Realize Your Dreams Gym™
for
Business, Leadership and Life Mastery
Centre for Transformational Leadership™ . Centre for Entrepreneurial Excellence™ . Centre for Personal Excellence™
Mums At Work™ . Centre for Sports Excellence™ . Centre for Coaching Excellence™
for
Business, Leadership and Life Mastery
Centre for Transformational Leadership™ . Centre for Entrepreneurial Excellence™ . Centre for Personal Excellence™
Mums At Work™ . Centre for Sports Excellence™ . Centre for Coaching Excellence™
Learnings from Verne’s CEO Bootcamp at Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain
1. Jobs to be done by the CEOs
i. Strategy
ii. People – To get the right team. Right people doing the right things right. FACE and PACE tools helps with this
iii. Culture - A weekly message by the CEO to the whole organization is a powerful way to create the right culture
iv. Capital Allocation
2. Business Owners’ Job
i. Drive up the valuation of the business – Innovation is #1 driver for valuation.
ii. Choose the right CEO
3. Fear blocks creativity
4. FedEx Corporation has 7 businesses - FedEx Express, FedEx Ground, FedEx Freight, FedEx Services, FedEx Logistics, FedEx Office, and FedEx Dataworks.
The founder, Fred Smith, who stepped down as CEO of FedEx Corp to become executive chairman on 1-June-2022 and was replaced by Raj Subramaniam, had 3 rules while managing the 7 businesses:
i. We operate independently
ii. We decide collaboratively
iii. We compete collectively
He met his 7 CEOs in a weekly group meeting.
5. The CEO’s / founder’s strength will ultimately become the weakness of the business. They would have to pay a lot more to the person to take over their strength than what they would be able to stomach. And, that becomes a barrier for the business.
6. The CEO shouldn’t have a one-on-one with their direct reports. It is not an optimum use of their time. The leadership team members need coaching but it is not the CEO’s job to coach.
The CEOs need to be able to coach in a group. It is best to hire outside coaches to take care of the leadership team members’ development along with an outside coach for the CEO.
Don’t do one-on-one with your leadership team members as peer pressure works better for taking up accountability and delivering on it.
Not only are one-on-ones time consuming, they also enable people to get away from taking accountability and delivering on it.
Daily Huddles are most important for the CEOs. CEOs can sometimes skip the daily huddle but not the leadership team members.
7. An important question for the Business Owner – Am I in the right job? In other words, am I in the right box on the FACE tool?
8. Sell your business for strategic value, not financial value.
9. Great companies have two-thirds of their people on the Vision Summary. Good companies get one-thirds of their people on the Vision Summary.
10. Teams want the CEOs to show them the direction. Steve Jobs wanted to start Retail Stores. The Board and the entire leadership team was against that idea. Steve Jobs still went ahead with that.
The strategic vision belongs to the CEO. The CEO’s job is to define the vision and align the team to that.
11. The CEO has a Strategic Council, which is not more than 5 people. The CEO meets the Strategic Council weekly for at least 1 hour weekly, apart from the weekly meeting with the leadership team members.
CEOs need to work on strategy every week.
The Strategic Council gives inputs but the final decision is with the CEO.
You can have an external mentor in your Strategic Council.
Sheryl Sandberg was Mark Zuckerberg’s Strategic Council.
12. CEOs need a 3rd place apart from home and office – their Design Studio for strategy design.
13. CEOs need to realize that their employees are scared of you. Be vulnerable - I am wrestling with this. Sharing what’s on your mind calms your people. By sharing vulnerabilities, you build trust.
14. Cash: You have a super viable company if as your company grows, cash grows.
Good metrics to review:
i. What is your Gross Margin %age for the last 3 years?
ii. Gross Margin Rupees divided by Payroll for the last 3 years?
iii. EBIDTA over the last 3 years
Having a consistent growth is better than when you are all over the place.
15. Private Equity firms most value Gross Margin. Earnout should be tied to Gross Margin.
When Gross Margin is steadily increasing, the business has a much higher valuation.
16. You don’t have a strategy if you haven’t named it. Every military mission has a name.
Laxman Narasimhan recently joined Starbucks as chief executive. He undertook a six-month immersion program. As a part of the immersion, he got on-the-floor experience working as a barista working side by side with other baristas at multiple Starbucks locations across the globe, earning his barista certification along the way.
That gave him first-hand customer intelligence for identifying his strategy for growth which he has named as –
Triple Shot Re-invention Strategy:
i. 35,000 locations outside US by 2030
ii. $3 billion savings
iii. Wage increases for Baristas
As per him - As a business that is anchored in human connection, the opportunities that we have are limitless. But in order for us to get limitless, we need to confront what limits us.
Mark Zuckerberg named his 2023 Strategy as Year of Efficiency. In Jan 2024, shares of Meta Platforms are approaching the $1 trillion mark after its stock price gained 200% in 2023. His 2023 strategy has paid off.
17. Rule of Three
Our brains are geared toward pattern recognition. The rule of three is a principle that suggests that things arranged in threes are more satisfying, effective, and memorable than other numbers. This principle is used in various forms of communication, from storytelling to public speaking, advertising, and more.
The rule of three is effective for several reasons. It simplifies complex ideas and makes them more accessible to an audience. When we hear or read a list of three things, it’s easier for our brains to process and remember them. Three elements can create a sense of completeness and balance, instead of a pair, which can seem at odds with each other. It gives the audience a sense that they have heard everything they need to know about a particular topic.
Finally, the rule of three can create a rhythmic pattern that is pleasing to the ear. This makes it more memorable and enjoyable for the audience.
Laxman Narasimhan’s Triple Shot Re-invention Strategy is a perfect example of this principle.
Therefore, we have 3 brand promises in the Vision Summary. In the 3 brand promises, 2 promises are quite concrete and measurable. The 3rd tends to be soft, a feel-good promise and not necessarily measurable.
Examples of Brand Promises:
i. Starbucks: To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time.
ii. H&M: More fashion choices that are good for people, the planet and your wallet
iii. Marriott: Quiet luxury. Crafted experiences. Intuitive service.
iv. minimovers.com – Australia’s most recommended removalist:
a. Furniture in better shape – They actually dust / clean / repair the items they are shifting before delivering to the destination
b. On time
c. Be Nice.
v. Southwest Airlines: Their buyer persona is sales people, so they don’t charge change fee knowing that the sales people need that flexibility.
a. Low fares
b. Lots of flights
c. Have fun
Reference: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-life-hacks/writing/what-is-rule-of-three
18. If you can’t state your strategy simply, you don’t have a strategy.
19. Warren Buffet – The best protection against chaos is investing in your own skills.
Satya Nadella – The Learn-It-All does better than the Know-It-All.
The reason why Steve Job’s legacy continued way beyond him is Apple University, his biggest gift to Apple.
The learning mindset is key to business success.
20. As a Business Owner, you want to ensure that you are on none of the boxes in the FACE Tool at steady state.
i. Strategy
ii. People – To get the right team. Right people doing the right things right. FACE and PACE tools helps with this
iii. Culture - A weekly message by the CEO to the whole organization is a powerful way to create the right culture
iv. Capital Allocation
2. Business Owners’ Job
i. Drive up the valuation of the business – Innovation is #1 driver for valuation.
ii. Choose the right CEO
3. Fear blocks creativity
4. FedEx Corporation has 7 businesses - FedEx Express, FedEx Ground, FedEx Freight, FedEx Services, FedEx Logistics, FedEx Office, and FedEx Dataworks.
The founder, Fred Smith, who stepped down as CEO of FedEx Corp to become executive chairman on 1-June-2022 and was replaced by Raj Subramaniam, had 3 rules while managing the 7 businesses:
i. We operate independently
ii. We decide collaboratively
iii. We compete collectively
He met his 7 CEOs in a weekly group meeting.
5. The CEO’s / founder’s strength will ultimately become the weakness of the business. They would have to pay a lot more to the person to take over their strength than what they would be able to stomach. And, that becomes a barrier for the business.
6. The CEO shouldn’t have a one-on-one with their direct reports. It is not an optimum use of their time. The leadership team members need coaching but it is not the CEO’s job to coach.
The CEOs need to be able to coach in a group. It is best to hire outside coaches to take care of the leadership team members’ development along with an outside coach for the CEO.
Don’t do one-on-one with your leadership team members as peer pressure works better for taking up accountability and delivering on it.
Not only are one-on-ones time consuming, they also enable people to get away from taking accountability and delivering on it.
Daily Huddles are most important for the CEOs. CEOs can sometimes skip the daily huddle but not the leadership team members.
7. An important question for the Business Owner – Am I in the right job? In other words, am I in the right box on the FACE tool?
8. Sell your business for strategic value, not financial value.
9. Great companies have two-thirds of their people on the Vision Summary. Good companies get one-thirds of their people on the Vision Summary.
10. Teams want the CEOs to show them the direction. Steve Jobs wanted to start Retail Stores. The Board and the entire leadership team was against that idea. Steve Jobs still went ahead with that.
The strategic vision belongs to the CEO. The CEO’s job is to define the vision and align the team to that.
11. The CEO has a Strategic Council, which is not more than 5 people. The CEO meets the Strategic Council weekly for at least 1 hour weekly, apart from the weekly meeting with the leadership team members.
CEOs need to work on strategy every week.
The Strategic Council gives inputs but the final decision is with the CEO.
You can have an external mentor in your Strategic Council.
Sheryl Sandberg was Mark Zuckerberg’s Strategic Council.
12. CEOs need a 3rd place apart from home and office – their Design Studio for strategy design.
13. CEOs need to realize that their employees are scared of you. Be vulnerable - I am wrestling with this. Sharing what’s on your mind calms your people. By sharing vulnerabilities, you build trust.
14. Cash: You have a super viable company if as your company grows, cash grows.
Good metrics to review:
i. What is your Gross Margin %age for the last 3 years?
ii. Gross Margin Rupees divided by Payroll for the last 3 years?
iii. EBIDTA over the last 3 years
Having a consistent growth is better than when you are all over the place.
15. Private Equity firms most value Gross Margin. Earnout should be tied to Gross Margin.
When Gross Margin is steadily increasing, the business has a much higher valuation.
16. You don’t have a strategy if you haven’t named it. Every military mission has a name.
Laxman Narasimhan recently joined Starbucks as chief executive. He undertook a six-month immersion program. As a part of the immersion, he got on-the-floor experience working as a barista working side by side with other baristas at multiple Starbucks locations across the globe, earning his barista certification along the way.
That gave him first-hand customer intelligence for identifying his strategy for growth which he has named as –
Triple Shot Re-invention Strategy:
i. 35,000 locations outside US by 2030
ii. $3 billion savings
iii. Wage increases for Baristas
As per him - As a business that is anchored in human connection, the opportunities that we have are limitless. But in order for us to get limitless, we need to confront what limits us.
Mark Zuckerberg named his 2023 Strategy as Year of Efficiency. In Jan 2024, shares of Meta Platforms are approaching the $1 trillion mark after its stock price gained 200% in 2023. His 2023 strategy has paid off.
17. Rule of Three
Our brains are geared toward pattern recognition. The rule of three is a principle that suggests that things arranged in threes are more satisfying, effective, and memorable than other numbers. This principle is used in various forms of communication, from storytelling to public speaking, advertising, and more.
The rule of three is effective for several reasons. It simplifies complex ideas and makes them more accessible to an audience. When we hear or read a list of three things, it’s easier for our brains to process and remember them. Three elements can create a sense of completeness and balance, instead of a pair, which can seem at odds with each other. It gives the audience a sense that they have heard everything they need to know about a particular topic.
Finally, the rule of three can create a rhythmic pattern that is pleasing to the ear. This makes it more memorable and enjoyable for the audience.
Laxman Narasimhan’s Triple Shot Re-invention Strategy is a perfect example of this principle.
Therefore, we have 3 brand promises in the Vision Summary. In the 3 brand promises, 2 promises are quite concrete and measurable. The 3rd tends to be soft, a feel-good promise and not necessarily measurable.
Examples of Brand Promises:
i. Starbucks: To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time.
ii. H&M: More fashion choices that are good for people, the planet and your wallet
iii. Marriott: Quiet luxury. Crafted experiences. Intuitive service.
iv. minimovers.com – Australia’s most recommended removalist:
a. Furniture in better shape – They actually dust / clean / repair the items they are shifting before delivering to the destination
b. On time
c. Be Nice.
v. Southwest Airlines: Their buyer persona is sales people, so they don’t charge change fee knowing that the sales people need that flexibility.
a. Low fares
b. Lots of flights
c. Have fun
Reference: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-life-hacks/writing/what-is-rule-of-three
18. If you can’t state your strategy simply, you don’t have a strategy.
19. Warren Buffet – The best protection against chaos is investing in your own skills.
Satya Nadella – The Learn-It-All does better than the Know-It-All.
The reason why Steve Job’s legacy continued way beyond him is Apple University, his biggest gift to Apple.
The learning mindset is key to business success.
20. As a Business Owner, you want to ensure that you are on none of the boxes in the FACE Tool at steady state.
21. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. – African Proverb
It’s ultimately about taking your people along with you that you will build a great business.
22. You can’t overtake 15 cars in sunny weather … but you can when it’s raining. – Racing Legend Ayrton Senna
Bad times are opportunities to build a great business.
23. Our satisfactory results have been the product of about a dozen truly good decisions. That would be about one every five years. – Warren Buffet
Your every decision doesn’t need to be a truly good decision. So, don’t be tough on yourself and don’t doubt yourself and don’t beat yourself for making a decision that turned out bad in retrospect. Simply follow the right process for building a great business and take decisions based on what’s available in that moment with confidence and belief.
24. Routine sets you free. Mastery is about reviewing the fundamentals regularly. Repetition is your friend.
25. Marketing Strategy equals Strategy. That’s how important the marketing function is. That is why in the FACE tool, the head of marketing is right below the head of the company.
26. Focus groups don’t work. In the Apple focus group, people said they would like yellow iPods. As the focus group session was ending, the group was asked to pick up an iPod on their way out. Everyone picked up a white iPod.
What people do is more accurate of their behavior than what people say.
27. Understanding the Job to be Done by Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School Professor, Disruptive Innovation Expert
To be able to innovate their products / services for growth, it is important that the leaders understand what is the job that their products / services are doing for the customer.
Here’s why the Job to be Done idea is important for defining Strategy:
When you look at marketing and innovation through a Jobs-to-be-Done lens, everything looks different:
i. The unit of analysis is no longer the customer or the product, it’s the core functional “job” the customer is trying to get done.
ii. Markets aren’t defined around products, they are defined as groups of people trying to get a job done.
iii. Customers aren’t buyers, they are job executors.
iv. Needs aren’t vague, latent and unknowable, they are the metrics customers use to measure success when getting a job done.
v. Competitors aren’t companies that make products like yours, they are any solution being used to get the job done.
vi. Customer segments aren’t based on demographics or psychographics, they are based on how customers struggle differently to get a job done.
28. Understanding the job to be done makes innovation simple and effective.
Innovation drives valuation.
Customer Personas with a clear understanding of each persona’s job-to-be-done helps in understanding what to innovate.
McDonalds thought their job is to make milkshakes. They invested a huge amount trying to make better milkshakes without any increase in sales.
Through the job-to-be-done exercise, they realized their job was not to make milkshakes. They identified two buyer personas with each persona having a very different job-to-be-done.
Their first buyer persona was an early morning commuter who bought 50% of the milkshakes they sold before 8:30 am. The job they wanted their milkshake to do was to keep them engaged through the entire boring commute and to keep them full till 10:00 am. Therefore, it had to be thick for it to take a long time to finish as they sipped it through a thin straw and with enough quantity so that they were not hungry till 10:00 am, and not chunky otherwise it would get stuck in the straw.
Their 2nd buyer persona were mothers with kids on the way back from school at 3:00 pm. The job that the mothers wanted their milkshake to do was to give a treat to the kids without feeling guilty and for the kids to be still hungry for lunch when they reached home.
After understanding the buyer personas and the job-to-be-done, McDonalds was able to innovate their milkshakes that resulted in higher sales.
Youtube video on the above McDonalds example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stc0beAxavY
HBR References:
https://hbr.org/2002/01/turn-customer-input-into-innovation
https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done
Read the HBR articles to learn how to do the job-to-be-done exercise and for the B2B examples.
The Number 1 thing we have to do is to discover the Job To Be Done. From here, everything else emanates.
Brand Promise is a measure of the Job to be Done.
29. Understanding the job to be done makes innovation simple and effective. That is why in 3M, RnD and Marketing work closely together.
In the FACE tool, the functions that need to work together are placed next to each other.
30. Customer Intelligence is critical for defining the right strategy for growth. Starbucks CEO spent six months serving customers as a barista. Lyft CEO started his new role by jumping into the driver’s seat. Another CEO spends one day a week with Customer Service and has his programmers spend half day of the week with Customer Service to get on the ground feel of the customers.
31. How BHAG drives growth: For Red Balloon, their Profit / X (unit of economics) is Experience. Their original BHAG, created in 2005, was to serve 2 million experiences by 2015. They reached that in 2013. After that they lost steam and the business started to decline till in 2017 they created their next BHAG – to serve an experience sustainably every second by 2030. By 2020, they had already reached one experience every 34s and now they are at one experience every 18s.
Red Balloon use Scoreboard on their mobile devices besides big monitors in their offices.
Their Purpose is – We shift the way people experience life.
BHAG – Experiences per second
Profit / X – Profit per Experience
Job to be done - Experience
Observe how their Profit / X, BHAG, Purpose and Job-to-be-done connects on Experience. BHAG is a measure of Purpose and unit of measurement is X from Profit / X.
Examples:
i. Volvo – Safety
Their purpose is Safety. They patented the seat belt and gave it away to all car manufacturers in alignment with their purpose.
ii. Google – Search
iii. Red Balloon – Experience
iv. 3M – Science
v. McDonalds - Fast
32. If you can boil your business to 1 word, that’s a Wow. If in the core values, BHAG, Job to be done, purpose, brand-promises - the same word or phrase shows up.
It would be evident on the Vision Summary if there’s a horizontal alignment and a vertical alignment.
Vertical Alignment
33. No. 1 job to be done by Strategy is to define the Brand Promise, which is the job to be done from the customer’s perspective.
Reminder of what is Michael Porter’s definition of Strategy – Strategy describes how a company creates a unique and valuable position through a set of differentiating actions.
Unique and valuable position is that one key word / key phrase.
Buyer Personas, Job-to-be-done, BHAG all determine what is the strategy.
34. It’s impossible to 30X a business doing it the same way you’ve been doing it.
It’s impossible to 10X a business doing it the same way you’ve been doing it.
35. If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask… for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes. – Albert Einstein
We have the answers, all the answers, it’s the question we do not know.
We need to spend a lot more time inquiring into what is the real problem we are solving, than immediately picking up the surface problem to solve because we may spend our time trying to solve the wrong problem, keeping the business struggling in mediocrity.
36. Appletree in the call-center industry plagued with historically extremely high-levels of attrition reduced their turnover from 200% to 18% and increased profit from 4% to 21% using the Scaling-up methodology growing 30X in 7 years. The business was sold at 14X Earnings.
37. The scaling-up flywheel
Reminder of what is Michael Porter’s definition of Strategy – Strategy describes how a company creates a unique and valuable position through a set of differentiating actions.
Unique and valuable position is that one key word / key phrase.
Buyer Personas, Job-to-be-done, BHAG all determine what is the strategy.
34. It’s impossible to 30X a business doing it the same way you’ve been doing it.
It’s impossible to 10X a business doing it the same way you’ve been doing it.
35. If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask… for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes. – Albert Einstein
We have the answers, all the answers, it’s the question we do not know.
We need to spend a lot more time inquiring into what is the real problem we are solving, than immediately picking up the surface problem to solve because we may spend our time trying to solve the wrong problem, keeping the business struggling in mediocrity.
36. Appletree in the call-center industry plagued with historically extremely high-levels of attrition reduced their turnover from 200% to 18% and increased profit from 4% to 21% using the Scaling-up methodology growing 30X in 7 years. The business was sold at 14X Earnings.
37. The scaling-up flywheel
If there’s an issue with Execution, it is likely that the Strategy is the issue.
If there’s a problem with Strategy, it is likely that the problem is not having the right people at the right jobs doing the right things.
If there is an issue with cash, there’s likely to be a gap in execution.
If there is an issue with People, there’s likely to be an issue with cash.
Ultimately, get started somewhere. Like a crossword, pick up the piece which is easiest to solve. Get started first, then get it right. Do 90-day iterations with the scaling-up tools.
You can’t change the way people think. All you can do is give them a tool, the use of which will change their thinking. - Richard Buckminster Fuller, an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer and inventor.
38. From a Lean Start-up (Mountain 1 to Mountain 2 in RYD Business Excellence journey) to an Agile Scale-up (Mountain 3 to Mountain 4 in the RYD Business Excellence journey), there is a chasm that the founder needs to jump.
(Mountain 5 of the RYD Business Excellence is when the company has cut-over to being a great business.)
If there’s a problem with Strategy, it is likely that the problem is not having the right people at the right jobs doing the right things.
If there is an issue with cash, there’s likely to be a gap in execution.
If there is an issue with People, there’s likely to be an issue with cash.
Ultimately, get started somewhere. Like a crossword, pick up the piece which is easiest to solve. Get started first, then get it right. Do 90-day iterations with the scaling-up tools.
You can’t change the way people think. All you can do is give them a tool, the use of which will change their thinking. - Richard Buckminster Fuller, an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer and inventor.
38. From a Lean Start-up (Mountain 1 to Mountain 2 in RYD Business Excellence journey) to an Agile Scale-up (Mountain 3 to Mountain 4 in the RYD Business Excellence journey), there is a chasm that the founder needs to jump.
(Mountain 5 of the RYD Business Excellence is when the company has cut-over to being a great business.)
Before the chasm, the founder says Yes to pretty much everything. After becoming an Agile Scale-up, the founder has to say No 20 to 30 times more often than Yes.
Steve Jobs had a Stop Doing List, instead of a Start Doing List.
39. Change Testimonials on your website, which founders miss to do. The first set of customers will turn-off current mainstream customers. (#RYDAction)
40. Don’t discount learning from other industries and applying to your own. The learning that Steve Jobs took from Pixar to Apple is that build only great products.
Spend 1 day a year in a different industry.
41. The Goal: A Process for Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
This book on Theory of Constraints should be read once a year.
Control the constraint in your industry that gives you a competitive advantage so that you can build a moat around the business.
Softsoap innovated handwash pumps. The spring-pump on the liquid soap dispenser was manufactured by one company. The entrepreneur, Robert Taylor, bought the entire supply of spring pumps for the whole year that other big players in the industry could not copy his innovation for a year. Colgate Palmolive ultimately bought Softsoap from him and Unilever bought the rest of his company 2 years later.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/business/robert-taylor-who-put-hand-soap-in-a-bottle-dies-at-77.html
Constraint of the electric car industry is batteries. Elon Musk is silently strengthening his business in that space.
# Key Question: What is the 1 constraint to get to your BHAG, 3 years and 1 year Goals?
What is needed is single minded focus on owning the solution to the industry constraint.
42. Scale by going down the mountains, along with the river. Find the easy path.
Gear 1 to Gear 3 of the RYD Leadership Depth journey, Mountain 1 to Mountain 3 of the Business Excellence Journey and Stage 1 to Stage 3 of the Craft Mastery journey is like climbing up the Mountain to reach the summit. From Gear 3 to Gear 5, from Mountain 3 to Mountain 5 and from Stage 3 to Stage 5 is like flowing along with the river down the mountains to become the ocean of greatness.
The important milestone is jumping the chasm from Gear 2 (Being of Service) to Gear 3 (Childlike Trust and Faith), Mountain 2 (Lean Start-up) to Mountain 3 (Agile Scale-up) and Stage 2 (Active Learning) to Stage 3 (Expert – 1st stage of Thought Leadership). It requires courage to jump that chasm but RYD is the safety net.
43. The Greatness Flywheel by building a Learning Organization – It’s all about learning, deciding what and how to implement, and then acting based on that. Learn from the implementation and other inputs, decide, act and continue the cycle ad infinitum.
Steve Jobs had a Stop Doing List, instead of a Start Doing List.
39. Change Testimonials on your website, which founders miss to do. The first set of customers will turn-off current mainstream customers. (#RYDAction)
40. Don’t discount learning from other industries and applying to your own. The learning that Steve Jobs took from Pixar to Apple is that build only great products.
Spend 1 day a year in a different industry.
41. The Goal: A Process for Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
This book on Theory of Constraints should be read once a year.
Control the constraint in your industry that gives you a competitive advantage so that you can build a moat around the business.
Softsoap innovated handwash pumps. The spring-pump on the liquid soap dispenser was manufactured by one company. The entrepreneur, Robert Taylor, bought the entire supply of spring pumps for the whole year that other big players in the industry could not copy his innovation for a year. Colgate Palmolive ultimately bought Softsoap from him and Unilever bought the rest of his company 2 years later.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/business/robert-taylor-who-put-hand-soap-in-a-bottle-dies-at-77.html
Constraint of the electric car industry is batteries. Elon Musk is silently strengthening his business in that space.
# Key Question: What is the 1 constraint to get to your BHAG, 3 years and 1 year Goals?
What is needed is single minded focus on owning the solution to the industry constraint.
42. Scale by going down the mountains, along with the river. Find the easy path.
Gear 1 to Gear 3 of the RYD Leadership Depth journey, Mountain 1 to Mountain 3 of the Business Excellence Journey and Stage 1 to Stage 3 of the Craft Mastery journey is like climbing up the Mountain to reach the summit. From Gear 3 to Gear 5, from Mountain 3 to Mountain 5 and from Stage 3 to Stage 5 is like flowing along with the river down the mountains to become the ocean of greatness.
The important milestone is jumping the chasm from Gear 2 (Being of Service) to Gear 3 (Childlike Trust and Faith), Mountain 2 (Lean Start-up) to Mountain 3 (Agile Scale-up) and Stage 2 (Active Learning) to Stage 3 (Expert – 1st stage of Thought Leadership). It requires courage to jump that chasm but RYD is the safety net.
43. The Greatness Flywheel by building a Learning Organization – It’s all about learning, deciding what and how to implement, and then acting based on that. Learn from the implementation and other inputs, decide, act and continue the cycle ad infinitum.
44. Implement Cash Flow Story for coachees to help track increase in business value to put a metric for measuring the brand promise – lead your business from good to great. (#RYDAction)
45. Key to success in markets is Intel.
That is why customer and employee data is part of the Weekly Meeting.
i. On taking over as the CEO of Lyft, David Risher jumped into the driver’s seat to meet and get to know the customers first hand. He drives the cab every Sunday to get market intelligence.
ii. Laxman Srinivasan, the new CEO of Starbucks, spent six months in his first year working as a Barista serving their customers.
iii. AirbBnB’s CEO spent 6 months living in his company’s rentals - and found the core problem with his business
iv. Roger Hardy, Chairman and CEO of Coastal Contacts Inc, a web-only retailer that sells contact lenses and eye-glasses put his entire leadership team on a diet of market intelligence. Each leadership team member had calls with customers. Through this focus on collecting market intelligence, the leadership team uncovered the #1 Job to be Done by contact lens – I need it next day. They innovated their offering to include over-night delivery. 60% business grew as a result. Roger Hardy made a very successful exit by signing a deal with Essilor.
This is equally valid for B2B businesses as much for B2C businesses. Read the HBR article shared earlier under the Job-to-be-done section for examples from B2B businesses.
How much time do you spend with your customers getting a first-hand feel of the customers?
If your business is struggling, the answers are likely to be with your customers than inside your business.
46. Weekly Meeting Agenda
Good News – 5 mins
Customers and Employee Data – 10 minutes
Priorities and the numbers (financials) – 10 minutes
If the weekly meeting is not lead by customer and employee data, the weekly meeting ends up adding no real value.
47. Important article to read for all CEOs - https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/what-every-ceo-should-know-about-generative-ai#/
A small business owner paid students from the Data Analytics department of local Universities USD 10,000 to get him answers to his business problems using generative AI:
i. Where do I put up my warehouse?
ii. What could be the next innovative product to put in the market?
iii. What could be the questions for their chatbot Olivia?
You can be innovative to use AI at a low cost instead of building expensive capability inhouse.
48. Difference between Traditional AI and Generative AI:
Traditional AI, often called Narrow or Weak AI, focuses on performing a specific task intelligently. It refers to systems designed to respond to a particular set of inputs. These systems have the capability to learn from data and make decisions or predictions based on that data. Traditional AI is like a master strategist who can make smart decisions within a specific set of rules. Examples of traditional AIs are voice assistants like Siri or Alexa, recommendation engines on Netflix or Amazon, or Google's search algorithm. These AIs have been trained to follow specific rules, do a particular job, and do it well, but they don’t create anything new.
Generative AI, on the other hand, can be thought of as the next generation of artificial intelligence. It's a form of AI that can create something new. Suppose you have a friend who loves telling stories. But instead of a human friend, you have an AI. You give this AI a starting line, say, 'Once upon a time, in a galaxy far away...'. The AI takes that line and generates a whole space adventure story, complete with characters, plot twists, and a thrilling conclusion. The AI creates something new from the piece of information you gave it. This is a basic example of Generative AI. It's like an imaginative friend who can come up with original, creative content. What’s more, today’s generative AI can not only create text outputs, but also images, music and even computer code. Generative AI models are trained on a set of data and learn the underlying patterns to generate new data that mirrors the training set.
The main difference between traditional AI and generative AI lies in their capabilities and application. Traditional AI systems are primarily used to analyze data and make predictions, while generative AI goes a step further by creating new data similar to its training data.
Article Reference: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2023/07/24/the-difference-between-generative-ai-and-traditional-ai-an-easy-explanation-for-anyone/?sh=4393e611508a
Power and Prediction: The disruptive economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Avi Goldfarb, Joshua Gans
Power is in answering the question – Where do we need efficiency? Generative AI would be used to answer this question.
Prediction is in answering the question – Where knowing sooner than later will save us money? Traditional AI would be used for answering this question.
49. The world GDP in 2000 was USD 34 Trillion and in 2023, the world GDP was USD 104 Trillion. The world economy grew by 200% in the last 23 years and at the same rate of growth, the world economy will become USD 312 Trillion creating room for more USD Trillion businesses by 2046.
Can India birth these USD Trillion Dollar giants to be the world’s most developed, beautiful, greenest nation in the world?
I believe we can. The economists of the world have declared that this is India’s century. All we need to do is to play the game to have a chance at winning.
50. Horse from a beast of burden to a super star – Today, the global Equine Industry is USD 300 Billion dollars while the industry had nearly vanished on the onset of cars and other motorized transportation.
If the equine industry can be re-invented, any industry can be.
Play to Win, not play to Not Lose.
51. The goal of implementing the scaling-up methodology is:
i. Reduce by 80% the time it takes to manage the business
ii. More market-facing activities
iii. Get everyone aligned and on the same page
If implemented fully, the scaling-up methodology would:
i. 2X Cashflow
ii. 3X Industry Average Profitability
iii. 10X Valuation
52. Key question in scaling-up People – Would you enthusiastically rehire?
53. Strength is what gives you energy. Weakness is which reduces your energy.
What gives you energy?
What reduces your energy?
54. From Gary Hamel’s interview with Jim Clifton, Chairman of Gallup on what drives employee engagement
i. Nobody wants a manager.
ii. Everybody wants to be coached.
Jack Daly, leading global Sales Trainer has recommended that Sales Manager be replaced with Sales Coach.
iii. Do I have a good friend at work? Having friends at work is the reason for employee retention and employee engagement. Use employee referral programs to get people to get their friends and family as co-workers.
Jack Daly, leading global Sales Trainer has recommended that Sales Manager be replaced with Sales Coach.
55. Aubrey Daniels, author of Bringing Out the Best in People (How to Apply the Astonishing Power of Positive Reinforcemen), says that when a team member or an employee or your kid does something good, instead of just saying Well-Done or complementing, ask the question –
How did you do it?
Answering that question, the positive behavior gets reinforced. Not only are they are emotionally set-up to do even better, they also review the process that they gave them the success giving them a structure for ongoing success.
Examples:
A new client got signed by a team member, ask enthusiastically – Awesome, how did you do it? Then, give committed listening.
Your kid won a match, ask encouragingly – Awesome. How did you do it? Then, give committed listening.
As they share in your committed listening, you build them up to do even better.
As a CEO, you win when you talk the least.
55. People need boundaries. Without boundaries, business won’t be a sport. It would instead be a chaos. Sports is fun because there are rules of the game. The rules of the game of the great sport of business are – Values, Purpose, Brand Promises.
56. The bottleneck in the growth of the business is between the business owner’s / CEO’s ears.
57. Marketing is the most important function. 1 hour weekly should be scheduled for Marketing alone. This meeting is separate from the Sales Meeting.
58. Important question to reflect on – What are the top 25 / 250 relationships / brands / influencers that you need to bolt on for your success?
Make that list today and build one relationship at a time.
Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. There is no need to read the book. Just use the idea in the title.
59. Zingerman’s Delicatessen generates USD 80 million from a single location. The owner has a rule – You see it. You own it. It doesn’t mean you have to do it.
Anyone who comes to him with a problem gets that as a project to lead.
He has a process for it:
Step 1: Envisioned future – What is your end-state vision for the solution of this problem?
Step 2: Who are the people that will get impacted by the new solution?
Step 3: Meet the impacted people and get their buy-in for the new solution.
Step 4: If everyone impacted or touched by the new solution is aligned, lead the project to deliver on the solution.
He has 800 employees. Through the above process, he has 800 change agents.
60. Any organization has two demands on it – People and Process.
45. Key to success in markets is Intel.
That is why customer and employee data is part of the Weekly Meeting.
i. On taking over as the CEO of Lyft, David Risher jumped into the driver’s seat to meet and get to know the customers first hand. He drives the cab every Sunday to get market intelligence.
ii. Laxman Srinivasan, the new CEO of Starbucks, spent six months in his first year working as a Barista serving their customers.
iii. AirbBnB’s CEO spent 6 months living in his company’s rentals - and found the core problem with his business
iv. Roger Hardy, Chairman and CEO of Coastal Contacts Inc, a web-only retailer that sells contact lenses and eye-glasses put his entire leadership team on a diet of market intelligence. Each leadership team member had calls with customers. Through this focus on collecting market intelligence, the leadership team uncovered the #1 Job to be Done by contact lens – I need it next day. They innovated their offering to include over-night delivery. 60% business grew as a result. Roger Hardy made a very successful exit by signing a deal with Essilor.
This is equally valid for B2B businesses as much for B2C businesses. Read the HBR article shared earlier under the Job-to-be-done section for examples from B2B businesses.
How much time do you spend with your customers getting a first-hand feel of the customers?
If your business is struggling, the answers are likely to be with your customers than inside your business.
46. Weekly Meeting Agenda
Good News – 5 mins
Customers and Employee Data – 10 minutes
Priorities and the numbers (financials) – 10 minutes
If the weekly meeting is not lead by customer and employee data, the weekly meeting ends up adding no real value.
47. Important article to read for all CEOs - https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/what-every-ceo-should-know-about-generative-ai#/
A small business owner paid students from the Data Analytics department of local Universities USD 10,000 to get him answers to his business problems using generative AI:
i. Where do I put up my warehouse?
ii. What could be the next innovative product to put in the market?
iii. What could be the questions for their chatbot Olivia?
You can be innovative to use AI at a low cost instead of building expensive capability inhouse.
48. Difference between Traditional AI and Generative AI:
Traditional AI, often called Narrow or Weak AI, focuses on performing a specific task intelligently. It refers to systems designed to respond to a particular set of inputs. These systems have the capability to learn from data and make decisions or predictions based on that data. Traditional AI is like a master strategist who can make smart decisions within a specific set of rules. Examples of traditional AIs are voice assistants like Siri or Alexa, recommendation engines on Netflix or Amazon, or Google's search algorithm. These AIs have been trained to follow specific rules, do a particular job, and do it well, but they don’t create anything new.
Generative AI, on the other hand, can be thought of as the next generation of artificial intelligence. It's a form of AI that can create something new. Suppose you have a friend who loves telling stories. But instead of a human friend, you have an AI. You give this AI a starting line, say, 'Once upon a time, in a galaxy far away...'. The AI takes that line and generates a whole space adventure story, complete with characters, plot twists, and a thrilling conclusion. The AI creates something new from the piece of information you gave it. This is a basic example of Generative AI. It's like an imaginative friend who can come up with original, creative content. What’s more, today’s generative AI can not only create text outputs, but also images, music and even computer code. Generative AI models are trained on a set of data and learn the underlying patterns to generate new data that mirrors the training set.
The main difference between traditional AI and generative AI lies in their capabilities and application. Traditional AI systems are primarily used to analyze data and make predictions, while generative AI goes a step further by creating new data similar to its training data.
Article Reference: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2023/07/24/the-difference-between-generative-ai-and-traditional-ai-an-easy-explanation-for-anyone/?sh=4393e611508a
Power and Prediction: The disruptive economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Avi Goldfarb, Joshua Gans
Power is in answering the question – Where do we need efficiency? Generative AI would be used to answer this question.
Prediction is in answering the question – Where knowing sooner than later will save us money? Traditional AI would be used for answering this question.
49. The world GDP in 2000 was USD 34 Trillion and in 2023, the world GDP was USD 104 Trillion. The world economy grew by 200% in the last 23 years and at the same rate of growth, the world economy will become USD 312 Trillion creating room for more USD Trillion businesses by 2046.
Can India birth these USD Trillion Dollar giants to be the world’s most developed, beautiful, greenest nation in the world?
I believe we can. The economists of the world have declared that this is India’s century. All we need to do is to play the game to have a chance at winning.
50. Horse from a beast of burden to a super star – Today, the global Equine Industry is USD 300 Billion dollars while the industry had nearly vanished on the onset of cars and other motorized transportation.
If the equine industry can be re-invented, any industry can be.
Play to Win, not play to Not Lose.
51. The goal of implementing the scaling-up methodology is:
i. Reduce by 80% the time it takes to manage the business
ii. More market-facing activities
iii. Get everyone aligned and on the same page
If implemented fully, the scaling-up methodology would:
i. 2X Cashflow
ii. 3X Industry Average Profitability
iii. 10X Valuation
52. Key question in scaling-up People – Would you enthusiastically rehire?
53. Strength is what gives you energy. Weakness is which reduces your energy.
What gives you energy?
What reduces your energy?
54. From Gary Hamel’s interview with Jim Clifton, Chairman of Gallup on what drives employee engagement
i. Nobody wants a manager.
ii. Everybody wants to be coached.
Jack Daly, leading global Sales Trainer has recommended that Sales Manager be replaced with Sales Coach.
iii. Do I have a good friend at work? Having friends at work is the reason for employee retention and employee engagement. Use employee referral programs to get people to get their friends and family as co-workers.
Jack Daly, leading global Sales Trainer has recommended that Sales Manager be replaced with Sales Coach.
55. Aubrey Daniels, author of Bringing Out the Best in People (How to Apply the Astonishing Power of Positive Reinforcemen), says that when a team member or an employee or your kid does something good, instead of just saying Well-Done or complementing, ask the question –
How did you do it?
Answering that question, the positive behavior gets reinforced. Not only are they are emotionally set-up to do even better, they also review the process that they gave them the success giving them a structure for ongoing success.
Examples:
A new client got signed by a team member, ask enthusiastically – Awesome, how did you do it? Then, give committed listening.
Your kid won a match, ask encouragingly – Awesome. How did you do it? Then, give committed listening.
As they share in your committed listening, you build them up to do even better.
As a CEO, you win when you talk the least.
55. People need boundaries. Without boundaries, business won’t be a sport. It would instead be a chaos. Sports is fun because there are rules of the game. The rules of the game of the great sport of business are – Values, Purpose, Brand Promises.
56. The bottleneck in the growth of the business is between the business owner’s / CEO’s ears.
57. Marketing is the most important function. 1 hour weekly should be scheduled for Marketing alone. This meeting is separate from the Sales Meeting.
58. Important question to reflect on – What are the top 25 / 250 relationships / brands / influencers that you need to bolt on for your success?
Make that list today and build one relationship at a time.
Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. There is no need to read the book. Just use the idea in the title.
59. Zingerman’s Delicatessen generates USD 80 million from a single location. The owner has a rule – You see it. You own it. It doesn’t mean you have to do it.
Anyone who comes to him with a problem gets that as a project to lead.
He has a process for it:
Step 1: Envisioned future – What is your end-state vision for the solution of this problem?
Step 2: Who are the people that will get impacted by the new solution?
Step 3: Meet the impacted people and get their buy-in for the new solution.
Step 4: If everyone impacted or touched by the new solution is aligned, lead the project to deliver on the solution.
He has 800 employees. Through the above process, he has 800 change agents.
60. Any organization has two demands on it – People and Process.
Employee Experience + Customer Experience = Shareholder Experience
FACE tool is about arriving at the Right People doing the Right Things Right.
FACE tool is about arriving at the Right People doing the Right Things Right.
FACE Tool is needed for each Business Unit.
61. CISCO has been the Best Place to Work for the last 3 Years.
Employees don’t want to be employees, they don’t want to work for managers, and they don’t want to work for executives. They want to be human beings who work for (probably ‘with’ would be more accurate) other human beings. – Chuck Robbins, CEO, CISCO
62. Scaling-up Compensation by Verne Harnish
i. Be different
ii. Fairness not sameness
iii. Easy on the carrots
iv. Gamify gains
v. Sharing is caring
Code for I want to make more money? – What is my career plan?
The role of a compensation system is to incentivize behaviors in your employees that your customers appreciate and make them reach for their wallets.
63. Scott Fuquar, CEO, Altassian, a USD 3.5 Billion dollar global business has asked their managers to get back to programming.
Haier has 74,000 employees has cut down 10,000 middle managers and created 4000 micro-enterprises.
64. 1 great employee can do the work of 3 good employees.
Do you want less people paid more?
Or
Do you want more people paid less?
65. Bonus should be paid only once a year. Mini-movers in Australia pay only 50% of the bonus and the other 50% is vested over the next 5 years. That money is paid on employment anniversaries and they don’t even pay interest on the deferred bonus.
Why this ensures retention is because of the principle shared by Robert Cialdini, the Master of the psychology of influence – People do more to avoid a loss than get a gain.
Mini-movers – another compensation strategy: They are in the business of moving houses. The irritation for the customers is breakage. They used to pay 4% to the Insurance Company to take care of payments to the customers on account of breakages. They decided to create a 4% bonus pool for the employees instead of paying 4% to the Insurance Company. If anything breaks, it comes from this pool. Because of this compensation strategy, the employees work together to ensure that there are no breakages. This compensation system creates a positive peer pressure to deliver on the brand promise.
Having a company-wide bonus pool is a good idea to encourage collaboration to deliver on the brand promises.
66. You can generally premium price anything by 9%.
When you have built a strong brand because you consistently deliver on your brand promise, you can not only charge a premium but your marketing costs also come down.
This is how you transform a vicious cycle of being a struggling business to a virtuous cycle of value creation.
67. Every decision including Compensation has to emanate from the Job To Be Done.
68. Why do we lose our new people? Usually existing team members don’t leave and there is a lot of churn in the new team members.
Companies treat new customers way better than the old customers. Companies treat new employees way better than the old employees.
The new employees go through a period of suffering (a version of Hell Week) psychologically imposed upon them by the old employees.
Sapient co-founders created an On-boarding Bootcamp that had the newbies serve the old employees for ensuring cultural integration.
A team of 3 newbies are given an internal project that will get completed in 5 days. These internal projects de-hassle existing processes contributing to existing employees. On Friday, when the project is completed, the rest of the company celebrates the newbies. The only way you know you have hired the right person is when you work with them. During these 5 days, bonding happens between old employees and newbies as the newbies have to interface with old employees to get the internal project completed in 5 days. The newbies are also 90% ready to start immediately contributing after the on-boarding bootcamp.
Zappos pay newbies to leave if they identify a cultural misalignment within 3 weeks of the onboarding process as part of which the newbies are asked to also do 9 pm customer service calls, irrespective of the level of the employee.
A commercial landscaping company would give landscape projects for their own office premises as part of the onboarding process which would also include painting the equipment. It didn’t matter even if the new hire was a VP. Senior leaders went through the same onboarding process.
69. After 40-50 employees, the culture begins to get impacted.
70. Biggest mistake that service companies make is that they don’t sub-brand. You can sub-brand a delivery approach or a sales approach or a design approach. This kind of sub-branding differentiates you.
Sapient’s Brand Promises are – On-time and on-budget. But, 90% software project in the industry are over-budget and over-time, primarily because the customers don’t have clarity on the specifications and / or keep changing them.
Sapient created a sub-brand QUAD which was a 5-day Bootcamp with their clients and their clients to generate a specification document and charged USD 50,000 for it. They not only ensured better quality business specifications for controlling the project cost but also turned a cost into a revenue stream.
They also created another service for 5 weeks for Design Specifications at USD 250,000.
Their clients were happy because this gave them predictability both on time and on cost.
71. Robert Cialdini (master of the psychology of influence) Insight – Every time you quote a price, make it an absolutely an odd number like 2073.50 because it is hard to negotiate if you are that precise.
72. Psychology plays an important role.
When we look right, it generates trust in us.
Mini-movers would park their trucks on the right as part of their operational process with the logo facing the house of the customer so that when the customer came out to open the door, they would look right to see the logo.
In their culture, friends knock on the door and strangers ring the bell. As part of their operations manual, the team members were instructed to knock on the door instead of ringing the bell and were asked to step back precisely 2 steps, not 3, not 1 after knocking because 3 steps away would be the space of a stranger and 1 step away was too close in the personal space.
This amount of detailing in the Operations Manual creates operational excellence. Otherwise, there’s a lot of drama in running the business.
73. Hiring strategies
Find a fishing hole to pick people from.
i. Michael Dell, all of 19 years, hired 2-3 people from Kodak which was laying off people. Those 2-3 people pulled more people who were getting laid off from Kodak. When he wanted to hire leaders, he developed a relationship with professors in MIT, Sloan. He hired 1-2 fresh MBAs from there who pulled more from there.
ii. Carpet company was looking for hiring sales people. They couldn’t afford to pay more to attract sales people from competition. Since their buyer persona was women and because buying carpet is a fashion statement, they hired the top sales people from the shoe industry who were happy to change industries as selling carpets gave them higher earning potential than selling shoes.
iii. Worst place to hire from is from competition. Toyota never hires from other auto manufacturers.
iv. Another business only hires student athletes. The business owner is graduate of University of Michigan which has a separate placement cell for student athletes.
v. City Bin, a garbage collection company in Ireland. Their problem was to hire the Garbage Pick-up men. The founder asked who loves this job. They found a man who was training in the gym for a kick-boxing championship. They went to the gyms to hire Driver’s Assistants (re-branding Garbage Pick-up men) inviting gym enthusiasts interested in getting paid while working out, branding the Driver’s Assistants job as ideal for athletes interested in maximizing their training schedule.
Through this strategy, they scaled from 60 employees to 1600 employees.
vi. Allied Printers’ entire sales team are ex-professional athletes. Not only the bonding is amazing but their clients also like to be called upon by the ex-professional athletes. Allied printers gave them an earning potential from USD 60,000 to USD 600,000 based on their sales, an amazing earning opportunity for these ex-athletes after their sporting career.
74. Job description is a waste of time as it is based only on skills. Topgrading Score-card is the way to go. Topgrading is a hiring and promoting method with 90% success rate globally on how to hire, coach and keep A players.
i. Topgrading scorecard
ii. Screening interview
iii. Tandem Interview
iv. TORC Technique (Reference Check)
An A player for your organization is the best person you can afford.
Even if you have one applicant, even then put them through the Topgrading process.
It may feel time-consuming to hire a person through this process but it saves a lot of time, money and effort because you hire the right person through this process.
In the Topgrading Process, the interview process is 4 to 8 hours long and 2 hours for others. Such long interviews help because:
i. You can’t fake for that long
ii. The person who is getting interviewed feels respected
iii. It calms down introverts
When you make it difficult to hire, when someone gets hired, they feel chosen.
75. John Ratliff of Appletree had an online form for screening candidates with the first question as – These are our values. Give us examples where you lived these values.
He made this question Optional. Two-thirds of the applicants did not answer this question. Only one-third who did answer this question made it to the next round. This was an elimination question.
76. Elon Musk was kicked out of Paypal. He went back to each co-founder – Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman and said – Let bygones be bygones. I still want to be friends. Let’s have dinner.
When later Elon was broke, Reid and Peter gave him USD 20 million.
It pays to maintain good relationships and recreate them, even if there’s bad blood.
77. CEO is the Chief Energy Officer.
Every decision you make lowers or increases the energy of the organization.
78. Marcus Buckingham, author of Go, Put your Strengths to Work – Good leaders play checkers - hire same kind of people. Great leaders play chess – hire different kinds of people.
79. Get your team to do the Love-Loathe exercise – Which parts of your job you love? Which parts of your job you loathe?
i. 25% of both sides, no one has to do anymore.
ii. Find someone who loves to do which someone else loathes.
4 engineers wanted 1 more engineer on their team. Three of them loathed client meetings, while one of them loved to do client meetings discovered through the Love-Loathe exercise.
The 3 engineers focused only on coding and could do more of that as they got extra bandwidth by the 4th engineer taking away their client meeting work.
The work that required 5 engineers is now being done by 4 engineers.
The salary of the the 5th proposed engineer – half of it went back to the company, the other half was used to increase the salary of the 4 engineers who were inspired to do more work not only because they were now doing more of what they loved but also because they were paid more.
80. In order of importance for employees – Pay, Purpose, Culture and Caring
81. Processes deliver value for employees, shareholders and customers; and are captured through the PACE tool.
61. CISCO has been the Best Place to Work for the last 3 Years.
Employees don’t want to be employees, they don’t want to work for managers, and they don’t want to work for executives. They want to be human beings who work for (probably ‘with’ would be more accurate) other human beings. – Chuck Robbins, CEO, CISCO
62. Scaling-up Compensation by Verne Harnish
i. Be different
ii. Fairness not sameness
iii. Easy on the carrots
iv. Gamify gains
v. Sharing is caring
Code for I want to make more money? – What is my career plan?
The role of a compensation system is to incentivize behaviors in your employees that your customers appreciate and make them reach for their wallets.
63. Scott Fuquar, CEO, Altassian, a USD 3.5 Billion dollar global business has asked their managers to get back to programming.
Haier has 74,000 employees has cut down 10,000 middle managers and created 4000 micro-enterprises.
64. 1 great employee can do the work of 3 good employees.
Do you want less people paid more?
Or
Do you want more people paid less?
65. Bonus should be paid only once a year. Mini-movers in Australia pay only 50% of the bonus and the other 50% is vested over the next 5 years. That money is paid on employment anniversaries and they don’t even pay interest on the deferred bonus.
Why this ensures retention is because of the principle shared by Robert Cialdini, the Master of the psychology of influence – People do more to avoid a loss than get a gain.
Mini-movers – another compensation strategy: They are in the business of moving houses. The irritation for the customers is breakage. They used to pay 4% to the Insurance Company to take care of payments to the customers on account of breakages. They decided to create a 4% bonus pool for the employees instead of paying 4% to the Insurance Company. If anything breaks, it comes from this pool. Because of this compensation strategy, the employees work together to ensure that there are no breakages. This compensation system creates a positive peer pressure to deliver on the brand promise.
Having a company-wide bonus pool is a good idea to encourage collaboration to deliver on the brand promises.
66. You can generally premium price anything by 9%.
When you have built a strong brand because you consistently deliver on your brand promise, you can not only charge a premium but your marketing costs also come down.
This is how you transform a vicious cycle of being a struggling business to a virtuous cycle of value creation.
67. Every decision including Compensation has to emanate from the Job To Be Done.
68. Why do we lose our new people? Usually existing team members don’t leave and there is a lot of churn in the new team members.
Companies treat new customers way better than the old customers. Companies treat new employees way better than the old employees.
The new employees go through a period of suffering (a version of Hell Week) psychologically imposed upon them by the old employees.
Sapient co-founders created an On-boarding Bootcamp that had the newbies serve the old employees for ensuring cultural integration.
A team of 3 newbies are given an internal project that will get completed in 5 days. These internal projects de-hassle existing processes contributing to existing employees. On Friday, when the project is completed, the rest of the company celebrates the newbies. The only way you know you have hired the right person is when you work with them. During these 5 days, bonding happens between old employees and newbies as the newbies have to interface with old employees to get the internal project completed in 5 days. The newbies are also 90% ready to start immediately contributing after the on-boarding bootcamp.
Zappos pay newbies to leave if they identify a cultural misalignment within 3 weeks of the onboarding process as part of which the newbies are asked to also do 9 pm customer service calls, irrespective of the level of the employee.
A commercial landscaping company would give landscape projects for their own office premises as part of the onboarding process which would also include painting the equipment. It didn’t matter even if the new hire was a VP. Senior leaders went through the same onboarding process.
69. After 40-50 employees, the culture begins to get impacted.
70. Biggest mistake that service companies make is that they don’t sub-brand. You can sub-brand a delivery approach or a sales approach or a design approach. This kind of sub-branding differentiates you.
Sapient’s Brand Promises are – On-time and on-budget. But, 90% software project in the industry are over-budget and over-time, primarily because the customers don’t have clarity on the specifications and / or keep changing them.
Sapient created a sub-brand QUAD which was a 5-day Bootcamp with their clients and their clients to generate a specification document and charged USD 50,000 for it. They not only ensured better quality business specifications for controlling the project cost but also turned a cost into a revenue stream.
They also created another service for 5 weeks for Design Specifications at USD 250,000.
Their clients were happy because this gave them predictability both on time and on cost.
71. Robert Cialdini (master of the psychology of influence) Insight – Every time you quote a price, make it an absolutely an odd number like 2073.50 because it is hard to negotiate if you are that precise.
72. Psychology plays an important role.
When we look right, it generates trust in us.
Mini-movers would park their trucks on the right as part of their operational process with the logo facing the house of the customer so that when the customer came out to open the door, they would look right to see the logo.
In their culture, friends knock on the door and strangers ring the bell. As part of their operations manual, the team members were instructed to knock on the door instead of ringing the bell and were asked to step back precisely 2 steps, not 3, not 1 after knocking because 3 steps away would be the space of a stranger and 1 step away was too close in the personal space.
This amount of detailing in the Operations Manual creates operational excellence. Otherwise, there’s a lot of drama in running the business.
73. Hiring strategies
Find a fishing hole to pick people from.
i. Michael Dell, all of 19 years, hired 2-3 people from Kodak which was laying off people. Those 2-3 people pulled more people who were getting laid off from Kodak. When he wanted to hire leaders, he developed a relationship with professors in MIT, Sloan. He hired 1-2 fresh MBAs from there who pulled more from there.
ii. Carpet company was looking for hiring sales people. They couldn’t afford to pay more to attract sales people from competition. Since their buyer persona was women and because buying carpet is a fashion statement, they hired the top sales people from the shoe industry who were happy to change industries as selling carpets gave them higher earning potential than selling shoes.
iii. Worst place to hire from is from competition. Toyota never hires from other auto manufacturers.
iv. Another business only hires student athletes. The business owner is graduate of University of Michigan which has a separate placement cell for student athletes.
v. City Bin, a garbage collection company in Ireland. Their problem was to hire the Garbage Pick-up men. The founder asked who loves this job. They found a man who was training in the gym for a kick-boxing championship. They went to the gyms to hire Driver’s Assistants (re-branding Garbage Pick-up men) inviting gym enthusiasts interested in getting paid while working out, branding the Driver’s Assistants job as ideal for athletes interested in maximizing their training schedule.
Through this strategy, they scaled from 60 employees to 1600 employees.
vi. Allied Printers’ entire sales team are ex-professional athletes. Not only the bonding is amazing but their clients also like to be called upon by the ex-professional athletes. Allied printers gave them an earning potential from USD 60,000 to USD 600,000 based on their sales, an amazing earning opportunity for these ex-athletes after their sporting career.
74. Job description is a waste of time as it is based only on skills. Topgrading Score-card is the way to go. Topgrading is a hiring and promoting method with 90% success rate globally on how to hire, coach and keep A players.
i. Topgrading scorecard
ii. Screening interview
iii. Tandem Interview
iv. TORC Technique (Reference Check)
An A player for your organization is the best person you can afford.
Even if you have one applicant, even then put them through the Topgrading process.
It may feel time-consuming to hire a person through this process but it saves a lot of time, money and effort because you hire the right person through this process.
In the Topgrading Process, the interview process is 4 to 8 hours long and 2 hours for others. Such long interviews help because:
i. You can’t fake for that long
ii. The person who is getting interviewed feels respected
iii. It calms down introverts
When you make it difficult to hire, when someone gets hired, they feel chosen.
75. John Ratliff of Appletree had an online form for screening candidates with the first question as – These are our values. Give us examples where you lived these values.
He made this question Optional. Two-thirds of the applicants did not answer this question. Only one-third who did answer this question made it to the next round. This was an elimination question.
76. Elon Musk was kicked out of Paypal. He went back to each co-founder – Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman and said – Let bygones be bygones. I still want to be friends. Let’s have dinner.
When later Elon was broke, Reid and Peter gave him USD 20 million.
It pays to maintain good relationships and recreate them, even if there’s bad blood.
77. CEO is the Chief Energy Officer.
Every decision you make lowers or increases the energy of the organization.
78. Marcus Buckingham, author of Go, Put your Strengths to Work – Good leaders play checkers - hire same kind of people. Great leaders play chess – hire different kinds of people.
79. Get your team to do the Love-Loathe exercise – Which parts of your job you love? Which parts of your job you loathe?
i. 25% of both sides, no one has to do anymore.
ii. Find someone who loves to do which someone else loathes.
4 engineers wanted 1 more engineer on their team. Three of them loathed client meetings, while one of them loved to do client meetings discovered through the Love-Loathe exercise.
The 3 engineers focused only on coding and could do more of that as they got extra bandwidth by the 4th engineer taking away their client meeting work.
The work that required 5 engineers is now being done by 4 engineers.
The salary of the the 5th proposed engineer – half of it went back to the company, the other half was used to increase the salary of the 4 engineers who were inspired to do more work not only because they were now doing more of what they loved but also because they were paid more.
80. In order of importance for employees – Pay, Purpose, Culture and Caring
81. Processes deliver value for employees, shareholders and customers; and are captured through the PACE tool.
Example:
For Softonic, a software company, here’s a list of their processes that capture their entire Value Delivery:
i. Recruitment
ii. Product Development
iii. Sales to Cash
iv. Innovation
v. People Development
vi. Customer Satisfaction
vii. Content Creation and Publication
82. CEO sets strategy. COO should eat, live, breathe Processes to deliver on the Strategy.
83. Regularly review PACE because processes become messed up and complicated over time.
84. Never call it LEAN because employees feel it is about making them do more work in less time.
Danaher is the best performing public company. It is ranked at #149 on the Fortune 500 and during the past 20 years, their stock has outperformed the S&P by 2,800%. They mint CEOs running other companies more than any other company as their leaders leave to become CEOs in other businesses.
They are #1 company using Topgrading – Right People
#2 company in implementing LEAN – Right Process (#1 in LEAN is Toyota)
85. Division of Labor is killing us. Time to get rid of it. Customers want to self-serve.
Where do you have more than required people touching something?
Where do we get the customer to self-serve?
86. Riches are in the Niches.
i. You want to be something to somebody
ii. You don’t want to be everything to everybody
iii. Pick a growing niche
87. Learnings from the Unicorns:
i. Have volunteers drive your business model.
Meta has 4 billion users out of which 3 billion are active users. They have 3 billion volunteers creating content for them for free. AirBnB doesn’t own, clean or maintain any property. Uber, Lyft don’t own, clean or maintain any car. Trip Advisor and Amazon’s value proposition comes from reviews that customers post for free. Free Labor drives their business model.
ii. No fixed price
88. Teeming: How superorganisms work to build infinite wealth in a finite world and your company can too by Tamsin Wooley-Barker
i. Cultivate collective intelligence
ii. Nurture swarm creativity
iii. Rely on distributed leadership
iv. Depend on reciprocity and sharing
v. Compound regenerative growth
All Unicorns have followed these principles to scale massively.
Japan handled COVID pandemic very well like bee-hives and ant colonies.
89. Resilient vs Regenerative
You do not to make your kids, people and organizations resilient. You want to make them regenerative / anti-fragile.
Resilience means managed to survive.
Regenerative means more hits you take, stronger you become. More muscle tears you have, stronger it becomes.
Immune system, more it gets attacked, it becomes stronger.
Structure your company such that it becomes stronger in chaos instead of trying to survive the chaos.
90. Ideal team size – 4.6
Google had 3-member teams – 1 lead and 2 members.
91. Kaggle – owned by Google – for posting challenges for leveraging wisdom of the crowd.
92. Time to change the traditional org structure
For Softonic, a software company, here’s a list of their processes that capture their entire Value Delivery:
i. Recruitment
ii. Product Development
iii. Sales to Cash
iv. Innovation
v. People Development
vi. Customer Satisfaction
vii. Content Creation and Publication
82. CEO sets strategy. COO should eat, live, breathe Processes to deliver on the Strategy.
83. Regularly review PACE because processes become messed up and complicated over time.
84. Never call it LEAN because employees feel it is about making them do more work in less time.
Danaher is the best performing public company. It is ranked at #149 on the Fortune 500 and during the past 20 years, their stock has outperformed the S&P by 2,800%. They mint CEOs running other companies more than any other company as their leaders leave to become CEOs in other businesses.
They are #1 company using Topgrading – Right People
#2 company in implementing LEAN – Right Process (#1 in LEAN is Toyota)
85. Division of Labor is killing us. Time to get rid of it. Customers want to self-serve.
Where do you have more than required people touching something?
Where do we get the customer to self-serve?
86. Riches are in the Niches.
i. You want to be something to somebody
ii. You don’t want to be everything to everybody
iii. Pick a growing niche
87. Learnings from the Unicorns:
i. Have volunteers drive your business model.
Meta has 4 billion users out of which 3 billion are active users. They have 3 billion volunteers creating content for them for free. AirBnB doesn’t own, clean or maintain any property. Uber, Lyft don’t own, clean or maintain any car. Trip Advisor and Amazon’s value proposition comes from reviews that customers post for free. Free Labor drives their business model.
ii. No fixed price
88. Teeming: How superorganisms work to build infinite wealth in a finite world and your company can too by Tamsin Wooley-Barker
i. Cultivate collective intelligence
ii. Nurture swarm creativity
iii. Rely on distributed leadership
iv. Depend on reciprocity and sharing
v. Compound regenerative growth
All Unicorns have followed these principles to scale massively.
Japan handled COVID pandemic very well like bee-hives and ant colonies.
89. Resilient vs Regenerative
You do not to make your kids, people and organizations resilient. You want to make them regenerative / anti-fragile.
Resilience means managed to survive.
Regenerative means more hits you take, stronger you become. More muscle tears you have, stronger it becomes.
Immune system, more it gets attacked, it becomes stronger.
Structure your company such that it becomes stronger in chaos instead of trying to survive the chaos.
90. Ideal team size – 4.6
Google had 3-member teams – 1 lead and 2 members.
91. Kaggle – owned by Google – for posting challenges for leveraging wisdom of the crowd.
92. Time to change the traditional org structure
The traditional org structure was fashioned after our skeletal system. Since we now use more of our brain than body to work, the new org structure should be designed as our brain.
93. Self-managed teams: Half salary of the manager give to the Team Lead and half salary goes back to the company.
Ants:
Queen (HQ)
Lead Ants (Team Leads)
Ants (Team Members)
94. The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that creates the world’s greatest teams by Sam Walker (Verne’s Favourite Book)
Can you guess the Team Captain in the picture below?
He is the guy on the extreme left applauding his team while his team members are celebrating the victory.
95. Life-line with each group member shares their 5 high points and 5 low points from their life. Whenever a new member gets added, everyone does the life-line exercise again.
Teams who do this are strong teams.
96. Teams which are effective and productive, the team members speak equal amount of time.
97. Peer coaching – Explore if adding this to the RYD Buddy Structure would create more value for the coachees.
98. In a price list, the least expensive item is on top. If in that price list, the items are reversed with the most expensive item on top, the revenue increased 26% for a restaurant because the customers ended up buying more expensive wines.
99. High Stakes Negotiations 10 Strategies for maximizing outcomes and building relationships by Victoria Husted Medvec
i. Name price first in a negotiation
ii. Always submit 3 proposals – https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-good-better-best-approach-to-pricing
100. Focus on Profit Share instead of Market Share
101. Overarching strategy is to make everything frictionless. How would you know if it is? From the customer.
What isn’t it easy to do business with us?
102. Leader’s job is to make their employees job easier.
103. It is not Leadership, it is Careship.
Former CEO of CISCO, John Chambers – If anyone was sick, they were brought directly to my office and we did everything to support them.
CISCO tops the list of Best Place to Work
What isn’t easy for your employees to do?
Without the Intel from employees and customers in the weekly meeting, you wouldn’t know how to make it easy or how to care.
104. Deep instead of Broad – A focused strategy
In the beginning, you say Yes to everybody. After crossing the chasm, you need to focus to scale-up.
95. Life-line with each group member shares their 5 high points and 5 low points from their life. Whenever a new member gets added, everyone does the life-line exercise again.
Teams who do this are strong teams.
96. Teams which are effective and productive, the team members speak equal amount of time.
97. Peer coaching – Explore if adding this to the RYD Buddy Structure would create more value for the coachees.
98. In a price list, the least expensive item is on top. If in that price list, the items are reversed with the most expensive item on top, the revenue increased 26% for a restaurant because the customers ended up buying more expensive wines.
99. High Stakes Negotiations 10 Strategies for maximizing outcomes and building relationships by Victoria Husted Medvec
i. Name price first in a negotiation
ii. Always submit 3 proposals – https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-good-better-best-approach-to-pricing
100. Focus on Profit Share instead of Market Share
101. Overarching strategy is to make everything frictionless. How would you know if it is? From the customer.
What isn’t it easy to do business with us?
102. Leader’s job is to make their employees job easier.
103. It is not Leadership, it is Careship.
Former CEO of CISCO, John Chambers – If anyone was sick, they were brought directly to my office and we did everything to support them.
CISCO tops the list of Best Place to Work
What isn’t easy for your employees to do?
Without the Intel from employees and customers in the weekly meeting, you wouldn’t know how to make it easy or how to care.
104. Deep instead of Broad – A focused strategy
In the beginning, you say Yes to everybody. After crossing the chasm, you need to focus to scale-up.
i. Choose the segment / niche – Which customer groups do we need to focus more on?
ii. What is the 100% solution?
iii. Follow them all over the world
105: One thing you are going to be best at. On a scale of 0-5, be a 10.
106. Compensation has to align with your culture.
You have to hire people who align with your values.
Southwest gets the candidates in a circle and gets each one to share a joke and then observe others. If anyone rolls their eyes, they don’t get hired because they are looking for people who are empathetic.
107. Scaling-up Barriers:
i. Leadership Development
ii. Scalable infrastructure
iii. Marketing Effectivene
108. Leadership team members read Scaling-up but the employees read Mastering the Rockefeller Habits as it is easier to read and is more relevant to the employees.
109. If there’s drama, you need a checklist.
The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
110. You can survive without Rockefeller Habits except that there’ll be drama and inefficiency.
#1 Habit to start with: Healthy Team (Reference: 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Pat Lencioni)
#2 Alignment to Number 1 Priority
#3 Meeting Rhythms
#4 Clear Accountabilities
#5 Employee Feedback
#6 Customer Feedback
#7 Values and Purpose is Alive
#8 Articulate the Strategy
#9 Know a great day / week
#10 Plan and Performance is visible
A professional does all parts of the job. An amateur does only the fun parts.
111. Going from 0 -> 1 is hard.
This is the right time for acquisitions since kids don’t want to take over the family business.
112. PE yourself
i. Get the right people on your Board to get PE thinking
ii. Acquire businesses to increase your revenue and EBIDTA
iii. Use Bank Debt to fund the acquisitions
113. FAST Goals instead of SMART Goals
F – Frequently Discussed
A – Ambitious
S – Specific (measurable)
T – Transparent (everyone can see them)
114. The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future by T. Boone Pickens
He got his first billion at 70 years, lost all of it, and built his wealth to USD 4.2 Billion in 6 years.
Insight from the book – Trying to think out of a problem doesn’t work as well as talk our way through a problem.
115. Train your Gut Feel by reviewing the data / metrics daily
116. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
117. List of priorities
Do #1 and don’t go to #2 till #1 is not done.
What is the #1 thing for the day?
What is the #1 thing for the week?
What is the #1 thing for the month?
What is the #1 thing for the quarter?
What is the #1 thing for the year?
118. Dell does Daily Huddle twice a day to stop and sharpen the saw. Michael Dell shuts his factory every 4 hours for a Daily Huddle.
Daily Huddle is the single most important Rockefeller Habit.
Why does Daily Huddle fail? Because of Generalities instead of Specifics.
Hearing is our most important sense. Hearing helps us in pattern recognition.
It doesn’t matter at what time during the day you have your Daily Huddle.
In the Daily Huddle,
Sales share Intel and Creatives show and tell.
118. 4D Weekly Meeting
Discover: Good News, Employee / Customer Data, Priorities and Numbers
Discuss: Issues and Brainstorming
Decide: Align and Commit
Delegate: Who What When
Customer Data during the 4D Weekly Meeting is at the heart of Customer Advocacy.
119. Owners don’t have a Daily Huddle with the CEO. They instead have a weekly.
CEOs have a Daily Huddle with their Leadership team members.
120. NPS: Any customer who does not give a 9 or 10 - Can we give you a call?
If the score is 7 or 8: Operations calls – We came close to 9, 10, what do we need to do to get to 9,10?
If the score is 9 or 10: Sales calls – What did we do well that had you give us 9 or 10?
Less than 7: Customer Service calls
121. Monthly meetings are about developing the next level of leadership.
122. Turn your company into a sport and gamify the whole business of the business for greater engagement, revenue and profitability.
123. Quarterly themes alternate between People and Process.
For example:
Quarter 1: Theme related to people
Quarter 2: Theme related to process
Quarter 3: Theme related to people
Quarter 4: Theme related to process
124: What is your Internal Brand Promise to your employees?
Recommended Books, Articles and Subscriptions:
1. The Heart of Business by Hubert Joly
Hubert Joly, former CEO of Best Buy and orchestrator of the retailer's spectacular turnaround, unveils his personal playbook for achieving extraordinary outcomes by putting people and purpose at the heart of business.
Back in 2012, "Everyone thought we were going to die," says Joly. Eight years later, Best Buy was transformed as Joly and his team rebuilt the company into one of the nation's favorite employers, vastly increased customer satisfaction, and dramatically grew Best Buy's stock price. Joly and his team also succeeded in making Best Buy a leader in sustainability and innovation.
In The Heart of Business, Joly shares the philosophy behind the resurgence of Best Buy: pursue a noble purpose, put people at the center of the business, create an environment where every employee can blossom, and treat profit as an outcome, not the goal.
2. The Outsiders by Thorndike
Drawing on years of research and experience, Thorndike tells eye-opening stories, extracting lessons and revealing a compelling alternative model for anyone interested in leading a company or investing in one - and reaping extraordinary returns.
In this book, you will meet eight individualistic CEOs whose firms' average returns outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of twenty - in other words, an investment of $10,000 with each of these CEOs, on average, would have been worth over $1.5 million twenty-five years later. You may not know all their names, but you will recognize their companies: General Cinema, Ralston Purina, The Washington Post Company, Berkshire Hathaway, General Dynamics, Capital Cities Broadcasting, TCI, and Teledyne. In The Outsiders, you'll learn the traits and methods - striking for their consistency and relentless rationality - that helped these unique leaders achieve such exceptional performance
Humble, unassuming, and often frugal, these "outsiders" shunned Wall Street and the press, and shied away from the hottest new management trends. Instead, they shared specific traits that put them and the companies they led on winning trajectories: a laser-sharp focus on per share value as opposed to earnings or sales growth; an exceptional talent for allocating capital and human resources; and the belief that cash flow, not reported earnings, determines a company's long-term value.
3. Uncharted: How to map the future together by Margaret Heffernan
4. The Goal: A Process for Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
This book should be read once a year.
5. The Greatest Business Decisions: How Apple, Ford, IBM, Zappos, and others made radical choices that changed the course of Business by Verne Harnish
6. Power and Prediction: The disruptive economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Avi Goldfarb, Joshua Gans
7. Important article to read for all CEOs - https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/what-every-ceo-should-know-about-generative-ai#/
8. Good Magazines to subscribe to:
i. Harvard Business Review
ii. Mckinsey
iii. Fortune Magazine
Blog – Tim Ferris
9. Gary Hamel’s Interview with Jim Clifton - The Power of Employee Engagement
Jim Clifton is the Chairman of Gallup. Jim has tracked what makes people thrive at work for decades, and written several bestselling books on the topic. In this episode of the New Human Movement, Gary talks to Jim about what drives employee engagement, the link between engagement and productivity & wellbeing, and how organizations can unleash the involvement and enthusiasm of all employees.
https://www.garyhamel.com/video/power-employee-engagement-jim-clifton
10. The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't by Robert I Sutton
11. Bringing Out the Best in People: How to Apply the Astonishing Power of Positive Reinforcement by Aubrey Daniels
12. A book on Marketing Effectiveness - Relationship Marketing: Successful Strategies for the Age of the Customer by Regis McKenna
13. Money Ball movie is based on The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis
14. Goal: The Ball doesn’t go in by chance (Management Ideas from the World of Football) by Ferran Soriano
15. Scaling-up Compensation by Verne Harnish
16. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
17. Change to Strange: Create a great organization by building a strange workforce by Daniel M. Cable
18. They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today's Digital Consumer by Marcus Sheridan
Questions that your customers want an answer to. Give them an answer.
i. What does it cost?
ii. How do you compare with your competitors?
iii. What is wrong with your offering? What are the problems with your offerings.
19. Job to be Done resources
Youtube video on the above McDonalds example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stc0beAxavY
HBR References:
https://hbr.org/2002/01/turn-customer-input-into-innovation
https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done
20. Foolproof Hiring: Powerful, Proven Keys to Hiring HIGH Performers by
Brad Smart and Chris Mursau
21. Habits of High Valuable Employees by Verne Harnish
22. Go put your strengths to work by Marcus Buckingham
23. Scrum: The Art of doing twice the work in half the time by Jeff Sutherland
24. Paul A Akers
i. 2s Lean – 2nd edition
ii. Banish Sloppiness
25. Teeming: How superorganisms work to build infinite wealth in a finite world and your company can too by Tamsin Wooley-Barker
26. The Wisdom of Crowd by James Surowiecki
27. Humanocracy by Gary Hamel
28. Outrageous Empowerment: Giving employees their brains back by Ron Lovett
29. The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that creates the world’s greatest teams by Sam Walker (Verne’s Favourite Book)
30. High Stakes Negotiations 10 Strategies for maximizing outcomes and building relationships by Victoria Husted Medvec
31. On Pricing - https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-good-better-best-approach-to-pricing
32. Hermann Simon
i. Confessions of a pricing man – Instead of reading this book, read the 78 slides slideshare
ii. Beating Inflation
33. Care to Dare: Unleashing Astonishing Potential Through Secure Base Leadership by George Kohlrieser , Susan Goldsworthy
(Best Leadership Book)
34. Uncommon Service by Dr Francis Frei
35. The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
36. The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future by T. Boone Pickens
37. Highly Effective Habits by Stephen Covey
ii. What is the 100% solution?
iii. Follow them all over the world
105: One thing you are going to be best at. On a scale of 0-5, be a 10.
106. Compensation has to align with your culture.
You have to hire people who align with your values.
Southwest gets the candidates in a circle and gets each one to share a joke and then observe others. If anyone rolls their eyes, they don’t get hired because they are looking for people who are empathetic.
107. Scaling-up Barriers:
i. Leadership Development
ii. Scalable infrastructure
iii. Marketing Effectivene
108. Leadership team members read Scaling-up but the employees read Mastering the Rockefeller Habits as it is easier to read and is more relevant to the employees.
109. If there’s drama, you need a checklist.
The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
110. You can survive without Rockefeller Habits except that there’ll be drama and inefficiency.
#1 Habit to start with: Healthy Team (Reference: 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Pat Lencioni)
#2 Alignment to Number 1 Priority
#3 Meeting Rhythms
#4 Clear Accountabilities
#5 Employee Feedback
#6 Customer Feedback
#7 Values and Purpose is Alive
#8 Articulate the Strategy
#9 Know a great day / week
#10 Plan and Performance is visible
A professional does all parts of the job. An amateur does only the fun parts.
111. Going from 0 -> 1 is hard.
This is the right time for acquisitions since kids don’t want to take over the family business.
112. PE yourself
i. Get the right people on your Board to get PE thinking
ii. Acquire businesses to increase your revenue and EBIDTA
iii. Use Bank Debt to fund the acquisitions
113. FAST Goals instead of SMART Goals
F – Frequently Discussed
A – Ambitious
S – Specific (measurable)
T – Transparent (everyone can see them)
114. The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future by T. Boone Pickens
He got his first billion at 70 years, lost all of it, and built his wealth to USD 4.2 Billion in 6 years.
Insight from the book – Trying to think out of a problem doesn’t work as well as talk our way through a problem.
115. Train your Gut Feel by reviewing the data / metrics daily
116. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
117. List of priorities
Do #1 and don’t go to #2 till #1 is not done.
What is the #1 thing for the day?
What is the #1 thing for the week?
What is the #1 thing for the month?
What is the #1 thing for the quarter?
What is the #1 thing for the year?
118. Dell does Daily Huddle twice a day to stop and sharpen the saw. Michael Dell shuts his factory every 4 hours for a Daily Huddle.
Daily Huddle is the single most important Rockefeller Habit.
Why does Daily Huddle fail? Because of Generalities instead of Specifics.
Hearing is our most important sense. Hearing helps us in pattern recognition.
It doesn’t matter at what time during the day you have your Daily Huddle.
In the Daily Huddle,
Sales share Intel and Creatives show and tell.
118. 4D Weekly Meeting
Discover: Good News, Employee / Customer Data, Priorities and Numbers
Discuss: Issues and Brainstorming
Decide: Align and Commit
Delegate: Who What When
Customer Data during the 4D Weekly Meeting is at the heart of Customer Advocacy.
119. Owners don’t have a Daily Huddle with the CEO. They instead have a weekly.
CEOs have a Daily Huddle with their Leadership team members.
120. NPS: Any customer who does not give a 9 or 10 - Can we give you a call?
If the score is 7 or 8: Operations calls – We came close to 9, 10, what do we need to do to get to 9,10?
If the score is 9 or 10: Sales calls – What did we do well that had you give us 9 or 10?
Less than 7: Customer Service calls
121. Monthly meetings are about developing the next level of leadership.
122. Turn your company into a sport and gamify the whole business of the business for greater engagement, revenue and profitability.
123. Quarterly themes alternate between People and Process.
For example:
Quarter 1: Theme related to people
Quarter 2: Theme related to process
Quarter 3: Theme related to people
Quarter 4: Theme related to process
124: What is your Internal Brand Promise to your employees?
Recommended Books, Articles and Subscriptions:
1. The Heart of Business by Hubert Joly
Hubert Joly, former CEO of Best Buy and orchestrator of the retailer's spectacular turnaround, unveils his personal playbook for achieving extraordinary outcomes by putting people and purpose at the heart of business.
Back in 2012, "Everyone thought we were going to die," says Joly. Eight years later, Best Buy was transformed as Joly and his team rebuilt the company into one of the nation's favorite employers, vastly increased customer satisfaction, and dramatically grew Best Buy's stock price. Joly and his team also succeeded in making Best Buy a leader in sustainability and innovation.
In The Heart of Business, Joly shares the philosophy behind the resurgence of Best Buy: pursue a noble purpose, put people at the center of the business, create an environment where every employee can blossom, and treat profit as an outcome, not the goal.
2. The Outsiders by Thorndike
Drawing on years of research and experience, Thorndike tells eye-opening stories, extracting lessons and revealing a compelling alternative model for anyone interested in leading a company or investing in one - and reaping extraordinary returns.
In this book, you will meet eight individualistic CEOs whose firms' average returns outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of twenty - in other words, an investment of $10,000 with each of these CEOs, on average, would have been worth over $1.5 million twenty-five years later. You may not know all their names, but you will recognize their companies: General Cinema, Ralston Purina, The Washington Post Company, Berkshire Hathaway, General Dynamics, Capital Cities Broadcasting, TCI, and Teledyne. In The Outsiders, you'll learn the traits and methods - striking for their consistency and relentless rationality - that helped these unique leaders achieve such exceptional performance
Humble, unassuming, and often frugal, these "outsiders" shunned Wall Street and the press, and shied away from the hottest new management trends. Instead, they shared specific traits that put them and the companies they led on winning trajectories: a laser-sharp focus on per share value as opposed to earnings or sales growth; an exceptional talent for allocating capital and human resources; and the belief that cash flow, not reported earnings, determines a company's long-term value.
3. Uncharted: How to map the future together by Margaret Heffernan
4. The Goal: A Process for Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
This book should be read once a year.
5. The Greatest Business Decisions: How Apple, Ford, IBM, Zappos, and others made radical choices that changed the course of Business by Verne Harnish
6. Power and Prediction: The disruptive economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Avi Goldfarb, Joshua Gans
7. Important article to read for all CEOs - https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/what-every-ceo-should-know-about-generative-ai#/
8. Good Magazines to subscribe to:
i. Harvard Business Review
ii. Mckinsey
iii. Fortune Magazine
Blog – Tim Ferris
9. Gary Hamel’s Interview with Jim Clifton - The Power of Employee Engagement
Jim Clifton is the Chairman of Gallup. Jim has tracked what makes people thrive at work for decades, and written several bestselling books on the topic. In this episode of the New Human Movement, Gary talks to Jim about what drives employee engagement, the link between engagement and productivity & wellbeing, and how organizations can unleash the involvement and enthusiasm of all employees.
https://www.garyhamel.com/video/power-employee-engagement-jim-clifton
10. The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't by Robert I Sutton
11. Bringing Out the Best in People: How to Apply the Astonishing Power of Positive Reinforcement by Aubrey Daniels
12. A book on Marketing Effectiveness - Relationship Marketing: Successful Strategies for the Age of the Customer by Regis McKenna
13. Money Ball movie is based on The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis
14. Goal: The Ball doesn’t go in by chance (Management Ideas from the World of Football) by Ferran Soriano
15. Scaling-up Compensation by Verne Harnish
16. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
17. Change to Strange: Create a great organization by building a strange workforce by Daniel M. Cable
18. They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today's Digital Consumer by Marcus Sheridan
Questions that your customers want an answer to. Give them an answer.
i. What does it cost?
ii. How do you compare with your competitors?
iii. What is wrong with your offering? What are the problems with your offerings.
19. Job to be Done resources
Youtube video on the above McDonalds example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stc0beAxavY
HBR References:
https://hbr.org/2002/01/turn-customer-input-into-innovation
https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done
20. Foolproof Hiring: Powerful, Proven Keys to Hiring HIGH Performers by
Brad Smart and Chris Mursau
21. Habits of High Valuable Employees by Verne Harnish
22. Go put your strengths to work by Marcus Buckingham
23. Scrum: The Art of doing twice the work in half the time by Jeff Sutherland
24. Paul A Akers
i. 2s Lean – 2nd edition
ii. Banish Sloppiness
25. Teeming: How superorganisms work to build infinite wealth in a finite world and your company can too by Tamsin Wooley-Barker
26. The Wisdom of Crowd by James Surowiecki
27. Humanocracy by Gary Hamel
28. Outrageous Empowerment: Giving employees their brains back by Ron Lovett
29. The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that creates the world’s greatest teams by Sam Walker (Verne’s Favourite Book)
30. High Stakes Negotiations 10 Strategies for maximizing outcomes and building relationships by Victoria Husted Medvec
31. On Pricing - https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-good-better-best-approach-to-pricing
32. Hermann Simon
i. Confessions of a pricing man – Instead of reading this book, read the 78 slides slideshare
ii. Beating Inflation
33. Care to Dare: Unleashing Astonishing Potential Through Secure Base Leadership by George Kohlrieser , Susan Goldsworthy
(Best Leadership Book)
34. Uncommon Service by Dr Francis Frei
35. The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
36. The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future by T. Boone Pickens
37. Highly Effective Habits by Stephen Covey