Ruckus, Random, Resistance...Killers Of Good Business

We Keep Trying To Do The Things That Do Not Work.

Working with business leaders can be trying.  I have seen many leadership styles.  Some styles have helped the business leader win often.  Some styles have contributed to the slow destruction of the business model.  Some styles of leadership need so much repair that it is amazing the business model still exists.  Let's talk about the styles of leadership that will guarantee fair levels of failure.

Sometimes it is good to describe how to win.  It can be helpful to read about how to do certain things that will help deliver winning results.  On the other hand, sometimes it is best to see the kind of leadership that will slowly destroy a good business model.  Describing how particular leadership styles will negatively effect good business results can be useful.  One time I remember watching the Johnny Carson Show a few years ago and a popular young actor came to the show as a special guest.  Johnny Carson and his sidekick Ed McMahon were describing to the audience how this popular actor had announced his intention to get married.  It became the fodder of attention in the discussion.  During the whole interview Johnny Carson kept giving the young actor a lot of advice on how to help protect a good marriage.  During all of the advice Johnny was offering, Ed McMahon was laughing deeply.  Finally Johnny stopped and turned towards his sidekick Ed and asked him why the advice he was offering was so funny.  Ed kept laughing and told the audience that he found it funny to listen to Johnny's advice since Johnny was on his fifth marriage.  Ed described Johnny's advice much like listening to the captain of the Titanic describing how to ram icebergs with a ship.  Everyone got a good laugh.  After the laughter settled down, Johnny spoke up.  Johnny Carson said he was giving the newlywed some advice on how not to do what Johnny did.  Johnny said it was not so funny to describe how to destroy a good marriage.  He continued to describe how some of the best lessons that he could offer to the actor would be the ones that could help the newly wed avoid the most destruction.

Sometimes describing what actions to avoid can be more effective than describing what techniques will work well.  Business leaders can practice some of the things they have heard will work well while at the same time performing other things that are very destructive.  They may avoid performing those destructive patterns if they learned about how those patterns can destroy their success efforts.  What kinds of management patterns help to produce ways to kill good business models?  What kinds of patterns will usually kill good business success?

If you are the type of leader who has the kind of personality that uses a stick to stir up bee hives, I can assure you that eventually your staff support for performing well will 'creatively' disappear.  The kind of leader who finds a stick and hits every little beehive on the business path is the kind of business leader who performs the ruckus style of management.  There are a lot of business managers who operate their leadership style using the ruckus style of management.  They like to create a ruckus in order to take control of the things they want to lead.  They deliver and manage a divide and conquer set of patterns to control.  The production of the business takes a back seat to the production of the divide and conquer methods instilled into the business operations.  The health of the relationships among the staff and customers becomes strained enough to refuse permission for success to grow.  A business can operate for a very long time in this kind of mode.  It will never become very successful.  It will flop along forever and ever doing well short of what it should be doing.  The ruckus developments of control will dominate the energy that could be applied to growing up big.  The model can never become efficient enough to produce the small 2% of difference that makes or breaks the great ones versus the 'also-rans' of the business race.  The ruckus style steals the energy that is needed to make that 2% edge become a reality.  The 2% winning difference will never show up.  The ruckus style eventually kills the good parts of the business model.

I have met a lot of business owners who practice this style of business leadership.  It saddens me.  Not one of them win big and not one of them can sustain a victory for very long.  However, most of them are still operating their struggling business models.  They get by just enough to play in their business models for another year.  Each time some good finds its way to the model, the ruckus style of leadership destroys the opportunity for success to settle in.  It almost appears as though the business leader kills the opportunity for success on purpose.  The ruckus style of leadership is a very destructive cycle to perform.  Hitting beehives with a stick is not a calm method to use for stirring up success.  It brings all of the bees out and they become very agitated.  Customers tend to flee from that kind of sight.  Remember, customer are very fickle.  Their support is very fleeting.  Customers do not appreciate bee stings.  Hanging out near business models that agitate bee hives looks too risky for them to support.  The ruckus style is a killer of good business.  Do not practice it in the marriage of your business model.  Divorce might not be the result, but a rotten marriage will need to be endured.

Leadership, Business And More Leadership

Fix The Leaks

Scroll around the web and search for help on how to improve your business models.  There are countless opportunities floating about the web that provide worthwhile suggestions which offer great examples to apply.  There is no lack in the libraries of helpful tools.  If this is true, then why do so many business models continue to struggle so seriously to succeed?  A business mentor once told me that systems are great, it is when you insert the people that they get all fouled up.  People screw it all up.  Systems of success work just fine.  It is the people that step in that run it off the road.  Business models struggle because there are people in charge of the command post that manages them.  There is not enough of the good leadership required to help those failing business models win.  Leadership and business go hand in hand.  Unfortunately, there is enough leadership only to own and operate one...yet not enough leadership to produce success from managing one.

The gap to success shows up when the leadership has been exhausted.  The storehouse of stock that produces the best leadership finds the end of its rope.  It is discovered that there are limits to how much leadership can be applied to the business model.  Once that storehouse of leadership becomes all used up, the business model begins its slow decent into a failing spin that seems to take forever to complete.  Failing business models can operate for a very long time in this type of mode.  It is painful to watch, painful to manage and painful to approach every single day.  It will wear out the leader and eventually destroy the good they ever dreamed would come out of their business model experience.  They become bitter and discouraged.  Most business owners show signs of this truth in small pockets of the decision-making they do.  Discouraged bitterness finds its way to the surface where the most challenging obstacles tend to appear.  The leader quits leading and begins to start following.  More leadership is needed when the fire gets stronger, not more following.

A business model that is facing some serious obstacles that are distracting the model away from success does not need its leader to stop leading.  It needs its leader to start leading with more success.  If your model is struggling, begin to concede.  Conceded to accept that your leadership needs to improve and increase.  Without this quiet move, your business model is at risk to continue to fail.  If you do not increase your level and volume of leadership, your business project will drain your money, your energy and your spirit.  It may well be doing that very thing right now.  Get it together.  Start to work on improving your leadership skills.  Leadership and business go hand in hand.  They are in many ways the same thing.  If your business model is struggling, it is safe to assume that your business leadership is struggling as well.  When I describe business leadership I am not referring to control.  A lot of business owners are demanding and in control.  That is not exactly the kind of leadership I am describing.  In fact, quite the opposite.  Being in control sucks when your business model does not get it.  Most owners cannot see this effect.  Most businesses are afflicted by it.  It is the result of lost leadership.  The owners are truly lost with their leadership exhibits.  They are displaying the wrong stuff.  Their business results are revealing it.  Blinks are happening.

Do You Follow The Business Rules?

I had a great discussion with one of the our employees the other day.  She is one of the better employees that knows how to produce good results.  She works hard most of the time.  On the downside level of her performance when she has a personal crisis at home, she falls off at work.  The rules that support business production tend to fly out of the window when she is in crisis mode.  She is better off going home.  She becomes lost for the day.  Her mind will flop completely out of gear and her work production forgets the rules of the road.  I do not like to compensate her for floating around in a daze, which she will do without concern.  Go home.  There are business rules to production.  That is why we employ people.  Owners need those production rules met every single day.  Unfortunately, business owners must pick their battles carefully.  Some employees do not produce well every single day.  They violate the business rules of production.

The discussion she and I had came on a different day.  It came on a day after she had spent the day walking around in a daze.  When she was walking around in a daze, no discussion about returning back to productive work would have served a good purpose.  Like I said, pick your battles carefully.  It is one of the invisible rules to business.  I waited until she had pushed through whatever was weighing her down before I opened the door to some lessons about work and the rules of the business road.  To my surprise, she was very receptive to listen.  It turned out to be a good discussion.  She actually asked some questions about the lessons and offered some insight as to why she gets so overwhelmed with personal stuff.  It was not a threatening exchange on either part.  Good timing is another business rule to follow.

I like to talk about the subject of fears when an employee goes south with regard to respect for the rules of the business road.  Personal issues are a very serious part of life.  This is more true today than ever.  We live in a complicated, carelessly managed, and falsely empowered day and age.  Your employees are buried deep in debt and worried about how life is headed.  They likely do not manage their personal lives well with regard to appropriately governed high standards.  Most of your employees live a life that has some terrible bumps and bruises occurring.  With so many life distractions flashing around in society, working to protect high standards of living is nearly an impossibility.  Your employees are compromising their high standards more now than ever.  The junk happening to them in their personal lives is growing.  Some of that junk is packed to and from the places where they work.  That junk they are packing is a by-product of our 21st century lifestyles.  It gets stirred into the time they spend doing the business rules at your place of business.  It lives with them at work.  Some of their focus on the rules of business production take a back seat to the emotions they carry caused by the mismanagement efforts that come from their home life.  Good employees can be packing some very bad personal loads.  It can show up at work...and does.

The home life mismanagement style of your employees is not your business.  It only becomes your business when the fringes of their actions interfere with the production rules of your work plans.  When they react to their mismanagement efforts of home life issues by ignoring the rules of your business production process, you must step in.  Their personal life is not your issue, however.  That is none of your business.  Your business is your business.  There is a definite difference.  Know where those lines are and stick strictly to them.  It is a very fine line and your business rules will determine where that line is drawn.  Open your policy book, open the unwritten rules about of how to operate a small business properly and you will not find any language that gives you the permission to interfere with the personal home life of your employees, unless the law permits it.  None.  Do not go there.  It ain't your business and you should never go there.  Avoid it.  Instead, find a different method to teach them about the rules of business production.  Do not try to do the three M's.  Make your mate move.  I love that one.  How many people have you met that tries hard to change the behavior patterns of the other mate?  It does not work but I see so many people try to make their mate move.  I call it the three M's.  I have watched many people fail to win that game.

We want our mate to be what we want our mate to be.  We try to manage our mates.  We insert the three M's techniques and watch our relationships suffer and blame the other mate for not getting it.  Hello, stupid!  Your mate is who they are.  Period.  Accept it or find a new one.  However, sooner or later you will need to get along with one of them.  I found that if I was having trouble finding a great mate, maybe my next date should be a mirror.  Fortunately, I did not need to use a big mirror for too long.  A great mate came along.  I do not try nor want to change her.  I go to work every single day with harmony at home.  It makes a huge difference in the respect I offer to the rules of my business production.  If you are an owner, get good at managing your home life.  It is one of the best business rules you can follow.  I could write seminars on this subject for hours upon end.  A home mess is a destructive ill that can immobilize success opportunities.   I have watched this type of destruction kill everything a good business deserves.  Make this business rule rise to the top.  Get it together at home.  It is the heart of your business rules.  Get it together at home.

Who Makes More Money, Leaders Or Followers?

Do Not Believe This Lie!

I am a few months away from being in business for forty years.  June of 2012 will be forty years for me.  It seems almost impossible to be true.  I have made a lot of mistakes in those forty years of operations.  I wonder how large the list of mistakes is?  There likely are not enough trees in my neighborhood to produce the paper enough to hold that list.  There are 210 trees alone on my lot.  That is not enough trees.  Wow, forty years is almost done.  In that forty years, I bet I cannot count on one hand the times I met a follower who made more money than the leader.  Maybe twice, maybe three times.

Leaders make more money.  That is the way money works.  Money has some laws that just do not find many ways to get broken.  Money laws are money laws.  They work like gravity.  We do not always think about how gravity works.  We just trust that it will hold us to the ground while we walk.  In fact, scientists really do not know how gravity works, specifically.  We can only prove that the greater the mass the stronger the pull.  Money is a lot the same.  The greater the leader the stronger the dough.

Money rarely violates some of its pure laws.  Most people walk this world and do not pay attention to how money works.  If you walked up to a stranger and asked them who makes more money, not one would say, "A leader makes more money."  Even though we like to be correct when we speak, even though we want to have the right answer, even though the truth is the truth, most would not be able to get the answer to this question right.  Leaders make more money.

I have not met many people who do not want to make more money.  In fact, most wished they were getting paid more for what they are doing.  The problem might be in the level of leadership they are producing.  If the level of leadership is not very high, neither is their income.  It is one of the laws of money.  Just because nobody ever told them how it works does not mean they get to be immune from those laws.  With or without that knowledge the laws of money will remain in place.  Leaders always make more money.  It is one of the laws of money.

Go visit a place of business and find out who leads the way of that business.  Then check out who helps the leader make that business happen by following what they are hired to do, the follower.  After comparing the two, measure who makes more money between the two workers...the leader or the follower.  It will always be the leader.

So why don't people who want to make more money learn how to become a better leader?  Because they want their cake and eat it too.  The sour part of that trip is that money does not care what they want, it only follows the laws it makes.  Millions of workers do not get this truth down very well.  They spend their whole life grinding away at a truth they just cannot seem to accept.  The result remains...they will not make more money....ever.  Followers are in abundance.  They will even try to get organized to rally together to demand more money.  The only ones who win that game are the leaders of the union, or the leaders of the organized group.  Same law, same result.  Followers never seem to get it.  They want results that they do not want to earn.  We all know that leadership comes with a price.  Followers do not want to pay that price.  Hence, lower income.

If you are a follower and you do not like what you are earning, start working to improve your leadership skills.  Increasing your income will not happen if you remain a follower.  Leaders make more money.  Get familiar with this simple law of money and start working to honor it instead of ignoring it.  It is not a law that will go away some day.  It will remain long after you are gone.  It is a law of money that will not 'skip over' you and honor some form of violation to give you more than your leadership is worth.  You ain't getting paid more for the level of leadership you produce.  If you want to earn more money doing what you are doing, you will need to learn how to improve the production of your leadership.  Otherwise, give it up, it ain't going to happen.

More On Leadership, What The Heck Is It?

Leadership Is Expensive

Boy, take a serious look at how our leaders run the business of our country and you find yourself in the position to ask, what the heck is leadership?  Leadership may be a lot of things, but one thing it is not...leadership does not come from making wrong decisions because of fear.  The fear of criticism is so debilitating that we easily forget to do what should be done and replace it with what we think might help us to save our face.  The problem with this kind of leadership is that it does not deliver favorable results.  We can save our face but only after we destroy the chance for producing great results.  Leadership is lost.

Leadership will not come to your aid in a friendly, warm and fuzzy way.  Leadership only arrives when you pay the high toll at the gate that governs it.  Leadership does not come because you want to have some of it.  A short few weeks ago I came home one evening to see if our federal leaders had solved the debt issue they were facing.  There were two days left until the deadline the federal government was facing on their line of credit.  I wanted to see if they had come up with a solution.  My wife and I flipped channels to the three major television networks to see if the news had anything to share about that progress.  With two days to go, not one of the three major networks carried any story about that process.  Not one.

I looked to my wife and said, "This is a sad day.  There are so many 'wrong' stories inside this development that I cannot begin to describe them without linking them together and admitting that our country has simply gotten so far out of control...the patrons have given up."  She said, "What do you mean?"

I described how we have two days left to meet a seriously bad financial deadline and the major networks of the news media did not run the story tonight.  Here is why.  Number one, the news media has become a monster business model.  The big three own the ropes and control how we see what they want us to see.  They have been doing this kind of process for so long we no longer can identify it.  They operate their leadership from the bowels of fear.  They are more concerned about their ratings and know the customers so well that they design their programs to capture the most attention.  The higher the attention ratings, the more advertising dollars they can attract.  The big three know this and play that game very well.  The news story about how our leaders were doing on the problem of working towards a workable solution on the debt crisis was not a story the public wanted to hear with two days remaining before the deadline was met.  Number two, the public was not fired up enough to run any successful story about a process that had no progress behind the work.  With two days to go until the deadline arrived, the work carried no substance to share.  The big three controllers of the news media were fully aware of the attention their patrons would not give to the leadership stall that was occurring.  The big three news media business models had more exciting news to share that would be better to share for improved ratings, at that time.  What the heck, we still had two days left so there was plenty of time to report the increasing stress that would eventually dominate the network space about the deadline our country would face.  My wife had to sit through my seminar.  I was irritated by all of it.

I described how our country has lost its leadership.  I described how our big three news conglomerates knew its patrons no longer had faith in the work those leaders were doing.  With two days remaining, the patrons knew the leaders would wait until the very last moment to solve such a huge issue and crisis.  The media business models knew this truth so there was no advantage to share any stalling activities related to the lack of decision-making skills from our leaders and subsequently waste the patrons time so they could change the channel and lower the ratings of the networks.  The story at that time was not a sale-able story.  The networks elected to ignore it for that night.  It would not produce good ratings.  Number 1 and 2 were obviously true.  Media is money-driven first, number 1, and number 2, the public at that time did not care nor believe its leaders had the ability to solve the problem early.  I told my wife how much this process indicates the total breakdown of our leadership in this country.  The sheep have wandered off into the fields with absolutely no hope for a 'right' solution.  Every single one of them is working to hard to produce and maintain a certain level of popular support from the people they serve and fear.  The tail is completely wagging the dog.  It is a very sad day for leadership.

If you write on the chalk board of your mind that leadership comes from being popular with your decisions, over and over and over...you will eventually believe that crap.  Your subconscious mind will eventually circle those chalked words enough to push out the truth and replace it with lies.  You will eventually find your thoughts become strongly connected to believe that leadership is a popularity contest.  That is a lie.  Do not believe it.  Quit feeding your mind with this kind of foolishness.  Leadership is expensive, hard to earn and will cost you some friendships.  Learn how to accept this truth and become a better leader.

Be A Good Waitress To Your Business

Sometimes I do not want to do any work.  I do not feel like hustling around to make sure everything is going alright.  It is rare for me to feel like that but once in awhile, it happens.  I know myself well enough to identify when I feel like skipping work.  I know I might not be the best person to be around when I feel that way.  It can be very ugly to work next to me when I do not want to be there.

My wife will read this post and wonder when that kind of day really exists.  It is very rare for me to not be moving about in a chipper mood.  I usually have a very positive attitude, day after day after day.  I also like to do my business work.  It has become as involuntary as breathing to me.  I do work in my mind almost on a 24/7 basis.  I rarely walk by something and do not give it a business thought.  It is just as common as breathing.  I do not tell myself to breath or to stop breathing.  The same holds true for my business thoughts.  It truly is a 24/7 deal.  Therefore, when a day comes along and I do not want to do any business work, it is rare...but serious.

I have developed a habit of force that I use when one of those days comes along.  Even though they are rare, they happen.  The trouble with having them occur is that they do not always choose a good day to show up.  My experience has proven that when those rare days come along, they usually arrive when I have some very important tasks to complete that are centered around a deadline of responsibilities.  It is like striking gold when those days show up on a day when I have nothing important pending.  Those are the days that make 'skipping school' so much more fun.

The method I have forced into a habit when I do not want to go to my business work but must attend, is to treat my business like I am the waiter at the side of its table.  I try to be a good waiter to my business on those days.  I try to add a lot of speed to my tasks, a long list of things to accomplish and an attitude of trying to squeeze in some extra stuff to get done.  I am usually a high need achiever in the first place but picture one of those types working on steroids.  That is me on a day when I do not want to be at my business doing any work.

I become much like a fast-paced waitress.  I try to serve my business like a waitress on steroids.  I have forced myself to behave in this fashion.  It is a good thing I do not get into this mood very often.  I would scare most of my employees and staff.  If they witnessed this activity enough, they might be able to tell when I did not want to be at my business.  As it is I do not feel that way very often.

If you are the kind of person who finds you do not want to be at your place of business very often, teach yourself how to become the waitress who serves the needs of the business at every turn.  Do multiple tasks of little things that are squeezed together to accomplish a lot of little things.  I find it will help the urge to get out of there from becoming a reality.  Once you get into the groove of performing like a waitress to your business needs you will soon forget that you had the urge to get out of there.  It usually does not take me very long to get out of the urge to leave.  Once I begin serving the needs of my business like I am its waiter, I begin getting a lot of little things done.  Getting a lot of little things done in a string of activities tends to motivate me to get more of the little things done.  The mood to leave slowly disappears and I become more ready to do the important task I came to do in the first place.

It is a technique I find useful.  It helps me to over come those urges that sometimes appear that try hard to take me away from the important work I really need to do.  I may not begin the work day getting right to the important tasks at hand, but when I do get to them, I am ready to give them my best efforts.  I am placed in a better prepared service mood by the time I arrive to those important tasks.  I usually do better work in this mood than the one that I came to work carrying.  I like to give the mind a chance to shift gears.  I become like a waitress to my business to help me erase the urge to get out of there.