For Successful Business Leaders, Sometimes it’s Right to be Wrong

One dreary October day in the late 90’s, I sat in my local Fidelity office waiting to shift funds from one account to another, a common practice in an era before online banking and financial services. That fifteen minutes sitting would have remained forever unmemorable, were it not for the fact that I picked up a business magazine sitting on the coffee table next to me and read a brief article on CEO’s and decision-making.

According to the article, researchers studied the decision-making of CEO’s at both successful and unsuccessful businesses, categorizing their strategic decisions along two dimensions — correct/incorrect and fast/slow, as shown in the table below:

CEO Decision-Making Success	Fast	Slow
Correct
Incorrect

As you might surmise from the labels on the table, “correct” was defined as making decisions that accurately gauged the market, adapted to changes in the business environment, and made new expenditures or trimmed costs in ways that helped their businesses to out-perform competitors; “incorrect” decisions were the opposite.  Along the other dimension, “fast” decision-makers were among the first to make a decision–right or wrong–and then act on the decision, while slow decision-makers took their time, often deciding and acting well after the counterparts in their industry.

Not surprisingly, the CEO’s who made fast, correct decisions led the most successful businesses, while the CEO’s who made slow, incorrect decisions were the least successful. However, the second most successful group of CEO’s came as quite a surprise to me, ultimately affecting how I lead and make decisions to this day. It turns out that the second-most successful CEO’s made fast-but-wrong decisions — not the CEO’s who made slow-but-correct ones. The completed table below summarizes this:

CEO Decision-Making Success	Fast	Slow
Correct	1stMost successful CEO’s	3rdThird-most successful CEO’s
Incorrect	2ndNext most successful CEO’s	4thLeast successful CEO’s

Why were fast-but-incorrect CEO’s the second most successful group? It turns out the slow-moving-yet-correct CEO’s were simply too slow to take advantage of changing business landscape. They waited too long, letting good opportunities slip by and causing their businesses to under-perform. However, the fast-yet-incorrect CEO’s did something that was really not very difficult–they monitored the results of their decisions and, when they determined they were wrong, they corrected their mistakes.

All of this makes thorough, complete analysis and extreme caution – even in the worst of business climates — look like a pretty bad decision-making model.  Sure, we should base our decisions on facts, research and data, weighing the options along with our trusted advisers. But, we shouldn’t wait until the last piece of information finally makes its way to our desk, assuming that having a complete picture is the only way to certain success.  Because if we do, we’ll probably be too late.

(If you’ve read my previous articles, you’ll notice that I’m pretty thorough about citing material appropriately. The article to which I refer needs an appropriate reference, but while I’ve looked and looked, I simply can’t find the original article, published in either Fast Company or Inc Magazine between 1996 and 1998.  Certainly, the publisher and the researchers deserve the credit, so if you know of this article, send me an e-mail and I’ll give credit where it’s due).

Donald Patti is a Principal Consultant with Cedar Point Consulting, a management consulting practice based in the Washington, DC area, where he advises businesses in project management, process improvement, and small business strategy. Cedar Point Consulting can be found at http://www.cedarpointconsulting.com.

Watch that Basket-Seven Ways to Identify Troubled Projects

Though the traditional advice is “don’t put all of your eggs in one basket,” the celebrated author Mark Twain is famous for saying, “…put all of your eggs in one basket and — WATCH THAT BASKET.”

Whether you’re a an entrepreneur leading a small business , a C-Level executive (CEO/CFO/CIO/CTO) at a mid-sized business, the head of the Project Management Office (PMO), or a business manager watching out for your department, you are often stuck in the position of having to “watch that basket” with your most critical projects.

Even worse, many times you’re never truly sure if one of your key projects is in trouble until it’s too late.

Fortunately, there are some signs that can help you identify a troubled project early, so that you can intervene and put it back on track. I polled our project recovery services specialists at Cedar Point Consulting, and we thought of seven effective ways to identify a troubled project:

1. Perpetual Green Lights, Little Activity. Many of us are familiar with the approach of labeling projects green when they are on schedule and budget; yellow when the project is falling behind; and red when the project is far behind and/or over-budget. Perhaps your key project has been reporting green for the last three months, but oddly there’s been very little activity related to the project. This is probably a good signal that the project is actually in trouble.
2. Lot’s of TBD’s. Effective risk and issue management are critical to the success of most projects, yet they are often ignored. If your key project is well past the early stages, but is reporting back a lot of TBD’s (to be determined) in the “resolution” column for risks and issues, then it’s probably a troubled project, even when the schedule doesn’t show it.
3. Avoiders. The leader in charge of your key project may be a formal project manager or a manager of a business line, but regardless of who they are, you are getting the unsettling feeling that they are avoiding you. Perhaps they are missing at meetings, they’re head the other way down the hall when they see you, they’re not returning phone calls, or they’re not providing status reports. Unless you have a problem bathing, the project leader is likely avoiding you because the project is in trouble.
4. Troubling Trends. Experienced project managers are familiar in using techniques like earned value management (EVM) to identify project progress by comparing actual to planned results for work completed, costs incurred and time spent. Though you may not be using EVM on your projects, you can watch for dramatic increases or drops in spending, dramatic changes to the work being delivered or sudden changes to schedule with no new schedule dates. In many cases, your key project is in a free-fall.
5. Non-Progress Reports. You’re wise, so you have asked your project manager to provide status reports on a weekly basis. However, they’re more like “Non-Progress” reports than progress reports because no progress has been made. In particular, if you have received two weekly status reports where no progress has been made, you’re well on your way to having a troubled project on your hands, if you don’t already.
6. Inability to Show Tangible Results. Well in to your project timeline and knowing that interim reviews are a good idea, you ask for a review or demonstration of work completed thus far. However, your review meeting is repeatedly delayed and rescheduled, sometimes by a few days and sometimes by weeks. Even worse, you’ve tried a quick visit by the desk of the project leader and it resulted in the person shoving documents in their desk instead of sitting with you to review tangible results. If so, this is likely a troubled project.
7. Spidey Senses Tingling. Like Peter Parker in the Spiderman comic book series, you know which projects are highest risk and every time the subject of your key project comes up, it sets your spidey senses tingling, though you’re not certain why. While I’m a big believer in science over emotion, there is surely something very scientific that you’re reading so trust your instincts. Your likely to find something amazingly like trouble in your key project.

Of course, identifying a troubled project is one thing, but recovering that project is a completely different challenge. I provided some tips to recover troubled projects in a previous article that may be of help.

However, particularly if you don’t have experience recovering troubled projects and the stakes are high, it might be time to consider getting some help.  Our firm provides project recovery services and we’re proud of our success rate, but other competent firms do, as well.

Donald Patti is a Principal Consultant with Cedar Point Consulting, a management consulting practice based in the Washington, DC area, where he advises businesses in project management, process improvement, and small business strategy. Cedar Point Consulting can be found at http://www.cedarpointconsulting.com.

Product Pricing: Avoiding the Dead Zone

I was talking to an entrepreneur-friend recently about product pricing for business products, and the fact that there’s a dead zone between the $1000 and $5000 price range that most successful products avoid. That dead zone exists for a reason and it’s important to avoid it, as I will explain here.

For most businesses – even large ones – a purchase under a $1000 can typically be made by a first-level manager and even by a staffer. In some cases, they put it on a corporate credit card and in others they use a discretionary budget, but when the user wants your product, the sale is usually pretty quick and simple.

In contrast, a sale of $1000 or more often requires a mid-to-senior level manager’s approval, a signature from purchasing and even a formal purchase order and invoice. In some cases, I’ve even seen $1000 plus sales rise to the VP level for approval, so this can become heck of a hurdle to clear to close a sale.

As a result of these restrictions, it makes sense to stay below $1000 if possible. But, why might your product need to be priced at $5000-plus instead of, say, $1500? The answer is the sales person. Over the $1000 price range, you not only have more hurdles to clear before closing a sale, you often have to use a one-on-one selling approach to close the deal, which requires a sales person. This sales person earns a small salary, makes commissions, generates expenses and only closes a portion of their leads, so suddenly a $1000 sale becomes very unprofitable.

It turns out that, in most cases, a sale through a salesperson is not profitable until the price reaches over $5000. Hence, the dead zone between $1000 and $5000.

So, if your business product or service is priced in the dead zone, there are things you can do about it.

1. If possible, move your product below the dead zone. Find a way to lower the price just below the $1000 threshold, break the purchase up in to multiple payments across multiple months, or sell a service-based subscription that generates monthly revenue.
2. If going lower is not possible, rise above it. Consider ways to bundle your product with others so that you can charge more and justify a salesperson, sell maintenance or support along with the product, or sell your product to someone else who can bundle it.
3. Stay in the zone. While this is the least appealing option, this option can work. Instead of using an outside salesperson, consider online ad campaigns with inside sales representatives at lower costs. Or, consider a multi-tiered marketing approach that allows for slack labor (college students, work-at-homes) to sell your product. Or, a viable option for a small business may be to sell the product yourself.  (Hey, I already said it wasn’t very appealing).

