100 Days and Counting

Posted by Greg Bustin (July 1, 2006)

Excerpted from the book, Take Charge! How Leaders Profit From Change, by Greg Bustin.

You have 100 days remaining in the year to achieve your 2006 business objectives.

Does this fact surprise you? Is this a concept that piques your curiosity? Or a statement with which you disagree?

“How can there be 100 days left in the year when it’s only July?” you may wonder. Well, when you subtract weekends, a week or two for vacation and time off for holidays, you’re left with about 100 business days in this year. You may quibble and say you don’t take vacations (a huge mistake for leaders, by the way) or that you always work on holidays. Okay.

Or you may be thinking, “Our business isn’t based on a calendar fiscal year, so saying there are only 100 days left in the year is flat-out wrong.” Okay.

If these and other thoughts are drifting through your mind, you’re missing the bigger point.

Here it is: Now is a good time to catch your breath, assess your position and begin making any adjustments that will allow your organization to finish the second half of 2006 strong.

But this time of year also means that if you’ve not already achieved or made significant progress toward achieving the goals you set for yourself and your organization months ago, it will now take more effort to accomplish what you said you wanted on January 1.

When you miss the first month’s target, it’s hard to catch up. When you miss your first-quarter target, it’s even harder. So if you’re still behind your plan in July, you have got one monster hill to climb to come out on top.

What’s to be done?

Unleash the power of the present

Have you ever wondered what our most precious commodity is? It’s time. Because once we lose it we’ll never get it back.

One reason most people (and countless organizations) fail to achieve goals is the failure to “live in the now” – to unleash the power of the present.

Living in the now is critical because the past is over – you can’t change it. The future is uncertain – you can’t foresee it. The past and the future are illusions. Only the present is within our grasp and, God willing, it’s the closest thing under our control.

By focusing on the present, you commit yourself to change and to success. This attitude embraces the idea that if you act today and do the things that you commit to doing, you can succeed. “Successful people,” said Earl Nightingale, “are willing to do the things unsuccessful people are not.”

But annual plans dissolve when goals seem too abstract. Or when we live in the past and dream in the future. Or when we don’t set our attitude to make the required changes, figuring it’s more comfortable living with the devil we know rather than the devil we don’t know. Or when we don’t see that what we’re doing today makes a difference toward achieving our goal. These thoughts and others like them are nothing but excuses.

Clarity is key

Clarity is essential to goal-setting and what I call goal-getting. Clarity requires discipline. You must:

Be very specific about what you want.
Set a deadline
Write it down

Wanting to lose weight is a dream; losing 10 lbs. by Labor Day is specific. Wanting to grow sales is a dream; increasing your revenue by adding five new accounts by December 1 is specific.

Assigning a deadline to a specific goal sharpens your focus, and increases the odds of attaining the goal. Deadlines are powerful tools. In our work with companies, we use a series of 100 questions to uncover opportunities, examine problems, gain agreement and set goals. The first question we always ask is: What do you want to celebrate one year from today? Because if you don’t achieve your 12-month objectives, you can forget about your 3- and 5-year plans. It’s healthy to dream, and we leave room for that as we work with companies, but we must be focused on achieving specific, concrete, doable, measurable goals by a certain date.

Committing goals to paper (or disc) allows you to preserve your thinking and measure progress. Saying it isn’t enough; writing down goals – whether they’re personal goals or company objectives – requires discipline and increases the chances of success. What are we doing? Who’s doing it? By when? At what cost? For what expected result?

Just do it

There’s a phenomenon we’ve observed over the years that occurs in organizations every September regardless of whether they are operating on a calendar fiscal year or not. It’s the Back-To-School Syndrome.

Once the vacations are memories and the kids are back in school, exceptional organizations – for-profit and not-for-profit alike – adopt their own Back-To-School mentality. They re-focus on planning to do more of what’s working, and they examine their options for jettisoning under-performing programs, products, processes and people.

Thomas Watson, the leader who turned IBM into a juggernaut, said, “The outstanding leaders of every age are those who set their own quotas and constantly exceed them.”
Here are six deceptively simple but remarkably powerful ways to come out on top:

Stay focused on the things critical to your success. Avoid distractions.
Communicate these priorities regularly and consistently to your team.
Track progress. What gets measured is what gets done.
Hold people accountable – starting with yourself.
Celebrate victories – even small ones. Doing so recognizes progress and builds morale.
Replicate successes and eliminate (but learn from) mistakes.

What will you do with your 100 days?

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