Posts Tagged ‘passion’

Welcome to the penultimate post in this 12-part series on QUALITY, titled #QUALITYtweet – 12 Ideas to Build a Quality Culture.

Here are the first ten posts, in case you would like to go back and take a look:

1. Quality #1: Quality is a long term differentiator
2. Quality #2: Cure Precedes Prevention
3. Quality #3: Great People + Good Processes = Great Quality
4. Quality #4: Simplifying Processes
5. Quality #5: Customers are your “Quality Partners”
6. Quality #6: Knowing what needs improvement
7. Quality #7: Productivity and Quality
8. Quality #8: Best Practices are Contextual
9. Quality #9: Quality of Relationship and Communication
10. Quality #10: Inspection can be a waste if…

#QUALITYtweet Critical question: Knowing that

people will change only if they want to, how do you

make sure they “want” to change?

Process Improvement is a “change” game and implementing change isn’t always easy. In case of process improvement, the challenge is to change habits and behaviors of your people. That makes it even more difficult.

People change, not by “force” but by their “intent”. With force, people may dispassionately comply with your processes, but for true involvement, their intent needs a direction. With this as a given, critical questions are:

• How do you make sure that you implement change by driving intent of people?
• How do you make sure that people are passionately involved in change?

The answer to these is “Change Leadership”. Leading a change means undertaking right initiatives, mobilizing resources, addressing soft aspects like motivation, overcoming hurdles and aligning the teams to make it happen. How can change leadership drive process improvement initiative? Here are a few pointers:

• Accurately define what needs a change: Apply 80:20 rule to identify what needs improvement. It is easy to align people when they know that they are improving the right areas that have maximum business/operational impact.
• Create a change time line: Humans work best when they work against a time line. We often tend to get complacent when there are no deadlines. Reasonable pressure helps us become more creative. Create a time line by when change will be implemented with a step-by-step action plan. This also creates a sense of urgency.
• Engage people: People tend to commit themselves to things they are involved in. Involve practitioners and managers in defining the change. They are the ones who will be impacted by the change. Engage them by explaining them the larger context, vision and business need. When they know the larger picture, they can align their actions accordingly. They also need to know the “What’s in it for me?” part. How will they become more effective? How will this change help them improve their performance? They want to know this.
• Review progress periodically: If you don’t monitor your people, you give them a reason to slow down. Have short and effective meetings (in group or one-on-one) with people involved in change. Take a stock of how things are going. Understand their problems. Help them do better. They get help and you get the broader picture. If you hit some roadblocks, you still have chance to re-align. Review early and often. This is also your opportunity to share progress and motivate people involved in improvement initiatives.
• Lead: Give them the context and set them free. Micromanagement on tasks can kill creativity and morale. Be there to help them, but let them do it on their own. People learn the most when they try to do it themselves. They will make mistakes. Help them overcome and share the lessons learned. Set right examples for them to follow.
• Share rewards: when you link participation with rewards, it will help you get voluntary participation from people. But after they have participated, it is only your leadership abilities that will keep them going. You will still have lot of people who will willingly participate.
• Keep rotating teams: Once a change cycle is implemented, induct new team members in the improvement team. You maximize the opportunities for everyone to get involved in defining improvements. Broader the participation, wider the acceptance of change.

Last but not the least, people engage when they see continuity of effort. If your improvement initiative is temporary or ad-hoc, people will not engage beyond the first cycle. When people see consistent results from a process improvement group, they willingly participate.

Process improvement is a journey and not a destination. Who you travel with matters a lot. Choose the right people and get them to swing into action. Your business will thank you for that!

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Tanmay is a Software Quality Management professional based out of India. He hosts QAspire Blog and tweets as @tnvora. He is also an author of the book #QUALITYtweet – 140 Bite-Sized Ideas to Deliver Quality in Every Project

Tagged as: behaviors, business, Change, comply, context, creativity, deadlines, effective, engage, force, habits, hurdles, intent, lead, Leadership, managers, micromanagement, mobilizing, morale, passion, practitioners, process improvement, progress, review, rewards, urgency, vision

Today’s article on Branding is about Branding with Passion. Before I delve into that, though, here are the links to the branding Series, so far:

1. Branding – What’s the point?
2. Branding – What’s your brand promise?
3. Branding – Branding is a balancing act
4. Branding – Consistency, Consistency, Consistency
5. Branding – Don’t get caught in the hype
6. Branding – Get the mix right
7. Branding – Your brand is being created with or without you

It’s a lot easier to do things you like, than things you don’t like.  You might be thinking…”duh”.  But how many of you spend your time doing what you are passionate about?  How many companies focus on the things they can do, as opposed to the things they should do?

I’m talking about what in most MBA programs would be called “core competencies”.  These are the fundamental things your customers value, and that your company does better than any of your competitors.  Let’s use HP as an example.  HP is a company with many lines of business, many products and even more things they could be doing.  One of the things that has made HP successful it its ability to “stick to it’s knitting”, as my Grandma used to say.  When they have veered off course, they have acknowledged it and pulled back – sometimes not as fast as they would have liked in hindsight, but they eventually realized it and corrected their course so that they play to their strength of innovation.  Their core competencies are the things that HP people are passionate about – innovation is what they are about.  R&D is a vital part of every successful division.  HP Labs holds more patents than any other working technology lab.  The net result is that HP continues to lead in the businesses where it innovates.  Why?  Because it is doing what it loves to do.

When it comes to smaller scale businesses, the idea is even more important.  Brandon Mendelson started his company in response to, well, having nothing else to do (his words not mine.)  The company, Earth’s Temporary Solution, is the production company behind Brandon’s campaign “A Million High Fives” (#AMHF on Twitter).  Brandon is a guy who does good things, because he wants to.  He is sarcastic and a bit wacky, but he is nothing if not following his passion.

“Our goal is to empower others to help those in need. In the not-for-profit world there’s a lot of mistrust and people looking to make a quick buck on willing, happy people, so as a for-profit, we want people to trust us and know we are providing them with the right tools to do the greatest good”, says Brandon.

By following his passion, and sticking to his core competencies, Brandon has amassed a huge following on Twitter, FaceBook and other networks.  Currently, Brandon is one of the most followed non-brand, non-celebrity, non-media outlets on Twitter. He is following his passion, and consequently, people are following him.

Now you ask, how can you identify your passion, your core competencies?  Ask yourself these questions about your business and your brand:

• Why do my customers choose our brand over another?
• What do we do that our competitors don’t?
• What is the one thing that we would protect over anything else?

Your answers will lead you towards clarifying your competencies.  Take them, build on them and make them to focus of your branding (and business) efforts.  When your brand is built on passion, it is authentic.  There is an honesty that comes from doing what you like to do.  You can’t make that up and you certainly can’t fake it.

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This article is contributed by Laura Lowell, Author of the Amazon bestseller ’42 Rules of Marketing’ and the upcoming ‘42 Rules to Build Your Brand and Your Business’. You can follow her on twitter at @42_rules.

Tagged as: 42 Rules, A million High Fives, active garage, authentic, Branding, Brandon Mendelson, core competencies, Hewlett Packard, HP, laura lowell, passion, Research and Development

There are broadly three phases of entrepreneurship

1. The Beginning

2. The Journey

3. The New Beginning ( Yes, It’s Not the Destination )

Now, the quick outline of the elements in each phase:

1. The Beginning

The five elements for the beginning phase are:

1. Purpose: Knowing why you are in this will help you keep going when the going gets tough

2. Passion: Doing what you love will make it feel like you are not working

3. People: Building together with the right people will make it look easy

4. Problem: Solving a real problem will help as people will pay to solve a real problem.

5. Plan: Having a plan even when you know that it’s going to change along the way

2. The Journey

The five elements of the journey

1. Patience: Everything takes longer and costs more. Patience is a MUST

2. Persistence: Sticking to the course of action even in the face of difficulty

3. Perseverance: Sticking to your beliefs even in the face of no successful outcome

4. Pain: Ability to handle the “pains” of entrepreneurship along the way

5. Politics: Knowing how to navigate in the sea of politics. You may not want to play politics but surely you should know how to survive and thrive in the politics that already exists

Last phase is what I call the “New Beginning.” I purposely did not call it the destination because rarely I see entrepreneurship “ends” with something – it’s usually a stepping stone to begin something new.

3. The New Beginning

So, here are the five elements of the new beginning

1. Pride: The satisfaction that comes with taking a concept to a completion

2. Profits: If executed well, there is money to be made. There are also profits in terms of personal growth and fulfillment.

3. Power: Since nine out of ten companies go out of business, if you are part of the one that succeeds, you automatically have more power.

4. Possibilities: New possibilities open up as you have more credibility

5. Philanthropy: You can make a bigger difference to the world as you have “extra” capacity

For those of you who are starting on this wonderful journey, wish you the very best.

Rajesh Setty is an entrepreneur, author and speaker based in Silicon Valley. He maintains another blog called Life Beyond Code and tweets as @UpbeatNow

Tagged as: Entrepreneurship, pain, passion, patience, people, perseverance, persistence, philanthropy, plan, politics, possibilities, power, pride, problem, profits, purpose