The Essence of Small Business Excellence

By John Spence

Several years ago a client asked me to put together a brief speech on “The Essence of Excellence” for 1,500 of their employees at their annual global meeting.  I researched the topic for weeks, called many of the CEOs I’d done work for, and tried to get to the core of what is required to truly achieve excellence in business.  After much work and contemplation, I arrived at the conclusion that there are three key elements that constitute the essence of excellence:  FOCUS – DISCIPLINE – ACTION.

Focus: First you must have a clear idea of what excellence looks like to you, how you define it in your business and how you will measure it.  I call this your “Philosophy of Excellence,” and although I believe it is fundamental to creating any level of success in business, I’m still amazed at how few leaders have done an adequate job of creating and communicating a compelling philosophy of excellence for their organization.

One of the most important responsibilities of a leader is to create a philosophy of excellence for your people to focus on.  Every great business I have worked with has been able to boil down to a handful of key ideas exactly what every employee needs to focus on in order to achieve excellence for the organization.  At Walmart, it’s pretty straightforward – Everyday Low Prices… buy it cheap, stack it high, sell it fast!  At Southwest Airlines, they understand that success rides on friendly service, low fares,  fast turns and team spirit.  At Dell the major focus is good technology, built to order, just-in-time inventory and logistics.  I could give you two dozen more examples, but the pattern is clear: The goal of the leader must be to deeply understand the key drivers of success for the business and then translate them into a focused philosophy of excellence.

Discipline: The next step is to infuse your entire organization with a culture of disciplined execution around the core strategies for success.  The major responsibility of the leader at this stage is saying NO to anything that would cause the organization to stray away from these core strategies and lose focus.  It was an epiphany for me a few years ago when I realized that one of the greatest skills of a highly effective strategic leader is the ability to figure out what NOT to do!

Action: The last step in the process is to create a sense of urgency by applying as much action, resources and focus as possible to the core elements of success.  Here it is the leader’s job to knock down hurdles, open up doors and do everything in his or her power to keep people moving forward at a fast, but disciplined, pace.

The three watchwords of excellence for business success: FOCUS – DISCIPLINE – ACTION.

John Spence is the author of Awesomely Simple – Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas into Action. He is an award-wining professional speaker and corporate trainer, and has been recognized as one of the Top 100 Business Thought Leaders in America.

Image by Flickr user JazzyBlue TR (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 21st, 2011 at 9:00 am and is filed under Entrepreneurship, Small Business, small business, Workforce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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