Low-Hanging Fruit

77 Eye-Opening Ways to Improve Productivity and Profits

Jeremy Eden, Terri Long

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118857922
• eBook ISBN: 9781118865040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

A straightforward, valuable guide to reduce effort and raise profits

Step inside any organization, even a very successful one, and you'll probably find a lot of waste if you know where to look. From providing a feature that consumers don't care about to exhausting efforts on tasks that only require adequate attention, there are countless areas where resources go down the drain. In Low-Hanging Fruit, Jeremy Eden and Terri Long provide seventy-seven of their most effective techniques for improvement, each drawn from their success working with major companies.

For more than twenty years, Jeremy Eden and Terri Long have helped companies of all sizes make millions by harvesting their low-hanging fruit. In this practical guide, Eden and Long share valuable, refreshing insights in entertaining chapters that get straight to the point. This book shows you how to smoothly shift your approach, your priorities, and your mindset to reveal the hidden potential in your organization. Whether you are a member of a small team or a global executive, you will learn how to identify and solve hidden problems, improve productivity, and increase profits.

Many people don't realize that there are dozens of quick, easy, and affordable ways to make things better. Don't buy into the myth that only some people have creative ideas. Typically, the people closest to the work (from the factory floor to the C-Suite) and the people closest to the customer know the best ways to improve business. We can pluck this "low-hanging fruit" every day to save time and money right away.

Need to grow your company's earnings but don't know where to find the low-hanging fruit? The answer is right in front of you, but harvesting it takes skill. Eden and Long show you seventy-seven clever ways to discover possibilities and make meaningful changes. Low-Hanging Fruit shows you how to easily improve your job satisfaction, your team's performance, and your company's earnings.

Part 1
How to Uncover Low-Hanging Fruit
Seeing the Problem Is Harder than Solving the Problem

When faced with low-hanging fruit, a short ladder is all you need! We have had the privilege of helping many Fortune 1000 companies in a range of industries solve literally thousands of problems in a matter of months. These companies have announced to Wall Street that their solutions would yield tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in new earnings. These companies then delivered even more than they announced.

To say the least, these results are uncommon! Most companies generate far lower rates of improvements. Having watched literally thousands of managers generate over 100,000 good solutions, we can bust one myth about innovation—it does not require uncommon courage and uncommon creativity. In Part 1, we describe many tactics that will help you and your teams find new insights about how to improve your company and strengthen your problem-solving skills.

You may think that seeing problems worth solving is the easy part. Well, it can be, but it can also require some new perspective. For example, imagine a call center team that has invested a lot of time, money, and energy in improving how they handle customer complaints and problems. They have become so good at it that customers who call with a problem stay loyal customers. Sounds good, right? They have seen and solved lots of problems.

The call center team members see the poor handling of dissatisfied customers as the problem to be solved. They see things from their own perspective, which is, “What can I do when an unhappy customer calls?”

But that’s the wrong problem. The right problem to solve should be to prevent problems that generate calls. A customer problem that is prevented is a lot better than a customer problem handled, even when handled well.

In this part, you will find many ways to uncover low-hanging fruit that is currently obscured from view.

Problem Solving in a Nutshell

You need to believe it to see it.

We pack a lot of air in our luggage for a very simple reason: We literally just do not see it. Remember, we said that if your luggage were filled with red sand rather than air, you would get right on solving that problem? Solving problems starts with acknowledging those problems.

If you truly believe that invisible problems surround you, you are far more likely to find ways to see them. If you do not believe it, you will not see it.

Try seeing the problem in this situation: Banks need to send some overdraft notices by snail mail. There is no clever way around mailing the notice. A highly efficient bank operations group uses the least expensive paper and envelopes they can buy, the most efficient printing process, the lowest-cost postage, and the smallest mailing list required by law.

Do you see the problem they should try to solve?

Continue reading when you are ready.

Sending paper notices is necessary but using envelopes is not! The problem is that the company spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on envelopes to send required notices.

The envelope solution is a quick illustration of good problem solving. We start with the money and see that we are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on envelopes. We then use this information to see a problem that is normally overlooked—namely, that we are buying and mailing envelopes that we would rather not buy and mail if we could find a way to avoid it. We call this a problem even if we have no idea how to solve it.

We then ask why we send envelopes. The obvious answer is because overdraft letters contain confidential information that only an envelope can keep private.

This answer seems reasonable, but before we give up we ask, “How do we know that’s true?” To confirm that our answer is true, we bring in a new perspective by talking to vendors who sell paper, envelopes, and mailing services. Lo and behold, a few conversations later we discover that there is a vendor that has designed a gluing operation to fold and glue a postcard so the information cannot be seen until the postcard is unsealed.

Aha, a practical solution to a problem we had not even acknowledged. The vendor informs us that its postcard process was specifically designed to eliminate envelope costs and to reduce the overall costs for mailing private information.

This saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars!

Chapter 1
Put a Price Tag on Everything to Stop the Waste

Problem solving must start by following the money. The problem the bank faced was not “We are wasting envelopes.” The problem was “We are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on envelopes.”

Following the money helps to turn an accepted practice into an unacceptable problem. Just imagine if everything your company did had a price tag. We mean, literally, a price tag, stamped on every section of every report telling you how much it cost to produce that section. Imagine a price tag on every record of every transaction telling you how much that specific transaction cost to complete.

Assuming motivated managers, this new visible information would change the tune from “That’s how we do things here” to “Wow, why does it cost so much?” or “Holy cow, this is not worth it!”

Putting a mental price tag on everything helps to place the focus on solving problems that matter. Two companies distribute marketing materials using a list of contact information that is only 85 percent correct. That means that 15 percent of the material distributed does not go to a real prospect.

Do both of these companies have a problem that they should try to solve? You need to follow the money to decide. The first company distributes material using e-mail. Sending material to people who are not really prospects has a very low incremental cost. The second company mails printed brochures that cost millions of dollars.

By following the money, we know that the first company does not have a problem worth solving, while the second one does.

Generally these price tags are metaphorical—a list on a spreadsheet. One technology industry executive was having a hard time getting anyone’s attention, so he went out and bought a package of labels. He then disassembled the product down to the last screw and attached a price tag to each part with the fully loaded cost of delivering that part to the customer. At the next meeting of the task force, with representatives from Engineering, Research and Development, Factory Operations, Brand Marketing, Sales, Logistics, and Finance, the executive laid out all of the parts with their price tags on a large conference table.

The reaction? Stunned silence. No one had realized how many different parts were used in just the one device. They certainly did not have a clue about how much some of the parts cost that were not important to the customer experience.

An executive who was frustrated by the countless reports produced by his company decided to commandeer a large conference room, which he filled with every report the company routinely produced. The stacks upon stacks of reports were visually arresting. Then he had the finance team put Post-it notes displaying the price of every report.

With serious money lurking in all of those reports, he then opened visiting hours for the executive team!

Talk about packing air versus sand in the suitcase!

Within a few weeks, hundreds of thousands of dollars were saved by eliminating, simplifying, or automating many of those reports.

Chapter 2
“Value Engineer” Your Products to Eliminate What Your Customers Won’t Pay For

Value engineering is a powerful process used to discover and eliminate all of the elements in a product or service that customers do not value but that cost the company money. For example, when applied to a food product, value engineering can result in changes to various ingredients...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Why Is Low-Hanging Fruit So Hard to Spot?
• Part 1: How to Uncover Low-Hanging Fruit
• Part 2: Now That You See It, Solve It!
• Part 3: Motivate Your Team to Harvest Low-Hanging Fruit
• Part 4: One Company—It’s Not an Impossible Dream
• Part 5: Decide and Deliver
• Part 6: Accountability: The Holy Grail!
• Part 7: Need More Time? It’s Easier to Find than You Think!
• Part 8: Win Over the Skeptics, Cynics, and Faint of Heart!
• Part 9: P.S. For Our C-Suite Readers (and Those Aspiring to Get There)!
• In Conclusion
• End User License Agreement