Feeling lonely today? Let’s call a meeting.

Suddenly, one of the partners, chuckled and gained the floor (not too difficult with only three people in a Skype videoconference). He recalled an earlier job in a medium size technology firm where the standing joke among the engineers concerning management was, “These guys seem to operate on the principle, ‘Feeling lonely today? Let’s call a meeting.’ “

After we all laughed a bit we once again returned to the ugly reality that most managers still do not conduct meetings following even the basics of best management practices. They do not ask what the meeting is about, what are the deliverables to be expected? Who actually needs to be at the meeting? Do we have enough information, data, to hold this meeting? Do we have a reasonable expectation that we can reach some actionable conclusions that will lead to real tasks with real outcomes? Or, is this just another meeting held ritually to review the status of projects? The moto of this approach to meetings is lets get everyone in the room and kick things around until the day has passed and everyone is bored to death.

Meetings are the lifeblood of organizations. Plan them as though blood will flow.

Meetings are the lifeblood of organizations. But, they need to be conducted as if blood was literally being spent in the process.

For every startup the development of a business plan is a  required first step. It is so obvious – business schools have course on writing the business plan and it is impossible to get funding without one. Teams coalesce around the labor. So, every startup has a business plan.

For the going concern, the ones that are now three or so more years old, the business plan (also called strategic plan -really the same thing) is forgotten, only stumbled on when a move forces someone to pick it up and wonder, “Should I just relegate this to the dumpster?”

This is not a good situation. A business without a plan is like a boat sitting in a pond just waiting to sink to the bottom for nature to compost it. Or, if it has the fate to be afloat in a stream, it will be carried along willy-nilly until it bumps into a stone or dead branch or reaches the ocean where nature will also send it to the big composter.

Every business exists in a world that is changing and filled with opportunities and threats. Your business plan is your set of oars to provide the means to pull in the direction you want to go in, to avoid the rocks. You might even row to shore and portage around the falls, to move to an entirely new river.

But, many people, even accepting the wisdom of having a plan, find it a painful exercise, all too easily avoided. This may be driven by the idea that a business plan involves dozens of pages of writing, lots of spreadsheets with numbers they really don’t believe (sometimes don’t understand). Business plans, strategic plans, these are just the exercises one does in business schools. Or it may be the folk wisdom that business plans are not a useful part of managing and they always end up on the shelf or hidden in a file cabinet only dusted off for display when in search of a bank loan.

However, shift your thinking to view the process of building a plan as a value in and of itself, and adopt a simpler more flexible business plan model you will find that building that set of oars for your little boat is fun and productive.

The Business Plan Model

Lets talk about the business plan model first. Since we are developing a business plan for our internal use it does not need to look like or contain everything that bankers, MBAs, venture capital funders expect. This is a working document to help us move the business in a definite direction.

First, I have found that setting an arbitrary limit of 12 pages focuses the mind and edits out all the useless boilerplate that populates many plans. Second, if you and your team prefer not to write a paragraphed narrative, use an outline, PowerPoint approach. Third, get out your most recent Income and Balance Sheet statements – these will be the starting point for the financials. Fourth, establish an outline of the topics that you feel must be covered and keep to it.

Basically, the plan will include these twelve topics.

1. Describe why you are in business – what value are you delivering to which customers. An important corollary to this topic is to identify why customers buy from you and not someone else?
2. How do you find customers? Who are your current customers? List the big ones and their share of your business
3. How do you produce the service or product?
4. How do you make money by making your customers happy?
5. What are your objectives for growing a larger customer base, adding a new market segment, new products or services, or other growth strategy?
6. What are the external obstacles to accomplishing these objectives and how do you intend to get around them? This is where you might look at competition, SWOT and PEST analysis and apply other analysis tools.
7. What resources do we need to put in place to achieve the growth? Money, people, technology….?
8. What strategies are we going to apply to achieve our objectives over the next year to three years? This should be limited to three to five strategies. State clearly what the objectives are for each strategy – how many new customers, new products, dollars of sales, profits, etc? When will these happen?
9. What key tactics are needed for each strategy? Who is responsible, what resources do they get, when will the accomplish the tasks and what results are you looking for?
10. Build a financial model. The spreadsheet should be not more than 25 rows with columns containing quarterly projections for three years. Starting numbers must link to existing financial statements.
11. What is the schedule for follow up business review sessions where you will examine progress on the plan and take required actions to revise and push the plan forward. The first meeting should be one month after you kick off the new initiatives. The, not less than quarterly.
12. How does all of this fulfill the management team’s personal objectives? The answer to this is not money?

The Planning Process

Now, how do you actually develop the plan?

Four to six two to three hour working sessions with all members of the management team present usually suffices. Some homework will be required between the sessions, typically a  couple of hours. You might imagine a month to six weeks as a useful window of time.

Who should be in the room? Every significant stakeholder – owners, chiefs of marketing, sales, operations, technology or product development, finance, and HR. In small companies this sometimes means that one person has to cover several functional areas. Do not let the group get larger than six to eight people. More than that and you can not have good, deep interactions – the work sessions will be more like a conference or convention. Two or three is fine as long as every key stakeholder in the business is present.

These work sessions are more important, in many ways, than the plan itself. During these sessions, the team will talk out loud and write things down. Arguments, discussions, innovations, deletions, new agreements about the business emerge. These flow out of the group and the whole team understands and owns these discussions and the conclusions.

In my experience, if the management team represents all of the key elements, all of the facts and concepts about the business are sitting in the room. Some people think that business planning is a research project. But, with a team, the process is more a sharing around the table of the facts, consensus building about the situation, goals, and strategies to get to the goals. The most powerful outcome of the planning process is that it arms the management team to convert the strategies into actions to reach the goals.

You Need a Consultant

All of this seems quite straight forward. You may be thinking, “Well, I am the Owner, the CEO. I am a seasoned veteran.  I can lead my team through this planning process.” Resist this line of thinking and here is why, and I say this despite the obvious self-serving nature of what follows.

A good strategy consultant who knows how to lead groups through a planning process will do the following, much of which you as the Owner, the CEO can not do just because of the fact of your position. First, the consultant stands outside of the actual business discussions, runs the sessions, and keeps the team moving forward. Second, the consultant establishes an environment in which the team is a group of equals for the purposes of the planning. This assures that one person will not dominate, that the less forceful personalities, who frequently have significant contributions to make, will be heard and participate. This increases the breadth and depth of the team ownership of the plan. Third, the consultant can bring up the elephants in the closet that no one wants to talk about. Overcoming the baggage of history can be difficult and painful. The consultant can drive the conversations to confronting the facts of the business situation. Fourth, the consultant will bring appropriate analytical tools to the table. The bag of strategy tools is enormous. All of this liberates the Owner, the CEO from the burdens of running the work sessions to focus on the content of the process. This is where their highest value is.

How Do You Convert the Plan Into Action?

For most strategic plans and business plans the end is the document itself. This is the critical moment and here is where Step 11 above, that asks about the schedule of review sessions, converts the plan into action. This is where the Owner, the CEO must take the lead. Otherwise the plan is just a plan and is not converted into action. If you have done a good job of establishing the tactics you will know who is responsible, what the success metrics are and the timetable for action. By tying the planning to the existing financial reporting system, you will be able to measure results directly. The review sessions are not designed to be dull reports, but opportunities to understand where the difficulties lie and where new opportunities pop up. A review session brings together the management team to work on the most important strategic activities of the firm.

Summary

Let’s wrap up this discussion.  A business plan is the result of a process in which the management team comes to a common understanding of:

• • the business situation
  • the value the business provides to customers
  • strategies to achieve new goals
  • obstacles to be overcome or avoided along the way,
  • tactics to bring the strategies to life – this includes who is responsible, resources available, timeline, and results expected
  • schedule of review meetings to take corrective action and make course corrections

The business plan is converted into action through the tactics identified supported by active supervision and follow up by the Owner, the CEO. The plan also provides a common language about the business and a platform to communicate the business’s goals beliefs, and values to everyone involved, employees, vendors, and customers.

More information is available on the strategic planning process in our white paper: Introduction to the Strategic Planning Process here

This article was the subject of an earlier podcast of the same title. It is available here.

I recently read 12 The Elements of Great Managing by Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter (Gallup Press, New York 2006) another in this series. Don’t be deceived by the title, this book is really speaking from the perspective of how employees experience high-performance management. So a little translation is required to uncover the implied principles and practices of the 12 elements. Here are the twelve elements as presented in the introduction to the book^[[1]] .

