Issue #2 Avoid chicken salad debates
We are having a lot of vision conversations this week, so our question to you is:
Is your business bogged down by chicken salad debates?
Herb Kelleher, founder and CEO of South West Airlines, was adamant that South West have a clear direction, a vision of what they were up to, and that everyone in the business knew it.
He wanted everyone in the company to make decisions, act, and focus on building the vision without getting bogged down in stuff that didn’t matter, like chicken salads.
He told a story about someone from marketing coming to him to suggest serving a chicken salad on a flight because customer surveys suggested that they might like that.
You can spend a lot of time debating questions like these. Should we or should we not? We’ve seen companies dedicate entire teams to trying to figure stuff like this out.
But when your vision is clear, you realize that these “chicken salad” debates are all a complete waste of time and easily avoided.
South West’s vision is to be the low-cost* airline, so when anybody in the company confronts a chicken salad question, they only ask one question: “will serving a chicken salad help us become the low-cost airline?”
The answer is no – end of discussion.
No need to form a deep dive analytic team and commission representative focus groups.
That clarity allows everyone to make business-relevant decisions and cut out the noise quickly.
So have you created a North Star Vision for you and your company?
Click here to learn more and get started.
*Grammarly insists on changing “the low-cost airline” to “a low-cost airline,” but the point is that Kelleher was creating THE low-cost airline, not just a low-cost airline. Grammarly clearly doesn’t understand the vision.
Do you have five minutes to help a friend (and test a tool?)
Well, we hope we’re friends…
Anyway, we are testing our new operational maturity assessment tool… it takes you through a few questions and delivers a result to you.
Cool right?
There are six foundational areas that we evaluate here:
- Know your business
- Know your team
- Build systems
- Grow leadership
- Create Engagement
- Examine Data
If you have a few minutes to help us work out the kinks, please take the assessment and let us know what you think.
Just for Fun
Did you see this new Kit-Kat ad?
It has exploded in ad circles, and many creatives are gushing over Kit Kat’s societal insight.
I bet Hershey wishes they created the ad and could take the credit.
(Well, they may just be happy with the exposure and extra sales…)
The ad isn’t real, it was part of a Twitter competition, and the ad went viral.
The interesting thing is why this is so effective. It appeals directly to the reptilian brain by tying it into an experience that almost all of us can relate to.
Read more about the reptilian brain here.
From Around the Web
- 🕑 Better time management for MSPs and technicians
- We work with a lot of MSPs (Managed Service Providers), and one of the issues that they experience is being able to track time successfully. So Joe discovered a wonderful article about time tracking for technicians. Learn more here.
- 😎 Tired of short blog posts and want some good content?
- Aren’t we all? Check out this post on the 30 best pieces of advice for MSP owners – it has some great stuff. Check out numbers 3 and 21, a couple of our favorites. Read more here.
