What is your business doing to you?

If you don’t like it, then fix it.

Change what YOU are doing and how you show up.  Get a coach.  Read or listen a lot more and change your perspective.  Lean on others to help – let them.  Change your business – what you offer to who and how.  Or, get out of it.

Your business is supposed to make your life better, not worse.

Call out the problem

Sometimes we don’t want to acknowledge a problem for personal reasons.  This is a problem when we become a leader, and everyone can see it.

This is when the counsel of a trusted friend who will be honest with you can help.

It could be you, how you are being, or something you are doing, not doing, or putting up with.

What problem is around you, and has been, that you need to acknowledge?

Calling it by name is the first step in fixing it.

What is your biggest problem now?

What problem, if solved, will have the biggest positive impact on tomorrow?

Work on that first and now.

Relieve Stress NOW

Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite way to relieve stress – strenuous physical activity.

Works for me. 

How about you?

Don't get comfortable.

“I’m uncomfortable when I’m comfortable.” – Jay Chiat

Complacency is the enemy of success. 

Success is the enemy of success.

Stay hungry.  Keep pushing.

Can you buy your way to greatness?

There’s a lot of mergers and acquisitions out there.  Private Equity buying companies, smashing them together and selling them.  The buyer repeats.  And that buyer repeats.  Until it’s all, on many dimensions, destroyed.

“Not a single company that qualified as having made a sustained transformation ignited is leap with a big acquisition or merger.  Moreover, comparison companies – those that failed to make a leap or, if they did, failed to sustain it – often tried to make themselves great with a big… acquisition or merger.  They failed to grasp the simple truth that while you can buy your way to growth, you cannot buy your way to greatness.” – Jim Collins

Woe into Woo!

Entrepreneurs solve problems – turning woe into woo!

Have you asked your customers lately what their problems are and what outcome they really wish from a company like yours?

Understand the woe and the wish, and you can make the wooo!

Steer your organization's attention

The leader must steer their organization’s attention to what is most important now.

Do it with many forms of communication, scoreboards, recognition, training, talks, acknowledgment, etc. etc. – and do it on repeat!

The problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.  If you don’t feel like you sound like a broken record, you aren’t saying the most important things enough.

What is most important now?  

Are you steering your organization’s attention to it in a way they cannot miss or forget?

Who sets the rules?

Are you playing the same game the competition is playing just because they are playing it?

Are you playing it the same they are playing it – trying to beat them at a game that’s already being played?

Are you chasing the same thing they are chasing the same way they are chasing it?

(They may be copying you who are copying them!)

Or should you think creatively and from the customer’s point of view? 

Shouldn’t you think about what is possible instead of what is done already?

Shouldn’t you think about what your capabilities and deep strengths are?

How about thinking about what would be really freaking cool for your customers?

Line up Your Dominos, and hit 'em!

THis comes from Brian Johnson of Heroic – 

Are you familiar with the physics of dominoes?

It’s fascinating. And wonderfully applicable to the power of lining up a series of micro-goals to generate a ton of momentum in the process.

(Check out this awesome two and a half minute video by an equally awesome Physics professor!)

Here’s the short story: A domino can knock over another domino that is about 1 1/2 times larger than it. So, imagine setting up a chain of dominoes such that each one is 1 1/2 times larger than the prior one. Let’s say 13 dominoes. The first domino is only 5 millimeters high and one millimeter thick—so small that you need a pair of tweezers to put it in place. The last one is 3 feet tall and weighs 100 pounds.

Push the micro-domino over and BOOM!!! More and more power is amplified as each domino in the chain topples over. In fact, there’s 2 BILLION times more energy in the last sequence than in the first.

That’s what we want to do.

Get clear on your big goal.

Line up your micro-domino goals.

Start with the tiniest one.

Knock it over.

Repeat.

Amplify your latent potential power.