Here are 3 simple thinking techniques I tend to use each day.  There are some more advanced thinking techniques, but here I’m boiling down to a set of 3 you can use today.  In fact, you can even use them while you read this post.  I’ll go through the thinking techniques in order from simpler to more complex, so you can use them right away.

For the sake of this exercise, let’s think of "thinking" as simply asking and answering questions.  If you want to improve your thinking, ask better questions.  Using these techniques will improve your thinking, by improving your questions.

3 Thinking Techniques
Here are 3 thinking techniques I use fairly regularly:

• How Might That Be True?
• PMI
• Six Thinking Hats

How Might That Be True
When you hear something new, or information that conflicts with what you think you already know, ask yourself, "how might that be true?"  This simple question will open your curiosity.  It can also help you build rapport.  This second point is especially important.  If you’re quick to prove people wrong, people won’t share information with you.  Rather than fight somebody on a point, right from the start, you can help them explore the point.

You don’t have to agree.  Instead, you’re exploring possibility.  Sometimes people have good information or knowledge, but it’s generalized so it appears to be wrong, but there’s kernels of truth or insight.

PMI
I think of PMI as Edward de Bono’s simplified version of Six Thinking Hats.  PMI is simply Plus Points, Minus Points, and Interesting Points.  Basically, all you do is ask yourself:

1. What are the plus points?
2. What are the minus points?
3. What are the interesting points?

This helps you expand your thinking.  Notice how the plus points are first.  This helps find the good first, before shutting it down with minus points.  By looking for interesting points, you find yet another class of insights.  This is where you might find some unexpected "ah-has."

Six Thinking Hats
Six Thinking Hats is Edward de Bono’s hard-core thinking technique, and it’s highly effective.  You can use it for yourself or even in a room full of people.  The beauty of the Six Thinking Hats is that you explore multiple perspectives for more complete thinking.  The Six Hats are:

• White Hat – the facts and figures
• Red Hat – the emotional view
• Black Hat – the “devil’s advocate”
• Yellow Hat – the positive side
• Green Hat – the creative side
• Blue Hat – the organizing view

The most effective way I’ve found to turn these into action is to turn the hats into simple questions:

• What are the facts and figures? (White Hat)
• What’s your gut reaction?  How do you feel about this? (Red Hat)
• Why can’t we do this?  What prevents us?  What’s the downside? (Black Hat)
• How can we do this? (Yellow Hat)
• What are additional opportunities? (Green Hat)
• How should we think about this? (what are the metaphors or mental models)  (Blue Hat)

If you’re in a room full of people, rather than fight on topics, you can team up.  Go to the whiteboard, write the list of questions above, and cycle through them as a group.  Instead of tug-of-war, you’re now teaming up on “what are the facts and figures?” …  … “why can’t we do this?” … “how can we do this?” … etc.  This technique helps “black hat critics” step out of character and your reduce the overall energy drain of fighting point by point.  Instead, you improve your overall thinking as a group.

What are your favorite thinking techniques?

My Related Posts

• How Might That Be True
• PMI
• Six Thinking Hats
• How To Use Six Thinking Hats
• Asking Better Questions

Photo by Capture Queen.

What are the key stages in an innovation life cycle?  What is the end-to-end value chain for bringing innovation to market? In “Smart Spenders, the Global Innovation 1000,” an article in strategy+business magazine, Barry Jaruzelski, Kevin Dehoff, and Rakesh Bordia write about the four key stages of innovation that the 94 high-leverage innovators have in common.

Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:

• Use the frame to analyze improvement opportunities.  I found this frame helpful for thinking about the end-to-end cycle for innovation.  After all, what good are ideas if you can’t bring them to market.  A lot of ideas get stuck in the ideation stage.
• Walk your innovation cycle.  By walking your end-to-end system for bringing your ideas to end-users, you can find ways to reduce friction or find places to build synergies. 
• Optimize your system over a stage.  Debottlenecking your end-to-end system is more effective than optimizing just a single stage.

Four Stages of Innovation
According to Jaruzelski, Dehoff, and Bordia, the four key stages of innovation are:

• Stage 1. Ideation – Basic research and conception.
• Stage 2. Project Selection – The decision to invest.
• Stage 3. Product Development – Building the product or service.
• Stage 4. Commercialization – Bringing the product or service to market and adapting it to customer demands.

High-Leverage Innovators
Jaruzelski, Dehoff, and Borida write:

Based on press coverage and interviews with executives, we conclude that each of the 94 high-leverage innovators has built sufficiently strong capabilities in all four links of the value chain, and has seamlessly integrated them, to provide a high level of performance over time.

My Related Posts

• 4 Stages of Market Maturity
• High-Leverage Strategies for Innovation
• 3 Keys for a Successful Innovation
• Innovation Objectives
• Innovation, Quantification, and Orchestration
• Innovation
• Orchestration
• Quantification

Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:

• Ask what your business should be.
• Systematically abandon what no longer adds value.
• Don’t waste energy defending yesterday.
• Exploit today and tomorrow through systematic analysis.
• Systematically analyze existing products, services, processes, markets, end users and distribution channels.
• Defining your business’s purpose and mission enable you to set objectives, develop strategies, and concentrate resources.

What Should Your Business Be
Drucker writes that you should aim to figure out how to modify, extend and develop your business:

What will our business be?  Aims at adaption to anticipated changes.  It aims at modifying, extending, and developing the existing, ongoing business.  But there is need also to ask, What should our business be?  What opportunities are opening up or can be created to fulfill the purpose and mission of the business by making it into a different business?  Businesses that fail to ask this question are likely to miss their major opportunity.

Systematically Abandon the Old
Drucker writes that you should adjust for changes in society, economy, and market as well as respond to innovation:

Next to changes in society, economy, and market as factors demanding consideration in answering the question What should our business be? comes, of course, innovation, one’s own and that of others.  Just as important as the decision on what new and different things to do is planned, systematic abandonment of the old that no longer fits the purpose and mission of the business, no longer conveys satisfaction to the customer or customers, no longer makes a superior contribution.

Exploit Today and Work on Making Tomorrow
Drucker writes that you should systematically analyze what your business is and what it should be to survive and thrive:

An essential step in deciding what our business is, what it will be, and what it should be is, therefore, systematic analysis of all existing products, services, processes, markets, end users, and distribution channels.  Are they still viable?  And are they likely to remain viable?  Do they still give value to the customer?  And they are likely to do so tomorrow?  Do they still fit the realities of population and markets, of technology and economy?  And if not, how can we best abandon them – or at least stop pouring in further resources and efforts?  Unless these questions are being asked seriously and systematically, and unless managements are willing to act on the answers to them, the best definition of “what our business is, will be, and should be,” will remain a pious platitude.  Energy will be used up in defending yesterday.  No one will have the time, resources or will to work on exploiting today, let alone to work on making tomorrow.

Purpose and Mission Enable Objectives, Strategies, and Focus
Drucker writes that defining the purpose of your business is the key to managing a business:

Defining the purpose and the mission of the business is difficult, painful and risky.  But it alone enables a business to set objectives, to develop strategies, to concentrate its resources, and to go to work.  It alone enables a business to be managed for performance.

My Related Posts

• How Much Profitability Do You Really Need?
• 5 Bad Entrepreneurial Habits
• Vision, Mission, and Values
• Measure of Success
• Four Needs of the Organization

The Five Bad Entrepreneurial Habits
According to Drucker, the five bad habits are:

1. NIH (Not Invented Here)
2. “Cream” a market.
3. The belief in “quality.”
4. The illusion of the “premium” price.
5. Maximize rather than optimize.

The Downfall of Established Companies
Drucker writes how the bad habits let small companies use Entrepreneurial judo:

There are in particular five fairly common bad habits that enable newcomers to use entrepreneurial judo and to catapult themselves into a leadership position in an industry against the entrenched, established companies.

Not Invented Here (NIH)
Drucker writes about the Not Invented Here syndrome:

The first is what American slang calls NIH (“not invented here”), the arrogance that leads a company  or an industry to believe that something new cannot be any good unless they themselves thought of it.  And so the new invention is spurned, as was the transistor by the American electronics manufacturers.

“Cream” a Market
Drucker writes about the pitfall of only chasing the big customers:

The second is the tendency to “cream” a market, that is to get the high-profit part of it.

