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Steve Akinboro (1)Steve Akinboro is the CEO of of Global Harvest Consulting LLC and Strategic Advisor/Board Member at MCM Franchising Inc. A Senior business executive and change agent who accelerates results in the retail foodservice industry, Akinboro is an acclaimed consensus builder, servant leader and an inspirational speaker.

Most recently as Executive Vice President of Corporate Operations at Domino’s Pizza, Akinboro managed strategic growth and development of the company’s corporate business. He held senior management positions at Domino’s and McDonald’s, where he was selected to support the expansion of McDonald’s into South Africa.

Akinboro later served as Global Operations Development Manager and was instrumental in the turnaround of McDonald’s markets in United Kingdom, South Africa and the United States. In addition, he served on the board of McDonald’s African American Council and the Ronald McDonald’s Children Charity in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Akinboro graduated from the Chartered Institute of Marketing in London and holds a post-graduate degree in Intelligent Management Systems from London South Bank University. He also attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Business School.

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" As a widely accomplished global senior operations executive and change agent, Steve Akinboro works to accelerate corporate results in the highly competitive multi-unit branded retail foodservice industry. Steve is a consensus builder and servant leader adept at building high-performance cultures that deliver record-setting improvements in revenue, EBITDA, employee engagement and customer experience.

Recognized for his ability to identify, assess and enhance critical business drivers, Steve was instrumental in turning around Domino’s and putting multiple McDonald’s regions on the path to unprecedented growth and profitability. With his extensive global experience, high emotional intelligence and personal accountability, Steve has an exceptional ability to engage and inspire others combine with a sense of urgency to deliver results in key performance areas."

—Leadercast

Google suggests that “disappointment” is the feeling of sadness or displeasure caused by the nonfulfillment of one's hopes or expectations.  As you’ll see, the sadness of disappointment can be the foundation for future success!

In business we all have to take calculated risks to make progress, and sometimes our efforts don’t go as we hope.  Failure is seldom fun—but at some point virtually everyone copes with failures, large and small.  As the great American football coach Vince Lombardi said, “It's not whether you get knocked down; it's whether you get up.”

Here are five ways to turn those inevitable disappointments into success:                                                           

1. Be Patient: What might, at first, seem a setback or a failure, can prove to be success in disguise. Think of that the next time you fry an egg on that non-stick frying pan. Scientists at DuPont were working on a new refrigerator coolant, which failed when it refused to stay a gas but condensed into a hard slippery coating. That failed refrigerant, when applied to cooking pans, became Teflon®, and revolutionized the way we cook.

2. Consistent Persistence: The first time he attempted to make a filament for his electric light bulb, Thomas Edison failed. He failed the second time. And the thousandth time. Only after three thousand different materials were tested, did Edison find the secret to making a practical light bulb. If you are convinced your fundamental idea is sound, then persistence may be the key to your success.

3. Avoid Self Sabotage: The fact that your idea may have failed does not mean that you are a failure. Do you remember Virgin Cola? Or Virgin Vodka? Or Virginware lingerie? Neither does anyone else. But that did not stop serial entrepreneur Richard Branson who tells us,  “Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.”  Think about that as you board a Virgin Atlantic flight to Europe or other parts of the world.

4. Honest Self-assessment: Sometimes a particular disappoint might actually be your fault! This is when you need to be painfully honest with yourself. Ask “Did I truly do everything in my power to create success?” Sometimes we might rationalize a failure by claiming bad luck, or unfair tactics by another. The problem is by not accepting full responsibility yourself for the outcome, you set your self up for more failure if, in fact, there is more you could have done to create that success in the first place. No one ever excused their way to success, hope or luck is not a strategy.

5. See The Bright Side: There are times when a failure is actually the best outcome possible. You’ll notice how people with a very positive outlook are seldom discouraged.  If not hired for that dream job, they’ll say, “Then that probably wasn’t the best job for me.” We all have had experiences when we learn what might have seemed like a failure was actually a blessing in disguise. Just be sure you really did try your hardest, and are not rationalizing away a failure!

The simple truth is that life (and work) can be very challenging. Not everything we try will turn out the way we wish. But allowing yourself to become disappointed almost guarantees you will find more disappointment.

Another great sports figure, the outstanding college basketball coach John Wooden, taught his players “things turn out best for people who make the best of the way things turn out.”

Bottom line - You will be a winner when you believe that inside every disappointment lie the seeds for your future success!

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Steve Akinboro

Uncategorized

5 Questions to Help You Achieve More Life Balance

OC - Is Your's Helping or Hurting Your Team's Performance

Strategic Collaboration - Key to Increasing Shareholder Value

Hassiba Braggs

Steve Akinboro

Kehinde Akinboro

Darren Hall

Steve Akinboro

April 17, 2015

“Everything in Moderation” has been a formula for health and happiness for generations. It’s as true today as ever, maybe even more so, as we find ourselves under increased pressure at work and home. Balancing all the various demands on our lives takes conscious effort, and the rewards are significant. Check your experience against the questions below and see where you come out on the “Work Life Balance” equation (and if you don’t think you can take the time to read this, you probably really need to!).

When is your next vacation? As you plan this year, how many days of vacation are scheduled on your calendar? Weekend get-a-ways are nice in between long vacations, but they are not meant to replace them. It takes 1-2 days of mental (physical) separation before vacation benefit kicks in. The reality is we need time from our daily grind to refresh and re-energize. As a leader, if you are not taking vacation, you're sending the wrong message to your team. You both need vacation. Plan it - Take it - and look forward to coming back with a fresh attitude and perspective.

Is your cell phone on or off overnight? The speed of change driven by e-commerce has been positive in a lot of ways. This demands that leaders move quickly and stay ahead of the curve. Perhaps you are reading this on your mobile device, which is fine as long as it’s not 2:00 am while you’re in bed! How often do you leave your phone switched on next to your bed? If your answer is “often”, you might want to rethink your priorities (unless you are a doctor on emergency call). The internet should be an enabler. Don’t allow it to disrupt your life in a negative, unproductive ways. Sleep is essential for the soul.

How do you spend your time off? If you spend them constantly catching up on the work week, or you are so tired that you slept through your time off, it could be a good idea to review your work load and assess your delegation skills. There may be resources to which you can assign parts of your work load.

When was the last time you spent really quality time with your loved ones…or even with yourself??? The notion is that we are working hard to leave a legacy sounds great and is legitimate – as long as we don’t allow that goal to dominate our lives to the point that the very people we are supposedly doing it for are excluded in the meantime. Review your calendar…how much quality time have you set aside to invest with your loved ones or with yourself for that matter. The time may very well be more valuable than the money.

Blaming your company for work/life challenges? We get so busy sometimes that we can hardly see the trees from the forest. News flash -- your company and your leaders are not responsible for your work life imbalance. Yes, sometimes it’s a delicate equation where you have to negotiate the right arrangement, but there are ways to take control. Review and analyze your calendar and try categorizing your activities and actions into these two buckets:

Urgent (Constantly dealing with crisis)

Important (Proactively leading/resolving matters before they get to crisis level)

Now, you can see where and how your time is being spent. If you are not satisfied with the picture, consider making a change and deploying the courage to say no to requests that are not consistent with your work/life goals.

We all know the old saying that “nobody on their deathbed wishes they had spent more time at work. If you’re feeling overwhelmed or feel like your life is out of balance, maybe it’s time to deposit/invest time in your personal, family or social bank account. If you’ve gotten to this end of the article you’re already on your way..

Share your feedback – What is your perspective on the topic?

March 20, 2015

Steve Akinboro

Uncategorized

5 Ways to Turn Disappointment/Failure into Success

OC - Is Your's Helping or Hurting Your Team's Performance

Strategic Collaboration - Key to Increasing Shareholder Value

Darryl Webb

Steve Akinboro

Kevin Leininger

Mariam E. Gobrial

Steve Akinboro

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Culture - The sum of attitudes, customs, and beliefs that distinguishes one group of people, brand or organization from another [1]. Effective leaders recognize the crucial role culture plays in the success of their organization.

Culture is deeply embedded in the fabric of every organization and can make or break your carefully developed business strategy. Too many mergers and acquisition fail simply because the impact of culture was under estimated.

Changing cultural norms is challenging - especially in long established organizations. The good news is that you can teach an old dog new tricks. However, this change can only happen if you make it the highest priority.

Here are some practical insights to guide you forward:

Define your current culture - Examine how your definition compares with what would be optimum. If there is a great divide, take mindful action. Identify those values that will enhance overall performance, and, at the same time, make note of attitudes and persons whose behavior undermines performance.

Let cultural considerations inform your hiring decisions - Be selective. Jeff Bezos who has shaped the high-performance culture at Amazon.com says, “I’d rather interview fifty people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.” Skills are important, but a good cultural fit may be more important. Use the cultural critical success factors you uncovered in point 1 above to guide you.

Is your current culture focused on stressing positive customer relations? - If so, that becomes a paramount consideration in hiring, managing, and promoting people. Review your customer satisfaction training materials to determine if they are an extension of the culture you are trying to create and sustain.

Employees consciously and unconsciously strive to ‘fit in” – they do that by adapting the “social norms” of their organization. If those social norms are centered around customer service, putting forth 110% effort on all endeavors, and seeking to be recognized as a good corporate citizen by peers and superiors, then the desire to do the right thing is as powerful a motivator as monetary rewards.

Just as Gandhi said “Be the change you want to see in the world" - “You must “be” the culture you want to see on your team and your company. Personally embody your desired cultural values. Warm, caring, focused, and upbeat cultures cannot be artificially manufactured. You can spend thousands of dollars on training - but people will take their cues from you.

Example - when visiting with your field team do you stop to acknowledge your paying customers, take a few minutes to say “thanks” and get valuable feedback about your products and services? If you don’t, your behavior sends a powerful cultural message signal that customer service does not matter.

One way culture is transmitted is via story telling - Companies with strong corporate cultures can tap into their institutional memory to guide decision-making. For example, Wal-Mart team members and executives are known for asking, “What would Sam do?” when faced with important decisions. Sam, of course, is Wal-Mart’s legendary founder, Sam Walton.

Conclusion - Leaders must take the time necessary to get –and keep–their cultural house in order, by examining their business purpose, and value system. Many revenue and profitability challenges that organizations encounter can be traced back to cultural dysfunction. Great leaders are usually renowned for their impact both on strategy and as masterful cultural change agents.

Be straightforward and clear about defining your organization’s desired culture, set expectations (around customers service, cost control and other key success factors), and recognize positive behaviors that support your brand’s cultural identity. How results are achieved is just as important as the result. Reward results achieved by placing emphasis on cultural norms. You can get started today if you are not pleased with the culture of your team or department, don’t wait for the CEO. Take the lead and others will follow. Good luck

Now it's your turn. What are the ways you have influenced a positive cultural change or share some examples of great cultural norms?

March 5, 2015

Steve Akinboro

Uncategorized

5 Ways to Turn Disappointment/Failure into Success

5 Questions to Help You Achieve More Life Balance

Strategic Collaboration - Key to Increasing Shareholder Value

Mimi Masala

Steve Akinboro

Caonex Abreu

Dana Slagle, CP-FS

Steve Akinboro

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SUMMARY: Strategic collaboration must involve face-to-face meetings as often as possible (considering logistics and financial constraints) with those who know the customers first-hand for companies to successfully refine and optimize products and processes to increase shareholder value.

Regardless of the business situation - whether it’s a Turnaround, Start-up, Re-alignment or Sustaining Success scenario - strategic collaboration works.

As a senior management operations leader for well-known quick service food companies, I was charged several times with reversing years of sales and EBITDA decline by re-aligning and re-energizing franchise groups, seeking a road map to recovery and improved engagement with the franchisor.

Within a few months working with these groups, sales were up, and per-store EBITDA increased to record levels as the franchise groups transformed into high-performing networks of business owners, that now viewed their parent company as more supportive, responsive, and collaborative.

What made the difference? Did I impose a master strategy with stern demands that all franchisees toe the new company line? Not quite. While there was an overarching strategy, it had nothing to do with forcing compliance with company policies.

That strategy was built on the simple principle of Collaboration (working together) and embracing diversity of thought[1]. When making decisions that directly affect others in the organization that are charged with implementation/execution, engage them at the outset.

When the next annual Business Unit planning season comes around, reach out and engage key influencers and opinion leaders in the owner-operator community, vendors and company staff. For your plan to be successful, all parties involved with front line execution have to become enthusiastic partners. Experience suggests that such enthusiasm is best created when those involved share a sense of participation in drafting that plan. They will not be eager to tear down something that they had helped to create! Support for superior front line execution is typically very high when this approached is adopted.

