Rita Gunther Mcgrath | Blog | The Discipline of Strategic Growth

ILO Institute

Visitors to our site might have an interest in the work of the ILO Institute. Here's the news about them:

The ILO Institute brings together senior executives from Fortune 500's, for dialogue with Nobel Prize winners and other distinguished thinkers (Christensen, Lessig, Dyson, others), and to provide research on best practices to make innovation a reality. Gathering are very small, the research is top-shelf, and the cost is relatively low.

For more information, email peter@ilo-institute.org. Tweet This!

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Posted Admin on November 07, 2006
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Comment on Virtual Operations

From our good friend in Korea, Hyokon Zhang (we've temporarily disabled comments due to too much junk and spam - but if you email me comments I'll happily post them - Rita)

I absolutely agree. If you want to improve the service level of store operation, six-sigma could help. But if you want to remove the store altogether and go virtual, you need a totally different perspective. Six-sigma assumes continuity, but what you are doing is destroying and recreating.

We just reopened our company website including a blog. I find blog as a great tool for expressing ourselves and communicating with people. And it shows that you are there. I think we are one of the earliest adopter of blogging among consulting firms (actually we aspire to be something else than a traditional consulting firm). It has a news entry about our seminar in 2005, but it is in Korean.

Hyokon Zhiang
Founding Partner
Innomove Group (http://www.innomove.com) Tweet This!

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Posted Admin on September 05, 2006
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Women owned businesses

I thought this update on the status of female entrepreneurship was very interesting:

Women-owned Firms Increase Nearly 20 Percent

Women-owned firms increased nearly 20 percent over the latest period studied, according to a report released last week by the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration. Between 1997 and 2002, women-owned firms grew by 19.8 percent while all US firms grew by seven percent. A significant portion of those firms were in professional, scientific, and technical services, and in health care and social assistance. Women in Business: A Demographic Review of Women’s Business Ownership, using newly released Census and other data, also finds that:

In 2002, women owned 6.5 million (28.2 percent) nonfarm US firms with 7.1 million employees and $173.7 billion in annual payroll.

Women-owned firms accounted for 6.5 percent of total employment in U.S. firms in 2002 and 4.2 percent of total receipts.

Of all women business owners in 2002, 85.95 percent were White, 8.43 percent African American, 8.33 percent of Hispanic heritage, 5.25 percent Asian, 1.23 percent American Indian and Alaska Native, and 0.18 percent Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander (total does not add to 100 due to some double counting across ethnic groups).

Women in Business: A Demographic Review of Women’s Business Ownership, written by Office of Advocacy senior economist Dr. Ying Lowrey, is available at http://www.sba.gov/advo/research/rs280tot.pdf. Tweet This!

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Posted Admin on August 21, 2006
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The power of backwards

Have just read a great story about Gamal Aziz of the MGM Grand, who has adopted a set of principles that are very like the ones we recommend in "Discovery Diven Planning." The idea: Pick a target for what a business can do (such as a restaurant or a hotel) and work backward to compare what it is actually doing. Any deficiencies? You're actually 'losing' money. What a difference from the usual "well, it's profitable, so don't touch it" approach. Tweet This!

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Posted Admin on June 27, 2006
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Procrastination!

I was recently asked by a reporter to comment on the dilemma of procrastination. Here are some thoughts:

Why do people procrastinate? Among the common reasons I’ve observed:

We have a human tendency to over-value goodies in the short term (free time, spending money, sleep) and under-value things that will give us future benefits (investing, staying awake, saying no to that movie date). A natural consequence is procrastination, in which people put things off but feel uneasy about it.

Ironically, in the short run procrastination LOWERS our stress level. Of course, eventually it catches up with us.

Fear of failure can also lead to procrastination. We all know someone who says, --Oh, if I’d tried, I could have….-- Fill in the blank – gotten that job interview, fixed the problem, taken that trip. Not trying means not failing, at least directly.

There is also a planning fallacy. Meaning that we all tend to vastly underestimate just how long something is going to take us, often by a long shot.

Finally, I think feeling overwhelmed comes into it. If a project, job or task looks too big, we feel we’ll never get it done, and resist getting started.

What do you need to overcome procrastination? Rita’s two cents:

1. First, look at the whole body of things that you are working on. It may just be that you are doing too much. If you can, try to get the list down to 7 major things or fewer – by definition, things that are less important will fall off the list. That’s step one. It’s been shown in scientific research that when people are involved with more than about 3 significant projects at a time, their value-added time drops considerably. So do less to accomplish more!
2. Get help if you can. There are often resources that you may not have thought of who could take on bits of a task. Many people really like being asked for help if it is within reason.
3. Next, break big projects down into littler pieces. If you are a list sort of person, you could break a huge task into things you can put on a list and cross off a list. Ideally, I like to work on things in 1.5 hour to 2 hour chunks – or even less. Focus on getting started with one step, then the next, then the next.
4. Next, set aside specific time to deal with the issues you’ve been putting off. Give yourself a reward when you get one of them behind you – could be a walk outside, a snack, a fun phone call, whatever.
5. I think it also helps to define what “closure” really means – when is the task done? How would you measure it?
6. Give yourself visible reinforcement that you are making progress. There is a reason why all those community fundraisers use huge thermometers to measure how they are doing – you can do the same for tasks. Color in the percentages you finish as you do them.
7. Finally, it can sometimes help to find a procrastination buddy. Share what you are putting off with them and have them do the same with you. Then touch base with each other regularly to see how things are going. Sometimes, having someone else monitoring what you’re up to is just what the doctor ordered.
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Posted Admin on June 23, 2006
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Find a list of previous Case Studies here in PDF format.

ILO Institute

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Women owned businesses

The power of backwards

Procrastination!

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ILO Institute

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Women owned businesses

The power of backwards

Procrastination!

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