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"Your job as a leader isn't to eliminate dissonance–your job is to make conflict productive. Right Fights enable you and your team to stop fighting about everything that doesn't matter and start fighting, in a high-minded manner, about what really matters.
I promise you this: Master the competencies of Right Fights and you will achieve sustainable breakthroughs and effect real organizational change. The fuel of human invention is found in dissonance, diversity, competition, and even conflict. That's how you win in the marketplace.
Start by asking yourself: Is this the right fight to fight?"
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"Before any significant and sustained increase in the creation of good middle-class jobs can take place, the voice of the entrepreneur who is the source of all breakthrough innovation and job growth must be heard.
Sadly, however, entrepreneurs are just about the only Americans without a voice in Washington. Big Business certainly has a voice. So does labor, as do teachers, retailers, insurers, doctors, environmentalists and just about every interest group you can think of.
Only entrepreneurs lack an effective organized voice. This despite the fact that, as the distinguished economist Jonathan Hughes once put it, entrepreneurs are 'the vital few' upon whom all of society depends for economic progress."
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"Some days it feels like the information age has morphed into the interruption age. But what if those interruptions turned out to be our best opportunity to make a difference in our workplaces?
As leaders, we make choices all day, every day. The "knock on the door" happens over and over again in some form – phone calls, meetings, emails, and text messages with questions to answer, concerns to address, problems to solve, and fires to put out. There are big issues and small issues, planned sessions and surprises, and they come at us endlessly and from every direction. We have to make decisions without having all the available information, and we need to make them right now. The workload is expanding, and the time we have to deal with each issue is shrinking.
But what if we could step back and look at all those interactions with a fresh perspective? What if, instead of seeing them as interfering with our work, we were to look at them as latent leadership moments? What if these moments were the answer to transformational leadership in today's busy world?"
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"The key is to control and shape the three most important levers of sustainable business growth—the Brains, the Bones, and the Nerves.
The brains of a business are its vision and strategy, and here the enterprise leader must shape and set direction.
The bones are the organizational architecture, and here the enterprise leader must design the organization in order to execute the strategy.
The nerves refer to the culture and climate of the organization, and here the enterprise leader must foster a culture of longlasting excellence.
Just as the human body needs all three systems—the brain, bones, and nerves—functioning in perfect harmony to maximize longevity and performance, a business needs its strategy, architecture, and culture to work in harmony in order to maximize results. As an enterprise leader, you should focus on these three as your most important focus areas; everything else must be delegated."
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"Thanks to the digital age, today's buyers can research, select and purchase their products without getting you involved in the decision. You won't even know they were buying. Everything shifted. Your choices: shift, too—or get left in the past.
We all know that people buy because of their perceptions. Today's perceptions are created through the Internet and word of mouth. You no longer have tight control over the way your market sees your business, the information that is available about you or the buzz about your brand.
Marketing, the way we've always done it, doesn't work anymore."
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