Break Through Your Comfort Zones
I love the title of John Ortberg's best-selling book, €If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat.€ An unfortunate truth is that most people€"and many managers€"would rather be comfortable than excellent. Instead of investing time, energy, and resources to achieve excellence, most prefer to sit idly by and remain merely average.
Too many of us become too comfortable too easily. This market has forced us now to be anything but comfortable. It's now time to break out of our comfort zones and prepare ourselves for tomorrow €" for tomorrow will happen whether we are prepared for it or not. Here are four powerful guidelines that can help you and your management teams move on.
1. Challenge Core Assumptions. During my strategic planning sessions with executive teams, I ask three important questions: What business are you in? What business should you be in? What business should you not be in? Challenge yourself and your team to objectively look at where you need to be a player and where you should never be a player. Through careful strategic assessment that challenges core assumptions, you can pragmatically break through comfort zones.
2. Think Beyond Your Walls. It is so easy for us to drive to offices and see the world only through our interior walls. Sam Walton spent as much time in other retail and service shops as he did in Wal-Marts, simply to learn fresh ideas and approaches, spot trends, and discover areas he needed to consider. I encourage you to get out of your office and look at your community with fresh eyes to seek untapped areas for your services and products.
3. Integrate Opportunities Management. Business guru Peter Drucker taught that the important thing is to identify the €future that has already happened.€ He challenged businesses to look where they are getting unexpectedly good results, then focus 20% of their companies' time, people, and resources into exploring growing these areas. He called this €opportunities management,€ investing in the future you have already experienced.
4. Choose the Future. In today's market, you must invent your future rather than redesign your past. We have nowhere else to look but the future. Even from the bottom of the barrel, the future looks as exciting as it does frightening. Regardless, we are marching into the future, and the future will win.
Challenge your assumptions, think beyond your walls, integrate opportunities management, and pick the future over the past. You will then break through your
comfort zones with a powerful new strategy for yourself, your company, and your future.
Too many of us become too comfortable too easily. This market has forced us now to be anything but comfortable. It's now time to break out of our comfort zones and prepare ourselves for tomorrow €" for tomorrow will happen whether we are prepared for it or not. Here are four powerful guidelines that can help you and your management teams move on.
1. Challenge Core Assumptions. During my strategic planning sessions with executive teams, I ask three important questions: What business are you in? What business should you be in? What business should you not be in? Challenge yourself and your team to objectively look at where you need to be a player and where you should never be a player. Through careful strategic assessment that challenges core assumptions, you can pragmatically break through comfort zones.
2. Think Beyond Your Walls. It is so easy for us to drive to offices and see the world only through our interior walls. Sam Walton spent as much time in other retail and service shops as he did in Wal-Marts, simply to learn fresh ideas and approaches, spot trends, and discover areas he needed to consider. I encourage you to get out of your office and look at your community with fresh eyes to seek untapped areas for your services and products.
3. Integrate Opportunities Management. Business guru Peter Drucker taught that the important thing is to identify the €future that has already happened.€ He challenged businesses to look where they are getting unexpectedly good results, then focus 20% of their companies' time, people, and resources into exploring growing these areas. He called this €opportunities management,€ investing in the future you have already experienced.
4. Choose the Future. In today's market, you must invent your future rather than redesign your past. We have nowhere else to look but the future. Even from the bottom of the barrel, the future looks as exciting as it does frightening. Regardless, we are marching into the future, and the future will win.
Challenge your assumptions, think beyond your walls, integrate opportunities management, and pick the future over the past. You will then break through your
comfort zones with a powerful new strategy for yourself, your company, and your future.
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