Overnight success sometimes happens by accident, but long-term success never does. It requires structure and discipline, a single direction, discipline, clear goals, structure, a unified team, discipline, accountability, and structure — but above all, it requires discipline and structure.
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I mention all this because I’ve been reading a lot about the new management system that Accounting Today‘s parent is rolling out internally. It promises to turbo-charge our growth, take our operations to the next level, and make all of our dreams come true, and from what I’ve read, it’s a perfectly fine system. I can tell this because it’s more or less the same as every other business management system (in fact, barely a chapter goes by in which the author doesn’t approvingly quote one of the dozen or so other major business management systems out there), so it really doesn’t matter what system you pick.
What matters is that you have a system.
Systems like these bring discipline and structure, and discipline and structure are what drive long-term success. Goals and desire won’t; nor will expertise, strategy or innovation. Those are all useful — even, sometimes, critical — but without structure and discipline, they won’t keep your firm successful over the long term.
One of the reasons so many business management systems are more or less the same is because they recognize this: Their main purpose is to give companies a structure to follow and the discipline to follow it for, say, more than five years. That’s why they’re popular, and why businesses often swear by them.
To save you the time of picking a system and reading all the books involved, I’m going to boil their main points down here:
- Decide where you’re going. Set detailed short-, medium- and long-term goals that are defined by unambiguous measures.
- Keep people accountable. Divide up the goals and the work necessary to meet them, and then assign it all to specific individuals.
- Communicate clearly and often. Make sure everyone understands where the firm is going, and what their part in that is. Repeat these points fairly frequently.
- Course-correct regularly. Meet on a relatively frequent cadence (quarterly at least) to review progress toward your firm’s goals, and adjust as necessary. Also, lift your head up from time to time to make sure your goals still make sense.
- Pick the right people. Identify the kinds of employees you’d like to have on your team, and the kinds of clients you’d like to work for. (Interestingly, most of these systems aren’t concerned with you getting “good” people — just the “right” people, i.e., people who will follow the system and believe in your organization’s goals and values.)
That’s it. I may have missed an element or two (and if I have, please let me know at
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