Yesterday I talked to a group about reaching 212 in 2012. I used a video that talks about water being water at 211 degrees but with that one more degree it gets to 212 and becomes steam. The point, of course, is can you give just a bit more effort. Can you raise the temperature by one degree? can you give one more percent. You know you can.

The CEO was in the room and this is what he sent me last evening.
Wally, EXCELLENT job today! I have had 6 people stop in my office this afternoon commenting on your presentation this morning. A while back I had an employee tell me I was an ass because I questioned their “break time.” I asked him if he had any idea what these “break times” cost the company. I then went to our CFO and asked for our total payroll dollars for 2011. This is what I found:

2011 total payroll 24,387,000.  I then divided by 12 to get the monthly cost (2,032,250.00) then divided by 4 to get weekly cost (508,062.50) then divided by 5 to get daily cost (101,612,50) then divided by 8 to get hourly cost (12,701,56) then divided by 60 to get cost per minute (211.69) After going thru this exercise and explaining that if everyone took a 10 minute break, we are talking real money. When the video titled 211-212 was playing I was thinking this was ironic. I don’t know who
came up with 212 as the boiling point. Mine is 211.69!

First it was just plain nice of the CEO to share with me his thoughts and to give me a pat on the back.

Second, it is easy to see why this firm is so successful (and they really are!). It has an owner who pays attention to the details, and when necessay, digs a bit deeper to get information he can share with his team to help them understand the link between behavior and bottom-line. He helps them understand the importance of executing the basics.

A while back I wrote an article called are you making your blocks.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2012 at 1:44 am and is filed under Excellence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.