Business is an active competition. Other businesses are working hard to beat you ever day. Businesses must perform, or cease to exist. Nonprofit organizations aren’t exempt. They must compete for donor money to survive.

For an organization to perform, it’s team members must perform. Good morale, flexibility from leadership, positive communication – these are important. So are standards, measurement, and consequences.

Do your team members know what levels of performance will meet your standards?

Are you measuring individual performance so it can be compared objectively and consistently to those standards? Can everyone see it on a spreadsheet, or better yet, a visual graph?

Does something happen when a team member or a whole team doesn’t meet the standard? Is there a consequence? What about when they exceed the standard?

Performance management needs defined metrics, accurate measurement, and specific standards. And if the standards are real, not just wishes, the experiences of the team members must be different when they fall short, meet, or exceed the standards. These are part of what it takes to be a team that wins and lasts.

When I decided to seek publication of my book, I had no idea what I was signing up for. I didn’t know the process would provoke my personal demons into fresh uprisings. I didn’t expect it to prompt so much soul-searching about what I’m doing and why. Here are some things I’ve learned.

I originally allocated 50 hours to writing the manuscript. Try 500 to 1000 hours. I was low by a factor of 10 to 20. Oops.

I reached out to assemble a team of people to help make the book proposal and sample chapter great. I got connected to a sweet set of professionals. A network of mutually trusting relationships is a priceless resource.

I thought I’d hate having someone edit my writing, and having to draft and redraft. My actual experience has been the opposite. The editor I hired not only made my writing much better, she made the process more enjoyable too.

For the most part, publishers are not looking for authors who can write a good book. Most publishers don’t take a good book and go sell it. Publishers are looking for authors who have the twitter followers, the speaking audiences, the blog readers, to sell the book themselves. It’s the author’s marketing ability, much more than the author’s meritorious content, that most publishers are looking for.

As we speak several publishers are evaluating my book. I don’t know if my book will “get picked” or not. In this age of Amazon, Kindle, and the Internet, I don’t know if it even needs to get picked. The relevance of traditional publishing is in flux, and its future is unclear. My sense is nobody knows what to do about that. I’ve decided my book’s impact is likely to be greater with a publisher than through self-publishing, so I’m still pursuing that route.

The best writing comes from an honest and vulnerable place. Putting a book out there guarantees it will be rejected by agents, publishers, and critics. It will also get flamed by outrageously unkind Amazon reviewers and other anonymous Internet trolls. One bestselling author and mentor of mine has received death threats, and even had a reader burn the book and mail him the ashes!

Offering honest and vulnerable writing up for rejection is not a naturally inviting thing to do. It’s a test of confidence and personal identity. This is a cost of entry to broader impact. It’s an invisible filter that silences a whole lot of people with something worth saying. There’s a fork in the road. One sign points to “safety from rejection” and the other to “opportunity for impact”. Sending one foot down each road will split something.

Most books fail to sell. Something like 80% go out with a whimper shortly after they are released. Investing a lot of time and energy in something that will likely be ignored by the world is an uncomfortable risk for me. And if it does get attention, that virtually guarantees a big flood of criticism. If I somehow make it really big, maybe I’ll even get death threats or ashes in the mail. Good times.

So why put myself through this? I’ve asked myself that a lot lately. Bottom line, I have conversations almost every day with people who tell me what I have said helped them. As odd as that sounds to me, I can see it’s true. And if I can be helpful to a broader audience, it’s not ok with me to let my raucous collection of fears, demons, and imagined critics stop me from doing that.

Onward I go. I’ll keep you posted.

The profits of a business flow through a funnel. All profit improvements come from improving one of these six.

1. Volume of New Customer Leads

2. Percent of Leads who Buy

3. Percent of Existing Customers who Buy Again

4. Average Sale Amount

5. Gross Margin (Sales minus costs of what was sold.)

6. Net Margin (Gross margin minus overhead costs.)

It’s hard to generate ideas for really broad goals like “increase profit”. Sometimes it helps to use this list to divide and conquer.

Our brains are wired to seek safety. Our fear-tuned brains hate it when we stick our necks out, create something that could be criticized, or take responsibility for something that could fail.

If you need someone to pass the buck to, you will miss the chance to lead something all your own. If you need assurance you won’t fail, you will miss the chance to do innovative work. If you need assurance people will like it, you will miss the chance to create meaningful art.

The biggest price of entry to a bigger future isn’t money or talent, it’s the willingness to feel fear and go forward anyway. Fear, that potent, invisible, indiscriminate force, keeps a lot of us out of the big leagues of our own lives.

Yes, you can miss out on a lot by playing it safe. Or you can go forward in spite of the fear, and in so doing find that you’ve chased it away.

Get out of your routine and spend 1.5 days working on your leadership and your goals. My friend and colleague David Martin and I will host an intimate group event in Houston, TX on April 20th and 21st, 2015. Tough questions, gutsy participation, and courageous ambition will be in the air. Come join us.

The event is limited to 10 participants, selected from applications on a first-come, first-serve basis. You can get details and a link to apply right here.