In a relatively short time, the strategy of business relationships has gone from direct to digital, from personal to pixels. But if you think the personal business relationship is dying, read this from Hillary Clinton:

“But you would think, in the world in which we live today, that with instantaneous communications, that you wouldn’t need to travel as much.”

“But, in fact,” Clinton explained, “you almost have to travel more, both because everybody knows you can get on an airplane and get to where they’re expecting you, but also because it’s almost as if the virtual reality cries out for the real relationships need to be affirmed.” (My emphasis.)

There are many formulas for success. This one is sent by Sandra Bandler (sbandler@ix.netcom.com), and authored by Philip Humbert. It is sophisticated in its simplicity, and probably the one worth remembering. Successful business owners do this naturally, and it’s a good reminder for the rest of us, myself included.

Your Daily Success Formula

The longer I work with successful high-achievers and
frustrated under-achievers, the more convinced I am that
the differences are very, very small.

Yes, peak performers occasionally have unique skills or
talents, and sometimes they get lucky breaks, but mostly I
see that the differences between creating the life your
truly want and living a life of “quiet desperation” is
incredibly SIMPLE!

The problem is that the great majority of people who work
hard every day have never learned to combine the power of
CHOICE with strong BOUNDARIES.

You cannot do it all! You have only so much time and only
so much energy, and when they are gone, your life, and the
opportunities that come with it, are over.

High achievers learn to focus their time and energy on a
few specific items, and they protect those few choices with
clear, tightly-defended boundaries.

Here are three absolute essentials for peak performance.
These three “little” things make a HUGE difference and can
help you create the life you truly want!

#1  Decide What You WANT

This is critical. You must choose! We live in a wonderful
time when we can do and have almost anything we want. Every
day we have more choices than our grandparents faced in a
lifetime! If you do not learn to say a clear “YES!” to what
you want, and “NO!” to everything else, you are doomed to a
life of mediocrity. You are doomed to stress, over-whelm,
and frustration.

Decide what you want and say YES to it! Then, get very
clear about all the tempting things you will say NO to, and
stick to your guns. That ability to choose is what makes us
human, and it is the price of success.

#2  Set Rigorous BOUNDARIES

If you are available “24-7,” you are doomed! If you allow
television and the telephone, email and the doorbell to
interrupt you, your life is out of control! That may sound
harsh, but it’s true. Turn off your cell phone! Refuse to
answer email except during specific times. Close your
office door, build a hide-away office in the garage. Find
ways to do the things that are important to you without
interruption!

If you cannot focus and stay productive for long periods of
time, your odds of success are greatly diminished.

#3  Create and Use a DAILY SUCCESS SYSTEM

Every day, plan your schedule and stick to it. Develop a
short list of “daily essentials” and follow them without
exception. Make those sales calls, or work on your novel,
EVERY DAY. No exceptions!

In his memoir, “On Writing,” Stephen King says he used to
tell interviewers that he wrote every day except his
birthday and the 4th of July, but that was a lie. In truth,
he writes EVERY DAY!  He says they wanted a more interesting
story, so he told them he skipped two days a year, but he
never does!

If you want to achieve the kind of success that brings the
world to your door, do your work every day. Make a list of
a few things that support you, that move your forward and
do them as a religious practice, EVERY DAY!

Everyone knows the saying that “a journey of a thousand
miles begins with a single step.” It’s true and has helped
millions of people get started. But the rest of the story
is that a journey of a thousand miles only requires that
you KEEP WALKING! It is not difficult or mysterious.
Success rarely requires unusual skill or special talent. It
only requires that, EVERY DAY, you keep walking!

Copyright by Philip Humbert

If you believe in the primary importance of content, and I can’t uncover any legitimate argument why you shouldn’t, then you simply must bookmark Junta42. It’s packed with valuable information, insights, and links, like one of today’s posts “11 Free Social Media Optimization Tools.” Stay on top of this topic by letting Junta42 do the heavy lifting for you.

Extreme Strategy:

3 Key Decisions To Propel Economic Recovery

When your business emerges from the recession, it may be tempting to return to pre-recession activity and hope for pre-recession results. Unfortunately, many economists are saying that this may not happen, at least for a very long time. But even if it does, is this a sound argument for returning to the status quo?

I believe not. It is the very nature of owners of small and mid-size businesses to seize on a vision and work relentlessly toward it—this is how they succeeded in the past. I suggest that they forge a new vision to create a better future.

Here are three critical questions for a business owner to consider to help re-vision the business of the future:

1. Will you play the same game, or will you change the game?
2. Will you return to normal, or will you create a new normal?
3. Will you limit the way you monitor your business to old systems, or will you add new ones?

Change The Game

The game is business. It has rules and standards, leaders and followers, rich owners and the not so rich owners. You may find comfort in playing the game the way it has always been played—work harder than the competition and earn a bigger slice of the pie.

Today, however, the pie has shrunk, and it may not get much larger very soon. Now is the time to change the game and make your competition irrelevant, or at least less formidable. You can create a new, bigger pie and keep it to yourself.

1.            Begin by rewriting the unwritten rules. “…unwritten rules form what you and all your competitors implicitly agree to and fight along. These rules are typically set by the current market leader who educates the customers—who then force the rules upon new entrants…” (Inbound Marketing Halligan and Shah).

2.            Next, think differently about your business. For example, look for new combinations. Kim and Mauborgne, in their book Blue Ocean Strategy, suggest six strategies: “Look across alternative industries, across strategic groups, across buyer groups, across complementary product and service offerings, across the functional-emotional orientation of an industry, and even across time.”

In other words, think about how you may have restricted your actions by restraints that do not exist, or which exist in the mind more than in reality. What rules do you feel bound by? What are the sacred cows? What competitive demons exist like dragons under the bed? Clear them all from your mind.

3.            Next, use technology to help break down old but vulnerable barriers. Consider these classic examples:

• Apple changed the game of music sales by introducing the iPod (which simplified downloading, storing, and playing music) and enabling its distribution with iTunes technology.

• Gary Vaynerchuk changed the way wine is sold by changing how people learn and experience the world of wine. His change vehicle is the video blog called Wine Library TV, which has a cult-like following of more than 80,000 viewers a day. It is as far as you can imagine from the stuffy world of “conceited sommeliers, snobby shopkeepers, and mystical conventions. His business grew 10 times in 5 years to over $50,000,000 largely through his only efforts.

• eBay changed the way buyers and sellers collaborate. No longer do you need auction houses like Christie’s. Live auctions are held online and even the smallest items can be exchanged.

• Legalzoom changed the way common legal services are provided. By focusing on a segment of services that can be easily customized via online activity from home or office, Legalzoom offers convenience, speed, and low cost. Conventional law offices cannot compete.

Businesses of any size can produce superior results when they commit to changing how their game is played.

Summary: Change the game by

• Discarding old ways of thinking
• Looking for new combinations
• Using technology to guide you

Create The New Normal

If the economy forced you to cut back, to turn the spigot off in areas like marketing and hiring, what will you do when the economy improves? Simply turn the spigot back on?

This is an option, of course, but this option cuts your business off from a major opportunity. This is the opportunity to create a new normal that raises the level of performance throughout the company and bridges critical gaps to higher achievement and competitiveness.

As businesses grow, gaps form when challenges and opportunities exceed the resources available to address them. In good times, these gaps are often masked by rising profits. However, they exist and they widen to the point where future profits are compromised. Typical areas where performance gaps occur include assigning new responsibilities (e.g. marketing and technology) to existing employees who may have an interest but not a competency in the area; hiring at levels that don’t meet current and future needs (e.g. administrators rather than directors); and growing staff without growing management (e.g. hiring more drivers rather than a manager).

Less obvious, but equally impactful, is the opportunity loss from the lack of training, inadequate standards, and the inability to communicate effectively across the entire operation. Consider this upside; for every 10 persons a company employs, helping each person work 10% more effectively (doing more in the existing time and reducing unproductive time) is the equivalent of adding 1 person AT NO COST. This is a training issue, and can be easily remedied.

Summary: The new normal requires

• Thinking about getting better, not more of the same
• Bridging performance gaps
• Helping everyone work smarter

Monitor For Success

The business that seeks to make competition irrelevant and create its own new normal requires a monitoring system that catches problems or identifies issues before they become crises that endanger the health of an organization.

The decision for the business owner is whether to continue to use historical monitoring measures (sales, customers, leads) or to devise a more sensitive and forward-looking system. Begin by considering all the different monitoring systems you can use, beyond the accounting system that is in place. These options include:

1. Marketing Systems: monitor online conversations, and set up listening posts to hear the voice of the customer.
2. Management Systems: expand forecasting into strategic planning; divide business into customer segments and track individually.
3. Internal Systems: the boss doesn’t know everything that is being said or thought. Find someone who can gain the trust of your employees, listen to what they say, and assimilate this into recommendations and insights.

Next, ensure that intangible assets like your database are organized, complete, and easily accessible.

Finally, keep your people healthy by setting standards of excellence and offering ongoing training

Summary: Monitor to keep your business healthy by

• Improving the depth and sensitivity of monitoring systems
• Heeding early warning signals and acting promptly
• Respecting and seeking the wisdom and insights of your employees

Moving Forward

Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li coined the expression groundswell (also the name of their book) to refer to how the world is being transformed by social technologies that enable customers to connect. Harness this force, they say, and you can transform your business much like Dell, Procter & Gamble and many other companies have done.

The message of this article is this: use this transformative force to change your game, use techniques of excellence to create a new normal, then monitor performance to preserve your new vision.

Quote of the day for small and mid-size business owners: “Don’t drown in a sea of opportunity.”

From an article by Cindy Krischer Goodman, Small Business, Big Job. As quoted by Boo Zamek: “Many have discovered that building a business requires sticking closely to your vision if you want to keep your family life. ‘Don’t drown in a sea of opportunity,’ Zamek says. ‘If you try to do too many things, you’re not focusing. You have to keep your eye on the ball or it’s just not going to work.’”

This is filed under the topic “counter-intuitive” marketing. In my experience, research is about asking the right questions in the right way. Do this and the answers will come.

Organizations often don’t dig deeply enough into what they really want to accomplish and consequently don’t ask the right questions. They get data that fills impressive presentation portfolios that lie on shelves gathering dust rather than solving business problems.

Research is a cost. The only thing that conducting research guarantees is that a cost will be incurred. Research is not a solution to a business problem but rather part of the path to a solution.

So, how do we use research effectively to help solve business problems?

You do this by asking the right questions in a 3-step process that begins at the “end.”

The end is the business goal you want to reach. For example, you want to reverse membership declines and establish consistent, sustainable net member growth of 2%-3% per year. In this way you are rooted in results.

Next, identify all areas in which actionable information will guide decisions. At this step it is important to follow the web of implications for any piece of new information. For example, the decision to evaluate current customer satisfaction raises the question of what prospective customers want. Will prospective customers be identical to current customers in their wants and needs? Using this process, you develop a research strategy rooted in the business objective.

Finally, let the research strategy determine the research approach or tactic.

All of this is to ensure that the right questions are asked. You want to avoid the following: You are approached after the research is completed and someone says, “I thought you were going to ask this question” (which wasn’t asked) or “We should have asked that question.” Or, even worse, you have data that does not address your business goal.

Can the new training techniques that are helping American athletes achieve record medal results be applied to small and mid-size businesses to improve their own form of gold medal: profits?

In a Fox News feature this morning, commentators noted that American training techniques have dramatically changed and that this change is responsible for record medal performance. The changes fall into two areas: all-body training vs. single movement training, and the heightened emphasis on balance and recovery training.

All-body training refers to conditioning muscles as they interrelate in movement. The opposite of all-body training is the classical core or single movement training  in which individual  muscles – like biceps – are exercised independently.

