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• Deliberate means being focused, with crystal-clear intentions, on a plan for the future and a commitment to following it without wavering.
• Simple means keeping an organization, its processes, policies and ways of working as straight-forward and easy to understand as possible so that they are manageable. It means consciously designing your business as a system for producing the results you want.
• Adaptable is about being flexible to change, so that you can improve and grow as needed to meet external challenges and internal objectives.

Leaders who are deliberate in what they want to do, how they’ll do it, how they’ll monitor progress and how they’ll make adjustments are the ones who create successful, profitable businesses that can stand up to any competitive challenge.
 

Steps You Can Take
As I always say, you must begin with the end in mind by visualizing what you want your organization to achieve. Here are some concrete steps you can take to create an always-improving organization:
 
Step 1: State Your Purpose – Define and articulate the purpose of your company. Start by describing your customers. Who are they? Be as specific as possible, and provide details not only on demographics but also motivation. What do they need?
 
Next, visualize how your company can help meet those customer needs. Create a vivid picture of what a successful enterprise looks like, now and at various times in the future. Put these thoughts on paper. Include planned objectives, such as sales, expenses, profits, etc. One example goal might be, “We will increase our revenues by 50 percent in two years by focusing sales efforts on higher-margin products and increasing profitability of lower-margin products.”
 
This clear purpose – knowing your customers, and defining how you will meet their needs – serves as the framework for all future decisions about the organization.
 
Step 2: Design Your System – Next, deliberately design how your company will fulfill its purpose through its products and services, as well as the systems and processes necessary to deliver those products/services.
 
Most companies are somewhat haphazard about how they fulfill their marketed promises. They evolve with no real plan or long-term direction, adding customers – or products and services – seemingly at random until they’ve created a business that’s not only complex and disjointed, but also only moderately profitable. Choose your customers carefully, and be deliberate and specific in detailing how you’ll meet their needs.
 
Step 3: Steer Your Business – The third step is about maintaining control. Be vigilant in keeping the business on track by actively monitoring performance trends of key financial measures such as revenue, gross margin, net income, cash flow, and non-financial measures such as sales backlog, production cycle times, customer satisfaction ratings, and employee turnover. The Plaid Group can help by developing a “dashboard” of appropriate measures that you can easily monitor.
 
Then, you can steer your business by:

• Defining performance goals and standards
• Monitoring actual performance versus goals/standards
• Making needed adjustments at three levels – enterprise, process and people – to guide performance toward company goals