Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself

The next time you dare to say “my business can’t be streamlined” or “I need to do all the work,” take a pause. You are lying to yourself. Your business can run on its own.

because your business will evolve and change, you’ll have to dedicate some time for Delegating. You will delegate until you hire a delegator, whose Primary Job is to continually empower the team to make on-the-field decisions and protect you while you do the Design work.

The ideal mix for a company is 80 percent (Doing), 2 percent (Deciding), 8 percent (Delegating), and 10 percent (Designing).

How you allocate your business’s time between the Doing, Deciding, Delegating, and Designing functions is called your 4D Mix, and getting it in the right proportions is crucial to helping your business run itself.

My enemy was my ego.

No, your people are not idiots. Far from it. They just need you to stop Doing and Deciding and start Delegating not just the deeds, but the decisions. For real.

You must get past this perfection mind-set if you ever want your business to successfully run itself.

The Survival Trap is what I call that never-ending cycle of reacting to whatever comes up in your business—be it a problem or an opportunity—in order to move on. It’s a trap because as we respond to what is urgent rather than what is important, we get the satisfaction of fixing a problem. The adrenaline rush of saving something—the account, the ord

Researchers concluded that in the absence of clear markers of distance and direction, we make a continuous stream of micro adjustments to what we think is straight, but those adjustments are biased to one side more than the other. Our constantly changing sense of what is straight keeps us walking in a loop. We circle and circle, ultimately perishin