This week’s book review is Living Forward by Michael Hyatt and Daniel Harkavy.
Hyatt and Harkavy detail out the process of building a life plan – a balanced plan for your life that provides long term focus complete with the detailed goals required to get there. The book is well written with tons of examples and great online tools.
Over the last few posts, I introduced my Ebook 12 Steps to Business Transformation and I defined Vision and Mission, the first 2 steps of the 12 transformational steps. This week we are going to talk about Values.
Defining the Values for your business is step 3 in my new Ebook “12 Steps to Business Transformation.”
Values describe the behaviors that will get you from where you are now to achieving your Mission and ultimately attaining the Vision.
Where Vision defines WHY your organization exists and Mission defines WHAT the organization does, Values are the driving behaviors that govern HOW the organization drives toward successful outcomes.
Values are the foundation of any organization.
A few years ago I attended a keynote speech from Pat Williams, Senior VP of Orlando Magic. His topic was the “Thirteen Qualities of Winners”.
Williams has had an amazing amount of leadership experience in the sports world at different levels within multiple franchise organizations. Perhaps his biggest venture was establishing the Orlando Magic NBA team, which is where he was at the time of the speech.
After I reviewed his list, it became very clear that the 13 qualities he identified equally apply to business leaders. If a business leader does not have these 13 qualities, they and their business’ potential, will be limited.
I took the liberty of replacing the word “Winners” with “Successful Business Leaders” in the list of 13 qualities below. This list describes the attributes of a successful business leader!
The book review for this week is The Magic of Conflict by Thomas F Crum.
Crum defines his method of conflict management through the lens of an Aikido martial artist which, all things considered, is a very interesting perspective. However, I was not a big fan of the book as it focused too much on expanding and contracting “ki” or “sources of positive and negative energy”.
My takeaway from this book is that I need to be more aware of the reasons behind a conflict.
Wants and needs can be completely different! What I want for a car (fast, high horsepower, flashy) is far from what I need (gas efficient, low maintenance, dependable). Similarly, what your customer wants and what they really need can be worlds apart.
The success of your business depends on you understanding this difference and working with the customer to ensure what you provide meets or exceeds their expectations!
I wrote in a previous post about when I was brought in by a client to redo engineering work that another contractor had outsourced overseas. The contractor was looking to reduce project costs by sending the bulk of their engineering to a lower cost country. Unfortunately, they did not control this work close enough.
