The Power Of Others

Look around. At your friends. At the people who surround you. The people with whom you interact the most. These people who influence your life. These people with whom you spend much or most of your time. Echoing the law of averages, motivational speaker Jim Rohn said that we're the average of our 5 closest friends. It's also been said that if you show somebody your closest friends they'll be able to show you your futur...

Happy Valentine's Day. I know. An odd thing for business. But not really. All business is comprised of both head and heart. Well, to be fair and accurate --- it's all head stuff. Brain stuff. That's where all the heart stuff happens. We tend to think of it in more simplistic terms though. Head is logic. Heart is emotion. It's not that simple though. Or that binary. Leadership gaps are often the result of heart st...

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”  - Aesop The return we get - let's start out thinking about ourselves because that's what we tend to do anyway (put ourselves first) - from kindness is immeasurable. Never mind the benefit we can provide to others. Then why is compassion so rare? “No one has ever become poor by giving.”   - Anne Frank In a word: pride. Pride gets in our way. It's the kryptonit...

High-performing groups and teams are fixated on one big thing - understanding! The key to understanding is one simple, but not always easy activity - asking questions. Being high-performing isn't easy. Ever. It takes hard work, dedication and know-how. It also requires discipline to engage in continuous activities that will foster high-performance. Most teams or groups lack the ingredients, but it's not technical prowess,...

The power of others is most evident when we get into trouble. The trouble that we create through our own foolishness, negligence or stupidity. I know you don't want to admit it, but we've all experienced it. Nobody is immune. All of us have written awful chapters in our lives. Hopefully, we didn't make them the longest chapters of our lives. Worse yet, let's not make them multiple chapters that end up defining our ...

Last week I read yet another article about the dangers of executive coaching. One of the dangers listed was the morphing of the relationship into a friendship where the coach is no longer pushing or challenging the client. Over time they've become friends and now things are different. It prompted me to go back and revisit some earlier articles, especially some appearing in the Harvard Business Review where there's been a c...

Making decisions. Solving problems. It's THE job of top-level executives and business owners. The higher up the food chain, the more critical the decisions and solutions. Lower level or mid-level decisions have an impact, but they're not as high risk as those made in the C-suite. Even so, it's important for an organization to help leaders at every level make wise decisions. Leaders can learn how to do it better. Organ...

2020 is getting a lot of appropriate buzz as a year for clearer vision. It remains to be seen if we can leverage it the way we hope. According to U.S. News & World Report, 80% of New Year's resolutions fail by mid-January. Other surveys report that well over 90% of all resolutions fail somewhere along the way as the new year progresses. Due to the vast distinctions of resolutions, it's tough to determine why they fail,...

Cue Tom Petty's classic hit song from his fabulous Wildflowers' album, Time To Move On. ? Tom's singing about divorce, but if I were singing the song it'd be about my long-last professional shift. Today, I hope you get some value as I rehearse with you the general angst and execution (or lack) of the past year. As we near the end of it and stare into the face of 2020 it feels right to craft this final chapter of t...

Dig out that SWOT analysis. It'll come in handy. Part of figuring out your best moves to ratchet up your branding is to figure out what customers really want, what you're really good at and what weaknesses exist in the competition. There's no magic to it. It's a basic formula to help you create the proverbial competitive advantage. What do your customers want most? Interview your existing customers. Interview pro...

What do your sales conversations sound like? What do they look and feel like? You may think that brand building isn't even a third cousin to sales conversations. Positioning your brand has much to do with the sales conversation. "Everybody knows our brand. We've spent millions through the years getting our name out there." There are at least three levels of a brand we all must consider. First, there's our nam...

Let's get something out of the way. If you're genuinely a jerk, then this won't work well. ;) Genuine means you're real, not hypocritical. It means you're YOU. Whatever that is. I can explain using myself (as always, it's easier to pick on myself than to pick on somebody else). Here are a few bullet-point factoids about me: • I'm an introvert. I'm not socially awkward or even reserved, but I don&#...

After today I'll be away the rest of the week because I lost another WHO in my life. Who you surround yourself with matters! I've surrounded myself with some important WHOs. Over the weekend I lost one of them, a very close family friend I've known all my life. His son, Stanley, was my lifelong best friend. I lost Stanley on May 12, 2013 (I mentioned Stanley in another podcast I produce at LeaningTowardWisdom.com). Jo...

“We would worry less if we praised more. Thanksgiving is the enemy of discontent and dissatisfaction.”         - Harry A. Ironside Harry was a preacher in Chicago. Anybody familiar with the Bible has to have an awareness of gratitude and being thankful. Mostly to God, but also for each other and whatever we've got stewardship over. That includes our businesses. As powerful as thanksgiving is you'd think we'd more easil...

We wrap up this week's series on Marketing In The Moment with some thoughts about multiplying our marketing. One obvious way to do that is with money, but writing checks isn't my point today. If you can write bigger checks and effectively drive business growth, then by all means...write the checks. Most of us don't have unlimited funds though. Most of us have a lot more fear than funds. The reason Wednesday's podca...

A UK business guy produced a brilliant little video about how 1 in 8 men in the UK have NO FRIENDS. Entrepreneurship is lonely. Extremely so. The Peer Advantage by Bula Network doesn't promise to provide you lifelong friends, but the value proposition does include removing the loneliness of owning and operating your business. It's about improving the company you keep by surrounding yourself with other entrepreneurs who und...

Marketing In The Moment - A 3-Part Series This week I plan to briefly discuss marketing. Today we start things off with monitoring your marketing. Wednesday we'll talk about measuring your marketing and on Friday we'll discuss multiplying your marketing. By monitoring I mean you take a good, hard look at your marketing. So many of us are stuck doing what we've always done even though it may have stopped working many y...

This week the focus has been on details and seemingly small things. Because they can make all the difference. Let's end this week with a focus on speed. Especially the speed with which we can make small adjustments. I wish I were a guitar player, but I'm not. I've just dreamed about it since I was young, but I've never learned to play. What I have learned is more about guitars than any non-guitar player should kno...

I grew up in retailing, which is closely related to the hospitality business. Little things matter. "The devil is in the details." This is why small percentages of improvement can garner big differences in performance. It's the 80/20 rule or maybe better yet the 95/5 rule. There seems to be statistical evidence behind the 80/20 rule. Experience bears it out. Eighty percent of our business likely is the result of 20% of...