Imagine Perfection to Shrink Your Work Week to Two Hours Business Articles | September 20 Cheap White Women's Air Max 90 Leather Australia , 2007 If you could accomplish 20 times more with the same time, effort, and resources, you could finish your current job in two hours a week. Does that strike your fancy? If so Nike VaporMax Plus Womens Australia , the key step in finding such productivity breakthroughs is identifying the maximum result that can be achieved with reasonable risk and resources, far beyond merely exceeding tomorrow?s best practices. This essay shows you how to identify that ideal maximum result.
To accomplish your week's work in 2 hours, you'll need to become 20 times more effective, a 2 Nike VaporMax Flyknit Womens Australia ,000 percent solution. The steps for creating a 2,000 percent solution (accomplishing 20 times more with the same time, effort, and resources) are listed here:
1. Understand the importance of measuring performance.
2. Decide what to measure.
3. Identify the future best practice and measure it.
4. Exceed the future best practice.
5. Identify the ideal best practice.
6. Pursue the ideal best practice.
7. Select people with the optimal talents and encourage them to succeed.
8. Repeat the first seven steps.
This essay looks at eliminating mental barriers that make it difficult to accomplish step five.
Remove Blinders to Envision Perfection
The ideal best practice is simply the most effective process that can possibly be accomplished by anyone over the next five years. It will usually exceed the future best practice by a wide margin Nike VaporMax Womens Australia , and the ideal best practice reflects a performance level that might not normally be reached for decades. Here's an example: In corporate communications, an ideal best practice would mean having all employees receive, understand, and act on a message in appropriate ways within a few seconds. We know that's possible because people after seeing a large fire Nike Air Max Dia Womens Australia , smelling smoke, and hearing a fire alarm will begin evacuating a building in that amount of time. By comparison, your organization's performance today represents a tiny fraction of what is possible. People perform nearly perfectly all the time in many different ways. Put those perfectly performing people into an organization, and it's often the same as removing 99 percent of their intelligence. That's the negative consequence that follows from employing poorly designed processes.
Before searching out the ideal best practice for your process Nike Air Max 200 Womens Australia , let us observe that you are seeing the ideal best practices of near perfection all around you on a daily basis. But chances are that you don't notice the near perfection at all. Instead, your focus is probably on what isn't working well ? and becoming either frustrated or annoyed.
Get the Message of Why Near-Perfection Routinely Occurs
Here are questions that my clients and students have found to be mind-opening. These questions provide the key to exponential success. Most people can do this exercise in less than an hour. But even if you spend more time, you'll be way ahead of those who never answer these questions. Keep in mind that understanding is more important than speed.
? What are 50 examples of individuals performing near perfection on a regular basis?
? What are 50 examples of how people in groups perform near perfection on a regular basis?
? Why do these near-perfect performances occur?
? What's missing from your organization's approach to its most important tasks so that near-perfect performance can be achieved?
Here's an example to help you get started: Employees are very good at cashing their paychecks. Rarely are paychecks not cashed. Why? Unless employees are extremely wealthy or unusually forgetful, they will feel the need to cash or deposit their paychecks in order to buy food Nike Air Max 720 Womens Australia , pay for shelter, and run the rest of their lives. For most people, not cashing a paycheck would be like trying to hold your breath for the rest of your life. It's an activity that cannot be sustained. Many examples of near-perfection draw on these elements: It's a natural thing to do; people enjoy doing it; the consequences of not doing it are extreme; people understand the consequences and know exactly what they have to do.
How High Is Up?
Managers often feel confused when they try to decide how tough to make corporate improvement goals. Imagine that your organization's output has been rising at 5 percent a year in units while revenues per employee have grown at 3 percent a year. Many will be tempted to choose this historical performance as a target.
Most leaders will choose goals that are 30 to 50 percent likely to be reached. Setting more challenging goals often stimulates higher performance by making the tasks more interesting for employees and other stakeholders. But it's harmful to set high goals without providing a clear direction for how to succeed and helping employees gain confidence about reaching the goals.
Utilizing the ideal best practice focus provides a major improvement in goal setting by identifying both a higher standard and one that is achievable and credible to employees. In essence, you get more stretch with the same degree of psychological comfort.