When you start to think from the perspective of your customer, and not the bottom line, innovation arises with ease. For example, someone that runs a gift shop that wants to have an edge, here are some ideas that spring to mind. People are busy, don’t underestimate the value of providing a concierge level of service to customers. Wrapping a…
For Example
I used to pride myself on thinking abstractly. For example, creating a software model to mirror the behavior of agricultural futures trading. But I’ve since learned that thinking abstractly is easy and coming up with an example is hard or just not intuitive. For example, I just reviewed a course on business needs analysis with 99% abstraction and at most…
Productive frustration
Negative emotions can be problematic if left unchecked, like frustration, but they can be a guide too. If something is frustrating you, see if there’s something you’re missing. Some extra piece of information that is vital to understand the situation that you either don’t know about or have forgotten about. For example, Jonathan and I were shopping the other day…
Tell people you’re not qualified
If someone asks for feedback, one of the #1 reasons why you want to ask them what type of feedback they’d like from you, is to ascertain if you feel qualified to give the feedback. For example, if someone asks me to tell them what they think of a pie, and I probe a bit further, I might find out…
Contentment is not complacent
Unchecked desire is a never ending quest to attain an always bigger boat. Ironically, once our needs are met, having more is not found in acquisition, but rather in deciding that you would like the peace of mind in not dealing with the consequences of pursuing further material acquisition. At some point, for all of us, contentment is the greatest…
Vote and move on
If you’re part of a board, or committee, you need to become adept at recognizing polarized issues. It’s not rocket science, yet for some reason it seems to trip up people on boards and committees. I’ve never understood holding open discussions about issues that people will never agree about, when the people who will ultimately decide have already made up…
Delegating authority isn’t an abdication to faith
The first step in being a more effective manager is to delegate decisions about how work is done, to those that are doing the work. Let them decide the right way to work. If you do this, you can focus on results and stop worrying about why people aren’t doing things exactly the way that you would do them. But,…
How to escape the feast-or-famine business mentality
If you routinely experience down turns in your business and you’d like to end the pernicious cycle, consider the following: Breaking out of the cycle simply requires a shift in mindset. You can chose to believe that this is the nature of the work you do, or you can take responsibility for it and believe that you can work to…
How to motivate people
The real challenge isn’t motivation, it’s dissuasion. Discouragement is a pernicious saboteur. It only takes one ill-advised remark to dismantle years of enthusiasm. This is most likely to come out of your mouth when something goes wrong. And you’re not likely to notice what you said either, in fact you’ll probably feel justified. For example, say your company conducts surveys…
Certification instructors have no moral compass
You can’t make this up. I just listened to someone that is a professional trainer talk about preparing people for certification exams. He said you have to be ready to give the “Microsoft” answer even if it’s counter to real world experience and what you would really do. At what point does someone taking this exam perhaps double check their…