Real Leaders Don’t Make Excuses

“Leaders have forfeited their right to make excuses.” – Horst Schulze

 

How many times in the last year have you heard high profile leaders making excuses for something that happened in their organization rather than taking responsibility for it? Statements like:

  • “The price of oil fell more than expected and because of the previous government’s actions, we now can’t balance the budget.”
  • “It was an engineer working for us that programmed a module to defeat pollution control tests.”
  • “Someone falsified and deleted data to make our test results look better”

You Make 35,000 Decisions A Day: How To Ensure They’re Excellent

According to some recent research, an adult makes about 35,000 “remotely” conscious decisions per day. These decisions can be as trivial as deciding between fruit loops or cheerios for breakfast but they can also be as impactful as deciding on the direction for a business merger, acquisition, spinoff or restructuring.

Being responsible for making 35,000 decisions each day can be overwhelming! How can you possibly hammer through these and be assured that you are making the best possible decisions?

4 Critical Rules For Any Business

It doesn’t matter whether you are in product manufacturing, internet marketing, engineering, retail sales, wholesales, real estate, auto repair, equipment rental, construction, or any other business . . . if you do not focus on empowering your customers and providing value to them, your business will flounder at best and most likely fail.

This is a servant mindset – or what Jay Abraham calls a “super-servant.” He defines a super servant in his book Your Secret Wealth, as someone who sets their “goal in life, in business, in jobs . . . is to identify and understand how many more, and better, and continuous ways you can help serve, or fulfill, or clarify the non-verbalized needs and desires of your customer or your marketplace – and your marketplace, again, is whomever it is you’re trying to positively impact.”

Five Ways To Avoid the Stupidity of “Group Think”

Never underestimate the human capacity for stupidity when operating in groups.Colonel T.X. Hammes quote from Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World

 

Have you ever done something stupid as part of a group?

I think we have all fallen victim to stupid “group think” decisions. Everyone in the group gets caught up in the excitement of the moment and something that sounded like a great idea at the time turns out to be a really horrendous idea.