What’s on Your Mind?

Right now it seems that many business people have lost their long term lens because they’re spending a lot of time and effort focusing on the day to day economy… listening each morning for the tidbit of news that will send the market up or down that day, hanging on Bernanke’s every word, and worrying about things they cannot control. 

Consider this – trying to determine whether we are or are not in a recession is probably not helping your business. In fact, if you haven’t already heard, one “pundit” has definitively declared that we are in recession.  (See Mike Vann’s blog post for the news.)  The important thing is to determine how best to handle a difficult economy no matter what the economists call it. (Again, see Mike Vann’s 2/28/08 blog post for five simple tips on how to ride the recession wave.) 

The fifth of Mike’s five tips is to “think”, and in this edition of the Vann Group Journal, we offer some important questions for you to think about for the long term health of your business.  Without minimizing the seriousness of the current economic downturn, it’s important to point out that if we don’t also focus on the long term, our businesses will be in trouble no matter what is going on with the economy.  We need to be thinking about topics like…

• recruiting and engaging talented employees
• leadership development and readiness
• succession planning
• creating a performance-based culture
• strategy development

These issues are critical to your business and they are controllable.

Do You Have The Right People on the Bus and in the Right Seats?

If you’ve been in business a while, you’ve witnessed or experienced directly the incredible difference in what you can accomplish with the “right person in the right place” versus even someone who is doing a pretty darn good job at something.   And you may have had the fortune to have worked with an outstanding management team that works well together to take their company to new heights.

Great companies make sure they have the right people on the bus and act promptly to get the wrong people off the bus before they decide where to drive.

Rather than relying on one “genius” leader to set the vision and recruit followers to implement it, great companies get the right people together to work as a team to figure out where to go and how to get there.  These companies know the ultimate throttle on growth is the ability to find and keep the right people.

Therefore, in thinking about the long term, it’s important to ask yourself, with brutal honesty, if you have the right people on the bus.

Are You a Level 5 Leader?

This is another term coined by Jim Collins in Good to Great.   In his research, Collins found that leaders of great companies share these characteristics:

• They are not egotistical for themselves but rather for the larger goal of building a great company.  They are ambitious for their company, not for themselves.
• They are self effacing, quiet, reserved and sometimes even shy; possessing a blend of personal humility and professional will that includes an unwavering resolve to do what must be done.
• When things go well they give credit to others, when they go poorly they take the responsibility themselves.

How Are You Doing with Your New Year’s Resolution?

You remember – communication!  If you don’t recall or you haven’t started yet, check back to the January 2008 edition of the Vann Group Journal.

Have You Made Your Competition Irrelevant Yet?

We know, we’re like a broken record, but that’s because it works.   Check out the latest white paper to be added to our library at www.vann-group.com for more information on crafting a strategic plan to unlock the value of your business and create a new blue ocean market space.

If you have any questions about anything you’ve read in this edition of the Vann Group Journal, please call: