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Prescription for Winning
Jack Welch
summed up his prescription for winning in three words:
Self-confidence
Benefits
Self-confident people dont need to wrap
themselves in complexity and all that clutter that passes for
sophistication in business. Self-confident leaders produce simple
plans,
speak simply, and propose big clear targets.
Challenges
The root of many of
bureaucracy ills is
insecurity. Insecurity makes people
resist change because they see
change only as a threat, never as an opportunity.
9 Signs of a Losing Organization
Action
Give people a voice, get them talking and
listening to and
trusting one another.
Cultivate self-confidence among your
leaders by turning them loose, giving them independence and resources,
and encouraging them to take big swings.
Entrepreneurial Leader: 4 Attributes
Provide an atmosphere that affords
employees
an opportunity to dream, risk, and win
and ultimately earn
self-confidence.
Simplicity
Benefits
Simplicity
is practically an art form with many definitions. To an
engineer, it's clean functional designs with fewer
parts. It means judging a process not by how
sophisticated it is, but how understandable it is to
those who must make it work.
In
marketing it means clear messages and clean
proposals to consumers and industrial customers. And, most importantly, on
an individual, interpersonal level
it takes the form of plain-speaking, directness
honesty.
Simplicity is indispensable to a
business leader's most important function: creating and projecting a clear
vision.
Simple messages travel faster.
Simple
designs
reach the market faster.
Challenges
You can't believe how hard
it is for people to
be simple, how much they fear being simple.
One of the most difficult
things for a manager to do is to reach that all-important threshold of
self-confidence in which being simple is comfortable.
Action
Urge everyone in the company to have the
courage to be simple.
Create an atmosphere in the organization
where people feel not only free, but obliged to demand clarity and
purpose from their leaders.
Speed
Benefits
If you're not
fast you can't win. Speed is
everything. It is the indispensable ingredient of
competitiveness.
Competitive Strategies
Challenges
Bureaucracy is terrified by
speed and hates
simplicity.
People have to think on their feet.
Action
Decisions at virtually every level should
be
made in minutes, not days or weeks. Decisions must be made
face-to-face, not memo-to-memo. Forests of meaningless paper trails and
approvals must be eliminated.
Decrease control to increase speed.
Reduce hierarchical layers to speed
communication and get products to markets more quickly. |
