Start at the End: How Companies Can Grow Bigger and Faster by Reversing Their Business Plan

Chapter 12

Becoming a Better Leader

In the last chapter, you learned techniques to boost your productivity. If you can boost your productivity by 100 percent, or even just 20 percent or 40 percent, you will see a significant impact on your bottom line. What if you were able to see such productivity increases in each of your employees? Then you could see exponential increases to your bottom line. You’ll also realize your financial metric and business asset goals that much faster.

One way to increase the productivity of your employees is to teach them the productivity techniques you learned in Chapter 11, and I encourage you to do just that. The other way to increase their productivity is to better motivate, train, and lead them.

Great leaders make all the difference. In sports, it’s obvious what a great coach can do. Vince Lombardi, who led the Green Bay Packers to five NFL championships and two Super Bowl victories, is a great example of this. Later, in his first year coaching the Washington Redskins, he led them to their first winning season in more than a decade.

In business, we also see the impact of great leaders such as Tony Hsieh, who took the helm of online shoe retailer Zappos.com from founder Nick Swinmurn. Under Hsieh’s leadership, the company grew from $1.6 million in sales in 2000 to more than $1 billion in sales in 2009.

Great leaders in both sports and business follow a similar blueprint. I lay out this blueprint, and the specific tactics great leaders use in the ...