55 Rules of Business

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Little different slant this time - all business....(except GO CAVS!)

I recently read the book "the Rules of Business" by the editors & writers of Fast Company. This book was outstanding. It outlined 55 rules for performance. I wanted to share them with you. I think this list is awesome. The book has many quotes that support all of the statements. It's a quick read (prob 2-3 hours). Well worth it.

Here they are:

The Rules of Business by Fast Company’s Editors & Writers
Change
1) Adapt or die.
2) Innovation is difficult & often painful. But there is no alternative.
3) When should you change? When things are going perfectly.
4) Regardless of how realistic you think you are being, the change process will take 3 times as long as you like.

Communication
5) Employees need to know – in painstaking detail – what you want to do & why. They need to hear it again & again. Don’t forget: it’s impossible for them to hear it too often.
6) If you can’t communicate, you can’t lead.
7) If you can’t get your message across quickly, you aren’t going to get it across at all.

Creativity & Innovation
8) Nothing is more overrated than a new idea. Ideas by themselves are worthless. It’s what you do with them that matters.
9) If your cool new product or service doesn’t generate enough money to cover costs & make a profit, it isn’t innovation, it’s art.
10) Make innovation pay its way. Business units should have to fund the research they want, instead of receiving a handout from corporate. Having to pay for it is a sure way to guarantee that the research is going to be focused.

Customer Service
11) Ask customers what they want, and give it to them.
Decision Making
12) No is the 2nd best answer you can get to any question you ask.
13) Not deciding is a decision. That’s the problem with procrastinating.
14) It is extremely hard to make a list of all the things you haven’t thought of. That explains why it is important to open up the decision-making process to as many people as possible.

Design
15) Design will be the next place companies battle for competitive advantage.
16) If consumers can’t easily use your design, they won’t buy your product.

Execute
17) If you don’t execute, you won’t accomplish a thing.
18) Hold people accountable. Reward those who execute. Coach those who don’t. And if they still don’t get it, fire them. You aren’t helping them, or the organization, by having them stick around.

Hiring & Developing & Retaining Great Employees
19) No matter how overwhelmed you are with work, it is always better to hire no one than to hire the wrong person.
20) A players hire A players, B players hire C players & C players hire losers.
21) If you lose great people, you lose success.

Technology is Not a Strategy
22) Technology is not the answer. It can enable & support the corporate vision, but by itself, technology will not give you a competitive advantage.
23) Operational silos are bad everywhere. But they are especially crippling when it comes to IT, with is vital to almost every organization’s success.

Knowledge
24) Don’t have your people waste time figuring out what someone else in the company has already discovered. Create & maintain an efficient knowledge management system to share experiences companywide.
25) Data are a series of facts. Information is a lot of data about a topic combined with some context. Ideally companies want to manage information in such a way that it yields knowledge: information that has been processed in such a way that it can be used for competitive advantage.
Leadership
26) The principles governing how you lead must remain absolutely constant. How you express them must vary every single time, depending on your audience. You need to make sure they understand what you are trying to do…what their role is.
27) Leaders lead.
28) Leadership is the art of getting people to do what you want because they want to.
29) Leaders need to say two things: “this is where we are going,” and “this is why we need you to help us get there.”

Life & Career
30) Achieving balance in your life is a time-management problem & needs to be treated as such. What that means is you figure out what you absolutely must accomplish in your personal & professional lives, & let everything else slide.
31) You can do anything, but not everything.
32) Take breaks. Not only will it make you more productive, if you go out & see the world you are bound to spot opportunities.

Managing
33) Great managers are just as important as great leaders.
34) The closer top management is to the customer, the more successful an organization is likely to be.
35) Your employees are never going to know how they are doing-and how they can do better- unless you tell them.

Marketing
36) Nothing happens in business until the customer says yes.
37) If customers won’t buy your product or service, you are not giving them what they want or need. It’s your fault, not theirs.
38) Every communication with a customer must answer the 2 questions that they always have (even if they don’t always express them to you): “what do you have and why should I care?”
39) 3 Rules of Advertising: don’t insult us, tell the truth, and have a sense of humor.

Organization & Corporate Culture
40) We get the kind of organization we deserve.
41) If you have a sr. VP of administration, something is wrong. You shouldn’t need a bureaucracy to manage the bureaucracy. In fact, you shouldn’t have a bureaucracy at all.
42) Ultimately, everything is personal.

Teamwork & Partnerships
43) The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. If not, you have a serious management challenge on your hands.
44) In well-run companies, everyone is needed but no one is indispensable. In other words, teamwork is built in.
45) Just because everyone wears the same uniform does not mean they are a team.

Risk
46) No prudent risk, no fairly predictable rewards.

Social Responsibility, Trust & Ethics
47) You can’t be a little bit ethical. Either you are ethical or you are not. There is no in-between.
48) Everybody must understand & internalize the company’s core values. Doing so frees up time, because you don’t have to debate the organization’s core beliefs. Everyone knows what they are. It also frees resources. When people know what they are supposed to do, they need less supervision.
49) If it is not right, don’t do it; if it is not true, don’t say it.

Speed
50) In today’s economy, it’s the fast companies that trounce the slow.
51) Look to streamline your operation everywhere. The cumulative effect can be astonishing.
52) Just because you occasionally step on the accelerator doesn’t mean you can keep it floored indefinitely. Organizations can run flat out only for short periods.

Strategy & Growth
53) If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. You need a clear strategy & a clear direction, one that everyone in the organization understands as well as you do. 54) Think!

Link Between Success & Failure
55) If you haven’t had one spectacular failure in your life, you haven’t tried hard enough.