My immediate answer is YES.

But aren’t entrepreneurs, and especially entrepreneurs who work alone supposed to do whatever it takes?

Well, yeah…

But “doing whatever it takes” isn’t the same as doing everything.

Doing everything is a bad idea, it costs you money and it costs you growth, and I can prove it.

Watch the video to get the whole scoop.

When you’re done leave a comment with your insights and if you’re up to it, your next steps.

PL

It might be time for you to face the facts…

Roughly half of whatever is rolling around in your head got there by accident and probably isn’t doing you much good.

But when you try to figure out what’s what, it tuns out the situation is a much like something David Ogilvy said while talking about advertising…

Half of it worked, half didn’t.

He just wasn’t ever sure which half was which.

 
Beliefs are scarily like that…

Until you take a closer look it’s tough to figure out which are “true” and which are garbage.

The good news?

You can do something about it, and the effects are phenomenal.

Watch the video.

And when you’re done, add to the conversation.

Comment on the things you used to believe and the things you now believe. Or comment on whatever you feel like.

Now I don’t know whether Buffet really told this to the pilot, but if he didn’t he should have. Either way, it’s solid advice.

The things you choose to focus on obviously have loads to do with what you achieve, but the things you choose not to focus on? Those things make focus possible.

Watch this 4-minute, 16-second video for a simple exercise to dramatically increase your focus and your results.

To your outrageous success.

Paul

P.S., take a minute and tell me what you think in the comments. Does this work for you? What are some of the things you’re going to avoid like the plague? Watch it now…

Being unreasonable leads to breakthroughs in profits and everything else (DNA)

Compare and contrast: incrementalism and breakthroughs.

The Incremental Improvement Strategy is based on finding things in your business that could work better and making small changes. Year after year your operations improve slightly and bit-by-bit become more efficient and more effective, producing small, consistent dividends for you and your family, and your investors if you have them.

Continuous improvement, or optimization, is always going to be a sound approach to running your business. Over time, those small but steady gains add up to solid increases in income. At 7% growth, your business will double in 10 years. At 10%, it will double in 7 years. At 15%, it will take 5 years.

If you’re risk averse, this can be very effective…

• As long as the external environment remains stable (for instance, no sweeping governmental changes in the Middle East.)
• As long as there are no oil price increases or surprise shortages of other critical raw materials.
• As long as there are no across the board price reductions (as we’ve seen in housing over the past 3 years.)
• As long as consumer tastes don’t change
• As long as there is no technological shift striking at the core of your product line.
• As long as there is no gorilla competitor altering the fundamentals of your market.

So as long as none of these things happen, it could all work out for you.

But when your market isn’t stable (and whose is?), when great sea changes are tearing at the very fabric of your environment, the only thing that is going to keep you in business is creating a business breakthrough.

A breakthrough is a discontinuous, non-gradual change in your business that shifts the revenue, production, and profit curves in a completely new direction.

Breakthroughs-the kind you’ll need if you are to compete with a global competitor or deal with a radical swing in consumer tastes-cannot come from “being reasonable” and sticking to existing business rules.

Breakthroughs are not predictable from where you currently are, and they have the nasty habit of making everyone in your organization totally uncomfortable.

Until 1983, Intel made most of its money selling memory chips. The company had come under increasing pressure from Japanese manufacturers, who were building significant capacity while cutting price to grab market share. Grove concluded Intel couldn’t continue to compete like this, and he came up with a new approach.

Intel saw that the future was in microprocessors, which until then had been a tiny portion of the company’s profits. He refocused the entire business to become a “single source” for computers-on-a-chip, increasing quality and diversifying the company not by product, but by geography, making it a more stable and reliable supplier.

He risked the company’s future on this strategy, broke every rule in the business doing it-and transformed Intel into one of the three most important players of the personal computer era.

Sometimes breakthroughs happen by accident, yet even when they do, it takes guts to pursue them, because the consequences create unbelievable levels of stress.

They are almost always – by definition – totally out of alignment with your current direction.

To deliberately set out to cause a breakthrough from scratch requires nothing less than a complete sacrifice of everything you hold to be reasonable. So what if profits are down; that doesn’t mean you should dump the main source of them, does it?

In Intel’s case, it did.

I decided to post this adaptation from my book, Be Unreasonable, to show the “other side of the coin” from my best selling programs, FormulaFIVE and BlueprintsToProfits, and even my newest program for start-ups and early stage companies, Getting Started in Business. Each of these programs use my “15% solution” combining incremental and breakthrough thinking, to reliably double entrepreneur’s businesses. These programs work so well because the incremental nature is easy to implement and pretty much failure-proof, while the breakthrough comes in combining small strategies into a blockbuster one.

