Master-Mind Alliance: The Key To Less Work, More Life, Balance

Productivity And the Game Of Enterprise
Written & Copyrighted by Richard Paris Borough, Ph.D.

Recently I've been thinking about management's number one obligation. It seems to me that management number one obligation is to win the Game of Enterprise. And to win that game, management must do whatever it takes to maximize productivity for all players on the team. This may sound rather obvious but I’m a plain thinking guy. Of course, the question is, how best to do this, how to maximize productivity and keep productivity humming along smoothly. So here are some of my thoughts starting with some Big True Facts about life and business-life.

Human life cannot long exist without constant nourishment in the form of food, clothing, shelter, and a few key psychological necessities like: meaning, accomplishment, self-worth, love, and friendship. Constant nourishment is the lifeblood of a human.

Business life also cannot long exist without constant nourishment in the form of sales, gradual continuous improvement, earnings, and a few psychological necessities like: purpose, motivation, loyalty, and, of course, productivity. Productivity can be expressed as a ratio of investment to profits. You invest time, energy, and resources and the profits you reap are wealth and satisfaction. As it is with humans, constant nourishment is also the lifeblood of business.

Now it's no secret that to play the Game of Enterprise well, management and employee skills must be honed to a high enough degree that they consistently maximize productivity for everyone. No kidding! Here's another Big True Fact. In today's demanding business world, those who manage by the seat of their pants often end up on the seat of their pants. There's a right way and there are many wrong ways to manage.

If you're a manager, to mange the right way, to maximize productivity at your place of business, so the work experience will give you more life--you, and all the people on your team need to be concentrating on a few key things. Your plans and goals need to be attached to strategies that will work. You need to systemize all routine business operations like marketing, sales, workflow, personnel management, and money management, so these operations will run almost automatically and will consistently produce desirable, predictable results.

You need to focus on your top money making activities, and get a lot of important things done, by minimizing distractions and by delegating everything but your genius, which of course, you keep.

Your people need to know where the boundaries are on your field of play. They need to know how to play the Game of Enterprise at your workplace. You need to keep score, and to check the score frequently enough to always know where you are, and what to do next. Scorekeeping is a vital ingredient in management. Minimum performance standards for the tasks that bring in the business, get the work done, and make the money, need to be established.

It should be possible for all employees to calculate their own batting average on those key tasks so they can instantly know whether they are winning, or loosing, and by how much.

When people know the score, if they're behind, if their performance falls below the minimum performance standard (MPS) they can work smarter to catch up. As managers, you can help by coaching them back up to par, and you'll either get them back to the minimum standard or you'll have to trade them for other perhaps more skilled, more trainable, or more willing team members.

And when your people are working above par, that is, exceeding the MPS, you need to take notice of their accomplishment, and reward them immediately, right on the spot. So, scorekeeping is more than a good idea in business, it's a necessity that makes a lot of sense.

And last but not least, you'll probably need to do this key thing. Find a way to significantly increase the level of energy and enthusiasm both you and your people invest in work, and keep it high. In as many ways as you can thinks of, you'll probably want to learn how to make your work more like play or recreation because people love to play and they naturally bring lots of enthusiasm to their play. In the Game of Enterprise, the ultimate victory is attained by playing at your very best.

So, the message here is clear enough. If you really and truly want your business to give you more life, you must become more productive. Period! There's no other way. And it’s helpful to have these questions at your fingertips: How much more productive could you and your people be right now? In dollar terms, what would that extra productivity mean to the business? To you personally? If your business were already significantly more productive, running like a fine Swiss watch, how much more worry free time off could you routinely take? How much earlier might you be able to retire?

These are good questions to ask once in a while, don’t you think? Yeah, they are!

Now let's look as what productivity does, and what productivity demands. What productivity does is simple. Productivity creates earnings. That's it. If productivity is in trouble, earnings are in trouble. No rocket science thinking or MBA needed to understand this Big True Fact is there! No.

And of course, productivity demands a few things. The creation of quality, value and benefit. Time and energy management. Strategic planning. Accountability. Clear focus on money making activities. Getting the right things done right the first time and every time and on time and on budget and with as much joy as possible for all concerned. Motivation and loyalty. Gradual, and continuous improvement. And measurable progress in reasonable time.

Now I've kind of hinted at this, but I should give you the official definition of productivity. Productivity means the degree to which the people, or a specific person, meets or exceeds the minimum performance standards for their job or a portion of their job. Obviously, clearly delineated and widely understood MPSs are inherent in this definition. People need to know the MPSs.

And tens of thousands of people at work all over the planet do not know the MPSs for their jobs, because…no one has ever told them. And this isn’t easy to do. Establishing MPS and communicating them in an understandable way can be tough.

The first trick is in defining and expressing the MPS in behavioral terms. And the second trick is in measuring the individual behaviors that relate to those MPSs.

But again folks, Big True Fact: business life cannot long exist without the lifeblood nourishment of productivity. Productivity is what the Enterprise Game is about.

As managers playing the Game of Enterprise, what's the main thing we need to do? Whether it's managing just ourselves, or managing a group of people, a task, or group of tasks, in order to succeed we need to do the same single thing. We need to get results. We need to get more value out than we put in. We need to manage for maximum productivity.

Consistently managing for maximum productivity, and…prosperity, happiness, and joy--as a manger/owner/operator, this is what we want isn't it? Yes. Whether we started our business, bought our business, inherited it, or are a dedicated employee of a business, responsible for our own tasks and/or for the work of others, no matter how we got our management responsibility, we don't know everything about making all things for which we are responsible run at its level best. We just don't. And there are common sense reasons for this.

Unless we have a business degree, we did not go to school to learn how to manage or run a business. We did not spend several years studying business management in a formal academic setting. If we're typical, we’ve never have taken a course or even read even a single book on the subject.

So here we are with management responsibility, and truth is, we don't know everything there about maximizing productivity, ours, or anyone else's. And we can’t take the time to go to school now, because we're too busy working. And even if we took a few classes, the knowledge we would get would be limited and general in nature, it could well be out of date, and may not be relevant to our particular circumstances at all. So even armed with new knowledge, which we could get, we’d still have to adapt it to fit our situation. And that's a big job in itself.

Now these little facts of life do not mean we're stuck or that improvement is impossible by any means. Certainly, we should constantly seek out new knowledge. In my opinion, life-long learning is a necessity if we want to improve and keep up. The trick is to make what we learn apply to our particular set of circumstances. But that's a story for another time.

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Richard Paris Borough, Ph.D. , is President of Strategic Business Development; a Humboldt County, California based small business consulting firm. He is director of The Master-Mind Alliance -- and also publishes “Keys To A DONE BUSINESS” -- a monthly newsletter featuring business management best practices.