Patricia Sherlock

“Don’t hire a person for what they can’t do; hire them for what they can do.” — Peter Drucker I’ve been traveling a lot recently and it still surprises me how low performance standards seem to have dropped. Companies with an average production of 3 or 4 units a month per sales person is becoming […]

“An organization can only perform to the capacity of its individual workers; thus, people decisions must be right.” — Peter Drucker In our industry, one of the most common mistakes I see — at companies of all sizes — is management investing substantial resources in transforming C players into A players. This is a strategy

“If we didn’t spend four hours on placing a man and placing him right, we’d spend 400 hours on cleaning up after our mistake.” — Peter Drucker Managers today have a choice: Hire smart or manage tough. What this means is that it is worth the effort to spend time upfront to select the right

“Make decisions on people — selection, placement and evaluation — your top priority.” — Peter Drucker In my recent travels, one issue I have noticed is companies that did not “right-size” because of last year’s hot market are just now coming to grips with the fact that 2010 will be challenging. One Top Ten lender

“Set objectives for attracting and retaining the best people, including goals for performance standards and employee attitudes and skills.” — Peter Drucker One of the trends I’m seeing now is that top producers —A players — are staying with their current employers longer. That means that the available hiring pool is made up of more

“People decisions are the ultimate — perhaps the only — control of an organization. People determine the performance capacity of an organization.” — Peter Drucker Hiring the right sales person is undoubtedly a manager’s most important task. No other decision has a greater impact on a company’s current and future success. Yet, many managers put

“There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.” — Peter Drucker Last week, I heard economist Doug Duncan speak on housing finance and the current marketplace. He believes that the “national financial crisis is over and like previous financial crises, this one has shifted from a national problem to a

“Precisely because change is a constant, the foundations have to be extra strong.” — Peter Drucker At a recent speaking engagement, I had two very different conversations that illustrate a growing problem in our industry: lowering our standards of excellence. One firm I spoke with said their average production per loan officer was $1 million

“`What is value to the customer?’ may be the most important question, yet the one least often asked.” — Peter Drucker In my opinion, the most successful financial firms view sales as a process and have adopted a systematic approach to improvement. The first step in any process improvement is to identify how the customer

“In an ecology, the ‘whole” has to be seen and understood and the ‘parts’ exist only in contemplation of the whole.” — Peter Drucker When traveling for my consulting business, too often, I see financial firms still using the standard measurement of volume and units to evaluate results. This approach may have been fine 20