Angenda & Priorities | Dave Kranzler

Okay, so that was the assessment. Setting agenda and priorities. What does that really mean? It means what's your strategy? Now that you've learned a little bit about the situation you're in, what are you gonna do? So while I can't tell you what you can do, I can tell you a little bit about how to think about the problem. This is a model we used at one company I worked in. When you do strategic planning, How do you get started? How do you think through the problem? One simple way to do it is like anything else, you break it down. First off, vision. Where do you want to be? What is your goal? What are you trying to accomplish? Now everybody has got to have their Sun Tzu quote whenever they make presentations, a little Art of War going on. Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. It's actually quite true. So you really do need to think about strategic planning. And the vision is, what do you want to accomplish? Then you have to break it down because it's awfully hard to get from a vision to literally what you are going to do every day. So we talk about the mission. What are the high-level actions you are going to take if you are going to achieve that vision? So what are the high-level actions? Then, and this point often gets lost on people, how are you going to know if you are successful? That may seem kind of obvious. Oh, we are making a lot of money. It takes a long time to make a lot of money. What milestones, what markers, what things are you going to look at to be able to know whether you are going to be successful? We will talk a bit about this later in dashboards. But it is very critical that you know what to look at, and it is also very critical that you narrow it down. Just look at a few things. What are the key metrics? And then, then, only then do you get to the strategy. What are kind of the overarching initiatives and what are the specific things you are going to do? And I will show you an example in a minute, but it is a nice framework to be able to step you through the problem of deciding how you are going to pilot this company, how you are going to turn around this business, how you are going to grow this product line. And then we will talk a little bit about tactical planning. Again, you can have a great strategy. If you cannot execute it day to day, it all falls apart. So you need to know where you are going and you need to know the specific steps you are going to take to get there. Sounds easy, right? So again, in my particular case, we had a vision for what we want to accomplish in developing products for the smart grid market and ultimately the Internet of Things market. Innovative, ready to deploy, on schedule, within budget, meet customer requirements, functionality, quality, RAS, all that good stuff. It sounds kind of highfalutin, but that literally was what I was hired to do and what my boss really cares about. So it's always good to frame your vision in terms of what your boss, investors, or stakeholders care about. If you do not And if you pursue a vision that is not what your stakeholders care about, you will not last very long. So one of the key things you must know when you are starting something new is to get your vision aligned with the people that you care about and who care about you. It may sound easy. It's not. So the mission. Okay, well, there are a couple of things that we knew we needed to do. Have to hit schedules. Have to hit quality. Have to stop redoing things over and over and over again to get them right. Okay, how am I going to know if we do that well? All right, well, you can actually measure on-time performance. I mean, you set a goal, you see whether you hit it. You can measure quality. You can measure the number of releases it takes. This is all simple stuff. Keep your metrics to about 3 or 4 things. One of the great disasters of the Iraq War is that Donald Rumsfeld, who is a great manager, and I have a quote from him later, Broke his own rule and started measuring a bunch of things and sooner or later didn't know whether he was winning the war on terror. It's a very famous quote. So be careful on what you measure. Choose it well. And then the strategy actually almost kind of fell out from there. And some of this is just from common sense stuff. Get the right people on the bus sitting in the right seats. No matter what you do, that is critical. And we will talk a bit about it later, about the power of hiring and selecting and training the right people. Basic business processes. Remember that learning slide, what everybody agreed on? Our processes stink. All right, fix that. There is some innovation. There is always innovation, but innovation without execution doesn't matter much. And then be able to get to scale. And again, that is what we are talking about today. You don't need to know how to manage if you don't care about ever scaling or getting big, but I presume you all care. All right. Now, you can't stop there. It's great to have a strategy statement. It's great to talk about it. But unless you tie it to what you do every day, it just sits on a spot on your desk and you never look at it. So literally, you can tie initiatives, specific things you want your people to execute on, to each part of your strategy. Remember, the first strategy was get the right people on the bus sitting in the right seats. All right, well, there was a particular product that needed a team, so one of the initiatives are, got to build that. QA wasn't capable, fix it. Get rid of the guy running it, hire somebody new. Bring in some new people who know what they are doing. In this case, I brought a number of people who worked with me before. I was able to rebuild that team. Processes, brought in a product lifecycle process. Pretty basic. Again, when you have 2 or 3 people who are coding, you don't need one. As soon as the team starts building other functions, you add QA, you add product management, as soon as it gets that complex, you need a process. And all of the best engineers I've ever worked with really wanted a process to run by. They didn't feel that it constrained them. They felt it actually freed them to focus on— The work. The things that take real brainpower. And that's not unique to engineering. It applies to manufacturing. It applies to sales. It applies to product management. It applies to finance, every aspect of your company. If you don't have a basic business process to run by, then you will not succeed at doing that. A couple other initiatives. Build a system engineering team. Focus on a few critical products that were broken and they need to get fixed fast. You can build this very simple chart to help guide you in how you are going to do your work every day, and it is driven top-down by what you want to accomplish. Now, that is the strategy, that is the high-level thinking. What do you do each day, each week, each quarter to make certain that you are doing what you want to do? You read most management books and they will tell you write your goals down. Actually, the simple act of writing your goals down makes you think about them more. Very easy to lose sight of this and all of a sudden you have not accomplished the things that you want to. So the system that I use that I would recommend for you is called Management by Objectives, MBOs. Everybody has them and take them each quarter and you decide what you are going to deliver each quarter. And the watchword with MBOs is make them SMART. Because if they are not specific, you don't really know what you are talking about. If they are not measurable, you don't know if you achieved them. If they are not achievable, you are wasting your time. If they are not relevant, who cares? And if they are not timely, you don't want to set an objective that takes years and years and years. You need to break these things down. Very simple acronym. What does this stuff look like? Well, a couple of things. You want to map what you are going to do every quarter to your strategies, and you want to set people who are accountable for them, and then you need to grade them, and you need to grade them honestly. You can't cheat. So without going through the detail of this, every person on my staff takes their objectives and they flow them down to the people who work for them. Very simple, and it almost seems unnecessary. Trust me, if you don't write it down, it won't get done. And very simple framework for you to write these things down, and again, know that you are asking people to do what you need to do to be successful. And if you go back to that definition of management, that was the 4th or 5th definition, getting other people to do the work. This is just a way To be very specific on what that work is. And when we talk about grading people and assessing people and knowing whether they're growing or whether you have the right people on the bus sitting in the right seats, one of the easiest tools, how well are they doing against their objectives? Did they meet them? Did they not? Now we don't always hit all of our objectives or else we're sandbagging. Personally, I like to stretch and when I look at My one lost record, it's actually— I always miss a number of them because we like to be aggressive. When they miss them, do they give you an honest answer or do they make an excuse? The dog ate my homework. No. It's OK to stretch. It's good to stretch. And it's OK to miss sometimes. But you need to know why. And you need to look at yourself. We'll talk more about that later. Thanks, Tim.