6-Minute Transition to Writing

April 25, 2006 by Liz

I’m No Good at Transitions

Start a day in a meeting; then it’s off to start writing. Some people can immediately be working. That won’t be me that you’re seeing. I’m not one of those people. I’m no good at transitions.

Tim Allen best expressed this feeling. He said smething like,

I hate getting into the shower, and I hate getting out.

That’s me.

The problem is I leave a meeting, chirping like a box of birds. It’s a personal idiosyncrasy–once my extrovert gets talking and interacting, I have trouble finding my thinking and writing introvert. As with most things me, the only solution I’ve found — giving my brain what it needs — I’m good at that. [Read more…]

Critical Skill 4: Part 1-Process Models

April 20, 2006 by Liz

Don’t Fear the Process

I was at a company where the core competencies were the highest I’ve ever seen. In three seconds, we could strategize where to sit in a meeting to make it more productive. We could layout a trade booth to maximize traffic flow and product exposure, leaving room for fun and improvization. We knew where we stood in the market and against our past performance on a minute-by-minute basis. We ate the low-hanging fruit for breakfast, and shot down our competition at lunch. We were good.

This day there was an executive strategy meeting — like we needed one. As you might guess, there was a new guy in charge, and HE needed one. My usual Pollyanna attitude didn’t have room for this interruption. There was real work that needed to get done. I resented this pretend work that was getting in the way.

“If he asks us to spell strategy, I’m out of there,” I said to another VP on the way in. It was worse than I thought. He flipped a chart and started talking about SWOT — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats — which, by the way, is analysis not strategy. We needed that even less. [Read more…]

5 Sure-Fire Ways to Break the Promise of Your Brand

April 10, 2006 by Liz

Brand YOU Common Sense

All of this Brand YOU conversation really does come down to common sense. In order to make a strong place for yourself in the world of business, you need to know yourself. You need to capitalize on your strengths and shore up your weaknesses, to find ways to let people know how you add value, and to think deeply so that you can speak to the unique assets that you bring to everything that you do.

Being able to do those things puts you ahead of most folks–if you keep the ideas in perspective–because most follks don’t quite understand the concept of brand versus product or store. Keep in mind your brand is a promise you make. Not everyone will take you up on it. Some will look for you to break that promise. One day, in some way, you probably will.

5 Ways to Break the Promise of Your Brand

Here are 5 sure-fire ways to break the promise of your personal brand.

1. Build a brand on what you wish you were instead of what you are. You’ve taken time to build a brand. You’ve gathered the attributes and strengths that you want people to see as yours. But they’re really just pipe dreams–wishes instead of realities. Your promise was made on false pretenses. People recognize soon enough when you’ve oversold yourself. They see it in what you can’t do. You not only lose your brand. You lose any credibility you might have had. It’s exponentially higher, if not impossible, to win back trust, than it is to earn trust you never had.

2. Crack under pressure. Sail along smoothly as a calm and charismatic leader until the chips get down, then lose it all and fall apart. It doesn’t matter whether you whine and shake, or yell and stammer. Lose your humanity, your leadership skills, your sense of humor and your brand is lost right with them. You broke your promise when it counts.

3. Change with the weather. A brand is a promise that you’ll always be there–you, the you that folks have come to know. Your coworkers and business relations don’t want to get to know you every time they meet you. They want a brand they can believe in. Consistency is a cornerstone of any brand. If you’re not consistent you don’t have a brand. Folks don’t make promises with the wind.

4. You don’t believe you. You know what you want to be, and in your heart you want to be it. You just don’t believe you ever will. If you don’t believe you, why in the world would I? It’s not good business to bet on a promise that starts with I’m not so sure, but I want to try.

5. You think Brand YOU is an entitlement. Whoa! Slow down cowboy. This isn’t a rodeo, and you don’t have the silver buckle yet. You see Brand YOU isn’t really about you at all. It’s about the customer, and the customer is every person who is NOT you–the folks you work with and those you serve. Brand YOU is merely a way of communicating to them what you stand for in shorthand so that you can get on to the relationship of working together with some common knowledge of each other as already established ground. The promise should be that you’re there for THEM.

Just like any broken promise, no personal brand at all is better than a broken personal brand.

Turning Brand YOU Upside-Down

Now that you’ve identified your personal brand and you know what it’s there for. It’s time to turn it upside-down. It’s time to add the most crucial part of it. ME–Well, me the customer. The customer is the reason you made a brand in the first place. The customer is the one who lets you know what your brand really is.

Now Brand YOU becomes Brand YOU & ME. Two is a lot more fun. Just wait I’ll show you why and how.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Perfect for Friday Productivity Checklist

April 7, 2006 by Liz

Productivity. Everyone wants it, thinks they have some of it, and loses it faster than they realize. Here are some things you might check and do on a Friday afternoon to feeling better about starting the week again on Monday morning.

Perfect for Friday Productivity Checklist

2. Use that half-hour to organize everything on your desk. Put things away. Lay out things that still need attending to. Mark what needs to be done. Make a to-do list, if that’s your way.

3. Make a plan for next week–at the least, decide what you will tackle first on Monday and what your three most important goals will be.

4. Do an office check. Are the things you use most closest to where you use them? If not, move them, so that they will be. Are the files you access most on your computer only one click away? If not, move them so that they will be.

5. Order the Monday tasks by putting what you can get done fastest first. Do this for two reasons. It will start your week with a quick sense of accomplishment, and you’ll be able to pass on what you finished–that means that when you move on to task two, someone else can be starting on what was your task one.

