| Walt Disney certainly never worried about getting the old thoughts out of his mind, did he? He was always 3 steps ahead of just about all his competitors and would-be competitors. Very good at how disney innovates and spotting trends. And once spotted, he certainly knew what action was required to take advantage of them. It is a very important skill and a factor in Disney’s innovation, even today. An important way to start the process of managing business change and adaptation. Most businesses do not manage change. Change takes them by surprise. Not a good thing. What these businesses do best is manage the conflict wrought by change. Reacting does not equate to anticipating … you must improve your trend watching and anticipating skills so you can change before you have to. A good thing. Let’s get back to Walt Disney and his abilities in trend spotting and rifts. Rift … what is a rift you may ask? A rift is a big tear in the rules we live by. Not a small tear, a fundamental change in the game type of tear. One that creates a small number of BIG, new winners, and bunches of losers who were sticking steadfastly to the old rules. Walt was a three-time rifter. Can’t think of any others in that category. He was one of the few people who have successfully managed to find a rift in the continuum of business life, to bet everything he had on it, and to then make great profit in doing it. And, amazingly, he did it three times. Let’s examine these rifts as a way to learn about spotting trends and acting on them. Rift 1 … Motion Pictures The first rift, or trend, that Walt discovered was the motion picture. He noticed early on that movies would drastically change the world of entertainment. Anticipating that there would be a high demand for family-oriented entertainment, he pioneered the development of the animated movie. His first film perfecting the form was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. And the fantastic growth of the rift was launched. But he was not one to rest on his success … not at all. He kept looking for another chance in the rules that would create further opportunities for his business enterprises. Rift 2 … The automobile The second rift was in the form of the automobile. Walt speculated that the car was going to change the way that families would get to entertainment. His vision was a strategically located, extravagantly designed theme park that could add a new leg to family entertainment and vacations. And take advantage of the new way of family travel rift. So, beginning with California’s Disneyland in 1955, he added a new business around this rift and it has dominated the theme park industry to this day. Rift 3 … Television He was now a giant in the entertainment business, but he was able to spot a third rift and opportunity: television. Many people regarded television simply as in-home movies. Walt, however, saw it as an entirely different medium. So with properties like the Mickey Mouse Club, he established a third business to produce a never-ending stream of content for this new market. Walt Disney was a three-time winner, someone who had a great vision to not only spot important trends but also to see the opportunities that these trends created. So what recommendations can we draw from Walt’s experiences? Here are three that we offer: Culture of Revolution An organization’s culture underlies its ability to adapt and times of dramatic change magnify culture’s importance. Work to create the culture of change of revolution. From this culture, you can spark a new paradigm for creative change from which your strategies will be derived. Spotting trends and rifts Innovation and competitive advantage hinge on your effectiveness in anticipating trends and identifying the next big thing. Invest energy and continuously work to improve your abilities to anticipate the important imminent changes. Filter through all the noise and chaos, cull out the trends and identify the opportunities that will be created. Focus your team’s creativity on the most important of these opportunities. Adaptive innovation Our government and the business world have invested billions of dollars and significant time and energy to perfect human creativity. Apply the best of these practices to jump-start your teams’ abilities in your own field focusing on the end state of new customer priorities. |
How Does One Remain Contantly Inspired?
A list of the right quotations always gives me a lift. Here are some examples of my favorite “perspective-changing” quotes to keep you constantly inspired.
Doors of happiness
When one door of happiness closes, another one opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.
– Helen Keller
Helping others
One of the most beautiful compensations in life is that no man can help another without helping himself.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
How you see
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
– Wayne Dyer
More quotes: Innovation Quotes … 10 Fantastic Lessons from the World Best
Use your imagination
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
– Albert Einstein
Careful for what you settle for
You are what you settle for.
– Janis Joplin
Your load
It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.
– Lou Holtz
Feeling good
People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
– Maya Angelou
The two most powerful things in existence: a kind word and a thoughtful gesture.– Ken Langone
Unless you walk out into the unknown, the odds of making a profound difference in your life are pretty low.
– Tom Peters
Optimism
The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
– Winston Churchill
How to Improve the Creativity Skill
| Don’t fall prey to the myth that only some people have the creativity skill and you are not of the chosen few. We are all creative; it’s just a matter of figuring out in what way. So find things you’re curious about and are interesting to you, use your imagination a little, stay motivated and work at it, and surround yourself with others who are doing the same. So how do you boost creativity? Here are 8 suggestions to improve your ability to exercise ideation: Be a detective Creatives and innovators always have enquiring minds. Are you asking enough questions to get deeper and understand the problem as much as you can? Make quiet time Most ordinary days of the average people include an enormous amount of multitasking. Multitasking is, of course, is very destructive to the time and space of good creative thinking. Set time aside for team members’ quiet time to stimulate and let the mind wander until ideas flow. Challenge good The phrases good enough, this has always worked, and this is all the time we have to devote to this problem, etc. are very destructive to team creativity. Avoid these at all costs as they are enemy #1 to the best results. Foster Autonomy We all prefer control over our environments. According to a 2008 study by Harvard University, there is a direct correlation between people who have the ability to call their own shots and the value of their creative output. An employee who has to run every tiny detail by her boss for approval will quickly become numb to the creative process. The act of creativity is one of self-expression. Granting autonomy involves extending trust. By definition, your team may make decisions you would have made differently. The key is to provide a clear message of what results you are looking for or what problem you want the team to solve. From there, you need to extend trust and let them do their best work. Divergent thinking Try the quantity approach to new ideas. Use brainstorming to improve divergent thinking. Study and then connect ideas to get new ideas. Add play to the equation When looking for fresh new thinking to solve a problem, shake things up by adding some fun and play to the process. It always has the ability to shed stress and pressure on a team. Avoid these myths: Myths on Creativity … 17 to Stop Telling Yourself Now Explore new experiences Open up your new idea thinking. Do things in new and untried ways. Avoid the set ways of solving problems. Experiment Do as much experimentation as you can. Don’t worry about failures and allow the team to question any and all assumptions and consider even the craziest ideas. |
Brands Best Tips for Using Chatbots in Advertising
Brands know that to advertise effectively on mobile, they need to gain access to consumers through the few apps that dominate daily smartphone use. This is one reason why brands have embraced Facebook’s recent announcement that it plans to support chatbots in advertising.
To Stand Out, Marketers Need to Be Authentic and Relevant.
WeChat, a messenger app in China, already has more than 10 million official accounts, including banks, hotels and even celebrities that are registered to interact with users through chatbots. While Chinese consumers are currently a more enthusiastic audience for messenger apps and bots, it’s likely that U.S. consumers will warm up to them as the technology and the accessibility improves.
Brands certainly hope so. They want to be able to reach a wider audience more directly through chatbots than currently possible with Facebook’s newsfeed, where recent tweaks to the algorithm could limit their access to consumers even further.
If business bots on Facebook end up looking anything like the applications on WeChat, we can expect to see mostly service and subscription bots. Service bots allow consumers to transact with businesses, book a flight, order a meal or review a movie. Subscription bots are focused on delivering pre-selected categories of content to users.
Kik bots Credit: Kik
In the U.S., many of the early bots created by brands on platforms like Kik, Facebook and Slack fall into the “service” category. Bots launched this year include KLM Airlines, Uber and Domino’s Pizza, each providing just a small and relatively cumbersome subset of the services that they offer in their apps.
Mondelez just announced its intention to invest heavily in new bots for Facebook messenger with intentions to focus on service, specifically e-commerce.
While it remains to be seen how many Oreos consumers will buy through bots, the company’s e-commerce strategy illustrates that even brands that usually focus on top-of-the-funnel advertising are starting their chatbot experimentation with service bots. It is less clear how to actually advertise with bots. Simply creating content for a “subscription” bot is unlikely to work for most brands.
Bots will most likely matter for top-of-funnel advertising because bots, like blogs and social media, have the potential to be important tools for consumer discovery.
Sephora and H&M have early examples of discovery-driven bots on Kik, allowing users to engage with the brand by asking for product tips and pictures. These bots are a lot like the first brand pages on Facebook, which means that they aren’t yet taking advantage of the platform in a sophisticated way, but do hint at future possibilities for engagement and exploration at a highly personalized level.
Like with apps, many brands will find that they simply can’t create an interesting enough bot to drive significant brand engagement on their own. While fashion and makeup mega-retailers have a lot of engagement potential for chatbots — and enough products to offer different messages to different people — brands that sell fewer products or products that rarely change will have more trouble generating interest in a specialized brand discovery bot.
And even bots like those from Sephora and H&M will mostly attract loyal fans. Like on social media and with apps, brands will need to augment their strategy by partnering with a carefully chosen selection of third-party bots to get in front of wider audiences in a relevant, authentic way.
As third parties to an interaction, brands need to fit into a chat environment as authentically as possible if they want to be successful. As bots evolve, advertisers need to weigh the risks of being awkward or annoying with the rewards of adding value and relevance.
Forkable is a lunch bot that learns people’s tastes. Credit: Forkable
For example, Mondelez might gain more scale if it partnered with a service bot rather than trying to become a service provider itself. One example is Forkable, a lunch bot that learns people’s tastes and then curates and delivers a different lunch each day. In order to be relevant, the right advertising campaign on such a bot could engage differently with each user based on the rich data history it has.
Mondelez could introduce different products to different people based on their past behaviors, rather than simply offering a coupon for a product such as Wheat Thins to the whole user base, which would be ignored by many and seem awfully rude to the gluten-free crowd.
Consumers are curious, and will always look for what’s new and noteworthy, and bots will play a critical role in shaping what they encounter, much like search or social media today. And similar to these other platforms, advertisers will find that a strategy of direct consumer interaction and partnerships with third parties gives them the scale and control they need. But only if brands focus on relevance and personalization will they achieve success in a promising new channel that will shape many future consumer decisions.
Creative Ideas to Improve Social Media Marketing
Social media has been around for a decade now, so it should be easy to figure out how to leverage it, right? Not so fast. New ideas? Definitely not that new, but they are very creative. There are recommendations on how to improve creative ideas everywhere you turn.
Social media works the way the grass grows. You rarely see it working, but every week you must mow the grass.
Before we start, let me ask you a question. What is your most creative idea to change social media marketing? We would love to hear it. Please share it in the comments at the end.
How many times have you seen companies requesting people to friend them on Facebook? Like farming followers was the name of the game. Sad but true. The truth is that social media marketing tactics are really about cultivating relationships with potential customers. Fan ‘skins’, by themselves, are of very little value.
Related: Find your Content Marketing Creative Ideas
What is the importance of social media to your business? Dialog with customers for sure. What about reading your content and remembering? Appreciating your help? Marketing? Building relationships? We believe it is all of these things, but the bottom line goal is relationship building.
In the ever changing landscape of social networking, you might be wondering if you are getting the most out of your business’s social media marketing tactics? Here we define social media community engagement as the process of gaining website customer traffic, attention, interaction, and ultimately relationships through social media sites.
In part it is true, but things get complicated by all the misinformation circulating about social media marketing. From leveraging tactics to tracking issues, you are bombarded with conflicting messages, including whether social media marketing is worth using at all.
Here are 10 ideas we use most often with our clients. We believe they are the ones most critical to the success of your social media marketing:
Define target customers
It all starts with knowing who your customers are and knowing as much about what makes them tick as you can. Without this step, most of the other steps become just a shot in the dark. So spent a lot of your time on this action. Keep in mind that you can’t be everything to everybody … not all customers are alike.
Choose best channels
Once you understand who your target customers are, you’ll need to study which social media sites they use most frequently and to what end. Social media takes a lot of time and energy, so you need to know where your time will be best spent’
Share unique content
Your content goal is simple … be as helpful as you can and/or be entertaining, or else be ignored. If you are going to put in the time and energy, you don’t want to be ignored.
Listening comes first and foremost to understand what customers are saying about their needs and perhaps about you. Once you have heard, then engage in as near real time as you can.
Related post: Improve Telling Stories by Employing These Remarkable Examples
Your personality and voice
This one is pretty simple, but takes lots of practice in the beginning. Be YOU and be consistent. Remember customers deal with people and not businesses.
Don’t be a robot
As we said previously, social media marketing takes a lot of time and energy. There many goog tools in existence that will help in the workload. But keep this in mind … customers take note when it seems they are dealing with a robot. Don’t be that robot.
Be part of the community
Remember you are dealing with consumers that are part of a community not part of the audience. Pay special attention to adding value in that vein.
Commit to a plan
If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there, as the saying goes. Know your objectives and establish the best plan to get them accomplished. Remember this plan needs constant iteration.
Emphasize social
One of your key business objectives is to build relationships with customers. That end game results in customer advocates and trust. This process takes constant attention to being social on a very consistent basis.
Measure results
This entire social media marketing process is a constant iteration. Establish a few key measurements and pay attention to how well you are doing.
Analyze, correct, iterate and learn
Analyze your measurement results, and continuously make corrections, iterate, and most importantly, learn.
The bottom line
There are a lot of misconceptions about social media marketing. Just because you read something in a blog post or hear something from a credible source doesn’t mean it is true or true for you and your business.
Always do your research, and continually try to improve. Social media marketing is here to stay, and it can drive a lot of business for you, assuming you are leveraging it correctly.
There is more opportunity to fail in social media than to succeed if we treat it like any other marketing vehicle. Social media requires us to get away from being promotional and sensational and instead treat our customers with special attention. Special attention to being social, building relationships, and creating trust.
Discover These 11 Helpful Social Media Tools for Marketers
Looking for better social media marketing tools? There are excellent third-party apps that can help you build your brand and audience through these social media tools.
.Analysis Tools
1. Analyze Social Media Traffic With Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder is a B2B tool that lets you track website visitors and retarget them on social media without having to install a special code or enlist the help of your webmaster.
