Talent And Determination, It Is At Your Fingertips.

When the best people find the most determination to win, your team will be unbeatable.  Talent and determination are two impossible characteristics to compete with in any market.  That begs the question, do you employ talent and does your talent have the right kind of determination?  It is not a lazy question.  In fact, it is a rather heady one.

First of all, what do I mean by talent?  Secondly, what does determination look like?  Thirdly, does your team of employees work together to build up the forces of talent and determination that makes it tough to compete with your organization?  Are you currently building up this head of steam?  If not, why not?  The cards of this economy are in your favor to make it happen.

Let's cover the area of talent first.  If you employ or hire people, what are you looking for in that effort?  We live in interesting times.  Our unemployed world has become a pool of desperate people trying to find some solid employment they can rely on to live a decent lifestyle.  There are a lot of talented people in that pool.  Many of those talented people have been placed there without regard to their high abilities.  The cards of having good talent to choose from are falling strongly in the hands of the employer.  How is that opportunity working out for your organization?  Are you taking full advantage of improving your talent of staff?

These are very good times to make that kind of business improvement happen.  However, one of my cautions is to refrain from being greedy.  Be smart and respectful in that process or it can backfire quickly and cost you everything.  These are good hiring times if you have some people that need the chance to improve or be remove.  Every organization has some people that need some motivation to improve.  Make sure you know who they are and make sure you have given them every opportunity to improve.  When all else fails, you have a strong labor pool sitting right behind you waiting for a better chance to improve where they currently sit.  Do not be afraid to use it.  Just use it compassionately.  Be smart, not greedy.  There is a huge difference in how you approach these two efforts.  They come with different sets of risks.

Many smart employers are using these difficult times of economy to ramp up their talent pools for quite a bit less than what it would normally cost.  These tough times have provided that opportunity.  Employers are strategically making the best of this bad economy situation.  Juts pick up a classified paper with job listing opportunities and read what those employers are expecting to hire and how much they are willing to pay for the talent they are demanding.  It is very clear that the employer is carrying the favor.

This last tough cycle in the overall economy has tipped the scale to the favor of the employer.  Employers are asking to fill positions that are asking a lot of the future employee but the remuneration for those services is well under valued.  Employers can easily offer less to get more talent.  That is how the combination of a large supply in the labor pool and a low supply of available quality positions pans out.  It is one of the few benefits a business can enjoy during tough economic times.  This pattern is continuing to occur.  Take advantage of this cycle.  However, I will place a serious caution to the wind.  Be respectful in those offers and make sure you allow the smart talent a fair return.  Do not go overboard and squeeze out all you can get!  That kind of thinking will add fuel and flame to your organizational developments.  Stay away from greedy tendencies.

Good people with good talent are looking to find good work.  The pool of talent is larger than usual.  Finding plenty of employment opportunities to fill quality spaces is still limited by some of these tough economical times.  The supply of talent is much larger than the available demand for work to place them.  There are fewer jobs available to place the large crowds of good people waiting to find good work.  The employer is sitting in a very good hiring position right now.  This is a very good time to replace the people who are not part of your talent pool.  This is a very good time to find better people who are more determined to do better work.  The unemployed pool is filled with some very talented and some very determined people.  Unfortunately, most of the really good ones are rather hidden.  They are harder to find than what the employers had expected.  Why is that?

I have a couple of good reasons I think are possible.  First of all, I think it all comes down to how the displaced employee becomes more determined to find quality work.  This kind of development can disguise the good ones from the bad ones.  It begs the new question, what does determination look like?  Those who are the most determined are the ones who make it known they want to go to work.  They are the ones who capture your attention when you are looking to hire someone for a position you need to fill.  They are the ones who do not play games about who they are.  The determined ones are the ones who strip down clean and nearly beg for an opportunity to give you the most they have to give.  The most determined ones are the ones who skip playing with posture and get down to being very willing to offer you everything they have.  Those are the best ones that capture your views.  Employers may not see these people the same way they see themselves, however.  This is where the gap begins.  This is what makes them hard to find.

Another good reason why talent and determination are hard to find is that leaders may discover some of these 'out-of-work' people in the pool have better abilities than the ones doing the hiring.  The talent in the unemployed pool is sometimes greater than the people working to add staff during the hiring process.  I have seen unemployed people go to interviews and actually possess stronger employment skills than the person conducting the interview.  This is how the current economy is panning out.  A lot of good talent is trying to find a quality place to become employed.  There are fewer quality places to adequately place the amount of talent into the system of employment.  This is where another gap begins.  The people you hire to do the hiring do not easily let you know how good the real talent out there is.  The real talent is too threatening to permit inside.  Like I said earlier, be smart.  Not everyone you employ operates cleanly.  Nobody wants to hire their replacement.  Insecurities are stronger than we might like to admit.

In fact, I have witnessed how business leaders have avoided hiring good talent because they themselves felt threatened by the potential skills of the applicant they faced.  This is not an uncommon scenario.  If you plan to develop a stronger and more competitive business team you will need to accept the higher talent on your team.  If they possess greater skills than you, give them good direction.  You do not need them working on your competitors team.  This is basic stuff.  This leads us to the earlier question, does your team of employees work together to build up the forces of talent and determination?  Or does your team of employees feel too threatened to provide that kind of growth?  Be careful, protectionism can easily limit your desire to grow.  It can and it does.

Is Your Day Routine Or Random?

Get A Good Routine Going!

I decided to count the amount of clocks I own.  I have never seen a study of how many clocks the average person owns, but I think we would be surprised at the amount.  The room I am sitting in has a clock on the computer monitor face, there is another clock on each of our cell phones charging at their stations (that is two more), one on the wall next to me, one near our fish rank, one on the television monitor, one on my Nook, one on my heart rate testing device sitting nearby, one on the printer, one on a pen near my desk, one on my land line telephone, one on my answering machine, one on my DVD player, one on my stereo receiver and one sitting on a sofa table in the family room next to my desk.  That is 15 clocks in the area where I am currently sitting!  Now you see why I do not wear a watch!  I do not need one.  Time is everywhere.

I do not carry a cell phone like a lot of people do in this day and age.  I do not text often, check on line stuff and need to keep looking at the mobile device for information that is currently happening.  I use the cell phone to make important calls, follow-up here and there and to be reached if I am needed for some answers.  That is it.  I have come to appreciate the timer on my mobile device.  I use it often.  It reminds me when a particular task needs to be started or finished.  I use that feature a lot.  It is amazing how much we use our clocks.  Time is an important thing in the lives we lead.

Clocks help us to identify a lot of things.  One of the most common uses of a clock is to make sure we get to work on time and to let us know when we get to go back home.  I think the working world knows this much about a clock as any.  I suspect this kind of time checking is one of the most common segments of clock watching anyone ever does in this world.  They check the time to make sure they are not late to work and they check the time to see when they can be done with work for the day.  I think that is how a lot of clocks are used the most.

This brings up an interesting perspective.  The core of going to work and going home after work is a routine thing.  It is not a random pattern of happenings.  People do not often spend tomorrow going to work whenever they feel like it.  People do not decide to arrive to work at 10:00 A.M. on Wednesday then show up at work at noon on Thursday in a random pattern of appearances.  This kind of work pattern does not set well in the employment world.  There is more structure to the pattern of work arrivals than this kind of random appearances.  Routine is king when we work our daily patterns of employment.  We go to work at certain and specific time slots.  The pattern is routine, not random.

In fact, most know exactly what would happen to their employment if they decided one day to begin a random pattern of showing up to work.  Instead of following the routine schedule they once were respecting, all of the sudden they begin to show up when they feel like it.  I wonder how well that kind of random appearance would work?  We all know the answer to that one.  Not well at all.  Random patterns are not one of the principles advised for producing good success.  Unfortunately, many business leaders have a strong tendency to do random stuff, often.  Many of them do these random acts as a subtle process to express some kind of personal freedom.  They show up to work one day and immediately decide they need to work on inventory controls.  It has been bugging them lately.  So they begin to ask questions in that department and they start doing some random checks on areas of inventory they suspect are incorrect.  They 'hit' the daily work trail with the new focus on inventory controls.  They randomly approach this new focus of work.

Business leaders who operate in this kind of fashion are the ones who do not produce the most favorable results.  If this kind of work leadership is somewhat close to your kind of management style, stop it.  It is killing your potential to produce great success.  In fact, it may even be helping to add failure to your business model.  Random leadership is only good when you use it to keep some other leaders honest.  That kind of leadership is an altogether different subject.  It is a whole topic all of its own.

Random leadership is dangerous leadership.  It is dangerous enough that not many people can practice it and produce good success results.  It is extremely rare to succeed well by using random patterns of business leadership.  The two do not mix well.  They work together like oil and water.  Try mixing them over and over and you will continue to get the same results.  Random patterns and business success are like unfortunate opposites.  If you possess the kind of personality that loves to play with your business in random leadership patterns, you are losing way to much profits to continue practicing those patterns for a very long time.  Stop it.  It is silently killing your success efforts.  Get better organized.  Develop a stronger respect for routine patterns of leadership work.  Quit taking down your hard earned efforts by randomly killing the results they could and should be enjoying.  Get closer to producing better routines of your business work patterns.  Allow your business model to receive a better chance at winning.

How do you know if your routine of leadership is random or routine?  What are the symptoms?  What are the signs?

Poverty Is An Amazing Thing.

Poverty is an amazing process.  It can operate in the world of finance as well as in the world of leadership.  Poverty is not always defined by the lack of money.  It can be defined by the lack of integrity.  It can be defined by the lack of character.  Poverty suggests that some areas of life are inadequate.  It is usually linked to finances but it can also easily connect to our leadership patterns.  Neediness and destitution can surface in how we operate our leadership ways.  Poverty does not always show up in our checkbooks.  It can appear in our life patterns of poor leadership.  That is what makes poverty such an amazing process.

When we watch business leaders do their work we do not always think in terms of poverty as they perform their duties.  We know when they operate well and we know when they do not.  Sometimes it is not easy to define how they function but we can see their results.  It is in the results that their methods eventually reveal how well they are doing.  If they are good operators, good leaders, their models usually reflect that goodness with favorable financials.  If they are not good operators and their leadership ways are challenged beyond what they have the capacity to manage, their numbers will tell the tale.  It is in the numbers that most leaders will find how well they do with their leadership patterns.  The numbers will not lie.  People do, but the numbers do not.

Poverty has another great mystery attached to its life.  It has the wonderful ability to hide from its owner.  The owner of poverty usually does not consider themselves as being poor.  Indigence is always a deceitful process.  The qualities of indigence have the ability to hide from its owner.  It can be sufficiently seen by others, usually outsiders, well before the owner recognizes where it lands.  Most who live in poverty can feel it, but at the same time most do not recognize how it works.  The functions of poverty are easily ignored by the holder.  Bad habits tend to disguise how it works.  In the end, poverty will sting.  It stings the lifestyle of the holder.  It stings the character of the holder.  It stings the intelligence of the holder.  It stings the creativity of the holder.  Poverty robs the holder of the ability to function in a higher level of performance patterns.  The holder of poverty will compromise their ways.  Poverty will limit the work they do on protecting their higher levels of integrity.  Compromise will be the turn of the day.  These patterns will become part of the habits a business leader will learn to protect.  The question then comes to mind, when will compromised integrity sting?

The answer: it already has.  That is why integrity becomes compromised.  The sting of poverty has already set in.

Poverty has taken over.  Poverty is rooted deep enough to dominate how the business leader functions.  Poverty has developed its habit methods of unwanted patterns that many do not recognize and work so hard to protect.  Poverty mind work is a debilitating process.  It is an amazing thing to witness.  It is an amazing thing to discover.  It is an amazing thing to overcome.  Poverty leads to the idea of compromise.  It leads to the idea that integrity has no limits.  It leads to the idea that bad judgement, bad decisions and compromised integrity are part of the contemporary ways that must be practiced freely and endured.  Poverty allows hard lines of integrity to quietly and magically disappear.  Poverty allows the holder to justify the results at the expense of compromising what integrity could bring.  Poverty is an amazing thing.

The condition of poverty is always a temporary condition.  It only becomes permanent when the holder loses sight of how to prevent what poverty brings.  We measure poverty by means of wealth, riches and plenty.  However, poverty can occur in the spirit as well.  Some people suffer from impoverished attitudes.  Some people suffer from impoverished human relationships.  Some people suffer from shaky leadership values.  Some people suffer from impoverished leadership styles.  Those who suffer in these ways are the ones who never seem to get their business models functioning properly.  They miss out of the production of consistent profits and fair returns.  Their financial positions reflect their impoverished ways.  Only they do not see how this pattern really works.  That is what makes poverty so amazing.  The holder usually does not see how it works.  Poverty is an amazing thing.

Criticism...Do You Put Their "F's" On The Refrigerator?

One of the most common methods people use to motivate themselves to accomplish something good is to place a symbol of their dream on their refrigerator with a magnet.  If they want to lose some weight, they might place their target number on the face of their refrigerator to remind them to stay on task.  They might cut out a dress size or a bathing suit and use a magnet to attach it to their refrigerator.  If someone wanted to get a new fishing boat they might place a picture of the one they want to buy on the face of their refrigerator.  Maybe a new house, a new car or some camping equipment might hit the magnets on the refrigerator.  People use the refrigerator as a bulletin board to remind them of loved ones, friends or some lofty goals to achieve.  The refrigerator has become one of the common places people use as a bulletin board.

I have some pictures of my kids and their beau's on my refrigerator, right now.  My wife has a picture of me on it.  She uses flower magnets to place all of these pictures on our kitchen bulletin board.  We have had financial goals, life goals and hundreds of people reminders placed on our refrigerator over the years.  Our home is arranged nicely.  It looks a lot like an interior design studio display.  However, our refrigerator is the exception.  It has a menagerie of stuff placed all over it.  It is our family life center.  It has become our goal report center.  It has become our favorite place to remind us of our best friends, family good times and things we would like to do.  If we plan to go to another country on a vacation, we will likely place some pictures of that future trip on our refrigerator.  It will help us remember our goals to go there.  Our bulletin board helps us to plan better.  It is also used to help us to remember the good things we have experienced.

