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EOS cuts through buzzwords such as “A players,” “platinum,” “100 percenters,” and “superstars” to provide a practical understanding of the two essential ingredients of any great team: the right people in the right seats.
The best leaders rely on a handful of metrics to help manage their businesses. The Data Component frees you from the quagmire of managing personalities, egos, subjective issues, emotions, and intangibles by teaching you which metrics to focus on.
In the end, the most successful business leaders are the ones with traction. They execute well, and they know how to bring focus, accountability, and discipline to their organization.
The inability to make a business vision a reality is epidemic. Consider it a new take on an old quote: Vision without traction is merely hallucination.
Dictatorships not only are exhausting, but also preclude future growth. It’s simple math. One person can only make so many decisions and solve so many problems. You cannot build an enduring, successful organization that lives beyond you if your organization is designed to crumble the minute you step aside.
You and your leadership team need to understand this, because you will hit the ceiling on three different levels: as an organization, departmentally, and as individuals. In all of these instances, growth is your only option. If you’re not growing, be it internally or externally, you’re dying.
Your ability to break through the ceiling also depends on your ability to delegate. Be prepared to “delegate and elevate” to your true god-given skill set. You’ll have to delegate some of your responsibilities and elevate yourself to operate at your highest and best use.
you and your leadership team must employ these five leadership abilities to reach the next level: (1) simplify the organization, (2) delegate and elevate, (3) predict both long-term and short-term, (4) systemize, and (5) structure your company the right way.
Clarify your vision and you will make better decisions about people, processes, finances, strategies, and customers.
Have each member list three people who, if you could clone them, would lead you to market domination.
When business owners get bored, there is always the potential for them to get distracted by the shiny stuff and inadvertently sabotage what they’ve created.
Again, what you’re creating here is focus. The most common mistake that most organizations make involves competing in too many sectors, markets, services, or product lines, and trying to be all things to all people. It’s a game you will not win.
Setting unrealistic goals is the biggest trap entrepreneurs fall into. The team has to believe it’s possible to hit the goal, or else you can’t hold someone accountable to it.
In order to maintain accountability, only one person can ultimately be in charge of any major function within an organization. Only one person oversees sales and marketing, only one person runs operations, and only one person manages finance and administration. When more than one person is accountable, nobody is.
An entrepreneur’s lust needs to be counterbalanced with a manager’s prudence and discipline.
Problems are like mushrooms: When it’s dark and rainy, they multiply. Under bright light, they diminish. In an organization where there is nowhere to hide, the problems are easily illuminated. EOS will create that strong light.
If your Vision/Traction Organizer (V/TO) is not complete and your leadership isn’t on the same page, you’ll never solve issues well. It’s like driving a car, not having a destination, and making turns randomly. If you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t make decisions on which way to turn.
In a Fortune magazine issue on decision-making, Jim Collins is quoted as saying that in his years and years of research, “no major decision we’ve studied was ever taken at a point of unanimous agreement.”
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.
After hearing many leaders complain about meetings and saying things like, “If I didn’t have to go to meetings, I’d like my job a lot more,” Lencioni asks us to imagine hearing a surgeon saying to a nurse before surgery, “If I didn’t have to operate on people, I might actually like this job.” He then asks us to consider the fact that, for those of us who lead and manage organizations, meetings are pretty much what we do.
A productive Meeting Pulse should meet the following five criteria. The meetings must 1. be on the same day each week, 2. be at the same time each week, 3. have the same printed agenda, 4. start on time, and 5. end on time.
