The 7 Deadly Sins of Resource Management
How to
Find and Fix Costly Drains on Your Business and Create a Change-Ready
Organization
Bruce Hunter and Richie Hunter
Copyright © 2012 COREBIZSTYLE, LLC.
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Does this scenario sound familiar? Your most productive employees are working their fingers to the bone and clocking 12-hour days, while those on the lower rungs of effectiveness are sitting around waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Accountability fell by the wayside years ago, outside consultants are no longer delivering results, and the expensive state-of-the-art technology your company invested in is gathering dust while workers go about business the “old fashioned” way.
If this scene—or any part of it—hits close to home, you’ve come to the right place. Whether your firm is committing just one deadly sin of resource management or all seven, we’re here to help you get things back on course. This handbook will walk you through the critical issues of vision mismanagement, change mismanagement, talent mismanagement, and project mismanagement—all of which take a heavy toll on a corporation’s ability to operate smarter, faster, and better.
The simple truth is that mismanagement of resources results in project failure, budget overages, employee overtime, and other costly errors. Creating an organization that can respond to, handle, and manage change means putting systems in place so no resource is wasted. Only then can your organization respond well to all internal and external pressures, set itself apart from its competitors, and deliver top-notch goods and services to its customers.
In this handbook, you’ll not only learn about the resource management sins not to commit, but you’ll also take away valuable strategies you can put to work in your own company immediately. We’ll discuss how you can develop clear, aligned goals and objectives that start with top management and work their way down to the individual employee level. Whether you’re running a multinational corporation or a small, regional firm, the lessons you learn from this book will apply to every aspect of your business.
We’ll show you how to ferret out and repair the issues that are draining your business’s valuable resources—none of which you can afford to spare in today’s economy. You’ll learn how to use careful resource management to create a sustainable enterprise that succeeds now and well into the future.
If you’re ready to start building (or rebuilding) an organization that manages change effectively in any type of economic environment, read on: help is just pages away.
Special Note: Be sure to take some time to read and reflect over these tips. We’ve provided plenty of white space for you to take notes, so feel free to print this out and spend some time with it.
Delivering Results that Matter
BRUCE HUNTER
As CEO of Digital Data Resources Inc., one of the Midwest’s largest digital imaging companies, Bruce Hunter established DDR as the fastest-growing and most profitable document imaging company in the Midwest. Having taken the company from startup to acquisition by a publicly traded market leader, he saw his vision of creating the largest Midwest firm that transferred images onto CDs from paper and microfilm to fruition and, more than satisfied with his efforts, went in search of new challenges.
In 2003, Bruce co-founded CORE Media and, in less than one year, established CORE as one of the fastest-growing print and electronic media properties in Colorado. CORE provided readers with business and lifestyle information, advice, inspiration, and essential tools for success. The bimonthly publication reached over 65,000 readers per issue and averaged 125,000 monthly visitors online.
Now with CORE, Bruce is using his years of experience designing strategic marketing plans and improving profitability to help businesses large and small, with an emphasis on leveraging the power of the Internet.
Bruce also teaches innovation, knowledge management and intellectual capital courses at the University of Phoenix.
RICHIE HUNTER
Richie Hunter is co-founder and President of CORE Media and the former Chief Marketing Officer for Health Net, one of the nation’s largest publicly traded companies, providing health benefits to approximately 6.7 million people. She has nearly 20 years of marketing, branding, communications, and sales support experience. Prior to joining Health Net, Richie was the Staff Vice President of Marketing Management for WellPoint, the nation’s largest health benefits company in terms of commercial membership, providing health care benefits to approximately 35 million people. Richie led enterprise-wide Marketing Deployment, Local Group Marketing, Sponsorships, and Events. WellPoint tapped into Richie’s entrepreneurial spirit and charged her to build this high-impact, high-value marketing division from scratch.
Today, at CORE, Richie strategically leverages her extensive corporate background to help individual executives and companies develop and master personal and corporate branding, integrated marketing, business planning and development, and operations management.
Table of Contents
Deadly
Sin #1: Mismanaging Vision
Deadly
Sin #2: Mismanaging Accountability
Deadly
Sin #3: Mismanaging Change
Deadly
Sin #4: Mismanaging Talent
Deadly
Sin #5: Mismanaging Consultants
Deadly
Sin #6: Mismanaging Projects
Deadly
Sin #7: Mismanaging Technology
The
Next Level
Deadly
Sin #1
Mismanaging Vision
WHEN YOU MISMANAGE YOUR COMPANY’S VISION, you commit the first deadly sin of resource management. A clear vision that is understood at all levels of your organization is the foundation of effective resource management. Without vision, you wind up with shaky systems that are unable to withstand change and lack the strength to adapt to and overcome challenges. This is a state of affairs that can drive a company into the ground.
A strategic vision, on the other hand, will align your personnel from the C-suite to the most junior employee. Without top-to-bottom executive and employee support, a corporate vision will suffer. If the vision isn’t detailed enough, or if it doesn’t involve every single aspect of your business, it will flounder even more. Inevitably, a company will crumble under the strain of a mismanaged vision because not only do the right and left hands of the organization not know what the other is doing, it’s not clear what they should be doing in the first place.
Take Yahoo, for example. In a 2010 Harvard Business Review article, “The Decision-Driven Organization,” Marcia W. Blenko details the technology firm’s sweeping reorganization attempts, which included replacing Yahoo’s product-aligned structure with one that was focused on users and advertiser-customers. Product units were moved around and new ones were formed, all in the name of accelerating company growth.
The changes sounded good in theory, but it seems no one factored in the human element. Team members quickly found themselves bogged down with new roles and responsibilities. To solve the problems, Yahoo created even more roles and responsibilities and hired management personnel to coordinate the new units. It wasn’t long before 12 layers of management and units were established. Decisions stalled and overhead costs increased. In the fight to stoke growth, the technology firm wound up slowing itself down and wasting money. They lacked a clear vision of where to go, adding structure and expense without looking at the bigger picture.
Correcting the Course
The good news is that it’s never too late to address problems of vision. By developing a clear picture of what you want the future to look like, including both short and long-term benefits to stakeholders and an actionable list of realistic goals, you can begin to correct your company’s vision. Like a ship’s crew sighting the North Star after a storm, seeing your guiding principles clearly again can breathe new life into an enterprise.
To succeed in creating a comprehensive vision, make the goals flexible, remain open to alternative solutions, and focus only on those goals that are easy to communicate and explain to others. Be realistic and specific. Broad goals that are impossible to achieve will put you right back where you started: in a state of vision mismanagement.
…
You are the architect and the people on your team are the builders. While you may have a sweeping and complex vision for the future that includes the landscaping and lighting design, you first need to lay the foundation. You want to communicate the vision to your team in stages of concrete, actionable steps.