One of my by business idols is Sir Richard Branson, whom I have had the pleasure of meeting. My close friend Joe Hollingsworth has spent a week with him on his private island in the Virgin Islands and heard 
many interesting stories. What makes him really stand out to me is that he has started over 400 businesses and has had great success with many of them. He also has dyslexia, which resonates with me because so do I. Some may see this as a handicap, but I see it as one of the reasons he has achieved much success.
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6 Secrets on Productivity from Branson
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Success Takes Time
We held our quarterly meeting this past week, and with it came some great discussions. Most of these conversations were centered on our direction and reaching our Big Hairy Audacious Goal, as introduced by Jim Collins. One major point that came up: How do we get where we want to go when we’re consumed by our day-to-day work activities?
We also discussed the Flywheel concept, as Collins examines in “Good to Great!”
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3 Keys to Business Greatness!
If you asked me the business authors out there who I think provide the most value, I would have to say Jim Collins and Peter Drucker.
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5 Steps to Execution
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.
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Proactive Vs. Reactive
I’ve written a lot about execution and getting things done. A few years back we created a software program (FlockGPS) to help us execute on our strategic plan by knocking out quarterly goals on the way to reaching our longterm BHAG, or Bug Hairy Audacious Goal (as coined by Jim Collins, author of Good to Great).Another aspect to execution is in the day to day – how to manage your time effectively and have productive days that add up to your longer term goals. We all struggle with getting tied up in so many things we must be reactive to, and not making time for those things where we must be proactive.
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Designing Your Life at EO Barcelona
I’ve attended EO Universities for several years now, but this year was unlike any I’ve ever attended. I went for the first time to Barcelona, Spain. The theme of the University was “Design Your Life”. The idea was to focus on what you really want out of life, and what you’re doing to get there. It’s like choosing a personal BHAG – your very own Big Hairy Audacious Goal.
As entrepreneurs, we set goals all the time, but experience has taught me that we tend to view are business goals and life goals as one in the same; that by reaching our business goals we receive all we want out of life. Shouldn’t our businesses really be the means to our personal goals and the life legacies we want to create? This isn’t the case, in that, more often than not we let our businesses consume our lives and distract us from our families, spousal relationships, and our own personal paths.
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3 Keys to Business Greatness!
If you asked me the business authors out there who I think provide the most value, I would have to say Jim Collins and Peter Drucker. Both of these guys have provided huge insight to the business community on how to run a successful company. Like most businesses, we at Efficience are starting the year formulating strategies and goals to make forward progress toward our destination, and reading Collins’ and Drucker’s material has always been good preparation.
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Choose to be Great with These 3 Behaviors!
In last week’s blog, I introduced the three core behaviors for business greatness as researched by Jim Collins in his new book “Great by Choice.” These behaviors include fanatical discipline, empirical creativity, and productive paranoia.
