Road to Greatness

Greatness is never something conferred, it is something achieved. It is not something given, it is something earned. Greatness is a way of life that is open to anyone who is willing to pay the price. Everything big starts with something little, something small. What is the path to greatness, how do organization and leaders get the tag of “Great Organization” or “Great leader”, here are ten steps which shows the road to greatness:

1.    Leadership: Leadership is the great elevator. It has the ability to lift the people around. Everything rises and falls on leadership. The most successful leaders focus on things that create great results more than the result itself. Great business leaders achieve their results by focusing on the right things day in day out. Great leaders live with integrity and lead by example. They develop a winning strategy and generates great ideas.  They inspire employees to achieve greatness and create a flexible and responsive organization. Leadership has the ability to take the organization to the whole new heights. Leader is someone who can take a group of people to place that they do not think they can go.  

2.   Vision: Vision is the great motivator. Vision has the ability to inspire and lift people’s experience.

A good leader leads people where they don’t want to go and make it. A great leader leads people where they don’t want to go and make it and like it.  Great leaders set the vision and secure buy in of people on where you want to take the company to. Great leaders not only need to set out what you want to do, they also need to set out what it would mean when you get there. All great leaders are visionary.

3.   Action: Action is the great separator. Action separates those who are wishers from those who are accomplishers. A simple parallel can be drawn from what happens to an “idea” you generate. You get lots of great idea, it is not the great idea that counts, it is what you do with that great idea is key. The leader who achieve and those who don’t, it almost always is based on there are those who act upon what they feel, believe and have conviction over and there are people that never act on it. Musician say that the hardest part of practicing is taking the instrument out of the case. To begin is to be half done. That is what we need to be do with our ideas. How do we create great ideas, how do we make it happen, by taking action on them. Action is a great separator. It separates the rich from the poor, winner from the whiners. Action get things done. To take action, leaders are committed to two things, a) Speed; and b) Flexibility.

4.     Passion: Passion is the great generator. Passion generates energy. Success is the not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must first set yourself on fire. High energy people are people with passion. No trait is more noticeable in the leaders than the passion they share for their people and their companies. They simply love what they do. They have a sense of mission that comes from the heart. Gives the energy drive and enthusiasm that is contagious in the centre for leading the organization. To be successful you need to love what you do. Passion fuels the leader and the people with conviction. Passion fuels the leader and the people with courage. Passion fuels the leader and the people with commitment. Passion fuels the leader and the people with increased energy. Let us live in the harness of striving mightily, let us run the risk of wearing out rather than rusting out. 

5.   Strategy: Strategy is the great navigator. Strategy navigates for us. Hope is not a strategy. Hope will not lead you anywhere, you need to act to reach someplace. Strategic thinker looks at the organization from many angles. Leaders have kaleidoscope thinking i.e. see things from all possible angles. They always look at things differently to solve a problem rather than following the conventional way of solving it. Leaders always keeps focus on what they do the best and what the customer needs most. This is the forefront of their strategy.

6.   Family: Family is the great indicator. Family is the great indicator of how successful as a leader you have become. If you have good solid family life, it is the indication of your potential odd of succeeding are much greater.

7.     Attitude: Attitude is the great compensator. A person with a right attitude makes up a lot for lack of talent or lack of gifts. There would always be people in the team who are not gifted, who are not as talented and not as smartest but they have a great attitude. They just hung in there with you and accomplish their job, they do it because they have the right attitude. On the other hand there are people who are smart and talented but their attitude just sucks. Not because they could not do it, but because they would not do it.  Attitude makes up for lot of other deficiencies in our life if we just have great attitude. Leaders have positive attitude. As a general rule, great leader tend to look at challenges as opportunities and seeks to make out the most from the difficult situation. The more mistake you make the faster you learn, this is the mantra great leaders follow day in and day out.

8.  Momentum: Momentum is the great exaggerator. Momentum just takes you to a whole new level. If you have momentum going for you, it makes you look better than you really are, it lifts everybody. When you have it, it is the great exaggerator in a positive way, but when you lack it, it is the great exaggerator in a negative way. When you don’t have momentum it makes you look worse than what you are. Leaders are like thermostat, they set the temperature and managers are like thermometer, they record the temperature. 

9.    Empowerment: Empowerment is the great emancipator. Empowering people frees up people and frees up organization. You are not going to attract or retain a top quality people under those silly and obsolete forms of bureaucratic or commander control leadership. You cannot release the brain power of any organization by using whips and chains. You get the best out of people by empowering them and being supporting and getting out of their way. Leaders keep their think time by empowering their teams. Ownership and decision should be at the lowest level possible in the organization.

10.  Results: Results are the great evaluator. What gets measured gets managed. What you don’t inspect they don’t respect. Great leader always like that bad news should better come out real fast, so that you can reassess and get going again.

Greatness is to lead without a title, regardless of your title at work be a team builder. Greatness comes by building human connections and relationships. Greatness is leaving everything you touch better then you found it. Greatness is doing great work whether one notices or not, its best source of happiness.

Source: Learnings from the works of Johan C Maxwell and Robin Sharma

Productivity Secrets

Leadership is not something that is written on your business card. It is not a position in an organization. Leadership is a way of thinking. It is about innovating when everyone else is resigning themselves to. Everyone in this world is addicted to technology. This is the age of dramatic distraction. There are a lot of people who are trying to expertise in small things. The problem with that is you get to the end of your career, or the last hour of your last day, and you realize you were busy on doing the wrong things. In this era, we should leverage technology to our advantage rather than become slave of the technology. We should use technology as a great servant to us and not as ruling our lives and distracting us. Majoring in minor things may make us feel good in the moment and we may think we are being productive but at the end of the day we would realize that we are really busy doing not much of anything. I came across few excellent tips by reading stuff on absolute productivity secrets of some of the world’s best CEOs which we can imbibe in our life.

1.   Mark Parker, CEO, Nike: His productivity secret is to have dinner with 25 artists, if not 25 artists spend time with 5 artists. Why this idea? He is of the view that we usually structure our lives to surround ourselves with people who think like us. Spending time with people who think differently, who provokes you, who irritates you, makes you think differently are the people who helps you generate most creative ideas which enables you to build your organization, teams and grow business.

2.  Mike Duke, CEO Walmart: He understand the importance of respecting your time as most people wish they had more time, yet we all waste the time we have. It may sound rude but he get up when the schedule time for the meeting is over. If a meeting is allotted 40 minutes, he actually gets up even if the other person is still speaking. One way he manages this discipline is he always goes to another person’s office for the meeting which enables him to decide when he wants to leave.

3.   Steve Jobs, CEO Apple: He says, business is all about making a dent in the universe. He related this to productivity secret as he was of the belief that nothing so focuses the human mind, nothing will so focus your energy than knowing what your life is standing for, having a cause that you are giving your life to. And according to Job, nothing so fuels your creativity and your innovation and your spark and your spirit than finding some cause that is bigger than your own life, to make a dent in the universe.

4.  Ken Fisher, CEO Ken Fisher: His productivity secret is to get fired. What he does is he tries to fire himself from any work that he does that he cannot be absolutely fantastic at. In other words, what he meant was, anything you do not enjoy, or anything you are not fantastic at, find someone else to do it who actually enjoys it, who can do it better than you and fire yourself from that job. So basically you end up only doing a few things, but really well.

5.   Catherine Fake, CEO, Flickr : Her productivity secret is manage time in meetings. She strongly believe that meeting waste time. What she does is before a meeting, she distributes one liter bottle of water to all the meeting participant. Everyone gets to drink the water and then by the time the first person has to go to the washroom, the meeting needs to end.

6.  Krissi Barr, CEO, Barr Corporate Success: Her productivity secret is shrinking her mental deadline. If something is going to take her one hour, she says, she gives herself only 40 minutes to do that. That is really important because the work expands according to the time available to do the work. If you give yourself a week to do a project, then you are going to expand the time or the work into one week. So collapsing the deadlines of something that might take you two days, give yourself one day. What it does is it focuses your mind and it focuses your energy.

7.       Founder of Ben and Jerry: His productivity secret was be so good at what you do that you are the only one in the world who does what you do. In other words, it is not being all things to all people. It is not diluting your brand to the point that you mean nothing to anyone. It means being so good at what you do that you are the only one in the world who does what you do. The productivity secret is just do one thing really well. Michelangelo did one thing really well. Mozart did one thing really well. Sachin Tendulkar did one thing really well.  So can you.

Apart from the above, one common productivity secrets of great CEOs is the habit of proactivity and no procrastination. Great CEOs are obsessed with their idea and they never leave the sight of a new idea, they never leave the sight of something that they know. As a principle you should keep a 90 second rule and you need to do within 90 seconds unless you have done something to not move forward. Within 90 seconds you do little things and the more you do little small acts that are difficult or challenging, you actually build your own capability and you build a new habit of discipline. Do important things within 90 seconds of first getting the idea and never procrastinate as that moment will not come again.

Another secret commonly used is reviewing your productivity at the end of the day. How productive were you today? What did you do right? What did you do wrong? It is simple idea but it is so important because with better awareness you will make better choices and with better choices you will see better results. What gets measured gets improved. One should spend some time in silence, solitude and stillness, where you sit, you think and reflect and take corrective action to be on course and be more productive. I have been following some of the above practices for last more than a year and it is definitely helping me in both professional and personal life.

Hope you find these thoughts useful and make yourself more productive in your journey ahead.

Source: Learnings from Robin Sharma's work on Productivity Secrets of Top CEOs.

Learnings from the life of Warren Buffet

Warren Buffet is one of the world’s richest men. He is one of the world’s most successful CEOs as the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. He started his company with $10000. His stake is worth billions and billions of dollars. But even more importantly, he is a respected leader. Even though he could buy anything in the world, yet he is so stable and grounded. Warren Buffet’s success has been unique as he has all through worked for creating value for the stakeholders. In this era, full of distraction and disruptions, he has consistently been leading without a title and has always been concerned about uplifting the people around than thing about himself. Here are few learnings from his life which will really help reconnect you with what it means to be a true leader and what it means to play your absolute best both in professional as well as personal life.

1.      Have a passion for your craft: Practice your craft, do something that you are passionate about. Genius is not genetics. Genius is much more about persistence around a specific craft for an extended period of time, along with daily practice of your craft. “Love what you do”. Find ways to be passionate about what you do and where you are today. You can find ways to be passionate about what you do even if you are in the most seemingly ordinary, mundane job. Passion is the fuel that allows you to play at world class. Passion is contagious. Everybody around you will feel your passion and you passion will allow you to keep going when you might not feel like you want to keep on going.

2.       Recognize opportunity amidst adversity: Your market is there to serve you, not instruct you. Warren Buffet does not worry about the cost of the stock, he is more concerned about value investing. When people are afraid, that’s when you want to take risk. When everyone else is afraid, the market place is there to serve you. People drop into an emotion called fear during disruptive times. And because of fear that clouds their lenses, clouds their judgment, they miss opportunities that people who can manage fear well seize and become successful.

3.       Be a specialist: Greatness is all about obsession. An intelligent obsession. All great man had a burning obsession that got them out of bed every single morning, even in the darkest of days. Concentrate on vital few. Focus, Focus, Focus, as Confucius said, “A man who chases two rabbits catches no one. Another great management guru, Peter Drucker puts it as “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” A focused mind block out the noise, block out the distraction and helps leave the realm of mediocrity and takes you on the road of mastery.

4.       Wait for the right pitch: Run your own race. Sit back and wait for the perfect swing. Warren Buffet says, his job is allocating capital. And all he do every day is sit back and wait for the perfect swing.  Most businesses actually fail because they had too many good opportunities. And rather than waiting for those few perfect pitches, those few perfect opportunities that were right for them to seize and them mine, those businesses that failed focused on too many good opportunities and they resigned themselves to mediocrity. They tried to seize every great opportunity, every perfect pitch that came their way. They did not have their discipline to understand which few opportunities were perfect for them to focus. Wait for the right pitch and just because everyone around you and your competitors are saying this is the best opportunity of a lifetime does not mean that you should seize it. Learn the discipline to wait for those few perfect pitches that are right for you and your business.

5.       Be a devoted daily learner: Warren Buffet spends 75% of his day in learning. The best of the best are curious. The best of the best are all looking forward for that next best idea that will give them a competitive advantage and elevate them. Focus on value versus cost. If you love reading, read, do not worry about the cost of the books, do not worry about the cost of learning, do not worry about the cost of seminars. If you look at the richest, happiest, most successful people in the world they are daily learners. They are always learning.

6.       The Warren Buffet Test: Warren Buffet has made sizeable investment in Gillette, the pioneer of razors. He understood that this is not a company that will be gone in a few years or even a few decades. What Warren Buffet focuses on is “Does the company have a Durable Competitive Advantage (DCA)”. DCA is knowing that one thing that you can do that no one else can do and focus on it to the point of obsession. Innovate and invest on it every single day by 1%. That is one of the great secrets of business and career success.

7.       Bet on tortoises versus the hares: Last mile excellence is the key. It is so important not to start the race strong, but to finish at world class. If you look at the Olympians, it is not only how you start. But what makes a champion is how strong you finish. Warren Buffet always bet on companies that have strong inherent value. He “Stick with things”. He looks at the fundamentals and then he does not worry about them.  The point here is  play the long game, figure out that you can be great at, stick to your fundamentals  and then be like the tortoise, steadily focusing on making small improvements every day. Always be focused and know what your mountain-top is, following your values, sticking to your fundamentals.

8.      Protect your good name: It could take you twenty years to build a great reputation and five minutes of bad judgment to lose it. Use the Newspaper Test, measure your life and your performance at work by the newspaper test. Warren Buffet ask his managers, how would you feel about doing an action if you knew it would be written up the next day in your local newspaper, to be read by your family, friends and neighbors and written by a smart but unfriendly reporter.  If you are wondering whether you should do a certain action or make a certain choice, use the newspaper test. Would you want your behavior or that choice to show up in the newspaper, to be read by your near and dear ones? There are many examples of leaders who had spent their entire careers often doing great works and then, through one act of bad judgment performed on a particular day, they lost everything. Always protect your good name.

9.       Live your life backwards: This is very powerful. It is like reading your own obituary. Alfred Nobel was one person who had read his own obituary. It was a mistake made by the newspaper publisher, when Alfred Nobel’s brother died, Alfred Nobel’s obituary was published and he was aghast to read what people thought of him as it was just opposite of what Alfred thought. This completely transformed his life and he worked really hard to get himself on track and post this Nobel Prize were instituted. While we all may not be lucky enough to read our own obituary, but it would be worth-while to live your life backwards. Assume you are 70 years old and live backward to your present day and align your actions to match your achievement at the age of 70.

10.   Your inner-scorecard versus your outer-scorecard: What’s in your inner-scorecard is more important than what is in your outer-scorecard. Authenticity is key. There will never be a better you than you. Being comfortable in your own skin is key. Authenticity is one of the competitive edge. Being authentic means you are transparent. Warren Buffet says that it is a waste of time worrying about what the world around you is going to think about you. Be so strong in your values, your own vision for the future, your own genius abilities that you block out the noise from the chattering voices of your neighbors. Always measure your success by your inner scorecard, not by your outer scorecard.

11.   Focus on creating value versus materialism: Always be obsessed with value creation. What keeps Warren Buffet up at night is creating value for the stakeholders of his Company. This is his singular focus. It is not stroking his own ego. It is not lining his own pockets. He has got the skin in the game. He makes money through his own shares and his own stake by increasing in value through his excellence in investing.

12.   Shift from focusing on success to significance: Every second that you are focusing on being successful is energy taken away from your legacy. Do not worry so much about success. Success takes care of itself when you are more concerned with helping people.  Think about being significant for people. Think about being a really good and honest person.

To sum up, Warren Buffet is a living example of a leader who has always stayed focused on the fundamentals, created value for people, protected his reputation and has been innovative for the benefit of the people who gave him business, and one can relate all the above when you see his achievements. Pick up few of the learnings from above and implement in your life, you will see that over time you will succeed beyond your imagination. 

Source : Learning from The Snowball : Warren Buffet and the business of Life by Alice Schroeder

            Learning from Robin Sharma's article

            

Self-Leadership

Great leadership is a cultivated art. It begins with self- leadership. Because at the center of leadership is the person who, more than anything else makes the difference. Leadership success or failure begins with how the leader approaches self-leadership. Self-leadership is the practice of intentionally influencing your thinking, feeling and behaviors to achieve your objective. Self-leaders have a drive for autonomy, can make decisions, are more creative and persist, even in the face of adversity. Here are few points on the qualities of self-leaders which distinguishes them from others:

Live for something bigger than yourself: Great leaders do what they do because it makes a difference to others – whether customers, employees, citizens or society at large. Mediocre people ask the familiar question: “What’s in it for me?” Great leaders are not selfless. Their selfish interest is to feel good about themselves because they made a difference to someone else. Life is too short to play small with your bigness. Great leaders takes it as a personal obligation to run their mind like a superstar and takes natural responsibility to be great.

Choose who you spend your time with (your association): No man is an island. We are influenced every day by who we spend our time with. Human being are emotionally contagious. We model the people around us and behave like the people we spend time with. Great leaders spend time with people smarter than themselves, whom they can learn from – whether it’s working for the right organization or hanging out with friends on weekends. Every bit counts. They live a contrarian life. Greatness is a self-improving cycle. Mediocre people surround themselves with other mediocre people – they don’t want to feel threatened.  Mediocrity is a self-sustaining prophecy.

Confront the facts – yet keep the faith: Great leaders are always dissatisfied and passionate. They remember that no matter how good things are, there’s always a better way. Great leaders are also resilient and persistent. No matter how bad things seem at the moment, they believe in their ability to control their destinies and overcome their challenges. Mediocre people are content with status-quo. If things are going well, that’s good enough; if they’re not going well, it’s for reasons beyond their control.

Be authentic and simplify: Great leaders would rather be authentic than artificially popular. Great leaders simplify how they deal with the world by focusing on fundamental principles. They will deal with people and situations flexibly, but base their judgment on principles, not convenience or popular culture. Great leaders reduce the amount of clutter in their lives – by not wanting too much, and by finding and developing the right people to empower and delegate to. Mediocre people complicate things. They’re forever chasing the latest fad, buying new things to show off, and never learn to empower others.

Discipline eats “freedom” for lunch: Great leaders understand that discipline is the balance between their rights and their responsibilities. They will demand their dues, but do more than their bit. Mediocre people over-correct to one or the other. Some are vociferous in demanding their rights, and will explain failure by describing how they’re being denied their rights. Others will forever wait for instructions, and won’t use their right to think different.

Stay relevant: Technology is both accelerating our productivity and threatening our very reasons for existence. Younger workers are more aware and smarter than we were when we began our careers. Great leaders keep current with technology and surround themselves with smarter and younger people they can learn from. By doing so, they multiply the impact they have on their ecosystem. Mediocre people stick to the old ways of doing things until technology risks their jobs. They feel threatened by the younger, smarter lot, and try to compete on rank and seniority until the inevitable happens – the young and restless win!

Self-leadership is an ongoing process of self-reflection. Continual self-leadership is a mark of leadership maturation. Personal leadership is a never-ending work in progress that draws on continually maturing self-understanding. Some people never mature as leaders — they remain insecure, self-defeating, juvenile or worse still, delinquent in their leadership development. And like all leadership skills, self-leadership skills can also be acquired. No matter what age, stage or circumstance in life, anyone can become a better person, a better leader. Self-leadership is imperative if we want to be great leaders.

Source: Good to Great by Jim Collins

             Compounding Effects by Darren Hardy

             Articles by Robin Sharma