What are the key areas of your business that need attention? Right now. Before you continue, take a moment and write down the three critical areas or issues that need immediate attention. The three practices that you can feel are missing something fundamental to their success.
Being a business owner, consultant, and advisor, I’ve had the advantage of observing both successful and failed businesses and comparing results from the experience. What I learned is this: the number one problem isn’t poor marketing strategies, outlandish ideas, or a lack of consumers. In Good to Great, Jim Collins says that the number one problem with struggling companies is that they put the wrong people in the wrong seats on the bus.
But let’s take it a step further. Specifically examine how we’re thinking about business, the people in it and the desired results. What kind of perspective and filter is needed to decode the disconnects in your workplace? How can we use a universal language unencumbered by cultural baggage, business jargon, or the smokescreens employed by those who seek to obfuscate rather than illuminate when putting our business practices under the microscope.
In reexamining Collins’ words, I realized it was more than the wrong people. It’s wrong thinkers filling the wrong positions. What happens when the thinking in your business is wrong? Miscommunication and confusion during a time when the economy is at its most unforgiving.
What few people realize is that there are three distinct roles that compose any successful organization, and those roles are determined by “Ways” of thinking and communicating: Way One, the visionary; Way Two, the planner; and Way Three, the tactician. (See the featured image. The three “Ways” of thinking are one of the primary tools of the Return on Energy methodology which will guide our Fishbowl conversation. For a full introduction to ROE, click here or here.)
After all, if your business can’t even think straight…your chances at reaching your desired return on investment is just wishful thinking.
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