January 2, 2005

BUSY. ISN’T. GROWTH.

                   

🚀 Audacious Move of the Week

BUSY. ISN’T. GROWTH.

Business growth doesn’t come from working harder at running the business you already have. It comes from deliberately creating, operating and leading the business you want to become.

Here’s my challenge to business leaders:

Do you REALLY want to grow?

Or do you just want to get better at running what you already have?

There’s a BIG difference.

Most leaders I meet are incredibly busy.

They’re buried in operations.

Solving problems.

Attending meetings.

Chasing numbers.

Responding to customers.

Putting out fires.

They’re working their asses off IN the business.

But growth demands something different.

It demands that you occasionally get the hell OUT of the business and work ON it.

Because BUSY. ISN’T. GROWTH.

And doing more of what you’re already doing—only harder—is rarely the answer.

🎯 CREATE IT.

Growth starts with making choices.

HOW BIG do you want to be?

WHO do you intend to SERVE?

What do those people CRAVE?

And most importantly:

HOW will you COMPETE and WIN?

Not by copying your competitors.

Not by adopting so-called “best practices” that everyone else is adopting.

Not by trying to be everything to everybody.

You need to create a Strategic Game Plan™ that gives people a compelling reason to choose YOU.

Your challenge?

Define The ONLY ONE™ you intend to be.

What can you deliver that people CARE about that your competitors aren’t?

If your answer sounds anything like what everyone else is saying, you haven’t finished the work.

Growth starts where copying stops.

⚙️ OPERATE IT.

Creating a different strategy isn’t enough.

You have to bake it into the organization.

This is where many growth plans die.

They become PowerPoint presentations.

Strategy documents.

Leadership speeches.

Then everyone goes back to doing exactly what they were doing before.

Growth requires turning differentiation from a strategy into an operating principle.

Every process.

Every customer interaction.

Every employee decision.

Every rule.

Every Dazzling Moment™.

Everything must reinforce the organization you said you wanted to become.

And you won’t get it perfect.

Good.

Be Imperfect FAST™.

Execute.

Learn.

Adjust.

Doing it is ten times better than talking about it.

🧭 LEAD IT.

This may be the toughest challenge of all.

Growth requires leaders who are prepared to disturb comfortable organizations.

To question yesterday’s successful formula.

To Call the Audible™ when circumstances change.

To get out of their offices and practise Leadership by Serving Around™.

To create Line of Sight™ so every person understands exactly how what THEY do contributes to the Strategic Game Plan™.

And sometimes to say:

“I Don’t Know™.”

Because pretending you have all the answers doesn’t create growth.

Creating an organization capable of finding them does.

💥 So here’s the challenge.

Stop confusing activity with progress.

Stop measuring leadership by how full your calendar is.

Stop assuming that because the business is running, the business is growing.

Carve out the time to work ON your business.

Then ask three uncomfortable questions:

What do we need to CREATE differently?

What do we need to OPERATE differently?

How do we need to LEAD differently?

And then choose ONE Move.

Not ten.

One.

Do it.

Learn from it.

Then make the next Move.

Because extraordinary growth rarely begins with a massive transformation.

It begins when a leader decides that running the existing machine isn’t enough anymore.

BUSY. ISN’T. GROWTH.

Different is.

🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?

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✍🏻 Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.

Extraordinary businesses aren’t built by ordinary decisions.

They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.

Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 1.2.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
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