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Values Drive Value — Always Did

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You Don’t Have to Wait for a Response to Know, Do You?

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In a conversation on Twitter on Sunday, I asked what I thought was a simple question.

How do you know when you’re tweeting value?

I asked it because a new guy on Twitter wanted to know the answer. I thought I might see what ways other folks had for managing the value of their Tweet stream — keeping the signal higher than the noise, not drifting over into in to useless chatter.

Many people started with the idea that they know they have tweeted value by the response — the retweets, reactions, engagement, and new followers that come from what they tweeted. So many answers basically said, “Other people tell me whether I offer value.”

I was thrown by the sheer number of responses that came back like that.
Being a teacher and a business person, my first thought was “Is this how our schools and our businesses have undermined us? They teach us to defer to other people’s opinion of value?

Isn’t putting something out there and then deciding it’s value by how people respond what network television does?

Value Is Worth


BigStock: Value is worth.

Imagine a contractor saying he would decide what a house he built was worth by tracking how many people talked about it? Wouldn’t you hope that the contractor might have a sense of quality and value before he picked his materials and assembled them?

Our reasons for sharing and responding or not doing so are often unrelated to value. Sometimes we share to get attention, without discrimination, or just to fill up the silence. Sometimes we don’t share because we’re busy, bored, tired of the noise, or uncaring.

If you offer something of value and no one responds does it mean that it has no value? If no one visits Tiffany, or Cartier for a week, will that mean that the diamonds they sell will no longer we of value?

Value is not what provokes a response — we swat mosquitoes when they bite us, but we don’t value the experience of a mosquito bite. Value is worth — what people find worth thinking about, worth using, worth discussing, worth time and attention. Value is what people keep and remember — we remember it because of how it changes or adds to our lives.

Values Drive Value — Always Did

Values drive value. We stop and notice what we value. Value resonates. Value influences. Value moves us to act on it because we want to incorporate it or add it our lives and our businesses. Finding value is its own reward. Sharing value is a generosity.

If you want to find what resonates with, influences, and moves other people, start with what resonates with you. influences, and moves you. If you want to know what other people will value, start with what you value first. If you don’t know where to start, here are three universal values you might use to offer irresistible value in what you write, build and choose to share.

  1. Value simplifies. Simple is elegant. Fewer clicks, fewer buttons, fewer steps in a to complete a task means less less to learn and less chance of introducing error. Simpler can move us past building to using. We do less hunting and gathering, less collecting data, art, photos, words, music, books, videos, and more enjoying, participating, reading, reviewing, listening, analyzing and sharing what we’ve collected. Anything that simplifies the navigation or the process of collecting gets us more quickly to discussing, learning, interacting, and connecting with the people about what we’ve found.
  2. Value saves time, energy, and resources. Who wouldn’t value something that offered more time, more energy or more resources? We need all three to process information and to make connections to people. Information and people help us remove problems, disarm obstacles, or lighten burdens. Connecting us to people who and you free our attention and time for what we want even more of in our businesses and our lives.
  3. Value adds meaning. Meaning, passion, purpose is what keeps us moving forward and gives us something to look forward to. Meaning is how we define ourselves and what connects us to other human beings. Meaning helps us explain why we’re here, who we care about, and how we’ll invest our time, energy and resources. Friends, family, fortune, fame, fun, faith and so many others are meaningful to people. Share what’s meaningful to you.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that we stop listening for a response. Listening is a value in itself. It adds meaning to the relationships we’re building. Values attract people who value what you do. Serve them. Sharing values builds trust and trust simplifies, saves time, and adds meaning to a relationship.

Don’t build a life or a business around people who don’t share your values. They won’t value you. They won’t value your work. Why would you want to share what you value with people who don’t value it too?

Share what you know to be of value with people who value what you do. Then listen to their responses. Identify those who value you what you do and use what they say to serve them better, to think about what they might need next of value that will simplify, save time, and add meaning to their lives.

How do you know when you’re offering value?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

How SWOT Analysis Creates a Culture and Strategy of Fear or Opportunity

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Creating Opportunity

What SWOT is NOT

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I started writing about strategic deep thinking — the importance of finding more than one solution to any problem and realistically advancing by leveraging opportunity for years here at Successful-Blog.

As part of my research and discussion on the topic of strategy, it’s not unusual for me to ask someone their definition of strategy. Recently a conversation like that reminded me of a bad experience with the misuse of SWOT Analysis.

“SWOT Analysis is a powerful technique for understanding your Strengths and Weaknesses, and for looking at the Opportunities and Threats you face.” says James Manktelow

STRENGTHS
WEAKNESSES
OPPORTUNITIES
THREATS

SWOT IS a powerful tool for analysis.
Unfortunately, some folks who use SWOT dropped the word Analysis. They think of SWOT as strategy.

SWOT is not strategy. It’s analysis.

The Difference Between Strategy and Analysis

SWOT is first reconnaissance then analysis. Analysis is not strategy.

A SWOT analysis is the examination and interpretation of the elements that make up a tactical position in business. Analysis reviews and reports a single moment’s position.

Analysis underpins strategy.

Strategy is a realistic plan to leverage opportunity and strength (avoiding weakness and threats) to advance forward over time. Strategy changes as that position changes.

Some folks treat SWOT as what it’s not. They do the analysis and believe they’ve got a strategy. They identify strengths and weaknesses. They list threats and opportunities. Then they go off to execute on tactics to reach their goals, totally leaving out the strategy step. The thinking never went to the strategy level — because they thought they were there already.

Instead their corporate thought was stuck in the abyss of analysis with only passing thought to what came after that.

How SWOT Analysis Creates a Strategy of Fear or Opportunity

Most folks do move onto something more strategic. They write the notes from the white board and circulate them. They give their analysis have room to breathe. They apply the deep thinking required to make informed choices after the analysis.

Where we focus that thinking is critical to our culture and the strategy that comes from it. The same SWOT chart with the wrong thinking can create a culture that is defending against failure rather than achieving success.

If we focus on the threats and weaknesses, the strategy we build will be a defense — focused on protecting ground, not gaining it. It will center around the strengths and moves of the competition. The “Plan B” we build will be one that is a lesser achievement than our “Plan A,” because it will be what happens if a weakness or a threat overcomes us. In that way, our company will be building a culture and strategy based on fear.

If we focus on the opportunities and strengths, the strategy we build will be and offense — focused on gaining ground, not protecting it. It will center around our own strengths and unique openings in the competitive field we can leverage to our own advantage. The “Plan B” we build will be a detour — another route to the same strong achievement as the “Plan A,” because it will be what happens when we engage our strength and find new openings. In that way, our company will be building a culture and strategy of opportunity.

Next time you do a SWOT analysis, rather than building shields around your weaknesses and threats, consider how to turn them into strengths and opportunities. The way we build our defense or offense can affect our entire culture.

How to you build strategy achieving toward opportunity rather than defending against threats?

Building opportunity is irresistible.
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

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How to Identify the Highest Potential Strategic Partners

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Strategic Partnership Series

The Story

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I sat at the conference room table with two other people. I was the consultant. They were the President and Key Partner of the Investment Firm that Owned the Company. It started as a simple conversation.

We talked about the company’s situation — their revenues were declining by 10% a year. Their product mix wasn’t robust enough to support growth. Attempts at new product had been poorly conceived. Now they were sitting with one potentially successful product that, if left alone, would leave the business in a slow growth, high risk situation.

We talked about product life cycles in their industry. Successful products could expect to grow for 3-5 years. Then the natural decline — the downside of the bell curve — would follow and sales might continue out to year 10.

“What would be your product strategy?” the big boss asked me.
“I’d get on a plane. Go to the U.K. Buy quality product and adapt it to fit the U.S. market.”
“Why the U.K.?” was the next question.
“Because everyone has already been to Australia, and if you don’t get some product to market and earning as fast as you can, it won’t matter what strategy I conceive.”
“You’re going to London,” was the man’s answer.

By the end of the year, I not only went to the U.K., I was hired and I took my first of what became a yearly trip to build and nurture strategic partnerships around the world.

How to Identify the Highest Potential Strategic Partners

The idea of entering a strategic partnership is both intriguing and challenging. Strategic partnerships grow TWO businesses at a faster rate. The ability to share ideas, piggyback resources, decrease costs, and shorten timelines by distributing, versioning, and repackaging can bring a huge increase in ROI even to the smallest business.