Balance training is aimed at helping the body achieve recovery after extreme movements.

To get a picture of what this looks like, think of a downhill racer and the need for the entire body to respond and recover. In effect, we are seeing the synergy effect- when all muscles are integrated they perform better than the sum of their parts.

This is a compelling concept for small and mid-size business; rather than over-build individual skills, departments, or functional areas (the muscles of any business) business can chose to build up the way skills, departments, and functional areas work together. In this way they support and sustain each other to achieve balance and to react to extreme business disorientations.

Of course, if a business lacks skills, talent, knowledge, or experience in an area critical for success, it must first gain them. In the words of Peter Drucker, only strengths produce results. However, the key is how to manage the development of the entire organization and not to overemphasize one area to the detriment of the total organization to produce results. This may mean, for example, that it is more productive to invest in coordinating marketing and sales rather than simply increasing the marketing budget for lead generation.

Are you ready to re-write the rules of your small or midsize business and begin playing by your standards? Doing so can create new opportunities and favor you over your competitors. Here are 9 reasons that you are ready.

1. You focus on creating uncontested market space and making competition irrelevant (a Blue Ocean Strategy) rather than on beating the competition. (a)
2. You understand and are ready to play by the new rules of marketing and PR. (b)
3. You want to hear the voice of the customer and have already deployed free “listening posts” throughout your company. (c)
4. You know the power of technology and how to leverage it, but realize that business is about people first.
5. You have strategic frameworks to create new customer value and to reconstruct market boundaries in your favor. (a)
6. You are prepared to “be there before the sale” to gain trust with prospective customers as a first step to doing business. (a)
7. You use a proven, integrated methodology that ensures your Internet efforts drive visits and convert to leads then customers.
8. You realize that you and your customers both have in common the scarcest resource-attention-and will tailor your selling efforts to this fact. (b)
9. You understand that by executing against these points you gain an immense advantage over your competition.

Would you like to share your ideas, or learn more about how to re-write the rules of your business? I’d like to hear from you.

References:

(a) Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim and Mauborgne

(b) New Rules of Marketing and PR, Scott

(c) Trust Agents, Brogan and Smith

(d) Kraft Associates

For SMB owners, there are four moves you can make now to change the business game in your favor.

1. Resolve to change the game. Create new rules that favor your business style and strengths. (a)
2. Break from the competition by reconstructing market boundaries. (b)
3. Recognize how the rules of marketing and pr have changed, and incorporate them. (c)
4. Simplify your business life and gain time to think by using a fully integrated system to manage your online presence. (d)

These four moves are based on timely and valuable insights from the authors of the following four books. Mine these books for details, or contact me.

Books and Authors

(a) Trust Agents, Brogan and Smith

(b) The New Rules of Marketing & PR, Scott

(c) Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim and Mauborgne

(d) Inbound Marketing, Halligan and Shah

In the online world, content is king. To provide relevant and useful content, businesses need a content strategy. Here is a useful approach by Michele Linn from a recent post on Junta42 “What’s Most Important About Content? It’s Not The Format“:

I love it when clients are enthusiastic about creating a content marketing strategy, but one of the first questions they often pose is,  ”What type of content should we create?” As Ardath Albee states in a recent post on her blog, Marketing Interactions, you should focus on these three things before thinking about the format:

Buyers, Prospects, Customers and Influencers – whose attention do you want to capture and keep?

Priorities, Problems, Issues, Objectives, Needs and Situations -what issue can you help your audience solve?

Buying stages – what information do your prospects need for wherever they are in the buying process?

Ardath walks readers through a great example of how to develop a content marketing program, which is much more than stringing together a few types of custom content. Instead of writing a white paper or an eBook because you need some new content, think of content as part of your brand building strategy.

Consider what your an audience has responded positively to and build content related to that. You can then reference other related white paper, webcasts, case studies, etc.

As Ardath says, “If you start with format, you’ll likely end up with one-off content that doesn’t attract the kind of extended attention you need to get people to stick with you all the way through the buying cycle.”