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THE THREE RESOLUTIONS

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THE THREE RESOLUTIONS

Tag Archives: greatness

You can be as GRRRREEEEATT! as Frosties.

11 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by threeresolutionsguy in Character and Competence

≈ Comments Off on You can be as GRRRREEEEATT! as Frosties.

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action, conscience, First Things First, greatness, Unifying Principles, YB12

“When we exercise the courage to set AND ACT on goals that are connected to principles and conscience we tend to achieve positive results.” Covey/Merrill, ‘First Things First’

And this was brought home to me this week, in two ways.

First of all, I have been establishing a training and coaching business (see this page ) and the business model involves making calls to business to seek their help in my provision of a keynote talk on overcoming procrastination, a talk after which I invite the attendees to come to a formal programme. I may have mentioned before that I hate making telephone calls at the best of times, so making unsolicited calls at the end of which I may be rejected was, shall I say, challenging?

But I set the goals (probably months ago, to be frank!) to make said calls this week and, ennobled by a colleague’s own success in making an approach to estate agencies, I did the same. I made a list of local agents and worked through them.

I was not called names. I did not die a horrible death. I overcame my dread (okay, it’s not facing a horde of Zulus but I have been spared that horror because some braver men did it for me in 1879) and established a positive experience that will serve me in the future. I also salved the conscience that’s been shouting at me to act. Lesson taught, and learning accepted.

But there was an added lesson. As I was making these calls my son walked in on me. He is involved in a college course, part of which requires him to do 300 hours relevant work experience. He is a shy lad, but owing to the desire to get the work (farming) and the failure of the college to provide any meaningful assistance, he has had to overcome that reluctance to deal with people and he has spent the week touring farms, talking to strangers and asking them for help. He appears to have met with some success.

And the bombshell – having nagged him to get out and put himself about because that’s what we coaches do, he looked me right in the eye as I put the phone down on a call and said, “Now you know how I feel.”

Boom! Right in the conscience, son! Twist that verbal knife! (And impress me with your wisdom.)

And was he right? Damn right he was right!

When we overcome our fears, however small and illogical, we make ourselves something better than we were before. It might only be a little bit ‘better’ but as Emerson said, “Little by little we build our power.” I remember my first public speaking effort. I was asked just to introduce myself. I got up and burbled for two minutes, then sat down – desperately wanting another go! That ‘little’ built so much power in two minutes.

Every time we leave our comfort zone, regardless of the results, we grow. So does the zone, so we have to stretch further the next time we want to leave it. Occasionally we don’t only enter the ‘stretch zone’ that sits immediately outside the comfort zone. Occasionally we are shoved mercilessly into the Panic Zone. And when we emerge from there, battered and bloodied (or even unscathed) we are all the greater for having been there.

Seek your greatness. Stretch yourself. Listen to your conscience and your Unifying Principles and, when the opportunity arises or life asks you to comply with them – do so.

It’s fantastic.

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Discipline leads to business greatness – ask Jim Collins.

24 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by threeresolutionsguy in Discipline

≈ Comments Off on Discipline leads to business greatness – ask Jim Collins.

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business, discipline, Good to Great, greatness, Jim Collins, self-discipline

Freedom is only part of the story and half the truth…. That is why I recommend the Statue of Liberty be supplanted by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” Victor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)

At the moment I am considering the focused application of The Three Resolutions to business and young people, and part of the research includes reading of that classic on successful business, “Good to Great” by Jim Collins – that’s where I saw the Frankl quote and, like many I use, it struck a chord.

I’ve written before about how responsibility is an essential counter-weight to freedom, so won’t labour that point. The reason for this entry is the study of the chapter in Collins’ book which is headed by that quote.

It is about how important the application of discipline is within a successful company, but with the caveat that it is not system-, management- or hierarchy- imposed discipline that has made the difference in the ‘great’ companies. No, the success relates to self-discipline of the staff.

Very briefly, Collins discovered that great companies (defined as monumentally more successful than comparator companies, and over a sustained period) did a few things others didn’t, including getting the ‘right people on the bus’, deciding the vision AFTER doing that, then focussing on what the company could be best at (and ignoring what it could not).*

One point Collins made is that the discipline wasn’t something injected at the 4th point on his Greatness Process Diagram. It was something that already existed at each point.

The right people on the bus showed discipline. Finding the right vision required discipline. Deciding on, and focusing on the core business required discipline. And execution required discipline.

Discipline is an essential in all activity, indiscipline undermines your efforts. Freedom is a great thing to have, but it requires discipline if you are truly going to enjoy it. We expect discipline in those who serve us, so absolving ourselves of the duty to be disciplined (e.g. ‘because we have earned it’) is selfish, arrogant, irresponsible and disrespectful.

Referring back to Collins’ example, the great companies did not impose discipline, they employed disciplined people who had the freedom to work (in a disciplined way) within and around the business’s systems so that the objectives could be properly achieved. Those disciplined people designed the systems but weren’t then confined by them. They were guided, yes, but not tied down.

I often bemoaned the way that organisations I worked with placed the system over and above the purpose – I used the expression ‘process at the expense of purpose’ because of the times I perceived that a success was criticised because a procedure wasn’t followed to the letter – e.g. finding a missing child instead of filling out the forms first. Collins’ suggestion is that the objective is paramount (provided it is ethical, of course) and if a process prevents it, it is the process that is wrong, not the objective, and the authority of the disciplined manager was such that s/he could work outside the procedural box to get things done without having to spend time worrying about the administrative consequence.

But the emphatic point was always – discipline made it possible. Self-discipline, then systematic discipline, and then execution discipline. But in the final analysis, given the ability to work imaginatively – it was self-discipline that mattered most.

See. I told you so.

*I’m still reading it, that’s as far as I’ve got so far. But why wait?

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