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          CEO Success Report  -  December 2002
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Increasing the Effectiveness and Enhancing the Lives of CEOs
and business owners.

Contents of this issue...
   .. Welcome - A few words from the publisher, Gary Lockwood
   .. Thought-Starter - "Your Personal Strategic Plan"
   .. Guest article - "Fierce Thoughts - Gruyere & Ground Rules"
   .. CEO Resources
   .. Quotes to use in your staff meeting this month
   .. Humor to lighten up the executive suite
   .. Contact the publisher
   .. Subscribe and unsubscribe instructions


See past issues of the CEO Success Report at:
     http://www.CEOSuccess.com/archives


===================================================
      WELCOME to this issue of the CEO Success Report!
===================================================


Hello again. I'm Gary Lockwood, President of CEO Success.

Welcome back once again to the CEO Success. I know you have
no shortage of material to read and I thank you for choosing to
read our newsletter.

We work hard to provide practical ideas, thought-provoking concepts
and useful information for you.

You (and about 1000 of your CEO peers), have honored me by
being a loyal subscriber. For that, I appreciate you.

Last month, I wrote about Think Strategically about Your Business. For
years, I've been helping businesses develop their strategic plans. A few
years ago, it occurred to me that you could have a personal strategic
plan that would help you individually get clarity and focus on your own
preferred future.

This is a great time of year to think strategically about your life.
Today's Thought-Starter will give you some ideas on how to develop
your own personal strategic plan. Do yourself a favor. Get started this
week.

May I ask a small favor? Please forward this issue to other CEOs
and company presidents who may be interested in receiving
these messages. Thank you.

Please take a minute to rate this newsletter at
  http://www.ezine-dir.com/cgi-bin/links/rate.cgi?ID=2510

And now for our guest article this month...

Our guest article this month is from Susan Scott, who tells us about
achieving success at work & in life, one conversation at a time.

Susan says, "Your greatest leverage is always the conversation in
which you are engaged RIGHT NOW. Whether that conversation
is with a child, a significant other, a co-worker, a customer, a client,
or your board of directors, I encourage you to come out from behind
yourself, into the conversation, and make it real."

Read more about Susan at the end of her stimulating article.

I hope you enjoy receiving these articles and ideas to
help you sharpen your thinking about being an effective CEO.

My wish is that you use the ideas in the CEO Success Report to
get the results you really want. If you want some help in putting
them into practice, or if you have questions, email or call.

As you know, our specialty is Increasing the Effectiveness
and Enhancing the Lives of CEOs and business owners.

Enjoy this issue with my compliments.

Sincerely,
Gary Lockwood
CEO Success

P.S. I have openings for two new coaching clients. If you are ambitious,
ready to tackle some big achievements, and are willing to be accountable
for the results you produce, let's talk.

Coaching is not cheap, nor is it easy. If you are in charge of your
life, ready to move quickly, and can afford to invest in your future,
contact me at (909) 739-7444 or at Gary@BizSuccess.com or check out the
details at
     http://www.BizSuccess.com/coach.htm


===========================================
       This month's THOUGHT-STARTER
===========================================


     Your Personal Strategic Plan

Corporations do it. Entrepreneurs do it (well, some of them). Many
successful businesses develop a strategic plan to help them get
clarity and focus.

For years, I've been helping businesses develop their strategic
plan. A few years ago, it occurred to me that you could have a
personal strategic plan that would help you individually get clarity
and focus on your own preferred future.

Set aside a couple of hours this month to contemplate your
Preferred Future for the next 3 years. Don't get hung up on the
small stuff. Look beyond today and this week and this month.

For this breakthrough strategy, identify the six or seven aspects
of your personal life that are seriously important to you. Generally,
we see categories such as:

      family
      spiritual journey
      health
      social involvement
      intellectual growth
      financial health

In each of these areas, develop a crystal clear vision of where you
are going with this. What's possible. What does it look like when
you're living up to your best expectations in each of these areas?
Describe as best you can what it looks like and what it feels like
when you have reached the point in each of your key result areas
where you are happy with each. Write in the present tense, as if it
is already in place. This represents a picture of your future as you
prefer it to be.

If you can articulate a clear vision of your preferred future,
focusing on those areas that are important to you, that vision
becomes the picture on the lid of your life's jigsaw puzzle. That
clear vision allows you to set goals in the direction of your
preferred future. That vision provides motivation, energy, purpose
and direction. It certainly helps you to communicate with the
people around you.

Many people continuously work on personal tasks that are leading
nowhere. I believe Thoreau could have been referring to those
people when he wrote:

       "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation".

Many others have made financial objectives their sole concern
and have paid a heavy price for their success - poor health, failed
marriages, neglected friendships, no personal development in
any area except business.

By developing and pursuing your own personal strategic plan,
you will increase your energy, motivation, and your sense of
satisfaction. In other words, your happiness. It's your choice to
make. Most people are as happy as they choose to be.

Get busy developing that for yourself...   Get a Life!!


   About the Author...
Gary Lockwood is Increasing the Effectiveness and Enhancing the
Lives of CEOs, business owners and professionals.
Get the Free BizSuccess newsletter -
     http://www.bizsuccess.com/newsletter.htm
or send any blank email to mailto:subscribe@BizSuccess.com


==================================
          Guest Article
==================================

Fierce Thoughts - Gruyere & Ground Rules
by Susan Scott

On September 3rd, I met Therese Morier, whom I hope to remember
always. Two years ago, Therese and her husband, Alexis, took over
from Alexis' parents the job of making Gruyere each morning for the
six months they spend in the high alpine meadows above Rougemont,
Switzerland with their cows.

Therese works gracefully around twelve hikers and our guides in the
small kitchen/dining/cheese processing room where milk is heated in
an enormous copper cauldron over a wood fire. In the attached barn
beyond a simple wooden door, twenty-eight red Holsteins lounge in the
hay, twitching tails still tied aloft to prevent them from swishing
faces during milking.

We have many questions.

How many cows do you have? What kind of cows are they? Where do you
live in the winter? Where do you store the cheese? Where is it sold?
Is any exported? How many children do you have? Where do they go to
school? Do they come home each day?

Therese looks directly at each questioner and answers thoughtfully.
One of the women in our group scans the tiny space and grimaces. You
and your husband must get along real well to do this every day in
this tiny room, ha, ha, ha.

Sometimes we don't agree, Therese responds. Sometimes we, how you say.
.. she spreads her arms wide, then claps her hands together
forcefully. Yes? You understand?

Indeed we do. Behind her, Alexis smiles.

And so we go be with the cows until we are... how you say... until we
can smile. Yes?

Yes, we say. Oh yes. During the lunch of salad and macaroni which
Therese has prepared, someone whispers. Can you believe she just came
right out and said that about fighting with Alexis?

Well, yes. I can believe it. Where would an impulse to pretend find
any purchase in this high place? There is no TV, no Blockbuster, no
fast food, no dry cleaners, no mall, no advertising of any kind.
There are instead, eleven hectares of grazeable grass, five hundred
square feet of indoor living space, rigorous work and a view to die
for.

I begin to speculate on Therese's ground rules for living as she and
Alexis do, and I am still thinking about this the next morning while
reading the International Herald Tribune at the Hotel Bernerhof in
Gstaad. The headline of an article by Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New
York Times read - Executives head back to school to sharpen skills
for post Enron era. Hmmm. Good idea, I thought. Apparently top
executives and board members of some of the largest U.S. corporations
attended a three-day boot camp developed by the Wharton School,
Stanford Law School, and the University of Chicago Graduate School of
Business.

One lecturer was disappointed to discover that many who served on
audit committees didn't know what retained earnings were. It was the
class on depositions that made my heart sink.

Attendees were advised that notes should usually (but not always) be
destroyed after board meetings. Richard Epstein, a law professor at
the University of Chicago advised, "You don't want to volunteer
anything. You have to have a personality vasectomy." I think he meant
a personality-ectomy. Otherwise, the image morphs from merely
disappointing to disturbing. Joseph Grundfest, a professor of law at
Stanford who is a former commissioner of the Securities and Exchange
Commission and is on the board of Oracle Corporation added, "Think
slowly. Don't pull a Bill Clinton and ask what the definition of 'is'
is."

While I imagine there was much useful learning at this boot camp, the
article points to ongoing failure and burnout. People don't burn out
because they're trying to solve problems. People burn out because
they've been trying to solve the same problem over and over and over.
Leaders who follow such ground rules as: Think slowly. Don't
volunteer anything. Delete your personality. Destroy notes from board
meetings... will fail, like their predecessors. Such careful
conversations do not solve problems. In fact, a careful conversation
is a failed conversation, for it merely postpones the real
conversation that is so desperately needed.

I'd like to send these executives to a different boot camp... a month
working alongside Therese and Alexis in the mountains above Rougemont.
 No cell phones. No ticker tape. No distractions. Just heaping
handfuls of silence during which they might care to revisit their
priorities. And their values, if they can remember where they put
them.

Since this scenario is highly unlikely (Therese would never tolerate
it,) I offer this ground rule for leading, for living. Make every
conversation you have as real as possible. Unreal conversations are
incredibly expensive.

