Are you strategic-planning yourself toward a nervous breakdown? Psychiatrists call it catastrophizing. It happens in companies, too.
We face a less-than-bright economic outlook, no doubt. But, how do you strike a balance between doomsday disaster forecasting and head-in-the-sand denial of the difficulties?
Organizational growth guru Dan Weston, Principal of The Weston Group, has a solution. Strategic near-term focus, with eye-on-the-ball future vision and a way to keep inching forward to the goal. Dan was a guest participant at the November meeting of Dallas COO Forum.
He is a practitioner of methodologies to help high-potential entrepreneurial companies – known as Gazelles — to grow gracefully and profitably into the next stage of growth and beyond. Dan helps them adopt The Rockefeller Habits, an approach used by the American industrialist and world’s first billionaire to dominate both his industry and era.
Elements include:
- Get everyone on the same page with a one-page strategic plan
- Identify the numbers you must watch daily to maintain your trajectory
- Get the right people doing the right things
- Track short-term, focused, measurable outcomes
- Create immediate impact
A major success story is Dan’s client, The SCOOTER Store – the nation’s largest retailer of motorized wheel chairs and scooters — which catapulted from $20 million in revenue to over $300 million in four years and has been named one of the “100 Best Places to Work” by Fortune magazine
You can do the same for yourself — propelling with discipline and focus. Dan calls it having a weekly meeting with yourself. It includes balancing your personal life with work.
The goal is to create a powerful, focused weekly To Do List that will result in the right things getting done.
The meeting with yourself should be at a fixed time each week: Friday afternoon, over the weekend, or first thing Monday morning.
Agenda
- Review the organizations’s critical targets/prorities.
- Review your quarterly priorities.
- Review status of last week’s activities/results.
- Review developmental/performance support that your subordinates need.
- Review personal priorities — i.e., family, exercise, medical/dental.
- Review calendar commitments.
- Create a powerful, focused, prioritized To Do List.
- Do number one!
- Have a great, productive week.
- Repeat next week.
November 16, 2009