Discipline Creates Opportunity

Discipline creates options. This is a concept from Harry Kramer in one of his many business books. This one’s called Values to Action, and it’s the concept of a strategic value, a powerful tool for leaders of businesses, of instilling order to actually open up opportunities for the business. And for the CEOs that I often work with who are technical experts who’ve come into the CEO seat, they’re, they’re brilliant. They have these amazing ideas. And what often goes along with that is they like to say they like to chase squirrels. They tend to get easily distracted. They are impulsive sometimes, and that creates opportunities for them, especially early in their business when it’s smaller and it’s a small team, but as the team grows, this dynamic breaks things. It’s a barrier to scale.

Reactive Space
And the reason why is that a vacuum gets filled by activity and other things. And when CEOs that aren’t big fans of order are not really a priority for them, kind of let that go and let things happen, so to speak. What ends up happening is the time the different projects are filling up all of the available space for the team. And then when something bad happens or something unexpected happens, or even if a huge opportunity comes up, the business has to shift gears and stop what they’re doing and concentrate on this most important thing that they have to work on. It’s being dictated to them. That’s why I call it a reactive space. They’re living in a space where the world is in control of what they focus their most important time on.

Proactive Space
When CEOs can put a system in place where there is, there’s intentional thought and order put into the work that their team does, that creates proactive space and that is empty space that’s available for potential. Those ideas, those squirrels that are being chased for one example, but things that come up in business that you can’t plan for. When you have an intentional order installed in your business engine, your team is ready to go after these things and doesn’t have to wait till they become a fire that needs to be fought.

B2B Clarity
So those of you who are really smart but really distracted, as CEOs out there, I encourage you to focus on this problem. And one solution I’ll offer you is from the EOS system. There is a very classic solution to this, which is you define yourself as the visionary in your organization and you assign an integrator role, kind of your COO, as the one that puts the plan in place. And you don’t try to be something you’re not, however you do it, it’s really valuable for your upscale future to make room for these important things that you don’t know that are coming down your path.