Start by analyzing how your business currently allocates time between Doing, Deciding, Delegating, and Designing (your "4D Mix"). This sets a baseline to improve from. The goal is optimizing the mix so your business spends most time Doing work, with just enough Deciding, Delegating, and Designing to support operations.

Analyzing Your Current 4D Mix

<ul><li>Treat your business's team structure as a flexible web rather than rigid hierarchy. </li><li>Adjust roles to maximize each individual's natural strengths.</li><li> Match people's innate traits to the jobs needing those traits. </li><li>Let employees fluidly move between complementary functions. </li></ul>

Optimizing Team Structure and Strengths

A business entirely dependent on you will never be worth more than your time.

Determine the core business function most crucial for your success - your "Queen Bee Role". This thrive factor should be priority #1. Empower your team to protect this function above all else. Only when the QBR is humming can other roles do their most vital work.

Identifying and Protecting Your Queen Bee Role 

Design clear dashboards to monitor your key metrics for financial health, operations, and growth. Dashboards enable you to lead at a strategic level without getting dragged into details. Maintain visibility even if not there daily.

Creating Business Dashboards for Visibility

Resist serving every customer need. Instead, commit to delivering extreme value to a specific audience through focused offerings.<ul><li> Variability makes consistent service impossible. </li><li>Restrict offerings to double down on your core strength.</li></ul>

Restricting Offerings to Focus on Your Core

With optimized systems, your business can sustainably run itself without daily founder involvement. Clockwork efficiency is the end goal - consistent, quality results, and growth with minimal direct oversight needed from you. True freedom.

Achieving Sustainable Clockwork Efficiency

Document the systems your business already uses so they can be transferred to your team and replicated. Capture them in an easily shared format - avoid rigid manuals. Make existing knowledge transferable so the business isn't reliant solely on you.

Documenting Existing Systems for Transferability

Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz is a business book that outlines a system for building a business that can run without the owner. The book outlines what the author calls the 4D mix (doing, deciding, delegating, and designing) and the 7 stages of building a Clockwork business.

Do you worry that your business will collapse without your constant presence? Are you sacrificing your family, friendships, and freedom to keep your business alive? What if instead your business could run itself, freeing you to do what you love when you want, while it continues to grow and turn a profit? It’s possible. And it's easier than you think. If you're like most entrepreneurs, you started your business so you could be your own boss, make the money you deserve, and live life on your own terms. In reality, you're bogged down in the daily grind, constantly putting out fires, answering an endless stream of questions, and continually hunting for cash. Now, Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit First and other small-business bestsellers, offers a straightforward step-by-step path out of this dilemma. In Clockwork, he draws on more than six years of research and real life examples to explain his simple approach to making your business ultra-efficient. Among other powerful strategies, you will discover how to: <li>Make your employees act like owners: Free yourself from micromanaging by using a simple technique to empower your people to make smart decisions without you.</li> <li>Pinpoint your business's most important function: Unleash incredible efficiency by identifying and focusing everyone on the one function that is most crucial to your business.</li> <li>Know what to fix next: Most entrepreneurs try to fix every inefficiency at once and end up fixing nothing. Use the "weakest link in the chain" method to find the one fix that will add the most value now.</li> Whether you have a staff of one, one hundred, or somewhere in between, whether you're a new entrepreneur or have been overworked and overstressed for years, Clockwork is your path to finally making your business work for you.

timemanagement

Time Management

business

Business

books

Books

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Mike Michalowicz

Clockwork

One recent academic study reported that even in high-performing companies with clearly articulated strategies, <a href="https://hbr.org/2013/06/when-ceos-talk-strategy-is-anyone-listening">only 29% of their employees knew what their company’s strategy was</a>. In another 2019 survey, only 35% of the employees claimed to know their company’s strategy and fewer than 20% said that they understood why they were following the strategy that had been communicated to them.

Disconnect With Strategy

Companies must first make the difficult choices that strategy requires and then <a href="https://hbr.org/2014/02/the-art-of-crafting-a-15-word-strategy-statement">communicate these choices to employees in an effective way</a>. Unfortunately, if we go by what companies communicate in their annual reports or by what CEOs say at company conferences, the bulk of the communication is focused on the organization’s goals and aspirations rather than its choices. This mode of communication leaves employees in the dark and limits their emotional connection to their organization. Improving our communication of strategy can lead to major benefits in how employees execute our strategy.

Strategy Is Not Aspirations, Objectives or Wishful Thinking

Most companies communicate strategy as a set of aspirations and platitudes. But aspirations aren’t strategy, and that mode of communication leaves employees in the dark. Strategy is a set of hard-to-reverse choices and explaining what these choices are and why they were made is what strategy communication should be.

Strategy Vs Big, Hairy Goals

Most companies communicate strategy as a set of aspirations and platitudes. But aspirations aren’t strategy, and that mode of communication leaves employees in the dark. Strategy is a set of hard-to-reverse choices and explaining what these choices are and why they were made is what strategy communication should be.

strategy

Strategy

Don’t Confuse Strategy with Lofty Goals

Productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal. Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every action that does not bring a company closer to its goal is not productive.Productivity is not about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting the right things done. The right things are those actions that move you or your company closer to the goal.

The Premise

Bottleneck: a resource whose capacity is equal to or less than the demand placed upon it. Non-bottleneck: a resource whose capacity is greater than the demand placed on it.Because bottlenecks are the constraint in the system, if you waste any time on a bottleneck resource, your entire system loses time. The capacity of the plant is equal to the capacity of the bottleneck. If you lose an hour on a bottleneck, you lose an hour in the entire plant.

Bottlenecks and Non-Bottlenecks

A manager has the ability to answer three simple questions:<ul><li>What needs to be changed?</li><li>What does it need to be changed to?</li><li>How do you cause the change?</li></ul>

The Role Of A Manager

<ul><li>Identify the system’s constraint.</li><li>Decide how to exploit the system’s constraint.</li><li>Subordinate everything else to the above decision.</li><li>Elevate the system’s constraint.</li><li>If in the previous steps a constraint has been broken, go back to step 1, but do not allow inertia to cause a system’s constraint.</li></ul>

The Five Step Process

Utilizing a resource means using a resource in a way that moves the system toward its goal. Utilizing a resource is a productive action.Activating resources means using a resource, whether or not there is benefit from the work its doing. This explains why activating a non-bottleneck resource is often inefficient – it does not move the system closer toward its goal.

Activating vs. Utilizing a Resource

At its core, manufacturing is a series of dependent events. Ensuring the right interaction between these dependent events is essential for the success of the manufacturing business.To improve in manufacturing, you must optimize for the entire system, not just a local area. The reality is that some resources have more capacity than others, and this needs to be considered when creating efficiencies in the system.

A Plan Is a System of Dependent Events

In business, you have three primary levers – net profit, return on investment, and cash flow. You want all three levers to move in the right direction. A common mistake is optimizing for one of these metrics, which may inadvertently make one or both of the other metrics go in the wrong direction. It’s important to view your business as a system, and the system improves when you move the three metrics the right way.

The Goal of A Business

In a warehouse setting, throughput, inventory, and operating expenses are proxy metrics that represent net profit, return on investment, and cash flow, the three levers of a business.Throughput: the rate at which the system generates money through sales.Inventory: Inventory is all the money that the system has invested in purchasing things which it intends to sell.Operating expense: Operational expense is all the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput.The goal is thus to increase throughput while simultaneously reducing both inventory and operating expense

Throughput, Inventory, and Operating Expense

Although the 5-step process above can work in any organization, the exact details and application must be tailored to the specific circumstances and challenges in your organization.The constraints that you face may not always be physical. There could also be intangible constraints, such as attitudes and deeply-entrenched practices from long-standing policies and procedures

Applying The Process of Ongoing Improvement

Essential reads for entrepreneurial growth, curated by Lenny Rachitsky.

startup

Startups

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

productivity

Productivity

Lenny’s Top Business Books

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

"This book, which introduces the Theory of Constraints, is changing how America does business. The Goal is a gripping, fast-paced business novel about overcoming the barriers to making money. Over 2 million copies sold! Used by thousands of companies and hundreds of business schools! Required reading for anyone in the Theory of Constraints. This book, which introduces the Theory of Constraints, is changing how America does business. The Goal is a gripping, fast-paced business novel about overcoming the barriers to making money. You will learn the fundamentals of identifying and solving the problems created by constraints. From the moment you finish the book you will be able to start successfully addressing chronic productivity and quality problems."--Proporcionado por la editorial.

Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Jeff Cox

David Whitford

The Goal

In content and content operations, the people are the foundation. While customers sit at the center of content, the operations aspect focuses on the company and its team. Roles and responsibilities should be well-defined and outlined to keep the system running smoothly.As long as the roles and responsibilities are clear, the team and its operations should function successfully.

People

Content operations is the combined foundation of people, process, and technology that allows an organization to effectively and efficiently maintain its content lifecycle from start to finish. This framework spans the strategy, creation, publishing, distribution, and management of content.Content operations focus on three elements:<ul><li>People: who is performing a task and what their roles and responsibilities are.</li><li>Process: what functions are needed to complete a project successfully.</li><li>Technology: what tools help build out a content operations system.</li></ul>

Content Operations

Because the planning and execution of content are so extensive, teams require multiple resources to be successful.The technology for content operations can fall into categories such as:<ul><li>Project Management & Scheduling</li><li>Task Management</li><li>Content Execution</li><li>Analytics & Reports.</li></ul>

Technology

Your team — and their roles and responsibilities — will help determine workflows to keep your content moving from planning to publishing.Style guidelines, templates, and content governance models strengthen processes and promote accountability and consistency. These frameworks help keep content on track, but they need to be used with technology to ensure content operations are running smoothly.

Process

Content operations lead to results, and they result in:<ul><li>Saving time and money. When a content operations team establishes a sound cycle between people, processes, and technology, it leads to efficiency.</li><li>Content operations promote better quality content.</li><li>Producing content faster. When faced with an immovable deadline, content operations keep teams on schedule.</li><li>Happy and confident teams. When team members are unhappy or confused about their roles, responsibilities, or resources, their work may reflect it.</li></ul>

Why content operations matter

In content operations, remember these three words: people, process, and technology. Find out why each pillar matters to your content operations.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

writing

Reading & Writing

What Is Content Operations? A Straight-Forward Guide

Many ideas people generate are a waste of time. This is because it seemed like a good idea but are not being checked upon. Instead, they keep going because of the initial momentum. Larger companies can accommodate wasteful overheads, but startups won't be able to. If the organisation has capacity and resources, they often just hire more people instead of trimming the things that become irrelevant. That's why it's good to do a periodic irrelevance audit.

Collected Baggage Grows Heavier

Our memory fades with time. So we won't always remember how things went down. We best remember emotional experiences, such as important ideas you generated, but you will not remember all the details. You are also likely to forget things other people generated. This is why people invented contracts. Contracts help us recall the exact wording of an agreement and help resolve conflicts. People also tend to forget details of any important decisions. The solution is simple: document everything.

Clockwork

Don’t Confuse Strategy with Lofty Goals

The Goal

It's time to
Read like a Pro.

What Is Content Operations? A Straight-Forward Guide

CURATED BY

Clockwork

Don’t Confuse Strategy with Lofty Goals

The Goal

It's time to Read like a Pro.

What Is Content Operations? A Straight-Forward Guide

CURATED BY

It's time to
Read like a Pro.