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The Making of Legends

I have written several books, on business, entertainment, history and pop culture. The Legends series is an amalgamation of all of them.

My four Legends books include “Pop Icons and Business Legends,” “The Classic Television Reference,” “Houston Legends” and “Non-Profit Legends.” This series will have three more to come.

Most people are more products of pop culture than they are of training. Business dilemmas, solutions and analyses are framed first in the field of reference (pop culture teachings of their youth) and then reframed in modern business context.

Working with companies, I have realized that presenting organizational strategies as an extension of previously-held pop-culture values gets more understanding, comprehension, attention and support.

Most leaders of today’s corporations grew up in the 1950s-1980s. I have conducted countless strategy meetings where leaders cannot articulate business philosophies, but they can accurately recite lyrics from “golden oldie” song hits, TV trivia and advertising jingles.

Being one of the rare senior business advisors who is equally versed in pop culture, I found that bridging known avenues with current realities resulted in fully articulated corporate visions. Many a Strategic Plan was written by piecing together song fragments, nostalgic remembrances and movie scenarios, then were aptly converted into contemporary corporate nomenclature.

When we recall the messages of the songs, movies and books of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, we realize that today’s adults were formerly taught in their youths to:

  • Think Big Picture.
  • Conceptualize your own personal goals.
  • Understand conflicting societal goals.
  • Fit your dreams into the necessities and realities of the real world.
  • Find your own niche, do your thing.
  • Do something well and commit to long-term excellence.
  • Seek truths in unusual and unexpected sources.
  • Share your knowledge, and learn further by virtue of mentoring others.

How individuals and organizations start out and what they become are different concepts. Mistakes, niche orientation and lack of planning lead businesses to failure. Processes, trends, fads, perceived stresses and “the system” force adults to make compromises in order to proceed. Often, a fresh look at their previous knowledge gives renewed insight to today’s problems, opportunities and solutions.

I developed the concept of integrating Pop Culture Wisdom with management training and business planning over the last 40 years. It all started by teaching The History of Rock & Roll Music when I was in graduate school back in 1971. Fancy the concept of analyzing a recent time frame (the 1950s and 1960s) as social studies.

From 1958-1982, I produced many entertainment documentaries for radio, comprising anthologies of pop music. I emceed concerts with stars like Elvis Presley, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Little Richard, Kenny Rogers, The Beach Boys, Roy Orbison, Simon & Garfunkel, Nelson Riddle, Dionne Warwick and Andre Previn. I have produced videos with stars from Audrey Hepburn to Vincent Price, plus television public service announcements. That was another lifetime ago.

For the longest time, I didn’t let my business clients know about my years as a radio DJ, status as a musicologist and experiences in pioneering radio’s “golden oldie show” formats. I didn’t think that it lent credibility to wise business insights. However, years of experiences with corporate leaders made me come full circle and start integrating pop culture lingo into the conversations, consultations and planning processes.

All business leaders agreed that no road map was laid out for them. Executives amassed knowledge “in the streets,” through non-traditional sources. Few lessons made sense at the time and, thus, did not sink in. When repackaged years later, executives vigorously enjoyed the rediscovery process. The previously overlooked became sage wisdom. Knowledge they were not ready to receive as youngsters before became crystal clear in later times.

Reasons for Caring, Giving and Serving Others

I got into volunteering and community service at an early age. I found it heartening to be a good citizen and that community stewardship made me a better professional.

I have worked with more than 1,500 non-profit, public sector, and non-governmental entities over many decades. I interfaced with many on behalf of corporate clients. I conducted independent performance reviews of many. I served on boards of directors, search committees, awards panels, review boards and task forces for many. I have spoken at conferences, strategic planning retreats, symposia, workshops and board meetings for hundreds.

Non-profit organizations are the backbone of modern society. Every individual and business should support one or many. All of us are recipients of their services, community goodwill and worthwhile objectives.

There has never been a full-scope book on non-profit service. There have been books on fundraising and some articles on volunteer management and the business aspects of running non-profit organizations.

