This week’s book review is Be Amazing or Go Home by Shep Hyken.
Hyken does a stellar job of describing the epitome of customer focus! This book focuses on what “Amazing” looks like to a customer and the personal and corporate habits that each of us need to cultivate to attain the “Amazing” status.
My takeaway from this book is twofold. First, the seven habits of Amazing listed below:
This week’s book review is Louder Than Words by Todd Henry
Todd Henry steps the reader through the process of, and importance of, discovering what makes each of us unique. He calls this uniqueness the “authentic voice.” Each of us needs to devote ourselves to impacting the world with the uniqueness that only we possess.
My takeaway from this book is that we need to find a “Sherpa” mentor. A Sherpa mentor is one that doesn’t just provide passive advice but is fully vested in the path to your success. If you succeed, they succeed and, if you fail, they fail . . . just like a Sherpa and a climber.
Also, Henry provided an effective template for getting feedback on your performance and to help you define your uniqueness. I have summarized this process below:
Over the last nine weeks, I introduced my Ebook 12 Steps to Business Transformation and I defined the first 9 of the 12 transformational steps. This week we are going to talk about steps 10, 11 and 12.
Steps 10 to 12 in my new Ebook “12 Steps to Business Transformation” deal with the outputs of your business which I call Outcomes. These are the resulting services or products that are created by your business.
“The power gap created by hierarchical leadership results in followers not providing feedback or questioning the leader…leaving the leader isolated and the followers discontent….” Sam Adeyemi
A Power Gap is the gap that exists between a leader and their staff. This gap is caused by actions that the leader takes that drives a wedge between them and their employees. The larger the wedge, the larger the gap and the more isolated the leader becomes. Large Power Gaps result in isolation that is dangerous to the leader and to the organization! Power Gaps can create huge blind spots that can cause the leader and the organization to stumble, fall or even be destroyed.
A number of years ago, I reported to a leader whose philosophy was to lead by title only. He felt that because he had a leadership title that he could bark out orders and everyone would just do what he commanded. It was so bad that he rarely even came into the office and, when he did, he rarely spent any time trying to get to know his staff and understand the business. He just barked orders and expected people to do what he said.
In several past posts, Do You Suffer From Continuous Partial Attention Syndrome? and Focused and Clear Communications, I wrote about the speed of communications and how complicated everything can be in today’s “over-connected’ world. As a business leader, there are a number of techniques that can be used to cut through the noise and effectively communicate and lead your organization. I am only going to talk about two techniques here in this post but I will add others in the future.
The first tool that I have found to be very effective is something called “Did you know . . . “ emails.
