Books

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Awesomely Simple

Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas Into Action

After working inside hundreds of companies, from mom-and-pops to Microsoft, IBM, and GE, I went looking for the patterns that separate organizations that consistently perform at a high level from those that struggle. I found six.

None of them are complicated. Applying them consistently across the entire organization is the hard part.

The six principles of organizational excellence:

  • Vivid Vision: A compelling picture of the future that people can use to guide their decisions.
  • Best People: Treating talent acquisition and development as a core business strategy.
  • Robust Communication: Creating an environment where people share information openly and put difficult issues on the table.
  • Sense of Urgency: Increasing speed and agility while removing rules that get in the way of good work.
  • Disciplined Execution: The systems and accountability that turn plans into measurable results.
  • Extreme Customer Focus: Understanding what customers truly value and delivering it consistently.

Each chapter includes an effectiveness audit, discussion questions, and specific action steps to help leaders evaluate their organization and identify where performance is falling short.

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Excellence By Design

The Six Key Characteristics of Outstanding Leaders

If you want to become a better leader in your business, community, volunteer role, or family, this book is for you.

I have made a career of taking enormous amounts of information on a subject, studying it carefully, and reducing it to the ideas that are most useful. If you read hundreds of the best books on leadership, you would find a common set of principles repeated again and again.

In Excellence by Design, you will learn:

  • The six characteristics I consistently find in outstanding leaders.
  • The Four C’s of trust and why competence alone will never earn it.
  • How to control The Gap between what happens to you and how you respond.
  • The KSA process for making bold decisions while managing real risk.
  • How poor leadership can quietly drain productivity.
  • How to build a vision clear enough that people can make decisions against it.

The goal is to help you take an honest look at how you lead and give you practical ideas for getting better.

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Letters to a CEO

eBook

Over the years, clients began asking me to put my advice into short letters they could keep and refer to later. Letters to a CEO is a collection of those letters.

They were written to real people facing real decisions. A new CEO taking responsibility for an organization. An executive stepping into a major promotion. A business owner preparing to negotiate an acquisition. A young professional beginning his first sales job.

The situations are different, but many of the questions are ones I have heard throughout my career:

  • How do I make a difficult decision with incomplete information?
  • How do I hold people accountable without destroying trust?
  • How do I become a more strategic thinker?
  • What makes talented people become a high-performance team?

The letters are brief and written to be useful. Read them from beginning to end or return to a particular letter when you are facing a similar situation and could use another perspective.

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Strategies for Success

eBook

What is your personal definition of success?

Every business leader understands the value of having a strategy for the organization. Far fewer people take the time to build one for their own life.

I created the first version of Strategies for Success for myself after failing out of college and realizing that nobody was coming to fix things for me. I have continued to refine the material and use it to help people think carefully about what success means to them.

This workbook asks you to work through:

  • Your own definition of success rather than one handed to you by someone else.
  • The five personal values that should guide your decisions.
  • A detailed picture of what you want your life to look like ten years from now.
  • What you can control, what you can influence, and what you need to stop carrying.
  • A practical approach to setting goals that fits the way you actually work.

Some of the exercises are uncomfortable. They should be. The goal is to finish with a clearer picture of the life you want and a practical plan for moving toward it.

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