Ric Payne – Page 6 – Ric Payne's Blog: The Consulting Accountant

IKEA’s success may have more to do with accident than design

As much as I love talking about strategy and execution and all that cool stuff I have always felt that a “magic potion” simply does not exist and great strategy is usually only recognized in hindsight and has way more to do with how people in a leadership role respond to opportunities that pop up from time to time and challenges that pop up all the time. Continue reading “IKEA’s success may have more to do with accident than design”

Should Governments step in to assist businesses in trouble?

And is this something business advisors should think about? Continue reading “Should Governments step in to assist businesses in trouble?”

It was 1998 and I was thinking about the firm of the future

In 1998 I was the CEO of Results Accountants’ Systems – the Accountants’ Bootcamp company. During a particularly difficult time I wrote a weekly report to our 100+ team scattered around the world. The report I wrote on August 15 talked to a “dream” I had about the way firms would be operating in the future. I picked 2008 as the year that defined the future but was out by 10 years. Continue reading “It was 1998 and I was thinking about the firm of the future”

Ever thought of playing a game with your clients?

One of the more interesting and enjoyable experiences I’ve had in the past year is spending some quality time with Paul Kennedy and his team in his Goffs Oak office in the UK. I’m about spend another 5 months there to finish a project that I think all accountants (and other business advisors) should seriously consider. Continue reading “Ever thought of playing a game with your clients?”

What I’m working on: The intersection between neuroscience and practice development

Yesterday, a good friend of mine asked if I was enjoying “retirement.” I explained that I haven’t retired (and never will) but have simply changed careers from running a consulting business to writing about the SME consulting process through the lens of my own experience, my observation of the experience of others, and based on some important science Continue reading “What I’m working on: The intersection between neuroscience and practice development”

The Biggest Challenge Facing a Business Adviser

The biggest challenge I have had as an adviser to the owners and/or managers of businesses who are seeking help to improve the profitability and value of their enterprise is typically encapsulated in the saying “a fish stinks from the head down.”

The most dangerous person in an organization

… is a founder CEO who believes he (more often than ‘she’ for some reason) knows everything he needs to know to manage and grow his business and believes anyone who doesn’t perform at a high level, as per his instructions, is incompetent, stupid or lazy.

Drucker on the Critical Importance of Knowledge Worker Productivity & the Role of Leadership

Management guru writes “A knowledge-based workforce is qualitatively different from a less-skilled one. True, knowledge workers are a minority of the total workforce and are unlikely ever to be more than that. But they have become the major creators of wealth and jobs. Increasingly, the success–indeed, the survival–of every business will depend on the performance of its knowledge workforce. And since it is impossible, according to the laws of statistics, for an organization to hire more than a handful of “better people,” the only way that it can excel in a knowledge-based economy and society is by getting more out of the same kind of people-that is, by managing its knowledge workers for greater productivity. The challenge, to repeat an old saying, is ‘to make ordinary people do extraordinary things.'”

The Creation of a Phenomenally Profitable Firm is a Matter of Choice

I have been looking through some of my earlier writing and came across a report I wrote in 2013 on an analysis is did on the 2012 Good Bad and Ugly survey conducted on Australian firms by Business Fitness.

I was looking for the defining characteristics of firms where the owner(s) were achieving a net profit of $1 million or more and it reminded me that there’s no secret here, the success of a firm (and this applies to any business) is really a matter of choice about where your focus needs to be and how you perform your role as the leader of the firm.

Before you engage in a debate to advance your beliefs, pause to reflect on Ben Franklin’s advice

In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin advised on how to keep friends and influence people:

“I took delight in it, practiced it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, even of superior knowledge into concessions the consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither myself nor my cause always deserved. I continued this method some few years but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence, never using when I advance anything that may possibly be disputed the words, “certainly,” “undoubtedly,” or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, “I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so or so,” “It appears to me,” or “I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons,” or “I imagine it to be so,” or “It is so if I am not mistaken.”