If we are growing as business leaders, I guarantee we will be making mistakes. If we knew everything about what we are doing and could do it perfectly, we would not grow.
Creating great teams takes time and effort, but it is an endeavor that will make your company stronger, more resilient, and innovative. In the end, the investment will more than pay off.
The concept of gathering all to-dos and having a dependable system to reduce stress is invaluable. Just this part alone has changed how I manage my tasks and helped me significantly increase my productivity.
It takes a balance of strengthening the fundamental, proven workflows while leaving room for innovation and creativity as you continue to grow.
The lens that systems-thinking provides is invaluable, especially if you are leading a firm or a team. With this perspective’s aid, you can evolve to become the caretaker of a complex system and work on making it more resilient and creative.
As I was writing Heptagram, I realized that all these steps could be combined into one business design system, a system that I wanted to be able to share with all of you. I hope that Heptagram will be as helpful to other entrepreneurs and business leaders as it was for me.
As we specialize, we become experts in our fields and deepen our knowledge, but we can also miss out on learning about other areas that can have a significant impact on our companies.
Where there is growth, bottlenecks will crop up. What is essential is to identify the problem and to keep trying to find ways to address it so that the company can move forward and keep growing.
In The Great Mental Models Vol. 1 (public library), Shane Parrish and Rhiannon Beaubien give us an introduction to mental models and their applicability to our work and our lives. Mental models are fundamental principles from different disciplines, such as engineering, biology, and physics, which can all work together, interlaced to help us think. The concept has become widely known in part through Charlie Munger, Vice Chairman at Berkshire Hathaway. He uses what he describes as a “latticework of mental models” to improve his thinking and decision-making.
The importance of having programmed processes in our company became apparent when specific necessary steps weren’t executed. We realized a client statement didn’t go out on time, and we once left out an action when we were closing a sale. I knew then that we needed to manage our workflows with set procedures.
When I began setting up our processes, I tried to do it for every part of the company. This effort turned out to be very successful. We were able to avoid many preventable problems, and we have also been able to operate consistently and with the quality we envisioned. I think this is where processes shine – they help you take care of the vital work that needs to be executed to operate as you envisage.