I found this current Harvard Business Review article entitled, “Are You Ready to Rebound” instructive. It focuses on identifying new opportunities to improve business execution through:
- Strong operational hydraulics
- Rewards for performance, not mediocrity
- Core values with teeth
- The right conversations
- Adventurous leaders in key positions
- Constant pressure versus heroic efforts
It uses a straightforward and useful checklist of questions you can ask yourself.
Larry Robertson, whose brain I’ve had the good fortune to pick from time to time, just published a new book, A Deliberate Pause. The book is far bigger than its 345 pages if you measure bigness by the quantity rich thinking and the number of ways it can be applied.
Through elaborate research and delightful storytelling, Larry Robertson has for me delicately deconstructed the concept of entrepreneurship, rebuilt it and paraded it back into my mind through many different doors. As a result, I have a much more realistic understanding of entrepreneurs, how they think, how they work, how they dream, how they persist and how they succeed.
I wish I’d had this book 30 years ago when I was starting this journey.
A not-so-small lagniappe that comes with the book is a huge inventory of Recommended Resources that Larry includes after each chapter. My reading list for 2010!