Strategic Discipline Blog

You’re interviewing a candidate for a sales position.  You like their responses to your questions, so you ask a typical question often required of sales candidates, “Sell me something!”  In this case it's a jug of water on your desk.

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Topics: Growth Summit, persaussion principles, Power of Persausion

You may recall in People: Teaching Willpower Spurs Starbucks’ Business Growth we discussed how habits changed ordinary people like Travis into an extraordinary service provider.  If you don’t know how hard that might be, read the blog to discover how Travis behaved at McDonalds.

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Topics: customer service, Growth Summit, daily huddle, customer loyalty, Starbucks

Exciting or Frightening. 

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Topics: Business Growth, Growth Summit, Esponential Growth, Salim Ismail

Learning, Growing and Planning.  It’s a crucial element of our Gazelles business coaching practices.   Companies that continue to grow look at education, training and learning as a competitive advantage. 

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Topics: Business Growth, Growth Summit, Growth Summit. Learning, Demand Based Economy

If you’ve not seen Dan Pink's video yet RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us, I urge you to view it.   Pink presented his views on human behavior and motivation during the Phoenix Growth Summit.  I’ll have more on his offerings in future blogs.

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Topics: priorities, Growth Summit, human behavior, productivity, Balance

Right now you should be deep into your annual planning or already have completed it.  In preparing our coaching clients for annual planning we always ask the company to complete a short five question employee survey to gather information.  Questions include what the company should start, stop and keep doing.  (Send me an email Employee Survey if you’d like these five questions.)  Discovery like this is important for the business in looking ahead.   Remember the movie “Titanic?”  “Iceberg dead ahead?”  Many times the people at the tactical level of our business know much more than we give them credit for, and frequently they see the obstacles, challenges and opportunities far better than we or our mangers and departments heads can.

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Topics: Employee Feedback, Annual Plan, Growth Summit, Employee Survey

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Topics: Discipline, Customer Feedback, Marketing, Growth Summit

You’re packing books, fulfilling orders to customers.  Making sure the right number of books are included and sent properly.  It’s not your real job.  No, you’re real job is founder, president, chief executive officer (CEO), and chairman of the board of one of the largest corporations in the world.  This is something you do each year to detach.  Remove your mind from what you do every day and get it occupied in the trenches, so your mind can do what it does best, be creative.

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Topics: Discipline, Growth Summit, Think Week

Who is the founder, president, chief executive officer (CEO), and chairman of the board of one of the largest corporations in the world whose annual detachment exercise helped him to come up with an idea that transformed his business and industry?  I’m sorry.  I’m afraid I’m going to make you wait until my next blog. 

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Topics: meeting rhythms, Growth Summit, competitive advantage

In Leadership Discipline – Emotional Intelligence I promised to provide you with four of the eight traits of transforming companies that Todd Klein “Built to Change” author presented.  Instead here’s one of the four – Detachment.  Detachment is characterized as:  Companies that embrace the value of periodically doing absolutely nothing are more transformative than their constantly action oriented counterparts.   It’s what we call proactively inactive:  these companies stop, measure, plan, and retool with greater frequency, regularity and purpose.

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Topics: Great by Choice, Growth Summit, Think Week