Good leadership is really clear about where it is going, aligning goals and collating ideas, feedback and suggestions all while enforcing the rules of how everyone works together. It doesn’t careen wildly in knee jerk reactions to every complaint, criticism or failure. It has a firm and fair hand.
I think of it like a bus. Everyone knows the destination, knows it isn’t up for debate and realizes that the passengers have to adhere to the bus rules. And everyone knows they don’t have to take the bus if they don’t want to.
My bus rules or the way I like to work together include:
- We don’t “doubt” what can be done, we “wonder” what we can accomplish
- We have purpose, we don’t wander
- We respect each other, are polite but direct, honesty comes before diplomacy or conflict avoidance
- We are independent; we don’t need cheerleaders, hand holding or face time to make each other feel better
- We know time is of the essence and we never waste it
- We don’t quit and we never say “just tell me what to do” we instead say “I suggest we do this”
- We live for vibrant dialogue; we are passionate about our ideas but our egos are checked at the door
- We seek the truth and don’t make stuff up to make ourselves feel better when we just don’t know
- We can just as easily say we are wrong as we can we are right
- We’re never done – mediocrity isn’t in our vocabulary – we continually improve ourselves and our work
- We live to learn, learning inspires, doesn’t scare us
- We set the bar high to see if we can beat it, we don’t set it low to make it easy for ourselves
- We are mindful in everything we do, never mindless, if something becomes mindless we tear it up
- We work hard but never to the point of burn-out, we take our vacation and return recharged
Everyone should know where the bus is going, they should appreciate that the destination isn’t up for a vote – but ideas and suggestions are welcome, and they should take their decision seriously:
- Do they want to get on?
- Is it going where they want to go?
- Are they looking forward to the journey?
- Is there another bus they would rather take?
- Maybe it is time to take a breather and stay off the buses for awhile?
Or maybe all of these buses suck. It’s time to start your own bus! Where will it go? What will your rider rules be?
I want a leader who pushes me and everyone around me to do better – to raise the bar.
I don’t want them to give me excuses as to why I can’t do it, create long stories to rationalize my shortcomings, or make it so cozy that I just don’t mind missing my targets.
I want them to tell me clearly what the goal is, describe honestly where I am at, and then demand that I get rid of any discrepancy between where I am and the objective I have. If the goal is what I want then I’m going to be into it, I’m going to be inspired to be pushed to achieve it. If I’m not inspired and I don’t really want it then a true leader is going to push me to poop or get off the pot, so to speak.
This is leadership from my perspective. It aligns mutual goals and pushes all of us to achieve more than what we could without it. Too bad it is such a rare commodity.
Live within your means or spend money you don’t have on a gamble that could pay off big.
I’ve done both and my personal experience has been that I have always done much better slow and steady, living within my means. Despite how much I hate admitting it.
There is allot of truth to the expression “necessity is the mother of invention”. Sticking to what you can afford and letting necessity drive your creativity rather than creating by throwing cash you don’t have at something seems to always work better for me – and if it doesn’t work, it is so much easier to recover from.
I’m running so fast I can’t stop and talk to you. I have to get there right now and have no time for all your questions about where “there” is. Get out of my way! Coming through!
Too bad. Because they will probably run in circles before they find “there”, or run right past “there” and never find it, or run head down into a wall and not live to see “there” or worst of all get to “there” and realize it isn’t where they wanted to end up anyways.
Sound familiar?
The architectural and visual appeal of an LED Ticker is incredible.
Check out these links to see them in action: Temple, Tennessee, and OU.
Hat’s off to Brian and his team at Rise Display!
Software creation is never easy. I personally have had more failures than successes but I feel the odds are starting to swing in favor of success over crash and burn.
We can now manage development virtually and have extremely tight review cycles – daily – all while allowing each team member to contribute from whatever time and place works best for them. And more importantly we can do it for almost no start up or ongoing costs.
There are no more barriers to creating amazing software, the only limits are the bounds of your creativity and your ability to inspire it in the team around you. For absolutely nothing you can use software development tools, application hosting, shared docs and spreadsheets, wiki’s, video and telephone conferencing, and video sharing. The tools are incredible. And you can even share how you do it with one click for free. Check out how we do it here.
We shut down servers and went SaaS (software as a service rather than software we install and maintain) to fully embrace the same model that we have moved our software products to. We felt we had to walk the talk and learn from our experience to be in the best possible position to continually improve the SaaS product that we provide (Rise Display Network). This didn’t start out as a money saving thing.
I just finished reviewing our annual fixed asset count and I am blown away by how much hardware and software is marked “No Longer In Use”. I cringe when I look at the total purchase costs. And when I add in the hire that we are about to make and the existing person we freed up whose job it was to maintain this IT monster I am real glad we decided to “Walk The Talk”.
Our move to an all SaaS (well almost, still a couple of things left to convert) has allowed us to focus on what we do best and to redirect the money saved into the value we create, not the administrative IT overhead that was a constant distraction. Why SaaS for us? To better understand all aspects of the software as a service model that we provide and it’s a money thing. We saved and are saving substantially.
If you find yourself cutting and pasting mindlessly just to get somebody to shut up and get off your back. Stop. Tell them you don’t get it, or their an idiot and they don’t get it. If after that discussion the work becomes mindful for you and you thoughtfully pursue it or they agreed it was stupid and you stopped. Great. Stay. Have fun. Enjoy. If not, quit. There is no point hanging out somewhere that requires and rewards mindless work.
Our fiscal year just ended in September. And like for most of us in business this wasn’t the easiest year that I have had to navigate through. Advertising networks dried up and customer bad debts piled on, revenue targets were missed, cost over-runs and missed deliverables proliferated.
But despite all of this we didn’t run, we didn’t put our heads in the sand, we looked at the situation for what is was and didn’t fool ourselves. From this honest, albeit painful perspective, we made tough decisions and adjusted. My thanks to Robert Fritz and crew for teaching us the importance of “reality”. Can’t recommend him enough and if you can’t get to see him in person do yourself a favour and read at least one of his books – my favourite is The Path of Least Resistance for Managers.
How did we adjust?
We restructured our SaaS company, repositioned the offering and lowered our cost base.
We parked a new company with a great product that was about to launch so that we could consolidate and focus our resources. Hopefully to be reborn before the close of this fiscal year.
We invested in our complete digital signage solution product and went looking to make acquisitions (more on that soon if all goes according to plan).
And it all worked. In the end revenues beat budget by 9% and grew by 47% over last year while our digital signage management subscriptions grew by 200%.
My hat goes off to my peers! What a year, what a turn-around.
