Sir John Key tells business leaders to define success explicitly and ask staff what it means to them. People list different priorities, so a shared definition aligns teams. He learned this leading New Zealand's National Party with a consistent message about business and national ambition.
For those of you who have, say, smaller businesses, go and ask everyone in the business to write down what success looks like for your business. I'll guarantee you that they'll get a few things that aligned and bugger all of them. So they'll say make money, because if you don't make money, you'll go broke. And if you go broke, they won't be there. Yeah, but they won't work out the rest of them. They'll all have different views of what success looks like. And if you can articulate what success looks like, then you can get people on the same page. And once you can do that, then you're really starting to go in the right direction. And that was why we ran the same slogan when I was leader of the National Party. Every election was ambitious for New Zealand because my whole argument was, we're a little country, bottom of the world, no one owes us a living. The only way to make that successful is we have to work and we have to have businesses and everything that's successful. And to do that, we've got to think broadly about where and how we can sell things to the world. And to do that, we've got to be ambitious.
