Strategic Discipline Blog

A recipe for a great meal is only as good as its presentation.  Clarity in your business is only as good as your ability to communicate it and then implement.  So perhaps your buying into to the idea of creating a vision for your business as the recipe for growth.  What's next? Gazelles One Page Strategic Plan provides clarity and action steps to not only broadcast your intentions but to provide steps to get everyone on board and contributing to the momentum of your top priorities.  It's the key to not only achieving clarity in your business, it provides the next action steps.  You must not only indicate where you are going, you must give your team a way to climb on board and contribute.

In Clarity Dissolves Resistance we discussed how many business owners and executives fail to understand the importance of determining a vision for their business.  While small business owners [less than $1M in revenue] may be more guilty of this than mid-size business owners, it’s not hard to find this lack of vision in larger companies.  The changing economy, advancing technology, competitive pressures, internal challenges all contribute to this so-called fog of war.  It can dull the senses and reduce the leader’s appreciation for developing a vision.  Setting priorities and communicating them to employees is critical to growth. 

How do you motivate action?  Whether it's your employees or customers it's a good idea to make them feel like they have a head start to the finish line.

Jim Collins in Built to Last and Good to Great discussed the importance of creating your BHAG. In the real world my guess is that very few businesses discover their BHAG either because they've never heard of it, or don't understand the value it can have in growing their business.   

Would you like to get more value from your team? Maximize their output and contribution?

If you’ve been following the markets and the $700 billion financial bailout the most powerful message you can absorb as the market and the financial segment of our economic base absorbs shock waves from the continuing impact of the subprime debacle is this – there’s been a failure in following fundamentals. 

Even though I’m big supporter and believer in Michael Gerber’s principles as provided in The E-Myth Revisited, Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What To Do About It, and was a Certified E-Myth Coach for ten years, my coaching experience with over 250 small to mid-sized businesses has provided a keen insight into where some of Michael’s assertions don’t always work in the real world.  

John D Rockefeller understood how to operate a successful business. That’s why he grew Standard Oil into the mega giant it became. Verne Harnish [Mastering the Rockefeller Habits] has distilled the principles Rockefeller used to achieve success and as a Gazelle’s business coach we use these daily in our coaching practices to help our clients follow the same success formula that Rockefeller gained.

How much time during your business day are you truly concentrating on your work? During the day, the average person is interrupted once every 11 minutes. It’s been estimated that it takes the human mind approximately 25 minutes to get up to speed on anything.

Last evening while reading the book I’d purchased on Civil War battles the enormity of the decision making these generals had to make occurred to me. It must have weighed on them heavily. We view the decisions of generals to delay or attack and fail to grasp the gravity of the situation. Each decision they made would lead to deaths. A decision to delay or dig in, while easily second guessed today, easily might have been that general’s effort to reduce the burden of killing more soldiers.