Improve Attitudes and Performance

KEY POINTS TO PONDER

 

An important ingredient, necessary to improve attitudes and performance in a company, is the knowledge of what the top management believes, how they measure and evaluate others and their sense of values.  These might be described as a list of business principles or what they consider to be the “Key Element for success”.  Following is a list of my personal “Keys”:

• Service first profit later—profits follow value.
• Value is the only sustainable competitive advantage.

• Always tell the bad news first—not last.
• Give bad news in person, good news in writing.
• Don’t allow surprises—always give fair warnings.
• Concentrate on the customer/student.
• Don’t compromise quality for price.
• Plan the strategy before fixing the structure.
• Don’t confuse brightness with judgment.
• Do keep your eggs in at least five baskets—only take one “big risk” at a time.
• Be careful of “quick-fix” managers.
• Don’t put a new person (to us) in a new job (to them).
• Hire (manage) smart rather than manage hard.
• Don’t promote a functional manager to head a major division.
• A professional manager is one who gets the job done.
• The boss should be the head salesman.
• Understand what really makes a company (branch, division) “tick.”
• Always play “what-if,” analyze alternative strategies and have a contingency.
• “About right” today is better than “exactly wrong” tomorrow.
• Study the environment—things we cannot control; become one with our industry.
• Do bet on a person—not a product, invention, or idea.
• A successful person makes up their mind very quickly and changes it very slowly.  An unsuccessful person makes up their mind slowly and changes it very quickly.
• Help people reach their full potential—catch them doing something right.
• Action and assessment separates planners from doers.
• Timely accurate reporting is crucial to survival—Accountability = Success.
• Do first things first and last things never.
• The customer is not everything; he or she is the only thing.
• Take care of your employees and they will take care of your customers.
• Education will follow health care into free market resource allocation.
• Highest of ethical and regulatory responsibility—ZERO TOLERENCE.
• Trust individuals, not ideas, patents, or copyrights.
• We can make a difference.  We can make a change.
• There is no I in team but there is in SMILE.
• Reward in public and punish in private.
• Give all the credit and take all the blame.
• Hire smart and nice people who care and constantly train.   You cannot train “nice.”  Most everything else you can.
• Over pay at the highest level of competence before promoting to lowest level of incompetence.
• If you will not train your replacement, you DO NOT have job security.
• We are only as strong as our weakest teacher.

 

Those who do not set SMART goals are destined to work for those who do.