The threat to an organization is not, as one executive complained,
changing rules that hold the organization to higher standards. Nor is
it the competition. The greatest threat to an organization is
conversations gone wrong, gone bad, gone missing. The half truth, the
dodge, the lie. This is the recurring problem that needs solving.

It seems to me that leadership must be for the world, and in a very
real sense the progress of the world depends on our progress as
individuals now. So whether you are running a country, a company, or
a life - take this on as your personal challenge. Begin with your
next conversation.

A central premise in Fierce Conversations is that our careers, our
companies, our personal relationships and our very lives succeed or
fail gradually, then suddenly, one conversation at a time. Your
greatest leverage is always the conversation in which you are engaged
RIGHT NOW. Whether that conversation is with a child, a significant
other, a co-worker, a customer, a client, or your board of directors,
I encourage you to come out from behind yourself, into the
conversation, and make it real. I don't have to tell you what real
means. You already know.

The overwhelming force of a conversation. While no single
conversation is guaranteed to change the trajectory of a career, a
company, a marriage, or a life - any single conversation can. This is
wonderful to contemplate, deeply rewarding to experience.

On a Personal Note... My week-long walk in Switzerland this month was
my annual fierce conversation with myself. I've written and spoken
about the importance of occasional solitude. I am well served by
extended walks in beautiful places. It seems that on day three my
life automatically properly re-prioritizes itself. It isn't necessary
to go to Switzerland. It isn't necessary to go anywhere. Except
inside. What is necessary is to learn how to keep yourself company.
To that end, I hope you will find some quiet time for yourself in
some place that nourishes your soul and simply breathe. No
expectations. No agenda. Just you with you. Open and available.


Susan Scott is the author of Fierce Conversations - Achieving Success
at Work and in Life, One Conversation at a Time. How do you inspire
followers, attract believers, win contracts, and build visions that
become reality? One conversation at a time. One fierce conversation
at a time, if you've ever worked with Susan Scott. For additional
information visit http://www.fierceconversations.com/



=============================================
             RESOURCES for CEOs
=============================================


The Executive Committee - Chief Executives Working Together
http://www.CEOSuccess.com

     **  Attention CEOs
Business leaders are choosing a new way to better their companies and
themselves - through membership in TEC, an international organization of
CEOs.

Imagine the benefits of meeting regularly with a small group
of company leaders in your area to share experiences, exchange ideas and
solve common problems.

Thousands of chief executives turn to TEC for a learning experience they
cannot get anywhere else. We are committed to connecting CEOs with the
people, ideas and information they need to help them improve their
businesses and enhance their lives.

Check it out at        http://www.CEOSuccess.com


=====================================================
      QUOTES to use in your staff meeting this month
=====================================================


"We never know the worth of water 'til the well is dry."
     English Proverb

"Time is the fire in which we burn."
     Gene Roddenberry

"Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have
let go."
     William Feather

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
     Confucius

"Feelings are not supposed to be logical. Dangerous is the man who has
rationalized his emotions."
     David Borenstein



=====================================================
           HUMOR to lighten up the executive suite
=====================================================


Letters Of Recommendations For Employees
*******************

  For the chronically absent:
  "A man like him is hard to find."
  "It seemed his career was just taking off."

  For the office drunk:
  "I feel his real talent is wasted here."
  "We generally found him loaded with work to do."

  For an employee with no ambition:
  "He could not care less about the number of hours he had to put in."
  "You would indeed be fortunate to get this person to work for you."
  "He consistently achieves the standards he sets for himself."

  For an employee who is so unproductive that the job is better left
unfilled:
  "I can assure you that no person would be better for the job."

  For an employee who is not worth further consideration as a job
candidate:
  "I would urge you to waste no time in making this candidate an offer
of
  employment."
  "All in all, I cannot say enough good things about this candidate or
recommend
  him too highly."


 A computer will not make a good manager out of a bad manager. It
 makes a good manager better faster and a bad manager worse faster.
 Edward M Esber


 Real friends are those who, when you feel you've
 made a fool of yourself, don't feel you've done a permanent job.


              ***excerpts from: http://www.joker.org/ ***


=================================
       CONTACT CEO Success
=================================


Gary Lockwood is the publisher of the CEO Success Report.
   Email:  mailto:Gary@CEOSuccess.com
   Office: (800) 272-1575 (USA) *  (909) 739-7444
   Fax: (909) 494-4314


========================================
         Your Comments, please?
========================================


I appreciate feedback, corrections, and comments about the
CEO Success Report. Please send your thoughts to:
  Gary@CEOSuccess.com mailto:Gary@CEOSuccess.com

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