4D of running a business

Mike Michalowicz defined the 4Ds of Running a Business in their book Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself.

I recommend this book to every business leader wanting more freedom and focus.

According to the 4Ds, every activity in a work environment falls into one of four categories:

• Doing — all activities that serve your customers and maintain operations.

• Deciding — is micro-management, making decisions and giving others tasks to execute while answering their questions.

• Delegating — assigning outcomes to others and empowering them to decide how to achieve them.

• Designing — deep thinking and working on the flow of the business and its vision.

Every team member has a different 4D distribution of how much time each category takes up for them.

Arguably, every business leader should get to a point where most of their time is taken up by designing, followed by a small portion of delegating.

If you're DOING as a business leader, you're doing it wrong.