Tag Archives: values

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How Strong Values Engage Employees and Increase Profits

12 Steps to Business Transformation – Step 3

Over the last few posts, I introduced my Ebook 12 Steps to Business Transformation and I defined Vision and Mission, the first 2 steps of the 12 transformational steps. This week we are going to talk about Values.

Defining the Values for your business is step 3 in my new Ebook “12 Steps to Business Transformation.”

Values describe the behaviors that will get you from where you are now to achieving your Mission and ultimately attaining the Vision.

Where Vision defines WHY your organization exists and Mission defines WHAT the organization does, Values are the driving behaviors that govern HOW the organization drives toward successful outcomes.

Values are the foundation of any organization.

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Relentless Cost Cutting Will Kill Your Business

Eliminating waste and unnecessary cost inside your business is critical to its long term growth, profitability and success. However, primarily focusing on reducing cost will eventually kill your company.

As Gordon Bethune said, “You can make a pizza so cheap, nobody will eat it. You can make an airline so cheap, nobody will fly it.” The king of corporate turnarounds, Greg Brenneman, supported this with his statement “a maniacal focus on trimming cost can lose you more revenue than you gain.”

This was certainly my experience back in 1998 when I was brought in by a client to redo engineering work that another contractor had outsourced overseas. The contractor was looking to reduce their engineering costs by sending the bulk of their engineering to a lower cost country. Unfortunately, they did not control this work close enough. When the engineering was submitted to the customer, not only did it not meet expectations, it caused the client to loose so much confidence in the contractor that the contract for the work was pulled and awarded to another engineering company.

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3 Ways to Protect Yourself From Fatigue and Burnout

Protecting the Asset

The most valuable assets in any organization are people. Without people, an organization will cease to exist. The people in an organization need leadership. Without strong leaders, an organization will quickly flounder and go off course. So, it stands to reason that leaders have a very important role to play in an organization and we need to ensure that we are always at the top of our game. We need to protect ourselves as leaders. Greg Mckeown calls this “Protecting the Asset” in his book Essentialism.

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4 Ways To Shred A Culture of Entitlement

“The quickest ways to kill entitlement are to regularly acknowledge what others have contributed to your current levels of success and always seek to increase this for others around you.” Andy Mason

 

What is a Culture of Entitlement?

A culture of entitlement means that your employees arrogantly believe that they deserve a certain level of unreasonable privileges. This belief is often built on the incorrect assumption that the current level of success of the organization is because of the work of the current generation of employees. Typically, nothing could be further from the truth. We are always building our organizations on the shoulders of the giants that have gone before us.

Where Does It Come From?

In the boom and bust world of the oil and gas business, a culture of entitlement always seems to take hold at the peak of the boom periods. This arrogance is created by the boom mentality where the price of oil increases and oil companies are scrambling to get more oil out of the ground by drilling new wells, creating new facilities and desperately trying to hire staff to make everything work. This desperation to hire results in escalating wages, options, perks and coddling that are simply not warranted and not sustainable.

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6 Things I Learned From My Dad That Are Foundational to My Success

“One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.” George Herbert

 

How often do we take for granted the foundational lessons that we were taught as kids not realizing that without those lessons we would not be the people we are today? I know I am guilty of this so, because this Sunday is Father’s Day, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about what I learned from my dad that contributed to my success so far in life.

I grew up on the outskirts of a small town in northern Alberta called Peace River. My parents were both from farming backgrounds and were comfortable with a very uncomplicated and frugal lifestyle. By the time I came onto the scene, my mom was a substitute school teacher and my dad was in the dairy business, neither of which were very lucrative. We never had running water until I was about 10 years old and we heated our house with a wood fireplace as much as we could (but the old furnace did kick in during those cold northern winters!) To say we were part of the lower income bracket is probably an understatement!