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How to Strategically Pull High-Opportunity from High-Risk Danger

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What Separates Opportunity from Risk?

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For me, growing up the youngest child came with a huge set of challenges. Courtesy of my two big brothers, I faced daily occasions to show or say that “I might be smaller, but I can hold my own on this proverbial dance floor.”

No matter where we are in the birth order learning to talk, walk, eat, read, ride a bike, swim, and cross the street are challenges that most of conquer as we find our identities. Conquering the challenges of social interactions and the personal particularities of our families, friends, teachers, teammates, bosses, clients, and customers add to the list. We learn those too watching, listening, attempting, adjusting, and eventually mastering.

Most challenges take the appropriate mix and measure of experience, personality, and motivation.

Challenges also motivate by the way they make something happen. They offer a way to gain ground or to conquer new skills and learning. The most exciting challenges are the ones in which risk may be there, but failure simply isn’t considered. On the other hand, taking on an unseen risk can be a ready-made failure.

What separates high opportunity from high risk danger?

High Opportunity, Low Risk Challenges

Long before we get to school, we’ve conquered plenty of learning. All learning is a series of incrementally increasingly difficult challenges that we conquer. We move forward and upward one step, one concept, one skill at time, repeating and relearning at slightly more challenging and more complex levels.

A well chosen challenge — like learning to walk when we’re ready — inspires the determination to scale mountains, ford rivers, navigate detours, roadblocks and fences to reach the ultimate successes. That challenge is a matter of finding success with total disregard to the possibility of failure. Falling down is simply a time to start again. Opportunities that offer sort of scaffolding builds skills, knowledge, and confidence with a possibility of failure but essentially no risk beyond loss of the time involved.

When they’re constructed naturally, learning challenges are high opportunity and low risk.

How to Strategically Pull High-Opportunity from High-Risk Danger

Risk and challenge are not opposite conditions. They often coexist in the same business proposition. We can define high-opportunity challenge as a difficult task matched to our skill set and experience that brings a reward such learning, advantage or new ground with it. If undertaken strategically, risk in that is limited. To limit that risk, we need to understand how gets dangerous.

What is risk anyway?

Risk is underlined and defined by cost. Risk means I might lose something dear that I value. I might give up something I can’t recover. I might find I am without something that I love, need, or desire.

The risk is not defined by solely by failure – (unless success is the something dear I value). Defining risk is defining what could be in jeopardy if we move forward.

With the right skills and conditions, the risk of a challenge is lower, but whether we see that depends on our mindset, skill set, personality, and experience. A realistic pessimist who has recently hit hard times might see risk everywhere. An idealistic optimist who has yet to fall down might be blind to the risks of the path he or she is proposing.

A strategic understanding of risk is sounder than seeing risk everywhere or being blind to it.

How to pull high opportunity from high-risk danger

We can mitigate the risk and test the challenge presented by any business proposition by evaluating the key strategic variables. Here’s how to do that.

  • Proposition: Define the business proposition in a concrete fashion. Give it measurable parameters — We will release the first offer consisting of [product description] that will [value and value proposition] by [time] to [audience] using [resource] to accomplish that with a return of [expected audience / market / $$ growth].
  • Position: Mitigate risk by finding the strengths in your unique position — your size, relative market share, audience awareness, reach, core competencies — and the advantages that come from these. Look for glaring risks in your position that are uncontrollable. Can you turn any of them into working advantages or strengths? For example, if you back is against the wall, you don’t need to monitor or protect that direction.
  • Conditions: Lower risk by letting condition support your success. Can you leverage the climate or cycles within your industry to support what you’re proposing? Is there a growing trend that you might align with to increase your growth?
  • Benchmarks and Decisions: Lessen danger by building in benchmarks at key decision points. How can you break the proposition into several “go/no go” stages? What is the risk of each one? Can you build an alternate outcome for the “no go” choice at each stage?
  • Systems and Relationship Networks: Structure the proposition to ensure scaffolded learning and gradually increasing investment. Can you build your customer base while you build your product or service? Can you test release to build to the customer’s tastes? How do you stage the development infrastructure to be financed by the first releases of the product or with strategic relationships? Set up systems to constant test for the hidden opportunities, and subtle differences from original expectations. See the patterns and respond to them.

Is it possible to risk at 30,000 feet and still fly with a safety net? I don’t think so. If you never risk, you never change. If we only take on low-risk challenges, will we ever learn the art of pushing the envelope, finding the edge of the universe, defining a industry leading purpose?

Find the risk that fits your calling, releases your spirit, and shows you know where you are going.

Would a risk of that nature be a risk at all?

Maybe there is no such thing as high-risk danger when you follow your instincts, evaluate the strategic variables, understand your unique position, leverage the conditions, worry out the secret chances, set up the systems, stage your decisions and incorporate key strategic relationships. The rest is mindset.

High opportunity is about moving forward. A high-risk danger is about not moving backward.

How do you pull high opportunity from high-risk danger?

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

How to Choose the Easiest, Fastest, Most Meaningful Next Move

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THEN We Will …

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During the Q&A of his interview at SOBCon NW, I asked Rick Turoczy (@Toruczy) of the Portland Incubator Experiment, “What seems to be the single problem that most startups encounter?”

Rick’s response was telling. He said that the young companies he worked with were clear on their vision and their mission. They knew were they were going … Where they got stuck was figuring out the first small step to get there.

Are you surprised by that? I’m not.

The act of paying attention to what relates to our mission and vision gets us attuned to the wide range of options that could relate to our end goal.

We think of our goal as THEN.
THEN we’ll be there.
THEN we’ll have what we’ve earned.
THEN we’ll know.

We can’t know what things will be THEN, but we know all we need to know about now.

But strategy is a function of NOW.
What is our position NOW?
What are the conditions NOW?
What is the opportunity NOW?

How to Choose the Easiest, Fastest, Most Meaningful Next Move

Choosing that next step often seems a problem. We listen. We follow links through our networks and systems. If our minds and hearts are open, we find a world filled with possibilities. We pay attention to learn as much as we might. We gather up information, ideas, and options. Then comes the moment to move. We get stuck in too many possibilities. Big ones, little ones — which to do?

To head in our best direction, we have to do the opposite of listening and paying attention. NOW that we’ve gathered the immediate information, it’s time to pull it in. It’s time to narrow and focus. It’s time to choose the best possible easy move to advance now. The small opportunity that fits us most naturally is the one that easiest, fastest, and most meaningful to reaching our biggest, most important goal.

Here’s how to choose the easiest, fastest, and most meaningful next move:

  1. Use your vision and mission to set your direction. Have a clear sense of where you want to be and why you want to be there.
  2. Use the information you’ve gathered by listening and paying attention to know your position — where you are now. Tell yourself the truth. Every position has advantages. Yours has advantages unique to you.
  3. Study the information you’ve gathered to understand the conditions under which you’re working. Look for openings that lead in the direction you want to go. You, your team, and your mission fit perfectly into openings right next to you. Look to do more for the people who love what you’re doing. Invite them to help you figure out what would be the easiest next small thing for you to do.
  4. Identify the easiest small opportunities and openings that move you forward by using these criteria. They will be those that
    • Align with your long-term goals.
    • Match with your values and culture.
    • Leverage what you and your team have already accomplished — skills, talents, and successes.
    • Make changes work for you.
    • Disperse the work to many best sources. (Do that thing you can get started and pass on so that another person is working while you work on the next one.)

Look for the position adjacent to the one where you’re standing. The best new positions look only slightly different than the position where we are right now. By moving into that slightly new position — serving the closest friends of our customers or adding a new flavor to the same offer — we built strength on what we already own. By keeping an eye on our vision at the same time as we make these tiny moves, we not only keep focus, but also bring our community of customers with us in a logical, predictable fashion that is easy to invest in, because it’s easy to trust.

Each small decision creates new opportunities that are unique to our position and the skills we bring. In that way, we create a path that is ours and impossible to replicate with authenticity.

We do what we are rather than are what we do.

How do you filter and narrow your options when you choose your next move?

Be irresistible.

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

Filed Under: Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Strategy/Analysis, Successful Blog Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Find the Genius in YOU — Stop Believing in the Box

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There Is No Box

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That box that everyone talks about — the one that we’re encouraged to think outside — came to be without a thought. No one decided or built a process called “Thinking Inside the Box.”

It was an accident, a management issue.

It’s easier and more efficient to run a school or a corporation of people when we teach, talk, and manage to the group.

Can you imagine how chaotic a school or a corporation would be if every student or every employee got to decide on his or her own creative version of “what works”?

So how can we bring leadership to every level and not ignite a mess that makes things worse? In the name of management, we build a bias toward one way of thinking in a sea of creativity.

Find the Genius in YOU — Stop Believing in the Box

When many of us weren’t looking, we learned about looking:

  • how to look at things the way other folks do particularly at the things our teachers revealed.
  • how to solve problems and show our work — or how to work them out the way we were shown.

We learned useful and appropriate skills for working in top-down managed groups:

  • to finish the calculation to the deadliest detail even though we already knew the answer wouldn’t solve the problem we were trying to solve.
  • to paint by numbers,
  • to color inside the lines,
  • to keep our curiosity inside the comfort of the teacher, the goals of the curriculum, and the norms of the group.

Within those boundaries our thoughts were caught much like a mime stays inside an invisible box.
And like the invisible box that the mime pushes and touches. The box that we think inside isn’t real.

The way to start thinking outside the box is easy enough — stop believing in the box.

Life Without the Box

The biggest problem with thinking inside the box is that for the mostpart, we’re relying on a model we learned, and so when we “show our work,” we’re really showing how someone else figured it out it.

Life without the box opens us.

New mind channels become available — creativity, flexibility, fluency, elaboration, and original thought. We break the habit of always doing “someone else’s work.”. The resources of your brain are freed up. Even better, it’s more fun, once you get used to it, because thinking outside of the proverbial box involves playing with ideas not just thinking.

DaVinci knew it.
Einstein knew it..
Lots of folks with divergent hair do it.

Most inventors only find the inside of the box to test things after they’re through seeing what they can do. Nothing new is achieved or gathered by staying where everyone else is thinking. And when we do get out of our usual ways of thinking, we land smack dab inside our own genius.

So let’s get on with getting out of it so that we can get into it.

Here’s one way to find the genius in you …

Even new creative, flexible, fluent, elaborative, original thinking needs structure. Let’s use a problem-solution format.

  1. Pick a problem.
  2. Move outside it. You can’t really see a situation when you’re part of it.
  3. Identify your greatest weaknesses.
  4. Look for how those weaknesses provides openings … Ask yourself “how can this weakness be a strength?” If your back is against the wall, no one can sneak up behind you. If you’re smaller, you’re more agile. If you’re unconventional, you’ve got surprise on your side.
  5. Leverage all of those new found strength into a single unexpected opportunity.

So, if you’re ready, I am. Enough with this introduction, let’s let the games begin. Everyone can think like a genius. It only takes a little practice, and a firm commitment. Throw away the darn box.

Put together your best out of the box thinking to find the strongest opening. Then check it against what a traditional in the box thinking would do to shore up any inconsistencies. That’s how to use your genius thinking to reveal opportunity.

Is inside or outside the box more comfortable for you?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related Articles:
Introducing Power Writing for Everyone
Don’t Hunt IDEAS — Be an Idea Magnet
SEO–Five Traits of Relevant Content

How to Build the Deeply Connected Network that Is Key to Any Strategy

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The Magnetic Attraction of Values

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When we were writing the press release for the first SOBCon, I said,

Every business is relationships, and relationships are everyone’s business.

Our networks are relationships with people who help our businesses thrive.

If you look to your network, what will you find? What moves you to follow up when you collect a business card or meet a new contact? What brings you to invite a new company or a new person into that network that keeps your business alive?

It’s been said that …

If you want to know what you stand for, look at your friends.

It’s true in business as well as in our personal lives. It’s not what you say. It’s what you do that counts. We define and describe our values by the relationships we make. The values of the company we keep attract other people who keep those same values. We trust people who value what we do. We know they’ll choose as we choose and decide as we decide.

It’s an almost automatic, magnetic attraction.
The attraction occurs so naturally that we often don’t notice our common values until we grow our network without attention. Then like a bad download, we add a relationship that corrupts and we feel the loss we get an unexpected and negative response that doesn’t match our values set.

Trust relies on having our values aligned.
Trusted sources are foundational to strategy.

How to Build the Deeply Connected Network that Is Key to Any Strategy

They say …

Information is power.

