Source of the image: https://www.consuunt.com/porters-generic-strategies/
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Your company's strategic approach will help you understand what business problem to use AI for to make a bigger impact through your business.

4. AI feeds on data. If you are not collecting vast amount of data in a structured way, then learning about AI will not contribute to your business. This means putting in Process Excellence is a key input to AI implementation. 

In our RYD Business Excellence journey, make your organization AI-intelligent when your business is on Mountain 3 (Mountain of Growth) to finally implement AI in Mountain 4 (Mountain of Scale) to scale your business with ease, grace and velocity.

5. What becomes amply clear is that running businesses with a 'jugaad' attitude is no longer a viable way forward. It is important to become a business scientist to learn the art, science and math of building a great business; and implement that with the meticulousness of a scientist. As we do that, we will learn AI along the way to make a massive difference in the world living our purpose through our business.

AI has further validated that our best friend on our good to great journey is Joy of Learning.

Keep learning, implementing and contributing to joyously lead yourself and your business from good to great, realize your dreams and have it all with ease and grace; while having lots of fun and adventure along the way 💜

Loving you,
j.

How to use Visual Systems Thinking for solving your toughest Business Problems?

It is a TED Talk worth watching again - Got a wicked problem? First, tell me how you make toast.

Here are a sample list of questions from Tom Wujec's website that visual systems thinking can be applied to:
1. Strategic Organisational Questions:
i. Where is your organization now?
ii. What is your noble purpose?
iii. How are global forces shaping your business?
iv. How are industry forces affecting you?
v. What is driving your market now?
vi. What is your essential offering?
vii. How will you delight your customers?
viii. How will you stand out and win?
ix. Where will you invest to grow?
x. What do you stand for?
xi. What is your business model?
xii. How will you track and measure success?

2. Tactical Organisational Questions:
i. Where are you creating value in your current business process?
ii. What is your approach to improving value? Why?
iii. How will you attract more and better customers?
iv. How will you get customers to buy?
v. How will you make your customers feel great at every touch point?
vi. How will you build your offering more efficiently?
vii. How will you do more of what works and less of what doesn't?
viii. How will you help your employees thrive?
ix. How will you run better meetings?
x. How will you respond to change more nimbly?
xi. How will your team work better?
xii. How will you measure your organisation's effectiveness?

Here is a PDF Document from Tom Wujec with a proposed approach on how to engage your teams in a collaborative visual systems thinking exercise to discover answers to the above questions.

​It would work very well to use this process to co-create process maps with your teams for the 4 to 9 key processes on your PACE (Process Accountability Chart) tool.questions illuminate how you can begin to see your business and 

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Here's a PDF of the PACE tool:

And, the PACE tool in an Excel:

Here's the process you can follow to build Process Excellence on Mountain 3 (Mountain of Growth) of the RYD Business Excellence journey before you scale your business on Mountain 4 (Mountain of Scale):
1. Fill up the Process Accountability Chart (PACe tool) with key 4 to 9 key processes that define your business, 2 or 3 metrics for each process and aspired for measure for each metric.
2. Pick up a process to innovate for better outcomes. 
3. It's best that you, the business owner / CEO, first documents the process themselves for better understanding to effectively lead a gamestorming session with your team to co-create the final process flow map. This exercise will give you insights into why the process is failing and / or how the process can be improved significantly. These insights will support you to effectively lead with questions in the gamestorming deep-dive for the team to reflect on points on the Ball of Perspective that they may have missed. During the deep-dive, you will also uncover fresh insights as the team gamestorms.
4. Use the approach shared in the PDF - A primer in Systems Thinking - shared above to lead the gamestorming deep-dive for the team to co-create the final process using sticky notes which can later be transcribed digitally.
5. Measure the process KPIs / metrics monthly / weekly / daily based on the process. The gap between the aspired for metric and the actual outcome is the Degree of Innovation that the process needs to be iterated through, as per the frequency of review that you defined In the Excel PACe.
6. When there is a gap between the aspired for process KPI and the actual outcome, do a root cause analysis using a 5 Why Analysis and arrive at a solution using a 5 How Analysis

The five whys and five hows techniques constitute a questioning process designed to drill down into the details of a problem or a solution and peel away the layers of symptoms. The technique was originally developed by Sakichi Toyoda who stated that "by repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear."

