I’ve turned this phrase over and over in my head since hearing it and suggest the following ways we can lose to win in business and in life:

1. Time

Yes, we all live crazy-busy lives with an endlessly long list of things to do. Losing to win with our time involves pruning that list of everything that doesn’t contribute to bearing fruit. This means making as much use of a “stop doing” list as a “to do” list and investing our limited resources in only those things that are our highest priorities, both personally and professionally.

2. Media

Along with our endlessly long task list, we have an equally expanding list of media options: from TV, to video, to books, to magazines, to apps, to email, to text, to Facebook, to Twitter, to Yelp, to whatever the next big thing will be. And all of this stuff is great, except. Except when we treat them like an all-you-can-eat buffet and ingest every item in aisle. Losing to win means going on a media diet and consuming those few alternatives that allow us to stay informed, eliminating the rest from our lives.

3. Customers

A common problem I address with the business leaders I coach is their trying to be all things to all people. These well-intentioned entrepreneurs do one thing for one kind of customer one day and an entirely different thing for an entirely different kind of customer the next. This inch-deep, mile-wide approach to the marketplace never works. Losing to win here means finding your focus (inch-wide, mile-deep) by knowing exactly who your core customer is and exactly how to meet their needs with the depth and intensity that builds a lifelong stream of business.

4. Pride

There’s a short proverb that’s repeated in the Christian scriptures, “God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” Losing to win spiritually means recognizing him as the author and sustainer of human life. Humility lives with the constant awareness that someone greater and wiser than oneself is at the center of the universe. Simply stated, humility understands its place in the world. From that understanding, then, flows acts of love, service, and generosity.

There’s something I’d like to see in someone running for president from either party. Wouldn’t you?

We face our own walls personally and professionally. A sales goal we never seem to be able to break. A product that has a seemingly insurmountable flaw. A relationship that has reached an impasse. And the same choice faces us: break through the wall or have the wall break us.

Here’s how to do the former and not the latter.

First, become utterly convinced that the accomplishment on the other side of the wall is worth the work. Embrace the vision of finishing the race and pursue that vision with abandon. Second, keep moving forward. When that inner voice screams at you to quit, take the next step anyway. Then take the next step. And the next.

It’s the combination of these two things, a powerful vision for the future and consistent progress in the present, that breaks through the wall. The one keeping your eyes on the horizon and the other keeping your feet moving no matter the obstacles in your way. This makes persistence one of the most prized possessions you can have in business (and in life), fueled by passion and forged in adversity.

Human beings at their core seek to extract meaning from the things that happen to them. We are sapient creatures and do this instinctively. When an event takes place in our life, we try to understand why it happened and explain its existence in some way.

When we do this with a belief system that sees adversity as a negative development, we slide into discouragement and despair. The opposite brings hope and opportunity. This is the fundamental difference between optimism and pessimism. Not the denial that bad things happen, but the rock solid belief that even when bad things happen, good things can come from them and that every problem has a solution.

And this is the fundamental difference between moving on in business in the face of opposition and giving up. What we believe about it determines how we act, and, ultimately, how we feel. In this way, adversity doesn’t define us but our response to it. Overcoming obstacles, then, begins between our ears with an inner conviction that no matter what we face, a better future awaits us. Positive action and new opportunity flow from that central belief, and so does a successful business.

Super Bowl Blunder One: The Big Splash

Even though a 30-second commercial in this year’s Super Bowl broadcast cost $3.5 million–an obscene amount of money–we cling to the myth that successful marketing is about making a big splash. Those of us who can’t afford $3.5 million, try to make our own big splash by buying a full page ad in the local newspaper or by sponsoring a big event.

Here’s the truth: the big splash doesn’t work.

Why? Because people forget even the biggest of splashes and move on with their lives. Remember any of last year’s Super Bowl commercials? I didn’t think so. Repetition is the key to marketing success. Especially today in the crazy-busy world in which we live, marketing that works takes place over time with an ongoing series of personal connections. Instead of making a big splash, today’s successful marketers are building real relationships with real people.

Super Bowl Blunder Two: The Power of Persuasion

For years marketing and sales has been about persuasion. Marketers have tried to be as powerful as possible, presenting their point of view in bold, even brazen tones. With the rise of the internet and social media, a seismic shift has taken place from the power of persuasion to the power of conversation.

People don’t want to to be shouted at any more with gotta-get-it-now deals and lower-than-low discount pricing. They want to be talked to. And they just don’t want to talk to you. They want to talk to your customers about you in a open and honest way. So create a forum for people to freely share their opinions and don’t scrub your bad reviews. The public is smart enough to know when someone’s begin a crank; but if you remove the crank’s posts, you look deceptive.

Super Bowl Blunder Three: Selling Too Soon

And then there’s the mistake of selling too soon. A, B, C: Always Be Closing is just a pile of foolish nonsense. People don’t like being closed, they like buying and want to do it on their own terms. Which means we can actually teach our prospects to say no to us by pushing hard to close. We push too hard to close, of course, when we spend a lot of money making a big splash (and want to get that money back in sales) and ply the old-school media powers of persuasion.

When we take our time to build relationships and have authentic conversations, trust emerges. From that basis of trust, agreements are reached that benefit both the buyer and the seller. Agreements that result in increased sales with decreased cost of client acquisition. That’s a recipe for success in marketing, and in business, today.

It’s a common misconception that the trajectory of goal fulfillment travels in a straight line. People are actually surprised when the cause they believe in so deeply and the targets they thought through so keenly meet repeated frustration and delay. But that’s not the way goals work.

Here’s the truth about goal fulfillment: it doesn’t really happen on the mountaintop, but in the valley. It doesn’t take place in the light, but in the darkness. It’s forged in adversity. To fulfill any worthwhile, meaningful goal one must possess a drive and determination to overcome obstacles in the way.

In short, you must have grit.

Not the grit of a gunslinger that the young Mattie Ross found in an aging “Rooster” Cogburn in the recent Coen brothers’ re-make, True Grit. But the grit that researcher Dr. Angela Duckworth defines as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” According to her research, this kind of grit outperforms both talent and intelligence in activities as diverse as graduating from military school and competing in the National Spelling Bee.

So here’s a series of questions for you, an eight-point gut-check for grit. Honesty answer each:

1. Do you seek out greater and greater challenges, always pressing the edges of the envelope?

2. Do you welcome adversity as a way to make you stronger? Do you “embrace the beast” as ultra-marathoner Lisa Smith-Batchen would put it?

3. Do you declare your goals to family and friends, colleagues and coworkers, creating public accountability for your actions?

4. Do you maintain internal emotional equilibrium in spite of the external circumstances of your life?

5. Do you look within for the solutions to pressing problems, refusing to blame those problems on others?

6. Do you keep yourself from always starting new things, changing goals before you’ve had a chance to see them through?

7. Do you remind yourself of the meaningful cause, the deeper purpose that fuels the passion for each goal you’re pursuing?

8. Do you celebrate, and celebrate well, when a challenging goal has been fulfilled?

Every question in this list is important, and every question should have an affirmative answer. Work on the no’s until they become yeses. It’s then that grit, true grit, will take root in your soul and the goals you’ve set for this year will actually get done.

We make them matter most by doing this: Instead of asking ourselves what kind of year we want, we first ask ourselves what kind of life we want. Our days must be an extension of our drive to achieve what matters most.

The problem we have as human beings is that we assume because we are so busy that we are getting things done. That would be like assuming that if we are driving a car at 100 miles per hour that we are headed in the right direction. Not a very safe assumption. Never confuse activity with accomplishment.

“The consequence of living our lives at warp speed,” write John Loehr and Tony Schwartz in The Power of Full Engagement, “is that we rarely take time to reflect on what we value most deeply or to keep these priorities front and center. Most of us spend more time reacting to immediate crises and responding to the expectations of others than we do making considered choices guided by a clear sense of what matters most.”

Take the time to complete this exercise before the week is up. Write a one sentence answer to each of the following questions:

1. What kind of person do you want to be? How are you staying healthy and strong mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually?
2. What kind of relationships do you want to have? How are you investing in the lives of those whom you love the most?
3. What kind of work do you want to do? What’s the best use of the gifts and abilities that God has given you?
4. How are you giving back? What causes are you supporting with your time, talent, and treasure?

This is how you can measure this year differently.

But let me ask you, why do airlines tell passengers traveling with children to put their oxygen mask on first in the event of an emergency? Because they want parents in a crisis to be supremely selfish? No. They do it because if a parent gets the oxygen they need to breathe, they’ll be able to ensure the same for the child traveling with them. In this way, their oxygen is top priority.

And so is your oxygen. If you don’t attend to the very important task of being healthy physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, you’ll have nothing to give to those who are traveling with you: from colleagues to coworkers, family to friends.

This is not to say, of course, that you are your only priority. That would be like putting an oxygen mask on yourself and not the child traveling with you. Not only is that selfish, it’s criminal. Our own physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health, then, is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. The end being to care for the other priorities of our life, both personally and professionally.

So let me ask you these questions:

• Are you taking care of your body, eating right, exercising regularly, and sleeping well?
• Are you taking care of you mind, learning new things, keeping it sharp and alert?
• Are you maintaining emotional equilibrium, leaving enough margin in your days to rest and relax?
• Are you attending to the deeper things in life, honestly seeking God in faith?

If you’re lax in any of these areas, not only will you pay a personal price, those traveling with you will pay a price as well, because, ultimately, you’ll have nothing to give them. You can’t pump water from an empty well. And if your well is empty, or nearly empty, it’s time to take care of a top priority: yourself. “Watch over your heart with all diligence,” the ancient proverb advises, “for from it flow the springs of life.”

So I’m on the alert. Anyone who can give me useful information on how to successfully build my consulting practice, to turn my house into the home of my dreams without having to move, and to get in shape without mortally wounding myself has my attention. My undivided attention.

Why?

Because they’re addressing the pressing needs of the tribes I belong to. They’re talking to me about the things I care about most deeply right now. And the more they do that well, the more I’ll follow them, trust them, spend money with them, and recommend my friends do the same.

This is the key to marketing today in the fragmented media world in which we live: narrowcasting versus broadcasting. Before there were hundreds of television stations, before there was satellite and internet radio, and before newspapers were killed by the web and the Yellow Pages by Google, all a person had to do to get new business was place an ad. The bigger the ad or the longer the run (or both), the more business you got. Those days are long gone. Gone, too, are the days of building a web site or starting a blog and having customers flock to you. Welcome to the post-web world.

To market effectively today you must first find your focus. You must know exactly who want to reach, you must know what tribe they belong to. Then you must know exactly what’s going on in that tribe. You must be able to answer this question with absolute clarity, “What does your tribe care about most deeply?” And finally, you must repeatedly address the things your tribe cares about most deeply, building a relationship where they begin to know, then like, then trust you.

To thine own tribe be true means this: consistently talk to your community in a way that meets their pressing needs, and your community will follow you anywhere. And that includes buying your products and services and recommending others do the same.

1. The Perils of Jumping to Confusions

2. Got Grit? True Grit?

3. Value, Added Value, and Unexpected Value

4. All Tasks are NOT Created Equal

5. 7 Ways I use my iPad for Business

As a special gift, I’ve put my top 10 blog posts of 2011 in a document for you to download for free. Here is it: Best of Bill’s Blog 2011.

Merry Christmas!

But there’s a price to be paid for this urgency: moment by moment adrenaline spikes that leave us in a state of perpetual emergency. The problem with adrenaline, a chemical produced involuntarily in the human body, is that it’s not intended for daily use. It should be reserved for actual emergencies. Under the influence of adrenaline blood rushes from our brains to our bodies. Our heart beats faster, our blood pressure rises, our muscles tense in the face of a perceived threat. A very real physiological alarm system is set off. But no alarm should ring all day, that’s just exhausting.

The second problem with adrenaline is that it’s addictive. The constant state of urgency it creates becomes a way of life we can’t get enough of. We crave the rush of excitement it brings as much as the alcoholic craves his next drink, the junkie his next hit. That’s why we feel the irresistible urge to check our email on vacation. This addiction results in emotional and physical burn out. We’re running on rocket fuel, but we’re designed for regular unleaded. The occasional emergency is fine, but the state of crisis most of us live in, not only makes us less effective, it also makes us profoundly unhealthy.

Here’s the cost of continuous partial attention to your business. No one does their best thinking in a crisis. We think we do, but that’s just our adrenaline talking. Remember, under the influence of adrenaline, blood rushes from our brain not to it. Constant urgency keeps us from giving full, concentrated attention to our work. And our work suffers.

I regularly hear from my executive coaching clients that their most productive work times are in the evening at home before they go to bed or on the weekend. Why? Because all their distractions are turned off (or at least minimized). But who wants to live that way? Do you really want to work an 8-10 hour day and then do your real work after hours and on Saturday and Sunday?

Not that I want to live off the grid. I love all things digital. It’s just that technology must serve us, not the other way around. We must learn, as the ancient proverb advises, how to slow down to move faster. As you enter a new year, make that proverb your mantra. Your work, your family, and your body will thank you.

Building community requires two key dynamics working in concert together. The first is a commitment to a common cause. The root of the word community refers to people sharing resources in common with each other. Not just physical resources, however, but spiritual and emotional: shared mission and shared ideals. This is what creates community.

Community is also about relationship. Healthy communities are not only committed to a common cause, but are committed to each other. They care for each other and treat each other with dignity and respect. Without this dynamic, a community implodes. Businesses do this and political movements, sports teams and religious institutions. The relational foundation doesn’t exist to bear the weight of the movement, and it collapses on itself.

An opposite phenomenon occurs, however, when a group of people is committed to each other but not to a common cause. The organization becomes ingrown, self-serving, and hopelessly insulated to the realities of the marketplace. One of the worst examples I’ve experienced of this was when my wife and I went out to a local pizzeria for dinner, and the large screen television was angled away from the dining area so that the employees could watch Dancing with the Stars, customers be damned. We didn’t go back.

To unleash the power of community in your business, get everyone on the same page when in comes to the values you uphold and the vision you pursue. Take the time to build these in a collaborative way so that everyone owns their measurable outcomes. Then treat your employees at every level of the organization with dignity and respect. Believe in your people and celebrate their achievements–large and small, personal and professional–and they’ll give you 100% effort 100% of the time. And that, too, impacts the bottom line. Big time.

Here were his concluding words of advice:

1.  Be prepared. The current financial downturn is likely to last for the next two years, failing to prepare for it is truly preparing to fail.

2.  Prepare for the future by creating a strategic business plan. Businesses with a strategic plan have a rudder to navigate through the rough waters ahead, instead of being blown back and forth by the wind and the rain.

3.  What a slow economy means, however, is that we will have two more years of low interest rates. Use low interest rate money to advance your strategic business plan. Today’s low fixed rates are a great tool you can use to invest in your company’s long-term growth.

4.  Improve business efficiencies. Many companies have discovered in the last few years that they can do much more than they ever thought possible with less. You probably can too. In fact, you must because for the next few years the cost of capital and operating expenses is only going to rise and revenue growth will still be slow.

5.  Plan for even more consolidation in your industry as bigger companies continue to buy smaller companies. This means you must sharpen the focus of your business to maintain its competitive edge. In other words, know what drives your core franchise value.

6.  Get your financial house in order: clean up your balance sheet, reduce your long term debt, reduce your fixed expenses, converting as much of them as possible into variable expenses. 

7.  Know exactly what it costs to deliver your products and services. If you are doing business at a loss, or nearly so, you can’t make it up on volume. Ever.

8.  Focus on your most profitable customer relationships. Unless you are a charity, it makes no sense to continue serving clients who drain you of time, money, and energy. Know who your ideal clients are and serve them to the greatest degree.

True vision is shared vision. Yes, it may begin with you, but it must also involve your people so that everyone fully owns it. It’s like two overlapping circles:

The first circle is what excites you about your work. It’s your passion, your  motivation, your cause. The second circle is what excites your employees about their work. Their passion, their motivation, their cause. What both of you share, the overlap, is the shared vision for your company and high-octane fuel for the future.

Your vision alone may drive people forward, but it won’t truly engage them or keep them motivated over the long haul. After all, it’s your vision not theirs. Their vision alone may create engagement, but democratizes the process so that the plan has no real edge to it. A camel, a wise soul once quipped, is a horse designed by a committee.

True vision is a synergy between leaders and their people, found in the shared ownership of a dream for a better future. It’s forged through the process of robust dialogue and intense discussion, iron sharpening iron. As a result, it’s owned by all the members of the group, and, not surprisingly, it also gets accomplished. And that’s the point of vision. Not to have a pretty plaque on the wall but to have real things getting done by real people in real time.

“Talent wins games,” Michael Jordan once said, “but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.”

FREE WORKSHOP: Tools for Two in Business

Marriage, family, AND business. Couples working in business together face unique communication challenges that few are equipped to face. Tools for Two in Business is a starting point for any marriage looking for healthy ways to meet the demands of the marketplace and the demands of home and family at the same time.

WHEN? Saturday, December 3 from 8:30 AM – 12:30 PM

WHERE? TNT Builders, 35897 Bryant Drive SW, Albany

WHO? Facilitated by Ken and Mary Himes from Friends of the Family Ministries and hosted by Bill Zipp and Trish and Trent Irwin

HOW MUCH? Workshop facilitation, materials, Continental breakfast, and lunch is FREE

Yes, this is a free workshop on interpersonal communication for couples in business together. Spaces are limited, however, and registration is required. Call Bill at 541-752-5323 to reserve your spot today. MORE INFORMATION

1. Weekly Thanks-giving

No week should go by without the people who work for you being praised in some way. Private compliments, thoughtful notes, public accolades at staff meetings, and personalized voice mail messages must all become part of your leadership repertoire. Like anything else in life, it’s a habit that must be learned. Put three poker chips in your right pocket at the beginning of every day and move a chip to your left pocket when you thank someone for their good work. Make sure that at the end of every business day all the poker chips have been moved to your left pocket.

2. Quarterly Thanks-giving

Break down your yearly goals into quarterly sprints. Create finish lines, specific measurable targets, that people can hit each quarter, or every month of each quarter. Post these targets prominently on the wall and keep track of people’s progress. When finish lines are crossed, celebrate. A sales team I work with does this every month, and it injects our meetings with energy and enthusiasm. For more information on this subject, read: The Genius of Quarterly Sprints.

3. Annual Thanks-giving

There’s a place for a big Thanksgiving Day event in your company as well. Annual reward and recognition allows you to celebrate major milestones and rally the entire company. Create a fun, meaningful yearly event where you publicly recognize excellence and reward years of service. Here’s a warning, however. If you don’t do steps one and two, an event like this will feel hollow and quickly become the company joke.

Your business budget for these three things should be around 1% of total compensation. For weekly rhythms, get nice stationary or note cards and drop in the occasional gift certificate to a local coffee shop, spending $5 – $10 per person per month. For quarterly recognition and reward, spend a bit more, $50 – $100 per person per quarter, and tie it into achieving certain goals for that period of time. Finally, invest $100 – $500 per person in annual career recognition.

Bottom line: when it comes to saying “Thank you!”, once a year is not enough. Happy Thanks-giving!

FREE WORKSHOP: Tools for Two in Business

Marriage, family, AND business. Couples working in business together face unique communication challenges that few are equipped to face. Tools for Two in Business is a starting point for any marriage looking for healthy ways to meet the demands of the marketplace and the demands of home and family at the same time.

WHEN? Saturday, December 3 from 8:30 AM – 12:30 PM

WHERE? TNT Builders, 35897 Bryant Drive SW, Albany

WHO? Facilitated by Ken and Mary Himes from Friends of the Family Ministries and hosted by Bill Zipp and Trish and Trent Irwin

HOW MUCH? Workshop facilitation, materials, Continental breakfast, and lunch is FREE

Yes, this is a free workshop on interpersonal communication for couples in business together. Spaces are limited, however, and registration is required. Call Bill at 541-752-5323 to reserve your spot today. MORE INFORMATION

So let’s say it aloud, boldly and brazenly, traditional time management is broken. Focus, not efficiency, is the key to managing our time.

I once owned a house on six acres of land under the grand delusion that I was a gentleman farmer. Year after year I had the most beautiful grapevines with long flowing branches, big beautiful leaves, and no grapes. One day a nosey neighbor came over and growled at me, “You gotta prune dem things!”

And he was right, because when I did, magically grapes appeared on the vines. Wonderful, juicy, delicious grapes. I learned that for grapevines to produce grapes, the energy of the plant needs to be spent on growing grapes, not branches and leaves. To achieve that objective, grapevines need to be rigorously pruned so the plant can do that which is essential to its purpose, bearing fruit.

In business and in life, pruning is cutting back what is secondary so that which is primary can thrive. It’s going through our endlessly long lists of things to do, identifying the few things that are vitally important, and doing them, letting everything else go. Pruning is, fundamentally, a counterintuitive yet liberating concept: doing more by doing less. In short, focus.

The prophetic words of Peter Drucker written over four decades ago declare, “Concentration—that is, the courage to impose what really matters most and comes first—is the executive’s only hope of mastering time and events instead of being their whipping boy.”

Concentration and courage. Words to live by in today’s crazy busy world. So farewell time management. I really won’t miss you that much. Hello focus. Let’s do business (and life) together.

I call this phenomenon “accidental leadership,” and again, it’s one of the most common occurrences I encounter in my practice. If you’re an accidental leader, here are four keys to success:

1. Embrace your role with vigor and resolve.

Frankly, it doesn’t really matter how you came to be a leader in your company. The fact is, you’re a leader now. What are you going to do about it? If the truth were told, most people’s path to leadership is accidental in some way, so forget about the past–it’s irrelevant–and focus on the present and the future. Make the decision right now to be the very best leader you can be.

2. Understand that the essence of leadership is trust.

This is where leadership begins. You cannot lead others if they don’t have a sense that you’re a person they can trust. Trust means doing what you say you’re going to do, no exceptions. Trust means not asking anyone to do something you wouldn’t do yourself, no exceptions. Trust means giving open and honest answers to the open and honest questions your people ask, no exceptions. And trust means, when you don’t do these things, you apologize, simply and humbly. No exceptions.

3. Be true to your own style of leadership.

Effective leadership is not a one-size-fits-all affair. There are extremely effective leaders who are quiet and reserved, and others who are bold and brash. There is no right and wrong here. History is filled with stories of amazing leaders, from Mother Theresa to Winston Churchill, who differed vastly in leadership style. Know who you are and be true to your own voice.

4. Take the time to rest and refuel.

The pressures of leadership are draining in ways that are utterly unlike being an individual contributor. As with the heat of the summer sun, slowly and imperceptibly your inner resources evaporate under its penetrating rays. If you don’t take the time to rest and refuel, you’ll wake up one day completely exhausted with no idea why.

As a consultant, I take at least four weeks of vacation every year and rarely work on the weekends. Not because consulting is a cushy job, but because the demands of my job are such that I need significant time to rest, reflect, and re-fill my inner resources. No one wants a burned-out consultant advising them on their business. And no one want a burned-out leader leading them. Don’t be a martyr in this regard. Take care of yourself, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Tom, the owner of a busy retail store, was working in his office when his desk chair broke. Quickly, before running off to an important vendor meeting, Tom bought a new chair at the office warehouse down the street. He drug the box in from the car and asked his staff to put it together while he was out. When he returned a few hours later, the chair sat in his office, partially assembled and painfully crooked.The box it came in lay empty on the floor with a collection of plastic wrapping and unused parts surrounding it.

Randy, the president of a local media company, informed his staff in passing at their weekly meeting that, due to the pressures of the economic downturn, a much needed exterior painting of their tired-looking office building would be put off for another year. As a surprise to the entire team, a front-line employee, his family, and some of his friends power-washed the facility, taped off the windows and doors, and painted the entire building in one marathon weekend. They paid for entire project, including the materials, themselves.

What’s the difference between these two businesses? In a word, culture.

Culture trumps everything. The most brilliant strategy and the most inspired plan is dead on arrival if it’s delivered to a company whose culture is broken. Culture is the context that determines the quality of all actions within an organization. As outsiders we see the frail branches, pick the tasteless fruit, and blame the plant. The issue is usually deeper though, unseen in the roots that feed the plant and affect its health. Culture.

What kind of culture are you creating in your company?

1.Your team is just a committee because the people on it don’t really know each other

Team effectiveness is based on trust. Everything flows from there. Committees don’t take the time to build that trust, they jump right into agendas and action items, irrespective of the people in the room. As a result the relationships at the table remain superficial and trust virtually nonexistent.

If a group of people is going to engage in solving serious problems–be they commercial, social, or even spiritual–that group must know each other, and know each other well. Depth of relationship forms the foundation for the building that will be built upon it. The taller the building, the deeper the foundation must be. To forge real teamwork, you must take the time to forge real relationship. There is no shortcut to trust.

2. Your team is just a committee because it doesn’t fight fair (or at all)

When team members trust each other, they talk openly and frankly. Committee members passively listen to one or two people drone on and on, disagreeing with decisions made behind their backs. That’s not fighting fair. True teams actively participate in dialogue, discussion, and even debate without incrimination. Not really fighting, per se, but iron sharpening iron. By default, committees protect the status quo. Teams change the world.

3. Your team is just a committee because it’s overly dependent on the formal leader

Committees have chairmen, and women, whose job it is to schedule a meeting, call it to order, direct the agenda, and follow-up on decisions made. A committee is entirely dependent on the chair for its success. Teams may start in the same way, but very quickly transform themselves into something quite different, a dynamic small group that’s mutually accountable to one another for results. The formal leader, while present, does not drive the agenda, but all the members of the team take full responsibly for success. In fact, the formal leader could step aside and the team would keep functioning at high levels of productivity. Not so with a committee.

That’s why Patrick Lencioni has made this audacious claim about true teams, “Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare. A friend of mine, the founder of a company that grew to a billion dollars in annual revenue, best expressed the power of teamwork when he once told me, ‘If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, any time.’”

When you build community, you gather together a group of people who are loyal to your business. Because of this loyalty, they return to use your products and services again and again and again. They also recommend your products and services to people just like themselves (again and again and again). And they defend you to other misinformed souls who aren’t loyal to your brand. That’s the power of community.

Every marketing method you use, from traditional media to the latest technology, must be rigorously measured against this question. Does it build community? If it doesn’t, don’t use it, no matter how cutting-edge it may be. The goal of marketing is not to win style points, but to bring a constant flow of well-qualified prospects into your sales pipeline. Building community is the best, and–given the proliferation of media options today–the only way to do that.

What builds community? It’s as simple and profound as this. If you and I went out for beers after work, we would talk about the things going on in our life. We’d talk about our kids and our family, our work and our favorite teams, and maybe the latest political rumblings. After a few pints and too many buffalo wings and fries, we would feel better connected. That’s the exact thing you must do with your customers. What do they care about related to the products and services you provide? Platforms like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Yelp make this easy to do. So do webinars, tele-seminars, blogging and good old-fashioned breakfast meetings.

Bottom line: Building community means having ongoing conversations with your core customers around the things they care about related to the products and services you provide. To do this you must, first, know exactly who your core customer is, and then what they really care about. In other words, who is your who and what do they want? Now go talk to them about it!

It’s the one reaction I’ve heard in my consulting practice more than any other. These words are uttered in horror by my clients, with images of slick talking, socially inept idiots dancing in their head.

The picture most of us have of the sales profession is Ned Ryerson, the irritating insurance agent in the movie Groundhog Day, who relentlessly bothers Bill Murray to buy a policy he doesn’t need. And, along with Bill Murray, we just want to slug the guy. A career in sales usually lands at the top of everyone’s list of jobs most despised, alongside lawyers, politicians, and tele-evangelists.

So the horror is understandable. But I’ve got news for you, the brutal reality of business today is this: nothing happens in it until someone sells something. Let me be even more precise, nothing happens in your business until someone sells something. And that someone is you.

Qualified customers don’t magically appear at your door ready to buy, interest needs to be sparked and trust built. Competitors don’t magically decide to leave your marketplace, differentiation needs to be made and loyalty won. Objections don’t magically answer themselves, engagement with the heart and mind of your prospects needs to occur.

All this, and more, is sales. When done with class and integrity, it’s a noble calling and an honorable profession.

And it’s the key to succeeding in business. From accountant to web designer, contractor to software engineer the day you chose you start your own firm, whether you realized it or not, was the day you chose to be a salesperson. Not only that, given the intensity of competition in the marketplace today and the flattening of organizational barriers, every employee in every business needs to understand that every touch with a customer can move that customer forward–or backward–in the sales process, generating revenue for your company or losing revenue.

The question, therefore, we should be asking ourselves is not, “Am I a salesperson?” but rather, “What kind of salesperson will I be?”

And that’s the genius of quarterly sprints. One year is too long a period of time to sustain people’s attention and enthusiasm, one month too short a period of time to make progress on meaningful goals. So I encourage the clients I work with to break the year into a series of three-month sprints. By having four starting gates and four finish lines in your year instead of just one, you harness the enthusiasm of starting something new and the energy of finishing something significant all throughout the year, instead of just at the beginning and the end. This sustained intensity assures the completion of goals that are critical to your success.

I just finished writing my third book a result of a quarterly sprint. Completing this project was one of my goals for the year, but I scheduled it as a summer sprint with a Labor Day deadline. This tight, twelve-week time frame gave me an intensity of focus that a whole year couldn’t. The sprint was most useful about halfway through the project. I got distracted, derailed by a family vacation and a bit stuck creatively. But because the finish line was literally a few weeks away, I sat myself down and got back to the business of writing. Sure enough, my juices began to flow again, and I hit the deadline as planned.

Most business leaders I’ve met have no lack of meaningful goals they want to achieve in any given year. They don’t achieve those goals, however, because they fail to execute on them. I’ve found that the rhythm of a 12-week sprint with a 1-week rest (13 weeks equaling one quarter) is a more effective way to get things done than one long 52-week marathon. I’m pretty sure you will too.

I just returned from Boston where, as a member of Alan Weiss’ Million Dollar Consultant community, I attended an extensive training program on conducting an event like this. Here are the high points I learned from Alan:

• Know your target audience. If your event’s for everyone, it’s for no one. You’re looking to gather the very best of your core customers for a high-content, 60-90 minute presentation.
• Attendance should range from 12-20 people. Less than 12 and the group is too small for quality interaction, more than 20 and the group is too big for quality interaction.
• To get 12-20 people in attendance, you’ll have to invite at least 50 prospects to your event.
• High quality printed invitations should go out 6-8 weeks before the event with clear instructions on how to register. Use email and the phone to follow-up your printed invites.
• Make sure one existing client for every six prospective clients are present at the event. Highlight the testimonial of an exiting client in your invitation.
• Promise compelling content. Address the burning issues that your customers are facing today. This is the only reason people will give up their valuable time to come to an event.
• Deliver compelling content. Give your ideas away generously, and attendees will say, “If that’s what I get for free, imagine what I’d get when I pay for it!”
• Make your event exclusive. A secret to success in using this approach is counterintuitive: there must be a strong sense that it’s for your core customer and your core customer only. No vendors. No surrogates.
• The venue is critical. It must be high quality and offer an excellent light meal, either breakfast or lunch.
• Start on time and end on time. No exceptions.
• Follow-up with those who came. Ask for business cards and note those who are responsive in the session. Set follow-up appointments for further discussion.
• Follow-up with those who didn’t come. Offer a private review of the issues discussed and send all invitees an executive summary of the event.

According to Alan, there are two ways to rapidly gain new business in this economy. The first is asking past clients and trusted friends for referrals, and the second is conducting an event like this every quarter. Put one on the calendar today and make it happen.

What rules do you need to break to get the attention of your customers? Break them, if only for a good laugh.

Here’s why.

A car is supposed to get you from Point A to Point B. When it does, it burns gas. Enough trips from Point A to Point B, and a car runs out of gas. People are the same. Yes, they’re supposed to do their job; but when they do, they burn internal emotional resources. Those resources need to be replenished. Exceptional leaders understand this dynamic and make it a top priority to put gas back in the tank. Recognition and reward is one way of doing that.

Unlike a car, however, people slow down when their gas tank approaches empty. They can run on fumes for months, even years. Not doing their best work, mind you, but just getting by. Surviving. In other words, if your employees are not giving 100 percent effort 100 percent of the time, the first place to look is in the mirror. Are you doing everything you can do to keep their emotional gas tank filled?

This is especially true with salespeople because so much of their work life takes place in an adversarial environment. Even the very best sales people hear the word “no” repeatedly. It’s like they’re always driving a car uphill. As a result, their gas tanks need to be filled on a more regular basis. That’s the reason why sales meetings should be fun and entertaining, filled with meaningful recognition and reward.

Is this what it’s like working for you?

Jan, eager to get ahead and look good in front of her boss, accepts the job, even though she has no idea what the job entails. The more time goes by, the more frustrated and confused Jan gets, but manages to actually get something done.