But partnerships are tricky to begin with. Choosing the right partner is critical to success. Use these questions to identify the highest potential strategic partners for your business.

  • Who has product we can version for our customers? Would they consider making two versions as they build their next product? Potential strategic partners have to make product appropriate for our market that we might want to distribute. Define that as something for customers who are like ours, only slightly different.

    If we make packaging for boutiques, we might explore companies who makes packaging for department stores, grocery stores, computer stores, jewelry stores, restaurants — the list is huge. We’d be looking for what we might distribute to our boutiques. Those tiny “to go” boxes used by Chinese restaurants might make interesting packaging for boutique candy stores. Would they be willing to print an exclusive series of those boxes in fashion colors, we could sell them to our clients at exclusive prices?

  • Who shares our standards and values? Naturally a partnership needs to agree on what is quality workmanship, what is good service, and how to respond when problems arise. Shared values and standards are foundational to trust. Partners who share our values and standards see the quality in our work, understand our pricing, and trust our choices and decisions.
  • Who is good at what we’re not and needs what we’re good at? Can they extend our brand or strengthen our marketing? Can we shore up their product offers and idea development? A great partner doesn’t look like us. They look like what we’re not.
  • Who has a similar process for approving ideas? My experience over time has taught me to be wary of potential partners with numerous approval stages. A business with the more approval stages will control final decisions. The approval process will break down ideas and steal time.
  • Who sees the value of the partnership immediately? High potential partnerships are agreements between businesses each contributing value to the other business. If a potential partner needs to be converted to the idea, that equality of agreement is missing. It’s wise if we don’t work at making it work. Converts rarely stay converted. We’re likely to end up in something that looks more like a client/vendor relationship.

Great strategic partnerships demonstrate the idea that leaders look to build things that they can’t build alone. We share easier, faster, more meaningful way to reach customers that are just outside our “sweet spot.” We can offer product ideas that we could pursue without partner help.

Have you given strategic partnerships enough thought?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Watch for more on negotiating strategic partnerships.

5 Smart Ways to Differentiate a Successful Business

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Grant Tilus

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Did you know Americans create more than 500,000 new businesses every month? It’s true, but only 50 percent of those businesses will still be operational within five years. While the amount of new businesses every month is encouraging, our rate of failure is unfortunate and must be improved upon.

5 Smart Ways to Differentiate a Successful Business

One way you can increase your business’ chance of celebrating its five year anniversary is to differentiate your business among your industry peers. Stand out from the crowd. Use these five ways to differentiate to build a smart and successful business. Each key point provides real-world examples of what you can do to improve your business.

1. Focus on the Customer

The best and often the most successful entrepreneurs create businesses they are so passionate about they will do anything for their customers. Over time many business owners tend to lose focus and begin straying away from having the needs of their customer be a top priority. However, by maintaining a customer-centric focus you will create a positive customer experience that will allow you to build your brand all while creating a loyal base of repeat and new customers.

Example: Stuffed Giraffe Shows What Customer Service Is All About

2. Be a Social Media Juggernaut

In our digital world social media cannot be ignored by even the smallest of businesses. Focus on creating a unique social community by engaging and educating your customers about your brand in a way that’s both entertaining and helps them feel connected to your business. We all know it’s easier to keep customers rather than finding new ones; social media can help you do both.

Example: Impressive Small Business Facebook Pages You Can Learn From

3. Don’t Focus on the Competition

Every smart business owner has conducted a SWOT analysis for their business venture. Far too often business owners get caught up in the threats of competition, which causes their own business to suffer. However, by focusing on the unique opportunities your business has to offer you will help it stand out among the rest as a clear and distinguished option for your targeted customer base.

Example: Your Competition, Isn’t

4. Make It Personal

Creating personal connections is part of human nature. In the midst of creating a business we subconsciously hide our own personality, and that’s not necessarily the best thing to do. Customers need ways to connect with businesses beyond the advertisements and sales pitches. By being transparent and humanistic your customers can begin to create a relationship with your business and become more than just a customer. Tell your story and learn your customer’s story as you build your business.

Example:


Papa John Telling the Papa John Story

5. Keep Things Fresh

Changes within your target market, technology, and the economy often require your business to make adjustments. In order to stay relevant and continue building a successful business it’s important to assess and refresh your business’ activities. The businesses that are comfortable maintaining the status quo are the ones that are failing to prepare for true longevity. As a business owner you need to be asking, listening and responding to changes in the market and your customer base in order to succeed in the long term.

Example: Living Business Plans Help Businesses Flow with Future

Differentiate your business in 5 smart and social ways to build success. Use social avenues to focus on and connect with customers personally by sharing stories. Then you can let your competition worry about you.

What successes have you had with differentiating your business in smart and social ways?

Author’s Bio:
Grant Tilus is an Inbound Marketing Specialist at Rasmussen College. He creates superior content and blogs about accelerated bachelor’s degree programs, other online business school degree programs or inbound marketing best practices. Feel free to connect with Grant Tilus on Twitter and Google+.

What Is Perfect in Business Thinking?

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Stardards Are Agreed and Repeatable.

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When I was in publishing, I spent a lot of time with editors, designers, marketers, sales reps, finance folks, and C-Suite executives. Each of them had different goals for success. Each had different ideas of what drives a successful business. Almost all of them wanted to do a great job for the company and for themselves.

But young product designers and builders that I worked with often had unrealistic aspirations and goals. They set a standard for the products they worked on. Their standard was that the products be perfect.

A standard is an agreed, repeatable way of doing something.

Perfect isn’t a standard. Perfect isn’t a repeatable way of doing anything.
Just as important, they would have been hard pressed to get the rest of the company to agree to their definition of perfect.

That idea of a perfect product worked against them.

What Is Perfect?

Those designers desperately would explain how to design the perfect product. Meanwhile, the sales reps, finance folks, and C-Suite executives each had their own definition of what perfect means in that context.

Perfect is in the eye of the beholder —

  • to the product builders — a writer, editor, illustrator, coder, programmer — a perfect product is structurally sound, without error, and elegant
  • to the designers a perfect product is aesthetically pleasing, easy to use, elegant
  • to the marketers a perfect product is new, compelling, and innovative
  • to the sales reps the perfect product is one that sells and stays sold
  • to the finance folks, a perfect product sells and makes money at the same time
  • to the C-Suite executives a perfect product seems to be one that does all of those things
  • to the only ones who count — the customers — a perfect product meets their needs, makes their lives easier, faster/simpler, or more meaningful.

Clearly the idea of perfect wasn’t the same from one team to another. Perfection is experience and perception, not a standard.

What Is Perfect in Business Thinking?

A quest for perfect is unattainable. What perfect judge would decide when we’ve succeeded?

The stress of perfection makes us less human. Our flaws and foibles, expertise and experience round out our thinking and define our appeal as unique beings. Perfect in business thinking is both strong with vulnerable. It takes wonderfully imperfect humans to truly connect a business to its customers.

It doesn’t matter whether our offer is a product or a service. If we focus on the work, it’s easy to forget the people. Yet, we’re do the work to attract, connect with, and serve people. Solid business thinking defines perfect work by how well it delivers value.

We can build in shiny bells and whistles that we decide will make our work perfect. If the folks we’re serving don’t see, need, or want the noisemakers we’ve built in, we’re not adding value. We’re adding cost — our time and energy to build them, their time and energy to avoid and ignore the ringing and whistling. (Unless they miss them completely, which is benign, but still a drain on our resources.

There’s no such thing as a perfect product. Even if we could achieve one, I’d go for the a product that attracts, delights, and serves customers. If a product serves the customer exactly as the customer wants and needs it to … To me that is perfect in business thinking.

When the next project comes — or even as your move forward on this one — here are a few imperfect suggestions that will get you closer to perfectly satisfying those customers …

  1. Unravel any rigid definitions of a perfect outcome to make room for new thinking. Don’t confuse wrong and different.
  2. Remember that perfect isn’t about you. Don’t define what’s perfect for customers. Let them tell you.
  3. Ask questions. Ask the people you serve to describe their “perfect” outcome. Do this before, during, and after a project. Do it often when you’ve encountered a problem.
  4. As you gather information from the people you serve, use it to set a true standard. Then live UP to it. An agreed upon, repeatable, and predictable standard makes business easier, faster, and more meaningful.
  5. Pay attention and keep tweaking until you’ve aligned your goals with your customers. Do more of what works. Stop what doesn’t.

Don’t try for perfect work. Like the young product builders and designers, any definition of perfect work will be flawed if leaves out customers. Perfect work in business thinking is outcomes and solutions that fit your customers’ needs as they see them. Show up consistently with generosity and your best reasoning. Be outstanding at seeing, hearing, and responding to people.

Make things easier, simpler, and more meaningful. Your work will be better than perfect. It will be irresistible.
And that’s perfectly appealing.

What’s your definition of perfect in business thinking?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

How to Build Something You Can’t Build Alone

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The Power of Community Focused in the Same Direction

Whether you count yourself in huge corporation, a small team, or feel you’re the only member of an entirely unique group. If we hope to move forward, we all could use a more strategic view. We can chase our dreams. We can hire an evangelist. We can put our noses to the grindstone. Still the truth of the matter is we’re social beings and we build better things together than we’ll ever build alone.

The best dreams are built with insight from a variety of viewpoints. The best ideas and innovations are fleshed out with minds and voices that approach a problem from differing points of view. The best communities come together around participation and personal investment. And we’ve all seen the power of a community focused in the same direction.

Leaders want to build something we can’t build alone.

How to Build Something You Can’t Build Alone

When we think of social business, the tools may have changed, but the people haven’t. We’d still like our lives to be easier, simpler, and more meaningful than just getting up each day to go to work. Invitations attract us. Aspirations move us forward. Focus brings us to a clear path. Relationships well-chosen lighten our load. Quality raises our investment. True collaboration brings out our better selves.

Great leaders who build great things understand that human nature and engage it to fuel their goals. If you want to be that kind of leader — one who attracts, inspires, guides, focuses, connects, and unites — here’s how to build something you can’t build alone.

  1. Be a Magnet, not a Missionary. Quit converting and start attracting. Understand and respect our different, yet symbiotic purposes. The community needs the goods, services, and economic contributions of growing businesses. Growing business need the support and patronage of loyal communities.
  2. Have and Share a Vision. To make a thriving business, start with a long-term loyal, internal community of employees. They will build and protect a healthy innovative culture, promote the values of the business, stay with the company, develop expertise with coworkers, and live to serve customers.In any community, it’s not the how or what of work that builds connection and loyalty. It’s vision and mission. The underlying vision that unites us toward building something that we can’t build alone. A community needs leadership to set and invest that vision and so that they can feel smart, safe, and powerful in investing too.
  3. Know How to Choose the Easiest, Fastest, Most Meaningful Next Move Strategy is a realistic plan to advance a position over time by leveraging your unique opportunity. Recognizing opportunity and getting where you want to go is impossible if you don’t know where you are now. Position is informational — It’s part part property and packaging, part size, scope, and systems. Position is relational — it’s part values and relationships, part mission, vision, and perception. The most advantageous next positions look only slightly different than the place we already are. Deeply study your position and you understand the true value proposition of your brand.
  4. Lead with Relationships Choose the people around you — employees, vendors, partners, customers — wisely with deliberation and intention. They are the people who will build your business with you. Likewise, choose your sponsors and the businesses you support with equal thought to how they build your community and your life.
  5. Even Cheap Is Expensive When the Model Is Doesn’t Work Start a new business and you’ll soon see, that numbers reflect history. Without history, questions are what we use to generate the numbers we use. Numbers are important and useful, but they are as deep as the questions we ask. When we aggregate the numbers into a graphic they become shallow and flat. What I just saw will forgotten in an hour. What I just bought won’t win you my next dollar. Haven’t we figured out yet that impressions, circulation, and hits in general are short-terms goals and NEVER have been attributable?
  6. Understand the Power of Collaboration If communities and corporations, align our goals and head in the same direction the results could be amazing. But first we each have to know where we’re going and negotiate from the SAME SIDE of the table, recognizing that we’re stronger together.

Leaders make work and life easier, simpler, and more meaningful. Sometimes we do that simply by letting folks see what they see, know what they know, and do what they do … because other people see, know, and do valuable things that we can’t see, know, or do.

Leaders who need no one, lead no one. Don’t hire a staff, engage people who contribute. Don’t build a coliseum, raise a barn.
It’s irresistibly attractive to build something you can’t build alone.

How will you be a leader this week?

Be a leader.
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!