It started with a decision. And it was a simple decision at that. To park my car and get out. To get out of my car and go in. To go in and meet people. To meet people and share my voice. Yes — to share my voice – with people I didn’t know, at a conference I had never been to before.
Do you know the difference between a plan and a strategy? Every strategy is a plan of sorts, but few plans are strategies. Thinking strategically takes a broader view and considers more variables than the planning that most of us do. Some ventures and adventures require a plan. Others require strategy.
Knowing which is which can mean the difference between watching the game and owning the team.
When we build a birthday cake, the plan — a recipe — takes place in a closed system. The birthday cake builder controls all of the key circumstances that will affect successful achievement of the goal.
And so the result is predictable.
We start building a birthday cake and we end with the birthday cake we set out to build. Rarely does an economic downturn affect it. It’s unlikely that another human unexpectedly tosses in a cupful of ketchup. A failure is a problem with execution or a flaw in the plan.
A plan is set of action steps to achieve a stated goal. Plans usually assume a closed system.
Birthday cakes can be build in a closed system.
A business can’t.
Building a business takes place in an open system. The business builder has inputs from outside the system and far less control. A business grows in an open system of change. It takes more than a plan to take advantage of the opportunity to grow that every change represents. That’s what makes a strategy the better road to growth.
Strategy is a realistic plan to advance over time by leveraging opportunities uniquely available to you.
Don’t just plan to grow. Leverage the opportunity that shows up everywhere you are.
Do you use and leverage only resources you can control?
Could be you’re building a birthday cake not a business.
Be irresistible.
Be irresistble.
—ME “Liz” Strauss
IRRESISTIBLE BUSINESS: Influencing Decisions
A few days ago I got another phone call from a person I met several months ago. He said his name and then said,
I’m launching a new product and I’m wondering if you’d like to see a demo.
“What?” was all that I could think of to say.
When he’d called, I’d been knee deep in writing a proposal. I was well into the context of the strategy I was developing and that strategy had no connection to the name or the random question that had just interrupted it.
After an uncomfortable few minutes of asking questions of my own, I managed to find out who the person was and why he was calling me — he wanted to enlist my help. After all, we were connected.
The disconnect in this “connected” thinking is that I can’t help everyone with whom I have a conversation, much as I might be inclined to be the helpful one. My life, my family, my friends, and my landlord demand their own part and parcel of my time. So I can’t stop my own goals to pursue others’ quests just because they ask.
No one can.
It’s hard enough for any one of us to determine where to lend our support to the most noble of quests within the time we have in our lives.
If you’ve got a quest that needs support, help yourself and the people you might ask by being able to tell us the information we might need to make that decision before you ask.
Anyone with more than one friend has to find a way to decide which friends to help and when. When you move beyond close connections, it sure helps if the “friends” asking lets us know that they’ve thought enough about their quest to start with trust.
Asking isn’t easy. Saying “no,” isn’t either. But time is the only resource no one has enough of.
Take the time to understand and prepare for the four points above and you’ll save time because you’ll contacting the right people with the information that they need to answer faster with a yes.
How do you make sure you’re ready to ask?
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!
IRRESISTIBLE BUSINESS: Influencing Decisions
The CEO was a great thinker. He made his decisions on the facts. As I watched him in meetings as people presented ideas with their best efforts to win him over, I learned a lot about what influences the decision making process.
One of the most important things I learned was what I should know to hedge my bets.
Influence is built on trustworthiness and connection.
To achieve those and meet our goals, it’s important to finely focus on the roads that will take us to our goal and the ways of inviting people to join us that move their mission forward as well.
Whether we work for a huge corporation or sit at a desk in our living room, we can’t be successful without tapping into the influence of others who can help us make our ideas and our projects become real. Yet, we all also know the experience of leaving a meeting or ending a phone only to find that the decision we wanted fell off the table into an abyss called “Next Steps.”
Knowing a few things before we go into those meetings can influence the results significantly by building foundational trust in our competence and connecting our goals to how those we want to help will benefit.
2. Know how this project will make the answer you want clear. Know how you’re going to make the project happen. Ask yourself before you meet, “What would be next if the answer is yes.?” Sketch out a plan of action and reasonable estimates for the costs and the resources needed to execute that plan. Do the thinking so that they don’t have to. Present a simple plan that can stand on its own.
3. Know how your plan will bring relevant and positive results faster and easier. Establish context that makes your goal relevant to the audience you want to enlist. Why are you pursuing this goal and why would the audience want to align their goals with yours? Are you informing a large audience or a small one? How deeply do they need to know the details? ?How will you connect what you want to happen to what already is? How will the proposed project fit into what they’re already doing? How can you make your proposal mission critical to THEIR goals?
4. Know how your experience will add value and mitigate risk. How will you establish your knowledge base as an expert? If possible, tie the proposed idea or project to something you’ve succeed at in the past. If you can’t, know what you’d expect based on your experience and be able to explain why you’re confident that together you can make this innovative approach a success. Research similar ventures. Be prepared to speak to one or two you know well.
Ideas are fun, but they’re not the genius that builds an economy. For no matter how ideas — genius or not — that get set on the “business table,” it’s the ones founded on solid thinking, realistic plans, and influential support from the right sources that develop into the next awesome technology or killer app we own.
If we do the strategic thinking and develop credible plans before we propose the idea, attracting the influential support of the right people is faster, easier, and more meaningful. In fact it could be said to be irresistible.
