In this Issue

🐥    Ideas Are Cheap
🗓️    Lead Change Weekly
🖐️    Fewer Priorities

🐥  Ideas Are Cheap

Strategy without action is just dreaming. And so much of what goes on in business is just dreams.

You can have brilliant ideas, but without the work, it’s all rather meaningless.

‍Ideas that aren’t acted on don’t grow your business.

It is no accident that some companies have better brands than others. The companies that have the most iconic brands are the best executors. They take ideas and they make them happen!

In uncertainty, actions trump ideas. The companies that act fast and adapt faster gain the advantage.

One Stat to Watch

95%

“95% of a typical company’s workforce is unaware of, or does not understand, its strategy,” write Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, authors of the Balanced Scorecard.

🗓️  Lead Change Weekly

Strategy is a process, not an event. The more frequently you and your team work to put ideas into action, the faster you can grow.

As a best practice, implement a weekly strategy huddle.

By making strategy a weekly practice, you emphasize strategy execution. Your team can’t hide behind missed deliverables and unexecuted ideas if you’re talking about them each week.

It’s in the deliberate work that results are achieved.

FranklinCovey refers to a company’s day-to-day tasks and operations as the whirlwind. These are activities that consume your team’s time, energy, and attention.

‍If the whirlwind is not managed, it will suffocate your strategy and prevent change from happening.

Whirlwind activities do not get prioritized in your weekly strategy huddle.

The purpose of the huddle is to work on the business: to set priorities, tackle challenges head-on, measure progress, and hold each other accountable.

🖐️  Fewer Priorities

Choose one to five meaningful priorities to advance your business. No more than that.

According to research by Booz & Company, “As an executive team’s priority list grows, the company’s revenue growth in fact declines relative to its peers.”

The reverse is true, too. Companies that focus on one to five strategic priorities outperform their peers.

One of my gripes with systems that use “Big Rocks” to set priorities is they don’t limit the number of rocks. Every manager does not need a collection of Big Rocks for their department. Worse, every employee doesn’t need their own Big Rocks.

As a leadership team, set clear, deliberate, and limited priorities for your organization. If everyone sets their own priorities, then nothing gets done.

What are the most meaningful changes and projects you and your company need to focus on and accomplish over the next three to eighteen months?

Identify the most pressing priorities and develop deliberate, detailed plans to achieve them. You can be detailed when you’re focused.

🤔  Thoughts on Today’s Issue?

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