With warmer weather approaching, the competition season is about to start, and I can’t wait!

On the 25th February I had my first taste of a competition for the year, with a “Light Hammer Competition” for all of the Loughborough hammer throwers. Throwing a lighter hammer (for women 3kg) is a challenge to see how fast you can move – as it is easier to accelerate the hammer, keeping up with it becomes the biggest problem!

Set a new PB!

I was very happy with my performance – I kept my head and threw a personal best of 44.37 metres. This placed me 17th out of 18, which means that after just one winter of training I have been able to catch up with some members of my training group. Given that it was only this time last year that I first saw a hammer, I’m delighted with my improvement, but I’m also looking forward to developing further so that I can challenge for higher rankings!

Official Ranking beckons…

Next weekend I have my first competition with a 4kg hammer (the standard competition weight). This is very exciting, because it will give me an official national ranking (see http://www.thepowerof10.info/rankings/), and also will allow me to qualify in terms of distance for the British University Championships, which is due to take place in none other than the Olympic Stadium this May!   (Editor note – Laura did achieve a placing on the Power of Ten, and is in 15th position on the national rankings!!  Fantastic news and sets a great foundation to build on!) 

The Championships have changed their rules this year, only guaranteeing only one athlete per event to each university, which is obviously a problem at a centre of athletic excellence, like Loughborough. Myra Perkins is currently the best female hammer thrower at Loughborough, but the Performance Manager says that a good qualifying distance would maximise my chances of being allowed to compete too. Fingers crossed!

In the meantime, I can just make sure that I am fully prepared and in the best condition possible.

Once again, throw-weights-stretch…

Investing in a Downturn…

In the last post I discussed how many companies have responded to the economic downturn by taking an increasingly short term, quarterly profit based view of their business – and reducing any investment in long term activities like innovation, learning and business improvement initiatives.   In doing so they are only looking at ways they can increase profits right now, and the easiest way to do this is to reduce costs through cutting heads and stopping investments.   This is akin to selling your ability to compete tomorrow simply to survive today – what I called ‘chopping trees’.

I would now like to look at the alternative – ‘sowing seeds’.

Jobs – Sowing Seeds of Growth at Apple

In a recent article in Time Magazine on Steve Jobs, it was stated that the biggest lesson that Western business leaders should gleam from what he achieved at Apple following his return in 1997 was his constant focus on the long term vision, and his relentless execution of it. Jobs knew that innovation was where he should focus, not just short term profit, and to make this point he put the engineers at Apple above the accountants in the hierarchy. In Walter Isaacson’s book on Steve Jobs he recounts a conversation where Jobs told him that; “my passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profit, were the motivation. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything.”

Profit – an outcome, not a strategy

The lesson here is that in order to win you need to keep a long term view and focus on innovation and real growth, rather than simply aiming for hyper-efficiency.   During the last recession back in 2000 when the dotcom bubble burst, most of Silicon Valley stopped spending.  Apple meanwhile, ramped up its investment in research and development – resulting in the iPod, iTunes, Apple Stores, Genius bars, and the OS X.  Isaacson explains; “Steve spent a lot of time stressing to me how seeds planted in that downturn, despite the scepticism and resistance of his board, grew into the products that turned Apple in the world’s most valuable company.  He didn’t worry about explain to Wall Street why building a bunch of glass shrine shrines with only 12 products in them was a good return on investment.”

This supports my previous posts on why investing during a downturn, when everyone else is cutting costs and keeping their heads down, is almost always a good idea.  Unilever’s decision to stop cutting costs in 2009 and instead focus on the customer comes to mind – which has resulted in unprecedented growth and a lower cost model than when they focused on cutting costs!

Leadership Courage and Personal Responsibility

Cutting costs and laying people off is an easy decision to make – blaming external events and the recession.  Taking personal responsibility and making the decision to invest in order to be better is much tougher. Courage is the key – there is no lack of money sat in corporate balance sheets but there is a lack of courage at the top in terms of spending that money in order to improve.  It isn’t easy to buck the trend and do what others daren’t – but extraordinary results come from doing extraordinary things – not the same as everyone else.

As George Wood Bacon famously said; “Fortunes are NOT made in the boom times …that is merely the collection period.  Fortunes are made in depressions or lean times when the wise man overhauls his mind, his methods, his resources, and gets in TRAINING for the race to come.”

Choose your future – choose to be great

So I’m calling out the CEOs of business, specifically in the UK – do you have the courage to examine what your company truly stands for and take the time to engage your people’s hearts and minds behind a vision of building a better company – not just a smaller, lower cost one?

As Jobs said “we are here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why else even be here?”

So, would your company’s current business strategy pass the ‘dent’ test?

Are we selling the future to survive today?

You’d be hard pushed to find anyone who’d disagree that times are both tough and uncertain at the moment. 

Organisations are focusing primarily on cost cutting, spending less and less on growth and development, reducing recruitment.  This is hitting both direct suppliers and service providers hard, causing them to go out of business or shed jobs.  People, concerned about their job security, are naturally spending less – which in turn creates more unemployment and cost cutting.

It’s a vicious circle. 

But are the major job and spending cuts the right thing to do?  I can’t help wondering whether people in businesses are behaving in a way that is making a bad situation worse; whether we are inadvertently ‘doing it to ourselves’.

Personally, I think this is the case.  Rather than investing in getting smarter and thus better, many companies appear to be dramatically reducing their horizon and focusing purely on appeasing analysts and the next quarter’s results, rather than long term planning for the future.   They are almost paralysed by fear at the moment, resulting in any planned expenditure being strenuously challenged, so no one dares to take any risks with their budgets for fear of failure or being viewed as corporately irresponsible.    They are selling out tomorrow in order to survive today.

It’s all in the mindset…

In NLP speak, this suggests that many businesses are taking an ‘Away-from’ approach, focusing on moving as far away from any risk and potential pain, and not a ‘Towards’ mindset where they have a more positive view of the future and focus on moving towards growth and innovation.   These companies appear to be focusing primarily on reacting to things they cannot affect (the economy, Euro crisis, recession) and not focusing on controlling things they can affect (innovation, product development, improvement, effectiveness).

One for the most damaging behaviours I have noted is the willingness to accept mediocre performance, financial loss, waste and poor behaviours and processes – as long as these suboptimal activities are without a direct owner and blame cannot be attributed.  Conversely, the availability of leadership courage needed to raise heads above the parapet and invest budget in improvement initiatives also seems to have dissolved.   In this mindset, protecting the status quo = survival.

Does the last man standing on a sinking ship win? 

In a recent example, a large manufacturing company has decided that the way it does business currently is ‘optimal’ despite the fact that it’s service levels are sub-standard, premium customers won’t buy from them and it is closing some of its manufacturing capability resulting in large scale job losses.  Their alternative would be to invest in improving; in ‘being better’.  However this requires innovation and learning from outside the organisation – which conflicts with the business’s fixed mindset and belief of itself as superior despite all facts to the contrary.

Another example I’ve come across recently involves a large multi-national organisation that is set to waste hundreds of millions of euros on an ERP implementation that will not deliver on its promise – due to a recognised lack of focus on the business, and too much focus on the technical and IT implementation aspects.  Whilst some in the organisation recognise the signs, the fact is that this project was started and signed off some time ago, and rather than ‘confront the brutal facts’ and spend 0.1% of this potentially wasted investment on ensuring the project succeeded, they would rather continue as is.   I struggled to comprehend why a business wouldn’t invest 0.1% to save 99.9%, until I realised that spending the 0.1% required two things;

1. Someone to authorise the additional budget (which no one was brave enough to do)
2. Courage to acknowledge that issues with their project existed and take action

Their lack of courage and ‘fixed’ mindset prevents them taking proactive action that would I’m sure ensure success.  The end result will be, I’m sure, disappointing, and followed by job losses as the business seeks to recoup money by cutting costs.

