Build a great company on a powerful foundation!
PLANNING IS FANTASTIC, but it has one big problem:
Reality gets in the way.
You go to all this work to create the fully robust plan, to get everyone on board, even to test various scenarios. It’s wonderful! But the plan was put in a binder on the shelf, never to be opened again.
Why is that?
AS OWNER OR LEADER, YOU are one of the key assets of the business. Your employees are wonderful, I understand, but without leadership it will all fall apart.
Yet it seems we’re the last one to get taken care of.
I admire leaders who recognize what it takes to sustain their own focus, energy, and inspiration. Without doing that, you can’t pass it off to your people.
PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS STRIVING for improvement. And visionaries paint an attractive picture of the future.
Leaders are the ones who can make the connection between the two.
The challenge is to pick a vision which is attractive, believable, and attainable. But you may have discovered that each of these is squishy, with lots of room for challenges.
WE FOCUS AN AWFUL LOT on product features. We’re faster, more powerful, more fully featured than the competition.
Honestly, a lot of customers are getting burned out on that.
They’re recognizing that “good enough” is plenty sufficient for most things in life. There are a few things that each person deeply cares about, but other things … it’s OK to not have the best.
HOW OBVIOUS is your company’s mission?
Is it so compelling that customers can tell you what it is, in their own words?
Is it so clear that your employees are thinking about it in some way every day?
WE’VE ALL CREATED lots of marketing messages. Our products will solve this problem. We’ll make your life better. We’ll treat you great.
Those are fine. Even powerful and compelling.
But how does this benefit your employees?
THERE’S A LOT OF FAKENESS in the world.
I would imagine that it’s always been this way, I suppose, but now it’s so much more obvious when people aren’t showing their company authentically in the world.
And consumers are getting really quite sophisticated in detecting fake messages.
SOMETIMES I JUST FEEL LIKE I’m drowning.
It’s not because I’m particularly messed up or disadvantaged. I’m just as human as anyone, and we all have our challenges.
The question is what we DO about it.
WE ALL KNOW that goals are important. If you’re going to make progress, you have to decide what moving forward means.
But that has no emotion in it. It’s just blah-blah-blah management speak.
Our challenge is how to create a sense of excitement and inspiration with your business goals.
IWAS READING a powerful article recently about building a conscious company from a systems perspective. It got me thinking about the idea of how we tend to create success measures.
It matters because those measures drive all behavior in your company.
The question is: What if we would adopt our customers’ measures of success as our own? What would happen?
The Values-Based Business 