Awesomely Simple: Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas Into Action

John Spence gets it: Simplicity is the new gold standard. Businesses that get simple shed expenses and boost customer loyalty. The new talent to have is simplicity-skills. Spence provides simple, yet surprising, recommendations on how to take the complex out of business life."

Tim Sanders - Author of Love Is the Killer App

Ch2 Best People

We live in a knowledge economy. In the world today, very few businesses gain sustainable competitive advantage through proprietary technology, manufacturing might, or specialized logistics. One key to success for every business is to create a strong corporate culture that attracts, grows, and keeps the best people.

This does not mean that every person who works for you needs to have three advanced degrees from Harvard and ten years as a former astronaut, only that each be the absolute best for the position that he or she is in — the best chief financial officer, the best engineer, the best receptionist, the best janitor. Obviously the skill levels of these four people are completely different, but the attitude, passion, creativity, innovation, and driving desire for success and excellence should be no different. Though you'd be hard-pressed to find a leader or manager today who doesn't agree with you that it is critical to get the best people on their team, you'd also find that few organizations do a superior job of creating the systems and processes needed to keep a steady stream of bright, talented, motivated people who want to work for them.

Chapter Two can catapult an organization to a higher level of success with one powerful idea: turning your organization into a talent magnet.

Additional Resources

Recommended Reading

First, Break All the Rules

This is a well researched and thought-provoking book about how to retain and grow top talent. After analyzing more than 25 years of data collected by the Gallup Organization - using an impressive sample size of 80 thousand managers and 1 million staff from 400 companies – the authors lay out precisely what is need to better attract, manage and keep the best people.
Read my full review

Lessons in Excellence from Charlie Trotter

This is a superb book on what it takes to build a world-class company based on talent.  Charlie Trotter leads what is arguably one of the top restaurants in the world, and this book gives you a window into how he has taken his team to the pinnacle of their industry. On a personal note, I used this book extensively when creating the vision, culture and key strategies of my business.
Read my full review

Make the Right Choice

This is a perfect book to give to your team to help them see how important it is to “make the right choice” about the attitude they bring to work every day. Written in a fun, witty, enjoyable tone, Joel clearly shows how each of us has the ability to live a more creative, passionate, effective, and productive life. I really loved this book.
Read my full review

NOBLE ENTERPRISE

This is truly one of my favorite books about how to create a fantastic corporate culture that will attract talent and allow them to thrive. I was deeply impressed with the ideas in this book and gave copies to many of my clients. This gets a very strong recommendation.
Read my full review

Talent: Making People Your Competitive Advantage

This is a solid, information-intensive book about the critical need to be "obsessed with talent" as a competitive advantage. Lots of examples, how-to information and superb advice on creating a human capital centric organization.
Read my full review

Team Building

A clearly written and easy to apply guide for creating successful teams, with lots of solid how-to information, excellent examples and great advice, it remains one of my very favorite books on team building.
Read my full review


Related posts from John's blog

“Make Them Easy To Manage”

I was recently out in California having a conversation with one of my clients, the COO of a Fortune 500 firm that has engaged me to coach several of his senior leaders. He said something that really struck home for me – “John, these are absolutely fantastic guys, but they can be tough to manage… please help make them easier to manage.”
read this post...

How to Handle the “Bad Apples” on Your Team

In line with my 3-T (Train, Transfer or Terminate) philosophy let me outline what I feel are some of the things a prudent manager/leader needs to do to try to turn this sort of worker around.
read this post...

A Few Ideas on How to be Successful in Sales

Although this was written to someone brand new to the selling profession, I believe that ideas are applicable to any person who makes a living asking other people to buy what they are trying to sell.
read this post...

An Excellent “Ideal Leader” Model from Millennium Bank

I recently had the opportunity to work with Andy Williams and his entire group of bank officers to help them more clearly define the skills, attitudes and behaviors of an “ideal” leader at their bank.
read this post...

My Top Book Recommendations

The following is a list of ONLY my top reading recommendations. I know the list looks long, but I assure you these are just the very best out of my library.
read this post...

The Value of Mentors

If you want to move ahead and succeed – you do NOT need a mentor… you need a vast network of “Power Mentors” to help you on your way.
read this post...