To change your perspective, consider how your old perspectives of your business were created: Something happened, but you didn’t really see it. Your mind just matched what occurred to something that had taken place in the past. That’s how you relate to it. Now you’re figuratively standing in your past looking at your present. And it sets up a threat: Your past might say, “This isn’t safe. Be careful; don’t take any risks.”
Why does it work this way? It’s because your mind’s chief aim is to attain safety and comfort and help you avoid experiencing anything that brought you pain and suffering in the past. This goes on all day long in business as well as in the rest of your life. This is why so many people unconsciously work to avoid failure. No one wants to go through that again, right? If you’ve never failed at anything, you can go ahead and disregard this. (Yes, I’m being sarcastic here.)
You’re not consciously thinking about what might have happened in the past, you simply react. You may be present to the current threat, but your mind is focused on avoiding that past experience. What you think about what happened—which is different from what actually occurred—dominates your field of vision.
How does this apply to business? Accept that your current experience is filtered through your past. We can’t see what’s really there, we see only what’s available through our limited thinking, and we end up with the limited actions available to us and, thus, the limited results.
The good news is that perspective is also easy to work with. Mindfulness plays a huge role in forming perspectives or opinions. Your principal job over the next year or so will be to become mindful of your own thinking, and when you’ve done that, you and your leadership team will be able to align on the perspective that best works for the future. To move your organization forward, you and your team will need to be standing together.
Enrolling them in this new way of being in business might be one of your toughest jobs. They’ve heard it all before. To them, this will be just the latest version of a solution. So first you have to work on yourself. When you are successful in shifting your view of your business, new possibilities (even breakthroughs) that are impossible to see from where you’re currently standing will appear as if by magic.
BSF Concept #2:
* * *
Business is a conversation given to you by the view you have of your business, driven by your relationship to circumstances and the experience of chaos you so detest. So accept that you can’t avoid the circumstances your business faces, and so instead, you need to change your relationship to them.
Business isn’t at all what you might think it is. It’s not a group of people getting clients to buy something and then delivering it better than anyone else. It’s not better selling practices, or a better marketing plan, or a better brand. It’s not just taking on a new client. Your business is made up of the conversations you engage in that dominate everything you think, everything you do, and everything (good and bad) you produce. Those conversations are at the heart of your business, yet you’re not even aware of them.
Together let’s uncover the conversations that are driven by the circumstances you are trying to control or change. Ask yourself what are you committed to that has you standing where you’re standing in your life and in your business? Are you standing there because of what you fear might happen in your life if your business were to fail? Do you think you might lose yourself and everything you’ve ever worked for if you failed? Do you think that without this business, you wouldn’t know who you are? Do you think your life as you know it would be over? Or maybe you believe that people wouldn’t respect you or that you wouldn’t respect yourself if your business were to fail? These are important questions that can lead you to understand why you won’t or don’t take the risk to transform something that desperately needs to be transformed.
The reason you stand where you stand—almost immobilized by fear some days—is that somewhere in the past, you saw something that terrified you, or you went through some horrible experience, or you observed someone else go through tough times, and you vowed you would do everything in your power to never experience that.
So you work every day (and most nights, I’m fairly certain) to keep the struggles of your past—the chaos—from ever recurring in your future. And you also work like hell to control the actions of the people around you so that the chaos of your past won’t repeat. Actually you have fabricated the fact that the chaos threatens the achievement of your dream, but the belief has a grip on you, and it’s not going to let you go.
When you wrote the email from your corner office issuing that last edict or rule, or when you sent out that biting email to your staff, you didn’t do it because you thought it would help you grow or improve. You did it because you thought controlling dominating behavior would help you eliminate chaos and possible failure in the future.
So you try to control circumstances by laying down the law and by being an asshole—your employees’ word, not mine. You try to control other people’s behavior, and you put them through hell because you believe that will motivate them. And you feel justified. After all, you gave them a great job, and you pay them well.
However, you still haven’t woken up to the fact that chaos and circumstances can’t be controlled. If you learn nothing else from this book, you must come to grips with that realization. People will leave, clients will dump you, your cell phone will stop working, and the banker will not buy your “creatively innovative” loan request. But until you realize that the only thing you can do is change your relationship to the circumstances, you will be in your own living hell.
You can do a lot of things at the same time, but you can’t work to avoid bad things happening to you and your business and simultaneously be working on building your organization.
You’re going to have to give something up here, and you’ll have to make a conscious choice: either work on keeping the past from repeating or adopt a new way of thinking and behaving.
