THE EIGHT RULES OF BUSINESS THINK

THE EIGHT RULES OF BUSINESS THINK

According to Marcum, Smith, and Khalsa, the eight rules of Business Think are:

• Rule 1: Check Your Ego at the Door. Check your ego at the door. Work delicately with the egos of others to keep dialogue open. Change yourself to lead to a change in the business.
• Rule 2: Create Curiosity. Ask questions and gather perspectives from your company’s collective intellectual diversity.3.
• Rule 3: Move Off the Solution. Get to the underlying business issues. Make sure you’re not guessing. Focus your attention on the vital few issues.
• Rule 4: Get Evidence. Collect the soft evidence to prove that the business problem or opportunity exists. Turn the soft evidence into hard evidence that the business can measure.
• Rule 5: Calculate the Impact. Convert the hard evidence into a financial equivalent to make sure that there is a worthwhile impact or payoff.
• Rule 6: Explore the Ripple Effect. Carefully consider who or what else in the company is affected by the problem or opportunity. Consider the relative weight of the importance of the issue compared to other intitiatives in the company.
• Rule 7: Slow Down for Yellow Lights. Know what has stopped the company from successfully doing something about this before now, or what might stop you in the future. If the impact of a problem or opportunity is big, ask “What has stopped you (or the company as a whole) from successfully resolving these issues before now?” If this is a new opportunity with no history, the yellow-light question is “What, if anything, might prevent the successful implementation of this solution from going forward?”
• Rule 8: Find the Cause. Identify the cause producing the symptoms that are showing up. Treat the cause of the problem rather than the effects.