Dave now brings that same talent for communicating real-world, “walk-the-talk” strategies to Up Your Business! He presents his ideas and principles in a clear and to-the-point way, and provides hundreds of easy-to-adapt strategies you can use to fix, build, or stretch your organization. It doesn’t matter if your organization is large or small; these principles can help a leader at any organizational level.

As the head of three organizations, I can relate to the emphasis Up Your Business! places on getting the right people on your team. Without the right people to implement vision and strategy, vision and strategy become useless. In this book, Dave not only shows the importance of people, he spells out specifically what you must do to find them, develop them, and retain them. He’ll also sell you on the necessity of ridding yourself of the wrong people quickly, professionally, and humanely.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Up Your Business! is that it ignores fads and quick fixes, opting instead to provide timeless leadership and management principles that work when they are applied. As you join Dave in the quest to fix, build, or stretch your organization, I can assure you that you’re in good hands. Open your mind, get out your legal pad, and prepare to take action. My best wishes are with you as you begin to set the stage for your best year ever.

Up Your Business! eschews fads and the latest business buzz-words. It offers sound, tried-in-the-trenches leadership and management principles that work if you work them. The chapters proceed in blueprint fashion.

Chapter 1, “Always Remember, ‘It’s the People, Stupid!’” leaves no doubt that without the right people your vision and strategy are worthless. But it doesn’t leave you there. It provides numerous tips on recruiting and interviewing the right people as well as strategies for removing the wrong ones.

Chapter 2, “Abolish Corporate Welfare: Create a Culture of Merit,” defines the difference between a culture of entitlement and one of merit and teaches you how to develop the latter. It explains how to produce a positive pressure to perform and how to differentiate your best people so you leverage the organization’s strengths.

Chapter 3, “Develop Your Human Capital: How to Train, Coach, Mentor, and Retain Eagles,” provides step-by-step instructions on how to develop the right people once you get them. Training, coaching, and mentoring are covered extensively, and after reading this chapter you’ll have the tools you need to retain and develop the eagles you bring on board.

Chapter 4, “It’s All Right to Aim High if You Have Plenty of Ammo,” presents a case for thinking bigger and going for unreasonable gains. After all, if you’ve brought the right people on board, removed the wrong ones, created the right environment, and are training the great people you’ve assembled you’ve earned the right to swing for the fences rather than bunting your way through business.

Chapter 5, “Look in the Mirror: Executing Your Leadership Twelve-Pack,” explains why you, as a leader, must look in the mirror and take responsibility for your organization’s vitality. It provides a Leadership Twelve-Pack: a list of nonnegotiable tasks you are responsible for executing day in and day out in order to fix, build, or stretch your organization.

Chapter 6, “Survive Success: How to Overcome the Six Temptations of Successful Organizations,” explains how to survive success. There are six temptations of successful organizations that cause you to plateau or lose ground. This section creates great awareness of these temptations and offers remedies to overcome them.

Chapter 7, “Build Long-Term Vitality: Steps for Execution and Follow-Through,” is the most important in the book because it lays out how you must take what you’ve learned and implement it. Knowing what to do is not enough — you have to do it. This chapter provides step-by-step change principles that guide you to get the job done.

Chapter 8, “Close the Gap between Knowing and Doing!” is a new chapter that reinforces and expands on the principles in Chapter 7 and provides new strategies and inspiration to help you to become more committed to changing your organization and leading it to a higher level by taking the right and consistent action necessary to optimize your results.

At the conclusion of each of the first seven chapters I have added a “Further Up Your Business” section that will isolate a key strategy in the chapter and provide you more insight and support in your efforts to implement the information presented. Throughout the book I intersperse the text with “Up Your Business! Bullets.” These short strategies will help refine your thinking on the points being made in a chapter and provide motivation for action.

I believe we are living in unforgiving times for business and its leaders. There is less margin for error than in the past. This should excite you, because I am confident that Up Your Business! will lead you to create an unlevel playing field, angled substantially to your advantage. As you compete in times that are both challenging and pregnant with possibility, my belief is that as you execute the strategies in these eight chapters you will earn more than your fair share of the market — and that you will, in fact, dominate it.

