Determine Your Economic Engine With 2 Metrics, New Online Onboarded Course & How To Stop Dumb Decision Making In Your Leadership Team
4 June 2023 Newsletter
“A man is great not because he hasn’t failed; a man is great because failure hasn’t stopped him.” ― Confucius
Hope you’re Thriving!
It’s been a very productive week recording, finalising and launching my new course for Onboarded as well as a presentation for EO.
NEW Onboarded Course
Last week I heard it said that it’s hard to write a short book. We’ve all read books and thought the author could have conveyed their message in half the pages.
For that reason, with Onboarded, I had a maximum word limit that I wanted to stick to. And so, since the launch, I’ve been keen to provide more detail in some areas through an online course. For example, the Onboarding Sprint Plan was always constrained to the size of the book pages, but in the video course, I can go through it in much more detail, and teach the viewer how to complete it, explaining how and why to complete various sections. As a result I’ve also brought in a completely new sprint plan, which explains in a lot more detail how to build it, with an example.
In the new Onboarded course, you will learn detailed explanations about the book’s key concepts, how to apply them in your business, and how to use tools from the book, such as the role scorecard and onboarding sprint plan.
Note for Australian readers; the course is in USD; please email me for Australian pricing.
The course curriculum is outlined on the link below, as well as two preview videos you can watch.
Onboarded Online Course
How to bring new hires to the point where they are effective, faster.
This online course will help you:
• Understand the cost of ineffective onboarding to your business
• Significantly improve the understanding of new hires joining your firm
• Build a simple and effective onboarding process for your business today to dramatically increase results!
Onboarded Online Course – Learn More HERE
One Page Business Plan Advanced Course – Learn More HERE
Made To Thrive – The Five Roles Of A CEO – Learn More HERE
Never Change Bank Account Details
Last year, a team I work with was a cybercrime victim. A hacker had gained access to a supplier’s email account and sent my client an email advising of a bank account change.
So the diligent accounts person updated the payment details when paying the next invoice. Unfortunately, the payment, which might have been enough to buy a cheap apartment, went to the hacker’s account, and they, along with the money, were never to be seen again.
Having been in the room with them when that unfolded, you’d think it couldn’t happen to me.
But also, this week, it did. Fortunately, it was much less, but in the same manner, the hackers infiltrated a tradesperson’s email who was doing work for me, and I paid them.
According to Australian law, it is your responsibility if your supplier gets hacked, and the hackers make you pay to the wrong account because the goods or services haven’t been paid for (*always seek your own legal advice).
The key? Have insurance and only change a bank account detail after phoning them, and probably the number on their website.
Determine Your Economic Engine With 2 Metrics
In our work with leadership teams, we use proven frameworks to consistently build, validate and evolve strategic plans. The Hedgehog concept from Jim Collins is one of them, helping our clients explore their strategic core, acting as a guardrail as they climb their growth mountain towards the summit, or as Jim Collins calls it, the BHAG.
In his book “Good to Great”, Jim Collins explains the Hedgehog as a concept to focus an organisation’s efforts on the intersection between three circles.
What are you passionate about?
What are you best in the world at?
And third, and this is the one we’ll explore further now, what is your economic engine? Or Profit per X.
We often see leadership teams not only struggling to define their Economic Engine, but also understanding how to use it to enrich their strategic conversations. To better understand this concept, let’s break that down into two metrics, your Impact denominator (your X) and your Financial numerator (your Profit per).
Collins suggests the following question: “If you could pick one and only one ratio – Profit per X – to increase systematically over time, what X would have the greatest and most sustainable impact on your economic engine?”
One of our clients in the consulting industry initially agreed on ‘Project’ as their impact denominator. During our quarterly planning workshops, the conversations were focused on how to increase the number of projects, how to increase the revenue and reduce costs associated with projects, and how to galvanise everyone around that impact measure.
Government Debt
This Week on The Growth Whisperers Podcast
164 Using the sandbox to stop dumb decisions in the leadership team
Without effective discipline around decision making we can end up making decisions we later might call dumb. To avoid this one of the tools we use is the sandbox. Where we play.
Our sandbox is where we have proven that we can win and earn the right to be a viable option for our customers. And the principle helps us to keep sand in the box…
What we sell, Who we sell it to and where we sell it.
Like any principle creates focus and guardrails for our thinking and decisions.
When going outside of these guardrails, we need to do it with extreme caution and this takes a lot of humility at times – especially when a business is doing really well.
Episode 164 – The Growth Whisperers
Listen to The Growth Whisperers
Or watch it on YouTube
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Keep Thriving!
Brad Giles