It’s important to remain flexible and not get locked into one model. Think big and think small at the same time. Insure steady, incremental improvement and simultaneously, look for the breakthroughs.

By the way, if you don’t yet have your own copy of Be Unreasonable, get one from Amazon (They were temporarily out of stock but do have the Kindle version) or Barnes and Noble.

I’m pretty sure not everyone agrees with me on this. If you’ve got a minutes, let me know what you think in the comments.

And stay tuned, I have some really interesting promotions coming up.

Don't make bad decisions because you didn't know any better

This is serious…

And it might come as a surprise, but from time to time, I’ve been known to make bad decisions…

And weirdly, some of my clients do too.

Bad decisions will cost you money, cost you time and eat into your profits. In the worst case, one bad decision can totally kill off your business.

Actually we all make bad decisions, and most of these “mistakes“ are not caused by a lack of knowledge or a shortage of skill. Often they are errors in judgment, caused by one or another of the basic personality flaws, the kind that are deeply imbedded in our brains and our culture.

What follows is the first half of a list of common ways entrepreneurs – and other people – decide the wrong way to do the wrong things.

I adapted this from something I saw in a quirky book called “Seeking Wisdom – From Darwin to Munger,” by Swedish author Peter Bevelin.

They say that recognition is the first step on the road to recovery. If you’d like to make better decisions and avoid some mistakes in the future, it would help to first understand how you make them.

Study the list, zero in on the parts that apply to you. Resolve to, at the very least, notice when you are making these mistakes, and fix them.

Okay, here goes:

1) Liking things similar to the things you already like.

If you like “A”, you are predisposed to think well of anything similar to “A.” This is the basis of a lot of advertising. After all, why do we say sex sells? Because we like sex, and, by association almost anything else. If I like playing golf, I may be predisposed to think that golf products make good investments. (They generally don’t.) The same mistake goes for disliking “B.”

2) Underestimating the power that rewards and punishments have on our thoughts and actions.

People are biased towards taking action and moving towards whatever we are incentivized to do, and we try avoid doing what will get us punished. As decision makers the trick is to explicitly understand the rewards and punishments implicit in the decision you’re making. For instance, you end up making a purchase decision based on the recommendation of a salesperson who is paid a special bonus for selling that product during a promotion, without considering that their expert opinion is biased.

3) Forgetting that people act primarily to serve their self-interests.

This is related to the mistake above. People ALWAYS act to increase their personal self-interest. This is fine (and to be expected) as long as your interests align with theirs. The problem is that realizing this may lead you to think that people’s actions are guided by some higher truth. For the most part, they are not.

4) Having an unrealistically high opinion of our own abilities, and tending toward seeing a rosy future.

As an entrepreneur you probably have a pretty high opinion of yourself. And just as likely, you’re optimistic about the future. Together these two qualities make it hard for you to evaluate the potential success of a project, especially one that hinges on your personal skills, abilities and business acumen. After all, you’re going to make it happen, aren’t you? How could it be any other way?

5) Wishful thinking and other distortions to reduce perceived pains.

When you are in some kind of pain – physical or emotional or financial— any kind of discomfort – you tend to act on things you believe will alleviate that pain. And your belief that something will help grows stronger the longer the pain goes on. After a while anything with a remote chance can look like a winner. Wishful thinking starts to seem quite grounded, and grasping at straws feels like anything but.

6) Being consistent with past decisions.

Psychologist Robert Cialdini makes this point in his book, “Influence.” He calls it “commitment and consistency,” and says that you’ll act in a way to confirm that your past decisions were the right ones. Deal makers use this against you when they repeatedly offer things to which you can easily say “yes,”making it so much easier to say “yes” to something big.

7) Bias towards maintaining the status quo

Most people don’t like change. It’s hard-wired into the species dating back to prehistoric times when any change meant some kind of danger. Most of us will go to great lengths to not have to change, including sticking with employees and vendors and, yes, clients, long past the time we should have parted ways.

Impatience – having a greater concern and valuing more things in the present, than things in the future

It’s easier to make a decision in favor of something we think will bring gains today or tomorrow than for a strategy or a project which may take months, even years, to materialize. This means a fortune-changing project can get sacrificed to something mediocre with a short-term payoff.

9) Comparing things to some random “standard” rather than looking at quantities objectively.

This one is weird. Most of us hate abstraction and don’t like to think about things without some reference standard. We’ll compare quantities, even when the underlying things we’re quantifying have nothing to do with each other. Nassim Taleb talks about a study where people who were asked to share the last four digits of their social security number unconsciously used those numbers when estimating the number of dentists in New York City. (I said this was weird.) Taleb calls it anchoring. This introduces a certain randomness into your evaluations, unhinging them from any kind of objective reality. It’s easy to manipulate people this way. Start your negotiations with a firm declaration of the true value: “It’s worth every bit of $2 million, and I won’ take a penny less.” Your counter-party offers an absolute top price of “a million and a half.” You would have been happy with $900,000.

10) Reciprocation

This is another one from Cialdini. Reciprocation is another hardwired trait, and is critical to the tribal structure of people, the ultimate purpose of which is to insure survival. We are willing to do people favors and kindnesses now, because we know they’ll pay us back in the future. All well and good, but in the future, you may find yourself making a bad decision because at a certain level you are driven to pay back the favor.

I said this earlier, recognition is the first step on the road to recovery, and understanding your how your mind works will pay tremendous dividends in making the right decisions. And making the right decisions will pay huge dividends in terms of sales, profits, happiness and satisfaction.

What do you think?

Do me a favor and post your comments below. I’ll pay you back some time soon.

Even your momentary blood sugar or hormone levels can shift your context. It colors how you interpret every event both internal or external. Whether you see something as good/bad, happy/sad, opportunity/threat, friend/foe, partner/competitor, worth it/not worth it, investment/expense, nourishing/poisonous, etc., is all given by that mental framework.

So while “out there” the event is the same for all, your inside experience can be completely different because it exists in a different context. From the point of the individual, context is decisive.

From the perspective of persuasion and influence, whether personal or in business, shifting someone’s context can shift every single thing about their behavior. And lasting influence comes from your ability to get someone’s context to change.

I’ll be writing more about this over the coming weeks. If you want to know more, sign up for my newsletter. I’ll keep you posted.

That you had to learn a whole bunch of new things, with lots of skill building and learning curves, and lots of time getting it right…

That you had to have these broad, sweeping initiatives that involved lots of people and turning things upside down and so on…

And of course, lots of risk.

Check out my newest 4-1/2 minute video and find out what it really takes.

When you’re done, leave your thoughts on the blog below.

Maybe you should stop setting goals that basically don’t work
anyway. This quick 6-minute video tells you what will work
better.  It’s short, and it’ll give you a few ideas.

Take a look and let me know what you think in the comments.

If so, watch the video below, it’s a short 6-1/2 minutes.

And be sure to leave your comments when you’re done.

I’ve noticed lately that my goals are a bit less “goal-like” and have more to do with feelings, emotions, states of consciousness and states of being, rather than with stuff.  Must have something to do with advancing age.

What a great pitch, right?  Like WHY would I possibly want to watch that?

Well, if you can make the time, you REALLY do want to watch it all the way through.

This webinar teaches the down and dirty details of how to craft a strategy and a strategic plan that will blow the doors off your business this year.

One more thing.  If you’ve already watched the “10 Questions” video, I do repeat some of that material in the beginning of this seminar, but in my opinion, this is better and worth the few extra minutes to hear it again.

So grab a notepad and a pen, get comfortable and turn it on. As I said, about 64 minutes.  When you’re done, leave your thoughts and comments on the blog, okay?

One of the reasons I like the holiday season so much is that I set aside time to gather up the past year, and lay plans for the coming one. So below are my 2010 Holiday Resolutions. I think of them as the first step in my strategic planning process.

You may think they’re a little heady, but they’re the one’s I need.

Here we go…

In the coming year, and I hope, for all time, I resolve to…

…keep my priorities straight and my goals clear.

…maintain my focus and limit distractions to the things that really, really seem like fun.

…“waste” only time that I’ve chosen to waste, and to not waste the time that is truly meant for getting things done.

…keep not only my promises to others (easy), but to keep my promises to myself (harder). I also resolve to come clean when I break my promises, and make amends when necessary (hardest).

…remember that my work is service in the world, and among my goals is to continually expand that service.

…know that my work exists to serve my life, even while I often realize that I exist to serve my work.

…continually seek higher levels of understanding.

…enjoy myself in all things. I further resolve to stop doing things I don’t enjoy.

…make this year a masterpiece.

…have a blast doing it.

Please leave your comments below and let me know what you think.  And if  you’ve got a moment, share some of your own resolutions.

Business Acceleration / Business Growth / Time Management …

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