BFS Concept #3:
* * *
All actions and results in business are determined by memes, which are specific conversations that get created internally and can either undermine and sabotage your intentions or connect your company so that it can execute your strategy.
Now we get to where the rubber really meets the road. Once you have found a new place to stand and you stop trying to mess around with circumstances and chaos, you can finally stop working hard to keep bad things from happening and making employee’s lives miserable trying to control outcomes by controlling others’ behavior. Once you’ve stopped doing those things, you can start working to transform the negative viral memes that make up the Execution Virus and Entitlement Virus in your company into positive memes that will make up the Empowerment Virus.
Negative viral memes are the products of your past experiences, and they cut off the blood supply for anything extraordinary that might be possible in your future. These limiting conversations are extraordinarily powerful, especially when you aren’t aware of them and you don’t know what they should sound like. Ultimately and arguably, they are the most powerful things in your life. Everything you do, everything you say in your life and in business is a function of these hidden and limiting conversations that create the context inside of which you will accomplish everything—success or failure.
Have you ever noticed how often you talk about your plans to create and accomplish something new, like a new strategy for sales? You meet with your salespeople and talk about what you’re going to do differently in the future to get more business in the door. We’ve all had these conversations, and we’ve all seen these plans evaporate in the following days and weeks and never get implemented. That doesn’t mean you’re a loser as a leader—it means you don’t understand the conversational context in which your business is operating. The plan you made was a conversation. It was a conversation about doing something differently from the way you’ve been doing it, and when you stood up to leave the meeting, the conversation imme
diately began to slowly fade away.
Review the three foundational ideas of the connection-driven organization. If anything seems unclear at this point, review the relevant chapters earlier in this book until all three legs of the stool are clearly in focus.
Pay attention to this: Talking about doing anything different in the future that doesn’t take into account the conversations that are already in place and running in the background means that the new conversations will always be overtaken and replaced by those older, more powerful conversations.
There’s no room for your new conversation. It’s like building a house on quicksand. After a while, the new conversation disappears. The old conversation simply did what quicksand does—it covers over everything.
You’ve got to become aware of the old, negative viral conversations that are swallowing up your efforts to change your organization’s future. And then you must replace the old with new, positive viral conversations that will self-replicate and create a solid foundation upon which you can build conversations for the future.
Transforming Your Vision into Accountable Action
If our urgent undertaking is to build a business, then why wouldn’t we want to build one that’s considered unstoppable, one that’s capable of anything we set out to accomplish? A THIRTEENER! Of course we would, but rarely is it clear what steps will actually lead to achieving that goal. If close to 90 percent of plans aren’t executed, then something must be missing. What work do we need to do on the ground today to close the gap and produce the results we know in our minds are possible in the future?
This next section of the book focuses on the Breakthrough Solutions Framework™ process, the blueprint for building a THIRTEENER company. I began developing this in the mid-1990s for my own teams, and I continued to develop it after selling my two companies and beginning to advise others. I’ve guided hundreds of people down these steps to discover what was possible for their future. I’ve attempted to include all the detail you will need to understand what is required, but not so much that the process overwhelms you. There is also a “process map” for individuals and micro-preneurs, and another one for teams—all downloadable at www.ThirteenersBook.com.
Before starting the four-stage process of transforming your company with a team, I recommend you finish reading the entire book. You’ll need to read the chapters on getting your employees aligned with and committed to the process, and you’ll also need to learn the nonnegotiable rules of planning (Chapter 16), without which the transformation process is doomed to failure. This is designed to set you up as the leader you already are, so that you can move forward with connectedness, great vision, conscious awareness, and clear accountability.
The Objective of Section 4
In this section, I will work with you to show you how to have everything you want in your business. That is really what this book is about. Of course, there’s a risk: You could try to shortcut the process and fail. I urge you to let go of all preconceived notions about planning and be open to a new paradigm in strategy execution.
The reason so many people don’t achieve what they want in business is that they get in their own way. They listen largely to their ego instead of giving in to another force within themselves that has the power to give them what they want or to prevent them from reaching their goals and objectives. Think about it. The job of your ego is to get approval and admiration, get control of circumstances, get and maintain power, turn the tables, get revenge, and even the score.
Your ego is out to win. You can’t do anything about that when you have no awareness of what’s happening. And it’s the ego’s desire to win at all costs that is depriving you of a large percentage of the results you could be producing. More is possible—in your life and in your business. A great deal more. But until you are able to understand the elements that cause results in your life, you will continue to struggle.
To achieve any impossible goal, you must first surrender to the truth that you deserve to have it all. This is what is meant by “the truth shall set you free.” Until you can be with the truth about your past, you will continue to struggle—because your primary struggle isn’t with reality or circumstances. Your struggle is with your truth.
And here is the second and perhaps more important lesson: The truth requires that you become responsible for everything you have now and everything that happens to you, good or bad, regardless of what happened and when it happened. Moreover, what has happened and will happen is a result of who you are being, not what you’re doing or have done. When you can begin to embrace this idea about your life, you will be able to find your “ultimate power,” as Aristotle described it. “Ultimate power,” he said, “is saying how it’s going to be and then having it be that way,” What we likely didn’t hear him say—perhaps because we didn’t want to hear it—is what probably followed: “but to have that kind of power in your life, you’re going to need to be willing to take responsibility for how it is and how it isn’t.” In other words, you’re going to need to tell the truth about your current role in how it is and how it isn’t. You have 100 percent responsibility for all of it.
For most people, this is a tough concept to confront and own. Your ego would rather let you be the victim of your circumstances, focused on fighting those circumstances and thinking—falsely—you could change them if only you worked hard enough. To give up that perspective, you would need to admit you had it wrong to start with and that you’re not a victim. And your ego certainly is not going to allow that. Instead, it keeps you locked into self-deprecating conversations with yourself that keep your view of yourself and your role in the world small and puny.
It doesn’t matter how big your business is right now. It could just be you and you alone, or you could have a thousand employees. The primary factor that is preventing at least 87 percent of entrepreneurs, leaders, and employees from achieving their goals is their lack of awareness of the role their ego plays in undermining and sabotaging their future—your future. Your ego wants you to settle for what you have right now, to play it safe, rather than allowing you to get bigger and have something outrageous you’ve convinced yourself you don’t deserve. Your ego has become a prison. And the key to getting you out is awareness of the truth.
In Chapters 15, 16, and 17, I will help you prepare for the transformational process. Then in Chapters 18, 19, 20, and 21, I will show you the process. (You may want to refer to the additional materials online.) And finally in Chapter 22, I discuss how you can sustain such a monumental effort with the focus on you, the leader.
Keynote Conversations
Before you can begin to build your Breakthrough Solutions Framework™ (Vision, Awareness, Connectedness, Accountability), you will need to prepare yourself for the process. Your objective is to first enroll and then align all your employees to move together with you through the transformational process. Even before that, you need some familiarity with the kind of conversations that will make a difference in your leadership.
When it comes to executing strategy, the only thing worse than not having a business plan is having one that employees can’t see themselves in, don’t own, and can’t execute because of the conversations that surround it and undermine it.
While crafting the right plan matters, you need to think about how to get your employees to align with you, you with them, and them with each other to be enrolled in your vision. You also need to structure the organization so that your plan can and will be executed. When the wrong people plan, the effort collapses into talking about the strategy, not creating a conversation for executing one.
I call these the Keynote conversations. They are important upfront conversations that ground you in your leadership. They are crucial to success. These Keynote conversations are part of the setup to the process. They are what I want my clients to understand, remember, and bring to the practice of strategy and execution. With them, you will create the space for success for all the members of your team—or if it’s just you, with y
ourself.
Eight Keynote Conversations to Help Establish Connectedness in Your Strategy and Execution Process
Regard the past, and then embrace the future. Most of our thoughts refer to our past experiences, and strictly speaking, such thoughts usually have little or no value in your planning process. They are often just a reaction to what has happened in the past, so that’s what you end up with in your planning efforts. You get a past-based strategy that addresses your symptoms rather than the core issues that plague you. As much as possible you want to keep the past where it belongs—in the past and out of the future your plan is building.
It can be damned difficult to let go of what worked so well in the past and may feel comfortable now. And when the results seem lackluster, the first obvious solution might be to just try harder at continuing to do the things you’re so good at. Resisting any kind of change is simpler—but usually less effective—than taking a hard look at what you’ve been doing and asking the question, “What are we missing?” What’s missing creates the gap you’re focused on closing in this process.
The rearview mirror offers us a clear view of the past. We can and must learn lessons from history, but as the financial industry constantly warns investors, “Past performance is no guarantee of future returns.” Companies that blindly continue their strategy are likely to miss important changes within their business ecosystems as the world shifts.
Making a shift to a new, transformed way of being means letting go of what is getting in the way of growth.
Thirteeners Page 14