Up Your Cash Flow / Goldstein 72-73

73 Have your accountants train your bookkeeping personnel to prepare the statements. Let the accountants confine their activity to a cursory review after the bookkeeper has completed the major portion of the work. This should reduce professional fees substantially and provide you with much-needed data.

Have your accountant recomment a free-lance bookkeeper.

Understanding financial statements is not enough. You much have a management information system that monitors properly prepared financial statements, cash balances, future cash needs, accounts receivable and inventories.

CASH IS KING, ALWAYS HAS BEEN AND ALWAYS WILL BE.

The Pursuit of WOW/Peters 73-75

74 Invest in players with day-to-day responsibilities for the nitty-gritty, invest in the junior aide who will tell the politisco, as she heads for the House floor to cast her ballot.

Keeping customers informed may be the premier element of good service. Explain and update your explanation--even if you have nothing new to say.

75 What works for customers also works for employees: Discuss in excruciating detail with them the new unpaid leave policy, the new health plan, the meaning of the big customer we lost (or gained) last week, the announcement of a new chain-store competitor opening a block away six months hence. You don't have to have all the answers. (Or even any for-sure answers.) Just making the effort to discuss things openly, vigorously, and repeatedly is itself a good thing to do.

The idea of "keeping people informed" (customers, suppliers, franchisees, employee, bankers, securities analyst) is hardly novel.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 175-178

178 Information Age companies seeking to exploit information's economics need to understand that strategic armamentarium available to them. There are essentially three kinds--families--of weapons.

1) Using Friends--some of whom might be competitors--to create and sustain early advantages in market share.

We want ubiquity first, then profitability.

Alliances are especially powerful weapons in information-intensive businesses, because the low marginal cost of information--its near zero manufacturing cost--allows alliances to be assemble quickly, and lock-in makes them strong.

2) Cooperative Strategies and Defending Leadership Positions.

...provided the company uses its leverage to create customer capital, rather than simply squeezing its suppliers and distributors to increase its own profit margins.

3) Learning as a Competitive Weapon

In the printed form thought is more imperishable than ever: it is volatile, intangible, indestructible; it is in the air we breathe..

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 118-122

121 Rathmann/Amgen also understood an alternative exists: Avoid bureaucracy and hierarchy and instead create a culture of discipline.

122 You never just focus on what you've accomplished for the year; you focus on what you've accomplished relative to exactly what you said you were going to accomplish--no matter how tough the measure.

Up Your Cash Flow / Goldstein 71-72

72 First we must lean to understand financial accounting.

Review sample financial statements
Enroll in an accounting course.
The third method is the easiest and the least time consuming. Every time financial statements are prepared, have your accountant explain them in detail. ask "Now that you've prepared this data, how is the information going to help me and my business?"

Every business should review financial accounting once each month. This data should be compared to your budget on a line-by-line basis. If there is a problem getting the data monthly, have statements prepared no less than once each year.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 170-175

171 The buyer cannot judge whether it's worth paying for a piece of information until he has it; but once he possesses it, he no longer needs to purchase it.

174 Knowledge-intensive businesses violate another basic economic law, that of diminishing returns...

175 The parts of the economy that are knowledge-based, on the other hand, are largely subject to increasing returns.

The Pursuit of WOW/Peters 68-73

69 Do manuals vs Don't manuals. ...manuals are typically company policy and procedures manuals---Don't manuals...this squelch innovation

73 "A minute with the CEO is worth a month with the guy or gal two levels down".

From those days onward I've paid most of my precious attention (time is all we have) to the people with access to the people who actually move the ball down the field.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 116-118

118 HEDGEHOG CONCEPT (SIMPLICITY WITHIN THE THREE CIRCLES)--Summary

To go from gtg requires a deep understanding of three intersecting circles translated into a simple, crystalline concept (the Hedgehog Concept) What you are deeply passionate about, What drives your economic engine, What you can be the best in the world at.

The key to understand what your organization can be the best in the world at, and equally important what it cannot be the best at--not what it "wants" to be the best at. The Hedgehog Concept is not a goal, strategy, or intention; it is an understanding.

If you cannot be the best in the world at your core business, then your core business cannot form the basis of your Hedgehog Concept.

The "best in the world" understanding is a much more severe standard than a core competence. You might have a competence but not necessarily have the capacity to be truly the best in the world at that competence. Conversely, there may be activities at which you could become the best in the world, but at which you have not current competence.

To get insight into the drivers of your economic engine, search for the one denominator (profit per x or, in the social sector, cash flow per x) that has the single greatest impact.

GTG companies set their goals and strategies based on bravado.

Getting the Hedgehog Concept is an iterative process. The Council can be a useful device.

The gtg companies are more like hedgehogs--simple, dowdy creatures that know "one big thing" and stick to it. The comparison companies are more like foxes--crafty, cunning creatures that know many things yet lack consistency.

It took four years on average for the gtg companies to get a Hedgehog Concept.

Strategy per se did not separate the gtg companies from the comparison companies. Both sets had strategies, and there is no evidence that the gtg companies spent more time on strategic planning than the comparison companies.

You absolutely do not need to be in a great industry to produce sustained great results. No matter how bad the industry, every gtg company figured out how to produce truly superior economic returns

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 163-170

169 Information about money has become more valuable than money itself. The intangible economy is now arguably of equal or greater size than the tangible economy.

170 Knowledge is what economics call a public good.

The Pursuit of WOW/Peters 66-68

67 Treat temporary workers just as you would a permanent employee--welcome them into your company, show them respect and trust, give them real responsibilities, and hold them to the same high standard.

IT'S SERVICES, STUPID.

68...all men and women are performing service activities--let's organize and compensate accordingly.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 115-116

116 Does every organization have a Hedgehog Concept to discover? What if you wake up, look around with brutal honesty, and conclude: "We're not the best at anything, and we never been." Therein lies one of the most exciting aspects of the entire study. In the majority of cases, the gtg companies were not the best in the world at anything and showed no prospects of becoming so.

Up Your Cash Flow / Goldstein 69-71

71Yet, today's economic conditions demand that management of all companies, large or small, learn as much as possible about using and understanding financial accounting. Not too many years ago, we could solve financial problems by passing on price increases to our customers.That was accepted as part of the times. Inflation helped hip mistakes.

Today, however, inflation is gone, competition is tougher than ever, business is more complex, and money is harder to come by. It is far more important to master the skills necessary to keep our business alive. We must run our business in a business-like manner

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 162-163

163 TEN PRINCIPLES FOR MANAGING INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL

1. Companies don't own human and customer capital...Only by recognizing this shared ownership can a company manage and profit from these assets.
2. To create human capital it can use, a company needs to foster teamwork, communities of practice, and other social forms of learning.
3. To manage and develop human capital, companies must unsentimentally recognize that some employees...aren't assets: Organizational wealth is created around those skills and talents that are (1) proprietary, in the sense that no one does them better and (2) strategic, in that the work they do creates the value customers pay for. People with those talents are assets to invest in. Others are costs to be minimized, as far as your business is convened; the skills might be assets for someone else.
4. Structural capital is the intangible asset companies own outright.
5. Structural capital serves two purposes: to amass stockpiles of knowledge that support the work customers value, and to step up the flow of that information inside the company.
6. Information and knowledge can and should substitute for expense physical an financial assets.
7. Knowledge work is custom work. Mass-produced solutions won't yield high profits.
8. Every company should reanalyze the value chain of the in the industry it participates.
9. Focus on the flow of information.
10. Human, structural, and customer capital work together.

The Pursuit of WOW/Peters 64-66

65 The age of mass production is fading fast. The emerging economy is based on knowledge, imagination, curiosity, and talent.

...the relationship between knowledge workers and their organization is a distinctly new phenomenon.

66 Organize everything into projects, and allow members to assign themselves to those projects.

Allow careers to unfold as they will.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 114-115

115 Build the Council, and use that as a model.

Characteristics of the Council
1. The council exists as a device to gain understanding about important issues facing the organization.
2. The Council is assembled and used by the leading executives and usually consists of 5 to 12 people.
3. Each Council member has the ability to argue and debate in search of understanding, not from the egoistic need to win a point or protect a parochial interest.
4. Each Council member retains the respect of every other Council member, without exception.
5. Council members come from a range of perspectives, but each member has deep knowledge about some aspects of the organization and/or the environment in which it operates.
6. The Council includes key members of the management team but is not limited to members of the management team, nor is every executive automatically a member.
7. The Council is a standing body, not an ad hoc committee assembled for a specific project.
8. The Council meets periodically, as much as once a week, or as infrequently as once per quarter.
9. The Council does not seek consensus, recognizing that consensus decisions are often at odds with intelligent decisions. The responsibility for the final decision remains with the leading executive.
10. The Council is an informal body, not listed on any formal organization chart or in any formal documents.
11. The Council can have a range of possible names, usually quite innocuous. In the gtg companies, they had benign names like Long-Range Profit Improvement Committee, Corporate Products Committee, Strategic Thinking Group, and Executive Council.

Up Your Cash Flow / Goldstein 47-69

69 ...a lack of adequate recordkeeping is a major cause of business failure.

Owners and managers of small companies find themselves in the position of leadership by accident rather than by design. They often lack the necessary knowledge to understand and utilize financial data.

Lack of experience leads them to conclude that financial data is for bankers, accountants, and the Internal Revenue Service, but not of much value in the decision making process.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 157-162

159 The more you know about your customer's business, the better you can serve them.

161 Use the information you have to provide a vital service to your customer, making it harder for him to switch to another supplier.