Dando Advisors

9 Reasons Growth-Hungry Leaders Use a Strategic Plan

Strategic Planning does not deal with future decisions. It defines the future of present decisions. As a leader your job is to have a blind date with destiny!

 An active, articulate, well-communicated direction for a corporation, division, or business unit is evidence of game changing leadership. Effective strategic plans encompass organizational discipline, accountability and direction.


Does it follow that an organization that lacks a strategic plan also lacks leadership? Perhaps.  The leader who claims, “Of course I know where we are going.  With this market it is obvious what we have to do. Besides we cannot afford the money or the time right now to get away and plan. I will let the others in on the direction on a need-to-know basis” is at least several shingles short of a full roof when it comes to leadership.

 As leaders, we often forget…we get what we set ourselves up for!

A strategic plan provides: 

1. A unified direction for your company: A strategic plan is a valuable leadership device. Employees sense when the organization is focused and when it is diffused.
2. More effective communication: A consistent means of expressing

… Read More >

How to Avoid the Pain of Hiring or Promoting the Wrong Person

As your company grows, the need for new/better talent becomes apparent. You are fully aware of the pain and destruction that can be caused by hiring/promoting the wrong person. However, due to your unknowingly flawed hiring and promoting practices, you now have friends, family members, partners, “pedigreed” executives hired from other companies or long-term loyal employees (who are not qualified for the job) in key positions. This is what I call HIRING AND PROMOTING FOR EXTINCTION.

No one ever disagrees; it takes the right person to get the job done.  Letting the tyranny of the urgent force you into hiring/promoting the wrong person blindly marches the company towards mediocrity and dumbs down the culture … or worse.  There is no other area in business where such poor results are so consistently tolerated than the area of promoting and hiring the right people.  As leaders we often forget; we get what we set ourselves up for!   

As the saying goes, we hire for expertise and we fire for behavior.  In short, if you want to improve your organizations growth and profitability, then improve the expertise and behaviors by doing a better job of promoting… Read More >

HOPE IS NOT A STRATEGY: 3 Steps to Making 2012 Your Best Year Ever!

Have you ever encountered people who say they desperately want to change their circumstances, but do not want to change themselves? They unconsciously choose the “hard way” over “hard work” and simply hope things will turn out for the best.

Dr. Woodrow Kroll recently reported in his radio broadcast that 3% of people have written goals, 10%  have goals but haven’t written them down,, and the other 87% simply do not have any specific goals at all.  Dr. Kroll noted that people with written goals are 50%-100% more likely to achieve them than those who haven’t written them down.   As Zig Ziglar says, “If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.”

Why do people avoid writing down their goals? What story do they tell themselves that makes not writing them down OK? Why is hope so attractive, even though it doesn’t work?

With the New Year upon us, it’s a great time to check your systems, people, strategies and resolutions to make sure you and your company don’t rely on HOPE as a strategy.  As leaders, we often forget…we get what we set ourselves up for.

Three overly obvious and embarrassingly… Read More >

Why Most Successful Executives Don’t Scale

It’s So Simple, You Just Missed It!

The moral of this story: Executives often are too busy trying to look smart; by doing so, they dismiss the solutions that are in plain sight. As leaders, we often forget, we get what we set oursleves up for.

Many executives are worried about how competition might kill their company, when in reality, they are doing a more than adequate job on their own of committing corporate suicide.

I recently gave a talk to a room full of Fortune 500 C-level executives about the Top 12 Warning Signs of Success™.  One of the executives commented that these warning signs were very elementary compared to their “real” issues, such as figuring out their global go-to-market strategy.  What she didn’t know was that I gave the exact same talk to 75 of the top managers and leaders in her company just a month earlier.  She was perplexed to learn that these 75 people, many of whom report directly to her, said the top 3 issues facing their company were (click on for full explanation):

 Warning Sign #2 – NOTHING KILLS FASTER THAN SUCCESS

Warning Sign #7 – HOPE IS… Read More >

Only 1% Have What It Takes to Lead … Do You?

Dando’s definition of lead.er.ship \ lēd-ər-ship\ n : Leadership is a walk on the wild side. If we did not have to deal with people or problems, leadership would be a piece of cake. Instead, leading is all about aggressively moving toward a clear goal while predicting the “train wrecks.” Mix in limited resources, uncertainty and people who may, or may not, come through in a pinch. Leadership is about growing in the face of crisis. Crisis is the eruption of chaos … it takes leaders to the edge, where some do not survive.

I’ve talked with more than 2,000 executives and their teams at growth-hungry companies around the world. In my experience, only about 1% of people have what it takes to be a Game-Changer. By gathering information and observing behavior – and its consequences – I’ve gained perspective on the traits I believe these leaders possess.

