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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“It is crucial to have a crystal clear picture of what you want to accomplish … Rivet your attention on that spot where you are to land at the end of your quantum leap … Once you do that, it’s almost as if you magnetize yourself to the ways and means involved in the methodology for getting there. Solutions begin to appear. Answers come to you.”
If you try to please everyone, you’re going to lose your ass.
My dad always teaches, “Never tell someone something you can show them.” In most companies, when salespeople are meeting with a prospective new customer, they normally try to win new business by using countless words and visuals in the form of pages and charts. When it’s all said and done, they end up looking just like everyone else.
Creating a standard proven process to use in selling situations will give you two very powerful advantages. It will increase your potential customers’ confidence and peace of mind in doing business with you. Second, as most other companies don’t illustrate how they work, it will make you stand out among the competition.
A guarantee is your opportunity to pinpoint an industry-wide problem and solve it.
You must determine what your customers can count on from you. If you guarantee it, that will put their minds at ease and enable you to close more business.
Make sure you have a projected budget in place that supports your one-year plan.
People need to hear the vision seven times before they really hear it for the first time. Human beings have short attention spans and are a little jaded when it comes to new messages.
According to an old business maxim, anything that is measured and watched is improved.
1. Thou Shalt Not Rule by Consensus
2. Thou Shalt Not Be a Weenie
3. Thou Shalt Be Decisive
4. Thou Shalt Not Rely on Secondhand Information
5. Thou Shalt Fight for the Greater Good
6. Thou Shalt Not Try to Solve Them All
7. Thou Shalt Live with It, End It, or Change It
8. Thou Shalt Choose Short-Term Pain and Suffering
9. Thou Shalt Enter the Danger
10. Thou Shalt Take a Shot
When documenting the processes, you should follow the 20/80 rule. That means document the 20 percent that produces 80 percent of the results. In other words, document at a very high level. You should not be creating a 500-page document. The 20/80 rule gives you the highest return on your time invested. The trap many organizations fall into is wasting valuable time trying to document 100 percent of everything. If you document 100 percent of a core process, it might take 30 pages. If you document the most important 20 percent, you should need around six pages.
The ability to create accountability and discipline, and then execute, is the area of greatest weakness in most organizations. If I asked you to rate the level of accountability in your organization on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being your perfect level of accountability, how would you rate it? Successful leaders rate themselves high because they know how to gain traction.
Once the priorities are set for this quarter, no new priorities can be added! If someone does try to throw something else over, you get to throw it back because you all agreed on the current Rocks as being the most important priorities for this quarter. New ideas and thoughts that arise during the quarter should be put on the V/TO Issues List for next quarter.
Please note that while the company and leadership team members should have three to seven Rocks, everyone else in the company should have one to three.
You need to learn from two quarters with only your leadership team setting Rocks before you roll out the Rocks process to everyone else. You will make some mistakes and it’s important you learn from those mistakes first so that you can be a better teacher for your people.
