Robert Heller: a check list for success
Submitted by Robert Heller on Sat, 2006-08-12 20:20.

A millionaire reader once told me that he had built up his eminently successful business by following these dozen points from my 1980 book, The Business of Winning:

• Improve basic efficiency – all the time

• Think as simply and directly as possible about what you’re doing and why

• Behave towards others as you wish them to behave towards you

• Evaluate each business and business opportunity with all the objective facts and logic you can muster

• Concentrate on what you do well

• Ask questions ceaselessly about your performance, your markets, your objectives

• Make money; if you don’t you can’t do anything else

• Economise, because doing the most with the least is the name of the game

• Flatten the company, so authority is spread over many people

• Admit to your failings and shortcomings, because only then will you be able to improve on them

• Share the benefits of success widely among those who helped to achieve it

• Tighten up the organisation wherever and whenever you can – because success tends to breed slackness

You’ll see that the Clean Dozen form an acronym – IT BECAME FAST. And even after a quarter of a century I wouldn’t change a word or a thought. Follow these precepts, and you have every hope of becoming a fast-moving leader. But I’ve added three more and more modern bullets, as you can see in my The Fusion Manager (published by Profile Books):


• Enable everybody in the business to use their individual powers to the fullest possible extent
• Serve your customers with all their requirements and desires to standards of perceived excellence in quality
• Transform performance by constantly innovating in products and processes – including the ways in which the business is managed

That makes a new acronym: IT BECAME FASTEST. There’s no substitute for being best. Best is simply best.