The Six Components of Every Business

A business has six parts: purpose, values, content, delivery, packaging, and brand. Don't make it any more complicated than that. Answer these questions:

1. Why does your organizaton exist? (Purpose)
2. What beliefs guide the actual day-to-day behaviors in your organization? (Values)
3. What is the basis of customer value that the people in your organization are working to continually improve? (Content)
4. How do the people in your organization deliver value to customers? (Delivery)
5. How is that value packaged for customers? (Packaging)
6. What is the value that you want customers to perceive receiving from your organization and what is the value they actually perceive receiving from your organization? (Brand)

If you want to dramatically improve your business, examine your answers to these six questions. Then decide if you want to really affect one or more of those answers. If you do, then what will you and other key members of your organization have to keep doing, stop doing, and start doing in order to make the desired answers a reality? Don't make the process any more complicated than that.

Understand the Upside and Downside of a Mentor

A mentor is a person who invests time and energy in getting to know you over an extended period and offers you insights on how to perform better.

Almost every extraordinary performer acknowledges the importance of mentors in his or her life and describes how they made an enormous difference along the way.

I encourage you to actively seek out mentors. You don't need to call them mentors and they don't have to have a formal relationship with you. If a person spends time with you and offers you helpful insights and suggestions, then he or she is being a mentor for you.

In my lifetime I've had about a half dozen wonderful mentors, individuals who dramatically impacted my thinking about my personal and professional life. Much of what I am doing today and the way in which I am doing it can be traced to an insight I gained from one of my mentors.

However, I've also learned some mistakes I've made with my mentors. It's not what they did to me, it's what I did in response to them.

Mistake #1: I tried to be like them.

Whenever I did this I was always disappointed in my performance. I felt that I was being a fake and I felt as though I could never be as good as the other person. I was right on both accounts. I was being a fake because I wasn't being myself, and I was never going to be as good at being the other person as that person was going to be. The purpose of a mentor is not for you to try to replicate him or her. The purpose is for you to gain insights from that person that you can consider incorporating into your approach that might improve performance.

Mistake #2: I expected them to be flawless.

Many times I got frustrated with my mentors when I realized they were not perfect. I had built them up in my mind to be superheros. Don't make that mistake. Mentors are humans. Learn what you can from the individual that can help you to be a better performer. But don't be unrealistic. No human being is perfect. It's unrealistic to expect you are going to learn how to perform better from every aspect of another person. Value the value you gain from the person and then accept that person for who he or she is as a person.

In the End Make Your Decision

Bill Belichick is at it again.

He calls for a pass on fourth down with two yards to go on his own 28-yard line with two minutes to go in the game. His team, the New England Patriots, came up six inches short of the first down and lots of people are calling him an idiot.

However, let's replay that in slow motion. Bill Belichick called for a pass on fourth down. He made what he thought was the best decison for that moment. Once he made the decision then he lived with it.

As a manager, you have to make a decision. At some point you have to make a decision. Once you make that decision you will have to live with the consequences of that decision. Belichick has made a lot of "unusual" decisions on the way to winning three Super Bowls and playing in four. I've grown fairly sick of all the critics in the world (Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olberman, Bill O'Reilly, Chris Mathews, etc.) who attack every decision by people they don't like or agree with. Hey, we can all criticize. But are you capable of making a decision? Deciding and criticizing or two different things.

However, in the end a manager has to make a decision in order to be a manager. Are you willing to do what you think is the right thing to do at any given moment? When you are you will have to live with the consequences, but at least you will know that you a true manager because in the end a true manager makes decision.

Trust is the Essential Ingredient of Influence

Leadership is influencing how other people think in ways that generate better sustainable results both for the organization and the people in it.

Think about the people who have influenced you effectively during your career to achieve better results. I'm not talking about the people who provided you with inspirational dissatisfaction. Those are the people who demeaned you or who wrote you off, and you came back to prove them wrong. I'm talking about the people who positively influenced your thinking and your actions in ways that lifted your performance level. Write down descriptions of each of these individuals. My hunch is that you will find they are very different types of people in a lot of ways, except for one. In the end, I'll bet one common characteristic is you trusted each of these individuals for wanting to improve performance both for the overall organization or team and your own performance level.

If you want to influence another person, invest nine hours building trust for every one hour you spend trying to influence the person. You build trust by listening to the person, by being honest with the person, and by doing what you said you would do. It is not complicated, but it does require you to pay attention to what you're doing. It requires purposeful effort to build trust. And it requires consistency in all of the above.

Write in a Handwritten Journal Three Times a Week

Capture your best ideas and biggest lessons learned in an old-fashioned handwritten journal three times a week. Every year read over what you wrote.

I started doing that in 1986, and I can trace the development of many useful ideas back to their infancy when the first pieces of a particular idea puzzle started falling in place. When you read your notes after after a good distance of time has passed, you will begin to see them in new ways and with new possible combinations.

The master of this is Malcolm Gladwell. Reading his books is like taking a masterclass in writing. Read The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers.