Category Archives: BookNotes

One Way

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Yesterday I introduced this short throw-back series with the story of a rock slide on I-40 on the NC/TN border that happened in 1997. That rock slide caused a lot of detours for months, and in the pre-GPS days, you had to pay attention to the road signs.

At the same time, the church I was serving was going through a “rock slide” of its own: the sudden resignation of the senior pastor, with practically no warning to anyone – including his staff! Our leadership teams had just begun working through Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Church. I had just returned from a PDC seminar at Saddleback.

Isn’t it amazing how we think we are in control and have it all together with our plans – until we encounter a rock slide!

When a rock slide closes the highway, and you have to take a detour, you learn to rely a lot on road signs…

One Way is a most appropriate sign for evangelism. Christian evangelism is believers sharing the gospel with persons who aren’t believers. It is asking them to repent of their sins, to put their faith in Christ for the forgiveness of their sins and the free gift of eternal life, and to follow Him forever as Lord. Evangelism is the good news spoken by believers and lived out in their lives.

courtesy roadtrafficsigns.com

courtesy roadtrafficsigns.com

We must never replace evangelism with anything else. Everything we do individually and corporately in the church ultimately should b a witness to lost people and work toward making them disciples. When this is not the case, the church is not healthy, no matter how busy we are and how much we seem to accomplish.

Every Christian is responsible for declaring the good news of Christ’s coming and his death, burial, resurrection, and return. If we do not, we will give an account to the Father. The manner of delivering the message is not the crucial point. The responsibility for delivering the message is the decisive issue.

Evangelism under the lordship of Chris is the only way to make disciples. Whatever else churches do, they must make disciples. Evangelism is unique in that the need for the gospel is universal and the message is universal and effective in all cultures. Evangelism is believers sharing the gospel with a non-believer in ways both understand.

We are God’s method for evangelizing the world. He has no other. We are His plan, and our obedience means growth in the kingdom and the churches where we worship and serve. God save us to send us into the world to speak, live and show His good news of salvation to persons separated from Him.

That is what evangelism is all about. That is the “one way.”

 

part of a series taken from presentations 16 years ago, introducing the Purpose Driven Church principles to a church leadership team 

brought back today to connect to Auxano’s release of the first Team UP resource, featuring the Top 100 Quotes from Purpose Driven Church, with applications and exercises from Church Unique

100PDQ

Team UP Launches

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As the Vision Room Curator for Auxano, one of the exciting things I am a part of is creating new resources for church leaders. In addition to the daily curated resources of the Vision Room itself, there is the biweekly release of Sums, our leadership book summaries. Both of these resources are free, requiring only an email registration available here.

Two weeks ago, we rolled out Auxano Founder and Team Leader Will Mancini’s latest book Innovating for Discipleship. It is  Volume 1 of The Church Unique Intentional Leadership Series.

We also released Issue #3 of the Unique 19 series – a look at vision-saturated churches you’ve probably never heard of. We call it the “list for the rest of us.”

Last week, we released the first of a new line of free resources called Team UP. In this inaugural release, we’ve taken our favorite 100 quotes from Rick Warren’s best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Church, and organized them for team discussion and vision implementation in your own church.

Enjoy this free resource and be inspired all over again by these timeless quotes here.

100PDQ

As I was doing the preliminary work during the summer on this resource (reading Purpose Driven Church again, selecting 150 quotes for our team to weed down to 100), I was reminded by the powerful influence this book has had on the church over the years. That was one of the reasons we chose it, and yet in the rereading I was taken back over 16 years to the first time I introduced PDC to the leadership team at the church I was the associate pastor for.

Earlier this summer during the infamous garage cleaning out, I had come across some of the files I had used, and a quick trip down memory lane uncovered the following:

When you look back with 20-20 hindsight, the inevitable will always happen.

The condition had existed for a long time. Actually, it started small but continued to grow. Everybody knew about it but no one really talked about it. As a matter of fact, it was easy to overlook. After all, things were going so well, and the future was bright. But trouble came just the same.

