A summary of things you should know about The Metronome Effect according to Shannon Susko: Introduction In this episode Shannon Susko takes a deep dive into her book, The MetronomeRead More
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]]>In this episode Shannon Susko takes a deep dive into her book, The Metronome Effect, where she reveals many effective ways to turbo charge the growth of any business.
In her book Susko provides a customized step-by-step action plan based on the best practices and tools that helped scale some of the most successful businesses today as well as ones she helped grow herself. The goal of the book is to teach you how to operate a company, how to scale a company dramatically, how to hold employees accountable, and how to organize a business into a smooth process.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who have a solid understanding of the best business practices and are in need of an easy, systematic way to tie them all into one cohesive framework.
The biggest difference I wanted to make was to be prescriptive. This book will give the entrepreneur a step by step, here is what you should do, and when.
Readers can definitely read it from front to back but they can also jump in and out where needed most.
The one thing that I would recommend that the entrepreneur and leader look at within what they are living today is coming up with what I call setting your metronome. The leader is the metronome of the business and it’s important to set some expected habits that are going to happen every day.
There is a picture in the beginning of the book that I call The House. Every entrepreneur is focused on building a great house so that their organization can grow, scale, and really set out on the success that they are looking to achieve within the business. And at the very foundation of the house is the entrepreneur and the leader of the organization and that leader needs to be absolutely in tune with their own core values and their own purpose. And that then drives to ensuring there is clarity both for the leader and the rest of the organization around the core purpose of the organization. What follows that are the core values of the organization which is absolutely in tune with the core values of the entrepreneur and the leader of that organization. From there is knowing what your big goal is for the organization. This is a 10 to 30 year goal that will guide the organization and the leader to where they need to drive to. The other piece of the strategic thinking process is the execution plan and really creating a way for an organization to have a collaborative brain, peer accountability, as well as setting up a rhythm within the organization that will beat daily, weekly, quarterly, and annually. This creates the habits needed for an entrepreneur to think less about the next thing that we need to do and think more about what we need to do within our business.
With every chapter we step through, starting with the leader, works through every piece that I go through. At the end of every chapter are actions that are recommended, books to read, as well as things you can do if you are challenged in a particular area.
The goal was to bring forth a way that the entrepreneurs and the leaders can easily and practically execute and grow their business within a time where they usually feel they don’t have another minute.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 04:04
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.” – Aristotle
I’ve been building high growth technology companies for the past 20 years and within that time I have very much found a great framework that I think others can learn from. Since the time of leaving my last organization I have been working with entrepreneurs and helping them scale up their own organizations.
The inspiration was to support other entrepreneurs in their journey in growing their company. While developing my first company I was looking for a silver bullet for myself to overcome that growth and sadly enough I came across many great tools but not one great framework that could pull it all together. This book allows an entrepreneur to understand that there is a framework available that you can bring in all the different tools that we learn along the way. I wanted to show entrepreneurs that there is a way that you can put this into play practically and grow your business at the same time.
Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
Buy The Metronome Effect by Shannon Susko on Amazon today
Visit ShannonSusko.com to learn more about Shannon and her book
Follow Shannon Susko on Facebook and Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Building Your Booming Business by David Mitchell
Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble
Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Overcome Business Failure
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Lean Enterprise according to Jez Humble: Introduction In this episode Jez Humble takes a deep dive into his book, Lean Enterprise whereRead More
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]]>In this episode Jez Humble takes a deep dive into his book, Lean Enterprise where he uncovers how high performing organizations are able to innovate at scale.
In his book Humble sifts through case studies, principles, and patterns of very successful well-known companies providing you with an action guide to help you rethink how to run your business. The goal of the book is to teach you what it takes to implement the methodologies he presents, manage large-scale projects, create a non-traditional management style, and accelerate innovation.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who run a well-established organization that is having trouble adapting to changing market conditions and need a fast, innovative approach to scaling up.
I don’t think anyone has written a book that talk about how to transform enterprises that need to be able to win creating digital products in this environment where you have short product cycles. There are books about how to change culture, there are books about leadership, but there is no book that really ties all these things together in the context of building digital products for large enterprises.
This book is very dense and the first two chapters need to be read straight through. The rest of the book you can dip in and out where needed.
For me the real epiphany of the book is this idea of taking a scientific method and adopting it for product development and for process improvement.
We start off by talking about the fact that lean enterprise is the result of culture. Even though the book is about how to work in a domain of technology the point of technology is really to enable humans to collaborate more effectively and more rapidly. In an enterprise context it becomes really difficult because you got a large number of people with a wide variety of backgrounds who all have to work together in order to achieve a common purpose. And the question is how do we do that rapidly at scale? The answer to that comes from military doctrine. The book is primarily about how you create alignment at scale, how you enable everyone in the organization to make the best decision from the organizational point of view despite their limited knowledge.
The second chapter dives into the product cycle and the product development cycle and there are a number of well named models for the enterprise portfolio. This is increasingly important in the modern world where product development cycles are so short.
Part two of the book describes how to work in the explore domain where exploring a number of ideas knowing that most of them won’t be successful. This explores how to adopt the lean startup methodology in an enterprise context.
Part three of the book describes how to work in the domain where you have validated products and you need to actually exploit it and develop it at scale. The key part of exploiting is actually around driving down cost, improving quality, and improving value to customers and that demands a completely different approach. For that we need to pursue process improvement which means enabling the people doing the work to actually try out new ideas to experiment new ideas in terms of how to increase quality.
There is a piece on engineering practices because engineering practices are poorly understood. Most people are going into management in large companies not necessarily to really understanding how to work in the digital domain and how to build products where software is a competitive advantage. And so we spend a bunch of time discussing how to do that and how to take an experimental approach through product development.
The last part of the book is about how to create a culture of innovation. As an enterprise you can’t afford to hire the top of market people who have exactly the skills and behaviors that you want. You have to invest in developing your people so there is a whole section on growing a culture of innovation rather than taking shortcuts. We talk about financial management and how you can do budgeting, how to do IT in a way that creates a competitive advantage rather than being a cost center, and how to get started using a case study from the UK government digital service.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 05:19
“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at the given time is a function of power and not truth.” –Unknown
I am a Vice President at Chef, a lecturer at UC Berkeley, and before Lean Enterprise I wrote Continuous Delivery. My background is in software engineering and I’ve worked in multiple industries, in multiple companies, helping organizations get better at delivering high quality valuable software products.
Lean Enterprise is about how you create organizations that are able to work in short development cycles, build products rapidly, and get feedback. And that requires us to change the way we think about portfolio management, financial management, culture, and pretty much everything else. All these things need to be a bit different in order to compete in this world where we have these very short product cycles.
Toyota Kata by Mike Rother
Buy Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble on Amazon today
Visit ContinuousDelivery.com to learn more about Jez and his books
Follow Jez Humble on Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
Exponential Organization by Salim Ismail
Fail Fast or Win Big by Bernhard Schroeder
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of Lean Enterprise with Jez Humble appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
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