Frame Your Words, Actions And Ideas.

Watch How You Think, Don't Limit Success.

A carelessly loose flapping tongue and a spontaneous decision-maker do not make for good business partners. Fire them if you own them.  They are not helping you win any business battles.  Trust me your business will face many battles.  To win at the business game, you will need to eliminate a loosely flapping tongue.  A tongue that spews out words with no idea of how those words can or should be used is a person who is destined to fail in the world of business leadership.  Watch your tongue closely.  Keep it in control at all times.  This kind of rule also applies to the actions and ideas a business owner has decided to process.  Make sure the things a business leader does makes good sense to do.  Make sure the actions and decision plans have had time to become part of a controlled effort before they are put into motion.  A great business owner does not operate well with continued spontaneity.  Continuous, spontaneous decisions do not fair well in the business world.  Get rid of them.  Get rid of those tendencies.  Get rid of acting like nothing has a plan of attack.  These are steadfast business rules.  Learn how to honor them.  These are some of the quiet, yet serious set of rules.   

This set of rules can be broken without a leader recognizing how they were broken.  A negative comment can be made in passing that can cost the leader a lot of needed support.  I once had an employee working for me several years ago.  She was born and raised in the United States but was half Caucasian and half Japanese.  She grew up and married her Caucasian husband.  She was a great employee for many years.  She became a great sales person, too.  Her numbers grew like she understood what she was supposed to be doing in sales.  She had a great knack for getting to know her customers.  One day she had a young couple in the store.  They were new to the area and were moving into a new home in a nearby town.  My employee was helping this young couple select some furniture for their new home.  The process seemed to be going well until she came back to my office and asked me to take over for her.  I was puzzled.  She did not appear to be doing very well, all of the sudden.  I asked her what was wrong?  She said she will tell me later.  She just wanted me to take over working for her with this young couple.  I got up and finished working the sale.  They were a nice couple.  I finished the deal and scheduled the delivery.  When I returned, I asked my employee what happened to her?  She said she could not handle that couple anymore.  She said she went as far as she could to help them but was just about to the end of her rope.  I asked her what was the matter?  She said she could not work with a 'mixed' couple.  He was African-American and she was Caucasian white.  They were married.  I was shocked!  I stood silent for a short moment.  I said, "Well what about you and your husband?"  She said, "That's different."

We need to recognize how our tongue, our actions and our plans can damage the work we do.  This young employee, even though the thoughts were out of line, recognized it.  I know it does not always make sense to think and do things in particular ways.  Sometimes the process of communication goes haywire.  Telling the truth is not always the best thing to say.  Just because she felt that way does not make it right to speak it.  Treating people the way we want to treat them is not always the best method to use.  These sets of rules are real and they matter to success a whole bunch.  Be very careful to control what you say, how you say it and be especially careful in doing what you do for work.  Your words, actions and ideas will often determine how much you will win or lose.  Become good stewards of these three things...words, actions and ideas.

Learn how to stick to success.  This employee was able to stick to success instead of her 'off' ideas about mixed marriages.  She recognized it well enough to eliminate working it wrong and saying something inappropriate to kill her success ratio.  She knew she would fail if she did not get away from the things she was thinking about.  She knew what she felt was likely going to hurt her results.  She made the decision to control what she said, how she acted and removed her presence of ideas away from her selling process with that couple.  She wanted to win even though she knew how she felt.  Winning was more important to her than processing the wrong ideas she was fighting to manage.  The truth is, she felt strongly about mixed marriages.  Even though she was one.  We all have these kinds of confusions running parallel with our own lives.  It might not be about mixed marriages but it will be about some other subject.  We have things we do in our lives that we do not support when others do them.  Humans are funny beings.  Learn how to keep the funny stuff in your life away from the working plans of your business model.  Success has a tendency to run away and hide from a loosely controlled tongue, spontaneous plans and random work.  These are not items listed on the top chart for making success happen.  Get rid of them if you have them.

Some Inventory Rules Need Greater Attention

Every Missing Item Adds Loss To Your Bottom Line.

I am watching the sour economy interfere with good inventory management.    I understand how important it is to cut back on how much inventory needs to be on hand.  I also understand how certain 'slow selling' items need to disappear from the product presentation mix during tough economic times.  These kinds of inventory control moves appear obvious.  However, there is danger lurking in those moves.  Sometimes the obvious logic can sneak right up and bite your sales off worse than the economy can deliver.  I see it happen to business owners all of the time.  There are steadfast rules that have surfaced over time about how a good manager should control the effectiveness of their inventory mix.  Those rules stand the test of time.  They are real, they are effective, they are consistent and the produce better sales results if they are respected.  I am watching some business leaders 'cut back' on inventory without any regard to the heart of some of these inventory rules.  I am watching some business owners actually destroy their sales potential by managing their inventory incorrectly.  It breaks my heart.  They obviously do not know about some of these inventory rules or if they do know about them, they are not giving them enough attention.  They are adding gasoline to the fire of the bad economy.  It breaks my merchandising heart.  Remember, I shop in some of your stores.

Some inventory rules need greater attention.

Some of those rules need to become better defined so the operator can honor how they work.  If the respect for certain inventory rules were increased the sales results would improve.  This is true even in a rotten economy.  The retail outfits that skip practicing the fundamentals of inventory control are the same business models who cannot produce profitable consistency.  If you are managing one of those 'bad results' business models...take notes.  I have a sneaky hunch that some of these inventory rules are getting placed on the back burner.  I also suspect some of these inventory rules are not known by the leaders of those failing models.  Do you think?

I am not your best employee.  I will speak up when I see a wrong being performed.  I am not shy about that kind of stuff.  I love it when I hear the leadership of an organization tell me how they want to have their employees be able to share and expose badly performed activities.  Are you operating a business model with this kind of approach?  Do you work hard on allowing your employees to practice sharing what they think is going wrong?  Do you permit this employee process to flow without fear of retribution?  Does your organization work on correcting wrongs it performs from the bottom up or the top down?  How do you find the wrongs that are going on in your business model?  If some of you are having trouble with this process in your organization, go read Jack Welch's book, "Straight From The Gut."  I know, reading.  Reading is something you do not have time to do.  I am sorry but if you skip reading this book you are skipping the chance to learn a ton about how to build a great employee working organization.  Jack did that thing right.  I think it might have something to do with why that company eventually developed into one of the largest market cap conglomerates in business history.  That company has not measured up to its true potential since he retired, by the way.  I like Jeff Immelt, who took over after Jack's retirement, but he is no Jack!  Jeff does not do it with the same qualities that Jack did.  It shows.  How does you organization measure up to its potential?  Let's examine that question deeper.  Let's get the right information flowing.  I do not necessarily care if it comes from the bottom or the top.  I just want your organization to begin getting the right information flowing.  You want to win, right?  That's what I thought.

Some inventory rules need greater attention.  In order to give those rules some greater attention we must first examine to see what those rules are.  Something tells me that most readers could not even begin to list five of those most important inventory rules.  If I was to stop writing right now, many business owners would still not be able to list those five most important inventory rules.  Many business owners are operating their model without knowing what the most important rules of inventory control are.  They have no idea about what those rules are, how they work, why they are important and how to manage them into constant existence.  A lot of business owners are operating their business model blind.  I suspect those might be the same business owners that are complaining a lot about this poor economy we are seeing.  Any thoughts, here?  If you do not agree, go ahead and list five of those most important inventory rules to practice on a separate piece of paper.  Let's see how well you did.

A Leader Without A Mentor Limits Success

Leadership Needs Wisdom.  Wisdom Needs Mentor-ship.

Winning is an attitude.  Winning is a process.  Winning is a combination of placing a lot of crucial  things in motion, all at the same time.  Winning is an order of components strung together massaging the same goal.  Winning comes from the efforts of those who know what to do, how to do it, when to do it and making sure it gets done.  Leaders practice winning ways more often than those who do not lead at all.  Business owners are people who need to win more often than not.  Business success comes form winning a lot.  Long term success comes form a leader who recognizes how to remain disciplined with the tools and requirements of their trade.  Long term winning does not come by accident.  It is earned.  A great business owner did not cheat to become great.  The two do not mix well long term.  Finally, the long term business success owner comes to the surface with the help of others.  Mentors were present along that owners successful trail.  Great success does not come to a 'lone-minded' business owner.  Great success does not come to the leader who operates all alone.  A leader without a mentor is a leader who limits success.

I have some mentors.  I appreciate what they bring to my table of production.  One of my best mentors is my wife.  She brings compassion to my stark way of approaching human dynamics.  I am very cold, calculated and efficient in the way I deal with softer traits humans perform.  I would just as soon flip out some bold quip to quickly resolve a nasty rub with one of my co-workers or employees.  It is my wife who helps me filter out the hardness I use in my method of treatment for the personality challenges I face in my leadership path.  My wife is my mentor in how I process my human relations.  She saves me from myself.  She has saved my leadership countless times in the past.  She fills in where I operate blindly.  She helps me reach better results with added compassion and increased human respect.  I do not naturally possess these important tools.  One of my mentors, my wife in this case, helps me find those tools when they are needed.  She adds the depth to the way I need to become as a better leader.  Who helps you with those missing parts?  A leader without a mentor limits success.

There is no business owner who knows it all.  None.  For every leader who made it big, someone behind them helped them learn how to mold how they did what they did.  Great leaders are littered with good mentors.  Great leaders surround themselves with good advice.  Great leaders know when they have reached their own personal capacity for moving forward with a challenging issue.  Great leaders now when to ask for help.  Great leaders learn how to pay attention to other minds that travel with them.  Great business success does not come from a single mind.  Great business models do not grow up big because one person did all of the great thinking.  A leader without a mentor limits success.

Business owners are leaders.  Some are good at it, some are not.  Some are terrible leaders.  The terrible leaders are the ones who struggle the most with business success.  This observation is not rocket science.  The terrible leaders of most business models are the ones who produce the worst numbers.  Terrible leaders do not usually produce great results.  Terrible leaders have a limited library of success rewards.  There are very few economic trophies on the shelves of their hallways.  The terrible leaders are usually the ones who go it alone.  They like wearing the Lone Ranger's mask.  They like being alone.  They mentor with nobody.  They read nothing worthwhile and have no desire to add new knowledge to the work they do.  Their results becomes the proof for how much help they do not permit to come in.  Unfortunately they help others live the loss they individually produced.  A leader without a mentor limits success.

For those of you who are currently leading a business model through the 'mind fields' of this day and age, without a mentor, I suggest you go find one as soon as you can.  There is no business owner on this planet who does not need a business mentor.  None.  Even Bill Gates has a mentor.  Even Steve Jobs had a mentor.  Even our President has some mentors.  Phil Knight has mentors.  Phil Knight has a multi-million dollar cash reserve, too.  In this day and age, and with this poor economy at hand...Phil Knight has a monster, after-tax, cash reserve.  Phil Knight has a lot of business mentors.  Gee, I wonder if that is a good idea?  Get serious, get a mentor.  Find someone who helps you think in ways you will otherwise ignore.  Get a good mentor.  A leader without a mentor limits success.  Some of the best business models in this world were developed by a group of leaders working together...not by a Lone Ranger.  Lone Ranger's suck.  They do not win as often as we would like to believe.  They lose a lot.  Winning comes form those who accept good advice.  Winning comes from those who recognize the power of a mentors views.  A leader without a mentor limits success.

How Do You Stop Worrying?

Managing Worry Is Part of Cultivating Character

One of the things we all do pretty well is that we worry a good deal.  We know how to worry about things.  We can easily find enough problems to think about so we can worry some more.  Worry is the best way to keep our mind working over time.  If we learn how to worry more often, we can skip trying to waste time sleeping.  We can lay awake all night and think about all of the things that can go wrong in our life and our business management.  Instead of sleeping we can think about all of the things we need to do to fix what we are worrying about.  That way when we get up in the morning we can go fix those things we worried all night about and we can go fix them when we are really tired and grumpy.  I think that is an excellent plan.  Not.  Don't do that approach, please.  It is not a good habit to develop.  It is also a hard habit to break.

You might be surprised to hear how many business leaders practice this kind of plan.  As foolish as it might seem, some do it almost every single night of their lives.  They go to bed to begin their process to worry about stuff that needs to be fixed.  The go to bed to start worrying about stuff.  They do it enough that it soon becomes a very bad habit.  They worry about the next darkened alley.  They may not be standing in a dark alley but they see one nearby and think they are headed in that direction.  They go to bed to think about the ways that dark alley can arrive.  They worry about what might become, not about what has already occurred.  They worry about a darkened future.  Worry is often times the result of thinking about something that is going to happen wrong.  We can see the possibility of the dark alley becoming where we will soon be walking so we try to figure out how to avoid that turn.  We worry about our options.  We do not think our choices will be obvious selections or good enough options when the time comes to exercise them.  We do not think our future choices will help us to avoid that dark alley.  That is why we worry.

Our body chemistry does not need help in producing the wrong kinds of internal fluids.  The production of the wrong kinds of internal body fluids will eventually wear our body out.  Wrong production of unwanted chemistry inside our body will eventually do some serious damage to the important parts of our body functions.  Our health will suffer if we worry too much.  Stress will take its toll on the health of our body.  We will not live as healthy nor as long as we work to enjoy.  It is a terrible plan to adhere to.  It will guarantee an unwanted set of nasty results.  To those who have developed the habit of worry, I just gave each of you one more thing to worry about.  Now your health will find its own dark alley to walk through.  More worry.

The art of worry is a process that runs deep like a bad habit.  If you chew your nails you have developed a bad habit.  Chewing your nails is not a natural bodily function.  It is an action that is prompted by the mind to do when no other reason can be justifiably found.  We only chew our nails because we developed that process as a bad habit.  That is all it is.  Chewing our nails is strictly a bad habit.  It is a habit that produces nothing worthwhile yet we protect it as if it means all the world to us.  We work hard on trying to sneak ways for chewing our nails without getting caught.  We get pretty good at it, too.  We already know it is not a good habit but we protect it anyway.  We seem to believe we gain power when we are able to sneak it by someone.  It is like making a little victory in our lives.  We seem to believe we have won when truly we have lost.  We are truly losing but we feel like we are winning.  Worrying is exactly the same thing.

When we worry we think we are winning.  We think we need to worry to get a victory in how we are living.  We think we need to worry in order to feel better about what we need to do.  We are not winning when that happens.  We only think it is the right thing to do.  We only think we are trying to win.  We are not.  We are trying to lose.  We are losing.  We are destroying the process for recognizing healthy appreciation for the things we have already produced.  We are taking our victories and forgetting about them when we place worry on our hearts.  We are searching for something to destroy the feelings we should be having in how we have won.  We are searching for something to be stronger than the victories we have already produced.  Those victories cannot be real so we manufacture more doom to think about so we can begin to manage what can happen that is bad.  We need bad stuff to happen so we can be correct in how we believe things will turn out.  We hate to be wrong.  So we plan how bad it can go so when that happens we will be right.  We want to be right.  We hate to be wrong.  That is why we worry.  We want to be right.

Some 'Skipped' Boring Things Do Not 'Skip' Hurting Us

Consistence Is Boring, But It Provides Great Success Opportunities

Yesterday on the radio a DJ explained how to stop boredom in your family life.  She was describing how she was trying to get her three children ready to go somewhere this past weekend and one of her girls was not getting ready on time.  She described how her girl, a five-year-old, was one of those tinkering types.  This radio DJ was a single mom with three small children.  On the weekends it is important for the DJ to get all of her domestic stuff done before the work week begins.  She and her group were trying to get ready to go out to the grocery store, the post office and run some other important errands.  This five-year-old daughter was dragging her feet.  She was not getting ready like all of the others.  This time she was busy coloring in a couple of coloring books.  The DJ mom asked her daughter why she was not getting ready.  The daughter said going to town to do errands was "boring."

