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.