What are some "traits" of successful companies?

Hi Anthony - this is an excellent question to which anyone in a leadership position is always trying to find the answer.

In my experience, the single most important element that I see is that the leadership of an organization is focused on creating a learning organization. Among other things, this entails:

1. creating a shared vision of where they are going,
2. articulating their near term goals clearly,
3. establishing an effective level of communication such that individual contributors, several levels down in the organization hierarchy, understand and agree with the plan,
4. driving a learning/feedback norm to understand what worked and did not work, and improving from that baseline.

Once this has been achieved, the opportunity for leadership to refine their strategies and improve implementation of them, is tremendous. Improvement can accelerate. Without this level of alignment within the organization, leadership will spend considerable energy achieving it, which will be necessary to achieve performance, but, ironically, the more this bandaid approach is taken, actually saps performance over time.

Especially in smaller organizations, strong leaders, who are focused on achieving results, tend to figure it out and find a way to move ahead, whether there are written out strategies and processes, or not. So, often there is little focus on any kind of process. I would advise such leaders to consider investing energy in building a learning organization, because it will enable them to leverage their "gut instinct process" and enable them to produce even more powerful results.