Do the Right Thing

There’s no greater foe to growth than being out of balance with certainty. If you have too little, you’ll constantly be second-guessing and doubting any plans you ever make. You’ll get flustered by failure, and constantly shuffle things around to try and appease your emotional side. But if you have too much, you’ll become stubborn […]

Stratification

Most visionaries and business owners that I know are chomping at the bit to try and improve their businesses. That’s smart…dissatisfaction drives innovation. However, it can be pretty hard to find the right place to start. How do you decide which of the hundreds of thousands of systems in your business to improve? The answer […]

Skip The Plan

Maybe your track record with goal-setting isn’t the greatest. It’s hard. It’s something you have to work at every day. Even if you miss a day, just get up and try again.

One Free Radical

The only bad decision is one made without all the data present. That puts business owners in a pretty tough situation. As their organizations grow in size, they become fantastically complicated. They can become such a dense cluster of processes and systems that they feel opaque. So what happens when they plan? They can’t achieve […]

The Polymath

Every system in a business is a pipe. You’ve got your sales pipe, your marketing pipe, your operations pipe, and so on. Each pipe is responsible for taking the effort of the people who do the work in that system and turning it into a result (the result depends on the pipe, naturally). Let’s say […]

The Theory of Constraints

Let’s say you’ve got some task, goal, or result that you want in your life. Let’s also say that this is a result that you want to occur with some regularity. For example, let’s take this content right here. It’s part of my grand social media strategy … and it’s necessary for anyone who wants […]

Organizing Roles

Clearly understanding and managing according to accountability and responsibility is critical for the success of your organization. Your organizational chart should represent the roles that are functionally necessary and individuals may be assigned many roles. Those roles represent nothing more than a process inventory that an individual employee is accountable and/or responsible for.