I call this deliberate act of seeking out and engaging opinion leaders and other influencers to achieve a win/win outcome “Strategic Collaboration (SC).”

Based on my global experience – See the recommended six steps to SC below:

DETERMINE THE KEY PLAYERS: Identify the most influential stakeholders, franchisees, business partners etc., who understand their markets and that can lead and inspire others, enlisting them as participants in a “Leadership Forum”.

DEFINE COMMON INTERESTS: Win/win is imperative. Stakeholders are in business to make money. Your business partners will agree with that. Certainly all parties want to improve sales and profits. And business partners want to know their ideas are valued and respected by the franchisor. Thoughtful alignment of interests will propel the group forward.

SET THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT: Established the norms and “guard rails” that would keep Leadership Forum discussions focused on win/win outcomes. For example, decision-making processes and rules for member conduct during meetings must be ironed out way in advance.

SUPPORT THEIR GOALS: Approach your business partners, franchisees, their front line teams/ active investors and vendors with the attitude that you are keen to help them succeed. Show sincere respect – you can agree to disagree. Remember when you leave the room and head home for the night, these front line team members are still in the trenches working on behalf of your brand.

KEEP SCORE: Provide timely updates [on sales, customer service metrics, as well as 1-2 other measures of success] only after the quarterly earnings call for publicly held companies. If you are operating in the Private Equity world, don’t wait till the end of the quarter. Your General Partner (fund manager) or portfolio company CEO will thank you for the sense of ownership and accountability. Recognize performance milestones achieved by the team as well as individual achievements. Resist the temptation to air dirty laundry. Keep the negatives offline.

ENGAGE CONSISTENTLY: Leverage the use of conference calls and online video collaboration tools as often as necessary. However, experience suggests the most important and productive sessions involves in-person, face-to-face interaction. This allows the team to share best practice and answer questions in real time without technology connectivity issues.

You will be amazed to see many of the attendees hanging around, networking long after meetings. Meeting frequency should be determined by polling the attendees and letting them decide. This can be revisited later depending on how things are shaping up.

In the early days of a business, company founders eagerly seek feedback from front line team members regarding decisions about merchandising, marketing, pricing, new product launches and new store location.

With time and growth, company management changes, and founders/top management can all too easily disconnect from regular engagement with those who know their customers and markets best. I call this the “Ivory Tower” syndrome, where management mistakenly believes it knows their market better than those who engage with customers every day.

The most important step in the Strategic Collaboration process is face-to-face collaborative communication with business partners, customer facing team members, and vendors who can offer both rapid and pragmatic intelligence about customer wants, needs, and behaviors.

“Relationships can start online, but they can only become real when we meet face-to-face,” says Simon Sinek in Leaders Eat Last. The power of the in-person opportunity to meet, fosters effective communication, and acts a catalyst to build trust. This seems to be the case and universal human characteristic, everywhere I have worked, whether in United Kingdom, Africa, Illinois, California or Oklahoma – USA.

When I ask key stakeholders how they would like to collaborate, the overwhelming preference is for a small to medium size group, in person. “Better yet,” they say, “how about sitting down in a quiet place for a meal or a cup of coffee.” That is fine depending on the objective you are trying to accomplish during that meeting. Be flexible, showing you are willing to listen and accommodate requests on a case by case basis. Bigger is not always better.

There is no question that today’s technology, whether telephone conference calls, Skype, Face Time, or Go-To-Meeting offers rapid and economical connectivity. But such tools are just not as powerful as those face-to-face encounters. David Topus, sales communications expert and author of “Talk To Strangers,” says, “The internet isn’t good at carrying that certain ‘chemistry’ which creates the strongest engagement between people.”

Great value-builders are collaborators. They co-develop value-focused objectives with incentives and opportunity that motivate others. They build trust and energy within their organizations to support execution of critical objectives. All of this ultimately shows up in top and bottom line numbers, as well as an increasingly engaged workforce and happy shareholders.

Feb 5, 2015

Steve Akinboro

Uncategorized

OC - Is Your's Helping or Hurting Your Team's Performance

Michael (Mike) Webster

Steve Akinboro

Lilian Jackson

Mariam E. Gobrial

Steve Akinboro

5 Ways to Turn Disappointment/Failure into Success

5 Questions to Help You Achieve More Life Balance

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