It connects to your Google Analytics account and uses the data to give you leads. As soon it’s set up, you’ll immediatelystart seeing which companies have visited your website from social media platforms over the past week. You can also view which products or services they’re specifically interested in.
There’s a free 30-day trial that you can sign up for using your Google account.
With your new list of leads, click on the name of a company and Leadfeeder will show you whom you can reach out to on LinkedIn from that company, including second-level and third-level connection contacts (which makes your lead outreach that much warmer).The tool also shows you which social network referred traffic, how many pages those users visited, and how long they stayed on your site.
Leadfeeder makes it easier to filter your data to analyze what’s happening with your social media traffic on your website.
2. Build a Custom Dashboard With Cyfe
There are plenty of social media dashboards available, but Cyfe makes monitoring your accounts a little bit easier. It’s a custom, cross-channel tracking dashboard that has performance (instead of scheduled posts) baked into its DNA. Better yet, it’s free.
Signing up is quick and easy with a simple form to fill out. Once you’re logged in, you can customize your dashboard by adding your own widgets.
3. Analyze Your Competitors With Mondovo
Are you wondering what your competitors are doing to capture the attention of their followers? Then you’ll want to start a Mondovo account.
Mondovo is a Facebook and Twitter competition analyzer tool that shows what your competition is doing right and wrong. It isn’t free, but it is affordable. You only pay a few cents for each feature you want to access.
To get started, you’ll be asked to choose which area you want to analyze. Click Social to analyze your Facebook competition.
Next, pick how many domains you want to analyze. They’re only $0.15 per domain. Then create your account.
4. Shoot Short Films With Cinamatic
If you’ve ever dreamed of being a cinematographer, you’ll want to check out Cinamatic. It’s an app that lets you create short films and share them on Instagram or Facebook. The big difference between Cinamatic and other video-production apps is that it lets you shoot short clips and then add filters to make your video more attractive and professional.
Cinamatic is available in the App Store for $2.99. Once downloaded, just press and hold the red button to record. You can stop mid-movie to go to a different location to add interest.
5. Combine Photos, Videos, and Music With PhotoVideoCollage
Does your business host a live event? Do you want to showcase your product in action? PhotoVideoCollage is the app to bring those static pictures to life with music.
You can take photos from your phone and put them to music using a variety of layouts. After you select your layout and add your images, incorporate music. Adjust the volume, use snippets of songs, and apply fade effects to complete the experience.
6. Broadcast Live to a Wider Facebook Audience With Livestream
Livestream is slightly different from Facebook Live. The big difference? You can reach more people by sharing your event with the masses, not just the people who like your page. If your business holds a conference or award show, this is a great tool to have.
Click the link to install the app on your Facebook page. Then choose whether you want to broadcast from your smartphone or computer.
Once you’re live, you’ll be able to engage with viewers through comments, as you can see in this livestream of the Ironman World Championships. Better yet, your viewers can engage with each other. It’s an interactive type of broadcasting tool.
7. Create Time-lapse Videos With Hyperlapse
Ever wanted to share a fun moment without taking up a lot of your follower’s time? Then Hyperlapse is for you.
Instagram build this time-lapse video software, so you know it has strong social media capabilities. But it’s not your average time-lapse video software. This app (which you install on your phone) stabilizes your camera, giving you higher-quality videos.
To use it, download the app and give Hyperlapse access to your camera. Then take a hyperlapse video of something, anything. For example, take a hyperlapse video walking through your office and saying hi to your co-workers. Or shoot a video of the sunset over your building.
Research Tools
8. Run Advanced Instagram Searches With Mulpix
One of the biggest challenges of social media is sifting through all of the noise. You have to contend with lots of chatter and algorithms online. When you’re looking for something specific on social media, you need a specialized search engine that filters based on your requirements, rather than what the bots think you want to see.
That’s where Mulpix comes in. It’s an enhanced search engine for Instagram that works by leveraging multiple hashtags (instead of just the term you used in your search), saving you a lot of time.
One of the best features is the geographic targeting. If you’re looking for places to go hiking in Boulder, Colorado, for example, you can type in the search terms “boulder” and “hiking.” The app will automatically filter out any posts that have to do with “bouldering” and instead focus on the city of Boulder.
9. Research Hashtags With Hashtagify
Many marketers use hashtags in their posts without knowing if people are actually searching for them. Hashtagify solves this problem by putting real data behind the hashtags you use. You can see the most popular hashtags related to your topic or product.
For example, if you sell running gear, you might be tempted to use #running in your posts. This is a good start, but there are other hashtags that will make your posts stronger. To discover those, type “running” into the Hashtagify search box. The results below include #everymomentcounts, which is a unique hashtag related to running that you might not have thought of before.
Contest Tools
10. Run a Contest With Rafflecopter
When it comes to social media, it’s all about engagement. Rafflecopter lets you create a contest to get people engaged with your account and build your following.
Sign-up takes only a clicks. Once you’re logged in, you can create a giveaway in minutes.
11. Run Facebook Campaigns With ShortStack
If you regularly run campaigns through your Facebook page, you need ShortStack. It lets you design and create attractive campaign pages.
Signing up is easy and takes only a few seconds. Once you’re logged in, create a new campaign using either a template or a blank page. If you’re new to the design world, a template is the way to go.
Wrapping Up
Setting up social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on is just the beginning. Gathering the right group of tools can make it easier to build your following and manage your accounts. These 11 third-party tools and apps stand out from the pack.
What do you think? What’s your favorite tool? Which apps do you use that aren’t listed here? Share your experience in the comments below!
Some of the Greatest Innovators in the Last Century
Innovation plays a significant role in the success of any economy. Successful companies not only respond to their current customers but often anticipate future trends and develop ideas, products or services that allows them to meet this future demand rapidly and effectively. In a broader sense, the greatest innovation is important to the advancement of society around the world. Here are some of the greatest innovators.
These are some of the greatest innovators that come to my mind:
Steve Jobs. The iconic American entrepreneur and founder of Apple will go down in history as one of the great innovators. As CEO of Apple in the 1980s and again in the late 90s and 2000s, Jobs played a central role in the personal computer revolution and in developing its key products, including the McIntosh, the iPod and the iPhone.
Larry Page. Co-founder and current CEO of Google, Page was the leading one of the most innovative and successful companies in the world, perhaps in history.
Sergey Brin. The multi-billionaire co-founder of Google, Brin has been involved with some of the company’s most innovative technologies including Google Glass, and Google’s self-driving cars.
Bill Gates. One of the great businessman/philanthropists of the last century, Gates founded and built Microsoft into an unmatched software behemoth before leaving to state the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, a multi-billion dollar philanthropic enterprise working to enhance global healthcare and reduce poverty.
Reid Hoffman. Founder of the pioneering social networking website, LinkedIn. Hoffman is a Silicon Valley veteran who was also COO of Paypal.
Richard Branson. The colorful and creative British founder of Virgin Group is one of the most successful businessmen of our time, as well as a billionaire philanthropist and humanitarian.
Jeffrey Grossman. The Carl Richard Soderberg Associate Professor of Power Engineering at MIT, Grossman has done pioneering work and research on materials science, including photovoltaics and nanotechnology.
Jeff Bezos. Founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Bezos is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time, and the man who revolutionized e-commerce.
Ray Kurzweil. Revolutionary futurist, celebrated inventor, innovative researcher, and bestselling author, Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and is currently Director of Engineering at Google working in the field of artificial intelligence.
Tim Brown. CEO and President of IDEO, the pioneering international design firm, Brown is a global expert on the nature of innovation in business, technology, and design.
Martine Rothblatt. Founder of United Therapeutics, a medical biotech company as well as a founder of Sirius Satellite Radio. Rothblatt’s technologically pioneering work has included innovations in space sceince, satellites, the human genome project. She has also been an activist in the transhumanist movement.
Larry Ellison. Co-founder and CEO of Oracle, Ellison is one of the wealthiest individuals in the world and has been a long-time pioneer and innovator in the software industry.
Michael Dell. Founder and CEO of Dell Computers, Dell changed the personal computer industry with his innovative business methods and pioneering use of e-commerce.
Jony Ive. A world renowned product designer, Ive is the person responsible for many of the Apple’s most innovative and pioneering designs, including the iPhone, the iPad and the Macbook.
Robert De Pera. Robert Pera is the founder of Ubiquiti Networks, a pioneering wireless technology company serving the world’s emerging markets.
Marissa Mayer. At one time the CEO of Yahoo, Mayer was the first female engineer at Google, and was the youngest on Forbes list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business.
Salman Khan. Founder of the Khan Academy, a free, nonprofit online education platform, Khan’s mission is to provide a “world class education for anyone, anywhere.”
Elon Musk. A co-founder of Paypal, Musk went on to found the electric car company Tesla, and the space technology company SpaceX.
16 Most Significant Business Lessons from my 40 Year Career
Significant business lessons from my 40 year career? It is tough to name just one as I have done much learning over the years and I will never be done.
Being such a business manager is a lifelong learning process. You are never done learning and renewing lessons you have learned. Every great manager always looks for ways to improve their ability to improve their leadership qualities and attributes.
Related: 10 Entrepreneur Lessons You Need to Know
If you read ten books on business management, you could easily build a checklist of 50 or more management lessons for future business managers. But more is not necessarily better for the best lessons to study and apply.
The following lessons represent my favorite lessons on business management I have learned over my 40 years. They are the ones that have made the biggest impact on my success:
I have been in management and leadership positions in the military and business world for forty years and I often get asked what the best lessons I have found. Surprisingly (or not) my list of lessons probably have varied to a degree, depending on when in my career it was constructed.
The following lessons represent my favorite lessons on business management that I believe could make the biggest impact. If I was starting my career over and could take what I learned back in time with me, these are the lessons I would choose:
Create an environment of continuous learning
It is absolutely necessary that business people be good learners. They need to instill this in all their team. They must learn from their mistakes. To be most successful, managers must acknowledge, understand, and improve on their shortcomings. And they must encourage their team to also focus on continuous learning.
Be a multiplier
Multiplier business managers know that at the apex of the intelligence hierarchy is NOT the lone genius. Rather, it is the genius who knows the importance of bringing out the smarts and capabilities in everyone in the team.
Related material: Lessons Learned in Life … Class Continues Daily
Build connections
Both managers and leaders know their job with their teams is about building lots of connections. They make people feel they have a stake in common problems.
Encourage feedback
It is vital that you let your team know you are interested and will listen to their concerns and ideas and contribute to solutions to any and all problems.
Embrace change
Change is the only constant in business, so make it your competitive advantage. Initiate change rather than react to it, and give clear instructions to help the team understand why the change is necessary, and how it will make the situation better.
Manage risk
After my first 3 years as a business executive, the business I ran was going great guns … we seemingly couldn’t lose. So I continued to ‘double down’, so to speak. The game finally caught up with me, as we got far ahead of our talent. Not a good place to be, believe me. Learn not to be greedy.
Offer recognition and always share success
Focus on building team confidence by publicly recognizing their efforts and achievements. Think of it this way; anything is possible if you share the glory. Giving others a chance to claim credit is an easy, and effective, way to magnify results.
Foster teamwork
Peter Drucker is a silent mentor for our small agency. We are big fans. He once made an interesting point when he said that leaders don’t train themselves not to say ‘I’ He’s implying that leaders innately work with others and let the team get the credit. They don’t force themselves to say ‘we’. ‘We’ is natural for them, and it’s the way they’ve always thought.
You work as a team when you don’t care who gets the credit.
So the next time you interview someone with a resume that states, ‘I accomplished x’ or ‘I did x’, it should send up a few warning signals.
Be decisive
One of the key jobs of a manager is to be an effective decision maker. Employees are never comfortable with managers who make slow decisions and the frequently change their minds. Quality managers make decisions quickly and stick with them.
Building and maintaining trust
Always do what you say and set good examples. Demand from yourself the same level of professionalism and dedication that you expect from others. Trust, once broken, is seldom restored to its original state. It is the most fragile yet essential attribute of leadership and management.
Doing the right thing
Always listen to your inner voice. If it “feels wrong” it is. It is never wrong to do the right thing. It is never right to do the wrong thing. The ends DO NOT justify the means
Take care of employees
Love your people. If your end users are viewed as people who are “clicks” or just customers you will fail. If you care about them, you will make the product that will actually make their life better or easier. You both win. Most companies are upside down.
Trust people
Don’t be precious and protective of things. Let people showcase their expertise and benefit collectively. Welcome people into the team with open arms, don’t be suspicious of their intentions. Ultimately you and the team are the beneficiary. You will meet lone superstars so find ways to connect whereby the partnership is mutually beneficial.
Keep learning
Don’t be afraid to ask stupid questions especially when you are new and fresh, its the best time to do it anyways.
When choosing work, don’t focus on what you CAN do, focus on what you WANT to learn to do.
Focus on results
You will encounter barriers, blockers but you must focus on getting results. Many instances in your process, you will be told “No” often but it is up to you to respond to it by taking whatever action possible to keep driving your project forward.
Do you need to ask for help? Do it. Can you re-negotiate by bringing certain people together in a room? Set it up. Do you need more time to make a decision? Ask for it.
Everyone is expendable
I have seen many people, whom I thought were indispensable, asked to let go. One failed initiative, an altercation with the boss, a year of under-performance is enough to undermine years of your contributions.
So don’t be complacent. If you are not evolving constantly to maintain your competitive edge, someone will catch up to you and make you redundant.
The bottom line
The moral of this story is that the best business lessons should have a great influence on team development and teamwork. If these different thoughts are possessed by your current management or leadership team, or your emerging leaders, you will be in a good position for the road ahead.
More leadership material from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Build an Effective Team by Being a Talent Hound
Workplace Skills Young Students Need for Success
Modern workplaces are as much a living breathing thing as the world they operate in. They are ever-changing and evolving, and as a result, offer new daily challenges and goals. It’s a collaborative and competitive environment for any newcomer. The best modern workplace skills for students to have foster trust, forge leadership, and create productive results.
