Tag Archives: failure

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5 Steps to Turn a Business From Failure to Success

Greg Brenneman is one of the best CEOs that you’ve never heard of! He is responsible for the turnaround of firms like Continental Airlines, Home Depot, Burger King and others. He currently is the Chairman, President and CEO of CCMP Capital, an equity investment firm that specializes in making buyout and growth equity investments.

CCMP Capital look for underperforming and undervalued businesses and invest in them in a way that they can control them and turn them around. Although Brenneman is a “low key” leader and doesn’t seek the limelight, he is one of the best business leaders in the marketplace.

He has written the book Right Now and All at Once in which he describes the leadership philosophies that he uses to acquire, lead and turnaround businesses. One of the philosophies he describes is his five step plan to turnaround and grow a business. As he emphasizes in his book, this five step process should be used in all businesses, not just businesses in trouble!

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Why An “Echo Chamber” Culture Will Destroy Your Business

If everyone in your business is always in agreement with you and no one challenges your decisions or ideas then you are running an “echo chamber” organization (this is also commonly referred to as a “Yes-Man” organization). This type of organization is called an echo chamber because everything the leader says, the organization echoes back to them. There are no original thoughts, dissenting ideas or challenging statements.

This is a very dangerous environment to operate in as a leader. If no one is there to challenge your ideas and direction, you will eventually lead your organization into one of your blind spots (news flash: each of us has blind spots) and over a cliff. You won’t have anyone to warn you until it is too late!

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5 Simple Steps To Fail Your Way To Success

“The goal, then, is to uncouple fear and failure – to create an environment in which making mistakes doesn’t strike terror into your employees’ hearts.” Ed Catmull

 

Organizations that value growth and success encourage their employees to innovate, try new things and stretch the boundaries of the business. These organizations embrace failure because they realize without failure an organization cannot grow and reach new levels of success. They also know that if an organization is not growing then it is stagnating . . . and stagnating businesses fail.

My son and a few of his friends started a landscape and lawn care company this summer. They built a website, flyers, posters and brochures. They knocked on doors, distributed flyers and sold their services to as many people as they could. Once they landed enough customers, they went and rented an aerator and power rake and worked their tails off. At the end of the first day they had lost $15! Talk about a disappointing failure!

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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”
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How to Know When It’s Your Turn To Step Up And Make A Difference

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about Seth Godin’s customer service entitled How to Wow Your Customers and Increase Your Sales. The book that Godin was shipping me was his latest project entitled “What To Do When It’s Your Turn (And It’s Always Your Turn). It is written in the typical Godin style; thought provoking, short, insightful and witty.

The basic premise of the book is that each of us needs to step up, take action and make a difference. We should not be worried about failure or what others think. We should concentrate on what we do best, our areas of strength, and put these strengths to work.

I found the book challenged me as I am often guilty of procrastinating and not stepping up to do something that I know I can do well. Because of this challenge, last week I posted How To Get Unstuck and Start Moving Towards Success. This post was more personal and how on a personal level we need to step out and start moving to get unstuck.