To get your week's work done in 2 hours, you'll need a
2,000 percent solution approach. The steps for creating a
2,000 percent solution (accomplishing 20 times more with
the same time, effort, and resources) are listed here:
1. Understand the importance of measuring performance.
2. Decide what to measure.
3. Identify the future best practice and measure it.
4. Implement beyond the future best practice.
5. Identify the ideal best practice.
6. Pursue the ideal best practice.
7. Select the right people and provide the right motivation.
8. Repeat the first seven steps.
This essay looks at eliminating mental barriers in step
five.
Remove Blinders to Envision Perfection
The ideal best practice is simply the most effective
process that can possibly be accomplished by anyone over
the next five years. It will usually exceed the future best
practice by a wide margin, and the ideal best practice
reflects a performance level that might not normally be
reached for decades. Here's an example: In corporate
communications, an ideal best practice would mean having
all employees receive, understand, and act on a message in
appropriate ways within a few seconds. We know that's
possible because those seeing a fire, smelling smoke, and
hearing a fire alarm in a building will respond
appropriately in that amount of time. By comparison, your
organization's performance today represents a tiny fraction
of what is possible. People perform nearly perfectly all
the time in many different ways. Put those perfectly
performing individuals into an organization, and it's often
like removing 99 percent of their intelligence. That's the
negative result that follows from employing poorly designed
processes.
Before searching out the ideal best practice for your
process, let us observe that you are seeing the ideal best
practices of near perfection all around you on a daily
basis. But chances are that you don't notice the near
perfection at all. Instead, your focus is probably on what
isn't working well … and becoming either frustrated or
annoyed.
Get the Message of Why Near-Perfection Routinely Occurs
Here are questions that my clients and students have found
to be mind-opening. These questions provide the key to
exponential success. Most people can do this exercise in
less than an hour. But even if you spend more time, you'll
be way ahead of those who never answer these questions.
Keep in mind that understanding is more important than
speed.
• What are 50 examples of how individuals perform near
perfection on a regular basis?
• What are 50 examples of how people in groups perform near
perfection on a regular basis?
• Why do these near-perfect performances occur?
• What's missing from your organization's approach to its
most important tasks for your organization to improve
to near-perfect performance?
Here's an example to get you started: Employees are very
good at cashing their paychecks. Rarely do paychecks go
uncashed. Why? Unless employees are very wealthy or
extremely forgetful, they need to cash or deposit their
paychecks in order to buy food, pay for shelter, and run
the rest of their lives. For most people, not cashing a
paycheck would be like trying to hold your breath for the
rest of your life. It's an activity that cannot be
sustained. Many examples of near-perfection draw on these
elements: It's a natural thing to do; people enjoy doing
it; the consequences of not doing it are severe; people
understand the consequences and know exactly what they have
to do.
How High Is Up?
Managers often feel confused when they try to decide how
tough to make corporate improvement goals. Imagine that
your organization's output has been rising at 5 percent a
year in units while revenues per employee have grown at 3
percent a year. Many will be tempted to choose this
historical performance as a target.
Most leaders will choose goals that are 30 to 50 percent
likely to be reached. Setting more challenging goals can
stimulate higher performance by making the tasks more
interesting for employees and other stakeholders. But it's
a bad idea to set high goals without providing a clear
direction for how to succeed and helping employees gain
confidence in the likelihood of reaching the goals.
Utilizing the ideal best practice focus provides a major
improvement in goal setting by identifying both a higher
standard and one that is achievable and credible to
employees. In essence, you get more stretch with the same
degree of psychological comfort.
Here's an example of how one man created vast wealth for
his family simply by thinking about the ideal best
practice. Early in the 20th century, no one knew how to
recover the oil and gas under a body of water, whether that
water was a lake, a bayou, or the ocean. One wildcatter had
the foresight to realize that someday it would be possible
to drill inexpensively in shallow water. He looked for
hydrocarbon fields where there were successful oil or gas
wells in surrounding bodies of water, and he bought the
mineral rights under the water, even though no one yet knew
how to drill there. He was confident there was oil and gas
there, and he was mostly right. For pennies an acre, he
ultimately added tens of millions of dollars to his family
estate. How did he figure out such a possibility?
While the actual best practice of the day didn't permit
drilling for petroleum in shallow water, technology did
exist then to build structures in shallow water (he had
seen piers and bridges jutting up from the ocean floor and
lake beds) and laying watertight pipelines. If these
capabilities were combined, he reasoned, you could drill
and transport petroleum products from wells located
underwater. He estimated that the cost would be about four
times the usual cost. To offset that expected cost, he
looked for dry land wells that produced at least four times
the usual volume for successful wells.
You can apply similar thinking to anticipate where
breakthroughs can be made in the next few years and to
seize major advantages by grasping those opportunities
before they are perceived by others. By scooping up the
best opportunities for your organization, competitors will
be left to fight over less favorable options when they
finally realize what they are missing. Your advantages will
be long entrenched and hard to dislodge when that
realization occurs.
Copyright 2007 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved
----------------------------------------------------
Donald Mitchell is chairman of Mitchell and Company, a
strategy and financial consulting firm in Weston, MA. He is
coauthor of six books including The 2,000 Percent Squared
Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, and The 2,000 Percent
Solution Workbook. You can find free tips for accomplishing
20 times more by registering at:
=========> http://www.2000percentsolution.com .
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