Scaling Up
Leadership bottleneck kills growth. Staff leaders or die trying.
leadershipThe best leaders have the right questions, but turn to their employees, customers, advisors, and the crowd to mine the answers. Every business is more valuable to the degree that it does not depend on its top leader. For more on these topics, read Margaret Heffernan’s book Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril and Liz Wiseman’s Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter.
AQ's take: I've hogged answers too long. My team's insights could save me from solo burnout.
May 10, 2024To scale up a business from a handful of employees to something significant (i.e., build a company that has a chance to both put a “dent in the universe” and dominate its industry), our tools and techniques focus on three deliverables: Reduce by 80% the time it takes the top team to manage the business (operational activities) Refocus the senior team on market-facing activities Realign everyone else (onto the same page) to drive execution and results
AQ's take: Burned out micromanaging. Refocus on market? That's my ticket out of ops hell.
May 10, 2024Yet there are three barriers to scaling up, which we’ll discuss in the next chapter: Leadership: the inability to staff/grow enough leaders throughout the organization who have the capabilities to delegate and predict Scalable infrastructure: the lack of systems and structures (physical and organizational) to handle the complexities in communication and decisions that come with growth Marketing: the failure to scaleup an effective marketing function capable of attracting new customers, talent, advisors, and other key relationships to the business
AQ's take: Nailed my barriers: weak leaders below me, crap systems, marketing blind spots.
May 10, 2024to overcome these barriers your team must master, using our tools, four fundamentals: In leading People, take a page from parenting: Establish a handful of rules, repeat yourself a lot, and act consistently with those rules. This is the role and power of Core Values. If discovered and used effectively, these values guide all the relationship decisions and systems in the company. In setting Strategy, follow the definition from the great business strategist Gary Hamel. You don’t have a real strategy if it doesn’t pass two tests: First, what you’re planning to do really matters to enough customers; and second, it differentiates you from your competition. In driving Execution, implement three key habits: Set a handful of Priorities (the fewer the better); gather quantitative and qualitative Data daily and review weekly to guide decisions; and establish an effective daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meeting Rhythm to keep everyone in the loop. Those who pulse faster, grow faster. In managing Cash, don’t run out of it! This means paying as much attention to how every decision affects cash flow as you would to revenue and profitability.
AQ's take: Core values like parenting rules? Explains why my team's chaotic without them.
May 10, 2024“most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”
AQ's take: My ADHD brain plans years ahead wrong. This quote slaps reality.
May 10, 2024Goals without routines are wishes; routines without goals are aimless. The most successful business leaders have a clear vision and the disciplines (routines) to make it a reality.
AQ's take: Wishes? That's my graveyard of goals without daily grind.
May 10, 2024“Routine sets you free.”
AQ's take: Routines chained me before. Now they unlock my chaos brain.
May 10, 2024