Lessons From A Lifetime Of Transformations

Today brings the new book by Ron Shaich, founder, and former CEO of Panera Bread. It’s called, Know What Matters: Lessons From A Lifetime Of Transformations.

Shaich offers clear-headed lessons for the entire life cycle of an enterprise, from bootstrapping a startup to going public to managing large companies to selling a business. He challenges readers to grapple with how business impacts life, sharing his own struggles and setbacks with as much honesty and candor as he describes his successes.

The primary four transformations Shaich led were:

Evolving Au Bon Pain (his predecessor company) from a simple French bakery to a chain of bakery cafes – a platform shift that set the stage for new opportunities in the space between fast food and fine dining.
Discovering, through careful observation of customer behavior, a whole new paradigm within the restaurant category that became the $100 billion-plus fast-casual segment.
Recognizing the potential of Panera Bread to become a nationally dominant brand and the decision to bet everything on that brand.
Reinventing Panera completely, when he had more than two thousand stores that were feeding one in thirty Americans every week. That reinvention included transforming the ordering systems and completely overhauling the back end to ensure efficient delivery.

As you read the book, you’ll discover Shaich’s rules for gaining and maintaining competitive advantage:

Recognize that you can’t please all people all the time. Understand who your target customer is and what job they are hiring you to do. Develop a concept that’s the singular best choice for some target customers on some days rather than the second-best choice for everyone, every day.

Define what competitive authority means within your understanding of your concept and know how you will build it.

Make sure the niche you focus on is big enough to sustain you, but not so easily duplicated that you simply become an R&D lab for larger competitors.

Search for the good ideas that really matter.

Build barriers to entry.

Get it done. Execution is everything.

Accept that maintaining competitive advantage is really difficult.

Be willing to do it all over again. Competitive advantage is fleeting. Don’t wait for your competitors to pass you before seeking out a new opportunity.

Ron Shaich

Finally, some of Shaich’s life lessons include:

Tell yourself the truth.
Know what really matters.
Make smart bets.
Conduct an annual pre-mortem.

Even if you are not the one in thirty Americans visiting Panera Bread every week, you’ll find Shaich’s book fascinating, inspirational, compelling, and full of wise and practical business lessons to give you the confidence to master transformation.

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.

Comments

Business And Life Lessons From Entrepreneur Miguel Leal

What I like most about Miguel Leal ’s memoir, aside from its overall compelling and inspiring information, are the business and life lessons he shares. Those lessons are found throughout his recently released memoir, The House That Cheese Built . The book is a quintessential American dream story from a Mexican entrepreneur who shares the tale of building a multi-million-dollar business from scratch, complete with both success and failure, and always a vision of hope. Leal came to the U.S. penniless as a teenager, speaking almost no English; he literally slept in the boiler room of a Wisconsin cheese factory for months before he was caught. Through hard work, grit, and ingenuity Leal would go on to launch his own business. He is widely credited with introducing Mexican cheeses to the U.S. market and grew his company to a multimillion-dollar success story that defined an industry. Yet, like many successful entrepreneurs, Leal’s great successes were matched by a variety of ...

Twenty-five Of My Favorite Leadership Quotes

All year during 2012, I collected my favorite quotes about leadership from Twitter. When the year ended, I published the list. So, for today's leadership flashback , among the thousands of tweets and retweets on Twitter about leadership during 2012 these 25 were my favorites. A mix of advice from some unknown individuals along with many from leadership book authors and famous leadership experts, and a few from past U.S. presidents and current-day athletes. Great leaders know the power of asking questions. Lead with your heart, not just your head. Learn to let go of fear and embrace the unknown. People are much more impressed by your potential than by your track record. Smart leaders use the power of stories whenever they have important messages to convey. To be effective, leaders have to close the conversational gap with their employees. One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency -- Arnold Glasow Managers...

How To Uncover Your Blindspots To Become A Better Leader

What you don't see about yourself can hold you back as a leader. That's typical for many leaders. What we don't see is what we can't see: we have blindspots . Your blindspots prevent you from achieving your greatest success. “It turns out that we're often not great judges of ourselves, even when we think we are. Sometimes we're simply unaware of a behavior or trait that's causing problems,” explains Martin Dubin , author of the new book, Blindspotting: How To See What’s Holding You Back As A Leader . “Bottom line: until we uncover these blindspots, we can't move forward. The good news is that you can learn to do your own blindspotting .” “Most of us understand the idea of blindspots in a general sense—areas we can’t see, to take the term most literally, or places we have gaps that we may not even realize, to be a little more abstract,” says Dubin. “But in the context of this book, I’m defining blindspots quite specifically: They are...

Helping People Win At Work

Here are some of my favorite pieces of advice from Ken Blanchard's and Garry Ridge's book, Helping People Win at Work : All good performance starts with clear goals. Continually planning and executing without the value of review and learning can blindside you. You don't want to save up feedback until somebody fails. It's amazing how much more you learn when you admit you don't know. If you can't measure something, you can't manage it. The key to developing people is to catch them doing something right. Whenever you attempt to influence someone else's beliefs, thinking, or behavior, you're engaging in leadership. A compelling vision tells people who they are, where they are going, and what will guide their journey.

The Five Critical Roles You Need To Build A Winning Team

The new book, Team Players , by leadership expert and New York Times bestselling author, Mark Murphy , explains why a team needs more than strong leaders—it needs the right mix of five roles and talents to succeed. In addition, Murphy reveals that the secret to extraordinary teams isn’t making everyone the same—it’s embracing and leveraging fundamental differences through those five distinct team roles. No amount of teambuilding, trust, or cohesion can overcome having the wrong mix of people in the room. The five essential roles and talents are: The Director assumes a leadership role within the team, guiding its direction and making important, difficult, and even unpopular decisions. The Achiever immerses themselves in the details of accomplishing tasks and getting things done, with a keen eye for delivering error-free work. The Stabilizer keeps the team on track with meticulous planning, processes and procedures, clear timelines, and organi...

How To Find Your Balance Point

A few years ago, Brian Tracy , along with Christina Stein , published, Find Your Balance Point . "The desire for peace of mind and the idea of living a balanced life are central to your happiness and well-being. When you start to live your life in balance with the very best person you could possibly be, you will enjoy the happiness you deserve and experience harmony among all the elements that make up a successful life for you, as you define it," explain the authors. The book teaches you how to identify you balance point, move to it at will, and automatically return to it whenever you want . "You need to establish your balance point before you can set and achieve the goals that are important to you," explains Tracy. The starting point is to develop absolute clarity about who you are and what matters to you. This means you much be clear about your values . Then, chapter by chapter, Tracy and Stein take you through: Creating your vision and ...

10 Quotes From The 5 Levels Of Leadership -- John C. Maxwell

Soon I'll post my full review of John C. Maxwell's latest book, The 5 Levels of Leadership . In the meantime, here are some of my favorites quotes from the book that I believe should become a must-read book by any workplace/organizational leader: Good leadership isn't about advancing yourself. It's about advancing your team. Leaders become great, not because of their power, but because of their ability to empower others. Leadership is action, not position. When people feel liked, cared for, included, valued, and trusted, they begin to work together with their leader and each other. If you have integrity with people, you develop trust. The more trust you develop, the stronger the relationship becomes. In times of difficulty, relationships are a shelter. In times of opportunity, they are a launching pad. Good leaders must embrace both care and candor. People buy into the leader, then the vision. Bringing out the best in a person is often a catal...

Full Engagement By Brian Tracy

Best-selling author Brian Tracy's book, Full Engagement , provides practical advice for how to inspire your employees to perform at their absolute best. He explains that above nearly every measure, employees' most powerful single motivator is the "desire to be happy." So, Tracy teaches you how to make your employees happy by: Organizing their work from the first step in the hiring process through the final step in their departure from your company so they are happy with you, their work, their coworkers, as well as in their interactions with your customers, suppliers and vendors. Full Engagement includes these chapters and topics: The Psychology of Motivation Ignite the Flame of Personal Performance Make People Feel Important Drive Out Fear Create That Winning Feeling Select The Right People Internal Versus External Motivation At a minimum, Tracy suggests that managers do the following when managing their employees : Smile Ask questions Listen ...

The Three Pillars Of Executive Presence

After two years of research, forty focus groups and a national survey, author Sylvia Ann Hewlett contends the three pillars of Executive Presence are: How you act ( gravitas ) How you speak (communication ) How you look ( appearance ) All three work together to help you telegraph (signal) to others that you have what it takes and that you're star material. "One thing to note at the start is that these pillars are not equally important--not by a long shot," explains Hewlett. "Gravitas is the core characteristic." And according to the senior leaders that Hewlett researched the top aspects of gravitas are : Confidence and "grace under fire" Decisiveness and "showing teeth" Integrity and "speaking truth to power" Emotional intelligence Reputation and standing/"pedigree" Vision/charisma In her book, Executive Presence , she teaches how to act, communicate and look your best while avoiding the most comm...

The Inspiration Code

At the end of each year, I select my choice for the best new leadership book for that year, and then highlight that book on my blog. Well, only five months into 2017, I had already found a new leadership book so good that I couldn't wait until year-end 2017 to share it. Reflecting back, and sharing again, that book is, The Inspiration Code , by Kristi Hedges . Perhaps now more than any other time, the need for inspirational leadership is critical in the workplace. Filled with profound insights and compelling data, and based on a commissioned survey on who and what inspires people, Hedges uncovers a set of consistent, learnable behaviors that dramatically enhance leadership success. And, shows you how to inspire those you lead. And, how to energize people every day . Kristi Hedges But, first, what exactly is inspiration? Hedges explains that psychology professors Todd Thrash and Andrew Elliot have determined that inspiration is :...

Eric Jacobson On Management And Leadership

Search This Blog