Who’s on your Board?

One of the key success factors of effective business people is having good advice.  However, good advice can be expensive.  Not all of us can afford to have a board or know enough of the right people to get advice from.  One way to overcome this handicap is to develop a virtual board.

A virtual board is made up of folks in or near our business areas that have written blogs, papers, and/or books.  It can also include people that have been written about like Billionaire Warren Buffet.  Choosing some of them and reading their work as much a possible will enable you to profile their thinking styles and approaches.  Once you have a good sense of how they think, you can develop a set of key points to have readily available.  When situations or problems emerge, you can go to your “virtual board” and ask:

• How would such and such do this?
• What would they do in my situation?
• What would they advise me to do?
• What questions would they ask?
• What information would they look for?
• What would be most important to them?

I set up my board a few years ago and I keep adding to it.  Here are some of my virtual board members:

• Stephen Covey (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People/The 8^th Habit)
• Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline)
• David Maister (Strategy and the Fat Smoker)
• Jim Collins (Good to Great)
• Jack Welch (Winning)
• Laurie Beth Jones (Jesus, CEO)

There are quite a few more.  It really works to “consult” them when I need some advice or need to make a decision.  Another way I am influenced by my virtual board is by developing what I call thinking tools and checklists based on the key points of their books or the theories they pose in their writing.  For example, I keep Jack’s Leadership selection criteria handy and use it to remind me to act a certain way:

• Passion
• Authenticity
• Execution
• Resilience
• Positive energy
• Ability to energize others
• Edge (courage to make tough calls)
• Ability to see around corners
• Capacity to hire and work with brighter folks than self

I created another list using Adizes’ PAEI management tendencies model to help me monitor and adjust my management balance:

• Focus
  • Big picture
  • Details
• Speed
  • Slow
  • Fast
• Process
  • Unstructured
  • Structured
• Priority
  • Process
  • Results

These are all great, simple tools to help leverage mindsets, theories and approaches used by highly successful people.  It takes some time to set up and build the board up assuming you have not read all the books.  If you have, go back and capture their key points and convert them into questions or checklists that you can easily remember or refer to when situations arise.  Doing so also enables you to develop your own items that are useful for thinking and decision making.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO