Bill Canady presents four leadership principles: maintain team pace without bottlenecking, make decisions with 70-80% of the data, surface problems immediately, and aim for measurable results over 70% success. He uses practical analogies to show how these four questions can diagnose any organizational issue.
So the 4 Commandments is something that we've developed over time that I truly believe you can lead any organization with just these 4 simple questions that you ask, right? And when you find that they're not followed, it's generally, this is what's causing the situation in the company, right? So the 4 Commandments are, and these are in no particular order, right? The first one is be on pace. If you're too fast, you're leaving everyone behind. If you're too slow, you are the bottleneck. You need to be on the right pace. for whatever it is you're trying to accomplish, you and your team. The second one is be data-driven, right? Your gut's fine and we need it. We need to think about it, but you want to get the data. If you have less than 20% of the data, you're just guessing. If you have more than 80% of the data, it's probably taking you so long to get it that you've been left behind. So somewhere between 20 and 80% of having the numbers is where you need to start making these decisions. And in order to do it, you need to be comfortable with ambiguity. You need to be able to live in the gray, which is where we all are with it. The third one is no surprises. So I always make the joke that bad news, relatives, and fish all stink after 3 days. It's true in business, right? You know, sometimes we get shame, we get whatever, we think we didn't do it right, but things go wrong. You need to come and tell people as fast as you can because once people know, they can take action around it. You know, just as an example, sometimes, right, you can get a leak in your basement. If you know the first day, it's just a little bit. You wait 2 weeks, you get Maybe a foot of water in your basement, mold everywhere. If you'd have known within the first few minutes there was a leak, things get cleaned up pretty well. It's the same way in business. Speed is critical on this. Make sure everyone knows, right? And the final one I actually think is the most important, right? And that is results matter. We will not be a best efforts company. You know, if you bat .300 in baseball, you go to the Hall of Fame. Getting only 3 out of 10 right in business, you get fired typically, right? We need to be a greater than 7 out of 10. Time in and time out. And that's a little bit of a misnomer because if you have one big one and you lose that and you get 7 little ones, well, that's really not going to be a help. But the point I'm trying to make here is you need to make sure you get the job done. People are counting on us. People's lives are tied up in this. Results matter. You cannot run these things as best effort. So those are the 4 commandments. With that, you can deal with any situation that comes at you. You'll know what the issue is and you know where to start focusing.
