Are you battlefield ready?
“On the battlefield and in business you need both inward and outward leadership.“
0:00
/
0:00
Are you battlefield ready?
I recently listened to a podcast with Jocko Willnik (ex US navy SEAL) said something that really struck me as a business leader. He said that on the battlefield you need a leader that is focused within, ensuring the troops are working as an effective and efficient team, and a leader that is looking outside the troop, into what is happening elsewhere on the battlefield. You need both inward and outward thinking.
Too often as entrepreneurs we get hyper-focused on the inside of our business, the doing, making and creating, the managing of people, finances, production and sales, that we forget to lift our eyes upwards and out into the world outside of our business.
There are always a dozen reasons for this – we may be short of resources, there may be deadlines, challenges, and customer problems that need to be solved. We might be focused on innovation and improvement, getting the wheels of the business oiled and quality perfected. We could just be battling to stay alive.
But unless we make the time, create the space and employ the strategies to look up and outwards, we may find ourselves battling away in the wrong direction, or solving a problem that’s already been answered elsewhere. We could be missing a changing trend in the market or a new customer opportunity. We could be chasing hard down a rabbit hole to nowhere.
So this week, let’s set a daily target to identify one thing that could make a difference to the way we do business. For 15 minutes (as part of my morning power hour) let’s actively look for what’s happening in our industry and across other industries, locally and in the rest of the world to find one small gem that can change the way we do business ever so slightly. In this way, we can stay battlefield ready – not just to fight, but to win.
