From the ridiculous to the sublime

The strapline for my business, Resolve Gets Results, is 'Top 1%-inspired'. What does this mean, and why could it be relevant to you?

People who know me well in business or follow me on LinkedIn know that I am deeply inspired by the Top 1% - the most successfully consistent companies, large or small, whose cumulative financial returns over many years dramatically exceed their competitors. It's not about size of earnings, but quality and duration.

Any fool can make a quick buck. Making superior long-term profits demands sustained excellence, which in turn demands Top 1%-inspired attitudes and behaviours.

As the old saying goes, revenue is vanity, profit is sanity. However, what separates the Top 1% is the recognition that sustained long-term profits only occur as a natural outcome of providing products or services on which customers place enduring value. Any fool can make a quick buck. Making superior long-term profits demands sustained excellence, which in turn demands Top 1%-inspired attitudes and behaviours. There are no short cuts - try to take them and you will be exposed, ever more quickly in the digital revolution.

Look around you at how business malpractice, or what I call BAUWAU - Business As Usual, Warped And Ugly - is being ruthlessly exposed. In the US Arthur Andersen, Lehman Brothers, WorldCom. In the UK British Home Stores, Carillion, and now Interserve. Organisations who do business this way increasingly look like dinosaurs destined for early extinction. Others, including millennials and even younger generations, are hungry for a healthier, more intelligent, less rapacious/coercive/zero sum style of business.

The Resolve team is putting together our strategy for 2019/2020. We anticipate steady growth in all aspects of our work in the UK and North America, built on solid foundations as we seek to learn how to adopt Top 1%-inspired attitudes and behaviours in our own business as well as our clients'. It's not easy – if it was, many more than 1% would have mastered it.

Over the coming months you'll hear more from me about Top 1%-inspired attitudes and behaviours – what they are, why they are so important, and how I’ve experienced them or the lack of them, discovered research that proves them, and tried to adopt them in business and in life.

I’ve decided to start by choosing my Top 10 Top 1%-inspired business attitudes and behaviours. This was tough! There are many more than ten. They come from a range of sources combined with my own experience and shared observations with others.

I have chosen the following ten, listed in alphabetical order because it is even more difficult to rank than to select them!

1. Accurately assessing asymmetric risk (AccAssAsR) - a classic human weakness is to exaggerate the upside, downplay the downside, and dramatically downplay the risk that the downside will happen! Avoiding this trap is crucial.
2. Building and leading through trust (Paradigm for Profitability - Dr John Young, McLaughlin Young) - everything in business depends on trust. Therefore you need to measure the critical components of trust, focus on them intensively, and build them steadily.
3. Defining purpose and enabling change (Three Circles Model - Dr John Young, McLaughlin Young) - most people and organisations fail to set demanding but achievable, inspiring goals in their private and business lives, and to work together to make their dreams a reality
4. Fire bullets, then cannonballs (Jim Collins - Great by Choice), aka Lean Startup - most people are afraid to expose their ideas and pet projects to potential criticism, so they spend huge amounts of time and energy perfecting them, only to discover that they will not work or do not meet customer needs. Top 1% thinkers have courage, and realise that they need to know as fast as possible what other people think of their ideas, good or bad, before they overcommit. When they do commit, they do so on the basis of empirical evidence and know they will hit the target.
5. It’s not the luck you get, it’s what you do with it that counts (Jim Collins – Great by Choice) - people are obsessed with luck, good or bad, and its impact on them. It turns out that what matters is how we respond to the luck we get, whether it's good or bad.
6. Measuring and assessing organisational health (Six Circles Model - Dr John Young, McLaughlin Young) - you will never achieve sustained positive change or transformation in an organisation unless you diagnose its real, underlying state of health. Most organisations and most external advisors fail to do this, for a variety of reasons.
7. Packard’s Law (Jim Collins) - named after David Packard, founder of Hewlett-Packard (HP), this 'Law' states that you cannot grow your organisation faster than your ability to find internally or externally enough of the right people to fill key seats. What constitutes the right people in a Top 1% context is crucial, and differs from the way most organisations select and appoint people.
8. Paranoid optimism, aka The Stockdale Paradox (Jim Collins – Good to Great) - individuals and organisations are generally guilty of blind over-optimism or irrational negativity, both of which damage and may even destroy performance. The Top 1% approach is to balance realistic optimism with brutal honesty about the facts, and to constantly consider how possible difficulties can be overcome.
9. Smart giving (Adam Grant – Give and Take) - the most successful type of behaviour in business is 'smart giving' - it is empirically proven. Other forms of giving are the least successful forms of behaviour in business, so people think they either have to be selfish ('takers') or guarded and unwilling to give freely ('matchers'). However, these behaviours are proven to be less rewarding, psychologically, socially and financially.
10. Transpersonal leadership (a term championed by my friends at LeaderShape Global), aka Level 5 leadership (Jim Collins – Good to Great) - transpersonal leadership is defined as leading beyond the ego for the common good. It is empirically proven to be the most effective form of leadership in all situations, though it can take different forms.

Underpinning all of these attitudes and behaviours is the critical need to understand evolution, neuroscience and the true, healthy meaning of self-love. I will deal with each of these topics throughout the series of articles as they apply to my Top 10 Top 1%-inspired attitudes and behaviours.

The people most likely to learn these lessons are those who are self-employed or who set up entrepreneurial ventures. There's nothing like the chill Arctic blast of carving out a living for yourself to teach you the brutal realities and forge an understanding of Top 1%-inspired attitudes and behaviours. This is truly an environment in which only the fittest survive. So they are worth listening to!

You won't learn any of these attitudes and behaviours from an MBA (I've got one), an executive development programme (I've been on one) or by focusing above all else on maximising your company's revenues, profits and shareholder returns, whatever it takes. The people most likely to learn these lessons are those who are self-employed or who set up entrepreneurial ventures. There is nothing like the chill Arctic blast of carving out a living for yourself to teach you the brutal realities and forge an understanding of Top 1%-inspired attitudes and behaviours. This is truly an environment in which only the fittest survive. So they are worth listening to!

These attitudes and behaviours come from the School of Life and Hard Knocks. That's the beauty of them - anyone can learn them if they have the desire and determination. Yet the statistics show that only 1%, in fact just under 1%, will master them, and even then not permanently. That's human nature. And that's what makes it exciting - if you can master them then you are guaranteed to dramatically outperform others.

So are you onboard and ready for the adventure to begin? I will try to go at the rate of one behaviour per week, starting with Accurately assessing asymmetric risk.

Please comment or ask questions, and consider sharing this blog with your LinkedIn network. That way we can spread this vital knowledge to a wider audience.