Bill Gates wrote a pretty good book a few years ago, "Business At The Speed Of Thought". There were some segments from that book that were quite good and other segments that were not very good. However, the segments that were quite good were not only quite good, they were magically dead on. Unfortunately, most people run through their lives operating less than magically dead on. This is especially true of business leaders.
Most business leaders run their duties through the daily process, missing most of the dead on stuff...all day long, every single day. They get up each morning, do today much of what they did yesterday. They run so close to their daily habits that they operate without zest, without added flashes of excitement and manage their way through a muddled process of leading their business models to a normal level of performance. That is exactly how most business leaders work their models every single day. They function in an average world with average results. They often struggle to get their business model 'over-the-hump' of its debt-ridden ways. They seem to be overwhelmed with sudden problems that plague their plans to make better things happen. They do not win as often as they would like to. Sound familiar? Welcome to average.
One of the brilliant segments that Bill wrote about in that book was the idea of learning how to manage your business leadership with a certain flair for continued disturbance. He called it, "bad news must travel fast." It is a little bit like keeping everything each day a little bit off-kilter, kind of on purpose. Not off-kilter for the sake of pseudo control, but off-kilter for the sake of seeing better. Not off-kilter for the sake of performing divide and conquer techniques, but off-kilter for the sake of fostering employee initiative and knowledge sharing. These segments of that book were written brilliantly. Go read them.
I once had a very strong business mentor. He had many one liners that became part of his trademark. One of those one liners was this, "Well...what are you waiting for?" Every time he made a suggestion it was not given to continue on as part of some long conversation. It was given to me to go do. When he would say I needed to go read something, he would look at me and say, "Well, what are you waiting for?" If I sat there waiting to have more conversation with him he might also say this, "Don't waste my time...I am telling you to go get some information I recognize you need. Why are you still sitting there? You do not know what you need to know. You have an information gap holding your success back. Go get that information gap solved. Then we will move on to the rest of this lesson."
Bill Gates wrote about some stuff that fits well in today's employment marketplace very nicely. We are there. This economy has become the breeding ground for the most brilliant business leaders to flourish well. Here's why. Tons upon tons of business leaders are dry, uninformed, egotistical wanna be's that are spending way too much time living in the past. They are spending way too much time pouring over financials long before they spend any time on the library of customer complaints they can be easily caught trying to avoid hearing. Markets of today are way too fickle to provide any measure of success to this kind of business leader. End of seminar. Go read Bill's perspective on this subject. The link is given freely to you above in this post. There is no excuse for missing this kind of work. What are you waiting for?
Why do we fail? That should be the prime question of the business world today. Business leaders should work harder on discovering why their models are not performing well. What's more, they should approach that question as if they have no answers pre-determined. A great business leader would approach that question without knowing any answers as to how they would respond in describing why they are suffering so badly. Unfortunately, too many business leaders already believe they have the answers as to why they are suffering so badly. I read that last sentence and it makes sense...even as it makes no sense. Let's figure this stuff out. Let's quit pretending we know why we are suffering. Let's get to some real work on finding where we are truly weak and begin fixing it. Let's wake up and become accountable for our reasoning and our efforts to improve. Let's find out what success requires and start doing those things more often. I am pretty sure this will not be some friendly work, however.
Here's the simplest test I know. How many of you actually read that segment in Bill Gates book "Business At The Speed Of Thought?" For ten bucks you can download it onto your Kindle. It can be read in about 30 minutes, from search, download, to find the segment then to finish reading it. Our world has brought every business leader the power of this kind of information, easily prepared...easily able to be accessed. How are you doing with this opportunity? If you are one of those business leaders leaving these kinds of wonderful tools untouched, you are allowing your competitors to kick your ass. End of that seminar, too! Get going. Wake up.
There are no excuses sitting on the porch of some of your competitors models. I watch many average business models fail because their leader did not get with it. They refuse to do what is suggested they do. They believe they know all of the right stuff. They stick to their lazy winning ways and cannot figure out why their wins are not as big as they need them to be. I watch many business leaders do exactly this kind of personal growth...limited and dry. They wonder why they cannot win more often. They have all of the right excuses, but little results.
In fact, some readers might even think that this post is a post written to support Bill Gates. I do not even like the guy. I could care less if he is one of the richest men in the world, I just liked how he described this concept of leadership management. I know it works well and I also know not many business leaders practice it. In fact, most business leaders will find the reading quite boring. They won't get it. It has nothing to do with Bill.
I once shared how I and my wife were once sitting at a dinning table with another business couple many years ago. We were sitting in their house, on their turf. They had invited us to their home to share some business ideas with them because they were struggling with their model. We had been chatting for about twenty minutes and I could tell nobody was there to learn. All I was hearing was justifications as to why nothing could be done about their business plight. Once in awhile I heard the wife share something more useful. Unfortunately, the husband always seemed to jump in and make a quick mop up of that kind of useful information. It was becoming clear that he was unwilling to change. I knew my wife and I were there to help this couple confirm what they were experiencing in their business model of challenges, not to ratify them. This is common to most average operators. They love to confirm what is going wrong rather than ratify how they do what they do. It is a common business leadership error.
I then decided to make a gutsy move. Unannounced, I asked everyone at the table to please stand. I stood up first. My wife looked surprised. She stood up second. The other wife followed her and stood up next. It got rather quiet for a brief moment. All eyes turned to the husband, still sitting in his chair. I could feel the pressure mounting. I could see his ego getting stronger. It was an amazing thing to witness. I thought it best to speak and break the ice of the mounting pressure. He remained seated. I said, "Go ahead, stand up." He refused. His wife asked him politely to stand up. He frowned at her and made it clear that he was having no part in this silly request. I sat down and so did the two ladies. He then felt the lead and began to describe why he did not stand up. We listened. Are you seeing this pattern? This is exactly how many business leaders fail. This is exactly how they work so hard on justifying why they should continue to fail. Many of us are very much the same as that guy who refused to stand up. We are stuck in our own ways very much the same as he was. We are also just as silly to justify why we must remain there.
Go read the piece Bill wrote. Get out of your chair. Stand up. Do the right things. Start making some personal changes. Begin doing what that man in the chair said was "too boring" to do. I happen to know that success is boring. It requires of us to do the same right stuff over and over again until it gets so boring that it hurts. Business success is boring. We hate that kind of effect so we avoid it. We justify ourselves right out of doing the right kinds of stuff and we are not open to learning anything more about how to change what we do not know. It is a ton more easier to describe how we failed than it is to fix how we fail. As a result, we continue to sit in our chair and we refuse to stand up. It looks silly, useless and boring. We can easily prove how all three of those effects are not part of successful ways.
How do we fail? We get bored with the things that produce success. We have no desire to learn how to do things differently. We remain imprisoned, by ourselves and to ourselves. All that seems to remain is the right to complain. I left that business couples table never to return. I had no desire in my business world to work with someone who could not bring themselves to do one simple task, an elementary move to stand up. He would never be able to do the more complicated stuff that success requires. He could not get past the simple stuff. That was over 15 years ago. His business eventually failed and his marriage ended. How many of us are walking this same kind of tight rope in our attitudes? Why do we fail? Because success is very boring. We must first learn how to stand up when asked to stand up. We must read a segment of a book when someone offers that suggestion to us. It is boring but necessary. Success will be fleeting until those kinds of things get clearly understood and clearly respected.
How is your chair? Still sitting in it? Maybe it is time for ratification instead of confirmation.
Until next time...
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