Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the category “Business”

The Only Three Things a Leader Should Focus On — ChiefExecutive.net

Brains—Bones—Nerves

You need to put in place a few important frameworks within which a large number of people can operate in a way that maximizes their energy.

The key is to control and shape the three most important levers of sustainable business growth—the Brains, the Bones, and the Nerves.

The brains of a business are its vision and strategy, and here the enterprise leader must shape and set direction.

The bones are the organizational architecture, and here the enterprise leader must design the organization in order to execute the strategy.

The nerves refer to the culture and climate of the organization, and here the enterprise leader must foster a culture of long lasting excellence.

Just as the human body needs all three systems—the brain, bones, and nerves—functioning in perfect harmony to maximize longevity and performance, a business needs its strategy, architecture, and culture to work in harmony in order to maximize results. As an enterprise leader, you should focus on these three as your most important focus areas; everything else must be delegated.

Here are a few simple but powerful ideas about how to lead a large workforce by shaping and managing the brains, bones, and nerves of your organization.

via The Only Three Things a Leader Should Focus On — Brains, Bones, and Nerves | ChiefExecutive.net | Chief Executive Magazine.

What is Execution?

‘Execution is a systematic process of rigorously discussing hows and whats, questioning, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability. It includes making assumptions about the business environment, assessing the organization’s capabilities, linking strategy to operations and the people who are going to implement the strategy, synchronizing those people and their various disciplines, and linking rewards to outcomes. It also includes mechanisms for changing assumptions as the environment changes and upgrading the company’s capabilities to meet the challenges of an ambitious strategy’ – Execution, Bossidy, Charan and Burck

Elevator Pitch Methodology

A brilliant methodology for a good elevator pitch is described by Mike Southon in his FT Column. He first describes how in sales there is the concept of “golden nuggets”. He identifies that customers have very short attention spans and can only remember three things about your product whereas the average marketing team tries to cram 50 amazing features into your literature:

‘The problem is…. that as soon as you mention the fourth golden nugget, the first, and probably the most important one, drops out of their memory.’ The simple methodology for a good elevator pitch ‘centres around five ‘P’s: Read more…

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