My “Non-Profit Legends” book covers everything non-profit, including such topics that have never appeared in an internationally published edition, such as:

  • Public service announcements.
  • Categories of non-profit organizations (my own creation).
  • The history of volunteering and community service, spanning 300 years. This parallels a chapter in my previous book, “Pop Icons and Business Legends,” where I covered a 400-year history of business.
  • Strategic planning, how-to instructions.
  • Pop culture influences of non-profit icons, events and campaigns.
  • Communications programs for NPOs.
  • Quotes on community stewardship, leadership and related topics.
  • Understanding your true service.

Here is what I wish to inspire via this book:

  • Motivate NPOs to be unique, true to purpose and make differences.
  • Encourage dialog on a Big Picture approach to non-profits.
  • Inspire new dimensions to corporate philanthropy.
  • Amplify discussions on community standards and ethics.
  • Encourage greater collaboration and partnerships.
  • Inspire a non-profit awards recognition program.
  • Inspire more non-profit presence on the internet.
  • Inspire more young people into community service.
  • Enlighten international audiences on Western world philanthropy tenets.

Here are the “heart and soul“ reasons for being engaged in humanitarian service:

  • Being good citizens
  • Volunteering, as time permits and worthy causes appear
  • Helping others
  • Business supporting communities
  • Non-profit organizations operating more business-like
  • Finding one’s passion
  • Working together with others
  • Exemplifying ethical behavior
  • Potlache: feeling happy and rewarded when serving others is appreciated
  • Sharing talents and skills
  • Innovating programs, strategies and methodologies
  • Recognizing and celebrating service
  • Honoring our elders
  • Involving young people in the lifelong quest toward community service
  • Diversity of society is reflected in service
  • Building communities
  • Interfacing with others
  • Learning from history
  • Enlightening others
  • Inspiring the next generation
  • Creating new constituencies
  • Re-involving those who have given, volunteered and participated in the past
  • Understanding the relationship of causes to quality of life
  • It’s good for business
  • It’s the right thing to do
  • Community events are fun and entertaining
  • Knowledge is transferable from community service to family and business
  • Injects heart and soul into yourself and your stakeholders
  • Leaders exemplify legendary behavior
  • Serving the under-served
  • Predicting new community needs
  • Benefiting humanity
  • Fostering respect
  • Communicating and developing people skills
  • Being productive and fulfilled
  • Planning for future programs and community service
  • Accountability of non-profit organizations and their programs
  • Learning from failure and success
  • Putting ourselves in others’ shoes
  • Visioning the future of communities and the population
  • Feeding, clothing, sheltering, educating and inspiring the needy
  • Sharing the wealth
  • Advocating for others
  • Learning more about life
  • Understanding conditions and circumstances
  • Discovering new frontiers, with opportunities to master
  • Networking, beneficial for all concerned
  • Growing as human beings
  • Growing as a society
  • Having fun while serving
  • Humanity as the basis for global peace and understanding

About the Author

Hank MoorePower Stars to Light the Business Flame, by Hank Moore, encompasses a full-scope business perspective, invaluable for the corporate and small business markets. It is a compendium book, containing quotes and extrapolations into business culture, arranged in 76 business categories.

Hank’s latest book functions as a ‘PDR of business,’ a view of Big Picture strategies, methodologies and recommendations. This is a creative way of re-treading old knowledge to enable executives to master change rather than feel as they’re victims of it.

Power Stars to Light the Business Flame is now out in all three e-book formats: iTunes, Kindle, and Nook.

Surf your data!

Is your strategy built on received wisdom or analysis of performance data? – management rhetoric or business reality?

Are you building your business strategy on received wisdom or real data? Corporate strategies are often based on assumptions about what drives business performance rather than data from the company itself. J.W. Marriott (founder of Marriott Hotels) is famous for saying “You’ve got to make your employees happy. If the employees are happy, they are going to make the customers happy”. TNT Express promotes the slogan “Take care of your people, let them take care of your customers and the rest will take care of itself”. The implication is that happy employees make happy customers, which drive profits. But does this really happen in your organisation?

The problem is that often some drivers of performance aren’t measured at all; let alone the correlations between them. For example, you may believe that loyal employees create satisfied, loyal customers, but do you have data which demonstrates that your longest serving staff create the highest levels of customer loyalty? Another assumption is that loyal customers are the most profitable; we’re often told ‘it is five times more profitable to serve existing customers than loyal customers’. It makes sense. The better we know our customers the better we are likely to serve them. And because customer spend tends to increase over time, it may well be cheaper to serve long-term customers than keep attracting new ones. But, can you prove this is the case in your organisation?

Performance topology mapping is a tool that can help with this analysis. The first step is making sure that you’re measuring the right thing. So if your business is built on the assumption that employee loyalty is necessary to create loyal customers, collect loyalty data. Identify your key performance indicators, and then measure the correlations between them in order to build a map of business drivers.

The findings can be astonishing. For example, the link between customer loyalty and financial performance is often regarded as a basic principle of retail management. However when they came to explore the data in their own organisation, the management of one home improvement retail chain discovered that there was no such correlation. They could not prove that the stores with the most loyal customers were the most profitable.

Analysis of the performance topology map of one of the UK’s big four grocery superstore chains also revealed counter-intuitive results. Its management bought into the idea that satisfied employees created customer satisfaction which drove store profitability. But the data revealed negative correlations! In fact the stores with the highest levels of employee satisfaction were the least profitable. The explanation for this lay in the value proposition: customers in these stores did not value contact with staff so much as product availability, price and checkout speed. Therefore their shopping experience did not hinge on the quality of their interaction with employees.

In other businesses, of course, the interactions between staff and customers are likely to be much more critical. Take, for example, the professional services of clinicians or lawyers. Their services are based on more sophisticated interactions between staff and clients, and long-term business relationships may well be an essential part of the value proposition. Therefore employee engagement is likely to be a more important driver of profitability in professional services.

Understanding the performance drivers is crucial. Because failing to understand what drives profitability is to fail to understand why your company has succeeded… or indeed failed. The reality is that your business strategy is based on all sorts of assumptions about what investments will yield increased market share, revenue growth or profitability. To get the strategy right, better start testing those assumptions… surf the data wave!

About the Author

Dr. Rhian SilvestroDr. Rhian Silvestro is Associate Professor of Operations Management at Warwick Business School. Rhian has conducted service management research in a number of large, leading edge organisations including retail companies, banks, transport companies, health services and call centres. She has publications in over ten international journals in the fields of service design, performance improvement and supply chain integration.

Value-Added Leadership

Every company has stakeholders, though a few with their own proprietary interests chart the course in their own vision, or lack thereof.

Within every corporate and organizational structure, there is a stair-step ladder. One enters the ladder at some level and is considered valuable for the category of services for which they have expertise. This ladder holds true for managers and employees within the organization, as well as outside consultants brought in.

Each rung on the ladder is important. At whatever level one enters the ladder, he-she is trained, measured for performance and fits into the organization’s overall Big Picture. One rarely advances more than one rung on the ladder during the course of service to the organization in question:

  1. Resource. Equipment, tools, materials, schedules.
  2. Skills and Tasks. Duties, activities, tasks, behaviors, attitudes, contracting, project fulfillment.
  3. Role and Job. Assignments, responsibilities, functions, relationships, follow-through, accountability.
  4. Systems and Processes. Structure, hiring, control, work design, supervision, decisions.
  5. Strategy. Planning, tactics, organizational development.
  6. Culture and Mission. Values, customs, beliefs, goals, objectives, benchmarking.
  7. Philosophy. Organizational purpose, vision, quality of life, ethics, long-term growth.

Value-added leadership is a healthy way of life that puts collaborations first. When all succeed, then profitability is much higher and more sustained than under the Hard Nose management style. Value-added leadership requires a senior team commitment. Managers and employees begin seeing themselves as leaders and grow steadily into those roles.

The ideal company could hopefully make the following answers to questions posed above, per categories on The Business Tree™, including:

  1. The business you’re in. You’re in the best business-industry, produce a good product-service and always lead the pack. Customers get what they cannot really get elsewhere.
  2. Running the business. The size of your company is necessary to do the job demanded. Operations are sound, professional and productive. Demonstrated integrity and dependability assure customers and stakeholders that you will use your size and influence rightly. You employ state-of-the-art technology and are in the vanguard of your industry.
  3. Financial. Keeping the cash register ringing is not the only reason for being in business. You always give customers their money’s worth. Your charges are fair and reasonable. Business is run economically and efficiently, with excellent accounting procedures, payables-receivables practices and cash management.
  4. People. Your company is people-friendly. Executives possess good people skills. Staff is empowered, likeable and competent. Employees demonstrate initiative and use their best judgment, with authority to make the decisions they should make. You provide a good place to work. You offer a promising career and future for people with ideas and talent. Your people do a good day’s work for a day’s pay.
  5. Business Development. Always research and serve the marketplace. Customer service is efficient and excellent, by your standards and by the publics. You are sensitive to customers’ needs and are flexible and human in meeting them.
  6. Body of Knowledge. There is a sound understanding of the relationship of each business function to the other. You maintain a well-earned reputation and are awake to company obligations. You contribute much to the economy. You provide leadership for progress, rather than following along. You develop-champion the tools to change.
  7. The Big Picture. Approach business as a Body of Work, a lifetime track record of accomplishments. You have and regularly update-benchmark a strategy for the future, shared company Vision, ethics, Big Picture thinking and “walk the talk.”

Value-added leadership embraces these characteristics:

  • Prepare for and benefit from unexpected turns, rather than becoming victim of them.
  • Realize that there are no quick fixes for real problems.
  • Find a truthful blend of perception and reality…with sturdy emphasis upon substance.
  • Continue growing as professionals, questing for more enlightenment.
  • Have succeeded and failed…and learned valuable lessons from both.
  • Learn and do the things it will take to assume management responsibility.
  • Be mentored by others. Act as a mentor to still others.
  • Don’t expect status overnight.
  • Measure their output and expect to be measured as a profit center to the company.
  • Learn to pace and be in the chosen career for the long-run.
  • Don’t expect that someone else will be the rescuer or cut corners in the path to success.
  • Learn from failures, reframing them as opportunities.
  • Learn to expect, predict, understand and relish success.
  • Behave as a gracious winner.
  • Acquire visionary perception.
  • Study and utilize marketing and business development techniques.
  • Contribute to the bottom line… directly and indirectly.
  • Offer value-added service.
  • Never stop paying dues… and see this continuum as “continuous quality improvement.”
  • Study and comprehend the subtleties of life.
  • Never stop learning, growing and doing. In short, never stop!

Key Messages to Recall and Apply Toward Your Business:

  • Understand the Big Picture.
  • Benefit from Change.
  • Avoid False Idols and Facades.
  • Remediate the High Costs of Band-Aid Surgery.
  • Learning Organizations Are More Successful.
  • Plan and Benchmark.
  • Craft and Sustain the Vision.

About the Author

Hank MoorePower Stars to Light the Business Flame, by Hank Moore, encompasses a full-scope business perspective, invaluable for the corporate and small business markets. It is a compendium book, containing quotes and extrapolations into business culture, arranged in 76 business categories.

Hank’s latest book functions as a ‘PDR of business,’ a view of Big Picture strategies, methodologies and recommendations. This is a creative way of re-treading old knowledge to enable executives to master change rather than feel as they’re victims of it.

Power Stars to Light the Business Flame is now out in all three e-book formats: iTunes, Kindle, and Nook.

Performance Measure Development Sheets

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice ArticleEffective performance measurement systems consist of high-quality individual measures associated with a strongly interrelated framework. Using this deliberately developed framework, leaders ascertain organizational performance quickly and accurately. The system itself should be economic to maintain and provide readily available updates typically necessitating a degree of automation. Quality systems present the same view of performance to a broad number of individuals within the organization concurrently. To achieve all of these qualities, each measure must be well thought-out and developed individually and then integrated into the collective system.


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Additional Information

Additional information on the individual characteristics of quality performance measures and their construction can be found in the following StrategyDriven articles and documents:

Articles

Documents

  • Organizational Performance Measures – Types
  • Organizational Performance Measures – Construction

About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Style Sheets

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice ArticleA performance measure’s value evolves from its ability to instigate and/or influence action. To do this, the measure must accurately reflect materially important performance parameters and present that information in a timely, readily understandable manner. It is to this later characteristic that performance metric style sheets are critically important.


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Subscribe to the StrategyDriven Insights Library

Sign-up now for your StrategyDriven Insights Library – Total Access subscription for as low as $15 / month (paid annually).

Not sure? Click here to learn more.

Buy the Article

Don’t need a subscription? Buy access to Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice 35 – Style Sheets for just $2!

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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.