Lately everybody's been looking for cost-cutting measures. What I've been looking for are examples of real value creation.

Real value creation: Where are leaders and managers and employees taking their status quo situation, adding time, energy, and ideas to create real value; i.e. improvements in quality, improvements in productivity, improvements in the experience of clients and customers? That's real value creation. And I've been looking for real examples everywhere I go.

In the retail sector I had a very excited store manager give me a tour of his new and improved store. They had cleaned the place up. They improved the cleanliness of the store. They looked at their inventory and improved their ordering so that they improved the products on the shelves. They changed the layout in the store to make it easier for customers to buy. And they streamlined the checkout process and retrained the cashiers to make the checkout process faster and more convenient for customers. That's real value creation.

Not long ago I was working with the managers in an information services company and they were looking at their least popular product with their customer and client base. And they decided, "Let's just discontinue it and let's start issuing our most popular product twice a month instead of once a month." That's real value creation.

Let me give you another example. I was with about two-hundred dairy farm managers a few weeks ago and here's what they were focused on: One of the big problems that dairy farmers have is waste, spillage, and milk throw-away. And they were walking through their process step-by-step to figure out how they could diminish the spillage, the waste, and the throw away. How could they get more of the milk that comes out of those cows into the marketplace to increase their margins? That's real value creation.

BONUS MANAGEMENT TIP
TRAIN JUST-IN-TIME FOR THE MISSION, BUT TRAIN FOR EVERY MISSION
Fast-paced, super-intense, mission-driven training from day one is the only way to get people into meaningful roles immediately and move them along to greater and greater responsibility as fast as they can possibly learn. The most effective approach is to gear the training of individual contributors for the specific tasks, responsibilities, and projects they are going to be working on in the very near term.
1. Get new contributors up to speed very quickly so they can start adding value right away.
2. Create a just-in-time training infrastructure that can support ongoing as-needed learning. Provide maximum information resources in different media and give learners the remote control. Try to anticipate the learning needs that may come up over time; skill and knowledge gaps; refreshers; information that may come in handy. Also prepare contributors to anticipate their own needs as well. Gear just-in-time learning resources around anticipated gaps.
3. Transform your corporate culture by making everybody a knowledge worker. Knowledge work is not about what you do, but rather, how you do it. If a contributor goes out of his/her way to leverage information resources and employ skill and knowledge to accomplish tasks and responsibilities, no matter how basic, then he/she is a knowledge worker. Help every single contributor identify information resources and make a plan for leveraging skill and knowledge to accomplish every task and responsibility, no matter how basic.