She looked at me and said, “And exactly when am I going to have time to do that?”
Does any of this sound familiar?
Seven Actions to Improve Your Most Important Business Outcomes, Accelerate Your Career, and Have a Life
1. See the business upside of downtime.
People oftentimes say they get their best ideas while in the shower. That’s because they stop doing activities for a moment and give their brains a chance to relax. By going on vacations, getting home early, and watching your kids play soccer, you can actually gain ideas on how to improve your business results. It seems paradoxical, but when you buy into this concept you will stop doing so many activities and achieve even better business results.
2. Schedule thinking time.
Since ideas come to you when you get away from work activities, schedule one hour a week during which you can just think. Find a space away from your home, office, employees, and customers. Take out a blank sheet of paper, write down the most important desired business outcome for your organization, and turn that outcome into an open-ended question. If the goal is to increase sales by 10%, the question might be: “How can we increase sales to our current clients by 10%?” Then answer that question with as many ideas as you can think of for 45 minutes. Finally, select your best idea, and spend the last 15 minutes building your action plan. That one hour can make the rest of your working hours far more productive. It can allow you to work a lot less while achieving a lot more.
3. Say “No.”
One of my all-time favorite ads is a BMW ad that simply says “no” in large letters. In the small print, it basically says BMW says “no” to a lot of good ideas so it can say “yes” to a few great ideas. That is tremendous advice!
How many good ideas are you acting on? Notice I didn’t say, “How many good ideas are you considering?” It’s healthy to consider a lot of ideas. It’s like sifting through sand to find gold. You do have to go through a lot of sand to find the gold, but you don’t run to the marketplace with sand in your hand and get all excited. You keep sifting until you find the gold. Keep generating ideas and keep sifting through them until you find the one to three great ideas you will act on.
Don’t try to act on more than three great ideas, because before you know it, you’ll have turned gold into sand. Trying to pursue too many ideas at once is a surefire way to generate mediocre results.
4. Stop doing the wrong things.
The key to Toyota’s greatness can be summarized in a single word: “stop.” On the manufacturing floor, any Toyota employee can simply see something that is wrong with an automobile and say, “Stop.” Then the assembly process comes to a halt until the problem is fixed. That is, in essence, the key to making the highest-quality automobiles in the world.
Look at your projects. Is there anything that’s going wrong? If so, stop the process and fix the problem right away. One of the biggest time wasters is redoing work you’ve already done.
5. Beat yesterday.
Here’s one more secret to Toyota’s success. It’s not that they are just saying “stop.” With each step in everything they do, they sincerely try to get better. They call this kaizen, which basically means, “How can we make today better than yesterday and tomorrow better than today?”
Look around your business. When do you need to say “no” and “stop”? Instead of pursuing a lot of good ideas, focus on pursuing a few great ideas.
But it’s not enough just to do fewer things. Do those few things with such focus and attention and with such a desire to improve that you do them better than you’ve ever done them before.
6. Use the One-Three-Six Rule.
Here’s the rule:
- One: Write down the single most important business outcome you want to improve in your organization.
- Three: Then write down the three things you can do that will have the greatest positive impact on improving this business outcome.
- Six: Then, and here’s the hardest step, write down the six things you are going to stop doing so you will have the time and the energy to do the three things that matter the most.
If you keep doing everything you’re currently doing, how are you ever going to have the time and the energy to do really well the three things that matter the most? As you let go of activities and focus your energy, your most important results will improve. Remember: you’re not paid to do activities; you’re paid to improve results.
Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Apple’s Jonathan Ive, the leader of the design team for the iPod (Fortune, September 2006):
“We don’t make very much stuff. That’s a very important part of our approach to what we do, which is to not do a lot of unnecessary stuff but just to focus and really try very sincerely to care so much about the few things that we do.”
7. Sacrifice to accelerate.
In summary, look around you and decide what you can let go. What meetings, projects, customer visits, and processes can you stop doing? Find the fewest activities that will have the greatest positive impact on improving your most important business outcome. Then do those two or three activities to the very best of your ability within a reasonable time frame. And then go home.
About the Author
Visit Dan at www.businessacceleration.com. Dan Coughlin is a business keynote speaker, a management consultant, and the author of Accelerate: 20 Practical Lessons to Boost Business Momentum. He has been quoted in USA Today, The New York Times, and Investor’s Business Daily. Dan’s clients include Coca-Cola, Toyota, Boeing, Marriott, McDonald’s, AT&T, the American Bar Association, and the St. Louis Cardinals.
