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Morry Patoka

Chief Accelerator, CTC Consulting

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How do you spend more time working on the business, versus in the business?

What you think about, and what you do with that thinking can have profound, industry-shattering impact on the future of your company. The majority of CEO’s and senior managers I speak with have one common complaint. They can’t seem to find enough time to think or do much about the future because they’re stuck working in the business much more than working on the business.

The challenge for most leaders is knowing when and how to turn the dial from in to on, and back again only when needed, and only for as long as it makes a real difference.

It’s about balance, recognizing what’s urgent and what’s important. What it takes to attain success, and what it means to sustain success. That takes discipline and creating the conditions to allow you the time, energy and emotional freedom to think creatively about the future, as well as the confidence to put the thinking into action.

So what are you doing, or have done, to spend more quality time working on the business versus in the business?
As a reference, if you’re interested, I posted an article I wrote called “Working On The Business Versus In The Business: Realizing The Greatest Return On Brainpower” at http://www.iquestinc.com/blog/?id=10024.

Related Talks:
Topics: business creativity future innovation leadership success
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    Julius Newman

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    Nov 26 2011: you can spend more time working "on" the business by having DEFINED goals and laying out every step of the process to reach them, as well as compiling lists and procedures for all the "grunt work", from exactly what to say to customers, to what other lists and procedures need to be made and how to make quality and efficiency easier. by writing out EXACTLY how lower level processes should work you maximize opportunity and FUTURE profits. employees will know what to do, customers will be happy and you can take a step back and view the big picture, open your eyes to new sources of revenue and make room for your company to expand. i think organizations should put more effort into developing their human resources at the middle and sub middle levels. this takes alot of the general decision making out of the hands of the CEO and empowering employees by trusting them to make decisions on behalf of the company. what makes this hard sometimes is when the structure of the company is overly complex or opaque. dedicate resoureces to systematically cutting out extra bullshit, like meetings and excessive emails and find something more effective or hire a company to do this for you. as a CEO, try to predict the direction of the market 5 years from now . not just in your sector, but start to understand where other companies will be 5 years from now. opportunities will emerge. focus, decisiveness and discipline. NO BUSY WORK. its easier said than done, but there are many companies looking to teach you how to do it.
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