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Chapter Highlights

Introduction: Business Tools for More Profits Right Now

Have you ever watched an air-powered impact wrench remove the lug nuts from your car's wheels? Or used an electric screwdriver in your home? Or prepared food with a Cuisine-Art in your kitchen? In most situations these specialized tools are so much more efficient for the job at hand than the manual variety.

This book equips the reader with similar tools for business to grow faster, to make more money and to get ahead quicker. It draws tools from the author's hands-on experience as CEO of eight companies in as many industries. The book suggests a management process to group tools into appropriate toolboxes for effective application in any business, for profit or not-for-profit. The following management process steps, or toolboxes, correspond to the seven book chapters where the tools are located, ready for the reader's use:

This introductory chapter puts a few exemplary business tools in the reader's hands from each of the seven toolboxes - tools to make money with right now. The chapter encourages use of the tools individually at first, just to get good at using them. It then goes on to introduce the concept of taking the company or team to a state of "we" - a sort of magical place where anything that can be dreamed can be accomplished. Using certain tools over time leads to "we," much like the auto assembly worker in Johnny Cash's song One Piece at a Time builds his dream car by smuggling parts out of the plant one at a time.

Chapter 1 Summary: Make Goals Meaningful Motivators

A goal is like a dartboard: you still get points for missing the bulls-eye. But by shooting for the bulls-eye, you'll always score more. Getting people in a business to grasp the concept of reaching higher is every manager's job: it's all about making goals meaningful in their context. At Graphic Arts Center printing in Portland, we got everyone to understand that doubling printing volume in two years would allow us to buy all new printing presses, a meaningful goal indeed. Why? Well, new presses meant the best state-of-the-art printing for customers, the newest toys for employees, more volume for suppliers, more profit for shareholders, and more jobs for the community. Meaningful!

This chapter contains many tools for setting meaningful goals, getting buy-in by team members and accomplishing the goals. Here are a few of the tools: an overall company or team goal, big audacious goals, getting commitment through I Will, the 1-page business plan, fun and celebration as tools, the repetitive communication tool and the Harley hot button.

Read how a $46,000 Steinway piano was earned by one sales manager who grabbed the brass ring by achieving unheard-of profits in his region. Get commitment from your team the same way well-known football coach Dick Vermeil has so many times. And experience the exhilaration of using a big audacious goal to turn Snapper lawnmower manufacturing company's pretax loss of $54 million to $13 million profit in a single year. Because the reader will want to keep this chapter's tools in a permanent, handy place nearby, the chapter wraps up with a tool kit summarizing the top ten tools for meaningful goals.

Chapter 2 Summary: Communicate to Get Meaningful Results

No communication at all is far worse than receiving bad news. The country group Lonestar captures this precept of communication in their hit tune No News in which the protagonist waits fruitlessly to hear from his beloved. And so it is in business. We routinely fail to provide the communication necessary for facilitating meaningful results. This chapter lays out a simple but complete set of communication tools for every manager to accomplish meaningful goals every time.

It also tosses trust into the equation, because talk without trust falls on deaf ears. Since trust is largely a function of values alignment in an enterprise, this chapter charts a course for building a cohesive culture through values and communication. Some of the tools include walking your four corners, the symbolism tool, repetitive communication tools, the manager's monthly letter, personal notes of praise, and a renewed focus on the power of "we." Read how a symbolic Q1 = $1.00 slogan permanently stopped pretax losses in my printing firm while the whole industry continued to lose money in that season each year. Again, the reader can capture the top ten communication and top ten values-aligning tools in chapter-concluding tool kits.

Chapter 3 Summary: Now Track What's Meaningful

Just before becoming CEO at GAC printing in Oregon, a surprise loss in the midst of their Initial Public Offering necessitated cancellation of the IPO. Responsive tracking to anticipate the future could have prevented this embarrassing incident.

"What gets measured gets done." You've heard that said, but no one ever told you there were three steps involved, namely 1) setting goals, 2) communicating and building trust, and then 3) tracking against the goals to feed back results to the team. It's obvious once you see it, but how many managers actually do these three steps, much less apply accurate, responsive tracking? And which tools are right for accurate tracking? It's this last question that is the focus of this chapter - it makes a decided difference which tracking tools are used. Many management-measuring tools are inaccurate, inconsistent and misleading.

An example of a misleading management tool is the ordinary monthly sales chart. People think up is good and down is bad, but what if the chart goes up less than the same month last year? What if that continues for 12 months? When will you finally notice that your growth has slowed to a crawl? Too late is the answer. A simple tool called the trailing 12 months chart (T12M) will forever solve this problem. Where ordinary charts regularly lie to you, the T12M always tells you the truth.

Other eye-opening tracking tools in chapter three include monthly re-forecasting, the quarterly priorities manager, managerial success traits, the time audit tool, two related communication tools, a backlog tracker, and the best financial reporting tool, among others. A tool kit containing the top ten tracking tools closes out this chapter nicely.

