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Shelter Chieza Change Management
My friend has developed an obsession for giving everything a mathematical and monetary value. She is the kind of person who, when you are late for a meeting, will take note of the time you were late to the nearest second and can work out the cost to the company in monetary value.

So, recently she has been sending me lots of e-mails about mathematical rules and lately the most appealing to her has been Stephen Coveys 90-10 principle.

Covey’s appreciation of this rule is that 10 percent of life is made up of what happens to you, whereas 90 percent is decided by how you react.

There are things in life that we cannot ever have control over; we cannot stop inflation, death of a loved one.

This consists of 10 percent of your life. Then we have the 90 percent that you control as a result of your reaction.

You cannot individually control the profitability of the sector you are in, but you can control how you as a company may react to it.

I believe a lot of what we react to is caused by unchecked emotions. Guard your emotions with all your energy in the morning because if you don’t, it might just spoil your entire day.

It is amazing that most of our moods are shaped in the early morning traffic rush? A series of incidences that could have been avoided are blown out of proportion.

For instance, you are driving along and a commuter omnibus cuts in front of you, in a fit of rage you chase after it and when you catch up with it as it stops to pick a passenger you pull up alongside it and slam on the brakes while sputtering and cursing the driver and the car behind you fails to stop in time and slams into the back of your car.

You get out of your car as the commuter omnibus takes off and patiently wait for traffic police to come and attend to the accident.

In the middle of that, you discover that you forgot your driver’s licence and wallet at home.

You have to call home so that someone can drop it off at the accident scene, which takes a bit of time, time that you were supposed to devote to work.

In the process you miss a scheduled business meeting. By the time you get to the office, it is almost mid-morning and you have lost strategic deals, you are in a bad shape emotionally and your productivity is so low.

You realise that there could be a more productive outcome if you had reacted differently. If you don’t analyse the way you react to situations, you lose valuable time and miss out on a lot of things.

The few seconds that you overreact or under react could cost you the entire day.

In the above instance, the problem was the way you reacted to the commuter omnibus driver. Generally, drivers know how commuter omnibus drivers behave it would have been wise to let the incident pass or to stop and confront the driver at a safe place.

Of course, you are human and you have rights on the road, but how you react to a situation determines the outcome.

This rule can also be used in encounters with customers. Initially, when products are introduced onto the market they have capacity to lure customers.

Most loyal users are hooked in the first 90 days. If it is aromatherapy body oil for aching muscles for instance, a customer’s initial encounter with the product may make them dependant on a product.

You see, if an individual user does not take to the product within the first 90 days of provision, in most cases there is a 10 percent chance that they never will.

At our shop, we have since realised that the first 30 days of introducing a product produces the highest volume of loyal users, followed by the next 30.

Initially, the company and the customer are united to work together after closing the initial deal.

This is the time when the parties have laid out their expectations. You see, initiating something is not difficult; what is challenging is delivering against expectations.

Customers want to see results; the moment you relinquish those expectations you are not doing yourself a favour.

You can apply this rule anywhere else. If you earn $10 000 on a monthly basis, it is always wise and advised to spend $9 000 and save the $1 000.

The 90-10 rule works in almost every space, even planning a meal. Plan knowing that 90 percent of your diet is the healthy meals and then the 10 percent can be those comfort meals.

You see, 90 percent of the success or failure of a project is determined by the first 10 percent of their effort.

The initial steps that you as a project manager take to select the team, the communication and plan for the project is the most important in any project.

I like what Robert Kiyosakis says about this rule: “Once again, the 90-10 rule of money applies — 10 percent of the borrowers in the world use debt to get richer — 90 percent use debt to get poorer.”

Till next week, may God richly bless you.

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