You are always asking what book I am reading

Welcome to the first of Kates book club. I get emails from you every week asking me what I’m reading at the moment, so I’m going to do a quick blog once a month just telling you what my book of the month is.

This month is The Four Disciplines of Execution, I read The Four Disciplines of Execution because I was starting to get a sense of overwhelm, really challenged in terms of what I should be focusing on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. I was sensing that progress was slipping in our business here and stuff that we were adopting wasn’t necessarily sticking.

In the four disciplines of execution, it talks about four major principles, one of which is to choose really big goals, we call them BFG’s here at Diamond, I’ll let you work out what the F stands for. They call them wildly important goals and then you want to create lead metrics pertaining to those goals, now that lead not lag metrics i.e. the activity behind making something happen. Then it talks about imposing accountability, which is very very important – so that people know who’s responsible for doing what. Also creating a compelling score card.

So how we have applied that in Diamond Logistics – we have done that within the Diamond sales team, we’ve looked that the huge goals – we’ve quadrupled our sales goals. In terms of what our lead metrics are we looking at the sales activity behind our sales numbers. I terms of accountability we’ve got a daily accountability practice which has been imposed. In terms of the compelling scoreboard and we’ve got league table that we publish once and month to see who is making and/or breaking their sales targets.

So that’s my book for the month which is The Four Disciplines of Execution.
I hope you read it and I hope it makes your business grow.

Take care