Strategic Discipline Blog

What are the barriers to growth in the leadership level of our businesses? At small, mid size and even large businesses the two critical abilities for leaders is their ability to delegate and predict. 

Can you really improve staff performance? What leads to superior performance, higher employee retention, and a better aligned organization? 

Do you dread meetings? If you’re a business leader you may abhor having to attend meetings or simply having to prepare for them. Pat Lencioni’s latest book, Death by Meeting provides an inside look on what happens when meetings go wrong and offers a good road map for how to prevent meetings from being the boring, self defeating, lethargic exercises that many of us have witnessed and participated in.

Last time I told you I’d reveal Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings ideas about vacations. My title has already provided that answer. At Netflix, Reed Hastings believes that tracking vacations is an artifact of the industrial age. He believes his business should be all about inspiration rather than control. So rather than caring about whether someone is at work or not, he’d prefer to focus on results and performance. What he really cares about is what the individual gets done.   

Just over two weeks ago I had the honor to be invited to Broomfield, Colorado to attend the Charter School Growth Fund’s 2008 Business Planning Conference as a guest with one of my clients. They had earned the opportunity to compete for one of the Growth Funds Grants and my client asked me to come along to help them with their work toward earning this prestigious awarding process.

How you and your people react to a stressful situation or emergency in your business can be very unpredictable and disarming. Yesterday one of my clients had their vendor change their software programs which is the link between their customers and their business. Being in the business of handling stock transactions this was a critical issue for them and they spent months preparing for it to make sure it went smoothly. Unfortunately through no part of my clients' neglect or care the system didn’t measure up to the expectations. On Monday my client offered that on a scale of one to ten, with one being a disastrous melt down of apocalyptic proportions to ten being flawless, the transition was about a three.

If you’re facing an uncertain period with your business, or concerned about the economy, then you’ll be interested to know that there are just four decisions in your business that you need to get right to assure you grow. To stay competitive and grow you need to keep your people smart. The best companies in the world take learning seriously. In fact they make learning a competitive advantage. Success is a moving target and the only way to make sure you are moving with it is to make sure your people are getting smarter.

What’s your one thing? The one thing you could do this year that would bring you the most success? The one thing simply by concentrating all your resources on you could impact your business to the greatest degree? In our Rockefeller Habits 2 Day Workshop we ask our participating clients to discover their one thing. The one thing that they need to focus on in the next 3 – 12 months that would make a significant difference in their business.

How do you measure customer loyalty? How important is customer loyalty? Fred Reichheld suggests that most companies are doing customer loyalty all wrong, and yet it is the one thing that when done right secures real growth for your business. In Fred’s presentation he discussed his books, The Ultimate Question, Loyalty Rules and The Loyalty Effect, mostly highlighting recent information in the latest offering, The Ultimate Question.

Paul Orfalea is that man who created Kinko’s. He’s written a book, "Copy This!" about his taking a small copy shop and turning it into a $2 billion a year company. FedEx Kinko’s, as it is now known, is the world’s leading business services chain with over 1500 locations worldwide. He is also the self proclaimed “poster boy for Attention Deficit Disorder and dyslexia who just happened to have failed two grades.