The one trait that Google’s bosses are missing, How to use LER to measure productivity return on digital investment & AI Marketing Tools
15 May 2023 Newsletter
“Productivity isn’t everything but in the long run it’s almost everything”
– Paul Krugman Nobel Prize winning economist
Hope you’re Thriving!
It’s been a productive week with workshops and meetings, and I’ve been building an online course to dive deep into onboarding. More on that in the coming months, but here’s a quote I heard this week that’s stuck with me.
“After the age of thirty-five, 90 per cent of your thoughts are the same every day.”
Let’s do this.
The One Trait That Google’s Bosses Are Missing
Fifteen years ago, Google identified the 11 traits that the best bosses share, but one was missing.
What was missing? Onboarding people into a new role from either inside or outside the company.
In this article, Jeff Haden outlines his experience working at Google and why the missing onboarding piece was so important.
“I had no idea whom I would be working with. I had no idea what the department manager hoped to achieve or what the team hoped to achieve. I was left to figure all of that out myself, and while I eventually did, it took me way longer than it should have to get the team to at least somewhat gel.”
That’s why I wrote the book ‘Onboarded: How to bring new hires where the point where they are effective faster’ – because it doesn’t need to be this way. This book is written for business owners and leaders. It details the business case of why onboarding debt is so expensive and provides two simple tools for any leader to implement immediately to help solve the onboarding problem.
A Great Interview Question
A great interview question I heard recently:
“We’re sitting right here five years from now, and you tell me your career is amazing. Things are great. It couldn’t be better.
What are you doing? How much are you earning? How big is your team? What is your day-to-day?”
Then be quiet and listen…
How to use LER to Measure Productivity Return on Digital Investment
One of our clients, a consulting company in Australia, made a commitment to track and review Labor Efficiency Ratio (LER) every quarter and identify opportunities to improve productivity. The below shows the dLER trend from July 2021 to March 2023.
In July 2021, their Direct Labour Efficiency Ratio was 1.3, meaning that for every $1 invested in Direct Labour (their consultants), they were generating $1.3 in Gross Margins.
Things were not looking good.
As we mapped and analysed their end-to-end money-making process, we identified different processes and digital improvement opportunities we prioritised quarter on quarter.
By April 2022 (after three quarters of improving some of their software systems), they noticed a dLER uplift of $1.99 in GM for every $1 invested in their consultants.
Graph: Consulting company – Direct Labour Efficiency Ratio from July 2021 to March 2023
Learn more about how this company took their LER from $1.30 to $2.90 here.
AI Tools for Marketing
Can Artificial Intelligence save you a lot of time and effort, thereby improving productivity? Yes.
Has the amount of junk email I’m getting, which is likely written by AI, increased recently, thereby decreasing productivity? Also yes.
A few teams I work with have gone full deep dive with AI; one CEO even told their leadership team that they are cutting salaries by $250k from the budget, and the team needs to find productivity improvements via AI.
This week I came across this list of 25 free tools for marketing and yes, it includes a few that use AI to collect emails and fully personalise junk email.
99 Problems
This Week on The Growth Whisperers Podcast
161 Rating your firm on Jim Collins 7 Good to Great principles (2/2)
Jim Collins book Good to Great is one of the all-time business classics due to the size and quality of the research that underpins the principles that he identified in the research about companies that endured and achieved great performance, relative to their peer companies who only achieved good performance.
In Good to Great, Jim Collins identified seven core principles that great companies excelled at.
In this part two of two episodes, we dig into the seven principles from Good to Great and ask you to rate your firm’s performance on each of these.
Episode 161 The Growth Whisperers Podcast
Listen to The Growth Whisperers
Or watch it on YouTube
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Keep Thriving!
Brad Giles
