The Kraig Kramers approach: CEO Tools
This week, I’m going to talk about Kraig Kramers and CEO Tools.
I was introduced to Kraig in 2000 through TEC, now called Vistage. Vistage is a monthly meeting of CEOs in small groups to work on their businesses. It consisted of a formalized process of group and individual meetings with a facilitator. Vistage is also where Masterminds began. Every quarter, we would have a speaker, and Kraig was one of the most popular speakers there was.
He had the experience of turning around seven businesses and the ability to take all that knowledge and condense it into a concise set of tools for just about every situation.
This is where I first learned of the one-page business plan, Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs), and walking the four corners when you have a physical business.
Are you an imitator or an implementer?
Many of Kraig’s ideas were not novel or his own, but he did something most people don’t. He executed on them and delivered results.
In the past, I’ve voiced my concerns about imitating others and its inherent danger as a business strategy. My admiration for Kraig for pulling a bunch of others’ ideas while railing against imitation may leave you confused. Here’s the difference.
Kraig understood and could explain how and why to use each of these tools. He was adept at it.
We live in a world where people decide they are experts. They have been taught to create a sales page selling a feeling you get when your problem is solved, only to try and figure out what the course is after they know they have customers. They ask what you need help with, or the only solution they provide is bringing others together with the same problem to figure it out for themselves.
That is different from someone who can look at your business, determine the 4% that fixes the 64%, and then suggest the best tools to get the job done. Kraig was one of those guys.
Going from imitator to implementer requires you to understand how and when to use the tools.
Here is a great example. Remember Amarillo Slim from the Wynn-ing Ways and Game of Cults seasons? He beat Bobby Riggs at ping pong using a frying pan. He beat Evel Knievel at golf using a carpenter’s hammer. Any tool in the hands of an expert can deliver above-average results. Then there are those of us who have a golf bag full of the latest clubs, each with a specialty, yet can’t use any of them as intended nor know why to choose one over the other.
How can this be?
The expert becomes proficient in the use of a tool before adding other tools. It is the old Bruce Lee quote, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
For me, the most impactful tool was the one-page business plan. It’s a great example of an idea that is easy but difficult to implement. It doesn’t take anything to write a single-page plan for your business with one measurable success goal focused on the 4% that creates 64% of your results. You could do that this afternoon.
It’s the devotion to staying in your lane and just doing that plan for the following 364 days, then reassessing and writing the next one. A true practitioner understands that a year could be too short. The business plan will take two or three years, and they will stick to it until they know they have wrung out all that they can.
Practical steps: Implementing tools into your business
By the way, this all ties into what I discussed in last week’s article about oscillations. I’m writing this article, and the words are flowing like water. I believe that is because I’m working on optimizing creative performance. If where you need to make improvements to optimize your business is becoming proficient in some tool you have never used, then follow this process.
- Understand the purpose of the tool.
- Understand what successful use of the tool looks like.
- Find an expert to help you with the use of that tool. That could be in real life or virtually via something like YouTube.
- Be critical of the tool. Ask if it’s the right one, but don’t mistake your misapplication or lack of expertise as the tool being wrong.
- Continue to practice using the tool. Remember that everything you’re good at right now, you weren’t good at when you started.