The fastest way to improve an organization is to put the right people in the right positions, give them the freedom they need to make decisions and get the wrong people out of the organization. In his brilliant book, Good To Great (HarperBusiness, 2001, New York), Jim Collins explains this concept in great detail in Chapter Three titled, "First Who…Then What." The fastest way to accelerate your career is to find the right position for your unique combination of values, passions and talents.

The obvious questions then become, "How do you determine the right person for a position? How do you determine the right position for you?"

First, a few definitions:

Values are the behaviors that are considered important. Passions are what you get excited doing. Talent is the capacity to do something.

When hiring someone, first determine the type of values, passions and talent you need for a certain position. Then search for the person who has those components. If any of the three pieces are missing, you have the wrong person. Once you hire the right person, then get out of their way. Give them the freedom to make their own decisions.

When looking for a position, first determine your values, passions and talent. Then search for a position that will provide you the freedom to implement these components on a daily basis.

Clutter slows down desired results. Not just cluttered offices, but cluttered thinking, conversations, meetings, decisions and activities. The key is to mentally establish very high levels of clarity in terms of what you want to achieve, why you want to achieve it, what you are going to do to achieve it and what you are going to stop doing in order to have the time, energy and resources to achieve it.

Here are the Four Clarifying Questions (which can be answered on an individual or group basis):

1. What is the highest priority desired outcome?

2. Why do I/we want to achieve it? (What are the benefits to various groups or individuals if this outcome is achieved?)

3. What are the three most important things I/we can do to achieve it?

4. What six things do I/we need to stop doing in order to have the time, energy and resources to do what I/we need to do to achieve it?

As you answer these questions, you will quickly notice that each of them forces you to make difficult decisions. While they seem basic at first glance, you will find that putting your answers on paper is an exercise in gut-wrenching discipline. It is very hard to only do three things and even harder to stop doing six things. However, increased clarity leads to increased acceleration. Acceleration starts with intentionally increasing clarity, and then moves into action.

Gosh, I love that quote. One common denominator of highly successful organizations is the simplicity with which they can be described:

Wal-Mart: "We sell for less."
Southwest Airlines: "We provide cheap, convenient and funny air travel."
Dell Computer: "We make inexpensive computers the way you want them."
Disney Company: "We entertain all members of the family."
McDonald's: "We serve hot food fast and with friendly service."
Microsoft: "We provide software solutions for world-wide use."
Oprah Winfrey TV show: "We create compelling conversations."
Marriott: "We provide comfortable hotel rooms at various price points."

The main time these organizations run into trouble is when their actions do not adhere to their simple descriptions. The same is true with individuals. When you simplify everything you do, you accelerate results. When you complicate your efforts or go off on tangents, you slow down your progress.

Go back to the Four Clarifying Questions. Examine each of your answers and work to simplify them. Bounce your answers off of several other people and ask for input on how to make each answer as simple as possible. Increased simplicity leads to increased clarity, which leads to increased acceleration.

Of course, clarity and simplicity are mental exercises. No plan matters until it is executed. The key is sustained effort. There are no right or wrong answers to the Four Clarifying Questions. There is no way to know definitively what three things to do or what six things to stop doing. However, in my opinion one thing is for certain: if you do not consistently apply your plan, you will not accelerate your desired results. Wal-Mart, Disney, Southwest Airlines, Dell Computer, Marriott, Microsoft, McDonald's and Oprah Winfrey. All of these success stories required consistent effort sustained over extended periods of time.

When these three accelerators, clarity, simplicity and consistency, work together in a synergistic manner, you dramatically accelerate your highest priority desired outcome.

The Acceleration Process looks like this:

Figure 1

Rainmaking is the ability to attract and attain a steady flow of well-paying opportunities. The clearest, simplest and most consistently executed plan will not generate new opportunities if no one knows about what you're doing. Organizations and individuals must stand out in a crowd if they are ever going to be noticed.

A brand is the value that a person thinks they receive from working with an organization or individual, or thinks they would receive if they did work with the organization or the individual. Brands are about perceptions. Brands are reinforced or weakened everyday. With a strong brand, opportunities flow toward you. With a weak brand, opportunities flow away from you.

The Branding Process consists of six steps:

1. Identify your customers.
2. Determine what outcomes they want.
3. Determine their one to three highest priority outcomes that you can generate.
4. Gear every decision and activity toward delivering at least one of these three highest priority customer outcomes.
5. Be boringly consistent and thoroughly innovative.
6. Market to resonate.

Here's a famous example: The Walt Disney Company in the 1950s. Walt Disney defined his customer as "family members." He determined that "smiling and being happy" was the highest priority desired outcome of family members that he could generate. Consequently, he searched for as many ways as he could think of to deliver this outcome.

The Walt Disney Company's efforts looked something like this:

Figure 2

Each of these ways of delivering value promoted the other ones. When you watched The Mickey Mouse Club television show, you would learn about the new animated films, live action films and attractions at Disneyland. When you went to Disneyland, you learned about the new films and their characters, which led you to buy the new licensed products.

Over the next five decades, the company has stayed boringly consistent and thoroughly innovative in terms of focusing on entertaining all members of the family and generating smiles and happiness. They didn't shift their focus and start making medical products for all members of the family. Over time they added Saturday morning cartoons, Disney On Ice, retail stores, additional theme parks, videos, CDs, and a myriad of other products and services that entertain all family members. (An argument could be made that the only time The Walt Disney Company has hurt itself is when it has strayed from this simple plan. For example, when they started making films and television programs that would be nearly impossible for all members of the family to watch together.)

You can apply these exact same six steps to your organization or your career. Again, The Branding Process forces you to make decisions: who is your customer, what do they want, which high priority outcome can you deliver, what will you do to deliver that outcome, and how will you make sure that each of your efforts supports and promotes all of your other efforts? By answering these questions, executing your approach with sustained consistency and constantly improving the value you deliver, you will make it rain for a long, long time.

A strategy is a guideline for making decisions with the intent of achieving better results in your highest priority desired outcomes. For example, Wal-Mart's strategy of providing the lowest cost consumer goods of any retail store impacts every decision they make. They will only work with vendors who support this strategy.

Defining Health And Wealth

This is one of my favorite quotes because it indicates that health is not a state you achieve, but rather an on-going process of improvement. Your health is not how you feel today, but rather the process in which you improve yourself. If you are very healthy, then you are continually finding and implementing ways to become better in the various facets of your life.

According to The American Heritage Dictionary, wealth is "an abundance of valuable resources." In other words, wealth is your current state of resources and health is the process of improving those resources. By constantly improving your resources, you create the capacity to do more things at a higher level in your career. As you can see in Figure 4, increased health and increased wealth lead to increased career options. Once again this means that you are in control of increasing the velocity of your career. Just as bigger loans flow to financially wealthier people, greater career options will flow to you as you become healthier and wealthier.

Figure 4

The components of health and wealth include the following:

Rather than trying to explain all of these elements, I'll just focus on Social Capital and Time.

"It's not what you know, but who you know that really matters."

This old saying still has a lot of relevance today. While I strongly encourage you to continue to strengthen your breadth of knowledge, experience and skill, I even more strongly encourage you to strengthen the breadth of your network. Social capital is just a fancy term meaning the quality of your network.

Here's a test to determine the strength of your social capital that I learned from Peter Birkeland, author of Franchising Dreams (University of Chicago Press, 2002, Chicago). It goes like this:

Step 1: Make a list of all the people you have had a meaningful conversation with in the past 24 months.

Step 2: Put their names into the following groups:

Group A:	Anyone who is the same sex as you, same race as you, is within five years of your age, who lives in your city, who belongs to the same religious type of organization, who earns within $10,000 of your income and who has the same level of education as you.
Group B:	Anyone who has six out of these seven characteristics.
Group C:	Anyone who has five out of these seven characteristics.
Group D:	Anyone who has four or fewer of these seven characteristics.

Look at how many people are in your network and at how many people are in each group. If more than 90% of your network is in Groups A, B or C, then the value of your network is becoming redundant. By that, I mean different people are providing you with nearly the same type of value. Look to expand the breadth of your network.

Arrogance is the belief that you know it all and can't learn anything new from anyone. The problem is that you essentially destroy your opportunity to develop social capital when you are arrogant. Stay open-minded to the value that other people can bring to you. Build mutually beneficial relationships with as wide a range of people as possible. Work to seek out and build new relationships. I can assure that it will accelerate your career. I recommend a terrific book called, The Tipping Point (Back Bay Books, 2000, New York), by Malcolm Gladwell that clearly outlines the value of social capital.

Of all the forms of wealth, time is the most precious because it perishes for all of us at the same rate every day. You simply cannot generate more time or retrieve lost time. We all get the same amount. No more and no less.

Consequently, the greatest challenge to maximizing wealth is maximizing the use of time. We can't manage time by saying we need 36 hours next Tuesday, but only 12 hours this Friday. We can only manage what we do within a given period of time. I suggest you make three lists on a sheet of paper:

1. My highest priority outcomes for this week:
2. My To Do List (The three things that will have the greatest positive impact on achieving my highest priority desired outcomes):
3. My Stop Doing List, another excellent idea from Good To Great, (The activities that I will stop doing so that I will have the time do what is necessary to generate my highest priority outcomes):

The hardest and longest list to generate is the third one. While there may be three key things you can do to generate any specific outcome, there are literally hundreds of things you can do at any given point in time. The real work is deciding not to do the myriad of things that will have no real impact on driving better results. Remember: clarity, simplicity and consistency.

Here's a partial list of activities I suggest you consider dropping if they still happen during the course of your day:

Reading or sending SPAM e-mail. Virtually every e-mail that gets forwarded to me gets forwarded to trash. Sorry, but the one in 100 that is worth reading is not worth searching for if I have to read the other 99. Of course, that doesn't include you forwarding this e-mail to someone else.

Complaining. It doesn't matter whether you're complaining about your boss, the economy, the stock market, your customers or your competition. Common old complaining is just simply a waste of time. You don't feel better when you're done and you're no closer to achieving your desired outcomes. A close cousin to complaining is gossiping. Again, this is cotton candy. Feels good for a few minutes and then bad the rest of the day.

Meaningless Meetings. Be much stricter about the meetings you attend. Don't go just because your boss says you have to go. Challenge your boss to clarify the connection between this meeting and better results in the organization's highest priority outcomes.

Keep searching for and eliminating time wasters. After you've cleared the decks, you can always come back and add something back to your calendar. Then pour a reasonable number of hours each week into doing the few things that will accelerate your highest priority outcomes.

Based on a random sampling of clients, prospects, colleagues, friends, family members and community members, I believe that stress is increasing across the board. If that's true, perhaps it's due to the on-going bad economic news, the number of layoffs, the corruption in Corporate America and the constant underlying worry about terrorism. In any case, stress can get in the way of accelerating results. When an entertainer or an athlete becomes overly stressed, their performance becomes erratic and falls below par. You need to reduce stress in order to optimize your performance.

First, identify things that increase stress:

OVEREATING, OVERDRINKING & OVERWORKING
Some people overeat, overdrink and overwork in an attempt to fight their way through the things that are creating the stress. Unfortunately, this increases the stress level even more. Even without becoming an alcoholic or workaholic, this cycle can slow you down dramatically and rob you of the opportunity to flourish in your career and accelerate your organization's results.

DUMPING YOUR STRESS ON TO ANOTHER PERSON
This is the dangerous cycle of seeking out some poor victim and unleashing your stress on them. You commit a virtual drive-by shooting by pouring all of the things that are stressing you out on to some one else. The ironic and sad thing is that many times people dump their stress on the people they love the most. (I know I'm certainly guilty of that trait.) Unfortunately, rather than releasing your stress in this manner, you multiply the stress in your life. Suddenly you find yourself going back and forth with the other person sharing stressful events until you both are worse off than you started. Scott Peck once wrote, "The best thing you can do for a poor person is not to become one yourself." At first I thought I read it wrong. Then I disagreed with him for a long time. Finally, I understood his point. If you become poor, you can't be of assistance to another person. If you become stressed out, you cannot help another person reduce their stress.

Second, identify ways to reduce stress in your life:

EXERCISE, EAT WELL AND TAKE A NAP
Take a break and go for a walk, or do some situps and pushups, or get into a volleyball or basketball game. Let your body get away from the mental work and just relax. If you pour twenty minutes a day into exercise, the rest of your day will be more productive as the stress in your body is reduced. Stay away from fried food and extra rich desserts and huge amounts of bread. Take a thirty minute nap in the afternoon. (That's right. Go out in your car and put the seat back for half an hour. Trust me, it works wonders.) Give your body some rest and some nutrition and start to feel the stress fall to the wayside. Reducing stress accelerates business results. When a person becomes overly stressed, their judgment weakens and they may end up doing crazy things.

READ SOMETHING INSPIRING
Recently I went on a doozy of a seven-day tour that went from Fenton to Chicago to Fenton to Tulsa to Fenton to Boston to Fenton. While in Boston my body and brain were fried, and I was stressed. As I walked through the airport, I stopped by the bookstore and found a book called, Living A Life That Matters, by Harold Kushner (Anchor Books, 2001). Its main point is that a successful person is a good person who makes a difference in the lives of other people. What a stress reducer! You and I don't need to be perfect or world-famous or make millions of dollars to be a success. We simply need to be a good person and make a difference in the lives of other people. The week before that I read a great interview between Oprah Winfrey and Ralph Lauren in the Oprah magazine. What a breath of fresh air from the constant negative hammering in the media.

BE A KID AGAIN
My three-year-old daughter, Sarah, does not have stress in her life. She laughs, cries, naps, runs and tells stories. She's a kid. That's what you need to act like to reduce the stress in your life. Stress is manufactured within us. No one can insert stress into our lives. Some people in the most horrific of situations have managed to remain free of stress. How do they do it? They focus on the outcome, they concentrate on doing what needs to be done and they attach no extra pressure to the activity. Some people call it being in the "zone" or "in flow." Call it what you want, but the idea is to focus on the activity and the outcome and not on all of the bad things that could happen if something goes wrong. I've found that when I laugh, my one-year-old son, Ben, stops crying and starts laughing. Maybe we should all pause and laugh more.

DO WHAT YOU LOVE
Before I started my own business, I invariably called in sick two to three times a year. For some reason, I just didn't feel well. Five years ago I started my own consulting firm. Now I enjoyed my other jobs, but I love being an entrepreneur! I haven't had a sick day in five years. Coincidence? I don't think so. I think when you do what you love to do you get reenergized quicker. Do something today that you love: read a book, fly a kite, volunteer to work with children, build a house with Habitat For Humanity, train for a marathon, do whatever you personally love to do. Even one day immersed in your favorite activity can make all the difference.

In times of great tension, you need to protect yourself so that you do not become stressed out. By protecting yourself from excessive stress, you do a great deal to help other people become more successful.

Business Myths are the widely accepted beliefs for improving results that have no factual basis. These myths rob workers and organizations of enormous amounts of time and money. The key is to identify them and avoid them.

One of the oldest business myths is that the key to job security and promotions is for employees to do exactly what they're told to do and never question their boss's decisions.

Nothing could be farther from the truth!

Here are four Primary Reasons To Push Back Your Boss:

For The Organization's Sake: Organizations exist to generate better results than the members could ever create working completely by themselves. For an organization to thrive, it needs the best possible solutions. Therefore, every employee must offer their best ideas for improving results in the organization's highest priority outcomes (HPOs).

For The Boss's Sake: Bosses get paid to deliver results. Effective bosses know they need ideas beyond just their own thinking. They understand the value of employees who willingly challenge their decisions and thought processes.

For The Employee's Sake: When employees do things they don't really believe in, they lower their self-esteem. As their self-esteem goes down, they see less value in themselves and ultimately lessen their contribution to the results of the organization. To be successful over the long run, employees must speak up and explain why they think a decision is the wrong one and what would be a better alternative.

For The Customer's Sake: Customers simply don't care what the boss said. They want better results from that product or service. Consequently, every employee must offer ideas and challenge decisions in order to constantly improve the customer's experience.

When you push back your boss, you don't even have to say, "No." When your boss gives you a new project that you think is of questionable value, you could say, "I would be glad to do that. Here are the things I am working on right now and the desired outcome for each one. Which of these would you like for me to stop doing so that I can do this new assignment? The reason I say that is because I want to make sure you get the quality of output you're looking for on this new project." Or you could say, "I'd be glad to consider doing that, but how does it fit in strategically with where we're going as a department?" Get your boss to be part of the thought process, and work with him or her to see the positives and negatives of the new project.

One of the fastest ways to accelerate results is to always make sure that every project builds on the lessons learned from previous projects. In order to accomplish that, I suggest you answer The Bar Raising Questions periodically both during the project and after the project is completed.

The Bar Raising Questions

1. What was our original goal?
2. What have we actually achieved?
3. What did we do to achieve our current results?
4. What worked well?
5. What did not work well?
6. What lessons did we learn?
7. How can we apply these lessons next time to improve our results?

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to accelerate your organization's highest priority desired outcomes as well as your career. Now is the time to have a need for speed!

As a corporate advisor and teacher, Dan Coughlin works with executives, business owners and associations to accelerate organizational results and individual careers.