The five whys are used for drilling down into a problem and the five hows are used to develop the details of a solution to a problem. Both are designed to bring clarity and refinement to a problem statement or a potential solution and get to the root cause or root solution.

For more on this approach, click on this link - 5 Whys and 5 Hows

Build strong processes for people to create Excellence rather than managing people to create Excellence.

Throw a Process at a Problem, instead of People.

Building a great business is a fun team sport. Keep playing to joyously lead yourself and your business from good to great, realize your dreams and have it all with ease and grace; while having lots of fun and adventure along the way 💜

Loving you,
j.

Consider Organisational Culture as an expression of the Consciousness of the Organization. 

We can transfer culture to other leaders and the rest of the organization through 3 growth levers:

1. Leadership Depth
Build the organization on the foundation of Shared Purpose, Shared Values and Shared Big Hairy Audacious Goal to transform the world.

It requires the CEO to grow in consciousness to at least Gear 3 to communicate powerfully in the world of others to touch, move and inspire the organization to raise its consciousness.

It requires the CEO to grow in consciousness to at least Gear 3 to recognise that building a culture is a long-term game and requires the engagement of one's heart, mind and soul for the good of the organization over and above one's personal benefit. At Gear 3, one's personal benefit is no longer a driver because there is childlike trust and faith in the Universe not as a trick to win but as an authentic vulnerable place to come from.

In building Verifone from $30 million to $600 million to dominate the global market of clearing credit card transactions, Hatim Tyabji said his key leadership and management tool was a booklet that explained, in 8 languages, the 8 core values at the heart of Verifone's success. "I essentially spent the last 6 years repeating myself," noted Tyabji, as he built a strong, global culture on the foundation of these 8 rules.

2. Business Excellence
Various tools as outlined in Scaling-up by Verne Harnish:
i. Storytelling
ii. Recruitment and Selection
iii. Orientation
iv. Performance Appraisal
v. Recognition and Reward
vi. Internal Newsletter.
vii. Friday Note from the CEO as a more personalised heartwarming communication to the organization.
viii. Quarterly Themes
ix. Everyday Management: Leaders and CEOs can repeat core values endlessly without it seeming ridiculous - so long as the core values they are using are relevant and meaningful to the employees. When you make a decision, relate it to a core value. When you reprimand or praise, refer to a core value. When customer issues arise, by all means compare the situation to the ideal represented by the core values. The same goes for employee concerns - weigh them against your company's core values. Small as these actions may sound, they probably do more than any of the above mentioned strategies for bringing core values alive in your organization.

3. Craft Mastery
Learning and mastering Business Excellence, and learning and growing in Leadership Depth with commitment, perseverance and dedication to implement the above from Being of Service consciousness; one tiny bit at a time each quarter.

Trust this helps 💜

Keep learning, integrating and contributing to joyously lead yourself and your businesses from good to great, realize your dreams and have it all with ease and grace; while having lots of fun and adventure along the way.

Loving you,
j.'

I played golf last Sunday with Eye-Q Co-founder and CEO. I was delighted to learn that he is a Scaling-up believer. He has scaled his business to 1000 employees using Communication Rhythm - one of the 10 Rockefeller Habits. He shared that he runs a Daily Huddle without fail even now.

Rockefeller Habits is one-fourth of the Scaling-up methodology. He scaled his business by using one-tenth of the one-fourth - that is by using 2.5 % of the scaling-up framework in depth.

He asked me - Isn't Communication Rhythm the crux of Scaling-up? My response to Rajat was - By not leveraging the entire framework, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. 

