2016 Business Excellence Forum – Blinding Flashes of the Obvious Part 3

Originally posted 6/1/2016.

The second day of the Business Excellence Forum was kicked off by Shawn Moon Senior VP of Franklin Covey.  Shawn opened with a rapid fire bit of jokes and funny quotes, one of the best was:

“The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it’s difficult to determine whether or not they are genuine.”

– Abraham Lincoln

After that he played the famous video of classical violinist Josh Bell playing his Stradivarius in the entrance to a Washington, DC subway station. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnOPu0_YWhw) Virtually no one stopped to listen.  Shawn asked how often do we see excellence right in front of us?  How often do we engage it?

Other BFOs from Shawn Moon:

• Interdependence – a draft horse that can pull 1000 pounds alone, two can pull 4000 pounds together / to accomplish more get leverage.
• “If you want to change your results change your habits, if you want to have massive change, change your paradigm” – Steven Covey.
• The value of time is the value of life.
• Clarity is simple, getting to clarity is complex!

Next he spoke about Edward Lorenz’s Butterfly Effect.  He told how:

Norman Borlaug – a Nobel Prize winner, saved more than one billion people by expanding the yield of corn, wheat and rice in arid conditions.  Borlaug was one of the first scientists to join experimental agriculture stations created in Mexico by Henry Wallace, former Secretary of Agriculture and then Vice President of the United States. But …

Henry Wallace – was influenced as a young boy growing up at Iowa State by George Washington Carver, so much so that he developed some of the first hybrid varieties of corn, doubling and tripling per acre yields. But …

George Washington Carver – who became a brilliant biologist was encouraged to study plants, rather than paint them by his art teacher, Etta May Budd.  The question Shawn Moon asked was “how far back can we go?”  And

“How far will our (your) influence go?”

Next, while on the subject of personal mission statements he flashed this slide

While his presentation was about personal mission statements, it does not take a lot of work to apply this to your business’s mission statement.

Shawn moon wrapped up with the following by Portia Nelson

The balance of the morning of the second day was breakout sessions.  Here are some insightful BFOs from the breakouts:

• Have a scorecard and KPIs for each box on your organization charts, both current and three or five years forward.
• Another speaker expanded this by encouraging a look at every role within your organization, determine the biggest issue for each role and develop a KPI to measure the solution.
• No matter the size of your business, it is essential to have a well documented on boarding or orientation process and checklist.
• Disney gives six weeks of training to the people who take tickets at the entrances to their parks. How much training do you employ at your business?
• One of my colleagues, a former senior HR executive with a major national retailer, said that they had two counter-balancing KPIs:
  • Average time to fill open positions
  • Six and twelve month retention of new hires.

More day two BFOs to come, stay tuned.