Great Month; Great People; Great Culture; Great Fullness; Barrett Ersek

HEADLINES:

Replay Topgrading Webinar — for those who missed last week's webinar on hiring great people, you can replay the 35 minute presentation. More info below…but first;

Elon Musk's Incredible Month — I wholeheartedly agree with BusinessWeek's notion that "No doubt (Elon Musk) has had one of the greatest months of any entrepreneur in a long, long while." From delivering cargo to the space station May 25 to the June 22 launch of the all-electric Tesla Model S sedan, Elon passed a couple major milestones in the span of 28 days. Add to the mix his focus on solar tech as Chairman of SolarCity, the leading residential solar provider in the U.S., and you have an entrepreneur swinging for the fences providing inspiration to all growth company leaders. Take two minutes to read this short BusinessWeek article and view their video. BTW, I had forgotten that Elon launched SpaceX back in June 2002, so it's been a ten year journey. Greatness takes time.

Great Fullness Of Life — THE favorite TED-like keynote at the FORTUNE Leadership Summit last month is now available for replay compliments of Gazelles – Barrett Ersek's 15 minute powerful presentation on gratefulness. Many business leaders find it hard to develop the right strategy to cope with uncertainty. In Barrett's concise and moving FREE Online seminar, named with a play on words, this CEO of Holganix offers insights into his own winning approach: Making gratitude a core value at his company. It's a strategy that has resulted in incredible abundance in his business and personal life. Watch this with your team and/or family over the weekend and start the second half of 2012 with an entirely new perspective. Thank you, Barrett, for your insight and wisdom.

8^th Best Place to Work in Australia — congratulations to Tristan White and his team at The Physio Co – this is their 4th time on the list in their 8 year history and they moved up from 12th place last year. Notes Tristan, "Our award-winning culture has been built by obsessing over our 4 core values. We hire, fire, reward & recognize by our core values every day. Obsessing over our core values make decisions easy. I have you & your book to thank for introducing me to the idea of creating a values-based business. Thank you so very much for inspiring me to create an enduring great company." Thank you, Tristan, for being a great "student" of business. Also congrats to Atlassian for making the Top 10 in Australia as well, another great global growth firm.

Building a Great Culture — as Tristan notes, the key to building a values-based company is aligning ALL your human resource (HR) systems (hiring, rewards, etc) around your core values. Here's a short "Growth Guy" column on eight ways to simplify your "People" systems and drive alignment using your core values. Please take 3 minutes to scan the article.

Hiring Great People — Mis-hires suck up time, effort, energy, AND MONEY! And there's only one methodology guaranteed to help you attract and hire "A" Players 90% of the time…Topgrading. If you want to find out more about Topgrading and how to implement it in your company, last week we reviewed 12 practical and easy to implement steps on a short webcast, see the replay.