Think about your day. How much time do you spend on productive work versus time consuming, time wasting and ultimately value destroying activities? How many necessary emails did you read? How many useful meetings did you go to this week? How much paperwork is on your desk? One way to put time on your side is to differentiate between high leverage and low leverage tasks. High leverage tasks are the core responsibilities of a given job. They tend to be the ones that are prominently listed in your job description. These also tend to be the activities that are more directly related to value creation. On the other hand, low leverage tasks are the ones that organization members spend the most time with, waste the most time with, and with which they have the most aggravation. These time wasting activities vary based on what your specific job is. For example for a secretary, clearing the meeting room of coffee cups, half eaten donuts and spilled tea, is a low leverage task for him or her, especially if the company has cleaning staff.

Getting his workforce to focus on high leverage activities is a major rallying point for Fred Smith, Founder, Federal Express (FedEx). He recognizes the tremendous power in this concept. How productive and how much value would be created for your firm, if everyone just did high leverage activities? For example, let’s assume that you spent two hours of your eight hours today doing high leverage activities. If you were able to increase it to the full eight hours, how much would you get done? Would you be 4 times more productive? I would venture to say that you would be more like 10 times more productive because you would be working in contiguous blocks, instead of 5 minute snippets. Furthermore, there is a momentum effect to work as well. Once you begin to work, focus, concentrate, you develop momentum. Now imagine what would happen if everyone in your company increased their productivity by 4 times or 10 times. It is almost too scary to think about. But why shouldn’t that be your company?

While the situation where each person is spending all of their time doing high leverage tasks may seem unlikely and perhaps unachievable, that should be your organization’s objective. There are several ways in which the organization can increase the percentage of time spent on high leverage jobs. The three most important are: delegate, redesign and outsource.

The first way to increase the high leverage content of a job is by delegating. While this may seem obvious, its practice is less so. Managers, especially in more traditional organizations, should be very familiar with delegation. The manager should simply delegate as much as possible of his or her low leverage activities to someone else. This does not mean the tasks should be delegated to just anyone. In fact, that would be counterproductive. The idea is to delegate your low leverage tasks to someone for which the task would be at best in their high leverage zone or at least very near. For example, if a company has a travel department, a manager or his secretary should not spend time handling the details of his trip to London. The travel staff should.

The second way is to redesign the job. It is possible that the way the job is currently formulated, includes too many low leverage or potentially low leverage activities. Here the answer may be to just extract many of the low leverage activities out of that job. In doing this you have a few options. One would be just to divide and reassign some of these activities to others. However an alternative choice may be even better. The low leverage activities removed, could be consolidated and packaged into a new job or function. In doing this they now become high leverage activities for those new persons. This way the tasks get the full attention of a dedicated person. Also the person could develop expertise and specialization that would allow the tasks to be accomplished in a productive manner.

Finally, some low leverage tasks can be outsourced. The growth of outsourcing is directly related to the desire of businesses to refocus their efforts on the tasks they believe are central to their mission or strategy. In this vein, low leverage tasks can often be bundled and outsourced. The first main advantage to this is that the success organization’s employees can be relieved of some low leverage activities thereby increasing their high leverage work intensity. Secondly, the newly outsourced activities will be handled by a firm whose expertise and focus (i.e., high leverage) are specifically those tasks. As a result productivity is enhanced and value is created.

So you want to start dramatically increasing the productivity of your day or that of your organization, start reducing the amount of time spent on low leverage activities and really start creating value.

How do you survive in your prison . . . I mean company?

It is important to note that requesting feedback often has negative effects, because it is typically handled improperly. If feedback is requested, the resulting feedback needs to be acknowledged. If the client takes the time to give feedback they deserve an acknowledgement. They further need to be told what happened to their feedback. This means, whether or not, the feedback results in changes, the clients should be told the results. If the feedback was not used, it can be handled simply as a brief statement thanking them and stating that their suggestion could not be implemented at this time. The worse thing is when the client believes that his or her feedback was not of concern or not taken seriously.

A manager should be partially evaluated based on how well he or she serves their subordinates in their task to create value for the firm and customers. This will help reinforce the managerial culture of service. This is virtually the opposite of what is found in most businesses today. In those firms managers expect subordinates to serve them. But again the successful client is not concerned with what most firms do, because what other firms do is usually wrong.

You can’t phone in leadership.

Executives must get their hands dirty. It has to be demonstrative leadership. For example, Lars-Johan Jarnheimer is the CEO of Tele2, the Swedish based telecommunications growth firm. Since he took over in 1998 revenue had shoot up over 500% by 2002. Jarnheimer personally answers customer letters addressed to him. He even works the customer service phones in the call center a few days a year. A few days is all it takes. The other employees, especially the call center, see by example that the customer is so important that the CEO takes time out of his busy schedule to do it. It has the additional effect of helping to reinforce the customer-centered culture of the organization as well. Amazon founder/CEO Bezos also fields customer service calls occasionally.

London-based Pret A Manger, an upscale sandwich chain, has a public promise that if you don’t like the food you should call in to complain. Founder Julian Metcalf requires his switchboard to record all such calls. He returns every on personally. While legendary Herb Kelleher, former CEO of Southwest Airlines used to work in the baggage department during the busy holiday travel season. Sonic Drive-In’s CEO Cliff Hudson requires his executives to spend at least half of their time in the fast food chains actual kitchens not only to understand the business from that base level but also to invent new menu items.

Meg Whitman, CEO of Internet giant eBay, requires each of her top executives to sell something on the eBay site every month. As a result not only does it make the executives customer-centered, it in fact, makes them actually customers. They no longer have to imagine how the customer feels. They no longer have to sympathize or even empathize with the customers. This is a perfect example of management both being customer-centered and demonstrative.

Demonstrative leadership has another important function. Management teams often do not have the respect or trust of their organizations. Trust is important for any organization including the opportunistic ones. Unfortunately, this trust is lost in many organizations by what I call hypocritical leadership. Hypocritical leadership, is when management says one thing, but does another. It is when top management exhorts the organization to behave in one way, but they continue to behave in another. But on the other hand, demonstrative leadership is when executives not only talk the talk, but walk the walk as well.

This serves a number of purposes. First, it shows that management is sincere. Second, it shows that top management sees itself as part of the organization, not above it. Finally, it can demonstrate how the management is supposed to work. All of these help engender trust and respect. When top management is directly and visibly involved, it makes it much easier to rally the troops and focus their attention on the tasks and objects in front of them.

If you have an organization that has lots of similar people with similar backgrounds, you are likely to get people with very similar biases. The net effect of that is that the entire organization will have same blind spots and the same type of opportunity myopia. Some companies recognize this problem and try to overcome it with a 360 degree feedback and review process. This is certainly helpful, but if you have a diverse group of people working with you, their biases in effect cancel each other out effortlessly. The entire organization then has a much broader view.

Secondly, there is the idea of selective perception. Perception is highly influenced by a person’s interests, previous experience, beliefs, attitudes and other personal attributes that basically make us individual. Therefore it may be concluded that perception is highly subjective and selective . Perception is selective because the person is not able to process all the stimuli around him or her; therefore, he or she subconsciously selects the objects to pay attention to or to react upon. As a result, the simple fact of having a diverse pool of talent will allow successful organizations to perceive a greater number and greater diversity of stimuli (potential opportunities) from the environment.

In sum, use human nature to your business advantage.

We know that the competition for talent has also increased over the past few years. In addition, talent is now more evenly distributed around the world. No one country or group of countries has a monopoly on smart people. Furthermore, talent (like financial capital) is more fluid today, meaning that it moves from company to company, opportunity to opportunity and even country to country. As a result, human capital can make the difference between corporate success and bankruptcy; it is therefore incumbent on top management teams to create a system to attract and to retain the very best people it can. However, this is much easier said then done.

This is especially true because of the Law of Crappy People. The law consists of two underlying tenets.

1. In addition to their lack of skills, bad managers usually hire very, very bad employees. Why? Because bad managers see everyone and everything as a threat. Since their biggest threat is competent people, bad managers hire and surround themselves with even less competent people. This is especially bad of the organization because of what you can call the bad manager multiplier effect. As already stated bad managers have a very negative effect on their subordinates and given that each bad manager will have five to ten direct reports, his or her negativism is multiplied many fold.

2. Competent managers can usually screen out bad employees. However, here lies the hidden problem. Competent managers often have difficulty time distinguishing good employees from great employees. Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the average or good employee. Unfortunately in this business environment, good is not good enough. For businesses to beat the competition, firms need to recruit the best.

And to make it worse it may be impossible to attract a good team to work with a bad manager. So what do you do?

Well, there are a number of ways. First, as stated above the firm must always be recruiting. The firm must have its eyes and ear open and be ready to hire when it comes across great talent. Second, the firm must recognize that it may be better to hire a brilliant person who does not have experience in the particular task and train him or her than hire a mediocre person with experience. Finally, the firm must hire the best recruitment/human resource staff it possibly can (which of course will supplement the recruiting efforts of the entire organization). It must instruct that staff is that good is not good enough. The recruitment staff then must develop a system to differentiate between good and great and then only hire those near the top of the heap.

Smaller and younger firms have the advantage here, because they probably have fewer average or below average people. For them hiring just a few key people may be enough to start turning things around. How many below average, average or good people does your firm have? How many smart people will you have to hire to increase your workforce’s average IQ score?

Hey, someone has been reading my stuff  AND paying attention. If you must pitch a VC (and we can talk about why you should or shouldn’t another day), this is as close to perfection as you can come. Thanks Antonio for finding this one.

The Principle of fork it over is simply this:

If You Pay Peanuts, You Only Get Monkeys.

As stated above you should aim to hire the very best people, because average or even good people are not good enough in today’s competitive business environment. The crux of this idea, simply put, is that to attract and to keep the best talent, you must be willing to pay top dollar. Do not scrimp here.

I am not talking about paying the top talent a little more than the average employee. Just as the top athletes are paid many times the average athletes, you must do the same. But remember you are not paying them this money only because you like them; you are paying this kind of money because you are expecting them to create substantial value of the firm. Fortunately, most studies show that top performers do deliver value at a much greater level than others.

However, while financial compensation is important, do not think that it is the only thing that makes your organization attractive for top talent. Typically, financial compensation will just keep you in the ballpark. Generally, it is the other more intangible things in which top talent is interested. For example, higher achiever must be given the opportunity to increase their skills. Therefore, a strong continuing education program is needed. In addition, talented and creative people typically do not respond well to direct supervision, so your organizational systems must be designed to accommodate different means of managerial control. Further, the entire organizational culture must be supportive. Few of these things can be done overnight. As leadership expert and best-selling author Warren Bennis states, “Talented people need appreciation.” It can be as simple as a pat on the back. As a result, the process of making your business attractive to the best employees must start now, because attracting the talented is one thing, keeping them is another.

Our company pays whatever it takes to prevent losing our high performers to other companies.

In that same McKinsey War on Talent survey only 6% strongly agree with this above statement.  Ed Michael’s in his book War for Talent, say that, “Top performing companies are two to four times more likely than the rest to pay what it takes to prevent losing top performers.” So if you pay your top talent well, you will be in fine company. How much are you currently paying yours?

While paying whatever it takes is a bit extreme, the idea is still valid. This means two things to the successful organization. First, you should begin to consider seriously looking at the compensation of your high performers, because virtually nobody else is doing it. Remember to have uncommon success you need to act uncommonly. Second, it means that 94% of the businesses out there have talented high performers that are unprotected and ripe for the plucking.

Pluck’em.