Self-confidence

Benefits

Challenges

The root of many of bureaucracy ills is insecurity. Insecurity makes people resist change because they see change only as a threat, never as an opportunity.

Action

• Give people a voice, get them talking and listening to and trusting one another.

• Cultivate self-confidence among your leaders by turning them loose, giving them independence and resources, and encouraging them to take big swings.

• Provide an → atmosphere  that affords employees an opportunity to dream, risk, and win – and ultimately earn self-confidence.

Benefits

Simplicity is practically an art form with many definitions. To an engineer, it's clean functional designs with fewer parts. It means judging a process not by how sophisticated it is, but how understandable it is to those who must make it work. In marketing it means clear messages and clean proposals to consumers and industrial customers. And, most importantly, on an individual, interpersonal level it takes the form of plain-speaking, directness – honesty.

Challenges

You can't believe how hard it is for people to be simple, how much they fear being simple.

One of the most difficult things for a manager to do is to reach that all-important threshold of self-confidence in which being simple is comfortable.

Action

• Urge everyone in the company to have the courage to be simple.

• Create an atmosphere in the organization where people feel not only free, but obliged to demand clarity and purpose from their leaders.

Benefits

If you're not fast you can't win. Speed is everything. It is the indispensable ingredient of competitiveness.  >>>

Action

• Decisions at virtually every level should be made in minutes, not days or weeks. Decisions must be made face-to-face, not memo-to-memo. Forests of meaningless paper trails and approvals must be eliminated.

• Decrease control to increase speed.

• Reduce hierarchical layers to speed communication and get products to markets more quickly.  >>>

→ Jack Welch's 5 Strategic Questions