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Roland Teigen's Stallbusting Contributions - June 2000
Carol Coles and Don Mitchell wish to thank Roland Teigen for a number of valuable ideas about stallbusting that he has shared with us. With his permission, we are summarizing and endorsing those ideas for your use. You can comment on these ideas by contacting us at askdonmitchell@yahoo.com or by contacting him directly at at viking1@worldshare.att.net.
Chunking: Refining Best Practices for Higher Levels of Effectiveness
His first idea is from a reference he found in a book called Applied Cynergetics: The Cynergetics Sixty Minute Success/Wealth Guidebook (available from Applied Cynergetics, 1308 Broad St, San Luis Obispo, CA 93401; 1991). The book's author deserves credit for this concept, which is called "chunking" but the book does not list an author. When we do find the reference, we will post it here.
The Chunking concept is designed for locating better, more effective solutions to problems and certainly fits in with stallbusting to create 2,000 percent solutions. It builds on Pareto's Law, which is that 80 percent of the benefit comes from 20 percent of the occurrences. Chunking calls for repeatedly applying the 80/20 principle to the most effective sources of success to subsegment what part of that success is the most productive. Then you shift your activities to maximize focus on that one area at the end of the subsegments.
Here's an example of this concept and how it can be applied. In the work place, this might translate into 20 percent of the sales people making 80 percent of the sales. Chunking would call for taking the principle one step further - what do the 20 percent do that provides them with 80 percent of their results? Let's say that this involves providing custom solutions for customers. Chunking would then call for looking at what causes 80 percent of the sales among these custom solutions. That might be reducing waste for the customer. And so on. By refocusing all sales people on finding current and potential customers for whom waste can be reduced with custom solutions, the effectiveness of the overall enterprise can go up by many thousands of percent.
Here's how the math works on that point. Let's assume the average sales per sales person are $100,000 when we begin. This means that the most productive sales people are creating $400,000 in sales while the others are averaging $25,000. By making the most productive sales people focus on where they are most successful, we can expand their sales to an average of $6,400,000. By having everyone do the same, everyone can reach this level. That means raising the average result by 64 times. This assumes of course that the resources to create the custom solutions exist, the other sales people can learn how to do this type of selling, and that the market is large enough to accommodate this much volume.
Basically, this is a way of finding the best of best practices and pushing them to a future best practice. You can obviously go even further by combining best practices that have not yet combined in the same organization.
In Applied Cynergetics, another example is provided. It is how to sell a "how-to" book by mail order. The author concludes that 80 percent of the benefit will come from having an outstanding advertisement for the book. He then concludes that the lead sentence will provide 80 percent of the benefit of the advertisement by grabbing the reader's attention. The author then sweated over that one sentence, and the rest fell into place.
Reducing the Time-lapse Stall
The recommended solution here is to combine the marketing concept of Œearly adopters' and Œtrendsetters' with the spread of the Internet. The former is important because these peoples' opinions count in influencing others (see Influence by Robert B. Cialdini, Quill Revised Edition 1993, and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown 2000). The latter is important because it expands and speeds communications.
To apply this stallbusting concept, you should get these influential people who like the new concept that is replacing stalled thinking connected to the Internet.
Also, you should create incentives for the trendsetters to share their opinions. The size and type of the incentives would be determined by how valuable it is to create the sharing, and what would motivate the trend setter to share.
Further, greater incentives should be provided for those who begin applying the new thinking. These could be provided both to those who had helped set the trend as well as those who are using the new thinking.
If what you are expanding has economic value to your enterprise, you could provide something resembling a percentage of the new revenues (in whatever form that would be most meaningful) to support this activity.
A corollary to this idea of working with trendsetters would be to be sure that people with large Internet communities they already influence would become early adopters. In many cases, these would be young people who are already much more experienced and interested in the Internet.
