The astute observers among you might recognize that the BMI newsletter, usually diligently sent on the 1st of the month, is, in fact, a few days later this month.  Whether you call it fate, chance, or just a creative accident, the tardiness of the newsletter coincides nicely with the topic.  Extending far beyond a characteristic found only in business owners or entrepreneurs, a general sense of reluctance and hesitation when starting something new seems to pervade through most.  It is unsurprising, and certainly not inherently negative or detrimental, as a sort of fear of the unknown makes it difficult to muster the motivation to face a challenge of undefined difficulty.  Clichéd  though it might be, a universally recognizable example would be of a student preparing to study for a test.  Glancing at the clock (which for this story, will read 6:54pm), he boldly states, 'I'll start studying at 7pm!'  Then, as so often is the case, time gets away from him, and he looks back at the clock in dreadful anticipation of having to start, only to realize it is now 7:02pm.  Enter the most curious part of the story: rather than start 2 minutes late, our proverbial student - akin to so many others - will set a new start time for himself.  'I missed the 7pm start time,' he might think, 'so instead I'll start studying at 7:15pm!'

It is not as if the act of studying is on a bus schedule, wherein a missed start time requires waiting until the next departure time to begin the journey, and yet the default of many is to act as if it is.  There is something to be said for having an affinity for nice, round numbers (starting a task at the start of the hour feels natural, somehow) but that affinity cannot become a curse.  Likewise, many processes in business are not stuck to a rigid schedule, and can essentially be started at leisure.  Undoubtedly there are more and less optimal times to start different tasks, but the scale is not binary in nature.  Starting at a sub-optimal time does not mean that beginning the process will have negative consequences.  As the traditional Chinese proverb goes, "the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.  The second best time is now." 

Changing your mindset from always attempting to implement at optimal times - and not starting at all if that timeframe is missed - to a mindset of continual improvement and better to start late than never will add fundamental value to your endeavors, business or otherwise.  Improvement needs to be treated as improvement, no matter how small.  Focusing on the increases in value, instead of comparing the hypothetical maximum value that could have been added versus what is actually being added, will distinguish your efforts from those around you.  Starting late and adding some value puts you that much further ahead than those who do nothing, lamenting the loss of the full value.  It is all about perpetual refinement - just as BMI's motto says - not perfect refinement.  And should you need assistance with cultivating the discipline to get started, or the accountability to see things through to the end, BMI is there to support you.

- Your BMI family

A theme you may have heard in BMI's publications, whether it is the newsletter, social media, or YouTube videos, is stressing the importance of holistic success.  Holistic success, a balance between the work life and home life, between personal and professional, between hard work and relaxation, is sort of an abstract concept.  At first glance, it might even be interpreted as nothing more than an obvious statement; of course there has to be a balance between work and home.  You can't live at the office; Maslow's hierarchy exists, in varying degrees, and applies to everyone.  Everyone requires food, sleep, and a day off now and again.  Arguments on the amount of any of these basic necessities aside, the major focus of BMI's holistic success is the time component of the work-life balance.  Finding the sweet spot of working hard, but not overworking, is not nearly so straight forward as it would appear at the aforementioned first glance.

For sake of simplicity, time, in this example, will only be divided into two categories: working and not working.  If you are spending time working - independent of whether you are physically at the proverbial 'office' - that time counts as work.  Everything else you do counts as not work.  What ratio of time, work to not work, is the secret ratio that maximizes success, without unreasonable sacrifice?  There is, you will agree, diminishing returns for the value of putting additional hours into work beyond a certain point.  The graph of work hours versus output has some hard limits that dictate this diminishing return.  At the upper limit, a 24-hour input of work in a day will suffer catastrophic output.  Not taking a single second to sleep, eat, go to the bathroom, or relax is not only impossible, it is detrimental to one's health; you could even go so far as to call it reckless abandon.  Clearly the ideal ratio of work to not work, then, is not 24 to 0.

On the other extreme of the graph, the lower limit wherein not a single second is spent working will have a similarly catastrophic output of nothing.  A business with sufficient automations will survive some level of zero output by owners and key employees, but that momentum will only last for so long before operations crash to a halt.  The ideal ratio of work to not work is not 0 to 24.  It might seem like common sense, but it does frame the question of where holistic success can be found, and pose another question altogether.  Tim Ferris, in his book "The 4 Hour Work Week," addresses this latter question; the question of why the ratio can't be 0 to 24.  Since he does an excellent job of making the case that the ratio should be as close to 0 to 24 as possible, let's examine the build-up to that ideal scenario.

Somewhere in between the extremes lies a golden ratio of time put into work, time spent relaxing and recharging, and the output of time spent doing both.  A single newsletter article might not be sufficient to explore finding that ratio, but that is not it's intention.  Instead, take the time yourself to reflect on what your current ratio of work to not work is, and if it is in need of adjustment.  The business world often gets so wrapped up in doing things 'the way they've always been done' that it doesn't take the time to ask if the status quo is the best approach.  A 40-hour work week might be the norm, yet there is nothing to say that it must be.  Can you justify the time you spend at the office as being truly productive?  Or, is it time spent there out of convention, of habit, without real reason?  Taking the time to prove to yourself that the time you are (or aren't) spending working is the closest you can get to your perceived golden ratio will motivate you in the time you are at work, or force you to move closer to that ratio. And, as always, if the ideal ratio is spending less time working, BMI is here to offer the support you need to clear your plate.

Do you know why Uber is so successful? Why DoorDash and SkipTheDishes are so successful? Do you know why Amazon has changed the game for deliveries across almost every industry? It is not as if Uber is a unique concept, nor is the idea of food being delivered to one's house. In fact, the industry of transportation as a service (TaaS, as the industry is called) goes back farther than the history of the automobile itself, as horse-drawn carriages existed. Why, then, did these companies have such a large impact on their respective industries? Stop reading here and take a minute to actually sit and think. The main answer (as there are several different small factors that played into their success) is the introduction of the tracking metric. In all 3 example businesses, their revolutionary addition was the fact that you could see (within some degree of accuracy) where your requested product or service was located. The Uber car is 5 minutes away the app will tell you, and it will show the icon's location as it travels towards you. The DoorDash or Skip progress bar clearly indicates what step of the process your food order is at, including where it is when the driver is bringing it to you. Amazon, especially in regards to the Prime 2-day shipping, has made tracking packages standard, so much so that (at least in Canada and the US), the app will notify your phone when your package is within 3 hours of delivery (along with every other step, from processing to shipping to the various postal locations it may traverse). But why does the tracking metric have such a drastic impact?

As it turns out, human psychology works such that we tend to hate the unknown. The creeping sense of fear or uneasy mystery that being in an unfamiliar place brings, especially if it is dark, is an easy example to use. Perhaps a more relatable example is ordering food at a restaurant, and having to wait well beyond what you might normally, and reasonably, expect to wait. Confusion, frustration, anger, and a host of other emotions can arise from such a simple inconvenience, because it is borne out of the unknown. We do not know why the food is late, and left to speculate on our own, we tend to assume the worst. This despise of the unknown is so powerful, in fact, that studies and testing have shown that a person would wait, happily, substantially longer for an event if they knew when it would happen, rather than a short unknown period. One such study measured passenger satisfaction with a subway service (c-train, metro, tube, whatever your local term is) over two different groups. The first group waited an average of 5 minutes, but the LED displays that would normally indicate how long until the next train would be arriving were disabled. The second group waited an average of 10 minutes, with the LED displays counting down the time until the train arrived. The second group's reported satisfaction and overall rating of the TaaS was significantly higher than the first, despite waiting twice as long. Why does any of this matter?

Knowing that a customer is more content to wait longer, but have progress reports and a time estimate, every business should strive to quantify their processes, to the extent they can. That is to say, while it might not make sense to quantify the waiting process of an over-the-counter in-stock purchase, wherein the lead time from purchase to product arriving in the customer's hand is practically zero, any process that is longer than that should have a tracking system attached to it. With Uber in mind, even if the wait time can be measured in the single digit minutes, there is value to ensuring that all of the stakeholders of the process are fully informed, every step of the way. It goes without saying, too, that longer processes should most definitely be tracked, a la Amazon and Amazon Prime tracking. There is an important distinction in this aforementioned tracking that is worth highlighting, and is made clearer by comparing Uber and Amazon. In a process, the longer it is, the more parties involved, or as the complexity rises, tracking each step becomes increasingly expensive. The benefit provided by offering the tracking has diminishing returns, and so each process must be balanced against how difficult it is to track and provide updates. Amazon, for example, has several moving parts in the process of ordering anything from their website, from dispatching, warehouse workers building the orders, packaging, shipping, delivery: it is a very complex process. Consequentially, Amazon has decided not to provide every single step as an update to the customer, and instead focuses on the major updates, typically order received, shipped, out for delivery, and delivered. And for their purposes, and their customers, this is sufficient.

Sufficient is, after all, the basis of what a customer is looking for to quench their curiosity. Inundating a customer with tens or hundreds of updates as every minute step of a process is executed would not only be costly to the company, it would quickly become frustrating (and borderline harassment) for the customer. Finding a balance of sufficient updates to keep a customer happy against the cost of providing the updates will require fine-tuning over time, but will be well worth it to reap the rewards of more relaxed and less demanding customers (as an average). An important caveat to this system is the notion that providing updates removes or relaxes customer expectations for delivery on time. It might be tempting to think that, so long as the customer knows where their product is in the proverbial assembly line, they have no reason to complain about how long the turnaround time is, or if the expected deadline for delivery comes and goes. On the contrary: the tracking provides the customer with a method to hold you and your company accountable to the expected result. Under-promise, over-deliver still reigns king as your best approach to handling customers. As the tracking is fine-tuned, you will naturally come to be able to offer "higher" promises to the customer of what a reasonable delivery time is, and be able to execute. Part of this will come from being able to build in a buffer to the tracking, such that expectations are managed correctly, and not set unrealistically high. The other part, however, will come from something far more valuable. 

A popular quote within BMI and BMI's publications comes from Peter Drucker, and is "what isn't measured, isn't managed." Examining the quote, and its intuitive truth, I will save for another blog, suffice it to say that Drucker's quote applies to the notion of providing updates to your customers. How so? In striving to provide said updates, it will quickly become apparent that keeping track of all of the steps, from an order landing to customer delivery, is a far greater ask than it might initially seem. As any manager dives into the documentation of a process, such that they can build systems and workflows that can be triggered to provide updates, they will quickly begin to find that every process has more steps involved in it than they are necessarily aware of (combating this requires げんちげんぶつ (genchi-genbutsu; translated to "go and see"); a principle of the Toyota Way.). Nevertheless, improving any process demands that some metrics be put into place in order to gauge performance, for better or for worse. Beginning the task of providing updates to a customer unveils the perfect opportunity to start measuring, and therefore to start managing, the processes of the company. Once measured, a proper examination of what the metrics are, why they are, and how they can be improved can be taken on, refining the turnaround time for the overall process, and improving customer satisfaction even further.

You might note that I suggested earlier that I said a business should strive to quantify every process that they can, and balance the cost of providing updates to the customer against the diminishing returns updates might provide. Take special note: these two do not suggest that only the processes that should be quantified are the ones that are part of the customer update workflow or system. If you imagine a manufacturing plant, for example, this theory should be clearer. Every process that is quantifiable should be, and so along the assembly line, each step of widget production should be documented, measured, quantified. It takes 2.5 seconds to do step x, 1.5 minutes to do step y, 40 seconds to do step z, and so on. Providing each of these updates to a customer would present a cost too great to outweigh the benefit of doing so, but that does not discount them as necessary to be documented and quantified. The update to the customer may only be after a particular batch of processing steps have been completed, or perhaps it is only at the start of production and at its completion. Whatever update triggers you decide to set depends on the cost of tracking the steps of that update. 

Implementing an update process for your customers, wherever your business is interacting with them for a lead time, provides the opportunity not only to placate customer curiosity and demand for (perhaps unreasonable) turnaround times, it also affords you the opportunity to examine your own process for efficiencies, and a mechanism by which customers can hold you accountable - which perhaps could be rephrased as incentive to ensure timely delivery on your business' products and services. The speed and power of technology has bred market conditions that do not accept slow, mystery, or excuse in business. By recognizing the powerful psychology behind providing updates to a customer, and harnessing that power to your advantage, your business will position itself above any competition that does not offer the same certainties of tracking and delivery dates. Further then, measuring your own processes and working to refine them will generate a competitive advantage that cannot be overcome easily; ultimately leading to stability and prosperity.

What would happen to your business if you were taken out of the picture? It can happen for any number of reasons – a family emergency, a long-term illness, or a serious accident, for instance. For many business owners and CEOs, the answer is that their business would ultimately fail. They are their business. While that might seem natural, even unavoidable in some instances, it’s not ideal.

You want your business to continue if something happens to you. You expect the team in accounting to show up to work, and expect your sales team to continue doing what they do. You expect your business to continue serving customers or clients – it should not simply grind to a halt because you’re no longer at the helm.

The question here is how to achieve that result. Often, removing the business owner from the equation does mean the business will ultimately fail. That’s most likely because you're biting off more than you can chew.. You're doing too many things yourself, and taking on too many responsibilities. Of course, chances are good that you think that’s unavoidable. After all, you’re the only one who can do them the way you want those tasks completed.. 

The answer to the question on avoiding business collapse if you’re not around is simple – learning to delegate. But the process of learning in itself is another story entirely.

Ask Yourself: Why Am I Not Delegating?  

“The really expert riders of horses let the horse know immediately who is in control, but then guide the horse with loose reins and seldom use the spurs.” – Sandra Day O’Connor

Delegation is vital. It is a critical element of not just business success, but  for helping  your business to survive, grow, and thrive. If you’re not yet, ask yourself why you haven’t begun delegating. To help narrow it down, following are some common reasons:

• The fear of giving up control

• The need to micromanage

• The insistence on doing things “your way”

• The belief that no one else can do what you do

• Fear of failure

 Since you’re the only one that can do things in a specific way, you need to learn how to work smart, not hard.. 

This is where delegation comes in by allowing you to take a step back from micromanagement and allowing you to focus on other mission-critical aspects, ideation, mentoring your team, and building relationships and a stronger business without getting bogged down by mundane day-to-day operations.

Accept Imperfections and Refine Results Over Time 

One common reason for leaders to avoid delegation is the desire for perfection. That’s natural and even laudable. However, it’s unrealistic. No one is perfect, and perfection isn’t possible 100% of the time. In order to maximize results you see from delegation, you’ll need to learn how to accept imperfection, at least in the short term, and then refine the results that you see over time. 

Strengthen Communications   

Delegation cannot succeed without open, accurate, ongoing, honest communication. That might seem like a tall order to fill, but ensuring that your team knows they can come to you with anything, at any time, guarantees small mistakes or missteps are handled in a timely manner and avoided overtime. 

It also flows the other way – you need to be able to communicate with your team whenever and wherever necessary. Communication is a crucial part of business growth and a lack of it can lead to road blocks, hurdles, and failure.

Avoid Micromanaging   

Micromanaging is a waste of your time and energy, showing that you have little faith in your team,  hinders innovation and accountability. To avoid it, make sure you’re setting yourself and your team up for success by ensuring that the right talent is in place within key positions, then, be clear on expectations and step back.

