Be More Productive Than Ever

**Note** I originally wrote this entry at the end of June and intended to publish it the first week of July.  Then my wife went and had a baby, and the last few weeks have been a blur of diaper changes and midnight feedings.  That said, none of what I wrote is any less relevant in August than it was in July.  Enjoy. -AB

If only it were this easy!

I’ve had one of the most productive years of my life so far in 2012, and the year is only half-over. During the first six months of this year, I have accomplished nearly every goal I set for myself at the beginning of the year. Those include personal and family goals like teaching my son or preparing my family for the birth of our daughter (any day now, seriously). Spiritual goals like daily prayer and volunteering at our church. Financial goals like getting that promotion I’ve been working towards. Giving speeches. Writing blog posts. Reading books. Of the 34 specific, measurable, attainable goals I set in January, I have achieved 27 of them in one form or another and failed at 7 of them. Goal-setting and regular evaluation of goals is an important part of my productivity.

1.) Set achievable goals, and then review them regularly.
Look back at the goals you set in January.  How many of them were specific, measurable, achievable goals? “Lose weight” is not specific. Lose how much weight? By when? “Lose ten pounds by June 1st” is specific, measurable and achievable.

2.) Do more in the same amount of time as everyone else.  
We all have 24 hours in a day. What you do with those 24 hours determines how successful you will be.  I read a great New York Times article about what CEO’s do that everyone else does not.  One of the things that popped out at me was that they get more done in the same amount of time than everyone else does. They find tiny ways to be more productive. For me, that has been eye-opening. I used to waste a lot of time on things that weren’t adding value to my life. TV, messing around on the internet, classic time-wasters. I’ve cut a lot of that out of my life and replaced it with things that I feel are more productive uses of my time.  In the mornings, when I’m getting ready in a quiet house with my wife and son sleeping, I will throw on my headphones and listen to a book.  This has helped me read/listen to more than twenty books so far this year.  They run the gamut, from fiction to business to biographies,  but each one has engrossed me and taught me something.  I write speeches for my Toastmasters group and then turn around and edit those speeches into a blog post. Twice the work in half the time.  But lest you think my productivity is limited to my personal life, I’ve also found ways to increase productivity at work, through consolidating a dozen reports into one simple easy to read report or getting a subject matter expert to explain to me a topic I am not familiar with before I dive headlong into a new project.

Find the places you are wasting time and figure out a way to use that time more effectively.  Sitting in line at the post office? Don’t check your email/Twitter/Facebook, rattle off some words you were trying to learn in German.  Playing blocks with the kid? Just kidding, when it’s play time, my son gets 100% of my attention.

3.) Find someone to keep you accountable. About once a month, a good friend and I talk by phone about our goals. We discuss the things we’ve been working on, detail our failures, and offer advice to each other. These conversations are great because they allow me the chance to see what someone else is doing (and sometimes shamelessly steal his goals as my own) and they keep me accountable because I know that I’m going to have to talk about what I accomplished and I don’t want to say “nothing.”

Sure, there are literally hundreds of other ways to increase your productivity, but these are three things that I started doing this year that have turned 2012 into one of the most productive years of my life. Wouldn’t you like to look back on 2012 in six months and be able to say the same thing?

Get To The Point (Again)

One of my most popular posts has been Get To The Point, a primer on how to be clear, concise and quick in a fast-paced business environment.  I talked about organizing your thoughts so you know what you’re talking about, concisely expressing your main points and getting to your conclusion quickly because no one likes to listen to someone prattle on.

I have a few more thoughts on Getting To The Point that I’d like to share with you.  I recently gave a speech in which I used Keynote slides to help illustrate my points.  I had about twenty-five slides and the speech lasted about ten minutes.  For most of you, this description is already bringing to mind some of your own experiences with Powerpoint in a business meeting.  Someone slaps a slide up on the screen full of text and bullet notes and then proceeds to read word for word what is written on the slide.  Within seconds, the audience zones out either by reading the slides instead of listening to the speaker, or by just tuning out completely.

GET TO THE POINT, PEOPLE!

This pretty much describes nearly every single staff meeting I’ve had in my professional career.  It describes about 75% of the courses I took in college.  I don’t know about you, but I can read.  Do I really need someone to put a slide up and then read to me word for word what is on the slide?

NO!

So why do we do it?  Why do you do it?  The biggest complaint I hear from meetings like that are about the presenter reading directly from the slide.  But when given the chance to present, the same exact people do the same exact thing- bulleted powerpoint slide, read from the screen.

THIS IS NOT HOW YOU DO IT.

Your slide should help emphasize what you are trying to say.  It should not give the presentation for you.  You should know what you are trying to say verbally to keep the audience focused on you and your message.  The powerpoint slide is there simply to help make your point or to show off something you want the audience to know.  That’s it.

For example, the speech I gave was about making smart decisions in the workplace.  I came up with a little acronym to help me outline my points.  Here is the slide I used:

Simple, right?  Doesn’t tell the audience what each point means, but it does sort of grab your attention and make you want to know what each letter stands for.  I could have used a slide like this:

But that is so wordythat the audience will focus on reading the text on the screen instead of listening to what I am saying.  I went on to outline each letter in bullet point and summed them up at the end, but I never dwelled on the slide and I certainly never read directly from the slide itself.

Here is another slide I used:

While this slide was up, I talked about Netflix’s recent decision making snafu’s, how they seemed to have no direction and how they only served to anger their customers who left the company in droves (800,000 lost subscribers) and tanked their stock price (from $300+ to $70 in only 15 weeks.

Again, I could have used a slide like this:

But then you aren’t listening to my point, you’re reading the words on the slide.  In fact, you may have read every word on the slide before you moved on, EVEN THOUGH I had just told you what would be on the slide in the previous paragraph.  The goal of ANY speech, whether it is a business presentation, a staff meeting or a toast at a wedding should be to communicate your message clearly and concisely while engaging your audience.  Not to overwhelm your audience with words on a slide.

After my speech, I received the following comments:

“Great visual aid, very well organized.”
“Good use of slides.  Thank you for not looking at the screen the whole time.”
“Your slides were simple and easy to understand and kept me engaged.”

People LIKE to be engaged by their speaker.  They want you to look at them, talk to them and make eye contact with them.  They don’t like having slides read to them.  The next time you have to put together a powerpoint presentation, make your slides simple and focus on the message you are trying to get across.  Your audience will thank you for it.

Critical Thinking

The most important skill you can have?  Critical thinking.

A friend recently sent me an article she had read about the importance of critical thinking skills.  The article discussed the failure of many businesses to engage in critical thinking, describing it as “an organized and disciplined way of thinking logically with clarity and precision by using an approach that’s fair and accurate and focusing on information that is relevant.”

It further broke down the components of critical thinking into four subtopics:
• Strategic thinking. This requires leaders to assess the business climate and make the right decisions about where a company is going.
• Creative thinking. Creative thinking is essential for problem-solving and growth. “If you think about it, everything that you touch, every building that you walk in started with creative thinking,” Hagemann said. “So it’s imperative that we have great creative thinkers in our leadership.”
• Problem solving. Problem solving is being able to assess a problem, cut it down to the bare bones and deal with it as quickly as possible, she said.
• Decision making. decision making is a often a test of character and being able to make tough decisions and have the willingness to be held accountable. “That intellectual fortitude and courage is also a very important piece,” she said.

I’m sure it is not entirely a surprise that critical thinking is, well, critical in business.  But how do you go out and hire employees who are critical thinkers and how do you train your current employees to think more critically?  I have an answer for both of these questions.

You must remember that the onus is management to train and develop your team to become more critical thinkers.  When I was managing a Bank of America branch, I had to face this task head on.  At the time, the bank had developed a deep focus on utilizing the teller team as the front line for recognizing sales opportunities and deepening the bank’s relationship with it’s clients.  One of the branches I managed had a great team, but they had never been challenged by management to seek out these sales opportunities.  The team was good, to a person they were intelligent, dedicated employees who wanted to be successful.  They just didn’t know how.

I started out by working behind the teller line with them.  During transactions, I showed them how to take a look at the customer’s accounts while they were processing the customer’s transaction.  I taught them what things to look out for- large dollar amounts in a savings or checking account, mortgage loans with a low balance or high credit card balances.  I taught them how to ask the right questions to customers as a part of their normal conversation to try and uncover opportunities.  It took time and one-on-one interaction with my employees, but they learned and they got better.  The results were amazing.  After two quarters, we had increased product sales by 38% and had reached 100% of the banking center’s sales goals, and we continued to do so for my remaining time at that banking center.  Even better, though, was that the center continued to be successful after I left, proving that it wasn’t just my presence at the bank that had caused the success, but that I had helped develop the critical skills in the employees that allowed them to continue their success even after I moved on to another banking center.