The mother agreed.  She undressed the rest of the kids and told the five-year-old to finish coloring the pages in the coloring books she was working on.  The DJ mom described how her daughter does not color like any other child.  She described how her daughter colors in 'rainbow.'  Everything is colored in a rainbow.  A shirt, a building, the mountains, the sky, a train...all of them are colored in rainbows.  Nothing has a single color.  Every item has a multiple of colors that are used to cover each item.  The DJ described how important it is as parents to permit our children to express themselves properly.  That is why she chose to allow her daughter to finish the pictures she was coloring.  It was a cute story and I can relate when I think back to how complicated it was to raise our three girls.  I remember similar experiences.  I remember some of the 'hair combing' wars my wife and the girls used to produce.  I remember some of the fashion wars developed when my girls picked out their own clothes to wear when we were going out into the public somewhere.  I could relate to the DJ and her challenging five-year-old who did not want to do the boring stuff in life.

One major problem with that desire.  Success, when done correctly, is very boring.  Success does not usually come from doing things that feel good.  Success does not usually come from doing things that change from one exciting project to the next one.  Success does not usually come from one person dominating all of the others because they stubbornly refuse to comply with how the rest of the group wants to go.  Success can happen without all of these things being placed in a boring line, but it does not happen very often without them becoming part of a boring routine.  True success is boring.  Success is usually the result of doing a lot of right things, a lot of necessary things, a lot of routine things and a lot of unwanted things all in a boring pattern of life movements.  Success does not usually come from random movements that are created to keep us interested in doing fun things all of the time.  Success becomes the by-product of doing a lot of routine things well, on a boring but consistent basis.  A lot of those routine things are not things that we all enjoy doing.  A lot of them are not enjoyable.

There have been thousands of times when I would prefer to color in a coloring book instead of doing some hiring or firing that was necessary for my business model to perform.  Sometimes the responsibility to do necessary routines is higher than the pleasure to ignore those duties by playing with stuff that is more fun to do.  When we skip doing the stuff we need to do we can begin to do the things we like to do.  We skip right past doing the boring things.  We find we prefer to do the exciting things.  Unfortunately, when we skip doing some of those important boring things and those 'skipped' boring things do not 'skip' hurting us.  Some of the important 'skipped' duties often turn out to come back and hurt our success efforts.  We 'skipped' doing them because they were boring.  As a result, we 'skipped' right over the necessary things that help us to produce more success.  We use our desire to do exciting things to justify why we can skip doing the necessary but boring stuff.  We get confused.  We want more excitement and less boring duty patterns in our lives.  We see this desire in our children and wonder why it does not happen more often in our adult lives.  We get confused and manage the wrong ways to honor both.  We forget how success works and compromise our walk on that path of life.  We give in and change the boring routine to honor the creativeness we see in our children.  We believe both cannot happen in the same plane of existence.  We are wrong but do not know how to manage the two together.  We therefore compromise success by giving into random patterns of movements and sacrifice boring routines that are necessary.  We limit our walk to success.  Unfortunately, we are dead wrong.  We can have both.

Unhappy Employees Will Destroy Your Efforts

Your Business Model Should Not Be A Disturbing Scene

Unhappy employees can creatively destroy your success efforts.  They can and they will if given the opportunity.  I used to carry some mixed emotions about this subject.  At one time I had a whole set of thoughts streaming through my mind that supported the idea that I was the boss and they were the employees.  I used to think that what I said goes and what they should do is to make sure whatever I wanted done gets done.  I used to have no gray area in my mind on this perspective.  If you worked for me you needed to do exactly what I wanted you to get done and that was it.  It was not a clouded subject.  I made it very clear that anything other than that would not be appreciated.  I had a strong sense that if you worked for me you were privileged to have this job.  I felt that way and meant it.  I did not hide those kinds of streaming thoughts.  This was how I used to develop my employee/boss relationships.

