"One Damned Thing After Another"

Life is one damn thing after another -Winston Churchill 

Stay in there and fix it, fix it again, and keep fixing it. 

That’s a leaders job.

Living Wide

You can do some things to make your life longer; but you can do many things to make your life wider.

What are you doing with your time here?

"With no cover" boss

Undercover Boss is a TV show where the CEO poses as a new employee and goes to work in his own company. Each time he comes to realize the value of his employees, ideas for improvement, and a new appreciation for what’s going on.

Does it take a TV show to get you out there working with your people once in a while to really understand what’s happening?

Reinvention

How often should you reinvent (partially, departmentally or fully) your business?

Should you ever stop?

Are you reinventing right now?

Expensive Information

The most expensive information is bad information.  Be careful where you get yours.

The world is awash in information including propaganda, biased opinions, advertising and “advice” from those who think they know things, but haven’t lived it themselves.

Sources of good tested reliable information are very valuable to you.  Find them and keep the channels open.

Hunter Gatherer

No matter how good a leader you are, you aren’t going to have all the new ideas yourself.  In fact only a small fraction will be “invented here” or invented by you. 

A great leader goes out into the world on a daily basis and looks for the best ideas and brings them back to the organization for customization, development and implementation.

Are you a Hunter Gatherer?

Hard to teach/ hard to learn

If it’s hard to teach new employees what you do, or hard for them to learn it, perhaps it’s too complicated.

Make it elegant – easy to teach and easy to learn.

Then you can get more people involved – right?

A Fertile Mind

Some of us need to come up with more new ideas.  But some of us have too many new ideas to act on – which is good.

Discerning which ideas are good and which to throw out is the key.  Pursuing a bad idea for months or years can be a big waste of time.

Are you good at sorting all your ideas?

False Assumptions

Most business failures happen because of false assumptions.

They will buy this, they will perform this way, it will work like this, they will love this, my competitors will stay the same…

You can fix it if you move fast – but only if you change the parts of your business that were wrapped around the false assumptions – (which could be most or all of it).

What false assumptions did you make?

Tracks and Sidetracks

Are you working on the most important thing, or less important things?