My experience has been that we are rarely lacking strategy and planning, they are abundant. What we do lack is execution around those plans, which is the major problem we face running a business.

We follow a 5 step process to gain execution on our strategies, and it’s had a major impact on our business.

To set the stage, think of your goals this way: After creating your BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), you will usually set shorter term goals that create the path to reaching your BHAG.

Here at Efficience, we have our BHAG, 3 to 5 year Goals, 1 year Goals and then Quarterly Goals. Each goal is a stepping stone to the next goal. When we set our company Quarterly Goals, each person on the team is assigned individual Quarterly Goals that help work toward the company’s Quarterly Goals. Every week we have a weekly team meeting where we review each person’s progress, defined as Next Steps, towards reaching their quarterly goals.

Here are our 5 steps to Execution:

1Stop for a minute and plan what the next step is you can take towards reaching your short-term goal.  For us, this has to be something achievable within the coming week.

2Write it down and make it visible for your peers to see. This can be posting it on a bulletin board, posting it online, sending an email…just so long as it’s visible to more than just you.

3Put it in your calendar: this means setting a specific date and time to work on your Next Step.

4Tell your peers what you are going to do. This works best if you have a rhythmic meeting schedule, such as weekly, where you can share it with everyone, and then flow right into number….

5Meet with your peers once more and tell them if you completed your task. As stated, this works best with a rhythmic meeting schedule, where every meeting you tell your peers what you did/didn’t do the previous week, and what your next step is for the upcoming week.

As humans we come standard with egos, and none of us like to look bad in front of others. Knowing that we’re being held accountable by our peers drives us to do what we say we’re going to do.

Black Swan Theory is and why the book by Nassim Taleb is so relevant to both our personal and professional lives.

Fooled by Randomness. I was blown away by how he analyzed risk as a former Wall Street trader. Being a regular in the book store, I saw another one of Taleb’s books The Black Swan about 3 years ago and picked it up immediately. I was once more blown away, only this time at a new higher level.

The Black Swan? The reason is that for years it was man’s experience that swans only came in white. Then one day in Australia a black swan was discovered. This is significant because it illustrates how one event can change everything you ever thought you knew about something. It shows a limitation in our learning because we use observations that pile up over and over, then one event changes our entire reality. The impossible becomes possible.

Some examples of a Black Swan Event would be World War 1, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the October 87 stock market crash, the computer, Google, Harry Potter and the events of 9/11.

There are 3 attributes to a Black Swan:

Leadership Wisdom from the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari,

Are you choosing high growth or low growth?

How often do we make a conscious decision to put ourselves in the path of opportunity? Do you consider this when choosing your type of business or market segment?

I spent years in the investment world, and one thing I can tell you is that around 85% of your returns are determined by the asset class that you choose to allocate money towards. For example, if you choose stock, bonds, or real estate as one of your asset classes, your portfolio manager, company, track record and all the research will lend little towards your return. Ultimately it’s the inherent return of that asset class that determines the majority of what you return.

What does this have to do with business? You have to consider similar things when selecting a marketplace or industry for business opportunities. In the 80’s and 90’s, reading all the financial magazines made it evident that mutual funds were gaining popularity with the masses, making it apparent that a mutual fund would help us grow our investment firm, and it did immensely.

Our software company grew out of an awareness of the value desired and created by innovative software, and how it was becoming the backbone of businesses. We’re experiencing strong growth during tough times. Is it because we’re just that good at sales, or is it because the sector we chose to play in?

green” movement or phone applications?  How about all of this government spending taking place? If the sector you are in is not a high growth industry, and isn’t headed that direction, have you considered changing your direction?

Have you ever noticed how things work in cycles with observable patterns? As someone whose strength is observing and seeing patterns, I find it helpful to know that these patterns exist and to see if this awareness generates some form of opportunity. This may be because I have that entrepreneurial instinct that draws out this intrigue, but whatever the case, they seem to pop up everywhere.

You can find these patterns in the stock market, football teams, the weather, time to market saturation for products, and a multitude of other things. For example, look at the stock market over a long period of time. You will see that over time the price to earnings ratio (PE) tends to expand and contract over a longer time horizon than the normal business cycle.

From 1903 to around 1920, you should notice a contraction of PE from around 24 to 5. From 1920 to 1930, the PE surged from 5 to 28. From 1930 to 1950, it contracted back to 9. From 1950 to 1969, it expanded from that 9 to about 23. Then from 1969 to around 1980, it dropped back down to 7. From 1980 to 2000, you should see it surge up to 42 (can you say bubble?). We have been on a PE contraction since then. The sad news, as you can see from the pattern, is that a long uptrend does not typically start until the price to earnings ratio falls into the single digits.

Being a University of Tennessee football fan, I observe the patterns there also. As fans, we have high expectations every season, which makes it difficult to see the patterns. However, you can go back to the 1960s and see a good decade for the UT program. The 1970s were tough. The 1980s bounced around with big ups and downs. The 1990s were great, and the decade of the 2000s has been sad. You would think from this, the current decade will improve.

If you listen to the news, you would think we have been on a warming trend from the past 100 years. Actually, we have been on a warming trend since the late 1970s. In the mid-70s, all the major news stories reported how the average temperatures had been dropping since the 1950s, so we would all starve to death because of crop failures. Last winter, we had snow on the ground in Knoxville, TN for over three weeks. Typically, snow only stays on the ground here for a couple of days, and this was the first time since I started living here in 1981 that this has happened. Could this be the start of something new?

Finally, notice the trend of how breakthrough technological inventions saturate the market. In a general sense, the automobile, television, and radio each took about 30 to 40 years to fully saturate the market. The VCR took at least 15 years. The internet reached saturation after around 8 to 10 years, and it only took Facebook around 3 years once it opened up to everyone.

This pattern is obvious, and we will see new products, services, and software tools reach full penetration within a year in the near future. This results from how connected everyone has become, and this connectivity continues to increase. I would say that at some point in the near future, products and especially software will reach full market saturation within weeks and even days.

What patterns do you see around you? Will these patterns affect your business? Are there opportunities in those patterns or just the satisfaction of knowing this is just one of those cycles and will eventually change?

The Hedgehog and The Fox, you know that the hedgehog revolves around one known truth, and the fox around many. The hedgehog is focused, and strategizes around that “one thing”, while the agile fox uses multiple strategies, many time uncoordinated and unrelated.

Hedgehog Concept, for their companies. Those who led the comparison companies, tended to be foxes, never gaining the clarifying advantage, of a Hedgehog Concept, being instead, scattered, diffused, and inconsistent.”

In other words, focusing on one thing that you do best, that you are passionate about, gives you a strong competitive advantage against the fox in business. The hedgehog constantly sees victory in business over the fox because they drive their business around that focus.

Collins asks these three questions to help you find your focus: