Removing the shroud of mystery from the topic of GROWTH Part 2

Once you have a great team together, you need to make sure that the team has the right people in the right role (right people in the right seats on the bus). The team also needs to have a clear,powerful and inspiring mission, a superordinate goal and a central core purpose. If you put the personal core values, beliefs, habits and behaviors of your entire leadership team together, you will get what I would call your cultural engine. It is this engine that drives the culture of your entire company. Growing a company while running it successfully requires a culture of disciplined thought to begin with. How would you know if your company has a culture of disciplined thought or not? What is disciplined thought anyway? Disciplined thought is one part of a four-part approach: CONNECT,THINK, PLAN, DO. It is the discipline that ties your plans and actions to your company's central vision, mission and values. It is the discipline that translates the aspirations of a company into clear, actionable plans. Without disciplined thought a company will lose the battle to keep things real. What would happen if you skipped the think and plan steps and went straight from CONNECT to DO. Well, at the risk of sounding facetious, you will essentially be caught up in a DO LOOP that will soon become a DOOM LOOP for your company. You will forever be building castles in the air, if your company survives that long. What are the elements of disciplined thought? Disciplined thought involves: •Clearly defining the problem and agreeing upon the problem definition as a group •Gathering the facts of each case and understanding the magnitude, the significance and the potential impact of the problem •Processing the information through the six thinking hats •Understanding the source of the problem and identifying the root cause •Clearly defining the goals and the purposes of the organization •Developing and exploring as many alternatives as possible and identifying trade-offs •Understanding what it will take to successfully execute the project •Developing hypotheses and testing them The above are just a few examples of disciplined thought. Implicit in the phrase 'disciplined thought' is also the idea that the team and the leader have the emotional fortitude and ego strength to be patient and wait until the facts are known and the analysis is done before taking action. This is a key discipline that any company that wants to grow and be successful needs to master. A study conducted by the Gallup Corporation with Deepak Chopra as the lead researcher found that there are three key components of happiness: 1.The Brain Set Point - do you see the glass as half full or half empty? (41%) 2.Your living conditions or external conditions (9%) 3.Your day-to-day choices and decisions (49%) Applying this to business, 50% of your business well-being and success is determined by the strategic choices you make every day. A culture of disciplined thought helps you make the choices that determine the remaining 50% of your business well-being. "Think before you leap."