OCTOBER 2019

Business Tips:

15 Invaluable Laws of Growth

Our management is doing a new study on the John Maxwell curriculum with the book called the 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth. We recommend you pick up a copy or listen to it online if you have the technology to do so. We will be exploring these laws as a team this year.

              The goal in the study is to help each of us learn how to grow and develop ourselves so we have the best chance of becoming the person we were created to be.

~ The Law of Modeling and Expansion~

MODELING:       It’s hard to improve when you have no one else but yourself to follow. 4 qualities of a modeling: 1 - A worthy example – when the people that follow you say, “I’d like to be just like you.” 2 - Proven experience. 3 - Having friendship and giving support. 4- Holding a track record of making a difference in people’s lives

      EXPANSION:      Growth always increases our capacity. You cannot get to capacity. As you continue to grow, you never run out of capacity if you are stretching and developing. This is what gives people purpose as you realize you never arrive; you just keep growing. Experts agree that most will only be using 10% of our potential at any given time.

How do we tap the 90% potential? Change how we think and what we do.

THINKING: Stop thinking more work and start thinking what works. Stop thinking can I and start thinking how can I. Stop thinking one door with one way and start thinking many doors with many ways.

DOING: Stop doing only those things you have done and start doing those things you could and should do. Look for those innovative things you could do. Get out of your comfort zone and stay in your strength zone. Stop doing what is expected and start doing more than expected. Stop doing important things every once in a while and start doing important things every day. The more you know, the more you know that you don’t know. The more you have done the more you realize what you haven’t. MAKE IT A GREAT LIFE!

Personal Tips:

~ Resolution 11 ~

RESOLVE To Develop Systems Thinking

Systems are everywhere. Indeed, both nature and organizations operate with innumerable systems. Nature is filled with ecosystems involving air, water, plants, animals, and more in organized patterns to sustain life, while organizational systems consist of people, structures, and processes that interact to produce results.

Systems thinking is the antidote to this sense of helplessness that many feel as we enter the “age of interdependence.” Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing the “structures” that underlie complex situations, and for discerning high from low leverage change. This is why systems thinking is so invaluable to a leader. In order to think systematically, though, one must learn to recognize the system and its parts, or put another way, the forest and the trees.

The best businesses design systematic solutions to their customers’ needs. Building a great business requires building a system that can produce the “good fruit” of consistent results for the customer without the need for superhuman efforts. Systems guru Michael Gerber wrote in his book The E Myth, “It is literally impossible to produce a consistent result in a business that is created around the need for extraordinary people; you will be forced to ask the difficult questions about how to produce a result without the extraordinary ones.” Gerber explained, “You will be forced to find a system that leverages ordinary people to the point where they can produce extraordinary results. To find innovative solutions to the people problems that have plagued business owners since the beginning of time. To build a business that works. You will be forced to do the work of business development, not as a replacement for people development but as its necessary correlate.” The question to be asked and answered is: How does one create a “super systems dependent,” not a “super people dependent,” process for customer satisfaction? Gerber shared, “‘How can I give my customer the results he wants systematically, rather than personally?”

The business equivalent of the biblical saying “As [a man] thinks in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7, New King James Version) is “As a business man thinks, so is his business.”

Systems Thinking to Satisfy Customers: Theodore Levitt said, “Discretion is the enemy of order, standardization, and quality.” Put in simpler terms, discretion is the enemy of duplication. Duplication is the goal for the best systematic process to be used across all similar operations, reducing learning curves and increasing output. The way to create a system that guards against operating discretion is to discover what works consistently and teach those best practices to everyone performing similar processes. For people to duplicate, leaders must orchestrate the best practices through culture, recognition, and rewards. Gerber explained orchestration: “Orchestration is based on the absolutely quantifiable certainty that people will do only one thing predictably— be unpredictable. For your business to be predictable, your people must be. But if people aren’t predictable, then what? The system must provide the predictability. To do what? To give your customer what he wants every single time. Why? Because unless your customer gets everything, he wants every single time, he’ll go someplace else to get it!” Finding the right balance between duplication, creativity, and discretion is essential for long-term systematic results. In today’s competitive environment, if the system isn’t broken, then a person must break it anyway to improve it before his competitors do this and put him out of business.

By studying systems thinking, a leader can learn the leverage points where he can create huge changes through small seemingly insignificant adjustments. As Senge described, “Tackling a difficult problem is often a matter of seeing where the high leverage lies, a change which—with minimum effort—would lead to lasting, significant improvement.” Creating change on a world-sized scale requires leadership and leverage. A person cannot lift ten thousand pounds by himself, but with the right system, a fulcrum, and a long-enough lever, the same task is easier, just as Archimedes exclaimed, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” What is believed impossible by a non–systems thinker is known to be achievable to a leader who thinks systematically. One of the systems gurus of the twentieth century is a man named Buckminster Fuller. When Fuller was a young man, he initially felt he had wasted his life. When he was thirty-two, his only daughter died, leaving him severely depressed. Soon afterward, alone at an ocean beach, Fuller waded farther and farther from shore, contemplating ending his life. But at the point of surrender, he realized he hadn’t really given life a chance. On the brink of suicide, he resolved to spend all of his energy discovering what a single human life could achieve. In a 1972 interview, Fuller explained the power a single human life had to change the direction of the world: Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, call me Trim Tab.  Woodward, Orrin. RESOLVED: 13 Resolutions for LIFE .  . Kindle Edition.

Life Skills:

Faith, Family, Fitness, Finances, Friends, Fun, Following, Freedom; we call these the 8F’s in life.

Many of these categories can tell one where their priorities are in life by measuring the time one would spend in one of the above categories. I know we don’t have it all figured out, but we have a lot of great sources that speak into these items and we welcome your comments. Please feel free to drop us a line concerning any of them.

THE DAILY DOZEN - ASSOCIATE

This year we are going to use this concept to explain 1 word per month that if made into a habit, we believe your life will, no doubt, improve.

Interact intentionally in meaningful relationships with good people in positive ways

Notable quotes: They are italicized above.

Something I want you to know:

Choose to find and be a model. Work on expansion and develop systems thinking!