Management57 Videos

Organizing Roles

Clearly understanding and managing according to accountability and responsibility is critical for the success of your organization. Your organizational chart should represent the roles that are functionally necessary and individuals may be assigned many roles. Those roles represent nothing more than a process inventory that an individual employee is accountable and/or responsible for.

Middle Management

Middle management is one of the most challenging roles to play in any organization. It’s easy to be a business owner. You just need to be accountable. It’s also easy to be an employee. You just need to be responsible. It’s hard to be both. That’s what makes middle management special. They have a gift […]

Itemize Function

Instead of trying to fit people into these abstract boxes you call “job descriptions,” you should itemize the functional processes and accountabilities that actually exist in your business. If you give people clear expectations in the form of process assignments and key performance indicators, they can measure themselves if they’ve done a good job or […]

Return on Investment

What’s the difference between someone who says they want to make money and makes it, versus someone who says they want to make money but doesn’t make it? You may remember I posed this question to a group of high school students in an episode of Daily Genius. I’m repeating it here because it illustrates […]

Short Term Pain Mitigation

Keep your hands off that marshmallow. Here’s a quick explanation if you don’t know what I’m talking about: in the 60s there was an experiment done at Stanford involving delayed gratification. A group of children were each given marshmallows and told that, if they resisted the temptation to eat them immediately, they’d get another. Later […]

ALEXANDER FORD, OUR PATRIARCH

As a business leader, you have the tendency to collect accountabilities. If it’s unclear who’s in charge of anything, it defaults to you as the leader. Over time, as your business grows and scales, that’s a lot of little accountabilities for one person to have. Often, it becomes impossible for one person to keep all […]

Stratification

Most visionaries and business owners that I know are chomping at the bit to try and improve their businesses. That’s smart…dissatisfaction drives innovation. However, it can be pretty hard to find the right place to start. How do you decide which of the hundreds of thousands of systems in your business to improve? The answer […]

One Free Radical

The only bad decision is one made without all the data present. That puts business owners in a pretty tough situation. As their organizations grow in size, they become fantastically complicated. They can become such a dense cluster of processes and systems that they feel opaque. So what happens when they plan? They can’t achieve […]

The Theory of Constraints

Let’s say you’ve got some task, goal, or result that you want in your life. Let’s also say that this is a result that you want to occur with some regularity. For example, let’s take this content right here. It’s part of my grand social media strategy … and it’s necessary for anyone who wants […]