Money, the revenue and profitability of the business, is a measure of the impact we are creating through our work. Essentially, he is leaving a lot of impact on the table.

If we only care about earning good money and having a comfortable life, do a little bit deeply. You don't even need to go beyond Gear 1 consciousness. With Gear 1 energy itself, you will build a good business. Mediocrity is another word for good. Greatness is playing the world-cup and playing to win. Playing IPL is fun and creates good money, but that is not greatness as yet.

But, if we really care about scaling our impact, we can use our business as a spiritual playground to do that by scaling our business to unimaginable, seemingly impossible, crazy big levels.

To care about creating an impact beyond the money that we will earn to have a comfortable lifestyle for ourselves and our family, we need to be in Gear 2 Consciousness (Being of Service). That is why creating a 25-Years Vision of our impact this lifetime through our Businesses needs us to be in Gear 2 consciousness, otherwise we are unable to create the Vision itself.

There is a lot of money to be made in the red ocean. We can work 18 hours a days and beat all the competition to earn more money and become market leaders.

It requires us to be in Gear 2 Being of Service Consciousness to be able to creatively arrive at a Blue Ocean where it is not about beating the competition and becoming a market leader, it is about making massive value to our core customer by addressing their unfulfilled, unaddressed, unconscious needs; fulfilling which makes a huge difference to them. We uncover those needs because we so deeply care about them. It is not about making more money, it is about love, passion and contribution that makes the blue oceans visible to us while the rest of the world can't see them. Blue oceans are not about what the competition is doing, blue oceans are about how can we serve more deeply the customer community we are inspired to contribute to. As a by product of that, we are the only one in the blue ocean because the competition is nibbling each other's toes in the red ocean.

Therefore, Mountain 2 (Mountain of Value) of the RYD Business Excellence journey requires us to be in Gear 2 Consciousness. The work on Mountain of Value is to solve for profitability by iterating business models.

It requires the CEO / Business Owner / Entrepreneur / Start-up Founder and their leaders to be in Gear 3 to be on Mountain 3 to even be able to implement Scaling-up framework. Why?

The work on Mountain 3 (Mountain of Growth) of the RYD Business Excellence Journey is to build repeatability and scalability into the Business Model. That's exactly what the Scaling-up framework does. But it requires leaders to evolve from being The Impact to being The Channel of Impact. Mountain 3 is no longer about what the founder likes to do but what the founder has to do for the sake of the business. Having solved for Profitability on Mountain 2, customers will line up outside your office and your organization won't have the maturity, capability and capacity to serve your growing customer base and growing customer needs unless Mountain 3 is scaled.

If the founder does not grow in leadership depth to embrace the boredom of building repeatability and scalability into the Business Model, the business will writhe in agony on account of indigestion because of too much customer demand and inability of the organization to digest it. 

Mountain 3 requires the founder and the leaders to grow in Gear 3 Consciousness to become an Empty Space - from Nobody (Gear 0) to Someone (Gear 1) to Somebody (Gear 2) to Nothing (Gear 3). You become the Impact in Gear 1 and strengthen yourself further to become a bigger Impact in Gear 2. What bought you here will not lead you forward, In Gear 3, our work is to raise our consciousness to let go of the intoxication of being the Impact to become the Channel of Impact so that Impact can flow through us. That is how limitless impact and transformation can flow through us.

It's a leap of faith from Gear 2 to Gear 3 (from Somebody to Nothing) and it is a leap of faith from Mountain 2 to Mountain 3 (from a Lean Start-up to an Agile Scale-up).

The foolish think they know everything but the wise know they know nothing. It is this consciousness of wisdom that is required in Gear 3 to scale Mountain 3. It is exciting to solve a problem and it is boring to replicate that solution at scale ensuring the same extraordinary customer delighting output across all processes with god-inspiring consistency, irrespective of the person delivering the process. That is Process Excellence and the magical stuff that Mountain 3 is made up of.

