We live in a world that measures everything. A world that tells us that metrics are important. However, we often fall on the trap of measuring and reporting on things that are either not useful or not used by anybody.
Insights
Letting go is hard. Being at the center of things and being plugged into everything is comforting because you can be sure that tasks are getting done just the way you like them. However, this is not scalable.
We have all noticed that speech recognition is all around us and that it is getting better by the minute. We are used to talking to Siri, Alexa, our cars, and to being greeted by a computer when we call somebody’s customer support center so it can properly route the call. It is interesting however that most of us do not take full advantage of dictation as a productivity enhancement tool even though it is already available to us everywhere.
Software companies are trying to figure out how to empower their users so they can figure things out on their own. Intuitive graphical user interfaces, embedded help, FAQs and user forums are some of the concepts that have developed recently to help software companies scale more efficiently.
For those of you who have now been using CommandHound for a while, here is a quick list of some features available that you may have forgotten about.
So, what happens when you have defined clear roles and responsibilities, expectations, compensation structures, performance tracking, and your efforts to develop a culture of accountability begin to take hold? It is time to act.
Are you in a work environment that suffers from excessive email traffic? You know you are in one when you receive more than 100 emails in one day. A business can grind to a halt if an email culture of indiscriminate use is allowed to clog every channel.
The short answer is, definitely. Why? Mostly to protect the founders from themselves.
Making the transition from being an entrepreneur-led business to one that operates as an “institution” is not easy. A business that deals with everything that comes their way in a reactive, ad-hoc, team-based manner is not scalable. So, start with clearly defining and communicating a function-based org chart that nicely follows your value-chain.
It is well understood that growing a business requires people. If you want to grow a business fast, therefore, you have to source, filter, and hire of a lot of people very quickly. Identifying the right people, with the right capabilities, and the right cultural fit when the hiring engine is in overdrive requires a special set of safeguards.
