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Archives for January 22, 2010

What is Budgeting For?

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From Good to Great:

Most answer that budgeting exists to decide how much to apportion to each activity, or to manage costs, or both. From a good to great perspective, both of these answers are wrong. In a good-to-great transformation, budgeting is a discipline to decide which arenas should be fully funded and which should not be funded at all.

In other words, the budget process is not about figuring out how much each activity gets, but about determining which activities best support the hedgehog concept and should be fully strengthened and which should be eliminated entirely.

What Do You Think of This?

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What do you think of this statement — do you agree or disagree?

“One should always set the objective twice as high as one hopes to accomplish because one will always fall 50 percent short.”

What Exactly is Thinking Outside the Box?

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From FedEx Delivers: How the World’s Leading Shipping Company Keeps Innovating and Outperforming the Competition:

When looking for these creative ideas and innovative solutions, it is often said that one should “think outside the box.” But what exactly is this proverbial “box”?

You can think of it as the space in the brain that contains all those bits of information and connections made so far. A dot is a bit of information in the knowledge base. And after solving a problem, repeatedly the same way, the connections become automatic. So, when a person is faced with the same problem, the mind, without any conscious effort presents the old, known solution.

In many ways, the mind operates like a computer. It scans the knowledge base of the memory (mind) to come up with creative solutions. If the knowledge base is old, the ideas generated may be obsolete. If the knowledge base is limited to a very small part of the total business process or operation, then the solution will only take that area into account.

Solutions that are derived from the same thought processes that the mind has used for years are unlikely to be innovative. The requirement for outside-the-box thinking is the ability to make new connections. New connections can be made in one of two ways: (1) having more dots to connect (a new or updated knowledge base) or (2) connecting the old dots in new imaginative ways.

Because creativity is the ability to connect seemingly unrelated variables (the dots we store in our minds) in imaginative ways, employees must continually update their knowledge bases…

Be Constructive

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When we notice things that could be better, it’s easy to respond negatively. This easily leads to (or is) complaining.

Complaining, in addition to just being wrong, tends to create an overall attitude of negativity that is not helpful. This not only sucks the joy from your life and those around you, but also makes it less likely that people will actually want to do something to fix the problem. Playing the victim doesn’t inspire people.

Seth Godin posted the other day on how to point out problems without falling into the trap of complaining. It’s a short, good post that is worth reading.

The gist is this: Instead of saying “my job has this problem and that problem, and it’s really starting to get to me,” you say: “In this economy, I’m lucky to have this job, and it’s almost perfect. It would be even better if…”

Or, instead of saying “they spent $10 million developing this device, and it can’t even do this or that,” you say: “I love owning this device, it lets me manage my life and contacts, and the one thing that would make it even better is…”

The latter approach is the way proactive people talk. It puts the focus on the positive first, where it belongs. Then everything after that is about how to improve things.

The former approach, on the other hand, just leaves you focusing on the bad. And it would seem likely that if you generally think that way, pretty soon the bad is all that you will see everywhere — which would not only be wrong, but would also be a pretty depressing existence.