“If you always do what you’ve always done,
you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”-Tony Robbins
Hi Everyone,
My kids are going to be sophomores in High School next month and as expected their class loads are heavy. They are balancing school, studying, and sports, not to mention friends and romantic interests. I’ve been talking with them about techniques for time management, how to create structure and consistency in their lives. The school calls it Executive Function, I think of it as good habits. I find it interesting when topics in my personal life intersect with my Tahzoo life.
I have been in meetings this week with many people in Delivery about how to
streamline our processes, become more efficient, and systematically eliminate the fire drills. I believe in our team; we have a lot of talented people within Tahzoo. We may have differences in our approaches to solving problems, but I believe that everyone is well intentioned. Having said that, there are some patterns in our company/organization’s habits that are not serving us well.
Our business is changing, and we are not doing custom one-off jobs anymore, we need to standardize our work and our approach. There are also lessons that we’ve already learned that we don’t need to keep learning every time a new person joins the company. For example, the Content Factory needs to run like a factory. It should have consistent, detailed, and documented procedures. Once those are established, we need to be in a model of continuous improvement and drive more output at a lower price over time, just like any business. It is the path to customer satisfaction and profitability. Implementing ContentStack should be templatized and systematic, we need to be faster and less expensive than our competition.
The only way we will achieve these goals is to change how we operate and change our habits. At Nordstrom, I worked for a manager named Steve Schreiber. On my first day at work, he pulled me aside and told me I would not be able to impress him by working heroically long hours. I would only be able to impress him by working smarter. His charge to me was “do it better than everyone else with less expense and in less time.” In the moment it seemed like a tall order but in fact it was just a matter of time management and a process for continual improvement.
We are changing and we are going to change more in the coming weeks and
months. I need everyone on the bus, looking at what is working and what needs to be improved. I am empowering you to take ownership and make Tahzoo a better company.
Let’s go be great!
Brad