Family Night – Emergency Night
I’m always looking for new innovative ways to teach the kids lessons. Sometimes the ideas are good, sometimes not so good. One of the ideas I’ve talked to my wife for a while was holding a family emergency night. Since we experienced a snow storm this week, it seemed like a great opportunity.
You may ask, “just what is family emergency night?” Well this time around, it consisted of a simulated power outage. Well, semi-power outage. Before I get to the details of “emergency night”, I feel it is a necessity to set some background for the day.
Due to the recent snowstorm, our rather large family (5 kids) had been cooped up in the house most of the day except for a brief sledding expedition. Brief for the 3 little ones, while the 9 year old big brother got to go on a longer outing. His sleek black plastic sled was the envy of the other adventurous souls which required us to be good neighbors. We shared. Daddy was exhausted. Something to know about having a really good sled…the walk back up the hill is longer.
Later in the evening, approaching dinner, my wife was preparing a delectable pot roast, but unfortunately, it took a little longer to cook than originally planned. Our fallback plan was pizza. Not just any pizza. A Garlic Jim’s pizza! Now being the adventurous type, I opted to skip the home delivery and venture out on the icy roads. Surprisingly, the roads were still amazingly slick and well worth the trip out! 
A few parking break pulls, a little tire spinning, 1 close call on getting stuck and I finally made it home with the pizza still hot. Now enter the “emergency night”.
After getting home, the kids wanted to do a picnic in the living room. Boy did they get more than they intended. We dug up our flashlights and lanterns, turned on the weather radio, and turned out the lights. Oh what a night. With no TV, we played boardgames and had a marvelous time. I think the most entertaining part was sending the boys upstairs in the dark with just their flashlights. I found out later they cheated and turned on their bathroom lights. It was just a little too much for them to be upstairs alone in the dark with just a flashlight.
As I mentioned, sometimes the ideas are good, sometimes not so good. This family emergency night was somewhere in between…depending on whose opinion you get. : ) It wasn’t quite as exciting as the night of the extreme rainstorm and the journey into the basement with our 2 year old and my pregnant wife sitting on a 5 gallon bucket, but it was less stressful!
Family Emergency Night
Omniture Summit – Presentation Update
It’s confirmed. At the 2010 Omniture Summit, we’ll be co-hosting a session with Brent Dykes, Director of an Omniture Consultants group. Brent has some great experience, and we look forward to presenting with him. Brent also has a nice site on building presentations at powerpointninja.com. It should be a fun time, and we both expect a lot of work will be put into the presentation. We’ll be trying to do this session up right!
This year Omniture is doing a few things differently by having their team blog 1-2x per week prior to the Summit. If you are planning to attend the Summit, make sure you visit the Summit Site frequently to take advantage of all the pre-summit resources.
The topic we’ll be work on is Killer Analytics: Best Practices for Making Analytics Strategic.
For more information on the session, go here.
Omniture Summit 2010
Omniture Summit 2010
Since our company’s relationship with Omniture began back in 2007, we’ve steadily been increasing our expertise with their product line. While I’m sure there are many more power users out there who exceed our current level, I feel our efforts have positioned us nicely in the Omniture community. Being positioned as a top 3,000 US website, depending on the day, we face a lot of challenges with our site. DaveRamsey.com supports some 25 different businesses covering several flavors of B2C commerce, B2B commerce, and about 20 different lead types for the various businesses while trying to provide free content and tools for our visitors. Needless to say, it is very challenging.
Omniture has been a fabulous tool for us as we’ve attacked our online design and business problems to increase results. Through our success with Omniture, we’ve been able to conduct on online interview with John Broady, Executive Director at OTTO Digital, contribute to an Omniture case study covering daveramsey.com, participate in the first MindMeld, and most recently contributed to an Omniture Webinar on The Cost of Free.
We’ve recently been pleased to speak with Matt Langie, about the possibility of being a presenter at the 2010 Omniture Summit. This will be our 4th Summit to attend as a company, and we are looking forward to it. Omniture has been a key component to our online strategy over the last 4 years, and we are excited about the opportunity to share some of what we’ve learned with the industry at large.