Heaven knows the world doesn’t need another article on the characteristics of a leader. The reason I am sharing my thoughts is to provide you with a tool you can use to 1) measure against your own perceptions and 2) let your team express how they… Read More >

A Tiger By the Tail: How Growth-Hungry Companies Get and Stay on Top

I have always been fascinated about what makes certain leaders and their companies get and stay on top. Why are some businesses wildly successful and stable, while others in the same industry, with the same opportunities, who fight the same battles day after day, level out in their growth and never reach their full potential? What, exactly, do successful companies and their leaders do and focus on that’s different?

After helping build a business to $1 billion, selling and subsequently interviewing and coaching over 2,000 executives in growth-hungry companies, I have been very surprised by the answers I’ve found. I thought I would find very complex and difficult-to-implement strategies; but I discovered just the opposite. It’s all about predicting and preparing for what turn out to be overly obvious and embarrassingly simple root cause problems (see The Top 12 Warning Signs of Success™). I have come to recognize significant, predictable patterns that are true for every business. Although the way your business grows is unique to your situation, the challenges that growth itself presents are common to all.

Experience has taught me that by focusing on the… Read More >

10 Steps to Make Your Meetings Suck Less

 A couple of years ago I was talking to my friend John Day, who was complaining about how much time he was spending in meetings and how bad they sucked. He had to get to the office super early and stay super late just to get “real” work done. 

I asked John why he and his company were having so many meetings.  He said most of them were regularly scheduled meetings to share information and give and get updates.  I asked him the obvious question: “John, if these meetings are not a good use of time or suck so bad, why do you and everyone else keep going to them?”  He sheepishly said… “They were ‘mandatory’ and no one ever questions them?” 

I told him not to worry about it;  it is very normal for a successful, growth-hungry company to experience what I call “Fieldtrip Meetings,” where people show up to meetings and take “mental fieldtrips” until they’re over.  Then when the “fieldtrip” meeting is over, the “real” meetings (sidebar meetings) begin in the hallways and offices of everyone who was supposed… Read More >

The Level I Company: "Entrepreneurial Startup"

Part 2 in a series of 4

Below are the characteristics and warning signs of a Level I Company, the Entrepreneurial Startup. This is the first of three defined company stages as part of The Business Lifecycle.™
 

CHARACTERISTICS

• The founders are usually actively involved in running the company.
• The primary emphasis is on producing products or services and selling them.
• Management, systems and planning receive minimal emphasis.
• Communication is informal.
• Employees work long hours and are paid modest salaries.
• Management reacts more to customer needs than to employee needs.
• The founders are either technically oriented or market builders and are usually not skilled managers.
• The company culture – the non-negotiable values and how to treat customers and each other – is generally understood and does not require a lot of reinforcement.
• The growth is greater than inflation but usually slow to moderate.

As a company matures, it often experiences subtle but very troubling growing pains.  Compounding the situation, management, in its haste to maintain growth, often fixes its gaze outward on the environment and toward the future, hoping that more precise market projections and higher sales… Read More >

The Level II Company: "Rapid Growth"

Part 3 in a Series of 4

Below are the characteristics and warning signs of a Level II Company, the “Rapid Growth” stage. This is the second of three defined company stages as part of The Business Lifecycle™.
 
 
 
 
 
 
CHARACTERISTICS

• A capable leader is at the company helm (Level I growing pain resolved).
• The business often has multiple locations, such as: 
  • Sales offices
  • Branch offices
  • Warehouses
  • Etc
• More detailed attention is given to certain areas (in addition to producing products or services and selling them), such as:
  • Marketing and sales
  • Inventory management
  • Personnel
  • Accounting, budgeting and finance
  • Systems support
• Employee jobs are more specialized.
• The company becomes more impersonal due to having more employees.
• The growth rate is faster than Level I; sometimes accelerating at a very fast rate.
• The company culture – non-negotiable values and ways of treating the customer and each other – start to need to be communicated and reinforced in words and actions that match.

Usually one or more problems block a successful company’s transition to a higher… Read More >

Welcome to The Warning Signs of Success™

My hope is this blog will become a must-read guide for you and other business leaders at all levels, from the boardroom to the mailroom.  It is a distillation of more than 20 years of my hands-on experience.

Why you should read The Warning Signs of Success™ : I will help you normalize and predict the journey to creating a scalable business by indentifying the preventable bad habits that eventually lead to “business train wrecks.”

• You will understand why it is critical that you AND your team know exactly where you and your business are on The Business Lifecycle™.
• You will learn what the difference is between building a business that can scale and growing a business by trial and error, or “see and solve.”  Better yet, you will learn how to build your business and your team so they can reach their full potential.
• You will learn how to predict the problems (The Top 12 Warning Signs of Success™ ) before they show up in the results and normalize your journey to scalability.
• You will gain uncommon insight from real-world stories and case studies of others who have faced the

… Read More >