The point here is that I spent time with them and taught them what to look for.  After a customer left, I’d dialogue with them and bounce ideas off of them to help them better understand what we were looking for.  It didn’t take long before they knew exactly what to look for and because they knew their customers better than anyone else, they could easily probe to find even more opportunities.  Customer has an 18 year old getting ready to leave for college?  Student accounts and online banking!  Customer is trying to pay off credit card debt?  Possible consolidation loan opportunity.  It was amazing what they were able to accomplish with just a little direction and instruction and coaching.

So that is how you develop critical thinking in the employees you already have, but how do you hire good critical thinkers when you are looking to hire new employees?  I’ve got three ideas:

1.) Engage your team.  Again, your team knows what works and they know a lot more people than you do by yourself.  Make sure they are on the lookout for good team members to add to your organization.  I am of the opinion that if you find the right person, you should hire them regardless of whether or not you have an open job requirement.  The right people make or break an organization.  Why let that person go somewhere else when you NEED them working for you?

2.) Always be on the lookout for talent.  If I were starting a company right now, I can think of about a half-dozen people off the top of my head right now who I would recruit to come and work for me.  Some of them might say no, but the people I’m thinking of are those stars who really love a challenge and would be willing to work their butts off for a new startup.  You should always be in the mode where you are hiring.  People will leave your organization for all sorts of reasons and you never want to be stuck relying on the resumes that come in from Human Resources as your only source of potential candidates.  Did the guy at the mall who helped you with your shoes impress you with his attentiveness and customer service?  Give him your card, sit down and have a cup of coffee with him.  He might well be the next valuable member of your team.

As a post-script to that, building your own team makes the unit incredibly strong.  When you pull someone into your team because you recognize their talent and potential, you are hiring someone who will be more dedicated to you and harder working than the average candidate.

3.) When you get to the interview, ask questions that will require critical thinking of the candidate.  I participated in several interviews when I was hiring people at Bank of America and the one thing I could not stand was the standard interview trope, “Where do you see yourself in five years” and “What are your strengths and weaknesses”?  Even what many hiring managers consider to be “better” questions are still junk.  “Tell me about a time you were challenged at work.”  “How do you work under pressure?”  Seriously, any job-seeker worth his salt will have a canned response to your canned question and if he’s a half-decent employee, he’ll see right through your boring interview to the boring desk job behind it.

Try this on for size. “What do you know about (my company)?”  Has the candidate done her homework?  Do they know anything about the company, position or industry?  If not, you know you’re probably not looking at someone with the passion to do the job the way you want it done.

“What would you do during your first 90 days on the job?”  What does this answer tell you about the candidate?  Is this someone who wants to come in and “fix” everything right away?  Or is this a more thoughtful candidate, who plans to observe before jumping right in?  Will she build relationships?  This question can help you determine whether the candidate is a good fit for your organization along with giving you a good idea of how she approaches projects.

How do you personally define and measure success?
This is a two-part question.  The first part is intended to help you determine the candidate’s view of himself, and how much he has thought about what exactly success means.  The second part is to gain insight into how the candidate would measure success in your organization.  Most people have an idea of what success is but very few have a defined way to measure it.  Even if the candidate hasn’t thought about it before now, a thoughtful and well-reasoned answer will be a sign of a quick thinking, analytical employee.

What tools or habits do you use to keep organized?  Everyone says they are organized, but take a look at the desks of the people you work with to see if they really are organized or not.  Asking for specific examples of how the candidate stays organized will allow you a peek into what to expect from this person on the job.  If they can discuss actual, specific methods (like Getting Things Done), you probably have a good applicant on your hands.

What accomplishment in your career to date are you most proud of?  I had to think about this one for a minute.  I’ve had numerous successes during my career.  All of the ones I am most proud of involved being a part of a team.  My study abroad experience at the Berlin School of Economics popped into my head.  Of all of the projects I have ever completed, this one was probably the most challenging and time consuming.  I also thought about going into underperforming bank branches and teaching them how to be top performers.  But the one I settled on was very recent- completing and analysis of moving the Procurement process to paperless.  I spent a week working on a team that broke down the Procurement process from start to finish and we figured out a way to do the whole thing without paper.  Right now, we generate between 150 and 200 pieces of paper for a new contract and anywhere from 2-100 pieces of paper for each purchase order.  We spend hours putting the files together and even longer trucking these documents all over the facility to get signatures.  The team developed a way to eliminate all of this by making the process paperless, and in doing so estimated we could save the company a pretty big chunk of change.  That is what I love- improving the process to make everyone’s life easier and saving the company money at the same time.

Get the candidate to think “we can’t do that.”  This one is great for testing their critical thinking skills.  You want to pose a problem in which the easy answer is “we can’t do that.”  The average candidate will look at the situation and say that it can’t be done.  The great candidate will imagine some scenario where it can be done or will offer alternatives and trade-offs.  This is the type of person you are looking for if you want critical thinking skills.

Get To The Point

Today I would like to discuss getting to the point.

Getting to the point is a crucial skill in the business world.  It is one we must deal with on a daily basis.  I remember at one point in my career being assigned a new manager.  You already know where this is going, don’t you?  I, playing the part of the impressionable young employee excitedly went to our first staff meeting to see what new and interesting things our manager would bring to the team.  I left two and a half hours later, exhausted, dejected, and completely out of sorts.  Why? Because this manager had no idea how to get to the point.  We are all busy.  No one has time for you to get to your point in a roundabout way.  You need to be able to express yourself in a clear, concise manner in order to be taken seriously in the professional world.  Without that skill, you will find your influence is diminished or you may find that people avoid speaking to you altogether.  Neither of these things will help you be a successful professional.

I am going to present you with three ways to get to the point and get on with your day.

Organize Your Thoughts

How often does something pop into our head and we rush off half-cocked trying to get someone’s attention?  Too often, I say.  Organizing your thoughts will help you figure our what you understand fully and what you require additional explanation for.  It will help you tease out the tough concepts and give you a chance to further deepen your knowledge before you present it to someone else.  Take the time to think about what questions someone will have for you and be able to answer those questions.  There is nothing more irritating than when someone presents half an idea and then does not have the simple basic understanding of the issue to answer questions or further expound on that idea.  Once you’ve organized your thoughts and thought up questions, walk away from it.  Then, a few minutes later, come back to it and review it again trying to come up with more questions or problems that may arise.  Being organized will help you come across as more credible and will give your opinions on the issue more weight.  Even if this means taking several minutes to jot down what you know about what you are going to report to someone, that time spent organizing your thoughts will lead to a more efficient use of your and your boss’s time.

 Be Concise

Get to the point in ten words or less.  What is the main point of what you are going to talk about?  This is the most important thing to get across to someone, and you should be able to summarize it in ten words or less.  If I were to summarize this post in ten words, I would say “get to the point, organize your thoughts, be concise, conclude.”  I’ll give you a second to count those, but I assure you, it is ten.  This doesn’t mean that all of your reports should be ten words or less, but you should be able to sum up the main point of what you are trying to say in ten words or less.  “The supplier is requesting an overall increase of six percent.”  “The contract expires within the lead time and must be extended.”  These are summaries of a broader explanation, but the main point is clear, and should always be clear to the person you are reporting to.  The best thing about being able to concisely state your point in ten words or less?  If someone needs more information, they can always ask for it.  But you’re not overwhelming them with pointless information they neither need, nor will remember.  And because you spent the time organizing your thoughts and thinking of potential questions, you will be prepared for when those additional questions do come up.

Have a Conclusion

This was my manager’s weak point.  She rambled on and on for as much as twenty minutes on a single point, throwing out random anecdotes and stores to try to help make her point clear.  But because she had not organized her thoughts and boiled the main point down to ten words or less, she ended up going on and on and only served to further confuse her audience.  Always be working towards a conclusion.  Often, ten words will be enough for your main point, but you will need to further explain the subject to your audience.  That is fine, but as Stephen Covey once opined, “Begin with the end in mind.”  While he was making the point about starting a project, it still applies to speaking before a group.  Once you get to this point, you have already organized your thoughts and boiled your main point down to ten words or less.  Now expound upon your main point, but know when to get out.  Be able to summarize your main points and any specific items that bear importance and then, shut it down.  For less complicated matters, you should be able to conclude in a couple of minutes.  Only the most intricate issues should go five minutes or more.  But regardless of how intrinsically complex your issue may be, have a point where you wrap your thoughts up in a neat little bow. Conclude.

And speaking of conclusions, that brings me to mine.  Getting to the point is a critical business skill.  We’re just too busy for you to take your time examining all of the different viewpoints of an issue.  Today’s business environment requires quick, decisive action and in order to facilitate such action, you have to be able to get to the point.  Remember to organize your thoughts, boil your main point down to ten words or less and have a conclusion in mind.  Once you have mastered these three skills, you will be well on your way to being able to successfully, skillfully, and concisely get to the point.

Revenue and Margins

Today I will be discussing some of the financial aspects of running a business.  Specifically, reading the annual financial documents released by a public company.  I will use my own employer, Spirit AeroSystems, since I am familiar with their financial statements and they are a good example of an Aerospace company with a strong financial position.  Do not worry, I am not releasing any sensitive financial data about the company.  All of this information can be found at Spirit’s website or on any of the many financial/investing websites that populate the internet.  I pulled mine from Google Finance.

I’m sure you have all seen this kind of document before.  The question is, do you know how to read it?

The answer most people will give is, probably not.  Believe it or not, these complicated-looking financial documents are actually quite easy to read when you know what you are looking for.  The first thing you will want to do is go to the company web page on whatever financial website you are using.  Like I said before, I use Google Finance.  From there, search for the company you want to learn about, in this case SPR (for Spirit AeroSystems).

On the left side of the page, click the link that says “Financials” which will bring up the quarterly financial statements.  Quarterly results are important, but for today’s lesson, we are going to look at the annual report.  Click “Annual Data” to bring up the report for the previous financial year.  For Spirit, this is 2010 data, which was released on Feb 10th, 2011.  This report compiles all of the quarterly data for the 12 months ending on 12/31/2010.

Where do you go from here?  There are several important pieces of information you want to gleam from this page of financial documents, but the main purpose of the Income Statement is to tell you how profitable a business is.

First, what is Spirit’s Net Revenue?  Net revenue is very important to knowing how a company is doing.  It is essentially the money the company is bringing in each year through sales.  Note the “Top Line” revenue.  In 2010, it was $4.172 billion.  In 2009, it was $4.078 billion.  2008 showed $3.771 billion and 2007 showed $3.860 billion.  Without looking at any other data, what does this tell us about the company?  First, it tells us that the company has grown it’s annual revenue by 7% since 2007 and other than 2008 being a down year for the company (like many companies in 2008), the company has grown every year since 2007.  This is good.  Whether you work for the company, like I do, or you are interested in investing in it, seeing net revenue growth is good.  The average growth for an S&P 500 company over the last ten years has been 3.5% (taking into consideration considerable losses in 2008, 2002 and 2001).

The next thing you will want to look at is Net Income, or “Bottom Line Net Margin.”  This number tells you how much money the company profited after taking out its expenses.  In this case, in 2010, Spirit’s Net Income was $218.9 million.  In plain language, that means that out of $4 billion in sales, the company netted almost $219 million in profit.  That money can then be used to invest further into the business, pay dividends to stock owners, pay off debt, or a whole host of other uses.  Again, seeing a company with strong Net Income is good, and Spirit has averaged $243 million in Net Income over the last four years.

That’s it.  Those two lines on an income statement are the base from which all the rest of your calculations come from.  But they are also the easiest to see and understand.  Net Revenue: How much money did the company bring in?  Net Income: after expenses, how much money did the company make?  These two simple lines require no calculations whatsoever, but can tell you a great deal about the profitability of a company.  There is one more item on an Income Statement that I want to discuss that can be helpful to a potential investor, but it requires you to break out your calculator.  If you are brave enough, continue on.

The last thing I want you to look at is the Gross Margin of a company.  Gross Margin is determined by figuring how much money the company made off of its goods sold.  You take the Net Revenue, subtract the Cost of Goods Sold and divide that by the Net Revenue again.

Gross Margins = (Net Revenue – Cost of Goods Sold)/Net Revenue

Easy as that.  The purpose of looking at Gross Margins is far more interesting.  Gross Margins give you a look into how well the company is run in comparison to its peers.  How much money did the company make off of the revenue it brought in?  How efficient is management at managing their cash flow?  For every dollar that came in, how much did the company spend to make that dollar?  Is this company well-run when compared against other companies in the same industry?  Gross Margin allows you to make an apples to apples comparison.  It is easy to say that Boeing had higher net income than Spirit, but they also have sixteen times the sales ($64 billion to Spirit’s $4 billion).  Comparing these companies in terms of their Margin is a better way to see just how the two companies stack up.

In 2010, Spirit recognized Gross Margins of 13.5%.  Not especially great, but just below average when compared against their results for the last four years.  Boeing, on the other hand, reported a margin of 19.4%.  Embraer showed 2010 Gross Margins of 17.2$%.  So by looking at these figures, you can see that Spirit could use improvement in the efficient use of their cash.  As a (relatively) new company, having cash on hand is important because it means the company can invest that cash into new programs, more employees, expanding, and many other things that are important to a company that is trying to grow.

I hope this post helped you understand what to look for on an Income Statement a little better.  I would like to write a disclaimer, any mistakes made in my calculations were inadvertent and are mine alone.  I pulled this information from the public listings for these companies on Google Finance, and from the S&P 500 page on the same site.  I welcome any comments or corrections.