Build A Better Business Exec Summary 1-47

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.
31. If you don't laugh some of the timeyou are really going to be crying a lot of the time. That's business.
32. Innovation=creativity + action.
33. The economy is shifting, finally.Time for new thinking, new plans and new actions.
34. Don't start a new initiative. Get the current one to work.
35. The external candidate only perhaps seems better for the job because his/her strengths are more apparent than the internal candidate whose weaknesses are well established. And most importantly how will you discover what the external candidate doesn't want you to know?
36. Words, sentences and paragraphs. But no story. Much corporate stratgey in a nutshell.
37. Split team meetings into three: 1 is training and development;  2 is Kaizen;  3 is admin.
38. A competitor is only a competitor when we become fearful.
39. MBO?  Maybe. Maybe MBR, Manage by Results.

40. Gather the team. Issue pencils, paper and chosen beverage. Ask the team individually and without conferring to write 100 words about the team, its purpose and the barriers to its highest performance. Now share. It will be revealing.

41. Start the week on a Friday.
42. Strategic Marketing is hard. Still needs to be done.
43. Do you remember the start up days? Crazy. Money hemorrhaging, no adult supervision and too many egos. But there was energy. Now there's a lethargy, a torpor, a deep unhappiness about the place. What's missing? Purpose? What's it all about, Alfie? 
44. The internal candidate has some drawbacks. That's because they haven't been developed, coached and allowed to release all of their potential.The external candidate seems perfect. That's because you don't know them yet. 
45. Amount of bull**it generated by large organisation = (nebulous nature of mission statement) x (flakiness of chairman's statement) x (delta needed in share price) x (accounting creativity implemented at end of FY) x (individual pension packages of those on board) x (ridiculousness-all things considered-of list of values).
46. Your competitors are probably copying their competitors who in turn are copying their competitors who 15 months ago copied you.Think fresh thoughts. 
47. Ask each of your team members to take a turn to run the team meeting. They get some growth. You get some perspective. Everybody gets some variety.

• The detail here.
• Bonus: Brilliant at the Basics of Business 100, the book.