Your Healthy Business

Introduction

Even though this looks like a typical blog, it is actually an experiment in using the features of simple blog software to develop, over time, a single unified piece of work. This is really an alternative to the book. It is not constrained to the chapter format and a single sequence of text. I think of this as a fabric of writing, so I am test-driving the term "fabwrit". In this introduction I'll describe this after outlining the key topic areas.

Your business dreams

Starting and running a business is always an adventure. Even for seasoned entrepreneurs, every new venture requires a step into the unknown, because each business is unique, and every situation is unique. And it always starts with a business dream.

It's Alive!

If you remember nothing else about this reading through this site, I hope you will take away this key point. The starting point for building and growing a healthy business is the recognition that your business is actually alive. A living thing. A form of life that has an existence apart from you, and yet is dependent on you for sustenance.

Key factors for your healthy business

How would you define a healthy business? Do you even think in those terms? I mean, do you think about a business as something that can be healthy or unhealthy?

Many owners and managers of businesses, all the way up to huge multi-nationals, do think in terms of the health of their businesses. They think in terms of life and death of the business. During my years in IBM I became used to hearing one top-level vice president talk about the “near-death experience” IBM faced, when challenged by the PC revolution, and all that came with it.

All services, all the time

Do you think you can manage to suspend disbelief for the next few minutes, to consider an idea that may seem ridiculous at first? Can you at least momentarily entertain the notion that every business may usefully be seen as a service business, and even what we normally think of as products can be viewed according to the services they provide? This is the essence of the “all-services, all-the-time” perspective. This perspective stems directly from the observation that people, with their talent, knowledge, skills, and experience constitute the ultimate source of value. No matter what business you’re in, this perspective can serve you well.

Why leading a business is so hard (and what you can do about it)

The nature of business is to make order out of chaos. "Really?", you ask. "What do you mean by that?"

I mean, the world is a pretty chaotic place. People, people, people, as far as the eye can see, each with their unique desires, talents, idiosyncrasies. Resources, suppliers, other companies and products. Forces of nature, social forces, politics, rules and regulations, technologies. Etc. Etc.

Life sustainment

Picking up from the outline of parallel patterns of biological and social life, let's focus on the sustainment phase of the lifecycle.

Sustainment of the living system, any living system, requires the following abilities:

The ability of the system to self-regulate. We see this in the internal forces that cause an organism to breathe on a regular basis, to respond to hunger and thirst in the pursuit of nourishment, the ability to slough off excess heat, or seek heat sources to stave off excessive cold.
The ability of the system to manage variety. The problem with variety is unexpected threats. An animal needs to be prepared to fend off attackers, whether predators or rivals. But an unexpected toxin may be a form of variety that the animal is totally unprepared to address. This becomes extremely complicated in the case of business, where threats can come from unexpected sources, and sources that actually have intentions to dislodge the business from valuable revenue sources.
The ability of the system to self-regenerate. Can the system heal itself? Can it recover from injury (or disaster)?
The ability of the system to maintain relationships among elements. In the case of the biological system, this is fairly obvious. Trees and persons have inherited the longstanding ability to keep their limbs from randomly falling off. Limbs that fall off clearly indicate unhealthy conditions. For businesses this presents special problems, when the needed relationships are with autonomous individuals and organizations. We will address this as a key health maintenance concern.
The ability of the system to grow. Maybe we should say "grow within limits". In the case of animals and plants, nature has supplied the ability to grow to a certain size, and then imposes limits to growth (no 300 pound mouse). In the case of organizations, we can see that there are major changes as they grow up to and beyond certain thresholds. But as a business leader, one of the main desires and responsibilities is, specifically, to attain specific growth objectives. It's enough to note for the moment that there are abilities, barriers, and methods to the achievement of various levels of growth.
The ability of the system to metabolize. Here we're talking about whole input, processing, and output systems, which we'll get into in greater detail as we think about supply chains and supply webs, as well as operational processes in the business world
The ability of the system to adapt. Again, as with growth, there are limits to adaptivity in the plant and animal kingdoms. Genetic adaptation occurs on a generational basis, so is fairly slow at a species level, and limited at the individual level to what is programmed into the individual by genetics. Except for humans, who have an almost infinite ability to adapt to situations, both psychologically, and through technology. For organizations, adaptability is even more unlimited, potentially. But the actions of leaders of organizations can go a long way to limiting or enabling the organization to adapt to changing circumstances. For much more on this topic, take a look at Stephan Haeckel's work on the adaptive enterprise.
The ability of the system to respond to stimuli. The ability to respond to external events depends on many factors. The ability to perceive situations, both opportunities and threats, the ability to process the implications of such perceptions, and the ability to form intent and take actions are all important to the responsiveness of the organization as well as the organism.
The ability of the system to learn. This ability is quite variable among organisms, and even more so among the organizations human beings. This is one of the greatest sources of excellent health, or lousy health (quite frankly).
The ability of the system to form a purpose. Both biological and social life have the ability to pursue goals. In Russell Ackoff's formulation the difference is that biological life forms purposes within the individual, whereas social organizations have individual purpose, as well as group purpose. We will see that the lack of common purpose among individuals and the group can be one of the greatest sources of ill-health in business.
The ability of the system to decide. Based on information from the environment, individuals and groups both decide on courses of action. In the business world, the concept of "buy-in" to the decisions that affect the business as a whole can effect the organization's health for better and for worse.
The ability of the system to communicate. The communication capability is one of the most interesting points of difference between the individual and the organization. Communication, especially among humans, provides much of the power to shape their situations. Likewise communication within a business, and outwardly from a business provides many critical success factors. For this reason, our considerations of business health will revolve around this ability, which is ever more important in a networked, global, business environment.
The ability of the system to produce. The ability to produce is most important for businesses. Yes, individual organisms, including people, do produce according to their abilities, but the power of the organizations (including businesses) is the collective ability to produce results that far exceed the ability of individual persons.
The ability of the system to reproduce. Do individuals reproduce? Yes, and in nature, the reproductive methods have a great deal of interesting variety, from bacteria that reproduce by simply dividing, to various forms of sexual reproduction. For the organization, there are even more mechanisms, including various forms of division and combination.

