Thursday, 6 December 2012
Saturday, 6 October 2012
Use everything
Each of you will have goals that are harder to reach, and evident strengths and weaknesses to bring to bear or mitigate to get there.
Some of the weaknesses are resource needs that are critically limited. This means, in connection with your goals, it is the absence of these resources that stops you dead. For resource here I mean anything useful: people, thoughts, money, tools, anything.
Have you ever felt though, that things you might need seem to turn up just when you need them? Often things that have been there all along and then a need arises and you recognise the resource.
This has to do with mental priming. You've heard that you cannot tell the mind "not" to think of something (usually we are asked not to think of an elephant :-)). Similarly if you decide to focus on anything, a particular colour or number for example, the mind immediately starts to find it and it can seem to become suddenly abundant. It's not changed in fact, but your attention has.
If your motivation for your goals is high enough for it to get your full attention, don't let that be sabotaged by the absence of a critically limited resource need. Try working on the problem, for example using a forcefield exercise or CEDAC. As you do so, firstly sift through all your existing resources and resource combinations, work thoroughly through it and use everything to start with.
"If I used anything and everything around me and in me, what ideas do I have that will move me forwards?"
Only after a full review do you then choose two or three pathways to try.
Use everything. Milton Erickson called it "utilisation" in a slightly different context, but it's a great idea to use everywhere.
Some of the weaknesses are resource needs that are critically limited. This means, in connection with your goals, it is the absence of these resources that stops you dead. For resource here I mean anything useful: people, thoughts, money, tools, anything.
Have you ever felt though, that things you might need seem to turn up just when you need them? Often things that have been there all along and then a need arises and you recognise the resource.
This has to do with mental priming. You've heard that you cannot tell the mind "not" to think of something (usually we are asked not to think of an elephant :-)). Similarly if you decide to focus on anything, a particular colour or number for example, the mind immediately starts to find it and it can seem to become suddenly abundant. It's not changed in fact, but your attention has.
If your motivation for your goals is high enough for it to get your full attention, don't let that be sabotaged by the absence of a critically limited resource need. Try working on the problem, for example using a forcefield exercise or CEDAC. As you do so, firstly sift through all your existing resources and resource combinations, work thoroughly through it and use everything to start with.
"If I used anything and everything around me and in me, what ideas do I have that will move me forwards?"
Only after a full review do you then choose two or three pathways to try.
Use everything. Milton Erickson called it "utilisation" in a slightly different context, but it's a great idea to use everywhere.
Monday, 1 October 2012
Energised or drained?
I'm sure you have had a session reviewing your strengths and weaknesses. The analysis is always interesting but how can we tell if it's correct?
The problem with conscious analysis is that we are often unconscious of our behaviours, let alone the reasons for them.
A good clue is to follow the signals your body gives you naturally. When you are playing to your real strengths and at your best, you may find it feels effortless or that your energy rises, that you have a buzz, and it feels like the real you, that you lose track of time.
Equally, if you are in a situation which challenges your weaknesses, you are likely to find time standing still, your gut wrenching and your head spinning, everything being affected and your energy literally draining away.
Follow your own energy for clues for your current strengths, and obviously, some ideas on what to do if you want to raise your personal energy and effectiveness.
Bear in mind, all real strengths are hard won and take years of application, so perhaps your strengths, and whether you are energised or drained, are a choice you can make.
The problem with conscious analysis is that we are often unconscious of our behaviours, let alone the reasons for them.
A good clue is to follow the signals your body gives you naturally. When you are playing to your real strengths and at your best, you may find it feels effortless or that your energy rises, that you have a buzz, and it feels like the real you, that you lose track of time.
Equally, if you are in a situation which challenges your weaknesses, you are likely to find time standing still, your gut wrenching and your head spinning, everything being affected and your energy literally draining away.
Follow your own energy for clues for your current strengths, and obviously, some ideas on what to do if you want to raise your personal energy and effectiveness.
Bear in mind, all real strengths are hard won and take years of application, so perhaps your strengths, and whether you are energised or drained, are a choice you can make.
What are your choices?
In my last blog update "Dreaming new reality" I emphasised the importance of creative thinking about your goals.
I guess the hackneyed phrase is "think outside the box". It is easy to dismiss the cliche. However, when you are searching for business growth it is useful to test many options. It is probably unforgivable, given the risks, not to establish the options fully.
Classic examples include:
Failing properly to review the options is natural. Decisions are often time pressured, and it can be hard to persuade colleagues to spend time on things that are not obvious. This can be especially the case if there is no established method for reviewing options more openly before selecting the key elements on which to focus. Who wants to argue against the flow and the status quo?