A New Stall and How to Overcome It: The Personal Power Stall
This stall addresses the lack of personal efficiency that many experience. A common source of this inefficiency are false beliefs that are harmful to the individual. These beliefs are often learned in dysfunctional families, or from role models who have bad habits. See The 17 Lies That Are Holding You Back and The Truth That Will Set You Free by Steve Chandler (Renaissance 2000), Unlimited Power by Anthony Robbins (Fireside Reprint Edition 1997), and Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki and Sharon L. Lechter (Warner 2000) for examples of the stall.
Common characteristics of people with this stall include being someone who cannot or will not try to improve. In business situations, such a person would often be very disorganized and not be using time management principles.
The stallbuster is to determine (by observations and employee attitudes) who are these diamonds in the rough, who have not begun to tap their full potential. Then, encourage them to test their false beliefs and reward them for changing their behavior. Reading one of the above books, selecting new things to try, and negotiating rewards could be the structure of such assistance.
Another New Stall and How to Overcome It: The High Cost of Start-Up
Many valuable new ideas and resources are too expensive for anyone individual, company, or industry to establish on their own. Yet, these ideas and resources would have enormous benefit for all once they reach the size to become efficient enough to be self-sustaining. For example, we all take the Internet for granted today, yet this was not a major way of communicating until the mid-1990s. It would have taken tens of billions to get this off the ground, at a time when no one was interested in spending that much.
The solution to this stall ends up being of the most legitimate areas for government action: providing the seed money and patience to nurture the new until its potential is affordable by private interests. Going back to our Internet example, the Internet's predecessor was developed originally by a Defense agency called ARPA (now DARPA) to help those working on defense grants for research to stay in touch with each other. That nurturing probably accelerated the Internet's development by ten or more years.
A current problem is doing business in space. The cost of launch is now over $10,000 per pound into Earth orbit. As soon as the cost falls to $500 per pound, many more applications can be developed that will be commercially viable. The development of early space business will probably have to be underwritten by the governments of the world until that point is reached. See G. Harry Stine's The Third Industrial Revolution (Ace 1987) or Living in Space (M. Evans and Co. 1997).
But government isn't the only potential source of such funds. Foundations could be established to provide funds to overcome stalls related to high start-up costs. In a sense, The MacArthur Foundation does that already with its so-called Genius Grants to encourage iconoclastic thinkers to work on whatever turns them on.
Yet Another New Stall and How to Overcome It: The Lack of Trust Stall
Some will see this as a variation on The Psychology of Disbelief Stall. A manifestation of this is the long sales cycle involved in major and important purchases. First, the sales person has to establish trust with the potential purchaser. At that point, the process shifts to the company the sales person works for. The whole process can take 6 months or more. What a waste!
A potential solution is to develop quick and reliable ways of checking on a person and company's reliability. Perhaps a new industry could be established that would do just this, and the potential purchaser could eliminate much of the work by checking with the third party. In the meantime, companies should develop processes for checking people and companies out that are much faster and more reliable.
Another Personal Stall with Organizational and Family Implications and How to Overcome it: The Mid-Life Crisis Stall
Many people will experience a mid-life crisis between age 45 and 55. With so many Baby Boomers in and reaching this age, these crises may become all too common. Typically, they start with someone asking themselves "Is this all there is?" In search of an alternative a lot of counterproductive behavior can follow, including a belated attempt to sow a lot of wild oats and cut one's current obligations.
A better solution is to turn this crisis into a desire to use the new-found perspective and energy to increase one's contribution to others. Increasing the awareness of the constructive and destructive potential of the crisis, and providing role models may help many to redirect in better ways. Self-help courses and books are an immediately available resource in this regard. Steve Chandler's book is recommended for this purpose.
About Roland Teigen
Mr. Teigen lives in Ohio. He offers an interesting service that reduces the time, cost and effort of getting paid for all businesses by, among other things, allowing checks to be used as payment over the Internet. You can learn more about these services at www.hbdsinc.com, or contact him directly at viking1@worldshare.att.net.
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