Reinventing Yourself Through Mindfulness – A very thought provoking post with some incredible case studies. How much better quality of work can be done when we are mindful? The mind is a powerful tool.
Car Dancing for the Greater Good – Come on! You know you wanna! Check out the video.
I’m not much into video games. I have nothing against them (although they can eat up time like crazy) but I just have other things on my radar that are more pressing for me. Regardless, I can appreciate a good video game, not just for its artistry but for what it can teach business owners:
Video games are a great intersection between technical proficiency, artistic ability, and user experience.
When those things intersect in the right ways, a compelling game is created. Your business is similar:It’s an intersection between those three things.
I coach a client who is a freelancer. He’s generally productive and looking at different strategies to grow his small business. In a conversation a couple of weeks ago he mentioned that he had just spent an hour browsing through a website that collected and posted complaints that freelancers have about their clients. He related at how funny it was to read these complaints because so many of them mirrored his own experience with customers.
Now, if someone is relatively productive, the occasional internet browsing is okay and it’s nice to take a break to laugh at something funny. But my advice to him was to drop the site from his bookmarks. It’s not that it would make him unproductive – that’s not the issue that he and I are working on. Rather, the site is poison. It’s highlighting something that is negatively funny about paying clients who are very much like his own. While a humorous site is okay, a site like the one he was browsing can bring serious harm to his business because it can highlight things he doesn’t like about customers in general (and his customers specifically!). I’ve seen it happen: Negative talk about customers can turn into negative feelings toward customers. That’s poison.
A friend of mine is a freelancer and he is a self-confessed tyrant of metrics. He analyzes the proposals he sends out and monitors how many people call him as a result. He analyzes every action in his sales process and has goals and can tell me at the end of the day how close
he came to achieving his daily goals. He claims that he’s not obsessed with charts, per se, but with the productivity that results from them.
It’s the old “what gets measured gets managed” adage. Makes sense (even if it seems excessive to the rest of us).
“Take my wife, please” is probably one of the most famous one liners there are. I’m not a big fan of one liners; it’s just not my brand of comedy. And when it comes to project management, I’m not a big fan of one liners, either.
In project management we bring together numerous smaller pieces so that, by the end, we have a completed project – whether that’s a book or a product or an invention or a new business. There are many different kinds of project management tools and techniques out there and the one that is used most often is the “one liner”. Click here to read more »
We’re living in turbulent economic times. Economists are now predicting that most of 2009 will continue this way with a market resurrection in the end of 2009 and through 2010. Larger businesses may have the assets and borrowing power to survive. But smaller businesses do not and many of them are wondering if they’ll survive during the year.
At the risk of sounding like I’m stating the obvious, I feel that it’s important to highlight the one best practice that all businesses should be pursuing this year:
MORE SALES
In the last blog, I talked about the first part of the conundrum of committedness: How the consultant needs to stay busy enough with commitments to earn and income but also have enough time to market in order to replenish the pipeline.
I said that the first part of the conundrum of committedness is: The more commitments you have now, the less time you have to generate new commitments. But the less time you spend on generating new commitments, the fewer you will soon have. Click here to read more »
One of the constant themes I see in the consulting I do is business-growth. Whether I’m working on helping a business get off the ground, or whether I’m implementing a new product into a company’s sales cycle, or whether I’m helping turn an idea into a product, it’s all about strengthening and improving the business.
But one of the challenges that businesses of all sizes face is something I call ‘committedness’. And as a business works to strengthen itself, the ‘conundrum of committedness’ increases and can cause all kinds of problems. Click here to read more »
