Quit Smoking

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If you are reading this, you or someone you know needs to quit smoking. This is good. My father smoked for 62 years before lung cancer took his life.  If you have ever watched someone die of lung cancer you will understand why I have entered this blog post.

First, understand that there are no magic pills or other devices that will make you quit smoking.  Only you and you own personal drive can do that. Actually, you do have two very effective tools available that cost nothing.  Your intellect and your desire are all you need.

From an intellectual point of view, you have to be able to know that you have an addiction and you have to understand the nature of your addiction. From a desire point of view, you have to want to break the addiction. There can be no excuses.

Here are a few things to understand about addiction to smoking. First, even the heaviest smokers only need about a third of a cigarette to get their addictive fix.  The other two thirds of the cigarette does nothing more than deepen your addiction. The only reason the other two thirds gets consumed is because it is there and because the tobacco companies want your addiction to stick. In other words, if cigarettes on the market were only one half of their current length, no one would miss the other half from an addiction point of view.

This leads you to a way to weaken your addiction. Simply cut each cigarette in half. This reduces the addictive force of the tobacco and reduces the harmful effects by half. Even if you smoke the same number of times per day, the effect will be a 50% reduction in your smoking habit. Don’t start telling yourself that you are wasting half of your money by doing this. You have already wasted the entire investment in the cigarettes the moment you bought them. If you don’t understand this, you are probably not serious about quitting.

Another thing to understand is that your addiction has triggers. These are events or circumstances that trigger your awareness to a need to smoke. Part of quitting smoking involves identifying these triggers and removing them. This is not that hard to do once you have weakened your addiction.

A log book will be handy for identifying triggers. Every time you have the desire to light up, document the circumstances at the time, how you feel, and what you are thinking. Be detailed. The better you understand why you want to smoke, the easier it will be to eliminate the trigger.  For example, I had a friend that quit smoking, but had an urge to smoke every time he smelled the burning brickets in his BBQ grille. His solution was to buy a gas grille. It worked.

Reducing your addiction and eliminating triggers will take a couple of weeks. Once accomplished though, quitting will be a manageable affair. Don’t get me wrong. Quitting will not be the easiest thing you have ever done, but it will be the most rewarding. Surround yourself with people that know you are quitting and will provide a degree of peer pressure against smoking.  It will not be easy to light up in front of someone who will chastise you for smoking.

As a recap, the method I am proposing for kicking the smoking habit involves 4 steps. These are:

  • Reduce each smoking event to ½ cigarette.
  • Identify the triggers to smoking events.
  • Reduce smoking events by eliminating the triggers identified above.
  • Once your addiction is manageable, stop smoking.

Before you pass judgment, let me share the facts with you. I have helped many people quit smoking using this strategy, with few dropouts. The plain fact is that if you are not committed to quitting, you won’t. If you are committed to quitting, you will, no matter what program you use.

I am inviting anyone who wants to help someone quit smoking to comment. I will not pester you with email. I just want to make a difference.

If you Aren’t Measuring It You Aren’t Managing It

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A favorite axiom in management is, “If you aren’t measuring it, you aren’t managing it”. Just as driving a car with your eyes closed will result in disaster, running a business without some sort of performance feedback will result in business disaster.

The collection and use of data is important because things are rarely what they seem to be. Data helps us separate what is really happening from what we think is happening (or what we want to be happening). When we make decisions based on how things feel or how they have always been, we are operating in the “as we think it is” world. This is a prescription for disaster. The successful business operates in the real world. We call this the “as-is” world.

The measure phase of a Six Sigma process improvement project focuses on characterizing the current performance of a business process, which is the current reality. In this phase, the Six Sigma project team is trying to accomplish two things. First is to establish an “as-is” performance measurement for the process. Second, is to use the data to begin looking for potential causes of defects.

Some of the important activities of the Measure phase are:

  • Developing a data collection plan and following it
  • Performing a measurement system analysis
  • Calculating performance indicators for the process from the data collected
  • Control charting

The objective is to measure the process’ impact on the customer’s CTQ (Critical to Quality) issues. The result is the characterization of the process’ performance from the customer’s perspective. This becomes the process’ story in the “as-is” world.