So what to do? 

In my next post I look Stateside to the lessons learned from Steve Jobs tenure as the man who turned Apple from a near bankrupt organisation to the world’s most valuable one – and how these lessons should be applied by organisations in order to thrive in these turbulent times.

Battling through the Winter elements…

The past few weeks have seen snow and freezing temperatures here in Loughborough, but we’ve battled on with frozen toes to complete our outdoor testing.

I was pleased to see that a slight dip in my distances before Christmas has been ironed out, as I have finally managed to correct a technical flaw that was really affecting my throwing – I was not using my left toes properly! We threw lots of different weights of hammer to test our strength and speed, and all of my hammers have improved by about 7 metres since last summer. This is a great achievement over the winter months, since over-training usually means that most improvements are reserved for the summer competition season.

Getting Stronger…

We have also been doing testing in our weights sessions. I have been lifting weights for one year exactly now, and it’s great to be able to look back and see all of my process. My squats and Olympic lifts are now three times heavier than they were in January 2011! My training group is currently doing something called hypertrophy, which aims to build as much strength as possible. The sessions are very long, and there is sometimes not much rest, but it will be worth it if I keep seeing results!

Deliberate Diversification…

As well as throwing for Loughborough University, I have joined the Rugby and Northampton Athletics club, so will compete for them over the summer. They are a very good club, but currently have no female throwers, so I will probably be throwing the shot putt and discus for them too – the variety should be fun!

I can’t wait for the competition season to begin so I can start putting what I’ve learnt to practice!

Thank you SEVEN for helping to make this possible!

(Or why ‘the way we do things round here’ stops us from doing things around here!)

Culture exists in every organisation; it controls the way people act and behave, how they talk, how trusting they are, and most importantly, how effective they are at delivering results. It affects staff retention, brand perception and it affects performance. It is completely within the capability of the business to control and shape, yet we often hear people moan about how the ‘organisation’, or its management style prevents work from happening, and projects from succeeding. People complain of being demotivated, disengaged and that the life and energy is being sucked out of the business.

Culture = Innovation killer?

The latest report by Booz & Company called ‘The Innovation 1000 Study’, clearly supports the impact culture has on an organisation. It shows that the success of a company (or a function within a company) is not a matter of how much is spent on R&D, marketing or technology, but rather how they spend it. This study took into consideration two particular qualities:

• Strategic alignment

• Culture

Soft issues, hard results

The Booz study found that culture is the key to innovation success, and its impact on performance is measurable.  It shows how 44% of companies who reported that their innovation strategies are clearly aligned with their business goals (and that their cultures strongly support those innovation goals) delivered 33% higher enterprise value growth and 17% higher profit growth on five-year measures than those lacking such tight alignment.

Addressing the cultural challenge

SEVEN has spent the last 5 years enhancing its significant SAP and Supply Chain capabilities with tools, approaches, training and skills to help companies develop effectiveness and the right environment for success.  If you were to read our website, any of my articles or attend our presentations you will notice that we talk a lot about ‘Culture’ and ‘mindset’, and its impact on an organisations capability to succeed.   This report explains why.

The 2011 Booz & Co report on strategy and business is a must-read for business leaders, regardless of industry. You can read the full report here.

Pleased to announce that my latest article for ‘The European Business Review’ was published today.

This is the second of a two part series I’ve written on ‘Operationalising Excellence – Making It Happen’ and completes the trilogy of articles on the ‘7 Keys to Unlocking Organisational Greatness’ that have been published in this journal. 

All three of these articles can be accessed via the following links:

The 7 Keys to Unlocking Organisational Greatness: 

Operationalising Excellence:  Making It Happen – Part I:

Operationalising Excellence:  Making It Happen – Part II:

I enjoyed writing them; I hope you enjoy reading them!

If you enjoyed these then you may be interested in my next article for The European Business Review, which I’m currently working through.  In this I will expand further the concept of Customer Value Chains and explain how to segment the business into strategic value chain teams, what measures to use, how to align competitive and risk strategies, and how they can be used to create ‘aligned integration’ that ensures long term plans and strategies are followed through to short term functional and systems execution.  I will be also going through specific case studies where we have achieved this, and will show the value organisations can expect to achieve from this ‘mindset’ and behavioural shift.

Organisational greatness is there for the taking.  The barriers are of your own making.  You just need to make the ‘conscious choice’ to go for it!

The last month of training has been dedicated to power and strength generation, and again developing throwing technique. It has been tough, exhausting physically and mentally, but I’ve kept my head down and worked very hard. I have even worn straight through the sole of my throwing shoes!

I am looking forward to being able to recover a little over Christmas, and also to seeing how much I’ve improved in January once I’ve rested.

See Laura in action!

I am so grateful to SEVEN for making this training possible, and thanks to their sponsorship I have been able to get myself new throwing shoes. Attached is a video of me throwing; this one was with a 3kg hammer and went 42.30m.

Launch video

I look forward to working hard in the New Year and wearing out this new pair of shoes in my training to get better!

I recently won a strongwoman competition! It was only a small charity event, but it was great to see my training paying off, and also to have a chance to compete and do something different to my usual training.

It’s all in the preparation…

The events ranged from deadlifting to holding a plank on two Swiss balls. My weights partner, Stef, was great in helping me prepare, and on many an embarrassing occasion she cheered me on as I rolled headfirst and out of control off the Swiss balls, in front of some of the best athletes in the country!

Bandaged but not broken

The observant among you might notice that I’ve got a few bandaged fingers in the photo with the trophy – I had an accident whilst lifting weights last weekend and crushed all of the fingers on my right hand. Initially, the nurses thought that I’d have to have my fingers re-straightened, but surprisingly all of the bones had remained intact! They are now a rather startling blue-green colour, and covered in cuts, but should make a full recovery very quickly.

Balancing Sports and Studies

It has been hard work balancing my training with degree deadlines, and unfortunately I have also had pressures from home, as my grandfather died and my mum has been very ill. I have spent a lot of time looking after her and some of my siblings, and things are starting to get better. I am hugely proud that I have been able to juggle this with both studying at a new university and my first ever term of elite level training.

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at the Harvard Business Review’s Conference on Supply Chain Risk Management in Poland, where I presented the concept that Risk Management should be incorporated into the very fabric of the business, and seen as an opportunity to evaluate the end-to-end Supply Chain, identifying its strengths, threats and weaknesses, and positioning all of these as opportunities to improve.  Anything that could potentially impact your ability to deliver to the customer should be highlighted as a risk. This goes for both internal issues as well as external ones  – in fact internal factors, factors that are within your ability to control, are twice as likely to impact Supply Chain than external factors.

Evaluate your Supply Chains

The starting point for this exercise should be to first step back and evaluate the different Supply Chains that actually exist in your business. It is unlikely that you only have one type of demand in your business, but very likely that you only have one way of satisfying that demand. The key here is to realise that you are potentially taking a ‘cookie cutter’ approach, when in fact different Supply Chains may exist that have different competitive drivers, and thus require different metrics and different supporting behaviours.  Do you measure the purchasing department simply on their ability to buy goods at the cheapest cost, when the key measure should be ensuring reliable supply?

The Weakest Link?

Geographically map out your different Supply Chains – where are the external risks? You may believe you know your suppliers – but do you know their suppliers?  Or their supplier’s supplier?  Any weak link in the Supply Chain could bring your business to a crashing halt.

Tolerance for Risk

Once you understand the different Supply Chains that exist, what they look like, what their main competitive drivers are and what metrics to concentrate on in order to drive the right behaviours to get the right results – then the next step is to analyse the risks and disconnects that are either preventing you from winning, or present a potential risk in the future. Supply Chain strategies that focus on customer service (e.g. reliable delivery) or where the cost of late or lost deliveries are high, generally have a LOW risk tolerance, and thus could be drastically impacted by any risk that affects your ability to supply. Strategies that focus on cost reduction, or where the cost of late deliveries is low, generally have a HIGHER tolerance to risk. Ultimately, the tolerance for risk will determine how much the enterprise will invest in mitigation measures vs. reactive efforts.

Analyse the Impact

One of the key points I proposed is that you should analyse the impact risks have on your ability to compete, and also evaluate whether your risk mitigation activities support your competitive strategies. For example, it is great that you have identified an alternative source of supply – but if reliability is your key competitive driver, and this alternative source is cheap but unreliable, then again this has just strategically injected risk into the business. Looking at business issues and risk management as an opportunity to drive better competitive performance means that not only will you mitigate risk, but you may find new opportunities to strengthen your Supply Chain to create improved levels of performance.

Risk Mitigation

Fully understanding your Supply Chains and their competitive drivers is the best Risk Mitigation strategy you can make – and the biggest risk you can take is not taking time to think about the risks.

Have you taken the time to identify the different risks that impact your Supply Chains, and the effect these can have on your ability to compete?

We live in uncertain times.  

In the last twelve months we have seen governments topple, tsunamis and earthquakes cause personal and Supply Chain devastation, the continued fall out of the banking crisis, public sector strikes in the UK and major European countries unable to service their debt and on the brink of bankruptcy, potentially causing the collapse of the Euro. For as long as I’ve been alive (let’s not go there) I don’t recall a period of time when the immediate outlook appears to be so glum, without any obvious signs of recovery. 

Perfect Storm?

The question is whether what we are currently going through is a temporary ‘perfect storm’ of issues, or the new norm.

So what to do? The over-riding mindset of many businesses to these economic woes is to keep its head down and hope for the best. Many manufacturing companies are announcing major job cuts and the closure of production capabilities, taking a ‘blunt edged’ approach to removing costs out of the Supply Chain. Whilst this reaction is understandable, and companies are simply trying to survive at all costs, I can’t help wondering whether this is the smartest approach. In many cases they are selling the ability to compete tomorrow in order to survive today.

False Economy?

A number of strategic cost reduction decisions have inadvertently embedded new levels of risk and complexity into their Supply Chain - the one-dimensional pursuit of a ‘lowest cost’ model has led to many companies outsourcing and off-shoring key capabilities to countries where labour costs are cheaper. This, however, has sometimes proven to be a false economy, as rising fuel prices have dramatically impacted transportation costs, and labour costs in these countries have risen once people start to demand a higher standard of living. As a reaction to this changing situation, China, for example, has recently begun to outsource its manufacturing to Vietnam, and companies like BMW Motorcycles have moved production back from China to areas of ‘profitable proximity’ i.e. Eastern Europe where the level of risk is low, as well as the costs. Gartner also recently announced that they predict that by 2015 30% of outsourced and off-shored manufacturing will return.

Building Strong Foundations

Recently I posted about Unilever and how they are made the ‘conscious choice’ to invest and redesign their Supply Chains, focusing on customer value and sustainability rather than simply cutting costs. The result – the highest period of growth in 2010 for 30 years, at a lower cost model than when they were cutting costs. Rather than sacrificing the future, they are building strong foundations for it.

Two very different mindsets, and two very different approaches to the current economic crisis. One approach is all around surviving, keeping your head down and hoping this ‘perfect storm’ will pass. The other assumes this is the ‘new normal’, and tales the opportunity to manage their business better in the downturn by taking the opportunity to better position themselves for the upturn – and in doing so finding that growth in this period is possible, as long as you work together, take time to step back from the chaos, and make the choice to make courageous, informed, intelligent decisions about how you can compete in this new environment.

Which approach is your business taking?

In my next post I will discuss an approach businesses can adopt in order to create customer focused, risk conscious, segmented Value Chains. As Charles Darwin once wrote, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”