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A check list for success

12-steps

A millionaire reader once told me that he had built up his eminently successful business by following these dozen points from my 1980 book, The Business of Winning…

  • Improve basic efficiency – all the time
  • Think as simply and directly as possible about what you’re doing and why
  • Behave towards others as you wish them to behave towards you
  • Evaluate each business and business opportunity with all the objective facts and logic you can muster
  • Concentrate on what you do well
  • Ask questions ceaselessly about your performance, your markets, your objectives
  • Make money; if you don’t you can’t do anything else
  • Economise, because doing the most with the least is the name of the game
  • Flatten the company, so authority is spread over many people
  • Admit to your failings and shortcomings, because only then will you be able to improve on them
  • Share the benefits of success widely among those who helped to achieve it
  • Tighten up the organisation wherever and whenever you can – because success tends to breed slackness

You’ll see that the Clean Dozen form an acronym – IT BECAME FAST. And even after a quarter of a century I wouldn’t change a word or a thought. Follow these precepts, and you have every hope of becoming a fast-moving leader. But I’ve added three more and more modern bullets, as you can see in my The Fusion Manager (published by Profile Books):

  • Enable everybody in the business to use their individual powers to the fullest possible extent
  • Serve your customers with all their requirements and desires to standards of perceived excellence in quality
  • Transform performance by constantly innovating in products and processes – including the ways in which the business is managed

That makes a new acronym: IT BECAME FASTEST. There’s no substitute for being best. Best is simply best.

Robert Heller