Today’s companies offer amazing solutions to dreams or problems. Marketing is communicating that you have their wish or solution, and it’s ready to be picked up!

Whether a company keeps local businesses running as a decades-old formality, specializes in a niche service performed by a rare breed, or ships product directly to the world’s pickiest consumers, chances are there is a moment of communication that has to go just right.

Research and development is a key area of business known in some industries as ‘innovation’. Regardless, the behavior stands out as opposite from all other business behavior. Most of the time, your company should be seeking consistency, stability, and a sort of repetition.

But the moment your target customer and market decide your competitor has it right is when R&D must have your adaptation and plan of attack in-hand and ready to roll out–yesterday. R&D should be designed to work tirelessly to receive customer and market feedback data and otherwise learn what would constitute an improvement over your current offerings. Be prepared with a new plan for that moment your cash cow product or service shows unmistakable signs of slowing down. 

There’s no way around it, you need to amass sufficient talents to meet your company’s task needs. Luckily, people come with some fairly spectacular natural talents. Enough in fact to solve every conceivable task need or problem your company could invent.

Okay, so you’re alone in your company. Or you feel alone in your role. Or you’re alone because your numberless helpers seem useless. Or your 50/50 partner doesn’t seem interested in the same mission anymore. After these 7 areas of business is a 2-step formula for leadership. Step one in that formula is to match each company task to a talent. 

The catch is, you don’t know which people have which talents. Enter organizational psychology! There happen to be an ample set of 8 cognitive tools in each person’s mind, set genetically into useful cognitive roles that give a sliced perceived view of the universe around us. Of our tools, 4 are perception antenna tools that let us see reality in certain ways, and the other 4 provide different ways to decide things about what we’ve seen. But, each person values certain tools above others!

So what? So, some folks are natural at coordination, others brainstorming, others sales, and oh so many other talents. Teamwork, after all, is synergizing your team strengths to neutralize their weaknesses. There are 16 scientifically-demonstrated genetic configurations of the mind, no more, no less, globally tested for nearly a century with roots back beyond ancient Greece. We call it personality typing, and assigning labor properly is key to human usefulness.

 For context, it’s been shown that the top 10-20% of performers at any company produce about 50-80% of its output. Don’t be alone in your business efforts. Configure your company labor with timeless depth psychology principles.

As mentioned, your company needs to do specific tasks. And it needs to repeat some tasks. A lot. And kind of flawlessly. Production is how you accomplish such madness without losing every worker and support staffer who attempt to support your sincere efforts to satisfy customers. For context, labor, production, and distribution are the core areas of business that make up what many industries term Operations. Full disclosure, if you’ve read this far you deserve to know that nature is not only trying to pull your company into success. Nature is also very clearly attempting to squash your company into the nothing it began as. 

Specifically, the entropy part of nature is doing so. Every single day, even weekends. To the rescue comes the ‘process’: repeatable success maneuvers for your company’s specific tasks. The production area of business combats entropy, aka chaos, by setting up consistent processes that build your company faster than it can fall apart. You just have to design your company’s production processes to do so.

The best part of being in business can be a happy customer’s cheery feedback. A happy customer is the only kind that willfully becomes a return customer. And yet, we must have all the complaint data possible–we should hunger for it!

Distribution is all your work leading into and out of that moment of truth when the customer receives your product or service. What does he or she experience the moment they heft and utilize that product, or once your worker knocks on their door for the upgrade? A dream come true, really resolving their wish or anxiety? Was the anticipation deceptive or perhaps one odd expectation resulted in some level of disappointment?

The moment your company promise is delivered is often the only moment of real first impression. The customer experience moment of truth can result in an evangelistic customer for life, or a disaffected i-bought-that-once destroyer of your once-good name, all hinging on the customer experience during distribution. Negative customer experiences are shared up to 20 times more often–often all over the web. It’s the difference between that airport you avoid and the one you don’t mind so much. So design and redesign customer experience to be right!

Whether lightly or heavily regulated, every company is subject to some degree of compliance with laws, certification, continued learning requirements, credentials, not to mention in-house policies and procedures. How close to designing a perfectly compliant system of processes can your company get? Does top management participate fully? Do staff or leaders consider themselves exempt or outside the system?

Even the best performing companies, doing every other area of business properly, can fall hard if compliance falters.

You got into business to ensure everyone in town has easy access to your heaven-sent cupcakes. Or, your team of dozens fulfill a high-demand product. Maybe you’re the only one around that provides a solution. Or, your team sustains heavy programming support for an industry service our entire economy relies upon. 

Whatever value is generated, every company has an easy-win in stability by consistently tracking financial activities like revenue, expense, margins, and so on. Whether you’re a bona fide bean counter yourself or you actively avoid calculators, there is cash and value flowing in and out of each company every day. Design this area of business sufficiently and you become unstoppable in yet another way.