders, Stakeholders, Stakeholders: Everyone has needs, wants and desires. That is why it is critical to figure out who are your critical stakeholders are, and what do they want. And if you don’t know, start with your boss, because he or she is one of them. Manage your stakeholders’ needs, understand what they want, and deliver on it. When there are conflicting needs between stakeholders, get everyone into one room, have a conversation, and come to mutual agreement.

Be Incremental: That means, don’t write the whole plan at one time, professionally design it and ask everyone, “What do you think? Do you like it?” Guess what? You’ll probably get a quite a few “NO’s!!!” I’m no fortune teller, but I can guarantee a rewrite will be in your future. Instead, break it into phases. Start with fundamentals. For example, facilitate a conversation around beliefs of our organization (to determine mission) and where we want to be in 5 years (vision). Once you’ve nailed down the foundation and future direction, it becomes easier to decide on the priorities, goals and objectives of the plan.

Give ‘em a Voice: Getting feedback at every step of the process is critical. The more opportunities you provide to let stakeholder create, weigh-in and vote on content, the more they feel they’ve been heard. And this is the most important part. Because when people see that their ideas are a part of your plan, the more empowered they will be to drive efforts when the rubber meets the road during implementation.

The goal of building a strategic plan is just that; it’s a plan. And being collaborative in this process comes down to humility. It’s not about you, or the plan. It’s about your team’s willingness to buy in, and their ability to implement it.

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