Is Your Business More Like a Lamborghini or a Lada?

A Lada may get you from point A to point B (if you are lucky), but a Lamborghini is a highly tuned engineering marvel! Not only will it get you from point A to point B, it will do it quickly, efficiently, and in style! It is a thing of beauty!

Just like a Lamborghini, a finely tuned, high performance business is a beautiful thing!

Understanding what to monitor in your business to ensure that it is finely tuned and highly performing is not an easy task. As you can imagine, there are as many opinions on the definition of high performance as there are businesses. And for good reason.

Can You Complete the 15 Minute Business Challenge?

If you cannot write out the plan for where you are taking your business in 15 minutes or less, chances are, you do not have a plan!

If you don’t have a plan then you and your business are just floating through time and you are at the whim of the marketplace and all of your competitors! Basically, if you cannot articulate what you are building or why you are building it then how do you know what you are doing or where you are going?

For those that regularly read my posts, you know that Thinking Business has a very detailed business blueprint that you can download (from our Business Tools) and apply to your business. We call it the Thinking Business Blueprint. It takes you through all aspects of your business to ensure that your business model and strategy are defined clearly at all levels.

However, I was recently challenged by a client to come up with a simple, high level, tool that would allow a business leader to summarize their business and their strategy in one simple page. This one-page tool must be simple to implement yet powerful enough to capture the very essence of an organization. A leader must then be able to take the completed tool and easily communicate it to any and all of it’s stakeholders.

To meet this challenge, I have come up with the “15 Minute” Business Blueprint described below.

How To Build a Powerful Performance Review System That Works

By many accounts, Ray Dalio is a very successful person. He is most well known for being the founder and the driving force of  Bridgewater Associates, which Forbes calls “the fifth most important private company in the United States.”

However, what many people don’t know about Dalio is that he is the creator of some amazing systems that, among other things:

  • Measure performance
  • Spur innovative thinking
  • Motivate people to develop and grow
  • Position businesses for success

He credits much of his personal and business success to the creation and implementation of these systems.

One of these systems is for employee performance management. Although performance reviews are typically the bane of every employee and manager’s existence, Bridgewater has created an engaging system that gets beyond many of the pitfalls of traditional performance assessments.

How to Build a High Performance Business

A high performance business is created by building a high performance team. A high performance team is created by studying, building, and expecting excellence from all your staff.

I have had the opportunity to lead quite a few high performance teams over the years. I can say that it is so much easier to spend the time and money to build a high performance team than it is to limp along with “bums in chairs!”

High performance teams can overcome incredible obstacles.

50 Powerful Leadership Lessons from Authentic Leaders

I recently attended the 2017 Global Leadership Summit put on by Bill Hybels and his Willow Creek organization. It was an amazing leadership training event that was attended by over 400,000 people through a global simulcast!

The speakers were amazing and the entertainment between speakers was world class.

What follows are the top one-line lessons from the two day event.

50 Leadership Lessons From the 2017 GLS

Bill Hybels