Implementer Posts
You Are What You Tolerate
have had the pleasure of working with many successful, good-natured, and pleasant groups. This was not one of those experiences. I was working with an investment company and they were an impressive collection of folks. They were wicked smart and had extremely lofty credentials. Looking at this team on paper, they were a formidable group, but something was not adding up when I met with them in person. In sessions, they were arrogant, pompous, and excellent at expressing their opinions and demonstrating how smart they were, but they were not speaking their truths, nor were they listening to one another. They didn’t take ownership of the issues they were having. They lacked trust and confidence as a team and quarter after quarter they kept failing to meet their goals. To put it simply, they were struggling. After several sessions with them, I had about given up that they could ever
Tackling the Five Frustrations of a Business Owner
Regardless of the system they follow, every business leadership coach has one primary task: help their clients overcome the impediments to their success. When Gino Wickman developed the Entrepreneurial Operating System®, he wanted to help entrepreneurs overcome what he called the “Five Frustrations of an Entrepreneur.” In my work as a Certified EOS Implementer®, I’ve seen how EOS® addresses each of the Five Frustrations. Here are some examples. Frustration 1: Lack of Control Entrepreneurs and business owners tend to be optimists. Where others may see problems, they see endless opportunities. However, this perspective can change as circumstances begin to put speedbumps in front of what started as a seemingly perfect business model. I have a client that specializes in building components for the Southern California light industrial manufacturing sector. When we started working together on their EOS Journey, the CEO shared with me the following thought: “With our business so
Making Your EOS Scorecard™ Work for You
Everyone who leads a business knows the value of good metrics. Decisions based on the right selection of information generally are better than decisions made on instinct alone. That’s precisely why EOS® recommends every business incorporate the EOS Scorecard™ into their Level 10 Meetings™. Dialing in a great Scorecard takes effort. False starts are normal, especially for teams that aren’t used to operating with KPIs (key performance indicators) constantly in focus. Stick with it. Tracking the right measurements helps a team know when it’s on track or off, and to identify the real problems facing the business. These are some ideas to keep in mind as your team develops and implements its EOS Scorecard. Embrace change. Most EOS companies aren’t at a point in their growth process to have a team of data analysts on speed dial. Instead they pull together their first Scorecard based on a mixture of instinct
5 Questions for Entrepreneurs with Growing Businesses
Entrepreneurs open businesses because they are good at what they do. They have an idea, a skill, a product, or a service that is excellent and they build on that. Founding a new business, however, is a very different proposition than leading an increasingly-complex business. Entrepreneur-business owners often find themselves struggling and frustrated at the very moment their companies are growing well. The specific reasons for this are many and varied. For example, a business owner might have been comfortable leading a team of five, but not understand how to lead a team of fifty. They might not be able to stay on top of complicated supply chains. They may not have the time or expertise to manage the IT needs of the company. It all boils down to this: the business has outgrown their ability to know everything and do everything. 5 Questions for Greater Clarity If this describes where you are as an
Performance Is Down. What’s Up?
When your corporate system – your company, your department, or your team – is malfunctioning, diagnosing the root cause can be tricky. You probably become aware that there is a problem very slowly because the signs are subtle: a general sense of malaise, a dulling of motivation, or a failure to innovate. Over time, more overt symptoms come into evidence, such as reports of unhappy customers, constant disagreements, and inefficient meetings. The constellation of data points prompts you to ask, “What is going on here?” What is going on may very well be that one or more of your people are acting like ill-fitting gears disrupting the smooth performance of your system. All systems are composed of multiple parts. If the system has an ill-fitting part (or parts), then the system as a whole cannot work at optimal effectiveness. It may be able to work – it just cannot work well. The same applies
The Warren Buffett/Payton Manning Secret Strategy
What’s the success strategy shared by Warren Buffett, possibly the best stock market investor of all time, and Payton Manning, one of the greatest NFL quarterbacks of all time (three-time NFL most valuable player [MVP] and the 2006 Super Bowl MVP)? They are both masters of preparation and opportunity exploitation. They both research, study and find ways to exploit opportunities that others don’t find. In Warren Buffett’s 1984 speech “The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville” at Columbia University, he stated his success strategy for choosing companies to invest in: “… search for discrepancies between the value of a business and the price of small pieces of that business in the market … exploit those discrepancies without the efficient market theorist’s concern as to whether it is January, or July, etc. …” He still successfully uses the same approach 40 years later. Buffett’s research doesn’t just evaluate the performance and opportunity of the company as a whole,