You’ll drive everyone in the organization crazy if you implement all of these habits at one time. The key is focusing on one or two each quarter, giving everyone roughly 24 to 36 months to install these simple, yet powerful, routines. Then it’s a process of continually refreshing them as the company scales up.

Communication rhythm is established and information moves through organization accurately and quickly.

• All employees are in a daily huddle that lasts less than 15 minutes.

• All teams have a weekly meeting.

• The executive and middle managers meet for a day of learning, resolving big issues, and DNA transfer each month.

• Quarterly and annually, the executive and middle managers meet offsite to work on the 4 Decisions.

• The annual sets the strategic direction and priorities for the year and beyond.

• The quarterly breaks these longer-term priorities into bite-sized priorities that the company can digest.

• The monthly addresses the bigger issues or opportunities that surface around the strategic direction.

• The weekly keeps the priorities top-of-mind and drives discussions around input from customers, employees, and competitors, which feeds back into the quarterly and annual planning processes.

• The daily huddle tracks progress and brings out sticking points that are blocking execution of the strategic direction.

If you're preparing for significant growth, we recommend paying loving attention to even the small problems. Most organizations have an implicit 80-20 rule, a belief that 20 percent of the problems are causing 80 percent of the harm. The built-in assumption is that if you can resolve the big ones, you'll be OK. But an HBS colleague, AnitaTucker, has found that it's the small problems that often cripple companies. Small problems often don't get addressed, because they don't seem significant enough to warrant focus. But because they don't get addressed, they always require a work-around, and that work-around can consume 20 percent of an employee's day. People can spend 20 percent of their time on the job working around problems that will never make it onto the priority list to be fixed. Tucker conducted a study of a nursing unit and found that on average, each employee wasted one hour per day working around problems that could be fixed, but that no one deemed important enough to address. An hour every day. What could your company achieve if it gave an extra five hours a week to every employee?

If you're preparing for significant growth, we recommend paying loving attention to even the small problems. Most organizations have an implicit 80-20 rule, a belief that 20 percent of the problems are causing 80 percent of the harm. The built-in assumption is that if you can resolve the big ones, you'll be OK. But an HBS colleague, AnitaTucker, has found that it's the small problems that often cripple companies. Small problems often don't get addressed, because they don't seem significant enough to warrant focus. But because they don't get addressed, they always require a work-around, and that work-around can consume 20 percent of an employee's day. People can spend 20 percent of their time on the job working around problems that will never make it onto the priority list to be fixed. Tucker conducted a study of a nursing unit and found that on average, each employee wasted one hour per day working around problems that could be fixed, but that no one deemed important enough to address. An hour every day. What could your company achieve if it gave an extra five hours a week to every employee?