1. I know what is expected of me at work
2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
3. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
4. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
5. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
6. There is someone at work who encourages my development.
7. At work, my opinions seem to count.
8. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.
9. My associates or fellow employees are committed to quality work.
10. I have a best friend at work.
11. In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
12. This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

A footnote at the end of this listing states that “Each of the Q12© statements above represent millions of dollars of investment by Gallup researchers…..”. This is one of the reasons these Gallup books are interesting. There is lots of data embedded in them. It is well worth the time to read through and absorb the anecdotes that flow from the data.

The questions I have about this list are not about the validity of these statements. They seem to jive very well both with anecdotal observation and the findings of many other studies about the attitudes and feelings of people in high performance organizations. The questions facing a manager is how to create the business culture, infrastructure and processes that produces these results in the human resources of the organization?

Without attempting anything exhaustive here, let’s take a look at several of these 12 elements and see how one might convert them into actionable tasks for a manager.

Looking at the first two elements,  applying Lean principles and practices creates an environment in which every person knows what is expected of them, how they are to accomplish the tasks, when the results are required, and what success looks like in terms of detailed deliverables of a product or service.  And, they receive immediate feedback concerning all of these characteristics from those around them in the work flow.

Since good Lean work design involves visual, simple feedback mechanisms, quality is a result of the process and failures are dealt with immediately. Apply Lean principles and practices develops processes that directly connect the work at hand to elements eight and nine. Central to Lean practices is the principle that quality is a outcome of the process and failures are identified in the flow and quality issues are resolved down to the root level.

Lean principles and practices include a focus on the development of every individual in the organization to be fully cross-functional in their skills. Typically this is implemented through specific cross-training requirements so that, over time, every individual learns to be a fully qualified practitioner of multiple skills required by the company’s processes and long-term goals. or

Element seven, “At work, my opinions seem to count.” requires some further comment. High performance organizations require the involvement of every associate’s mind and energies to solve problems and carry out the work at hand. It is not optional in a high performance environment. So, by definition, every person’s engagement counts. The word “seem” needs to be replaced by “does”.  A little further quibble here. Opinions are not very useful without the supporting facts and thought processes behind them. This is the reason that high performance organizations, whether they identify themselves under the banner of Lean^[[2]] , Baldrige^[[3]] , EFQM^[[4]] , or ISO9001-2008^[[5]] , use disciplined problem solving techniques that everyone learns to use. This assures that everyone’s engagement in the problem is represented, but the problem solving is fact-based, gets to the root, and is actionable.

Element 10, “I have a best friend at work.” is clearly beyond the control of management. It is understandably nice, but definitely not a controllable element of any work place.

Some elements are particularly subject to influence by the behaviors of senior management. Elements 3, 4, 5, 6, and 11 are typically elements to be found in high performance human resources management processes. But, making those processes come to life can readily be driven by the example of senior management in how they manage the selection, development and pruning of the people who report to them. If they practice sound high performance human resource practices, those practices will cascade down to everyone in the organization. It goes without saying that a component of that is direct involvement by senior management in oversight and monitoring of the health of the human resources management processes in the organization. A simple example of this is to impose a rule that no manager, even to the CEO level, can receive a pay grade review if they have any outstanding performance reviews for their subordinates. This drives timeliness quite nicely.

To conclude, this list of 12 elements is an interesting starting point to venture into high performance management. The list is really a slice of the results that flow from high performance management practices. The trick here then is to reverse engineer the list to uncover high performance practices from the world of Lean, Baldrige, and other high performance models that can be applied in your particular business environment. Building a high-performance organization is one sure approach to developing an organization that produces great results and solid answers to the 12 elements of great managing as described in 12 The Elements of Great Managing by Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter.

1. pages xi and xii
2. Lean is the American name for the Toyota Production System, also more broadly the Toyota Business System. There is no standards organization for lean principles and practices. A good starting point is Womack, James P., and Daniel T. Jones. Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated. 2nd ed. Free Press, 2003 and The Lean Enterprise Institute
3. Baldrige National Quality Program Criteria
4. European Foundation for Quality Management
5. International Organization for Standardization ISO9001-2008 Quality management systems — Requirements

In the world of planning and strategy, there is a truism that too much planning, too much detail, too much analysis, leads to inaction, to a loss of opportunity. Along the same line of observation, in the world of learning to becoming a more effective manager, there can be too much study, too much thinking, too much integration of the many many skills and aptitudes required to become more effective. In both strategy and management skills action is almost always preferable to another round of study. Action bumps you up against the real world and provides the real basis for improving skills and results.

But, that still leaves us with the nagging question as a manager, especially for rookie managers and supervisors, how do I get started?

Based on many years of personal work as a manager and many years coaching managers, here are three steps you can take that will get you into action and guarantee striking results. These results will come in your personal effectiveness and in of the results of the organization you manage.  Remember,  by results, I am referring to the three meanings Drucker defined: (1) direct business results (usually measured in $s); (2) improved organizational culture (values); and (3) development of people.^[[1]]

1. Stop Answering Questions

If most managers could listen to themselves, the proverbial fly on the wall, for just a few hours, they would discover that they are chronically enabling dependency all around them and undermining whatever formal delegation systems are in place. How is this happening? Just listen and you will hear a stream of questions coming at them followed by answers in response. You are enabling the following the reflexive pattern: ask the expert and be rewarded with answers. Ask the boss, get an answer, and be safe from responsibility for the answers.

If you want to get people to take responsibility and be involved in the business, you can’t go on answering all these questions. They will just go on asking whether they need to or not. And, you are spending an enormous amount of your time, your most valuable resource, to answering all of these questions.

What should a manager do to break this pattern?

Simply announce to the troops, “If you want to ask me a question, you have to have at least three possible answers thought through before I will consider your question. If you are having trouble coming up with answers, ask others to help you. Group thinking is always the best thinking.”

Shortly I will go into a few further refinements to make this a really effective policy. For the moment though, think of how simple it would be to put this new policy into action. The really tough step is entirely in the mind and habits of you the manager. You have to get up every morning and look yourself in the mirror and say, “My job as manager is to create an environment in which everyone can participate fully and will take responsibility. To help this along, I will help people by not answering their questions. And I will examine and fix why it is that they can not answer most of the questions that arise in their day-to-day work.”

One of the reasons managers answer so many questions from their staff and others in the company is that they fear that if they don’t, then really important issues and opportunities may be addressed incorrectly or sub optimally.

A key to getting out of the round of endless questions while still being involved in important ones, is to set some boundaries, some limits.

This might sound like this: “I want you to develop three solutions before you come to ask me a question. Ask your colleagues for help if you get stuck. But, in the case of the following critical customer, Immense Big Machines, Inc., I want to be informed of any issues involving delay or cost overruns in Project XZY.”

With the right boundaries set around your new rule, you can still be assured of being involved where you need to be.

Once you put this policy into action you are likely to see that many of your reports’ questions arise because they lack information and decision making tools. Glance down to Step 3 It’s Your Fault – Take Responsibility below and you will see that you have to take action to get these tools into place to enable your report to work effectively.

Finally, to make your staff and others in the company comfortable about taking responsibility for solving problems and answering their own questions, you need to have environment in which mistakes are expected and dealt with positively. Remember, if you are not making mistakes, you are doubtless doing very little and learning not at all. Mistakes need to be analyzed and the lessons learned. Perhaps the only rule about mistakes is that they should not be repeated.

As a bit of personal history, I implemented this step myself out of self-preservation in the midst of merging four sales departments into one. For the first couple of days some Regional Managers were frightened to death that they would make mistakes. These folks had worked for years before I came on the scene for managers who acted like your worst image of tank commanders. Other Regional Managers were delighted immediately. All of them made mistakes. The company was not adversely effected and within a few weeks almost all found their legs, helped work out the decision algorithms we needed, and I had much more time available to address all of the other issues revealed by this merger. One final note though, one manager never became comfortable making her own decisions. No amount of work on my part and her compatriots convinced her that she really should and could make decisions. Within two months she moved on, of her own accord, to a staff position in another business unit where she would not be confronted with the stream of business decisions about pricing and production priorities that every Regional Manager faced.

2. Seize Your Time – Don’t Manage It

In recent work with managers on time management, we have taken a new tack on this old problem of time.  We have encouraged managers to simply seize a block of time during the week and get to work on the really important things they feel they need to do to improve their contribution to their company.

It works like this. Look at the next week’s calendar and mark off one, or better, two hours on some day where there is nothing now scheduled or their are meetings or tasks that really can be skipped. Send an email around to everyone who reports to you announcing this time as your Private Work session. Tell them that you will be working on an important initiative and that barring a fire, you are not to be disturbed until the session is over.

