In the new environment, with speed to market timetables of eighteen months instead of five years, plans become obsolete fast. And if our planning is centered on an overall purpose or vision and on a commitment to a set of principles, then the people who are closest to the action in the wilderness can use that compass and their own expertise and judgment to make decisions and take actions. Principles are not practices. Practices are specific activities or actions that work in one circumstance but not necessarily in another. If you focus on principles, you empower everyone who understands those principles to act without constant monitoring, evaluating, correcting or controlling.
Principles have universal application.
And when these are internalized into habits, they empower people to create a wide variety of practices to deal with different situations. Leading by principles, as opposed to practices, requires a different kind of training, perhaps even more training, but the payoff is more expertise, creativity, and shared responsibility at all levels of the organization. Before people will consistently act on the principle of customer service, they need to adopt a new mindset. The president of a major corporation recently asked me to meet with him and his management team. He said that they were all too concerned with preserving their own management style.