Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Grow Your Small Business Without Losing Passion or Purpose


Back view of businessmanMany businesses are born because entrepreneurs have a strong sense of purpose – there's a problem to solve or a passion they can offer the world. As a business grows, it's infused with an electric sense of possibility from new people and ideas. But it's often during these times of growth that entrepreneurs feel like their grasp on everything is slipping away.
We approached Gino Wickman, founder of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), a business system that helps companies mold strong leadership teams for long-term success. Gino, an entrepreneur since the age of 21, is the bestselling author of Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business. In the below post, and this great video, he shares his insights on breaking through to the next level without losing sight of yourself or your business.
–Cindy
Most of our clients come to us because they're hitting a ceiling. It's a natural phenomenon that many companies experience once they passed the startup phase. Now they're a successful small or mid-sized business, but they've grown to a point where sheer passion and drive isn't enough to carry the organization forward. There's a need for systems, process, structure and leadership.
One of my favorite examples is Sachse Construction, a Detroit-based commercial construction firm, which has been an EOS client for over 10 years. Founder Todd Sachse's business was hitting a major ceiling when he reached out to us, but he couldn't point to a specific reason or problem.
In our decades of helping small businesses get unstuck, we've been able to take this intangible feeling of frustration and get to its core. Fundamentally, it's about the people – after all, businesses run on human energy.
What Sachse needed was an operating plan to harness this energy and channel it in the right direction. We got to work helping Sachse build a strong leadership team with laser focus. First, we got the business owner and the leadership team into one room for a series of full-day sessions. The idea was to give them a holistic approach to treating the entire company, rather than just symptoms.
Below are a few tips we used during these sessions that you can use in your own business:
1.) Share your vision for the company – The first step is to get the leadership team's ideas out of their heads and into writing. This lets you see where there's overlap with the rest of your team and where there's almost no alignment.
2.) Get your leadership team to agree on answers to eight core questions – To do this in a structured way, we use the EOS Vision/Traction Organizer, which you can download for free. The basic questions are:
  • What are our core values?
  • What's our business's core focus or sweet spot?
  • What's our 10-year target?
  • What's our marketing strategy?
  • What's the 3-year picture?
  • What's the one-year plan?
  • What are the quarterly priorities?
  • What are all the issues, obstacles, and barriers that we have to solve?
3.) Develop a vision statement based on your answers – Every effective leadership team has a strong vision statement that defines who they are, what they do, where they are going and how they will get there. This will inform every decision within the company for years to come. It's your guiding light, even as people come and go.
4.) Create a solid leadership team based on the vision – This was a real challenge for Sachse because there ended up being some changes to the original team. This isn't unusual, though. I'd say about eighty percent of the time, we end up making changes to the leadership team.
But this isn't a value judgment or indictment. Rather, it's about defining the core functions of the business. Put simply, the leadership team is made up of the people who head up these major functions. For this process, I use an Accountability Chart and the People Analyzer to ensure the right people are in the right seats.
Once the new leadership team and vision statement are in place, then the answers to formerly confusing decisions seem to come into focus. You get unstuck. This is when companies begin to see a shift in culture that cracks the ceiling.
As for Sachse Construction, over a decade later, they've experienced incredible growth – as much as 400-500% – through a recession in one of the hardest hit cities. But over the years, they've had to get unstuck more than once.
If you find yourself getting stuck again, go back to the vision your leadership team agreed on and work towards getting everyone on board again. Once you have the structure in place, it's as simple as reviewing, refining, and reminding yourself about the core focus that gave you passion and purpose in the first place.

5 attributes that are crucial for success in the 21st century By Guy Claxton




We can no longer assume that being ‘in work’ is the same thing as being employed – ‘having a job’. As the world becomes more connected, so companies get bigger, but so too do opportunities emerge for all kinds of small-scale, niche and self-employed enterprises. Many people who do not have ‘jobs’ in the old-fashioned sense bid for contracts online. Websites like http://www.elance.com broker deals between people who need a task done and those why know how to do it. Elance has nine million freelancers and four million clients on its books. It is currently doing one billion dollars’ worth of business a year, and growing.
Education is about the cultivation of competence and inclination. It is what we do to enable children to succeed in the worlds they will inhabit. We teach them to do, and to love doing, the things that will help them to flourish. Especially when we cannot know how tens of millions of children will be earning a living, those competences and inclinations have to be broad and generic. Obviously reading is one such disposition. It is every child’s right to be shown how to read, and to develop a love of reading, for example. The inclination to read is, according to the PISA tests, a more powerful predictor of life success than the bare ability to read. It opens your eyes to possibilities: new ways of earning a living, for instance. Yet the love of reading is killed, for many children, by misguided education.
But reading is only one of these key dispositions. Here are some others. There is the disposition to be your own teacher: to design learning activities and experiences for yourself, either alone or in collaboration. Young people will not be accompanied by kindly and experienced teachers for the rest of their lives; they will have to become adept at thinking, “What will be the best way to acquire the knowledge and skills I am going to need?” You don’t learn that if learning is always designed for you by your teachers.
There is the ability to think on your feet, when your expectations are dashed and novel responses are required. In tomorrow’s world, learners will be much more in demand than knowers. But traditional education doesn’t build the capacity to cope with the unexpected. It tries to fill young people up with well-rehearsed performances of understanding – which is not the same thing at all. And those performances tend to be confined to single disciplines, whereas the real worlds of both work and play do not respect the boundaries between ‘subjects’.
There is the capacity to manage your attention. Learning how to pay attention to things that you consider to be worthwhile, and often challenging, rather than being at the mercy of every advertisement, flashing link, tweet or email that comes along, is, for many people, one of the big challengers for 21st century education. Concentration and discernment are mental muscles that grow stronger with exercise – but that growth won’t happen in a classroom where everything is beautifully quiet and orderly. Yet the ability to concentrate is crucial to ‘getting the job done’, whether that be in employment, in self-employment or for one’s personal satisfaction.
What about scepticism: the inclination to subject knowledge claims, especially ones that are written and authoritative, to critical scrutiny? Many teachers are worried that their students are too ready to believe whatever they read on the internet – yet, without thinking, they have been training their students into an attitude of credulity by treating the textbooks as if they were beyond question. Students can get A grades in examinations but not have developed this inclination to question, yet a questioning mind-set is the foundation stone of creativity and innovation, and it is these that employers say they seek, but too often fail to find, in applicants for jobs.
Here are five dispositions that are crucial for life, work and play in the 21st century: a love of reading; the inclination to design your own learning; the capacity to think on your feet; the strength to control attention; and the disposition to question knowledge claims. Any system of schooling, no matter how well it performs in international comparisons, is miseducation if it stifles rather than nurtures these tendencies.

Published in collaboration with WISE. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.
Author: Guy Claxton is Visiting Professor of Education at King’s College London.