Today I found another good manifesto from ChangeThis. It is based on concepts discussed in Tony Jeary’s latest book, Strategic Acceleration: Succeed at the Speed of Life
He is on spot writing how business as usual is unrealistic in our current economic climate. Leaders must accept the fact that success is likely to become a moving target and their organizations must become faster, leaner and better equipped to compete and change quickly. He determines three basic strategic concepts that directly impact achieving superior results. The concepts are Clarity, Focus and Execution. These are the keys to achieving superior results on both professional and personal fronts. These three keys also reflect a new way of thinking you need to embrace, to better frame your strategy building process. Here is a quick description of each of these strategic concepts.
Clarity:
You must be clear about your vision and what you really want!
Focus:
You must focus on high-leverage activities that will move your results needle!
Execution:
You must execute by elevating your ability to persuade and influence others!
Clarity, Focus and Execution must become the foundational framework for all that you do.
This is the new action template he is suggesting for your mind. Get Clear! Get Focused! Execute! When you are committed to this approach, the next step is to wrap them in a powerful concept that can transform your life and work. The concept he refers to is this: Always exceed expectations!
Good leadership is required to put all these pieces together. For a vision to be executed, it must be understood and supported by the business as a whole. There must be unity and there must be clarity. All of this comes together with one primary goal: To get results! In the most basic terms, that is what leadership is about: Creating organizational environments capable of getting superior results. To get results there must be a high level of organizational energy.
Tom lists seven things for a leader to do NOW to change results
1. Recognize that “Business As Usual” is not an option.
2. Create strategies based on what can actually be seen.
3. Reevaluate the Value and Purpose of your Vision.
4. Identify and disrupt organizational comfort zones.
5. Conduct Quarterly More-Of-Less-Of Reviews.
6. Commit to exceeding expectations and providing value.
7. Abandon activities that won’t move the strategic results needle.
In other words stop doing what is comfortable but not necessary, and start doing what is necessary even if it feels uncomfortable in the beginning.
Tony's text reminds me of two earlier manifestos I have been blogging about - Leadership in Hard Times and Achieving Business Excellence.
2 comments:
Hi Samuli,
Couple of comments. Regarding the clarity and focus, they can be still relatively easily found, but without a proper execution everything is like wasting time and money of the shareholders. Just recently I have been listening to the Keith McFarland's audiobook "The Breaktrough Company" and I have become more convinced that placing of bets in a poker game is actually a very close relative of execution in today's business. In short-term, you can use fold for several times, but in long-term you should start placing bets; i.e. play the game. Otherwise you will gradually lose your stacks. Continuous crying calls won't make it better.
Daddy
Hi Daddy,
that's were true. Imagine you are playing the poker and placed all your bets on big cars. Suddenly the rules changed and small cars became the winning combination. Isn't it then a matter of ability to change direction and a matter of proper execution of the new bets - and a matter of abandoning the old bets, which is often really hard to do.
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