The answer is often Business/IT alignment. In organizations that are unsuccessful in aligning business and IT, the blame, angst, and even contempt is often mutual. While organization that are well aligned consistently deliver substantial shareholder value.

In a recent study by Roger Sessions, he concluded that the IT failure worldwide costs the world economy a staggering $6.2 trillion per year, or $500 billion each month!

Sessions believes, and we agree, that this problem is solvable by successfully aligning Business and IT. Not only will the solution bring compelling financial rewards, it will bring many other rewards as well, such as:

• Reducing complexity
• Faster time to market
• Helping small and mid-sized businesses become more competitive
• Boosting customer satisfaction
• Increasing the agility of organizations
• Making the workplace a more collaborative environment
• Delivering IT systems on-time and within business expectations

Innovation and hard work, just like our ancestors did, not to long ago, are the only way out this mess.

And to John Wayne, I am building a homestead

Sam Walton grew up poor during the Great Depression, yet rose to start the biggest retail store; Wal-Mart. In Sam Walton’s “Running a Successful Company: Ten Rules that Worked for Me,” he talks about the secrets to his success. Read on to learn Sam’s winning formula for business.

Excerpted from “The Book of Business Wisdom”

Edited by Peter Krass

Rule 1: Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else. I think I overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work. I don’t know if you’re born with this kind of passion, or if you can learn it. But I do know you need it. If you love your work, you’ll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you — like a fever.

Rule 2: Share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations. Remain a corporation and retain control if you like, but behave as a servant leader in your partnership. Encourage your associates to hold a stake in the company. Offer discounted stock, and grant them stock for their retirement. It’s the single best thing we ever did.

Rule 3: Motivate your partners. Money and ownership alone aren’t enough. Constantly, day by day, think of new and more interesting ways to motivate and challenge your partners. Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score. Make bets with outrageous payoffs. If things get stale, cross-pollinate; have managers switch jobs with one another to stay challenged. Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don’t become too predictable.

Rule 4: Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand, the more they’ll care. Once they care, there’s no stopping them. If you don’t trust your associates to know what’s going on, they’ll know you really don’t consider them partners. Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitors.

Rule 5: Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. A paycheck and a stock option will buy one kind of loyalty. But all of us like to be told how much somebody appreciates what we do for them. We like to hear it often, and especially when we have done something we’re really proud of. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free — and worth a fortune.

Rule 6: Celebrate your success. Find some humor in your failures. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up. Have fun. Show enthusiasm — always. When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song. Then make everybody else sing with you. Don’t do a hula on Wall Street. It’s been done. Think up your own stunt. All of this is more important, and more fun, than you think, and it really fools competition. “Why should we take those cornballs at Wal-Mart seriously?”

Rule 7: Listen to everyone in your company and figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines — the ones who actually talk to the customer — are the only ones who really know what’s going on out there. You’d better find out what they know. This really is what total quality is all about. To push responsibility down in your organization, and to force good ideas to bubble up within it, you must listen to what your associates are trying to tell you.

Rule 8: Exceed your customer’s expectations. If you do, they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want — and a little more. Let them know you appreciate them. Make good on all your mistakes, and don’t make excuses — apologize. Stand behind everything you do. The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Wal-Mart sign: “Satisfaction Guaranteed.” They’re still up there, and they have made all the difference.

Rule 9: Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. For twenty-five years running — long before Wal-Mart was known as the nation’s largest retailer — we’ve ranked No. 1 in our industry for the lowest ratio of expenses to sales. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you’re too inefficient.

Rule 10: Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you’re headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.

Well, there is a way to avoid interception. If a QB never tries to throw the ball, he will never throw an interception. Of course; never trying also means never succeeding, and no want to fail for never trying.

But the difference between merely making an “effort” and producing results is that between a winning quarterback, and one who is not. Preparation and hard work will lead to making the right decisions most of the time. You don’t have to be right all the time, just more right than wrong.

Too many people in business are hesitant to try new ideas, or make decisions for the fear of throwing an interception. It is the business leaders role to create a culture where colleagues are not afraid of trying, and not afraid of making decisions. And it is your responsibility not be afraid of making an “interception”, if you are well prepared, you will score more touch downs than interception.

This brings us to the topic of change management. First, let’s ask; What is Change Management?

“It is a structured process and set of tools for leading the people side of change.”

Another way to explain Change Management is; it is the technique used to ensure that everyone involved in change gets from point A to point B together, and on the designated line planned to go from point A to Point B.

Attempting to make a change, whether it is a a new software platform, a new finance process, changing workflow in the current supply chain, or any other business change, without “taking people with you”, is doomed to failure.

A very effective process I used in Change Management is the the ADKAR method. This method has 5 elements:

Awareness
-  Creating awareness of the need for change.
– What is the nature of the change?
– Why is the change happening?
– What is the risk of not changing?

Desire
-  Cultivating desire to support the change.
– Personal motivation to support the change
– Organizational drivers to support the change

Knowledge
-  Providing knowledge on how to change.
– Knowledge, skills and behaviors required during and after the change
– Understanding how to change

Ability
- Providing the ability to implement new skills.
– Demonstrated ability to implement the change
– Barriers that may inhibit implementing the change

Reinforcement
-  Reinforcement to sustain the change.
- Mechanisms to keep the change in place
– Recognition, rewards, incentives, successes

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

This advice is particularly true when embarking on a new project or initiative. Part of “sharpening the axe” would be to ask these questions:

- What is the business case/need?
- How this this project map to the business strategy
- Is the timeline for project execution co-terms with the business quarterly/yearly/etc.. objectives?
- What is the impact on the financial plan (quarterly impact)
- What bad things will happen if the project/initiative is not done at all?
- What good things will happen if it is done?