Strategic Discipline Blog

Imagine this scenario. Your tight on cash and you’ve paid a number of bills believing you can pay some of the small ones first so you don’t go over your cash on hand in the bank. One of your vendors is a large bill so you pay that last believing that it will be cashed last and giving you more time to get more cash receipts. On Monday you begin to get calls from all of your creditors politely informing you that your checks bounced. You wonder what happened, not realizing that while you didn’t have as much cash in the bank as you anticipated, the bank chose to cash the largest amount first thereby insuring you would have to pay overdraft fees on all your checks rather than just on one. 

Have you ever encountered a difficult customer that you weren’t able to satisfy no matter what you did to try and appease them? One of my clients had a large number of these customers. It seemed that frequently when he got a job completed he was stuck waiting for payment due to the unrealistic demands these customers had. He wanted to know what he was doing to attract these customers, how he could avoid it, and possibly determine how he could identify them before he began doing business with them.

What scares us most? What do employees, managers, owners and even customers fear the most in your business? No it’s not public speaking, although I understand that leads the parade of most feared things personally. Rather it is change!   Apparitions, Biblical passages of the Apocalypse, terrorist attacks, global warming, death and even gas prices are probably not as fearful to our business as the word change. Who Moved My Cheesedescribed this and offered many ideas on why change is good and why we need to embrace and be proactive in supporting change.

In Verne Harnish’s Mastering the Rockefeller Habits he has a quote from American philosopher, architect, and inventor,Buckminster Fuller, “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”

Two keys to being a good leader are the ability to predict and delegate. As your business grows, in order for you to be able to spend more time focusing on the growth and strategic areas of your business, you and your managers need to develop in these two key areas. If your key managers don’t know how to function well in these areas, face it, the ability for you to remove yourself from key functions and decisions in the business will be severely limited.

A recent conversation with a sales representative who was attempting to sell me his product helped to remind me of one of the steps we should all be making in our efforts to help our prospects understand the value of our proposition.

Watching the Phoenix Suns, my current favorite basketball team, lose to the San Antonio Spurs on Tuesday again offered a subtle clue on the value of focusing on your strengths and perhaps how debilitating focus on weaknesses can be.  

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.