The 4 Disciplines of Execution
- Focus on the wildly important
- Create a compelling scoreboard
- Translate lofty goals into specific goals
- Hold each other accountable – all the time
via Execution
Just Seven Things
Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better
Archive for the category “Focus”
How to be an entrepreneur
During a talk last night I was asked about the key lessons that I have learnt from running several businesses. I feel hardly qualified to answer, but I am very clear on a number of aspects:
- The cost of understanding your product/service has to be less than the immediately obvious benefit that comes from using your product/ service.People will stay with you (pitch/ marketing message/ website) for as long as their needs being solved are made immediately apparent, are sufficiently significant, and the ways in which your product/ service solves that need are clearly understandable (and the cost of understanding is less than the benefit) [adapted and evolved from SuperConnect]
- A CEO should be aiming to only focus on strategy and people development: your head should be 12-18mths hence at first (longer over time), and your heart should be in developing the person better than you.You are the only person in the business whose job it really is to ‘develop the insights/ perceptions/ abilities to detect patterns of change and relate them to your landscape, industries, competition and business’ [adapted from Execution]. You should always be looking to develop the person better than you to be able to take your job. If they don’t yet exist in your company, make sure you hire them. ‘Yes’ or ‘passive no’ people will kill your business.
- If the core transactions of your business don’t exist without funding (including your time/cost funding), then your sole focus should be on adjusting your business model to be profitable in its core operation without investment.However well-funded or visionary your plans are, the cash flow monster eats the investment and then chases and kills 99% of its prey.
- Read more…
What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology // ben’s blog
By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics….. all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check. Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs all with the same experience. Nonetheless, very few people talk about it and I have never read anything on the topic. It’s like the fight club of management: The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.
via What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology // ben’s blog.
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