All kinds of organizations seek these kinds of recruits. Luckily the modern workplace skills listed below cover pretty much all the bases.
So what’s on the list? Practicality, versatility, and adaptability are key here. These are the kinds of modern workplace skills that never go out of style. As workforces evolve, these skills will likely become even more important.
Problem Solving Skills
This one heads the list for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is that technology transforms the very fabric of our society. Our students will be coming up against challenges we can’t even conceive. There are literally problems not yet invented that will need creative and versatile solutions applied to them.
Of course, the problems of the present need just as much attention. Problem solving ability is a top priory as far as modern workplace skills go. A guided process for doing this is what the 6Ds of Solution Fluency are all about. Consider it a timeless teachable and learnable system that will serve our students well.
Information Skills
There’s so much information being created every single day it’s staggering. Bernard Marr has some Web facts that are blowing people’s minds. You can check them out in the article Big Data: 20 Mind-Boggling Facts Everyone Must Read. Here are a few highlights:
- More data has been created in the past 2 years than the entire history of humanity.
- By 2020 we’ll be creating about 1.7 MB of new information every second for every person in the world.
- Right now, less than 0.5% of all this data is ever analyzed and used.
Someone’s got to be able to wade through all this. Modern workforces need those who can critically analyze, organize, and utilize information. That’s why these are the kinds of skills that are taught within the process of Information Fluency.
Communication & Collaboration Skills
As mentioned before, the workplaces of today and tomorrow are collaborative. We are just as easily establishing virtual partnerships with people across the world as those across the room. Modern workplace skills like Collaboration Fluency focus on building teams that take businesses to new heights.
Collaborative practices begin in the classroom. That’s where our students form groups to solve problems and create projects. It’s how they interact and work together that determines their success. It’s the exact same thing for the workplaces they will graduate into.
Independent & Critical Thinking Skills
Any successful business draws on an employee’s ability to think critically and independently. Workers who need constant direction and supervision are often seen as a detriment to an organization. As such, these people will become less and less employable in the future. The same can be said for those unwilling or unable to think deeply and analytically about any issue.
It also means being able to spot problems and the potential for them before they happen. This kind of “cognitive initiative” can save businesses untold sums of time and money. Our students absolutely must add critical and independent thinking to their catalog of modern workplace skills.
Useful Failure Skills
Great students and workers turn mistakes into proactive moments of clarity. This means seeing failure as an opportunity. If we can use our mistakes to learn and to flourish, then we need never fear them. No matter what, we are always moving forward with a “useful failure” mindset. Establishing an intention to learn from failure and use it to grow as person, and then delivering on that promise, is exceptional.
It’s also the responsibility of those in authority to ensure that this is nurtured. Blame, guilt, admonishment, and derision for mistakes hinders progress and prosperity. This again is true of both the classroom and the workplace. As teachers or business leaders, we must provide encouragement and guidance when errors are made. This is how success grows for everyone.
Personal Organization Skills
There’s a reason why Mom told you to clean up after yourself and pick up your toys. She wasn’t being tyrannical or bossy. She was teaching you a valuable and respectable life skill for home, school, and work. Grumble all you want—the lady knew what she was talking about.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe instructed us as follows: Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean. The capacity for personal order ranks fairly high among modern workplace skills. Outward order is a reflection of inward order. It positively affects everyone around us in the work environment. It’s the kind of thing that leaves a good impression on teachers, employers, and co-workers alike.
Adaptability and Agility Skills
Nothing ever stays the same. Companies get demolished, ideas fade, promises get broken, and people go their own ways. Positions get handed to new people and others get moved around. Promotions and demotions happen regularly. Physical spaces expand and contract. Money is made and lost. People gain and lose control. This is the game of life.
Here we echo the words of Rudyard Kipling and ask: Can you keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you?
The ability to adapt and be agile in the face of change is a must among modern workplace skills. Work and life will throw curveballs of every kind at us. The person who would lead stands fast with change, keeps a clear head, and fixes an eye on the future.
Relationship Building Skills
Finally we come to relationships. Life is built on them, as is success and progress. Only by interacting with others can we truly learn and grow. We can know our own strengths and limitations better. We can also come to understand others better by having solid relationship skills. This makes collaboration so much more enjoyable and productive. Students should make fostering interpersonal skills of all kinds a priority.
What other modern workplace skills do you think our students can benefit from having?
Entrepreneurial Skills Required by Successful Business People
In today’s world, if you want to be successful in business or as a business entrepreneur, there is certainly a continuous “evolutionary” process that we must all undertake. In other words, there are entrepreneurial skills that successful business people must each practice, learn and re-learn in order to thrive in today’s business world. As our business environment changes, we need to be able to adapt those skills to our surroundings, or be left behind.
Before I tell you about the entrepreneurial skills to develop, I’d like to tell you a story to set the stage, so to speak.
The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday morning. Perhaps it’s the quiet solitude that comes with being the first to rise, or maybe it’s the unbounded joy of not having to be at work. Either way, the first few hours of a Saturday morning are most enjoyable.
A few weeks ago, I was shuffling toward the garage with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. What began as a typical Saturday morning turned into one of those lessons that life seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it:
I turned the dial up into the phone portion of the band on my ham radio in order to listen to a Saturday morning swap net. Along the way, I came across an older sounding chap, with a tremendous signal and a golden voice. You know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the broadcasting business. He was telling whomever he was talking with something about “a thousand marbles.” I was intrigued and stopped to listen to what he had to say.
“Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you’re busy with your job. I’m sure they pay you well but it’s a shame you have to be away from home and your family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. It’s too bad you missed your daughter’s dance recital,” he continued; “Let me tell you something that has helped me keep my own priorities.” And that’s when he began to explain his theory of a “thousand marbles.”
“You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years.
Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3,900, which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime. Now, stick with me, Tom, I’m getting to the important part.
It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail,” he went on, “and by that time I had lived through over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays. I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy. So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round up 1,000 marbles. I took them home and put them inside a large, clear plastic container right here in the shack next to my gear.
Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it away. I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on the really important things in life.
There’s nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight.
Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign off with you and take my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very last marble out of the container. I figure that if I make it until next Saturday then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing we can all use is a little more time.
It was nice to meet you Tom. I hope you spend more time with your family, and I hope to meet you again here on the band. This is a 75 year old man, K9NZQ, clear and going QRT, good morning!”
You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this fellow signed off. I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned to work on the antenna that morning, and then I was going to meet up with a few hams to work on the next club newsletter.
Instead, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss. “C’mon honey, I’m taking you and the kids to breakfast.”
“What brought this on?” she asked with a smile.
“Oh, nothing special, it’s just been a long time since we spent a Saturday together with the kids. And hey, can we stop at a toy store while we’re out? I need to buy some marbles.”
Below are 11 essential entrepreneurial skills for today’s business men and women whether they ever become an independent entrepreneur or not:
Have fun
You won’t find this skill on many lists, because many people would not consider it a skill. We not only consider it a skill (fun doesn’t happen often without working at it!), but we consider it so fundamental to all the other skills on the list that it is our top priority. The corollary to this skill must be mastered as well … when you dislike something, stop doing it.
Decision Making
No one can deny that the ability to make decisions is a core skill that every business person must possess if he or she wants to be successful. Decisions on how to proceed with marketing, funding, product production (in some cases), vendor selection, and a host of other judgments need to be made. The key is to learn from mistakes.
Avoid Fear of Failure
Remove fear rather than fearing mistakes to the point that you avoid decisions. This is a skill that is very difficult for some people to master.
Be disruptive and change the playing field
Don’t settle for the ordinary or the mundane, even if it means a little controversy. Don’t be afraid of ticking someone off. Make those around you think.
People skills
It’s often said that no matter what business you’re in, you’re in the people business. How true that is! Whether dealing with customers, vendors, investors, the press, or employees, well developed people skills can mean the difference between success and failure.
Innovate and iterate
Car models change every year because customers want something different. This is true in all industries. Be sure to innovate on your thinking often … be creative and try new ideas.
Planning
Being able to project into the future and build a plan to accomplish your objectives is a skill that can take any entrepreneur far. Effective planning is what will guide your business and ultimately define what you’re all about. The skilled business planner knows that planning is only an effective skill when combined with action, so they don’t get bogged down in planning rather plan with flexibility in mind. Don’t exclude strong time planning and management here, as without it, little else can be planned well.
Be Decisive … Just Do It!
The Nike slogan is not just for sportswear. Stop sitting around talking about your “great idea.” Get out there and pursue it. As Wayne Gretzky said, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”
Don’t believe you know as much as you think
Find an experienced entrepreneur-like mentor to help and guide you and don’t be afraid to ask for help. Listen to feedback from your mentor and others. Sure, you’ll get some bad inputs, but learn to filter.
Avoid the time killers
This includes constant email monitoring, meeting just to meet, having in-person chats when phone or Skype will work. Your time is very valuable, make the most of it.
Communication
If ever the term “last but not least” was appropriate, this is it. The skill of communication (all forms) plays a role in the execution of all of the other skills above. If you don’t have this skill, none of the other skills will be fully developed, no matter how hard you try.
Of course there are other important entrepreneurial skills you will need, but these are the key ones in our opinion.
What would you add to the list? Please share one or two entrepreneurial stories with us.
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