“If you stop eating just one slice of bread a day, one, you’ll lose 8 to 10 pounds a year doing nothing else.”(1)
“If you stop eating just one slice of bread a day, one, you’ll lose 8 to 10 pounds a year doing nothing else.”
Physically fit Sylvester Stallone… of Rocky and Rambo fame… does NOT recommend difficult diets. Sly recommends simply consuming a little bit less of what you currently enjoy eating. Now that’s an improvement plan almost anyone can bite into. “If you’re addicted to chocolate cookie dough ice cream, have it! Just eliminate something else from your diet the next day.” (1)
For most people and organizations, implementing and sustaining change is difficult. As a result, change is commonly postponed or abandoned. A sly approach to achieving change is doing a little, not a lot.
Achieving 10% of a simple plan instead of 0% of a perfect plan is 100% better for you or your organization. Here are a couple examples of simple, sly moves:
- Based on a simple technique found in a book titled All Your Worth, my wife and I spent 45-minutes categorizing everything in our April 2005 checkbook as (a) Must Haves; (b) Wants; and, (c) Savings. The authors recommend 50%, 30% and 20%, respectively. “Testing yourself against the Balanced Money Formula is a little like checking your cholesterol against the recommended levels. It helps you flag when something is wrong, and it shows you where you need to take a closer look at your money choices.” [2]This simple financial analysis showed we need to redeploy $325 from Wants into Savings. The 45-minute exercise was certainly not as comprehensive as what we’d get from a Certified Financial Planner, but we made good progress none-the-less.
- According to Bain & Company’s 2005 Management Tools & Trends Survey [3], Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Activity Based Management (ABM) systems are rated high in usage and satisfaction. Implementing all of these tools can be expensive and time consuming. As a simple alternative, ICMS has created 5-Minute ABM [4], an Excel-based template organizations can use to quickly calculate activity-based customer profitability. Harvard professors Robert Kaplan and V. G. Narayanan recommend using ABM and CRM in a four-quadrant BSC [5]to (a) Celebrate Targeted Profitable customers; (b) Watch Untargeted Profitable customers; (c) Transform Targeted Unprofitable customers; and, (d) Eliminate Untargeted Unprofitable customers. While 5-Minute ABM is not perfect, it’s far better than doing nothing!
The dictionary defines sly as “stealthily clever”. Without fanfare, simply eliminate a slice of bread and an unprofitable customer from your diet this month. The results will have a positive impact on both your physical and fiscal health.
[1] Sly Moves, Sylvester Stallone & David Hochman, Harper Resource, 2005 [2] All Your Worth, Elizabeth Warren & Amelia Warren Tyagi, Free Press, 2005 [3] www.bain.com/management_tools [4] To receive a free 5-Minute ABM template, e-mail tompryor@icms.net [5] www.acornsys.com/company/whitepapers
