Thomas J Harrison

How many times have you been asked, “What is your favorite color?” Like many I don’t have a favorite color. If I reframed the question and asked , “If you were an artist and you could have only 3 colors with which to paint, what colors would you select and why?” Would you pick your 3 favorite colors?

Understanding the answer is understanding what BasicsRedefined is and why it is just as important to your enterprise as the colors are to the artist. And why it is perhaps the single most powerful organizational training tool available. If you were to select the 3 primary colors, you could paint with any color you chose. Similarly, if your organization masters 3 primary competencies, there is virtually no end to what it could accomplish.

In a nutshell, BasicsRedefined is:

Mastering and synergistically integrating the fundamentals of:

1) Project Management
2) Creation and Deployment of Highly Performance Teams
3) Mastering Time, Priorities and Resources

Projects are the objectives your organization needs to accomplish. THE WORK
Teams are the right people to get them done. THE PEOPLE
All objectives are governed by Time, Priorities and Resources. THE ALLOTMENT

Effectively integrating these 3 core competencies is like a master mixing his paints. He or she is limited only by his imagination and skill. Interestingly, many organizational problems will “simply go away” with the mastery of BasicsRedefined. Why? Most problems are rooted in neglect of the fundamentals.

BasicsRedefined is distilled, lean, and highly interactive. NO FLUFF.

Each competency is broken into one-hour programs.

All three competencies are covered in one-half day or full day programs.

BasicsRedefined is a program of Thomas J Harrison International

For further information:

www.thomasjharrison.com
tom@thomasjharrison.com
or call 702 509 3389

Over the past twelve years Tom Harrison has conducted over 1400 seminars throughout the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand speaking in every major city. Over 75% of Fortune 500 companies have been represented in his audiences as well as hundreds of small businesses, governmental agencies, nonprofits and healthcare organizations. He lives in Henderson Nevada.

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It was hectic.  Melbourne one week, Milwaukee the next. I was on the taxi way just before take-off talking to the COO of a specialty steel fabricating company in Southern California, that I would be addressing the following week. We had been trying to touch base for a couple of weeks. He wanted to give me a heads up on the negotiating program that I would be delivering. “One of our sister companies will be joining us.” he said. “Great!” I said. This would mean that all the office managers from around the U.S. and Canada would be at the program.

The following Tuesday morning I walked into the offices of the Seal Beach company. The COO immediately met me and pulled me aside. “Tom, I want to give you another heads up.” “Shoot,” I said. He went on to tell me that the CEO of the company would be joining us for the entire day. “Great!” I said. “Well, you need to understand who it is.” He told me the name. I knew the name. He had taken his private helicopter from Holmby Hills to attend the program. He was dressed in one of his company shirts. He participated in all the exercises. Asked poignant questions. I would much rather have listened to him speak on the acquisition of $50-$100m companies. I was humbled that he was there. He was humble enough to spend the day with his troops knowing that what they would learn would be well worth his time and theirs.

Classic. Leadership through example. Great companies master and relentlessly practice the fundamentals.
Simply put, his presence amplified the importance of the information and significantly increased the accountability of it being leveraged in practice.

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Sometimes, no matter how prepared you may think that you are at doing what you do so well, you can still be surprised. Such was the case in doing a highly distilled one-day Project Management seminar for a company that does interiors and retrofits for private business jets.  My expectation was that I would be talking a group of project managers that worked on Learjets, Dassault Falcons or maybe a GIII or GIV.  Such was not the case.

Within thirty minutes of starting the program, I knew that I was going to have to abandon the norm and dig deep and give a program that was atypical.  There were seven project managers and the COO.  The company did do retrofits and interiors for private business jets.  There were six or seven in the hangers.  The smallest was a Boeing BBJ (737), a 767 for a head of state, and a private 747 for a Middle Eastern Prince that had changed the spiral staircase to one modeled after “Tara” in Gone With the Wind. I went through them all except for the 767 that was roped off, with armed guards. The interiors ranged from $10m to $50m not counting avionics and engines.  The PM’s all drove to work on tricked motorbikes, they slammed espresso’s all day and were obviously adrenaline junkies. I learned all sorts of things that I didn’t know before.  Some Middle Eastern heads of state travel with a “live donor”, as in available for heart transplant if needed. I learned that the insulation making the plane ultra quiet and the speed of delivery were the two most important drivers.  The day for me was exhilarating.  I had to dig deeper than I ever have on a project management program.  Never stop learning.  You don’t know what might come up next. Soon I will share they most important points I gave to that great group of PM’s.

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In my previous blog on time management I mentioned that the very first step to “effective” time management is not planning your time.  It is “identifying” where you are currently spending your time.  I recommended setting up a simple recording sheet to track you day as it occurs. Do it in no more than ten minute increments.  Don’t wait until the end of the day to do this.  But do it at least every hour. This process of recording your day will not take more than for or five minutes for the entire day.  It is time well spent. Do it for at least a month.

The next item is important and will take some time to do.  Make a list of everything that you do in your job.  Most often you will not be able to do this accurately in one sitting. Hint, it will be considerably more than shows on your job description. But keep at it. Over a period of two or three weeks, you will have a substantially complete list. But make sure to include everything.  Do you conduct a Monday morning meeting? Do you handle Performance Reviews (be looking for a blog on how to conduct performance reviews) for your department? Do you hire, fire, discipline? Budget projections, projects, lead a team, etc., etc.? List all of your activities.  Every single one of them. You may have a list of upwards of one hundred items.  This is a very important list. If you haven’t already read the blog Some Thoughts on Pareto, do so now.  Recall the 80/20 rule. For example if you have one hundred things that you do, you will find that approximately twenty items on your list are more important than the remaining eighty.  It is crucial that you identify what those items are.  “They are all important”, you might say.  Fine.  Think it through critically.  Prioritize the top twenty things that you do.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, as the story goes, a consultant by the name of Ivy Lee was called to work with Charles Schwaab, then President of the largest steel company in the U.S.  He was to track everything Schwaab did for an entire day.  At the end of the day he would give recommendations on how he could more “effectively” manage his time. At the end of the day, the advice was simple and to the point.  I have given the same recommendations in BasicsRedefined Time, Priority and Resource Management programs.  Lee said, toward the end of the day, before you leave your office, write down the six most important things you have to do when you come in to work the next day (this takes discipline).  Then take a few more minutes and prioritize the list. Then, upon coming into the office the next morning, after very briefly getting settled into your day, start working on item number one.  Keep working at it until it is complete or you have gone as far as you can go with it at the time.  Then on to item number two.  And do this until you work your way through the list.  Does it sound impractical?  What about all the interruptions, emergencies, etc.?

A most important Question. What is more important than doing the most important thing with your time at this moment?  If you are continually distracted or interrupted, why? Emergencies coming up? Why?  Here is the ultimate test of your list.  Why would you be doing things that are not more important than those six items. If they are more important, why weren’t they identified on your list.  In Part 3 we will discuss multi-tasking, the nature of relationships in the context of time management and the critical difference between “efficiency” and “effectiveness”, as well as important strategies for effective delegation.  To summarize:

1. Track your day.  Identify accurately where your time is being consumed.
2. Identify every single thing you do in your job. Make a complete list.
3. 80/20 your list.  List and prioritize your top twenty.
4. At the end of every day, before you go home, write down and prioritize the six most important things to do the next day.
5. Always be asking “Am I doing the most important thing with my time at this moment.” If not, why not? Always be honest with yourself.

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After writing yesterday’s blog on “Know Thy Time, Part 1”,  I thought it best to give some background information before continuing with part 2.  As you will find, BasicsRedefined process is considerably different than most protocols found in business today.  A few years ago I was browsing the bookstore at Belfast International Airport. I happened upon a book entitled The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch.  Like most consultants I was familiar with the Pareto Principle, The 80/20 Principle and The Vital Few and the Trivial Many, but had never studied them to any great depth.  Even though the seminal research by Pareto, published in 1906 was enlightening (Pareto discovered that 20% of Italy’s population owned 80% of the land), it was another 35 years before Joseph Moses Juran blew the dust off his research and started using it in his consulting practice and then later writing his seminal Quality Control Handbook.  It was Juran who coined the terms, Pareto Principle, the 80/20 Rule and the Law of the Vital Few. Juran confined most of his research to the area of Quality Management, TQM and Quality Circles.

Today knowledgeable executives and companies are exploiting the principle as never before. After reading The 80/20 Principle and studying the Pareto Rule, I started saying in my programs that I felt the principle it contains could be the most important management discovery of the twentieth century.

Let’s take a look at a few examples as to how this principle could help you.

Suppose you are handed a new and troubled department to oversee, in addition to your current duties.  The department manager was fired.  There is no new manager. You need to clean up the mess. The department which has 100 people appears to be completely dysfunctional.  You feel like firing everybody and starting over from scratch.  Let’s take a look at how Pareto could be used.  80/20 would say that 20% of the employees are creating 80% of your problems. If you were to carry it another step by doing 80/20 on the 20% you would find that 4 people are creating 64% of your headaches.  Try one more step, 20% of the 4% you would find that .8% of the people (one person) is responsible for 51.2% of your problems.  So to start turning your new department around, IDENTIFY and extract those five people and you are well on your way to solving your problem.  Just a side note for now.  The word identity will loom large throughout the blogs.

I often refer to the 80/20 Principle as the Law of Disproportionality. Years ago I did a sales seminar for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.  There were 20 agents. 16 showed up for the program.  4 were too busy.  Interestingly the 16 remaining agents shared the services of 2 secretaries. One agent had 3 secretaries, three agents each had their own secretary. Most sales managers know that 20% of their sales people sell 80% of their products.

As a side note I see over and over again the mistake that upper management makes in laying off people.  They cut back on secretaries or administrative assistants, forcing higher valued personnel to perform lower value work.  That diminishes productivity to a downward spiraling level.  Managers for the most part are not Cracker Jacks at Word, Excel, or Access. Making incompetent secretaries out of highly skilled personnel is misguided management, at best.

We’ve known for a long time that 20% of a manufacturing process accounts for 80% of product defects. Understanding this principle was seminal to six sigma.

This phenomenon continues throughout the organization. It applies to time management, relationship management, problem solving, project management, product management, team management. I encourage you to read The 80/20 Principle, by Richard Koch. If you are of an entrepreneurial mindset take a look at a derivative, The 4 Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss.

The Law of Disproportionality has always been with us.  Understanding and utilizing it is one of the most important skill sets that executives, managers and business owners can possess. On a closing note. 80/20 is not exact.  It could be 75/25, 90/10. However, it is always disproportional.

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There are dozens of poplar time management books.  Today I would like to point to my favorite. It is not considered a time management book at all. It fact it is my favorite management book of all time. To quote from the preface. “Management books usually deal with managing other people.  The subject of this book is managing oneself for effectiveness. That one can truly manage other people is by no means adequately proven. But one can always manage oneself.  Indeed, executives who do not manage themselves for effectiveness cannot possibly expect to manage their associates and subordinates. Management is largely by example. Executives who do not know how to make themselves effective in their own job and work set the wrong example…Without  effectiveness there is no “performance,” no matter how much intelligence and knowledge goes into the work, no matter how many hours it takes. Yet it is perhaps not too surprising  that we have so far paid little attention to the effective executive.” The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker, 1967. I mention the year for impact.

So many things go into effective time management.  Most of us have one system or another. Smart phones with calendars and time management applications, Franklin-Covey planners and on it goes.  This will be short and to the point.  I will quote from one passage in the book and then give a few procedures that you may find helpful.

Know Thy Time

Effective executives start with their time.

“Know thyself,” the old prescription for wisdom, is almost impossibly difficult for mortal men.  But everyone can follow the injunction “Know thy time” if one wants to, and be well on the road toward contribution and effectiveness.

Most discussions of the executive’s task start with the advice  to plan one’s work.  This sounds eminently plausible.  The only thing wrong with it is that it rarely works.  The plans always remain on paper, always remain good intentions.  They seldom turn into achievement.  Effective executives, in my observation, do not start out with planning.  They start by finding out where their time actually goes.  Then they attempt to manage their time to cut back unproductive demands on their time.  Finally they consolidate their “discretionary” time into the largest possible continuing units.  This three step process;

• recording time
• managing time
• consolidating time

is the foundation of executive effectiveness.

Here are some recommendations that may prove helpful.  Track your day.  It is best to have some printed form that have each hour broken up into a minimum of fifteen minute increments.  Then religiously, without trying to control what is happening, record where your time is being spent, e.g. a twenty minute telephone call, someone stopping by your office to chat, meetings, etc. Do this for at least four weeks. (I strongly recommend that you do not use this technique on your employees to track their time.) This will yield to you a valuable trove of information as to how your day is consumed. And will give you helpful insights on how to better manage your day. If you are like most of us you enter your day in a whirl of activity and by the end of the day can hardly remember what you accomplished.  In my next blog I will give several additional, simple strategies for far more effectively using your time.

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Mission Statements are fundamental, to projects, teams, departments, small companies and global conglomerates. What are they? Why have them? How can we better utilize them. Here are a few poignant thoughts that may be helpful to review.  In polling over fifteen thousand employees in the Fortune 1000 I found that virtually all worked for companies with Mission Statements.  However fewer than ten percent could tell me what their companies Mission Statements were.

• A Mission Statement should not be a noble-sounding plaque to hang in the companies lobby.
• An effective Mission Statement basically answers one question: “How do we intend to win in this business?” It is defining.
• Harp on the mission constantly. In every meeting, large or small.
• Get input from anywhere–but setting the mission is top management’s responsibility.
• A mission cannot, and must not be delegated to anyone except the people ultimately held accountable for it.
• A mission is the defining moment for a company’s leadership. It’s the true test of its stuff. The above bullets are from Winning, Jack Welch. (Highly Recommended.)
• “It has been proven time and again that individuals achieve their greatest successes when they work with others toward a common goal they are passionate about reaching.”
• “Every enterprise and team requires simple, clear, and unifying objectives.  Its mission has to be clear enough and big enough to provide a common vision. Without a commitment to a common vision there is no enterprise; there is only a mob.”
• “A mission statement should fit on your T-shirt.”   The above bullets are from Peter Drucker as recounted in the book The Definitive Drucker, Elizabeth Haas Edersheim (Highly Recommended.)

To summarize:  Everyone in the organization should know and understand the company’s mission.  Every division, department, project and team should also have a mission statement.  That mission statement must be in alignment with and congruent to the organization’s overall mission statement. Absence of the above leads to fragmentation. Dispersion and waste of limited resources. Frustration and apathy among employees.

BasicsRedefined teaches three fundamental competencies; project management, cutting edge teams, and rigorous time, priority and resource management. Integrating the disciplines into organizations to the point of internalized habituation, creating far more productive and profitable enterprises.

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It was a watershed moment of sorts.  Several years ago I was delivering a two-day project management seminar in Reno, Nevada.  An important part of any project management program is the skill of setting, planning and implementing specific goals.  In future blogs I will be discussing more on the subject of goals.  For now there are just a few salient points that I would like to make.

One particularly important observation I found was this.  Lower levels in management were far less adept in the skill of goals (setting, planning and implementing). In fact in polling thousands of seminar participants I found  most lower and mid-level managers had never consistently set goals either personally or professionally. There are many predictive elements for those who tend to be more successful than others in their business careers. One of the most obvious is summed up in this bullet point:

If you don’t have clearly defined goals, by default and without exception you will work within the framework and parameters of  someone else’s goals for you.  Rarely will those goals have your best interest in mind.

Employees should always work diligently toward the accomplishment of the goals identified by both employee and supervisor.  Alignment, congruency and metrics are for another time. If your employees or sales representatives do not have clearly defined goals with the metrics to measure them, they are operating in default mode. They will not function at the level of those who do.

Along this line I posited a question during the seminar. “Suppose you and your colleagues decided that you wanted to get together after work and go do something, socially.  It was decided that everyone would meet in the parking lot at about a quarter to six and then the decision would be made as to where to go and what to do.  Five showed up and someone popped the question, ‘So…What do you wanna do?’ ”  What do you suppose was the most common response?  By far:  “I don’t know  what do you want to do?”  I subsequently asked the same question hundreds of times all around the world and overwhelming got the very same response.

There is an interesting definition that I use in Project Management:

Project Management is a disciplined way of thinking about a job.  This way of thinking should be followed in all projects regardless as to content, size or complexity.

One of the best things you can do for your employees is to train them in a disciplined way of thinking.  A chief cornerstone to disciplined thought is the development of the skill of goal setting.  The cost of sloppy, ambiguous, thoughtless ‘thinking’ is one of our biggest expenses in doing business. One of your greatest investments in your people is to lead the way.

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Over the years I have delivered several hundred two-day project management seminars. Different people attended for different reasons.  Many were seasoned PM’s managing projects from several hundred million dollars to Billion dollar plus projects. At the other end of the spectrum were Executive Administrative Assistants helping out their bosses with various small in-house projects.  In either case the following definition of a project may be helpful.

A Project is a one-time, multi-task job that has clearly determined starting and ending dates, a specific scope of work to be performed, a budget and a specified level of performance to be achieved.

Some companies have successfully used the project management model as a way of managing the entire company.  There are some benefits to that particular model.  For purposes of today’s blog, let’s look another word that gets a bad wrap.  The word is Problem. We’ve all heard statements like a problem is a “challenge”.  A problem is an “opportunity”, etc. There is validity to looking at it that way.  Even better, looking at problems as a flag to identify a potential project is very helpful as well.

A few years ago I was consulting with a hospital in Northern California.  In one of our brainstorming sessions I asked “what percentage of your time is being spent each day solving problems that were a direct result of poor process?” There were over a dozen director level nurses in this particular meeting.  The answer was not surprising.  Across the board the answer was that 25% of their days were spent handling problems that were a direct result of poor process.  The information gathered that day was a veritable gold mine of opportunity.  Because there were a dozen or so departments represented in the meeting, it was easier to identify the “five whys” of the problems.  Each presented opportunity to be solved through developing a project for each of the problems identified.

The average salary of the director level nurses ranged from $65,000 to $85,000 a year. It doesn’t take much work to do the math.  Not only were these nurses spending time correcting errors, but those expenditures reverberated throughout the organization. Annually the cost was estimated to be in excess of $500,00 dollars. Simple projects solving in-house problems, by refining process through project management methodologies is a cornerstone of Basics Redefined.

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