Problems with any of these sustainment mechanisms will inevitably lead to ill-health for the organization. So feel free to link over to the discussion of healthy factors for businesses.

Or pick up on a deeper discussion of the characteristics of businesses (and other organizations) as living systems. (To be written)

Or return to the introduction.

Expert mindset and CEO mindset

One of the most important points of balance for business leaders concerns the mindset that you bring to the leadership role. In another section there will be a discussion of the so-called leadership pipeline, which applies to large organizations that have the luxury to groom people, over time, into leadership positions. On the other hand, it is the norm in smaller businesses and startups for the founder and owner to be a passionate performer, who starts a business to pursue their passion, without necessarily going through a series of training and promotion experiences to build the mindset and expertise of a CEO or business leader.

Mindset of the CEO

What do you think of when you think of a CEO? Do certain famous names come to mind? Jack Welch? Meg Whitman? Richard Branson? Lou Gestner, Sam Palmisano or Ginny Rometty? Steve Jobs? Henry Ford? Warren Buffet? I'm not going to try to detail out what these people have in common. I'll just let those images sink in, and ask you to think which, if any of them seem to be perfect role models for the leader of a business.

However different CEOs may be in personality, education and experience, I think we can agree that the great ones stay in our minds as the face of their companies. They carry the image, the brand, and the story of their organizations. They set the tone for the culture, and what it means to be a member of their teams. For any business to experience a healthy future, and rise to its potential, there needs to be someone with the mindset of a leader to stand up and take the lead.

There are many ways to develop into that leader. It's not our purpose here to catalog all the aspects, and all the sources of help in that quest. But here are a few points to consider.

It is difficult under any circumstances to bear the responsibility for the vision-setting and decision-making that provide guidance to your business. This becomes overwhelming if, at the same time, you are mired in the day-to-day firefighting and details. Setting and guiding the vision open up the opportunities for the future growth and maturity of your business. Without the CEO mindset, it is all too easy for you to literally become the bottleneck. If you can't find the time to get away from the press of current events, then the business tends to stay at its current level, or shrink, or shrivel.

A big part of this is micro-managing everything that needs to be done. And why would you do that? You can answer that yourself, but if you're honest with yourself I'm sure that lack of trust is at the heart of the answer. Can you trust the people who are performing, to do things the way you feel they should be done? Do they know how to interact with customers? Do they maintain your standards of quality? Can you trust all aspects of your business to operate smoothly when you take your eyes away? If not, this is a health issue of the highest priority.