"Inside the box" thinking may well include the right answers, but there is a strong probability that it will not. It is critically limited thinking, constrained by existing ideas and structures; by "the most familiar".
Here are some of the reasons why thinking gets constrained:
I suspect the last is the most common. It is very human only to notice the weather as it changes, but I would be interested to hear your views.
At each significant point of decision, a balance of research, discussion and agreement is needed. Good process can take you through all of these rapidly.
I guess the hackneyed phrase is "think outside the box". It is easy to dismiss the cliche. However, when you are searching for business growth it is useful to test many options. It is probably unforgivable, given the risks, not to establish the options fully.
Classic examples include:
- only considering local markets
- not agreeing why a product or service is attractive to you (by what criteria, and what importance each has)
- only considering organic growth options
Failing properly to review the options is natural. Decisions are often time pressured, and it can be hard to persuade colleagues to spend time on things that are not obvious. This can be especially the case if there is no established method for reviewing options more openly before selecting the key elements on which to focus. Who wants to argue against the flow and the status quo?
"Inside the box" thinking may well include the right answers, but there is a strong probability that it will not. It is critically limited thinking, constrained by existing ideas and structures; by "the most familiar".
Here are some of the reasons why thinking gets constrained:
- attention is narrowly focussed and no-one on the board has the experience or wisdom to take a step back
- there is no "normal" process of debate that includes more divergent ideas
- creative thinking is thought of negatively; perhaps seen as "madcap", "unstructured" or "distractions" (which are also a result of poor thinking or process; there is no inevitable logic to such attitudes)
- failure to notice any of the above happening
I suspect the last is the most common. It is very human only to notice the weather as it changes, but I would be interested to hear your views.
At each significant point of decision, a balance of research, discussion and agreement is needed. Good process can take you through all of these rapidly.
Friday, 25 May 2012
Dreaming new reality
Dreaming new reality is a unique thinking process and an essential component for any successful venture.
I often see businesses fail because they do not know enough about potential development options even to consider them. They think about what they know about and are comfortable with, and ignore the infinite rest.
The trouble is, as Dr Daryl Cross says "the Juice of Life lies in your Courage zone."
So, who routinely gets out of their comfort zone to dream new realities and create more in the world? You are probably immediately thinking of the more successful companies and brands. You may not know about the many failures. This is business, and this is life.
Gymnasts put their bodies through new moves and then sit and imagine doing it for an hour before doing it for real, patients who have lost function, re-create muscle tone and body connection through imagining they can do it. Thinking about exercise or relaxing creates some of the benefits without the need for other action.
Do you find time for the unique and important process of dreaming into reality for yourself? Notice that you might be starting to now as you read and feel inspired about the power and control you do have to make your world.
....................
More than dreams are required of course; we test clients on D*V*P which stand for Desire, Vision, and Planning.
Score yourself now out of ten for each and multiply across. The total is out of 1,000 and you'll note that if you are failing on any of the factors your score (we call it change potential) will be well below 500. You need to hit 700 or more or 70% to make real progress towards the goal. Test it. It's true, right?
Come back and read my next blog to hear more, or post up a comment for me.
I often see businesses fail because they do not know enough about potential development options even to consider them. They think about what they know about and are comfortable with, and ignore the infinite rest.
The trouble is, as Dr Daryl Cross says "the Juice of Life lies in your Courage zone."
So, who routinely gets out of their comfort zone to dream new realities and create more in the world? You are probably immediately thinking of the more successful companies and brands. You may not know about the many failures. This is business, and this is life.
Gymnasts put their bodies through new moves and then sit and imagine doing it for an hour before doing it for real, patients who have lost function, re-create muscle tone and body connection through imagining they can do it. Thinking about exercise or relaxing creates some of the benefits without the need for other action.
Do you find time for the unique and important process of dreaming into reality for yourself? Notice that you might be starting to now as you read and feel inspired about the power and control you do have to make your world.
....................
More than dreams are required of course; we test clients on D*V*P which stand for Desire, Vision, and Planning.
Score yourself now out of ten for each and multiply across. The total is out of 1,000 and you'll note that if you are failing on any of the factors your score (we call it change potential) will be well below 500. You need to hit 700 or more or 70% to make real progress towards the goal. Test it. It's true, right?
Come back and read my next blog to hear more, or post up a comment for me.
Sunday, 18 December 2011
Business Sweet-Spots top 10
You know when you have a business sweet spot. When you take a product to market and it just sells like hot cakes; when your management team hardly need to communicate, meetings fly by, and things just get done right, you are so on the same wavelength.
We have been working through these and other "sweet spots" this year with clients and on my coaching blog you can find an article about combining this thinking into your SWOT analysis (you can read my other blog at http://coachingpartnership.blogspot.com/2011/12/sweet-swot-strategy-6.html).
Here are my top ten business sweet spots - a round up the reviews with clients in the last few months.
 |
| The vibes are right when you hit it sweet |
We have been working through these and other "sweet spots" this year with clients and on my coaching blog you can find an article about combining this thinking into your SWOT analysis (you can read my other blog at http://coachingpartnership.blogspot.com/2011/12/sweet-swot-strategy-6.html).
Here are my top ten business sweet spots - a round up the reviews with clients in the last few months.
- Personal flair
Everyone has strengths - their personal "tap-dance", so to speak. So often in business we find people focussed on process, risk and rule based approaches. All good but do they take space and opportunity away from your people, preventing them from bringing you their flair?
Remember Jim Collins exhortation, in "Good to Great", to work in the space where your passion and your skill touch the economic wheels of your business. Our rule of thumb is that process is designed to speed up and perfect the chores, maximising the time available for people to do what needs to be done personally and that they are great at. - Special projects
Where is the space in the routine of work for this flair to have a chance? Special projects around improvement issues - with a few people drawn from across status, structure, and location, with real opportunity to fail and learn are fabulous for identifying leaders in your team. - Recruitment decision matrix
Getting the right people into your team is such a crucial factor - this year's recruitment sweet spot has been working through the key attributes, running pareto to identify the top 5, weighting each relative to the others for importance and then grid ranking candidates as a super approach to improving recruitment accuracy. - Star product/service in the product portfolio analysis (ppa)
To remind you, star products are those with high market attractiveness and where your business is strong relative to competition. Maximise these and ensure you have pushed them as far as they can go, check in on them for lessons, use them to cross sell others. - Top Wildcat product/service in the ppa
These are high market attractiveness, but your task is still to build your competitive strength. Don't waste your time developing too many at once - ensure adequate "bat swing" is applied to ensure your best shot wildcats become stars. - Leadership beats process
Process will get you so far and is essential. Process is as much key to change as it is to being stuck - as it sticks routine activity into your business. However, great leaders will always be able to draw more motivation and quality than process will achieve by improving feel good factor, learning and development of key people. Leaders can layer processes and build businesses with great people. - Having the courage to discuss the cash
Get the terms discussion out and clear at the start and then stick to it. So much time is wasted mopping up after a sloppy start on your terms. A clear winner of a sweet spot is having the courage to address up front your pricing and cash terms. - Double prices on the bottom 20% of your customers, and divert your time to the best 20% instead
If you are working hard but not making money, look at your pricing and focus your market to the quality end. - Innovate with your best clients
R&D/innovation that has worked best has been in the contract and with the clients rather than back in the board room. Look to improve value right at the edge and you will very quickly hear what you need to do. - Leadership attribute matrix
This is an essential point to end on. The choice of investment partner and director team for a new venture is the essential initial condition for success. So many businesses fail due to this team mix being wrong or going predictably wrong. Mind-map the attributes you need for your crucial leadership team, select the top 5 or so and weight them relative to each other for importance and then realistically go through each partner/potential partner and rank them. Take the problems seriously and talk them through.
A great investment and leadership team is the "business sweet-spot" I wish you for 2012 - with all the challenges, excitement and "rocks in the road" of business in the current economic realities you will find a close knit and capable team a real blessing for the next twelve months.
Feel free to contact me about any issues this raises for you.
Sunday, 30 October 2011
Little failures
Here is a post about failure and risk. Just what you all need!
I was reading Dawkins "the Selfish Gene" on the advice of a scientist friend and, well, it is a good and a compelling read.
Those gene sets that survive, do so through millions of machines and adaptations that failed. It is almost as if it is the failure that is the crucial thing. What I mean is, if the ratio of gene success is 1 successful adaptation for each 100,000 failures, then that tells you the "rate of failure" (ROF) in order to find success. This is in the natural world, and I am not aware of gene's taking expert experienced advice.
Thinking about the underlying themes I was reminded of Napoleon Hill's commendation for each of us to have "the opportunity for applied failure", and of course Eddison's "I failed my way to success". (If I have failed here in my quotations I am sure I will learn about it quickly!)
From a business point of view, Dawkins' billions of "gene machines" that dry out and die away unable to keep up with the changes in their world, are rather like the business failures that happen each day. That's the metaphor at one level. When you read the statistics on business failure, it's a pretty off-putting metaphor.
And yet although each failure contains a back story of some pathos (and some somewhat worse than getting a low grade essay score at school!) each also points towards success. The key things here are to avoid allowing the negative connotations of the word to demotivate you, and to mine down to the learnings within each failure.
What are the little failures? What are the little learnings?
I am sure you are starting to get the drift of this post. In my business experience, it is the ability to fail, without having to stop, that has taught me the most, probably because the immediate successes, few and far between, though welcome, were often surprising. Hard won successes taught me things I was able to re-apply with similar effect, and keep in my kit bag of useful tools for life.
Napoleon Hill, unlike Dawkins, calls for unusual and compelling belief in order to create success. He noted that most people don't have anywhere near enough belief to be successful. I think he was right. Most people are afraid of failure. Fight or flight are fundamental reflexes. We teach fear of failure from the first day. Many cultures punish failure. It's not a surprise that many people struggle with entrepreneurial-ism and have a reflex to blame others when failure arrives. The blame game tends to suppress innovation.
Most new business ideas, whether a start up or just a new product or project, start in the mind; with an idea. Then a huge amount of belief in the idea and the ability of the thinker to sustain them through the failures along the track.
With belief, available effort and gold are needed to sustain activity. Like a scientist, entrepreneurs should then go looking for failures. Small scale, obvious and quick are the best sort! However any failure will do, and is just another fence knocked down on the way towards success. Failure is interesting. Like risk, the possibility of failure and consequences are one way in which we come to know life, and they keep us alert and sharpened to the possibilities. Good marketing people tell you to do a limited but real test; the same idea is highly valued in new IT implementations, and in any profit and change projects. Plan, do, check, act is an effective cycle that embraces failure in its design.
My post this week is designed to make you think about your organisation's approach to risk and failure. Is the balance right? In what areas so you need to reduce failure and in what areas do you need more?
We are all happy to think about return on investment, a calculation based on risk and return. Perhaps one way to think about failure more positively is to develop an ROF, or "return on failure" measure.
I was reading Dawkins "the Selfish Gene" on the advice of a scientist friend and, well, it is a good and a compelling read.
Those gene sets that survive, do so through millions of machines and adaptations that failed. It is almost as if it is the failure that is the crucial thing. What I mean is, if the ratio of gene success is 1 successful adaptation for each 100,000 failures, then that tells you the "rate of failure" (ROF) in order to find success. This is in the natural world, and I am not aware of gene's taking expert experienced advice.
Thinking about the underlying themes I was reminded of Napoleon Hill's commendation for each of us to have "the opportunity for applied failure", and of course Eddison's "I failed my way to success". (If I have failed here in my quotations I am sure I will learn about it quickly!)
From a business point of view, Dawkins' billions of "gene machines" that dry out and die away unable to keep up with the changes in their world, are rather like the business failures that happen each day. That's the metaphor at one level. When you read the statistics on business failure, it's a pretty off-putting metaphor.
And yet although each failure contains a back story of some pathos (and some somewhat worse than getting a low grade essay score at school!) each also points towards success. The key things here are to avoid allowing the negative connotations of the word to demotivate you, and to mine down to the learnings within each failure.
What are the little failures? What are the little learnings?
I am sure you are starting to get the drift of this post. In my business experience, it is the ability to fail, without having to stop, that has taught me the most, probably because the immediate successes, few and far between, though welcome, were often surprising. Hard won successes taught me things I was able to re-apply with similar effect, and keep in my kit bag of useful tools for life.
Napoleon Hill, unlike Dawkins, calls for unusual and compelling belief in order to create success. He noted that most people don't have anywhere near enough belief to be successful. I think he was right. Most people are afraid of failure. Fight or flight are fundamental reflexes. We teach fear of failure from the first day. Many cultures punish failure. It's not a surprise that many people struggle with entrepreneurial-ism and have a reflex to blame others when failure arrives. The blame game tends to suppress innovation.
Most new business ideas, whether a start up or just a new product or project, start in the mind; with an idea. Then a huge amount of belief in the idea and the ability of the thinker to sustain them through the failures along the track.
With belief, available effort and gold are needed to sustain activity. Like a scientist, entrepreneurs should then go looking for failures. Small scale, obvious and quick are the best sort! However any failure will do, and is just another fence knocked down on the way towards success. Failure is interesting. Like risk, the possibility of failure and consequences are one way in which we come to know life, and they keep us alert and sharpened to the possibilities. Good marketing people tell you to do a limited but real test; the same idea is highly valued in new IT implementations, and in any profit and change projects. Plan, do, check, act is an effective cycle that embraces failure in its design.
My post this week is designed to make you think about your organisation's approach to risk and failure. Is the balance right? In what areas so you need to reduce failure and in what areas do you need more?
We are all happy to think about return on investment, a calculation based on risk and return. Perhaps one way to think about failure more positively is to develop an ROF, or "return on failure" measure.
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