Thoughtfully Ruthless E-Book

Val Wright

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 338

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Unlock explosive growth potential with the true model of modern leadership Thoughtfully Ruthless lays out the secret to rapid business growth by showing you how to magically invent more time, catapult your energy, and boost the productivity of your resources. Author Val Wright has worked with leaders of all stripes--from doctors to musicians to Fortune 50 C-suite executives--to help them unlock their potential and achieve the next level of success. Her experiences have shown time and time again that it's not the economy, or the market conditions, or the competition that's holding your business back. The secret to exponential growth lies within how leaders ruthlessly manage their time, energy, and resources in parallel. Everyone is on a virtual center stage with the whole world watching and reporting every move, leaders need to know how to be ruthless in a thoughtful way. This book shows you how to become that kind of leader, and how to adopt the habits, skills, and practices of some of the most successful business leaders of our time. You'll learn how to become sensibly selfish, how to spend your time and energy, and what issues to delegate or ignore so you can clear your slate to focus on what really matters to you. In a world where rapid growth is the new norm, we have input overload. Leadership is much-lauded but commonly under-practiced in business today. This book is designed to help you shape your leadership to drive business growth, get you promoted faster, and create a life that you love. * Recover your time and energy away from black holes * Focus on the factors that really impact your business * Identify and build the all-star team you need tomorrow--today * Create magnetic support and followership * Learn the secret to pulling ahead of the competition With all the boardroom handwringing about products, the new consumer, and financial results, it's easy to get sucked into issues that ultimately have only a granular effect on real growth. Thoughtfully Ruthless leadership differentiates remarkable leaders and companies. This book provides a model for growth-oriented leadership, and lays out the essential practices you should start today.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part I: Why You Need to be Thoughtfully Ruthless

Chapter 1: Thoughtful and Ruthless

The Trigger Points for Thoughtfully Ruthless

Who Is Thoughtful? Who Is Ruthless?

Can You Name One?

Your Time, Energy, and Resources

How Thoughtfully Ruthless Are You?

Chapter 2: The Cost of Doing Nothing

The Cost of Delay

The Downward Spiral of Gloom

The Thoughtfully Ruthless Success Loop

Chapter 3: Your Selfish Charter

Your Sensibly Selfish Charter

Wishful Thinking Works

Notes

Chapter 4: Become Brilliant at Demonstrating Your Brilliance

Assessing Your Brilliance and How Brilliantly You Demonstrate It

Why Appearance Trumps Reality Every Time

How to Transform from Being Humble to Shameless

Your Action

Part II: Thoughtfully Ruthless with Your Time

Chapter 5: The Power of No

The Powerful Post-It

The Immediacy Effect

How to be Productively Unproductive

How to Control Input Overload

Your Lost Discipline List

Thirty Ways to Say No

Chapter 6: Shush!

Your Daily Silence

The Gift of Time

In-Box in Control

Calendar Chaos

Meaningful Meetings

The Thoughtfully Ruthless Deadline Tracker

Part III: Thoughtfully Ruthless with Your Energy

Chapter 7: Becoming Imperturbable

How to Stop the Worry Trifecta

Rapid Thought to Action

How Imperturbable are You?

Managing the Energy Leaks

Your Accelerators and Decelerators

Accelerating by Improving Your Sleep, Nutrition, and Exercise

Chapter 8: Divorce Your Friends and Network

The Greenhouse Effect

Put Your Social Life on Autopilot

An Enviable Inner Circle of Advisors

Internal and External Connections

Communities

Perfecting Your Team's Connections

Surrounding Yourself With Believers

Chapter 9: Creating a Leapfrog Organization

Your Five-Year Leap

The Intentional Annoyance Phase

Building an Exemplary Board

Leaving Your Legacy

Chapter 10: The Thoughtfully Ruthless Team

Steps for Galvanizing Your Team

The Characteristics of a Galvanized Team

Do You Tolerate Mediocrity?

Chapter 11: Amazon Versus Microsoft

Assessing Your Culture

Can You Take the Heat?

