The engineering and construction industry, long berated for lagging behind in terms of digitalization, is picking up steam. New business models are changing the game.
Breaking the mold: The construction players of the future
Thursday, October 31, 2019
A conversation about the future of Asia
Asia will account for more than half the global economy by 2040. What opportunities and risks lie ahead as “the Asian century” unfolds?
A conversation about the future of Asia
A conversation about the future of Asia
How the British Army’s operations went agile
Military commanders have had to change the way they operate in the field. Corporate executives should take note.
How the British Army’s operations went agile
How the British Army’s operations went agile
Building agility in the British Army’s headquarters
Three leaders from British Army headquarters lay out what it took to bolster agility and flexibility in its operations.
Building agility in the British Army’s headquarters
Building agility in the British Army’s headquarters
Changing the game: A conversation with Katerra’s Michael Marks
As Katerra strives to digitally disrupt the construction industry and “productize” the way we build, CEO Michael Marks discusses lessons learned and aspirations.
Changing the game: A conversation with Katerra’s Michael Marks
Changing the game: A conversation with Katerra’s Michael Marks
Leading Remotely
Image courtesy of Ken Orvidas/theispot.com
Editor’s note: This article is part of a new MIT SMR series about how leadership is evolving in a digital world.
Shortly after the turn of the century, I left Wall Street to work from home.
My husband had finished his Ph.D., and his best job opportunity was in Boston, not New York City. Well established in my career as an investment analyst, with an Institutional Investor ranking, I wanted to continue to work for Merrill Lynch and was able to persuade my boss to let me work from our new home in Boston.
This doesn’t sound especially exotic today, but it definitely was then. Relatively few people were working remotely; fewer still were working for large, fast-paced, team-collaborative companies that way. The technology was available, of course, but compared with the tools of today, it was primitive. A tech specialist from Merrill Lynch had to come to my home and spend a full day getting me set up.
These days, the organizational challenges are more difficult than the technical ones. And now that I run my own company, with employees in more than five states and the possibility of expanding internationally, I’m thinking about these issues not just as an individual contributor but also as a manager.
For my firm, home base is Lexington, Virginia, but only 15% of us are colocated, so most of our work is done remotely. We’re certainly not alone. A 2018 study found that 70% of professionals globally are telecommuting at least once a week; 53% work remotely half the week or more.1 Swiss office service provider IWG, sponsor of the study, clarified that the numbers refer to full-time employees — not freelancers and the self-employed. Add these other types of workers, hired on a temporary, part-time, or contract basis as critical contributors to many business teams, and the number of remote employees balloons.
We shouldn’t expect this trend to slow, much less reverse. Leaders must evolve strategies for managing both people and technology in an increasingly distributed workforce.
The Challenges
Leading remotely involves grappling with problems in several key areas:
Communication. When a company has employees all over the country or world, it’s understood that time differences can add a layer of complexity to the logistics of everyday communication. However, there are more subtle, and oftentimes more important, complications to consider when managing remote employees.
For one thing, when time zones don’t match up, less information can be transmitted in a given period, which means we as managers need to be aware of how this might affect the pace of project development. For another, in text-based communication like email or instant messaging, we’re unable to convey as much meaning as we can through vocal tone and cadence, facial expressions, and physical gestures — tools we normally take for granted in face-to-face conversations. Even our more robust methods of communicating virtually, like audio or video chats, don’t give us a broad view of body language.
As a result of those fundamental differences, miscommunication will almost certainly be more common among remote colleagues than in a traditional office. Our words alone rarely transmit as much meaning or information as we think we’re conveying. We must continually strive to make all communication as clear and consistent as possible.
But we also need to be patient with our employees and ourselves when miscommunications do occur. I recently hired a new assistant to help with research. She’s capable and has a lot of potential to grow in her role, but every week I cause a misunderstanding because I’ve assumed she understood my feelings and intentions behind sending a certain email, for instance, or I’ve failed to give her enough information about how to send a package. I need to remember that distance can make the onboarding process even more difficult than usual. As we both go through this transition, I try to stay aware of these dynamics, provide clear guidance up-front for each project, give immediate feedback on tasks as my new hire completes them, and praise her for the things she’s doing well. Despite the awkwardness of this adjustment period, she’s told me that the “hands-off” nature of the onboarding has helped her grow immensely. Because she can’t simply go to the next cubicle over to ask for help, she’s forced to problem solve on her own.
Finally, we all have different comfort levels with technology and our preferred modes and styles of communication. It takes time to understand the idiosyncrasies of each employee, not just new hires, and to reconcile those quirks with our own. Some employees may prefer email, some texts, some phone calls, and others video calls. If we don’t invest the effort to meet them where they are and speak their language, then we miss out on opportunities to connect with employees on a deeper level.
Project management. Having good systems and people in place to handle project management is essential for any organization — but it’s even more crucial for remote groups, especially given the communication challenges I’ve just described. For my own company, I’ve found tools such as Slack (which separates communications by topic so that employees can stay informed about the projects concerning them) and Asana (which allows us to share quick and efficient status updates on each of our projects) to be indispensable.
While digital tools facilitate remote project management and collaboration, they can also make it harder to tell what each person is actually contributing. With onsite employees, managers can simply visit people at their desks to have a better grasp of what they’re doing. But with offsite employees, we need to be proactive in reaching out and teach people how to manage up effectively so they can advocate for themselves. Relying solely on updates via digital tools can lead to under- or over-appreciation in the best-case scenario and misattribution and resentment in the worst. Staying in close contact with people can help avert some of these problems and give leaders a more complete picture of everyone’s contributions.
Talent development and management. In my thinking about how to effectively manage people along what I’ve been calling their “S-curve of learning,”2 I’ve come to appreciate the importance of having some employees who are at the launch point of their curve. Not only do they generate fresh ideas, they also help companies continually disrupt themselves so they can keep innovating in their fields. Despite my belief in this and the benefits shown in research, it’s hard to resist hiring a team of seasoned pros who are at the high end of their curve, who possess a full tool belt of skills, and who have a history of strong performance. It’s especially tempting in a remote setting to seek out people who require little to no training or oversight. I always try to push against this natural bias and make sure I have the proper systems in place to train and mentor new hires in order to cultivate their skills and gain their valuable insights.
However, I also have many employees who are at the high end of their S-curve. For them, I have to make sure I’m constantly taking their temperature and managing their engagement level with novel tasks. This helps maintain productivity and fend off boredom, which can be a greater challenge for offsite employees, given the lack of workplace camaraderie.
IT support and service. Since moving to rural Virginia, I’ve learned the hard way how much we take easy access to high-speed internet for granted. On numerous occasions, I’ve had to reschedule podcast interviews or make the 20-minute drive to my husband’s office to do a webinar because the connection at my own house just wouldn’t cut it. This rude awakening to the non-universality of good internet has led me to reevaluate assumptions that I used to make (and probably continue to make) about the availability and reliability of technology across my business.
As managers, we cannot assume that all of our remote employees will have equal access to reliable technology, internet, and (if they’re contractors) tech support. And even if they do, systems sometimes fail. It’s vital to have a good understanding of everyone’s situation and construct backup plans to use in the event of technical difficulties, which always seem to happen when we least want them to.
Why Bother?
Given the list of challenges, it may be tempting to question whether engaging with remote employees is even worth it. In my experience, it is. The concerns are valid, but over the years, I’ve reaped considerable benefits from having a largely remote staff.
Allowing people to work remotely means that you are not limited to the talent that’s near you geographically. If you’re introduced to a skilled sound engineer on the other side of the country, or if you have an acquaintance who could, with a little bit of training, become a great COO but lives in Singapore, those people can be viable employees or business partners instead of impossible collaborators.
Face-to-face interactions tend to be richer, as well, because more thought goes into planning them when team members aren’t colocated. These encounters can’t happen simply by chance — we have to carefully arrange a time for and understand the purpose behind each in-person meeting. Given all this planning and forethought, I’ve found that my employees are much more likely to be truly engaged in the meeting — offering suggestions and valuable insights and really listening to what I say. Instead of being brushed aside as everyday chatter, the words spoken in these meetings have real power.
There’s an unexpected upside to leading remote employees, too: When colleagues don’t share the same physical space day after day, there’s a distinct lack of workplace drama. I’ve found that this decrease in unnecessary conflict increases productivity and reduces the drain on everyone’s emotional energy. That isn’t to say that brick-and-mortar workplaces can’t be energizing — many are. But without a physical stage for gossip, intergroup antagonism, and the like, such issues are less likely to materialize.
Digital tools make working from home possible and contribute greatly to the flexibility of both organizations and individuals. But remote work is like a genie in the lamp of the digital revolution. Once released, there’s no stuffing it back in. We must learn to lead an increasingly large cadre of workers at home. And yet, if we effectively harness the strengths of this workforce while taking steps to minimize the drawbacks, we managers will find ourselves with an extremely motivated team who is willing to put in the time and effort to make the relationship work.
Leading Remotely
Navigating the EU rail-market liberalization
The European Union’s liberalization of the commercial long-distance passenger-rail market will have sizable impact for both operators and investors, potentially benefiting the entire rail industry.
Navigating the EU rail-market liberalization
Navigating the EU rail-market liberalization
Examples Of Process Improvement Metrics
Process Improvement Metrics Examples
Process Improvement Metrics are the standard measurement processes to evaluate business operations. These processes are optimized in a cycle of measurement, improvement and again measurement. The process relies on some common metrics as mentioned below:
Profitability Indicators
This Process is the first and foremost indicator you should ensure before starting any process or operations in the business. The percentage relationship between profit and total sales indicates the profitability of a business or a particular company.
Competitiveness Analysis
Competitiveness Analysis can act as a guide to maintain the business process smoothly. Competition and market awareness can lead to handling a proper investment strategy and upgrade at a certain level.
Efficiency Measurement
Efficiency measurement allows you to indicate the comparison between obtained results and expected results. The process is measured by the resource amount used with the equality of the ways to reduce resource usage.
Through this process, the best outcome can be achieved. On the other hand, efficiency is good for minimizing resource usage. By efficiently applying the process and resources, you can reduce costs and make the best use of resources in quantities.
Effectiveness Comparison
Effectiveness is the combined measurement of efficacy and efficiency. When these two indicators are summed up, you can gather an exact report of our resource effectiveness in business process development and maintenance as well.
Capacity Indicator
This metric indicates the ratio between the production amount and the occurring time. On the base of this ration, you can calculate the production capability of a company and also the required time range to execute it.
It also helps you to find out the exact number of working hours utilized in terms of production.
Productivity Observance
The productivity of a company is measured on the ratio between the job outputs and the spent resources.
This process not only allows you to have a keen observation of productivity but also keeps the resource flow well balanced. This way, you can evaluate the potential performers to plan ahead for an upgraded workflow process to ensure more productivity with fewer resources.
Value Improvement Indicator
The comparison between the process of identified value and the spent resource indicates the improvement of value for a respective product or any particular goods.
This method is one of the most important indicators to scale down the actual perception of a product. It also provides you with the market value of a certain product or a particular good.
Quality Indicators
This indicator is the last and most important of all the metrics. It is measured using total production or output and appropriate or usable production.
This process enables you to relatively measure the accountable production with the actual production. In some cases, quality assurance can make value to potential customers and also increase the market value of a company.
Process improvement metrics can become tricky to measure at some point or in certain situations. But the outcome can make or break our company perspective in respective markets. It can also create a benchmark for other companies to improve their process management and productivity.
The post Examples Of Process Improvement Metrics appeared first on Mr Dashboard.
Examples Of Process Improvement Metrics
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
Take a Wrecking Ball to Your Company’s Iconic Practices
Image courtesy of Brian Stauffer/theispot.com
Editor’s note: This article is part of a new MIT SMR series about how leadership is evolving in a digital world.
Most leaders today are trying to do the same things: help their organizations become more agile, more innovative, more digitally savvy, and more customer-centric.
Sooner or later, though, they come up against entrenched values and behaviors, and progress stalls. That’s particularly true with digital transformation. Experts concur that traditional mindsets and “ways of doing things around here” — the lay definition of culture — are the primary culprits hindering the fundamental transformation that emerging technologies are meant to enable.1
But organizational culture is hard to change. It’s intangible; there are no direct levers for controlling it. As MIT’s Ed Schein has noted,2 what an organization’s leaders pay close attention to and shower with time — not what they say — will provide the best clues about its culture. Think about it as the difference between a formal value statement and what employees say about the company on Glassdoor. There is typically a large gulf between stated aspiration and experienced reality.
When they confront that gulf, leaders often fall into one of two traps: overrelying on formal, structural changes (new lines of reporting, new jobs and work units) in an effort to eventually shift people’s mindsets, or simply leaving the job of culture change to HR, hoping that with time, training, and repetition, the new slogans will become reality. Of course, neither approach works.
In my ongoing research on how established organizations transform for the digital age, I have observed a third way that yields better results — identifying and then eliminating (or modifying dramatically) iconic practices: practices that are emblematic of historical cultural values but whose continued existence sends mixed messages about the organization’s desire to change.
Iconic practices originate to help an organization achieve its most mission-crucial tasks. Over time they also serve symbolic or ceremonial functions, such as showing that one is a good insider, a person who understands and can be trusted as a keeper of the culture.
A good way to identify iconic practices is to note which customs, seen from the outside, seem to involve an inordinate investment of people or time. For example, as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explained in a recent annual report, the amount of time Amazon executives spend crafting and getting input on their famous six-page memos is a strong signal of important corporate values: deep thinking and clarity.3 Learning how to write a good memo is a rite of passage for all senior hires. In a ritual that is often puzzling to newcomers, all meetings begin with a 30-minute silent period in which attendees read the memo before any discussion ensues. The practice has become iconic and is as much corporate theater as a productivity tool: While the memos may still be crucial aids to decision-making, it’s also clear to the anthropologically trained eye that they are a critical way of demonstrating that one is an Amazonian in good standing.
Iconic practices can include anything from company offsites and business review meetings to onboarding processes and ways in which decisions about people or money are made. Typically, they play out in events attended by the company’s power elite — settings where reputations are made or broken. The venues often have special names to evoke the importance of what transpires there (for example, the big room, at one institution where I worked). As Schein so aptly noted, these practices create and maintain the organization’s inclusion boundaries: who’s in the inner circle, who’s out, who’s tolerated but peripheral.
Logically, iconic practices need to change as a company grows or faces new threats. But because they are emblematic of core values that led to the organization’s success, they can persist long after they have become stale, meaningless, or even counterproductive.
An organization’s cultural values can thwart needed changes as the business enters a “what got you here won’t get you there” inflection point, such as the digital disruption currently experienced by many incumbent companies. As the examples below illustrate, cultural change requires — and can be accelerated by — eliminating or radically transforming practices that reinforce the old mindsets and behaviors a company is trying to shift.
Eliminating the Midyear Review at Microsoft
When Jean-Philippe Courtois took control in 2016 of Microsoft’s global sales, marketing and operations, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella, he realized that he needed to lead the organization away from what he called an inspection culture and toward a culture of learning and coaching. The “why” was the company’s shift to a cloud-first strategy; moving into businesses where Microsoft was not the established expert, its people would have to experiment and tolerate mistakes. This required a mindset shift from being know-it-alls to becoming learn-it-alls, as Nadella famously put it.
With revenues depending more than ever on how much customers were using Microsoft’s products and services, the company radically restructured the sales force and its partner organization, adjusted compensation, and rolled out digital tools to provide them with both real-time data on customer usage and metrics on how they were allocating their time among accounts. Yet mindsets and behaviors were slow to change.
As Courtois pondered how to eliminate obstacles to change,4 he realized that what was holding people back was a culture that still valued having the right answer, being the smartest person in the room, and its unspoken corollary, never admitting to mistakes or failure under scrutiny. One of the most visible manifestations of this inspection culture was the annual gathering known as the January midyear review.
A meeting in which senior managers from around the world would be flown to a particular venue and grilled by the top team on their progress and plans, the January business review had “a fear impact on people,” said one manager: “They felt like they were going into that meeting to be judged on themselves personally, rather than what they’re actually bringing to the table.” Another recalled that it “almost felt like an old-style exam, a memory test of all the things you knew about your business.” Stories abounded of senior managers beginning their preparation well before the Christmas period, meaning that a raft of the company’s most valuable resources were diverting more than a month of their time to getting ready for an internal meeting.
After decades of ceremony, Courtois decided to kill the midyear review. As part of a cadre of leaders who had come of age in an era known for precision questioning — the interrogatory stance adopted by the company’s leaders at these highly visible, orchestrated meetings — Courtois was a master of the game. For him, “it was a huge learning moment for the company, dating back to Bill [Gates].”
But he realized that the ritual had outlived its usefulness. Worse, it signaled that the company still rewarded having the right answer above all else:
Because there are so many people helping presenters, so many people who wanted to witness the drama of the “high mass,” it had started to become an act. We were all anxious to make a good impression, we spent weeks and weeks preparing.
As Courtois’s words indicate, the midyear quarterly review was emblematic of the culture that Microsoft’s founders had built. No trivial exercise, it expressed fundamental values about rigor and mastery of detail; navigating it with skill was a rite of passage for advancement to the senior ranks and, as such, an important part of any long-tenured senior executive’s professional identity.
The reality, however, was that technology had eliminated the need for old-style managerial inspection and control. As Courtois explained, once everyone had the same dashboard, executives could afford to spend much less time on review; instead, they could focus their meeting time on learning:
We all have the same dashboard, so we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that, “Oh yes, this business is in trouble indeed, yes, or that business is on fire, yes.” And so dramatizing that doesn’t help. More important to us is the why and how, and we try to structure the discussion around what we can learn.
Once Courtois dispensed with the big midyear event, all four quarterly business review meetings were transformed into quarterly business connections, a name change that conveyed shorter, lighter, more interactive sessions. A new template, for example, reduced the volume of slides that managers presented within the meetings to a tenth of its previous size. Leaders were encouraged to behave more like coaches than inspectors, asking questions like: “What are you trying? What’s working? What’s not working? How can we help?” In the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region alone, one of Courtois’s managers calculated that they saved 4,000 hours of preparation — in their view, time better spent with customers and employees.
Abolishing Moderation Meetings at A&O
In an era of transformative cognitive technologies like AI and machine learning, it’s become obvious that managerial practices must become more nimble, too. Among these, traditional annual performance appraisals and rankings have been eliminated by many companies as no longer fit for purpose.5
Critics have noted that annual reviews take too much time relative to the value they add and hold people accountable for past behavior at the expense of improving current performance and grooming talent for the future. Moreover, organizations that espouse a collaborative culture but continue to use a forced-curve performance management system inadvertently create an environment in which employees must compete against one another for high marks, undercutting cross-unit collaboration, as had occurred at Microsoft.6 P&G, for example, reportedly freed up a lot of time to devote to employees’ growth by eliminating both forced-curve rankings and talent calibration sessions, which according to managers had devolved into arbitrary horse-trading.7
That is what happened at Magic Circle law firm Allen & Overy (A&O), which by 2019 became the first of its peer group to eliminate the traditional performance review process. A&O had invested in integrating technology with the delivery of traditional legal services8 and aspired to nurture “a collaborative culture where talented individuals, working together, can truly flourish and achieve great things” and where “[i]maginative, independent thinking is not just encouraged, it’s expected.”9
As at every other top law firm, senior partners devoted inordinate amounts of time on moderation meetings, aimed at creating a comparative performance assessment of their junior associates, typically on a forced distribution curve. The moderation meetings were seen by many as laborious but also necessary for calibrating standards across teams. “Otherwise,” as one partner told me, “you’d end up looking at just your own people sort of in a vacuum. You need to occasionally have a sense check to make sure that what you think is fabulous is actually fabulous.”
While some partners still found the meetings useful, many believed they were no longer getting good value for the time and effort the process required. For starters, some felt that the practice encouraged horse-trading, reinforcing the silos they were trying to break. Heads of practice groups lobbied for their own associates, “almost sort of going into battle for them,” as one person put it. Others saw the ranking process as a barrier to the kinds of developmental conversations junior associates wanted to have and the firm wanted to encourage, as a person’s “number” usually ended up being the key piece of feedback they received.
Inspired by learning about what other companies were doing, David Benton, A&O’s head of capital markets, insisted that the firm pilot a shift away from a numerical rating as the indicator of someone’s ability, performance, and potential. As his colleagues described it to me, Benton was asking questions that the current system, with its once-yearly appraisal, could not help address: “How could we ensure that the right conversations were happening at each level? How could we better identify and help nurture talent? What would help one-on-one conversations between partners and associates include useful information so that associates understood how they were tracking and what opportunities they had?”
By 2019, after three pilots, a new performance management system would be live in almost every A&O office — and the old annual appraisal and ranking gone. Survey data and focus groups indicated increased employee satisfaction with feedback from their managers and support for their career development, and partners reported satisfaction with the talent discussions that replaced the old moderation meetings.
What Do You Need to Stop Doing?
To be clear, the problem lies not in conducting business reviews or in doing talent calibration, nor will it, in the future, lie in writing six-page memos to pitch ideas or in any of the other practices that are fashionable today. The problem is the persistence of things that were once vital but now merely serve to show that participants know how to play the game at a high level.
As they pursue digital transformation, most leaders know they must also orchestrate a cultural shift — from prioritizing flawless execution to valuing more agile learning and experimentation, from doing siloed work to fostering true interdisciplinary collaboration, and from evaluating people’s past performance to enabling their future development.
Articulating the ambition is the easy part. Taking a wrecking ball to what gets in the way of moving in that direction is a lot harder.
In the transition from old to new ways of doing things, iconic practices express what Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan calls competing commitments: conflicting priorities that effectively maintain one foot on the brake while the other hits the accelerator. We want to be more agile and innovative, for example, but without diminishing margins or efficiency. We want creative thinkers, but we don’t want to lose managerial control.
To foster real culture change, leaders must align what they say with how their companies actually operate when solving important problems and making key decisions. Their organizations must unlearn the lessons of years of experience and understand that the very cultural values that made them successful in the past may have hardened into iconic practices that are now holding them back. In that effort, more important than what leaders decide to implement is what they have the courage to eliminate.
Take a Wrecking Ball to Your Company’s Iconic Practices
Auctioning of Indian mining leases—the next disrupting factor in the iron ore market?
A closer look at the lease auctioning process in India suggests a potential shift in the country's iron ore trade position.
Auctioning of Indian mining leases—the next disrupting factor in the iron ore market?
Auctioning of Indian mining leases—the next disrupting factor in the iron ore market?
Business Plan Key Metrics For Success
Business Plan Key Metrics
Most businesses fail to take off without a proper plan for operations, marketing, sales and so on. Business plans provide an idea about how the company runs and how it should run in the future.
And to better understand that, people have to turn to different metrics that help them monitor the health of their businesses and, based on that, make further planning for future operations. Some of the most common metrics for business planning are:
Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter score represents how likely a person is to recommend your business to another person. It is a basic score of how satisfied your customers are.
People with high net promoter scores are loyal customers while the ones with low scores are dissatisfied customers that resort to negative promotion.
Identifying this score allows you to understand how you can improve your customer service in order to provide a better user experience for a better overall image.
Qualified Leads
There are three kinds of leads that you need to pursue: marketing-qualified, sales-accepted and sales-qualified leads.
Each of these kinds of leads needs to be handled by the marketing team and sales team separately and, based on their efficiency, the leads can turn into customers. So, this measure is important to figure out whether you’re getting enough leads from the channels you’re targeting and structure your marketing activities accordingly.
Conversion rate
The conversion rate is the rate at which your leads turn into customers. This measure reflects the performance of your sales team as well as your product. A low conversion rate may be an indicator of your sales team performing poorly or your product not matching the needs of the market.
Customer Acquisition Cost
Customer Acquisition Cost measures the cost of acquiring a new customer. This can involve several kinds of marketing expenses. This, coupled with Customer Lifetime Value, can help you find the most profitable segment of customers.
So, instead of investing resources in leads that never turn into paying clients, you can direct your marketing efforts towards the most rewarding targets.
Customer Retention
Customer retention is an indispensable metric of customer loyalty. Most business enthusiasts would know that it is much more profitable to seek out existing customers for repeat sales rather than investing in the acquisition of new customers. Hence, the customer retention rate is an essential tool for forming an idea about the number of loyal customers you have.
A low retention rate calls for a higher focus on providing the best customer care as well as the highest quality of products.
Net Profit Margin
Net Profit Margin is the sum of the revenue you collected from your business against the expenses that went into it.
This measure shows the efficiency of profit generation of a company, that is, how well the company is at turning its investments into earnings with great returns. You always want a high Net profit margin because you need your income to exceed your costs. A low-profit margin can be a reminder to raise your product prices or lower sales or production costs.
Businesses need to put a great deal of planning into every business-related decision. And the best way to do that is by tracking these business planning metrics that can allow them to determine the best actions to take for enabling continued growth.
The post Business Plan Key Metrics For Success appeared first on Mr Dashboard.
Business Plan Key Metrics For Success
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Insights into China’s dynamic auto market from Daimler’s Hubertus Troska
In this interview with Daimler’s board member responsible for Greater China, Hubertus Troska discusses changes in the market and how his company has upped its game in the premium-car segment.
Insights into China’s dynamic auto market from Daimler’s Hubertus Troska
Insights into China’s dynamic auto market from Daimler’s Hubertus Troska
The future of packaging
McKinsey experts expect tomorrow’s packaging to be smart, personalized, and reusable.
The future of packaging
The future of packaging
Alternative proteins and the future of meat
Four McKinsey experts share what they see—and foresee—in the evolving meat and protein market.
Alternative proteins and the future of meat
Alternative proteins and the future of meat
Small plant, big protein
Could a tiny aquatic vegetable become the primary source of protein for millions of people worldwide? An Israeli start-up believes so.
Small plant, big protein
Small plant, big protein
How digital and advanced analytics can boost growth in Asian insurance
Asian insurers have achieved remarkable growth in recent years, but disruptors are looming. To maintain their momentum, these insurers must ramp up their digital and advanced analytics capabilities.
How digital and advanced analytics can boost growth in Asian insurance
How digital and advanced analytics can boost growth in Asian insurance
Eliminating roadblocks to Accelerated Performance Transformation
A three-step Accelerated Performance Transformation can help industrial, technology, and consumer companies obtain benefits that eluded them in the past.
Eliminating roadblocks to Accelerated Performance Transformation
Eliminating roadblocks to Accelerated Performance Transformation
The power and potential of AI in insurance claims
Githesh Ramamurthy, chairman and CEO of CCC Information Services, shares his views on the future of claims.
The power and potential of AI in insurance claims
The power and potential of AI in insurance claims
‘It’s our job to evolve with consumers’: Tyson Foods on alternative protein
Justin Whitmore is the head of alternative protein for one of the world’s largest meat companies. In this interview, he shares his views on the future of food.
‘It’s our job to evolve with consumers’: Tyson Foods on alternative protein
‘It’s our job to evolve with consumers’: Tyson Foods on alternative protein
Five Fifty: Innovating bold
Want a more innovative company? Check your aspirations—and your willingness to make tough
Five Fifty: Innovating bold
Five Fifty: Innovating bold
Ensuring resilience and the strategic imperative: A conversation with Kevin Laczkowski
A strategic transformation that focuses on resilience will allow a company to adapt to changing economic scenarios.
Ensuring resilience and the strategic imperative: A conversation with Kevin Laczkowski
Ensuring resilience and the strategic imperative: A conversation with Kevin Laczkowski
Managing industrials’ commodity-price risk
Industrial companies can hedge an ever-increasing number of commodities, but effective hedging requires a comprehensive approach.
Managing industrials’ commodity-price risk
Managing industrials’ commodity-price risk
The future of insurance claims
Four McKinsey partners describe their Claims 2030 vision.
The future of insurance claims
The future of insurance claims
Leaders Don’t Hide Behind Data
Image courtesy of Beppe Giacobbe/theispot.com
Editor’s note: This article is part of a new MIT SMR series about how leadership is evolving in a digital world.
One hundred and thirty years ago, a jeweler named Willard Bundy changed the world of management: He invented the employee time clock.
It was a natural consequence of the times. Management had fueled industrialism (and vice versa). Without management, there was no chance to coordinate the workforce, to be sure the work was getting done, and to ensure quality. Management not only worked to contain the costs of our most expensive input (labor); it created a command-and-control regime that allowed us to increase productivity and quality.
Then Frederick Taylor came along and took things to the next level. Taylor was the Madame Curie of industrial management. His breakthrough work on scientific management created a movement that persists to this day. The theory is simple: With a clipboard and a stopwatch, you can measure and improve the performance of your workforce.
So, of course, the new digital tools were the next big thing, seen as a boon for managers. First, we digitized the time clock. But that was just the beginning. Now we can track the path of the night watchman, the keystrokes of the legal team, and the throughput on the assembly line. Not only do we get instant transparency into how labor works, but we can spend our days endlessly tweaking the data and using it to manage people even more closely.
At Bloomberg, every employee badges in every morning. That badge is connected to the internal management system, and now, white-collar workers are measured just as easily and precisely as those on the assembly line.
But a revolution is happening. As the resolution of our insight has gotten ever sharper, the need for more management has rapidly decreased. The step after making a job an efficient program is to automate it and replace it with a computer that works for free.
Two Digital Traps
There are two traps that have ensnared many who see digital management as a boon:
First, it’s easier than ever to do A/B testing. Digital tools allow us to spend a lot of time comparing one approach with another. A/B testing encourages tiny steps instead of bold ones. A/B testing is safe. A/B testing allows us to spend our day seeking deniability instead of taking responsibility.
Second, it’s easier to stay busy. It’s possible for a manager to engage with every employee several times a day. Slack, email, and videoconferencing mean that every conscientious boss is, as Tom Peters wrote, managing by walking around. The challenge is that all that virtual walking around distracts us from the real issues.
Starting now, the future belongs to leaders, not managers.
Management is an industrial activity. In many ways, it enables the race to the bottom. By managing carefully, bosses can inexorably lower costs. The problem with a race to the bottom is that you might win.
Amazon and the rest of the internet bodega have demonstrated that a downward ratchet benefits the monopoly middleman, not the organization churning out widgets or the driver hustling his Uber. Your competitors are trying to out-manage you, an effort measured in productivity and thus in costs.
A/B testing is a trap because it insulates us from A/J testing. A/B testing is an asymptotic stroll toward a local maximum. But it leaves no room for more extreme alternatives, for the breakthroughs when we compare method A with something very different, call it method J. This is much harder to measure in a digital way, and so, in our metric-driven mania, we avoid it.
And busyness is a trap because it allows us to believe that we’ve actually created value. A day spent in digital volleys is thrilling, tiring, and ultimately nihilistic. It’s true, your business is not on cruise control — you’re driving. But what you’re not doing is figuring out a whole new route forward. What you’re not doing is inspiring your team to level up. What you’re not doing is inventing a new game. Instead, you’re playing someone else’s game.
The Art of Persuasion
Leadership is the art of doing things you’re not sure of, and doing them with enrollment instead of authority. Leadership is often conflated with management, but they’re completely different ways to expend time and energy.
Management is an exercise in power. It can’t work without authority, because managers tell people what to do. Effective management requires knowledge of the work to be done, awareness of best practices, and yes, probably a stopwatch.
On the other hand, leadership is voluntary. Those who follow you must be enrolled in your journey and persuaded to follow (and contribute to) your vision.
Digital management, then, begins by eliminating the cruft that makes it so easy to manage.
Slack and email don’t make it easier for you to lead, not if you’re using the very same channel to manage. Those who work with you will be confused about which voice you’re using.
Yet, the leveraged presence that digital tools create for leaders can amplify the engagement that smart leaders put to work.
Just as Franklin D. Roosevelt used the radio to enlist a country in his decade-long effort to recover from the Depression, a modern leader can use digital charisma to clearly delineate her vision, to describe the goal, and to earn enrollment in the journey.
Digital charisma doesn’t feel like management, and it requires alternative channels. Human channels. Channels that involve actually showing up, not hiding behind a system.
Who sees you, and who do you see in return? What does it mean for those on the journey to listen to you, and given the asymmetric nature of leadership (there’s more of them than there are of you), how can you possibly listen back?
We can learn quite a bit from how the modern cultural leaders of Instagram and Facebook use their platform, despite so many of their habits we’d prefer to avoid. They’ve changed the worlds of fashion, politics, and much that lies in between. Not because people are forced to follow them or spread their ideas, but because they’ve chosen to.
In 1983, as a young brand manager working at Spinnaker Software in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I started one of the first desktop-published newsletters in history. I printed 60 issues at a time (on yellow paper) and slipped them into the interoffice mailboxes of each person in our small and growing company. At the time, no one reported to me. I managed no one.
By highlighting the essence of the projects I was working on, by celebrating our contributors, and by creating a narrative that some felt compelling, I was able, through that newsletter, to lead a team of 40 programmers, musicians, artists, and operations professionals. None of them had to make the choice to follow, but each of them did.
Sooner or later, important work becomes a choice. It’s a choice to put something extra into the project, to care enough to extend ourselves. At Spinnaker, the choice was even more obvious: Not only did I have to persuade people to work on my projects at the expense of other things vying for their attention, but I needed to describe a vision and a path to how it might happen.
We ended up shipping five products in record time, each of them earning gold status and ultimately creating a significant share of the company’s sales. More important to me and the team, though, was what it felt like to be part of something, to leap and to explore instead of merely being managed. We changed the world of software games, we discovered how much we were capable of, and we found work that was worthy of the effort we were putting into it.
I could never have managed my way to this extraordinary outcome, never managed this group of professionals where I had little authority. Leadership was the only way to get there.
Management is essential, but it’s ultimately a form of hiding. Today’s tools open the door for tomorrow’s leaders, if we care enough to choose to make things better by making better things.
Leaders Don’t Hide Behind Data
How Excel Charts Can Improve Your Management Reports
Excel Charts Management Reports
Excel is now commonly used in management reporting. It is a very efficient tool for data entry as well as data analysis. Excel charts add a different dimension to data in management reports that makes reporting more convenient.
Excel has its own default charts to choose from but, you can also easily create and use advanced charts.
Some of the most useful Excel charts that can enhance the process of management reporting are given below:
Actual Vs Target
Fixing a target value to meet helps you compare the achieved value to understand whether a company is meeting its goals effectively.
For example, it can be used to show the sales target of a business in comparison to actual sales. This measures the performance of the sales force.
Bell Curve
A bell curve or a normal distribution curve is a bell-shaped figure. This acts as a scatter line chart to determine expected values as well as deviations from the value.
While it can take some effort to create such a chart, it can help you figure out the mean or average value along with the standard deviations of your values for analysis.
Milestone Chart
This kind of chart is useful for project planning since it can list out different milestones to fulfill over a period of time.
For example, this can be used for supply chain-related decisions since it can track deliverables checked in or finalized. The visual element aids managers to witness the progress better.
Step Chart
Step charts are used in showing changes in value over intermittent intervals. For instance, it can reflect the increase in interest rates for a financial instrument.
In comparison to line charts, the step chart shows the fluctuations of a value more accurately.
Gantt Chart
The most common use of Gantt charts is in project management. It can show the scheduling and progress of a project since it records the time used for each task.
It can essentially point out any overlap of tasks on certain periods along with keeping track of absenteeism of workers. This can help the managers to address such issues and plan the project ahead.
Sales Funnel
A sales funnel chart typically shows the stages of closing a sale. This begins from identifying an opportunity, validating it, acting upon it to turn it into a qualified deal, directing it towards a proposal and, finally, winning the deal.
So, it helps you figure out the success of each of these stages.
Waffle Chart
This is essentially a squared pie chart that can act as a dashboard for presenting data in a concise manner that is simple to understand.
This chart is not easy to create. But contrary to pie charts, a waffle chart presents data more accurately and can highlight any specific points that require attention.
Bullet Chart
Bullet charts are used in dashboards for presenting plenty of information within a concise space.
This chart can not only help you measure performance quality but also compare actual performance with the target values.
In conclusion, Excel charts is a great tool for managers in examining the performance of their business. And the charts mentioned in this list can help you understand your management output and concerns better and, accordingly, plan its processes better.
The post How Excel Charts Can Improve Your Management Reports appeared first on Mr Dashboard.
How Excel Charts Can Improve Your Management Reports
Monday, October 28, 2019
Five Rules for Leading in a Digital World
Image courtesy of Ken Orvidas/theispot.com
Editor’s note: This article is part of a new MIT SMR series about how leadership is evolving in a digital world.
For years now, everyone has been talking about VUCA, the U.S. military’s acronym for the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world we live in. However, we now have VUCA on steroids as we try to keep up with the increasing speed of change in a business environment where the amount of data generated doubles every two years, reflecting a 50-fold growth from 2010 to 2020.1
To thrive in this landscape, organizations that have long been siloed and bureaucratic must become nimble and customer-centric, and command-and-control models must give way to distributed leadership.
However, many leaders fear letting go. They don’t want to lose power, which is integral to their identity in an organization. They also worry that chaos will ensue if they loosen the reins. And they tend to shy away from the unfamiliar — they know much more about bureaucracies than about the emerging organizational forms that will take their place.
Such fears often result in inertia. But leaders must evolve quickly or risk extinction.
In a rapidly changing world, people need to know who is leading them — that must be clearly articulated. Those leaders must possess the skills to track an ever-shifting environment and cultivate those skills in others. They need to create flexible teams that collaborate effectively with both internal and external partners. They must inspire their organizations to solve big problems. And they can’t do all this alone — they need to bring in adaptive leaders at all levels, giving them autonomy to innovate but providing guardrails to prevent chaos. In our research at the MIT Leadership Center, my colleagues and I have found that executives and managers who do these five things in particular are best equipped to navigate what lies ahead.
Let’s take a closer look at each new rule in the emerging leadership model.
1. Communicate your leadership signature. When things change, people crave leadership. They seek stability when they fear disorder. They want to feel confident about who is at the helm, steering through treacherous waters. But the romantic notion of the leader who is there to take control isn’t enough to assure them. They need to know your leadership signature: who you are as a leader and how you view and approach the job.
Most of us are “incomplete leaders” who excel at certain leadership capabilities and struggle with others.2 The key is to understand and communicate your own unique way of leading given your experience, values, strengths, and personality. For example, Steve Jobs was the quintessential inventor, pushing himself and others at Apple, Pixar, and NeXT to create innovative, sleek designs that wowed customers, even if he bruised people along the way as he strove for perfection. Eileen Fisher, founder of the clothing company by the same name, is a designer who studied the Japanese kimono to try to understand how to make comfortable, stylish women’s clothing that will withstand the test of time. She is passionate about that and about promoting sustainability for the planet, and she rallies employees behind both goals to create meaning in her organization. Jobs was a visible leader who promoted himself as well as his products, while Fisher leads more quietly, setting direction and then letting go.
How do you discover your leadership signature? First, think about what you do day to day as a leader. Do you focus more on the tasks or on the people? Are you a visioning leader, visibly out front, or a leader who stays in the background, quietly coaching and influencing? Do you encourage experimentation and innovation, or do you nurture areas of core strength? Second, ask people who work with you how they would describe your leadership, or take a 360-degree survey to collect data. Finally, consider the impact you have. Are you changing the culture? Driving results? Once your signature is clearer to you, tell stories and use images and anecdotes to communicate to others who you are.
2. Be a sensemaker. In a rapidly changing environment, sensemaking is more important than ever. A term coined by organizational theorist Karl Weick, sensemaking refers to the process of creating meaning out of the messy world around us. This activity is triggered when something in our environment seems to have changed. We then try to make sense of what has happened by collecting data, learning from others, and looking for patterns to create a new map of what is going on. From there, we experiment with new solutions to learn how the system responds.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, has been a sensemaker throughout his career at Microsoft. By changing jobs often, he learned about the overall processes and culture of the company. His curiosity about customers and technologies enabled him to read the changing landscape in which the company found itself. When he became CEO, he met with employees, customers, and experts to understand the issues on people’s minds and potential pathways to success. He brought leaders from acquired companies to his management retreat so that everyone could engage in sensemaking about new technologies.
Like Nadella, leaders should think about what additional sensemaking they need to do to keep up with shifting markets, technologies, business models, and workforces.
3. Build X-teams. When asked what makes for effective team performance, most executives talk about the ideas spouted in team-building courses and written up in bestselling texts: setting clear goals, defining roles, establishing trust, improving interpersonal relations, and so on. But research shows that such guidelines are only half the story. In a fast-paced world where organizations are trying to shed their bureaucratic chains, leaders should also build a new kind of team, X-teams, to foster speed, innovation, and execution.3
These flexible teams don’t just collaborate internally; they also link to knowledge, resources, and innovation partners in the outside world. You need them to do external sensemaking, to connect people within and across organizations, and to enable change beyond bureaucracy. Members of X-teams serve as organizational ambassadors to scout for talent and resources, align team activities with strategic goals, and coordinate tasks. By bringing people together for certain tasks — and switching people around from time to time — they create a dynamic structure that can respond to new problems and opportunities that arise.
Organizations have created hundreds of X-teams around the world — teams that are bringing needed medications to Africa, finding new ways to test technologies, and creating a closer connection between customers and companies developing future products and services. The next time you assemble a team, think about what kinds of bridges you can build to facilitate innovation.
4. Replace toxic tendencies with challenge-driven leadership. Toxic leaders are becoming increasingly common. You know who they are. They denigrate subordinates and have a reputation for being hypercritical. They can be aggressive, immoral, and insensitive. They hoard information, blame others, and promote themselves. Over time, other people and teams in their organizations begin adopting these same behaviors, which erode trust and reduce effectiveness.
Toxic leadership often stems from the dark triad of personality.4 Leaders who exhibit narcissism feel they are better and more deserving than others. They seek attention and are aggressive if threatened. Those who exhibit Machiavellianism do whatever it takes to hold on to power, build alliances, and keep secrets. Those who show psychopathy are callous, with no empathy or impulse control. Not all toxic leaders possess the whole triad, but I’m sure you’ve met enough to know how damaging even one or two of these qualities can be.
Toxic leadership can achieve results (higher productivity, say, or greater efficiency) in the short term. But over time, performance deteriorates as people start to realize how they have been manipulated and seek ways to cope with the negativity. Unfortunately, when things get tough, even leaders with the best intentions may slide into a more domineering or self-centered approach. The good news is that with self-awareness and some feedback, leaders can shed these tendencies and move toward challenge-driven leadership.5 Instead of saying, “I’m great; follow me,” we need leaders to bring people together around challenges to tackle.
NASA brought people together with the audacious goal of getting a man on the moon. Now, leaders are inspiring organizations to take on climate change, dementia, and social alienation, to name a few major problems. They need to think about how they can reframe their work around such challenges and leave their egos at the door.
5. Build the systems to make all this possible. Successful leaders in our changing times will need to construct, or “architect,” organizations in which the above steps can take place. This will involve hiring and developing three types of leaders — those who are entrepreneurial, enabling, or themselves architecting — and giving them room to draw on their signature strengths as they carry out these functions.6
Entrepreneurial leaders are the engine of innovation. They take on the sensemaking needed to discover new products and processes while creating the X-teams to make them a reality. Enabling leaders have a broader perspective, so they can identify similar projects within the company and opportunities for collaboration outside. They coach the entrepreneurial leaders, who may be too junior to know how to bring their ideas through the organization. Architecting leaders cultivate systems, structures, and a culture that will allow people to explore possibilities and make decisions autonomously without veering into chaos. All three types of leaders help people meld bottom-up ideas with strategic priorities before subjecting internal pitches to a tough funneling process. The whole approach leads to better ideas with greater traction. We can see it working effectively at scientific research company PARC and manufacturing company W.L. Gore & Associates;7 and we see it in many organizations that transition from bureaucracies to leadership at all levels.
This new model of leadership means decoupling authority from formal positions and having everyone take on a strategic mindset. It means just-in-time structures and resources and a belief in collective intelligence. Leaders may find it tough to embrace the five rules, but doing so will allow them to unleash the talent of many in service of strategic innovation and organizational resilience.
Five Rules for Leading in a Digital World
Sales Growth Metrics Reporting Tools
Sales Growth Metrics
Sales growth metrics: While many businesses don’t pay much attention to their sales metrics, it is important to remember that you can only manage what you can measure. And when it comes to sales growth, it is crucial to keep track of these metrics to ensure the highest return.
Without proper metric-based strategy making, the risks of failed sales attempts are bound to be higher. Hence, these are some of the sales growth metrics that you need to focus on:
Sales Target
Sales Target is an extreme measure of sales growth. Companies need to plan their estimated target of sales revenue and, at the end of each accounting period, compile a sales report to ascertain whether the targets have been met.
By studying the data against the forecasted sales, one can determine trends, outliers or inconsistencies for promoting growth.
Sales Cycle
The sales cycle consists of the different stages involved in completing a sale. Every business has its own pattern of the sales cycle, which acts as a standard.
Any stagnancy or plummet in the sales can be an indicator that any one or more of the stages in the sale cycle have issues to address. In that case, the sales team needs to identify the inconsistencies that may have led to such downfalls.
Customer Acquisition Cost
Customer Acquisition cost calculates the total amount of expenses that go into the acquisition of a new customer.
This can include all kind of marketing expenses that the company has incurred for converting them into a customer. Businesses need to keep this metric as minimum as possible to get the most efficient returns.
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Lifetimes Value (CLV) basically shows the amount of return you can expect from each customer through repeat purchases. The higher your customer lifetime value is, the better you are at retaining a profitable relationship with your customers.
If you have low CLV, you might need to spend more time and resources in serving your current customers. Businesses need to coordinate their CLV with their cost of customer acquisition to better understand where to invest their resources for extracting returns from customers.
Lead Conversion Rate
This measures the number of leads that are converted into paying clients. It can be an indicator of the performance of your sales team.
Every industry has its own standard conversion rate that every business should pursue. A low conversion rate calls for re-evaluating the areas that can enhance the customer experience.
Sales Pipeline Coverage
Sales Pipeline Coverage (SPC) provides an estimate of the number of opportunities you have to meet your sales target. It plants a value on your sales pipeline to maintain for the best practices. In general, this standard value is 5:1.
Revenue Per Sales Rep
This measures the amount of revenue received by the dint of each sales representative’s efforts. The sales force of a business is vital for accomplishing high conversion rates, high sales revenue as well as for meeting sales targets.
So, revenue per sales rep helps to set goals to meet in terms of sales, which, in turn, helps the company to forecast future sales based on their performance.
Sales growth metrics are incredibly essential for achieving your sales goals.
But not all metrics can practically help you understand what areas to correct or prioritize for higher sales. So, this article should act as guidelines to help you analyze your sales progress and align your activities to reach your targets better.
The post Sales Growth Metrics Reporting Tools appeared first on Mr Dashboard.
Sales Growth Metrics Reporting Tools
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Saturday, October 26, 2019
Reinventing the CFO for the digital age
Digitization raises the demands on CFOs, along with the scale and influence of the role. How should finance chiefs reinvent?
Reinventing the CFO for the digital age
Reinventing the CFO for the digital age
Sustaining the base: A new focus in shale’s quest for cash
Production from shale wells declines quickly, but operators can cushion the fall. Sustaining base production is often the best use of capital, a quick way to generate cash, and a key pillar for producers seeking to transform their operations.
Sustaining the base: A new focus in shale’s quest for cash
Sustaining the base: A new focus in shale’s quest for cash
The mindsets and practices of excellent CEOs
The CEO’s job is as difficult as it is important. Here is a guide to how the best CEOs think and act.
The mindsets and practices of excellent CEOs
The mindsets and practices of excellent CEOs
Focusing on customers and team mind-sets to deliver growth
The key to achieving sustainable growth at Danone is a strategy focused what customers want and building up a growth mind-set within the business.
Focusing on customers and team mind-sets to deliver growth
Focusing on customers and team mind-sets to deliver growth
KPIs For Non-Profit Organization
Non-Profit Organizations KPIs
KPIs for non-profits: The moment you think of determining the efficiency of your nonprofit money-raising process, there are some performance indicators that can be very helpful to perform an accurate fundraising process.
But it’s difficult to find out the exact measurement criteria based on organization needs. Most non-profit organizations commonly some basic Key Performance Indicators. Some core KPIs that can help your organization are mentioned below:
Growth of Donation
KPI for Growth of Donation helps you to stay in one way over time. If you measure the dropping of donation growth in a specific month, which will allow you to plan accordingly for next year. Also, you should make your team more efficient to maintain the donation rate.
Growth of Donor
When you focus to improve your fundraising process, you need to ensure that you are accurately measuring your growth of donors for non-profit sectors over year.
This measurement allows you to find out the lacking of your management to maintain donors. It also acts as a red flag to warn you of losing donors.
Retention Rate of Donor
A huge turnover depends on getting new interactions as well as evaluating the existing one, so it is mandatory to keep a track record of the donors if they are maintaining consistency in donation after the first giveaway. Donor retainment is easy when you keep the tracking process up to date.
Gift Size Growth on Average
This is one of the most important measurements you should evaluate to get at least a 25% turnover in a year. This process allows you to shortlist your donors in a certain log, so you can have a perfect idea about how much time you can spend on which client.
This process will narrow down the list of interests for the organization as well as perform an extraordinary turnover.
Gift Percentage
You should track the gifts that you receive from your donors is also important as Donor Retention Rate.
The continuous flow of gifts can enable you to perform small and targeted campaigns to increase the size of the gift. Also, it may increase the number of donors who will begin giving gifts continuously.
Engagement on Social Media
Social Awareness plays a huge role to improve the fundraising process. Focusing on the right point in social media and allocating a small budget for it can end up in a greater number of continuous donors. This will not only generate impressions but also spur engagement to the potential donors.
Return of Investment on Engagement
Return on Investment is much important to an organization with a limited budget. In this process, you take everything into account how much of your precious time is being spent on each donation.
After adding up the factor, you can find out the amount is to spend to bring in donations.
Gift Percentage Online
This process shows you how much you receive the donation or gifts online. Even the percentage is low from any other mediums basically. But you should ensure a healthy from this medium also.
In summary, all the points mentioned above are essential to maintain a smooth flow of donations and gifts as well as to increase the amounts of donors as well.
The post KPIs For Non-Profit Organization appeared first on Mr Dashboard.
KPIs For Non-Profit Organization
Friday, October 25, 2019
The Best of This Week
The AI Workforce of the Future
…will be built with symbiotic systems. As authors H. James Wilson and Paul R. Daugherty of Accenture note from their research, to effectively implement AI, organizations will need to use human-centered AI that motivates and retrains workers, which shifts the focus from automation to collaboration between humans and machines. This strategy has proven results in the health care sector and allows both systems to work to their strengths.
Bracing for the Next Tech Bubble
Unlike the tech bubble of the 1990s, in which growth was spurred by the public’s fascination with any business that branded itself a dot-com, the next tech bubble is shaping up to be something different, according to an article in The Atlantic. This time around, investors are proceeding with greater caution and distinguishing between “real” tech firms and the wannabes.
Leadership Decisions and the Deregulation Debate
This month’s MIT SMR Strategy Forum poll looks at the Trump administration’s recent rollbacks on a wide range of environmental and public health regulations. We ask our panel of experts to weigh in on whether companies will decide to adhere to rules that closely resemble original standards, or if they will embrace deregulation.
Small Businesses Model Successful Community Engagement
When it comes to corporate social responsibility, big businesses’ well-publicized gestures might make headlines, but a Harvard Business Review article describes how small businesses can offer their larger counterparts a blueprint for creating campaigns that allow them to engage on a local level to make positive impacts and strengthen their relationships with communities.
Blend Entrepreneurship Strategies to Boost Innovation
Companies seeking to drive innovation in the face of constant disruption benefit from adopting a strategy that supports both internal entrepreneurs and external partnerships rather than taking an either/or approach. The benefits: reduced development costs, faster time to market, and a collaborative, engaged workforce.
Bloomberg notes that a recent McKinsey & Co. report suggests that a majority of the world’s banks are weakly positioned for any economic downturn that may be on the horizon. Kausik Rajgopal, a senior partner at McKinsey, said, “We believe we’re in the late economic cycle, and banks need to make bold moves now because they are not in great shape.” To avoid “becoming a footnote in history,” banks will need to make heavier investments in information technology, much like their fintech competitors, and also become more comfortable with working with external partners.
In Defense of Quantitative Leadership
As Michael Schrage writes for MIT Sloan Management Review, “The irresistible rise of data-driven, analytics-enriched digital instrumentation and decisions has provoked an intellectual backlash.” Schrage offers a counterpoint that the true underperformers in this digital disruption are not measures but their managers.
Quote of the Week
“We’re seeing amongst the states a growing consensus on a few core things that are necessary to make that transition from a fossil-based, carbon-addicted economy to a zero-carbon, decarbonized, new economy that still works for people, still creates jobs, still functions as a society.”
— Robert Klee, lecturer, Yale Law School, in an interview with Yale Insights, “For a Path to a Decarbonized Economy, Look to the States”
The Best of This Week
Warehouse Management Metrics Reporting Tools And Strategies
Warehouse Management Metrics
Warehouse metrics: Warehouses are used for storing products for a certain period of time. It involves a great amount of costing and management skills since a corporation’s inventory depends on its capacity.
Here are some of the most important metrics for warehouse management which act as a great tool for measuring a business’s success:
Inventory Turnover
At first, let’s focus on what inventory turnover is. Inventory turnover is the number of times a corporation buys its inventory over a financial period.
This is an amazing metric for measuring the proper utilization of a business since it shows whether the warehouse costing and the inventory selling costs are feasible or not. The greater the inventory turnover, the better it is for a business.
Therefore, if an organization is able to sell its inventory over the forecasted time period, it is a good sign.
Inventory to Sales Ratio
For a business, more sales should mean more profit if other externalities are not being taken into consideration. However, sales and inventory have an inversely proportional relationship which at times can turn out to be complex.
If inventory decreases, it means sales are increasing and vice versa. This indicates that the profitability percentage of business is improving.
The effect it will have on the warehouse metrics is that it will give the warehouse manager an idea of how much to stock over a specified period of time.
Order Packing Accuracy
The order packing accuracy basically deals with how a product is sealed in such a manner that it does not get hampered or damaged while it is being shipped.
A warehouse will perform satisfactorily if only they pack the correct products in a proper manner for the designated buyer. If they are successful in doing so, they will be able to get rid of inventory very soon which will, in turn, reduce the warehouse management cost.
Back Order Rate
This business metric is the waiting period a customer has to endure if there is not enough stock available for a particular product. These situations often tarnish the brand image and the organization can lose customer loyalty.
Hence, if the warehouse is filled properly with an adequate level of products, this can disruption can be avoided and this will only be possible if the warehouse is controlled and maintained regularly.
Days on Hand
Days on hand is the number of days a business requires to completely clear out its stock. This is a great indicator of how well the business can sell its products to the customers.
It also measures the time period by which it is possible to do so. In such cases, the warehouse management metric should definitely not allow the stock to remain for a longer period of time since it’s cost-ineffective and will slow down the business. The fewer days on hand, the better it is for a firm.
In conclusion: warehouse management metrics are great for measuring the success of a business in both the long run and short run. Hence, it is better to productively use the warehouse since it has a lot of benefits.
The post Warehouse Management Metrics Reporting Tools And Strategies appeared first on Mr Dashboard.
Warehouse Management Metrics Reporting Tools And Strategies
What you need to know about women at work
Around the world, women are paid at lower rates and wages than men and are less likely to be promoted. They also tend to work in different sectors. The implications are everyone’s business.
What you need to know about women at work
What you need to know about women at work
Modular construction: Priorities for real-estate developers
Real-estate developers are in prime position to lead the shift to modular construction. Crafting their product strategies and supplier partnerships are good places to start.
Modular construction: Priorities for real-estate developers
Modular construction: Priorities for real-estate developers
The innovation commitment
To catalyze breakthrough growth, leaders must set bold aspirations, make tough choices, and mobilize resources at scale.
The innovation commitment
The innovation commitment
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)