January 6, 2005

DOING. BEATS. KNOWING.

🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week

DOING. BEATS. KNOWING.

Bold Decisions Create Extraordinary Businesses.

I hope it helps you create yours.

Business growth doesn’t come from consuming more business theory. It comes from executing, learning what works and building your organization around it.

Stop borrowing other people’s beliefs. Build your own from what works.

I’m often asked which business books and mentors had the greatest influence on my leadership philosophy.

My answer probably disappoints people.

There wasn’t one.

I wasn’t particularly interested in joining the business book club.

I was interested in performance.

When you’re trying to grow a startup into a business doing more than $1 BILLION in annual sales, theories don’t get much respect.

Results do.

So I learned by doing stuff.

Trying things.

Watching what happened.

Keeping what moved the performance needle.

Killing what didn’t.

And changing direction FAST when something stopped working.

Over time, those experiences became my BE DiFFERENT Growth Playbook™:

CREATE IT → OPERATE IT → LEAD IT.

Not because somebody taught me that model.

Because that’s what I discovered actually worked.

🎯 CREATE IT

Don’t spend months polishing a strategic plan nobody will remember.

Get your Strategic Game Plan™ Just About Right™.

Decide HOW BIG you want to be.

Choose WHO you intend to SERVE.

Discover what they CRAVE.

Then determine how you will COMPETE and WIN by becoming The ONLY One™ who delivers what they care about.

Then execute.

BE Imperfect FAST™.

Execute. Learn. Adjust. Revise.

⚙️ OPERATE IT

A strategy sitting in a binder is worthless.

You have to bake it into the way the organization operates.

Cleanse the Inside.

Delete to innovate.

Kill Dumb Rules™.

Cut The CRAP™.

Design customer experiences people remember.

And create an Organizational Instinct™ that solves customer problems rather than defends company policies.

👊 LEAD IT

Execution doesn’t happen because leaders issue orders from their office.

It happens because leaders get dirty.

Serve Around™ asking one simple question:

“How can I help?”

Create Line of Sight™ between what every person does and the strategy.

Take care of the frontline because they control your brand and strategy execution.

And develop Fingerprint Leadership™ that leaves your personal mark on how the organization performs.

💥 The lesson

My business philosophy wasn’t created by studying what successful organizations supposedly did.

It evolved from discovering what produced amazing performance in the real world.

There were people whose thinking later resonated with me—Seth Godin, Lady Gaga and even The Grateful Dead among them.

But I didn’t copy them.

That would violate the whole point.

Create. Don’t copy.

Your greatest business lessons won’t be found in somebody else’s book.

They’re happening inside your business right now.

Pay attention to them.

Find what works.

Do more of it.

Find what doesn’t.

Kill it.

And turn what you learn into your own way of winning.

🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?

🎙️ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION™ for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business and having a remarkable career.

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

Extraordinary careers aren’t built by ordinary decisions. They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.

Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 1.6.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink