Achieving Business Excellence with John Spence

Four Fabulous Business Books

12/05/2017 By

I shot this video around Thanksgiving, before I had left for London and Kraków, and forgot to post it! However, better late than never. Here are four book recommendations that would be excellent holiday gifts. Bear in mind that the book by Chester Elton and Adrian Gostick on great teams will not be available until February, but you can preorder it now (and you should). I really loved all four of these books and I hope you will too.

And if you have not read it, this is a pretty good business book too;-)

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Business Excellence, Employee Engagement, High Performance Teams, Leadership, Winning Culture

How to Get the Best Talent for Your Company

09/15/2017 By

The last video I posted was on the importance of having top talent in your organization (here is a link). I got a great follow-up question from my friend Brandon West the owner of PHOS Creative (the company that does our digital marketing) asking: “Do you have any resources that would be helpful to us in starting a stronger recruitment initiative? Sites, books, tools, contacts, etc.” Instead of writing him a long email, I decided to just shoot this video with my best ideas on how to find, hire and retain top talent.

Please send me any business or leadership questions you have and I’ll be happy to shoot a video with my best ideas and suggestions.

I hope you will share this video with your network. Thanks so much – John

 

Here is the book I talked about from Geoff Smart and Randy Street – I very highly recommend it.

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A very important question…

09/14/2017 By

Filed Under: Business Excellence, Customer Service, Employee Engagement, High Performance Teams, Winning Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Google Research on Key Habits of Top Managers and Leaders

06/22/2017 By

Here is some really powerful information on what it takes to be a highly effective manager and leader. It is based on a Google research project that looked at 10,000 of their top employees. I urge you to take a few minutes to watch the video – I think you will find it very helpful.

Also, please share this video with anyone you feel would find value in the ideas I cover, I believe these concepts can help a lot of people to be more successful.  Thank you very much – John

Remember to share this with your network

*** If you have not read it yet, here is a link to download my short eBook on how to build and sustain a winning culture – for FREE!

 

 

 

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Filed Under: Business Excellence, Career Success, High Performance Teams, Leadership Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Some BIG Ideas on Strategy

03/28/2017 By

This video is an overview of some of the most important ideas I’ve ever learned about creating and executing a winning strategy for your business.

If you found these ideas of value, I very much hope you will share the video with your network.

Thanks – John

Filed Under: Business Excellence, High Performance Teams, John's Rants, Leadership, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Let’s Talk About Vision

03/16/2017 By

In 23 years serving as a management advisor to companies of every size, all over the world, I have yet to encounter an organization that does not struggle with some form of “communication” challenges. Although this can impact companies from several different angles, there is one communication breakdown that has the most significant impact on the overall success of the business.

The lack of a sharply focused, easily understood and extremely well-communicated vision and strategy for growth.

In most businesses, the executive team and senior managers are constantly talking about the vision and strategy, it’s part of their meetings, it’s what they lay awake at night thinking about, but typically if you go just one or two layers down in the organization nobody has a clue about the actual meaning of the vision and how they are supposed to implement the strategy. Remember this: without a clearly communicated vision there is no way to achieve alignment across the organization, act strategically, empower fast decision-making or create a high level of accountability.

When people do not know where they’re going, it is impossible for them to get there successfully!

The key point here is, to effectively communicate the organization’s vision and strategy you must talk about them all the time, using multiple communications channels, at all levels of the organization, delivering a consistent and focused message. I once had the CEO of a company ask me, “When do you know that you have communicated the vision enough?” I replied, “When you get to point that if you have to explain it one more time… you’ll vomit… that’s when the lowest person in your organization just heard the vision for the very first time.”

The answer is simple: communicate, communicate, communicate… and then communicate some more.

Filed Under: Accountability, Business Excellence, Decision Making, High Performance Teams, John's Rants, Leadership, Strategy, Winning Culture Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Does Your Team Measure Up?

03/06/2017 By

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This Determines the Future Success of Your Business…

02/07/2017 By

As I look back across two decades of working with companies around the world, from start-ups to the top of the Fortune 500, there are a few key ideas that I think are fundamental to business success, here is one of them:

 

The success of your business is directly tied to the quality of the people that you can get, grow and keep on your team – and the relationships they create with your customers.

I have yet to meet a single business leader that does not strongly agree with this idea, however, I see a lot of businesses where they do not actually live this idea. Today I want to talk about the growth and development of top talent.

Once you get somebody on your team, there is absolutely no excuse for not investing time, energy and money in helping that person continuously improve.

Frankly, I believe this is the single most important investment you can make in your company because, without highly talented people who are steadily getting better and better, you have no chance of making your company better and better. I also write above that there is, “no excuse” because never in the history of humankind has there been more information available, much of it for free, to assist you in delivering world-class training to your people.

Here are just a few of the things that you should be doing:

  • Formal mentoring program
  • Creating a formal development plan for each employee
  • Creating an internal training department
  • Training classes taught by qualified outside instructors
  • Cross training
  • Benchmarking your training efforts against leading companies
  • Buying a copy of a book for each of your employees
  • Creating a lending library of top business books
  • Getting your employees a membership to an audiobook service
  • Getting your employees a membership to a book summary service
  • Bringing in outside experts for a “lunch and learn”
  • Taking your employees to visit other companies
  • Sending out a newsletter with good information for your employees
  • Sending out a list of top podcasts they should be listening to
  • Sending out a list of YouTube videos they should watch
  • Investing in online/virtual training for your employees
  • Taking your employees to a major training seminar by an expert
  • Taking your employees to an industry event
  • Annual or semiannual company training conferences
  • A formal recognition and rewards program
  • Team building events
  • Regular coaching meetings
  • One-on-one meetings with senior executives
  • Lunch with the CEO
  • Getting high potential employees a business coach

These are just a few things that I came up with off the top of my head, I’m sure there are several more you could add to this list. But here is my point: if you are not doing all or most of this then you’re not truly serious about helping your people (and your company) to be as successful as possible. A good deal of what I have listed is absolutely free, much of it is very inexpensive, and only a few things require a significant financial investment. But I can tell you this, not doing the things on this list is very, very expensive.

If you found value in this blog, I hope you will share it with your network.

Filed Under: Business Excellence, Employee Engagement, High Performance Teams, Winning Culture Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The Foundation of Business Success

01/30/2017 By
After more than two decades of working with organizations around the world, the single biggest issue I see in company after company is: Lack of Disciplined Execution.

I meet plenty of brilliant people, who have developed amazing products and services and have unique and compelling strategies for how to win in the marketplace. Yet time and again I see those strategies fail because they are not effectively executed. Below is a article that was created by an amazing company out of New Zealand called Advisory Works. They are among the world’s leading experts in helping companies execute their plans, which is why I am extremely proud to announce that we have formed a partnership so that the team at Advisory Works can assist my clients who are struggling to implement the plans that I help them create.

I believe you’ll find some very powerful ideas in this PDF, things that you can apply right away to help you be more successful in taking the exciting ideas in your company and turning them into action in the marketplace.

Please feel free to share this article with anyone you want to and if you think you might need a little bit of help, don’t hesitate to contact the folks at Advisory Works, you will be extremely impressed.

View and Download PDF

The Four Cornerstones of Strategic Execution 06
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