Management Focus Part 2
This article is the fourth in a series dealing with small business operating fundamentals, and it winds up our focus on management.
Here’s the next essay question in our small business course: Outline how your managers execute their assignments as components of your written business plan.
Oh, you have your business plan in your head, huh? Well, there’s one big problem with that strategy: You’re the only one who has access to it. Business plans need to be available to managers, advisers and bankers, which requires words and numbers on paper.
There’s an adage that we should all post on our office walls: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Your small business must focus on the road that you’ve built in a written business plan.
You’ll pardon the mixed metaphors, but a business plan is the best medicine to prevent the toxic practice called crises management. By regularly comparing your plan to actual performance, a problem that might have become organizational double pneumonia turns into a management sneeze.
In the beginning, you’ll have to show the discipline and courage to deal with the crises-of-the-hour while you’re executing your plan. But soon, you’ll see that both the size and frequency of crises will diminish.
And every day you execute your plan is a day closer to the opposite of crises management – outrageous success.
Next question: What are the two most consistent characteristics of a successful manager?
Day after day, regardless of the challenge, the two predominant traits of a successful manager are: leadership and the ability to develop leadership in others.
Here are five things we know about leaders:
- Leaders are consistent.
- Leaders do what they say and deliver what they promise.
- Leaders develop other leaders and mentor them.
- Leaders are courageous.
- Leaders can find people who will follow them.
Some people seem to be natural leaders, but nothing they do is anything the rest of us can’t learn.
The next essay question is about intellectual property.
Calculate the ratio of assets in your company between tangible and intangible or IP.
As late as the 1970s, a typical business’ assets were 80 percent tangible: equipment, rolling with stock, inventory, etc., while the rest was IP: systems, software, patents, etc.
But according to recent surveys, that ratio in the 21st century has essentially reversed, with 73 percent of corporate assets being in IP, and the remainder in hard assets.
Compare your own tangible/intangible asset ratio to the new national trend.
Then identify the steps you’re taking in your business plan to leverage IP more and hard assets less.
In the 20th century, intellectual property supported tangible assets. In the 21st century, hard assets support IP.
Write this on a rock… You don’t have to be Super Manager to be successful, but you do have to focus on the fundamentals.
Jim Blasingame
Small Business Expert and host of The Small Business Advocate Show
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