Interestingly, a dead zone exists to some degree for consumer products and services just as it does for business products, though the zone for consumer products is a good deal lower and it doesn’t appear to be quite so “dead” – it’s probably between $100 and ending at $500. It may be coincidental, but $100 is about the point at which I start running purchases by my wife and she runs purchases by me. Hmmhh.

Donald Patti is a Principal Consultant with Cedar Point Consulting, a management consulting practice based in the Washington, DC area, where he advises businesses in project management, process improvement, and small business strategy.  Cedar Point Consulting can be found at http://www.cedarpointconsulting.com.

From Chaos to Crisis to Calm – Nine Tips to Recover a Troubled Project

Brendan Moore, a fellow Principal at Cedar Point Consulting, recently reminded me that, “You can’t manage chaos, but you can manage a crisis.” These are very wise words, but they reminded me of the early stages of a trouble project — one which is far behind schedule, well over budget, not delivering results, or all of the above.  If anything, a troubled project is chaos waiting for a strong leader to transition it to crisis, and then ultimately to calm.

Whether you’re a C-level executive, an entrepreneur or a project manager, you may not have encountered very many troubled projects in your career, so you may not be familiar with how to transition from chaos, to crisis, and finally to calm. We consultants are often brought in to deal with just such problems, so I have a few tips that should help:

1. Don’t Panic! Douglas Adams references aside, you may have just learned that a key project is in trouble, but it’s important that you not panic. First of all, panic spreads, so you create chaos from crisis, and it won’t be long before your co-workers and your subordinates are panicked, too.Second, panicked people don’t reason effectively – they make “fight-or-flight” decisions instead of rational ones, so you’re far more likely to make a bad decision or push others to do so.
2. Be Methodical. At Cedar Point Consulting, we have a 5-step process that we follow to recover projects – Review, Recommend, Respond, Transition, Close. While this is not the only way to recover a project, it does consistently work – by step three, the project is making progress once again. Regardless of the technique or methodology that you choose, don’t attempt to solve the project’s problems until you have an understanding of their causes. Do take measures to stop the bleeding, until you’ve effectively identified root causes.
3. Read the Tea Leaves. Whether well run or not, nearly all projects have documents that tell you where the weaknesses are and whether they are being managed well. At minimum, even the smallest project should follow a standardized process ( project methodology); a charter (with a project goal); a project plan that includes a schedule, a budget, and assigned staff; regular meeting minutes and regular status reports. If these exist, review them to assess where problems are occurring. If they don’t, find out why.
4. Be From Missouri (“Show Me”). Reading current project documents is a good start, but what if someone is fudging the numbers or painting a rosier picture than reality? For select documents, like staff hours, project schedule and project budget, confirm that they are reasonably accurate independently. Which brings us to the next tip…
5. Use an Independent Third Party. Whether you hire a consultant or have someone in another part of your business lead your project recovery effort, they should be an independent third party. Having a friend of the Project Manager, the Project Manager’s immediate superior or one of their subordinates jump in to help is unlikely to be successful.
6. Change Leadership or Change Process. At the most basic level, projects most often fail because either the project manager is not up to the task or the project management process is preventing them from succeeding. A good project manager controls time, scope, cost and quality on a project. If they don’t control at least two of these and influence all four, then they are likely to fail. Conversely, if they control all of these but the projects headed off a cliff, you probably need to switch project leadership.
7. Increase Communication. When you’re trying to identify problems with a project, it helps to increase communication within the team. Schedule and require participation in regular meetings – daily, if necessary, like Stand-ups or Daily Scrums. Finally, increase the frequency of status reports to key parties, such as the client, the sponsor and key stakeholders, even if the reporting is informal.
8. To Thine Own Self be True. There’s always a need for optimism in every situation, but good leaders are also honest to themselves and to others about the current state of a project. Depending upon how far behind the project truly is, consider reducing scope or resetting the schedule. Failing to do so may doom the project and the project team to yet another failure – one from which they may not recover.
9. Start Small, Review Frequently.  After you’ve planned your recovery, be sure to start with small deliverables and shorter milestones, reviewing the project’s progress frequently to make sure the conservative short term goals are being met. While this is not normally the best approach with a project, starting small enables the team members to practice working together as a team before they have to tackle the larger, more challenging deliverables of the project.

