Here’s the second half of Altitude takeaways from my mastermind meeting on February 12.

Again - if you have the chance to get these DVDs… DO SO! I’m only skimming the surface of brilliance here.

1. Although people are INSANELY important (in fact, Bill Gates had said something like, “Take my 20 best people away and Microsoft is nothing.”)… they’re maybe 5% of the results.

95% of your results come from your SYSTEMS. This brings me to an Eben quote that I love.

2. “If you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process… you don’t know what you’re doing.”

3. A lot of people get stuck in the minutia and can’t zoom out.

This was a great point for me, and why I decided to do so much outsourcing last week.

4. Short term results are often very different from what long term results are going to be, and that needs to be taken into consideration.

Don’t let variation freak you out… but make sure you chart it. Like a crazed bulldog. (That was one of John Carlton’s power phrases. I love it. ;))

5. Once a system is stable , it’s VERY difficult to change… so keep it moving constantly. If someone gets trained wrong, it’s ridiculously hard to change them.

This is HUUUUGE. Eben mentioned this at the Altitude follow-up too, and I’ve really taken it to heart. He talked about how he tells his team from the start, “I’m going to be changing my mind constantly, so expect it.”

I tell people that I outsource to that as well… so they know from the beginning, and I don’t feel like I’m being as annoying when they know it from the get-go.

(It was also really nice to have the validation that I’m not the only one who wants to try 3827432 different things. :))

That being said, he also mentions that you should identify what you never want to change and what you constantly want to improve. For example, with Wal-Mart, they’ll always be the lowest priced company… but they might want to tweak customer service, customer experience, etc.

6. Character is also a stable system that’s hard to change. Eben told a story about Jack Welch, and how he went golfing with some of his top employees. He saw one of the guys cheat at golf, and fired him that Monday.

7. A win is very dangerous for you and your team. People are cocky and feeling invincible. Be careful. Eben told a story about an older woman who was scheduled to be on the Titanic when it sunk. She saw an ad that said something like, “The Titanic - the ship that even God couldn’t sink.”… and so she cancelled her ticket.

Another important point is that most people only associate with success, and disassociate from failure. The classic, “I trained my team to make $700/hr.”, but “They messed up that account.”

8. Tips for creating effective systems…

a) Hook everything up, run it, THEN make guesses about future results.

b) Track results visually - don’t delude yourself any other way.

c) Proactively look for unintended consequences, and EXPECT them.

d) If you want to change a result, look at the SYSTEM, not the SYMPTOM

e) Focus on the strengths, not the weaknesses. I think I might have blogged about this before, but one huge takeaway I got from Joe Polish’s SuperConference was this quote (”If you focus on all your weaknesses instead of your strengths, at the end of the day, all you’ll have is a bunch of strong weaknesses.”)

f) Constantly look for bottlenecks in your system.

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