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:
Business goals that are well worded, feel-good platitudes are useless. Properly defined SMART goals that your staff understand and contribute to, will align your organization and drive it towards your mission and vision!
Everyone has been talking about setting SMART goals for years so I am amazed at times when I see corporate goals that are really just a high level objective statement. Business leaders must set SMART goals if they want their organizations to be aligned and motivated towards goal achievement.
I have seen many examples over the years of how powerful SMART goals can be. I have seen:
This past year has been a very busy year for me. I have been “on the road” for about 3 weeks out of every month, traveling all over the US and Canada, twice to Europe, twice to India and down to Mexico City. My main role on these business trips is to review projects and provide insights, connections, suggestions and guidance wherever possible for the managers that are running these projects. The project managers are as diverse as the projects themselves which vary widely from around $20 million to upwards of $350 million. This has made for a challenging year!
Besides striving to provide value on these projects, I also try to learn as much as possible wherever I go. One of the interesting observations I have made is that regardless of culture, business environment, language or time zone, everyone wants to be successful. However, only those that are willing to take responsibility for their success actually achieve it. What I mean by this is that the people that take responsibility for their success do not let anything stand in their way to achieving success. For example;