I operated from the stance that you were the hired hand and I was the guiding boss.  Since I was the one who ponied up the money to risk building the business, you do what I wanted done.  I would often remind some of my employees that if you wanted to do it your way, pony up your own risk money on your own business model.  Don't try it your way with my risk model.  I would make that perspective very clear.  It was not kept secret.  I even included that kind of profile in the way I walked.  I had a hard stride that exhibited how I felt about owning my own business.  You know the one.  The one that looks like the walker just finished first place in a beer chugging contest.  Exuberant, confident and loaded with arrogance.  You can still see some of those remains in some of my writing.  That was how I used to manage my employee relationships.  It was more like expecting that my employees should do as I say and quit questioning how I wanted it to be done.  I was the director and they were the staff.  Any questions?

I could write a series of funny books describing all of the damaging and very funny experiences that kind of leadership promoted.  At the time those experiences occurred, very few of them seemed to be funny.  Most of those noteworthy experiences were of the wrong kind to report with pride.  The damage I would constantly be mopping up from the wrong things my staff would perform was also a constant stream of challenging and unwanted stuff.  My earlier years of employee leadership was marked with constant issues of wrong doings.  The issues that involved my employment staff was always filled with garbage and challenges.  Each day was an adventure.  I have a business associate I communicate with once in a long while.  We connect occasionally to share what is going on in each others lives, about three to four times per year.  Whenever he calls I ask him how things are going.  He usually has the patented reply, "High Adventure."  His personal life is a mess.  It always has been.  His business model is a jewel.  Somehow he gets one of them right.  It is always the same, however.  At home, his life is "High Adventure."  At work, his model is kicking well and growing with new ideas all of the time.  My business life used to resemble his personal life.  It was always stuck in the lane where high adventure lives.

I was a troubled business leader.  I had a great disrespect for the people who worked in my employ.  I was a tyrant and an owner who did not necessarily care how they felt about what they came to work to do.  My view was this...if you do not like it you can always go work somewhere else.  I had the 'have at it' position of view.  As far as I was concerned, they could go work for someone else and destroy their model instead of mine.  That was my true view.  I not only had that view, I promoted it and was proud to parade it around.  I made sure every employee understood my view so they can become more productive.  That is exactly how I thought.  That is exactly how I led my gang.  That is exactly why I had so much employee turnover in my furniture retail store career.  At one time, during a ten year stretch, I had employed 180 people.  My full compliment of steady employees during that period of time was 5 people at a time.  My retail store could not support more than 5 employees at one time.  Yet during that ten year period of my operations I had hired 180 people to do those five jobs.  I was turning employees over at a monthly rate and proud of it.  I thought the world was filled with a bunch of lazy people.  None of them wanted to do the work I wanted them to do.  It almost destroyed me.

I grew very cynical.  I become very nasty with how I treated new people.  I did not trust anyone.  I made that position very clear.  I set up very stringent written rules on how my employees were supposed to behave.  I posted those rules all about the facility just far enough out of the sight of my customers.  I had labels posted in the delivery truck to remind the drivers how to use the turn indicators, the brakes, the speed they moved and the safety issues I wanted them to respect.  I had notes of this nature posted on the wall of the restrooms and all around the shop and storage areas.  Every desk had a note of the controlling type to remind the staff what they could and could not do.  I micro-managed every single step my employees took.  I performed that kind of controlling method with a high level of cynicism.  I made it clear that I did not expect them to actually be able to do their jobs well.  I was filled with this kind of resonant behavior.  I was not a good boss and did not even care if you felt that way about me.  Just get your work done.  That is what I pay you for, that is why you earn what you earn.  Get to it.  Quit complaining.