no more excuses: the five accountabilities for personal and organizational growth

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NoMoreExcusesThe Five Accountabilitiesfor Personal andOrganizational Growth

SAM SILVERSTEIN

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Copyright# 2010 by Sam Silverstein. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Silverstein, Sam.

No more excuses : the five accountabilities for personal and organizational

growth / Sam Silverstein.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-470-53192-1 (cloth)

1. Responsibility. 2. Growth. 3. Management. I. Title.

BJ1451.S55 2010

650.1–dc22 2009038781

Printed in the United States of America

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For Renee, Geoffrey, Sara, Jaclyn, and Allison. Youinspire, challenge, and support me, and for that I am

eternally grateful.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction—Your Competitive Advantage ixLearn the Five Accountabilities that give people andorganizations the edge.

How to Use This Book xxiGet an overview of the ‘‘No More Excuses’’program—and meet the Accountability Masters whocontributed to this book.

PART ONE

Chapter 1—The $10,000 Question 3Learn who you are really accountable to.

Chapter 2—Beyond the Excuse 23Find out how expensive excuses really are.

PART TWO

Chapter 3—The First Accountability:Doing the Right Things 37

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You are accountable for understanding andidentifying your strategic intent—and theactivities that support it.

Chapter 4—The Second Accountability:Managing Your Space 67

You are accountable for creating space for new ideas,initiatives, and projects.

Chapter 5—The Third Accountability:Managing the Process 85

You are accountable for creatively pursuingyour strategic intent, even when you hit an obstacle.

Chapter 6—The Fourth Accountability:Establishing the Right Expectations 107

You are accountable for setting expectationsthat reflect your values, that are properlybenchmarked, and that are a bit of a stretch.

Chapter 7—The Fifth Accountability:Contributing to Your Relationships 129

You are accountable for giving to the relationshipsthat matter most to you—and for giving to thelarger world.

Chapter 8—Creating a Culture of Accountability 155Advice from the Accountability Masters onsustaining an accountable team.

Conclusion: The Accountability Movement 175Join the global alliance of Highly Accountable People.

Index 179

Contents

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following:

My team at John Wiley & Sons, Inc., who supported thisproject and helped to make it the best it could be.

Brandon Toropov, my editor, who challenged my think-ing and helped to make the writing process seamless withmy business endeavors.

My many friends and colleagues, who helped me toarrange interviews with the accountability masters.

The more than 50 accountability masters from aroundthe world who contributed their thoughts and ideas andhelped me add meaning and impact to this project.

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INTRODUCTION:YOUR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

S ome people achieve extraordinary things in life; othersdo not. The difference between the two groups lies inaccountability.

True story: Early in the Minnesota Twins 2009 exhibitionseason, Twins manager Ron Gardenhire discovered a noteon his desk from Justin Morneau, his star first baseman. Itread: ‘‘Gardy: I forgot to run sprints after the workoutsyesterday; I am fining myself.’’ Next to the note was ahundred-dollar bill.

Was Justin Morneau accountable because he was a su-perstar, or was he a superstar because he was accountable?

No More Excuses is a way of looking at the world—astandard to which we hold ourselves and others account-able. It’s a strategy for life and work that attracts others tous, because accountability is a universal trait of admiredpeople.

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No More Excuses is not a slogan. It is a competitivechoice. Whether you are trying to hold onto your job orexpand your enterprise, whether you are trying to create anew business relationship or improve your communicationwith key stakeholders, or whether you are trying to find anew customer or retain a major client, you will always findthat personal accountability differentiates you from yourcompetition and give you the competitive edge. Account-ability is not a consequence. In order for it to become yourcompetitive advantage, you must be willing to change whatyou expect from yourself and others.

No More Excuses is all about closing the gap betweenwhere we are and where we could be as individuals andas organizations. We can do this by learning and applying,on a personal level, the five critical principles that supportan expanding Accountability Zone that has us at the verycenter.

In this book, I will challenge you to expand your ownAccountability Zone by embracing what I call the FiveAccountabilities:

Right things: Be accountable for doing the right things.This means ethical execution of the activities that willactually support the goals you have chosen for yourself.If you are managing a team, you must model this skill bydoing the right things yourself; you must then empowereach member of your team to identify his or her own rightthings, and you must be willing to communicate aboutwhat’s working and what isn’t in an open, transparentway at all times.

New space: Be accountable for managing your space fornew opportunities. This means being willing to step awayfrom things that are working, even though they may befamiliar, tomake room for something that maywork better.

Introduction: Your Competitive Advantage

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Yes, this is a risk, but it’s one that successful people take—because the return can be positive for the whole enterprise.

Managing your space takes time and practice. Force ofhabit causes us to repeat many behaviors and initiativesthat aren’t what we really want.

Process: Be accountable for managing the process whenyou hit an obstacle. It is inevitable that you will encounteradversities and setbacks when you pursue your goals. Thequestion is, how will the adversities and setbacks affectyou? Will they keep you from making creative newapproaches to attain your goal?

Transparency Means Being Accountable forDoing the Right Things—from the Top Down

Organizational governance systems are likemachines,and the only oil that actually makes these machineswork is the oil of confidence. To generate confidenceand trust, you need transparency. If there is no trans-parency, there is no trust. If there is no trust, the basicarchitecture of any company just falls down rightaway.

—Jordi Canals

Redefine Your Space!

If you had the exact same dollars today that you didback then, and knowing what you know now, wouldyou jump into this opportunity or a different one?

—Jeff Booth


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Expectations: Be accountable for establishing the rightexpectations. The targets you set for yourself will have ahuge impact on your actual achievement. How will you setthe targets for yourself and your team? Will you set thembased on what is familiar or what is possible? Will you setthem too high, too low, or in that ideal zone where the goalis a healthy stretch?

Relationships: Be accountable for your relationshipsand your contributions to them. The human touch in anyrelationship is the ‘‘lubricant’’ that makes communicationpossible and empowers individuals, groups, and organiza-tions to accomplish great things. Without accountability for

HowWill You Respond?

We cannot control what happens to us, but we canalways control howwe react towhat happened, andwecan alwaysmake good choices aroundwhat happened.

—Roger Staubach

What Are You Shooting For?

We all have to set our own targets in life. Let’s say I’m astudent. If all I do is shoot for a B in a course, thelikelihood that I am going to get an A is pretty low. If Ishoot for an A, even if I fall short, I’ve still got a prettygood chance to get a B. So, I don’t want peopleshooting so low that they create that tyranny of lowexpectations we’ve all heard so much about.

—Gerry Czarnkecki


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supporting and contributing to the relationship, there canbe no true leadership, and no effective implementation, atthe group or organizational level, of any of the otheraccountabilities.

When you are accountable for supporting and contribu-ting to your relationships, you are acknowledging thatthere is no such thing as ‘‘group accountability’’—thereis only the accountability of one person to another.

These are the five pillars of personal accountability thatmake organizational accountability possible. I believe thatevery truly meaningful achievement and every great orga-nization starts with an individual who has established apersonal Accountability Zone—a place where the transpar-ency is high, the values are clear, and the commitment tothe Five Accountabilities is unmistakable.

These Five Accountabilities are your responsibility be-fore they are anyone else’s. What’s more, they are scalable:

It’s Really about Relationships

A corporation really is a collection of people. It is ajoint mission to accomplish something in a business.The way an organization or a household works, theway a community works—it’s really about relation-ships, and the real measure of any leader is the abilityto leverage relationships to influence others to em-brace accountability. You can only do that by givingsomething to your relationships and supporting themover time.

—Peter Aceto


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They can affect and enhance virtually all aspects of yourlife, as well as the lives of people you touch. These FiveAccountabilities not only transform businesses, organiza-tions, and communities but also help us to improve thelarger world we all share.

ARE YOU IN THE ZONE?

When you are in the Accountability Zone, your actions arefully in harmony with your promises to stakeholders. Icall this alignment.

Alignment means being the same person all the time. Itmeans operating with enough integrity to talk straightabout both your strategy and your tactics.

When you are in the Accountability Zone, you knowwhatyou’re doing and why you’re doing it. I call this strategicintent.

What Do You Believe In? What Do You Standfor? What Will You Deliver?

Accountability means being in the position of trulyowning all that an organization believes in, stands for,and promises to deliver. Everybody had better be inthat position—not just the CEO. The CEO can onlydeliver on the big picture if the other people in theorganization deliver on their pieces of the picture. Atthe end of the day, everyone is responsible to eachother for executing on the larger vision.

—Nido Qubein


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You’re going to be hearing a lot about strategic intent inthis book. Your strategic intent is the driving, overridinggoal that motivates and inspires you. It’s the goal thateveryone gets—not the tactics that support that goal.(Those tactics are your right things.) Strategic intent isgoing to the moon for the first time and getting back safely;it’s launching a startup that creates a whole new industryby winning 100,000 new customers in its first year; it’smaking $250,000 in personal income for the year, whenyou’ve never done that before.

Strategic intent is a big goal that’s easy to understandand buy into.

Know Your Strategic Intent

I created Dean’s Beans about 16 years ago for onereason: to model how a for-profit business could be apositive player in social change and still be profitable.That wasmy strategic intent. So, wewere accountablefor that social change, whether it was environmental,economic, or social. It was not relegated to the worldof the nonprofits. I realized that nonprofits werealways asking businesses to give them money, sothey could keep going. I made myself accountablefor changing themodel. I thought, ‘‘It’s [the] business’sresponsibility to behave in a way that doesn’t damagethe earth, the people, [and] the societies in it so thateventually, we can reach a point where those non-profits may never have to exist.’’ Proving that con-cept’s viability became my own commitment.

—Dean Cycon


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When you are in the Accountability Zone, you encourageopen dialogue and discussion rather than sealing yourselfoff from it. I call this engagement.

Engagement means connecting with other people. Ifyou’re not willing to communicate with people about what-ever you’re doing that affects them, you are not in theAccountability Zone. Very often, leaders of governments,corporations, and other larger entities must make a specialpoint of identifying at least one individual whose job it is tosupport the task of promoting dialogue and listening tostakeholders. This engagement may be a little job you can

Accountable to a Nation

In our case, we were accountable for creating a newconstitution for a post-apartheid South Africa. Thatmeant starting from scratch, disengaging from every-thing in the old space, and starting a responsible,transparent dialogue that somehow incorporatedthe views not of a tiny elite [group] but of 42 millionpeople. That dialogue wasn’t about revising what hadgone before; it was more about liquidating the previ-ous dispensation and replacing it with [a] completelynew idea. We had to liquidate the old company as itexisted, scrap it and bring it down to zero, and fromthat create a new environment with a completely newstructure. We had to create a new paradigm based on acompletely new set of values that would replace anold paradigm that had been in place for 350 years.

—Roelf Meyer


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do on your own, or it may be something you have to getsome help with. After all, some of us have a few stake-holders to listen to, some of us have hundreds or eventhousands, and some of us have millions!

When you are in the Accountability Zone, all stakehold-ers know what you’ve done, where you stand, and why.You are operating above the board. I call this transparency.

Most of the high-profile scandals in which business peo-ple, politicians, and celebrities find themselves enmeshedcome about as the result of an early decision to leave the

Be Clear about What’s Happening

One of the principles that I live my professional lifeby—andmy personal life, too, for that matter—is to beas open and transparent with people as I can possiblybe about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. I had aconversation with a person who worked for me sometime back where I had to deliver some news about adecision I knew he wasn’t going to like. After I’d toldhim what my choice was and how it would affect him,his response was, ‘‘Well, I may not agree with yourdecision, and I may not agree with everything youhave always done, but you have always been veryclear about what is happening, and I have alwaysunderstood exactly where you have stood, and that’ssomething I value a great deal in our relationship. Ihave never had to question where I have stood withyou. Thank you for telling me this.’’

—Richard Chambers


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Accountability Zone by keeping key stakeholders in thedark about important choices. This is a seemingly smalldecision that inevitably echoes larger and becomes moredestabilizing over time.

When I’m working with organizations to create a cultureof accountability, my clients will sometimes ask: ‘‘How dowe create anAccountability Zone?’’ I think it’smore amatterof knowing when you left it. Your own private Account-ability Zone is always there waiting for you. Here’s a quickand easy test you can perform at both the personal andorganizational level: If there’s no alignment, if there’s noengagement, if there’s no strategic intent, if there’s notransparency—guess what? You just left your Account-ability Zone!

A better question than ‘‘How do I create an Accountabil-ity Zone?’’ is: ‘‘How do I expand an Accountability Zone?’’And the answer is, by making the Five Accountabilities apart of your daily life. In over 30 years of owning busi-nesses, observing people, speaking professionally, andwriting, I’ve found the Five Accountabilities covered inthis book to be the most powerful tools for personal andorganizational growth available. I suspected that the FiveAccountabilities I had identified were already serving asanchors in the lives of the most successful people andorganizations on earth. I interviewed dozens of high achiev-ers from around the world and found that they, too, hadbeen using most or all of these principles to create Ac-countability Zones for themselves and their organizations.

Some of the people I interviewed had mastered the FiveAccountabilities quickly in life, almost by instinct; forothers, it took years of personal experience and plentyof trial and error to master the principles. No matter howlong it takes to master these ideas, no matter what you call


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them, the lesson remains the same: The Five Accountabil-ities work, if you are willing to use them to change yourown life first by expanding your current AccountabilityZones and creating new ones as you go along.

This book includes interviews with Highly AccountablePeople from all walks of life—including corporate CEOs,politicians, professional athletes, educators, a conqueror ofMt. Everest, and even the man who led the effort to writethe new constitution of South Africa. These Highly Account-able People come from business, government, and acade-mia, and from six different continents. They all agree onthe core accountability principles you’re about to learn. Asyou’ll soon see, they have used the Five Accountabilitiesto open new doors, take advantage of new opportunities,and expand Accountability Zones in their lives, their ca-reers, and their organizations. When you expand yourown Accountability Zone, you create and support a cultureof accountability within your organization.

No More Excuses gives you the tools you need to goabout designing and living an excuse-free life. If you’re amanager or executive, you’ll also find insights on the best

Start at the Top

What I have found is that accountability is somethingthat people often don’t understand. Leaders have toeducate people about what they are accountable for,and the very best place for a leader to start is his orher own management team.

—Sir Andrew Likierman


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ways to model the Five Accountabilities for your team. Ibelieve we can all model the highly accountable achieverswho have made these five commitments a daily blueprintfor living. What’s more, I believe that these are the founda-tion of all great achievements, both on the individual andthe organizational levels.

The Five Accountabilities have made an incredible dif-ference in my life—and I believe they can make the samekind of difference in your life, too. Let’s get started!

The Key Drivers

When I look at these Five Accountabilities, I thinkthese are probably the key drivers that allow people tomake and fulfill commitments.

—George Tamke


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HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

E xpanding your Accountability Zone is as easy as . . .

One: Read Chapters 1 and 2. You will get clear on whyaccountability matters, find out how expensive theexcuses we make to ourselves really are, and get anoverview of the Five Accountabilities shared by alltruly successful people.

Two: Then, get serious about the Five Accountabilities.Each of the following chapters will help you masterone of the Five Accountabilities and offers case stud-ies and insights from the Highly Accountable People Iinterviewed for this book. Lock in what you’ve learnedby completing the Accountability Check activities atthe end of each chapter. (You can find additional toolsfor implementing and reinforcing each Accountabilityat www.SamSilverstein.com.)

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Three: Check Chapter 8 for long-term advice on how tocreate a culture of accountability within your organi-zation from the remarkable gathering of Highly Ac-countable People who shared their experiences in thisbook.

ACCOUNTABILITY MASTERS

The Highly Accountable People who agreed to be inter-viewed for this book are as follows:

Peter Aceto, President and CEO, ING Direct, Canada

Christine Aquin, President and CEO, GunpowderBusiness Development, Inc.

Gary Bailey, Legendary goalkeeper for the ManchesterUnited Soccer Club and a member of the EnglandWorld Cup Soccer Team

Jeff Booth, President and CEO, BuildDirect

Dixon C. Buxton, Senior Managing Director, PrivateCapital Corporation

Sila Calder�on, Former Governor of Puerto Rico

Jordi Canals, Dean, Instituto de Estudios Superioresde la Empresa (IESE) Business School, University ofNavarra

JamesC.Castellano, CPA andChairman, RubinBrown

Richard Chambers, President and CEO, the Instituteof Internal Auditors

Elim Chew, President, 77th Street

Dean Cycon, CEO, Dean’s Beans Organic CoffeeCompany

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Gerry Czarnecki, Former President, UNC Incorpo-rated; Former Senior Vice President, IBM; FormerPresident and CEO, Bank of America Hawaii; FormerPresident andCEO,AltusBank;Author,LeadwithLove

Bill Donius, Former President and CEO, Polaski Bank

MarkEaton, All-star basketball player for the Utah Jazz

Kenneth Evans, Dean, Price College of Business,University of Oklahoma

John Hannah, Former professional football playerand member of the National Football League Hall ofFame

Mike Knetter, Dean, Wisconsin School of Business

Lowell Kruse, President and CEO, Heartland Health

Pat Larmon, President and CEO, Bunzl Distribution,Inc.

Peter Legge, CEO, Canada Wide Media Limited

Steve Lipstein, President and CEO, BJC HealthCare

Sir Andrew Likierman, Dean, London BusinessSchool

Craig Lovett, Partner/Principal, Incognitus

Achi Ludomirsky, MD, PhD, Director of PediatricCardiology, New York University Medical Center

Mariano Macias, President and CEO, Victus, Inc.

Joan Magruder, President, Missouri Baptist Hospital

Brian Martin, CEO and Founder, Brand Connections

Jim McCool, Executive Vice President—InstitutionalServices, The Charles Schwab Corporation

Roelf Meyer, Director, FeverTree Consulting; FormerSouth African Minister of Defense; Former South

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African Minister of Constitutional Affairs and Com-munication; Former South African Minister of Consti-tutional Development and Provincial Affairs

Ronnie Muhl, Explorer who climbed Mt. Everest

Stan Nowak, CEO, Silverlink Communications

Tan Sri Ramon V. Navaratnam, President, Trans-parency International, Malaysia

Greg Powell, President and CEO, Fi-Plan Partners

Howard Putnam, Former President and CEO, South-west Airlines

Dr. Nido R. Qubein, President, High Point University

Dana Roets, Vice President and Head of Operations,Kloof Gold Mine/GFI Mining, South Africa

Steve Romer, Director of Operations, Sydney Conven-tion and Exhibition Center

Peter Schick, Chairman of the Board, Moneta Group

David Silverstein (no relation), CEO, BreakthroughManagement Group International (BMGI)

David Snively, Senior Vice President, Secretary andGeneral Counsel, Monsanto Company

Eric R. Spangenberg, PhD, Dean and MaughmerChair, College of Business, Washington State University

George Steyn, Managing Director, PEP, South Africa

Clem Sunter, Former Chairman and CEO, AngloAmerican Corporation of South Africa, Gold andUranium Division

Michael Staenberg, President, THF Reality

Roger Staubach, Former professional football playerand member of the National Football League Hall of

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Fame; Executive Chairman, Americas, Jones LangLaSalle Americas, Inc.

George Tamke, Chairman, the Hertz Corporation;Chairman, Culligan, Ltd.; Chairman, ServiceMaster;Former Co-CEO, Emerson Electric; Partner with Clay-ton, Dubilier and Rice, Inc.

Gareth Taylor, Regional Vice President, Barrick Africa

Dato’ Dr. Jannie Tay, Executive Vice Chairman, theHour Glass

Dr. Beck A. Taylor, Dean, Brock School of Business,Samford University

Paul Taylor, Chairman of the Board, U-Gas/Dirt Cheap

Robert Tuchman, Founder, TSE Sports & Entertain-ment

Bill Whitacre, President and CEO, J.R. Simplot Com-pany

Pat Williams, Senior Vice President, Orlando Magic

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PART ONE

What we are seeing now . . . are the effects of steppingaway from accountability, the results of sacrificing long-term survival and success for short-term success. Wehave to go back to the notion that competence, integrity,and service are worth committing to, because they allowus to deliver value that plays out in the long term.

—Jordi Canals

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1

THE $10,000 QUESTION

I t was a bright, cold morning in mid-December when oneof my best clients called my office. He wanted to check onmy availability to speak at his organization’s annual lead-ership conference. My assistant checked the calendar, sawthat the date in questionwas open, and booked the date.Wemailed out our standard agreement, and the client signedand returned it.

A couple of weeks later, I realized that a few of mypersonal commitments had somehow never made it ontomy business calendar: little things like my anniversary,spring vacation with my family—and my daughter Jackie’shigh school graduation! No problem, I thought. We’ll justput all the missing items on the calendar.

When we did, we noticed something interesting.I was supposed to speak at that favored client’s leader-

ship conference in Washington, D.C., at 8:00 on Fridaymorning, the eighteenth of May. As it turned out, mydaughter Jackie’s graduation was in St. Louis on the

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previous night. The ceremony started at 7:30 P.M. andwouldn’t be over until past 9:30 P.M. When I realized thatI had a family commitment on the evening of the seven-teenth and a speaking date on the morning of the eigh-teenth, my stomach started to churn. I’m a frequent flyer,and frequent fliers who live in St. Louis know that the onlyway out of our fair city after 7:00 P.M. on a Thursday is ona donkey . . . and a donkey definitely wasn’t going to getme to D.C. by Friday morning.

I called my client. Here’s what I said: ‘‘Sal? Hi, SamSilverstein. How’s it going? Good, good. Hey, you knowthat program in May? Listen, I kind of double-bookedmyself up against my daughter’s graduation. Is there anychance I could speak in the afternoon on Friday or firstthing Saturday?’’

There was a pause.Then Sal said, ‘‘Sam, let me get clear on something. Your

program is called ‘No More Excuses,’ right?’’Now I knew I had a problem. Quickly, I pondered my

options. Theoretically—only theoretically, mind you—Icould call in sick at the last minute and ask another speakerto come fill in for me. The fact that Sal had branded theentire conference around my signature program ‘‘No MoreExcuses’’—was it really that big of an issue?

Yes, it was.Option number two: I could miss my daughter’s gradua-

tion. I started thinking to myself, Well, she is my thirdchild . . . Then I stopped myself. My stomach started feel-ing funny all over again. Seriously: There had to be someother answer.

I started calling charter companies to inquire about aflight.

No More Excuses

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The lowest bidder to get me from St. Louis after gradua-tion to Washington, D.C., in time for my speech was$10,000.

I now had a $10,000 question: What am I accountablefor—and to whom?

Was I going to pick one commitment over the other,or was I going to write the check? Every time I thoughtabout letting one or the other of those commitments slide, Ithought about the guy who’d be looking back at me fromthe bathroom mirror each morning, and I knew I was goingto have to face that guy.

I wrote the check. At about 9:30 P.M. on Thursday theseventeenth, I watched my daughter walk across the stage,with her head held high and a smile that could light upNorth America, to receive her diploma. At 10:15 P.M., it waswheels up in a little charter plane that might as well havebeen called ‘‘Spirit of St. Louis.’’

It was a turbulent takeoff. In fact, I remember thinkingto myself,Maybe I shouldn’t have gone with the low-costbidder. But the ride smoothed out nicely, and by about2:15 A.M., I was tucked away safely between the lily-whitesin my hotel room in Washington. I got a couple of hours ofshut-eye and made the speech that morning, which wasvery well received. In fact, I got a standing ovation.

(By the way, the rumor that I made Jackie start hersummer job the very next day to help defray the cost of thejet fuel is completely without foundation.)

Here’s the point. My $10,000 question wasn’t just aboutJackie and my client. Ultimately, I realized I had to beaccountable to myself first in this situation. I had to finda way to follow through on both commitments I hadmade—for them, yes, but for me first. I didn’t want to be the kind

The $10,000 Question

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of person who looked away from either of those commit-ments. Often, as this story illustrates, it takes self-disciplineto live our life with ethics, morality, and integrity. Yes, indoing so there will be some late flights and some large billsif you hold yourself accountable. But accepting all of thosechallenges beats the alternative: making excuses.

That’s exactly what I would have been doing if I had goneback on either of those commitments:making an excuse tomyself first—telling a story, buying it, and then passing thatstory on to someone else.

I believe that it is only by learning to hold ourselvesaccountable, by taking a pass on the inevitable opportuni-ties we get to feed ourselves excuses, that we can achievethe end results we are seeking in life.

Eventually, we all face our own version of what I callthe $10,000 question. That question isn’t really about whatkind of flight you take from St. Louis to Washington, D.C.It’s about what kind of person you are and what kind oforganization you are willing to create by holding yourselfaccountable first and encouraging others to do the same.

A Personal Matter

Accountability is a really deep, personal driver. Eventhough I believe others can remind you about it andpoint you toward it, and even though I have certainlyhad mentors that have done that, I think at the end ofthe day, it is really up to each individual to makeaccountability happen.

—David Snively

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It’s about launching your own global No More Excusesmovement by expanding your own Accountability Zone.You have to be the first occupant of that zone, and youhave to get very good at stepping back into it once younotice you’ve strayed from it. Once you’ve perfected theart of returning to the Accountability Zone as an individ-ual, you’ve taken the essential first step toward organiza-tional accountability and responsibility.

Individual Integrity, OrganizationalIntegrity

Any discussion of organizational ethics begins withindividual accountability, because we all eventuallyhave to pay the consequences when individuals arenot accountable to themselves first. If you’re notaccountable to yourself first, what that means isthat you are not honest on the small scale and yourintegrity is suspect on the small scale. When there’sno integrity in individuals, then as the organizationscales up and out, it turns out that there is no integrityin processes and organizations, either. We saw thatphenomenon with Enron, we saw it with WorldCom,we saw it with Parmalat, and we saw it with some ofthe devastating risk-management problems that wehave encountered in the global economy in recentyears. And of course, we saw it in the spectacularscams and frauds that have unfolded, such as theMadoff case. All of those problems are rooted, I think,

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MAKE CHOICES, NOT EXCUSES

I believe that accountability is the basis of all meaningfulhuman achievement. I also believe that our first account-ability is to the person we see in the bathroom mirror eachmorning. No, it’s not always easy for us to start there, but itis the very best place for us to start, and it’s much, muchbetter to start with accountability to ourselves than it is tostart with an excuse.

Ultimately, accountability comes down to choices, theonly things we truly own. Everything else that we think weown can be taken away—our home, our cars, all of ourpossessions. Even the people we know and love can leaveus. At the end of the day, the only thing that will remain willbe the choices we have made.

To get the most out of this book, make choices, notexcuses, about how to implement and practice whatyou encounter here. Conscious choices are the oppositeof excuses; they are one of the hallmarks of an excuse-free life.

(continued )in failures of personal accountability. That’s whatmade the organizational problems possible: peoplewho weren’t accountable to themselves. We allhave to be willing to step back and say, ‘‘You knowwhat? This has to start withme, becausewe all pay theprice when we have elements in our culture that arecorrosive.’’

—Richard Chambers

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MOVING BEYOND THE EXCUSE

What is an excuse? An excuse is a story that you tellyourself to sell yourself—and then try to sell to others.This is an important point: We always convince ourselvesto buy an excuse before we try to sell it elsewhere!

When I’m speaking to people in my live ‘‘No MoreExcuses’’ program or working with companies who wantto transform their organizational culture to one of pro-active accountability, I encourage people to recite thisdefinition right out loud so that everyone can hear. Why

It’s Up to You!

We are each responsible for all aspects of our lives.Many people don’t understand that or buy into that.They look for excuses, and they look for other people[to blame]. They think it could be the spouse; it couldbe the prime minister; it could be the president or themayor or somebody else who is really responsible.Other people may be responsible for making somedecisions that affect us, but ultimately, we are theones who are responsible for how we respond andhow we react. That doesn’t mean everything we do isgoing to succeed, of course, but it does mean weaccept full accountability for what is actually happen-ing in our world and for how things work in our lives. Ireally believe that I am responsible for how CanadaWide works and what I do in the community. That isentirely up to me.

—Peter Legge


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not say it out loud to yourself, too, right now, so thateveryone, including you, can hear it?

Wemust learn to move beyond excuses. The number onereason people succeed in their personal and professionallife is that they don’t make or accept excuses.

Successful people know that failure is part of the successprocess. However, they don’t use excuses to justify failure,and they don’t let others around them get away withexcuses, either.

Leaders are accountable. Leaders admit fault. Leaders donot make excuses.

Accountability Means Walking the Walk

You’ve got to walk the walk, and people have to seeyou walking the walk. If you’re going to be account-able as a leader, you’ve got to spend some timecommunicating with all of your constituencies. Ithas got to be interactive. You can get up and makea great speech, and that may be interesting, but afterthe speech, you have got to be willing to stand up onthe stage and interact with people. As the leader,you’ve got to stay there for as long as you have to [inorder to] answer everybody’s questions. Interactionis really important, whether it’s with your ownemployees, your vendor base, the people that youhave your financial relationships with—it’s impor-tant with everybody. They all have to understandexactly what you stand for and exactly what theycan expect from you. You have got to be willingto get out in front and listen to what everybody

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THE CHERRY TREE

It’s interesting to me that a story about accountability hasbecome one of our great tribal narratives in the UnitedStates. You know what a tribal narrative is, don’t you? It’s astory that, even if it isn’t true, ought to be.

The story, of course, concerns one of our FoundingFathers, George Washington. Supposedly, after the youngWashington cut down a cherry tree, his father approachedhim and demanded, ‘‘Who chopped down the cherry tree?’’We’re told that Washington responded, ‘‘I cannot tell a lie—it was I who chopped down the cherry tree!’’

That’s accountability. There are absolutely no excusesin that response, which may be one of the reasons thestory has remained so important to us over the years.Unfortunately, it’s a story that a lot of our politiciansdon’t seem to have grasped.

Do you get the feeling that if a politician got in troubleover a cherry tree today, an excuse or two might creep intothe equation? I do. In fact, we have a special name forpeople whose job it is to come up with excuses for politi-cians. We call them spin doctors.

has to say and take the hard questions and give themtruthful answers. You have got to be willing to say,‘‘You know what? That’s a good question. I don’tknow the answer, though. I’m going to find out, and Iam going to get back to you.’’

—George Tamke


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Imagine a president being interviewed today about thatsame incident.

‘‘Mr. President, did you cut down the cherry tree?’’‘‘Well, yes, and no. It’s a complex issue. You see, I

couldn’t have ‘cut it down,’ because cutting is actuallysomething one does with a knife. You can ‘cut’ a finger,but you can’t really ‘cut’ a tree. And since I usedmy hatchet,the relationship I had with the tree was really not a ‘cutting’relationship. Personally, I would call it more of a choppingrelationship. And obviously, I didn’t cut the cherry tree‘down,’ because, as you can see, the cherry tree’s stump isstill standing. Now, since that stump is clearly a part ofthe tree, saying that I ‘cut down’ the cherry tree becomesyet another example of the bitter partisan rhetoric that ispoisoning our whole political culture. This an example ofan exaggerated claim alleged by those people who havesome personal vendetta against me. And after all, the wholereason I approached the cherry tree in the first place wasthat I was looking for weapons of mass destruction andalso looking for ways to avoid having to raise your taxes,which I made very clear during the campaign that I did notwant to do. I also want to make this perfectly clear: I—did—not—inhale!’’

Don’t you hate it when politicians make those kinds ofexcuses? Me, too. But here’s the question: Do we ever letother people get away with them? Do we ever let our-selves get away with them? I’m talking about the excuseswe use to get ourselves off the hook, deny personalresponsibility, and spin our own actions so that we cantry to manipulate ourselves and other people to accept ourown bull.

In the end, excuses are what we use to deny our ownpersonal accountability. And people are finally beginning

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to realize that denying personal accountability is always atthe root of organizational accountability problems.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REALLY MEANS

Accountabilitymeans . . . being accountable to ourselves.This is where we should start but usually don’t. Account-ability to ourselves is what happens when we decide wewon’t violate our own values, and we resolve to hold our-selves accountable to those values. When I had to choosewhat to do about Jackie’s graduation, I had to find a way to

A New Scrutiny on Accountability

In my lifetime, there has been a huge increase in therequirements for accountability, and here, I mean itin the sense of being answerable. This includes thetransparency with which things are done within anyorganization and the need to report in an open way.Taking two high-profile examples, all the expenseclaims (including receipts or lack of them) of UKMembers of Parliament have been published. As aresult, a number have resigned; others have beenforced out as some of their more outrageous claimshave been exposed. Then, there is the questioning ofprivate-jet travel by automakers on their way toWashington to ask for bailouts but also, more gener-ally, on environmental grounds.



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be true to two core values: my professional commitmentsand my responsibility to provide emotional and personalsupport to my family. Once I realized that I couldn’t short-change either of the people I’d made commitments to, mydecision was easy.

You already have examples of this kind of accountabil-ity in your own life, too. For instance, if you ever had theopportunity to cheat on a test and chose not to, eventhough no one was looking and you knew you could getaway with it, you were holding yourself accountable toyour own standards. If you had the opportunity to padyour expense report, but you didn’t do that because youdidn’t want to be the kind of person who cheats on anexpense report, you were holding yourself accountable toyour own standards.

The question I have for you is this: How often do youhold yourself accountable to your own standards duringthe average day? Probably more than you think. Don’t sellyourself short. If you’ve ever chosen not to cheat on yourdiet, even though you could have done so, you know whatpersonal accountability is. If you’ve ever made a commit-ment to yourself to get a physical examination from yourdoctor once a year and followed through on that commit-ment, you know what personal accountability is. You arealready a resident of your own Accountability Zone. Yourjob now is to make that zone a bigger and more habitualpart of your life.

Highly accountable leaders don’t simply imposeaccountabilities on the members of their team. Theyspecialize in learning exactly what has to happen for anindividual to hold himself or herself accountable forattaining a given goal. Yes, this means modeling self-accountability, but it means a lot more than that.

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When You Love People, They BecomeMore Accountable

I believe it is our responsibility to help people achievetheir own accountability to themselves. This is not amatter of saying, ‘‘Hey, you didn’t do your job, go get itdone.’’ It’s not a matter of saying, ‘‘By the way, you dida good job back there—you were outstanding, and Iam hereby stroking you.’’ We have to accept that atsome point, almost everybody is going to have ahiccup, and if we are leaders, it is our job to helpthem through. Having people accountable to us—managing those accountabilities—carries with it ac-countability on our side.

We are accountable to support and help the peoplethat we are holding accountable. A lot of executiveslike to either stroke or punish people, but they don’ttake the time to develop and support those people.That means these executives tend to reward peoplewho already find it pretty easy to hold themselvesaccountable for something. That’s your A-team. Well,guess what? The world is not made up of superstars.We have A, B, and C players in our organizations. Itis our responsibility to help the B and C playersmove up to the next level. Their personal account-ability is something that has to be nurtured andreinforced by our support, and our success or failureas leaders is entirely a result of our ability toempower our people. We are responsible for empow-ering them to achieve to their fullest potential andbecome more accountable. Every human being who

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Accountability means . . . being accountable to otherpeople. This is where we usually start. That’s not a badthing—in fact, it’s essential to be accountable to others.When we make commitments to other people, we have tohonor those commitments, but if you’re not true to yourown values, you’re eventually going to find it impossible tobe true to your commitment to someone else. We musteach be the first occupant of our own Accountability Zone.

Which is usually easier for us: Taking action to fulfill acommitment because we’re committed to our own valuesor taking action because we’re afraid of what someone elsewould think? If you’re like most of the people I talk to,you’ll admit that the opinions of others sometimes play alarger role in motivating you than your own values do. Arewe really more worried about what others think of us thanwhat we think of ourselves?

Accountability means . . . understanding commit-ments others have made to us. People may give usexcuses. In fact, we may have trained them to give usexcuses, based on what we have shown we are willing totolerate in the past. This type of accountability can be verydifficult if we’re trying to make ‘‘No More Excuses’’ thedriving reality in our lives.

We can’t buy someone’s excuse and stay in our ownAccountability Zone. If we’re really serious about creating

(continued )works for me has the capacity and the potential toactualize and to achieve excellence, and it is my jobto help them get there.

—Gerry Czarnecki

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an Accountability Zone, we will occasionally have to con-front someone once we receive an excuse. Of course, thatis not always easy.

For example, I got a haircut a few months back. Theplace where I go is a one-man shop that’s run by a verynice guy named Bill. I arrived at 9:55 A.M. for a 10:00 A.M.appointment, and the door was locked. Bill didn’t show upuntil 10:30 A.M. As he unlocked the door, he said, ‘‘I’m sorrythat I’m late. I got a ticket on the way to work.’’

Have you ever heard that one about the ticket before?How do you respond to that? Do you show sympathy andcompassion? Or, do you look for the real issue and thenfind an appropriate way to call the person on it?

It’s easy just to join in the pity party. It’s easy to think,‘‘Hey, he got a ticket, cut him some slack.’’ Sometimes wemay choose to do that. We should know, however, that eachtime we buy an excuse at face value, we leave the Ac-countability Zone.

At least half of the time when people let their account-ability to us slip away, they’re selling us an excuse aboutsomething that really happened and hoping we’ll buy itwithout noticing that it didn’t really have anything to dowith their failure to deliver what they’ve committed to. Isuspected that Bill was going to be late regardless ofwhether he got a ticket but simply didn’t mention thatpart. Was he planning to walk in the door at 10:00 A.M.?Wouldn’t it have made more sense to plan to walk in thedoor at 9:45 A.M., or 9:30 A.M., to get ready for the day, just incase something unexpected happened?

The easy way out is to let people who make excuses offthe hook—to buy the excuse. But amazing things canhappen when you choose not to buy.


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I looked at Bill and said, ‘‘I know you got a ticket, but youalso left late, didn’t you?’’ He said, ‘‘Yes.’’

I left it at that.The following month, Bill was 10 minutes late (as op-

posed to half an hour). This time he didn’t say a word ashe unlocked the door. You see, Bill realized that I didn’twant to hear his stories, because his issues are his prob-lems, and they are not my problems. Together, we werebuilding a shared Accountability Zone.

After my haircut, as I was on the way out, Bill said, ‘‘Sam,next month I will be standing here waiting for you.’’ Andhe was. Bill became a better businessman, and I becamea better customer, because he chose to move beyond theexcuses.

Would we have gotten the same outcome if I had simplybought his initial excuse about the ticket and accepted hispoor planning as my problem?

Think twice before you buy or sell an excuse. When youaccept an excuse from someone who’s made a commit-ment to you, you take on that person’s problem. Don’t letsomeone else’s problems become yours, and don’t try tooffload your problems on anyone else.

Accountability means . . . helping others stay account-able to themselves. This is what happens when people helpeach other to become more self-accountable. It’s part ofwhat I call an Accountability Circle: a group where eachperson has the implied right to help someone else in thegroup do a better job of maintaining commitments tothemselves. This group is also known as a MastermindGroup. I think everyone should have a group like this. Noneof us is perfect. Just as we all need a pat on the back fromtime to time, we all need reinforcement when it comes tocreating zones of accountability.

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I originally got involved with a Mastermind Groupbecause I thought it was a great way to share ideas andsolve problems. I saw it as an opportunity to leveragesomeone else’s experience. What I didn’t realize is thatthere was another, much bigger benefit from the Master-mind Group. It was this: After discussing issues at one ofour meetings, each of us would invariably make choicesand commit to taking a specific action prior to our nextmeeting. Coming to the next meeting and not havingcompleted the tasks you’d committed to was simply notacceptable.

This was not a ‘‘support group.’’ It was a choice group:a place where people went to make choices, not excuses.By being part of a Mastermind Group, we each benefitedas individuals, and we helped others to become better atbeing accountable to themselves. We each expanded ourzone of accountability.

For more information on Mastermind Groups, go towww.SamSilverstein.com.

Our accountability to ourselves makes the other threekinds of accountability possible. It is impossible to create anAccountability Zone in your life without establishing self-accountability. This kind of accountability, I believe, is aprerequisite for all meaningful achievement with the team.

Four hundred years ago, William Shakespeare wrotethese words: ‘‘This above all: to thine own self be true, andit must follow, as the night the day, though canst not thenbe false to any man’’ (Hamlet, I, ll.¶78–80). Those wisewords have been repeated so often and in so many differ-ent contexts that we may actually have lost sight of theirreal meaning. Look at them again. There’s a reason peoplehave been repeating this sentence for over 400 years. Bylooking at those words with fresh eyes, by internalizing


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them, we may find that we have come up against animportant opportunity to grow as people.

When we are accountable to ourselves first, when wehonor our own values, we really will find it a great dealeasier to make and keep commitments for which we canbe accountable to others. We’ll get better at only makingthe commitments we can actually keep, and we’ll do abetter job of following through on those commitments.

When we are accountable to ourselves first and foremost,we will find it’s much easier to have productive exchangeswith people about areas where there’s a gap between whatthey’ve promised and what they’ve delivered.

Last but not least, when we are accountable to ourselvesfirst, we will be a better model and a better resource forthe people who look to us for help in building up their ownaccountability ‘‘muscle’’ and creating their own Account-ability Zones.

Of course, I realize that a lot of us find it easier to holdourselves accountable when we believe we are account-able to others. Consider the following true story.

HowDo You Hold Yourself Accountable?

I had a client who was embarking on a big program afew years ago. He called me up one day and said,‘‘Hey Dave, I told the board of directors yesterdaythat we are going to save $26 million by the end ofthe year.’’ I said, ‘‘That’s great, but taking somethinglike that to the board is pretty unusual. Most of myclients don’t want to make a big deal out of that kindof prediction by involving the board. Why did you do

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It all starts with self-accountability. We live with our-selves 24/7, and if we don’t care much about honoring ourown values, about following through our own commit-ments to ourselves, we’re going to limit our own poten-tial and needlessly diminish what we can accomplish inthis life.

WHAT ARE YOU MODELING?

Are you now committed tomodeling personal accountabil-ity for everyone you meet? If you are, then congratulations:You have just entered the Accountability Zone. Somepeople spend most of their lives in that zone. Others rarelyenter it at all. Which kind of person do you want to be?Where do you want to spend most of your time?

People who make a habit of living in the AccountabilityZone know that if they don’t model excuse-free standardsin their own lives, they cannot possibly receive account-ability in return from others. They know that rejecting

that?’’ He said, ‘‘Well, I learned years ago when I wastraining for a marathon, that by telling my wife, myfamily, and everyone else about my goals, that is theonly way that I can really hold myself accountable.Otherwise, I knew that when I got up to about 16miles, I would probably quit. By telling other peopleabout what I was going to do, I learned that I holdmyself accountable better when I think there areother people watching.’’

—David Silverstein


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excuse making is the essential starting point to all mean-ingful achievement. And they know that buying excuses—whether their own or someone else’s—is an expensiveproposition, because they always have to leave theAccountability Zone in order to do it.

Finally, people who spend most of their time in theAccountability Zone know that being accountable is anactive choice, not a passive response—a choice thatenriches all of their relationships and all their outcomesin life.

Remember: Accountability is not a consequence.Accountability is your competitive advantage.

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2

BEYOND THE EXCUSE

A s we have seen, excuses are stories you tell yourselfto sell yourself—and then try to sell to others. In thischapter, we look more closely at the habit of selling our-selves excuses and learn why that habit is too expensive.

There are at least three negative outcomes when itcomes to using and accepting excuses. Let’s look at them.

Consequences

Culturally, we have drifted away from accountabilityin this country for at least the last generation andperhaps longer. The consequences have been moredire than most people realize.

—Richard Chambers

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EXCUSES WEAKEN US AS PEOPLE

I believe that excuses make us weaker as people, regard-less of whether we’re giving the excuses or accepting them.Giving or accepting an excuse is a choice, and choicesalways have consequences. Often, the consequence is thatwe get addicted to excuse making.

Have you ever noticed that the most successful peoplein life do not make very many excuses in the areas thatmatter most to them nor tolerate many excuses? Have youever noticed that the least successful people in life make awhole lot of excuses and that some of themmake a habit ofaccepting the excuses of others more or less at face value?Do you think that behavior pattern is a coincidence? Inmy experience, I have learned that weak people—by thatI mean, people who are not trying to get the most fromthemselves—are usually peoplewho are hooked on excuses.

Donald Trump is successful in business, not just becauseof his business savvy and not just because of his family’shistory in the real estate industry. He’s also successfulbecause his personal commitments actually mean some-thing. And you know what else? Another reason he’ssuccessful is that he surrounds himself with responsiblepeople, and he doesn’t tolerate excuses from them.

Until we can stand up, live our life responsibly, andexpect the same responsibility from others that we demandof ourselves; until we are willing to draw a line in the sandwhen it comes to both giving and receiving excuses andto commit to staying on the right side of that line; until wecan say, and mean, ‘‘No More Excuses’’ as our core philos-ophy in our interactions with ourselves first and otherssecond, we will weaken ourselves with every excuse, andour true potential will evade us.

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Truly effective people admit fault when they’ve made amistake. They inevitably gain strength by making thatadmission. Weak people, on the other hand, usually tryto attach fault for a problem to someone or somethingoutside of their control, and they always seem to become alittle weaker as a result.

Haven’t you noticed this? Isn’t the person who acceptsresponsibility for a problem the onewho comes out lookingand sounding strongest? On the other hand, don’t you loserespect for people who deny responsibility for problemsthat are clearly theirs? And don’t those people look andsound stupid when they’re in excuse mode?

It is powerful to admit fault without offering a big excusestory, but we rarely hear people do this. We rarely hearpeople say,

‘‘Yes boss, I was late, and it won’t happen again.’’‘‘Yes officer, I was speeding, and I deserve a ticket.’’‘‘Yes senator, I sold energy to California for exaggerated

prices and absconded with shareholder money.’’That’s not what we hear. What do we hear instead? Some

variation of ‘‘It’s not my fault,’’ when everyone knows that itreally is. As a result, we get sick of ‘‘It’s not my fault’’whenever we hear it.

And you know what? We have a right to be sick of it.We’ve heard ‘‘It’s not my fault’’ for far too long. We want tolive in a world where people actually own up for things likegetting to work late, acting unethically, or breaking the law.Personally, I’m still waiting for some of those steroid userswho hit all those home runs to stand up and say what theydid was wrong for themselves, for Major League Baseball,and for the country as a whole.

Don’t we all want to live in a world where people admitwhat happened, take responsibility, and fix the problem?

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Don’t we all want to live in a world where people grow up,step up, and own up?

Ifwe reallywant to live in that world—and I have a feelingthat deep down, all of us do—then we have to make somechanges in our own life.We have to accept that excuses onlymake usweaker as individuals, as organizations, as a nation,and as a species on this planet. And we have to be willing tostop making and accepting excuses in our own life.

Are we really losing all that much when we commit tostop making excuses? I don’t think so. The main thing I cansee that we’re losing out on is the opportunity to look andsound just as stupid as all the excuse-makers out there.This opportunity to distinguish ourselves is something weshould actually be grateful for, because the act of makingexcuses makes us look stupid—and you can’t fix stupid.

A motorist once explained the reason she got into anaccident in the following unforgettable words: As I ap-proached the intersection, a sign suddenly appeared in aplace where no sign had ever appeared before, making meunable to avoid the accident.

Dowe really want to be known as the kind of person whocomes up with that sort of lame excuse? I don’t think so.

I believe we each have a responsibility to be proactivelyaccountable in what we do. That means we stop spendingtime and energy making excuses for what has happened inthe past, and we start building ourselves and others up aspeople by making clear commitments for what we will bedelivering in the future.

Reactive accountability is about managing the past.When you manage the past, you are unable to create thepresent or future you desire. To live a prosperous presentand create an ideal future, you must use proactive account-ability. It is only through proactive accountability that you

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take control of what you should really be focused on andinsure that you achieve what you desire in the future.

Just saying ‘‘my bad’’ without drawing any conclusionsabout what should take place in the future is reactive ac-countability. That is the sound of weakness. Proactiveaccountability uses the past as a guide and establishesexactly what we are committing to from this point forward.For instance, if we had avoided the temptation to blametraffic signs and instead stopped risky behaviors like talk-ing on the cell phone while we were driving, that wouldhave been an example of proactive accountability. Wecannot be proactively accountable if we have becomeaddicted to giving or accepting excuses.

Here’s the good news. A lot of the people who do buildtheir lives around giving and accepting excuses are thepeople who are working for our competition. Let’s facefacts: It doesn’t take all that much to distinguish ourselvesfrom these people.

& If you show up, you’re in the top 25 percent. That’s ifyou just show up!

& If you show upwith a plan, you’re in the top 15 percent.& If you show up with a plan and you work that plan,you’re in the top 10 percent.

& If you show up with a plan, work that plan, don’t makeexcuses, and are proactively accountable, you’re in thetop 5 percent. From there, you can succeed in almostanything you do.

Learn to stop making and accepting excuses. You willenter that top 5 percent and become stronger as a person.Why? First and foremost, you will stop making excusesto yourself.

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It is far easier to make excuses to ourselves than werealize. Do you know the number one excuse people givefor not going to the gym to exercise? The gym is toocrowded.

Stop and think about that one for a minute. ‘‘Gee, Iknow I ought to go to the gym, but it’s awfully crowdedat this time of day.’’ McDonald’s gets crowded, too, butwe don’t seem to have a problem with waiting in that line!We give ourselves too many excuses, and the result isthat we get weaker—physically, emotionally, spiritually—each and every time we buy into our own excuse orsomeone else’s.

EXCUSES PUT THE FOCUS ON THE STORY

Again, excuses are stories we make up about why webelieve we are not responsible, when we know we actuallyare. Every time we make or accept an excuse, we put ourenergy and attention into The Story, we lose transparencyin the relationship, and our values slip. Eventually, if we’renot careful, The Story—not our own guiding values and notour strategic priorities—becomes the way we make itthrough the day.

We seem to think that if The Story is good enough, there’snot really any problem. Guess what? No matter how goodThe Story is, we still haven’t fixed the problem!

We as a society are spending way too much time on TheStory and way too little time on doing what we ought to bedoing with our lives. Have you ever heard that great song bythe Eagles, ‘‘Get Over It’’? It’s all about people who havetalked themselves into believing The Story and who can’t

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think of living any other way than repeating it over andover.

Let me ask you a question: Have you ever come up with acreative story for coming in late to work? Even once?

Making excuses puts all the energy and focus on TheStory and no focus, with no energy, on the situation athand. The Story never makes you a better team player, abetter leader, or a better contributor. The Story underminesyour abilities and ultimately, your self-esteem.

So, for instance: If you’re in sales, when you don’t makethe sale, stop coming up with a new, intricate story blamingthe client. You know the kind of story I mean:

‘‘They misled me every step of the way . . . they neverreally gave me a shot . . . they deliberately wasted mytime . . . they couldn’t make up their mind . . . they hadthis sweetheart deal with the competition that they didn’ttell me about . . . ’’

You will never be a better salesperson if you don’t takeresponsibility for the end result. Either they bought it, orthey didn’t. Period. You’re not getting paid to write TheStory about why they didn’t buy. No one gets hired to comeback with excuses—or a trunk load full of product.

When we choose to focus on The Story, we get socaught up in arguing for our limitations that we actuallyaccept them as reality. We focus on The Story and not thesolution, so we never fix the problems that are actuallyholding us back.

It is only when we face the facts and eliminate theexcuses that we discover the answers to our questions,the solutions to our challenges, and the behaviors that willultimately deliver the kind of business and life that wewantand deserve.

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Eventually, we have to stop and ask ourselves: What isour story—our excuse—going to cost us? Accountablepeople realize that the price is almost always too high.

For example, I run marathons. When I’m running a 26-mile-long race, I hear a lot of excuses in my head. I mayhave cramps in my side, my knees may ache, and I may beexhausted. I may even start wondering whether the vaca-tion money I spent to come torture myself in this marathonwould have been better spent on a chaise lounge and a coldbeer overlooking a beautiful beach in Cozumel. Therecomes a point as I’m running a marathon when I beginto hear ‘‘quit.’’ And it’s at that point that I have to decidewhether I’m going to listen to all the reasons for quittingthat my mind can come up with.

It’s at that point that I have to decide whether I’m goingto buy intomy own stories. It’s a question of whether you’relooking for reasons to sell yourself an excuse or reasonsnot to.

That’s what happened to me in my first Boston Marathon.Bymile five of the race, I had killer cramps, and at one point,I was bent over and in pain by the side of the road. I couldhave bailed out; there were plenty of reasons I could havegivenmyself—plenty of stories I could have told myself—tosupport the idea of quitting. I pulled myself together andkept running. I saw myself crossing the finish line.

At mile 7.7, when you leave Framingham, Hanson Elec-tric is on the right side of the road. Hanson Electric is asingle-story building with reflective plate glass windows.Old Man Hanson stands in front of the store, and using abullhorn, yells, ‘‘Check yourself out in the window; checkout your form as you run by!’’

If you see your form in the window and you look good, itcould be a comfortable 19 miles to the finish line. I really

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didn’t want to look. I knew how bad I felt. But I peeked outof the corner of my eye, anyway.

It was worse than I thought.Now, OldManHansonmust have seenme and taken pity,

because the next thing I heard was, ‘‘Don’t worry. Objectsin window may look worse than they really are.’’

So, now I had evidence for another story if I wanted it.Who am I kidding? I not only feel awful, I look awful.Maybe I didn’t train correctly. Maybe I’d better stop afterall. I got out of excuse mode and kept running. I sawmyselfcrossing the finish line.

At about mile 12, you’re running up Route 135, right pastWellesley College. Wellesley is one of the nation’s great all-women’s schools, and there’s a tradition of supporting theMarathon. Suddenly, there are thousands of women liningthe street to cheer you on. As I ran by, I looked around andthought: You know what? This would be a great place topause . . . for a semester or two! Another possible storyflashes through my mind: Hey, I made it all the way toWellesley. That’s a pretty good effort. Maybe that’s goodenough. I was tempted, but I put that story aside and keptrunning. I saw myself crossing the finish line.

At mile 15, there was a table with cups of water for therunners, and I knew I needed water really badly, but thetable was so crowded that I decided not to stop. Before Ipassed the table, though, I felt a spray of water on my back.Someone must have seen that I needed the water and justthrown it out at me. I looked back in gratitude. It was aCatholic priest. I think he was giving me the last rites!

I kept running. I saw myself crossing the finish line.When we eliminate the excuses, we don’t even deal with

them. We don’t evaluate whether they’re good excuses orbad excuses. We just keep moving forward. The only thing

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ahead of us is the finish line. Oncewe are truly accountable,we stop giving energy to the stories, because we recognizethat we have no more excuses for not achieving at anextremely high level.

I am proud to be able to tell you that I crossed the finishline that day. And the reason was actually pretty simple: Ididn’t give any energy to the stories that were looking for aplace to land in my head.

There always comes a point where we have a choice. Wecan focus on the excuse, The Story—all the reasons whythings shouldn’t happen—orwe can focus on the finish line.When we choose to focus on the excuses, we take our-selves out of the game. If we focus our attention on thefinish line rather than on our excuses, then that’s wherewe’ll end up: crossing the finish line.

EXCUSES LIMIT OUR EXPERIENCESAND HORIZONS

Excuses legitimize the past, ignore the present, and elim-inate the future. That adds up to a big lie!

Be honest: What are we really doing when we toss out alame excuse or accept someone else’s? We’re throwing apity party. Excuses are a plea for sympathy when thingsaren’t going precisely our way. Here’s the part we some-times forget: We are just as much a part of the pity partywhen we buy into someone else’s excuse!

Things are going so badly for me. I’m crying, and youshould be crying, too. I never get the luck I need. I’m notreaching my sales goals. My company’s pricing structure istoo high. The economy isn’t doing what I want it to do. Myparents made me eat lima beans when I was little!

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It takes two to tango. And it definitely takes two to form apity party.

Now hear this: There are five, and only five, things in lifethat you need to do to be a success. I’ll show you whatthey are in the next section of this book. I can tell youhere and now, though, that throwing a pity party oraccepting an invitation to one definitely isn’t one of thosethings.

Sometimes, we make up our own excuses for acceptingless than we deserve. Sometimes, we accept other people’sexcuses and use theirs to do the same thing. Either way, welose, because excuses limit our experiences in life andcondition us to accept less than we deserve. All too often,our excuses keep us living a very small life and stop us fromexperiencing some really great things. Excuses give us areason to say no to our own potential and close the windowon our own strategic intent.

It is only when we create a culture of accountabilitywithin our team or our organization that our strategicintent can be realized!

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E1PART02 11/14/2009 10:30:42 Page 35

PART TWO

Everybody has a great plan. The plans are masterful. Theplans capture the essence of the challenges in the mar-ketplace. The plans recognize the company’s strategicposition. The plans take all the competitive challengesinto account. If it were just a matter of coming up with agreat plan, success would be a very simple matter. Theproblem is, leaders don’t execute the damn plan, andthey don’t hold people accountable. So we go in and turnthings around, and what we do is not magical. It is just amatter of saying, ‘‘Okay, let’s reviewwhat the plans were,and let’s understand what the commitments that connectto that plan are, and let’s follow through and manage thething in all the details.’’ It is setting the expectationsproperly so that the commitments that people make dohave meaning and are realistic. You have to instill in theorganization a sense of responsibility, so that the wordcommitment has meaning. Then you reward those peo-ple who demonstrate commitment, and you get rid ofthose people who don’t.

—George Tamke

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3

THE FIRST ACCOUNTABILITY:DOING THE RIGHT THINGS

E fficiency, as Peter Drucker once said, is doing thingsright; effectiveness is doing the right things. Doing thewrongthings in an efficient way can cost us. When we look closelyat any given day of our lives, we realize we might be doingthe fun things, and we might be doing the easy things. Arewe sure, though, that we’re doing the right things?

Little Things Can Have a Big Impact

One of the things that climbing Mt. Everest does foryou is help you get very clear about what you shouldbe doing and what you shouldn’t be doing. Because somuch of what you do has such direct impact onwhether you live or die, you have to do the right

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‘‘WHAT MAKES YOU SUCCESSFUL?’’

Some years back, I had lunchwith someonewhose achieve-ments in life and business I really respected, and I askedhim a blunt question: ‘‘What makes you successful?’’ Hisanswer was a simple one: ‘‘Do the right things consistently,and do them with a commitment to excellence.’’

I’ve never forgotten that answer, and every successfulperson I’ve interviewed for this book has agreed with it. Weare each accountable for doing the right things consistentlyin life. If something is not working at the level of excellencefor us, that fact is our responsibility and no one else’s. Noone else can do our own right things for us. And no one can

(continued )things, and you have to do that consistently—or youdie. Something as simple as putting one foot in front ofthe other, you realize, carries tremendous conse-quences. It can’t be any step; it has to be the rightstep. That lesson really hit home for me. Themountaingaveme the opportunity to learn the importance of thelittle things that you do, because the little things havebig implications. It’s an intense way to live, but it’s agood way to live, I think. You get into the habit ofasking yourself, ‘‘If my life depended on the nextaction I took, how differently would I perform thataction?’’—because doing the wrong thing can havemassive consequences. When a single action candetermine whether you live or die, you learn to eval-uate your actions a little more closely.

—Ronnie Muhl

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ensure that we are doing them to the level of excellence ifwe do not.

By ‘‘doing our own right things for us,’’ I mean choosingthose activities that support our strategic intent. Once wehave settled on a goal that makes sense for us, we must berelentless in pursuing the answer to this question:What canI do consistently, with a commitment to excellence, thatwill make it easier to achieve this goal sooner rather thanlater? We must pose this question for ourselves as individ-uals and for any people who are looking to us as a leader.

Sometimes people say to me, ‘‘Sam, it sounds inspiring,but how do I start? What do I actually do? What happens ifI don’t know what my own ‘right things’ are? What if myteam doesn’t know?’’ One good way to start when it comesto doing the right things is to benchmark others and findout what their right things are. Looking at what others aredoing to get results that are similar to the ones you want toget in your own life can be a great reality check. Call peopleup and take them out to lunch (like I did). Ask them, ‘‘Whatare you doing?’’

Writing this book has been a truly great experience forme in terms of implementing and reinforcing this critical

Execution and Results

Without exception, anyone in a leadership role has tostand tall and accept the responsibility not only forsetting the vision but also for establishing the strategy,for the execution, and the results.

—Nido Qubein

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first level of accountability. Why? Because it’s forced me toreach out to dozens of highly successful people for inter-views. Those interviews have allowed me to get multiplereality checks on the right things that these people aredoing in their everyday lives, day in and day out. In fact, I’velearned more about doing the right things in the last sixmonths than I learned in the previous six years.

But I had to take the initiative. I had to reach out topeople and ask if they’d share what they’d learned aboutaccountability in their own lives and then ask them forspecific examples of right things that worked for them insupporting their accountability to a big goal. Contrary towhat you might think, I found that the more successfulpeople were, the more willing they were to share their ‘‘dothe right thing’’ stories with me. Getting in touch withpeople in the first place sometimes takes a little persist-ence; and no, wrestling your way onto their calendar isn’talways easy. But once you connect and once you get peopletalking, you get ideas and insights on what the right thingslook like, how to refine them, and how to execute them inyour world at a level of excellence.

Right Tools, Right Things

Doing the right things, for me, is always based inmaximizing my strong suits. When I started my com-pany, I knew my worst attribute was cold calling, andmy best attribute was meeting people in social situa-tions and developing a relationship that way. I playedto my strong suits in business, just as I had in the NFL.That’s a big part of doing the right things—knowing

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John Hannah is a Hall of Famer, and I believe that a bigpart of the reason for that is his willingness to put theemphasis exactly where it belongs: on refining what hewas doing so that he could execute at the level of excel-lence in a way that supported his goals. Doing the rightthings means taking responsibility for changing your tech-niques and adding new techniques to your toolbox. When-ever I’m asked for an example of doing the right things,John’s story is one of my favorite case studies. You don’thave to be a football player to get this concept!

Another great example of doing the right things with acommitment to excellence—and one that I love to share

what you do best and emphasizing those things tosupport your goals. You are the one who has to beaccountable for managing that process.

There was a time when I was with the Patriots whenI was getting beaten by a defensive lineman by thename of Joe Klecko—a great player and a great guy.Joe was controlling what was happening and makingme look bad. On the sidelines, I got frustrated. I knew Iwas trying too hard, and my frustration was growing.My coach sat me on the bench and told me to calmdown. He said something I’ll never forget: ‘‘Sit here andthink about what he’s doing to beat you and what youneed to do to stop him. He’s not better than you. You’rejust using the wrong technique. In any given game, youhave tohave a toolbox full of techniques. As the compe-tition changeswhat they do, youhave to have an assort-ment of tools you can use to adapt to the situation.’’

—John Hannah


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with people from all walks of life—comes from the worldof sales. And no, you don’t have to be a salesperson to get it!

Some sales managers (in fact, most sales managers) fallinto an unfortunate trap. They get hookedon countingwhich‘‘closed deals’’ have come in the door over the last week;they get addicted to comparing that number to the teamquota, the number their department is supposed to hit. That’sas far as they look: ‘‘What’s come in recently, and how doesit match up with the quota for this month?’’ (Or, even worse:‘‘How does it match up with the quota for this quarter?’’)

Some sales managers take a more tactically sound ap-proach; they ask, ‘‘What activities have been proven to leadto sales, and what’s the daily quota for those activities?’’Once the sales manager knows the answer to that ques-tion—once he or she has concluded for certain that Xnumber of conference calls with decision makers at theCFO level or above leads to Y number of new customersover Z period of time—that sales manager doesn’t getdistracted by the number of deals coming in the door today.

Yes, you read correctly. I said ‘‘distracted.’’ Great salesleaders know that it’s the consistent relationship-buildingactivity within the pipeline over time that matters, not thedeals that come in the door on any given day—like, forinstance, the Tuesday before the quarter ends. Show me asales team that’s worried about what closes today, and I’llshow you a salesmanager who hasn’t figured out how to getthe team to take control of the right things in their ownsales process.

There is a significant tactical difference between max-imizing short-term sales and sustaining long-term growth.When you’ve taken control of the right things that need tohappen day in and day out in your own process, you knowyou’re going to hit quota. Why? Because your right things—

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the number of calls you need to make, the number of meet-ings you need to conduct, the number of face-to-face pro-posals youneed todeliver—are already keyed to your goal. Itdoesn’t come as a surprise to you that you need to make Xnumber of conference calls to hit your goal for the quarter,and you don’t start thinking about that March 31 goal on thefirst day of March! Because you had a good sales manager, asales manager who was doing something besides measuringthe deals that came in the door today, you were focused ondoing your own right things on the very first day of the year.

Some sales managers call these right things Key Per-formance Indicators. That name works for me as well asany other. Whatever name you use, though, you must holdyourself accountable for identifying them, executing themwith excellence, and measuring these activities, day in andday out. In other words: If you sell for a living, don’t getdistracted by the sales that come in the door today! Notclosing a deal today isn’t all that big of a deal if you’ve beendoing the right things to support your selling goal for thepast month; closing that deal today may actually take youreye off the ball. If you ‘‘celebrate’’ that deal by taking threeweeks off from doing the right things, you’ll eventuallybe sorry.

How Are You Using Your LeadershipBandwidth?

I think one of the scarcest resources in business is notfinancial capital, not human capital, but leadershipbandwidth. This is always tied to the leader’s ability

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KNOW YOUR RIGHT THINGS!

Knowing what your own unique right things are is some-thing you do day by day—and it’s also thework of a lifetime.The goal is to identify the things we do best that support ourgoals and then come back to those right things again andagain, relentlessly. This is our job andnoone else’s. Onceweaccept our own accountability for executing our own rightthings, we’ll find it much easier to distinguish our organiza-tion, and ourselves, from competitors.

(continued )to focus on the right things, and tune out everythingelse. Many companies have gotten so big that they losetrack of their own resources, and the resource thatthey underestimatemost is their own leadership band-width. The company is just too complicated and thereare just too many things to do for anyone to do themall well. So, eliminating things that are on your to-dolist and knowing how to prioritize and focus on thestrategic imperatives— that skill is something that isespecially good for you. It’s something we all have tohold ourselves accountable for. If you let yourself getdragged into theminutiae— if you are constantly beinga micromanager— the micromanaging rolls downhill.If you micromanage your executives, guess what?They now have to micromanage their team. All of asudden, you are sucking up all of this leadershipbandwidth, and the company can’t do the things thatit needs to do.


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ARE YOU SLEEPWALKING?

I believe that most of us really do know the right things we’resupposed to be doing. The problem is that it’s so easy tooverlook those right things.Weget in theoffice in themorningand we might as well be sleepwalking through the day.

Get Specific!

One of my right things is focusing—identifying andowning a very specific area of expertise. This isimportant in a crowded marketplace. It’s a tactic Ishare with clients and one I use to build my ownbusiness. When I quit my job and started this com-pany, I knew I had to stand for something specific inthe market. I had to choose one particular thing, ownit, live it, and become that brand. If I wanted to bewell-known in an environment where there were a lotof people doing similar things to what I was doing, Ihad to find a niche. So, I did what I told my clients todo: I focused. I built my business around developingmarketing tools for national brands to help themreach consumers at a specific time: while they arein travel and leisure environments. That positioningwas super focused; it’s what got people to think ofme as ‘‘the guy who can reach people while they arerelaxing on vacation.’’ That one tactic allowed me tobreak through all my other competitors and own aplace in people’s minds, so I could build my brand.

—Brian Martin


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We spend an hour looking at our inbox in a trance stateor maybe listening to some juicy office gossip that hasnothing to do with what we should really be doing with ourday. How much time do we spend in trances dealing withstuff like e-mail, gossip, or some other unimportant ‘‘busi-ness’’? So much time that we don’t want to measure it?That, my friend, is too much time.

So, what do we do? We try to be proactive. We pull outour legal pad and list all the stuff that we think we need todo. Can you guess what the first thing on that list is going tobe, nine times out of 10? Right: the easiest thing to do. It’snot the most important or possibly even the most urgentthing, and it doesn’t really connect to our goal for the day,but we do it anyway, because it’s the easiest, and we wantto get that all-important first check mark of the day so thatwe can feel like we’ve accomplished something.

We’ve got to wake up! Once wewake up, we will find thatat some level, we really do knowwhat we’re supposed to bedoing with our day—and with our lives. And then we canstart doing it.

Time Is the Critical Resource

Doing the right things consistently is a tactical way ofdelivering on your plan, and it starts with you as amanager or as an executive. Themost critical commod-ity that you have as an executive or as a CEO running abusiness is your time. Where you choose to spend yourtime is the most important decision you make everyday, every week, every month. If you use your time towork a number of wrong things, you are screwed.

—George Tamke

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It is time for us get serious about this: We and we aloneare accountable for how we spend our time. We like topretend sometimes that other people, other institutions, orother events can determine how we use that resource.That’s a fantasy. No one else decides what we’re goingto do with our day. It’s us!

All too often, we invest our time, effort, and energy ontactics that do not necessarily support our strategic intent,or indeed, any strategic intent whatsoever. We are buildingour day around tasks that are not really crucial to ourmission; they are just ‘‘urgent.’’

What Really Matters?

You have got to be pretty selective as to what you getengaged in; otherwise, you get burned up with thecrisis of the moment as opposed to thinking in thelong term. You have to stay focused on what reallymatters. In my office, I keep a list of what I considerthe top 10 things that I have got to work on for the12 months to come, and I update that list and revise itregularly. I come back to that list every day just tomake sure I am grounded in what really matters.

—David Snively

Urgent or Important?

Here’s an experiment: Take something that you thinkis urgent, and see whether you think it’s actually

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It is all too easy to get stuck with someone else’s priori-ties, someone else’s to-do list, and someone else’s assump-tions about what supports the mission. If we are trulyaccountable to ourselves, we will confirm for ourselveswhat supports our strategic intent and what doesn’t.

(continued )important to do that thing. See what happens whenyou try to eliminate the urgent and focus on the impor-tant. Most people stay so busy doing the urgent stuffthat they never get around to doing the important stuff.

—Dixon Buxton

Improvising Your Way toward the RightThings

I didn’t know I wanted to be in the sports eventbusiness; I just knew that I wanted to be in sports,and I wanted to be doing something I loved.

Eventually, I read about a sports publishing com-pany that was based in Chicago, and I landed a jobwith them and worked selling advertising space out ofmy home in New York. What I realized was that thepeople buying the ads were much more interested ingetting the tickets I was offering as a premium than inbuying the ads! At that point, I realized that I waslooking at a real business opportunity. It wasn’t sellingadvertising—a lot of places were doing that. Gettingpeople into sports events was the real value. Shortlyafter that, my partner and I started our corporateevent business.

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Robert Tuchman’s experience is a classic one amongentrepreneurs. He had a stable job at Lehman Brothers butfound he could not commit in the long term to that organi-zation’s strategic intent. He found his own strategic intentand his own right things to support it. He ended uplaunching a company. The career he left behind at LehmanBrothers turned out to not be as stable as everyone thought.The company eventually collapsed. Robert’s company, onthe other hand, is doing great!

STRATEGIC INTENT

How do we know what our own right things are? By askinga critical question: Is what I am doing right now supportingmy own strategic intent?

My goal was big enough to leaveme some flexibility.Sometimes, as you pursue a goal, you come across anopportunity that doesn’t look like an opportunity toother people. You’re basically improvising your waytoward finding new right things that will work for you.

There weren’t a lot of companies trying to do what Iwanted todo,whichwasbuild abusiness aroundsportsevents travel packages. Over the years, as my businesshas grown, the industry has grown as well, and thereare a lot more precedents to follow now. Back then, Iwas definitely improvising a lot and always looking fornew right things that would move me toward my goal.

Who’s going to change what you’re doing, so youend up doing something that doeswork, if it’s not you?

—Robert Tuchman


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People often ask me, ‘‘What is strategic intent?’’ Strategicintent is nothing more or less than a driving goal, passion,or purpose that we are motivated to pursue at the level ofexcellence.

This kind of intent operates in two dimensions: theindividual dimension and the organizational dimension.In either case, if you’re not pursuing your goal at the levelof excellence, you are not pursuing your strategic intent.That’s because strategic intent is inherently competitive.We’re not just accountable for identifying the right thingsthat will help us execute on any plan; we’re accountable foridentifying the right things that allow us to excel. Un-fortunately, most people do not pursue these right thingsor even bother to learn what they are.

Sometimes, people call anything and everything they’redoing, in order to pursue their goal, their ‘‘strategy’’ toattain what they want. In fact, these activities are tactics.Your strategy is your driving goal; your tactics are thethings you do to turn that goal into reality. By definition,all things that fall into the category of right things aretactics that support your strategy.

What Fills Your Space?

I’ve always been a believer in the idea that if you’renot clearly focused on your goal as an individual, anorganization, or a company, a million things will comeup to fill the space.

—Bill Donius

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STRATEGIC INTENT: THE INDIVIDUALDIMENSION

On the individual level, strategic intent is that which youare personally most committed to making happen in yourlife at the level of excellence. If you don’t yet know whatyou are committed tomaking happen at a peak level in yourlife, you have some work to do in determining what reallymatters to you as an individual, and I’m afraid only you cando that work.

I learned from interviewing John Hannah that his strate-gic intent was to become the best offensive lineman in theNational Football League. He achieved that goal. How didhe do it? In part, by using a single stance to throw off hisopponents about what he was planning to do on the nextplay. He also pursued that goal by studying game films forhours on end so that he could uncover opportunities that

Where Will You Get the GreatestPositive Result?

The first step is defining a good strategy by setting theright kind of goal. Then, you have to ask: How do Iensure that I’m really carrying this out? You have tofocus in on where you will get the greatest result. Inour strategic planning, that’s exactly what we do.Each of my associate deans has to tell me the fourthings he or she is working on that will have thebiggest positive effect when it comes to achievingthe larger goal for that person’s program.

—Mike Knetter


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(in Robert Tuchman’s words) didn’t look like opportunitiesto most people.

That turned out to be one of his right things. It alignedwith his personal goal of being the best offensive linemanin the NFL, and it was something he was willing to pursueand execute at the level of excellence.

What is your strategic intent as an individual? Itmight bebecoming the best lineman in the NFL, but the odds are thatyou’re going to point yourself in a different direction. Whenyou know for certainwhat your own strategic intent is—andnot before—you’ll be ready to start figuring out whetheryou’re doing the right things that support that intent.

Evaluate your strategic intent and the things you aredoing to support it on a regular basis.

STRATEGIC INTENT: THEORGANIZATIONAL DIMENSION

On the organizational level, which we may also be account-able for, the strategic intent is that which our company

Don’t Wait!

I have known plenty of people who thought they weredoing fantastic jobs, only to discover that the peoplearound them didn’t. This is a big mistake if one of thepeople is your boss or (if you’re the boss) your boardor shareholders. Don’t wait for the year-end to findout. Keep it in your mind all the time and get feedbackbefore it is too late.


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pursues at the level of excellence. Hopefully, that’s obviousfrom the organization, but organizational goals, like indi-vidual goals, may be poorly defined—or not defined at all.If we know the direction our organization is headed andare committed to excellence in achieving, our right thingswill always connect to our company’s driving purpose—assuming that we share in that mission as stakeholders.

Herb Kelleher established the strategic intent of South-west Airlines very early on in his tenure as the leader of thatairline. He wanted to make Southwest the number one low-fare airline in the United States—no ifs, ands, or buts. Thatwas his mission and the company’s mission. For CEOs andother executives, the individual’s strategic intent some-times fuses with the organization’s strategic intent.

There’s a great story that people tell about Herb’s obses-sive focus on strategic intent. One day, an employee cameinto Herb’s office and said, ‘‘Mr. Kelleher, we’ve done a pollof our passengers, and we’ve found out that the people who

Are You Aligned with Your Own Agenda?

We have an organizational goal of being in the top 5percent of all hospitals in the country for quality, forsafety, for patient satisfaction scores, for financialstability, and for our employee satisfaction. Weknow those are attainable targets. There are bench-marks that are out there that support those goals. So,we are able to ask ourselves, ‘‘Are we moving with theagenda? Are we aligned with it?’’

—Joan Magruder


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regularly fly the Las Vegas to San Francisco route wouldlike to have a nice chicken salad sandwich served to themduring the flight. What do you think?’’

Herb said, ‘‘I’ve got a question for you: Does serving achicken salad sandwich get us measurably closer to beingthe number one low-fare airline in the United States?’’

The employee thought for a moment and then said, ‘‘No, Iguess it doesn’t.’’ Herb took a pass, and so should you whenyou come into contact with any initiative that doesn’tsupport your organization’s strategic intent. That’s notyour right thing! What specific activities will keep anorganization on track with its strategic intent? What activi-ties won’t? What specific activities will keep a community,a nation, or an employee base on track with a givenstrategic intent? What activities won’t?

Change the Behavior!

What we’re seeing in this country is a movementtoward doing the right things when it comes to healthandwellness. Thatmovement is being led by employersand by some innovative health plans that are beginningto reward healthier behaviors in meaningful ways.Health plans are starting to design benefits based onspecific behaviors— specific right things that will keeppeople healthier over time. You know, that’s reallyexciting, because it benefits a lot of constituencies,and it has a very significant positive impact on healthcare costs. So, when employers and health care provid-ers start to assume accountability for that, employeesfollow suit and begin to assume accountability for

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STRATEGIC INTENT IS MANDATORY!

You must have a clear strategic intent from both an indi-vidual perspective and from an organizational perspectiveif you hope to identify and execute the right things thatsupport your goals. Don’t pick a dozen different strategicintents.

If you or anyone on your team can’t remember yourstrategic intent, it’s too complicated!

‘‘WHO OWNS THIS?’’

Once you’ve identified the big goals, figure out who’sdoing what to turn that goal into reality. A big part of

changing those behaviors. The employers model theright things for their employees, and that brings about anew focus on the right things at the individual level.Why is this important? Because the Journal of Occu-pational and Environmental Medicine reports that 70percent of health care costs in this country are lifestylerelated and are largely driven by behavior. In 2008, U.S.annual health care costs topped $2.4 trillion. If 70percent of this $2.4 trillion annual spending is relatedto our health behaviors, it’s clear that the ability to drivethese behaviors is a significant opportunity for ourcountry to reduce healthcare costs and to improvehealth outcomes.

—Stan Nowak


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organizational accountability is knowing who owns theright things that connect to that goal. Get used to asking,‘‘Who owns this?’’

Certainty

When I think about accountability, I think of it as thecertainty of accomplishing previously set goals. If I’mheld accountable or if I’m holding somebody elseaccountable, I want to be absolutely certain thatthey have accomplished what we have agreed uponas our previously set goals. And there has to be clarityon both sides for that to happen. That’s why account-ability always reverts back to the clarity of yourstrategic planning and your vision.

A common problemwith strategic planning is a lackof focus. Sometimes people walk out of the planningprocess with 10 or 15 different initiatives that they’resupposed to follow through on. Our experience is,when you get more than two or three initiatives in agiven year, or four at the most, there’s just no wayyou’re going to accomplish them, because it’s im-possible to keep track of them. So, when we do ourstrategic planning, we make sure we walk out of thestrategic planning process with no more than two orthree major initiatives. And then, we create responsi-bility for those initiatives. Who’s going to do this? Is ita committee? Is it an individual? Is it the whole group?And we agree to what the action item is going to be foraccomplishing that particular initiative.

—Peter Schick

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Identifying our own strategic intent is mandatory if wehope to identify the right things for ourselves, or our organi-zation, or to revise those right things over time, as circum-stances demand. And this, of course, is one of the bigchallenges managers face. Ultimately, within any organiza-tion, it is themanager’s responsibility to ensure that the rightthings that are in place are appropriate, not only to theorganization’s strategic intent but also to the changing cir-cumstances that must inevitably be accommodated.

For each of us, the right things may vary, given ourindividual skills and the nature of the changes our teamsencounter, but those will always have the goal in sight.

For me, the right things might be to review my ownstrategic plan and measure progress, to reach out to newprospects, to deliver a certain number of speeches, to buildrelationships with key executives, or to write a new articlefor my monthly business ezine. That all supports thestrategic intent I have of growing my business to a certainlevel. For the people in my organization who I manage, I amaccountable for synchronizing my company’s strategicintent with each team member’s skills, aptitudes, andinterests. This means that each member of the teammay—and typically does—pursue a unique array of rightthings. If I were to pretend that all of my employees wereidentical and had the same skills, aptitudes, and interestsso that I could assign the same right things to each andevery team member, I would be letting everyone down. Iwould be overlooking my accountability to them to identifythe right things that would allow them to make headway onour shared goals, so I couldn’t be too surprised if they didnot make headway. Some people are better writers thanothers. Some people are better salespeople than others.Some people are better administrators than others. The key


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is to develop a list of right things that plays to each teammember’s strength.

Giving ourselves the very best list of right things to domeans knowing our own strong suits and adjusting accord-ingly, based on our strategic intent and our current circum-stances. I’ve found that people who are personallyaccountable to themselves, first and foremost, have a wayof mastering this skill of adjusting what they do. For in-stance: There are plenty of books and training programsout there that tell you that you must prospect for businessin a certain way; typically, by picking up the phone andcalling strangers so that you can ask them to meet with youin person. Now, some people are very, very good at this. It’scalled ‘‘cold calling.’’ Other people, however—and JohnHannah is one of them—have realized it’s not the bestuse of their time, skill, and aptitudes. John has made thedecision that he’s better at prospecting for new business bymeeting people face-to-face in social situations. That’s hisright thing. That’s the kind of prospecting and businessbuilding that supports him professionally and that he hasmade a commitment to pursue at the level of excellence.

Giving other people right things to do that supportorganizational goals, by contrast, is an essential skill ofentrepreneurs and effective managers.

What Questions Are You Asking?

The feedback you give people is what determineswhether you are doing the right things or not doingthe right things as an organization. Our feedback aboutright things is based on questions we are constantly

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The fact that we are familiar with a certain activity is notin and of itself any proof that that activity constitutes oneof the right things that supports our strategic intent. I maybe familiar with the activity of catching up with friends,family, and professional acquaintances by hanging out onFacebook for three hours every day. If I analyze my time,however, I may reach the conclusion that my Facebooktime does not actually get me any closer to any of my goals.By the same token, if something I’m used to doing connectswith a strategic intent that the organization has completelyabandoned, I may need to be coached into a new routinethat’s a little less familiar and a little more in line with whatmy team is trying to accomplish. Right things can and dochange over time.

asking about what is happening in our stores. So: Howdo we work with our people in the stores? How do wecommunicate to them to look at what their activitiesare? How do we evaluate the actual tasks that they areengaged in to make sure they are doing the rightthings—the things that are going to be truly productive,as opposed to the things that are just filling time andspace?

—Paul Taylor

Evaluate . . . and Reevaluate!

In the interests of consistency, people tend to enactbehaviors that may not actually be in their own best

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DELEGATE THE RESPONSIBILITY—ANDTHE AUTHORITY!

When you delegate the responsibility to others in yourorganization, you have to be sure you delegate the author-ity, as well.

(continued )interests—or in the best interests of the enterprise.So, we must constantly reevaluate what our peopleare actually doing, which is different from evaluatingwhat we’ve told them to do, as far as ‘‘right things’’are concerned. People tend to move back towardthe ‘‘familiar things’’ instead, often even when a given‘‘familiar thing’’ has been taken off their list ofresponsibilities.

—Kenneth Evans

Are You Giving Your People aShot at Success?

Some people are really fearful of being held account-able. It is scary for people to be told that they areaccountable for something if they don’t have the au-thority to make the desired result happen. So, if youare going to create a culture of accountability in yourorganization, you will also have to give the people themeans—the resources—to get the job done. All right:You want to hold people accountable for their resultsand their behavior. To get that, you have to give them

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One evening several years ago, whenmy oldest daughter,Sara, was in high school, I came into the computer roomwhere she was doing her homework. Here’s the picture Itook in: She was sitting in front of the computer. Hernotebook was on her right and her class book was onher left. Music was playing on the computer. Instant-mes-sage windows from her friends were popping up on thecomputer about every three seconds.

I didn’t even know it was possible to hold 17 conversa-tions simultaneously. It wears me out just thinking about it!

I couldn’t help it. I went into parent mode. I said, ‘‘Sara,don’t you think you could get done with your homeworkquicker if you finished your work first and then chattedwith your friends?’’

Sara looked back over her shoulder and sweetly asked,‘‘Daddy, have you seen my grades lately?’’

I knew what Sara’s grades were, and she knew that Iknew what her grades were. They were great. In fact, theywere much better than mine were when I was in school. So,the only thing I could do was to gently tuck my tail betweenmy legs, turn, and slowly slip out of the room.

a shot at their own success. You will have to ask themwhether they really feel accountable; what they thinkaccountability means; whether they can embrace that.The leader’s ability to walk that talk, to make surepeople get the tools and resources and authority theyneed, can determine who’s going to be a winner andwho’s going to be a loser in the organization.

—Peter Aceto


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You see, my wife, Renee, and I have given the responsi-bility to do well in school to our children. We have askedthem to be accountable for doing the best they can. If theirbest is an A, great. If their best is a B, then so be it. We havealso given them the authority to figure out how to do theirbest. If they slip below a B, then we step in. We delegate,but we don’t abdicate.

It’s our responsibility to check in and find out how ourkids are doing. If you supervise people, it’s the same withyour team members. Delegate both the responsibility andthe authority for your people to do the right things thatsupport your organization—and then stay engaged enoughto track whether they’re actually delivering the results youand your team have agreed upon.

Only when you delegate both the responsibility and theaccountability does the person feel that he or she owns thegoal. And only when the person has that feeling of owner-ship is there going to be accountability.

Trust and Empowerment

The boss shows up and says, ‘‘Be responsible for thisprocess.’’ Then, the boss leaves. Do you feel moreresponsible than you did yesterday? Of course not.

What’s missing? Well, you may be responsible forthe outcome of this process, but you haven’t beenempowered to make changes to the process if thatbecomes necessary. You have to have both the re-sponsibility and the authority. Otherwise, you can betold that you are responsible—you can be told thatyou’re accountable—but youwon’t really feel that way.

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KNOW YOUR OWN STRENGTHS ANDWEAKNESSES

A leader must strive to be objective when answering thequestion, ‘‘What are my own right things?’’ This answerrequires a commitment to be honest with oneself—andwith the rest of the team—in identifying one’s own apti-tudes and skill gaps.

Now, I, as the boss, may not be ready to give you thatempowerment until I believe that you are going tomakedecisions that will be similar to the ones I wouldmake. That’s a question of trust. So, there is this rela-tionship between trust and empowerment and account-ability, and you really need to have all three of them.Otherwise, all you’re doing is calling people account-able when they are not truly accountable. You haven’tempowered them, because you don’t trust them yet.You don’t have that trust until they demonstrate somedegree of accountability. So, you get this vicious cyclehere. I believe there are two kinds of people in theworld: the peoplewho say, ‘‘You have to earnmy trust,’’and the kind who say, ‘‘You know what? I hired you.That means I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.You get to start out with my trust . . . but watch out,you can lose it.’’ I prefer to take that leap of faith andallow people to start with trust, because you have tostart somewhere. There is no real accountability with-out trust and empowerment.



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ACCOUNTABILITY CHECK!

Now, it’s time to expand your Accountability Zone.

Park Your Ego Where You Park Your BMW

When it comes to being accountable to do the rightthings, self-awareness is key. Just look around—it’sa trait the best leaders exhibit. They are especiallyself-aware—and while they most likely have strongegos, they are usually able to park those egos wherethey park their BMWs. That’s what allows them torecognize their strengths and weaknesses. And thebetter leaders are transparent about this. You know,it’s not a comfortable thing to talk to your directreports or to other senior people and say, ‘‘Folks,here’s where I’m really strong, and here is whereI’m weak.’’ Self-awareness can create clarity withyour team on where your time will or will not bespent. It takes humility and a sense of trust in theteam to be able to talk about these things. Youhave to see the discussion as a tool that enablesyour team to optimize the way you and they worktogether and thus more likely to accomplish great-ness. You’re not being critical. You’re saying, ‘‘Hey,here’s how we put all these different cylinders and allthe pieces of the engine together, so we have a reallyfine-tuned engine.’’

—Jim McCool

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Implement what you have learned about the firstaccountability.

Your primary accountability: Identify your strategicintent!

& What are you trying to accomplish and by when? Areyou trying to generate the highest customer satisfac-tion levels for yachts manufactured in North Americaby two years from today? Lose 10 pounds within thenext 90 days? Get your sales team 20 percent abovequota this quarter?

& What activities—what right things—support that stra-tegic intent?

& We are all accountable to someone! To whom will yoube accountable (besides yourself) for identifying, eval-uating, and implementing the right things that supportyour strategic intent? (The person you discuss thesematters with may not be the person you’re accountableto in terms of implementation.)

Individual focus: List five things that would have tohappen for you to turn your strategic intent into a reality.

& When would you have to take action on them in orderto make your schedule?

& What would have to happen today?What would have tohappen every day?


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& What are you doing right now that does not supportyour strategic intent?

Team or organization focus: If you are a manager, find aplace where you can work on your own, uninterrupted,for at least an hour. Repeat the previous exercise from ateam perspective. Then, set preliminary expectationsfor yourself and each of your teammembers that supportyour strategic intent.

& What are the right things?& Who owns what activity right now?& Who should own the activity?& Who should be accountable for what outcome and bywhen?

This is your first draft—think of it as a brainstormingdocument, an overview intended for your eyes only.

Do not publicize your list or formalize the accountabil-ities until you have completed the exercise at the conclu-sion of Chapter 6, ‘‘The Fourth Accountability: Establishingthe Right Expectations.’’

For free tools that will help you implement this account-ability, visit www.SamSilverstein.com.

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4

THE SECOND ACCOUNTABILITY:MANAGING YOUR SPACE

O f the Five Accountabilities covered in this book, this istheone thatmyclientsaremost likely, at least atfirst, to thinkof as new or innovative. When you talk to successful peoplefor long enough, however, what you find is that they havebeenholding themselves accountable on this score for years.They just did not have a name for what they were doing.

Adding by Subtracting

Most people think that when you take somethingaway, when you truncate something, you are by defi-nition less of a person, or less of a business, becauseyou are abandoning what you were well known fordoing before. I actually think that if you make theright decisions to reallocate your resources, you are

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We must be accountable to ourselves to create the newspace we need to grow and innovate in our own lives,which sometimes means taking space from something elsethat we’re doing. No one else is going to do that for us, andif we don’t do it, it won’t get done.

We are each accountable for asking the questions thatallow us to manage our own space.

(continued )stronger, because you really know your focus, and youare choosing to focus on something that makes moresense. We are constantly managing our capacity—ourmental, emotional, and economic capacity—to fulfillour mission in a sustainable way.

—Joan Magruder

Would You Still Jump?

I have learned to ask a question that helps me to getout of that trap of continually doing the same thing overandover again.Forget aboutall the timeandenergy thatyou spent on it, whatever it is, and just ask yourself thisquestion: If you had the exact same dollars today thatyou did back then, and knowing what you know now,would you jump into this opportunity or a differentone? In our business, we created a logistics extensionfor overweight shipping. It was a major undertakingand amajor investment—it gave us the ability to do a lotof things we hadn’t done up to that point. But wedecided to phase it out. We had to narrow the focus

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A LESSON FROM A PLAID SPORTS COAT

A few years back, I was on a skiing trip with my family, andmy daughters bought me this great North Face down jacket.I had seen it in a store and admired it, but I wasn’t going tobuy it. They surprised me with it and gave it to me as a gift!Of course, I loved the jacket, and I knew even before thetrip was over that I would be wearing it a lot that winter.

When I returned home, I went to put the big down jacketinto my hall closet where all my other coats were stored.Guess what? It wouldn’t fit. There just wasn’t enough space.

That’s when I took a good, long look at all the coats Iwas keeping in that closet. I knew there were literallydozens of coats in there: coats I had not worn in years,coats I had only worn once, and even some coats I hadsworn to myself I would never, ever wear again. Therewas a plaid jacket in there that must have dated back tothe Carter administration.

I began to wonder something. Why hadn’t I gotten rid ofsome of those coats—thrown them away or given them tocharity—years ago? The answer was that I had simplygotten used to seeing them each time I opened that closetdoor. Now that I needed the space, I began to wonder howimportant the familiarity of that closet really was. Therejust wasn’t enough space.

to stay profitable and to keep growing in our ownspace. We narrowed the focus and freed up a lot ofresources and allowed us to do what we needed to doin our business.

—Jeff Booth

The Second Accountability: Managing Your Space

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I started pulling out old jackets that I didn’t wear any-more and putting them into a big pile to give to a localcharity. The pile grew and grew. When I was done, my newdown coat went in easily. I just had to clear out the old stuffso that I could make room for the new stuff, the stuff thatreally mattered to me: the new coat that I could now enjoy,that would improve my comfort level, and that would keepme warmer.

Exactly the same principle applies to our life and ourbusiness. We get so filled up with our familiar stuff, so usedto seeing familiar stuff, and so used to navigating aroundfamiliar stuff that we forget tomake the space for ourselvesto try anything new. Force of habit prevents us from givingourselves the physical, mental, financial, or emotionalspace necessary to shake things up a little bit and putsomething new in our lives—something that could providegrowth and improvement.

Here’s what I learned from a vintage 1979 plaid blazer: Ifmere force of habit is dictating our daily agenda, there isno room for anything new on that agenda, which meanswe are not managing our space efficiently or creatingthe space we need to pursue new opportunities for growth.We and we alone are accountable for making space forthe new stuff by getting rid of the old stuff.

If we don’t create space, we can’t try new things. If wearen’t trying new things, our competitors will beat us tonew opportunities.

High achievers hold themselves accountable for makingspace for new growth. How do they do that? By managingtheir own space. They know they are personally responsi-ble for managing their own space, which means that theyhave to take the initiative to get new opportunities into themix, even if that means getting rid of some familiar old

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opportunities. The fact that they’re used to the old stuffdoesn’t make it a priority for them.

Your personal priorities must be based on your optimumchoices, which are not necessarily your most familiarchoices. Ask yourself: If you were all done making a livingfor the day by noon and you still had to do somethingproductive, what would that something be? If you could doanything for that afternoon and you had the period from1:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.M. absolutely open, what would you put inthat slot? Once you know the answers to that question—whether they are ‘‘design a whole new product,’’ or ‘‘reachout to my best customers,’’ or ‘‘create a new marketresearch initiative,’’ or ‘‘build relationships with executivesat other firms,’’—ask yourself how you can work the best ofthose new initiatives into your schedule tomorrow. Whatwill you get rid of to make space for the most importantnew priorities you’ve identified?

For instance: If you stopped handling all the phoneprospecting yourself and delegated it to someone elsewho could do it just as well, what would you do withthat time that could produce even greater results for you? Ifyou’re not willing to ask those (sometimes uncomfortable)questions, you’re not managing your space effectively.You’re using force of habit as a strategic forecastingtool. How much sense does that make?

Ask the Questions!

We redeployed a lot of our assets in the customerservice area after asking ourselves, ‘‘How do ourcustomers actually prefer to interact with us?’’

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Suppose youwere to decide that even though you’vemademoney with a product or service in the past, you don’t wantto be married to it for the foreseeable future. What newproducts would you be able to fill your floor space with?

The choice to expand your business by getting rid of aprofitable line and replacing it with something more rele-vant to your current goals may at first seem counterintuitiveor even foolish. Yet, this is what great visionaries havealways done. It’s evidence of accountability and of yourwillingness to take seriously your responsibility to allocateyour resources strategically.

Sometimes, accepting this responsibility means makingdramatic changes in our lives and in our businesses. That ismuch better than pretending that whatever you’re alreadydoing always makes perfect strategic sense.

(continued )What we found is that a lot of our customers werereally more inclined to do things themselves than theywere to ask for help. So, we were able to revise thebudget and put the resources to work elsewhere,which we would never have done if we hadn’t askedthe question in the first place.

—Pat Larmon

Eliminating 35 Percent of the Business

We chose more than a decade ago to eliminate anyproduct that had anything to do with commissionablebroker-dealer fees, because those products were

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APPLE DROPS THE MINI

A few years ago, Apple, the dominant player in the personalmusic player category, dropped its best-selling product, theiPod Mini. Why? Because they were launching a brand newproduct that took the iPod experience to another level: theiPod Nano. Most businesses would have been extremelyhesitant to simply jettison a profitable product, let alone acategory leader, regardless of what they had on the drawingboard at the time. Apple was different. Why?

The answer: Apple’s business philosophywas different. Itwas based on creating new space. The company’s statedoperating principle was—and is—that they would rathermake themselves obsolete thanwatch the competition do it!

The iPod Mini represented where Apple had been. It waswhat everyone who was competing with Apple was tryingto match. Apple’s approach could have been to keep riding

taking an inordinate amount of our time and weresending the wrong signals to our clients. We didn’t seethat it was in our best interest to continue offeringthem, so we got rid of them, even though they repre-sented something like 35 percent of our business. Thiswas a huge decision from a strategic standpoint andone of the best ones we’ve ever made. Over an 11-yearperiod, that one decision led to 350 percent morerevenue and was a big part of the reason we wereable to grow faster than the market as a whole duringthat period.

—Peter Schick


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the same horse until it dropped. For a lot of companies, thatstrategy would have been seen as the safest. But Apple’ssenior management saw complacency as the bigger com-petitive danger.

Apple’s senior management knew something that manybusiness strategists forget: People andorganizations usuallycling to seemingly safe options for far too long out of sheerforce of habit. When they do, they inevitably lose ground.

We are told as we are brought up, ‘‘A bird in the hand isworth two in the bush.’’ I never hear anyone ask, ‘‘What ifthere are three birds in the bush? Or five? Or ten? How oldis the bird in your hand, anyway? What if the bird that’s inyour hand is losing weight and isn’t looking as chipper as itonce did?’’ Assuming that you’ve got the right bird meansthat you’re not managing your space.

We are accountable formanaging our own space to createnew possibilities for growth in income, pleasure, and per-sonal development. We are accountable for moving beyondfamiliar patterns and finding new opportunities. ‘‘We’vealways done it that way’’ is, on its own, no excuse for notmanaging our space. Force of habit, though powerful, is noexcuse for not managing our space. Familiarity, thoughcomforting, is no excuse for not managing our space.

We are accountable to askwhat if.We are responsible toexplore where we can create space that could be filled withsomething that could offer us a greater yield.

Am I saying that all businesses should pick up theircatalogs and cross out their number one product? Ofcourse not. What I’m saying is that it may not make themost strategic sense for us to keep doing everything we’redoing right now. I’m saying that we’re responsible foracknowledging that something in our space could change.The question is, what is that something?

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As Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of iPod andiPhone worldwide, put it: ‘‘Our competitors tend to put thecross-hairs on where we are now. By the time they come upwith a product that tries to match where we are now, we’rebeyond them. We’re one or two generations beyond, mov-ing faster than they are.’’

A NEW WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

Back in the 1970s, my father-in-law, an immigrant who hadlived through the horrors of the Dachau concentrationcamp duringWorldWar II, started a company called Delsan

Simplify, Simplify

Managing space is basically simplification. Lowe’swent from offering 135,000 products to offering93,000 products in their hardware stores. Sometimes,a simpler business is a more profitable business. So,what did they eliminate? Maybe they don’t have 19different types of lawn mowers on display anymore.Maybe people don’t want to have every type of lawnmower to choose from. It almost becomes too much;people are overloaded, and they can’t deal with allthe technical specifications they have to analyze inorder to make a good choice. Maybe Lowe’s listenedto the consumer who said, ‘‘Look, all I want is a lawnmower to mow the grass. I don’t need to have fourdifferent kinds of hedgers to choose from, each withtwelve different attachments.’’

—Michael Staenberg


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Aluminum Industries. The company’s main product wasaluminum storm windows.

The firm did very well. Indeed, my father-in-law prettymuch lived the American dream during the company’s earlyyears. It grew so fast, in fact, that my father-in-law decidedhe needed some help.

By the time my brother-in-law and I decided to buy intothe company in the early 1980s, Delsan was enjoying somepretty remarkable success in the marketplace. In fact, wewere a major provider of aluminum storm windows in theMidwest.

Then something astonishing happened: We found awhole new market.

Shortly before I joined Delsan, my father-in-law hadintroduced a new product line: vinyl replacement windows.I vowed to push the volume on the new window products,and push it I did. The sales exceeded everyone’s expect-ations and just kept growing.

The new offering transformed our business. We wereaccumulating huge numbers of new accounts—accountsthat were worth more, far more, than the average cus-tomer that had made my father-in-law a wealthy man. Irealized that we were capable of doing things in themarketplace with vinyl products that we’d never beenable to do before with the aluminum ones. We startedlooking for new vinyl products to pull into the mix, andthe response got even better.

This presented us with an interesting situation. Thealuminum storm window had established us as a companyand was an ‘‘emotional favorite’’ for us. We thought ofit as the heart of the company. It was making money. But itwas not our core product anymore, and its volume wasdropping.

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We realized that we had to take a long, hard look at thedirection of our business.

We did an analysis and concluded that we were notturning our inventory fast enough on the aluminum prod-ucts to justify continuing their presence in our line. Thathurt, but it was true. Another problem was that the floorspace required to manufacture the aluminum windowswas massive; we could use the same space to createvinyl products and generate at least four or five timesthe product volume (and by extension, four or five timesthe profit) from the same space. What was more, we hada lot of new vinyl product lines that we wanted to addand currently couldn’t.

We changed our name to Delsan Industries, and we soldoff our signature product—the genesis of the entire orga-nization, the aluminum storm window. This product hadmade the companymillions of dollars in years past and wasstill profitable. But it was the wrong investment for us as anorganization.

We needed new space.Selling off the old line was a hard decision, but it was a

very sound move strategically, because it allowed us tofocus on the products that would take our company to thenext level. If we had decided simply to continue makingaluminum storm windows because that was what we werefamiliar with doing and good at doing, we would havefollowed a very different path in the years ahead.

I liked the path we chose. It led us to exponential growthand a level of commercial success that we could hardlyhave imagined before we took on the vinyl line. We sold offDelsan Industries to a Fortune 500 company just a fewyears after we eliminated the aluminum products thatpreviously had been at the core of our business.


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This one business decision not only bought us thephysical space we needed to expand our business, but italso established an important decision-making and leader-ship precedent for the next phase of our business’s growth.It generated leadership space.

With this move, we confirmed something essential aboutour organization and the way we were going to take itwhere it had to go next. We made it clear to everyone in theorganization that what we were familiar with or successfulat doing in the past was always open for review. Of course,not every company feels that way about its core businesslines.

But that wasn’t all. With this decision, we also made itclear that the company leadership was responsible forlaunching new ideas and new initiatives. That was true,even if it meant leaving behind something that made a lotof emotional sense or something that was still workingfor us. We confirmed, as a working principle, that creatingnew opportunities, creating new space, was part of ourjob description as company leaders and part of what weexpected from others in the organization. We had to createspace to try new things and grow. That was now part ofour culture.

By the way, we sold the aluminum storm window busi-ness to the plant manager who had been operating it foryears. By setting him up in his own business, we took careof a loyal employee who had been with us a long time, andin doing so, we also made space on the management teamfor someone whose skills were more relevant to the marketwe now faced. We still needed products from the formerplant manager, and in fact, we became one of his majorcustomers. Several years later, he sold the business andretired on its proceeds.

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‘‘DISNEY’S FOLLY’’

Walt Disney was the king of the short cartoon in the mid-1930s, and he was making plenty of money in the middleof the Great Depression, but he didn’t want to keep onbeing the king of the short cartoon. He wanted to master anew form, and he wanted to grow his business at an evenfaster rate. So, Walt went beyond what was safe, whatwas familiar, and what was predictable, and he turnedhis business upside down. He invested everything he had,and then some, in a new venture: a full-length animatedfeature.

No one had made money with a full-length animatedfeature before, and there were plenty of people whothought Walt was a fool to bet his entire studio on suchan undertaking. Some people believed that audienceswould be overwhelmed by the visual stimulation of an

No Sacred Cows

I spend most of my time these days on the subject ofinnovation, and I think perhaps one of the biggestobstacles to innovation is the fear of cannibalizingyour own business. That’s not always a bad thing. Youhave to be willing to kill things and also to cannibalizeyour own business in order to grow. You have tounderstand what all those sacred cows are, and youhave to ask yourself whether they are so sacred afterall. A new idea may just justify getting rid of one ofthose cows.



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80-minute cartoon and would walk out on the featurehalfway through, no matter the quality of the film. Otherscouldn’t imagine a full-length ‘‘gag film,’’ which was whatthey imagined the Disney studio was making: a very, verylong Mickey Mouse cartoon. The film industry know-it-alls dismissed the project as ‘‘Disney’s Folly,’’ and Disney’sown wife advised him that no one would pay a dime to seethis picture.

Walt thought otherwise and went about reinventing hisown studio. Every available resource was channeledtoward the new project.

He knew full well that the technology did not exist tomake the animated movie he had in mind. He wanted thedepth of field and the three-dimensional feeling of a well-made live-action film. Instead of relying on the same toolsthat had made him a household name with his MickeyMouse and Three Little Pigs shorts, he resolved to createthe new tools he and his team would need. He made newspace for himself. That new space was called Snow Whiteand the Seven Dwarfs.

The technical advances necessary to bring Snow Whiteand the Seven Dwarfs out of Disney’s head and onto thescreen had to be built from scratch. They included arevolutionary multiplate shooting system that gave whatwas (and remains) an astonishing illusion of depth andmovement in many of the shots, an effect designed to pullviewers instantly into the world of the picture. He alsoresolved to make the characters lifelike by shooting manyof the scenes based on live-action footage that was pains-takingly retraced, frame by frame, to create some of thecharacters—notably, Snow White herself.

No one had ever combined those elements into ananimated film before, and no one had spent the kind of

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money on an animated picture that Disney was spending.The rumors of the project’s ever-escalating expenses as-tonished some and delighted others who were eager to seeWalt Disney fail. And for a while, it looked to many peoplethat he would fail. The fact is, he ran out of money longbefore he ran out of movie.

Disney’s quest for new space was backed by commit-ment and definiteness of purpose and can serve, even inour era of $100 million and up movie budgets, as a re-minder of how important it is to stay resolved and focusedon your goal. Once you’ve charted a new path and set asidesomething that works to make an investment in some-thing that you know could work even better, you muststay the course. And that’s what Walt Disney did. Havingalready spent every penny his company had, and havingmortgaged his own home and put every cent of that intoSnow White,Walt Disney had only half a movie. He neededanother $1 million to complete the project. And he neededit at a time when most of the experts in the movie industrywere convinced that hewas out of hismind andwhen abouta third of the American labor force was out of work. Timeswere hard, money was tight, and the buzz around the moviewas not good. No one would have been surprised if Disneyhad walked away from the task of reinventing himself, hisstudio, and the motion picture industry.

But he didn’t walk away. He put together a screening ofthe film using the footage that he did have, some of whichwas rough and only black and white, for a senior lender atBank of America. And he got his $1 million.

He created the new space he knew his company neededto take on this new task; he finished the picture andreleased the first great animated feature film in moviehistory. At the time of its first release, Snow White and


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the Seven Dwarfs quickly became the most successfulmotion picture of all time. (It would retain that rankingfor two years, until the release of Gone with the Wind.)

All of what happened from that point forward at Disney’scompany—all the animated breakthroughs, all the greatcharacters, all the merchandising, all the theme parks, allthe television ventures—would not have occurred if Disneyhad not decided to leave behind what was familiar andcreate new space for himself and his organization. Hebelieved in the space to do something new that he wascreating for himself and his company.

What new space will you create for yourself? What newdirection makes the most sense for you? Will you believe init as deeply and with as much commitment as Disneybrought to his new direction?

A Lesson from aMaster

I was at a point in my career where I was frustratedand questioning whether I was able to play basket-ball at the NBA level. Then, I ran into Wilt Chamber-lain one day while I was working out. He had beenwatching me. He pointed to the lane in front of thebasket and said, ‘‘This is what you can be great at.Guard this basket. Own the key. Keep people awayfrom the basket. You’re seven-foot-four; you don’thave to race up and down the court with the shorterand faster players.’’ In that five-minute conversation,Wilt showed me how to manage my space. I was ableto set the single-season record for blocked shots,make the All-Star team, and do a whole lot of other

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Implement what you have learned about the secondaccountability.

Your primary accountability check:Manage your space!Answer each of the following questions in writing with atleast two full sentences.

& Imagine your day now has 36 hours, and imagine youhave an unlimited budget. If time were not an issue, ifresources were not an issue, and if physical space werenot an issue, what would you do in addition to whatyou’re doing right now?

& What new priorities would you take on?

things in the NBA, but it really all started with thatfive-minute conversation with Wilt. He brought ithome for me. You have to know what you can begreat at. You need to know what to let go of, so youcan figure out what you should be focusing on.

—Mark Eaton


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& What would you have to change in order to make thathappen?

& What would you have to eliminate?& We are all accountable to someone! To whom will yoube accountable (besides yourself) for evaluating newopportunities to manage your space in the future?

Individual focus:What new initiatives could you pursuetomorrow to support your strategic intent that you didn’tdo today? Make a written list. Create at least threepossibilities.

Team or organization focus: As a manager, answer eachof the following questions in depth.

& If you were building this team, this department, or thisorganization from scratch today—knowing what youknow now—what would you do differently?

& What differences would there be in terms of yourinvestments of time and resources?

& What differences would there be in terms of staffing?& What projects would you eliminate?& What priorities would you change?& What new projects would you take on and why?

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5

THE THIRD ACCOUNTABILITY:MANAGING THE PROCESS

O nce upon a time, a father needed to buy his daughter apair of soccer shoes after her old pair of soccer shoes fellapart during a late-afternoon game. This was the day beforeher big game, which was to take place first thing the nextmorning. The father checked his watch and realized that hehad about 15 minutes left before the store’s closing time.Unfortunately, he was about a 25-minute drive from thestore, even if he pushed the speed limit. Should he:

(a) give up and tell his daughter she was just going tohave to play the game in tennis shoes?

(b) pray for a rainout?(c) give his daughter some money and tell her to solve

the problem herself?(d) get in his car, pull out his cell phone, call up the store

manager, and negotiate 10 extra minutes so that he

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could buy the shoes his daughter needed forher game?

If you picked option (d) —as I did, being the father inquestion—you already have a head start on mastering thethird accountability.

Managing the process is what happens when our strate-gic intent faces an obstacle, and we still move forward totake creative action toward attaining the goal.

This is being personally accountable for making prog-ress toward whatever it is we are trying to make happen.This is not giving up the minute we face some situation orchallenge that doesn’t support our goal. This is not throw-ing up our hands and saying, ‘‘If it’s not meant to be, it’s notmeant to be.’’

This is accepting proactive accountability for making ithappen.

BEYOND ‘‘WE TRIED’’!

If you’ve spent any time as a manager, I think you knowexactly what skill I’m talking about here.

HowWill You React to Change?

The real problem with the way that some people lookat accountability is that oftentimes it’s layered into anotion of a rigid set of expectations and performanceparameters, and frankly, you can get into very deeptrouble if that’s your mantra. How you react to chang-ing events is important as well.

—Kenneth Evans

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Here’s my question for the managers who are reading thisbook: Have you ever had the experience of delegating the re-sponsibility for something important and then having theperson you delegated it to drop the ball the moment somenew and unfamiliar situation, or problem, presented itself?

The person didn’t navigate a new path forward based onthe new situation, didn’t come close to the best obtainableoutcome, didn’t come to you and ask for help or guidance innavigating the difficulty, and didn’t even tell you that he orshe stopped trying to make progress toward the goal! Thataction item you delegated simply fell off the edge of theearth, and you actually had to remind the person that youhad delegated that task to him or her. Once you did, youheard an excuse: ‘‘We tried, but such and such happened. Iwasn’t sure what to do.’’

If you’ve ever had that experience as amanager, then youknow what managing the process is. It’s what you wishedthat person had done for you instead of dropping the ball.It’s moving beyond ‘‘We tried’’!

Effective people and effective organizations accept fullaccountability for managing the process rather than let un-foreseen obstacles and unanticipated events manage them.We don’t stop being accountable for delivering on our strate-gic intentwhenwehit abump in the road.Weacceptpersonalresponsibility for negotiating the best possible outcomebased on whatever circumstances actually arise.

Stay in Accountability!

At the end of the day, we have to be agile enough torecognize when things are not going well and to

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WHAT WILL YOU DO?

In the real world, you are going to encounter unwelcomedevelopments on your way to the attainment of any worthygoal. What will you do when that happens?

Whenever you do run into adversity (and you will), yourresponse to it will confirm for yourself, and everyone else,

(continued )identify different courses of action, as long as they arelegitimate and fair and honest, and then start tomanage those processes. One of the things that weare looking at in our own organization is that it is verydifficult to predict with any great degree of accuracyhow our business is going to perform from quarter toquarter. Now, on one hand, we could say, ‘‘Okay, well,we can’t control it.’’ That would take us out ofaccountability.

What I constantly preach instead tomydirect reportsis how important it is for us to do two things. First, wehave to be willing to step up as soon as we anticipatethat we are going to have a problem, and we have to beopen and transparent about that, because bad newsdoes not get better with age. And then second, we haveto identify the thingswecan do tomitigate the problem.If we think we are going to fall short of our revenueprojections, is there anything we can do from a coststandpoint to improve the situation? If we just waituntil the end of the quarter, it will be too late to goback and make any of those adjustments.

—Richard Chambers

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exactly what kind of person you are: someone who ispersonally accountable for managing the process or some-one who isn’t.

Being personally accountable for managing the processis a trait of Highly Accountable People. Let me ask you this:How many people do you really, truly admire who duckresponsibility when things get tough? If you take a momentto think of the truly successful people you’ve met (or evenheard about) in your own life, you’ll probably realize thateach of them was willing to accept responsibility formanaging the process. If you’re interested in learninghow to become one of those people, read on.

‘‘WHICH PAINTING IS YOUR FAVORITE?’’

Several years ago, my wife, Renee, and I spent a few days inSanta Fe, New Mexico. Just up from the city center is awonderful area called Canyon Road; it’s about a mile long,and it’s lined with artists’ galleries on both sides. Renee andI walked in and out of the various galleries as we strolled

Good Leaders, Poor Leaders

Every day we are faced with situations that are un-expected and are not within our control. One of theother things that distinguishes a good leader from apoor one is the ability to understand how to cope withand adjust to such situations.



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down the street. We had no intention of buying a paint-ing. In fact, I didn’t particularly want to buy anythingthat afternoon.

Renee and I came across one gallery featuring PhyllisKapp, a prominent local artist. After we walked through allof the rooms, admiring the magnificent paintings, we saw awell-dressed lady approaching us. It turned out that Phyllisherself was in the gallery that day.

She started a conversation; we began chatting pleas-antly with her. Eventually, Phyllis asked, ‘‘Which paintingis your favorite?’’

The moment those words were out of her mouth, Iremember thinking to myself, She’s managing the process!After all, we had no intention of buying a painting oranything else. Phyllis had the strategic intent of selling apainting, and we’d given her no indication whatsoever thatwe wanted to buy anything. She was in a situation whereher strategic intent faced an obstacle (our silence). Byasking that question, she was taking action toward hergoal, anyway.

We still had no intention to buy a painting, but more outof a sense of courtesy than anything else, we took Phyllisback into one of the rooms and pointed out a particularpiece that was hanging in the middle of the wall. It wasa watercolor with bright, vibrant colors: a desert land-scape with mountains and a beautiful sky. ‘‘That’s ourfavorite,’’ my wife said. (She was right, of course; beforePhyllis had shown up, we’d each mentioned that we’dliked that painting.)

Phyllis proceeded to tell us all about that particularpiece. She told us how she had come to paint it, whatshe was trying to accomplish with the piece, what otherwork had influenced her, and so on. Then, she asked us

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another great question: ‘‘Where in your house do youimagine this hanging?’’

Phyllis was still managing the process. Think about whathas to happen in order for that piece of art to hang in ourhouse. Of course: We would have to buy it. She was askingus a question whose very answer required us to buy thepicture—in our minds. And getting us to buy the paintingwas, of course, Phyllis’s strategic intent.

We hadn’t walked in the door looking for a painting tobuy, but when Phyllis asked that question, we actuallystarted thinking about where it might look best in ourhome.

I smiled and answered, ‘‘In our family room.’’And that’s where the painting is hanging today.Was this some kind of magic trick? Did her question

always get people to start thinking about where they’dhang her work? Of course not. Nothing sells paintings—orproduces any other positive outcome—100 percent of thetime. I’m confident, however, that Phyllis does sell a lotmore paintings than a person who never manages theprocess. Phyllis was (and is) the kind of person whoroutinely takes proactive responsibility for moving thingsforward, as far as she can, in support of her strategic intent.

Are you?

Defiantly Adjust to the Situation

Shortly after I arrived at NYU Medical Center, I losttwo of my best surgeons. One of them decided toleave to take another position, and the other one,

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ARE YOU MANAGING THE PROCESS ORABDICATING?

At any given moment, you are either managing the processor abdicating. Any time you abdicate, any time you stopmaking an effort to adjust to whatever obstacle you’veencountered and pursue your strategic intent, you’vestepped out of your Accountability Zone. Many people,as you’ve probably noticed, are very good at abdicating andspend most of their time and energy explaining why theycan’t move forward on a goal. The same energy that couldgo into creating a new pathway to the goal instead goes intoexplanations and excuses and stories about all the terriblethings the world has done to keep us from being able tomove forward. We can’t always control what happens in

(continued )unfortunately, passed away suddenly. It was quite asituation to walk into! Even though everyone waspanicking, and some people even said that we hadto close all operations, I looked at it as an opportunityto upgrade our services and upgrade our capabilities.On very short notice, we were able to recruit one ofthe top surgeons in the country. So, we defiantlyadjusted ourselves to a situation that we were notable to control. What we could control was our re-cruitment effort. We enlisted the help of the entireadministration, from the dean down to the chair ofsurgery, and the result was that we found one of thebest surgeons in the country.

—Achi Ludomirsky

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this world, but we can control the choices we make inresponse to whatever does happen.

Phyllis didn’t let fate or luck determine her outcome.She took action and managed the process.

In stark contrast, most of the galleries that we went intodid not manage the process. Instead, they abdicated!

Here’s what abdicating looks like: Some of the gallerieswe looked at that day simply let people walk in and walkout, without ever engaging them in conversation. Most ofthe galleries we visited were overseen by someone whowasn’t very good at establishing rapport. Typically, thatperson walked up to us and asked what you and I havebeen asked hundreds of times before in hundreds ofstores: ‘‘May I help you?’’ That person wasn’t managingthe process. He or she was reciting a question that could,and did, routinely receive responses that pushed theconversation further away from the strategic intent ofselling a painting.

When I said what so many of us would say—‘‘No thanks,I’m just looking’’—the person said, ‘‘Okay, let me know ifyou need any help,’’ and the conversation ended. You couldtell that some of these people really didn’t want to be havingthe conversation at all. In fact, I think they were terrified ofhaving the conversation in the first place! They were notwilling to be accountable for managing the process. That’s ashame, because the lower your accountability for manag-ing the process, the less effective you will be at negotiatingoutcomes that support your strategic intent.

Managing the process takes practice, just like any otherworthy undertaking in life. The more practice you giveyourself, the more comfortable you will be when it comestime to take action that supports your strategic intent. Youcan always tell which person in a given situation is


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effectively managing the process. It’s the person who isn’tterrified of improvising.

People who are used to improvising when they encoun-ter an obstacle to their strategic intent have learned tothink on their own feet. They’re comfortable doing so, justlike Phyllis was. They’ve learned to keep moving forwardtoward the goal—even though there’s no instruction bookaround to tell them exactly what has to happen next.

Phyllis got an A inmy book, because she created her ownAccountability Zone. She knew that she and she alone wasaccountable for managing the process. Someone across thestreet who says ‘‘May I help you?’’ and ‘‘Let me know if youneed anything’’ gets an F!

If you are not accountable to manage the process, youhave left the Accountability Zone. You are ceding account-ability for some aspect of your life to forces outside of yourcontrol.

EXAMINE NEAR MISSES!

Managing the process, as we’ve seen, is what we do whenwe encounter an obstacle, and we still find some way tomake headway on our strategic intent. One big asset inmanaging the process is close analysis of the phenomenonknown as a near miss. A near miss in the world of air traf-fic control is what happenswhen a pilot almost encountersa major obstacle—namely, another aircraft. That encoun-ter could have derailed the pilot’s strategic intent of com-pleting the journey safely, but thanks to quick thinking onthe pilot’s part, the mission is not compromised.

The near miss idea applies not only to processes thataffect human safety but to every undertaking with the

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potential to affect our strategic intent. That means we wantto know about the sales that were nearly lost, the defectiveunits that were nearly shipped, the P.R. disaster thatnearly played out.

These are important events. The government mandatesthat airlines maintain full accountability for reporting,categorizing, and analyzing their near misses, so they’llbe more effective at managing the process when similarcircumstances arise in the future. We must hold ourselvesaccountable for the same kind of close analysis. Justthanking our lucky stars that we didn’t crash is not enough!The more we learn about our own near misses in anygiven area, the better we and our organization will be atmanaging the process in that area.

This is one of the areas that Highly Accountable Peopleare endlessly committed to. They never stop asking thesegreat questions: ‘‘What do our near misses teach us? Whathave we learned? How can we keep this problem fromarising again?’’

Don’t ask me why this kind of event is called a near missrather than a near hit; that’s one of those inscrutablemysteries of life. The point is, a responsible review ofany project must include an above-board discussion andanalysis of all the near misses that we’ve experienced. Wecan’t wait for a plane to crash before we conduct a reviewof whether our airline’s safety procedures are appropriate!We have to look closely at the accidents that almosthappened, the collisions that were narrowly averted, andthe people who were nearly hurt and adjust accordingly.

If we are truly accountable, we will recognize theseevents for the blessings in disguise that they are. Nearmisses tell us where there are likely to be challenges thatkeep us from realizing our strategic intent.


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Warning: Leaders within any process-focused organiza-tion must go out of their way to praise and rewardindividuals who report near misses. If your company cul-ture rewards the opposite behavior—concealing nearmisses—or punishes people who try to call attention tonear misses, you will not have the information you needto improve your organization over time. It is impossibleto create a truly accountable organization without reward-ing the people who help you learn from near misses andmanage the process based on what you’ve learned.

THE ULTIMATE LIFE SKILL?

Learning to manage the process may be the ultimate lifeskill. This skill affects everything. Let’s say you’re at theairport, and your flight is cancelled. You can either go get inline like all of the other people who are willing to wait forthe agent to book them on another flight, or you canmanage the process. For my own part, when I encounterthis situation, I don’t make a habit of standing in line asthough I were a bewildered, obedient sheep. I pull out mycell phone, I call the airline’s phone reservation line, andwithin a matter of minutes, I have a seat on the nextavailable flight. I’m off down the concourse. I’ve noticedthat sometimes when my new flight is getting ready to takeoff, there are still people in that long line, waiting to betaken care of. That’s managing the process in action!

We can’t always get what we want. But we can alwaysmanage the process, and we can always see just how closewe can come to getting what we really want.

Aren’t you curious? How close can you get to what youreally want?

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Are YouManaging the Process?

A while ago, when Wall Street sort of collapsed,virtually every hospital found itself facing majorshortfalls in terms of its investment income—whichis a major source of capital for hospitals. Overnight,most hospitals were looking at portfolios that haddropped by 30 percent or more. And so, the questionis, how do you respond to that? About 90 percent ofour competitors responded by simply freezing capi-tal projects, discontinuing benefits, cutting tuition,and so on. Instead of doing that, we said, ‘‘Wait aminute—most hospitals are not-for-profit organiza-tions; they don’t live quarter by quarter. Our missionis not to deliver a dividend to investors.’’

We decided to send the message, internally andexternally, that it was important for people’s carethat we keep building private beds, keep investingin cutting-edge technology, keep managing infectioncontrol. So, for me, managing the process meantaccepting that yes, we will have some cash depletionin the short term and we will have to be smart, but ourinvestment income will come back. In the meantime,we are going to stick to our priorities. Why wassomething we thought was very important a yearago suddenly not important? Instead of acceptingthat kind of thinking, we have put a lot more energyinto looking for waste, into lean initiative. Unlike ourcompetitors, we have stayed the course when it comesto reinvesting in the things that we consider mostimportant to our mission for the medium term and

(continued)


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Suppose the news reports tell us that the economy isstruggling. Do we let someone else’s assessment of whatthe economy is or isn’t doing determine what we will donext in our lives, or do we assume accountability formanaging the process ourselves?

Does the bad economy really run our choices about howwe’re going to do our job, how we’re going to respond toopportunities we find, and howwe’re going to deal with theinevitable obstacles we will encounter along the way tosuccess? Is the bad economy accountable for determiningwhat happens next in our lives, or are we?

A sales manager I know of was debriefing with one of hissalespeople following a meeting with a hot prospect—acompany that represented potentially millions of dollars inbusiness. The sales manager asked the salesperson whathad happened during the meeting, and the salespersonanswered, ‘‘Well, it turns out they’re not buying.’’

The sales manager asked, ‘‘Why not?’’And the salesperson replied, ‘‘Let’s face it: We’re in a

tough economy. That’s the reality we’re up against now.’’Wrong answer. The sales manager hit the roof. He said,

‘‘The economy is why you didn’t close the sale? Don’t tellme that. Tell me you didn’t close the sale because ofsomething you could have done differently, or I couldhave done differently, or the company could have donedifferently, so we can figure out how to do it better the nexttime. But don’t tell me it’s the economy’s fault that you

(continued )long term. We’re not going to overreact because of ashort-term change.

—Joan Magruder

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didn’t get this commission, because I won’t believe you. Ifyou’d closed the deal, would you want me to give 20 percentof the sale to the economy instead of putting it on yourpaycheck?’’

When you hit an obstacle, you are the one who isaccountable for finding a way forward. It’s not the econ-omy. It’s not the president. It’s not your first-grade teacherwho made fun of you years ago. It’s you.

I think we’re all tempted at times to abdicate in just theway that salesperson did—to step away frommanaging theprocess and buy into excuses. Every time we make anexcuse and every time we abdicate, we stop managing theprocess. And when that happens, we move out of theAccountability Zone.

‘‘WHAT CAN I DO TO RAISE MY GRADE?’’

Managing the process is something we are accountable forin all walks of life and in all disciplines. We get dozens,maybe hundreds of opportunities to manage the processeach and every day.

My daughter Jackie calculated after a big test that shewas right on the bubble in a college class she was taking. Ifher grade was rounded down, she would get a B. If it wasrounded up, she would get an A. She wanted the A. Thatwas her strategic intent.

Instead of doing nothing, instead of complaining aboutthe situation, and instead of saying ‘‘If it’s not meant to be,it’s not meant to be,’’ she assumed personal accountabilityfor attaining her outcome. She scheduled a meeting withthe teacher, shared how hard she had been working in theclass, and asked if there was any extra-credit assignment


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she could do to push her grade over the hump from B to A.The teacher, impressed with her initiative, gave her anextra-credit task; she completed it, and she overcame theobstacle, thus fulfilling her strategic intent.

Jackie managed the process.

HOUSTON, ARE WE ACCOUNTABLE?

Have you seen the film Apollo 13 about the real-life NASAmission that sustained an unexpected explosion en route tothe moon? The blast disabled the spacecraft, threatenedthe lives of its three crew members, and left MissionControl with a brand new strategic intent: that of gettingthree astronauts home safely in a crippled ship. Can youimagine how differently that movie would have ended if thelead participants in the drama had stopped managing theprocess and started making excuses instead?

Astronaut: ‘‘Houston, we’ve got a problem.’’Mission Control: ‘‘Copy that. We want you to know that

whatever the problem is, Apollo, it wasn’t Mission Con-trol’s fault. This is an issue that arose because our vendorslet us down, our budgets have been slashed, and theweather is really lousy outside today, which has a lot ofthe people here facing some serious morale problems. Wehave no record of a problem at this point in time on any ofthe simulations that took place. Last but not least, wehaven’t really budgeted for a problem here, so we’d appre-ciate you referring to this with some other term, such as‘incident’ or ‘event,’ for accounting purposes. Good lucksorting this out, whatever it is. If there’s anything you wantthe public relations people to pass along, please feel freeto leave us a message.’’

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That’s abdicating—the opposite of managing the pro-cess. Here’s what managing the process sounded like inthe film (and, I suspect, in real life):

NASA director: ‘‘This could be the worst disaster NASA’sever faced.’’

Flight Chief Gene Kranz: ‘‘With all due respect, sir, Ibelieve this is gonna be our finest hour.’’

Let’s think for a moment about what actually happenedon Apollo 13. The mission was to be the third mannedlanding on the moon, and it was launched at a point when amoon landing was seen by some members of the public asroutine. Routinemeans that there’s no adversity, no obsta-cle, no problem to overcome. You’re following the plan, andit’s working. There are no bumps in the road.

No spacemission is actually routine, of course. There arecountless adversities and challenges to deal with as anysuch mission moves forward. Everyone at NASA knew thatmuch. But the world at large figured out for sure that theApollo 13 mission really wasn’t routine when word camethat one of the ship’s oxygen tanks had blown up, causinganother tank to fail, crippling the command module, andforcing the crew to move into the lunar module, whichbecame their lifeboat.

Suddenly, the moon no longer mattered. There was anew strategic intent: getting the crew home safely, despitethe many obstacles that appeared to stand in the way ofthat goal. A new course had to be plotted for earth. Withnavigational systems down, the astronauts would haveto manually reorient the ship for a safe trajectory back toearth, using the sun as a navigational point. The lunarmodule, where the men were now camping out, was closeto freezing. There was limited oxygen and even lesswater—barely enough water to sustain life and cool the


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ship during final phases of the trip home. The oxygenfilters in the lunar module had been designed for two men,not three. This meant that with every breath, the astro-nauts were taxing the system and coming closer to poi-soning themselves with carbon monoxide. The astronautswould have to create new filters from scratch to fit thelunar module’s system. Last but not least, the powersituation was critical: If the crew did not find someway to use its available power more efficiently, theywould die before they reached earth.

None of these problems had clear solutions at the timethey arose. All of them demanded the capacity to managethe process creatively, persistently, and collaboratively.

Procedures for the new mission had to be createdfrom scratch—and tested on the ground in Houston—more or less instantly. There were no protocols for han-dling the new and daunting series of obstacles that hadarisen. Working together, the astronauts and Houston hadto assume mutual accountability for managing the pro-cess and for moving forward toward the goal, despite alack of experience in resolving the obstacles that hadpresented themselves. I’ll be sharing more thoughts onthe important subject of mutual accountability in the nextchapter, ‘‘The Fourth Accountability: Establishing theRight Expectations.’’

If people had tried to follow an existing script, if they hadused the old job descriptions, or if they had wasted timefiguring out whose fault it was that the tanks had exploded,the new strategic intent of saving the men from disasterwould have been compromised, and the astronauts wouldalmost certainly not havemade it home. As it happened, theteam as a whole, in space and on the ground, was able towork together to manage the process.

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When the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts were in graveand immediate danger, NASA didn’t throw up its collec-tive hands and say, ‘‘Well, I guess a successful outcome tothis mission just wasn’t meant to be.’’ Why are so manypeople ready to relinquish their accountability for manag-ing the process when they hit obstacles that are far lessdaunting?

To provide that kind of leadership, we must model theskill of thinking and acting creatively. Following the mostfamiliar set of instructions wouldn’t have gotten the Apollo13 astronauts home safely, and it won’t get your team pastthe many unpredictable challenges they will encounter.

Failure Is Not an Option

Gene Kranz, the mission control director for Apollo13, had a saying: ‘‘Failure is not an option.’’ As busi-nesses are beset with setbacks and failures, likewise,individuals suffer setbacks and failures—but in spiteof those risks, we should set lofty goals. We shouldhave an expectation that We—and that is with acapital ‘‘W’’—can solve the most intractable or seem-ingly impossible situations. That mindset has to be-come part of the culture. There’s a sense of undyingoptimism that I think is a characteristic of many greatleaders; a sense that somehow, we will figure this out.Apollo 13 is my favorite example of inspiring leader-ship against near impossible circumstances.

—Jim McCool


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Implement what you have learned about the thirdaccountability.

Your primary accountability check: Identify opportuni-ties to manage the process! Answer each of the followingquestions in writing with at least two full sentences.

& What is the biggest obstacle you are currently facing inturning your strategic intent into reality?

Change Your Angle

We get companies face-to-face appointments with C-level decision makers at major firms. Sometimes, I’veleft a decision maker over a hundred voice-mail mes-sages before I booked an appointment with that per-son, but I didn’t leave the same voice-mail message,and I didn’t stop leaving messages. Whenever you hit aroadblock and there’s a big boulder in your way, youhave to change your angle if you want to find the‘‘sweet spot’’ that will crack the boulder in two.

—Christine Aquin

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& How have you typically dealt with that obstacle in thepast—by managing the process or by abdicating?

& How could you manage the process in dealing withthese obstacles in the future?

& We are all accountable to someone! To whom will yoube accountable (besides yourself) for managing theprocess on this issue in the future?

Individual focus: What is the biggest obstacle standingin the way of you attaining your personal strategic intentright now?

& How will you manage the process in dealing with thatobstacle tomorrow?

Team or organization focus: As a manager, answer eachof the following questions in depth.

& Within each of the major functional areas of yourbusiness—sales, manufacturing, operations, humanresources, and so forth—list one problem you havefaced consistently and so far haven’t been able toovercome.

& Working with your team, identify three or four ways tomanage the process in dealing with each of thosesituations.

& What near misses have occurred in each of thesefunctional areas? Ask your team to provide examples,and then discuss those examples in depth.

& What risks would you and your organization face if oneof those near misses turned into an actual crisis?

& What steps can you take today to minimize yourexposure to those risks?


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6

THE FOURTH ACCOUNTABILITY:ESTABLISHING THE RIGHT

EXPECTATIONS

E xpectations are the targets we set for ourselves. Oncewe accept them, they determine our actions, our outlook,and our destinies. They create our world. Expectations areworth setting consciously. But we often set them heed-lessly, both for ourselves and for others.

Make the Goal Obtainable

Sometimes, the goals are set too high. A goal thatpeople believe is not obtainable is not motivating,because it is not real. You can’t visualize it. Youhave no evidence for it, no benchmarks that support

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Expectations are our view of what is attainable andwhat is possible. We are accountable for establishing notjust any expectation but the right expectation, both forourselves as individuals and for the team we oversee.

The fourth accountability is all about figuring out whatthe potential is in a given situation and then adjusting ourexpectations accordingly, in alignment with our strategicintent. The quality of our expectations inevitably deter-mines the quality of our measurable results, both individu-ally and organizationally.

We are accountable for what we decide to expect fromourselves, how we decide to strive for it, and whether weactuallymeasure the outcomes of our efforts to fulfill thoseexpectations. Managing our expectations on an ongoingbasis is essential. Our quality of life depends in largedegree on our ability to manage expectations.

Whenwe allow ourselves simply to base our expectationson past results, we are not effectively managing our

(continued )it. The other challenge comes when the bar is set solow that you trip over it. I think one of the worst thingsyou can do to someone is refuse to stretch them. All ofus need to come up against a little resistance in life.So, there’s an art to setting our own expectations, andby the same token, there’s an art to setting expect-ations for other people. Each individual person wework with needs to have a unique goal that the personperceives as realistic and that at the same timestretches that person a little.

—Brian Martin

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expectations. The present and the futuremay have entirelydifferent requirements than those we faced in the past, andour own capacities may be far greater than we realize.

We all have expectations, but not all of us accept ac-countability for establishing the right expectations for thesituations we face and managing them on an ongoing basis.The following story will make the distinction clear.

THE $5,000 MAN

Back in 1960, Maxwell Maltz wrote a remarkable bookcalled Psycho-Cybernetics. It’s a book about our account-ability to manage our own expectations.

Cybernetics is a real-life science, the science of goal-driven systems—guided missiles, for instance, that can hita moving target in midair, or a piece of computer softwarethat identifies the shortest route from point A to point B.These are systems that are designed to attain a certaingoal. Maltz’s book proposes that the human brain andnervous system are themselves cybernetic systems. Heargues that human beings live goal-focused lives. The

Get the Expectations Right

I don’t think it is possible to overstate how importantit is to get the expectations set properly in the begin-ning, regardless of what it is you are talking about. Ifyou can’t set reasonable expectations for yourself andothers, everything else is for naught.

—George Tamke

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problem is, they don’t always realize what goals they’veset for themselves and sometimes don’t even choosethose goals consciously.

One example Maltz gives is of a salesperson working inthe 1950s who managed to make $5,000 in a single yearfrom a subpar sales territory. Even back then, $5,000 a yearwasn’t a huge amount of money, but it was a high enoughfigure to make this salesperson’s manager wonder whatwould happen if the same man had a prime territory towork in. Full of optimism, he gave the fellow a much betterterritory but saw his overall sales effectiveness drop almostinstantly. When the next year was finished, he had earnedonly $5,000, despite having access to much greater oppor-tunity in the new territory.

So it continued, year after year. No matter how promis-ing, or dismal, the salesperson’s territory was, he alwaysfound a way to make it produce roughly $5,000 for him incommissions. One year, he was significantly ahead of quotawith plenty of time still to sell, and his sales managerthought that the pattern was finally broken. No suchluck. The salesperson developed a mysterious illness,spent several months out of the field, and returned toaction just in time to finish the year at (you guessed it)$5,000 in commissions.

Regardless of whether he knew it, that salesperson hadexpectations. He saw himself as a $5,000-a-year man.What he didn’t do was manage his expectations effec-tively. If he’d wanted to, he could have seen himself as a$30,000-a-year man, quite a sum for the mid-1950s, or aneven higher figure. His past did not have to determinehis future. But he allowed it to by default, because herefused to change his own expectations on a fundamentallevel.

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Another way of looking at this, of course, is that thesalesperson never had a manager who helped him to set anew, more realistic expectation of himself.

Sometimes, we sabotage ourselves by settling for ‘‘whatwe’ve always done.’’ That salesperson’s return to the hom-ing signal of $5,000 in annual incomewas not a unique case,and the phenomenon of not managing one’s expectationseffectively is certainly not limited to the world of sales. It is,however, fairly easy to measure in the world of sales, andthe same story has played out countless times on countlesssales teams.

I suspect that most sales managers today could providemultiple examples of people on their teams who had verysimilar experiences. This reflects lost opportunity forboth the organization and the salesperson. These situa-tions change for the better only when the individualsinvolved work with someone who can help them to acceptexplicit accountability for establishing, not simply re-peating, their own expectations. Changing an existingpattern often takes good coaching. And for most sales-people, simply raising the quota to some arbitrary numberis not good coaching.

In the end, a coach can only help us to pose goodquestions. We are accountable for consciously establishingour own expectations to match the current situation, ourcurrent capacities, and our own strategic intent.

Who’s Setting the Best Expectations?

The people who accept accountability for, say, 10things that are part of their job description and

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We have to be extremely careful with expectations,because if we’re not careful, we can train ourselves tobuild our expectations around what was possible for us.That is very different from what is possible!

(continued )then accept personal accountability for five morethings all on their own are the ones who are morelikely to get the bigger bonuses and bigger raises inthis company. They’re the ones who may end uprunning a business of their own someday.

—Elim Chew

Talk to People before You Setthe Expectation

Setting expectations in any quantitative area, anyarea you can measure, means talking to people.Instead of simply setting down a target that makessense to you, you have to get buy-in. You have to askyour team, ‘‘What can happen? What is possible?What is within reach? How much of that can weexpect to achieve?’’ That’s the discussion you wantto have. That’s what you build your constituency on—not the other way around: ‘‘What did we do last year?X? Okay, let’s do X plus 10 percent.’’ You want todefine the universe of what is possible, then workbackwards.

—Nido Qubein

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A LESSON IN MUTUAL EXPECTATIONS

By 1993, my window and door company had lost severalmillion dollars. We were in deep trouble. We were hemor-rhaging money, and it wasn’t pretty.

One huge problem we faced was our turnaround time.Our customers really didn’t like the six or eight weeks ittook to get our products. I knew that one of our competi-tors had a guaranteed two-week turnaround and that thiscompetitor was turning aroundmost of its orders in a singleweek. This competitor was hammering our company!

We began to look for ways to measurably reduce theamount of time it took us to process, assemble, and ship outan order. Because our competition was having such suc-cess with the two-week guarantee, some of the seniorexecutives wanted to simply issue an ultimatum to thepeople on the shop floor: Change the turnaround timefrom six weeks to two weeks maximum . . . or else!

If we’d said that, however, we in management wouldhave been making a big mistake. We would have beensimply holding people accountable for an expectation thatwe had in our heads: two weeks, maximum!

That would have been like telling the $5,000 salespersonthat his quota was now $20,000! A grand gesture, but howeffective would it have been?

Sometimes, when people think of accountability, this isall they can think of—the traumatic experience of beingheld accountable to someone else’s goal. In this case, wetook a different approach, and as a result, we got a betteroutcome. We chose to focus on developing shared expect-ations that were based on the situation we currently faced,our own true capacities, and our strategic intent, whichwas to create a better offering than our competitor.


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I sat downwith a diverse cross-section of the company—the senior management, the salespeople, the productionsupervisors, and the director of operations—and we had ateam meeting. We looked closely at what was actuallytaking place when an order came in the door and whatwas actually happening on the production floor.

Remember, I had done a little research to benchmarkwhat other companies were doing, and I knew that com-petitor of ours was turning aroundmany of its orders in oneweek, not two. I kept that part of the story to myself fornow. The critical point was that I knew it was possible toget the windows shipped in a single week. I now had to getthe key people in my company to buy into that expectationon their own.

Instead of simply issuing orders to the production teamor holding them accountable for a goal that they had no rolein shaping, I asked them some questions: ‘‘What are all thesteps in the process of making a window, and how longdoes each of those steps take?’’ The director of operationsbroke everything down for us, from order entry to assemblyto packaging and shipping. And what he came up withwhen you added it all upwas four and a half days.What didthat mean? Two things. First, it meant that our productionsystem was so inefficient that it was taking four and a halfdays’ worth of work and stretching it out over a muchlonger period of time. And second, those inefficiencies hadcreated a huge backlog of orders that was keeping peoplefrom getting to new orders in a timely manner.

During a break in the meeting, one of the senior manag-ers said to me privately, ‘‘Well, if they’ve got a four-and-a-half-day job, a two-week turnaround is eminently doable.Let’s make that the goal.’’

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Again, this would have been like simply assigning a newquota to the $5,000 salesperson. I wanted the productiondepartment to establish its own expectations and buy intothose expectations based on the new information they had.

When we returned to the meeting, I asked the director ofoperations, ‘‘If we had a two-week timeline to hit, thatwould mean an order would just be sitting here for a wholeweek before anything started, right?’’

He thought for a moment and said, ‘‘Yes, that’s right. Itdoesn’t have to be that way.We really should be able to turnan order around in a week.’’

I said, ‘‘Great. What would have to happen for you to turnthe orders around in that time period?’’

He said, ‘‘Let me talk to our people.’’We agreed that he would have an assessment for us to

look at the next day.I knew that just setting the target was not enough. I had

to give him the opportunity to go to his people and givethem ownership of what was going to happen on theproduction floor. They had to feel empowered and chal-lenged by the new goal we were talking about, and they hadto decide for themselves that the goal was realistic.

The next day, he came back with a plan for completelyredesigning our order entry and production process. Itwas his team’s plan—not mine. But it was based not onour current standard of performance but on the newassumption that it was possible to process, complete,and ship an order within a single business week. I okayedthe plan and gave him the resources he needed to put itinto action. I also gave him the authority to do what he andhis team felt was necessary to turn our expectation into areality. I asked him to let me know if a time came when it


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looked like the plan was going to hit a roadblock, and heaccepted accountability for implementing the new plan.

Over the next six weeks, he and his team took the entiresystem apart and put it back together again. They stream-lined everything, from the way an order came in, to the wayit was assembled, to the way it was shipped out.

Less than a month and a half after our initial meeting, wehad set up a system that placed orders into our productionpeople’s hands almost immediately. Production changedthe design and flow of raw materials through the manu-facturing process. We cleaned up our backlog of orderswithout compromising our quality in any way. All thewindows were made correctly, and they were shippedwithin the new time standard that our employees hadset down for themselves. We went from hemorrhagingmoney every month to making money every month.

Without shared expectations, the order-entry and pro-duction process had rambled aimlessly. With sharedexpectations, a quality product was being manufacturedin a much shorter period of time, and our customers werehappier. We probably couldn’t say the same about ourcompetition, of course, but that was their problem!

What allowed us to turn things around? I believe it wasour ability to set and act on mutual expectations and ourwillingness to give the team both the responsibility and theauthority they needed to do the job.

Make a Prediction

How we set our expectations for ourselves and[where] we set those expectations, or the level atwhich we set them, is often determined by the people

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BEYOND ‘‘WE’VE ALWAYS DONE ITTHAT WAY’’

What are you using to establish your expectations—yourgoals for yourself and your organization? If it’s past prece-dent, or what you’ve always been able to do before, yourexpectations may not reflect your true potential, either asan individual or as an organization.

If I hadn’t known that there was someone in our industryturning orders around in one week, I would not havepointed the team in that direction.

According to many of the people I interviewed, theexpectations we set for ourselves should, as a general

we surround ourselves with or the social contextwithin which we make predictions about what weare likely to do. As a researcher, I’ve found that when Iask people to make predictions about behaviors likevoting, or choosing healthy foods, or being on time, orgetting their health checked, or taking their medica-tions, I find that the act of asking them to predictwhat’s going to happen in their own lives is actuallymore effective in reinforcing those kinds of behaviorsthan simply reminding people about the behavior. Ifyou really want to inspire someone to take action onsomething worthwhile, you may want [to] considerasking the person to make a prediction to you oranother person about what he or she plans to do inthat area.

—Eric Spangenberg


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rule, be higher than past precedent—‘‘the way we havealways done it.’’

In fact, a big part of the leader’s job is to model theaccountability of consistently putting precedent in contextand looking toward what makes the most sense for all hisor her stakeholders, now and in the future, based onwhat ispossible today. To find out what’s possible today, we mustbe willing to look outside our comfort zone, our business,and our industry.

Evaluate Your Expectations of Others

If people keep missing their expectations, they getdiscouraged and despondent, and it gets worse as theygo along. So, you try to budget your expectations. Ifmy magazine’s salespeople keep missing the goalsthat I set for them, then obviously, I am doing abad job. They will get discouraged, and sometimesthey will go and do something else, which is not whatI’m after. So, it is a delicate balance.

—Peter Legge

Benchmark Based on What’s Happeningoutside Your World

At our hospital, we constantly try to isolate whateverisn’t adding value to the customer and then minimizeor eliminate the problem. Our expectation is thatwe will continually improve on the quality of thecustomer experience. When you spend four hours

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in a hospital, the only thing you really want to pay foris that 10 minutes you spend with the doctor when hetells you, ‘‘Here’s your medication, and here’s yourtreatment plan.’’ Then, you want to go home. So,everything that makes you wait would ideally needto be considered ‘‘non-value-added’’ and eliminated.That’s what we’re always moving toward. We alwayswant to identify a baseline and a metric for what thecustomer actually wants to experience and then lookat whether we were successful in moving that needlein the right direction.

In doing that, it’s been our experience that whenwe’re deciding what should be improved and by howmuch, we often want to benchmark based on what’shappening outside the hospital. We want to identifywhere the relevant best practice really is, and wewantto know what our own expectation should be inexecuting that best practice. There were a lot of timeswhere we decided to look at the auto industry, so wecould benefit from something they had learned frommaking cars. If we had managed our expectationsbased only on the experiences we ourselves had livedthrough inside of a hospital, we would have missedout on a lot. You have to be willing to say, ‘‘You knowwhat? There are people out there doing things wehaven’t even thought about. Let’s go see what theirjourney has been, and let’s see how they’re doing two,or three, or five years along the maturation cycle of anidea that might apply to us.’’ That willingness to go offcampus, to set targets based on what people outside

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Another standard for establishing expectations that thepeople I interviewed agreed on was this one: Don’t set yourexpectations based on the outcome you want. Set yourexpectations based on the right things that will deliver thatoutcome when an individual team member performs themon a consistent basis.

(continued )of health care were doing, helped us to set and meetexpectations that would never, ever have arisen fromour own environment. And once you find evidencethat it can be done, your whole expectation changes.If you only look at your own experience, you willself-limit.

—Joan Magruder

What Comes before the Deal?

If you’re thinking about selling for us, you might thinkthat the goal you’d be working toward was to close Xdollars in business. Actually, that’s wrong. That’s notthe goal. We don’t even care about that. What we careabout are the five separatemetrics that we are going tobe measuring that precede you closing the deal.

If you execute against those metrics day in day out,consistently with rigor, that is all we care about and allwe measure. Our expectation is for you to do thosethings. If you execute against those metrics, you willget to where you need to get to in terms of closedsales. And if for some reason you don’t get to where

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Do some benchmarking. Know what the expectationshould be, and don’t be afraid to point beyond your ownpast experience in setting a new expectation. Get the teaminvolved, pose good questions, and the team will often setthe expectations even higher than you would.

If you are in senior management, remember that push-ing beyond what’s realistic can set your team up forfailure. The team has to know that your expectations,while aggressive, are grounded in reality. They must also

Stretch Your Expectations

Every day, you have the opportunity to do things thatyou never thought you could accomplish—but thatmeans getting out of your comfort zone and experi-encing all the discomfort in learning, growing, failing,and striving in order to reach new levels. It may alsomean trying to ratchet up the expectations someonehas set for you instead of dumbing them down.

—Jim McCool

you want [to] get to on the income side, then it is notyour fault. It is our fault. We either screwed up yourtarget list, or we didn’t train you appropriately, or ourstrategy was wrong. The expectation is never the endgoal, because by then, it is too late.

—Brian Martin


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know that you are committed to the expectation, that youare enthusiastic about it, and that you are allocatingappropriate resources to support them as they turn theexpectation into reality.

Get Full Value from Your Expectations

If you set expectations too high, you are not going toget the full value out of your people. If you set expect-ations too low, you’re not getting the full value, either.You have to create a certain amount of tension interms of your expectations, but not too much. I thinkthat a big challenge that a lot of business leaders haveis that we set our expectations for others based onwhat we expect of ourselves. It is unreasonable forleaders to expect exactly the same things of othersthat they expect of themselves. Even in my ownbusiness, I used to get frustrated that people werenot living up to the standards that I had set. I even-tually realized that the standards were the same onesI had set for myself. Well, I don’t really have any rightto expect them to do what I do in terms of the workhours or the effort. I have everything to win andeverything to lose; it’s my business. When I choseto build and grow a business and chose to work nightsand weekends when I needed to, I put myself in aseparate category. If I’m going to set expectations thatother people are going to buy into, I need to acceptthat other people haven’t made that choice.


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Beware of team expectations that have been set by asingle individual. Get feedback from all the stakeholders,and get a look at relevant benchmarks from other indus-tries, companies, and functional areas.

DO YOUR EXPECTATIONS SUPPORT YOURVALUES?

Of course, raising the right expectations applies not justto performance benchmarks but also to your team’svalues and ethical standards. If you put all your time,effort, attention, and energy into the production side, butyou don’t tie those performance targets into your organi-zation’s values and ethical expectations, you will inevita-bly face problems. The values must always guide theperformance targets! If they don’t, you’ve got an expect-ations mismatch.

Use Expectations to Support Your Values

I believe that no business is successful without goodprocedures. Initially, those procedures are likely toincorporate good values. What happens, though, overtime, is that as an organization grows, people forgetto expand their procedures in a way that supports theorganization’s values, and as a result, some compa-nies put their employees in a bad situation: Theydon’t give them the backing or the information or theresources they need to make those values a reality.

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No organization is sustainable without values to com-plement and guide the performance expectations it givesits team members. If your organization avoids dealing withan expectations mismatch for long enough, it will inevita-bly end up facing a crisis.

Let Your People Tell You When the ValuesAre in Conflict with the Expectation

We sometimes forget that there is a potential majorproblem with expectations that are too high—thatare not in alignment with what can actually beachieved. This is where integrity starts to play arole. It may be possible that others may set yourexpectations higher than are realistic. At that point,you have to be willing to demonstrate enough integ-rity to push back a little and say, ‘‘You know what? Ican’t achieve at that level, and we need to talk aboutthat now.’’

If you look at the most spectacular frauds that havebeen committed in various business settings over thelast 20 years, you find that there are a number of cases

(continued )You need something that says to the employee, ‘‘Look,even if the client wants to do this, you tell them no.’’We would rather lose the business than do somethingthat would put our values in question.

—Greg Powell

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you can trace back to the fact that people were being‘‘held accountable’’ for achieving things they couldonly achieve by bending or breaking the rules. Theexpectations were never benchmarked. If the pres-sure gets very intense, for instance, to deliver a certainlevel of earnings per share, people may conclude thatthey have to start to bend the rules and to cheat inorder to do that. That’s not what we want. We wantthem to have a place where they can step up and say tosomeone in authority that it’s simply not possible tohit the goal without compromising standards thatshouldn’t be compromised. They shouldn’t be pun-ished for saying that out loud.

What you have to watch out for is when youdevelop a culture of management consistently saying,‘‘Look, we don’t care if there are no benchmarks thatsupport the idea of attaining this goal; if you’re goingto work here, you’re going to find a way to go outand do it, and how you pull that off is your problem.Don’t bother me with the details.’’ If the expectationsbecome suddenly unachievable, or more importantly,if they were never achievable in the first place, thenyou have to be willing to let people have an honestconversation with you about that.

—Richard Chambers


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Implement what you have learned about the fourthaccountability.

Your primary accountability check: Look for bench-marks outside your industry, functional circle, orarea of expertise that will tell you where your mostcritical expectations should be set. For instance, if youare a manager in charge of a hotel, what could you learnfrom the cruise ship industry about expectations in theareas of customer service, restaurant management,hospitality, room service delivery time, and guest satis-faction? If you own and operate a home-based writingbusiness, what expectations could you set for yourselfin the areas of accounting, promotion/marketing, ortime management by talking to someone who operatesa home-based graphic design business?

Individual focus: Identify your own personal expect-ations for the next 30 days. Don’t set arbitrary goals—settargets that you know from your own personal experi-ence and research that you can hit, want to hit, and willknow when you have hit.

& How do you know this expectation is attainable?(What outside source confirms this? Who could youtalk to for benchmarking purposes? Identify at leastthree candidates.)

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& Why do you want to fulfill this expectation? (What isthe reason to take action on it today and for the next30 days?)

& What will tell you for certain that you have actuallyattained this goal? (Will your bank account be at acertain level? Will your production increase in a mea-surable way?Will your weight be at a certain number ofpounds and no higher?)

Team or organization focus: Pick one measurableexpectation that your team is supposed to execute on.Then do the following.

& Identify at least three outside organizations you couldevaluate for benchmarking purposes in setting thisexpectation. Don’t be afraid to choose organizationsthat are outside your industry circle.

& Make a list of all the stakeholders, both internal andexternal, who will be affected by your team’s hitting(or failing to hit) this goal. This includes each of yourteam members!

& Place a check mark by every stakeholder who hasgiven you feedback (such as an e-mail or a brief verbalassessment) on whether the expectation you haveestablished is appropriate. Ask for advice on establish-ing the expectation. Look for benchmarks.

& Make sure you receive some form of feedback fromevery stakeholder you can track down before you con-firm the expectation. Is the goal too high or too low?Does what you’re trying to accomplish support theorganization’s strategic intent? Do you have buy-in?Does your expectation support your organization’svalues?


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7

THE FIFTH ACCOUNTABILITY:CONTRIBUTING TO YOUR

RELATIONSHIPS

The final accountability involves our relationships withothers and with the larger world. Failure to manage ourrelationships means ultimate failure. Success in managingour relationships means ultimate success. This success orfailure depends entirely on the quality of our contributions.

Relationships at Many Levels

We are all accountable to stakeholders. As dean, I havedifferent groups of stakeholders, each in a differentstage of their relationship with my organization, whichis a business school. I have to pull all of those folks

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(continued )together and integrate them in a way that creates acritical mass support for our programs, whether it befinancial support, or support in terms of activity andinvolvement, or other kinds of support. My job isreally about maintaining relationships, developingnew relationships, and most importantly, engagingthose relationships in a way that creates the energyand the outcomes that we are looking for. So, forexample, I need to maintain relationships with per-spective students. These are students that haven’tyet decided to come to my university, but at thesame time, they are looking at it. I need to be ableto engage them and maintain relationships withthem so that they will eventually decide to comehere. That means giving something to that relation-ship, of course. I need to maintain that relationshipand build it into a different type of relationship.Ideally, they turn into students, and I engage withthem on that front as well. When those studentsleave this place, they become alumni of the univer-sity. That’s a completely different set of stakeholdersand a different part of the evolution as these peoplego through the system.

As alumni get further away from the school interms of years, they often become financially suc-cessful, and they have the capacity to become do-nors, and perhaps even major donors. So, I have tomanage those relationships as well. And then often,past the donor stage, many of these folks begin tothink about where they are going to send their

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We are each accountable to make contributions to ourrelationships. In fact, making a contribution is the onlyeffective way to manage a relationship.

As individuals, we are accountable to ourselves for eachof the other four accountabilities. At the same time, we areaccountable to others in our lives. We all have importantconnections and commitments to other people, eitherindividually or collectively.

Stop and think about any great accomplishment orpositive event in your life. Whether it was your gradua-tion, a promotion, starting your own company, or anyother landmark, you didn’t experience it entirely on yourown. Whatever that achievement or positive experiencewas, it involved someone else. Once you understandthis much about human experience, you begin to under-stand why the ultimate punishment in any penal system,short of the death penalty itself, is solitary confinement.When society really wants to make a point, it doesn’tadd years to a wrongdoer’s sentence or work hours tothe man or woman’s day: It deprives the wrongdoer ofrelationships.

Our accountabilities to manage our relationships comein two big categories. First, we need to contribute to ourpersonal relationships with family, friends, and business

children to school, and so the cycle starts all overagain. And so for me, my job, and any success I haveexperienced in my job, [it] is all about maintainingaccountability to those relationships and integratingthose relationships with the school.

—Beck Taylor

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You Are Accountable for the Qualityof the Relationship

Malcolm Gladwell writes about the fact that a givendoctor’s likelihood of being sued by a patient hasvery little to do with the competency of the doctorand almost everything to do with the quality of therelationship the doctor has with the patient. We maylose sight of the importance of the doctor beingaccountable for supporting the relationship. If Iwas going to practice with 20 physicians, I wouldwant to make sure that my peers were going tobe held accountable for doing a good job when itcomes to managing their relationships, in addition tobeing held accountable for the practice of goodmedicine.

In the workplace, I expect my employees to doa good job of managing their relationships withothers. It’s part of their job. It matters. I have letmany a person go who was doing a good job as anindividual contributor but thought it was unimpor-tant to manage relationships with other people.They would say, ‘‘Leave me alone! I do my jobwell; nothing else should matter. I don’t care whatother people think.’’ It absolutely does matter whatother people think. You shouldn’t compromise yourethics or compromise who you are, but you have torealize that it really does matter what other peoplethink of you.


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associates. This falls under the heading of personal ac-countability. We also need to contribute to our relation-ships with society and the larger world in which we live.This falls under the category of social accountability.

In both realms, we should constantly be looking for waysto invest in the relationship and enhance the value of therelationship over time.

The secret of successful relationship management interms of both personal accountability and social account-ability can be summed up in one word: give.

Try this simple experiment: Think of a single important,successful relationship in your own life that does notfeature you making some kind of contribution or the otherperson making some kind of contribution to you. It shouldtake you about 30 seconds to realize that the only relation-ships that fall into this category are dead ones. In fact, thequickest way to kill a relationship is to start keeping trackof all the reasons it’s not your turn to give to it and supportit. The minute two people stop looking for reasons to giveto each other, the relationship between those two peoplestarts to decline.

Personal accountability is not about giving back—it’sabout giving!

If you’re truly accountable to a personal relationship, youwill give—period. You will look for reasons to serve others.

How do you treat the key relationships in your life? Doyou look for reasons to give, period? Or, do you look forreasons to give because you feel you owe someone some-thing? There’s a big difference, you know. The kind ofgiving that supports relationships is the giving that doesn’tthink about what’s gone before or what’s likely to comeback in return.


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Giving back is the process of giving because you havereceived something first. That kind of giving is not basedon the core principle of giving because it is the right thingto do. Whether you have received something first shouldnot enter into your decision to give. The cycle of realgiving in any relationship always begins with the intentto give.

Real giving has to start with someone asking, ‘‘What canI give to this relationship?’’ Why shouldn’t that someonebe you?

This kind of giving always pays off in the long term.When Iwas in thewindowbusiness, therewere timeswhenthere were industry-wide glass shortages, but the relation-ships we had contributed to over time saw us through. Wehad built up strong personal relationships with our keyvendors, and because we had held ourselves accountablefor maintaining those relationships over time, everythingwas in place when we needed glass. When there wereshortages, we never ran out of glass. We sometimes ranlow, but we never ran out.

Supporting Relationships over Time

Getting is often a result of giving, but if the giving is anexpectation to get something, then it comes across asa hollow kind of giving. Most of our company’s sup-pliers turn into lifelong friends, because we reallywant to help them and help their businesses. As aresult, most of our supplier relationships have gottenbetter and better over time.

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There is something fundamentally human about acknowl-edging the fifth accountability. We are built with the needto connect with others, the need to nurture and sustainrelationships, and the need to care and be cared about. Weare somehow more ourselves when we make a consciouschoice to give something to a relationship with someoneelse. The relationships that matter most to us are the ones inwhich both sides are accountable, over time, for giving tothe relationship for the sake of the relationship itself.

Any meaningful relationship that endures over timeinevitably draws on this sense of mutual accountability.The more individual accountability there is for givingwithin any relationship—not giving back, but giving—themore significant the relationship is to both parties.

During the recession recently, things fell off the clifffor everybody, and businesses slowed down for a lotof our suppliers. There were companies that floodedthe market with inventories; people were going bank-rupt. We could have bought that inventory andchanged suppliers over and over again, but we de-cided that we are going to stick with the long term,stay with the people who had helped us to put togethera winning formula, and support our long-term suppli-ers. We built a plan together with our key supplier towin in our market. That plan didn’t make them liqui-date their entire inventory, because we knew thatwasn’t a good approach in the long term. We decidedthat we weren’t going to play that game, and wedecided we were going to commit to the relationship.

—Jeff Booth


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YOUR SPHERE OF CONTRIBUTION MODELSYOUR VALUES

In your personal life, what are you doing to support thepeople you love and care about?

Supporting Relationships over Time

Managing relationships will always be an essentialpart of leadership. Leaders can’t act effectively with-out good advice from reliable sources, and you can’tget that advice without giving something to the rela-tionship. Whenever you act as a leader, you have tomake sure you keep your people on board—peoplewho may agree or disagree with the course you’repursuing at any given moment. It’s a little like amarriage. You can’t simply ignore your spouse.

In our case, we were negotiating a new constitutionon behalf of 42 million people. Managing relationshipsin that situation is not always easy. In fact, it’s ofteneasier to negotiate with your opponents than withthose who are supposed to be your supporters. Youhave to work hard on an ongoing basis to stay con-nected, because you need people who are close to youand who will tell you what you need to hear, eventhough it may not be what you want to hear. You wantclose counterparts—people who are willing to betransparent in their thinking; people who are preparedto share what they think and accountable for whatthey have said to you in the past.

—Roelf Meyer

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If you’re a salesperson, what are you doing proactively toconnect and reconnect with your clients?

If you’re in management, what are you doing to find outwhat’s going on in the lives of the people on your team?What are you doing to help them achieve their goals?

Building relationships is about choices, and the choicesshould always be based on your values. To get a fix onyour values, ask yourself: How can I best serve thisrelationship in the short term and the long term? Posingthat question on a consistent basis allows you to createa group of values-based connections, which I call yoursphere of contribution.

When you’re expanding your sphere of contribution,you’re not focused on short-term agendas. Serving effec-tively in both the short and long terms becomes youroverarching purpose—your standard for managing all ofyour relationships. Once you’re committed to serving ef-fectively, your decisions suddenly get a whole lot easier,because your best values are driving the actions that servethe people you’re connected to.

When I’m training senior executives in the ‘‘No MoreExcuses’’ program to create a culture of accountability intheir organization, they often ask me about the best waysto cultivate ethical, responsible, transparent decisionmaking. The answer isn’t to write amemo or give a lecture.It’s to give, give, and give somemore to the people who areclosest to you in the organization.

Any organization’s commitment to social responsibilitycan only be a reflection of the responsibility its peopledemonstrate to their colleagues within the organization.

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acknowledge them openly, accept your fair share of theresponsibility for resolving them, and spend more time onthe solution than on the blame game.

If you take that approach, your team will follow yourown example. They’ll start asking how they can best serve

Delivering on the Promise

Our promise at High Point is, ‘‘Every student receivesan extraordinary education in a fun environmentwith caring people.’’ That means we’re accountableto each other for delivering on being caring. So, howdo you do that? Well, you do it in small ways and bigways, and you start by recognizing that the caringdoesn’t stop with our relationships with the students.If we don’t exhibit that caring internally, we can’tpossibly show it to our students. So, for instance,we just built a building that was supposed to cost$40 million; it ended up costing over $60 million. I’mnow accountable to explaining to the Finance Com-mittee Board of Trustees and to other stakeholdersexactly how and why that happened, how I plan todeal with it, and why the end result is going to befruitful, purposeful, and worthy of any risk that wasinvested in the process.

If I’m going to be true to our promise and ourmission, I have to accept both the accountabilityfor that project and also the accountability to becaring toward the other people in the organizationwith whom I’m working.

—Nido Qubein

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the relationship and the organization in both the short andlong terms, and they will never, ever solve a problem in away they wouldn’t want to read about tomorrow morningon the front page of USA Today.

Lecturing people about values is useless. Using thecontributions you make to a relationship to model yourvalues is a much more effective strategy. In the end, forany organization to endure, our accountability to manageour relationships must support principles of equity, trans-parency, and ethical dealings with others.

NETWORK BY GIVING

Don’t worry about widening your sphere of influence.Focus on widening your sphere of contribution. That’sthe sum total of the people you have a connection withand are willing to give something to on a consistent basis.Your sphere of contribution should be aligned with yourvalues and should be constantly expanding. You shouldalways be looking for new people you can give to andconnect with. The more people you help succeed today, the

No Transparency, No Accountability

You cannot have an ethical behavior unless you actu-ally are accountable or transparent about what youdo. You cannot say, ‘‘I behave ethically, but I don’tbother to disclose what I do.’’

—Jordi Canals


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more people who will be out there predisposed to help yousucceed tomorrow.

The only truly effective way to network is to give to arelationship within your sphere of contribution and thenconnect that relationship to another great relationship in away that benefits everyone involved. In essence, you’regiving again by introducing people. On social networkingsites like YouTube and LinkedIn, you can do this in amatterof seconds with a few clicks of your mouse.

As I was writing this book, I used Twitter to send amessage to my contact base about an interview I wantedto conduct. Within seconds, I received a response fromone of the people on my list, and in just a few minutes,I had a new interview and a brand new professionalcontact!

JUST KEEP GIVING

Just keep giving to the people in your sphere. Give time,give energy, give thought, and give care. Just keep giving,and the relationships will grow. Don’t worry about what’scoming back to you. Get better at giving than anyone else.This is one of the classic secrets of leadership. It’s some-thing that every leader I interviewed was eager to share.I don’t know how much of a secret this really is, but it’sdefinitely a principle observed by highly accountable exec-utives and managers at all levels.

Have you noticed that the most effective businesses tendto be led by great networkers? These are people who standout because they know how to give to relationships. Thoseleaders never take any relationships for granted. Theyknow that all human relationships, whether high or low,

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are based on contributions, and they are always looking forsome reason to give. That’s networking!

Suppose you’re a salesperson taking an importantclient out to lunch. Granted, you’re having lunch becausethis individual is a client. If you’re truly connected to thatperson as a person, however, and if you’re truly lookingfor ways to support and make contributions to the rela-tionship, more often than not, you will find that thebusiness will take care of itself! This is the secret ofmost successful sales careers: The salesperson caresabout the customer as a person and is personally account-able for looking for ways to make contributions to therelationship.

As you grow your relationships, you inevitably growyour sphere of contribution. For this book, I interviewed alot of people—many of whom reached out to other peoplewho were intrigued by the possibility of taking part in theproject. I was introduced to people from all over the worldand from all walks of life who were as enthusiastic as Iwas about the subject of accountability. By the time I wasdone writing the book, I had many more relationshipsthan I had when I started out and many more opportuni-ties to give.

Don’t get distracted by networking. Just keep lookingfor new ways to give and new contributions you can maketo the relationships that you have in your life. Your sphereof contribution will grow and thrive, and so will you.The more focused you are on giving for the sake of giving,the better off everyone in your sphere of contributionwill be.

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customers, and others on a personal level. If you donot respect a relationship enough to send the messagethat you actually care about a stakeholder’s emotions,you are not yet fully accountable for supporting thatrelationship.

Giving to Stakeholders

Every three months, I communicated with our entireemployee pool by sending out a personal letter. Iwrote not to the employee but to the employee’sfamily to tell everyone how the company was doing.If profit sharing was on track, we included a littlecheck for every family. I think it was $175 every threemonths. That’s not a big deal from an accountingstandpoint, but from a relationship standpoint, itwas everything. To get a letter from the president ofthe company, along with a check—it was very mean-ingful to the relationship.

Another relationship strategy I used: When I wastaking a flight, I’d have them make an announcementat the terminal: ‘‘The CEO of our airline is at Gate 12;he will be here for about 10 or 15 minutes. If any of youhave a question about Southwest Airlines, please stopby and say hello to our president.’’ Many times, 10 or15 people would show up, and I would shake a fewhands. Just making that interaction proactively builtup the relationships and improved our connectionswith people.

—Howard Putnam

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WHO BUILT THE WELL?

I got up this morning, and the first thing I did was to gointo the bathroom, turn on the faucet, fill a glass withwater, and brush my teeth. As I was doing that, I startedthinking: Water is the sustaining force of all life. Wesimply cannot live without water. Who built the systemthat gets the water onto my toothbrush? I didn’t have theslightest idea.

Our Emotions Are Our Reality

We are all human beings, and that means we experi-ence nothing aside from our emotions. Our emotionsare our reality. So, if you’re going to manage relation-ships, you’ve got to manage emotions. I have askedevery single person I’ve hired two questions: ‘‘First,what is most important for you to feel professionally,every day? And second, what’s most important for youto avoid feeling? What would you really rather not gothrough, not have to replay with your spouse at theend of the day, when that person asks how your daywent?’’ I keep the answers on file, and I look at thoseanswers every week when I do my own planning.

I always try to remind myself that I’m not so much‘‘managing people’’ as I am managing what they wanton an emotional level. When you realize what it is thatthey want, you also realize that you have to talk toeach person in a unique way.

—Brian Martin


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Then, I began thinking that not so very long ago, peopleweren’t fortunate enough to be able to simply turn onthe faucet every time they needed water. What did theydo? Theywent out to the well and they pumped somewater.And if you lived in a small community, maybe at the centerof the community was a town well. Everyone in the com-munity drew water from that well, and everyone benefitedfrom the well. But you know what? The people using thewell often aren’t the same people who dug the well.

Think about that for a minute. Think about what washappening just a century ago in this country. The peoplein a town were drinking water and sustaining life fromsomething that had been created before they even existed.Had someone not dug that well, the town would not beable to support itself! We take things like that for grantedsometimes.

Someone always has to start digging the well. If you stopand take a look around, you’ll realize there are a lot of wellswaiting to be dug these days.

Barack Obama once said, ‘‘We are the people we’ve beenwaiting for.’’ That’s another way of saying that someonealways has to start the giving, and I see him every morningin the mirror when I turn on my water faucet and startbrushing my teeth!

We are each responsible, not just for ourselves but forthe larger good.

Finding Purpose

What gives human life purpose? I think it’s our pas-sionate pursuit of something that can define our legacy

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For many, the fifth accountability’s emphasis on selflessgiving takes on a spiritual dimension. That was certainlythe case with many of the people I interviewed for thisbook.

in a meaningful, purposeful way that involves service.You just have to choose what you want to do to serve.Whatever you choose, pursue it in a way that stretchesyou a little. Every time you stretch beyond yourself,you redefine who you really are. Whether you’re suc-cessful in your aim is almost secondary. What mattersis the continuous, tenacious commitment to makesomething happen that will allow you to serve some-one or something that’s bigger than you are.

I have tried to spend a third of my life earning, athird of my life learning, and a third of my lifeserving—and looking back, I realize I’ve gotten themost profound happiness and satisfaction from theserving part of that equation. Not everyone who ismaterially successful is happy. Once you look atthose who are both materially successful and happy,what you will find is that their happiness is almostalways rooted in their ability to serve—their abilityto build bridges and connect with other people andbenefit those people.

I believe that at the end of the day, we really areaccountable for our gifts—for the abundance that hasbeen given to us. I believe we benefit most when webenefit others.

—Nido Qubein


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In the end, regardless of whether we give ourselves aspiritual reason for doing so, we have to give something;not necessarily money, but something. We can give time,we can give attention, or we can give the recycled alumi-num cans we find by the side of the road. Again, this is notgiving back to the community but simply giving: giving forits own sake, for the greater good. It’s like digging a well forpeople who will be drinking from it in the future who wemay never meet.

A Billion Trees

Ultimately, I feel that we are accountable to our inter-nal and external customers, to our community, andultimately, to our planet. We must be accountablefor giving something to the planet we live in. That’s

The Ultimate Accountability

Be your best, not just for yourself but for others aswell. Ask yourself: What is my purpose? If the answeris ‘‘making a lot of money,’’ then you may have asituation where greed undercuts accountability. If Iam too greedy, then I won’t be responsible to mycommunity, my country, or my world. I think thehappiest people are those who are not just searchingfor money but want to contribute something to others.The ultimate accountability, I think, is to observe theGolden Rule.

—Tan Sri Ramon V. Navaratnam

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For many of the Accountability Masters I talked to, thefifth accountability took the form of a desire to contribute,not just to those who were close to them personally but toall those who cannot help themselves.

probably the highest level of accountability for me. Mygoal is to plant a billion trees; we’re pursuing that goalon our web site, www.saveourplanet.org. I think that’spart of being accountable to the environment—takingon the responsibility to bring oxygen back to theenvironment.

In the end, it’s all about giving: not just givingmoneybut giving time and being involved—actually beingpart of the community. Sometimes when people gettoo greedy, it’s because they’ve forgotten about some-one that they were supposed to be accountable to.That’s where a lot of the problems in the financialsector and in other parts of the global economy sprangfrom, I think. People forgot about their own account-ability to their internal and external customers, andto the larger community, and to the planet.

—Dato’ Dr. Jannie Tay

Am IMy Brother’s Keeper?

I was interviewed about my contribution to the dis-advantaged people in Puerto Rico. The person askedme to sum up my beliefs, and I quoted a story from theBible. In the Bible, when Cain killed Abel and God

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SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY

We each have a relationship with our community, and thebest way to nurture that relationship is to give. You don’thave to give money, but you do have to give something.

Community can be the local Parent Teacher Associa-tion, the township you live in, your subdivision, yourchurch or synagogue, or a food pantry in your community.These days, with the Internet, our community is not onlygoing to be local but also global, and for all I know,intergalactic.

Community may include people I do not know. It maybe the future community that comes along after I’m gone.I’m accountable for devoting time to digging wells and

(continued )asked him about his brother, Cain asked back, ‘‘Am Imy brother’s keeper?’’ Yes, we are, and isn’t it won-derful that we are? We are blessed that we are. Whatan honor and a joy.

—Sila Calder�on

Making a Difference

I always ask the question, ‘‘Is what I am doing makinga difference?’’ I try to remember what was helpful tome, and then I try to do that for others.

—Lowell Kruse

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creating opportunities for the people who are comingalong in a generation or two, and so are you. We are ac-countable to the people who need a hand getting startedor the people who are just plain down and out and don’tknow where to turn. Each of us has something to give.Each of us has some time. Each of us could watch one lesstelevision show a week and find a way to help out some-how, somewhere.

There is always a great opportunity to follow through onthe fifth accountability, support a relationship, and findsomething to give. The question is whether we are willingto look for that opportunity.

There are many different ways to contribute. If weactually think we do not have an opportunity to give,then we have left the Accountability Zone.

Green Accountability

Sometimes, giving means taking less. We found outthat we were the biggest user of power in the city ofSydney, Australia, and we realized that that put usin a position where we really wanted to look moreclosely at what we were doing. What we found isthat our greatest opportunities for cutting down ourown energy use lay in the heating ventilation andair conditioning area, where we can reduce our powerconsumptions by 20 percent. We set that goal forourselves, and now we are making good progress.

—Steve Romer


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You can start by finding more opportunities to give justa little of the most precious commodity of all: your time.We are each given 24 hours in a day. We can each chooseto give some portion of that time to a cause that is largerthan ourselves.

Change Your Perspective

A friend told me once, ‘‘When I get rich, I want to beone of those people who gives and gives at everyopportunity.’’ I told him he had it backwards. Thewealthiest people I know—and I’m not just talkingabout wealth inmonetary terms—arewealthy becausethey are always looking for opportunities to give.That’s how they got there.

—Jeff Booth

No Excuses for Not Giving

People tell me they can’t afford to give. They say, ‘‘Hey,I have no money. I can’t do what you do.’’ Okay— givesome time. Just because you don’t have the dollarsto throw around right now, that’s no excuse for notgiving. If you can’t give money, give your time, or giveyour attention. Time is just as good as money, and inmany cases, probably a lot better.

When I was about 21 years old, I had no money togive, but I agreed to give a lot of my time to the BigBrothers and Big Sisters of America. I think I made a

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real difference in one kid’s life. His name was Andrew.I worked with him for two straight years, every Satur-day, and at the end of our time together, he wasenrolling in technical school. He wasn’t on drugs; hewasn’t stealing anything; he wasn’t hanging out withthe wrong crowd. He was on the right track. Lookingback, I like to think the time we spent together onSaturday afternoons was a part of him being on theright track. That wasn’t any kind of financial gift at all.It was just deciding to spend timewith Andrew insteadof watching the ball game on Saturday afternoon.

Everybody has some time to give. Nobody is thatbusy. If you think you don’t have time to give, just keeptrack of the amount of time you spend watching TV orlooking at YouTube. Everybody is given 24 hours in aday, 365 days a year. The question is, what do we wantto do with those 24 hours? You can choose to make adifference with your time.

One really important rule when it comes to giving isfollow-through. If you say you are going to do some-thing, then show up and do it. Anyone can talk aboutgiving; not everyone actually gives. I have a littlesaying: ‘‘Talk is cheap; whiskey costs money.’’ So,don’t just talk! Put something on the table after youmake a commitment, whether it’s money or your owninvolvement or a combination of the two.

Find something you can make a commitment to—and then follow through on that commitment. Showup and do something.

—Michael Staenberg


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And of course, we can give by making a long-termpersonal commitment to help our neighborhood, our com-munity, our nation, and the larger world in whichwe live. Indoing so, we are expanding our Accountability Zone in themost profound way of all—by acknowledging that we areconnected to countless others and that everything thattouches us ultimately touches another person.

Show ThemWhat Your Company Believesabout Relationships

A customer who had bought four shirts returned toone of our stores after she noticed that she’d losther wallet. She didn’t have any money to get home.Our employee decided to loan the customer $50from the cash register. The next day, the customerand her parents came into the store and repaid themoney. That employee not only won us a customerfor life by choosing to support that relationship—she modeled our company culture for everyone elsein our organization.

—Elim Chew

Change the World by Making a PersonalCommitment

In South Africa, we have a lot of poor people. We havesomeone begging on every single corner at everysingle traffic light in the city. You constantly feelthe need to help the wider community, and I think

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Implement what you have learned about the fifthaccountability.

Your primary accountability: Identify at least threeinstances when you have reached out to help someonewith no expectation of receiving help in return. If youcan’t think of three, make those three contributionsright now!

Individual focus: Pick one person who is extremelyclose to you and one person who isn’t. Give each avoice-to-voice call today that lets the person know youare thinking of him or her and hoping all is well. Keep

as aworld, we have to do that. It doesn’t make sense tome that a third of the children in this country are livingon a starvation diet—that is unacceptable. I thinkthe greatest accountability I would have above allthe others would be to make sure that we as a worlddo not allow that to continue for much longer.

—Gary Bailey


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calling until you reach someone live—don’t leave avoice-mail message. Do not ask that person to doanything for you or even imply that he or she shoulddo something for you!� List 10 important relationships on a sheet of paper.For each one, write down what you’ve done tosupport each of those relationships and when you’vedone it. Then, list what you plan to do next to make acontribution to each relationship.

� Identify at least one opportunity where you canpersonally make a contribution to the larger com-munity—without having been asked.

� We are all accountable to someone! To whom willyou be accountable (besides yourself) for takingaction on your plan for supporting or contributingto your relationships?

Team or organization focus: Identify one way yourteam, department, or company can give somethingof value to the larger community. Come up with anidea for something you aren’t already doing and havenot been asked to do. Discuss your idea with yourteam, and come up with an action plan for giving time,effort, energy, or resources that reflects your organi-zational values and priorities. Review your plan withthe team on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

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8

CREATING A CULTURE OF

ACCOUNTABILITY

There were so many great insights from my interviewswith the Accountability Masters that I was tempted to startwork on a sequel before I even finished this book.

The wealth of great material at my disposal meant that Ihad to think carefully about what I wanted to include in thischapter. I decided to focus on a topic that is near and dearto my heart and important to every person I interviewed:expanding the team’s Accountability Zone over time bycreating a long-term culture of accountability within theenterprise.

Everyone I interviewed for this book was a leader.Everyone I talked to was interested in making accountabil-ity a day-to-day organizational reality, not a fad or a trendor even a high priority for a single project. Everyone Italked to had already spent a great deal of time thinkingabout the very best ways of making accountability a way

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of doing business and an operating philosophy over boththe short and the long term that supports the organization’smission.

Maybe you’re curious as well: How do you implementaccountability in the long run? How do you make it part ofyour culture? How do you keep what you’ve learned abouttheFiveAccountabilities frombecoming something you talkabout but don’t actually do? How do you ensure that ac-countability actually gets woven into your own life, the livesof your loved ones, and ideally, the daily life of everyonewith whom you interact in the workplace during the day?

On the following pages, you will find some of my favoriteresponses to these questions. Implementwhat follows, andmake accountability a consistent part of your own organi-zation’s culture!

MAKE ACCOUNTABILITY PART OF YOURCULTURE BY . . . BEING CLEAR

Begin at the beginning: Building and supporting a culture ofaccountability starts with accepting the responsibility forclarity in your relationships with people.

Create Clarity!

If you don’t have clarity, then how can you haveaccountability? A leader’s first job, in my view, isclarity creation around business objectives and suc-cess definitions. Once you’ve done that, you can focusyour energies on your team and the work towardattaining your objectives—not before.

—Jim McCool

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MAKE ACCOUNTABILITY PART OFYOUR CULTURE BY . . . EDUCATINGPEOPLE ABOUT THE ‘‘WHY’’ OF YOURSTRATEGIC INTENT

If your people don’t understand why your organization isdoing what it is doing, there is no way they are going to buyinto it. If you are a leader, it is your responsibility to sharethe ‘‘why’’ behind your organization’s strategic intent and todo so in a compelling way.

Do They KnowWhy They’re Doing WhatThey’re Doing?

First of all, you must treat your employees like humanbeings; you must make them feel that they’re actuallypart of the business. That means making sure they’refully aware of what the business is: why it runs theway it does, how its investments work, who the stake-holders are, and why it makes sense for them to pulltogether andmaximize their advantage. Particularly inthe African context, we have a lot of work to do on thisfront. Many of our mine workers see themselvessimply as hands. I’ll ask people, ‘‘What are you doingin this business?’’ And they’ll say, ‘‘I’m here to sell myhands.’’ They don’t see themselves as human. They’rea pair of hands that can be rented. They’re physicalenergy that can be used in a certain way. They don’tyet know why we’re doing any of this. So, if you cantap into the fact that they are humans; if you can helpthem understand how they’re using their intellect as

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MAKE ACCOUNTABILITY PART OFYOUR CULTURE BY . . . REWARDINGTHE RIGHT PROCESS

Earlier, we talked about managing the process, by whichwe meant responding creatively to obstacles in a way thatsupports your creative intent. Here, we are talking aboutsomething very different. We are talking about rewardingspecific processes that people find pleasurable to executeas they fulfill their strategic intent.

Each member of your team should enjoy moving towardthe fulfillment of his or her goals. If they don’t take pleasurein the processes that allow them to fulfill their commit-ments to themselves, they’ll quickly lose focus. Even if theirintentions are good, they’ll probably find themselves side-lined when they hit a roadblock. It follows that if we wanta team or a person to remain accountable for takingaction on the strategic intent we’ve established together,we have to make a special effort to notice, reward, andreinforce those processes that people actually like!

(continued )well as their energy and hands; if you can show themhow they can improve the business and improve theoutcome for themselves through improving the busi-ness, then suddenly you have the possibility of ac-countability. Now, they believe in the business. Theydidn’t believe in it before—not because they wereopposed to you, but because they didn’t understandwhat you were doing. No one had explained it to them.So, accountability was impossible.

—Gareth Taylor

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LEARN TOGETHER AND GROW TOGETHER

Does your organization reward learning, even when (espe-cially when) that learning is accompanied by major mis-takes? Do people in your organization know that they willbe praised, not punished, for admitting that they don’tknow something? Do you make a point of giving peoplepublic praise for identifying major problems so that theintelligence of the enterprise as a whole can be applied tothe problem?

No Satisfaction, No Progress

Often, people don’t take enough intrinsic satisfactionout of process. Woody Allen once said that 80 percentof success is showing up. I think a lot of the time wedon’t stop to ask ourselves why people sometimesdon’t even bother to show up. It’s because there’s nosatisfaction in executing the process.

If I actually have self-accountability with the short-term tactics that support my goal, I should be takingsatisfaction in consistently executing that process.That has to be one of the things the process does:reengage me. I may still be nine years from my ulti-mate goal, but if I don’t take some kind of pleasure inthe process of executing, there’s going to be this senseof inertia. Time will pass, and I may be sitting in thesame place I was four years earlier. Too often, I think,people don’t take pleasure or satisfaction in a processwell executed.

—Eric Spangenberg


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If your answer to any of those questions was no (or even‘‘Let me think about it’’), your enterprise’s culture actuallymakes it difficult for people to learn and grow over time.If you want people to develop full accountability, youmust make it easy for them to answer for both successesand failures and to look for learning opportunities in both.(By the way, they’ll learn a lot more from their failures thanfrom their successes.)

A Lesson from Africa

Our company culture is built around a native Africanphrase: ‘‘SikhulaKunYe,’’meaning ‘‘Wegrow together.’’This is an idea we talk about almost every day: We tryto empower people tomake and design their ownplansand then execute on those plans. We understand thatthis freedom also carries with it the burden of account-ability. So, it may be a bit of an expensive freedom, butit’s the kind of freedomwewant everyone to have—notjust leaders or middle management.

