Seth Godin told us in his book Purple Cow that marketing is that outstanding product or service which gets people talking about you. I was reminded of that the other day when my wife and I ate at Not Your Average Joe’s restaurant for the first time. The owner, Steve Silverstein, has created a business casual experience at blue jeans pricing with from scratch foods and value priced wines. It’s home base is in greater Boston (15 locations) and it’s Glen Mills, PA location, where we ate, is it’s first in Pennsylvania.

If you will give me 15 minutes of your life right now, I will greatly improve your company's productivity.

In working with entrepreneurial leadership teams, there is one challenge that consistently shows up, particularly with smaller companies. One of my clients, for whom I am implementing the Entrepreneurial Operating System, is a perfect example. He called me the other day and was frustrated and feeling overwhelmed. We have only been working together for a little over three months so his leadership team is really learning the process. They had identified and committed to completing 5 Rocks (major 90 day priorities) for the company along with several individual Rocks owned by the team members. With the quarter nearly half gone the Rocks hadn’t even been started.

EOS helps people get more of what they want from their business. EOS is a complete system with simple tools to help them do three things we call Vision, Traction and Healthy.

I was sitting down with one of my first clients over 10 years ago and we were working through a few issues. "Jim, we are struggling as of late with our quality and shipping on time," Tom told me. We took a walk down to the manufacturing floor to watch a few of the guys craft one of the products. We were there only a few minutes when I saw something that didn't look right. "Tom", I said, "they are creating the same product, correct?" Tom confirmed my suspicion. "Then, why are they doing it in two completely different ways?" Tom took me back to his quieter office to discuss. As we got back to his desk, he proudly handed me a binder. Looking through it, I see that he had spelled out the steps to the process for creating the product. "Tom, I am a bit confused", I said, "it would appear from this that neither of them are actually doing it this way". "Oh, well, they haven't actually seen this", said Tom sheepishly.