Why I love ‘Management by Looking like a Tw*t’.”

The reality is in your uber busy day-to-day life as a CEO or Business owner, without the right “Strategy” and accurate measurement tools in place, it can be really difficult to always have a “Helicopter view” of exactly where you are at in your business. Today I’d like to deep dive into Why I love ‘Management by Looking like a Tw*t’. and how to be able to “Spot Trends” and easily adjust before disaster strikes out of blue. Read on to discover:

• The benefits of utilising Colour to Measure Performance
• How to measure what is important quickly & effectively in order to avoid disasters later down the road
• How to get a quick helicopter view of the “trends” in your business
• Gain Access to a simple Tool that highlights those areas where you’re weak & where you’re kidding yourself and…
• …Why I love “‘Management by Looking like a Tw*t’.”

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Right, over the last few days we’ve been looking at measuring you performance and how you can use the same colour coding for your business growth indicators.

For example, you will now have (if you have been taking action and following my posts) …you’ll have all the numbers on the page that you had planned to achieve. Note: See image in comments or download this Chapter of “Strategy on a Page” for free here?? >> https://altitudesystem.com/strategy-on-a-page-chapter-sign-up/

But now you need to add in the numbers that actually happened.

If you said you were going to do ￡20,000 in revenues and you do ￡21,000 in revenues, then you highlight that number with a Green. ?However, if you only did ￡19,500, very close, you get an Amber. But if you are way off, by which I mean more than 5-10% off, then it’s a Red because you didn’t do what you said you were going to do.

Use this same system for all your “key actions” and all business growth indicators ?(BGI’s) every month and you will find it really makes the page a far more powerful tool.

The other advantage of using the ‘traffic light’ colour coding system is that you can use it to get a quick helicopter view of the trends in your business by looking back over your pages for the past few months.

Now, this exercise is very quick. You are not drilling down into detail, but simply looking at one subject, or task, and tracking the colour of it over the past few months. If it is green all the way, you are doing well. If you have a larger than average number of reds, then that should be telling you something. What you get is a trend.

You can get a trend every single month for each of the five core strategic actions. Obviously, these are major to the business and it gives you the chance to compare what you commit to doing every month with what you actually did.

You should do the same thing with your business growth indicators, which is a powerful way to hold you to account. By doing this, it allows you to take strategic actions very quickly and months before any other business would typically make a decision.

?It is such a simple tool to use, and yet what it tells you is priceless.

It also very quickly highlights those areas where you’re weak and where you’re kidding yourself. We are all really good at that!

Using this simple system, what you quickly find, from the flashes of red, is that you may be giving yourself more to do than is realistically possible. Alternatively, you may find that you are committing yourself to do what is achievable, but it is not being prioritised over penny tasks, or that other things are being allowed to get in the way. Either way, it is an indication that you need to step up and take the action you needed to take.

When you get this accountability every month on your core strategic actions, it is holding a mirror up to yourself.

You’ll easily be able to spot where your strengths are, which is reassuring, but also those area you’re kidding yourself in business and need to take action. This is an incredibly simple yet effective Tool. Next, let's explore ‘Management by Looking like a Twit’

One of my clients, who’s very bright, Oxford educated and who’s into the leadership and management theories, asked me what school of leadership theory “Strategy on a Page” came out of. He was interested if it was influenced by an MBA programme or if it was some leadership theorem.

For me, I have always thought it was just plain common sense and I had not given it a label. But he pressed me to give it a name. So I flippantly said, “It’s called ‘Management by Looking like a Tw*t’.”

When he dug deeper I explained: “If you’re very clear on the purpose of your company and you have mapped your strategy and you know what you should be doing every month; if you have five core strategic actions every month to step you towards your ultimate vision and purpose of your strategy; and every month if you hold yourself accountable to somebody else and you keep coming to the table and you haven’t done what you said you were going to do, you are going to look like a twit.”

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“What is more, if you come back the next month again, and you still haven’t done what you were going to do, and that continues for several months, you’re going to look like a bigger twit, until you have so much pain associated with not doing it because you’re looking so stupid in front of other people, that you end up doing the action you should have done in the first place.”

So, Management by Looking like a Twit.

If you are holding yourself accountable to the five core strategic actions that need to be done in the month, you are very much in control of your business.

?If there is some action that has not been taken, it’s going to have a knock-on effect on the business growth indicators and you will see this right away.

Cause and Effect. Tomorrow I will share a Case Study with you to highlight this Till then…