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Rosemary O’Neill

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“First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.” Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Stop messing around and just throw the grenade already!

King Arthur, Galahad, and Brother Maynard wasted a lot of time debating the proper way to hurl the hand grenade while the killer bunny escaped unharmed.

What are you doing that is sidetracking you from your real purpose? Your 200 blog subscriptions are useful, but only if you do something with the information you’ve read (and the ones you aren’t reading…I give you permission to delete them). The teetering stack of business books on your nightstand might contain ideas that will launch your business to the stratosphere, but only if you have a way to implement the ideas (and yes, they still count if they’re clogging up your Kindle instead of your bedside).

Instead of counting to three over and over again, take action that will get you closer to your ultimate goal.

Here’s how to toss the grenade:

  • Every time you read a blog, article, or book, write down the “action items” you pull from them. Keep a notebook handy so that you can remember what you decided to do.
  • Check off the hardest task first thing in the morning. That thing you’ve been delaying because it’s hard or unpleasant. That thing you need to tackle in order to get to the next step. Didn’t do yours yet today? Go do it right now!
  • Find something that will snap you back to the original goal. Some people keep a dream board, or a written “big picture” list that they refer to at least daily. Keep your eyes focused on the prize, and feel free to turn off your social network notifications in order to do it. (Note to self: read your own blog posts, lady.)
  • Spend some time mentally considering how you will feel once you’ve taken action. Give yourself the mental image, how it will look, feel, taste. Savor that feeling and it will give you the power to start moving.
  • Take one bite at a time. Often, inaction or indecision is the result of feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of a project. If that’s happening, you need to stop and break the project down into manageable pieces. Then, you can gain momentum as you check off each task.

What strategies do you use to get yourself to take action?

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Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out their blog. You can find her on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee
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No Time this Week to Do It Right? Stop! Right There!

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Why Those Four Day Weeks Seem Even Longer

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I’m not sure who make the sure that most holidays would be celebrated on Mondays, but I’d like to to talk to … ahem … brilliant person who first had that backward idea.

The way I see it play out in reality often looks something like this …

  • The Sunday night “impending doom” of the new work week that usually sets in some time Sunday afternoon still shows up sometime Sunday afternoon as we forget that we have Monday off. For just a few moment, thoughts of work intrude on what is supposed to be a “free day,” before we brush them off.

  • The usual Monday buffer that eases us into the rituals of the work week     becomes another Sunday with that “impending doom.” We enjoy the off time, but feel it going, going, and then gone — knowing, knowing and then well aware that we’re facing a week with 20% less time.
  • Tues must rise to the challenge of handling the Monday rituals

    • while carrying the weight of the regularly scheduled Tuesday catch up meetings.

  • And Wednesday through Friday – we fret the time we lost, while reminding each other quite often which day it is because our weekly calendars are screwed up.

Certainly, a better way would have been to choose to offer Fridays as the recurring holiday – Then we’d get our work in order and be able to enjoy the day off without guilt or confusion that the Monday holiday causes. Just a thought.

Of course until that happens, we really ought to give our responses to recurring short weeks a little more thought.

No Time this Week to Do It Right? Stop! Right There!

Rather than “hit the ground,” might I suggest that we stop there, reflect on what actually needs doing and then slow down to thoughtful walk.

Early in my career I heard this saying …

We never have time to do it right, but always have time to do it over.

