January 14, 2005

LEADERS. BREAK. MOLDS.

                   

🔥 Audacious Move of the Week

LEADERS. BREAK. MOLDS.

Breaking the old leadership mold means rejecting conventional leadership practices and replacing them with approaches that actually produce extraordinary results.

Forget conventional leadership.

Forget the textbook formulas and endless lists of behaviours supposedly shared by “great leaders.”

I never built a billion-dollar business by following a leadership recipe.

I learned that leadership is about doing things that produce results.

Sometimes those things are unconventional.

Sometimes they make people uncomfortable.

And sometimes they run directly against what the leadership herd says you should do.

I call these my 7 Mold Breakers™.

🎯 Mold Breaker™ #1 — Be The ONLY One™.

Most leaders study what successful organizations and leaders are doing.

Then they copy them.

That might make you competent.

It will never make you remarkable.

Mold Breakers™ Create. Don’t Copy.

They carve out their own path and refuse to blend in.

Your job isn’t to become a better version of someone else.

Your job is to become The ONLY One™.

⚡ Mold Breaker™ #2 — Be Imperfect FAST™.

The traditional leadership world worships the perfect plan.

I don’t.

While you’re polishing the plan, the world is changing around you.

Mold Breakers™ move.

They put something into play. See what happens. Learn. Adjust. Revise.

Execute. Learn. Adjust.

Perfection doesn’t win.

Movement does.

🤝 Mold Breaker™ #3 — Serve Around™.

Leadership isn’t about sitting at the top issuing instructions.

It’s about getting into the organization and helping people execute.

I call it Serving Around™.

Get out of your office.

Spend time with the people doing the work.

Ask them:

“How can I help?”

You’ll discover barriers, Dumb Rules™ and execution problems you’ll NEVER see from the executive suite.

Don’t command from above.

Serve execution from within.

🔎 Mold Breaker™ #4 — Micromanage Strategically.

“Never micromanage” is one of those leadership clichés that makes absolutely no sense.

Of course you shouldn’t stick your nose into everything.

But some things are simply too important to delegate and disappear.

Identify the few things critical to strategy execution and get intimately involved.

Not because you don’t trust people.

Because they matter too much to leave to chance.

Micromanage where it matters.

🌊 Mold Breaker™ #5 — Strip The Drag™.

Every organization accumulates things that slow the flow of value to the customer.

Rules. Policies. Approvals. Processes. Touch points.

That’s drag.

Mold Breakers™ relentlessly Strip The Drag™.

Simplify processes. Reduce touch points. Remove unnecessary approvals. Cut The CRAP™. Get rid of Dumb Rules™.

Anything that gets between what the customer craves and your ability to deliver it is drag.

Strip it out.

Make value flow.

🔗 Mold Breaker™ #6 — Create Line of Sight™.

A strategy sitting in a PowerPoint deck is worthless.

Execution happens when every person understands how what they do every day contributes to the Strategic Game Plan™.

That’s Line of Sight™.

People need to see the direct connection between their job and the strategy.

Not vaguely.

Specifically.

When Line of Sight™ exists, strategy stops being something management talks about.

It becomes something the organization does.

🧭 Mold Breaker™ #7 — Head West™.

Traditional planning says define the destination precisely and then chart the route.

Real life doesn’t work that way.

Markets move. Customers change. Competitors surprise you.

So Head West™.

Establish a direction.

Start moving.

Learn from what happens.

Let execution reveal opportunities you couldn’t possibly have predicted when you started.

The destination becomes clearer because you’re moving.

Don’t worship the plan.

Ride the Execution™.

💥 BREAK THE MOLD.

These are my 7 Mold Breakers™.

I learned them in the real world, building an organization from a startup to more than a billion in annual sales.

- Be The ONLY One™.
- Be Imperfect FAST™.
- Serve Around™.
- Micromanage Strategically.
- Strip The Drag™.
- Create Line of Sight™.
- Head West™.

You don’t produce extraordinary results by faithfully following the leadership practices everyone else follows.

Break the mold.

Do what works.

🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?

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

✍🏻 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 1.14.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
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