The Best Success Strategy for 2020
Success in 2020 will require new strategies. You won’t need to be a superhero or have all the answers. The greatest successes in 2020 will be built on four strategies:
- Build a deep network of friends and allies you can call on
- Learn to anticipate new needs and disruptive challenges
- Benchmark and improve your personal skills and brand every year.
- Be grateful to the Millennial’s, court them on their terms, and ask them better questions. They are your customers and workforce
Keith Ferazzi, author of ‘Whos Got Your Back’ has counselled the world’s top enterprises on how to dramatically accelerate the development of business and believes the best way to spark innovation, create team cohesion, develop sales, and expand your knowledge is to have a network of deep close relationships with a few trusted, knowledgeable friends that will offer the encouragement, feedback, expertise, and generous mutual support we all need to really succeed. He strongly recommends quality and depth over breadth.
The Schulich Executive Education Center has built their business on this theory of deep networking and has brought together subject matter experts to match with corporate leaders needs. They subsequently have helped over a thousand companies succeed at being better, faster, and more consistently by giving expert knowledge plus a forum to develop lifelong relationships.
The idea of the lone professional superhero is long gone. None of us are smart or agile enough to see everything that is coming at us and we sure don’t have all the answers.
The concept of a huge network is also gone. Most of us can’t really get to know more than two hundred associates we could call on and expect a prompt call back and well thought responses. We are learning to be good critical thinkers but it is still better to gather five equally good or better thinkers around us when faced with a perplexing problem.
Keith Ferrazi recommends:
- Build deeper more trusting and engaged lifeline relationships
- Get further faster by considering the resources of your friendship team when setting goals. It is no longer what you can do but rather what we can do.
- Use sparring with friends as a productive tool to make decisions to fuel your personal growth
- Lower your guard and let others help.
None of us can do it alone. We all need an army of subject matter experts to continually build our strengths and skills. Whether it is Schulich, Harvard, or another university with a strong executive program, they each have a compliment of hundreds of subject matter experts that have spent their lives researching and developing specific skills and they are standing by to impart this knowledge.
Couple this with the ability to develop strong relationships with other experienced executives with interests similar to your own and you have a method to select and build a strong team of trusted associates around you.
Dr. Alan Middleton, the Executive Director of Schulich’s Executive Education Center spends much of his life these days networking with experts that lead him to others and matching these skills with the needs of senior executives. He recently took some time out of his schedule to share his thoughts on succeeding in 2020 and it was surprising how his thoughts on how to succeed mirror Keith’s .
To learn more about how to develop a mentor, a few friends or a group of advisors to give you unvarnished feedback and help hold you accountable I would encourage you to take some time to read Keith Ferrazzi’s bookWho’s Got Your Back.
Some food for thought towards the future, “You will be the same as you are today in ten years except for: the people you meet, the books you read, and the things you do. So make the most of each and find greater success than you ever dreamed.” Hindsight is 20/20, carpe diem.
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