11 February 2002

• "Real wealth is not gold, real wealth is knowing what to do with energy."– R. Buckminster Fuller.

Clockspeed – how to survive and flourish in the age of temporary advantage using business genetics to evolve faster than your competitors. Author: Charles H. Fine. Publisher: Little, Brown & Company. It is an undeniable principle of business today that the forces of technological and management change can quickly knock an industry leader off their pedestal, to be replaced by a more innovative or savvy competitor. This book provides managers with the analytical tools they need to anticipate the twists and turns of the marketplace, and seize tomorrow’s opportunities while simultaneously exploiting today’s.

 

• Website link of the Week

www.howstuffworks.com This is truly one of the web’s great websites. Virtually everything you wanted to know about anything is answered here for you. A tremendous resource for your kids as well.

Being on time is a contract that you make between yourself and others. It is also a contract that your organisation makes with its various stakeholders. It’s not just about people physically turning up on time, its about keeping time agreements with every thing that your company is involved is. Its about deliveries being made on time, bills being paid on time, service jobs being completed on time, meetings starting and finishing on time, etc. etc. Not honouring time agreements not only shows your disrespect for other people, but worse than that, you steal some of their most valuable asset, time.

To demonstrate the theft of time, next time one of your members of staff is late for a meeting, stop and do the following calculation on the whiteboard. Take the number of people at the meeting, multiply that number by their average hourly wage or salary, divide by sixty, and then multiply by the number of minutes they were late. As an example; a meeting of 15 people averaging $25 per hour, and the person is 15 minutes late equals $93.75. Ask the offending person if they would like this amount deducted from this week’s salary. Clients who have used this strategy report positive outcomes in terms of getting the message across to staff about the importance of being on time. It also clearly proves once and for all that time truly is money.

Punctuality is a value just like honesty, respect, compassion and integrity. You either live it or you don’t. It’s either an essential component of your corporate culture or it’s not.

As the pace of change continues to accelerate, the need to be in the right place at the right time will become increasingly important. I therefore suggest that even being on time may not be enough. In order to take advantage of the many opportunities that will come your way, the key to seizing those opportunities will rely not, on you being on time, but by being early. Being on time will probably be too late as the various windows of opportunity open and close in the blink of an eye.

Being on time is one of the simplest ways of showing customers and the other stakeholders in your business that you care. And the great thing about being on time is that it costs you, your people and your organisation absolutely nothing.

In my experience, people who are always late, are always late. Sounds like a statement of the obvious, but they are late in everything they do. They pay their bills late, servicing their car is always overdue, they turn up for dinner parties late and their bank accounts are never reconciled etc.etc. They also miss the boat when presented with new opportunities. They are buying shares when others are selling. They get a hot tip and act on it when the opportunity has passed.

Ensure punctuality is an integral part of every aspect of your daily operations and corporate culture.

Until next week, many happy customer returns!

Graham Harvey APS

Watch out for Graham’s new book Seducing the Vigilante Customer – winning strategies to guarantee the return of happy customers and healthy profits, available in all good book stores in mid February.

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