A few years ago my mentor Dan Sullivan taught me about the No Office Solution. It sounded so foreign at the time.

Dan’s concept is that an entrepreneur (or executive) really doesn’t need an office. “But where will I put my stuff?” you ask. “What stuff?” Is Dan’s reply. His point is that you shouldn’t have stuff. Your people should have stuff. You don’t have files. The people who work for you have files. Your entire “office” should fit into one bag and probably contains little more than a laptop.

If you follow Dan’s concept you’ll get to where your only time at the office is time spent in the area of your unique ability. In most cases that involves meeting people—in a conference room. If you are doing something else and need some space to spread out you can do so in that conference room, or at another workstation you’ve borrowed, but you really don’t need an office.

I’m almost there.

I’ve got an office. But I haven’t sat in it for weeks. It does have my “stuff” in it, just because we haven’t bothered yet to get organized in such a way that someone else has all my stuff. But we are SO close. In fact, if I had to, I could be officeless within an hour. And that is my success—-if you can be implemented in an hour, you’re there!

So, I’ve still got a corner. It’s outfitted in a duck theme…..(I’m no duck hunter but the paper looked cool). There are little ducks sitting around amid the nic naks and pictures of my family. There’s a cabinet full of files, and a desk top covered in papers people have handed me. But I’ve not touched it in a month, and pretty much won’t need to for another month.

It feels weird and wonderful to essentially not have an office. Everything I do is in my laptop (for the most part). And I only go in to the office when I am meeting with people.

It’s a good life. I like it.

I still have a job, but I am awfully close to owning a company instead.

When it comes to executing your roles in your family, and in that responsibility for which you are economically compensated, are you a leader or a manager? Oh, I know some reading this post will say “I’m neither, I just……” but wait, in that case you are at least a manager; responsible for managing that particular responsibility which you’ve been assigned. So if you are willing to accept at least the “manager” designation, then I want to engage in thought with you about Leadership vs. Management. Perhaps in the mental conversation you’ll find a way to make a bigger difference in the world.

This matter arose in my company because of a management issue. I have colleagues who the world would call “managers” but I find myself talking to them about being better “leaders.” What’s the difference and why does it matter? Good question!

My mentor Lee Brower called my attention to the fact that we have way too much management in this world, and not nearly enough leadership. This is true from Wall Street to your street. Think about it: The large financial companies were gaming the system in the early 2000’s and proverbially “got caught with their pants down” causing legendary firms with centuries of history to vanish over night in 2008. The response was “We need more regulation.” That’s “management speak” and it’s wrong.

What we needed then and now is leadership which says “that’s wrong, danger ahead, you can’t cheat the system and keep inflating the numbers into perpetuity. There will be a pay day, some day.” Leadership speaks to the WHY behind those kind of decisions while management just seeks control. But control ultimately never works. In the 30’s the government tried to control liquor. All that did was make the bootleggers like Joe Kennedy and Al Capone rich. Today, we’ve got drug laws that seek to control use of illicit substances. How’s that working in your community? It won’t work on Wall Street either. Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme has already resulted in a great host of additional government “management” through financial regulations seeking to “control” unethical financial behavior. What’s needed instead is leadership born of personal morality that says “No. You can’t do it. We won’t allow it. And you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to do it. We shun you!” all the while teaching people about the financial, emotional, moral, social, and spiritual costs of such thievery. Really, we need stronger teaching, not stronger legislating. There are absolutes, and those of us who know that need to stand by them.

Lest you think this is just an issue on Wall Street, let’s look at your street. Lee has mentioned how leadership vs. management plays out at your kids school, or in their Little League, or Mighty Mights or whatever they are involved in. Have you heard about these places where the children’s athletic teams don’t keep score because “we wouldn’t want little Johnny to feel badly because his team lost”? Or how about the schools that don’t give grades because they wouldn’t want the low achievers to feel badly because they flunked. What kind of stupid thinking is that? Do you think that when these kids grow up they are going to get a passing grade in life and business just for showing up, without contributing…..”doing their homework” so to speak? Is no one going to keep score in life? Is their employer going to give everyone the same promotion and the same raise, or are there going to be winners and losers? Those who advance, and those who are held back? Those who succeed and those who fail? Ask the guy I terminated yesterday. He’s a prince of a fellow. I like him alot! But he wasn’t getting the job done. He wasn’t passing the class, and ultimately he got kicked out of school. He lost his job. To have kept him on the team risked the economic health of the entire company and ultimately the jobs of every person on the team. Management might have protected his job and thus his emotions, but leadership ultimately protected the jobs of 50 others.

I’m all for cushioning someone’s pain the best we can. Medicine calls it “palliative care” But I’m also for letting people learn by experiencing the hard realities that are life. You will lose, sometimes. You will get hurt. You will experience pain. You will someday die! This is life. Good leadership doesn’t try to “manage” away the pain, instead it equips people to overcome the negatives they face.

Are you leading your family, or managing them? What about your department? Your peers?

When it comes to the vision you are pursuing at home or professionally, are you throwing wood or water on the flame, or are you the keeper of the flame? One is management, the other is leadership.

Here’s another difference between management and leadership: Management focuses on short-term results—what will get the best response “tomorrow?” Leadership focuses on long-term results—what will ultimately make us the strongest as a family or a company over the long haul?

Which is best, short term management, or long term leadership? It depends on what you want. Pine trees grow rapidly. They are a “soft” open-grained wood and don’t have tremendous strength. Oak trees grow slowly. They produce a “hard” tightly grained wood with the greatest strength. So what do you want? A soft child that is emotionally weak? Then manage his environment so that he is protected from every unpleasantness. But if you want a strong family that endures and thrives amid the hardship of life you lead them in how they are to think, how they are to approach and experience life’s difficulties, and you produce a child that will have deep roots through which to draw water during the harsh droughts of adulthood.

In my company I want leaders. People come to us for our leadership. We even having a saying “We help people who have problems, not those who are problems.” That’s true. People come to us when their financial, investment, real estate and business life aren’t working, and we help them sort through their options and develop a strategy to move their life forward.

I want each member of my team—everyone I touch, really—to step up their leadership; to seek to influence for better, the situations in which they are involved and the people they are around. I don’t want people who know how to check boxes, though that is required. I want people who understand intuitively WHY we are checking the boxes. It’s NOT so we’ll have “checked boxes” at the end of the day. It’s because if we have checked all those boxes we’ll have followed a protocol designed to give the highest probability of a positive result for the people who are depending on us.

You see, it really is about WHY vs. WHAT. People who ask WHAT always work for people who KNOW WHY. WHY people set the temperature in the room. WHAT people monitor the temperature in the room.

If the WHY is big enough, the WHAT will always become evident, at least for bright people.

You are bright. You wouldn’t have been able to read this far in this lengthy epistle if you weren’t. You are bright enough to be a WHY guy (or gal). You can be a leader. You can be a difference maker in your family, your church, your community, and your workplace. It starts when you move through and beyond your management responsibilities to take up the mantle of leadership for all the people who are depending on you.

In our American rush to success we entrepreneurs err critically in trying to grow our businesses when in fact we shouldn’t grow our business at all; we should grow our people and let them grow the business.

This is difficult for many of us to comprehend because our entrepreneurial careers were often started as a one-man show where if you didn’t grow the business today you were not going to eat tomorrow. I get that. But as soon as you begin building a team it is important to shift a portion of your mental and time resources toward planting the seeds of multi-generational growth in your followers, rather than continuing to just plant your own personal crop for harvest.

I’m not saying you should send them to a conference or workshop. That can be fine, or not. I’m saying you need to begin teaching them how to replace you. You do want to be replaced, don’t you? You do want to spend less time doing things you don’t want to do and more time doing the things you want to do, don’t you? Then, you’ve got to replace yourself with someone who can do all those other things that you aren’t so good at or don’t enjoy.

Twenty five years into my career, I’m just now grasping this concept at a level where it is meaningful and makes a difference for me. (I’m a slow learner.) It’s always been a nice idea that sounded good in books and from business guru’s, but I didn’t have a clue what it really meant that I should do. Now I do, so I want to share that hoping you can accelerate your achievement and increase your difference-making sooner.

When I speak of growing people who are on your team, I’m talking first about being sure they understand their job responsibilities. This involves the implementation of SYSTEMS. A system is simply “the process by which do something in the same way every time.” Because we entrepreneurs are creative by nature we tend not to follow systems. We’re easily bored and so we may do the same task a dozen different ways to keep ourselves entertained. However, when handing responsibility to team members we mustn’t burden them with an obligation to be creative—which often leads to inconsistency in results. Instead we must say “This is exactly how I want this done every time. Follow this procedure and you will not fail.”

W. Edwards Deming taught that failure was almost always a result of a break down in a system, rather than a people problem. If you have a system and perform the same activity in the same way every time, you’ll be able to predictably produce consistent results. It is that resulting consistency from team members that is required for you to replace yourself.

Teaching people to run your system is the key to getting consistent predictable results. You do have a system, don’t you? Of course you do. You just may not have realized it and written it down. So begin thinking “systemically” and you’ll likely capture little systems and ways that you always do things in a certain way that you never realized. That is an AH HA moment and you are now a guru!

Teaching people to run a system may be the first step in their career with you, but in order to grow them you must also begin to teach them how to think. “Who am I to teach them how to think” you may ask? It’s simple, you are the teacher. You are the better thinker, aren’t you? If you aren’t then you’ve already found someone better than you to whom you might want to consider handing over the reins and getting out of the way. That’s the goal: for your thinking to become obsolete because you have replaced yourself with people who are better than you. Meanwhile, you know things they don’t, and they’ll never grow in their capability until you teach them what you know and HOW YOU THINK.

Often when we run up against an unusual situation or challenge I’ll say to a member of my team “Here’s how I want you to think about this.” If they are “dull-eyed” or too busy talking to listen, learn, and develop thinking skill it then tells me that they are ultimately not promotable.

It is a lot easier to bark out orders than it is to teach thinking. But if you are ever going to be able to step aside, let others lead, and develop unstoppable momentum you’ve got to help them develop critical thinking skill. Doing so first involves helping them see how you think, what process your brain goes through, and then how and why you achieve a conclusion. Then, it’s time to put their own brains to work by asking questions about their thinking and decision making—typically hard questions—and critiquing their answers and thought processes. If you’ve got a team member who can stand up to and shine under that scrutiny, then you may just have a winner!

How do you teach them to think?

I’ll tell you one of the methods we use. Our company has six core values. These aren’t just platitudes developed by executives in some group-hug-in-the-woods retreat experience. These are the core, killer, non-negotiables; inviolable principles around which we make all of our decisions. (if you’d like a copy of our core values, email me.)

Each month our training meeting (you do have regularly scheduled training meeting where you teach your team, don’t you?) is built around a particular core value. For example, in January and July we train on Core Value #1: It’s About the People Who Depend on Me. In February and August we’ll train on Core Value #2.

“Don’t you run out of training material if you keep talking about those same things over and over?” No. Not so far. It kind of reminds me of the preacher who preached the same sermon Sunday after Sunday. When his parishioners complained he said to them “When you prove to me that you ‘get it’ and start doing what I am teaching you in that sermon, then I’ll move on to the next one.” A good philosophy!

Fortunately, my team gets it. By going back to the same topics over and over and interacting over them together yet again, we mine more deeply each time for the nuggets and kernels of truth that change the way we think corporately and individually. It’s those thought shifts that grow people, and its growing people that will grow our business.

Tomorrow I’ll be teaching my team on Core Value #4 Initiative: Be Solutions-Oriented. I’m going to start by asking the question “Why do we humans tend to complain rather than to help?” I’m going into training not with answers, but mostly with questions. My team will come up with answers (solutions) and we’ll all be better-off for it.

Being an entrepreneur in these challenging times isn’t for sissies. It’s a lot easier to just take a pay check from somebody else who is taking all the risk. But entrepreneurs were born to do this. We’d pay for the privilege. Part of the opportunity is to develop people.

