Monday 3 December 2012

Superior Returns for Your Shareholders

WHAT HAVE YOU LOOKED AT MOST?

This blog series started in February 2009 - but which post has attracted the most visits since then? It was July 2010. So we wondered why? Is it because it contains the answer that MOST business leaders need to find?

So let us repeat the central message of that blog - 
If you want to generate superior returns for your shareholders, not just for this year or next but sustainably into the future, generation after generation then doing all the right things and doing them really well has to be at the core of your business philosophy and strategy. How can we make this assertion?
 
Well first from many years of business experience, including learning from our many mistakes in not doing all the right things and/or not doing them really well. Then nearly 20 years of working with clients as business coaches and learning what really enables sustainable, superior business performance and what does not. But it’s not just us; the research of several eminent business and economic experts backs up our experiential conclusions. For example:
  • Professor Vinod Singhal of Georgia State Institute of Technology, whose extensive research into the effective implementation of TQM demonstrated that those businesses that achieved and sustained this were twice as profitable as the average business.
  • Robert Buzzell & Bradley Gale whose work on the Profit Impact of Market Strategies identified the crucial importance of Relative Perceived Quality by the customer as a key driver of profitability, described in their book the PIMS Principles.
  • The work of Robert Kaplan and David Norton on the development of Balanced Scorecard demonstrated clearly how financial performance is an outcome of the quality of everything that goes before.
  • Jim Collins research on what makes a good company able to become a great company, described in his book “From Good to Great”.
  • Michael Jarrett, Adjunct Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, whose work published in his book “Changeability” in 2009 confirmed our own work and experience when we first defined and publicised this new business culture criterion in our “Why Excellence” seminars in 2003.
So not only is it Common Sense but a lot of work and research by some really bright people says that common sense works and works better. To actually make it work in your business requires you to find the answer to two questions.

What are all the right things?
And
What does doing them really well actually mean?

What does this mean in real life for you?

Finding the answer to these two questions can be made very complicated and can produce very large and intricate action plans, policies or strategies – and that is what happens far too often.  Or it can be made very simple with clear expectations for everybody involved .  There is no doubt in our minds that the exceptionally successful companies are those that have learned how to make finding these answers very simple.
In other words, it is not what they are doing that is different.  It is how they think about what they are doing that is different and that is what makes the difference in the results that they obtain.

Capitalism or .... Common Sense is brought to you by Steve Goodman & Tony Ericson, partners in ChangeWORLD &Achievement Coaching International where we help businesses to learn different thinking to enable different actions that deliver the different results that Make a Big Difference. It is one of our "Excellence Quartet" of blogs promoting the cause of Excellence as the key to prosperity. We publish a new article on one of these blogs reguklarly using a recent business/financial topic to highlight different perspectives and conclusions from those obtained using conventional thinking and techniques. You can read the other three blogs at -Exceeding Expectations - You're having a laugh ... seriously-Business Bloop of the Month Award - and you can catch up with our weekly commentary on The Week before This Week