First-time readers will get the benefit of a full dosage of Up Your Business! strategies the first time through. Although the first group will have a head start on you in implementing many of the ideas in this book, with commitment and discipline you can be up to speed in no time. And make no mistake about it: Moving fast with these strategies will be essential to your very business survival. I’m trying to be an alarmist, so please stay with me here and consider the following:

The clock is ticking but many business leaders can’t hear it. The sound of their own boasts, slaps on the back, and soliloquies of celebration have drowned it out. Business has been good for a while now. Yes, people still whine about a weak economy, but they need to get a grip, gain some perspective, and understand the difference between a down economy and a bad one. Many of us have gotten so spoiled we can’t remember what a truly bad economy is: 21 percent interest rates, 13.5 percent inflation, 7 percent unemployment, and the like. Some of you remember those numbers, but many leaders today can’t imagine them because they never led through such times. In fact, anyone who has been in a leadership position for under a dozen years has never had to lead through sustained down economic times, and if you’ve been in leadership for less than twenty-five years you’ve never had to function through the economic disaster on a national scale found during the Carter presidency or its immediate aftermath.

You may think the good times will last forever. Perhaps with the success you’ve enjoyed you’ve even made the error of mistaking a bull market for brains. You may be tempted to use the great years you’ve had as a license to stay the same — write it down, build the manual, and document the formula. If so, you’ll also be authoring your own business obituary.

Just as it did on Cinderella’s enchanted night, the clock will strike midnight for many of you. Business still travels in cycles, and so do economies. A day of reckoning will come — probably not suddenly but gradually, so as to catch many of the unaware napping. The time to prepare for “midnight” is before the bottom falls out.

You have two choices after reading the strategies in this book: You can dismiss them as being too dramatic, negative, or irrelevant. Or you can decide to return to the basic disciplines they espouse that will fuel your business to greater success in good or bad times. To help you make the right choice, I should remind you that choosing to live in denial concerning business cycles and embracing the “we’ll never see another poor day” mantra of manure is a catalyst to a future of longing for yesteryear and boring your friends with pathetic reminiscences about the good old days and the big one that got away.

Few people would deny that the points presented in the upcoming pages would improve one’s enterprise substantially and quickly. Thus, the only question is when you should get serious about putting them to work. You can either fix the roof while the sun is shining or wait for it to leak and cave in. Choose well.

Business is simple. Not easy; simple. (Intellectuals try to complicate it.) It still boils down to having the right people in the right places doing the right things. You can read books on strategy and attend courses on corporate vision, but the fact is that without getting the right people on your team, nothing else you do will matter. Your vision is worthless, strategy impotent, and values corrupt without the right people to execute them. And just as important as getting the right people is getting rid of the wrong ones. Keep these losers around and they’ll dilute the effectiveness of your great players and pollute your culture. Too many managers are leadership wimps. They won’t make the tough calls on poor performers and allow these slugs to continually break momentum, sap morale, and diminish the managers as leaders.

Once you have the right people and get rid of the wrong ones, your job is just beginning, because you must develop the talented people in your charge. If you don’t, you’ll lose them — and you’ll be getting what you deserve.

The good news is that once you have the right people and are continually upgrading their capacities, you can stop thinking incrementally and begin swinging for the fences. The foundation you build gives you the right to be unrealistic and go for more than you would ordinarily think is reasonable.

This book is written from real-world experience in the business trenches and not from the viewpoint of an academic or a researcher. I’ve had my nose bloodied at the front lines of one of the most competitive businesses in the world — the automotive retail industry — and have made every mistake a leader can commit: hired the wrong people, kept them too long, let the potential of my best people rot on the vine, failed at developing vision, created impotent strategies . . . the list goes on. In my first management jobs I was arrogant, acted more like a cop than coach, and didn’t know the first thing about leadership even though I was in a leadership position. In fact, if I could find the first group of people I ever managed, I’d apologize and beg forgiveness. I suspect many of these people were in therapy for years after their stint as my subordinates. The good news is that my mistakes turned out to be great investments because I learned from them and developed strategies that helped me lead some of the most successful businesses in my field and today help clients around the world apply those same ideals. The catalyst for turning around my business career was when I stopped looking out the window for answers and started looking in the mirror. Once I realized that it was my inside decisions and not outside conditions that determined my success, I started focusing ferociously on what I could control. I’m grateful for the opportunity to share these strategies with you in Up Your Business! I know how hard you work, the challenges you face, and the decisions you agonize over. I understand what it’s like to feel overwhelmed with problems — the challenge of finding and developing great people, and the consternation at having fired the wrong ones, especially if they’ve been loyal or are your friends.

I’m pulling for you. But I’m not going to let you off the hook with a bunch of Pollyanna happy hot-tub talk. I’ll give you effective strategies, presented in simple and direct talk, that you can apply immediately. The only catch is that while they’re simple, they’re still hard work. But it’s even harder work to do things the wrong way, to push the wrong people to do the right things, or to do more of the work yourself because you have the wrong people on board. Don’t even think about reading this book without a highlighter, because there is help on every page. Turn Up Your Business! into your personal textbook for fixing, building, or stretching your organization. You will find three themes in this book: