ReaditFor.me | Great by Choice

How would you like to create (or work at) a company that outperforms your competitors by at least 10x?

Jim Collins and his team concluded was that there are 4 main attributes of a 10x company – fanatical discipline, empirical creativity, productive paranoia and Level 5 ambition.

Today I read a summary of the book Great by Choice.

I learned the specific attributes that the world’s most successful companies follow to outperform their competition by at least 10 times.

Here is an idea and an exercise to consider this week, inspired by the book:

Idea: Fire bullets, then cannonballs

The idea is that if you were down to your last bit of gun powder, and had an enemy ship bearing down on you, you’d need to be judicious in your use of last reserves. Take it all and fire a cannonball, and the chances are that you are going to miss, and perish. But fire bullets first instead, and sooner or later you are going to find the right trajectory for your shots. Then, and only then should you load up the cannonball and go for broke.

Collins defines a bullet in the business context to be something that is:

1. Low cost – it shouldn’t cost you a lot of money to fire a bullet.

2. Low risk – the result, one way or another, shouldn’t have a major impact on your business.

3. Low distraction – it shouldn’t take much time away from the other major priorities the company has at the moment.

Exercise:

This week, come up with a “bullet” you can fire in an area of your business that is critical to your success. If you make sure it’s low cost/risk/distraction, you should be able to test a major hypothesis by the end of the month.

If you want more, you can read a summary of this book here today (you’ll need to create a free account first):  https://readitfor.me/read-rothbard


This link offers you a free Readitfor.me Membership (daily summary by text only), which is regularly $9.99/month.

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