The Gazelle’s Coaching organization (Growing Leaders – Growing Companies)  – an affiliation of trained, forward-thinking coaches, help their clients in many ways, but in this specifically:  they help their clients make four key decisions.  Verne Harnish, the “Growth Guy,” who gave birth to the Gazelle’s Coaching organization, wrote about these four key decisions:  4 Decisions That Will Help Your Company Grow.  Here are the four, with just a line or two from Verne’s article:

People — Focus on getting the right people doing the right things with clear accountabilities and metrics.

Strategy — If revenue is not growing as quickly as you like, then it’s time to re-examine your strategy i.e. what you’re selling to whom. It’s important to have a concise articulation of that strategy so you can get everyone aligned and on the same page without wasting sales or operational energies on activities not useful to the business.

Execution — When execution is haphazard, the organization has to rely on the “heroics” of their people putting in incredible hours to just keep the wheels from falling off the organization.

Cash — The first law of entrepreneurial gravity is “Growth Sucks Cash.”

Over the next few days, I will write about each of these – and add a fifth of my own at the end.

Let’s begin this way: ask yourself these simple questions:

Do you have the right people on your team? 
This is such a big, big issue.  Every book I read, every company and organization profile I read, says the same thing – the wrong people can.be.disastrous!  Anytime your people drain you as a leader, rather than energize the process and then capably get things done, you have a people problem.  Finding the right people is incredibly challenging.  “Making do” with the wrong people is a big, bad mistake.  As Jack Welch put it in Winning:

Hiring good people is hard.  Hiring great people is brutally hard.  And yet nothing matters more in winning than getting the right people on the field.  All the clever strategies and advanced technologies in the world are nowhere near as effective without great people to put them to work. 

Are you following the right strategy?
Is everyone on your team on board with this strategy?  In other words, are you doing the right things to accomplish what you set out to accomplish?

Are you executing this strategy? 
One of the Gazelle’s Coaches is convinced that execution failure is the curse of the age.  In one sense, he is right, of course.  Every failure in delivery of product or service, every hassle created for the customer, is a failure of execution.  And your customers will not forgive very many failures of execution.

Do you have enough cash to keep your company moving forward?
The Jeff Bezos Amazon story is one long pursuit of cash to keep building the infrastructure to get those deliveries to all the folks on time.  It is a fascinating challenge.  Mr. Bezos takes the long view – put the resources into the expansion of execution excellence, and some day (later), the profits will come.

I will elaborate more fully on each of these over the coming few days.  And, then, write about that fifth decision.  It is one that I think is especially important for this era.

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In my e-book, 12 Vital Signs of Organization Health, I have this graphic image of the 12 signs.  Three of the four decisions  — People; Strategy; Execution — play prominent roles. Take a careful look: