Pete Winiarski, President and Founder of Win Enterprises, LLC is the author of Act Now! A Daily Action Log for Achieving Your Goals in 90 Days. This book can be utilized in the workplace as well as for personal goals.

As a Business Leader, you can achieve more as a business if your whole team becomes great goal achievers. The methods in this Daily Action Log can be used for any goal.

In Act Now! there are goal setting exercises that use five common categories: financial, business & career, health & fitness, relationships, overall happiness. These exercises represent a whole person’s interests and are not just business goals. You can expect to see your business results improve even if your team uses the Act Now! Daily Action Log process to work on personal goals. There are many reasons this will happen.

• First, goal achievement is a skill. As your team learns to set goals, take all three types of action as described in chapter two of Act Now!, and achieve great results in one area of their life, the experience translates to other areas -including your business.
• Second, your team members have lives both inside and outside work. If you can help them become fulfilled in all areas of their life, their self esteem and total contentment will go up. This makes them better team members at work.
• Third, by having your whole team go through the experience of setting goals, taking action, and achieving great results, they now have a shared experience. You can expect this to aid in team cohesiveness and make the team more productive.

Nonetheless, you could decide to use this book only for work-related goals, if you choose. Everything on the Daily Action Log works the same way.

Do an experiment: share Act Now! A Daily Action Log for Achieving Your Goals in 90 Days with your team and encourage them to set personal goals as well as business goals. Have your whole team use the Act Now! Daily Action Log for the next 90 days. Survey the results at the end. My prediction is that as personal goals are achieved, so are the business goals.

We’d love to hear about your successes!

“With the improvements through Kaizen, how do we show them flowing through onto the bottom line ? And if we cannot, why not?”

Here’s the short answer: When you plan your improvements, predict what the results will be: financial, operational, strategic, team impact, etc.  If what you predict doesn’t have a direct or indirect link back to your strategy, your financials, your operational targets, or will positively impact your team then cross it off the list and do something else.

Now the longer answer: Recognize you’re building a system.  The problem many companies run into with kaizen events is that they look at the kaizen to provide quantitative impact right now, every time, rather than having a clear future-state vision that they’re marching toward.  A kaizen event might provide “indirect impact” as an enabler that must be in place for future financial, operational, or strategic results.

For example, what if you had a project to define and start an S&OP process.  That will have a HUGE impact in the future but at the final presentation all you’d be able to say is “we defined a process.”

Even getting changeovers from 90 minutes down to 10 min on your molding machines might appear useless if you don’t integrate it into the your new scheduling, inventory planning, team cross training, etc.  (Although, even if you don’t do any of those other things, at least it ought to be easier for the operators to do their changeover job.)

When I met Peter Willats, who was the co-founder of the Kaizen Institute of Europe with Masaki Imai (a company that promoted helping businesses improve using Kaizen for years w/ ex-Toyota Japanese consultants), he said to me, “Now that we all know that kaizen simply doesn’t work…”  I had a kaizen background at Wiremold and immediately became defensive.  So I asked, “What do you mean by that?”

We had a long conversation that ended with me understanding his point – unless you have guidance from someone to help you with your production system design and to get all the larger pieces of the puzzle defined and in place, then running a bunch of kaizen events thinking you are making improvements is risky and has a high failure rate.  Ah, now this is starting to make sense.  Research suggests that 90% of all business transformations fail.  I would think that failure rate applies especially to those companies who only utilize kaizen events.

Kaizen is not lean.  It is an approach to making a change.  Without the new knowledge (as Dr. Deming used to say, usually from the outside) on what to change, why, how, etc. you’re in trouble.  You’re asking well-intentioned people to participate in improvements (which is good) but with a lot of effort with far less payback than otherwise if you had a clear vision and injected proven principles that would lead you to make changes in the fundamental way your processes work.

Since this initial conversation with Pete Willats,  I have observed and experienced this to be true in many companies time and time again.

So, the larger plan / strategy is important - your strategic goals are what you’re shooting for.  Put together comprehensive plans to achieve your startegic goals, and execute the plans using kaizen events and other methods of implementation or change management.

If you can incorporate your kaizen event to your plans for hitting your goals, and they, in turn, tie to your larger strategy, then you should be fine.  If you can’t, then don’t do it and work on something else.

If your business isn’t making money then your cash flows will suffer.  As cash for a business is like oxygen for the body, your business will die or be unhealthy if you don’t have sufficient cash flows.  This is a fundamental that you cannot ignore.

What’s deeper than “maximize returns”?

Unfortunately, many businesses fail to articulate their sense of purpose beyond “maximize returns for shareholders.”  I would argue that the deeper purpose of a business is what will allow it to thrive. Figure this out, communicate to your employees and other stakeholders,
and allow it to determine the guiding principles for your organization’s functioning and decision making and you will excel.  The financial benefit will become a natural byproduct of being on purpose.

What exactly do we mean by “purpose”?  Your purpose is your raison d’etre, or your reason for being.  Think of what will inspire you to act, not just because you can be profitable, but because it aligns with your higher purpose.

How would you answer the question about your purpose if you were to write a business plan today for your business (even if you’ve been in existence for decades)?  What would you
say that differentiates you from your competitors, motivates investors to fund your initiatives, and creates a long line of people who want to work on your team?

This would be a sufficiently narrow definition and identify who you are, who you serve, and how you serve them.   This will also guide your immediate actions as you want to be focused on your purpose and take actions that align with that purpose.

If high-performing individuals can, so can your business…

For individuals who understand their personal purpose, they make decisions and move forward in their lives with clarity, enthusiasm, and passion.  This is what is meant by living on purpose.  Their lives become easier. The same is true for organizations; that when your company (all employees) understands its purpose it can make decisions and move forward with clarity, enthusiasm, and passion. It is the job of the leadership team to ensure they are
aligned with the company’s purpose in everything they do.  When they can communicate with clarity and get the entire workforce and extended team excited about the company’s purpose,
the whole business will enjoy that same passion and enthusiasm that individuals who have a clear purpose enjoy.

Constancy of Purpose

Another key point to make is what Dr. W. Edwards Deming called Constancy of Purpose.  I had the opportunity to study under Dr. Deming during the 1990s, and observed him drilling this point into countless people during his famous 4-day Seminar for Managers and at his course at New York University’s Graduate Business School.  The point is to stay true to
your purpose, rather than lose focus.

Specifically, many companies fall victim to short-term financial performance at the expense of their purpose.  This may be one of the ills of Wall Street and the perceived need to manipulate results (often strong arm cost controls to make up for missed revenue projections).
I’ve heard quite a few of Dr. Deming’s rants about this.

Align with your purpose, and be confident about your results

Your purpose can act like a filter for your decision making.  If decisions you make align with
your purpose, then you’re on track.  If they are counter to your purpose, then perhaps it’s the wrong decision and you might reconsider.  In the end, as business leaders we need to manage many variables to ensure long-term success and might need small course adjustments along the way.  As long as we keep our company’s purpose in mind, we can feel confident that the results will follow.

In the context of the Win Holistic Transformation Model™,
the word Holistic mean two things.

1) Holistic means it’s comprehensive – whole – all the
components are accounted for.  Look at the graphic for the model.  If you’re missing the outside circle, Purpose – Vision – Goals, then you really don’t know where you’re headed so you won’t get there.  The five core elements, shown in the star, represent the building blocks that need to be in place to drive your transformation and deliver the results you seek.  The yellow background represents your  culture.  It’s all there.

2) Holistic also means that there is more than just the “technical answer.”  There’s a people element to a successful transformation, too.  Your company culture will either accelerate your progress, or stop it dead in its tracks.  Actively design your culture to support where you want to go.

As a business leader, you know you must deliver results –  your job depends on it.  The problem is when you focus on results without an awareness of the systems and processes  that will deliver results, you risk your results sliding back or not achieving them in the first place.

Understanding the Win Holistic Transformation Model™, with clarity about the results you seek, will enable you to systematically drive results while putting in the building locks for long-term sustainability.