"We are such stuff, As dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with sleep"

- William Shakespeare - The Tempest  

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Attention CEOs, Company Presidents and Business Owners:   

There is still time to take advantage of a special membership offer that will save you $1170 - if you act now! This makes today the perfect time to consider whether Vistage would be a good investment for you and your company.   

Call 845.782.0178 today for details on how you can visit an upcoming meeting and whether you qualify to join one of my CEO Boards in Northern New Jersey and the Lower Hudson Valley. Membership is offered by invitation only. There are no competitors or supply-relationships permitted in groups.  

 

Greetings!

What do you worry about?

If you are anything like most CEOs I work with, the typical answers are: how to improve cash flow, how to attract and retain key people, how to grow your business - especially in uncertain times, how to protect the assets that you have grown and how to maximize the performance of your people.

Throughout the years, I have learned that one of the simplest ways to address all of these concerns is to look at your business through the lens of transition. A solid exit strategy that focuses on maximizing value will necessarily address all of the things that worry us most. In other words, the best way to identify and assess the shortfalls in any company is to go about the same process as you would if you were preparing your company for a sale.

Oddly enough, most people don't worry about selling their company until they either have to, or because they have received a buy offer. This is unfortunate, because most experts I speak to suggest that the process of optimizing the value of a private company for sale could take as long as five years. Nate Sachs also suggests that you not only have a plan for a successful exit - but a contingency plan that can be put in place is something should happen to you prior to that plan being executed.  

I'm not suggesting that you should add even one more thing to worry about. Benjamin Franklin once wrote, "Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight." That said, as CEO, while your job may not be to necessarily "worry" about things - but you must take full responsibility for protecting the value of the company's assetts while measuring the necessary risk applied to those assets in order to yield a level of return commensurate to the degree of risk.   

What is the real value of sleeping at night? ( and Is sleep overrated?)

Benjamin Franklin also once said "There will be sleeping enough in the grave." From the man who also suggested the wisdom of "early to bed and early to rise"- he was clearly not advocating that sleep is necessarily a waste of time.

In fact, sleep is one of four things critical to maintaining good health and personal performance. According to Carolyn Strauss, one of my favorite Vistage expert resources,  the "quick start" instructions that should come with every new human being's body would simply instruct us to:

1. Water it
2. Feed it
3. Move it
4. Rest it

Your job is to figure out how much of each you need to keep yourself healthy and balanced. The harder we drive ourselves (and our companies) the more crucial the need to take care ourselves. Being fit physically and emotionally is the key to successful leadership on any level. It's all about how we "show up" before others -and truly how well we perform. Failing to manage and balance our body's needs results in stress that robs us of our ability to think clearly and critically and be fully resourceful to the people we lead and the situations we face.

Sleep is definitely not overrated.

And neither is dreaming. I'm not suggesting that the "dreams" our country was built on - or that great businesses are driven by are necessarily the products of deep-sleep induced dreaming. I am, however, confident that dreams, as a process of imagination, creativity and ingenuity, are the product of our best selves, and that the ability to sleep well at night will only help us achieve our fullest potential.

Another good resource for stress reduction in your executive life is David Allen's book, "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity; - which you can read more about below.

As always, wishing you a great and successful week ahead.  

Philip R. Liebman

Managing Director, Strat4

Group Chair, Vistage International

• Apply the "do it, delegate it, defer it, drop it" rule to get your in-box to empty
• Reassess goals and stay focused in changing situations
• Plan projects as well as get them unstuck
• Overcome feelings of confusion, anxiety, and being overwhelmed
• Feel fine about what you're not doing.

It's time to reduce the unneeded stress in your life and improve your ability to perform and your health!