Strategic Discipline Blog

Why is it some organizations continue to Win year after year?

Why do the New England Patriots in NFL football, Apple, Amazon, GE in business consistently produce winning teams?

Every organization has habits, ways they do things.  These habits result in consistent or uncertain results.

Performance is the best measure of whether the habits you are using work.

The Whirlwind

As we shared in The BIG Question – Problem Most Small to Mid-Size Business Face and Without Top Priority “Whirlwind” Wins, the major challenge facing small to mid-size businesses is to make time to achieve the big stuff, your priorities.  This is why authors Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling in The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals believe most business fail to achieve their Wildly Important Goals (WIGS).  WIGS are what we call your One Thing or Priority for the quarter or year.

Growth is achieved only by your business making gains in these Wildly Important Goals, or Your One Thing.

In New England, their theme is “Do Your Job!”  There are a lot of components to that, and with 16 regular season games, every four games is like a quarter in business.

Strategic Discipline

The key is to develop a winning habit for your business.

What’s Your Priority?  (This Year, This quarter)

What are your metrics? (How will you measure success on your One Thing, your other quarterly objectives?)

What are your meeting Rhythms?  (How do you keep your focus on your One Thing? Do you and your team measure your progress through daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings?)

Our Strategic Discipline blog has dedicated 21 blogs to the subject of habits. Why?

Your business is the way it is because of your organizational habits – good, bad or the lack of them (which may be the same as bad, however I want to make it clear that bad habits are different from having none at all).

William James, the father of America psychology, “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.”  Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits.

If you question why your business is the way it is, or why you are personally the way you are, read Why Is Your Business The Way It Is? The Power of Habit.

In this blog, I share Aubrey Daniels observation on company performance, “a company is always perfectly designed to produce whatever it is producing.”   Daniels points out, “Every company is getting the performance it should be because it’s reinforcing that performance with what it is currently doing.  If you’re not happy with what you’re getting you need to put consequences in place that stop these outcomes and then put new consequences in place to positively reinforce the new outcome you want.  The bad news is you’re reinforcing the wrong things or you wouldn’t be getting that performance.  The good news is you can change it with some diligence.”   

This axiom is shared in Bad Performance is Your Responsibility.

The Power of Habits quotes former Super Bowl Champion Coach turned NBC NFL Analyst Tony Dungy, “Champions don’t do extraordinary things.  They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.”   

That’s the key to turning your business into a champion.  Develop winning habits!

BUILD A WINNING HABIT

Are you confident in your business’ ability to perform consistently?

Great Performance, Promises Made and Consistently achieved can be demonstrated through your Brand Promise.

Positioning Systems Strategic Discipline Brand Promise is to build your team’s winning habit.   Here’s how:

1. Priorities: Determine your #1 Priority. Achieve measurable progress in 90 days. Repeat every 90 days.
2. Metrics: Develop measurable Key Performance Indicators.  Develop reporting dashboards. Increase accountability. Follow Pearson’s Law to achieve dramatic results.  
3. Meeting Rhythms: Establish effective meeting rhythms. Compound the value of your priorities and metrics. 

Many companies that have Measurable Brand Promises, back them up with a Brand Promise Guarantee.  How sure is Positioning Systems you will develop a Winning Habit and achieve measurable results?

I’ll allow our Brand Promise Guarantee to declare our confidence:

(BRAND PROMISE GUARANTEE): We will refund all compensation if our disciplined coaching and proprietary tools fail to meet your expectation.

In our nearly ten years as a Gazelles (Rockefeller Habits/Scaling Up) coaching, we’ve never been asked for a refund on our services.

Because it works – GUARANTEED!

My email signature reflects this confidence from Jim Collins, Good to Great, “A culture of discipline is not a principle of business; it is a principle of greatness.” 

Is your business struggling to maintain and achieve consistent performance and growth?  Is the Whirlwind preventing you from focusing on and meeting your Wildly Important Goals?  Do you have a ONE THING for this quarter, this year?  Are you in sight of achieving it?

Build a Winning Habit Now!  Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com

Achieving Short Term vs. Long Term

Is your team more likely to achieve its quarterly or annual objectives? Are you better at achieving the shorter goals you set or the long term ones?  In Michael-Bungay-Stainer’s The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever, Stainer explains why we our eyes are too big for our stomach on short term objectives.  Plan to learn why and what to do about it, next blog.