Business Results Radio

Terri Levine is a best-selling author, keynote speaker, radio host, and appears regularly in the media as a business coaching and consulting expert. Terri shares her experiences on how adding "heart" as a leader will increase honesty, communication, and integrity among your team.

As business leaders, you impact the lives of millions: your customers or employees, and their extended families and community members. If you have fear of making decisions, you are not alone. What will set you apart is recognizing that fear and taking action anyway.

And let’s put this in perspective – you’re not risking your life to save a baby from a wild beast. You’re making strategic decisions about your company. I promise you: you won’t get eaten.

Even so, the courage to risk for a business leader is absolutely critical. Courage is a success attribute where, if you have it, everything becomes easier because you get into action. And, nothing can happen before you take action.

Let’s look at the opposite – the absence of courage.  You’re paralyzed by the difficult business decisions in front of you, so you sit back and do nothing. You get stuck. You don’t do what you’re supposed to be doing. Projects are delayed. Everyone on your team is waiting for you and wondering what’s going on and what they should do next. Your whole business screeches to a halt.  

Dr. Deming is known as The Father of Quality Management, popularized PDCA, and is the motivation behind the Deming Prize. But that’s not all of his contributions. There are many other things that Dr. Deming has given us.

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, I was a huge follower of Dr. Deming. I probably read every book that was written about him and, of course, I digested his book, Out of the Crisis.  You probably know that he is well-known for his 14 Points for Management and for modern quality control methods, but do you know these other interesting tidbits?