Strategy I want to talk with you about what is perhaps the greatest success commonality and the greatest success characteristic that spans all eras. You will find it heavily riddled through Napoleon Hill’s work going all the way back to the 1930’s and before.

You will find it in today’s business leaders and I am convinced we will find it in the next century’s business leaders.

In fact, several years ago at a political function that I attended, one of the things that I had an opportunity to do was to observe President Reagan up close speaking and I tell you this and ask you to sit aside whatever your political preferences are for a second, not that I make mine a secret, but it really doesn’t matter what your political preferences are, but we would all probably agree that he did an amazing job under crisis.

Yes…the greatest success characteristic is the ability to handle crisis.
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We have been talking about the key components of success and now I’d like to share with you my final one. It is the ability to process information.

There’s more information to process than ever before. There’s more stuff to know. There’s more stuff to read. There’s more stuff to listen to. There’s more stuff to sort through in order to succeed in business.

I really can’t call it a skill because I really didn’t develop it wholly as a skill – but some may say one of my talents is speed reading with good comprehension. It is becoming increasingly important over the years.

It’s very valuable to me because I can get through a ton of stuff and I see the amount of stuff increasing year after year, month after month and as you get involved perhaps in more and more things and the more successful you get the more information you’ll have to process.

I subscribe to trade journals and newsletters and magazines today that I didn’t know existed three years ago that I’ve got to get through to stay current on the things that we do. So there’s more information than ever before to process so you’ve got to be a great organizer.

Kind of tied in with that is the organization of people resources. Your ability to get the most out of people and that really is a coaching kind of thing and this is just an incidental piece of information but it kind of shows you how big business prizes this.

An example of getting the most of your resources is utilizing webinars for a conference or seminar.

In fact, many companies have taken advantage of that today like for their annual sales meetings. So that instead of the expense of putting all the sales people into one place they let the sales people go to 200 different places and they have the meeting anyway and in many cases that works fine.

You can even use this type of resource for coaching sessions. Executives from many of the Fortune 500s and many companies of all different sizes and types often come together for conferences to listen to coaches’ talk to them about coaching techniques and how to apply them in the business environment and that is of supreme importance to you if you will be highly successful today.

I want to share with you a very important key factor in my success, and the success of other entrepreneurs… keeping control!

We are finding that highly successful people are doing a better and better job of blending new technology with keeping control. Now there’s a lot of businesses and a lot of people who get trapped, being controlled by the technology and that’s why many of us often sound anti-computer, for example.

But the truth is the reason that I don’t like a computer is…
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Perhaps my favorite example of innovation is Tom Monahan of Domino’s Pizza. In fact, I spoke about him for the ten years that I was speaking on The Success Tour.

Tom is a very innovative and creative guy and his innovative attitude has communicated through his ranks and I’ll tell you my favorite Domino’s story.

There is a Domino’s franchisee who bought a Domino’s pizza place and opened it at a resort area near a resort lake. Now the first problem with his market area is most of the residences live there only six months out of the year. It’s a place where people come in the summer and really nobody stays there in the winter.

The second problem he discovered shortly after he was opened was there was no way that he could deliver the pizza in thirty minutes or less consistently…you all know that’s Domino’s guarantee…because it’s a big lake and the houses are stretched all the way around the lake and trying to do it in a car was impossible.
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All successful people have many, many differences that they are able to operate with and put together sort of into formulas of their own… but all successful people do have certain commonalities.

And that’s what we try and do.

That’s what any of one of us who records or writes material tries to do is to help people focus on the commonalities and still allow them room for the differences because when you finally put it all together your formula for success will undoubtedly be a little bit different than the one that works for me.

And the person next to you will undoubtedly be a little bit different than the one that works for you and me. But in all three of us there will be certain commonalities and when we’re focused on those commonalities the differences kind of take care of themselves.
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