At one point in our life my wife and I spent a lot of time working with people that were trying to improve their home and life finances.  We visited a lot of homes during those years.  We noticed a lot of people in the world use their refrigerator in the same fashion as we did, like a bulletin board.  Wealthy homes, economically strapped ones and middle class homes...all used the face of the refrigerator in this way.  It is apparently an unwritten rule.  It has become one of those silent things many people do that is common to life.  In fact, you can find display set-ups in many grocery stores that sell refrigerator magnets.  They come in fancy packages.  My wife has a box in one kitchen drawer filled with different styles and fashions of magnets she has purchased over the years.  Right now she is using some really bright flowers to hold our current stuff on the face of our refrigerator.  Next year they might likely be Gummy Bear magnets!

In all of this common pattern of refrigerator postings we have witnessed in our whole life, not once have I ever seen someone place one of their children's "F's" from a report card on the refrigerator.  Not once.  Not once have I ever seen any picture of a house burnt to the ground.  Not once have I ever seen a picture of a wrecked car.  Not once have I ever seen a picture of an employee's employment release pink slip.  Not once have I ever seen a picture of a welfare check.  Not once have I ever seen a divorce document.  People do not appreciate these kinds of events and occurrences enough to parade them around for everyone to see.  They do not place their "F's" on the face of their refrigerators.

Instead...they place their best dreams, their best goals, their best friends and their best family memories on that face.  People use bulletin boards to help motivate them forward.  They do not use bulletin boards to bring themselves down.  The "F's" are not on parade.  Since that is the truth, I wonder why so many business leaders work on placing their employees "F's" out into the open?  Why do so many business leaders think it is a good idea to place their employee's "F's" on the company refrigerator?  What gives with that effort?  Think about this if you are one of those business leaders.  If you criticize your employees in an open fashion you are actually placing their "F's" on the company refrigerator.  Why are you doing that?  Nobody likes that kind of treatment.  Nobody respects that kind of pattern.  You yourself do not appreciate this kind of treatment when it happens to you.  So why place their "F's" on the face of the company refrigerator?  Why?  What purpose does it serve?  Think about this kind of stuff if you are a business leader.

Whistle Blowers, Good Or Bad?

Whistle blowers are not very much fun to have on your team.  They seem to be wired to hunt and search for issues to unearth.  They are usually the ones who are most prone to hit the beehive with a stick to see what happens.  They are wired to come to the party looking for trouble.  I have played that role more than once in my life and I can assure you that it is not a popular role to play.  Since 1995 I have been hired four times in four different organizations to help them repair their broken business models.  Although my main role was never to become a whistle blower, my job of repair usually ended up taking those kinds of steps.  Many times I needed to call a whoa to some activities that had become part of the accepted bad habits those organizations performed.  Blowing the whistle to identify the fouls eventually became one of my most important duties to perform.  It is a very unpopular position to hold.  I speak from a position of knowledge on this one.

As much as it is unpopular to perform, sometimes blowing the whistle is a critical step towards beginning the repair process.  An alcoholic will never begin the repair steps to quit drinking until they at first blow the whistle on themselves to admit they have a drinking problem.  The beehive will need to be slapped with a pretty strong stick to begin that process.  It will not be popular and it will not feel good.  It takes a certain amount of courage to blow the whistle on some wrong things being done.  The whistle blowers know they are always at risk with their personal outcomes if they decide to blow the whistle on some wrongs being performed.  It is risky business.  For sure, it is unpopular work.  Popularity does not come from disturbing the beehive that is hanging next to a large group on a picnic.  The resulting activities will easily disturb everyone in attendance.  To blow or not to blow becomes the concern for those who discover some wrongs that are being done and also being suppressed.  The one with the stick in hand will likely take the blame for the disturbance the bees produce.

Are you prone to be a whistle blower?  Are you wired to search out the wrongs and try to make them right?

Those are very serious considerations that leaders must learn how to manage.  Organizations have a certain level of human dynamics that require a leader to learn how to manage these kinds of things.  These dynamics can show up and help to destroy a good working pattern.  They can disturb the process for good production.  The human factor is a large part of the engine movement to the pattern a business uses to produce its results.  Those human factors often times govern how the business engine runs its components to the end results it eventually delivers.  Success or failure depends largely upon how those human dynamics are permitted to work.  Success of a business pattern is often times found in the development ways of the human dynamics.  The people employed are often times the controllers of the eventual outcomes a business model produces.  Success can hinge on how well those people generate the good dynamics needed to deliver what that business should produce.  Relationships matter.

When a business leader begins to ignore the signals and nuances of the relationships that weave through the business model that leader is developing a contemporary leadership problem.  To ignore the relationships is to set fire to one of the most human desires people bring to the table.  We are people first, workers second.  To get that reality turned around is to work the patterns of leadership backwards.  A business leader who mixes these two key elements up is a business leader too focused on the money production of the model.  Dealing properly with the relationships that transpire during the business operations is a major part of how a good leader directs the model.  Success often times comes from how well the leader handles the human dynamics that occur at work.  That part of the business model is a large part of the fabric that weaves out the success patterns.  Humans matter.  When they feel they do not matter any more, they begin to search out reasons and situations to prove how right they are.  Whistle blowing begins.

