Dancing With Your Best Self in 2019

​Dancing With Your Best Self in 2019

During the biggest gap week of the year we send you our warmest thoughts and pledge to continue our quest to write great content on how to bring your best self and team in 2019.

An Enlightened Breakfast

Recently I had breakfast with a friend and he exclaimed:

“Sanders you have to watch the movie “Free Solo” about the guy who climbed El Capitan at Yosemite without a rope! It is the most amazing physical and mental personal achievement I have ever seen.” 

My response was:

“Awesome, I will go see it.”

Then a challenging notion came to mind and I made an assertion: 

“You know, when you try and to climb it with 2 to 100 people together is when the whole plan and challenge changes.”

 
Free Solo
We ended up having a great dialogue about the differences in trying to lead a company where you are telling people to be their best, and yet are not sharing and teaching how they should work together to accomplish the mission of creating a remarkable customer experience. 

Looking back on six years of running Banyan Tree Strategies, much of what we have been sharing with you has been about that gap or transition. The leader's challenge of teaching people to go from the one, to the few, to the many while achieving collective excellence.

Learning how to work together well is described in the second layer of John Wooden’s pyramid of success, going from best self to the best team. Some relevant recent work has been done by a group of Wooden’s players and fellow professors at UCLA. It is called “The Pyramid of Teaching Success in Sport.” 

Wooden’s challenging call to coaches lingers in this pyramid when he said, 

“You haven’t taught, until they have learned.”

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We Are Splitting Branches & Roots Into Two Publications 

•    One will be focused on business owners and continue our eight times a year cadence.
•    The other will look at the secret ingredients of winning teams and be published quarterly.

Building A Re-Mark-Able Business

Banyan Tree Strategies serves business owners who believe that growing a re-mark-able business is a worthy pursuit. Our content is for owners who want to know more about how to lead their people, position their services correctly, and win the new business they desire. Our pledge is that by engaging us you will build a business that can double in size every five years.

We will follow four themes to help your business grow. 

•    The effective use of thought leadership to drive new client engagement.  
•    Customer acquisition frameworks that are working currently and how to scale a sales force.
•    Managing transitions with key people and potentially the sale of a business unit.
•    Challenges facing the C-suite and how to manage and lead your direct reports.

The Secret Ingredients of Winning Teams

The quarterly content will be for people who believe that building and maintaining small societies (teams) is interesting. It is for people who want to know more about what makes certain teams different than others. We hope that by reading our thoughts on teams that you will be empowered to be a better teammate and leader. 

The non-profit we founded in 2005 and still run today is focused on serving youth sports coaches. We will share with you what we are doing to serve these coaches and you will get an early look at what we are building to allow them to be better at their craft. 

You will receive our email on February 15th, May 15th, August 15th, & November 15th and our goal is for it to be a less than five-minute read and worth the time. 

Our view is that everyone is a coach to someone and that the best ones loved to be coached. However, it is quite a challenge to go from individual learning to group learning and this is where John Wooden’s quote “you haven’t taught until they have learned” leaves many of us challenged and wanting. 

We look forward to sharing the journey of 2019 together and appreciate your readership and advice along the way.

Drew & Sara

P.S. Our first offering for coaches in 2019 is going to focus on what to share with someone when they don’t make the team. Any thoughts you have on this topic are welcome.