Reward the Results You Want

Unleashing Innovation

Using the Cultural Continuum

The Express Lane to Culture Change

Chapter 12: Mind the Gap

Evaporating Excuses

Prepare for Abrupt U-Turns

Change Your View, Change Your Habits

Listen to Who You Listen to

Evidence, Patterns, and Observed Behavior

Practice Altitude Adjustment

Make Unpopular and High-Risk Decisions

Appendix

Ninety-Nine Ways to be Thoughtfully Ruthless With Your Time

Ninety-Nine Ways to be Thoughtfully Ruthless With Your Energy

Ninety-Nine Ways to be Thoughtfully Ruthless With Your Resources

About the Author

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1

Figure 2.1

Figure 3.1

Figure 3.2

Figure 4.1

Figure 4.2

Figure 4.3

Figure 6.1

Figure 6.2

Figure 6.3

Figure 6.4

Figure 6.5

Figure 7.1

Figure 7.2

Figure 7.3

Figure 8.1

Figure 8.2

Figure 9.1

Figure 9.2

Figure 9.3

Figure 10.1

Figure 10.2

Figure 10.3

Figure 11.1

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Part 1

Chapter 1

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Thoughtfully Ruthless

Val Wright

The Key to Exponential Growth

Cover image: © iStock / samxmegCover design: The Digital Marketing Institute

Copyright © 2016 by Val Wright Consulting. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

Thoughtfully RuthlessSM is a trademark of Val Wright Consulting LLC and cannot be used without permission.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom.

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ISBN 978-1-119-22257-6 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-119-22258-3 9 (ePDF); ISBN 978-1-119-22259-0 (ePub)

Dedication

For Andy, for your love, friendship, laughter, and boldness to move across the other side of the pond, and utmost unwavering confidence in me.

Acknowledgments

This book would still be floating around my head as a “perhaps-one-day” aspiration if it weren't for the following people:

Jeannene Ray, Heather Brosius, Lauren Freestone, Michael Friedberg, and the team at Wiley. Your thoughtful feedback and great partnership resulted in a book that will transform how executives rapidly grow their businesses.

Alan Weiss, my strategic advisor, author of over 60 books and godfather of the most dramatic vibrant community of consultants, speakers, and authors in the world. Thank you, Alan, for continuously pushing and challenging me, and creating the ultimate community that I learn from every day.

My remarkable circle of clients, colleagues, and friends who kept asking me to write this book and cheered me across the finish line. Your positively relentless optimism is infectious.

My three daughters, Naomi, Keira, and Olivia, whose boundless energy, continuous curiosity, and love for everything adventurous teach me valuable lessons each and every day.

Finally, my mum and dad, for teaching me that anything is possible with the right confidence and support.

Foreword

In 30 years of executive and entrepreneurial coaching around the globe, I've observed that people tend to begin their day in one of two ways: It's either yet another glorious opportunity for success, exploration, and personal growth; or, it's a long, slow crawl through enemy territory.

Mind-sets inform behavior, whether consciously or subliminally. My dogs' mind-sets are always positive. If there's an open gate, run through it. Many people's mind-sets default to the negative. Let's do an analysis of the rewards and risks of proceeding through a gate unexpectedly found open. Is it a trap? Could there be danger lurking? What resources should we gather?

Of course, by the time these questions are meticulously answered, someone else has launched Uber, invented the iPhone, and won the Super Bowl. “He who hesitates” these days is no longer “lost,” but rather a nonperson. In a turbulent world, we need speed and boldness and a carpe diem attitude. The metaphoric gate doesn't remain open for long.

Can you imagine John Donne (and Ernest Hemingway after him) taking the time and analytic intensity to write, “Identifying the populace for whom and not for whom the cacophony in the campanile sounds” instead of “For whom the bell tolls”? Yet in the age of big data and persistent turbulent times, I see too many people slowing their pace rather than increasing it.

Val Wright has opened the gates at firms such as Xbox, Starbucks, and Microsoft and then urged talented people through them. For a quarter century, she has fine-tuned what she calls “thoughtfully ruthless” approaches to better create and exploit opportunity by intelligently leveraging time, energy, and resources. She has coached, worked with, and interviewed leaders globally and found the wisdom in what I call healthy selfishness: If you don't put your own oxygen mask on first, you're not as able to help others and will eventually be useless.

The filters we are blessed with in the aging process, as the horizon becomes closer and we begin to regret what we might not complete, can be used at much younger ages if you allow yourself the opportunity. Val doesn't assume the reader is damaged—as so many business books do—but does believe that there are behaviors and skills that aren't always understood, let alone utilized at the most propitious moments. That's why suggestions here such as avoiding regret roulette and letting go of the mediocre seem so obvious and useful, while also so neglected.

I've known Val for several years, and she is one of the true all-stars I've had the pleasure to coach and support. She practices what she preaches, in that she's forthright, fast, and factual. She suggests nothing that she doesn't practice herself and that I've seen a thousand successful people employ consciously or naturally. Val will drive you toward the conscious competency of ensuring that the techniques that follow can immediately and pragmatically improve your life and career.

The question that remains is whether you have the thoughtful ruthlessness to do so. That bell tolls for thee….

Alan Weiss, PhD

Author, Million Dollar Consulting, Million Dollar Maverick, and more than 50 other business books