Boldly Break It Off!

excerpted from Time To Lead (available on Amazon.com)

Break Off Old Relationships

Radical action causes us to look for new anchors.

II Kings 18:4: He (Hezekiah) removed the high places, and broke the images, and cut down the groves, and broke in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made (during a time of destruction as a focal point): for in those days the children of Israel burned incense to it (turned the one use object into a sort of a god): and he called it Nehushtan (piece of brass).

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Base Living:Human nature leans toward base living. As much as we would like to complement our humanity, it simply will decay into animalistic expression left unchecked. Values and character are built over time and circumstance. Truth, honesty, courage, and compassion in a community do not come from standing on the corner and watching. They come from purposeful and determined action of many individuals over time.

Urgency: Hezekiah in his young heart knew action had to be taken. He sensed the urgency of the moment and moved off of the sidewalk of people watching. Hezekiah seized the day throughout his life. At this trend-setting juncture, he established a position of “no retreat” by tearing out the places to which people could retreat.

Disequilibrium: Creating disequilibrium for those caught in a vacuum of disillusionment and distortion of vision can be a necessity. When wanting to move forward into new territory, it is many times absolutely necessary to take away reminders of a destructive past. Radical action causes us to look for new anchors. Even a good thing in the brass serpent, which God meant for good when it was created, can become an evil reminder and a draw backwards instead of forward.

Hezekiah broke off old relationships that pointed the wrong direction in establishing and living in greatness before God with the people.

Ugandan Change Agent: Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni stood against the curve. After discovering a third of his army officers were HIV positive, he determined to make a stand. The President started a hard and loud program focusing on faithfulness and sexual purity. It was against the cultural curve. The nation had a culture of free sexual activity with multiple partners. He called for cultural change as an answer. The results were astounding. HIV percentages dropped 15% over a decade.

There have been many detractors to his actions. But he took them. He stood against the curve and called for a break with old relationships at a national and individual level.

Respond with Action: What symbols of antiquity cause your vision to look backwards? What about the people with whom you partner? What ideas are anchored in the past but not the future? What keeps character tied to a post?

Pray with Faith: These are challenging words, Lord of Life. You have plans for me to succeed and prosper in all I do. You have focus on my future. There are many around me waiting on my action. Deliver me from the death of apathy. Deliver me from the shroud of inaction. Cause me to come to Your fresh and living waters. Cause me to see those obstacles that bind me and those around me to the past. Birth this greatness in me, Father. I commit to see life in a new light. Help me to purge the distractions that draw me backwards.

Time To Lead: Reroute

excerpted from Time To Lead: Steps To Transformation For Those and Those You Lead

Leaders are able to reroute their path to meet core vision and objective.

II Kings 18: 5: He trusted in the LORD God of Israel; so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor any that were before him.

“Preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use words.” St. Francis of Assisi

Trust In God: Our speaking platforms and writings resound with lessons on leadership and change based on the lives and teachings of Genghis Khan, Rollo May, Marcus Aurelius, William James, Winston Churchill, Confucius, Sun Tzu, humanism, capitalism, IBM, Jack Welch, Lee Iacocca, and the Marriott’s. Here is a man, who in his youth established a testimony of trust in God greater than David, Solomon, and all the other recorded world rulers of the day. Here is a man, who with little resource, pulled off the greatest upset against the giant of his day. His strongest resource was trust of God.

Common Creation: Hezekiah is a man like us. Young, ambitious, and filled with a life of bad examples, he chose to set a different path. In his later years, when he waned in trust in God and began to lean on himself and his strengths, he revived himself to former levels. Through a commitment to God, greatness oozed from him beyond what he had experienced early in ruling. Again, he saw great action of God on his behalf.

Greatness Enjoined Willingly By Others: In his hard twenty-nine years of leading, he worked with God to change his world. He worked with God to change himself. He worked with God to upset the status quo culture that had become ingrained in everyday living. What we attempt to do through hard legalistic mandates, he saw accomplished through leadership first in example and second in commanding action that so impressed others they left their commonness and joined him in greatness.

Cultural Imperatives: Our nation of the United States is under testing. Other nations have similar challenges. There is nothing new about the tests before us. Trials come in waves over the centuries. Equality is always questioned by some group and requires a constant adjustment as a nation of ever new citizens grows. Racial barriers rise in differing manners, but they will never totally subside. Poverty will always be with us and require constant adjustment and compassion to address. Distribution of wealth through taxation and business legal edicts will never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Governance issues of when and how much to restrict use of common resources and contain greed through legislative restraint remain. Freedoms of speech, religion, and self-assertion need protecting.

How we act today as states and nations leaves the next generation a different set of symptoms of problems than ours. The issues are the same at the core. Leadership cannot rest once an issue is significantly addressed. Leadership is required for continuance of peace and community stability and economic prosperity. Hezekiah had been left with pain and bad example. He left a better line to follow.

Overcoming Bad Example: One of the strongest impacts in the last century in the United States came from Ronald Reagan. Through political and personal activity in California and as President of the United States, Reagan influenced the way people think and relate. His examples as a child were contradictory.

Reagan’s mother influenced him through personal example and involvement in the Disciples of Christ. Reagan’s father influenced him through continual failure in business and alcoholism. The unstable and irresponsible example could have been Reagan’s choice. It was not. He chose a higher road.

During times of change economically and in global duress, Reagan provided a leadership on which the nation depended. Dependability and responsibility in his life and example impacted those who agreed with him and those that did not.

Many leaders have bad example in their early life. It serves as an incentive and passion to live a different way. Every action we take is not always right. However, actions that bring hope and healing for others out of our own pain can make a big difference. Many of our leaders of all political parties and cultural heritage have acted out of their history and commonality with struggles to influence our nation.

Respond with Action: Take time to remember a good example left you from the last generation. Too often we focus on the bad and miss the good. There is blessing you can carry forward stronger than the last generation.

Pray with Faith: Father, pull from our heritage goodness. Yes, You placed goodness in our heritage from which we can grow. There is a path in our past meant to be stronger. Help us to sort through the bad and find the good. Help us to pass forward a world stronger and better than the one we inherited.

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Risk It!

Winners take risks. They are unafraid of loss. The balance of gains over losses motivates.

Psalm 20:6: Now I know that the LORD saves (brings out of trouble, restores, and strengthens) His anointed; He will hear him (and respond to his rallying call for help) from His holy heaven with the saving strength of His right hand (the hand of power and ability, the hand at which Jesus represents His). 7: Some trust in chariots, and some in horses (some trust in their riches and alliances and abilities and mental acuity): but we will remember the name of the LORD our God. 8: They (our enemies and all those who trust in their own strength) are brought down and fallen: but we are risen, and stand upright.

Winners are not afraid of losing.

They are willing to take risks necessary to succeed in life.

Life means risk. Life means taking chances that cause loss. Loss of friends, loss of co-workers, loss of status, loss of power, loss of control, loss of understanding of those important to you, loss of money.. all these are losses a winner decides at times must be risked. “No pain, no gain. Know gain, know pain.”, some would say. Life means risk. Risk means loss. Risk also means winning.

Edison risked until he found the right element for light bulbs. Once on a comment that it took fifty thousand tries before he got results, he explained, “Results? Why I have gotten a lot of results. I know fifty thousand things that won’t work.”

Ray Kroc became an outstanding business leader. Yet, for years he failed at every business attempt. It was so bad his wife was ready to leave him on his last venture. Seems he sold out everything to buy a few hamburger joints owned by some brothers named McDonald. You guessed it. That was the start of the McDonald’s chain of restaurants that made the Krocs multi-millionaires. Winners keep trying. (By the way, his wife stuck it out.)

Those secure in Jesus are unafraid of risk because they know He will back them up. They know they can make a mistake and be put back on track.

Psalm 37:23: The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delights in his way. 24: Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the LORD upholds him with his hand. 25: I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread. 26: He is ever merciful, and lends; and his seed is blessed.

Take Inventory

Pensive?

Trying to make a decision?

What is it?

Write it down. Write down the good and bad about it. Pray about it. Listen to God. Commit it to Him. Decide. Don’t let fear hold you down.

Make Application

Write what you are going to specifically do in the next 30 days about this.

Pray To Be Bold

Father, encourage me. Strengthen me to take that step of faith in Your leading. I am weak, Father. I fail. I am made of grass and wither in the noon sun, but You cause a shadow to cover me. Let the cool breathe of Your Spirit blow over me and freshen my day. Though I fall, I will get up and go again. You will cause me to succeed.

Risk It! The Better Way Mentality

Every progressive effort starts with a step toward change and a holy dissatisfaction with status quo.

Phil:3:13: Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before,

A winner …says, “There is a better way.”.

A loser…. says, “That is the way it has always been done around here.”

Philippians 4:13: I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me.

Life is full of opportunities to continue to do the same things. One man defined insanity this way: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Expectations, persistence of others, voices from the past, and other forces impugn on our ability to think new, creative thoughts about what we do.

How do you get into the “better way” mentality? A favorite saying of mine is, “If it ain’t broke, break it.” What? Don’t you mean, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” No, I meant what I wrote. “If it ain’t broke, break it.” Many times we build traditional barriers around an activity structured on preference and our limited understanding at the time. A man displayed curiousity about the way his wife cooked a roast beef. She would always cut the ends off. Thinking there must be a great culinary secret to this method he asked her why. “I don’t know,” she replied, “my mother taught me that way.” Pressed for information on the private process he went to her mother. “I don’t know,” she replied, “my mother taught me that way.” Perplexed he drove to the matron of the family’s home and asked again. “Oh,” she quickly responded, “my roasting pan was too short to hold the full roast.”

Most processes need to be repaired regularly. Now, you don’t want to tear up a good thing, so there are many other rules of change and improvement like: Always give a change time to go through the curve of lagging productivity until people learn the new way and become adept before implementing the next change. AND Any change will be resisted in strength in direct proportion to its’ potential for improvement.

Life is full of processes and a “better way” mentality will protect you from foolish failure. A computer tech went out to resolve a problem one day in an executive secretary’s office. Seemed that every time she printed a letter she first had to print all the letters she had ever printed. It took an half a box of paper to print a letter! The cost and time of doing her job that way finally overcame her embarrassment and she asked for help. The fix was simple. She was simply doing what she had been shown. Open a file, go to the end, type the letter, print it. Problem was she had only be given one file name and all the letters since she began her job were in one file that she printed each time according to explicit instructions. Absurd? Real. Fortune 500 company. Executive secretary doing something that needed to be broken.

What about the way we converse with others? What about how we walk into a meeting? What about how we greet our friends? Are those processes that could use some “better way” mentality?

Jesus broke the mold for some in the way they treated their parents in a story related in Matthew 15. God gave a principle. Honor your fathers and mothers. They made a rule that discluded them conveniently. Tradition overruled wisdom and principle, and Jesus saw through the smoke. Matt 15:6: Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Hebrews 12: 1-2 NIV.

Principle is principle is principle. Relationships, work issues, projects, and hobbies all present problems. When you allow others to help in the process, you prosper quicker. Sometimes they have the solution you need. Always, Jesus has the solution you need.

Take Inventory

Where do you have a process, a way of doing things that really could use some improvement by being broken?

Are you ready to give up personal preferences and do what it takes to “break it and make it better” ?

Can you think of a scripture to apply that can help you into “better way” mentality?

Make Application

Write what you are going to specifically do in the next 30 days about this.

Pray To Be Changeable

Father, quicken my mind and heart. Life is full of processes. You know the one that needs breaking and bettering at this moment. God, I can get so confused with all of the items in life. What item can I work on today? What am I doing that really does more damage than good? Where can I get a lift seeing you touch a new area of my life and give me a creative fresh approach? Cleanse my thinking, Lord. Jesus, be my wisdom, be my source, be my life giver. Holy Spirit release the fresh wind of Your brooding. Brood over my thoughts and bring order to their chaos that I might see clearly what You want to create.

Manage Well : Go On Through

To go through a problem is to conquer it and create new paths. Go through. Don’t go around it.

Ps:95:8: Harden not your heart, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness: .

A winner goes through a problem.

A loser tries to go around a problem.

Philippians 4:13: I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me.

Problems are life. Sound like the last chapter? You are right. It is not the same though. What makes a winner a conqueror, an overcomer, is the problems they face and conquer. You will have problems. 1Pt:4:12:” Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you:”

The question is will you go through or around?

Going around. The children of Israel spent 40 years going around their problems. When they were offered the land of opportunity, they chose to stay away and not deal with their problems. What was their problem? Discord, lack of submission to leadership, unbelief, selfishness… basically just a lot of reliance on themselves and little on God.

Going through. After that 40 year phase, a new set of children rose up and went through their problems. They stuck together, defended each other, and took the blessings by going through their problems.

Going around. The United States is full of men and women going around their problems. Insecurity, lack of knowledge on how to be a dad/mom/husband/wife, lack of commitment, irresponsibility, self fulfillment keeps them from sticking with their families and spouses and friends. It’s easier to go around.

Going through. My heroes are the ones who overcome their insecurities, lack of knowledge, lack of commitment, irresponsibility, and self fulfillment, replace it with security in Jesus, knowledge from the Word, commitment to what counts, responsibility even when it hurts, and other fulfillment, and stick with the program. It is not easy. It is incredibly rewarding.

Hebrews 4:14: Seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession.15: For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.16: Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.

Take Inventory

Where do you have a problem that you have circumvented but not solved?

Are you ready to do what it takes to solve it?

Have you ever felt like getting mad at God because of a problem? Did you go around the problem or through it?

Overcoming. As I write this I am praying for five relationships where someone has come to me in the last week and asked for prayer. They are GOING THROUGH!. Anger, alcohol, and accusations make for hard lives. You can GO THROUGH. You can overcome. It takes both involved in the relationship, but it can be done. Who are you praying for?

Make Application

Write what you are going to specifically do in the next 30 days about this.

Risk It! Find A Way

A winner says, “Let’s find a way.” A Loser says, “There is no way”

Rv:2:7: He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcomes will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.

A winner says, “Let’s find a way.”

A Loser says, “There is no way”

Philippians 4:13: I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me.

Problems are life. A great book written some years back is entitled, “Eating Problems For Breakfast.” Another great book published years ago was “Lateral Thinking”. Both of these books challenge us to remember that problem solving requires getting outside our normal boxes of thought and thinking different thoughts. When we are ready to do that, we can see incredible solutions to plaguing problems.

Recently in the children’s department of a large church, the problem of space for growth came up. The main area for elementary kids would only hold about 150 chairs, crammed uncomfortably with bad visibility. There had to be a way. After 15 years of looking at the problem, no one had a real viable solution. It took getting outside the box.

Walking through another room planned for remodel a worker struck on an old idea with a new twist. A choir loft seating about 75 adults was going to be torn out. Why not split the loft and reassemble it in the kids area as bleachers? The new use of an old item would make room for 100 new kids. Not only that, but it took up little used space in the room and changed the room to a more exciting place for the kids and allowed over 250 kids to be in the room with all of them having good visibility. Add to that another idea of doubling the lumens in the lighting and the whole idea gelled. Unusable, dim space was turned into light, great space because some folks though outside the box against 15 years of “no way”. (Sunbonnet: The cost was only a few dollars as the labor was volunteered along with some great carpet to cover the bleachers. The cost of purchasing bleachers and installing a new lighting system would have been over $10,000.)

1 Pt:1:7: That the trial (testing by presenting of problems)of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perishes, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ:

This principle applies in all areas of life. Tests, trials, opportunities, problems, glitches, frustrations, whatever you call them come up. Persistent prayer and thought can bring new light (couldn’t resist) and a different way to attack the problem. Faith pushes through to solutions. Fear stares at the problem and gives up.

Take Inventory

Do you have a long term problem that needs fixing? How can you persist again and say, “There has to be a way!”?

What can you do today to get past the idea that you have to live with that old problem?

Make Application

Write what you are going to specifically do in the next 30 days about this.

Pray To Be A Problem Solver

Father, quicken my mind and heart. Encourage faith in me to believe again for something on which I have given up hope. You are so real and alive and active in everything that is. Stretch my faith. Let me be like the one who said to Jesus, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”. Give me the courage to try a new approach and see Your had displayed.

The Day You Launch a Product You Begin to Lose Ground

http://americanprinter.com/columnists/phil-larson/022515-phil-larson-grow-sustain

Every product enhancement must continue to be enhanced. There is always a better mousetrap. Better does not mean changed. Better means it meets a customer need in fresh ways that help them achieve their goals. That is better.

What about the internals that make that happen. Here are a few tips focused on the print services industry as they adapt to changing volumes, order types, and media integration. The principles apply to any and all businesses and organizations.

Build A Better Business – Build A Better Life Forward

Common Grounds: Training Tenacity

Exerting your vision through your people and customers requires training. You need to train team. You need to train prospects and customers. You need to train yourself. You need to train your board. You must perform with consistency, congruency, and tenacity. They may resist. Do it anyway.

Train Your Team

Customer Service: A relaxed customer service is failure in the making. Many inside service team unravel at this point. Every team member must understand the vision of the service group. They must breathe it and live it. It should affect every point of decision. Plus Training

The press tech, the manager, the finishing tech, the shipping clerk, and the prepress tech must breathe customer service. This means constant training on phone skills, face-face consistency, issue handling, and prioritization to customer need. How often do decisions get made based on equipment and supplies versus customer demand? Change it. Attend to it always.

Customer Knowledge: Team need to know who they serve. Communicate personal information about the key customers. Did someone recently have a baby? Take a once in a life time trip? Accomplish a certification? Why do you restrict this knowledge to the sales and customer service teams? When your team members know the customers they serve in simple ways, they take what they do more personal and increase excellence.

Team Technical: All falls apart if the machines are not running. Machines run with good files, good process, and good people. Good people are trained. They are retrained. They are over trained.

Train Your Customer

“Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.” Sir Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister

Mission Criticals: Customers must be trained. Men and women around the world follow leadership into life ending battles. They grasp a purpose, attach to leadership, and thrust themselves into the oncoming firestorm. Your customers have a mission purpose. When you show them how their mission purpose connects with your service, you gain customers for life. They want to have loyal and mission attached service and will fight through budgets, purchasing departments, discretionary funds, and idiosyncrasies of their organization to work with you. Connect them. Educate them.

Linked Process: Customer process must be engaged. Discover their process and adapt yours to work with theirs. Educate them on your journey and your excellence. Take time to make them more knowledgeable on your ordering and delivering process than you are. They don’t care how you print it. They care how you interact with them at beginning and end of process. The better they understand, the easier their life becomes and the more they turn to you for service with a smile.

Train Yourself

Be the expert in your industry. Know substrates and capabilities and twenty uses for every machine.

Be the expert in your people. Learn something new every day about a team member. Surprise yourself.

Be the expert in your customers. Study their needs and demands. Know what they need before they know what they need.

Be the expert in your customers industry. Read industry articles and journals your customers read. Get outside your pocket of knowledge.

Be the expert in the mundane. Maybe the numbers don’t excite you. Maybe organization process is boring. Master the mundane. Take a college course. Go interview an executive or manager in another area of the organization and learn what they know.

Train The Board

There are executive stakeholders surrounding every decision you make. Official or unofficial, you have a stakeholder board. They may meet in a room or in the hallway. Get them trained. Keep them updated with quick, pithy mission points of accomplishment and plans. Let them be involved in your decision thinking. You may not have an official board of advisors, but you better have a list for your own reference.

Summary: This is quick and high level. Every organization must train these four and train them well. Skip one and risk failure. Tend to all and move forward. Overcome your inertia. Move on it.

COMMON GROUNDS: These tidbits come out of daily consternations, comments, and concerns of real managers doing what needs done. Executives gain insight.

This article focuses on the Be Responsible side of the triad and Communications level of the operational pyramid.

Let’s talk: Phil Larson or Shepherd Consulting OK

Renaissance Man – There is No Box

Danny DeVito starred in an acclaimed movie entitled, Renaissance Man. He impacted others to believe outside the restrictions of present systems. My junior year of university, Dean Musselman tagged me with that title. As he reviewed my business, psychology, literature, religion, and sociology mix of courses, he both scratched his balding dome and complimented me for being broad in my quest for understanding. Renaissance leads to revelation. There is no box.

Wikipedia defines the Renaissance Man as “A polymath (Greek: πολυμαθής, polymathēs, “having learned much”), is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas; such a person is known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems”

My personal form comes in taking a few keen skills honed over many iterations in business, community, and congregation and offer them to you. Most of us in our journeys do not discover who we really can be until later in life. Some find the path early. Finding and early path to late discovery is a joy.

Excellence in operations and communications really shouts what I want to say to you. Business, community, and home are fields of prosperity. Leadership in community (business, government, education, non-profit), leadership in the people services (non-profit, congregation) and leadership in the home (fathers and families) build the environment in which healthy, dedicated, morally and emotionally and socially competent individuals and groups develop in balance and holistic health.

Contact me to assist in improving your business results.

Contact me to assist in improving your non-profit or congregation results:

Contact me to assist in your family results:

Contact me to GET RESULTS.. 405.388.8037 cell/text

Manage Well: The 3 Questions

Bring a team into high productivity and positive morale with “The 3 Questions”. Managers must master these. Imbed them into your psyche. Repeat them in your sleep. Make them your meditational mantra. Get it.

What is the down-line impact of this action? How often do you have problems in production or sales or finance because of an inadequate exploration of this question? What will happen in accounting if we promote this new product line at 5% markdown? What will happen to other product lines? Can marketing adjust in time for the sales season? Will production be ready to handle sales volumes?

Put off this question at maximum risk of failure. Even the simplest action in a sequence of workflow has to pursue an expanded understanding before change. If we print this at a new size, will the finishing team be able to handle it? If we promote a new advantage to our product will it meet compliance guidelines? When we implement this change to our computer program for billing will it cause extra workload at 3am that affects another unrelated cycle? There is no end to implications of one actions on other team action. No one can know them all. But you need to ask.

Who else needs to know? How familiar is your team with the interaction of what they do with others? Do you have workers living in a vacuum? Have you taken time to educate them about interplay with other departments, people, teams, divisions, customers, and vendors? When you change the usage of a machine, it might be wise to include the manufacturer in the discussion. Ask often, “Who else needs to know?”

What is your information plan to include them? When do they need to know? Do they have access to enhanced information that might help you make a better decision before advancing?

Work with a production team with large dependency on delivery cycles proved out value here. The delivery team was constantly a day behind. They were only being informed at the time of pickup. By moving the information to them at time of beginning of production, a day was cut out of delivery cycle to the customer and orders increased with increased customer satisfaction. The sales team also needed to know at the same time instead of being informed only after delivery. This enabled them to engage the customer along the path with pertinent and reliable information. Who else needs to know?

What is the best use of my time right now? After you ask the first two questions, answer this one. Too often we ask this one and answer it only considering what we know and what we are doing. We need to consider what others know and what they are doing. A project launch could falter due to conflicting priorities in the organization. A customer order may not be deliverable as requested due to a supply shortage and should be renegotiated. After considering the plans and availabilities of others and related resources, we may want to work on an entirely different project or action and time this one in front of us into another day or week.

Summary Simplicity: These 3 questions are priceless practice for any manager for self decisions and for training team members in their decisions. After working with a team for a season on these, you will find they become masters of the top manager rule. What is the top manager rule? NO SURPRISES. These questions eliminate the element of surprise and provide a foundation for a self managed team.

Ask them often.

What is the down-line impact of my action?

Who else needs to know?

What is the best use of my time right now?

Be Busy Building Better Business,

Phil

Phil@shepherdok.com

405.388.8037