The most powerful information isn’t published in Wikipedia or available to the masses via simple research. The best jobs never make it to the job boards. The best partnerships don’t get offered to everyone. Competitors don’t advertise their disadvantages or their future plans. It’s impossible to know about every startup about to launch and every web application that could expedite what you’re currently developing. Yet that scarce information is the rocket fuel that drives a brilliant strategic plan.

Strategic information like that depends on a deeply connected, values-based network of relationships. Access to prized information is what advances your position more quickly than any other resource can.

Developing a deeply connected network that brings that information to you is key to any strategic plan.

Here’s how to build a power network like that.

  1. Know your values. Identify the values that need to be present to determine a “go” or “no go” decision in your business. Those values represent your brand and the foundation of the relationships that will help your business thrive.
  2. Use those values to identify the network relationships you want to establish and cultivate. The people and businesses who share your values will be predictable and easy to trust because they will make the same decisions as you would even when the situation is not clearly black and white.
  3. Become an information magnet and filter. Develop a sense of what information is available to everyone and what is not. Put to use what informs your position. Capture and catalogue scarce information that is irrelevant to you.
  4. Pass on to others in your network information you’ve captured that will improve their position. If you share a trend building, a competitive initiative, or a new tech development about to be announced that could change their strategy, you’ll soon find they are sharing similar information with you.
  5. Treat your network as highly valued. Offer them the same regard you would offer a world leader you admire. Hold them in the highest respect. Keep their secrets. Make time for them. Value their time even more than you value your own.
  6. Show your clear appreciation. Point out their great work. Have gratitude not expectation. Realize and appreciate their achievement by filtering the connections you offer them.
  7. Choose them wisely and trust their truth. Enlist only those willing to invest to equal depth. Seek a comrades that “won’t let each other fail.” Ask them often to challenge you to see and know the truth.

A deeply connected network isn’t measured by numbers, but by commitment. Five people who hold us to a true north outweigh 500 who say we’re always right. Reach for one or two who are willing to grow your mind, your heart, your resolve, and your vision as well as your bottom line and you’ll find that many more of the same kind will find their way to you.

A deeply connected network like that is irresistible.

On what values do you deeply connect?

Be irresistible.

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

How to Use Strategy to Build Opportunity into Your Life Now!

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Making Random Decisions Is as Reliable as Luck

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Get up in the morning, get working, solve today’s problems go have fun is that the way life is working for you? Facing each day with a single-day view will get you through a life or a career, but at the end you may find that many of those days might have put to better use.

If you think of it making random decisions probably has about the same long-term results as relying on luck.

Strategy is a longer view, a stronger view, and a more useful way of leveraging opportunity too.

20 Everyday Situations That Strategy Could Turn to Opportunity Right Now!

With a mind toward strategy, you can leverage the opportunity in any situation, fix the problem your facing, open the door that isn’t moving and get things working FOR you. Strategy is not some high-falutin’ sort of thinking that only great minds do.

It’s a method of solving problems. Did you ever want to …

  1. be more visible in your circle?
  2. become the first, trusted source at what you do?
  3. settle a conflict without becoming part of it?
  4. help solve a problem with friend, family or coworkers?
  5. enlist powerful people to your cause?
  6. get sponsors for an event or meeting?
  7. quit a bad habit or change unhealthy thinking?
  8. get out of debt or pay off a loan?
  9. negotiate a new or better position?
  10. get upgraded to a better hotel room?
  11. change how people see you?
  12. raise money for your cause?
  13. get a meeting with someone you admire?
  14. find a new career that fits you?
  15. organize a group trip?
  16. motivate people to join you in something cool?
  17. get a raise you deserve or raise your rates without worry
  18. start doing what you were meant to do with you life?
  19. do damage control?
  20. start investing in a retirement you look forward to?

Too often we walk into all of the above situations without putting together a system for finding success. A clear strategy could turn any of those 20 (or most other) everyday situations into an opportunity rather than leaving the outcome to instincts and chance.

What Isn’t Strategy and What It Is

We use the word strategy as a synonym for the word way or the word plan. It’s not right, but it sounds cool. Bet you’ve heard people say things like this …

  • I’ve figured out how to use two tools to offer a new strategy for making money online.
  • My strategy is to say “yes” and then do whatever I want.
  • Our strategy this year is to focus on growing by 50%.
  • It was a bad strategy to spend money on that vacation.
  • Our long-term strategy is marry well and have a house with a great view.

Those are not strategies. Some aren’t even decisions or plans.

Strategy is more and more useful in our lives than most folks expect.

Strategy isn’t a business tool. It’s not a single goal, or a choice, or good idea, or a description of what we’re going to do. Strategy is a practical system that changes how we view and interact with the world.

Next time you have a situation that offers a change of any kind bring some strategy with you before you respond. Here’s how to do that.

  • Think about the outcome that you want to achieve — your goals.
  • Think about the people involved and what motivates them — their goals.
  • Think about your position and what you bring that adds value to THEIR goals.
  • Think about what you might offer to align your goals with theirs.
  • Think about how you can turn your what you want — your opportunity into a benefit for them.

Start by listening to what you know and asking questions to hear more about what they know. Offer a few suggestions that are unfinished, allowing everyone to participate in defining a great outcome. Call the group to action. Then claim and celebrate the agreed upon result! The hardest part is thinking it through before you begin.

How have you used strategy to build opportunity into your life right now?

Be irresistible!

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

5 Steps To Create a Solidly Successful Online Product

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A Guest Post by
Rahil Muzafar

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We know that almost all products, no matter how good or bad they are, have a certain life cycle, and once a product has ran its lifecycle, the business needs to modify, innovate, or even create new products to survive. So, whether you are an old online business or a new one, you can benefit from having a step by step course-of-action for product creation, because you will need it sooner than later.

Online businesses should not be treated differently from their offline counterparts, as far as product creation is concerned. In both cases, the businesses have to come up with a product, or service that some customers are looking for, while expecting some rewards (AKA profits) for doing so. The only difference is probably in the nature of the products, for example, in cyber world, even a website that offers a very basic service like accumulating news on a specific topic at a single platform is still a product, regardless of how profitable or unprofitable it turns out to be.

Following are five basic steps that you should adhere to, when creating a new online product, regardless of how small or how big the product is supposed to be.

Step 1 – Idea

First step in product developments of all sorts is the idea, whether it is unique or just inspired by an already successful business model. The idea for an online product should be based on solving an unattended problem or a particular need of Internet users. Mindlessly copying some get rich quick schemes with the purpose of earning some extra income doesn’t really stand for an idea.

Remember that the web might appear to be already cluttered by all types of business, but a little out-of-the-box thinking will reveal many untapped markets, however you will be able to see these opportunities only if you are not driven by “overnight riches” dreams.

Step 2 – Scrutinizing

Next step is to brood over the idea, while considering all aspects. This phase is very important, still most entrepreneurs, in sheer excitement, neglect this very important step, and go straight from idea to development phase. It’s important that you take some time and wait for the excitement to settle down, only then you will be able to see the glitches in your plot. Once the initial excitement fades out, you will see that it’s not really a walk in the park.

Step 3 – Marketing Strategy

Some businesses devise a marketing strategy after the product is ready. Ideally, you should be wearing your marketing hat even before you get into the development phase. Having a marketing strategy, or more importantly the target market in mind will help you come up with a product/service that caters to the specific type of customers you are going to target. Thinking from the perspective of a marketer will give you an idea of the cost, and profit margins. Otherwise, it’s quite possible that once you’ve invested your time or resources in the product development, you will discover that you aren’t left with enough money or resources to invest on marketing.

Step 4 – Product Development:

Once you’ve mulled over the idea a number of times, and devised a marketing plan, it’s now time to develop the product. This should be easy, because you’ve successfully gone through the planning phase.

When developing product, think of your customers, and what they’d be looking for, and not what you’re looking for.

Step 5 – Test Marketing

Before you go full throttle with your marketing strategy, you must do the test marketing. Test marketing is quite the same like the actual marketing, but on a smaller scale, while targeting a small test group. Thanks to the Internet, you can use the power of social media to identify your target customers and check the initial response. If it’s good, you should set the wheels in motion, and if they are finding faults in your product/services, be thankful that you’ve avoided a bigger setback, and get back to make necessary changes before launching the final product into the market.

Rahil Muzafar

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Author’s Bio:

This article was contributed by Rahil, who is an Internet Marketer, specializing in making available discounts (like this) and coupon codes (click to see) opportunities. At his website, you will find all kinds of coupon codes and discounts, from hosting packages to stuff like 4inkjets or 123inkjet. Feel free to avail these deals to save on popular online products.

Thanks! Rahil!

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