STRATEGY CENTRAL

You have goals.  You have objectives.  You even have a very detailed vision statement.  But every time you turn around, you’re dropping what you’re doing to put out a fire.  Another fire.  The third fire in the last 10 days!  It’s like you’re living in a high fire hazard severity zone.  You may be getting pretty good at putting out fires…but at the end of the career that’s little consolation if you don’t get to where you’re trying to go.

Is there a solution?  As Seth Godin says, maybe the start of a solution is "to make the long term items even more urgent than today’s emergencies.  Break them into steps and give them deadlines. Measure your people on
what they did today in support of where you need to be next month."

Can you see that happening?  Can your organization get to the place where the most important projects get priority…instead of the fires?  I love Seth’s closing line: "If you work in an urgent-only culture, the only solution is to make the right things urgent."  What’s urgent in your organization?  Hopefully it’s beginning to be the right things.

Frances Hesselbein was a guest on the Leading News podcast  last week.  Quite a gal.  Not sure if you know her.  Former CEO of the Girl Scouts.  Legendary example of the Drucker disciples.  I’ll post a link to the audio from the call as soon as it’s available.  Listening to her was very similar to hearing John Wooden speak.  Wisdom pours out.  Here’s the Drucker quote she pulled out when asked to talk about 2015.

"I never predict.  I just look out the window and see what’s visible – but not yet seen."

This was too good 2 years ago.  Seemed fitting today to bring it back!  Thanks to Tom Asacker for the comedy!

We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of
nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know
about peace, more about killing that we know about living.  General Omar Bradley

Some things are just too good to pass up.  Enjoy it for what it’s worth…there’s actually quite a message if you watch through to the end.  Gotta love it!

A while back I got an email asking if I’d like to review a book by John Wood, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur’s Odyssey to Educate the World’s Children.  I’d never heard of it…but it sounded interesting so I said "yes."  It’s been in the stack waiting its turn and on Sunday its number came up.  And what a beautiful book it is!  I love the story!

Leaving Microsoft is the autobiographical account of how John Wood left his job with Microsoft to educate the world’s children.  The founder of Room To Read, Wood’s story is both heartbreaking and inspirational.  Hard to really grasp the state of the children in many parts of the world.  Even harder to imagine his courage and conviction to leave a great job at a young age and set out on a quest to change the circumstances of the children of Nepal.

Looking for a book that will both captivate you with its beauty and carry you along with its passion?  If you’ve not read it yet, you can pick up your copy right here. 

Every once in a while a book comes out that I get really excited about.  Funny how it works…it’s not always the same genre, but there are just times that I hear about a book and really can’t wait until it hits the mailbox.  The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures is totally one of those books.  I can sense it, and I’m expecting it tomorrow or maybe Thursday.

There’s a lot of buzz about it right now.  You can see some of what’s going on at Digital Roam, the author’s blog.  In addition, there’ll be a different podcast every day this week focusing on the book.  You can get the line-up right here.

If you’ve been around here any length of time you know how much I love a good diagram or drawing.  It’s just better.  This book is right up my alley.  You may want to pick up a copy and read along!  You can get one  right here.

I don’t know about you…but I’m only learning how to lose gracefully…at Monopoly.  I know there is a place for the ability to live without getting your way.  I get that.  But there is something so sacred about the business that many of us are in, I really believe we ought be be pretty serious about succeeding at what we’re attempting.  Not at all casual.  Very intentional.

And yet…there is a great danger in the inability to see our own shortcomings. 

What’s got me thinking this way today?  I came across another great link from Bill Taylor over at the Mavericks at Work blog after he sat in on a workshop by Sydney Finkelstein, the Steven Roth Professor of Management at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Management and author of Why Smart Executives Fail.  Bill’s post is very helpful.  Finkelstein’s The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives is more than a little scary.  Here are the seven habits:

1. They see themselves and their companies as dominating the environment.  They "tend to believe that their companies are indispensable to their customers."
2. They identify so completely with their company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interests.
3. They think they have all the answers.  "One of the critical side-effects of a CEO’s fixation on being right is that the opposition can go underground, effectively closing down dissent."
4. They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn’t completely behind them.
5. They are consummate spokerspersons, obsessed with the company’s image.  "Instead of accomplishing things they often settle for the appearance of accomplishing things."
6. They underestimate obstacles.  "When CEOs become so enamored of their vision they often overlook or underestimate the difficulty of actually getting there."
7. They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past.  "They insist on providing a product to a market that no longer exists."

Sound familiar?  Anyone?  Anyone?

Preempted by a freak thunderstorm. Even in So Cal. First flash fooled us…for about 10 seconds. The boom was a dead give-away.

First the big decision: Are your customers the people who have already said, "Yes."  Or are your customers the people who haven’t yet said "yes" but might?  See, for many of us, we’ve got the existing group but we really want to reach the customers who have not yet said "yes."  Make sense?  So our question might be, "How do we reduce the risk of trying what we offer for potential customers?"

Think about what Steve Jobs (Apple founder) said in a recent interview when asked about the Apple Store strategy:

It was very simple. The Mac faithful will drive to a destination,
right? They’ll drive somewhere special just to do that. But people who
own Windows – we want to convert them to Mac. They will not drive
somewhere special. They don’t think they want a Mac. They will not take
the risk of a 20-minute drive in case they don’t like it.

But if
we put our store in a mall or on a street that they’re walking by, and
we reduce that risk from a 20-minute drive to 20 footsteps, then
they’re more likely to go in because there’s really no risk. So we
decided to put our stores in high-traffic locations. And it works.

Can you hear what he said?  "It was very simple.  Our existing customers will drive to a destination.  But the people who own windows…our potential customers…

You can read the whole interview right here.