Related posts:

1. Change Management for Social Media Success
2. Social Media Survey Results – A Report on the State of Social Media in Northeast Wisconsin
3. One Minute Social Media

It’s no surprise then that I follow Sbux and notice many of the subtle changes in their environment. One of them from a couple of years ago got me thinking again this week. This story comes from an old Businessweek article.

As part of Schultz’s efforts to improve the quality of the millions of lattes and cappuccinos Starbucks serves, he forbade what had become the common practice of re-steaming milk. That meant the baristas were pouring millions of dollars of leftover milk down the drain. As store managers for the first time began thinking about how to operate more efficiently, an idea emerged. It was simple, obvious, and made everyone wonder why no one had thought of it before: They could put etched lines in the steaming pitchers so that the baristas would know exactly how much milk to use for each size drink. Before, they just guessed. "The celebration of that line in the halls of Starbucks has become a metaphor," says Schultz. "How many other lines can we find? We’ve found a lot because no one was ever looking. The people who have found those lines have become part of the folklore."

As I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago on the topic of complexity, and as I read more from the IBM Capitalizing on Complexity report this year, I’m noticing that I’m taking steps each week to “draw new lines” that reduce complexity in my business, reduce waste and try to make the operations run more smoothly, even if it’s only a little bit.  (in a way, it’s my own Kaizen…which we’ll cover in a future post).

Think about those “lines in the steaming pitchers” and look for you “damn, why didn’t I think of this before” moments.  Spend some time today looking at the little inefficiencies (how many phones, emails, applications, addresses, staplers, pens, whatever…) that keep you from performing at 100% today and make note of them, and then start drawing your own lines.

Related posts:

1. The growing complexity in school communications
2. Are customer preferences ‘baked in’?

Gist is a great helper for executives, marketers and salespeople to keep up to speed on their most important contacts. Basically, Gist takes in your contacts from the various places you keep them, such as Outlook, LinkedIn and what have you, and sorts them by importance (your rank them) and gives you updates on information they find about them by scouring the web. It allows you to say “hey, Bill, I see your company just got an award, great job!”

Gist, in a word, gives you the gist of what’s going on with your mot important contacts at a glance. It also catalogs the emails & interaction you have with them (through the Gist plugin on your desktop) so that you can log in to Gist and see EVERYTHING that’s going on with that one contact. Brilliant!

Sign up early and get in on the Gist BETA »

Related articles by Zemanta

• Get the Drift With Gist (gigaom.com)

No related posts.

That said, how many of us take control over the music and messages that are played each day in our stores, offices and workplaces? Moreover, if you have 2 or 3 tier distribution and a network of dealers, what do you have coming through their speakers?  The folks at Integrity Management, a chiropractic practice coaching & business management group, has their own “ChiroFM” podcast (“radio station”) that their doctors can download and play through the speakers in their office. In their words: “This station provides music for your office audio system that can be played through your computer.  We provide commercial free radio with Positive Chiropractic messages between songs.  With each episode you will be able to receive more than 3 hours in programming specifically designed for the Chiropractic office and IT’S 100% FREE!!!”  Personally, I think that this is an outstanding idea.  It’s a passive thing, but it’s a positive thing. It’s about a business owner taking control over what they can in their environment to help build their business.  If I were Integrity, I’d be adding another line of service where replace their stock messages (which are quite good) with the doctor’s own voice and message. They could offer to send out a podasting kit, help write some semi-custom script, do a bit of coaching and get recordings of the doctor in their own office.  How powerful would that be? 

Another idea is for companies with dealer networks.  Let’s say that I’m a Stihl chainsaw dealer.  Wouldn’t it be great if once a month or so I could download a file from Stihl with some music programmed to what the typical Stihl customer likes with messages from Stihl’s CEO, Hans Peter Stihl, about new products, that month’s promotions or whatever was appropriate?  I think that would be sweet.

In an age where we’re encouraging everyone to become a publisher, engager, and better communicator through social media, including those coffee houses, why aren’t we taking a bit more control over the experience and the audio background that surrounds our customers?  More to the point, why aren’t people creating play lists, with a promotional bit for the store mixed in at random, to play in their stores?  With the power of podcasting, the ease of iTunes and a dozen other quick, effective and professional sounding ways to deliver a better audio experience mixed with sound promotion, I’m surprised that more companies aren’t doing this.

I know, there’s licensing issues and all kinds of other stuff to probably consider and work through. You could, of course use some pod safe music if you’d like.

What can you do to create your own audio experience in your store, office or workplace?  A simple iTunes playlist with a podcast studio in a box and you’re off to the races!

No related posts.

I’m a tools & process person. Ever since I started my first business (20 years ago, actually), I have always asked “isn’t there a tool for this” when I came upon a new challenge and I’m constantly asking “isn’t there a better way to do this?” There’s always a better way!

One of the process improvements that I wanted to make recently was the process for gathering information for proposals and stremlining the process for proposal development. So, like any good researcher, I bought a book. In fact, it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time on any business topic. Persuasive Business Proposals is a cross between a Bible and a cookbook for writing effective proposals. It’s a wonderful resource and I can’t recommend it enough if you’re looking to improve your proposal creation process. So, armed with a few more tools in my toolkit, I set out to put this all together in the form of process improvement.

Capturing proposal data

One of the things that’s great about Persuasive Business Proposals is the series of questions poses throughout the book that are designed to help you create better proposals. So, based on one of the lists of questions on creating “client-centered proposals” and with some insight from my existing but now outdated process, I decided that this was a great way to leverage the form functionality in Google Docs and integrate it into my workflow.

The idea here is that I’ll have a web-based form that I can invoke while on a phone call, fill out in real time, feed a spreadsheet for capture and storage and then use that captured data in the proposal process. No more losing notes or trying to understand handwriting or forgetting to ask a key question. It’s all here. More to the point, if you’re trying to help your small team (very large orgs may have “enterprise class” tools for this sort of stuff) synchronize their habits to your process, this could be a great tool for you.

Setting up the form

Setting up the Google Docs form is very simple. In the Google Docs “New” menu dropdown, you’ll find an entry for forms. Clicking on that takes you to the form creation area and simultaneiously creates the back-end spreadsheet that will capture the data you collect through the process.

You can add as many questions as you want (from what I can tell, there’s no limit that any reasonable person would exceed) and you can add things like text, multiple choice, checkboxes, lists, scales and grids. I won’t walk you through the form creation process here, Google has documentation for that, but I do want to share some of the screen shots and process pieces.

Setting up a Google Form

Using the form

Using the form is pretty easy. When I’m on the phone, I simply call up the form and start filling it out. When I’m done with the call, I submit the form and then visit the spreadsheet to call back the data that I need to do the proposal.

Integrating into workflow

I use Google Chrome to work with all of my Google docs and use a handy feature that Todd Lohenry shared with me on how to “create application shortcuts” that can basically turn a web document into an application in the start menu. So, as you can see, I have this form as a “program” in my taskbar and call it up as though I were opening any other program. Very slick, very quick and very cool.

While this isn’t a plausible solution for everyone, for me and for a small sales team, this is an ideal solution to help improve processes around capturing sales data. Sure, I probably could have created something in Zoho to do this, but for my needs and for the speed that Google docs offers, this is a great solution!

No related posts.