This is basically what Xerox did and what made it an easy target for the Japanese imitators of its copying machines.  Xerox focused its strategy on the big users, the buyers of large numbers of machines or of expensive, high-performance machines.  It did not reject the others; but it did not go after them.  In particular, it did not see fit to give them service.  In the end it was dissatisfaction with the service – or rather, with the lack of service – Xerox provided for its smaller customers that made them receptive to competitor’s machines.

“Creaming” is a violation of the elementary managerial and economic precepts.  It is always punished by loss of market.

The Belief in “Quality”
Customers only pay for what they value — they don’t care how hard it was for you to produce it.  Drucker writes:

Even more debilitating is the third bad habit: the belief in “quality.”  “Quality” in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in.    It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for.  A product is not “quality” because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe.  That is incompetence.  Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value.  Nothing else constitutes “quality.”

The Illusion of the “Premium” Price
Drucker warns to watch out for “premium” prices:

Closely related to both “creaming” and “quality” is the fourth bad habit, the illusion of the “premium” price.  A “premium” price is always an invitation to the competitor.

What looks like higher profit for the established leader is in effect  a subsidy to the newcomer who, in a very few years, will unseat the leader and claim the throne for himself.  “Premium” prices, instead of being an occasion for joy – and a reason for  a higher stock price or a higher price/earnings multiple – should always be considered a threat and dangerous vulnerability.

Yet the illusion of higher profits to be achieved through “premium” prices is almost universal, even though it always opens the door to entrepreneurial judo.

Maximize Rather Than Optimize
The fifth bad habit is maximizing when you should be optimizing.  Drucker writes that you need to optimize and move on, rather than maximize:

Finally, there is a fifth bad habit that is typical of established business and leads to their downfall.  They maximize rather than optimize.  As the market grows deep and develops, they try to satisfy every single user through the same product or service.  Xerox is a good example of a company with this habit.

Examples of Optimizing Over Maximizing
Drucker provides a couple of examples how smaller competitors beat the larger company through optimizing rather than maximizing:

Similarly, when the Japanese came onto the market with their copiers in competition with Xerox, they designed machines that fitted specific groups of users – for example, the small office, whether that of the dentist, the doctor, or the school principal.  They did not try to match the features of which the Xerox people were the proudest, such as the speed of the machine or the clarity of the copy.  They gave the small office what the small office needed most, a simple machine at a low cost.  And once they had established themselves in that market, they then moved in on the other markets, each with a  product designed to serve optimally a specific market segment.

Sony similarly first moved into the low end of the radio market, the market for cheap portables with limited range.  Once it had established itself there, it moved in on the other market segments.

Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:

• Just because you aren’t the first, doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea.
• Go after the low-profit part of the market too, not just the “cream.”
• Customer’s don’t care how hard it is for you; they only pay for what they value.
• Beware of “premium” prices.
• Optimize over maximize.

My Related Posts

• Innovation Objectives
• Innovation
• The Business Development Process is Not Static
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding

Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:

• Innovation, Quantification and Orchestration are the keys to your business.  Innovation, Quantification and Orchestration are the backbone of business development.
• Innovate in how you do things.  Innovate in how your business does business.
• Quantify it.  Know the impact of your innovation.  Quantify the impact of your innovations.
• Bake your innovations into your business processes.   Turn your innovation into results.

I have to admit, I really do like the distinctions and the precision that Gerber puts to the business development process.  What he’s really emphasizing is that your business is a living, breathing system with people and processes and that to survive, your business needs to continue to grow and learn through innovation.  But innovation doesn’t help if you don’t know the impact or if you don’t actually make it a part of your business.  Beautiful.

Reflecting back, I know that innovation was a key part of our patterns & practices team.  We pushed innovation and changing the game.  It wasn’t necessarily about innovating in the product, though we did that too, it was about innovating in how we built what we built.

The Three Part of a Business Development Process
According to Gerber, the three parts of the business development process are Innovation, Quantification, and Orchestration.

Building the Prototype of your business is a continuous process, a Business Development Process.  It’s foundation is three distinct yet thoroughly integrated activities through which your business can pursue its natural evolution.  They are Innovation, Quantification and Orchestration.

Innovation
Gerber says you should innovate the way in which your business does business:

The Franchise Revolution has brought with it an application of Innovation that has been almost universally ignored by American business.  By recognizing that it is not the commodity that demands Innovation but the process by which it is sold, the franchiser aims his innovative energies at the way in which his business does business.  To the franchiser, the entire process by which the business does business is a marketing tool, a mechanisms for finding and keeping customers.  Each and every component of the business system is a means through which the franchiser can differentiate his business from all other businesses in the mind of his consumer.