Maybe this is going a little deep, but I thought it might be worth mentioning a study on the value of a (good) mission statement to the longevity of a business. Of course I translate longevity into health. You can access the full paper here, but the key finding for me was the following paragraph: "Inclusion of customers (r=-.12) or employees (r=-.03) in the mission statement, the two stakeholders most likely be addressed, was not related to longevity. In contrast, specifying the business existed to serve the community/society (r = .15) resulted in a significant relationship with company lifespan. Regarding the strategy variables, none of the relationships were significant. This lends further support to the recommendation that specifying financial objectives such as profit does not enhance the desired benefits of mission statements. Values related to longevity included only: (1) the importance of accountability/stewardship (r = .15), and (2) respect for a company's civic or social responsibility (r = .17). Behaviorally, the only content correlated to lifespan was mention that actions were driven by ethical, equitable, or moral principles (r = .13). Interestingly, the correlational results do collectively support de Geus' "living company" orientation toward stewardship...."

What this makes me think is that the mission statement itself is a bit of evidence of the mindset and behavior of your management team. The apparent importance of concern for serving the community/society, accountability/stewardship, civic or social responsibility, and ethical, equitable, or moral principles, paints a pretty vivid picture, in my mind, of a management team that is unlikely to engage in a cut-throat race to the bottom, but rather is focused on building relationships that foster ongoing health and wellness throughout the organization and the community.

Return to Expert mindset and CEO mindset.
To get back to the hub list of healthy business factors, click here.
To get back to the discussion of businesses as living systems, click here.

Mindset of an expert

[in progress]

The Hoppers observe that the internal growth of leaders who truly and at a gut level understand and appreciate what the workers feel, how they are motivated, the esprit de corps that they feel as being part of a band of brothers and sisters. They may endure hardships, but that is what makes the unique, and gives them a sense of accomplishment. Can an outsider, educated in general theories of business management, ever have the visceral relationship to this kind of working organization? Can they gain this perspective, and the trust and rapport that goes with it?

They are relentless in their criticism of what they call "The Cult of the So-Called Expert"

To return to Mindset of the CEO and the expert
To get back to the hub list of healthy business factors, click here.
To get back to the discussion of businesses as living systems, click here

Marketing and Sales

The balance point between marketing and sales is important for any business. Both aspects and processes are needed, although there are differences in balance, from industry to industry, and by individual business, depending on a number of factors.

There are discussions of marketing separate from sales, linked below. At this point, the topic is balance. But in simple terms, what needs to be balanced?

In simple terms, marketing is about gaining the attention of potential customers, clients, users of the products and/or services of a business. Gaining the attention, and creating interest, and hopefully desire, or matching with desires that the audience already has. In simple terms, sales is getting members of that audience to take action on the fulfillment of their desires by actually making some kind of exchange that gives them access to the product or service. So it's about education, and then a move to action.

The need for balance arises from the fact that the action won't happen without a potential being identified, or self-identified. This requires a connection, which needs to be about desires, and the satisfaction of desires. The buyer needs to be aware of their own desire, and their awareness may arise from exposure to the seller's marketing. The seller needs to be aware of a potential buyer whose pre-existing or stimulated desire matches well enough to initiate the selling process.

So we see the important linkage of marketing and selling. Let's take at a look at each of these separately: To Marketing To Sales

To get back to the hub list of healthy business factors, click here.

To get back to the discussion of businesses as living systems, click here.

Marketing

[in progress]

A dictionary definition: the ways in which a company encourages people to buy its products by deciding on price, type of customer, and advertising policy
From Wikipedia: "process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling that product or service" and "a set of processes for creating, delivering and communicating value to customers",

Back to Marketing and Sales
To get back to the hub list of healthy business factors, click here.
To get back to the discussion of businesses as living systems, click here.

Sales

The sales process, even abstracted away from the rest of your business, is one of your most important considerations. As Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM, is quoted, "Nothing happens until someone sells something." (Or was it "Nothing happens until a sale is made"?) Whatever it was that old Tom actually said, the point is clear. A business will not continue without people buying products or services, and that means that somehow the business has made those sales.

This is such a fundamental factor of a successful business, it is definitely worth serious attention to the health of the sales process itself.

