Every CEO has a vision for his or her company; that is the easy part! Few companies ever fail because there wasn’t a vision; they fail because they can’t execute the vision and get concrete business results. As someone once said, “Vision without execution is hallucination.” And as Jim Collins said in Built To Last: Successful Habits Of Visionary Companies, “Great performance is about 1% vision and 99% alignment,” so the secret isn’t having some unique or phenomenal vision. It is creating a vision, getting everyone to understand it and their role, and then executing like crazy. The Execution Tune-up consists of four key elements for every CEO and executive team:
Barriers to Growth – Every company hits very predictable walls as it tries to grow profitably. These walls can’t be avoided and each one presents a new challenge to executive teams in terms of leadership skills, infrastructure required, and marketplace dynamics. The key is to know when a company will hit its next wall, and what to start doing in advance to get ready to get over the wall as painlessly as possible and get back to profitable growth. The Execution Tune-up provides clear understanding of these walls, their causes, where they occur and what CEO’s should do to prepare themselves and their leadership teams to climb over these walls quickly.
Rockefeller Habits – Strategic execution is the name of the game for effective implementation of any vision. Translating the long-term vision and strategies into short-term goals and tactics that every employee understands and supports is the payoff. Verne Harnish (founder of YEO) wrote the book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Fast-Growth Firm, on these simple, practical tools that every great company CEO and executive team use to set priorities, utilize the right metrics, and establish an effective executive team meeting rhythm. Implementing these habits is a huge first step in preparing for the walls that can become barriers to profitable growth.
CEO Leadership – In today’s fast-moving, complex environment, executive teams and companies have to be both smart and healthy. Smart is actually the easy part; getting a group of smart executives to work together in a healthy manner is not only the challenge but how to become a great company. There are four specific steps for working on the healthy side of executive teams.
The Execution Roadmap™ – Getting a company’s entire vision, from core values, purpose, mission, and BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) to SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), to three-year focus areas to one-year initiatives to 90-day tactical priorities is a critical step toward alignment of the executive team and then the entire company. Too many companies spend two and three days each year in retreats to come up with grandiose strategic plans that far too often then gather dust on a bookshelf during the year. Every strategic plan must be dynamic, and there must be a way to translate all of the long-term visionary elements into practical bite-size pieces that an organization can accomplish in short bursts. The Execution Roadmap™ captures everything from most strategic to very tactical on one page and provides a clear roadmap for executive team leadership.
The Execution Tune-up provides understanding, simple and practical tools and a methodology, The Execution Maximizer™ that every CEO can use on his own with his executive team to gain alignment and actually execute his/her plan and achieve concrete results.
Biography: Jim Alampi is managing director and owner of Alampi & Associates LLC. He coaches CEOs and executive teams in the areas of strategy, leadership, executive development, and business improvement. He created the proprietary process, The Execution Maximizer™ to help CEOs execute their vision and get results. Alampi earned his bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University, and served three years as an officer in the U.S. Army. He has led three public companies ranging from $325 million to $1.5 billion in revenue, started three entrepreneurial companies and served on over 20 Boards of Directors. He joined TEC originally in Chicago and has been a member in Michigan.
The book, Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization, is the result of a 10 year study of over 24,000 people. Authors Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright recognized culture strategies failed 70 percent of the time. In their inquiry as to why this occurred, they discovered Peter Duckers’ statement that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” was true.
One of the challenges to cultural change is that it has been difficult to measure and you can’t manage what you don’t measure. We assess a culture by observing the language people in the tribe use in their everyday conversations. This video displays the language of Stage Three.
Stage Three is the dominant culture of U.S. workplace tribes, where the language is “I’m great” (and you’re not). Stage Three people are competitive and work to show everyone that they are smarter and better than anyone else. This personally competitive cultural stage produces limited innovation and almost no collaboration. No amount of ropes courses and “trust exercises” will turn this tribe of self-declared superstars into a team.
I would love to create a series of videos that illustrate the different stages. Please send me your suggestions.
Talk 2 Brazil is the world´ s only English language talk program on business in and with Brazil and is broadcast through LA Talk Radio, Los Angeles California. The audience is international business oriented, native and non native English speakers, mostly in the US, but also Europe, Asia and Brazil. Here is a link to the interview.
In the interview, we talked about what Vistage is and how the economy is doing in the United States. We also talked about Tribal Leadership, triads, and culture.
If you are like me, you probably have at least 4 or 5 business and personal development books lying around that you intended to read, but just can’t find the time for. We know how important it is to learn new ideas and pay attention to our personal growth, but we can barely squeeze in 15 minutes for ourselves at the end of the day before we start it all over again in the morning.
I want to introduce you to a tool that will allow you to learn the best ideas from the best business and personal development books in the world, in less than 15 minutes. It’s called Readitfor.me, and they take those books and turn them into interactive 12 minute videos that you can watch anywhere, anytime. I use it personally, and I love it.
For a limited time, they are giving away some pretty incredible bonuses just for signing up including:
a book they are publishing in 2012 called “The 30 Second Mind”, which is all about how to train your brain to make the best decisions in any situation.
a course on the principles from “How to Win Friends and Influence People”;
a digital marketing course on how to use content marketing, email marketing, website conversion, social media and a bunch of other skills to grow your business in 2012.
Thousands of people from 60 countries around the world subscribe to the service, including well-known companies like Zappos and Target. Here’s what Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos has to say about the service:
“We use Readitfor.me here at Zappos, and we love it. Pursuing growth and learning is one of our core values, and Readitfor.me lets us do that in a fun and engaging way”
I encourage you to take the trial, watch the bonus videos, and make an investment in yourself as we launch into a new year.
We’ve all seen or heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Although most of us are not worried about “survival” like people in past generations, you might be surprised how Maslow’s principles apply to business. Chip Conley, author of Peak: How Great Companies Get their Mojo from Maslow , literally transformed his business and his life by applying these principles to his business, which he grew from a single hotel to one of the world’s most profitable boutique hotel chains.
According to Conely, “Meaning creates inspiration.”
People want to work for a cause, not just for a living. However too many organizations ask their employees to engage in hollow work, to be enthusiastic about small-minded visions, to commit themselves to the selfish purposes and competitive drives of the company. Conley suggests there are three kinds of relationships someone can have with work; you can either have:
A job,
A career
Or a calling.
This ties in with The Transformational Pyramid: Someone who sees the relationship as a job will be anchored to the survival level with money the tie in, those on a career path find motivation on the success level and those who experience work as a calling at the transformational level. There is however a subtle difference between meaning at work, and meaning in work.
Meaning at work relates to how an employee feels about the company, their work environment and the company’s mission. Meaning in work relates to how an employee feels about their specific job task. It is the achievement of meaning at work that realizes transformation. So how can meaning at work be achieved? Conley believes an employee must align intrinsically to the mission of the company. If the company can identify its higher calling: what philanthropic, strategic or humanistic mast it “pins its colors to” – then the employee can in turn find meaning.
“In the end it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.”
Through her work as a psychologist at Stanford University, Carol Dweck has been able to identify the one thing that makes the difference between success and failure. In her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she says there are two mindsets you can have in this world, and the one you choose will make all the difference.
GROWTH MINDSET
Learning: Growth-mindsetters view every day and experience as a learning opportunity, not a stage to prove themselves.
Effort: Growth-mindsetters believe they can change anything if enough effort is put in.
Passion: Growth-mindsetters have passion for the things that they devote their effort to.
Process: Growth-mindsetters master the processes that put them on the path to success.
FIXED MINDSET
Talent: Fixed-mindsetters believe that accomplishment comes through talent.
Judgment: Fixed-mindsetters believe that each situation is a stage for judgment.
Fragile: Fixed-mindsetters are fragile if that judgment is negative.
Looking good: Fixed-mindsetters are more interested in looking good than in learning and growing.
There are many ways to divide the world. Benjamin Barber – an eminent sociologist – says,
“I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures, those who make it or those who don’t. I divide the world into learners and non-learners.”
This is at the heart of Dweck’s argument. The learners believe that they have the ability to change, and set about learning what they need to do in order to make the change a reality. The non-learners, on the other hand, are quite clear about the fact that “things are the way they are” and that there’s no sense in trying to change them.
There are things that you as a leader can do to help create this mindset in the workplace. The most powerful thing you can do in this situation is always ask what a person is learning. Don’t focus on the success or failure of their work directly, but focus on what they learned through the experience. Fixed mindset people have trouble thinking this way, because to them, that’s not what it’s about. It’s about winning and losing – and looking good or not. However, you should make it clear to them that the only way they will achieve the success they are looking for is by learning. If they want that bonus, raise or promotion, they’ll earn it by proving that they are learning in growing. Of course, this takes more time and effort on your part. You can’t focus only on the numbers and results – you have to focus on the process in how they get there. It’s hard work, but to have a team full of growth-mindset people is the only way to achieve long-term success.
As you go off into your day now, ask yourself the question – which mindset do you choose?
John King and Dave Logan concluded after a ten year, 24,000-person study, that 75% of our corporate cultures are ineffective. (Published as Tribal Leadership 2008) The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. One of the great insights of their research was that the 24% of organizations that were effective had one major difference—they met in “triads”. A triad, at its most basic level, is three people that meet together. The objective is to create a peer-to-peer-to-peer relationship for accomplishing a mutual purpose. What follows are the best practices or principles for creating effective triads.
Common Interest. “Triads are based on core values and mutual self-interest.” The purpose of three people meeting is to contribute to one another towards a common goal or cause. What is your mutual interest?
Collaboration. The way of being in a triad is supportive. It’s ‘I’ve got your back and you’ve got mine’ or ‘all for one and one for all’. “The triad provides a level of support that often comes as a surprise to people.” (p191)
Authenticity. Authenticity is being real with one another. It is transparency and speaking the naked truth without fear of looking bad or holding back out of fear of rejection.