Quantification 
Gerber writes that you should quantify your innovation so you know the impact and where to spend your energy:

But on its own, Innovation leads nowhere.  To be at all effective, all Innovations need to be quantified.  Without Quantification, how would you know whether the Innovation worked?  By Quantification, I’m talking about the numbers related to the impact an Innovation makes.

Orchestration
Gerber writes that you should integrate your most effective innovations into your processes and routines:

Once you innovate a process and quantify its impact on your business, once you find something that works better than what preceded it, once you discovered how to increase the “yeses” from your customers, your employees, your suppliers, and your lenders — at that point, it’s time to orchestrate the whole thing.  Orchestration is the elimination of discretion, or choice, at the operating level of your business.  Without Orchestration, nothing could be planned, and nothing anticipated — by you or your customer.  If you’re doing everything differently each time you do it, if everyone in your company is doing it by their own discretion, their own choice, rather than creating order, you’re creating chaos.

My Related Posts

• Innovation
• Quantification
• Orchestration
• The Business Development Process is Not Static
• Work On Your Business Rather Than In It

Key Take Aways
Here are my key take aways:

• Be a master of exclusion.   Less is more.  Ruthlessly prioritize and focus on the vital few.
• Boil it down to simple + profound. Create messages that are both simple and profound.
• Create engagement.  Use surprise, emotions, concrete images, and curiosity.
• Surprise people.  Surprise people’s expectations.
• Have testable ideas.  Have a ‘”try it yourself” approach and help people test out your ideas for themselves

I can definitely say that the six principles of sticky ideas resonate.  I see them in action at work.  I also remember how Ward Cunningham used stories, as a form of mental judo, to share ideas.  He also was good at getting people to tell their stories by asking them either "What did you learn that you didn’t expect?"  … or "What did you learn that surprised you?"

SUCCESs
To help you remember the principles, Chip and Dan provide the acronym “SUCCESs”

Simple … Unexpected … Concrete … Credentialed … Emotional … Story

Six Principles of Sticky Ideas
According to Chip and Dan, there’s six principles that help you craft a sticky message:

• Principle 1. Simplicity
• Principle 2. Unexpectedness
• Principle 3. Concreteness
• Principle 4. Credibility
• Principle 5. Emotions
• Principle 6. Stories

Principle 1. Simplicity
Keep it simple and profound.  Chip and Dan write:

We must relentlessly prioritize.  Saying something short is not the mission — sound bites are not the ideal.  Proverbs are the ideal.  We must create ideas that are both simple and profound.  The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that the individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

Principle 2. Unexpectedness
Surprise your audience.  Chip and Dan write:

We need to violate people’s expectations.  We need to be counterintuitive.  … But surprise doesn’t last.  For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity.  … We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically "opening gaps" in their knowledge — and then filling those gaps.

Principle 3. Concreteness
Use concrete images.  Chip and Dan write:

How do we make our ideas clear?  We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory informational.  … In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush." Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.

Principle 4. Credibility
Help people test your ideas for themselves.  Chip and Dan write:

How do we make people believe our ideas?  … Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials.  We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves — a "try before you buy" philosophy for the world of ideas.

Principle 5. Emotions
Tap into emotions to convey your point.  We’re wired to feel things for people, not abstractions.  Chip and Dan write:

How do we get people to care about our ideas?  We make them feel something.  In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness.  The statistics "37 grams" doesn’t elicit any emotions.  Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region.  We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.

Principle 6. Stories
Tell stories to get people to act on your ideas.  Chip and Dan write:

How do we get people to act on our ideas?  We tell stories. … Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps up perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment.  Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.

My Related Posts

• Putting Good Ideas in Place

Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:

• You can innovate in your product, process or marketplace.  There’s three kinds of innovation: product, process, and marketplace.
• Innovation is how you grow your business.  Innovation is how you transform your business into what it should be.
• The toughest part is measuring the impact.  The key challenge with innovation objectives is measuring relative impact and importance.

From what I’ve seen, the people that do best with innovation are the ones that can effectively leverage their intuition.  I think the other real key is being able to turn innovation into results, both iteratively and incrementally.

In today’s world, I think another key that might not be as obvious is that innovation needs to meet applied use.  If the innovation doesn’t feel real to the stakeholders, you lose support.  Along these lines, it’s important to know that sometimes the market isn’t ready.

What Our Business Should Be
According to Drucker, the innovation objective helps transform the business into what it should be:

The innovation objective is the objective through which a company makes operational its definition of “what our business should be.”

Process, Product, and Marketplace Innovation
There’s three kinds of innovation.  Drucker writes:

There are essentially three kinds of innovation in every business: innovation in products or service; innovation in the marketplace and consumer behavior and values; and innovation in the various skills and activities needed to make the products and services and to bring them to market. They might be called respectively product innovation, social innovation, and managerial innovation.

Measuring Impact and Importance
Drucker points out that the key challenge with innovation objectives is measuring impact and importance:

The problem in setting innovation objectives is measuring the relative impact and importance of various innovations. But how are we to determine what weights more: a hundred minor but immediately applicable improvements in packaging a product, or one fundamental chemical discovery that after ten more years of hard work may change the character of the business altogether? A department store and a pharmaceutical company will answer this question differently; but so may two different pharmaceutical companies.

My Related Posts

• Resources Objectives
• Productivity Objectives
• Social Responsibility Objectives
• How Much Profitability Do You Need?
• Quantification
• Innovation
• The Business Development Process is Not Static

My Nuggets
Here’s my nuggets so far …

• Idea Techniques (Group A)
• Idea Techniques (Group B)
• Idea Techniques (Group C)
• Idea Techniques (Intuitive)
• Personal Invention Quotas
• Storyboarding the Disney Way

Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:

• Orchestration is the elimination of discretion or choice. Initially I had an averse reaction to this, but then I realized the point is to carry forward what works and avoid figuring out everything on the fly. It’s about baking your lessons learned into your system so you can free yourself up to worry about other things.
• The purpose of Orchestration is to create order, standardization, and quality. The point is to make your results more systematic vs. lucking into success.
• Your people and systems need to be predictable. For your business to be predictable, your people and systems need to be predictable.
• When your Orchestration no longer works, change it. This sounds obvious, but in practice I often see people that don’t change their approach when it’s not working. Part of it is because they don’t know it’s not working and the other part is they don’t know what to change to. That’s why I think knowing your numbers and having a lot of reference examples and a good network to draw ideas from is key.

Orchestration is the Certainty
Gerber writes that orchestration is the key for predictability:

Orchestration is the certainty that is absent from every other human experience. It is the order and the logic behind the human craving for reason. Orchestration is as simple as doing what you do, saying what you say, looking like you look — being how and who you are — for as long as it works. For as long as it produces the results you want. And when it doesn’t work any longer, change it.

Orchestration Creates Predictable Results
Gerber provides examples how Orchestration produces predictable results:

"If a blue suit works, wear it every single time you’re in front of a customer," is the dictum of the disciples of Orchestration. "If ‘Hi, have you been in here before?’ works better than anything else you’ve tried, say it every single time you greet a customer." is the rule of the day from the disciples of Orchestration. By every disciple of Orchestration, I’m referring to anyone who has ever seriously decided to produce a consistent, predictable result in the world of business, no matter what business they are in.

If You Don’t Own It, You Can’t Depend On It
Gerber writes that Orchestration is the key to owning your business:

Because every founder of every great Business Format Franchise company, whether it is franchised or not, knows one thing to be true: if you haven’t orchestrated it, you don’t own it. And if you don’t own it, you can’t depend on it. And if you can’t depend on it, you haven’t got a franchise. And without a franchise no business can hope to succeed.

A Franchise Is Your Unique Way of Doing Business
Gerber writes that your franchise is your unique way of doing business:

If by a franchise, you understand that I’m talking about a proprietary way of doing business that differentiates your business from everyone else’s. In short, the definition of a franchise is simply your unique way of doing business. And unless your unique way of doing business can be replicated every single time, you don’t own it. You have lost it. And once you’ve lost it, you’re out of business!