Thanksgiving Notes

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This will not be a post about Six Sigma or personal development. It is a time for being thankful and telling those you love how you feel.

Things I am thankful for and people I care about:

My mother and her recovery from cancer surgery.
My wife who deserves recognition for putting up with me.
My grandson Caleb who brings light into every corner of my life.
My son and the difference his life makes with others.
My daughter-in-law whom I love as if she were my own daughter.
My job and the opportunities it gives me.
My friends. Special mention: Lonnie who gave me a job, Brian and Fadi who share my burden at work.
My readers, who follow my words agree or not.

The problem is that when making a list you will undoubtably leave someone or something off by mistake. If I left anyone out, please do not take offense. I am only a human man, flawed, but saved by Grace.

Talent vs Heart

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If you follow professional football you are hearing a lot about Tim Tebow’s perceived lack of passing talent. Even so, he continues to win. So what’s up with that? If you look deeper into the story, you will find that his teammates believe in his leadership and drive, even if his head coach and the sports news talking heads do not.

Obviously, there is something else in play here. Let me explain. Talent by itself is like a box cake mix. Until you add some water and eggs, you have nothing of value. Talent without heart and drive will not win a championship for you. After coaching high school basketball for several years I found that teams who relied on their talent for success were the easiest to beat.

Success comes more from effort than talent. Yes, talent is an important ingredient to success, but it is just an ingredient. The plain truth is that there are many people with talent who are wasting away with sub-par performance because of a lack of effort. At the same time, there are people who are less talented, but because of their effort they accomplish great things.

Let me give you some exciting information. Your success depends on your effort. Sure, talent helps but effort is what carries you to the top. You can go as far in life as your effort will take you. There is no magic, no silver bullet, or short cut to success. It is all up to you. My dad used to tell me that in order to win I had to out work the competition. I have found this to be as true in business as it is in athletics.

So, put on your game face and get busy. Plan to out work and out effort the competition. Success is a choice you make, not something that just happens to you.

Personal Development and Six Sigma

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You might ask why I write about personal development on a website that is supposed to be focused on Six Sigma. This is a question that I hear from those who are trained in Six Sigma, but I rarely hear by those who are not.

The answer is that I see Six Sigma as a paradigm change for business people, not a just statistical business management program. At the end of the day, businesses are operated and managed by people. Any real change in the way things are done will happen at the people level. Failure to understand statistics will not cause a business to fail. Failure to understand the underlying, people focused reasons for why things happen in a business will lead to failure. The “why” is more important than the “what”.
Let me give an example. Business arrogance will cause a business to have a deaf ear toward customers and employees even if the business metrics show a problem. Six Sigma processes and statistics will not solve the problem of a manager who is not a believer or is protecting their turf. Therefore, a paradigm change at the individual manager level has to take place in order to bring business processes in alignment with customer expectations.

The majority of Six Sigma consultants are probably aware of the importance of existing corporate culture and its ability to adapt to the Six Sigma paradigm. At the same time, they probably do not know how to fix the problem and (or) are unwilling to walk away from the job opportunity. The resulting Six Sigma roll out fails because of failure to change the leadership culture. No one is happy as a result.

From a cultural perspective, the change is from the inside out not the outside in. No consultant can push change in an organization. Change is pulled. The impetus of pushed change comes from desire that is outside the organization. The impetus for pulled changes comes from the organization’s internal desire to change. This is where the rubber meets the road in Six Sigma.

Circle of Influence

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The concept of a circle of influence has been around for a while. For me, Stephen Covey’s description was the most influential. Just in case some of my readers have not had much thought time with the concept, your circle of influence incorporates those people, organizations and circumstances you are able to influence in some way.

Each of us, as individuals, or even as a business/organization, has some control over expanding or contracting our circle of influence. Obviously, for growth to take place, the expansion of your circle of influence is important, as long as it is for the right reasons.

Breaking things down to a simplistic philosophical level, I see four sets of opposing forces at work. Each set is made up of a quality that will expand your circle of influence and a quality that will contract it. These are:

Self-honesty/Self-deceit
Reality centered/Self-centered
Self-confidence/ Self-doubt
Self-Esteem/Self-condescension

Bear in mind that balance is important in any relationship and the same is true here. Going too far in the direction of self-honesty, for example, can be as bad for you as practicing self-deceit. Our wishes and dreams are not always in the realm of reality, but can still be used to give direction and motivation to our lives.

Being honest with yourself is critical for any forward progress with your personal life. If you consider a business/organization a self-contained entity, the same relationship to forward progress applies. Being honest with yourself allows you to make quality decisions based upon facts and the truth. The fear of the facts, or the truth, is a sign of deception and untrustworthiness that will contract your circle of influence. No matter how hard you try to hide it, others can see right through you.

Being reality centered means realizing that you are very seldom at the center of the universe, as a person or as a business/organization. Actually, in the human experience, the center of universe changes along with circumstances and priorities. When others see a reality base perspective about what is important, your circle of influence grows because trust and confidence in your opinions and perspectives grows. When others see a consistent self-centered perspective, your circle of influence shrinks along with trust in your opinions and perspectives.

It is difficult to make quality decisions when you doubt yourself. Whereas it is prudent to evaluate your abilities in specific circumstances, to always doubt yourself is not. Just think of how the world would be different if people like Edison or Einstein let self-doubt prevent them from making bold statements and decisions. On the other hand, being over confident has its own problems. People want to be lead either directly or indirectly, so they pay more attention to self-confident people and pity those lost in self-doubt. Your circle of influence expands with self-confidence until the tipping point of arrogance is reached.

I consider self-esteem to be one of the most important of human perspectives. It is the firewall that allows you to operate interdependently with others in our social network. When self-esteem is healthy, you are not nearly as dependent on other people’s opinion or criticisms of you. When self-esteem is low (self-condescending), your voice joins other voices in criticizing and bullying you. The resiliency that comes with good self-esteem expands your circle of influence because others appreciate your emotional strength and stability.

All of this can be state in a unified way. Being honest, confident, grounded and emotionally strong will expend you circle of influence. This expansion results in more opportunity on multiple levels.

Productivity Myth

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We hear a lot about productivity these days and it’s impact on being competitive. I believe this to be a mistaken relationship. Or better stated, an incomplete relationship. I am not saying that productivity is not important. It is just that production is only half of the equation. The other half is production control.

Production and production control are balanced against each other. The idea is to produce products and services to a production control target. For example, a business can say they need to produce 100 units per hour, or they can say they need to produce 100 units per hour that meet 100% of the targeted customer critical to quality specifications.

The result is that you may take a production line that can produce 200 units per hour if quality is not a concern, and tune it to produce 100 units per hour with no waste, rework or negative customer impact. I know what you are saying here. “My productivity is half of what it was and my costs are higher.” 

Is this really the case? Out of the 200 units originally produced, how many met customer specifications? How many of the 200 units had to be scrapped or reworked? How many inspectors, rework, and scrap removal dollars have been spent? How much market share did you lose because customer expectations were not met? The lack of quality will never save you money. It will always cost you more.

The trick to staying viable in a difficult economy is to remember that shoppers buy based upon perceived quality. Especially when their financial resources are  limited. No one wants to waste their money on a cheap, but ineffective, purchase.

The way to business success is by managing both production and production control. That is, to measure a process’s production capability by its ability to produce “at quality”. This enables a business to make capital and human investment decisions based upon a process’s true “customer” capability.

Avoid Being a Commodity in the Sales World

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According to Wikipedia:
“A commodity is a good (product)…. which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market…. the market treats it as equivalent, or nearly so, no matter who produces it….one of the characteristics of a commodity good is that its price is determined as a function of its market as a whole.”

As you drive along looking for gasoline, and you see multiple gas stations, how do you choose which service to use? Most people chose the least expensive, thereby treating gasoline as a commodity. Quality is considered equal across the suppliers and, as a result, is not a part of the shopper’s decision making process.
No matter what you are selling, you don’t want your product or service to be treated like a commodity. Without differentiation, you are like driftwood and have no control over your sales. Product or service differentiation is what gives you control over the market.

The best way to differentiate yourself, and what you are selling, is to begin with the awareness that the shopper is looking for a solution, not a price. The shopper cannot evaluate prices without first understanding the solution options.

Consider the game show “The Price is Right”. A contestant has to choose between Door Number 1 or Door Number 2, without knowing what is behind the doors. The decision is a hard one if the only thing you have to work with is price. This is why it is not a good idea to start any sales pitch with price. You are forcing the shopper to think commodity.

When you start by trying to understand the need and present a solution that fits that need, the shopper is now focused on differentiation. What you are trying to get to is relevancy. When the shopper can say “yes” to what you are saying (even if silently in their mind) you are moving toward a closing opportunity because you are in tune with them.

Next, understand that the solution and the price are related. Once the solution options are understood, the price becomes relevant. For example, if I say that I can sell you a calculator for $100.00, your first question is what kind of calculator is it and what can it do. You are not in a closing situation. If I tell you that I can sell you a calculator that can evaluate and trade stocks with a single key stroke based upon an algorithm used by Warren Buffet, and it only costs $100.00, you are in a closing situation.

Here is the formula to avoid being a commodity. Find out what the shopper needs, offer them a solution that fits their need, then price the solution accordingly. Always be pricing is a bad strategy. Always be closing is a good strategy.

Six Sigma and Business Acumen

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A common mantra in Six Sigma is to “make decisions based on data”. This is a flawed strategy that probably comes from Six Sigma’s dependence on statistical experts instead of business experts. A Six Sigma Black Belt or Master Black Belt is only as good as their business leadership skills. This is why a form test for Six Sigma certification will not work. A form test cannot measure leadership skills or business acumen. You need the full package to be effective. This is why so many Six Sigma initiatives fail. There is too much emphasis on math skills and not enough on business acumen and leadership.

Good business decisions take both data and business acumen. Data by itself can tell you what is happening, if you have measured the right things. Business acumen will enable you to measure the right things and help you to understand the “why” behind the data. Business leadership is used to lead change.
There is also the question of significance. Data can tell you statistical significance, but business acumen is required to understand practical significance. For example, a process change can produce a statistical significant shift in a product or service that is insignificant to the customer or business from a practical point of view.

To continue to be relevant to the business world, Six Sigma will have to become more business acumen and leadership focused.

You Are What You Expect

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What you expect from others becomes the minimum you will accept from others.

There are certain aspects of human nature that are predictable and usable by marketers. These behaviors occur whether we are aware of them or not. One of these is shopper/customer expectation behavior. When we tell a sales person what we expect, we are really telling them the minimum acceptable performance required for us to buy. In Six Sigma this becomes a critical to quality concern.

Whether you are in sales, Six Sigma or a relationship, knowing the expectations of the other party allows you to know the minimum level of performance expected. People who operate at or below this expected level are probably going to fail.

If you what to succeed in business and have quality relationships, exceeding expectations should be your goal. In life, we cannot always control our circumstances, but we can always control our effort.

What you expect from yourself becomes the maximum effort you will put forth.

A few years back, when the Orlando Magic played the Houston Rockets for the NBA championship, the series was a blow out. The Magic had a great season and talked consistently about “playing for the championship”. They accomplished that goal, which seemed to be the target of their season. The problem is that they played poorly in the championship series and were embarrassed by being swept. They met their expectations and could go no further.

This is another one of those unconscious behaviors mentioned above. When you set expectations for yourself, you have also set a target for your effort. This is why you should not set your expectations too low, or unreasonably high. Goal setting is a progressive thing. The healthy pattern is to set expectations that you know will change once you reach them. The satisfied person is also a stationary or static person. Becoming satisfied will stop your forward momentum.

Look at it from the good, better, best approach. If you believe that “good” is good enough, you are a minimalist and failure will plague you. If you think in the better category, that just makes you average, and though you have a somewhat higher probability of success, true excellence escapes you. When you think in the best category, you have the highest probability of success and excellence comes to define your efforts.