Throughout the entire area, the slopes of the mountains are filled with what geologists call “wedge failures.” That’s when wedges of rock are separated by a fault, fracture, or other weakness. That’s nature’s part.

Then man stepped in and built a road through the wedge failure areas. The road that was blasted through the mountains intersected the wedge failures. Weakened by the cuts made for the road, it was only a matter of time.

Add some rain as a lubricant, and whole sides of mountains can come crashing down on the highway. On July 1, 1997, a section of mountainside 800 feet high by 200 feet wider tumbled down onto I-40 near the TN/NC state line, closing all four lanes. Hundreds of tons of mountainside covered the highway; the rock that didn’t fall remained fragile and unstable.

When a rock slide closes the highway and you have to take a detour, you learn to rely a lot on road signs.

Set up road signs; put up guideposts. Take note of the highway, the road that you take.           Jeremiah 31:21

Isn’t it amazing how we think we are in control and have it all together with our plans – until we encounter a rock slide!

Tomorrow: What a rock slide has to do with Purpose Driven Church

Starbucks: A Significant & Purposeful Business Anchored in Engaging & Compassionate Leadership Practices

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It is important to remember that Starbucks started as a single store and that anything is possible if we take the lessons learned from Starbucks as a nudge to think about how we can innovate and expand our products, services, social media tools, technologies, and channels. The leaders at Starbucks also demonstrate what is possible when you foster product passion, teach your people the importance of human connections, seek operational excellence and efficiency, and engage in a never-ending pursuit of relevance.     – Joseph Michelli, Leading the Starbucks Way

The first session of the Fall Term of the 2013 GsD is wrapping up with today’s post. Organizational consultant Joseph Michelli’s latest book Leading the Starbucks Way has been the primary resource for this session.

Michelli uses over two years of research with dozens of leaders in the Starbucks organization to develop five actionable principles that forge emotional connections that drive innovation, grow new business product lines, and foster employee and customer loyalty. These principles are “brief and clear, and put the customers, products, and experiences at the purposeful center of Starbucks.” Here are the five principles:

  1. Savor and elevate
  2. Love to be loved
  3. Reach for common ground
  4. Mobilize the connection
  5. Cherish and challenge your legacy

In order to help you evaluate mastery of the material as well as apply independent thinking skills to your own setting, here are a few summary thoughts based on the five principles above.

  • When frontline team members are passionate about your Guest Experience, they build interest and excitement on the part of your Guests.
  • Evaluate every strategy to ensure that it aligns with your core values, reinforces your purpose, and stimulates continued progress toward your aspirations.
  • Well-designed experiences involve a willingness to see the environment and process from your Guests’ perspective.
  • If your Guests view your organization as being competent and having integrity, you have created the environment for trust. Trust is a gateway emotion on a journey to greater levels of emotional engagement.
  • Listening is not a passive pursuit; listening is synonymous with connecting discovering, understanding, empathizing, and responding.
  • Good leaders provide uplifting moments for those who uplift Guests.
  •  One of the most powerful opportunities for building a relationship occurs after your Guests’ visit, with your team members offering a warm farewell, and inviting Guests into future opportunities to connect.
  • Observe your Guests, then adopt, adapt, and extrapolate new ideas that will connect both locally and globally.
  • Technology should support the mission, not the reverse.
  • Complacency and inertia are challenges to innovation for your organization.
  • There is typically a strong interdependence among a organization’s performance, its values, and the impact it has on the communities it serves.
  • Passionate team members have a magnetically positive impact when it comes to turning Guests into attenders and future team members.

It is important to remember that, at its heart, Starbucks is in the people business serving coffee. Place, Process, and Product are all important, but the foundation and core of Starbucks success is its People.

Take a look at this brief video and you will have a better understanding of what I mean:

SBPartner1

The M.U.G. Award referred to in the video allows partners to recognize co-workers for “Moves of Uncommon Greatness” that help them achieve their goals. It’s a way of saying, “Thanks for helping me out. I couldn’t have done it without you!”

Can your team members say the same thing?

Part 9 of a series in the 2013 GsD Fall Term

Leading the Starbucks Way: Information, Insights, and Analysis Needed to Create a High-Performance Guest-Oriented Organization

inspired by and adapted from Leading The Starbucks Way, by Joseph Michelli

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Leaders Honor the Past – But Aren’t Trapped There

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In late 2007, Starbucks was not doing well, and the future looked bleak. To address the emerging problems, former CEO Howard Schultz, who had stepped aside almost eight years earlier to become chairman of the board, did something unexpected: he returned as CEO to oversee day-to-day operations.

Schultz came back to Starbucks with a passion and a plan, and over the next two years, Starbucks returned to sustainable, profitable growth.

Here’s what Schultz had to say in looking back to early 2008: 

If not checked, success has a way of covering up small failures, and when many of us at Starbucks became swept up in the company’s success, it had unintended effects. We ignored, or maybe we just failed to notice, shortcomings.

We were so intent upon building more stores fast to meet each quarter’s projected sales growth that, too often, we picked bad locations or didn’t adequately train newly hired baristas. Sometimes we transferred a good store manager to oversee a new store, but filled the old post by promoting a barista before he or she was properly trained. 

courtesy nbcnews.com

courtesy nbcnews.com

As the years passed, enthusiasm morphed into a sense of entitlement, at least from my perspective. Confidence became arrogance and, at some point, confusion as some of our people stepped back and began to scratch their heads, wondering what Starbucks stood for. 

In the early years at Starbucks, I liked to say that a partner’s job at Starbucks was to “deliver on the unexpected” for customers. Now, many partners’ energies seemed to be focused on trying to deliver the expected – mostly for Wall Street. 

Great organizations foster a productive tension between continuity and change. On the one hand, they adhere to the principles that produce success in the first place, yet on the other hand, they continually evolve, modifying their approach with creative improvements and intelligent adaptation.

When organizations fail to distinguish between current practices and the enduring principles of their success, and mistakenly fossilize around their practices, they’ve set themselves up for decline.

By confusing what and why, Starbucks found itself at a dangerous crossroads. Which direction would they go?

In Leading the Starbucks Way, organizational consultant Joseph Michelli uses two years of research with dozens of leaders in the Starbucks organization to develop five actionable principles that forge emotional connections that drive innovation, grow new business product lines, and foster employee and customer loyalty. These principles are “brief and clear, and put the customers, products, and experiences at the purposeful center of Starbucks.”

Leadership Principle #5: Cherish and Challenge Your Legacy

“Cherish and challenge your legacy” is all about encouraging you to define the legacy you wish to leave and evaluate your leadership performance, in part, based on your progress toward that legacy.     – Joseph Michelli, Leading the Starbucks Way

A key element in the success of the Starbucks transformation results from an alignment between leaders who are charged with driving change and those who are responsible for ensuring consistent operations.

Our challenge has been to produce innovations that improve operations, drive growth, enhance the partner and customer experience, and increase profitability. That’s a tall order, but it often occurs in the most subtle ways.     – Craig Russell, Starbucks senior vice president, Global Coffee

Ultimate success in driving innovation hinges on the alignment of those who foster change and those who maintain stability.

ChurchWorld Application

  1. What are the strengths of your organization that have been most instrumental to the success you have achieved?
  2. How might those success drivers inadvertently become traps that could constrain future growth?
  3. How aligned are the “operators” and the “innovators” in your organization? Would you say that both groups share an “operational innovation” mindset?

Any organization, small or large, consumer or otherwise, that is going to embrace the status quo as an operating principle is just going to be dead…The need for constant innovation and pushing forward has never been greater than it is today.    – Howard Schultz, CEO, Starbucks

Leaders must honor the past but not be trapped in it.

 

Part 8 of a series in the 2013 GsD Fall Term

Leading the Starbucks Way: Information, Insights, and Analysis Needed to Create a High-Performance Guest-Oriented Organization

inspired by and adapted from Leading The Starbucks Way, by Joseph Michelli

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Growing Connections Through Technology

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I’m writing this post sitting in an airport, waiting on my flight. I drove to the airport from my client’s location, navigating via my smart phone. Along the way, I was updated by the airline with a flight time change. Arriving at the airport, I checked in with a boarding pass on my phone. Waiting for the flight, I checked email, websites, and participated in a conference call – all on my mobile phone.

Mobile technology has changed the world, and that includes ChurchWorld.

courtesy mobilecommercedaily.com

courtesy mobilecommercedaily.com

In Leading the Starbucks Way, organizational consultant Joseph Michelli uses two years of research with dozens of leaders in the Starbucks organization to develop five actionable principles that forge emotional connections that drive innovation, grow new business product lines, and foster employee and customer loyalty. These principles are “brief and clear, and put the customers, products, and experiences at the purposeful center of Starbucks.”

Leadership Principle #4: Mobilize the Connection

This principle looks at how Starbucks strengthens the relationships formed in Starbucks stores and extends them into the home, office, and supermarket experiences of customers. It also examines how Starbucks leaders leverage technology to integrate a multichannel relationship with their customer base.

Great leaders continually seek to leverage the options that are emerging through technology and to position their businesses on social platforms more effectively and strategically.     – Joseph Michelli, Leading the Starbucks Way

ChurchWorld Application

  1. How would you assess your success in forging a digital connection of trust and relevance?
  2. Do you have a multi-pronged and integrated strategy concerning digital and mobile solutions?

Two key elements in the Starbucks social media strategy are authenticity and interesting content. Starbucks is committed to making friends, not offers. They feel that Twitter and Facebook are about connecting – there are more appropriate settings for selling and closing.

ChurchWorld Application

  1. How strategic are your decisions concerning the social media platforms through which your brand will engage?
  2. Have you dedicated resources to commit time to thinking about the platform that fits your organization and guest and member interfaces?

Technology will serve our mission, and we will deploy our strategies to engage our partners and customers wherever they spend their time. We will seek to stay relevant to them and uplift them through human connection.     – Alex Wheeler, vice president, Starbucks Global Digital Marketing

SBFacebookpage

A few of the highlights of this principle:

  • Twitter and Facebook approaches should focus on consistent but not overwhelming levels of communication, delivered for the purpose of connecting.
  • No matter the size of the organization, its leaders should designate someone to be in charge of social media strategy.
  • Technology is powerful when you view it as a way to enhance the human connection rather than seeing it as inevitably leading to impersonalization.
  • Technology should not be provided for “users,” but instead should be seen as a tool for serving and connecting with your “people” and your “Guests.”

 

Part 7 of a series in the 2013 GsD Fall Term

Leading the Starbucks Way: Information, Insights, and Analysis Needed to Create a High-Performance Guest-Oriented Organization

inspired by and adapted from Leading The Starbucks Way, by Joseph Michelli

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Applying the Power of AND: Understanding the Universal Needs of the People You Serve AND Innovating to Meet the Unique Needs of Your Local Environment

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There is an ongoing debate among cultural anthropologists between the two conflicting perspectives of universalism and cultural relativism. Universalism suggests that the underlying similarities among all people are greater than their cultural differences, while cultural relativism asserts that cultural differences have a profound effect on people, making it difficult for “outsiders” to fully understand the relevant context of behavior.

As a church leader, you may not consider yourself a cultural anthropologist, but go back and read that last phrase and you will probably change your mind.

To put it a different way, how easy is it for “outsiders” to become connected to your organization?

In Leading the Starbucks Way, organizational consultant Joseph Michelli uses two years of research with dozens of leaders in the Starbucks organization to develop five actionable principles that forge emotional connections that drive innovation, grow new business product lines, and foster employee and customer loyalty. These principles are “brief and clear, and put the customers, products, and experiences at the purposeful center of Starbucks.”

Leadership Principle #3: Reach for Common Ground

Starbucks leaders have made their share of mistakes in attempting to strike a balance between the universal and the cultural. In the process of their setbacks and victories, Starbucks serves as a helpful guide on how to make powerful and respectful connections in new opportunities.     – Joseph Michelli, Leading the Starbucks Way

The goal of leadership is to create the right environment for human connections to occur and to help staff members manage the inevitable issues that surface.

ChurchWorld Application

  1. Are you paying attention to your Guests’ needs to be seen and heard?
  2. Would you go so far as to say your Guests feel understood and known?
  3. Do your team members say thank you, offer a fond farewell, and invite guests into future opportunities to connect?
  4. When it comes to seeing, hearing, and knowing your Guests, what are the strengths and opportunities for your organization?
  5. Are you connecting with each Guest verbally and nonverbally upon first contact?
  6. Do you go from listening to Guests to Guest knowledge on which you can act?

Your community has all kinds of specific challenges. Do you know what they are?

Understanding your local predicament is about having an intimate grasp of the soil where God has called you to minister. It’s about walking firsthand your contours of locality.

Starbucks leadership has deployed a series of key approaches and adjustments to maximize the local relevance of products, services, and physical environment. They include decentralization and revitalization of their corporate structure, developing relationships with local allies, and understanding the physical properties of history of the community they serve.

 Considering local cultural influences is an important layer of our design process to ensure market relevance. For us, it starts with listening and observing the needs of our partners and customers. It’s about communicating up front, talking to customers, listening to partners, and it’s seeing through the lens of that collective experience.     – Thom Breslin, Director, Design, Starbucks UK

ChurchWorld Application

  1. Are you seeking to provide the same thing to everyone, or do you understand the needs of unique needs of different people?
  2. How far can and do you go to achieve local relevance?
  3. Have you completed a “sense of place” in your new markets such that you can blend your brand with local needs?

Leaders understand that maximized choice is essential to today’s consumer, but with choice comes a responsibility to ensure that you can execute the new product offerings at a level commensurate with your existing levels of excellence.

 If you don’t innovate, renovate, and constantly seek relevance – you die.     – Thom Breslin

ChurchWorld Application

  1. What are the product rituals and daily use patterns of prospective customers in new markets?
  2. How are you positioning your product (define or give examples) to capture customers in the context of their lifestyles?
  3. What are you doing to stay alive and thrive in new opportunities?

Starbucks leaders actively seek local relevance and adjust their product and service offerings accordingly. When leaders find the right business partners and make conscious and concerted efforts to give customers what they love, their business achieve lasting connections and maximal success.

What are the unique needs and opportunities where God has placed your church?

Part 6 of a series in the 2013 GsD Fall Term

Leading the Starbucks Way: Information, Insights, and Analysis Needed to Create a High-Performance Guest-Oriented Organization

inspired by and adapted from Leading The Starbucks Way, by Joseph Michelli

Return on Luck

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– a quick personal note: I’m away attending to some urgent family business, so I’ve suspended the 2013 GsD Fall Term for a week. In it’s place, I’m reposting one of the most popular series on 27gen – a look at Jim Collins’ book Great by Choice with application to ChurchWorld. It continues to get views almost every day, so I hope you enjoy the entire series

Today marks the final post this week on Great by Choice, the recently released book by Jim Collins and his colleague Morten Hansen. In much the same way as Collins’ previous works (particularly Good to Great), Great by Choice is written to a business leader audience using primarily business examples – but it is dead-center must reading for leaders in ChurchWorld.

Here are Collins’ and Hansen’s summary thoughts on the final principle in the book, Return on Luck.

courtesy jodymichael.com

courtesy jodymichael.com

A luck event is defined as one that meets three tests:

(1) some significant aspect of the event occurs largely or entirely independent of the actions of the key actors in the enterprise;

(2) the event has a potentially significant consequence (good or bad); and

(3) the event has some element of unpredictability.

Luck happens, a lot, both good luck and bad luck. Every company in the research experienced significant luck events in the era of analysis. Yet the 10X cases were not generally luckier than the comparison cases.

  • The 10X companies did not generally get more good luck than the comparisons.
  • The 10X companies did not generally get less bad luck from the comparison.
  • The 10X companies did not get their good luck earlier than the comparisons.
  • The 10X companies cannot be explained by a single giant-luck spike.

There are four possible ROL scenarios

  • Great return on good luck
  • Poor return on good luck
  • Great return on bad luck
  • Poor return on bad luck.

10Xers credit good luck as a contributor to their success, despite the undeniable fact that others also experienced good luck, but the never blame bad luck for setbacks or failures.

“Who Luck” – the luck of finding the right mentor, partner, teammate, leader, friend – is one of the most important types of luck. The best way to find a strong current of good luck is to swim with great people, and to build deep and enduring relationships with people for whom you’d risk your life and who’d risk their lives for you.

How’s your luck today?

Great by Choice

SMaC Down!

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– a quick personal note: I’m away attending to some urgent family business, so I’ve suspended the 2013 GsD Fall Term for a week. In it’s place, I’m reposting one of the most popular series on 27gen – a look at Jim Collins’ book Great by Choice with application to ChurchWorld. It continues to get views almost every day, so I hope you enjoy the entire series

 

All week long I’ve been posting excerpts and summaries from Great by Choice, the latest work by Jim Collins (assisted this time by Morten Hansen). Great by Choice asks a simple question:

Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?

Collins and Hansen have answered that question with solid principles, based on nine years of research and interviews. The following are the authors’  comments on SMaC.

SMaC stand for Specific, Methodical, and Consistent.

The more uncertain, fast-changing, and unforgiving your environment, the more SMaC you need to be.

A SMaC recipe is a set of durable operating practices that create a replicable and consistent success formula; it is clear and concrete, enabling the entire enterprise to unify and organize its efforts, giving clear guidance regarding what to do and what not to do. A SMaC recipe reflects empirical validation and insight about what actually works and why.

Developing a SMaC recipe, adhering to it, and amending it (rarely) when conditions merit correlate with 10X success. This requires the three 10X behaviors:

  • empirical creativity (for developing and evolving it)
  • fanatic discipline (for sticking to it)
  • productive paranoia (for sensing necessary changes).
courtesy greeceathena.wordpress.com

courtesy greeceathena.wordpress.com

Amendments to a SMaC recipe can be made to one element or ingredient while leaving the rest of the recipe intact. Like making amendments to an enduring constitution, this approach allows you to facilitate dramatic change and maintain extraordinary consistency.

Far more difficult than implementing change is figuring out what works, understanding why it works, grasping when to change, and knowing when not to.

What is your SMaC recipe? Is it still valid, or does it need amending?

Continually question and challenge your recipe, but change it rarely.

Great by Choice

Leading Above the Death Line

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– a quick personal note: I’m away attending to some urgent family business, so I’ve suspended the 2013 GsD Fall Term for a week. In it’s place, I’m reposting one of the most popular series on 27gen – a look at Jim Collins’ book Great by Choice with application to ChurchWorld. It continues to get views almost every day, so I hope you enjoy the entire series

In one of the strangest names I’ve seen applied to a business principle, Jim Collins and Morten Hansen describe three key dimensions of productive paranoia in their book Great by Choice with the following chapter title:

Leading Above the Death Line

courtesy peakfreaks.com

courtesy peakfreaks.com

The authors use a real story (two different climbing teams’ assault on Mt. Everest in 1996; one succeeded, one had a tragic ending) to illustrate the concept of productive paranoia.

  1. Build cash reserves and buffers to prepare for unexpected events and bad luck before they happen.
  2. Bound risk – Death Line risk, asymmetric risk, and uncontrollable risk – and manage time-based risk.
  3. Zoom out, then zoom in, remaining hypervigilant to sense changing conditions and respond effectively.

10Xers understand that they cannot reliably and consistently predict future events, so they prepare obsessively – ahead of time, all the time – for what they cannot possibly predict. They assume that a series of bad events can wallop them in quick succession, unexpectedly and at any time.

It’s what you do before the storm hits – the decisions and disciplines and buffers and shock absorbers already in place – that matters most in determining whether your enterprise pulls ahead, falls behind, or dies when the storm hits.

10Xers build buffers and shock absorbers far beyond the norm of what other do. The 10X companies studied carried 3 to 10 times the ration of cash to assets relative to the median of what most companies carry and maintained more conservative balance sheets than the comparison companies throughout their histories, even when they were small enterprises.

10X cases are extremely prudent in how they approach and manage risk, paying special attention to three categories of risk:

  1. Death Line risk (which can kill or severely damage the enterprise)
  2. Asymmetric risk (in which the downside dwarfs the upside)
  3. Uncontrollable risk (which cannot be controlled or managed)

10Xers zoom out, then zoom in. They focus on their objectives and sense changes in their environment; they push for perfect execution and adjust to changing conditions. When they sense danger, they immediately zoom out to consider how quickly a threat is approaching and whether it calls for a change in plans. Then they zoom in, refocusing their energies into executing objectives.

While you might not face the same circumstances in ChurchWorld as in the business world (especially in terms of generating revenue), you have a risk profile just as any business does.

Take a look at the environment around you – how much time before the risk profile changes?

What have you done to get ready for it?

Great by Choice

Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs

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– a quick personal note: I’m away attending to some urgent family business, so I’ve suspended the 2013 GsD Fall Term for a week. In it’s place, I’m reposting one of the most popular series on 27gen – a look at Jim Collins’ book Great by Choice with application to ChurchWorld. It continues to get views almost every day, so I hope you enjoy the entire series

In Jim Collins’ last book Great by Choice, he and colleague Morten Hansen used extensive research to identify companies whose financial performance bettered their competition by at least a factor of 10 over the study period. Identifying these organizations and their leaders as 10Xers, they then discovered three core beliefs that these organizations had in common. Their research also revealed some common principles these organizations practiced; principles that lead the companies to greatness in environments characterized by big forces and rapid shifts that leaders could not predict or control.

Take this one, which could come out of the latest “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie:

Fire bullets, then cannonballs.

Here is a summary of what Collins and Hansen said about this principle:

A “fire bullets, then cannonballs” approach better explains the success of 10X companies than big leap innovations and predictive genius. A bullet is a low-cost, low risk, and low distraction test or experiment. 10Xers use bullets to empirically validate what will actually work. Based on that empirical validation, they then concentrate their resources to fire a cannonball, enabling large returns from concentrated bets.

courtesy examiner.com

courtesy examiner.com

The 10X cases fired a significant number of bullets that never hit anything. They didn’t know ahead of time which bullets would hit or be successful.

Next, there are two types of cannonballs, calibrated and uncalibrated.

  • A calibrated cannonball has confirmation based on actual experience – empirical validation – that a big bet will likely prove successful.
  • An uncalibrated cannonball means placing a big bet without empirical validation.
Cannon

courtesy jackintheteambox.com

Uncalibrated cannonballs can lead to calamity. The companies researched paid a huge price when big, disruptive events coincided with their firing uncalibrated cannonballs, leaving them exposed.  10Xers periodically made the mistake of firing an uncalibrated cannonball, but they tended to self-correct quickly. The comparison cases, in contrast, were more likely to try to fix their mistakes by firing yet another uncalibrated cannonball, compounding their problems.

Failure to fire cannonballs, once calibrated, leads to mediocre results. The idea is not to choose between bullets or cannonballs, but to fire bullets first, then fire cannonballs.

The difficult task is to marry relentless discipline with creativity, neither letting discipline inhibit creativity nor letting creativity erode discipline. This combination of creativity and discipline, translated into the ability to scale innovation with great consistency, better explains some of the greatest stories – from Intel to Southwest Airlines, from Amgen’s early years to Apple’s resurgence under Steve Jobs – than the mythology of big-hit, single-step breakthroughs.

The Leader’s Key Question

Which of the following behaviors do you most need to increase?

  • Firing enough bullets
  • Resisting the temptation to fire uncalibrated cannonballs
  • Committing, by converting bullets into cannonballs once you have empirical validation

Ready – Aim – Fire!

Great by Choice