Episode 28: Who You Have Is What You Get, with Karla Nelson and Allen Fahden

[wp_social_sharing social_options=”facebook,twitter,googleplus,linkedin” facebook_text=”Share on Facebook” twitter_text=”Share on Twitter” googleplus_text=”Share on Google+” linkedin_text=”Share on Linkedin” icon_order=”f,t,g,l,p,x” show_icons=”1″ before_button_text=”Share” text_position=””]

Join us for this week’s episode of The People Catalysts Podcast as Allen Fahden and I discuss the six week pilot we facilitated with 12 small business owners and what we discovered about the WHO-DO Method and small business.

Anyone who knows Karla Nelson describes her as an experience. She is as close as a human being can ever be to a human doing. It’s simple. She finds an idea that’s different and valuable, and then she builds it with a team. Swiftly, and relentlessly. She does this by a rare process of how to fit people together, that goes far beyond just connecting them. Karla has built several businesses since her early twenties and learned that in business and in life, “Relationships Are Everything.” And now she has put it all in a form that’s easy to learn and use: The People Catalysts.

When the world zigs, Allen Fahden zags. His first book introduced the unifying theory of creativity. Using his own method he created the one-book bookstore, and got media exposure in front of 50 million people without doing anything. Next, he launched the first strength-to-strength work process that gets three to eight times more done in less time. He beat Gallup and the Strengths Finder by five years. One company used his method to take their division from $20 million to $60 million in two years, while the rest of the company was flat. His clients include Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and dozens more.

Between them and their team, Karla and Allen have used the WHO-DO Method with 25 of the Fortune 100 and dozens of mid market companies and startups. Typically, The WHO-DO Method cuts 50-80% off cycle time and produce better results with happier people. The Who-Do Method’s client list includes Target, Best Buy, Disney, Comcast, 3M, Amazon, General Mills, HP, Coca-Cola, Deloitte, Cargill, Chase, US Bank, State Farm Insurance, IBM and many other corporate market leaders.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

• The experiment we did a couple months ago where we paused the podcast to teach the WHO-DO Method to small businesses
• Why it’s easier for small businesses to incorporate the WHO-DO Method than it is for large corporations
• Why activity doesn’t equal productivity
• The reason our pilot attracted Movers and Shakers
• The Titanic game: using the WHO-DO Method to save everybody on the Titanic when in reality half of the people died
• The communication game: a game where we had someone describe a picture to the rest of the group that only they could see and how using the WHO-DO Method turned this game from a failure of communication into a repeatable process for success
• Why almost all failure in business is process failure, not people failure (and why leadership loves to blame people, not process)
• The bridge game: a game for taking plans for a bridge, bidding the amount of time it would take, and then building the bridge
• Some of the other games/tasks we completed during the pilot
• The biggest “A ha!” moments from the pilot
• Why people have the tendency to jump right into action instead of using the system
• Predicting what’s going to happen based on who you have in the room
• Making sure you have a Mover in the room to remind everyone else to stick to the process
• Remembering to use the 80/20 rule and spending 80% of the time planning and 20% of the time implementing
• Building a team with a Mover, Shaker, Prover, and Maker and using them at the right times in the process

Ways to contact us:

• Email: next@karlanelson.com
• Schedule a Strategy Session: meetme.so/Karla-Nelson

Do you want to host a podcast? Click here to find out how I do it.