Earlier this month I served as executive producer of the AlphaGraphics annual conference for the sixth straight year. The keynote speaker at our opening general session – Les McKeown – shared some great business tips for leaders, which I summarize below.
“Put your foot on the gas peddle and the car goes toward it” – That’s the way to look at setting and achieving goals. Keep your eyes focused.
“To change the way you do business, you have to change the way you make decisions. Your role is to build a Decision-making Machine” – Early on, you make a decision, then tell someone else to get it done. As your business becomes more complex, if you keep making decisions, you slow everything down. The key is to have other people make decisions that impact their group. You serve as the visionary, let them be the operators.
“When you move from ‘this is how we do it today’ to ‘this is how we’re going to do it tomorrow,’ you’ll lose some Big Dog Operators who aren’t wanting to change”
“For every meeting, have an agenda. For each agenda item, have a start time and end time for discussion. For each item, reach an agreement or decision” – Once you do that, it’s important to “release the item to execute” so something happens.
“At some point you have to stop being the hero in your business.” – Wean yourself away from the “hero model” by rewarding the scalable, so you have capacity to do more.
