“Make use of time, let not advantage slip.” ~ William Shakespeare What Does It Take to be a Great Leader? As we've all learned, most of life's lessons don't travel in a neat formation accompanied by bugles and cavalry. They arrive filthy and unkempt, prominent in the mess we've made…
If you’ve ever exercised by lifting weights, you know that the amount of the weight on the bar is only one variable that needs to be considered for a particular exercise
If you’re doing a bench press, you can add more weight because your chest and shoulder muscles help your arms to lift the weight
But if you put 50% of that total weight on each of two dumbbells, you can’t lift either one
You’ve probably also learned that you can’t use the same weight for curls as you do for bench presses
[pullquote]“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler
” ~ Albert Einstein[/pullquote]
Likewise, if you’re going to do only one repetition, you can handle more weight than if you’re going to lift it ten times
If you are lying flat, (more…)
What are we going to be covering in this 6th and final podcast in our Action Planning Course? In this final episode of our Strategy podcast series, we extend our conversation to examine a 4th criterion that should be used to evaluate all of the opportunities available to build your…
At this time of year, we all get excited about personal renewal, our plans for the coming year and how we can enhance our personal and professional lives in 2011.
Even though most of us have traveled the road of broken resolutions, hope springs eternal as we prepare to refresh our commitment and recharge our batteries … and make plans to overcome our shortcomings and rise to new levels of success.
There are many fashionable approaches to this process, many of them with valuable insights.
Jonathan Fields chose 10 words to focus his energy. His approach is an expanded derivation from a three-word approach used by Chris Brogan, who, like me, uses his carefully chosen words “the way a lighthouse helps a ship in a storm.”
Ernest Hemingway used only six words to write what he called his greatest novel … and the more you think on it, the more intriguing it becomes.
It’s one more approach you can use to bring the essence of your 2011 plan into sharp focus.
Although we’re more interested in clarity than mystery in our annual pilgrimage to the altar of realistic expectations, this approach, like those of Jonathan and Chris, also celebrates the power of simplicity.
[pullquote]“You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.” – Alvin Toffler[/pullquote]
Maybe you’ve used variations on these K.I.S.S. principles to craft all sorts of goals and objectives … memorialized in lists, notebooks and diagrams.
Yet, when we step back into the maelstrom of real life, distractions intrude, new input floods our inboxes, and without seeing it, we start to slowly drift off course. We madly implement course correction procedures, but instead of returning us to our original direction, they cause us to lurch about, each adjustment resulting in a slightly different course even further from our original objective.
So, how many words does that leave us? (more…)
What are we going to be covering in this 5th podcast in our Action Planning Course? We've all been here, haven't we? We've got a great idea to expand our business, we dive in head first so certain that it will work ... only to find that we've squandered valuable…
Too busy to clean the barn because all the horses are running loose? Our recent series featuring the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was a grim reminder that regardless of how many people are lined up outside our door, how many calls we have to return, whether we’re in the top ten for inbox clutter – we’re not absolved of our duty to master our most precious resource: cash flow. That’s why Warren Buffett calls it the “lifeblood of business.” Whether you’re unable to make payroll, can’t finance growth, can’t raise money or find that your business value is a black hole, mastering this process is the centerpiece of excellence.
So, what do we do about it? Although I didn’t start out to create a long series about business finance, so many of you have asked about how to make these improvements that I’ve decided to create a path to help you get there.
The first step on every knight’s journey is to slay any dragons in his path … so we’re going to kill off a few misconceptions about business finance. The most important is that you can learn these basic principles. As I’ve said before, you don’t have to be an MBA, CFO or accounting major to understand these essential concepts. If you focus on the core principles, you can direct your team and be sure that everyone’s paying attention to the right things.
Another dragon in our path is EBITDA. (more…)
What are we going to be covering in this 4th podcast in our Action Planning Course? A critical part of planning requires you to carefully examine all of the opportunities available to help you build your business … and to apply consistent criteria so that you can compare each of…