Short weeks seem to bring out more of that “never have time to do it right thinking” than ever. Part of what gets the momentum of a over-stressed, “no time to do it right” short week going is that we buy into having the same amount to do in less time. We think of ourselves as “time poor.” Time poor thinking is running into a situation because we start out sure that we don’t have enough time to walk. That leads us to

  • shallow planning
  • half-attention
  • inefficient participation
  • false engagement as we “multi-task”
  • unfriendly, hurried responses – that make the work more important than the people we work with
  • hyper-responses to small interruptions
  • an air of contagious agitation

all of which can be alleviated by walking with a “time rich” approach to the the week.
“Time rich” is being generous with the time we have and realizing that we have all of the time we need for important things. We’re more aware of what it means to connect for others who need help. In a short week, that would bring …

  • setting realistic priorities
  • listening and participating fully in important events and conversations
  • focusing and engaging in what can move things forward most efficiently
  • knowing that taking care of the people will often make it so they can take care of the work they do.
  • a welcome response to news and a easy way of making a later date for less urgent to dos
  • an atmosphere of breathing easy and control

I’ve found it’s a truth in my life that
Every time my brain needs to run faster — that’s a time that I need to slow to walk. So I remind myself that …

If we plan it and do it right the first time, we won’t have to do it over at all.

How do you get to “time rich” thinking to do right, when everyone is thinking “time poor”?

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

30 Blog Posts to Get Strategy and Celebration Back into Your Business and Your Life

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That Fireworks Feeling of Celebration!

Remember when you first were going to see the fireworks? It wasn’t that different from the first day of school or the first day of that new fabulous job! And if you’ve ever started your own business, the first day you’ve got things in order to launch is certainly a time worth celebrating with fireworks!

Then come the days that follow that often get filled with more work and a little less of that brand-new feeling that made everything easy at that very first. I’ve been taken by the thought of how much fun it is when we get back with our heads, hearts and our hands in our business and everything once again works.

Here are 30 blog posts based on solid strategy — a realistic plan that moves you forward over time by taking advantage of the opportunities that are uniquely yours.

  • Stating your mission and sharing the vision
  • Seeing and levering your unique position
  • Finding opportunities in changing conditions
  • Bringing leadership to decisions
  • Building networks and systems to align your goals.

These five strategic steps and the blog posts that explain them are yours for building the kind of business that feels great every day when you walk into work. So get ready to strategize some, to make some plans, to explode your business and then once again you can celebrate!

Be of the Right Mind

  1. The Top 10 Ways to Start Living Your Life Life either happens to us, or we take hold of life and live it. Here are 10 Ways to get a life and start living it.
  2. 5 Ways to Take the Work Out of Work and Connect with Life Ever notice that some of us live, some of work to live, some of us live to work … and one or two of us seem to BE a piece of work?

Stating Your Mission and Sharing the Vision

  1. Why Play the Game, If We Aren’t Playing for Keeps? Why should anyone believe the shoemaker makes fabulous shoes if his own shoes are ratty?
  2. Is Your Strategy About Winning Opportunities?Tactics are interesting. The accomplishments they bring can be thrilling. But the bigger picture that a strategic mission lays out is powerful and amazing thinking.
  3. How to Make Your Dream Come True — Thought, Strategy, Action You can wonder. You can wish. You can wait for help. Say that you will, or say that you can’t right now. The most important key to a dream come true is personal investment
  4. How to Share the Vision and the Plan with a Business-Building Community We have to be able to explain — what we’re building and what roles others might play.
  5. WHY Doing What We Love Is Solid Business Thinking Because it’s how we’re wired as humans. We bring our best to whatever challenge we face. We’re better when we’re inspired by deep feeling.

Seeing and Leverage Your Unique Position

Position is the unique combination of where you stand in your field and what you bring to it.

  1. Are You Seeing So Much That You’re Blind? With or without a real itinerary, traveling too fast made see so much I was blind to the people around me.
  2. 8 Powerfully Subtle Ways to Let Your Work Show Your Expertise To be recognized as a expert requires communication skills and social skills as well as technical expertise.
  3. Marketing Strategy ala Mickey Mouse Eisner didn’t make random decisions. He followed solid business strategy. Anyone can use these strategic principles for success in any enterprise from a service business to a blog.
  4. Checklist: Opportunity Is Knowing Your Position on the Playing Field Think through where your brand and your business is right now.

  5. Personal Branding: Strengths Assessment Tool     Here’s a tool to help you assess what you have to work with.

Find Opportunities in Changing Conditions

Every business faces change in cycles, climates, and shifts. That change holds opportunities that are fit our unique position and skills. Working with change grows a business.

  1. Change As Influence: How to Get the Attention of Deniers, Followers, Dreamers, and Leaders? Every now and then, something happens that pulls the rug out from under us …
  2. How to Claim Your Ground and Own It It was still the 20th Century when someone told me that I could count on these four words to always be true … This too will change.
  3. Do You Sleep in the Freeze or Invest in the Spring? The sailors who love sailing know just saw it as part of the yearly progress of the sailing “routine.”
  4. Stop Thinking Poor – Start Irresistibly Growing Your Business Something negative happens. People hit a wall with their business. They pull back, retreat to safer ground to protect what they have.
  5. The 5 Step Strategy that Saved a Company Can Also Get You to Your Dream Working with strategy of any kind, it comes with the territory to know that, the minute a strategy is worked out, it is outdated. That’s because the information on which the strategy is based has already moved and changed.

Bring Leadership to Decisions

Making command decisions is about understanding the role of a leader and the people who can help a business thrive.

  1. Leaders and Higher Ground There’s not a person on the planet
    who has not been a jerk.
  2. How Do You Recognize and Attract Heroes and Champions for Your Brand? Before you try to create evangelists why not reach out the ones you already know?
  3. Strategy: All of the Information Available Strategy is setting a vision, making a path, knowing what we can know, and planning for the variables. To know what we know . . . That means having command of the information available.
  4. Have You Tried the DO Strategy of Social Business Success? People who succeed DO what the work to get themselves where they want to be.

  5. Money Strategy, a Dead Horse, and Folks     The key here is whether the new upgrade will pay for itself in productivity, quality of life, or other tangible or intangible benefits. In circumstances such as this, here are some of the “go or no go” questions.

Build Networks and Systems

Networks and communities are the people who help the business thrive. Systems and processes are the ways of doing things that support the work people are doing.

  1. The 5-Point Strategy to a Powerful Network Networks of people can be powerful influencers. A network of influencers expands our knowledge and our reach by engaging the power of “WE.” The problem is that networks take time to build and require attention.
  2. How Do You Get a Community to Help Build Your Business? The beauty of enlisting a social media community from the start is that communities only have time for ideas that will work.
  3. A Barn Raisers Guide: 7 Ways to Leave the Field of Dreams to Build a Thriving Reality Barn Raisers invite collaboration from the people they’ll be serving and so what they build is often a gathering place for people even before it’s fully finished.
  4. Where Would a 30-Minute Strike Force Strategy Increase Your Productivity? When the piles start to slow down progress try this 30-minute strategy to get back to a Command Center that works for you and your productivity.

  5. Building A Powerful Personal Developmental Network – Is Your Next Teacher on Twitter?     Whether we’re a company or an individual, it’s easy to find reasons that we made our successes, but that our failures were due to other circumstances. That’s where a powerful personal developmental network can keep things real.

The Challenge

Leave hesitation behind. go for the win and claim your successes.

  1. Extreme Hesitation and Extreme Strategy: Are You Willing to Own Your Life? Because deeply knowing where you’re going is irresistibly attractive.
  2. How to Turn a #Fail Position into a #Win Then it struck me that how I was looking at the problem was what was keeping it a problem.
  3. Are You Ready to Claim the Right Things You’ve Done? We’re great about learning from our losses. We’re not so great a learning from our success.

It’s a true calling that allows to serve other people by providing a service that make’s other folks lives easier, faster, and more meaningful. That kind of calling is worth celebrating because it makes us all feel more alive. Other people find a living soul irresistible, fascinating, and attractive. They come to see what makes a person so engaged, directed, energetic, and calm. The best part of bringing that kind of true strategy to work is that it is contagious and explodes into that a fireworks feeling that we all can paint the sky with light!