Contribution. It is a way of being with one another, where the intention is always to come from contribution and not ego or judgment. “Once the triad is established, all the roles merge and morph, requiring each person to contribute to, and receive contributions from, the other two.” (p 204) It is like a flock of geese, where each goose takes a turn leading. Each person in the triad steps in when it is appropriate. Triads are vibrant, values-based, and filled with people giving their best efforts—leading and being led at the same time.” (p 185)
Identify & leverage core values. “Values are only manifest when they are called and they are only called when they are missing; when a value is missing, the anchor presences the value.” An anchor is a device that is used to connect a vessel to prevent it from drifting due to wind or current. In a triad, the anchor connects each person to their values in order to prevent the relationship from drifting. Each person is an anchor for the quality of the relationship between the other two, and consciously nurtures the relationship.
Way of Being:
Be Authentic
Be Accepting
Be Present
Be Useful
Value of Triads:
Opportunity to get an unbiased perspective from peers that have no hidden agenda
Help with decisions, challenges, problems
Expertise, diversity and experience of team members
When Jim Collins wrote his best-selling book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, he became an instant business hero. Executives from around the world aspired to be Level 5 leaders and focused intently on finding their hedgehog concepts. But there was a question that remained unanswered: in a world that is increasingly in financial turmoil and constant change, how do you succeed?
In a methodology similar to Good to Great, Collins and his team studied companies that were in industries where there was a constant state of change, and found that there were some companies that outperformed the marketplace by a significant margin.
He called these the 10x companies, because they all had outperformed their “industry index” by more than 10 times over the span of the study. In fact, on average, the 1 0 x companies outperformed the marketplace as a whole by 32 times. If it sounds to you like these would be some good companies to learn from, you’d be right. What Collins and his team concluded was that there were 4 main attributes of a 10x company:
Ask any Vistage member “Who has been among the best speakers you’ve heard on increasing sales and profit margins?” and the name Jack Daly is always on every Vistage CEO’s list.
Jack has made over 500 presentations to the CEOs of our Vistage CEO Groups and has been a successful CEO in his own right. Jack has built six companies, selling two to Wall Street firms; led a sales force of 2,600 in hundreds of offices that created $42 million in profits in three years and was named Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young and ranked #10 on the Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing firms nationwide. In short, he’s been there and done it….and here’s how.
The key ingredient to increasing profits is enhancing sales management. Your sales force is only as good as your sales leadership. This workshop has been designed to make positive results happen through more profitable selling. A sampling of areas to be covered includes the following:
Recruiting top-selling professionals
Field sales coaching
Getting sales people committed to your business goals
Establishing and measuring minimum performance standards
Communication, team building, and recognition tactics
A CEO action agenda
The emphasis is on street-tested (not theory) sales management techniques that are immediately implementable and that show in enhanced profitability.
Value: Participants will benefit from this seminar by taking away at least five ideas they can incorporate into their business. Significantly more ideas are shared to ensure each business gets several key actions to implement. Many of the ideas are easily transferable to areas beyond sales; however, Daly’s examples are positioned from the sales perspective. A workbook with applicable forms, examples, and schedules will be provided to each participant. He presents solid ideas for building, managing, and monitoring a sales force and sales program.
Want a sample? Watch a 25 minute video of Jack Daly by clicking here.
Finding your next big thing is a lot more like “Finding Waldo” than you think. The ideas are out there waiting to be discovered – for those who are looking. This becomes especially true when you are in a world and marketplace that is changing as fast as it is today.
How to track down your next big idea? Here are 10 useful questions you can ask yourself to find the hidden clues to your next breakthrough:
1. This product should already exist (but it doesn’t). Is there something that you feel should exist in your marketplace?
2. There is a needlessly complicated and frustrating customer service. Can you remove friction from the customer service in a new and novel way (think Netflix)?
3. A resource or asset is priced too low. Are there arbitrage opportunities to acquire assets that will be worth more in the near future?
4. This is a good discovery, we’re just not sure for what, yet. Is there a technology or discovery that you see a killer use for, but nobody else does yet?
5. This should be everywhere, but it isn’t. Have you discovered a product/service or business model that should have a large market adoption, but doesn’t?
6. People have started using products/services in new ways, but don’t have the necessary support. Are people using products/services in ways that are not intended by the producer?
7. People shouldn’t want this product/service, but they do. Is there a product/service in your portfolio that seems to perform well, even though you didn’t predict it would?
8. People are using products/services that you aren’t offering or recommending. Are people using things even though you think they shouldn’t?
9. The product/service is selling well elsewhere, but not here. Is there a product or service in another part of the world that hasn’t reached your market yet?
10. The product/service shouldn’t be making so much money. Is there a product or service where the margins are much higher than you expected them to be?
How to apply it to your business
Make a habit (once a week) to ask yourself these questions. Better still; ask your entire team to answer them as well. It is the constant application of the model that will help you find your next breakthrough idea.
Posted by mtaylortec 