Then consider the week closed, leave the office at work, give your brain a break, and have a weekend. What a great way to promote yourself and your brand to anyone who walks by on their way home for the weekend. It says a lot for your personal brand–almost everyone wishes their office looked like it could be in a magazine . . .

Whether you work in a building away from home or in your bedroom, it’s boost to your Monday to walk back into a space that’s ready to work in.

What do you think when you see an office that looks well taken care of?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Have Failure of the Imagination

April 5, 2006 by Liz

Plan B No–Fail Fast and Move On

The meeting had just started. We were talking to the company’s major owner-partner. We had laid out the framework of how we would turn the company around. The partner turned to the company president and said, “And do you have a Plan B, in case this doesn’t work?”

I said, “If you don’t mind . . . ” and asked if I might edit his question. We knew each other well, and so he said, “Sure.”

My new version was, “Is the plan flexible enough that if you find one or more parts not working, you can adjust your plan and keep moving forward?”

. . .

After the meeting, the owner-partner queried what my thinking was in editing his question. I said that it was two-fold: that how he thought affected our thinking and that to talk of Plan Bs at that juncture was to give permission to fail at Plan A before we’d even tried to make it work.

I really don’t like assumptions that Plan A has a chance of failing. I really don’t like Plan Bs for that reason. I don’t mind failures. I like to see them coming, fail fast, and move on.

Failure of Imagination

I actually seek out failures of imagination. I have them on purpose often. This is not a literal “my imagination does not work” kind of thing. It is my imagination conjuring all kinds of failure situations.

I use imagined failures to get ideas for writing and for all kinds of problem solving. Here are a variety of situatons and ways you might use failures of imagination to bring you to a stronger outcome.

Getting Ideas for Writing

Ask questions such as these.

Personal Failures as Ideas

Questioning Other Folks’ Possible Failures
Why is this person not qualified to teach, say, or do this?
What would happen if I actually tried this?
Where’s the flaw in this argument?
What information is missing from this report?
What failures are in the famous person’s past?
How many failures preceeded this invention?
How long before this gadget breaks down?

Designing a Process

Ask questions such as these.

On an Interview or With a Client

Ask questions such as these.

On Your Brand Identity

Ask questions such as these.

On Promoting Your Blog

Ask questions such as these.

Positive Negatives

No need to jump to the negatives. Instead, use them to keep your life positive. The trick is not to focus on the unproductive, but to seek out unwanted outcomes to find fun, positive ways to avoid them. Think of imagining failures as building a safety net for the tight rope walk that is your brand and your business.

Having a failure of imagination can be a fantastic resource for protecting your business. It’s so much more fun than working out a Plan B that, if you think about it, could easily have the same failure opportunities as Plan A does.

Can you have a failure of imagination? Are you positive or negative?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Brand YOU–Handling Problems

April 4, 2006 by Liz

Brand Integrity

People say, Ã¢â¬ÅDonÃ¢â¬â¢t judge a book by its cover.Ã¢â¬?

In any relationship of substance, there comes a moment when things go wrong. Often folks can simply adjust and move forward, occasionally the damage is large enough that things need to stop before progress can be made. Problems need to be fixed. How these moments are handled can mean the end of a relationship or just the opposite an even stronger bond of respect is forged.

Integrity, graciousness, and the ability to deal in times of problems are key indicators of brand strength and viability. People look to see who you and your business really are when troubles come your way.

Handle Yourself, Not the Problem

Problems are opportunities . . . make lemonade. . . yeah, yeah, we all know that. The truth is. They don’t look or feel that way, when they’re happening and we don’t feel like drinking lemonade. In business, ignoring problems or running away from them usually isn’t an option, at least not for long. So instead, we rush in and try to handle them–be the hero, adrenaline pumping. That’s when we make wrong decisions–knee-jerk reactions happen. Words get said that aren’t our usual, in tones that aren’t our own.

The key to solving problems with grace and brand integrity is NOT to handle them, but to handle ourselves instead. Try these steps the next times a crisis hits to keep your head safely wired to your heart.

When I give my soul a little breathing room . . .
everyone I know gets nicer.

I try to remember, when problems come, that if I don’t feel taken care of myself, I’m not going to give a very good showing. So the first thing I do is a personal check. When was the last time I ate, slept, saw something beside flourescent lighting or a hotel room? I walk outside to see sky and trees if I can. It’s hard to take any business stress over-seriously when I’ve just been confronted with the scope of nature and taken a moment to breathe.

2. The more that you want to run, the more that you should walk instead. Forcing myself to think slowly keeps me from knee-jerk reactions It also leaves space for other folks to talk.

3. The minute you feel righteous you are wrong. When I feel a crusade coming on, I find someone to tell me what I’m not seeing. There is no problem with only one side. I know I need balance. I need somone to tell me what I’m about to get wrong.

4. When you have balance, THEN gather facts to make an informed plan of action.

5. Execute the plan with confidence and calm.

No Need to Be Pollyanna

No, you don’t have to look forward to problems, nor do you need to think the sun is always shining. The world can only take so many Pollyannas. Still, it is nice to have the confidence of knowing that when a problem comes, you can handle it with grace and be a credit toyour brand.

You’ll know you’re there when folks start asking how you stay so cool under pressure. They will. When they do, just smile and paraphrase my sentence for them

I find that when I give myself a little breathing room, everyone gets nicer.

I won’t tell them where you got that from.

–ME “Liz” Strauss