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!
We all grow up to be leaders on someone else’s path.
That’s not a bad thing, but it’s a reality that builds our world view.
We need to learn how the world works … how to stay alive, how to access food, how to win respect, influence, and trust. The first values, rules, and ideas we learn teach us that. They set a foundation for building character, setting boundaries, and making decisions for ourselves.
Most of us are born into a top-down organization called a family. Our parents (or older, bigger significant others) teach us about good and bad behavior. At the same time we literally find our hands and our feet. Before we learn to talk, we know some things work and others don’t. We’ve already figured out whether a smile or a crying fit gets us what we want. If we didn’t know that, we’d have died of hunger. As we find our way to standing in the world, values, rules, and ideas help us find the place for our feet.
Family values, rules, and ideas start simple. They come from our caregivers. They sound like “Love your brothers, Don’t take what’s not yours. Don’t hurt other people. Don’t yell indoors. Be nice. Do well by doing good. Think.”
We learn to navigate when those values, rules, and ideas conflict.
When my older, older brother was three, he tried to put his hand in the sugar bowl. My mom reached out to slap his hand.
My dad said, “Wait!” Then he turned to my toddler brother and said, “You won’t do that again, will you?”
My older, older brother agreed. But the very next day, he tried the sugar bowl again and my mother slapped his hand.
He said, “I’m going to tell Daddy you did that!!”
My mother slapped his hand a second time and said, “Now you can tell your Daddy I did it twice.”
We learn early to sort whose values, rules, and ideas are more powerful.
It’s a self-preservation skill.
At school, we learn to be a leader on someone else’s path. We learn values, rules, and ideas that engage us in a manageable way. Some kinds of creativity and leadership are rewarded because they help the school run better, faster, easier. They give the school more meaning. They make it more fun. Other forms of leadership and creativity are brought back onto the path, because they make things harder to manage. Some behaviors don’t fit.
Conflicting values, rules, and ideas come from the same source.
Some sorts of curiosity are good. Some sorts are disruptive.
Asking why is eager participation in some situations and defiance in others.
Some sorts of helping others are applauded. Other helping is called cheating.
It’s good to ask what would happen if you don’t brush your teeth.
It’s not so good to ask what would happen if you don’t go to “time out” when the teacher sends you there.
Add the exponential complication of the values, rules, and ideas of our peer group.
The simple values, rules, and ideas require interpretation as we get older.
We learn that some rules interpret our actions by what that action “most often means.”
We graduate and fit ourselves into yet another set of values, rules, and ideas.
The more people we meet, the more complicated the values, rules, and ideas become.
The tricky thing is the way our brains build abstract thought. We construct our understanding of values, rules, and ideas through experience. We construct our world view, our basis for making decisions, the same way we construct the idea of blue — it all starts with someone else’s idea of what blue is. We learned our idea of blue by trial and error.
What color is this?
Blue.
No, honey, it’s red.
What color is this?
Blue.
No, dollface, it’s green.
We learned blue by learning what’s not blue at the same time.
We learn what to do by learning what not to do — by doing things wrong — by finding out that our inclinations and instincts have lead us astray.
We learn to trust other people’s values, rules, and ideas more than our instincts.
That’s a problem.
Most of us don’t realize where doing that.
That’s an even bigger problem.
In fact, it’s dangerous — so dangerous, it can cost us our life.
How many of your decisions come from habits set years ago and never challenged. If you’ve been feeling like you’re not on the right path, I’m betting it’s because you’re working under some old rules — rules that don’t fit, rules you don’t need.
What are the values, rules, and ideas that run your life and your business? Who inspired them and are you ready to decide which are your own?
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
When it comes to making big decisions, that can often make or break your business, it can be tempting to just go with your gut instinct, Isnât it? After all, itâs your business and you know it better than anyone, right? Whoâs better qualified to make a decision than you? And then, most of you out there have learned how hard this mentality bites too.
In actual fact, the âgut instinctâ approach is fraught with hazards, that is, unless your gut instinct is Homeric â the stuff of legend. Face it, people have tendency to let their imaginations run away with them â we have all these plans and ideas and we can picture everything in our minds working out perfectly, accordingly â even in the most dire situations. Our judgment can so easily become clouded, as we get excited and think too far ahead of ourselves. Consequently, we make rash decisions that usually backfire on us.
So, decision making big or small, requires intelligence. No, not you turning into Albert Einstein, but the kind of business intelligence that can be gleaned ever more effectively in our digital work and playground here.
[Click the image to see the infograph full size.]
Created By DomoTechnologies, Inc.
Business intelligence is far more accessible now, than ever before. As the above infographic courtesy DOMO (http://www.domo.com/what-we-do/additional-resources/8/82#featured) above shows, business intelligence, in the form of highly visualized and easily accessible data, is quickly becoming a vital resource for internet entrepreneurs. Check this out.
Having access to business intelligence is critical to your success. Unless you have a crystal ball, you simply cannot predict the outcome of those key decisions, no matter how well you might think you know your business and your consumers. The message is loud and clear â donât act impulsively, get the facts first. Thatâs what everyone else is doing â so think about competing.
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Author’s Bio:
Mihaela “Mig” Lica founded Pamil Visions in 2005 where she uses her hard won journalistic, SEO and public relations skills toward helping small companies navigate the digital realm with influence and success.
You can find Mig on Twitter as @PamilVisions
Thanks, Mig!
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!
