You want to succeed in business today correct?

OK - then stop building fixed plans. Stop assuming everyone knows or cares what you think. Stop thinking that 'meetings' is work. Stop the meaningless communication that does the opposite. Stop parading your legacy thinking and start paying attention to the real world that already left you behind.

Stop using language that proves you don't appreciate just how much has changed. Stop thinking that you know anything - especially what you think will get you through this.

Just Think About It!

Start figuring out how to be curious and observant. (Read that again). Start designing a business that people actually care about - identify what that means, make that the focus and the narrative. Start identifying what people can actually do - find out what they care about - get them using that stuff. Find a way to generate interest and ownership in the purpose and intention of the firm. If you don't have a purpose go and make one.

Start using examples from outside to show how different things work these days. Study that stuff. Start cultivating your ability to listen - that means listening with integrity to the fellows around you. Start appreciating things and stop just nodding your head.

Start being a human being at work.

Go Look It Up & Think

Stop making excuses - about anything. Stop using worn out jargon. Stop banging on about your usual stuff. Surprise us! Just find ways to engage with everyone and patiently explain Extreme Thinking to them. Stop what you are doing today long enough to appreciate why, how and where things are not working.

Stop thinking that everything you were comfortable with is all going to get back to normal. Normal has gone. Stop defending the sacred cows, the way things were and what's always worked in the past. With everyone's help you've just got to kill the bad parts of the organisation. In particular the bits that are automatically doing the work that's not contributing to your new purpose and story.

Stop people in their tracks. Interrupt them in polite ways when you see them reverting back to what was once comfortable and is now suicide.

Start to bring great examples and world views from the outside. Bring them into your conversations. Avoid the self congratulatory patterns. Start defining what's actually valuable - what matters and why. Start to see the signals in the business where encouragement is possible. Start to be objective early when you see that something's not working. Start to make intelligent risks - both about ideas and people - in particular those that are using their own initiative.

Enable those that aren't willing or able to move to the new way of working to find other jobs elsewhere. Make it plain when people aren't working out. Tell them when they're not being true to what they signed up to and what's been put in place.

Study the new platforms and technologies that are central to everything above.

Everything Is Subtle - So Delight In The Nuance

Business leaders say they want certainty and distinguishing strategies. Well that's both a puzzle and a dilemma. They want flexibility and innovation and yet they want reduced risk. And that's a conundrum. They want emotional attachment to their consumers but they also want automated processes. That's almost certainly a paradox.

Business leaders, now more than ever, need enlightenment and consciousness and that's just a fact.

Value is certainly in the eyes of the beholder - as well as in the mind and the senses. Value is a mercurial thing. Value is hard to define but easy to spot when it's absent. Value has to be bred, it has to be fed and watered - it has to emerge and be true. It has to be genuinely felt and embodied in everything or you will be dead in the water.

We live in an age of no hiding places.

For a long time, generations even, we've become attached to creating detailed upfront plans before executing. For many years it's made sense. If you were making something of significance a plan was a great idea. Now it's the last thing you need. For 'extreme thinking and working' you need an attitude and a mentality and frameworks not conservative dogma or a process.

Everything changes fast every day so if you aren't looking at your business as a whole you are fixing the wrong stuff really well.

Humans generally want to maximize predictability and eliminate surprises. Trouble is the world changed and technology (along with software and applications) came along and messed with all of that. It allowed many parts of the complex processes that we had become used to - to happen at light speed. This tended to push humans out of the process when it fact for the enlightened it's actually brought them to the heart of it. Nobody wants to have an intimate relationship with a robot.

Nowadays we have to figure out what's able to be done automatically and upweight what needs to properly be done by humans and in a human way.

Beacuse That's What You Really Need

Such an abused word sadly. We would all agree that it's beneficial to everyone involved to change plans when fresh information comes along. Unfortunately everyone has different appetites for that. Especially so if that change is inconvenient to them in any way whatsoever. Agile means to be ready and prepared - it means to test and see progress when we create anything.

We must be able and obsessive about making everything in short cycles so as to collect feedback and then adjust again as quick as we can.

Creating rigid, long-term plans doesn't work. We need frameworks not processes. We need ways to approach problems and challenges and not some stuck method that may or may not embrace the whole system of things. Long term plans are crazy when the solution to a problem is unpredictable. It's worth repeating that we need to codify the possibilities not simply the knowns. Codify the variabilities and be fluent in executable ambiguity.

Your Mantra

That's The View You Always Need To Take