Unfortunately, the work Jan does in no way resembles what Jan’s boss had in mind, and, instead of giving Jan another chance with better instructions, Jan’s boss takes the job away from her, fiercely determined to never delegate anything again. A least not to Jan!

This story happens thousand of times every day and in no way reflects the nature of true delegation. When a leader delegates something and doesn’t spend any time on clarifying the expectations of that something, that leader abdicates their leadership role. Delegation like this feels more like a drive-by shooting, where an employee is riddled with a long list of things do while their manager speeds away to the next victim.

How do you clarify the expectations of a delegated task and improve your leadership effectiveness? By using three W’s, Who is going to do What by When?

Asking “Who and What?”

By asking “Who?” the specific people related to the project are clearly identified. Other people who could help Jan, in addition to her boss, are also identified. By asking “What?”, the task at hand is defined. So many times what a manager has in mind for a project and what his associate has in mind are two totally different things. This is what happened to Jan, her boss expected her to read his mind and abdicated leadership.

Asking “What?” allows everyone to clearly understand the things that need to get done in very concrete terms. Ironically, most bosses, when they delegate a task, haven’t thought through what actually need to get done. Asking “What?” solves this problem. Who is going to do what seems so elementary, but endless confusion exists in the workplace around these two simple questions.

“I thought you were doing that!” a surprised employee exclaims.

“No, I was assigned this, you were assigned that,” comes the reply.

“No, Jan was assigned this. You were supposed to do the other thing.”

Have you ever had a conversation like this? A lack of clarity is what caused it.

Asking “By When?”

Added to these first two questions is a third question, “By When?” That is, what are the specific dates and deadlines for the task?

“Get it done sometime!” is not good enough because sometime will magically become now in a matter of days. When sometime becomes now, we drop everything to do it, leaving other things that are perhaps more important undone. Do you see the vicious cycle that emerges when we don’t ask the “By When?” question? Clarity about timing is critical to world-class performance.

“By When?” must be asked regarding two things: the ultimate deadline and intermediate deadlines. The ultimate deadline is the date when the project needs to be completed in its entirety. Intermediate deadlines, also known as milestones, are simple checkpoints along the way that ensure a project is kept on track. These dates must be achievable; unrealistic deadlines are as bad as no deadlines at all. But when the realism of the timeline is established, the targets must be placed in everyone’s calendar and adhered to rigorously.

Who is going to what by when? It’s time to lead!

That doesn’t mean, however, that we wait passively for it to act on us, as ships without a sail. We must face the future with a plan and the agility to adjust that plan as needed. This is planning with an open hand and not a clenched fist, clinging to our color-coded Gannt charts (No offense intended to the brilliant Henry Laurence Gannt).

The Paradox of Open-Handed Planning

Planning in this way is truly paradoxical. Open-handed planning doesn’t over-invest in analysis, but is fully informed. It doesn’t rigidly stick to prescribed activities, but acts with consistency and perseverance. It clings to the core of one’s mission and vision, yet constantly innovates.

Open-handed planning takes an approach to the future that any good leader would take in conducting a business meeting. A good leader prepares for a meeting, setting a reasonable agenda and distributing all the information needed to complete that agenda in the time allotted. But that leader also acts in the moment, moving agenda items around as the meeting develops and the people in that meeting interact with each other, adding some items and eliminating others entirely.

What’s the point of the agenda? To get the meeting aimed in the right direction and to keep it on track if it becomes unfocused. But the agenda is a tool to serve the overall purpose of the organization, and, as such, is changeable given the demands of the day. Ideas emerge from meetings like this that no one previously considered and actions are taken that move the organization forward.

Next Immediate Steps

This is why I implement an approach to planning that makes liberal use of next immediate steps. Here’s how this works. Imagine you’ve decided to launch a You Tube channel to expand your company’s social media presence. A traditional approach to doing this would involve buying video recording and editing equipment, or hiring a production company, and launching with great fanfare your You Tube channel with fully edited video clips A very expensive proposition.

Next immediate steps would ask, “What’s something I can do right away to learn as quickly as possible how to use You Tube for my business?” You may find after doing this that amateur video shot in the field by your customers is more effective than any professionally produced piece could be. So you conduct an ongoing contest for costumers’ videos and give the money you would have spent on equipment away as prizes.

Next immediate steps allows you to be nimble as a company. Instead of committing yourself to a huge initiative that may not be right for the marketplace, you test the marketplace and change on the fly. It’s like buying a quart of paint and putting the color on a few square feet on the side of your house, instead of buying 40 gallons of radiant green that looked so lovely in the showroom. Because a quart of paint is relatively cheap, especially compared to 40 gallons, you can afford to sample a lot of different colors and get the perfect one. All in service of the overall objective of painting your house.

Next immediate steps also allows you to fail faster. And that’s a good thing! You swing, you miss, you learn. You swing, you miss, you learn. The more swings you get, the quicker you’ll learn. Don’t make failure fatal in your organization. It’s the one of the best teachers on then planet. Next immediate steps followed by rigorous review is the core of the curriculum. The next time you swing, it just might be a home run.

Here’s my bottom line on this: You can’t think your way into to a better future, you must act your way into it. Determine your agenda and set your goals–get clear about the big picture–but then act small, constantly learning along the way.

The reason for this, however, is not a lack of desire to serve their customer, but rather a lack of focus. Unfocused businesses do one thing for one customer one week, another thing for another customer the next, and a third thing for a totally different customer after that, never specializing with one kind of customer or one kind of service. Like the sign I saw on vacation once above the door of a small business. It read, “Tax Preparation and Massage.” Very confusing. Do I get my taxes done, then have a massage? Or the other way around? (This is a true story. I have the picture to prove it.)

Businesses “diversify” like this under the grave misconception that this is what they need to do to survive. It achieves just the opposite. It spreads their limited resources an inch deep and a mile wide, never really serving anyone with the depth and quality it takes to build a loyal following. That is, being a inch wide and a mile deep.

Find Out the Facts and the Feelings

Knowing your customer begins with acquiring basic facts about age, gender, work habits, living conditions, and income levels of the person most likely to buy your products and services in sufficient numbers to allow your business to thrive. This information must must be as familiar to you as your own name. With the volumes of data available today, there is no excuse for being in the dark on this.

As important as good demographic information is, however, you must use that information to go deeper. Human beings are much more than their statistics, and you must uncover what a your customer needs, desires, wants, _demands_ from a business like yours. Data is just a starting point, so dig down deep for the emotionally compelling reason that motivates your customer to purchase the products and services you provide. Who is your who and what do they want?

Depth of understanding like this can’t be done at a cursory level, but it must be done to build a loyal following over time. Which company will you chose to do business with, the one that knows your needs deeply, almost anticipating them before you do, or the one that barely gives you the time of day? In other words, if everyone’s your customer, no one is.

Identifying the person who’s most likely to buy your products and services in sufficient numbers to allow your business to thrive (Yes, I know that’s a mouthful, but every word of that statement is key), takes some time. It may require you to list every customer you’ve ever served and dredge throughout the data until you find your focus. But you must do this work.

Master The Art and The Science

Getting it right is part art and part science. Over the years I’ve found the advice of my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Pearson, to be incredibly helpful. She told our class when she assigned us our first ever report, “Pick a topic that’s big enough to find information on, but not too big to bog you down.” I followed her advice in graduate school when I chose the topic for my thesis and follow it in business as well. If the world is your customer, that’s too big of target. You’ll waste lots of time and energy trying to master that subject. But target too narrow a niche, and you’ll unnecessarily limit your growth.

For example, the primary customer I serve is executive leaders. I define an executive leader as a person in an organization, large or small, with the responsibility for generating top-line revenue. Every day, every week, every month, every year there’s a number they have to hit, and hitting it is essential to their success. They’re the hunters for their tribe and have hungry mouths to feed. So they want to get better at the hunt. That is, they’re intent on growing their business and they want business strategies that work.

This target is big enough to include a Chief Sales Officer at Fortune 500 firm and an entrepreneurial leader at start-up company. But the target is narrow enough to give me tremendous insight into what these leaders need: real answers that make them money, and no fluff. I love this kind of clarity.

It has not always been this way in my business, however. There was a time when all you needed to do to engage my services was fog a mirror and sign a check. Defining my primary customer in this laser-like manner, however, has resulted in doubling my annual income in the last two years in a time when many solo consultants have shut their doors. This is the discipline of focus at work.

Visionaries look to the future and are not constrained by the present or the past. Visionaries see things differently, not through the lens of currently reality, but through the lens of future possibility. Armed with a meaningful cause to fulfill and a challenging goal to achieve, visionaries drive a stake in the future, throw a rope around that stake, and pull themselves–and anyone else who will join them–up to a new reality.

October 4, 1957 … July 20, 1969

One of history’s most striking examples of this began on October 4, 1957. That was the day Americans looked into the night sky and realized they had been beat into space. Sputnik 1 was the first man-made object to orbit the earth. In light of the United States’ spectacular failures to do the same, it signaled Soviet domination of space and freedom’s failure to affect the cold war.

Four years later, however, a visionary president declared to Congress that his country would land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth by the end of the decade. In spite of that very president’s assassination and some stunning NASA setbacks, the Apollo space program did just that. On July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong slipped out of his Apollo 11 lunar module and declared to 450 million people listening worldwide, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The crew returned safely to earth four days later.

Please note all the elements of vision which are at play here. First, the adversity from which vision was born. Second, a leader who would not accept the status quo of current reality. Third, a bold declaration, driving a stake in the future. And, fourth the amazing creative and technological advances that came as a result of a nation and a people energized by that vision.

Getting from Here to There

Bill Hybels in his brilliantly insightful style refers to this process as getting from here to there. Here being current reality and there being future possibility. A leader’s job, according to Bill, is to get people from here to there. What he’s found, however, is that painting a rosy picture of future possibly is not the first step on that path. Most people like being where they are. They are quite comfortable with here, thank you very much.

To get from here to there a leader must first convince people, then, of the absolute unacceptability of current reality. We commonly refer to Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have A Dream speech as one of the most eloquent examples of a leader casting vision. And it is. But what’s not as well-referenced is his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, written before that speech was ever given. This letter passionately presents the absolute unacceptability of the injustices that black men and women were facing in this country.

The order of these two pieces of communication is critically important to understanding the casting of vision. Many in the African American community had grown accustomed to the status quo, as bad as it was, and were resistant to the changes being proposed. Dr. King first had to convince them that here was awful before they could embrace the beauty of the vision of there.

You must do the same. Before you paint a picture of the wonderful joys that await you in the future, point by painstaking point document why the present status quo is completely unacceptable. This is where vision is born.

What began as a whim, however, has quickly become an indispensable business tool. Here are seven ways I use my iPad for business:

1. Meeting Notes

Being an executive coach and business consultant, my week is full of meetings. I prepare for meetings, conduct meetings, and record my thoughts during and after meetings. Apart from the cool factor of opening up an iPad instead of a manilla folder in a meeting, I’ve found my iPad unbelievably easy to use to quickly jot notes and capture random thoughts. The pre-installed iPad Notes app is okay, but not robust enough for what I needed. For awhile I used an app called Notability, but (inexplicably) it didn’t have spell-check, so emailing meeting notes to clients was unwise. What I now use for all my meetings is an app called Notably. It’s incredibly elegant, well-designed, and automatically synchs with Dropbox.

By the way, with your iPad video camera you can easily conduct virtual business meetings anywhere using WebEx, GoToMeeting, or Skype. My favorite, however, is the multi-user, multi-screen app from video upstart ooVoo.

2. Tasks and Projects

I’m a raving fan of a software called Things by Cultured Code and have it on both my laptop and my iPad. From the first day I bought a MacBook Pro, I’ve used Things because iCal task management is just deplorable (Let me tell you how I really feel). The iPad app is even better than its software cousin. At $20 it’s a bit on the expensive side for an app, but, in my opinion, Things is worth every penny.

Things allows me to closely manage the dates and deadlines for both my tasks and projects, set reoccurrences, assign tasks to areas of responsibility, and tag them for quick reference–all quickly and easily. The underlying architecture of Things is based on David Allen’s immensely popular book, Getting Things Done, but it’s not overly dependent on it. The iPad app automatically synch’s with my laptop via the wireless network in my office and allows me to stay on top of everything I need to do everyday. Cultured Code’s online support and resources are second to none.

3. Appointments

Speaking of synching, you can’t beat iCal and Mobile Me for keeping track of appointments and meetings. I put an appointment in my iPad and it’s automatically posted online, on my laptop, and on my iPhone. From all reports, Apple’s IOS 5 and improved cloud service will only make this better. For me the best part of this iPad functionality is that my wife can check my calendar at any time and know exactly what I’m doing. She can also schedule appointments for me, which is how I ended having a colonoscopy recently (but that’s another story).

4. Document Management

The big concern, of course, with using an iPad is reading and managing documents and fulfilling the quest for a paperless workplace. Enter GoodReader, the best five dollars you’ll ever spend in your life. It reads every conceivable document, from Word files to TXT files, iWork files to PDF’s, allowing you to mark them up as well. It also views pictures, plays audio and video, and reads maps. I haven’t even scratched the surface of what it can do on my iPad, but it’s amazing. In addition to all this stuff, GoodReader syncs with a half a dozen different remote servers to keep everything up to date. Technology expert, Mashable, calls it, “the Swiss Army knife of awesome.”

5. Travel

When you travel, you have your airplane ticket, your hotel, your car rental, and God knows what else to keep track of. My iPad helps me keep all that stuff in one place through an amazing app called Tripit. Download the app and forward your travel info to “Tripit”:http://www.tripit.com/, and, voila, it’s all there for you to see along with other great things to do in the region you’re traveling to. If anything changes in your itinerary, Tripit will send you an email alert and text alert to your phone. Almost makes those body scans worth it. Tripit is provided free from a company called Concur, who also has an excellent app for business expense tracking that fully synchs with your credit card. Check them both out.

6. Books and Magazines

My Kindle was cool when I first got it, but there’s nothing like reading a book in vivid color like you can on an iPad. In fact, Amazon’s Kindle app for iPad is simply amazing and their book selection way beyond what’s available for iBooks. The coolest of the cool, however, is an app called Zite. Zite is an online magazine that crawls the internet for articles that match your personally customized categories. Read an article and rate it, and you’ll get more of what you like. In other words, the more you use Zite, the smarter it becomes, all for free. Who needs magazines?

7. Background Music

No, I don’t want music gobbling up the memory of my business devices. But there are times when I want to listen to music as I read, write, and reflect at work. If you’ve ever listened to Pandora, you already know how online music streaming works. But Pandora’s become a commercial wasteland, so I listen to the app IHeartRadio. There’s tons of commercial-free music of any genre, as well as live streaming of radio stations across the country. All for free. A nice set of Bose headphones almost makes the workday seem like a vacation (Not really, but Bose headphones are pretty great).

I’m sure I’m just getting started using this post-PC tool for business. I love the exceedingly responsive touch screen and find the keyboard easier to use than the mechanical ones we’ve all become used to. With cloud computing advancing at an amazing rate and ubiquitous wireless networks, look for your iPad to become even more useful in the future. BTW I tried out about three or four different iPad covers to protect my investment, and landed on this slick leather one from Snugg. It’s perfect!

Stage One: Acceptance

A bell curve begins not with rapid acceleration, but slowly and tentatively. The beginning of any program is the same. Growth is slow, progress incremental. Wise leaders understand this and are patient with the process of initial acceptance. They use this stage to learn, listening intently to the advice of early adopters. They then make the changes needed and create an infrastructure that can sustain greater growth. Doing this well is the difference between being a one-hit wonder and actually building a formidable business.

Stage Two: Acceleration

If an idea or initiative gets past the acceptance stage, the days of incremental growth are over. Your bell curve takes off, and, if you invested wisely in stage one, stage two brings rapid acceleration and popular success. Acceptance comes not just from early adopters, but from a growing community of raving fans.

What must be understood about this stage, however, is that your bell curve will ultimately flatten. Many leaders miss this critically important development, distracted by the popularity of their ideas and, perhaps, a bit intoxicated by success. But any project or product, no matter how popular, will peak at some point in time, slowing acceleration.

Stage Three: Deceleration

The transition from acceleration to deceleration is subtle and, on the surface at least, unnoticeable. This is where a leader must be bold and courageous. People assume that past success guarantees future success. But just he opposite is true. According to the bell curve, past success guarantees only the possibility of future failure. Courageous leaders understand this and re-invent their companies, products, and services at the peak of their popularity, avoiding the atrophy that comes from deceleration.

If you don’t do this, disaster awaits you. What was just a slowing of sales turns into a full downward slide, a death spiral. Asleep at the wheel, or just ignorant of the laws of the bell curve, leaders are shocked at this sudden, rapid fall from grace. But it was inevitable when the initial indicators of deceleration were ignored. We need only look at the iPhone and the iPad for examples of what re-invention looks like, and to Blackberry–who once owned the smart phone marketplace–as an example of what it doesn’t look like.

Stage Four: Rejection

In this final stage the car hits the wall at the bottom of the hill, the airplane never pulls out of its death spiral and crashes to the ground. The great idea now seems passe, the bold new initiative boring. Brands become irrelevant, and businesses close their doors. All preventable, however, if leaders were more attentive and responsive in stage three.

What should you do about this?

Honestly assess where you’re at in each of the of the stages outlined above. Don’t pretend that the bell curve doesn’t apply to you. No one is immune from its laws. And don’t let rapid deceleration sneak up on you. Courageously re-invent yourself at the peak of popularity. Also, know when it’s time to kill something. In other words, when a program has landed in the rejection stage, even if it has a rich and celebrated history, let it die. It’s only draining your company’s valuable resources. This too requires courage, an attribute essential for exceptional leadership.

Secondly, you must know your weaknesses to keep them from becoming fatal flaws. If there’s an activity you must do in your business that’s critical to its success and that activity resides in the area of your weakness, you have the makings of a fatal flaw. You can’t say, for instance, if you’re an independent consultant, “I’m not good at billing. So I’m going to stick with my strengths and let billing take care of itself.” I’ve got news for you, it won’t.

Avoiding Fatal Flaws

To keep a weakness from becoming a fatal flaw, you have two options: develop baseline competence in it or delegate it. That is, learn how to do it good enough to get by, or get someone else to do. That may take the form of asking someone within your organization who has a strength in this area to do it for you, or contracting with someone outside of your organization to do it. Either way, if you don’t have this awareness about yourself in a skill area that’s mission critical and keep stumbling forward, you’ll ultimate fall flat on your face. And your business will as well.

I can’t balance a checkbook to save my life. I forget to enter deposits, misplace checks, transpose numbers, and lose receipts. My wife, however, is a whiz at it. One of her favorite days of the month is reconciling our checking accounts to the penny (Creepy, huh?). Guess who handles the finances in our home? As a result of knowing my weakness and leveraging my wife’s strength, we’ve never bounced a check and never missed payment.

Look at Your Strengths Differently

Of course you must know your strengths, too. Not, however, for the reasons that are commonly assumed. First you must know your strengths so they can be developed into world-class skill. Most of us coast in the area of our strength. We rely on our gregarious personality in a sales meeting, instead of preparing for it. We cobble together some inspirational thoughts before making a presentation, instead of doing actual research. The presence of talent–even great talent–is not enough to guarantee success. Talent must be rigorously developed or you’ll forever wear the moniker of “does not fulfill potential.”

A second uncommon reason to know your strengths is to keep from overusing them. Any strength casts a dark shadow if over-utilized. For instance, if you’re a naturally humorous person, but crack a joke in every situation, you’ll end up being seen as the company’s court jester and not a serious leader. If you’re caring and compassionate, you may hesitate taking hard, necessary decisions to move your company forward. Conversely, if you’re a bold, decisive leader, you may alienate your people by acting without care and compassion. In this way your strengths, as well as your weaknesses, can become fatal flaws.

Bottom line: know yourself. Self awareness is one of the first skills leaders need to master, all other awareness flows from there.

Under the diffused rays of the sun’s light we lay on our beach towels and fall asleep, blocking its side effects with a bottle of lotion. Under the direct penetration of a laser beam, diamonds–one of the earth’s hardest substances–are cut into pieces and cancerous tumors are surgically removed.

Most companies approach the marketplace like the sun. They’re nice and warm and glowing, diffusing their finite resources an inch deep and a mile wide. As a result they never impact the marketplace in any meaningful way and struggle to generate significant revenue. Purpose-driven companies, however, do the just the opposite. They apply the discipline of focus to everything they do. Like a laser beam they channel their resources an inch wide and a mile deep, maximizing their impact in the marketplace and, ultimately, achieving spectacular success.

Three Essential Elements

Focus, the crystal clear definition of your organization’s central purpose, is found at the intersection of three lines: your company’s unique ability, your customer’s enabling condition, and your primary value proposition. Like the triangulation of a global positioning system that pinpoints a person’s exact location, these three lines pinpoint your precise place in the marketplace.

Unique ability is defined as that which your company is good at and that which you love to do. If you’re good at something, but don’t love doing it, you won’t have the passion or tenacity to persevere in a competitive market. If you love to do something but aren’t good at it, you won’t be able to compete as well. Think golf. It takes both, fully present, to succeed in business today.

The next element in finding your focus involves looking outside your organization to the needs of your customer. As with unique ability, there are two keys to uncovering your customer’s enabling condition. The first is answering the question, “Who are they?” And the second is knowing, “Why do they buy?”

First, we need to know who our customer is. Basic facts about age, gender, work habits, living conditions, and income levels must be as familiar to us as our own name. With the volumes of data available today, there’s no excuse for being in the dark on this information. But this is just a starting point. We must use that information to go deeper to the emotionally compelling reason that motivates them to purchase the products and services we provide. What do they need, desire, want, or demand from a business like ours? That’s their enabling condition.

The final piece of finding your focus is your value proposition. In other words, what happens when your company’s unique ability meets your customer’s enabling condition? What’s the fire that rages when sparks meet dry tinder? What results do you deliver?

Silent Night, Holy Night

I have very few memories of growing up as a kid, but this one’s vividly etched in my mind. It was Christmas Eve and I was four-years-old. We were gathered in the basement of our church singing Christmas carols by candlelight. For some inexplicable reason, I, a rambunctious four-year-old boy, was given a candle and a carol book. From the moment the wick was lit on that candle, I could think of nothing else that this: what would happen if the candle in my left hand touched the carol book in my right hand?

I pondered this dilemma throughout the service. As festivities came to a close, I realized I would lose my opportunity to answer that question. It was somewhere during the singing of Silent Night, Holy Night that I found out. When the candle in my left hand touched the carol book in my right hand, the dry paper burst into flames. I screamed at the top of my lungs and threw the flaming mess on the floor. My mom screamed as well, probably more in embarrassment than fear, and my dad jumped from his seat and stomped on the blaze in the middle of the room until it went out.

The flame that burns in your company is the unique ability you possess, the strengths you bring to the marketplace. When that unique ability meets the needs of your customers, their enabling condition, it’s like putting a candle to paper. There’s going to be a fire. But unlike on that Christmas Eve so many years ago, that fire will not result in the spanking of a lifetime. It will result, however, in significant revenue development and robust business growth.

That’s what discipline of focus can do for you.

Three Universal Questions

Anderson, Reckhenrich, and Krupp maintain that Lady Gaga’s leadership, and her tremendous success in the marketplace, is attributable to her ability to answer three universal questions: Who am I? Who are we? And where are we going? Growing up as the weird kid at school, Stefani Joanna Angelina Germanotia–that’s Gaga’s given name–never seemed to fit in. Talented and eccentric, she dropped out of New York University the second semester of her sophomore year to find her own way in the music business. And, despite all the odds, she did. That’s her personal narrative.

Her group narrative, answering the “Who are we?” question, connects with the millions of disaffected teenagers who, too, never seem to fit in. She refers to them as “my little monsters” and communicates with them endlessly through Twitter and Facebook. This community is unbelievably strong and fiercely loyal to its leader, who calls herself “Mama Monster.” Their loyalty, then, reaches it’s logical conclusion as the community expresses itself in collective mission. Where are they going? Recently, her fundraiser for tsunami and earthquake stricken Japan raised millions of dollars. Lady Gaga repeatedly tells her fans that “together we can change the world.”

The Three Questions and You

What does this mean for you as a business leader? First, know your story. It’s the starting point for leadership. Who are you? At the very core of your being, what do you believe in? What are the unique talents and individual strengths you bring to the table? What are you passionate about? What brings you joy? What drives you crazy? This is your personal narrative and the clay from which your leadership is formed.

Secondly, make an emotional connection with your people. Today both workplace empowerment and marketing effectiveness are about building community. That can be done negatively through outrageous behavior, or it can be done positively. But don’t underestimate the power of emotions in working with people. In our increasingly fragmented society, successful leaders build their tribe and connect deeply with the members of that tribe, thereby answering the “Who are we?” question.

And finally, cultivate a sense of mission. Know how your business makes the world a better place. Every human being wants assurance that what they are doing makes a difference. So identify the difference you make and rally your people around it. If none exists inside your business, find one outside of it. A contractor I worked with gave generously from his firm to an orphanage in Costa Rica, single-handedly supporting the facility. There’s a collective mission if I’ve ever seen one. Where are you going?

Yes, people will do what you want them to do both out of love and out of fear, but only one will produce sustained, world-class results. People give their best effort and do their most creative work when they love what they’re doing. It’s even in the metaphor. We’ll do what it takes to get away from a German Shepherd, and simply avoid that side alley the next time, but we’ll train and sacrifice and strive year after year to win a gold medal.

What’s Your Gold Medal?

What this means as a leader, then, is you must have a gold medal for people to aspire to. You must have a cause that people will run after. You must think through how your business makes the world a better place, so you capture, not just their physical presence at work, but their heart and soul as well. You must give people something to love. Not in place of business metrics and financial measurements, but alongside them, animating them and giving them life.

As a leader, this love begins with you, for water cannot rise higher than its source. “To become the best leader you can be,” best-selling authors Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner advise in _The Truth About Leadership_, “you have to fall in love with the work you are doing and the reason you are doing it. You have to fall in love with leading and the purpose you are serving.”

When Do You Use a German Shepherd?

Unfortunately, there are times when only a German Shepherd will do. We live in a real, broken world where sometimes you have to outline the pain of negative consequences and the outcomes of poor choices. But like our canine friend, this will only produce a temporary, reactive result. Your clear intention in doing this should be to help others fall in love again. You can’t compete today with half-hearted, uncommitted people, for world records are only set by those who give themselves passionately to it.

So when you are selling, take Thomas Freese’s advice and remind your buyer of both the positive benefits to be gained from using your products and service and the negative consequences to be avoided. But when you’re leading people, paint such a compelling picture of the gold medal that lies before them that they give themselves wholeheartedly to the cause.

Patience is a vice when we’re sitting in a meeting and the participants in that meeting rehash the same issues over and over again, never reaching a conclusion. Patience serves no one here because everyone’s time is being wasted and organizational resources diminished.

Patience is also a vice in meetings when groupthink prevails. Groupthink occurs when group members look at a critical issue in exactly the same way, considering no possible alternatives. In both of these instances, it is our duty–to the people in the meeting and to the organizations we serve–to insert ourselves into the discussion, get it back on track, and to insist that all legitimate options be honestly considered.

Patience is a vice when we are with a prospect whose business is faced with a pressing problem and we, with the perfect solution, let him say, “I think I’ll wait on this.” When has waiting to address a pressing business problem ever solved that problem? Never. The problem only will get bigger, more pressing, and more expensive to fix. We have a duty in to push back, and push back strongly, not to get a sale at all costs (that’s old-school sales rubbish), but to improve the client’s condition. When we are passionate about improving the client’s condition, we will not let them ruin their business by putting off difficult decisions to another day.

Patience is a vice when you have a client with habits that are hurting his business and you do nothing to address them. I had a client who loved to hear himself talk. In his meetings with me and in his meetings with his employees he talked at least 80%, if not 90%, of the time. This man was brilliant but flawed, and sucked the oxygen out of the room every time he showed up. If I just patiently endured this destructive habit, I would be an accomplice to his leadership malpractice. So I told him plainly–because no one else would–that he talked too much, to shut up and listen. And then I helped him do it.

You do not have to be liked to be successful in business. In fact, there are times, and this is one of them, where being liked does not serve the client’s best interests. Please don’t misunderstand me. I like to be liked as much as the next guy. But I get those needs met from my wife, my family, and close friends, not from clients with whom I have a fiduciary responsibility to serve.

Patience is a vice when we accept results that are less than expected and tell ourselves, “Oh, well, I did my best.” Did you? Many times we say things to ourselves that are terribly misguided just to make us feel better, modern society’s psychological obsession. Maybe, just maybe, what we are feeling is entirely accurate. When you’re sure you’ve done your best–not perfection, which in unachievable, but 100% effort–then be patient with yourself. If not, get mad and get going. This, in the long run, will also allow you to feel better about yourself.

Patience is a vice when we’re confronted with a moral dilemma and do nothing. Neville Chamberlain was a very patient man as Nazi Germany swept through Austria, Poland, and eventually most of western Europe. His epic declaration, “Peace in our time!” quickly became a tragic joke. While few, if any of us, will face the moral crises of pre-war WW II Europe, we do face clear choices of right and wrong everyday. In these we must not be patient, but do what is right uncompromisingly. In the New Testament every account of Jesus’ life relates the story of his taking a whip and driving corrupt money-changers out of the temple. There are times when it’s right for us to do the same.

Aubrey has determined that the Surprise’s guns must be loaded and fired in less than two minutes to defeat the enemy. They time themselves, and the results are dismal. So over and over again the crew fires their guns and gets their time, fires their guns and gets their time. Until finally they break the unheard of two-minute barrier and the dirty, grimy, sweaty, exhausted men explode in thunderous cheers. Aubrey lavishly praises his crew, who swell with pride, and doubles their ration of rum for the day.

I’ve played this scene for many of my clients and discuss these essentials for creating a culture of accountability in their companies:

1. Know your critical number

A lot of things could have been measured on the H.M.S. Surprise, but there was one number that mattered above all: two minutes. If they couldn’t load and fire their guns in less time than that, nothing else mattered. All would be lost. Here in a very clear and succinct way the crew knows what exactly it takes to execute successfully. Do you provide your people with this kind of clarity?

I’m convinced that most leaders do not bring strategic focus to their business and drown their employees with endless detail, making the path to execution incomprehensible. Every position within your company and every person in every position within your company must know with certainty what their “two minutes” is. That is, what number, percentage, ratio, or multiplier is central to their success. Not everything is covered in this number, of course, but that’s not what makes it critical. It’s critical because it’s core to the business and predictive of future success.

2. Keep score

It’s not enough, however, to have a critical number for your business. You must also track it. Here, too, the H.M.S. Surprise teaches us how to create a culture of accountability. Watches are pulled out and seconds are counted, over and over again. Bad news is received without blame and good news is celebrated joyously. And here is a most important point: it’s done in public for all to see.

The public nature of keeping score is essential to creating a culture of accountability. Most people have no idea what’s really going on in the companies they work for. Inexplicably, management keeps vital information under wraps, like a closely guarded secret. But I believe and ill-informed employee is an ill-armed employee. You don’t have to divulge confidential data, but let people know the key numbers that drive the business and ongoing performance against those numbers on a regular basis in a very public way. What you’ll receive as a result is an enthusiastic, inspired workforce.

3. Have fun

What strikes me most about this scene in Master and Commander is how much fun everyone is having. Yes, they are working hard, but they are also enjoying themselves. The men are hooting and hollering, clapping and cheering. And at the end of a very long day, they are praised lavishly and rewarded generously. Accountability must never become a way to brow-beat people into submission. It’s a way to have fun. That’s why we like playing games, because we keep score and know when we win. The shooting competition we witness here, however, is not one man competing against another, but the entire team competing together against a seemingly impossible goal. Winning this way as a team is the most fun of all.

4. Connect metrics to mission

Between firings, as the crew gets closer and closer to the two-minute target, Jack Aubrey shouts to his men insulting wisecracks about Napoleon and the hated French. They shout back with equal vigor. What’s going on here? Vision casting. All metrics must be given deeper meaning or enthusiasm around measuring them will wane. It’s a pain in the neck to beat the two minute timer, but worth it to defeat the enemy. Purpose fuels passion and is the intention that drives the intensity that’s needed to achieve world class results. Without a deeper cause and an abiding commitment in your people to to fulfill it, accountability quickly becomes an irritant, or worse, coercion. Mercenaries and conscripts don’t win wars, or bring revolutionary products to market.

This is not what you see, however, on Jack Aubrey’s man-of-war. His passion is palpable and inspires the entire crew to possess the same. Creating a culture of accountability is not an outside in model of performance management (The beatings will stop when morale improves), but rather inside out. Metrics make sense because they are the natural extension of the mission, lived out for all to see by the group’s primary leader.