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The same principle of continuous improvement applies to you personally as well. Identify the most important thing to do for your business and your cutomers. Give yourself a grade in that area from one to ten. Ask your coworkers, your boss, and your customers how they would rate you in that area. Then commit yourself to doing whatever you have to do to increase your ranking by one grade at a time until you achieve absolute excellence in your skill areas.

Practice the Kaizen method of continuous improvement, and the CANEI method of continuous and never-ending improvement in everything you do. Never be satisfied with your current level of performance. Every day, in every way, you should look for ways to do your job even better than the day before. Whatever got you to where you are today is not enough to keep you there. Continually raise the bar on yourself. Your life only gets better when you do.

In your business, you have products, services, and activities that are peripheral to your business - the outer walls of sales and revenues - and you have products and services that are central - your citadel business activities that represent the major sources of your profits.

Your core business can be thought as your "citadel". It represents the product or service lines that are vital for your survival. They must be protected at all costs. As long as you remain strong in these areas, you can withstand market fluctuations and sales declines. You must therefore guard and protect them against all competitor.

Because of this competitive game pressure, within five years, approximately 80 percent of all products and services will be new or different from what they are today. Many businesses that are thriving today will be memories five or ten years from now because their products will become obsolete and unwanted in a fast-moving market. Companies will fail to replace their products fast enough and will be left in the dust of those businesses that move more quickly.

A serious problem with many companies is that they fall in love with their product and with their history. They "get married" to process of producing and distributing their products, thinking that customer loyalty is strong enough to withstand superior competitive offerings. As a result, they fail to respond fast enough to their competitors when they come out with something that customer prefer. Don’t let this happen to you.

The first part of the marketing mix is your product or services. Always define your product or service in terms of what it "does" for your customers, versus what it "is". Here’s the question : Is your product or service, as you are offering it today, ideally suited for your current market and customers?"

Remember, if it works, it is already obsolete.If your product or service is popular or profitable, it is already being replaced by your competitors. Because of the dynamics of the market, they will be aggressively seeking ways to offer something to your customers that is better, faster, or cheaper than your successful products. Your competitors are staying up at night thinking about how to take your customers, grab your markets, and put you out of business. As Tarzan said to Jane, "It’s jungle out there!".

In ancient times, walled cities were built to protect the citizens against marauding tribes and armies. As the city grew, additional concentric circles of defensives walls were built to enclose and protect ever-greater numbers of citizens. The cities came to resemble dartboards with rings surrounding a bull’s-eye.

If the city was attacked by an enemy army, the citizenry withdrew behind the outer ring of walls and defended themselves. If the outer wall was breached, the defenders withdrew to the next wall. If that walls was breached, they withdrew to the next wall, and so on, until they were forced back into the most heavily defended part of the city, the citadel. The citadel was the key of the survival of the kingdom. As long as it held, the city could be saved. The enemy could be beaten back and the kingdom rebuilt.

The citadel contained all the treasures of the city and was designed to accomodate the king, the top army officers, the leading citizens, and sufficient soldiers to sustain a prolonged siege. With adequate reserves, the city could survive until a neighboring kingdom sent an army to relieve the defenders.

If you add third step, the number three squared equals nine. The complexity level is now nine in terms of potential costs, delays, and mistakes. For example, let us imagine that you ask someone to ask someone else to make a phone call for you, relay a message, and get an answer. The potential misscommunication, and all the increased costs, delays, and problems that may go along with this confusion have jumped 900 percent from when you thought of making the call yourself.

As you keep adding more steps, the level of complexity begins to increase exponentially. Once you have a process with ten or fifteen steps, the costs, time, and possible mistakes go through the roof and out the hundred of millions dollars of waste that has to be written off in government projects each year. The complexity levels are so high that it takes years to get something done, the costs are horrendous, and there are usually numerous mistakes.

This is how the law of complexity works. If there’s only one step in a process, the square of one still one. The level of complexity is very low in a single-step activity. The potential costs, time, and mistakes are low as well. For example, if you decide to make a phone call, and you do it yourself, the action is simple and direct. There is virtually no complexity. The number of mistakes you can make is only one, misdialing the number.

Once you add a second step, you have a complexity level of two. The number two squared is four. The level of complexity has now jumped from one to four, and the likelihood of mistakes, increased costs, and delays has gone up by 400 percent. An example of this would be if you asked someone to make a phone call for you to relay a message and get a reply. The room of miscommunication and the probability of missed messages jump dramatically.