It is important for us, now and then, to review what comprises the overall CCCC process for corporations or other human endeavors. What exactly is it, and where, you might ask, in this mix of CCCC offerings, does your organization lie or at which point should your firm get involved?

The Real Deal

I recall a visit to a client in Vienna who had praised me as I completed delivering a lecture to her team,
about the CCCC techniques. In a chat after the lecture she berated me when I proudly talked about the
CCCC process. “Don’t say ‘process’ to me unless you want to chase me away permanently.” I didn’t get it,
as I tried to defend our systematic approach. She did not budge and I learned that she had been doing
everything in her power to avoid the Six Sigma process at her Viennese branch, a process which had been
mandated by company headquarters in Denver for the previous number of years.

Now, much later, I do get it. (a) Today, it is a documented fact that 85% of so-called business processes fail. (b) I tell my friends that the essence of what CCCC does is to help companies deal with emotions because they continually interfere with progress, no matter where you are. How do ideas (a) and (b) mix? If we can master emotions, we can master solutions, or broadly speaking master the hard-working, well-intentioned people that make up all companies, everywhere. Programs of individuals in business, despite great capability, continually fail ‘due to other people’ – i.e. due to their own run-away emotions and other
people’s ‘instabilities’.

Yet, one cannot approach clients to solve their issues with a message that speaks only of touchy-feely ideas – unless one wants to frighten them away. So we must expose the second part to this CCCC equation: an engineered business process to support the change in behaviors within the work environment. However, unless you master emotions, a business process, no matter how clever, will not be successful. So, in degrees of importance, we say that mastering emotions is first and the engineered process is second.

Mastering the Feelings
The list of tools to master feelings via the CCCC approach is lengthy, but in brief it includes:

 The safe environment
 The Team-of-Two
 Effective meetings
 The monthly Problem Management Council
 The suggestion box
 And plenty more – the totality being integrated sequentially

All of these are means to listen to others, unemotionally – and to use the learned information as starting
points.

Mastering the Process
I take pride in being an engineer. From my engineering origins came the CCCC engineered business
process that will work for any company, medium-sized or larger, anywhere in the world. In the engineer’s
mind there is a reason for everything. So, an engineered process must always provide consistent answers
and ours certainly does. The CCCC engineered business process took 4 years to develop based on work of pioneers such as Ichak Adizes, Buckingham & Coffman, Elliott Jaques – and others. Development still
carries on every day at CCCC. Once a year this material is shared with up to ten leaders at a public seminar stretched over an intense week – the Practical MBA.

Essentially, the CCCC process consists of 7 steps (while interweaving the aforementioned human aspects).

The steps are:

1. Theory of enterprise operations
Theory encompasses decision-making, what it takes to get tasks done, how things actually fit together,
management techniques (meetings, action lists, Boards, committees, etc.), the life cycle of enterprises,
psychology of human behavior, and meaningful communications.

2. Mission
Since everything must begin with purpose, a clear statement of why the organization exists and the
vision of where it is going provides the solid base-rock that every employee can fall back onto when
making decisions during difficult times – no matter where the branch is located.

3. Planning
(a) Planning
Laying out a plan for the next 12 months is so essential, that CCCC uses this phase as the starting point
for most of its clients. If you don’t know where you are going, how will you ever get there? We show
the CEO how to maintain an independent monitoring system so that this leader knows at any moment,
exactly where the company stands

(b) Strategic Alignment Review (SAR)
Alternatively, for companies that may have lost their way (typical of companies with a 20-year history),
the SAR is the starting point. It leads to a company’s renewal or re-birth. It is nothing less than a deep
self-analysis of the company, setting a direction towards the peak of Excellence.

4. Problem-solving
As a company refocuses itself for improvement, it has to fix the gimpy leg of its steeplechase racehorse
before it can start jumping the hurdles. That is, solving problems MUST come before grandiose plans
of escalating the company’s performance. Any other approach will lead to a disappointing failure.

5. Accountability
Management of staff is hard work because most people have to be nurtured – trained, tested, cared for,
made accountable, performance measured, reviewed regularly, hired, fired, listened to and, most
important of all, inspired. This only happens if the manager devotes his/her time to the reporting
people.

6. Start-up of a new enterprise
While an experienced manager may feel he or she has business concepts under control, the real
business lesson come with the challenge (and excitement) of starting a new enterprise or department.
Those new, exciting, challenges have to laid out clearly.

7. Maintaining the System
Just because you have a great company now, sitting at the peak of Excellence, it will not stay there all
by itself. You must continue to enforce the discipline that got you there in the first place.
Good luck,
Bill