More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
To read
The best leaders have the right questions, but turn to their employees, customers, advisors, and the crowd to mine the answers.
In leading People, take a page from parenting: Establish a handful of rules, repeat yourself a lot, and act consistently with those rules. This is the role and power of Core Values.
First, what you’re planning to do really matters to enough customers; and second, it differentiates you from your competition.
gather quantitative and qualitative Data daily and review weekly to guide decisions; and establish an effective daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meeting Rhythm to keep everyone in the loop. Those who pulse faster, grow faster.
In managing Cash, don’t run out of it! This means paying as much attention to how every decision affects cash flow as you would to revenue and profitability.
In the end, it’s about keeping everyone focused on the summit (BHAG®) and then deciding the appropriate next step (quarterly Priority) while respecting the rules that keep you from being swept off the mountain (Values).
So, to start implementing the 4D Framework, the first question is, “Which of the 4 Decisions — People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash — needs the most attention next?”
4 Decisions Assessment available at scalingup.com
KEY QUESTION: Are the stakeholders (employees, customers, shareholders) happy and engaged in the business; and would you “rehire” all of them?
Would you keep all your existing customers? Are you happy with your investors/bank? Are your vendors supporting you properly? Are your advisors — accountants, lawyers, consultants, and coaches — the best for the size of the organization and future plans?
Having a strong and fulfilled personal life provides an important foundation for sustaining your efforts in the business.
Are all processes running without drama and driving industry-leading profitability?
Most important, the company is generating less than three times industry average profitability.
Improve the impact of your weekly meetings by taking a few minutes at the end and summarizing Who said they are going to do What, When.
Patrick M. Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable,
It’s also critical to know your Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC). It’s a technical term for how long it takes, after you spend a dollar/euro/yen on rent, utilities, payroll, inventory, marketing, etc., for it to make its way through your business model and back into your pocket.
Harvard Business Review article titled “How Fast Can Your Company Afford to Grow?” by Neil C. Churchill and John W. Mullins.
Simply send an email to vharnish@gazelles.com and put “weekly insights” in the subject line.
Treat our tools as you would Sudoku or crossword puzzles. Fill in what you know as you go. Again, it’s not necessary to work through the tools in any kind of sequence. Start where it makes the most sense for your organization. “Get it down; then get it right” is one of our mottos.
The key is lots of iterations: reviewing and updating our Growth Tools every quarter.
Great execution won’t get you anywhere if your strategy is wrong.
“Grow where you’re planted.” In other words, stick to the businesses and markets you know best.
For more on these natural cycles, read professor Larry E. Greiner’s classic Harvard Business Review article titled “Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow,” from July-August 1972 (updated in May 1998).
To get to 10 employees, founders must delegate activities in which they are weak. To get to 50 employees, they have to delegate functions in which they are strong! In many cases, the strength of the top leader becomes the weakness of the organization.
L. David Marquet, author of Turn the Ship Around!:
Repetition encompasses consistency. Finish what you start. Mean what you say. And don’t say one thing and do something else. Consistency is an important aspect of repetition.
The “20-Mile March” lesson from Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen’s book Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck — Why Some Thrive Despite Them All highlights how companies with steady growth year in and year out dramatically outperform firms that experience wild swings in revenue and profits.
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, by Kerry Patterson, et al.
And just as no cell can be too far from the blood supply, no team can be too far removed from the action of the marketplace — or so big that it becomes unwieldy and unresponsive (think of Amazon’s “two-pizza rule” — no team should be so big that it can’t be fed with two pizzas).
This is a way to increase the surface area of the company, giving the maximum number of employees a chance to interact with the marketplace. Each cell within the organization must have someone clearly accountable for it. This doesn’t mean the person is boss and/or gets to make all the decisions.
The rule: If more than one person is accountable, then no one is accountable, and that’s when things fall through the cracks.
Conor O’Clery’s The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune
you want to delegate the functions listed on the FACe tool to leaders who pass two tests (including culture fit): 1. They don’t need to be managed. 2. They regularly wow the team with their insights and output.
Or the leaders figure they can “watch over the details,” bringing in someone too junior to oversee the function vs. bringing on the powerhouse they really need. Instead, 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.
but if one executive’s name shows up three or four times compared to everyone else’s one or two, that leader is either going to die young (a little dramatic) or one of the functions he or she owns will not be supported sufficiently. This is another red flag.
Again, this doesn’t mean that any of these people is the boss; it means they are to monitor the situation, ensure that customer-satisfaction feedback is gathered and reported to the leadership team at the weekly meeting, and alert the team if there are issues.
Key Performance Indicators: The 75 Measures Every Manager Needs to Know, by Bernard Marr.
Again, the idea of a leading indicator is to measure the specific actions that lead to results. In the case of the head of the company, it’s simply the ratio of all the other boxes on the FACe tool that are right (i.e., the main job of the head of the company is to make sure she has the right people doing the right things right).
five-minute video interview of Parsons as a way to explain to his team and others how they are using Lean. You can visit scalingup.com to view the video.
One of the most important KPIs for processes is time — in either number of days (to deliver) or number of hours (to produce).
It’s important to revisit and examine one process every 90 days as part of your quarterly planning process.
Before starting your search for a key executive or frontline associate, create a Job Scorecard
(For more practical insights about building Job Scorecards, read Bluewire Media’s excellent blog on the topic.)
These central elements of the Job Scorecard — the outcomes and competencies — drive the recruiting, interviewing, and selection process.
In our experience, the learning curve for well-rounded generalists (checker pieces) is simply too long and too steep in today’s fast and complex world.
Teams need to be well-rounded, but their individual members don’t have to be. Leaders don’t always grasp this, which explains why the traditional “feel-good” interview has such a high failure rate.
Author of Change to Strange: Create a Great Organization by Building a Strange Workforce
To read
You need a “strange” culture and a “strange” strategy to differentiate your firm in the marketplace. This is why it’s so critical to discern the real Core Values underpinning your culture; and create the elements of an industry-dominating strategy.
Research strongly suggests that you need a minimum of 20 applicants per position (frontline to senior) if you want to dramatically increase your odds of hiring A Players.