Jim Collins – How the Mighty Fall – Day 4
Our leadership team will be wrapping up the book early next week, but this week, I’ll cover Stage 3 – Denial of Risk and Peril.
Jim leads out by describing Motorola’s Iridium satellite phone project that cost the company several billion dollars. Jim’s point being that in any stage of the project prior to launch, Motorola could have cancelled saving the company billions. Although it would still come with a cost, it would only have been a fraction what came later.
In another case, Texas Instruments made the investment in voice recognition chips. Over a 20 year period, TI continued to invest and grow their technology knowledge until they were able to make a “big bet” on the technology.
Jim draws the comparison of these 2 companies as opposing gambles. Motorola made their bet born of “Hubris of Success” while TI did not. Emphasizing the principle of not taking risk below the waterline.
Jim then goes on to discuss the NASA Challenger catastrophe. I learned quite a bit about the challenger issue and how even the best organizations with the “best of the best” can make bad decisions with poor leadership.
Jims comparison of Leadership-Team Dynamics: On the way up versus on the way down. I don’t to steal all of Jim’s thunder, so I’ll only share a few.
- (down) People shield those in power from grim facts, fearful of penalty and criticism for shining light on the harsh realities vs. (up) People bring forth unpleasant facts – “come here, look, man, this is ugly” – to be discussed: leaders never criticize those who bring forth harsh realities.
- (down) People assert a strong opinions without providing data, evidence or a solid argument vs. (up) people bring data, evidence, logic, and solid arguments to the discussion.
- (down) team members seek as much credit as possible for themselves yet do not enjoy the confidence and admiration of their peers vs. (up) each team member credits other people for success yet enjoys the confidence and admiration of his or her peers.
Jim shares a few more good comparisons.
Markers for Stage 3
- Amplify the positive, discount the negative.
- Big bets and bold goals without empirical validation
- Incurring huge downside risk based on ambiguous data
- Erosion of healthy team dynamics
- Externalizing blame
- Obsessive reorganizations
- Imperious Detachement
Jim Collins, How the Mighty Fall
Jim Collins – How the Mighty Fall – Day 3
Loving Jim’s book, How the Mighty Fall.
The interesting point of this book for me has been realizing that as a whole, our company is doing very well in the areas that Jim outlines. However, as you compartmentalize some of our business segments, you can see elements of How the Mighty Fall creeping in. In Stage 2, Jim explains how a company’s success can create the undisciplined pursuit of more. Through several examples, Jim’s research explains details as company’s struggle to maintain or create accelerated growth. As they strive to acheive this growth, companies can loose focus on the things that made them successful or overstretch and take unnecessary risks with their resources.
I agree strongly with “Packard’s Law” as mentioned by Jim. No company can consistenly grow revenues faster than it’s ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth and still become a great company. The creates the counter wisdom of a great company is more likely to die from an ingestion of too much opportunity than starvation from too little. It is imperative that you fill key seats on the bus with the right people.
As companies start to fill key roles with the wrong people, a typical response is to add more rules and regulations to control quality. However, this accelerates the downward spiral of the company as the most talented people expect and require more freedom to produce results. A bloated bureacracy drives away the most talented people further compounded the problem. You no longer have to hire quality people to continue growth. You also have to replace talent to maintain past results.
Markers for Stage 2 – Undisciplined Pursuit of More
- Unsustainable Quest for Growth, Confusing Big with Great
- Undisciplined Discontinuous Leap
- Declining Proportion of Right People in Key Seats
- Easy Cash Erodes Cost Disciplined
- Bureacracy Subverts Discipline
- Problematic Succession of Power
- Personal Interests Placed Above Organizational Interests
Enjoying Jim’s Material
Jim Collins, How the Mighty Fall – Day 2
My apologies. I’ve been reading the book, but I haven’t been posting. I’ve got some catching up to do.
