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Inside the Minds Stuff - Inside the Minds. Managing for Profit. Leading CEOs on Key Strategies for Increasing Profits Exponentially in Any Economy Authors: N Published year: 2004 Pages: 46-48/130 |
My management style has evolved and matured greatly over the past eight years . Through feedback from longtime employees , Ive learned how to be less intimidating. That was a primary complaint, especially from female employees. Ive found parenting to be one of the best sources of management experience. Employees are very much like your own children (even when they are much older than you). They are all different; each of them brings their own talents, knowledge and baggage to the workplace. Ive found that each key employee requires a slightly different approach. I often joke that I am the staff psychologist . Understanding their personalities, what drives them, what worries them and what their emotional and psychological issues are is part of being their manager. Just like my children, they all need consistency, structure, direction, encouragement, appreciation and the occasional scolding. Obviously I cant do this with all employees. There just isnt enough time in the day. So I focus my management efforts on key employees and let them manage the others. Ive noticed that several of my managers have begun to take on this same approach, so there is an element of leading by example.
AccuCode has been through two very difficult financial times during our eight year history. Both were due to my attempts at growing too quickly. In anticipation of growth, I added people and infrastructure. Because AccuCode is self funded , when revenue took a short term dip I found myself overextended. Sadly, good employees had to be laid-off and others had to take pay cuts. Vendors, both good and bad, were stretched while we tried to sell our way out of the situation. In both instances the company went through short periods of contraction. I had to very quickly make decisions about which employees were critical and which could be let go without impacting our ability to serve our customers. These were painful and expensive lessons. However, as a growth-minded CEO, I think these situations are inevitable and in many cases healthy for the company. Neverending success leads to complacency. Every organization needs a dose of reality and an occasional pruning. Due to those experiences, I now try to go through a smaller (voluntary) version of this kind of pruning at least twice a year.
Risk assessment is all about the potential return. First, the potential return has to be significantly higher than the cost of failure. Second, its important to examine whether or not this application or project is within the core expertise of the company. If so, then the odds of failure are low, and if not, then the potential return better be significant, or it should not even be considered .
A prime example of a risk handled efficiently by our company occurred just a few years ago. One of our largest customers came to us and ask if we would be willing to take on a very large e-commerce and logistics software development project. We had previously competed for the project and had lost to a competitor that subsequently failed miserably. On paper the competitor was imminently more qualified to do the project than we were. Through mismanagement and failed expectation setting, they had not succeeded and were now being sued by this Fortune 100 customer. At the time, AccuCode employed exactly one full-time programmer. We had never done anything like this project before. If we succeeded, it would forever change the face and future of my company and deliver the biggest profits in company history. If we failed, it would probably put us out of business. Our odds of pulling it off were slim. However, I personally had some ideas for the project that the customer liked and I had convinced them that we could probably accomplish the project. To seal the deal I offered them a no risk proposition: If we failed to deliver the first milestone, on-time and on budget, I would refund 100% for their money. If that happened , I would be out of business. The customer accepted. I recruited the development team over the next three weeks and we delivered. The customer was delighted , and today over half our staff and our revenue comes from software projects similar to this one. I knew that this is the direction in which I wanted to take the company and I knew that without a successful software component to our offering we would never reach our true potential. And therefore I seized this opportunityand the risk associated with itas a chance to redefine my company, and it worked better than I could have ever hoped.
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Inside the Minds Stuff - Inside the Minds. Managing for Profit. Leading CEOs on Key Strategies for Increasing Profits Exponentially in Any Economy Authors: N Published year: 2004 Pages: 46-48/130 |