Strategic Discipline Blog

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.

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.