If we’ll develop them, grow them, and teach them to think better they’ll build our businesses for us and in the process they’ll build themselves. Their families, their communities, and their lives will be much richer for it. In the end, they’ll gather around our coffin and say “I am better, because I knew him.” That’s about the best we could ask for.

I was sitting on the porch (my specialty) drinking a Diet Coke and resting a bit from an intense few hours getting my garden in shape for Spring, when my friend Brett Godfrey gestures broadly and says “not everybody would ‘get’ this.”

It was a beautiful Spring day; the horses were grazing in the South pasture and the goats were frolicking in the front paddock. This is life as it was meant to be. (Deep good sigh!) 

But Brett is right, most people can’t conceive of why I’d be sitting here in muddy boots and Big Smith overalls with an aching back when an hour in my office working in the area of my unique ability would generate more revenue than my family will spend on vegetables in an entire year. Maybe I don’t get this either. Why do I do it?

Balancing work and leisure (yes, the garden is a leisure activity—-some people play golf, some people move rocks and dig in dirt—–both cause sweat) is an ongoing struggle for entrepreneurs. Nearly every day that I pause to play I find my mind drifting to “how much I’m worth an hour if I were doing something productive.” But the truth is: that’s weak thinking. Strong thinking realizes that life is about life, and work is just a tool to support life, and most importantly—leisure is productive.

Life is found in the simple pleasure of eating bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches when the pork came from your farm, and the lettuce and tomato grew in your garden. (In trying economic times there’s a certain confidence that comes from experiencing a meal that you grew totally on your place—slow food instead of fast food.) Life is in sitting on the porch in a rocking chair (yeah, we’ve got about ten big ones across the porch) visiting with your friends. In fact, that’s one of the best places to sit and talk with God. It’s also a good place to think.

Have you just sat quietly and done any thinking lately? What about talking to God? What about visiting with a friend? I won’t even ask where your bacon came from.

Dan Sullivan Founder of Strategic Coach (if you’ll contact them they’ll send you a free CD on the entrepreneurial time system) has taught me that in order to be most productive on what he calls Focus Days, I need to have a commensurate amount of Free Days in my schedule. A Free Day is a 24 hour time period where you do nothing related to work. Many of my friends in Strategic Coach have over 100 Free Days a year. That’s a nice balance of life and work.

I don’t have this subject all figured out yet, so I’m mostly just musing aloud. Though I am discovering that the more time I take off, and the more relaxed I am, the more productive I am on my Focus Days, and the more money I make. When Brett commented about people “not getting it” I promptly replied, “Yeah, I like money. But I like homegrown tomatoes, too.”

Take the day off. Go stick a shovel in the dirt.

A business owner this week reminded me that we’d had lunch at a local cafeteria about a year ago, and that he’d been desperate…..less than 30 days from financial ruin. He’d said to me “I may lose it all, the house, the cars, everything, but regardless I’m all in.”

All in. As in, “Committed.” As in, “Ain’t no turnin’ back.” As in, “Run those ships up on the beach and burn them, we’re not sailing back to Europe.”

I’m reminded that Columbus would have never discovered the new world if he could have gotten off the ship in the middle of the storms. Like it or not, he was “all in.”

How “all in” are you? Are you committed, or just contributing? You’ve heard that old joke about the chicken and the pig discussing the farmer’s breakfast of ham and eggs haven’t you? For the chicken it was just a contribution, but for the pig it was a commitment.

As you analyze your performance in life, is it what you want it to be. Do you only having a toe in the water or are you fully immersed? Are you committed, or are you just pretending?

What fear keeps you from being all in?

Where do you want to be a year from now? Can you get there with your present level of commitment?

Fast forward a year with my business owner friend. He told me this week how grateful he was for all that was going on in his life. His personal income had grown to almost six figures……..A MONTH!………..he’d paid off all his personal debt and had several months of living expenses in the bank in CASH. He said “You know, I’m not a quitter. It never would have happened if I hadn’t been ‘all in’.”

Wow!