eCommerce and

My partner recently sent out a neat article:

11 Business Lessons From The Battlefield

As I read through the lessons I naturally began asking myself “Do I do that?”, “How am I on that one?”, and “I wonder how my managers would rate me on that one.”  So to make things a bit easier, I went ahead and turned the 11 lessons into 44 more specific questions.  Here you go:

Eleven Lessons Become Forty Four Questions

1. Do I genuinely respect the people who work for me?
2. Do I help my employees reach their career goals in tangible ways?
3. Am I more interested in what is best for my employees or what is best for me or the company?
4. Do I conduct myself in a sober, professional way?
5. Do I make employees feel degraded or humiliated?
6. Do I provide relevant, positive reinforcement?
7. Do I criticize more than I compliment?
8. Do my employees know who I believe the star performers are?
9. Do I actively listen to people?
10. Do I allow employees to choose their own path much of the time?
11. Do I overrule my employees plan too frequently or without giving them a chance?
12. Do I bend or give in on nonessential issues or questions?
13. Do my employees believe I can distinguish between essential and nonessential?
14. Do I seek clarity on an issue before correcting or reprimanding?
15. Do I know when and how to give an order?
16. Am I timid about giving orders?
17. Am I condescending when giving orders?
18. Am I direct about what needs to happen when giving orders?
19. Do I make eye contact when giving orders?
20. Do I remain cool and firm, without yelling, when giving orders?
21. Am I passive aggressive when giving orders?
22. Do I validate grievances when giving orders?
23. Do I explain why an order is being given?
24. Am I afraid to insist on a standard?
25. Am I afraid to tell people what to do?
26. Am I afraid to demand quality?
27. Am I a “yeller” or “nice guy freakout yeller”?
28. Am I meek?  In the “poor leader” way or the “inherit the earth” way?
29. Do I do an appropriate level of inspection of work?
30. Do I care about output and results?
31. Do I allow employees to become lazy and complacent?
32. Do I care about the unglamorous tasks?
33. Do I see myself as above the unglamorous tasks?
34. Am I clear about expectations?
35. When giving a task, am I clear about what the task is, who has to do it, and by when or clear that my employee needs to identify the task, assign it, and establish a due date with his/her team?
36. Do I believe everyone gives a crap about my credentials, or should?
37. Do I give a crap about my credentials?
38. Have I established a reputation for competence, common sense, and listening?
39. Once a path is established, do I balance small, firm corrections with steady, disciplined execution?
40. Do I have a tendency to waffle on initiatives or change direction frequently?
41. Do my employees have a clear understanding of the paths/initiatives I believe are important?
42. Do I address problems in a clear, timely manner?
43. Do I have a tendency to side step problems and let them fester?
44. And lastly, if I sent these questions to my managers as a survey, would I do anything tangible with the responses?

If you’re interested in more leadership insight from a military perspective, here is a link to the widely distributed 18 Lessons in Leadership by General Colin Powell.

Kohler is arguably one of the most innovative brands in the home improvement industry. The new Karbon faucet has completely transformed the kitchen and more specifically revolutionized the kitchen faucet. Meanwhile Kohler seems to effortlessly create bathroom fixtures that are not only sleek but save water, like the Escale toilet.

Our lives are garden hoses, long, coiled conduits whose utilitarian value lies solely in their output. While it is important to closely monitor what comes in to each, a cursory Google search found approximately zero statistics associated with garden hose input, or for that matter, storage capacity. Our lives, like garden hoses, are designed for one use: action.

It is wildly unimportant to evaluate the amount of water a garden hose can contain. We measure the usefulness of a garden hose by its demonstrated performance and reliability. Our lives are much the same way; while there are dozens of higher-species dynamics at play, our lives are evaluated (professionally, physically, relationally – even spiritually) by what comes FROM them rather than what comes into them. A push and pull, tug-of-war between input and output. Any nurturing or care taken during the inputting stage is done wholly to improve the expected output.

Examples:

1. A man diets and exercises (input) to feel and look better (output.)


2. A woman enrolls in graduate school (input) to increase self-confidence and professional opportunities (output.) – If the learned information does not guide new decisions or bear fruit within her life, she is, by our measure, unsuccessful.


3. An investor purchases stock in a company (input) because he believes in the success of the company, and the eventual growth and profit of the stock (output.)

The largest, most expensive garden hose is useless unless it reliably and consistently facilitates the output of water. Similarly, a decade of medical school might add a few initials to your name and might even land you a job at your local hospital, but the second you do not perform (output) is probably the same second you’re terminated – hospitals tend to be very serious about output.

So often we pride ourselves in our potential, in our latent intellect - It might be wise to understand that a valuable life isn’t the one that consumes, but the one that gives, produces, and, like a garden hose – pours itself into the world.

Just pouring isn’t enough. This is part 1 of 2 in the Garden Hose series. My next blog will discuss why your output must be refined in order to reach your maximum distance.

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With an understanding of Gordian Project’s required results, as a manager, I’ve spent countless hours process mapping the “buckets” of responsibilities related to supply chain. Buckets such as new business, fulfillment, and returns. These buckets can then be further broken down;

•  New Business into new suppliers, new brands, and new products
•  Fulfillment into supplier performance and carriers
•  Returns into RMA Team and Warehouse Team

Follow this to its natural conclusion and you’ve created not only job descriptions but detailed processes in which to successfully fulfill those descriptions.  But it’s not full proof, at least not when it comes to the results.

We recently received a past due notice from UPS Supply Chain Solutions as a result of A Series of Unfortunate Events (I love this movie). The details of which are not important for our purposes here, what is important is where this series of unfortunate events began. PlumberSurplus.com and OutdoorPros.com both ship internationally via UPS Supply Chain Solutions which performs the export, export in this case being shipments from the United States to Canada. A process was “perfected” for creating shipments using UPS.com and was followed successfully for more than a year.  My first response was then to immediately assume UPS had made an obvious clerical error and by clerical error I mean point the finger. With a bit of digging it became clear that an update to UPS.com resulted in our “perfected” process inadvertently charging import fees to ourselves as the shipper rather than to the receiver.

All eyes turned to the warehouse team. Given that the process was followed to the tee, and UPS.com had clearly been updated I still had to ask, “why hadn’t the error been caught?” To the warehouse team’s credit, and you know who you are, I didn’t get the expected, “That's not my job.” A spirit of complete responsibility was evident, but was it solely their responsibility?

In answering this question a statement in Rick Darci’s article, When 'It's not my job' isn't the answer, hit me square between the eyes; “Descriptions (Read processes) are task-focused. They do not describe how the role fits into or contributes to the success of the entire organization. The incumbent can operate in a vacuum without concern for what is happening around him - how she affects customers, co-workers or the organization.” The results originally desired of profitably and successfully shipping internationally aren’t accurately communicated, nor can they be insured, in processes. Let’s just say I’ll be communicating with a new sense of fervor the importance of big picture results, balanced with providing processes; sorry warehouse team.

Do your employees know what they’re ultimately trying to accomplish?

The possibilities are endless with a bathroom remodel. Discover your classic side with a clawfoot tub, experiment with fresh bathroom vanities and coordinate it all with matching faucets. Shop PlumberSurplus.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for all of your bathroom needs.

• Optimalogica blog recommends a reconciliation system for making financial decisions and experimental sales decisions.


• Gross National Happiness has been measured, and Facebook’s Prototype confirms that we are in fact less happy on Monday’s.


• Can’t keep up with all of the social media, internet and search options available at any given moment?  Mike Moran can help you figure out what to ignore in Internet Marketing.


• Google Reader adds Magic to your settings.

My personal favorite this week, courtesy of SEOmoz:

Sam Niccolls, SEOmoz blogger, writes "This e-mail from a hopelessly confused webmaster to a competitor is worth its weight in gold."

The possibilities are endless with a bathroom remodel. Discover your classic side with a clawfoot tub, experiment with fresh bathroom vanities and coordinate it all with matching faucets. Shop PlumberSurplus.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for all of your bathroom needs.

If you look at the history of work we can see that the way wages were calculated has changed quite a bit. Before the invention of the assembly-line production people’s pay was determined by the amount of work done. After the great restructuring, pay was measured by the amount of time or hours it took to get work done. As of recent there has been talk about whether the End of Time-Based Management is near. Before we determine whether work environment will be going back to its roots, we need to understand what ROWE (Results-only Work Environment) is.

ROWE was developed by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, Best Buy HR Managers. ROWE is a management view which believes that trusting employees to manage their time will increase productivity in the workplace. Departments that have been using ROWE have reported increased amount of productivity, Best Buy alone had a 35 percent increase. Recently, Gap Outlet migrated 137 Corporate Headquarters employees to Results-Only Work Environment and their success has been amazing; according to Cali and Jody’s blog “voluntary turnover rate dropped by 50 percent and employee engagement rose by 13 percent”.

How it works:
“In a Results-Only Work Environment, people can do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done.” This isn’t just time flexibility, according to Cali and Jody a true ROWE has unlimited paid vacation time, no set schedules, no mandatory weekly meetings, and no judgments from co-workers or bosses about how employees spend their days. Trust is one of the key elements of ROWE, managers must trust employees to get their work done so that their performance and pay can be evaluated based on what they accomplished, not how many hours they spent looking “busy” at work.

Why it works:
ROWE forces all employees and managers to be clear about their job descriptions and expectations. Teams learn how to work together more effectively while motivating and retaining employees. Though ROWE can also expose underperformance, the end result provides a company with stronger teams that can make the company grow.

Who it works for:
ROWE would work for anyone whose work revolves around projects or tasks. However, in order for ROWE to be effective, there needs to be a strong goal-oriented manager that can provide employees with a clear understanding of what is expected of them. ROWE is a bit complicated when it comes to hourly employees or those whose jobs do not entail completion of projects; but the shifting from thinking about work in terms of time to thinking about work based on performance can still be effective.

Moving a department to ROWE is a drastic change that companies might not be willing to make. However, though the complete program might not be a feasible option, adopting new habits that can refocus your team on results instead of time-based, can be of a great benefit as well. Whether you decide to make the big change or not, I suggest that you first read Cali and Jody’s list of 10 ways to get ROWE working for your team.

The possibilities are endless with a bathroom remodel. Discover your classic side with a clawfoot tub, experiment with fresh bathroom vanities and coordinate it all with matching faucets. Shop PlumberSurplus.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for all of your bathroom needs.

I recently took a trip to the Philippines where I had the opportunity to help out at an orphanage as well as working on some philanthropic construction projects. Although the work I was doing was hard and repetitive, I had a great time and was able to maintain my energy and enthusiasm throughout the trip. Once I returned, I started thinking about the causes and effects of that experience, and how they could be applied to a business environment.

Most people want to do something worthwhile with their lives. Few people are content to simply work for a paycheck they spend on themselves. Many people choose to donate their money or volunteer their time to a cause they support, and even those who don't, often feel they should. Doing good makes us feel good, and helps us stay enthusiastic and focused. In the same way people spend their personal resources, they also react to their jobs. People want to do a job that's personally fulfilling, a job that accomplishes something worthwhile. Of course, not all of us can work at a philanthropic organization. However, we can still be doing something meaningful even if that's simply making the world a better place by leaving our customers satisfied. In college, I was the leader of a team of people who did, essentially, janitorial work. This was not a glorious job. However, I emphasized to my team that our job was to perform an essential service with superior quality, and the policies and goals I set reflected that. Because of that, my team maintained consistently high morale and an excellent service record.

Another phenomenon both experiences taught me was the benefit that doing good gives to team interaction. People that work together on a project they believe in tend to have higher camaraderie and work together more efficiently. This probably has several causes: they are inevitably like-minded people drawn to the same cause, and they receive positive reinforcement as they see each other playing out the individual benefits I mentioned above. People who are enthusiastic and enjoy what they do tend to like and work well with others who do the same, additionally gratification in assignments will drive focused attention to the project, all of which increase efficiencies.

All of this is fairly straightforward: it's no secret that we want our team members to care about what they do. But it is one thing to want something and quite another to have it. How do we instill this atmosphere in our business? The first and most important step is to have a business worth believing in. That means your goal has to be to provide superior goods or services that actually help people, not simply to make money. Secondly, you must clearly show your team members how your business does that. Third, they need to know their place in the system and how they contribute. Finally, they need to have active participation in improving the process. When team members believe that their active participation has a real positive effect in the world, they'll naturally gain that enthusiasm that helps them do the best job they can.

For the best prices, on the largest selection of faucets, from your favorite brands like Kohler, Danze, and American Standard shop PlumberSurplus.com 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.