We covered Stage 1, Hubris Born of Success, 3 weeks ago. It was a great discussion about how past success can make a company arrogant to the point they get careless. “We can do no wrong.” This in turn can cause the company to neglect the very things that made them successful in the first place. Usually, a company finds success by stringing together a series of good decisions and initiatives. Seldom does success come in one fell swoop. It is that ongoing series of good decisions that companies begin to stray from that is brought on by Hubris of Success. Jim first cited Circuit City as an example of how Hubris began with their CEO in an interview back in late 1998. 10 years later, Circuit City folded.
Once a company has built their successful flywheel, that flywheel must be maintained. Extending the company’s business lines can be done, but care must be taken to maintain the primary flywheel. In Circuit City’s case, they ran unopposed for years and soon found their market share eroding to the upstart Best Buy. Circuit City failed to adjust accordingly.
Jim listed several other compelling examples of the Hubris of Success including A&P with Wal-Mart as the comparison company.
Jim’s Markers for Stage 1, Hubris of Success
- Success Entritlement, Arrogance
- Neglect of a Primary Flywheel
- “What” Replaces “Why”
- Decline in Learning Orientation
- Discounting the Role of Luck
Speed Does Matter
Tim Munsell, our lead web analyst, ran across this great resource on how site download speeds affect results and revenue of web sites. We’re in the middle of a rollout for our new website at http://beta.daveramsey.com and I’ve been harping lately on the size of the new website compared to the old website. It’s nice to have a pretty website, but you still have to be wary of the download times. A page or site that is too big can spell disaster, and you might not even realize it.
Check out this and post your thoughts.
http://www.watchingwebsites.com/archives/proof-that-speeding-up-websites-improves-online-business
Netflix Cultural Presentation Leak
A VP buddy of mine from work passed this link to me. It was never meant to be leaked out to the public, but Netflix does some very interesting things in their company. Check it out. It is worth the look.
Jim Collins – How the Mighty Fall, Day 1
I recently started reading How the Mighty Fall by Jim Collins. Dave Ramsey, our CEO, was given an article by my boss, Bill Hampton, that summarized How the Mighty Fall. Dave, being the driven and forward thinking guy that he is, went out and picked up the book. Recently, I found out that he’s going through the book with some trusted friends. Several years ago, Dave purchase another of Jim’s books, Good to Great, and covered it with his team leaders. It was a great book, and greatly added to my development as a professional.
As I began reading How the Mighty Fall before going to bed, I’ve found the book to be well written and very thought provoking. As such, I’ve decided to blog about my journey through the book in hopes to aid other leaders trying to make the most of their opportunities and carry their companies through these tough economic times.
If you’ve read one of Jim Collins’ other books, Built to Last and Good to Great, you know that Jim’s approach is to conduct tons of thorough research that supports his conclusions and writing. How the Mighty Fall follows this same approach using the data from his other books but with a twist. Instead of using the data to support the decisions and approaches that turn good companies into great companies, Jim flips the data and shows us how companies descended from good stable or perhaps great companies to irrelevancy or death. Circuit City is one of those examples.
One of the early statements from How the Mighty Fall goes something like this: While Good to Great shows that great companies usually follow the same track to success, companies that descended to irrelevancy have followed any number of routes. 1 general path to success. Numerous paths to decline or failure.
Unlike Good to Great where Jim walks you through the data and takes you on a journey of success to validate his level 5 leadership formula for a companies success, How the Mighty Fall introduces the 5 Stages of Decline on page 25. While How the Mighty Fall is a short read, the anchor statement of the book is delivered very early in the read. Since I am only on page 33, I expect the rest of Jim’s material to validate the 5 stages while letting us look into companies that have taken the fall from success.
The 5 Stages of Decline
- Hubris Born of Success
- Undisciplined Pursuite of More
- Denial of Risk and Peril
- Grasping for Salvation
- Capitulation to Irrelevance and Death
If you just can’t wait for my review, check out Amazon.com reviews.
