A few years ago a national retailer, after analysis of its worst performing stores, decided to close the worst of the worst. On that list was a store that had it baffled. It was a good location in a good trade area with plenty of traffic and great visibility. But, it continually lagged behind other stores in the system.
In the movie, “The Karate Kid”, Mr. Miyage exhorts Daniel to “Look eye, Daniel-san, always look eye!”. Most communication issues can be distilled to a lack of “Look eye”. These issues have many symptoms but the most common is “avoid eye”.
”Five frogs are sitting on a log. Four decide to jump off. How many are left? Five, because deciding is different than doing.” That is how Fred Kofman begins his post entitled Are You Making This Mistake at the End of Your Meetings? If you are a member of LinkedIn, you can read the whole post here. It is worth it. Lots of practical advice. The gist is that you must make a commitment to solve the problem, not just discuss it.
We have a confession to make. We hate Mission Statements.
We just met a Leadership Team that works hard to move their business forward as fast as possible. So when a new issue emerges, one of them takes the lead to tackle it right away, even though the issue may need input from other members of the team. The first thing the lead person does is try to get the right people in the room to discuss and solve it.
I recently had an epiphany (if this can be called that) after teaching Scorecard for the last 13 years to over 125 companies, running my last two businesses on one, and teaching it to our 58 EOS Implementers and thousands of companies indirectly.
