Who doesn't know them: bosses who talk a lot about 'empowerment', but turn out to be the most detail-oriented micromanagers when push comes to shove. If you want to come even a little bit close to start-up thinking, the great leader must above all give out trust and responsibility. He should coach and stimulate his employees, while remaining very critical of the goals and agreements. Communicating a clear vision and translating it to the shop floor are indispensable talents of a good director. This also includes the boss having to know exactly when to say 'no'. Make sure that new activities or priorities are not constantly added, but eliminate all peripheral matters so that the core tasks clearly remain the most important in daily work.
Step 5. Innovate!
It may sound like a cliché, but without the ability to innovate, you will remain an old-fashioned boat. Being curious about new things is the ideal starting point for an interesting future. If you have a wide variety of people and functions within your company, this can be a fertile ground for this curiosity: who are all these interesting people, what ideas do they have? But you are not there yet. Innovation also means: falling flat on your face. And many companies are afraid of that. Logical! After all, performance and profit targets hang like a threatening cloud over all activities. That is why the author of this book advises making a clear distinction between business as usual and 'experiments'. Innovations are allowed to fail. And if that does happen, make sure that there are no philippines whatsapp number free serious reprisals associated with it. If you do, the urge to innovate will disappear in no time.
The customer's bottlenecks are usually the starting point for innovation. If you know the customer well, you know what occupies, pleases or irritates him. Based on that, you add your knowledge and expertise to come up with something new that matches the customer's wishes. The classic quote from car manufacturer Henry Ford comes up in this context: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have told me: a faster horse." In order to exceed the customer's expectations in this way, it is essential to let go of assumptions. You must be 100 percent certain that the starting points for your product improvement are based on facts. Matters that really matter to the customer.
Steps 7, 8 and 9 are successively: 'dream big and deliver top performances', 'take small steps' and 'keep learning and developing'. And so Mike Hoogveld provides a readable step-by-step plan in 176 pages, from which many a manager or director will find inspiration. Even though all the usual suspects appear in the book (Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk), Hoogveld still manages to mention more than enough interesting examples. His tips are concrete and directly applicable, his writing style is friendly and practical. All of this invites action.