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Know Yourself … as a Strategy

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Does the Unexpected Undo Your Best-Laid Plans?

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We can’t plan the people.
We can’t plan the surprises.
We can’t plan the creative solutions to problems that we never expected.
Planning too tightly removes our chance to leverage those rare opportunities that is the serendipity of new adventures and new people.

Rather than planning out every possibility, know yourself and you’ll have a strategy for work and for life.

Have a Strategy for Your Work and Your Life

So don’t just plan. Have a strategy. Know yourself as well as you want to know your business. Have a strategy for yourself in work and life as you do for your business. A strategy is a realistic framework that moves you forward over time by leveraging opportunities that are uniquely yours. A strategy leaves room for opportunities you might not see when you first start a plan. To build a great, working, living strategy you need to know a few things.

  1. Know who you are, what you’re building, how you’ll build it, and why you’re building it. That way you’ll know which people share your values and which opportunities will help you move forward.
  2. Know where you’re standing and where you’re going, so that you know which direction to focus on. That way you’ll understand which choices are detours on the path to your golden destination. Besides knowing where you’re going is irresistible. People who are drawn to your goals will figure you’ll know how to help them achieve theirs too.
  3. Know your own cycles and patterns of behavior and those of the people you care to about. That way you’ll be able to make some predictions, choose the behaviors that keep you winning, and learn how to lose those that don’t.
  4. Know how to make decisions based on your experience, goals, and values. Then you will know how to kill off the stuff that gets in the way of your successful mission without killing off yourself, your relationships. A great decision will keep you from wasting time that you could spend on a world of choices that are more fun and alive.
  5. Know who you include in your personal development, care, and support systems. Make a list of who truly cares about your life, your goals, and your dreams for the future. That way you’ll be able to always show them their importance in your life.

The key to leveraging opportunity is knowing that who you are and where you stand has as much to do with what can move you forward as where you want to go. Get know yourself deeply and you’ll be aware of what work and life opportunities fit your best strengths, when they’ll be coming, and how you might best incorporate them into your plans.

Know yourself and you’ll know how you can move forward.
Know yourself and you’ll know how you can help others.
Know yourself and you’ll be able to see how our goals align so that we can make things we could never make alone.

Take a few minutes now to go through the list and find out …
what do you need to find out about yourself?

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!!

Inside out vs. Outside In: Choosing the Right Approach for Your Online Business

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A Guest Post by
Rahil Muzafar

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Which Is Best for Your Business?

When you are looking to setting up an online business (or any other business for that matter), there are two, totally different approaches that you can choose from, commonly known as “Inside Out” and “Outside In” approach.

Going Inside-Out:

You should know that you are taking the “Inside Out” route when you are trying to build on a business plan that you ‘think’ is profitable. Normally, it’s not a plan that you have laid out after careful research and assessment, but merely an imitation of what other successful businesses are doing. In other words, you try to get hold of a plan, which has worked for someone else, and then try to replicate the exact same model while hoping for the similar success (or should we say, hoping against the hope).

Choosing Outside In:

On the other hand, an online entrepreneur with “Outside In” approach will start from the market, or customers to be more precise. They will start from trying to decipher what exactly the customers want, and then finding a way to bring exactly that product or service on table. Therefore, it wouldn’t be wide off the mark if we say that a business with “Inside out” approach is basically a follower, whilst a successful “Outside in” approach will make you a trendsetter, which is an accomplishment in itself.

However, when we look at all of those new businesses popping up in the cyber world, we will see that more businesses are taking the Inside out approach, whilst very few are daring to opt for the Outside In. But before we disapprove of those businesses, let’s have a well-rounded discussion about the pros and cons of both these approaches.

Finance and Budgeting:

As you can make out from the aforementioned descriptions, Inside out approach is more feasible when it comes to finances and budgeting, for the reason that you can easily go through different “success stories” and choose the one that suits your budget.

On the other hand, Outside In will require a more flexible budget, because your main objective is to fulfill the customers’ need and come up with a product or service that doesn’t fall short of their expectation. In an Inside Out approach, you will be more concerned about your own resources and restricted while taking business decisions, whereas Outside In approach wouldn’t even allow you to start until you have arranged for enough resources that will let you deliver a good enough product.

Risk:

Outside In might come across as the more risky one, but then high profits are always a product of risky ventures. Besides, you are not really shooting in the dark. This approach merely requires you to try and comply with the customers’ demands, so it is far from being a gamble but a well calculated risk, which will eventually pay off.

Convenience:

Inside out approach is clearly the easier route, especially on internet, where replicating a business is fairly simple and doesn’t require much thinking. Lured by this handiness (that later turns out to be a trap), many people invest their time and resources in copying some successful business, which is precisely the reason why we see so many failures in the cyber space. In contrast, outside in requires research, lots of thinking, creativity, and problem solving skills to set the wheels in motion … quite difficult but then long term success is never an easy feat.

Long Term vs. Short Term:

Inside out doesn’t always end as a failure, but even when you’ve achieved something, that is going to be a relatively short term success. You might seize some profits but you will hardly make it big, and as Dale Carneigi once wrote “The surefire boat never gets far from the shore”. Outside In is the approach that promises long term success, mainly because you are required to continuously get back to the customers and adjust your business according to their demands and requirements.

Security:

Inside out businesses are the most vulnerable in the wake of some adversities like recession, or maybe in case of Internet businesses, an update in Google’s algorithm. Outside in businesses are less susceptible because they always have their eyes on the external factors and they are ready to fine tune well in advance of some inevitable change.

Which approach have you seen used most often?

Rahil Muzafar

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This post was contributed by Rahil, who is currently working for sell a Marriott timeshare and cancel wyndham timeshare .

Thanks! Rahil!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Why avoiding conflict avoids success

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by Patty Azzarello

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Clarity Causes Conflict

As I work with management teams who want to successfully execute a change or be more strategic, they often tell me, “This is not a new idea, but we need to make it stick this time”.

I have been thinking a lot about this lately – Why is it so hard to for an organization to do something new?

Here’s the thought: Clarity is the secret sauce for execution. You can’t GO without real clarity. But real clarity reveals conflict, and most people don’t like conflict.

Therefore execution stalls so people can avoid being uncomfortable.

Comfort with conflict

You need to be comfortable with the fact that creating real clarity is going to expose disagreements. It’s going to expose gaps. It’s going to expose things that you need to deal with.

It can be much more comfortable to just leave everything fuzzy so you don’t actually have to address these things. This is one of the key reasons why so many change initiatives fail.

Clarity gives you the trail of bread crumbs to success

Any successful business agenda or initiative needs a tremendous amount of clarity to succeed. First you need to be really clear about the desired outcome. What is expected?

Then:

  • You need to break that big goal down clearly into smaller, concrete parts
  • You need to be clear about who is responsible for each piece
  • You need to be clear about how each piece is resourced
  • You need to be clear about what doing something different in each case means to the old way of doing something
  • You need to be clear about how the roles of specific people change
  • You need to be clear about not only what the new tasks and deliverables are, but what are the new behaviors and values that are expected at each level
  • You need to be clear about how the success of each role will be measured
  • You need to be clear about what the consequences are for not doing the new thing
  • You need to be clear about what will be communicated.


But getting clarity on any one of these points opens the door to conflict.

For example if you say: We need to improve the quality of our products. The priority of the next product release is quality.

That may sound like a clear statement, but…

  • Does that mean that you will hire new people for testing?
  • Does that mean that you will include customer testing earlier in the process?
  • Does that mean that you will measure the performance of the engineers differently? How so?
  • Will you re-rate the priority of all the bugs in the system? Or just some of them? Under what criteria?
  • Does that mean that you will stick to your quality plan when the sales force is clamoring for new features?.

Or if you say: We need to sell higher up in organizations

  • Does that mean that you expect every rep to spend some time on strategic deal making? How much time? Doing what, exactly?
  • How will you engage customers differently? Are people trained to do that? Who will be trained?
  • How will you measure if it is happening? What will you do it if isn’t?
  • Or does that mean that you will split the team into tactical and strategic teams?
  • Will you change the comp plans of the sales team?
  • Will you create new product/solution offers to appeal at a higher level?.

Discussing the answer to all these kinds of questions out loud, with your team, opens the door to conflict.

Once you get really clear, people will not agree.

But that’s the important part.

That means you are doing it right

As I bring teams through this process of getting real clarity, taking the time to hear the opinions and debate, we reach a point where everyone can see what to do differently, specifically.

It becomes clear what everyone needs to do personally to achieve the big goal. Everyone leaves knowing exactly what is expected, and how they will be measured on what they do moving forward.

Being Fuzzy – the comfortable hazard

If you are not clear enough to cause and then work through conflict, I call this being fuzzy. Being fuzzy may be more comfortable in the moment but it causes several problems.

  • Nothing changes.
  • People go back to whatever they were doing before because they clearly know what that is. They don’t know specifically what they need to do, to do the new thing.
  • When the outcome doesn’t happen, you can’t put your finger on what isn’t working, because you never defined exactly what “working” looks like.
  • If people are not performing you can’t do performance management because you haven’t defined the expectations clearly enough to show the gap.
  • If you can’t show the gap, you can’t get people to cross it.

Don’t settle for shallow team pleasantness, or avoid performance management at the expense of getting your business strategy implemented.

As a leader you need to create clarity and navigate through the conflict it causes, if you want to get anything important done.

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Patty Azzarello is an executive, author, speaker and CEO-advior. She works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. Patty has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello. Also, check out her new book Rise…

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The Ultimate Guide to a Blog Status Report

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A Status Report for a Blog?

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This week Chris Brogan wrote about whether our personal networks would be of value to companies that hire us. He used Twitter to choose an example of someone with a strong personal network. The example he used was me.

The thoughts Chris wrote dovetailed with some thoughts I’d been having, so I put them together in a post of my own. I set out three questions with an offer of free consulting time to the most insightful comments. Joanna Young offered this idea that I’ve shortened some here . . .

. . . But what might be more interesting is the frame that needs to go round that, the parameters if you like, that come from *your* wants and needs: they might be things like wanting to blog less (or more!) frequently; to spend more time off line (or online); to experiment with a different style or topic; to focus on one dimension or get more creative by sending out streams with many…
How to deliver the material that’s working for our readers at the same time as achieving the things that need to work for us.

That got me thinking about accountability, communication, and managing projects in all of the past publishing jobs I’ve ever known. One tool I always insisted upon was a status report.

So I’m starting a Status Report for this blog. It seems like a fine way to answer the question of what keeps this blog running and what choices I make to ensure the bills are paid.

What Makes a Great Status Report

A status report is a snapshot of how finished something is at a specific point in time and next steps in the process. With a well-written status report, everyone knows what the news, issues, problems, and great new ideas are. A great status report is written to be

  1. brief,
  2. relevant,
  3. and easy to scan

just like a great blog.

My form for a status report has four headings:

  1. News — Changes in the atmosphere, market, strategy, or agreed plan, as well as important people we’ve met, events we’ve attended, and publications that have taken notice of what we’re doing. New initiatives will get announced.

  2. Issues and Requests — Information about actions, requests, and ways of doing things that make work harder or are inappropriately handled in some way. Requests for help and volunteers might be here. Think of these as business problems that need talking about.

  3. Progress — an update of what’s going on and what’s starting up

  4. Short Term Goals — dates by which certain things will be done.

When it’s shared, the status report keeps a community / team involved in the ongoing work and how it’s getting done. People can offer help. People can spot future problems. People can generally participate more because they can see where they might fit and how busy things are.

The routine of “publishing” a status report also keeps everyone aware when priorities when changing and where stresses might be coming in. Status reports also keep us aware of how we’re doing on reaching our goals.

Joanna’s comment is perfectly tuned advice for a community blog like this one. It nudges me to be more transparent about the business of blogging. I’ll be posting the first Successful-Blog Status Report tomorrow. Hope you’ll look for it then.

Have you worked with status reports before?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
Check out Models and Masterminds too

In Search of the Elusive Non-blogging Customer

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Last week, in a conversation called Traffic, Readers, and Colleagues — Are They Customers? I asked how you might help a new blogging business connect to customers in the offline world. A comment by SpaceAgeSage was so packed with ideas, that I asked if she might package them up, elaborate a bit, and offer them to you in the form of a guest post. I’m delighted to share this with you.

In Search of the Elusive Non-blogging Customer
by SpaceAgeSage

Liz is on a quest to bring blogging enlightenment to non-bloggers who are a vast and mainly untapped population of potential readers and customers. She recently asked in a post, “How would you help a new blogging business connect to customers in the offline world?” With a small and humble background in the brick-and-mortar world of public relations and journalism, I offer the following ideas:

Contact local organizations in your niche
Talk face-to-face with local groups and organizations associated with your niche and ask politely for a blurb in their online or hard copy newsletter. Offer to be a guest speaker for one of their meetings if applicable. One time, as a martial artist teaching self defense classes, I went to the biggest real estate organization in my area and asked them to send out my flyer in their monthly packet to members.

You can find contact information by looking for the meetings section in the newspaper, finding a national website for an organization and then asking for local contacts, talking to your local librarians (they know a lot), and calling up buildings or facilities where such groups might rent space for meetings.

I come from small town, America, but one of the most productive resources I have used is the “Welcome Wagon” lady. She takes packets of information, flyers, and coupons to every new home buyer or new rental she can find. If no one is home, she hangs the plastic bag full of promotional materials on the door.

Look beside you
As Liz says, “Look to the customers standing right beside you.” Family, friends, bowling buddies, classmates, colleagues at work, and members of organization you belong to, including your local church, could be a rich source of customers or people who can network you to customers.

When you do this, realize that not everyone understands blogging. I just recently spent a weekend changing one friend’s mind who avoided any internet connections because she had relatives endangered by some online activities. Remember, you get to be an ambassador for the blogging world and a business person!

Find non-blogging experts to interview
Write or email top non-blogging experts (authors, professors, business leaders) in your niche area and politely ask to interview them. They will tell everyone where to find the interview.

As a journalist, I was told never to let anyone read my story before it went into the newspaper. Trust me, though, any potential interviewee would love to be able to edit your work before your post goes live. You may want to offer this to the expert to make them more likely to give you the interview. Also, when querying them, let them know what you want to ask them, who will be reading your blog, and how the interview will be conducted (live, phone, or answers returned via email). After you post, send them the link so they can forward it easily to others, and please remember to thank them! They may be able to steer other interviews your way (or my way!)

Utilize press coverage
Write a press release to get coverage in your local paper. Focus your press release on either your blog or blogging. If you write about blogging in general, just make sure to use your site as a highly profiled example. Tell your local press that blogging is a “lifestyle,” and they will perk up their ears.

Online sites exist with free information on how to write a press release, but just remember the “who, what, when, where, why and how.” Also here are three tips:

  • Sending a press release may get noticed, but not as much as having a face-to-face with a reporter or editor
  • Journalists like to eat and may listen better over a meal that you offer to buy
  • During slow news days, reporters fight for news – that’s when you want to talk to them, not when a tornado has leveled a subdivision.

Online forums
Find online Web forums, message boards, discussion boards, discussion groups, bulletin board, etc., in your niche subject outside the blog world and jump in. Be nice, be real, and give as much as you can when promoting yourself. You can find forums often attached to magazines, to newspapers, to activities, to organizations, and to web sites of companies that complement your niche and product.

Become a “YouTuber”
Make a YouTube video about yourself, your blog, or your product. Make it fun, funny, or interesting. I know of a company that sells equipment for autopsying lab rats for scientific study, and even it has “how-to videos.” (No, I did not watch them.) Just one video that “goes viral” can rocket anyone into stardom for a day or month. Be ready to utilize any generated traffic in ways that maintain these new readers to your blog.

Team up with complementary non-blogging businesses
Let’s say your blog is about astronomy, and your product helps people find or see the stars during different seasons. The RV online and offline community is huge. You might be able to team up with them in a mutually beneficial way. Think outside the box. Maybe schools, or home schooling groups, or the local hiking club would find your product interesting, too. It never hurts to ask politely. As my husband says, until you ask, the answer is always, “No.”
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Best wishes with your quest to find the non-blogging reader and customer!
—SpaceAgeSage

Thanks, Sage! You’ve got me busy with an entire list of things we can do.

–ME “Liz” Strauss