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July 17 - July 23, 2020
Conor O’Clery’s The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made ...
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Ted Leonsis, a Greek-American sports team owner, venture capital investor, filmmaker, and philanthropist, is author of The Business of Happiness: 6 Secrets to Extraordinary Success in Life and Work.
Achievements
Think about the major ways you’d like to make an impact through your work beyond reaching monetary goals — perhaps by mentoring others or setting up a nonprofit organization — and set objectives in these key areas.
In your personal life, you’ll want to think about how you can make a real difference to the key people in your life.
Rituals Establishing regular routines in your life will help you achieve your larger goals.
establish rituals with people whose presence in your life supports your bigger goals.
there might be some bad habits or behaviors you wish to stop
Wealth
“All assets become liabilities!”),
Besides determining how much money you want to set aside for retirement, set goals for the amount of money you want to donate to causes and communities that matter to you over the next several years.
Lynne Twist’s insightful book titled The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Life
Whatever is the strength of a leader often becomes the weakness of the organization
leaders have a tendency to hold on too tight, strangling the efforts of those around them.
leaders must make a counterintuitive decision and find people who exceed their own capabilities in their area of strength, to prevent the company from stalling.
Jack Stack, founder and CEO of SRC Holdings Corporation and author of the classic book The Great Game of Business: The Only Sensible Way to Run a Company,
Jim Collins, in his book How the Mighty Fall, And Why Some Companies Never Give In,
executives with good companies tend to share their titles, whereas executives at strong and great companies share what their accountabilities are in a very measurable fashion, e.g., “I am accountable for driving revenue into this company.”
When the business gets above 50 employees, the organization needs to start aligning teams around projects, product groups, industry segments, and geographical regions.
Unless you get accountabilities straight, productivity and innovation will slow, and you’ll waste a lot of time oscillating between centralizing and decentralizing various shared functions among the business units.
“Lean describes waste as anything that happens in a company that a customer would not want to pay for,”
STEP Gather your executive team together (it’s smart to include some middle managers) and name the four to nine key processes driving the business.
STEP Next, assign accountability for each process to a specific person.
STEP Identify a few KPIs to track each process.
It’s important to revisit and examine one process every 90 days as part of your quarterly planning process.
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Dr. Atul Gawande
Among Gawande’s findings: “[Checklists help] with memory recall and clearly set out the minimum necessary steps in a process.
easy-to-remember steps of service training, the initial letters of which spell out APPLE: • Approach customers with a personalized warm welcome. • Probe politely to understand all the customers’ needs. • Present a solution for the customers to take home. • Listen for and resolve any issues or concerns. • End with a fond farewell and an invitation to return.
Before starting your search for a key executive or frontline associate, create a Job Scorecard (vs. the standard job description). A Job Scorecard details a person’s purpose for the job, the desired outcomes of this individual’s work, and the competencies — technical and cultural — required to execute it.
An A Player, by the Smarts’ definition, is someone in the top 10% of the available talent pool who is willing to accept your specific offer.
Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, authors of First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently.
Change to Strange: Create a Great Organization by Building a Strange Workforce
You need a “strange” culture and a “strange” strategy to differentiate your firm in the marketplace.
The best people to consider first are those with whom you have already worked.
Dan Cable, author of Change to Strange,
Assess Systems’ wide range of pre-employment tests
OMG’s Sales Assessments
Geoff Smart and Randy Street’s book Who: The A Method for Hiring;
Bradford D. Smart’s book Topgrading: The Proven Hiring and Promoting Method That Turbocharges Company Performance.
The Topgrading methodology includes a screening interview used to further narrow your list from 10 to the top three candidates.
When hiring, bear in mind that past performance is the best indicator of future performance.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in his 2014 letter to shareholders, is “to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company.”
Will — a desire to excel, act with courage, persevere, learn, and innovate • Values — the test for culture fit – do they align with your core values • Results — in the end can they deliver on your KPIs/outcomes • Skills — the least important since most skill-sets need updating every 5 years
You hire the right people and life is great; you hire the wrong people (fit) and life is miserable.
People join companies. They leave managers.
to keep your team happy and engaged, you need one thing above all else: great managers — not free lunches or yoga classes!
“Managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee ...
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great managers are not just born; they are continually advancing their skills and ...
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periodic one-on-one coaching (rather than superior technical knowledge) ranked as the #1 key to being a successful leader.
great managers must focus those coaching sessions with their “direct supports” (a better term than “direct reports”) on five topics representing the five main activities of successful managers. In reverse order of importance: 5. Hire fewer people, but pay them more. 4. Give recognition, and show appreciation. 3. Set clear expectations, and give employees a clear line of sight. 2. Don’t demotivate; “dehassle.” 1. Help people play to their strengths.