Which Is It? Control Or Profits?

Learn How To Properly Hand Over The Steering Wheel!

I love the male ego.  I have one.  I make sure it runs well.  In fact, I protect it like I have nothing better to do with my life than make sure my male ego gets all of the attention it deserves.  I work hard to get it placed on center stage.  What's more, I will disguise that kind of effort.  I will deny that my male ego is a dominate force in my decision-making ways.  True, true and all true.

Furthermore, I have worked with women business leaders who have produced ego's larger than any man could ever generate.  That is also true.  They can be the worst when it comes to protecting a strong ego, at "all" costs.  I have met women business leaders that can make the male ego look like child's play.

Control is a very funny business to practice.  I have witnessed the high desire to control absolutely destroy the ability for a small business to churn out a consistent profit.  Although strong ego's are often necessary to help the business leader carry tough business loads, they can destroy the efforts to profit well.  Control can become a serious issue of mounted wrongs.  The strong desire to be in control can upset the smooth process needed for making healthy and consistent profits.  Ego's must be monitored well.

(First of all, before we move on to more business sharing...I want to thank every reader for their support.  This blog hit a milestone today.  It has crossed the 20,000 mark of posts read.  Thank you.  Twenty thousand business thoughts have been shared to offer business leaders some kind of insight to help them develop into better leaders.  Thank you.  I hope my thoughts have made a difference to someone out there who can sometimes get lost in the confusing forest of business leadership.  I hope my years of bloody noses can be shared enough to help someone else prevent at least one bad turn.  Turning wrong in a business model is a very easy thing to do.  Often times, we do not see the wrong turn until it is too late.  I hope by sharing my experiences with other business leaders together we can help prevent too many unnecessary business losses.  Losing is not very much fun.  I hate it.  I love winning much better.  Thanks for the great comments and the readership.  It is much appreciated...now on to 100,000.)


Ego's must be monitored well.  They can easily get out of control if they are not harnessed with some respect and attention.  Watch your control issues very tightly.  Having a strong need to control everything is not always a good thing to practice.  It can become the food your ego is looking to consume.  Be careful.

I have watched many good business leaders get lost in the ego forest.  They place their compass of balance down on the tough business trail somewhere and try to navigate the trees in that forest with their own way of being completely in control.  I have watched some very smart people do this kind of business leadership with some unfortunate and terrible results.  Their high desire to be in control cost them the brains they needed to allow to perform.  They placed unwanted limits on their staff and support system when the going got tough and those who could help them, did not.  As a result, some of those very smart business leaders took on some unwanted and unnecessary losses.  They did it to themselves.  I see it happen often.  Sometimes more often than is necessary.  Ego's and control can be become a serious issue of placing rotten limitations on the art of producing nicely arranged business profits.  Which is it?  Control or profits?

One of the more difficult things to do as a business leader is to 'catch' ourselves protecting our egos.  We are good at it.  We are serious about protecting it and we can develop the most amazing ways to justify it.  Business leaders who have a seriously strong desire to control things are the most vulnerable ego protectors. They are the ones with the strongest levels of deceitfulness.  They can go bust making sure their way is on the top of the ladder of the doing trail.  Controlling their environment is the only thing they see when stuff begins to challenge profit production cycles.  Controlling all things, with their methods only...becomes the duty of the day.  Collaboration is thrown out of the window and dictatorship begins driving their thoughts.  As you might expect, long term profit production becomes a secondary issue.  Producing long term profit methods no longer runs the top of the pile of priorities.  Long term profits become compromised at the expense of protecting the ego.  Control sets in, profits play second fiddle.  Which is it?  Control or profits?

Too Conservative, Too Stingy.

Do Not Look Like You Are Closing For Business

We all go through some interesting cycles in our business careers.  We develop some interesting patterns in how we operate from time to time.  I am not sure that every time we go through a new pattern of operating that we produce the best results.  I know in my career, some of my patterns of change did not turn out as well as my business preferred.  Some of the cycles of change I introduced in my life of business leadership did not necessarily turn out so well.  At the time I was in those cycles, I could not see how bad the pattern interrupted and eventually damaged the good flow of business activities.  I was blind to the ways my cycle of changes had done the damage they did.

I recall one of those not-so-good cycles.  There was a period of time when I became very conservative in how I lead my business operations.  Conservative methods are not necessarily a wrong way to operate, however.  I prefer to recommend some conservatism in many functions that help a business model become more responsible, especially in accounting.  Unfortunately, I went through a period of time when I became too extreme with my conservative ways.  I became too conservative.

I would pinch every penny, watch every penny and count every penny.  I become so obsessed with my conservative attitudes that I become rather stingy about my business money and my business time.  I went across the line of responsible conservatism.  I became a nasty little miser.  I got too stingy.