That last part is often the hardest, but if you’ve done your legwork with the rest, you should be able to do so with confidence that the team will succeed even without you getting involved in every single decision.

Consider Delegation as a Development Tool   

Team member development is a critical consideration, and a vital step for business owners interested in retaining and grooming top talent. This is particularly true in today’s competitive environment where job openings outnumber qualified candidates. By developing your team members through delegation, you can promote job security, increase retention and boost loyalty, while ensuring that your business has a firm, stable foundation for growth and success.

Hire More Frequently   

One hurdle to delegating might be that you simply lack the staff to do so. The answer to that is simple – hire more. However, you need to hire with a strategy in mind, and that plan should include being able to delegate responsibilities to employees or entire teams so  you can step back and take on a different role. 

Note that this doesn’t mean you should hire without proper vetting or evaluation.. Quality counts, so hire the right talent. Just don’t delay the hiring process because you want to maintain control over a particular process or part of the business.

Consider Working with Freelancers   

Freelancers can provide a viable way of delegation without having to hire in-house employees. They’re used to short-term, impermanent positions with their clients, as well as being called on an as-needed basis. 

This provides you with the means to delegate whenever the need arises, and downsize workforce if the situation changes. 

Outsource Where Necessary   

Working with freelancers is a type of outsourcing, but you can go bigger. Business process outsourcing (BPO) offers the means to outsource part or the entire process integral to your company’s operation. Some of the most commonly outsourced business processes include bookkeeping/accounting, marketing, and IT services.

Institute Processes and Technology that Mitigate Risks   

Finally, consider instituting processes and technology that mitigate risks involved with delegation, while making things more streamlined. For instance, create a process that dictates when X happens, Y must also happen, then Z must occur. It’s about providing guidance and a concrete set of steps for your team to follow based on your knowledge and expertise.

In addition, consider technology like automation – this can completely eliminate the need to delegate to a human team member at all. For instance, consider chatbots. A chatbot integrated with Facebook messenger provides a way for customers or clients to get information, as questions, and move forward without the need for human talent in the equation at all.

In Conclusion   

Ultimately, delegation is an important consideration for business owners looking for expansion and success.There is only so much that you can do on your own, and insisting on being personally involved in all aspects of the business will ultimately push you beyond what's needed, compromising your ability to do what you do best. 

By mastering the delegation process, you can take a step back, while being confident that your business will continue operating as it should.

Law 30 - Make Your Accomplishments Seem Effortless

Law 29 - Plan All the Way to the End

Law 46 - Never Appear Too Perfect

Do you have similar experiences in your organization or in your workplace? How did you handle this type of scenario? We want to hear about it! Share your  experiences and thoughts in the comments section below!

Whether you are aware of the Laws or not, if you begin to look for specific telltale signs, you will begin to notice who among your employee group, or even friends, has an implicit understanding of them. Some will have innate social skills that can be categorized as one of the Laws, and they could be unaware that they are even invoking any said Law. Others may have read Greene's book and are using it to their own benefit, as they should. As an example, and to set the stage for the Laws of Power, imagine a typical office: XYZ corporation has a downtown skyrise firm HQ, perhaps around 100 employees, and has been around for a while. XYZ is well established in the community as a successful and astute business. Its employees are well paid, though worked hard, and XYZ has several stories of employees climbing the corporate ladder from beginner to manager to vice-president, earning substantially increasing benefits and paychecks. You are an employee of XYZ, having started there 5 years prior, and worked your way into the middle management. Having spent the last year working yourself ragged, you have several impressive achievements to your name, including reducing an expense account by several percent points. Your boss continually commends you for your long hours, though your wife and child do not. In fact, youh begun to fight with your wife about the number of hours you are spending at the office. Just a little longer, you say, and you will get the big promotion you have been talking about with the boss. It will all be worth it; you are investing so much into the company that there is no way you are not getting the promotion.

Can you see yourself in the XYZ building? Perhaps the story even sounds incredibly familiar, or hits a little too close to home. Can you predict how the story ends? You are not going to get the promotion. Your co-worker, who has not been working as hard, has not been as successful, and not made sacrifices the way you have got the big promotion. You are bewildered, and the only thing your boss can offer you is that it was a group decision, that your co-worker just has that special something that makes him a better fit. All that time, effort, and sacrifice, for nothing. And why? You may not be able to tell, but it is because you were not playing by the rules - rules that you did not even know existed. You were not using the Laws of Power. Within our example, let us call the boss Ed and your coworker Gary. Gary played by the Laws of Power, and was able to reap the benefits. Which laws apply to our fictitious scenario? Let us examine them in order:

Law 1 - Never Outshine the Master

Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please and impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite - inspire fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power.

Gary must have displayed some levels of competency to have been selected for promotion, but his displays of competency were not presented as a threat to Ed. Something as simple as crediting Ed for his brilliant input helping Gary's plan succeed plants the seeds of comfort within Ed. (Bear in mind how Gary might credit Ed, however, when we discuss Law 7). Even within Gary's success, he would never flaunt the success at the expense of Ed. A Facebook post discussing how he came up with an idea no one else in XYZ did may garner several likes and congratulatory comments - all of which stroke Gary's ego - but such a post is the exact type of post that would put Ed on edge. If Gary came up with the idea, it implies that Ed was too lazy or stupid to come up with it. It is critical, then, that Gary plays by Law 1, and never make actions or comments that place him above the proverbial master, at least, until the time to strike is right (which we will cover in Law 15 and 35).

Law 3 - Conceal Your Intentions

Keep people off-balance and in the dark by never revealing the purpose behind your actions. If they have no clue what you are up to, they cannot prepare a defense. Guide them far enough down the wrong path, envelop them in enough smoke, and by the time they realize your intentions, it will be too late.

Remember, the Laws are amoral, neither good nor evil, formless, and nothing more than tools. This concept becomes important to bear in mind now, as we begin to touch upon and use words that can have a negative connotation. In our example, conversations between you and Ed about the big promotion were alluded to. Your excitement, and consequentially, your revelation of your intentions, made you predictable. Did Gary ever talk about the big promotion? Thinking about it, you do not remember him ever saying anything, and you might have even thought that he did not care about it. Gary's concealment prevented you from taking actions to ensure that he was eliminated from the running for the promotion until it was too late. Like a chess Grandmaster, your true goals must remain within your head and heart. It is not about deception per se, and the distinction is an important note. Did Gary ever lie to you about not wanting the promotion? Alternatively, did he not comment on it, and left you to your own conclusions? Lies, especially in the work place, can be detrimental to employee-team competency, and as such, deception is not the answer. Conflating deception with concealment is an incorrect understanding of the Law. How, then, does one conceal without deception? Fortunately, we have the next Law to assist us.

Law 4 - Always Say Less than Necessary

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.

A fundamental human action is to seek validation. There is nothing wrong with it, as it justifies our existence, our actions, our time spent. Yet, seeking constant validation is a hindrance to power. Law 4 is a tough Law to follow, as it requires having a strong sense of self-approval. Saying less gives less time to brag about our accomplishments, seek approval and validation, but comes with the consequence of concealing intentions, and preventing detrimental commentary. Gary, as discussed previously, invoked Law 4 to help him invoke Law 3. You, and arguably Ed, had no idea that Gary was gunning for the promotion, and all Gary had to do was say nothing. It has a lovely irony; doing and saying nothing can be the hardest thing, even harder than taking action. 

Our examination of the Laws will continue in Part 2. 

Do you have similar experiences in your organization or in your workplace? How did you handle this type of scenario? We want to hear about it! Share your thoughts in the comments section below!