Faster Than the Speed of Change: How to Transform Your Business into a High Performance, High-Profit, High- Satisfaction Enterprise: Secrets from a Leading Executive Coach & futurist - Hardcover

Lemberg, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0970112130 ISBN 13: 9780970112132

Publisher: Akiba Pr, 2000

Synopsis

An important new book for entrepreneurs who are serious about attaining world class results...

Every day I'm approached by entrepreneurs and executives who want to get more from their businesses. Of course they want to increase sales, profits and cash flow. They’d also like to be stronger leaders and better managers. They even want to take time off for themselves, once in a while.

The sad truth is that some people go through their whole working lives without mastering these critical business elements. Others go to great lengths to discover the secrets and learn how to do it for themselves. The payoff when they do? Cash, impact, and above all — satisfaction.

This book can take years off your learning curve. The ideas and action steps it contains are distilled from over seven years coaching hundreds of executives—in seventeen industries with sales ranging from one million to hundreds of millions of dollars.

You'll learn the simple yet powerful master secrets of entrepreneurial leaders. Every one of the eighty-four chapters contains detailed, how-to, common-sense strategies, methods, and techniques including:

How to unleash the spirit that puts your people in overdrive;

Getting people to do exactly what you want for their own reasons;

Discovering your highest value contribution and focusing exclusively on that;

Developing your personal leadership abilities, and how to generate those same abilities in your team;

The magic of having bigger problems, and how they produce bigger payoffs;

Finding the very best leaders in your organization and making them even better; Zeroing in on your strengths and zeroing out your weaknesses;

Playing games for peak performance;

The secret to creating unstoppable motivation--every single day;

Using breakdowns to create breakthroughs;

Turning your business into a no-problem zone;

Raising unreasonable expectations to produce unreasonable outcomes;

Changing how you think about change; and,

How to have more than enough time to do all the important things and only the important things.

If you applied just one of these 84 simple secrets, it would quickly improve your business and add cash to your bottom line. But imagine if you took the time to master two, three, or more. What if you piled secret on top of secret on top of secret—the impact on your business could well be incalculable. And while many of these ideas are different than what you’ve done until now, none of them are difficult.

However, I feel it is only fair to warn you...

This book is not for everybody. While the chapters are short – most are one or two pages, and none is more than five – to get the most out of it you will have to do some work. There are checklists to follow, questionnaires to fill in, and some of the chapters even contain exercises for the reader. So if you are looking to be spoon-fed some tired, old business pablum which isn't going to make a difference anyway, you probably don't want to get this book--since it will just end up gathering dust on your bookshelf.

On the other hand, I don’t think you can find a publication of any kind that will be more intriguing, informative, and profoundly profitable—if you are willing to make it work for you. I don’t care how successful you are right now—this book will help you massively grow your business.

By the way, this book only contains solutions. It does not have any war stories, mini-biographies or tales of corporate derring-do. I didn’t think you had any time to waste, so I left them out.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Lemberg believes that while there are born entrepreneurs, the main requirement for success in business is courage. Combine courage with flexibility, stamina and resilience, and you will surely be successful. Having built three successful businesses, a few failed ones, and helping over 53 separate companies – his clients thinks he knows what he’s talking about.

Paul is a growth strategist and executive coach working with executives and entrepreneurs in a variety of fast-track businesses. He has consulted with executives from companies such as American Skandia, OpenText, Mass Mutual, Goldman Sachs, Lexis/Nexis, SAIC, JP Morgan, Adobe Systems, Great Plains Software, and many others.

As a speaker and coach Paul has worked with thousands of executives and entrepreneurs to have more profitable, productive and satisfying businesses: to be more effective executives, leaders, managers, strategists and entrepreneurs. Prior to starting Lemberg & Company, Paul co-founded, and later sold, two international banking software companies, a multimedia production company, and a sales training company. As a market researcher and product strategist, Paul worked with major technology companies including Texas Instruments, Compaq, EDS, Anderson Consulting, IBM, KPMG, MCI, and Bell Atlantic.

Paul's executive letter, Extraordinary Results, is read by over twenty thousand people in more than fifty countries. He is a popular speaker at conferences in the US and Canada, focusing on topics relating to executive coaching and leadership, the future of technology, and how technology effects your business and industry future.

From the Inside Flap

What if there was one person who could solve all the business problems you now face – all those big and little issues, which cloud your vision, slow your progress, limit your competitiveness, and ultimately shrink your profits?

There is.

What if there was a way to have all this and more - Faster Than the Speed of Change?

You can – all you have to do is act on these simple, insider secrets from internationally known executive coach and futurist, Paul Lemberg

This how-to handbook contains detailed instructions and all the tools you need to transform your business into a high-performance, high-profit, high-satisfaction enterprise. Specific strategies and tactics you will learn include:

6 simple questions that will solve any problem.

How to eliminate distractions and become a true visionary

How backward thinking can rocket you forward.

How to know what to do when you don’t know where to start.

How to become fearless, destroy doubts, and create unstoppable commitment – in yourself and those around you.

Why big problems can help you succeed beyond all your previous expectations

How to get your values, goals, and people working together for astonishing results.

Changing your beliefs for greater leverage and getting incredible results.

When being wrong is the fastest way to get it right.

How to create breakthroughs – on demand!

When doing nothing at all is the best thing you can do.

How to make any enterprise fun!

This book reveals simple, easy to apply secrets, and spells them out step-by-step. All you must do is: 1) Pick up the book, 2) open to a chapter and read it, and 3) do something. That’s it!

Although as they say – your mileage may vary – but your results are guaranteed. Reading this book will – without a doubt – help you move your company Faster Than the Speed of Change.

Reviews

Lemberg is an "executive coach" who publishes a newsletter called Extraordinary Results. He counsels personal transformation as a way to cope with the increasingly fast pace of change. Befitting Lemberg's theme, his book is a collection of short chapters with inspirational messages and self-awareness exercises that take little time to read. Each is meant to be a step in the transformation process. ("How do you get to the top of Mount Everest? One step at a time.") Lemberg leads the reader through establishing a positive mindset, setting down values, putting thoughts into words, and putting words into actions. David Rouse
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

BE UNREASONABLE

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. George Bernard Shaw - Maxims for Revolutionists

Nothing much happens until you make a request and ask someone to do something. But what really makes things go are requests that are unreasonable.

What is an unreasonable request? Asking people to do things you have no right to expect from them. Asking for things you expect people to say no to. But asking anyway.

The trick is to expect them to say yes, and not worry about whether they do or they don't.

Create a game in your enterprise. The game is for everyone to continually be unreasonable in what you ask of each other, and in what you ask all your outside stakeholders. Do you think that could rocket your project or your business forward? Of course it would.

If making requests is not a normal activity for most people in businesses, unreasonable requests are doubly abnormal. We don't want to risk rejection, so we ask for small things, easy things, wimpy things, and make it easy for people to say yes.

This is a good strategy if you are no-o-phobic, but it limits your results.

The action in your business is moved forward in direct proportion to the size of your requests, so to move things along quickly, you have to ask big. You have to ask unreasonably.

Think of what would make your requests unreasonable. Whatever you were going to ask for, ask for more. Whenever you wanted it, ask for it sooner. Whatever you were willing to pay or trade, ask for it for less, or free. You get the idea.

Make your requests for more. Bigger. Faster. Cheaper. Outrageouser.

Make them unreasonable.

DO SOMETHING. ANYTHING.

What to do when you still don't know what to do?

The answer? Do Anything.

People get stuck trying to do things right. They want it to be perfect, and so do the task - whatever it is - over and over. They tweak it a little here, change something else there. Making it better and better, bit by bit, on and on.... Someday, they may decide it is finally ready for the grand debut.

Perfectionism is the death of many good opportunities. People fritter all of their lead time getting it right instead of bringing their venture out in the open and letting the market shape it.

The world already knows much more than you do about what will make your business great. People will be more than happy to tell you what's needed and wanted if you only expose yourself and your ideas to their opinions and thoughts.

The trick then, is to do something.

Just get into action.

You have a concept, an idea - do it now! Implement some version of your concept and get it out into the marketplace. Get feedback.

Perfect it in version two.

FAITH

Ya gotta have faith. George Michaels

Faith is absolutely essential to creating a breakthrough for your enterprise. Specifically, faith that your venture and its vision will be realized. Faith means unshakable confidence, total trusting acceptance.

Faith puts you beyond doubt, in the realm of complete certainty. Once in that realm you are willing to try anything, do anything necessary to realize your vision. To have your dreams come true.

At the margins, there are many actions you are unlikely to take if you weigh the likelihood of success and failure. On the other hand, if you know, absolutely know, things will work out - those marginal actions don't seem marginal anymore. They simply make sense. Breakthroughs are often the result of action at the margin of reasonableness. So faith has a way of keeping us in action, keeping us ahead of the change curve.

How do you develop faith? This is tough to swallow, but you just have to have it. Faith is a declaration you make to yourself. You simply say, I have total faith in this and such. And then you have it. You say I have faith and then you take action based upon your faith. When the voice in your head raises doubts about your outcome, you counter with your faith in the outcome. Over and over again if necessary.

You keep keeping the faith.

Take in a deep breath, and let it out slowly and say I declare that I have absolute, total, unshakable faith in ____________________________________________.

Doesn't that feel good?

Edition details

• Publisher: Akiba Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0970112130
• ISBN 13: 9780970112132
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 186