It took a few years to write the blog posts I gathered here for my birthday. It took a lifetime to learn what they say … what will you do with them?

Be irresistible.

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

5 Critical Questions for Your High Performing Team of Volunteers or Employees

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10-Point Plan: A High Performance Team

Keeping the Focus Is Fun

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Whether we work for huge enterprise or help build the economy from your home, leaders know that we can only do so much on our own. To build a business that thrives, we need to rely on employees, partners, vendors, volunteers, and customer who pitch in to help us grow. It takes a team, a community to build anything that resembles a business. A great team can build a great business.

Anyone who’s assembled a great team knows that when you get the right people on the bus you make amazing things happen. And if you’ve been part of a team like that you probably also know that money isn’t what moves a team to greatness. As Peter Drucker realized, “money is a disincentive.” People notice when there’s not enough and it brings them down, but more doesn’t improve their performance in any predictable wya.

Those right people on the bus work for less money when they can do more …
more of the things that work,
more of the things they do well,
more of the things that get more done well,
more of the things that put meaning into what they do.

Those right people on the bus work for less money when they can do less …
less of the things that don’t work,
less of the things that they don’t do well.
less of the things that get in the way of great work — the meaningless work-like, useless,
out-of-date, without purpose, policy-driven, time-wasting, relationship-breaking, stupid tasks — in other words, things that make work rather than get work done.

Getting the right team going in the right direction is challenge in time when time is at a premium. It takes more than just telling everyone “Do what you do well. Delegate to others what they do better. And don’t do what we don’t need to do.” Still, if we can get that kind of focus and momentum going, we’re well on our way to business that is responsive to customers, highly performing, and structurally sound.

Nothing beats reflection, checking in regularly as benchmark test to be sure we’re moving in the right direction. Here are five questions you, your team, and your business should be asking and answering at least once a week.

  1. What is the goal? What are we trying to do or say this week?
  2. What is the strategy that drives us? Where do we want to be by the end of the week?
  3. What’s missing from the team? Have we got the right people doing the right things? Do we have too much of one skill set and not enough of another? Do we need to rearrange things?
  4. What’s right / wrong with the process / structure / culture? Who needs resources, room, or support to do their best work? Who’s doing the wrong work?
  5. What rewards are ours to claim? How can we leverage them? Do we define, measure, and reward the outcomes we seek?

People, teams, and businesses can get off track in big leaps, but we usually lose our way incrementally by losing focus while doing what worked in the past. If you use the five questions to keep challenging your direction, you’ll find that the team soon will see every decision strategically.

How do you keep the focus to grow the high-performance business you want?

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

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Change the World: Put Yourself in Your Work

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It Makes a Difference to Know

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Yesterday I was in a business meeting with some spectacular human beings who own a digital animation company. We had reached that point at which our conversation turned to contracts and a formal relationship about the work that we would do together.

As we spoke of who, how, what, and how much, one young man excused him and left. He’d gone to find a single sheet of paper and copied it several times. Upon his return, he handed a copy to each of us still in the room, including members of his own team. This is an excerpt from the letter be brought.

My 71 year old father has stage IV pancreatic cancer . . . He is in his third week of taking part in a clinical trial using Rexin G.

Viewing your animation helped me understand his cancer treatment. . . . I’ve been praying for cures for the many types of cancer for years. I never imagined that my own father would develop the terrible disease. My Dad is hopeful and so am I . . .

Thank you for your part in helping us to understand this complicated treatment.

The letter made us all stop. I think I heard every voice in the room whisper, “Wow!” Each person handled the page with reverence and care for the person who wrote. I’m sure it slightly changed our perspective on what we already knew was a good and right relationship to something more.

The writer had sent a piece of herself in the spaces between her words. She said, “You made a difference in my life.”

That page was proof. One man had put heart in his work and that gift had changed a stranger’s life.

Just the thought is stunning.

We can change the world — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss