“Ownership Thinking: How to End Entitlement and Create a Culture of Accountability, Purpose and Profit” by Brad Hams (McGraw-Hill, $28).
Hams distinguishes between employees who think they’re owed a job and those who own their jobs. Those who believe they’re owed a job produce more busyness than business. Just by doing the minimum (i.e. showing up), they expect the maximum — good wages, merit raises, great benefits, etc.
He acknowledges that this situation is as much the employer’s fault as the employee’s. When combining bureaucracy, silo building and command-and-control management, employers create the entitlement mentality. Having a performance review system where excellent really means average doesn’t help. Nor does cutting training and development at the first sign of a firm’s financial trouble.
Hams also feels that all employees can become job owners. They simply need their employer’s help through “Ownership Thinking.” Give employees a sense of personal importance by explaining how the business works. When they know and understand things like profit, cash flow, risk, competition, costs, stakeholders, customers, etc., the more they’ll see how their job fits into the organizational big picture.
To enhance the collegial experience, Ownership Thinking companies also believe fun has its place in the workplace. Having fun differs from goofing off. It offers people an opportunity to get to know each other socially. When people know each other, they’ll work better together.
“Rapid Improvement Plans (RIPs)” focus teams on performance indicators requiring attention. They’re 90-day plans with quantifiable goals. Incorporate fun by giving the RIP a theme. One company created the “Big Green Cash Cow” to focus on improving its collection activity. When there’s a win, celebrate it throughout the company.
Opportunity plans play a role is Ownership Thinking, too. On one front, they provide incentives for improved financial performance. Employees must see “the connection between the work they do and the incentive payments they receive.” On another, they present training and development investments that build skills and get employees to stretch beyond their comfort zone.
Check out the testimonial videos at ownershipthinking.com; CEOs discuss how and why Ownership Thinking works.
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“Plan B — How to Hatch a Second Plan That’s Always Better Than Your First” By David Kord Murray (Free Press, $26).
Even the best laid plans go awry. To ensure all is not lost when they do, you need an adaptive, agile structure capable of evolving from what is to what could B.
Setting the table: “Strategy is what we are going to do, while tactics are how we’re going to do it.” Strategy thinking must incorporate two types of thinking: top-down and bottom-up. Future-focused top-down identifies a situation and a goal. Here-and-now bottom up deals with “solutions that one is already prepared to offer.” The top-down and the bottom-up have to intersect for strategy to translate into tactics that work.
Murray cites H&R Block’s moves into financial services as an example of how top-down thinking led to acquisitions of mortgage and brokerage operations without bottom-up input about the demography of its customer base.
To adaptively execute, you have to balance confidence with paranoia. While implementing with confidence, you must remember that you are going where you haven’t been. So you can’t take forecasts, data and current tactics as gospel. While confidence sees opportunity, paranoia sees the barriers.
To mesh the two views, Murray advocates “encouraging constructive debate.” This isn’t I believe-you-believe; it’s about using various perspectives to think things through. Constructive debate allows us to develop various scenarios and align them with our tactical inventory (i.e. what we are good at doing, what we have to learn to do). Often, that debate involves going outside the industry to do more homework.
As the strategy unfolds, keep a close eye on what tactics work and don’t work. Ask why in both cases because things may shift — after all you’re dealing with the future.
The bottom line: Being practical and imaginative yields results.
Jim Pawlak is a nationally syndicated book reviewer.