One thing to notice is the extent to which the sales process has penetrated into one of the traditional arenas of marketing - the advertisement. This has been made possible by various electronic media, including television and the WorldWide Web. A familiar example is the infomercial, which seeks to

Gain our attention
Make a claim to provide some satisfaction of desire to enhance or remedy our lives in some way
Educate us as to how such a claim is brought into reality through some device or product that can be delivered
Have us respond to a call to action -- "Call this number now! Operators are waiting"

This is a form of sales that populates late-night television, of course, but is also ubiquitous on the Web. There, the all-important click-through takes the potential buyer directly to a place payment can be made through some supposedly secure service, and the product or device sent, through the magic of outbound logistics, straight to the buyer's home or office.

There are many gems and quips of wit and wisdom about the art and science of selling. People buy from those they know, like, and trust. Everyone likes to buy, no one wants to be sold to. Etc. There are also dozens of programs that can help salespeople from cold calling to closing. These typically have some version of the following approach:

Establish rapport, or find common ground, with the potential buyer.
Determine the needs or desires of the buyer.
Match something you offer to the concerns you've uncovered.
Make the deal, close the sale.

Variations on this approach include solution selling, and consultative selling. A still more recent approach has arisen from an intersection of the selling process and the coaching discipline. A summary of a coaching-based sales process can be found here.

Back to Marketing and Sales
To get back to the hub list of healthy business factors, click here.
To get back to the discussion of businesses as living systems, click here.

Leading and Managing

[in progress]

Let's take at a look at each of these separately: To Leading To Managing
To get back to the hub list of healthy business factors, click here.
To get back to the discussion of businesses as living systems, click here.

Leading

[in progress]

Back to Leading and Managing
To get back to the hub list of healthy business factors, click here.
To get back to the discussion of businesses as living systems, click here.

Managing

[in progress]

Back to Leading and Managing
To get back to the hub list of healthy business factors, click here.
To get back to the discussion of businesses as living systems, click here.

Planning and Execution

[in progress]

Let's take at a look at each of these separately: To Planning To Execution
To get back to the hub list of healthy business factors, click here.
To get back to the discussion of businesses as living systems, click here.

Planning

[in progress]

Back to Planning and Execution
To get back to the hub list of healthy business factors, click here.
To get back to the discussion of businesses as living systems, click here.

Execution

[in progress]

Back to Planning and Execution
To get back to the hub list of healthy business factors, click here.
To get back to the discussion of businesses as living systems, click here.

Habits of thought and action

Business coaches will often advertise that they help people work less, make more money, make a greater contribution, and have more fun, while falling back in love with their business. The key to the coaching experience is the ability to form new habits of thought and action. One approach is the “Not-To-Do” list. But, while this is a cute idea, there's a good reason not to overly focus on the “not-to-do’s”. This has to do with how the brain works.

Everyone knows that trying to break a bad habit is devilishly hard. Of that there is no doubt. The “Stop smoking” industry, the diet industry, the self-help industry are all built on the fact that it is indeed devilishly hard to break habits that have taken hold in our minds, such that there is a lot of repeat business in those industries. Because of the recent advances in our understanding of the human brain and how it works, we have a better idea of why this is so hard.

In the 2012 book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg of the New York Times talks about the habit loop, which shows how a reward reinforces habitual behavior, and suggests figuring out ways to achieve the same reward with different behavior. A lot of this has to do with how the reward is defined. If the “reward” is itself the enjoyment of a cigarette, then changed behavior to get there will not be much help. If the reward is an intensive business-oriented visit to Egypt, as with one case study, the behavior required to achieve that higher reward served to overwhelm (if that’s the right word) a number of habits that appear to get in the way of achieving the new (complex) reward.

Another perspective is provided by David Rock’s 2006 book Quiet Leadership. As Rock points out, reinforcing mechanisms in the brain are what make it so devilishly hard to break a habit. “The more we focus on a problem we have, the more ingrained we make it”.

Rock suggests that business leaders (acting as coaches) can benefit by helping people focus on thinking itself. Get employees (or clients) to think about their own processes of thought, and then help lead them into the creation of new habits of thought, and action. His specific advice on how to help a client or employee form new habits can be summarized by the acronym: CREATE – understand their Current Reality, Explore Alternatives, and Tap into their own Energy for positive change.

We are still in early days of fully understanding the workings of the human mind. Recent advances in the science of the brain are starting to give us new knowledge of how habits are created, and how they can replace destructive behaviors. This is giving us, as coaches and managers, powerful new tools to help our clients and employees improve their lives.

One key area to focus on is the habit of happiness. This is worth some special attention.

To get back to the hub list of healthy business factors, click here.
To get back to the discussion of businesses as living systems, here.