Strategic Discipline Blog

Growth companies need to get Four Decision right in order to achieve success.  These Four Decisions are People, Strategy, Execution and Cash. Depending on the severity of your challenges in these four decision areas, you will ultimately need to choose one of these four decisions as your One Thing for the year and quarterly priorities.   We’ve covered the outcome for getting People and Strategy right in your organization in previous blogs. 

If you’re a small to mid-sized business owner you probably have a number of aspirations for your business.  To build it so you can spend your time doing what you love most while the business runs consistently and predictably without you.  Or it may be to watch it grow to achieve success humming along like a well-oiled machine.  The dream of many small business owners was outlined in Michael Gerber’s book The E-Myth Revisited, Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What To Do About It. Ultimately you want to be in a position to invest most of your time working ON the business rather than IN it.

Recently I rediscovered the value of routine when I purchased a new computer.  If you’ve had the occasion to move to a new computer recently perhaps you will recognize the disruptive forces that occur when suddenly you are without the use of your computer for several hours or in my case more than a day as your old data is restored to your new computer. 

Where does positive reinforcement need to start in your organization?

In many companies one of the worst things that we perpetrate is discarding our victories and highlighting our problems!  Too often we are on to our next mountain to climb before we acknowledge those who have helped us reach the heights.   We need to do a better job of adequately celebrating our victories and those who were accountable for them.   The Thin book of Appreciative Inquiry describes the benefits of recognizing what you are doing right. More recently the book Switch emphasized the importance of highlighting “Bright Spots” as integral to discovering solutions. Strategic Disciplines quarterly meeting intends to correct this oversight. 

Saturday evening I attended my youngest son Noah’s concerts.  The coordination between orchestra sections and individual students at the sixth, seventh and eighth grade level can be challenging, yet it’s surprising how much harmony a group of 60 or more 12-14 year olds can offer.  This orchestra mixed students from the different high school middle schools in the area.  They only had a couple of practices and yet performed remarkably well.  When it comes together it really is inspiring.

One of Michael Gerber’s [E-Myth Revisited author]precepts for building a business was that the business should serve the owner.  In order to do that Michael preached that you had to build the business to sell it one day.  Until now I haven’t seen a good test that could accurately offer whether or not your business is ready to market and sell.  Our Rockefeller Habits Checklist provides a good list of activities that when followed put your business in position where your executive team will consistently work strategically on the business, concentrating on the right things and not to be interrupted by the day to day operations.  That puts the business in a position to be sellable. 

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. 

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.