Vistage Helps CEOs Unlock Leadership Greatness: Six-Steps to Breakthrough Initiatives

SAN DIEGO-(Business Wire)-September 19, 2009 - Behind every successful initiative or solution is a great leader who championed the vision, executed the plan, and created amplified results. Jim Bandrowski, Vistage speaker and author of Discover Your Inner Strength, has developed a proven step-by-step process that enables leaders to achieve breakthroughs. It is particularly effective for developing and executing a strategic plan, formulating a marketing strategy, solving problems, improving processes, or handling a financial or personnel issue.

Below are the first six steps in Bandrowski’s 12-step process for creating and implementing successful initiatives as a leader:

				1.			Define the Situation
							Summarize the key facts, then define the voice of stakeholders, empathizing with customers, employees, suppliers, your board and even your competitors—anyone important to the situation. Think in extremes. What would each love and hate about the situation? This can be highly revealing.

				2.			Set a SMIT Goal
							If you want to achieve a breakthrough, aim at (not promise) a SMIT goal (Specific, Measurable, Impossible with Timing.) Set the goal high to force you and your team to creatively seek both insights and solutions “out of the box.”

				3.			Dive Deep for Insights
							Rather than solving or addressing symptoms, penetrate to the root causes of your strategy, process or performance issue. It is at this constructively negative extreme that great leaders discover strategic insights and foresights. As Jim Collins says, face the “brutal facts of reality.” This is also where your compassion for the pains of customers can uncover unmet needs, the fuel for innovation.

				4.			Take Creative Leaps
							It’s now time to soar to the positive extreme to work with your team to conceive wild ideas and strategies (as well as not-so-wild ones) that will ideally eliminate the problem or capitalize on the opportunity. To unleash your organization’s imagination in this step, ignore cost, feasibility, company policy and industry rules—for the moment. But realize that almost all breakthroughs seemed absurd when first proposed, and then totally logical when they became profitable.

				5.			Borrow Best Practices
							Seek out best practices. Borrow them from competitors, and even look for them in entirely different industries. Southwest Airlines, for instance, wanted to shorten its already best-in-the-industry turnaround time in terminals; so, it sought ideas from Indy Car racing pit crews.

				6.			Play with Wild Ideas
							Don’t kill any yet. Float all wild ideas gently down to earth, particularly ones that might generate a breakthrough if they could be done. Scale them down in size if necessary, and/or try to morph them into winners. Not all ideas will translate into something workable, but it’s far better to spend a few minutes trying, than to immediately race to reasons why they will fail. Innovative leaders spend time “playing” with wild ideas to make them work.

To read the full article and see all 12 steps, visit the Vistage Article Library.

about Vistage International

Vistage is a CEO peer organization in 15 countries with nearly 14,500 members. The Vistage model brings groups of CEOs from non-competing industries together monthly to hear expert resource speakers and process key business and personal issues through peer-to-peer discussions. Additionally, Vistage CEO members receive monthly one-to-one coaching from a mentor called a Vistage Chair. The sharing of information in a Vistage group is completely confidential, allowing for the open exchange of problems, ideas and solutions.

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