I was talking with a business owner last week, and she mentioned she had an Instagram blog titled “My chickens are in love with my husband.” Then she told me how, that very morning, one of her hens had flown up on the windowsill and started pecking at the window. She told the hen her husband wasn’t home, so she flew down and laid an egg right next to one of his shoes. I guess I’m not the only one who writes about chickens? But then I started to think about my chickens. They are definitely not looking for me. In fact, whenever they see me approach the coop, they scatter with haste. Why the difference in how these two sets of chickens respond to human interaction? Well, I’m not an animal behavioral scientist, but I think it has to do with the type of interaction they received in their early peep-formative

This is a post really intended for integrators, to remind you of three tools you should be revisiting with the team annually as a way of proactively reinforcing the habits built during the early years of your EOS journey. 1. LMA Review The 10 things leaders and managers DO (See the toolbox in your Leadership Team Manual or the book How To Be A Great Boss) is something we asked each leader to self-assess as Yes or No when considering all the people they lead directly. As a habit, once a year ask each leader to read through the list and reaffirm they are all Yes or recommit to changing all No answers to Yes. 2. Core Process Review  Take a deep dive at a quarterly/L10 into one of the handful of core processes to make sure the leadership team understands it (we call this shared by all or SBA in EOS), the metrics are clear, and flush out any

In EOS we often talk about hitting the ceiling. It is a feeling of being stuck, frustrated, or that business has suddenly become too complex and chaotic leaving you scratching your head and wondering why you can’t get unstuck. The good news is that cycles of evolution and revolution are a natural part of growing a business, but many owners reach this point in the life of their businesses where they hit a ceiling, a point beyond which they are either unable or unwilling to go. Business owner John Warrillow was quoted in the NY Times saying “Somewhere around $3 million dollars of revenue, I went from being the driver of my business to the bottleneck. Each year we stood still, I grew more frustrated. I felt like I was trying to swim in a pair of jeans.” He described intellectually knowing that he needed to revamp the way he ran his

Recently, one of my client teams moped into their planning session depleted of their usual energy and enthusiasm. Concerned, I asked them to check-in with an update on what had been happening in the business. “Too many things going on. It seems we can never finish quarters as strong as we start them.” “I have some good news”, I told them. “You have the ‘90-day blahs’ and that just makes you normal”. It’s normal for human beings to experience life as cycles of energy. Thousands of years of evolution have instilled in us an instinctive sense of time (and purpose) geared to nature’s 90-day pattern of the seasons. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to follow the food. When the seasons changed, so did their sources of food. In the modern world, we see this cycle clearly in the rhythm of fitness clubs. Every 90 days they offer membership discounts because new

My phone rang and I saw that it was a client who’d recently begun the journey of implementing EOS™. “Dale, I’m trying, but there are so many daily distractions in my business. How do I get off the hamster wheel?” This is, by far, the number one question I hear from busy entrepreneurs. I reassured my client that being on the hamster wheel only made her normal, but if this is such a universal disease that can be contracted by starting a business, why hasn’t anyone developed a cure? Perhaps it’s because the root cause is hard to discover and needs thoughtful diagnosis. First, we should ask “how much of the problem is because of the wheel, and how much is because of the hamster?” WHEEL PROBLEM: If your business is structured to put you at the center of everything, you’ll never get off the wheel. EOS™ provides leaders with a tool