We want all of our people to be able to think forthemselves, to be honest about both successes andfailures, and to learn from what’s happening. We wanthonest feedback, because we think that’s the only wayfor people to learn and for the organization to learn.Blamedoesn’t come into play in our company except inreally extraordinary situations, like corruption or grossnegligence. Those are quite rare, of course. Beyondthose situations, we try not to blame anybody for any-thing.We have this saying: ‘‘It’s okay to giveme the badnews immediately.’’ That means you won’t get blamed,

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MAKE ACCOUNTABILITY PART OF YOURCULTURE BY . . . LETTING PEOPLE PLAYTO THEIR STRONG SUITS

The process you select for your people should be one thatallows them to maximize their strong suits. If you ask themto invest their time, effort, and energy in a process theycannot execute well or cannot execute at all, they willeventually disengage. If you allow each person to use tacticsthat work for them, they will become more and morecommitted to the strategic intent youwant them to buy into.

you won’t get in trouble for doing that. You know, iftime is tight, just pass along the bad news, so we cando something about it. We can always talk about thegood news when we see each other again. That’s fine.Maybe we can have a drink together then, too.

—George Steyn

KnowWhat They Can Do . . . and WhatThey Can’t

I always tried to get very, very clear onwhat I could doand could not do in my athletic career. For instance, Iknew I was shorter than most guys I played against. Ihad to strengthen things that would help me compen-sate for that. I also knew I wasn’t the speediest guyin the league, and I wasn’t going to become that

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MAKE ACCOUNTABILITY PART OF YOURCULTURE BY . . . PUTTING FRONTLINEPEOPLE IN CHARGE OF THE ‘‘HOW DOWE DO THIS BETTER?’’ DISCUSSION

How do you make sustainable improvements in account-ability within your organization? Here’s an innovativemodel that drafts frontline employees and gives them achance to deliver on and defend ideas for doing thingsbetter. This delivers ownership and buy-in!

(continued )guy any time soon. I had longer arms and powerful legsbut didn’t have the quickness of some of the people Iwould play against. Knowing what I could do andcouldn’t do allowed me to focus in on those tech-niques that would support the things I actually coulddo to turn a game around—which in turn made it morelikely for me to be able to make a big play in a gamesituation. It’s exactly the same in business.

—John Hannah

A Frontline-Driven Process

Perfecting quality in a sustainable way is always, Ihave found, a frontline-driven process. It’s never atop-down process. So, we’re putting our people incharge of the discussion. We’re taking them out ofthe workflow for a while and putting them on the

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frontlines, making a carefully chosen group of 10 or12 people the key players in identifying some new,leaner processes that will do a better job of deliveringvalue to the customer over time.

We’ve learned that there has to be shared account-ability for a new process to work—and that is verydifferent from siloed accountability! So, one job isgetting people out of their silos. In any given groupthat’s working on making a change, two-thirds ofthe people are not from the area where the changewould occur. We don’t just want the content expert.We don’t just want the person who delivers the ser-vice. We want a fresh set of eyes, and that means wewant people from outside of the department on theteam, too. That gives us diversity of thinking andmultiple perspectives on what the customer will ac-tually experience.

People set aside four days. They spend the wholefirst day out on the floor, observing and measuringexactly what happens on the frontlines from begin-ning to end and coming up with ideas for making itbetter for the customer. Then, on days two and three,people are actually simulating the new process theywant, in real time. They are empowered to change theprocess as it’s unfolding, right there on the floor. Bythe fourth day, the new process is in place. But thequestion remains: Is it delivering on our expectation ina measurable, sustainable way? Is it moving the nee-dle in the right direction over time?

To answer those questions, we have 30-day, 60-day,and 90-day review sessions, where those same people

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MAKE ACCOUNTABILITY PART OF YOURCULTURE BY . . . ENCOURAGINGMEANINGFUL DEBATES

As a general but very reliable rule, people will only assumeaccountability for initiatives once they feel that they havebeen listened to. If your organization does not do a good jobof listening to people—if it does not encourage people toshare their insights, concerns, and frustrations in a positiveway—then you are going to have a hard time getting themto do the things that will actually support your goals.

Make it part of your organizational culture to talk throughthe successes and the challenges that come your way. Givepeople permission to contribute, to share problems, and totake part in a fair and an open discussion. Once you do that,you will find them much more likely to assume accountabil-ity over time for taking action on the goals you’ve set out.

(continued )who revised what was happening on the ground comein and talk to the whole organization about the cus-tomer impact and the sustainability of what they’veimplemented. During those review sessions, every-body gets to know your business. We encouragepeople from all around the organization to ask toughquestions, play devil’s advocate, and find out if all theangles have been thought through. We’ve found thattransparency and peer pressure can be wonderfulthings when it comes to breaking down silos andsupporting shared accountability.

—Joan Magruder

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MAKE ACCOUNTABILITY PART OF YOURCULTURE BY . . . ORGANIZING FORACCOUNTABILITY

How do you create and sustain a culture of accountability?By organizing for accountability. That means building astructure that teaches accountability—that organizes foraccountability—and then rewards accountability.

DoYourPeopleFeel ThatThey’veBeenHeard?

We’ve got to trust people. We’ve got to hear them out.We’ve got to be able to get everyone to come in andhave a real debate, a real discussion with real frustra-tions, and then we’ve got to walk out of the room witheverybody being on the same page. Now, we may havehad to go through some bloodletting in order to getthere, and there may not always be complete consen-sus on everything that was discussed, but all theviewpoints are explored in that discussion. Thatway, people can feel that they’ve been heard; theycan walk out of the room and say, ‘‘Okay, let’s go do it.’’

—Bill Whitacre

Consistent Standards

You focus on the team. All of our results and all of ourincentives are evaluated based on team performance,

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MAKE ACCOUNTABILITY PART OF YOURCULTURE BY . . . REVIEWING YOURSTRATEGIC INTENT AND YOUR RIGHTTHINGS WITH OTHERS

Over and over again, the Accountability Masters I spokewith emphasized the importance of committing each teammember’s goals and tactics to paper and ensuring that theteam member had the opportunity to review his or hergoals and tactics with another person on a regular basis.

(continued )not on individual performance. So, my incentive com-pensation metrics as the CEO are the same as thepeople who report to me, and theirs are the same asthe people who report to them, and theirs are the sameas the people who report to them. So, it’s not a diffe-rent set of standards. It’s very consistent, from thefrontline to the most senior levels of management.

—Steve Lipstein

Share the Plan!

Every individual in our firm has what we call a per-formance development plan, or PDP. Each year, thatperson works with his or her counselor to set out thefive or six most important things to accomplish in thenext year. Those goals have to be clearly aligned withthe business unit the person is working in. So, if youare working in a real estate industry group, we know

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MAKE ACCOUNTABILITY PART OF YOURCULTURE BY . . . BEING READY ANDWILLING TO BE AN ‘‘ACCOUNTABILITYMENTOR’’

The instinct of finding someone to be accountable to is, forsome of us, an essential part of establishing self-account-ability. Not everyone on your team will need this kindof ‘‘accountability mentor,’’ but you should constantly beasking yourself who does and be prepared to play that rolewhen it is appropriate.

what that group as a whole is trying to accomplish, andthen we look at the individuals within that group andsay, ‘‘How can you contribute to the success of the realestate group this year? What are the five or six impor-tant things you should do to help the unit achieve itsgoals?’’ Then, we have a process throughout the next12 months where there is a progress review.

You need a counselor who leads the discussion andhelps you review your progress on your plan, so youcan remain accountable to that and see what progressyou’re actually making. I have a counselor, and sodoes every single person in the firm.

—Jim Castellano

I Am Accountable to You!

RichDeVos is the owner of our team and the cofounderof the Amway organization. He is 82 years old and for

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MAKE ACCOUNTABILITY PART OF YOURCULTURE BY . . . FOCUSING ON VALUESFIRST AND LAWS SECOND

Which would you prefer: for your people to hold them-selves accountable for staying out of trouble by followingthe rules or for them to be accountable for thinking cre-atively and consistently, taking action on your organiza-tion’s core values? All of the Accountability Masters Iinterviewed favored the latter option.

(continued )many years has supported an older evangelist namedAnthony Zeoli and has helped to fund his ministry.Every Sunday morning at 9:00, Rich’s phone rang athome, and Rich knew who it was. Rich would pick upthe phone and say, ‘‘Goodmorning, Anthony,’’ and thenAnthony would start telling Rich all the things he haddone thatweek. Onemorning, Rich said, ‘‘Anthony, youknow you don’t have to call me like this.’’ And Anthonysaid, ‘‘Yes I do, because I am accountable to you—yougive the ministry this money, I have to be accountableto you for that.’’ Rich loves to tell that story; the point, Ithink, is that all of us are accountable to someone.

—Pat Williams

Beyond Following the Rules?

Sometimes, organizations send people the message,‘‘We have a lot of rules and a lot of laws here, and you’d

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better follow them all.’’ We keep telling people, inother words, ‘‘Here are the laws, and if you break thelaws, then you are bad.’’ For instance, ‘‘If you don’tmeet X, Y, and Z performance expectations when youinteract with a customer, then you are bad.’’ I’m notreally fond of that kind of discussion. I’d prefer to talkabout principles. I’d prefer to throw the rulebooks outas much as you possibly can and then tell people whatthe organization’s core values are. In this model,you’re saying something very different to the team:‘‘Here’s how we interact with each other, here’s howwe interact with a customer, and here’s what we wantto achieve. Go make that happen.’’ To the degree thatit’s possible, you want to give people the freedom totake action as they see fit within the broad outlines ofthose principles and give them the freedom to do whatthey think is right. Of course, this is a challenge. A lotof people in any organization are going to feel a littleuncomfortable with that standard, and there willoccasionally be problems you need to sort out. ButI think that there is a much bigger upside waiting foryour customers and for your business when you givepeople the authority to navigate in a way that feelscomfortable to them.

Ultimately, what you really want people to thinkabout is what they need to do to follow through onthe values you’ve established for your organization.There are probably 30 important meetings going onhere at any given time, and I am not going to be in allof those meetings. Many people are operating at

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MAKE ACCOUNTABILITY PART OF YOURCULTURE BY . . . MAKING SURE THE TEAMFEELS SUPPORTED

Don’t assume your people know that you will back themup as they move forward to take action on your strate-gic intent. Make absolutely sure they know! Communi-cation with the team should constantly reinforce thismessage: ‘‘I am delegating responsibility and authorityto you.’’

(continued )many different levels. If I have made it clear to themexactly where we are headed and exactly what theguiding principles and values of the organization are,then I can feel very confident about what’s happeningin all those meetings. I can trust that people will verylikely make the right decision about the way forward.

—Peter Aceto

Delegate Responsibility and Authority

If you want people within your organization to holdthemselves accountable for something, you have togive them both authority and responsibility. A lot ofpeople know they’re being held responsible, butthey also feel that no one in management is backingthem up when they try to fulfill that responsibility,

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MAKE ACCOUNTABILITY PART OF YOURCULTURE BY . . . INTELLIGENTLYADJUSTING YOUR EXPECTATIONS

Sometimes, the team will uncover an important new pieceof information or propose a paradigm-shifting new ideathat justifies revising the expectations that you and theteam have set. Be open to these moments. Honor yourteam’s creativity by showing enough flexibility to changethe target when circumstances warrant.

so they don’t hold themselves accountable. If theydon’t feel supported by management, then they’renot supported.

—Craig Lovett

See Where the Path Leads

Be aware that there will be times when your teamidentifies a major crossroads for you that youhadn’t noticed. A new event or a new piece ofinformation can lead you in a completely differentdirection, a direction that is quite beyond the bound-aries of the expectations you’ve set up. You don’twant to follow every new path, of course, but youdon’t want to reject that new path instantly, either.Strike a balance. Have reasonable expectations,and if an event happens that leads your team in a

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MAKE ACCOUNTABILITY PART OF YOURCULTURE BY . . . DEMONSTRATING YOUROWN COMMITMENT TO FOCUS ON THERIGHT THINGS

In centuries past, the architect who had designed anarch for a town would demonstrate his accountabilityfor his own work by being the first person to standbeneath the arch when the construction supports wereremoved. Make no mistake! Your team is looking forthe same level of accountability from you, and they willbegin by looking at the choices you make about your ownright things.

(continued )promising new direction, have some fun, see wherethe path leads, and keep an open mind. Don’t refuseto explore the path just because it isn’t part of yourgrand plan.

—Clem Sunter

Accountability for Doing the Right ThingsFlows from the Top Down

Leaders must focus on the right things—because ifthe CEO is focusing on the wrong things, that is notgoing to help in getting the organization as a whole upto speed. The people who work for that CEO are

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The conversation about how to build an accountableorganization is, of course, an ongoing one. Please join it byvisiting www.SamSilverstein.com.

inevitably going to spend their time focusing on whatthe CEO is focusing on. Like it or not, we set the tone.

—Gerry Czarnecki


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CONCLUSION:THE ACCOUNTABILITY MOVEMENT

T here came a moment early on in the process ofdeveloping this book when I realized that each and everyone of the Highly Accountable People I was interviewingwas a member of a special group.

Each of these successful individuals had a powerfulshared cause with the other achievers I was interviewing:Each was on a mission to recruit new accountable peopleby helping them to recognize and expand their own Ac-countability Zones. Each of these Accountability Masterswas saying, ‘‘There are accountable people, and there iseveryone else. Join us!’’

This ‘‘accountability cause’’ transcended even their ownpersonal or professional intentions. In fact, this causesupported everything they did. It enriched every alliancethey made, supported every project they undertook, andinvigorated every goal. It transformed their very sense ofself. They all loved talking about people they had inspiredto reclaim long-dormant Accountability Zones.

Each of these people, I realized, was an active participantin what amounted to a global movement: the movement tobuild accountability into families, organizations, and na-tions, one person at a time. They each supported that

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movement by expanding their own Accountability Zoneand by spreading the word about the power of the FiveAccountabilities to others.

My challenge to you as we close is simple: Join ourmovement.

Become a highly accountable person. Implement theFive Accountabilities in your own life, and share themessage with others. Then, share your stories about build-ing a culture of accountability within your own family, inthe workplace, and in the larger world.

If you’re willing to become part of our movement—andby this point, I hope you are—you can begin the job ofbuilding a more accountable world by building a moreaccountable you. That means practicing and implementingwhat you’ve learned here about right things, new space,managing the process, establishing expectations, and con-tributing to relationships. It means reaching the point inyour life where you can say, ‘‘No More Excuses! I’m notgoing to make excuses, and I’m not going to buy excuses,and I want the world to know that.’’

It alsomeans spreading theword about accountability byyour own consistent example and by direct invitation. Nomatter what you may have been through in your life, youcan always expand your own Accountability Zone, and youcan inspire others to do the same. You can practice the FiveAccountabilities in your own life, and you can talk aboutthe accountabilities regularly with the people you meet.You can also share this book. Most of the people I inter-viewed about the Five Accountabilities were eager to seethe finished book so that they could share it with otherpeople in their life; it’s likely that you, too, know someonewho would benefit by reading about these principles.

Conclusion: The Accountability Movement

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Spread the word. Always begin with yourself. If you wishto change the culture of your family, your department, orthe larger world, you will find, as I have, that a Culture ofAccountability always begins with personal choices andthat accountable relationships always involve individuals,not organizations.

Please share your experiences and your own insights onaccountability with me by visiting www.SamSilverstein.com.

I look forward to hearing from you! Remember:Accountability is not a consequence . . . accountabilityis your competitive advantage!

Conclusion: The Accountability Movement

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E1BINDEX 11/14/2009 10:36:29 Page 179

INDEX

Accountabilityas competitive advantage, xi, xii,

22, 177meaning of, 13–21modeling, 14, 21, 22and transparency, 139

Accountability Circle, 18. See alsoMastermind Group

Accountability Masters,xxiv–xxvii, 175. See alsoindividual names

Accountability mentors, 167, 168Accountability movement, 175–177Accountability Zone

alignment, xviengagement, xviii, xixexpanding, xx, xxiii, xxiv, 14, 19,

175, 176and Five Accountabilities, xii, xv,

xx, xxi, xxii. See also FiveAccountabilities

and modeling personalaccountability. See Modelingaccountability

strategic intent, xviiand transparency, xiii, xv, xix

Aceto, Peter, xv, xxiv, 61, 170Alignment, defined, xviAquin, Christine, xxiv, 104

Bailey, Gary, xxiv, 153Benchmarking, 117–123, 126,

127Booth, Jeff, xiii, xxiv, 69, 135,

150Buxton, Dixon C., xxiv, 48

Calder�on, Sila, xxiv, 148Canals, Jordi, xiii, xxiv, 1, 139Castellano, James C., xxiv, 167Chamberlain, Wilt, 82, 83Chambers, Richard, xix, xxiv, 8, 23,

88, 125Chew, Elim, xxiv, 112, 152Choices

as opposite of excuses, 8personal choices and culture of

accountability, 177Competitive advantage, xi, xii,

22, 177Culture of accountability, creating

accountability mentors, 167, 168clarity, accepting responsibility

for, 156expectations, adjusting,

171, 172as frontline-driven process,

162–164importance of, 155, 156

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Culture of accountability, creating(continued)

individual strengths, maximizing,161, 162

learning and growth, 159–161listening and encouraging debate,

164, 165organizing for accountability, 165,

166and personal choices, 177responsibility and authority,

delegating, 170, 171rewarding the right process, 158,

159right things, reviewing with others,

166, 167and strategic intent, 157, 158, 161,

166, 167, 170top-down accountability, 172, 173and values, 168–170

Cycon, Dean, xvii, xxivCzarnecki, Gerry, xxv, 16, 173

DeVos, Rich, 167, 168Disney, Walt, 79–82Doing the right things

accountability check, 64–66delegation of responsibility and

authority, 60–63described, xiiidentifying right things, 44, 45importance of, 37, 38ownership of right things, 55–60, 66and strategic intent, xvii, 39, 47–55,

57–59, 65, 66strengths and weaknesses,

awareness of, 63, 64and success, 38–44and transparency, xiiiand use of time, 45–49

Donius, Bill, xxv, 50

Eaton, Mark, xxv, 83Engagement, defined, xviii, xixEvans, Kenneth, xxv, 60, 86

Excusesaccepting excuses from others,

16–18, 32, 33consequences, 23, 24defined, 9and denial of personal

accountability, 12, 13and focus on ‘‘the story,’’ 28–32as justification for failure, 10as limit on experiences, 32, 33and politicians, 11, 12and strategic intent, 33and weakness, 24–28

Five Accountabilitiesand accountability movement, 176and Accountability Zone, xii, xv,

xx, xxi, xxiidoing the right things, xii. See also

Doing the right thingsexpectations, establishing, xiv. See

also Right expectations,establishing

process management, xiii, xiv. Seealso Managing the process

relationships, contributing to, xiv,xv. See also Relationships,contributing to

scalability, xvispace management, xii, xiii. See

also Managing your space

Gardenhire, Ron, xiGladwell, Malcolm, 132Group accountability, xv

Hannah, John, xxv, 41, 51, 58, 162

Integrity, individual andorganizational, 7, 8

Joswiak, Greg, 75

Kapp, Phyllis, 90, 91, 94Kelleher, Herb, 53, 54

Index

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Knetter, Mike, xxv, 51Kranz, Gene, 101, 103Kruse, Lowell, xxv, 148

Larmon, Pat, xxv, 72Leadership and accountability, xv,

xxi, 10, 11, 14–16, 155–157Legge, Peter, xxv, 9, 118Likierman, Sir Andrew, xxi, xxv, 13,

52, 89Lipstein, Steve, xxv, 166Lovett, Craig, xxv, 171Ludomirsky, Achi, xxv, 92

Macias, Mariano, xxvMagruder, Joan, xxv, 53, 68, 98, 120,

164Managing the process

abdicating compared, 92–94, 99accountability check, 104, 105described, xiii, xiv, 85, 86as life skill, 96–100and moving beyond "we tried,"

86–88andmutual accountability, 100–103near misses, learning from, 94–96proactive support of strategic

intent, 89–91and response to adversity, 88, 89and strategic intent, 86, 87,

90–95, 99–102, 104, 105Managing your space

accountability check, 83, 84commitment to new direction,

79–83creating new opportunities,

75–78creating space for new growth,

73–75described, xii, xiiihabit and familiarity, influence of,

69–73importance of, 67–69

Martin, Brian, xxv, 45, 108, 121, 143Mastermind Group, 18, 19

McCool, Jim, xxv, 64, 103,121, 156

Meyer, Roelf, xviii, xxv, 136Modeling

accountability, xxii, 14, 20–22,118

creating thinking, 103doing the right things, xii, 55values, 136–139

Morneau, Justin, xiMuhl, Ronnie, xxvi, 38

Navaratnam, Tan Sri Ramon V., xxvi,146

Nowak, Stan, xxvi, 55

Powell, Greg, xxvi, 124Proactive accountability, 9, 26-27,

86Putnam, Howard, xxvi, 142

Qubein, Nido R., xvi, xxvi, 39, 112,138, 145

Relationships, contributing toaccountability check, 153, 154described, xiv, xvand emotions, 143and giving, 133–135, 139–142, 145,

146green accountability, 149importance of, 129–132and leadership, 135and mutual accountability, 135personal accountability, 133personal relationships, 131, 133and responsibility for larger good,

143–147social accountability, 133, 148–153sphere of contribution, 136, 137,

139–141and success, 129and values, 136–139, 154

Responsibility and authority,delegating, 60–63, 170, 171

Index

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Right expectations, establishingaccountability check, 125–127adjusting expectations and

creating culture ofaccountability, 171, 172

changing existing patterns, 109–112

described, xivfeedback, 123, 127importance of, 108, 109mutual expectations, 113–117obtainable goals, 107, 108, 126standards for, 117–123, 126, 127and strategic intent, 108, 111, 113,

127and values, 123–125, 127

Roets, Dana, xxviRomer, Steve, xxvi, 149

Schick, Peter, xxvi, 56, 73Self-accountability, 1–9, 18–21Shakespeare, William, 19Silverstein, David, xxvi, 21, 44, 63, 79,

122, 132Snively, David, xxvi, 6, 47Social accountability, 133, 148–153Spangenberg, Eric R., xxvi, 117, 159Sphere of contribution, 136, 137, 139–

141Spin doctors, 11Staenberg, Michael, xxvi, 75, 151Stakeholders

accountability to, 129–131, 138alignment with, xvi, 53communication with, xii, xviii, xix,

xx, 141, 142feedback from, 123, 127

Staubach, Roger, xiv, xxviSteyn, George, xxvi, 161Strategic intent

and Accountability Zone, xvii

and culture of accountability, 157,158, 161, 166, 167, 170

described, xvii, 50and doing the right things, xvii, 39,

47–55, 57–59, 65, 66and excuses, 33and managing the process, 86, 87,

89–95, 99–102, 104, 105and right expectations, 108, 111,

113, 127and use of time, 47, 48

Sunter, Clem, xxvi, 172

Tamke, George, xxii, xxvii, 11, 35, 46,109

Tay, Dato’ Dr. Jannie, xxviiTaylor, Beck A., xxvii, 131Taylor, Gareth, xxvii, 158Taylor, Paul, xxvii, 59Top-down accountability, 172, 173Transparency

and accountability, 139and Accountability Zone, xiii, xv,

xixand doing the right things, xiii

Tuchman, Robert, xxvii, 49, 52

Valuesand accountability, 13, 14, 16, 20, 21and creating culture of

accountability, 168–170and excuses, 28and expectations, 123–125, 127modeling, 139and relationships, 136–139, 154

Washington, George, 11Whitacre, Bill, xxvii, 165Williams, Pat, xxvii, 168

Zeoli, Anthony, 168

182

Index

THE FIVE ACCOUNTABILITIESFOR PERSONAL AND

ORGANIZATIONAL GROWTH

SAM SILVERSTEIN

$24.95 USA | $29.95 CAN

Accountability is not a consequence.Accountability is your competitive advantage.

Many professionals avoid accepting personal accountability for failures while readily ac-cepting credit for successes. But those who achieve truly great things in life know that true accountability makes all the difference between success and failure—on both a personal and organizational level.

Based on interviews with over fi fty successful masters of the art of accountability—including academics, Fortune 500 CEOs, and Hall of Fame athletes—No More Excuses identifi es the fi ve accountabilities that all truly successful people and organizations share. These prin-ciples and traits are the common currency of successful individuals and businesses across virtually every industry and culture. When organizations embrace accountability at all levels, performances improve and competitive advantages emerge.

When you willingly accept and embrace the fi ve accountabilities, you encourage account-ability in others and empower your teams to achieve at the highest level. The result is an organization focused on its fundamental values and committed, at the individual level, to achieving critical strategic goals.

Whether you’re a business owner, a top executive, or a team leader, accountability starts with you and trickles down to everyone else. If you want to build an organization that achieves its goals and beats the competition, it’s time for No More Excuses.

PRAISE FOR NO MORE EXCUSES

“As a former CEO of Southwest Airlines, I learned that a key leadership prin-ciple for success in a challenging market was to make accountability a com-petitive advantage. In this exciting read, No More Excuses, Sam will show you step-by-step just how to do that. The fi ve accountabilities that Sam shares will be key in making your organization successful.”

HOWARD PUTNAMFormer CEO, Southwest Airlines, and author of The Winds of Turbulence

“At ING DIRECT, we believe that understanding and driving a culture of accountability is a major competitive advantage for our business. Practic-ing the fundamentals of accountability as set out in this book can help you differentiate your business, drive engagement and retention among your employees, improve interactions with your customers, and drive business results. Sam Silverstein’s unique approach to this strategically vital issue is required reading.”

PETER ACETOPresident & CEO, ING DIRECT, Canada

“When I look at the Five Accountabilities, I think these are probably the key drivers that allow people to make and fulfi ll commitments.”

GEORGE TAMKEChairman of The Hertz Corporation; Culligan Ltd.; and ServiceMaster

“In the age of fi nger-pointing and corporate bailouts, accountability seems to be a long forgotten myth. As someone who sees, fi rst-hand, the impact of personal accountability on our nation’s healthcare costs, I view No More Excuses as an important guide for individuals and corporations that want to harness the power of accountability to achieve their goals.” STAN NOWAKCEO & cofounder, Silverlink Communications, Inc.

“You cannot run a company or an organization effectively, no matter how big or small it is, without a strong culture of accountability. At PEP, employees at all levels know exactly what outputs are expected of them, they also know how and how often these outputs are measured. No More Excuses shows you exactly how to build the same kind of culture.” GEORGE STEYNManaging Director, PEP, South Africa

SILVE

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IN NO

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SAM SILVERSTEIN is an internationally acclaimed consultant, coach, and business advisor. A past president of The National Speakers Association, his client list includes such organizations as AFLAC, Lucent Tech-nologies, the National Association of Home Builders, Prudential Insurance Company, and the United States Postal Service.

AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH: SUZY GORMAN

no more excuses: the five accountabilities for personal and organizational growth

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