If we ran with speed to climb Mountain 1 and Mountain 2, it is now time to slow down to build a strong foundation to speed up for scale on Mountain 4.

Contrary to popular belief, Process Excellence requires extremely high levels of creativity because we have to change the engine and wheels of the car of our business while the car is moving. 

While we use Steve Blank's Lean Start-up Methodology, Alex Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas and Blue Ocean Strategy framework on Mountain 2, Verne Harnish's Scaling-up Framework is designed for Mountain 3 (Mountain of Growth) to help build repeatability and scalability into the Business Model.  

CEOs and Founders have a tendency to use their intelligence to pick and choose what to implement from Scaling-up framework, and customise because they feel their business situation is different.

It doesn't matter which part of the world a baby is born in, the child will go through the same developmental milestones and has the same needs to be met by their parents and other care-givers.

So, it is with business. It doesn't matter which part of the world the business is born in, it will go through the same developmental milestones and has the same needs to be met by it's founder and leaders. 

If Mountain 1 and Mountain 2 were about rolling up the sleeves, Mountain 3 is about rolling up the sleeves even further to see the whole picture from a distance and then zoom in on the 1% which needs maximum attention as a place to start building repeatability and scalability.

The intention in Mountain 3 (Mountain of Growth) is to implement 100% of Scaling-up framework, which would take about 3 years for full implementation. The intention of the implementation is to build a strong foundation for scaling-up with ease, grace and velocity at Mountain 4 (Mountain of Scale). 

In Mountain 3, the business still grows though in a disciplined fashion at a steady pace to allow for the foundation to be strengthened through learning, integration and institution of Process Excellence and Best Practises. Verne has done a great job of putting that together in the Scaling-up Framework.

In which order to implement Scaling-up?

It's important to understand that the Scaling-up implementation is an iterative, additive and a build-up process. As more Scaling-up Growth Tools are implemented every quarter, they are reviewed and updated regularly. Once  all tools are implemented, the review and updation is done quarterly as the business moves to full-throttle scale-up in Mountain 4. Every new tool implementation and subsequent quarterly reviews will make visible new blindspots in the organization, which become an opportunity for creative solutioning and growth.

There are multiple pathways for implementation. The below is one pathway. It's a good idea to make a list of all problems faced by your business and pick-up the top 10% solving which would resolve 90% of the challenges faced by the business. For those 10% problems, identify the right scaling-up growth tool for implementation.

1. Strategy Tool: Core Values, Purpose and 10 to 30-years BHAG is the glue for the organization. This is what holds the whole organization together, if implemented correctly. This is usually the place to begin the implementation from unless there is so much of fire-fighting going on elsewhere, and solving that becomes a life and death situation.

2. Strategy Tool: Once there is familiarity with the Vision Summary Tool, the leadership team works through the One-Page-Strategic-Plan and the rest of the organization works through the Vision Summary. The intention is to get at least two-thirds of the organization on the Vision Summary with a clear line of sight on how their priorities roll up to the organisational priorities. Each leader across levels having a clarity on their Number 1 Priority this quarter, this month, this week is a measure of the success of the Vision Summary.

3. Execution Tool: Individual 13-Week Race. At least two-thirds and 100% of leaders of the organization on Vision Summary and Individual 13-Week race will significantly cut-down drama, over-work and overwhelment. 

4. Execution Tool: Communication Rhythms. This is the heartbeat of the organization. Daily, Weekly, Monthly. Quarterly, Annual rhythms for all people in the organization ensure the CEO, the orchestra conductor, is effortlessly creating beautiful music with all musicians in the orchestra  playing their individual instrument in harmony with each other. If these meetings are not creating value, it just means they haven't been implemented correctly.

5. Strategy Tool: Strengths, Weaknesses, Trends (SWT) Worksheet

6. Strategy Tool: 7 Strata. If a Business Model Canvas is not built, it's a good idea to build one for each customer segment before working on the 7-Strata tool. Creating a Strategy Canvas to understand the industry landscape before working on the 7-Strata tool would provide greater clarity for developing 7-Strata.  

7.  People Tools: FACE and PACE

8. Other Strategy Tools  

9. Other People Tools

10. Other Execution Tools

11. Cash Tools

​If implemented fully and correctly, the scaling-up methodology would increase:
i. Cashflow by 2X
ii. Industry Average Profitability by 3X
iii. Valuation by 10X

Shifting the Organisational Consciousness

CEO's Weekly Newsletter is a powerful structure of success to strengthen the culture through the regular emphasis on core values, purpose and BHAG. It is continuous repetition of the shared Purposed, shared Values and shared BHAG that shifts the consciousness of the organization one bit at a time. The weekly note from the CEO is a very effective tool for raising the consciousness of the organization and strengthening the community feeling amongst the people, the feeling of being one, walking together towards a shared BHAG. 

The weekly note requires the CEO to be in Gear 3 Consciousness in their Leadership Depth journey - Communicating Powerfully in the world of others. Vulnerable authenticity, creativity, humility, childlike trust and faith in the Universe and in the process of life are the spiritual values on this Gear, practising which gives us access to step up to Gear 3 consciousness. It's on this Gear with deep belief that 'I am making a difference. I am a channel of impact' that we get full access to Generative Language. From Gear 1 onwards, we start practising generative language but in Gear 3, we become Generative Language and it becomes our secret super power to generate the organisational culture by generating people to be high-performing, nurturing and growth-oriented; inspiring them to travel their own good-to-great journey. 

For the organization to be on its Good to Great journey, requires each one in the organization to be on their Good to Great journey and the CEO is the Chief Inspiration Officer, Chief Energy Officer, Chief Believer in the process for such a transformation to take place because the Good to Great journey is a team sport.

People want to do great work and deliver excellence.

If they are failing to do so, it is because either the process is missing or the current process is ineffective. Mountain 3 mantra is - Fix the Process, not the People. Using every poor performance as a way to go 5 levels deeper through the 5-Whys Business Excellence framework to understand the root cause at the process level and to creatively redesign the process through the 5-Hows framework to make the process person-independent so that excellent results are delivered in alignment with the intention and measurable outcomes of the process; irrespective of the person responsible for delivering on the process.

Mountain 3 work is about designing the game for excellence and the founder, having done their inner work to raise their consciousness to Gear 3, becomes the Chief Business Designer.

Common Language

The bible for the CEO and their leadership team is Scaling-up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't by Verne Harnish

For all other people leaders, the bible is Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: The Keys to Successfully Scaling any size Organization (from start-up to Scale-up to Unicorn) by Verne Harnish.

And for all employees, the bible would be 12 Habits of Valuable Employees: Your Roadmap to an Amazing Career by Verne Harnish.

This ensures that the whole organization begins to speak the same language. 

A Gear 3 leader on Mountain 3 operates at 3 levels

1) Height: S/he can step up to a higher plane to see the big picture to discover opportunities for innovation, growth and strategic direction. This is what the Entrepreneur role in each one of us is capable of. The Entrepreneur role in us loves Leadership Depth, which is what gives him / her Height.

2) Width: S/he can step back to view the inter-connectedness of business and organisational elements enabling effective decisions to ensure process excellence. This is what the Manager role in each one of us is capable of. The Manager role in us loves Business Excellence, which is what gives him / her Width.

3) Depth: S/he can deep-dive into the details to identify the 20% that is at the source of the problem and the 20% that can be at the source of greater impact. This is what the Technician role in each one of us is capable of. The Technician role in us loves Craft Mastery, which is what gives him / her Depth.

A great leader has all the 3 roles in equal balance.

Be a great leader by consciously learning, integrating and growing across the 3 Growth Levers - Leadership Depth, Craft Mastery and Business Excellence - to joyously lead yourself and your business from good to great, realize your dreams and have it all with ease and grace; while having lots of fun and adventure along the way.

Loving you,
j.