Overview it today; start on it tomorrow.
1.Recognise it
Recognise that there is a ‘New World of Work’ out there: a world in which in every market possesses its own ‘tipping point’, a point at which markets irrevocably change and are never the same again. Banking (no more bank managers), retail (store within store), leisure (the exotic experience): you name it, the market is experiencing its tipping point. Recognise that it is happening to your own market. Do you know what it is?
2.If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.
General Eric Shinseki, retired Chief of Staff, U. S. Army
3. Stay on top of it
Create a team who meet once a month to observe, track and identify the changes in your market. A cross-organisation team who turn thoughts and observations (mmm-that’s interesting!) into decisions (let’s get out of that market) and decisions into actions (notify all customers that we will only support that product for a further 18 months).
4. A year from now you may wish you had started today.
Karen Lamb
5 Get a plan
Ensure your organisation has a plan. It’s on a wall in the action room; it’s highly visible. It’s clear what has been done and what needs to be done. Ensure you have a plan for your career: what will you be doing in three years time? And how will you get there? Ensure everyone of your people has a plan. Help them realise their dreams. Sure: one or two may leave but they will be eternally grateful to you. The rest will step up from 12% output to 87%.
6 We have a ‘strategic’ plan. It’s called doing things.
Herb Kelleher, founder, Southwest Airlines
7. Work that plan
Turn that plan into actions with milestones and owners. Hold the owners accountable for the actions, particularly the delivery milestones.
8.You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
Gandhi
9.Re-invent
Regularly get together and brainstorm and ask the question: how can we be better-how can we be even better than we are currently? What will stop us? Who can help us? What are we missing which with hind-sight would seem so obvious? Allow time for the best thinking. Walk, take breaks and get off-site. Have a facilitator. Manage the flip-charts and yellow stickies. Record everything.
10.Do one thing every day that scares you.
Eleanor Roosevelt
11.Be brilliant at the basics
Ensure sales are selling, strategic marketing are strategically marketing and accounts are doing the accounts and you are leading. Get the basics done and done properly. Identify and blockers to execution of the basics and remove those blockers.
12.Nobody can prevent you from choosing to be exceptional.
Mark Sanborn, The Fred Factor
13. Be innovative
Innovation is creativity plus action-challengingly different skills. Ensure your people know how to create but also how to implement.
14. Have you invested as much this year in your career as in your car?
Molly Sargent, OD consultant and trainer
15. Inspire people
Your job as leader is to ensure people are the best version of themselves: you do that by inspiring them.
Use challenge to create comfort. Human beings are at their best when they are reaching out to an appropriate goal. Create and articulate clear achievable goals which stretch. Reward success, understand and learn from failure.
16. It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin
17. Use hi-tech. Stay hi touch.
Be efficient with what needs efficiency e.g. processing of e-mail, proposal templates. Be effective with what needs effectiveness e.g. writing that e-mail. Playing with your children. Don’t confuse ‘getting stuff done’ with getting the right stuff done.
18. Do it with passion or pack it in.
Obvious really: why would you want to do anything for more than a day or two for which you have no passion? Quite. Look for the intrinsic worth in what you do. Get passionate. But if you can’t, find what does turn you on and get into it.
19. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish
Steve Jobs, Apple
20. Start
Monday 0800 or earlier