Your People and System Must Be Predictable
Gerber writes that orchestration is the key for predictability:

The need for Orchestration is based on the absolutely quantifiable certainty that people will do only one thing predictably — be unpredictable. But for your business to be predictable, your people must be.  Then what? Then the system must provide the vehicle to facilitate predictability. To do what? to give your customer what he wants every single time. Why? Because unless your customer gets everything he wants every single time, he’ll go someplace else to get it! Orchestration is the glue that holds you fast to your customer’s perceptions.

Discretion is the Enemy of Order, Standardization and Quality
Gerber writes how Orchestration is about eliminating choices to achieve order, standardization and quality:

Orchestration is the elimination of discretion, or choice, at the operating level of your business. Without orchestration, nothing could be planned, and nothing anticipated — by you or your customer. If you’re doing everything differently each time you do it, if everyone in your company is doing it by their own discretion, their own choice, rather than creating order, you’re creating chaos. As Theodore Levitt says in his stunning book, Marketing for Business Growth, "Discretion is the enemy of order, standardization, and quality."

My Related Posts

• Quantification
• Innovation
• Why Some Small Businesses Fail
• The Entrepreneur, The Manager, and The Technician
• Work On Your Business Rather Than In It

Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:

• Know your numbers. Start with what you can quantify that’s meaningful for your business. Find ways to find the numbers for things that may not be so easy to get, but may produce better results.
• Your numbers are your health chart. Remind yourself that the purpose of quantification is to chart your business’s health. You need to know whether innovations are improving or decreasing your performance.
• Wear your multiple hats. In a small business, you wear multiple hats. Remind yourself that your inner entrepreneur, manager, and technician are always at odds. If it helps, think of switching hats. When you go into bean-counting mode, put on your “manager” hat.
• Make data-driven decisions. In the absence of data, you have to use your intuition and pattern matching. If you make your decisions purely by emotion, that’s a recipe for failure. It’s why most people lose at casinos. You need to make data-driven decisions.
• Carry forward what works. This is where your numbers serve you. It can be tough to break a habit or practice that’s not working, particularly if you have an emotional attachment to it. If you have the numbers, it’s easier to convince yourself to make meaningful change and throw out what’s not working.

Innovations Need to be Quantified
If you don’t quantify your results, you don’t know whether your innovations work. Gerber writes that you need to quantify your innovations:

By it’s own, Innovation leads nowhere. To be effective, all innovations need to be quantified. Without Quantification, how would you know whether the Innovation worked? By Quantification, I’m talking about the numbers related to the impact an Innovation makes. The sad fact is that Quantification is not being done in most businesses. And it’s costing them a fortune!

The Numbers Tell You the Value of Your Innovation
Gerber writes that numbers tell you the value of your innovations:

For example, how would you know that by changing the words you use to greet an incoming customer you produced a 16-percent increase in sales unless you quantified it by (1) determining how many people came in the door before the Innovation was put into effect; (2) determining how many people bought products and what the dollar value of those products were before you changed the words, and what you said to produce those sales; (3) counting the number of people who purchased something; (5) determining the average unit value of a sale; and (6) determining what the improvement was as a result of your Innovation? These numbers enable you to determine the precise value of your Innovation.

Quantify Everything Related to Your Business
Gerber recommends quantifying everything related to your business:

Begin by quantifying everything related to how you do business. I mean everything. How many customers do you see in person each day? How many in the morning? In the afternoon? How many people call your business each day? How many call to ask for a price? How many want to purchase something? How many of product X are sold each day? At what time of the day are they sold? How many are sold each week? Which days are busiest? How busy? And so forth. You can’t ask too many questions about the numbers.

Without the Numbers You Can’t Know Where You Are
Gerber writes that without the numbers, you don’t know where you’re improving:

Eventually, you and your people will think of your entire business in terms of the numbers. You’ll quantify everything. You’ll be able to read your business’s health chart by the flow of the numbers. You’ll know which numbers are critical and which are not. You’ll become as familiar with your business’s numbers as your doctor is with your blood pressure and pulse rates. Because without the numbers you can’t possibly know where you are, let along where you’re going. With the numbers, your business will take on a totally new meaning. It will come alive with possibilities.

My Related Posts

• Innovation
• Calculating Impact
• Eight Rules of Business Think
• Why Some Small Businesses Fail
• The Entrepreneur, The Manager, and the Technician
• Work On Your Business Rather Than In It
• Sustainable, Healthy Commitment