When I think back at my stingy ways I see some things that really hurt my business model.  The things I see now that hurt my business back then were not evident to me back then.  I was blind to the damage they were doing.  I did not know what I could not see.  In retrospect, I now see exactly where the most damage was done.  It is too bad that my ego and my over-confidence was not in better check back then.  Those characteristics hurt my business growth.  What's more, I protected them with all of my might.  Nobody could tell me anything different.  Not back then.

I sometimes wonder how many business leaders are reading this blog and operating in that kind of mode?  I know it can happen.  I did it comfortably.  I practiced wrong thoughts, wrong methods and strongly supported them.  Nobody could tell me anything different.  Not back then.

We all go through some interesting cycles in our business careers.  We stand on wrong doings as if we have reached the top of the hill.  We practice wrong stuff, wrong thoughts and wrong doings.  We are proud of doing those wrong things because we truly do not see how wrong they are.  We protect them with all of our might.  I know, I am guilty.

One of  the most damaging things that can come with too much conservatism is that we can grow into becoming too stingy.  Often times when we go over-board with our conservative ways we develop a rather stingy attitude about money and ideas.  I have not found that either of these characteristics is such a good idea to practice in a business leadership role.  They can create more growth damage than the business deserves.  I highly recommend that if you are one of those business leaders who operates with a high degree of conservatism, check your stingy pulse more often.  In fact, find someone who is not afraid to tell you the truth and ask them if you operate with a certain degree of stinginess.  Make sure it is someone who is not afraid to hurt your feelings.  Maybe you could ask your spouse.  They are often the best ones for telling the truth.

Stingy methods can limit future growth.  Stingy methods can cripple creativity.  Stingy methods can promote stingy employee behaviors.  Stingy methods can ruin the laws of compensation that can quietly work invisibly against your business efforts to succeed.  Stingy methods burn up valuable resources.  It robs your business of hidden support from all of the players you need to engage.  Stingy methods curb your potential to develop a good sense of character.  Stinginess does not often come from careless and reckless business methods.  It usually is found under the covers near the more conservative strains of business leadership.  If you are somewhat conservative in your business leadership, look honestly for the signs of stinginess.  It might be happening to your business model under the covers.  Take a serious peak to see if you have some happening.  We need to clean it up if it is happening.

Being too conservative with the cycle of business leadership can become converted to an unwanted high level of stingy ways.  It can happen to the best operators.  It can also happen without notice.  It can come strong to play without the business leader recognizing that it has arrived and taken over.  Be careful of stingy methods if you operate your leadership from a more conservative stance.  Some unwanted business damage may be happening right now, without your awareness.  We can become too conservative and therefore too stingy in our cycle of business leadership.  Our business model will suffer.

How do we detect this little effect?

Winning Is Unnatural, Try It And See For Yourself!

How Do You Know What You Do Not Know?

There has not been a business leader that I have met in my 40 year career that did not at one time believe they were naturally made for running a business.  Furthermore, most of them also believed they would win naturally. Not one of them went into business for themselves to lose at business.  They all thought they had what it takes to win doing what they thought they were meant to do.  All of them thought they knew how to win running a business.

I have never met a single business owner who did not think they already knew how to win at business.  Unfortunately, most of them lose.  Very few of them win.  That is what the real financial numbers tell us.  That is what the data supports.  Most business owners lose at the financial game of owning a small business.  Even a tougher reality remains.  Very few business owners produce upper middle class incomes.  Very few.  Those are the realities of owning a small business.  That is what the real honest data tells us.

Winning is not natural.  It is an unnatural thing.  Losing is natural.  The data supports this assumption.

What is natural on this subject is that most business owners will easily deny that they are some of the ones who lose at the business game.  Denial is natural.  That truth is also very common.

The truth is never really easy to accept.  Some people are good at seeing and accepting the truth when it is not so friendly.  Most people are not good at it.  Unfriendly truths are more likely to be swept under the rug.  Most people avoid them at all costs.  Some of the best business leaders do this kind of dodging of the truth more than they should.  The more they dodge the truth the more it hurts their business performance.  I have seen many business leaders do this kind of pattern and operate for years in the pain of never really winning big.  You can lose in business year after year and never really get it right.  This kind of pattern can be practiced and tolerated for a very long time.  I am watching many business leaders I personally know right now do this very exact thing.  They are leading their models into some unwanted losses and they will not win much more than what they already have won until they change the way they operate what they do.  They remain doing what they naturally believe they should be doing.  They do not yet understand that winning in business is an unnatural act.  As a result, they will continue to hold on to the natural things they feel they need to do.  They will keep on losing.

Winning is not natural.  It is an unnatural thing.  Losing is natural.

If you are a business leader and your results have not yet produced some handsome rewards, your business model may be one of those models that needs to shift how it does what it does.  You may need to change the way you lead the business model you control.  You may need to begin doing some unnatural things.  You might need to learn how to do some things you are not naturally wired to do.  Your victories, your business model and your future success may be waiting on you to make some unnatural changes.  You might be the kind of business leader who does not understand how profound this kind of thinking truly is.  You might be the type of business leader who would rather gloss over the truth and avoid making some unnatural changes in how you function when you lead your business model.  If so, keep up the natural stuff.  Just get used to losing more often.

Winning is unnatural.  It is an unnatural act.  If you are not pushing yourself to do unnatural things in your leadership ways, you may be one of those people leading a losing business model.  Nobody naturally gets lucky and wins consistently.  Nobody wins consistently doing natural things.  Accept it and move on.

Winning is unnatural, try it and see for yourself.

CAREFUL! Brain Drains Can Become Competitors Gain

Apologize For What?  Poor Volume Growth?

When your sales volume begins to slow down enough to consider cutting deeper into the cost of the operations, pay attention to how you allow those cuts to be made.  Lost volume might be due to poor merchandising, not because the economy is slowing down.  I have watched many business models struggle with less than good marketing methods enough to cause them a considerable amount of lost business volume.  I have watched many business models perform their marketing responsibilities so poorly that their sales growth is hampered.  I have witnessed business leaders fail to provide the right kind of attention to customer service.  I have seen many business leaders create a sour pattern for sales growth and actually consider that slowing pattern a part of the result of a poor economy.  As a result, they believe their next best business move is to trim costs.  It all seems to make sense to those who miss seeing this pattern of marketing failure.

Business models who misunderstand how vital and important a good marketing effort is to the growth of their sales volume are the models that suffer the most in the profit of their operations.  The lack of understanding for how important good marketing is to the total profit picture is a shortcoming that plagues business leaders who cannot ever seem to find a healthy pattern for improved sales growth.  These kinds of business leaders fail to fully comprehend how important the idea of serving the customers is to the patterns of growing sales volumes.  Many of the business leaders who suffer from this kind of marketing weakness do not know or recognize that they have acquired many hidden marketing afflictions.  Their style of business leadership gets in the way of improving sales volumes.  They lack the proper skills to manage serving the customers well.  As a result, they never seem to really produce any measurable patterns of improved volume.  They are quietly plagued by poor marketing skills.  Sales become very stagnant to these kinds of business operators.  Good marketing techniques is not a skill set that they perform very well.  They do not know how to properly grow their business volume.
      
When a business model becomes stagnant in sales performance, the first and most natural thing to do is to begin evaluating the general marketing condition's.  The first place we look to do this is to check out the health of the economy.  The economy becomes our immediate excuse.  It becomes our most natural villain.  If you have these tendencies, which many business leaders do, it will be difficult to see marketing weaknesses exercised by your leaders, staff and employees.  As a result, slow downs in business sales volume will be met with operational cut backs that may need to be made.  Included in those business cuts will likely be payroll expenses.  In most business models, payroll and inventory combine to make up about 68% of the costs associated to the company gross sales.  Payroll gets a lot of cutting attention.  Be smart when you go to cut payroll.  Make sure you do not cut talent deep enough to allow that talent to become part of your competitors library of skills.  Many self-taught business leaders make this simple business mistake.  Work hard to avoid it.  Pay special attention to keeping talent in your own fort.

CAREFUL!  Your talent might end up in the competitors fort.

Many business leaders believe sales volume and the growth of sales is a natural and routine result that all business models normally generate.  Many business leaders think that the resulting volume of sales their business model produces is exactly the level of volume they should be producing.  Most business leaders who suffer from the lack of strong marketing skills also suffer from wrong justification methods that help them to support why their sales volumes do not typically improve.  The two characteristics usually go hand in hand.  The poor marketing skills also carry the most protection packages to justify why the good and effective marketing techniques are absent.  One usually follows the other.  It is very predictable.  It is very common.  It is also difficult to detect.  Those who are afflicted have developed wonderful ways to disguise the lack of marketing skills they do not recognize they fail to possess.  They become very good at describing why their sales volumes 'cannot' improve.  They do not see, feel nor possess the proper skills to change the patterns their business model misses in the growth that can occur.  The only thing left to do to keep the business temporarily alive is to cut, cut, cut.  This is where the first symptoms appear.

Marketing is one of the three legs to the stool of success any business model performs.  A good marketing plan with a good head to manage that plan is a vital part of business growth and sales volume increases.  If your business model lacks sales volume growth, you may be afflicted with a poor marketing plan or worse yet, a poor head to develop that healthy marketing plan.  It may be you or your business manager that lack the proper skills to produce increased sales volumes.  If both of you are afflicted with this shortcoming, you may actually be lying to yourselves to cover up your marketing weaknesses.  This is a typical pattern that I see in the failing business models I am asked to repair.  It is more common than one might first think.  I see this lack of understanding a lot in my business travels.  Good marketing skills come with a price.  Poor marketing skills come with a deeper price.  Some business leaders just simply fail to grasp this truth.  They continue to operate their methods of leadership within the confines of failed marketing ways.  They then perform the only remaining responsibility...cut, cut, cut.  They become convinced that this is what a good business does.  They accept the loss of good business growth as being part of the natural ways their local economy provides.  They misunderstand good marketing techniques and skills.  They resort to tightened accounting skill sets to survive.

This kind of pattern for business leadership is a pattern that is ripe for a strong competitor to destroy.  A competitor that possess better marketing skill sets is a competitor that will easily draw away more business volume from the troubled pattern these leaders work so hard to protect.  When this happens, the troubled business model will run out of logistic ways to keep on cutting.  It will eventually dry up to become a business model with no proper levels of inventory available on hand for the customers to select and it will have no revenues to properly staff how it services what it hopes to sell.  The good inventory and staff have been reduced and cut to the bone of destruction.  A good competitor will destroy what little sales volumes remain.  The struggling business model will eventually fail.  It's marketing efforts will be at fault.  The leaders that disguise why they do what they do will cause this effect to overcome their efforts to prevent its failure.  The competition will gain the best employees they eventually released.  I have seen this kind of resource pattern work its ways in every single marketplace I have traveled.  Every single one.  It is as common as light bulbs.  It is as misunderstood as gravity.

CAREFUL...brain drains can become your competitors gain.

How do we prevent our competitor from acquiring our most skilled employees?

Why Do We Fail? Because Success Is Boring.

Bill Gates wrote a pretty good book a few years ago, "Business At The Speed Of Thought".  There were some segments from that book that were quite good and other segments that were not very good.  However, the segments that were quite good were not only quite good, they were magically dead on.  Unfortunately, most people run through their lives operating less than magically dead on.  This is especially true of business leaders.

Most business leaders run their duties through the daily process, missing most of the dead on stuff...all day long, every single day.  They get up each morning, do today much of what they did yesterday.  They run so close to their daily habits that they operate without zest, without added flashes of excitement and manage their way through a muddled process of leading their business models to a normal level of performance.  That is exactly how most business leaders work their models every single day.  They function in an average world with average results.  They often struggle to get their business model 'over-the-hump' of its debt-ridden ways.  They seem to be overwhelmed with sudden problems that plague their plans to make better things happen.  They do not win as often as they would like to.  Sound familiar?  Welcome to average.

One of the brilliant segments that Bill wrote about in that book was the idea of learning how to manage your business leadership with a certain flair for continued disturbance.  He called it, "bad news must travel fast."  It is a little bit like keeping everything each day a little bit off-kilter, kind of on purpose.  Not off-kilter for the sake of pseudo control, but off-kilter for the sake of seeing better.  Not off-kilter for the sake of performing divide and conquer techniques, but off-kilter for the sake of fostering employee initiative and knowledge sharing.  These segments of that book were written brilliantly.  Go read them.

I once had a very strong business mentor.  He had many one liners that became part of his trademark.  One of those one liners was this, "Well...what are you waiting for?"  Every time he made a suggestion it was not given to continue on as part of some long conversation.  It was given to me to go do.  When he would say I needed to go read something, he would look at me and say, "Well, what are you waiting for?"  If I sat there waiting to have more conversation with him he might also say this, "Don't waste my time...I am telling you to go get some information I recognize you need.  Why are you still sitting there?  You do not know what you need to know.  You have an information gap holding your success back.  Go get that information gap solved.  Then we will move on to the rest of this lesson."

Bill Gates wrote about some stuff that fits well in today's employment marketplace very nicely.  We are there.  This economy has become the breeding ground for the most brilliant business leaders to flourish well.  Here's why.  Tons upon tons of business leaders are dry, uninformed, egotistical wanna be's that are spending way too much time living in the past.  They are spending way too much time pouring over financials long before they spend any time on the library of customer complaints they can be easily caught trying to avoid hearing.  Markets of today are way too fickle to provide any measure of success to this kind of business leader.  End of seminar.  Go read Bill's perspective on this subject.  The link is given freely to you above in this post.  There is no excuse for missing this kind of work.  What are you waiting for?

Why do we fail?  That should be the prime question of the business world today.  Business leaders should work harder on discovering why their models are not performing well.  What's more, they should approach that question as if they have no answers pre-determined.  A great business leader would approach that question without knowing any answers as to how they would respond in describing why they are suffering so badly.  Unfortunately, too many business leaders already believe they have the answers as to why they are suffering so badly.  I read that last sentence and it makes sense...even as it makes no sense.  Let's figure this stuff out.  Let's quit pretending we know why we are suffering.  Let's get to some real work on finding where we are truly weak and begin fixing it.  Let's wake up and become accountable for our reasoning and our efforts to improve.  Let's find out what success requires and start doing those things more often.  I am pretty sure this will not be some friendly work, however.