The busier you are, the more important it is to stop and read this story.

One day, an expert in time management was speaking to a group of business students and, to drive home a point, used an illustration those students will never forget.

As he stood in front of the group of high-powered over-achievers, he said: “Okay, time for a quiz.”

He then pulled out a one-gallon “wide-mouth” mason jar and set it on the table in front of him. Then he produced about a dozen fist-sized rocks and carefully placed them, one by one, into the jar. When the jar was filled to the top and no more rocks would fit inside, he asked “Is this jar full?”

Everyone in the class said: “Yes.” Then he said: “Really?”

He reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel. Then he dumped some gravel in and shook the jar, causing pieces of gravel to work themselves down into the space between the big rocks. Then he asked the group once more: “Is this jar full?”

By this time the class was on to him. “Probably not.” one of them answered. “Good!” he replied.

He reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand in the jar and it went into all the spaces left between the rocks and the gravel. Once more he asked the question. “Is this jar full?”

“No!” the class shouted. Once again, he said: “Good!”

Then he grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour it in until the jar was filled to the brim. Then the expert in time-management looked at the class and asked, “What is the point of this illustration?”

One eager beaver raised his hand and said, “The point is, no matter how full your schedule is, if you try really hard you can always fit some more things in it.”

“No”, the speaker replied: “That is not the point. The truth this illustration teaches us is this: If you don’t put the big rocks in first, you’ll never get them in at all.”

What are the big rocks in your life? Your children. Your spouse. Your loved ones. Your friendships. Your education. Your dreams. A worthy cause. Teaching or mentoring others. Doing things that you love. Time for yourself. Your health.

Remember to put these BIG ROCKS in first, or you’ll never get them in at all.

If you sweat the little stuff (i.e. gravel, the sand) then you’ll fill your life with little things you will never have the real quality time you need to spend on the big, important stuff (the big rocks).

So, tonight, or in the morning, when you are reflecting on this short story, ask yourself this question: What are the big rocks in my life? Then put those in your jar first. Have a nice day.

I don’t know the author of this piece, but wanted to share it anyway.

——

A few weeks ago, what began as a typical Saturday morning turned into one of those lessons that life seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it.

I turned the dial up into the phone portion of the band on my ham radio in order to listen to a Saturday morning swap net. Along the way, I came across an older sounding chap, with a tremendous signal and a golden voice. You know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the broadcasting business. He was telling whomever he was talking with something about “A Thousand Marbles.” I was intrigued and stopped to listen to what he had to say.

“Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you’re busy with your job. I’m sure they pay you well but it’s a shame you have to be away from home and your family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. Too bad you missed your daughter’s dance recital he continued.” “Let me tell you something that has helped me keep a good perspective on my own priorities.”

And that’s when he began to explain his theory of “A Thousand Marbles.” “You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years.”

“Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3900, which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime.”

“Now, stick with me, Tom, I’m getting to the important part. It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail”, he went on, “and by that time I had lived through over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays.

I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy. So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round up 1000 Marbles. I took them home and put them inside a large, clear plastic container right here in the shack next to my gear.”

“Every Saturday since then, I have taken one Marble out and thrown it away. I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focus more on the really important things in life. There is nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight.”

“Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign-off with you and take my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very last Marble out of the container. I figure that if I make it until next Saturday then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing we can all use is a little more time.”

“It was nice to meet you Tom, I hope you spend more time with your family, and I hope to meet you again here on the band. This is a 75 Year old Man, K9NZQ, clear and going QRT, good morning!”

You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this fellow singed off. I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned to work on the antenna that morning, and then I was going to meet up with a few hams to work on the next Club Newsletter. Instead, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss. “C’mon honey, I’m taking you and the kids to breakfast!”

“What brought this on?” she asked with a smile.

“Oh, nothing special, it’s just been a long time since we spent a Saturday together with the kids. And hey, can we stop at a toy store while we’re out? I need to buy some Marbles…”

——

If I used the CIA’s WORLD FACT BOOK, Life expectancy at birth of a Canadian Male is 78.72 years (it was certainly less than that when I was born – which should be my benchmark). Then, I have 1100 marbles left – on the outside. The positive side of this is the adrenalin rush to continue to make a difference in the lives of people around you.

In one my past engagements, where we had agreed to implement a whole bunch of changes, the CEO asked me, “how do we do that?”, “how do we implement this new way of thinking?” After explaining all the concepts of change leadership, operational alignment and organization alignment, I felt they were still not all on the same page. So, I added: “you have ALL to walk the talk”, I said.

As smart as I thought I was, the answer clearly remained unfulfilling, I could see.

What does “walking the talk” mean?

We intuitively know that you can’t say one thing, point everybody in one direction, and then walk in a different path. We all understand it means preaching by example.

But to preach something, by example or not, you need to have something to preach about. More precisely, you need to be complete, coherent and abundantly clear about your preaching. There should not be much room for interpretation. There should not be ambiguity. There should not dissonance in what is being preached.

In leadership terms, what is it that leadership teams are preaching about? To make change happen, leadership teams need to paint a picture about the company (its culture), paint a picture of the future (the envisioned future), explain the main strategies to get there, clarify how the company will organize to execute the strategies and deliver on the vision, explain the responsibilities each will add up to the execution of the plan and how this all relates.

In this context, all executives and managers need to be using the same exact language when describing all of the above, they need to act in the exact same way, in a way that is highly coherent with the above, make decisions that support all of the above.

To enable all this, to be able to walk the talk, the “talk” needs to be written down, literally. Just like a theater play is written down for all comedians to understand the whole plot.

I was recently asked to talk to a round table of executives about what is important in growing organizations. I elected to talk about the need for a Leadership Framework, as I believe it is the foundation of success.

Taken in a different context, if an individual wants to grow to become a great orator, he/she will need to have a communications framework assimilated in three steps:

1. learn the basic of a given language (the words, the grammar rules, sentence construction),
2. apply the previous learning to master the language (reading, writing, verb conjugation, synonyms, antonyms, style, story telling, organization thoughts)
3. apply the previous learning to develop interesting subjects that will shaping understanding of audiences, mold their beliefs, impact their own thoughts.

Most organizations I visit continue to look like a Tower of Babel. A great number of people trying to achieve a common goal (hopefully one God would not despise) yet speaking a different language and as a result employees spend 51% of their time on activities not directly related to their organization’s priorities, which causes 90% of well articulated strategies fail to be successfully executed.

I recall vividly the feeling of having my entire organization in complete harmony, completely aligned, pulling all in the same direction, rowing in complete synchronization, achieving plans and results seemingly effortlessly. How did it become this way? How was it that we had the right plan, the right team, the unbelievable ability to execute?

I humbly submit that the vision, the mission, the plan, the strategies, the culture, the values, the team, how teams were built and organized, the execution framework, the sales model, the genuine care for stakeholders, all of the above and more, were of the highest coherence, which required that they were clearly articulated, which required that every sentence, every word were 100% clear and understood.

So I advocate every leader must do the following three things:

1. Teach the basic leadership language to your team. What does the words mean (mission, vision, strategy, plan, BHAG, etc.) and why they are important.
2. With the words understood, give them meaning and build your vision, your mission, your plan, your strategies, your culture, …
3. Master the effective use of the leadership language to deliver an organization in complete harmony, completely aligned, pulling all in the same direction, rowing in complete synchronization, achieving plans and results seemingly effortlessly.

I was fortunate to be invited to a fabulous event hosted by the Ted Rogers School of Management of Ryerson University. Entitled CEO Outlook, the event gathered some of Canada’s most successful entrepreneurs and business executives. First, tribute goes to the leadership of Ken Jones, the Dean of the Ted Rogers Scholl of Management for his vision and dedication to serving the school’s body of students in such a visible and tangible way. Thanks also go to Prof Diane Francis, who so masterfully organized the event and moderated the panel discussions.

As I listened to the panelists, I realized that the learning from the afternoon can be summarized in 4 points that perfectly align with my leadership framework:

• You’ve got to love it
• You’ve got to have discipline
• You’ve got to have the right people
• You’ve got to look after stakeholders

Love

To endure the rejections, the set-backs, the pains of creating something new, love has to be in the air. Entrepreneurs love their vision and their mission. They love it so much, it does not matter anymore how many hours they work, because it is not work. Then, they need to make their people love it to the same degree. This happens when they share their beliefs, vision of the future, and their sense of purpose. This happens when they share the plan to get from A to B. This happens when, and only when, they are able to share their love by writing it down in a plan. I call this strategic planning.

Discipline

Care needs to be taken. There is a difference between loving it, and falling in love with it. Yes, there is a difference. Loving what you do is key, falling in love with your idea can be fatal, as it will prevent you to apply the discipline to make the right decisions. Executing on a vision requires discipline in any circumstances. Having a team execute on the same plan requires structured discipline. You may have to implement a structured change leadership model to take the organizations from A to B. You will need to create operational alignment to ensure coherence of processes. You will need organizational alignment to ensure what needs to be done is actually assigned to someone. And you will need a structured revenue generation model. I call this disciplined strategy execution.

People

It was said that “no one is as good as all of us”. Successful leaders have learned to surround themselves with people that know more than they do. The role of leaders is not to know all, but to set the stage, the direction and assemble the team that can deliver, now and in the future. They have to establish an organizational development framework to ensure that, as the organization develops, the skill-base develops as fast, or faster. I call this organizational development.

Stakeholders

Customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, the community, need to be looked after, or else something will break in the process. Granted this equilibrium may be tricky to achieve, but it is clear that employees want to work for more than their paycheck. Clearly, destroying the communal environment in which a business operates will have negative ramifications eventually. Clearly suppliers aspire to more that being the cheapest provider. Clearly shareholders want a higher return than leaving their money in the bank. Clearly, customers expect more. To the extent that an organization can deliver more than others to its stakeholders, it will attract reciprocity from stakeholders. I call this creating stakeholders value.

Strategic planning, disciplined strategy execution, organizational development and stakeholders value creation are at the core of what makes leaders successful.

I was reading a post at LeadershipNow entitled Getting the Information You Need. It referred to an article written by Mark Ronald and Robert Shaw from the Leader to Leader institute entitled Developing Peripheral Vision.

They warn to watch for signs of resistance to change:

Silence: In leadership teams, members who don’t support the trend of a decision often simply disengage from the dialogue and remain silent rather than pose a contrary point of view—particularly if the leader appears to support the decision or the group is moving quickly to closure. Who has checked out?
Non-answers: People can opt out by appearing to agree with the leader when, in fact, they do not. “If you think it’s the right decision, that’s good enough for me.”
Omissions: It is often what is not said that is most critical—particularly on issues that the leader believes will be problematic.
Specific language: People surface their true feelings in hundreds of subtle ways. Leaders need to pay attention to the specific use of words that are flags suggesting that more discussion or follow-up is needed.
Offline input: Often, the insights people bring to a leader (or each other) during the breaks of meetings or in informal hallway conversations are more important than what is said in formal discussions.
E-mail traffic: In many firms, e-mail offers insight into potential issues that may require a leader’s attention. For example, an overly formal e-mail message with multiple people copied (or blind copied) is often a protective action taken by a team member with concerns.

Those six behaviours are part of what I call “background conversations” which are typical incarnations of “passive resistance” – the worst kind of resistance. Background conversations occur when one’s head says YES and one’s heart say NO; when one lets other under the belief that agreement exist, when in fact it does not.

What I don’t find discussed much however is that such problem should not be a Leader-subordinate issue. Most leaders have, or should have, developed a leadership team, and in there lies a powerful tool. In companies I lead, we openly talked about background conversations at the leadership team level.

When Ronald and Shaw say “know your people”, the one thing we already know for certain about your people is that there is always resistance to change. So, the CEO has to establish [as early as possible in his/her tenure] a leadership model based on the assumption that there will be resistance to change. The best way of dealing with change is to establish a “change leadership” culture at the senior leadership level, and allow open and frank argumentation, and where, in the initial stage, disagreeing is OK to a degree.

By getting the leadership team on that page from the get go [regarding change leadership], more eyes on the watch for signs of weak support, no only with subordinates, but more importantly amongst peers. I have countless examples where one member of the leadership team was “taken on” by the rest of the team, without the need for CEO influence. They used “we’re on the same boat and have to row in the same direction” message. It was no-longer the problem of the CEO, but that of the leadership team. This behaviour propagates through the organization and sets in as a cultural characteristic.

In this way, the leadership team become the primary guiding coalition which can propagate the vision and the plan.

We all know the power of the brain. No one would argue that humans can achieve the seemingly impossible when they apply their collective brain to a problem. Since the beginning of human kind, countless proofs of the power of the human “belief engine” can be found in everything that surrounds us, from harnessing the power of fire, to the invention of the wheel, to landing a spaceship on a moving planet traveling at 87,000 km/h, 36 millions miles away.

Beliefs shape how we act in our everyday life. Albert Einstein had beliefs, despite his Cartesian approach to science, based on logical analysis and mechanistic interpretation of physical phenomenon. He had postulates [hypothesis assumed without proof] on which all of his work is based. He believed, for example, that the speed of light [c] was constant which is a fundamental premise for his famous E=mc². He even believed in God, as he repeatedly said “God does not play dice”, referring to the predictability of outcomes.

It has been said that faith can move mountains. I grant you that faith is necessary to move mountains, yet we all know faith alone is not sufficient. You do need to believe but you also need the right equipment. Furthermore, we can also agree that having the best equipment is insufficient, and that without belief one is likely to fail.

This belief power, works both ways. If one believes that something cannot be done, that person will be absolutely correct. If you believe you cannot do something, you will be right all the time. Beliefs set our individual frontiers for the possible, and it is very rare that one can go beyond these imaginary frontiers. Now, why is that? Because we won’t try. Because of the fear of failing.

Let me tell you a real story.

In 1993, I had hired a sales rep from a competitor. His largest transaction with his former employer was in the neighborhood of $250K, which was considered an extremely good transaction size for his company. His surrounding was not encouraging him to belief in something bigger. In our company, the average transaction size of the time was $750K, which was very annoying to me [as it was way too low for the value I believed we brought to organizations.] One day, he came to me for help. He had secured a meeting with the CIO of a larger electric utility company in Eastern Canada, and was very anxious about this opportunity which was coincidently neighboring $750K [by far the largest contract he ever had to secure]. So we did a review of everything we knew about the account and everything that had been done with them. The prospective customer wanted to replace their legacy accounting system and the proposed transaction reflected the expressed requirements.

I accompanied him to his half-day meeting with the CIO. Not only did we end-up spending the whole day there, we uncovered different types of needs. We spent hours with the COO as he spelled out his aspirations for the organization; the replacement of accounting system was their perception on how to get there. By probing, by listening, by imaging, by daring, we allowed them to paint a much larger picture of what was possible; they sold themselves on a much broader project. At that moment, they realized that they were not looking for a software vendor, but for a partner; the very partner that had taken their blinders off. We walked away with a $5M order covering all of their needs for the next few years. But this is not the end of the story, it is the beginning. Not only did the customer’s blinders come off, so did the sale rep’s.

From that moment on, that sales rep had different beliefs about what was possible in a sales process. He went on to sign a $10M order and then a $17.5M order. We had removed his blinders. We had created a difference frame of reference, a different belief. Other sales rep took notice, shattered their own blinders and before long, the largest single transaction had become $30M.

Beliefs apply to organizations as well. An organization’s fundamental belief is linked to its mission. Why do we wake up in the morning? Why do customers buy from you? Why do investors invest in you? Because they share beliefs.

At SAP Canada of the mid-1990s, we had the collective belief that legacy enterprise systems used by Canadian organizations were an old collection of patched, broken, inflexible un-integrated systems beyond the point of repair. Furthermore, we believed that this state of affair would hamper their ability to adapt to a globalizing world, and as Canadian we cared passionately about that. So we set our mission, our raison d’être, to “make Canadian organizations better”. This was our sense of purpose. This was why people came to work for us. This is why employees came to work every morning. This is why customers bought from us. This is way our customer satisfaction rating was second highest n the world (second to the Mexican subsidiary, which was an order of magnitude smaller). This was, in part, why SAP Canada, then, significantly outperformed other much larger SAP subsidiaries.

Corporate beliefs drive passion in the organization’s sense of purpose or mission. So the message to CEO’s is this: make you beliefs clear.

Believe is or not, it is your call. In either case, you’re likely to be right.

Let’s start with the premise that CEOs are not all equal.

Like in any population, the population of CEOs is grouped according a standard Bell Curve. 2% are exceptionally good, 14% are good, 68% are average, 14% are not good, and 2% are exceptionally bad.

What gives an extra edge for a CEO?

I submit it is a broad base of experiences.

You are looking for a CEO that has successfully acted in multiple industries and varying types of organizations, and doing so, has developed different sets of muscles.

He/she has experienced selling fewer larger ($10M+) transactions as well as smaller and high volume transactions.
He/she worked in complex (Outsourcing/ERP/Engineering) solutions, or simple over-the-counter consumer transactions.
He/she dealt with sophisticated customers (Governments/Corporate America) and sold over the web, where there is hardly any interaction.
He/she ran organizations operating with 80% gross margin and 25% EBITDA and in those with 25% Gross Margin and 10% EBITDA.

You want the same CEO to have also run companies in different geographies, against different political backdrops.
He/she has also lead a start-up company, did turnarounds and sat atop a large corporation.
And he/she has run a subsidiary for an American as well as for a European company.

You want someone who has lived through fast growth, but also knows what it feels like to fire 25% of the staff, or to take a company out of stagnation.
You want some who has run both a private and a public company.
And yes, you want someone who has come very close to missing payroll.

Evidently, no single CEO has all of that. And if you ever find one with all that experience, he/she has to be what Jim Collins calls a Level-5 Executive. Someone who has built enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.

So may be, hiring someone from the industry is not all that great after all. Someone who knows that success is always shared with the executive team, and failures never can be. So where do you find someone like this? Not necessarily in your industry!

After running several companies, ranging from a few employees to several hundreds, and after reading 100s of management books, I remained unsatisfied.  None of these books could have been sufficient as a single guide to help me in any of my leadership jobs.

They were all great books, and I mean that – really great books.  You can see some of my favorites here <http://rgbglobal.com/html/bibliography.html>.

The reason for my dissatisfaction is because, individually, each book helped solve some of my issues as a CEO, but in an unconnected way.  This unconnectedness was my big problem.  I had to make the connections myself; I had to reconcile what one author said, with what another professed.  Every time, although no connection was evident at first, my experience told there were several very complex connections.

How was I supposed to connect the notions of strategic planning theory with the best execution practices?  What is it that drives shareholders value?  Picking the right strategy is the first step, but only the first step.  Picking the right strategy is essential, but insufficient, if the strategy does not get executed.  How do link hiring with shareholder value creation?  By having the right people, with the right personalities, in the right seat that are able to deliver the strategy.

As a leader, I had to understand the connections between the various leadership principles.  That led me to develop a leadership framework

My Leadership Framework is called Executive4sights is a leadership framework, or philosophy. Contrary to traditional leadership approaches, Executive4sights is about integrating planning and execution focused on sales and discipline, it is not training, it is a tool for Boards of Directors and Senior Leadership Teams to implement coherency. Why Executive4sights?

Why Executive?

As an adjective, the word executive implies execution, or the action of getting things done. So the Executive4sights is about getting things done.

Why 4sights?

Here 4sights signifies two related concepts.

First it stands for foresight, or the act of looking forward and the capability of taking action about or responding to something before it happens. And it is plural, because it is a never ending process — Always trying to look out.

Second, it suggests four axes of successful leadership – four axes of sight:

• Long-term Strategic Planning;
  
• Organizational Development;
  
• Short-term Strategy Execution focusing management on revenue and disciplined actions; and
  
• Stakeholders Value Creation — Customers, Investors, Employees and Community.
  

In the simplest form:

• Executive4sights is based on the fact that stakeholders’ value creation is in direct relation to Core Strategies an organization has selected.
  
• Core Strategies are themselves selected to deliver a corporate vision articulated in a strategic plan, which answers the question will your organization be in 5 years and will you get there?
  
• Proper execution of Core Strategies needs the right people, with the right personalities in right seats; that is because an organization’s size, strength and ability to deliver is the sum of its employees’ size, strength and ability to deliver.
  
• Proper execution of Core Strategies also needs an execution framework that ensures change leadership, organizational and operational alignment as well as effective revenue generation processes.
  

To succeed, leaders need to keep their sight on these 4 axes. This applies equality to not-for-profit, governments (although execution is often time-bound) and small to very large for profit organizations.

Failing to plan is Planning to fail

If you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’ll keep getting what you’ve been getting! and

Change is the only constant!

To successfully tackle issues that keep Directors and CEOs awake at night, leadership teams have to work as hard ON the businesses as they do IN the businesses. Changing HOW your organization operates today requires that you work ON the business. 

Boards need to take their executive teams back to 30,000 feet where they’ll be able to “see the forest for the trees”, where they will be able to build a cohesive executive team, where they will be able to enable the organization to develop an executable strategic plan, and help create the organization and operational alignment needed to able to execute effectively.

To do this efficiently, a leadership framework is necessary which focuses the leadership team on the four key axes of successful leadership: 

• Strategic Planning
  
• Organizational Development
  
• Strategy Execution
  
• Stakeholders Value Creation
  

Before the write a new Strategic Plan, organizations need to establish an honest diagnostic of the business [from governance to customer satisfaction to employee satisfaction].  It is only based on such a honest diagnostic that a vision can be established and core strategies set that will maximize stakeholders value, and implement an enduring growth and disciplined execution culture.

The Leadership Framework aligns all aspects of the business, from vision to execution, to selling excellence; ensuring stakeholders receive maximum value. Implementing a cohesive management philosophy is an iterative process your executive team will master, and make part of a new vision focused, change centric, and disciplined execution corporate culture.