When the hour arrives put a sign on your door or at the entrance to your cubicle, “Private Work Session – Do Not Disturb“. Turn off your email, instant messaging, cell phone, Blackberry, or any other communication device that can interrupt. Sit down at your desk or work table and get to work on that project that you have not gotten to because of all the other “important” tasks in your day-to-day work life.

Managers who have taken the step to seize their own time have found that they make real progress on their projects and the company does not grind to a halt.  They become daring and schedule two or three hours for the next week. Seizing personal work time also energizes their efforts to really learn how to manage their time. They already can see that they can make real progress working on the future of the company instead of constantly balled up in the day-to-day activties of the company. It is a demonstration of the power of spending significant time working on your company instead of just in it.

3. It’s Your Fault, Take Responsibility

Attracting, selecting, training, mentoring, and pruning human resources are among the most important tasks a manager confronts. Almost everyone agrees that, at every level of organizations, managers need to be devoting a significant portion of their time addressing the people needs of the firm, business unit, or department. Without the right people in the right positions, no strategy, no matter how clever, can succeed.

To be truly successful in meeting these responsibilities, a manager must embrace an all important management rule: “If an employee is working below expected or required performance it is always the manager’s fault.”

Read that through again. The manager is always responsible for sub-par work by any employee in their work group.

The first place to look for the source of poor performance is the manager. After all, the manager hired or selected the person. The manager defines the work, provides tools, training, and all other resources required for the job.  The manager is responsible for the success of every person they supervise.

An important effect of this rule is that it prevents you from entering the whinny land of thinking, or worse, saying:  “Why doesn’t Joseph pay more attention to detail?” “Mirabelle keeps making the same errors over and over in these quotes.” “Walt just doesn’t get the big picture of where this project is going and he is heading down the wrong track, for the umpteenth time.”

Embrace your responsibilities and powers to make your personnel successful.

• Make sure that you really have well thought out and planned jobs.
• Are job definitions focused on results?
• Are the task definitions actionable?
• Do the skills listed actually match up with the results you want to achieve?
• Have you provided the training required?
• Do your personnel understand where the company is going strategically and is it clear how the results of their jobs connect with these strategies?
• Have you acted promptly to provide feedback and take corrective action to support performance?
• Do you have a company culture that embraces, supports, and demands full participation by everyone?

Selection and promoting personnel are management tasks with a high error factor. Every manager needs to acknowledge that their judgments in selection and promotion of personnel are not perfect, not even close to perfect, . So, faced with a weak performance from a new hire or newly promoted person, managers must ask the question early, “Did I make a mistake here?” If you come to that conclusion you need to act promptly to correct the error.

The central point is that you selected your personnel, you set the conditions and environment of their work, your provide the tools and training, you set the expectations, the results required. If you are not getting top performance from your personnel, look to the basics, look to your own responsibilities as a manager first. After all, if you are really holding yourself accountable for these responsibilities, you will achieve equal or better performance from everyone in your organization.

The Three Steps Taken Together

These three disruptive steps will make you a more effective manager. Stop Answering Questions reveals where you need to improve training, data resources, and decision making algorithms. This step also firmly embraces and puts into action the third step, It’s Your Fault, Take Responsibility. It is a certainty that implementing the first step will librate those who report to you to perform better and by cascading the third step down the chain of command your reports will apply the first step to those who report to them with equally robust and invigorating results. Meanwhile, you will have implemented the second step, Seize Your Time – Don’t Manage It. This will lead to some significant achievements on your part. You will be able to work on forward looking projects that will move your group ahead. After a bit, you will be able to recommend that your reports apply all three rules to their own work.

1. see Chapter 2 – What Can I Contribute? in his book The Effective Executive

This podcast is 4 minutes 59 seconds long.

A text version is available here.

“You have to walk the talk.”

A central truth is that managers must model high performance principles and practices in order for the organization to adopt them. This is the old saw, “You have to walk the talk.” However, it is not necessary to perform everything perfectly right from the start. High performance management is a learn-by-doing process.

The great news is that once you begin to learn and apply high performance practices, people in your organization will notice and they will begin to adopt them too.

What are some of the key principles and practices?

Personal practices that drive manager performance

1. There really is no independent organization that represents “lean”. Nevertheless, the Lean Institute is a great resource with lots of  information and educational activities.

Business coaching results come in three areas:

Customers This means revenue, profits, and number of customers. For managers of internal departments or functions this means internal budget results and internal customer satisfaction. It is a regular practice to spend time on a monthly or quarterly basis reviewing the financial results. This provides us with the metrics to judge the success of the work we are doing together. Clients always find that they can point to results on the top or bottom line that is clearly connected to our work together. Values Building solid company values is critical to success. Good values sustain the high performance organization. Good values flow directly from management. Managers must embody and model good values. People Hiring, selecting, training, and pruning human resources is another critical success factor. High performance managers spend a significant portion of their time assuring that the right people are in place and that those people are empowered, engaged, and accountable.

This podcast is 7 minutes 24 seconds long.

You can read the text here.

The initial chapters take up the question of humans as multitaskers. For those who need to be reassured that the common sense answer to this question is, in this case, more than common, that it really is the sensical answer, take the time to follow the narrative. Yes, this is one of those business books written as a story. In most regards I have come to think of the first such approach that I know of to writing a business book in a narrative story format, The Goal: a process of ongoing improvement, by Goldratt, wishing it had been the last. But, I digress.

Crenshaw introduces the notion that because we really are capable of only one task at a time, the appearance of multitasking is really a series of “switchtasking” in which we shift our attention back and forth among a number of tasks. This process incurs significant inefficiencies due to the housekeeping overhead of our brain keeping track of where we are starting and stopping with each task.  Significant errors also occur as a result.

The proliferation of information devices over the last decade has multiplied the opportunities for interruption and created environments which are perpetually competing for our attention. Email, cellphones, voicemail, instant messaging, text messaging, faxes, and more clutter our desks, pockets, belts, pocketbooks, backpacks, hands, and, ultimately, our brains.  As Crenshaw aptly states, “The reality, though, is that these things will make us productive only if we learn to take control of them….If you and I don’t set up a schedule and protect our time, we allow ourselves to be run over by the traffic of information.” (page 61).

Crenshaw goes on to suggest a strategy for doing just that, establishing a schedule. I have written earlier about the need to avoid Too Much Information.

In Crenshaw’s approach to meetings which calls for establishing “recurring meetings” where people regularly need to meet with you, I think that an opportunity for a deeper understanding of what is happening is missed. The first step with meetings is to examine the reasons for the meetings. Altogether too often meetings are symptoms of poor underlying business processes, especially decision making. Many meetings turn out to be about how a decision is to be made, what information applies, what are the boundary conditions and parameters, and so on. These meetings should be replaced by sound business processes that make the decision making faster, closer to the end user, and more reliable. Other meetings will turn out to be program or process status meetings. These too should be replaced with better business processes and visual status reports. In general a manager should view every meeting where they do not add significant, singular value as a symptom of opportunities to improve processes.

Crenshaw’s approach to developing a time budget seems to me just a re-run of the age old time management gurus’ spreadsheets in which we keep track of all activities for a number of weeks and then analyze them for waste. In my experiences personally, and with clients, this approach does not work well. A significant number of people simply will not maintain a log of their activities in sufficient detail and at enough length to really be useful. More troubling, very few are able to act on the results of the analysis.

I have come to relie on a Seize Your Time approach which I have written and spoken about frequently. Basically, this works as follows:

Take out your schedule for the next week. Block out two hours during which you will post on your door a sign saying, “Do Not Disturb”, turn off all communication devices including your beloved Blackberry (iPhones, too) and work without interruption on some valuable project that will move your organization forward.

You can read more about this in my Time Management postings and podcasts.

One area in which Crenshaw strikes on a rich vein of truth is his discussion of “business systems” and “personal systems”. Here he points out the fact that the “personal system” of the business leader becomes de facto the “business system” of the company.

Many business managers and owners act as though magically their behavior is disconnected from the behavior of their company. They engage in the delusional notion that people throughout their company do not notice how they behave, how they make decisions, what their priorities are, what their values in dealing with people and other companies are, in fact, almost everything they do or say (mostly do).

Fortunately, this is not true. Why “fortunately” you might ask. The answer is that the behavior of the leader of small and medium size businesses has dramatic and reliable impacts on the performance of the company. And, since we do know what constitutes high-performance in business leaders, the leader can learn the appropriate behaviors, actively model them in their own performance, and see the results cascade through their firm.

I applaud Crenshaw for taking on a popular buzzword and small-scale plague not only in business life, but also our day-to-day world. Multitasking is indeed a myth. I would be tempted to be more vigorous in my rhetoric and say that multitasking is a fraud and a thief.