The Laws of Business Success
Under the Laws of Business
Every business has a number of key success factors that measure and determine its success or failure.
Critical success factors in business are like the vital functions of the body, such as heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, brain-wave activity, and so on. These vital functions are all indicators and measures of the overall health and vitality of an individual. The absence of any one of them, even for a few moments, can lead to the death of an individual.
Companies have critical success factors, as well, which measure the health and vitality of an enterprise. Many of these are common to all businesses. In addition, some companies will have critical success factors that are unique to that organization.
The most common critical success factors in business are leadership, product quality, service, sales, marketing, manufacturing, distribution, and finance and accounting. Excellent performance is necessary in every one of these areas for a company to enjoy excellent results. Poor performance, or nonperformance, in any one of these areas can threaten the survival of a business.
For example, according to Dun and Bradstreet, the majority of business failures in the United States are triggered by a drop-off in sales and sales revenue. Whatever the causes of low sales, any prolonged weakness in this area can lead to the collapse of the enterprise. This, then, is a critical success factor, or a vital function of a business.
The first corollary of this law is
Each individual has personal critical success factors, the performance of which determines his or her business future.
You have a set of key skills or core competencies that you use, like tools, to do your job. A weakness or failure in any one of your key skills can undermine your overall effectiveness and weaken your ability to do your job effectively. To perform at your best, you must first identify the critical success factors of your work, measure your strengths in each one, and then develop a plan to become excellent in the areas that can help you the most.
For example, problem solving and decision making are critical success factors for every person in business. These are core competencies that are central to all business activities. If a person is physically ill or experiencing a difficult emotional situation in his or her life, that person may not be capable of solving problems intelligently or making good decisions. Everyone who then depends upon that person to think and decide effectively is at risk. An entire department can be negatively impacted because of a weakness in one critical success factor in a key person.
Within each key performance area, there are also critical success factors. For example, in selling, a weakness in a single one of the critical success factors can reduce a salesperson’s effectiveness, causing that person to sell only a small part of what he or she is capable of selling. In many companies, the sales force has been poorly trained or not trained at all. The members of senior management cannot figure out why they are not getting the kind of sales that they want or expect. Sometimes, by focusing in on a particular critical success factor, sales training can double or even triple the sales of a business.
To determine your personal critical success factors, ask yourself two questions. The first question is, Why am I on the payroll?
What, exactly, have you been hired to accomplish? Why does the company pay you the money it does? Both you and your boss should be in complete agreement on this question. Whatever your answer is to this question, that is what you should be working on most of the time.
The second question is, What can I, and only I, do that if done well will make a real difference to my company?
This is a task or responsibility that only you can do. If you don’t do it, it won’t get done. But if you do do it, and do it well, it can make a tremendous difference both to your company and to yourself.
These are questions that you should ask each day: Why am I on the payroll? and What can I, and only I, do that if done well will make a real difference? They should be asked of every single person in an organization on a regular basis. Everyone should be absolutely clear about the answers. This is one way to assure that each person is focusing his or her very best efforts in the areas of personal critical success factors.
The second corollary of this law is
Your weakest critical success factor determines the height at which you can use all your other skills.
Your personal strengths and core competencies are what have brought you to where you are today. They are the foundations of your position and the determinants of your income. At the same time, your weaknesses form the ceiling on your ability to rise to even greater heights. Your weakest critical success factor sets the limit on how far and how fast you can go. It acts likes a brake on your potential.
To move ahead more rapidly, you must be brutally honest with yourself in seeking out and facing your areas of weakness. What are they? What one skill, if you developed and did it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on your career? Whatever the answer to this question, this is where you should begin to work on yourself. This is where you can get the biggest payoff in terms of increased competence.
How you can apply this law immediately:
1. Look upon yourself as a work in progress. You have come a long way, but you still have a long way to go. What are the critical success factors of your company, the areas of activity where you absolutely, positively have to be excellent to be the best in your particular business?
2. Identify the critical success factors of the key people in your organization. What are the strengths that are responsible for their successes to date? Their weaknesses, especially personal weaknesses, usually lie at the root of most of your problems.
3.What are your personal critical success factors, and what is your plan to become absolutely excellent in the one area that can help you the most at this time? Whatever it is, begin immediately to work on yourself in that area, and don’t stop until you’ve mastered this key skill.
Source: Brian Tracy, The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, (San Francisco, 2000).
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