LearnToLead - Success Manifesto

Dave Anderson's
11-Point Organizational Success Manifesto

Don't Settle For Success; grow to your maximum potential. It's not your job to merely become more successful, help the people around you become more successful or make your organization successful. Your job is to grow all three to their maximum potential. The difference between being successful and growing to your greatest potential is staggering: leadership makes up the difference.
Make each day a masterpiece by creating daily energy and urgency. Energy stimulates urgency; urgency creates focus, which creates momentum, which brings results, which completes the circle by creating more energy.
Commit to lifelong learning. Learn like you'll live forever and live like you'll die tomorrow. Leaders are developed daily: not in a day. They keep a beginner's mind.
Invest 80% of your time, energy and resources into the top 20% of activities and the top 20% of the people who bring your organization its greatest return.
Continually raise standards for performance. If you're not stretching people, you're not leading. Raise standards for your team by constantly upgrading your team through recruiting, training, transferring or termination. Pay the price to build a team of all stars. Don't settle for less.
Reach for the stars. Bite off more than you can chew by developing and striving for bold visions. It's only in trying to go too far that you ever find out how far you can go.
Develop leaders at all levels within your organization. When developing followers you grow your business by addition; when you develop leaders you grow it by multiplication.
Take more risks. By initiating rather than imitating you secure a competitive advantage. Breakthroughs don't take place in safe environments. It's better to risk, make a mistake and shoot yourself in the foot then to sit still and have a competitor shoot you in the head.
Change before you have to. Change is the rule in business today, not the exception. Anticipate change and initiate it before you're stampeded into changing. Look to the future to plan changes for the future: not to the past.
Make tough decisions daily. Any average college sophomore can make 95% of the decisions you make each day: you're getting paid to make the other 5%. The best time to make tough decisions is when things are going well.
Flatten out and speed up. Hierarchy and bureaucracy slow down progress and punish initiative. Empower people to move faster and make more decisions. Err on the side of speed. In today's business climate the big don't eat the small: the swift eat the slow.