In The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber advocates treating your business as if you intended to franchise it. Whether you franchise or not, he says the discipline of writing out an operations manual for everything will help you to improve the things that stink and make everything you do consistent and professional. Like McDonalds, only with better taste (hopefully).

I’ve found this is a useful way to work. At some point, we’d all like to get to the Four Hour Workweek, right? The way to do that is to act like an owner, not like a worker/manager. Assume others will do everything someday and plan accordingly. So you get to delegate the things you hate, but only after you’ve worked through the way they should be done. You specify what should be done and how it should be done. You train others to do that (or do it that way yourself, if you really want to work in the business) and you hold everyone accountable to the standards you set. So instead of getting outside your comfort zone and staying there until it becomes comfortable, you drive head first into your uncomfort zone, decide what should be done there and how, specify that in writing, then hire or outsource someone to live in that uncomfort zone and do the stuff that you find uncomfortable. Then you sit back and collect the profits.

As Gerber says, Work on your business, not in it.

It was during one of my more difficult assignments as a consultant that I started to equate feelings of inadequacy and frustration at work with the feelings of fatigue and being out of breath that one gets when doing cardio excercises. Working out is supposed to be hard (you know, the no-pain-no-gain thing) and keeping this in mind while making decisions has kept me pushing myself. If work is hard, I’m learning.

The only way to make things more familiar (especially in problem solving) is to take risks. Because the only way you will learn how to solve new problems is to try them and succeed, or try them and fail.

I wrote an article about this called "What I Do When I Hit A Plateau"

There are two things you can do to familiarize yourself with new risks:

• Make a vertical move, which is when you keep training in one skill to reach proficiency.
• Make a horizontal move. which is when you learn different skills to reach proficiency in one task.

These two tactics will allow you to go outside of your comfort zone, and take new risks.

Scientists in academia are (generally) good examples of people who regularly decide that being an expert in everything is not necessary. If research leads into an area where a scientist isn’t an expert, it is more and more common for said scientist to contact his/her friend who is an expert in that topic/field to collaborate on the project.

I haven’t pinpointed any particular rubric for knowing when to collaborate, but certainly outsourcing is the key to maintaining flexibility while staying competitive! In a world of such rapid technological and social advancement, there are fewer and fewer situations in which becoming an expert is the most efficient solution to a problem.

I suspect, however, that for most of us with an entrepreneurial bent, one or both of the following factors affects our desire to outsource or collaborate:

1) personal enjoyment in our pursuit and satisfaction of learning/becoming an expert in new things

2) lack of financial resources for outsourcing

The relative weight you assign to these factors will, of course, affect whether you decide that becoming an expert (or continuing on without one) is an asset or a liability for you.

This is just a little trick that I’ve learned:

I tell myself that lots of people plenty less smart/capable/whatever than I can do it and it would be silly for me to do anything but figure it out.

Long time lurker, first time poster.

I think think one of the major keys to this is good ol’ fashioned awareness of this issue and a healthy dose of humble-pie— admitting that you aren’t good at certain things.

Kepner Tregoe will teach you, for a fee, a very good problem solving rationale - I heartily recommend it to everyone.

The essence of solving a problem is being able to ask the right questions and handle the answer.

Some things to consider...

1. What is a problem? One definition of a problem is that you have a deviation from what you expect (i.e. something isn't doing what it should), you don't know why, and you want to know why. If the answer to all those is yes, then you have a problem to solve. If not, then there's nothing to worry about.

2. Ask Why? until you get to an unknown. Sometimes called the 5 whys - if you ask why 5 times you will always get to an unknown.

e.g.
I can't get my report into the boss
--> Why can't I get my report to the boss?
--> Because I can't print
---> Why can't I print?
---> Because the printer is offline
---> Why is the printer offline?
--- Dunno - this is the problem I must solve.

Ok, so that's a simplistic example, but it works for real problems too.

e.g.

We're going to miss our sales targets

-- Because production is down
--- Production is down because we have a high reject rate
--- We have a high reject rate because our Oojits have grounding faults
--- We don't know why our Oojits have grounding faults

3. Look for closely related things that do work, and see what is different about the thing that actually has the problem. Then look for changes relating ONLY to those differences.

All problems come from change - it's just finding the RELEVANT change that you need to do. Hence looking for only the changes relating to the differences you find.

By closely related things, I mean comparing, say, 2 mobile phones (1 working, 1 broken) rather than a broken mobile phone and a landline phone.

I could go on for a long time!

I’ve learned from the successful and unsuccessful Executives* I recruit, that the minute you believe that you can solve everything, your toast. Concentrate on being extremely accurate at defining or leading the definition of the real problem, and then put the best resources behind its solution.

Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s an expert and maybe it calls for doing something you said you would never do.

Ego gets in the way …

*(Substitute the word Companies for the word Executives and it’s true as well)

You already have a goal, which is often most of the battle. Now you just have to wrestle down to the nitty-gritty all the work that has to go on to accomplish that goal.

There are things that only you can do, like coming up with the ideas for the posts. There are also things that anyone can do, like taking out the trash, you can’t afford the pay cut to do this anymore.

You might want to stop for a moment and evaluate what jobs are being done and need to be done. Then break it into groups: • What you, personally, need to do. • What needs to be done but doesn’t have to be you. Outsource these as soon as you can. • What shouldn’t be done at all. Put on your Don’t Do list. • What can’t be done now, but will have to be done in the future. Start learning.

It is okay to fail at something. It is not okay to not learn from that failure.

IKEA, the Swedish furniture retail franchise, allows for competition among the backbone companies (supply chain, trading etc) which keeps them from stagnating withing the currently very profitable group. If one company can offer the franchise stores a better deal on e.g. transports, it can out-compete the current lead provider. This makes up some sort of limited size free market for services and seems to be working very well.

IKEA has introduced out-sourcing this way and since the retail stores are constantly trying to cut their expenses and improving service, only actually working out-sourcing deals have a chance of replacing the in-house providers.

Personally I always try to do things to get me out of my comfort zone. Making that a habit is the best way to handle strange situations and get new insights.

First: Make it a rule to do something 'strange each week' (See http://wafel.net/2007/10/01/do-something-strange-each-week/)

Second: 3 times means action -- If you encounter something three times in a short period, force yourself to follow-up on it (See http://wafel.net/2007/10/03/my-new-lifehack-rule-three-times-action/)

Have a great day!

--
Walter

man, I used to read this blog for cool solutions and ideas from Merlin, but now it just has a bunch more questions. I don’t need more questions in my life and comment responses are never very answerful.