The list above isn’t a comprehensive recipe for solving all the problems of a troubled project or for complete recovery, but it is a good start.  In a subsequent post, I’ll provide a list of ways to minimize the possibility of troubled projects altogether.

Donald Patti is a Principal Consultant with Cedar Point Consulting, a management consulting practice based in the Washington, DC area, where he advises businesses in project management, process improvement, and small business strategy.  Cedar Point Consulting can be found at http://www.cedarpointconsulting.com.

New Decade, New Venture

There’s an old saying that the happiest days in a boat owner’s life are the day they buy the boat and they day they sell it. Never having owned a boat larger than a canoe, I’ve always chuckled when I’ve heard this truism, particularly as I watched my nautical neighbors in Annapolis clean, paint and other-wise maintain their boats.

One would think the same truism would apply to running a business, particularly when building a business from the ground up. As many entrepreneurs and small business owners know, it’s not uncommon to work 60 or more hours a week when starting a business; customers and clients will come calling at all hours of the day and night; and, sometimes you have to stretch more value out of a few bucks than a third-world soup kitchen. Even when the business is stable, vacations are never truly vacations – there’s nearly always a crisis that requires your input, which prevents even three-day weekends from being work-free.

So it may surprise some of my friends and business associates that, after running a business for a little over five years in the first decade of the 21^st century, followed by roughly five years working for others, I’ve decided to start another business again in 2010. There are a few reasons I’ve decided to do this, but here are the most significant:

• Running a business enables me to pursue my passions. As with any consulting business, your client is your first priority. However, after all of the client’s work is done, there is still time to improve your own business, to research new innovations in your industry, and to help your co-workers to learn and grow, too. Along the way, if you identify a new market or business opportunity, it’s yours to pursue – no approvals necessary.
• Running a business enables me to consult in multiple areas, preventing me from being typecast as solely a “strategist”, a “technology expert” or a “project management guru”. If you are both a voracious reader and an experienced practitioner, it’s amazing how effective you can be in many disciplines, not to mention the synergistic benefits of being knowledgeable in many areas. As an entrepreneur, you aren’t bound by the practice area or job title that someone else gave you – you are bound by the knowledge and experience that you truly hold.
• Running a business enables me to live according to my own values. A number of years ago, a former PR Manager for an energy company told me why he’d moved out of PR and in to HR by saying, “There was an incident at one of our plants where an employee of our company had made a mistake. I was head of Public Relations, so I wanted to say to the public, ‘We screwed up, we’re sorry, but here’s what we’re doing to make sure it won’t happen again.’ Instead, I was told to deny that the incident ever took place, which was a flat out lie. I did what was asked, but I couldn’t bear the thought of the next time an incident occurred and I’d have to cover for our mistake.”
  While few events in business pose moral challenges as great as what he faced, there are day-to-day decisions that may help your business but harm your soul. As a business owner and a Christian, I can say how nice it is to be able to do the right thing should the need arise, yet not have to worry about whether I’ll land in the unemployment line.
• Running a business adds weight to my advice. It’s one thing to say something because you’ve seen it work for others, and an entirely different thing to speak from firsthand experience. As a consultant, so much advice is based on observation, but as a business owner, you not only speak your advice you live it and breathe it. Your clients know this, so they respect your advice even more.
• Running a business enables me to balance work, family and charity. There are many myths about running a small business versus working for someone else that I’ve uncovered during the past ten years, but the most important factor is this: Never was I more able to meet my clients needs, to arrange my schedule around family activities, and to put in time to perform charitable work than when I ran my own business.

I can safely say that I have met many wonderful people while working for other businesses, I have served a number of clients that were well worth the time and effort expended, and I have worked with some very talented leadership along the way. In addition, I have served more than a few Fortune 500 companies and managed more than a few multi-million dollar endeavors in the process.

However, I’m looking forward to living the life of a small business owner once again. I know it’s considered by many to be one of the hardest jobs to hold. But it’s also a very fulfilling life, one that holds the most promise for me to positively impact others – and it’s nothing, apparently, like owning a boat.

Donald Patti is a Principal Consultant with Cedar Point Consulting, a management consulting practice based in the Washington, DC area, where he advises businesses in strategy, process improvement and project management.  Cedar Point Consulting can be found at http://www.cedarpointconsulting.com.