Build A Better Business: Exec Summary: 1 thru 30

1. Do the maintenance: clear the gutters of leaves.
2. Test the interactions with the business: be a secret shopper.
3. Dig deeper:don't make decisions solely on the summary PPT.
4. Stay special: don't allow the chase for business to weaken the story that gets you the best business.
5. Less, less, less. Vital few not trivial many
6. Forget mission, vision, values, goals etc for a while.What's your story?
7. Attend to the big 5: competition, innovation, people, systems, customer service.
8. Find 1% improvements. And multiply them together.
9. Fewer slide-decks, more innovation.
10. Close the gap between marketing story and real story.
11. What's lurking in your business?
12. More War Zone, Less Country Club.
13. Don't just talk to customers, listen to customers. Don't just provide for customers, innovate for customers. Don't just please customers,amaze customers.
14. Get rid of the fuzzy thinking and ask who?, why?, where?, when?, what? and how? Stop talking in PowerPoint
15. Ask those at the front line.
16. Really, really thinking about profit generation tends to solve the revenue problem.
17. The business model must work in tough times. It must work in uncertain times. It must work in times of stiff competition. It cannot only work in easy times.
18. Most 'motivators' of people don't.
19. In tough times only good habits will get a firm out of the mess.
20. E-mail isn’t free. It seems free. It feels free.
21. Work on people: get great ethos and great innovation.
22. Great teams: people x process x priorities.
23. Fewer late night pizza sessions.
24. Once a person gets great leadership, he can get down to great work.
25. There are few fresh ideas in e-mail. There are plenty in a few minutes reflection and observing a real horizon.
26. Never hide behind a job title. Allow skill, presence and sheer humanity to inspire to get the job done.
27. Don't let potentially valuable long-term work on mission, values, goals, competencies, 'road-maps' and new product releases to distract a person from their day job and their having absolute 100% clarity of what they are meant to be doing minute by minute.
28. Why do some spend the whole of their mid-day break complaining about the business? Because we all love drama and in the vacuum of something positive to celebrate we will create negative melodrama. Lead towards the positive; lead towards results; lead towards success.
    
29. For them to change for the better, they need to know what might be better. For them to know what might be better, you need to reveal to them some feedback. For you to reveal that feedback, you need to have courage. For you to have courage you need to be seeking and acting upon your own feedback.
30. Little can beat the WD40 of respectful, deep and consistent coffee and conversation.

The detail here.

Bonus: Brilliant at the Basics of Business 100, the book.