In film making, the 180-degree rule is a basic guideline regarding the on-screen spatial relationship between a character and another character or object within a scene. However, I recently learned about a 180-degree rule which can  be applied to business.

I learned it from Rich Lucia who has built his speaking and consulting brand around the term Selling in the Now. Rich has applied the knowledge we have about our lizard brain, the amygdala, and it’s bias towards negativity, to harness it in a positive way in brainstorming and solution creation.

Seth Godin wrote a post recently called "The Illusion of Control." As with all Seth’s posts, it prompts great thoughts.

The gist of the post is that we delude ourselves when we tell each other, tell our children, tell our employees, tell our management team that we have control over the future. We don’t. Plain and simple.

All we can control are our actions. The things we choose to do. If we choose wisely, we can greatly influence the future. But that is all. Just like with your cholesterol. What you eat will influence whether your bad cholesterol goes up or down. Not what the exact number is. And exercise, of course.

Jim Collins famously admonishes all business owners and leaders in his classic book, Good To Great, “Before you begin your business journey, get all the right people on the bus, get all the wrong people off the bus and make sure that everyone on the bus is in the right seat”. Every business owner  I speak to knows this to be true. No one  disputes the logic. So why don’t more leaders act on it?

What’s in a preposition? Maybe everything when it comes to running your company. What I am talking about is the difference between BY and WITH.

Every successful company has a simple road map for their future. Among the mandatory items on that roadmap are: the company’s core values, the core focus of the company, its long-term vision, its marketing strategy for accomplishing that vision, its medium-term vision, its vision for the next year, the objectives it will work on for the next quarter, and a compilation of the opportunities and obstacles it doesn’t currently have the resources to handle. There may be other items on your company’s road map, but these are the basics.

This is a double “hat tip”. First to fellow EOS Implementer, Ken Ritterspach, who commented in his recent newsletter about comments made at our EOS Quarterly Collaborative Event (QCE) by another EOSImplementer. Second to that implementer, Dan Wallace,  who, in turn, was sharing a quote from a speech by Suzy Welch: