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It’s amazing how many corporate people I come across who tell me how they wish they could leave their companies and work for themselves. Yet they can’t run an operation for the company they work for. Become an entrepreneur. Take risks, use your initiative.
Make things happen. Get personally involved in the action. If you’re an employer, encourage employee initiative. Lacerate red tape. Red tape is symbolic of the worst type of bureaucracy in both the private and public sectors. Nothing strangles initiative, creativity and innovation more effectively.
Implement an open door policy. Invite all employees at all levels to pop in
and kick new ideas around.
If you think you have influence, just try ordering somebody else’s dog around. Keep your employees aware of the risks, of what they can gain and of how they can make the difference. Businesses - even big businesses - now want people with entrepreneurial flair. You need to acquire at least four skills before you can consider yourself a business leader in the mould of an entrepreneur... No business can survive without making profits. So become a self-contained profit centre. Watch your bottom line. Nurture the desire to make money. Think and earn profits. Keep pushing the profit button. Draw up a budget. Take into account every factor that impinges on the cost of your product or service. Calculate exactly how much each person costs the company in terms of wages and salaries, office or factory rental, medical aid, pension, stationery, telephones, etc. Then ask them to calculate the profit on their jobs. A minimum of three times cost is an acceptable norm. For example, if a secretary costs you R10 000 a month in total - including 13th cheque, office space, salary, etc - she should be providing you with value worth R30 000 a month. Smash the logistics jam. Let’s face it, there will never be an organisation that is completely without boundaries. You can’t eliminate all boundaries. But you can make them permeable so that they allow information, ideas, resources and energy to flow freely throughout your company. To make the boundaries in your company more porous, set each of your employees the task of redefining his or her role in producing a result. Work on results. Replace the titles on everyone’s business cards with a description of what each individual does in customers’ terms. Change from descriptive titles to prescriptive statements. And don’t stop there. Produce a measurable result - make everyone in your organisation responsible for producing a measurable result, whether he’s the office cleaner who has undertaken to keep the premises clean, or the managing director who’s responsible for producing long-term profits. Get each person to define their result. Then ask them to write down exactly what functions they should perform to produce that result. Outsource. Buy in high levels of specialist expertise. Save on the cost of ownership. Outsourcing certain functions costs you less and gives you more. “An economy built around lots and lots of minnows rather than a few dinosaurs is infinitely better,” says Frankfurt-based Max Worcester. In fact, 96 percent of German GDP comes from small and medium-sized companies. Outsource as much as possible. Farm out tasks to save on the costs of ownership and the substantial costs related to the employment of people required to do the work. Outsourcing gives you access to specialist expertise while containing costs, improving quality and enhancing efficiency. Surround yourself with experts.
Use beginners as experts. Use break-it thinking. Beware of the typical expert of yesteryear. They can hinder more than help. They have tendency to fit a NEW IDEA into an existing model or framework. They put new problems into the same old context in order to understand them. They tend to define what is unknown in terms of what is known.
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