3 Steps for Creating Leverage in Your Business

“Work smarter not harder.”

This dreadfully overused phrase is meant to address the apparent lack of time, money and resources we experience in our work and personal lives. But how do we translate these words into something actionable? Here are three methods I have used in my business to accomplish this:

1. Focus on what matters. Over the years, I have studied numerous organizations and have found that only about 30 percent of the typical day is spent on activities that directly create value. For example, sales representatives devote on average only one-third of their day with prospects. The remainder is allocated to administration, travel, meetings, and other less valuable activities. The same is true for almost every other “knowledge worker” in an organization.

To get more done, focus on the critical tasks while eliminating, delegating, outsourcing, or automating less important activities. I have seen many individuals go from 30 percent to 50 or 60 percent with little effort using this method.

While working at a major computer manufacturer many years ago, I was able to cut my 80-hour a week workload to less than 20 hours simply by using this strategy. It took only a weekend of analysis and implementation. This allowed me to focus my energies on activities that really matter, while helping others find time saving strategies.

2. Leverage sales channels. The ultimate goal is to maximize results with the least amount of effort. You can accomplish this through leverage: generating disproportionately large returns with a minimal investment.

Let’s look at selling again. Traditionally, to sell more, you identify prospects, create sales collateral, develop marketing materials, and then directly solicit potential buyers. This is a linear strategy. If you make a sale, it is one sale.

To create exponential growth, consider working with businesses that already have the relationships you want to build. One partnership with the right distribution channel can lead to hundreds or thousands of sales, without any extra effort on your part…

Read the rest of this article on the American Express OPEN Forum

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Laziness is the Father of Innovation

If necessity is the mother of invention, then laziness is sometimes its father.*

Some of the greatest innovations were developed by people who were too lazy to do a particular task.

Professor John Atanasoff, along with graduate student Clifford Berry, built the world’s first electronic-digital computer back in the late 1930′s. Why did he do this? He said, “I was too lazy to calculate and so I invented the computer.”

A number of years back while working for a computer manufacturer, the department head dubbed me the “Chief Laziness Officer.” He meant that as a compliment. I was constantly finding ways to reduce my workload. I got so good at it that in my spare time I helped others do the same. (you can read more about this in an earlier blog entry)

Laziness drives innovations that improve productivity. It comes from saying, “There must be a better way.”

Laziness does not mean sitting on your butt watching Jerry Springer and eating bon bons.  The process of simplifying takes a lot of effort. But when you develop a new innovation once, you get to leverage it over and over again. So in the long run, you are ahead.

Leverage is the key word. Laziness often involves the creation of something that results in exponential returns.  The development of the computer certainly did this.

Although it is not considered to be a positive trait, sometimes it is useful to tap into your inner laziness.

* This reminds me of when I worked with Dr. Michael Hammer many years back.  I once introduced him at a conference and said that he was the father of reengineering.  When he took the stage he said, “Every time my wife hears that I am the father of reengineering, she wants to know who the mother is.”  Classic.

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The Walk More, Wait Less Innovation

Think about this problem.

You run an airport.  It takes on average 8 minutes for luggage to go from plane to baggage claim.  Customers can walk to baggage claim in one minute, resulting in 7 minutes of impatient waiting.  Complaints are high.

What do you do?

Conventional wisdom says, speed up the process.  Use more automation.  Hire efficiency experts.  Hire more baggage handlers.

But according to a recent New York Times article, this isn’t what they did in Houston’s airport.

Instead of speeding up how quickly bags arrive in the claim area, they slowed down the speed at which passengers arrived. They moved the arrival gates so that they are further away from baggage claim. This increased the walk time so that waiting in the baggage claim area was reduced to almost nothing. Complaints also dropped to almost nothing.

This innovation highlights a key point in innovation:  solve a pain.

In this particular case, the pain is the waiting.  The walking is not perceived as painful.  It is productive time.  Waiting is not.  Disney does a great job of helping people pass the time in their amusement parks while waiting an hour to get on a ride.

I wrote about the concept of the perception of time back in 2006.  I talked about how time passes at different speeds when stuck in traffic versus when moving quickly down the highway.  I started the article with a favorite quote of mine from Einstein…

“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours.”

Time, and hence customer satisfaction, is relative.

Traffic is pain.  Waiting is pain.  Unproductive time is pain.

I wrote several articles on the power of solving a pain, versus creating a gain.

One article is about financial investments: people will take massive risks to protect what they have because loss is perceived more powerfully (pain) than a financial gain.

I also wrote an article on why a blizzard was the key to the ATM’s success: although people were not interested in the convenience of cash machines, when a blizzard prevented them from getting money elsewhere, ATMs became an overnight success.

When innovating, look at the pain points of your customers.  Be sure to look at the perceptions of pain, not your guess as to the pain.

Waiting is more painful than walking.  Unproductive time is more painful than busy time.  Driving slowly on back roads, even if it is takes longer in the end, is perceived as being a better option than sitting in traffic on the highway.  Financial losses are felt more deeply than financial gains.

Design your business to reduce the pain.  The perception of pain.

P.S. I provide other examples of the pain/gain concept in my book “Best Practices Are Stupid.”

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How Goals Kill Luck

Richard Wiseman is the author of many great books, including The Luck Factor.  I’ve spoken with Richard on several occasions, and we share a similar perspective: a myopic focus on goals can reduce how lucky someone is.

Dan Pink (an endorser of my Goal-Free Living book, and author of A Whole New Mind and Drive), interviewed Richard for Fast Company magazine. Here is a small excerpt…

What are some of the ways that lucky people think differently from unlucky people?
One way is to be open to new experiences. Unlucky people are stuck in routines. When they see something new, they want no part of it. Lucky people always want something new. They’re prepared to take risks and relaxed enough to see the opportunities in the first place.

But the business culture typically worships drive — setting a goal, single-mindedly pursuing it, and plowing past obstacles. Are you arguing that, to be more lucky, we need to be less focused?
This is one of the most counterintuitive ideas. We are traditionally taught to be really focused, to be really driven, to try really hard at tasks. But in the real world, you’ve got opportunities all around you. And if you’re driven in one direction, you’re not going to spot the others. It’s about getting people to have various game plans running in their heads. Unlucky people, if they go to a party wanting to meet the love of their life, end up not meeting people who might become close friends or people who might help them in their careers. Being relaxed and open allows lucky people to see what’s around them and to maximize what’s around them.

Much of business is also about rational analysis: pulling up the spreadsheet, running the numbers, looking at the serious facts. Yet you found that lucky people rely heavily on their gut instincts.
Yes. You don’t want to broadly say that whenever you get an intuitive feeling, it’s right and you should go with it. But you could be missing out on a massive font of knowledge that you’ve built up over the years. We are amazingly good at detecting patterns. That’s what our brains are set up to do.

Read the entire article

Be sure to read my article from yesterday which provides mathematical “proof” for why a focus on specific goals can reduce luck.

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How to Increase the Probability of Your Success

My next article in the series on success…

You can mathematically increase the likelihood of your success when you are not obsessed with specific goals or approaches to achieving those goals.

Let me illustrate this with the famous “birthday game.”  Here’s the extremely short version…

If you have a room of people…

• for there to be a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday – any birthday, you need only 23 people in the room (matching day and month)
• for there to be a 50% chance that two people have a specific (e.g., April 25) birthday, you need over 600 people in the room

If you want more details on the birthday mathematics or on how to better leverage the concept, read my American Express article on the topic.

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