Chapter 4 Summary: Anticipate the Future, Then Realize It

Country-western star Vince Gill says it best in his all-time top platinum recording: There Ain't No Future in the Past. We use lessons from the past to improve our future plans, but more than that, we need to see the future and change it before it happens. Que sera, sera isn't good enough: what will be is what we decide will be. Or try it this way: they say there'll be a recession and we decided we just aren't going to participate!

Chapter four answers the questions: how can I improve my future results? How do I grow faster? How will I increase future profitability? How do I control my destiny? The answers lie in tools that anticipate the future better and in an attitude of not giving in, not ever. George Steiner, the grand-daddy of modern planning put it succinctly: "Planning is looking into the future and changing what we do now to create improved results." It's the manager's job description: read the trail signs and take action to make things better. Here, the trail signs are genuine crystal balls - tools that really allow us to see into the future.

The tools for future realization include the "right growth rate," the 1-page action plan, using "what if?" as a strategy tool, the unique business proposition, 1-page tactics and the dreamtime tool. This chapter revisits tools from other chapters, showing how they work for gazing into the future to get genuine, highly probable pictures of what will be and how to re-paint those pictures before they materialize. A bonus-pack of tool kits synopsizes the chapter with the top ten planning tools plus the top ten strategy tools.

Chapter 5 Summary - Get, Coach and Keep Winners

People are almost always the deciding factor in true business success. What if your shipping or mailroom clerk stays an extra five minutes each day to get a package out to a customer? It would get there a whole day sooner. If your receptionist were the very best wouldn't that attract and keep more customers? Management's job is to point our people at what's important, which is usually the customer. This particular tool is called key customer-impacting jobs, and it's just one of many spelled out in this chapter. The idea is to turn every one of our people into winners, getting them to see how they can best contribute to the success of customers and the company.

Chapter five focuses on tools that have to do with people performance. The tools involve finding winners, putting people in their best jobs, weeding our employee garden, coaching winners rather than laggards or losers, and getting our winners to concentrate on important things while permanently fixing urgent things. This chapter winds up with tool kits containing the top ten customer tools and the top ten tools to get, keep and motivate winners.

Chapter 6 Summary: Get Organized to Get Results

One of my very best chief financial officers was an organized manager but was also one of the worst when it came to organizing his own paperwork. Often our greatest strength shows up as our greatest weakness in other areas. This CFO just couldn't file or find stuff quickly! He would eventually find what we needed, but it took hours - no exaggeration. He finally adopted the C-drawer tool from this chapter, and amazingly it bought back a half-day per day for him. His lack of a filing system was literally doubling his workweek.

Being organized imparts efficiency and productivity to a business, which in turn promotes bottom-line profits. The well-known, now retired chairman of Bank of America during its growth decades, Lou Lundborg, cited this as one of only two traits he sought in executives. If nothing else, we managers need to be organized just to set an example for those around us.

Chapter six serves up a truckload of tools for organizing self and others. The systematizing tools in this chapter include a time audit, lead-manage-do guidelines, keys to successful delegation, a management roles tool, the monthly operations report tool, the powerful company calendar and more. The top ten tools for getting organized are summarized in a tool kit at the end of this chapter.

Chapter 7 Summary: Celebrate Every Success!

A management team that fails to celebrate will devastate motivation and future successes that meaningful goals might have created. Similarly, celebration after a big effort certifies the true meaning of the endeavor. My first time as CEO of a really small company taught me this lesson lastingly: we had just achieved gargantuan growth for that industry, up from $1.2 million in sales to $2.5 million in just two years. We didn't celebrate, and you could feel employee morale palpably plummet going into the next year.

Celebration tools make and keep goals meaningful. One such tool is monetary reward (compensation) and another is recognition of people for getting results. Recognition as a tool pays off at least 1000-to-1 over compensation of any kind. A headline lauding Jack Welch's success at GE hits it hard: Raises and Praise(s) or Out the Door! Compensation and recognition (praise), plus a fair-but-tough attitude about performance, are Welch's secrets to success.

Now add some more of chapter seven's success tools: fun, challenge, personal growth, convenience, communication and security. Together with compensation and recognition, these are what people want in their jobs. When we managers fail to provide these, our best people leave. Other tools in this celebration chapter include an employee satisfaction index, recognition buck$, personal notes of recognition mailed to a person's home, and awards of all kinds. These tools and more are captured in this chapter's two tool kits, the top ten tools to be a better recognizer followed by the top ten celebration tools.

Summary: Get Started, One Tool at a Time

How can the reader assimilate and adopt so many tools? Chapter eight suggests a number of solutions, such as implementing only one tool per week, delegating the implementation of certain tools to others, and beginning with tools that will have the biggest payoff for you. The top ten tools as picked by the author's audiences, representing over 30,000 CEOs and managers, are also offered as a starting point, along with several other short lists for using the tools. Some notes on using certain tools together are provided, and a brief discussion on becoming CEO and personal growth is offered. Finally, this chapter's tool kit covers the top ten tools from the computer compact disk designed to accompany the book. This summary offers readers an easy route to implement two dozen of the book's more popular business tools.

Click here to order Kraig Kramers' book.