Quotes from Verne Harnish

For additional examples, read the Harvard Business Review article titled "Building Your Company's Vision," by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras. You'll notice that all the Values listed are phrases, not single words.

Individuals or organizations with too many priorities have no priorities and risk spinning their wheels and accomplishing nothing of significance. In turn, laser-focusing everyone on a single priority — today, this week, this quarter, this year, and the next decade — creates clarity and power throughout the organization.

Lynne Twist's insightful book titled The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Life

More companies die from indigestion than starvation.

All these great biz leaders know one thing — nothing interesting can come out of your brain that you don't put in first. Having a natural curiosity and thirst for learning separates the good from the great in our experience. Happy reading!

si usted no está en condiciones de solventar a las personas que pueden dirigir el negocio en su lugar, usted sólo dispone de un empleo, no de un negocio.

If your competitive advantage depends on your people creating something valuable and distinctive, then your workforce can't be normal.

read Margaret Heffernan's book Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril and Liz Wiseman's Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. To

It's time to break apart a 50-year-old business term — strategic planning — and think about it in terms of two distinct activities: strategic thinking and execution planning. Each requires two very different teams and processes.

Who, What, When (WWW): Improve the impact of your weekly meetings by taking a few minutes at the end and summarizing Who said they are going to do What, When.

Largely ignored, by gurus and governments, are the older, high-impact growth firms. Though they generate almost all of the innovation and job growth in economies, there are not enough of them to garner the favorable attention of politicians or book publishers. For more on this topic, read Verne's interview in Business Review Europe titled "Give the Gazelles a Break".

Steven Johnson's Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.

Scaling Up is organized around the 4 Decisions a leader must address: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash.

Simply send an email to [email protected] and put "weekly insights" in the subject line. And please include a first and last name and your title, and tell us where your company is based.

The key to affording higher wages (we're talking frontline employees, not senior leadership) is a lower total wage cost as a percent of revenue. You have to remain competitive, and the best companies know that one great person can replace three good ones. Through rigorous selection (i.e., Topgrading), they get the absolute best talent in the door, pay employees above-market rates, and then invest heavily in training and development to make them more productive.

People join companies. They leave managers. Therefore, to keep your team happy and engaged, you need one thing above all else: great managers — not free lunches or yoga classes! As Gallup notes, "Managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement scores." And great managers are not just born; they are continually advancing their skills and those of their employees.

we suggest that the term "manager" be replaced with the word "coach," which more accurately describes the role.

In general, looking forward is great management; looking backward is micromanagement.

Studies have shown that for people to be happy and productive at work, they need to experience positive interactions (appreciation, praise) vs. negative (reprimands, criticism) with their manager in a ratio of at least 3:1. (Watch out: For a marriage to work, you actually need a 5:1 ratio!!) So make it a simple habit to thank people each and every day — and that includes using the word generously in emails to your team.

A Core Competency has three attributes, according to Prahalad and Hamel: 1. It is not easy for competitors to imitate. 2. It can be reused widely for many products and markets. 3. It must contribute to the benefits the end customer experiences and the value of the product or service to customers.

It takes real guts to ignore or even alienate 93% of customers, focusing instead on the 7% of the market that is fanatical about you and willing to put up with the trade-offs.

Repetition encompasses consistency. Finish what you start. Mean what you say. And don't say one thing and do something else. Consistency is an important aspect of repetition.

The goal is to reverse the first law of entrepreneurial gravity and develop a viable business model in which the faster you grow, the more cash you generate — through larger deposits, faster collections, shorter sales and delivery cycles, etc. Then you've built a company that can self-fund its own growth.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Outcomes. We start with the functions and processes driving the business, then push for the company to set goals, delineate measurable Brand Promises, and pick Critical Numbers on the One-Page Strategic Plan, including KPIs for both the People and Process sides of the business so the leadership team has a balanced view of performance.