Do you work for a

bunch of pushers? 

Well, it looks like another big-time management theory has just bumped itself over the horizon by virtue of a new book, The Momentum Effect: How to Ignite Exceptional Growth, by J.C.Larreche. 

Larreche is an INSEAD Graduate Business School Marketing Professor.  He categorizes businesses as “Pushers,” or “Plodders,” or “Pioneers.”

• Pushers push their businesses hard traditionally seeking to drive sales through aggressive marketing increases. 
• Plodders are safety zone status-quo-invested businesses that maintain constant marketing-to-sales ratios. 
• Pioneers cut traditional marketing expenses to explore, discover, and cultivate other more creative and more effective avenues of growth, reducing advertising-to-sales ratios despite overall expense increases

The author contends that research he’s done uses Dow Jones Index markers and proves the revenue growth of Pioneer businesses measured over two decades ends up 93% better (almost twice as dramatic an increease) over Pusher businesses that spent considerably more in traditional “spend money to make money” marketing mindsets, while Pioneers and Pushers, both, left the Plodders in the dust!

Okay, so how does this translate for small business?  Slow down the push to be like everyone else in the market, and step up some new industry and community leadership approaches that will set you apart from the rest of the pack. 

If it feels like too big of a risk to suddenly start trying to do things differently, that’s a signal from the secure little competitive corner of your brain that you should do it!

Wasn’t it your Grandaddy that told you something like “Nothing ventured, nothing . . .”?

Remember that Momentum Leaders are, as Professor Larreche exclaims, “not lucky — they are smart.”  He says that managers often talk about “riding the wave,” but that Momentum Leaders aren’t so passive.  They believe you must first build your wave, then ride it.                   halalpiar 

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BE A CO-AUTHOR!  ENTER YOUR OWN 7-WORDS OR LESS TACK-ON to the “billboard discipline” story started 38 posts ago. The next 7 words could be yours! 

One candidate wants to “CHANGE” everything.  He obviously misses the point that “Change” is NOT a leadership word! Why? Because . . .

CHANGE is never a good

                                               

thing when somebody else

                                                              

does it TO you.  

                                                                  

     In business, industry, education, government, real estate, banking, food and gas pricing, et al, “CHANGE” is NOT a good thing when somebody else does it TO you.  Change is only meaningful and rewarding when YOU can make it happen for yourSELF. 

     When change is done TO you, it prompts inaction, resistance and excuses.  When you create and deliver change for your SELF, you are more likely to take ownership of the steps involved, and follow the process through more determinedly to make it happen.  

     “Okay, Joe, from now on, you’re going to have to print out, copy, and collate three copies of the daily 75 pages of inventory activity that you were just submitting by email before.  The two new bosses want hard copies, and of course I’ll need one too.  Oh, and you may want to run a fourth as a sort of cover-your-butt set that you can check with if questions arise.”    

     How does that feel compared with: “Joe, the new bosses are interested in seeing your inventory spreadsheets without having to jump around on their computer screens; could you come up with a method that you think might work better for them, something that doesn’t require a lot of your time?” 

     Do you think one of these approaches might serve to motivate more than the other?

     “Gwyneth, I want you to clean up your room right this minute, or you’ll not get dessert after dinner!” OR “Gwyneth, I’m getting concerned about the condition of your room; would you please take some time right now to come up with a way to get it shaped up by dinnertime every night, starting tonight, and let me know your plan when I stop back in ten minutes?”

     Notice the focus is on HOW can a task get done.  NONproductive emphasis is on WHY did you screw up, or on what threats might prompt action, or on implying some level of personal incompetence. 

     When you ask someone WHY? you will only ever get a reason or excuse for an answer.  When you ask HOW? you’re prompting the other person to evaluate, assess, and recommend process steps, without suggesting any personal shortcomings.

     HOW to get others to make changes happen for themselves?  Remember that behavior is always a choice.  You can choose to not react.  If you don’t react, you will never overreact!  You will be more effective in controlling and helping yourself and others to more effectively control behavior and accomplish tasks.  Remember if you need to criticise, criticise behavior, not the person.  And do it in private.  Save the audiences for giving praise! 

STOP trying to CHANGE the

 things others need to choose 

to change for themselves!      

halalpiar

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BE A CO-AUTHOR!  ENTER YOUR OWN 7-WORDS OR LESS TACK-ON to the “billboard discipline” story started 37 posts ago. The next 7 words could be yours! 

HEY YOU, MUCKFACE!<) 

     Are you stuck in muck, mired in muck, all mucked-up, mucking around, or perhaps you’re a top muckity-muck in your business or organization?  

     I just finished a fun blog post about “muck” for a client at http://blog.igburton.com and that started me thinking about the value of popularizing, and ways to popularize, increased use of this great word.  You know, like substituting it for another more-commonly-used word that sounds like it (um, no, not “luck” or “buck”). 

     For formalized discussion purposes, we may want to know that somewhere between “mu” (the 12th letter of the Greek alphabet) and (ugh!) “mucus,” the Oxford English Dictionary devotes considerable attention to muck and its derivatives.  These include family members “mucky,” muckiness,” “muckle,” “muckraking,” and my personal favorite: “mucker.” 

     Now, I once owned a horse for a couple of years, so I have firsthand knowledge of “mucking out” a stall, which I suppose makes me an ex-mucker?  Anyway, there are better ways to spend a hot humid afternoon.  I even saved the pitchfork to remind myself why not to ever own another horse!    

     The dictionary even digs up “Lady Muck” as a socially pretentious British woman, which gives cause to wonder were the Lady to have children, would she be a mother mucker?

     Now, I don’t want us to go off the deep end here, so let me simply say that “muck” has a probable origin in Scandanavia from a Germanic base meaning “soft.” 

     That’s nice, I think, don’t you?  I mean wouldn’t it serve to soften up all those hard, harsh expressions that use the other similar-sounding word?  Think of a few that of course you’ve never spoken but which you’ve undoubtedly heard, and change the word involved to “muck.” 

     There now, isn’t that better?  Softer?  Just imagine what’s possible.  It could be a whole new political crusade.  Like “A Chicken in Every Pot,” and “The New Deal,” and “The Great Society.”  And now, with your help: “The Softening of Society.”  It would seem like a kinder, gentler life.  All because of muck. 

     Oh, well.  Dream on, you muckers!                            halalpiar    

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BE A CO-AUTHOR!  ENTER YOUR OWN 7-WORDS OR LESS TACK-ON to the “billboard discipline” story started 34 posts ago. The next 7 words could be yours! 

Interested in boosting your

revenues with better writing? 

Yes, my blog post idea tank is bottomless, but if I don’t squeeze in this little sales pitch/announcement, I may end up a few blog-visitors short (from the wonderful folks who package my teaching these days).  So, without further ado:

     If you own or run a business or professional practice in Delaware or Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and you’re interested in boosting your revenues with better writing, I will be running a 6-session workshop series “BETTER BU$INE$$ WORD$ BOO$T REVENUE$.”

     The focus will be on writing business plan narratives, strategic marketing plans, business emails, letters, memos, reports, and blogs . . . depending on participant interests. 

     Scope of emphasis will address creative writing for marketing, branding, advertising, promotion, sales, customer service and relationship management, and public relations programs for all traditional and nontraditional media applications (from website and email content, to print ads, news releases, broadcast commercials, brochures, billboards, direct mail, and “elevator speeches”). 

     The course is designed for business and professional practice owners, managers, and entrepreneurs who seek to improve their sales messages and strengthen public image. 

     Sessions are scheduled for Wednesday nights, 5:30-8PM, from February 4 through March 11, at the Delaware Tech & Community College campus in Georgetown, DE. 

     If you’re interested in sign-up details, contact Shelley Grabel at 302.855.5905 or email her at sgrabel@dtcc.edu. 

P.S. There are still some openings left in the 4-session Wednesday night workshop course I’m facilitating: IMAGERY WITH WORDS featuring specific how-to’s for writers of all levels (and includes personalized coaching) 11/5-12/3, from 5:30-8PM at The Creative Writing Center in Lewes, DE.  Contact Shelley for sign-up details on this course as well.  Thanks for listening, and thanks for forwarding this info to anyone you think might be interested. 

See you tomorrow with some news about MUCK!     halalpiar

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BE A CO-AUTHOR!  ENTER YOUR OWN 7-WORDS OR LESS TACK-ON to the “billboard discipline” story started 33 posts ago. The next 7 words could be yours! 

Starbucks is like a 

                                                                                             

danceless, daytime, non-

                                                

alcoholic pickup bar . . .

                                                                                                  

at roughly the same cost!

                                                                                                                        

     Take a shower; wash, dry and fix your hair; shave; brush your teeth; gargle; deodorize. Grab your cell and notebook (cellphone and laptop computer, for the old folks!), sling your elbow-patched jacket over your shoulder (or tie your little cardigan around your little bare, bellybutton-ring-enhanced waist), hop into your freshly-washed and aroma-therapied car, and head on down to Starbucks to do a little work . . . or at least to give the appearance of doing something important.  Oh, and remember $20 for some coffee!

     Am I missing something here?  Okay, I always did officework in my office, schoolwork at home or in the library, but I can understand the need to expand one’s horizons a bit and have a more active backdrop than a window-view of brick or, heaven forbid, a TV screen, but Starbucks? 

     Starbucks is like a danceless, daytime, non-alcoholic pickup bar . . . at roughly the same cost!  And, to top it all off, you can be Democrat or Republican (but you’re probably an artsy-crafty screaming liberal); you can be gay or straight (or leaning); and you can get totally whacked on caffeine (without being embarassed at having to carry a 6-pack of Red Bull in the baggy sidepockets of your painter’s pants).  Whoa, and DUICS (Driving Under The Influence of Caffeine from Starbucks) is legal!

     So just meander on in, claim a tabletop space for your gear, then get in line behind some perverted coffeeholic who’s taking twenty minutes to order a Grande (so what happened to “large”?) peppermint pumpkin spiced skimmed-milk mocha latte with two and a half shots of peach espresso, one-half shot of amoretta reserve espresso, a squirt of alfalfa honey and three spritz’s of lowfat vanilla, with whipped cream.  Cha-ching, cha-ching, you’re thinking; this baby will run about $37 without a spoon for the whipped cream! 

     Oh, and, let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard the details of this request be bantered back and forth and “checked on” eleven times.  This is usually a good time to head for the bathroom without worrying about losing your place in line.

     So, okay, you finally get your overkill coffee and return to claim your seat, which has now been muscled in on by four people who decided to commandeer your table and work around your gear.  “Oh, sorry, Dude.  (or Dear)  We didn’t think you were coming back, y’know?  Do you want us to like move or something?”

     Game Over!  You lose!  You picked an idiot to get behind in line and you’re simply not up to battling four people for the table.  Time to call it a day.  But, no problem; you can just sit in your car and drink the hot mud, and be thankful you still have $13 left; that’s like a decent bottle of wine, right?

     So, next time, skip Starbucks; play your own game!  Stay dirty, dress sloppy, spend $1.50 for WAWA coffee (it’s better anyway), and go to the library to work.  Then you can get an $18.50 bottle of wine and just go to your room and drink and sleep.   halalpiar   

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BE A CO-AUTHOR!  ENTER YOUR OWN 7-WORDS OR LESS TACK-ON to the “billboard discipline” story started 18 posts ago. The next 7 words could be yours! 

SOME ACTION

BEATS NO ACTION!

     Growing up dirt poor, I learned the hard way that the old high school physics theorem (?) that a body in motion tends to stay in motion was true indeed, especially when it comes to both financial survival and to innovative thinking.

     Well, I guess it’s obvious that some degree of mental and physical hustle will generally produce a more stabilized income flow than sitting at the local bar downing beers or sitting on the beach counting grains of sand.  I can spare you the latter effort, by the way, by telling you there are approximately 10,000 grains of sand per average-sized handful.  (This magnificent piece of trivia is thanks to science and space superstar Carl Sagan from his marvelous COSMOS TV series.)

     But let’s take a quick look at the other end of the “motion” spectrum: innovating!  It’s important to keep in mind that literally ANYone can come up with creative ideas.  If you doubt this, ask those you would least expect capable of offering creative input for some creative ways to do something.  You’ll get them.  The point is that –in the end– creative ideas are worthless unless they are accompanied by detailed plans or strategies for how to implement them, how to make them work. 

     That’s innovation!

     Manufacturing a mattress that has a fire retardant in it is a creative idea that seems on the surface to be a positive step toward fire safety compliance, but when the fire retardant is made with toxic chemical ingredients that release chlorine and bromine traces that threaten the air we breathe and landfill leeching into waterways, the creative idea stops short of having real value. 

     Mattresses manufactured with harmless soy-based ingredients instead represent a path of true innovative thinking.  Someone didn’t just say, “Make ’em flame resistant!” 

     Instead, someone said, “Here are different ways to make the mattress so as to meet fire compliance codes and be safe to the consumers as well as the environment; here are the cost differentials; here is where the raw materials can be purchased and this is the expected delivery time and this is what the market will bear and here are the changes we’ll need to make in the manufacturing process, etc., etc. 

     And there’s no difference between the dynamics of this example and those involved with high-tech, or healthcare or, for that matter, with any other industry.

     Thinking a creative idea all the way through to completion or implementation is innovation.  It only happens with action (vs. inaction).  So go for it!  Besides, now you don’t need to count grains of sand.    

# # #

Hal@Businessworks.US  

All the world’s a stage.

                                                                           

(Maybe Shakespeare had it wrong?)

                                                                                                    

     He said all the world’s men and women are “merely actors.”  Are we?  Do we, for example, do what we do and say what we say purely for the intrinsic worth of it?  Or do we preoccupy our minds with intentions of impressing others for the lame sakes of our own egos?  Or are the shows we put on and the acts we deliver simply a means to our ends? 

     These are not unimportant questions in the grand scheme of things because the answers are ones that actually end up driving and energizing us as individuals as well as team players. 

     And youth (ah, yes, remember that?) seems rather tenacious in its approach to ego protection, projection, promotion, and strengthening vs. the signs of acceptance that seem to come to many with age.  Or is it that we just lose contact with (or not give a damn) after journeying over one of those proverbial “hills” that mark numerous birthdays from 29 on up that end in a zero?

     Maybe Shakespeare had it wrong?

     Maybe all the stages are our worlds!

     My “stages”—my office, my bedroom, my softball field, my car, my garage, my favorite restaurant, my favorite beach and mountain and vacation escape, my telephone, my computer— plus those I share with my wife, and friends, and relatives, and dogs, and guests, and business associates, and neighbors—all seem to dictate my behavior, my acting, and move me forward in ways unique to each set and setting. 

     Each stage offers different props and lighting and sound levels, and to each I often wear different costumes.  Each has different entrances and exits, and each affords large, small, sometimes indifferent and sometimes exuberant audiences.  Some stages promote my appearances ahead of time, some I sneak into and out of, some I enjoy and others, like the dentist’s chair stage . . . 

     Oh, well, sorry Will.  It was a good idea at the time, I thought: thinking of your words differently.  But, then, wasn’t that perhaps your intent after all?  Ah, onest wilst never know, wilst one?             halalpiar  

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     I HATE being a “blogger”!

     I’m a writer.  When I write something that gets published, people ask me to sign it.  When I rent a car in Ireland where writers –not football and Hollywood stars– are the national heroes, and I fill in “writer” for occupation, the counter clerks practically trip over their green shoelaces (yes, Irish green predates America’s “green“!) trying to grant my slightest wish. 

     Former schoolmates who generally thought it best that I should simply be swept under someone’s rug (because my Father was a low-life mailman who drank too much and I was a little too illiterate and rough around the edges), are now agog (agoogle?) at my sophisticated career track.

     So that enviable high-brow reputation thing was all working out, and then one day I decided to try blogging. Like I’ve done alot of things once: parasailing, taboggoning, i-podding, so I never dreamed that writing a blog would make me a blogger!  Imagine!  On Monday, I’m a writer with years worth of writing experience.  On Tuesday, I write a blog and on Wednesday, VOILA!  I’m a blogger!  

     I mean I once wrote the words for a matchbook cover, but I didn’t go and wake up the next morning as a matchbooker.  So what’s the deal with blogging?  The damn word isn’t even in my dictionary, which is only a couple of years old.  My grandmother would have a fit to hear that I ended up after a life of intellectual toil and hardtimes to be . . . ta ta ta DAH: . . . . . a   b  l  o  g  g  e  r  ! 

     Good Grief, Charlie Brown!  A BLOGGER?  Unfortunately, it sounds and looks a bit like BOOGER, which is not a terribly flattering analogy.  And it really doesn’t work well with kids either.  My grandchildren give me “Where, oh where has my little blogger gone?  Oh, where oh where can he be . . . ?” and “Hickory dickory dock.  The blogger ran up the clock!” [Did you ever stop and think about the violence there, by the way, of running after the three poor old (blind, no less) mice with a carving knife and cutting off their tails?  That’s like a bloody mess.  Whew!  And then there’s the breaking bough that comes down from the treetops with the baby?]  Who writes this stuff anyway?  A writer. 

     Maybe being a blogger ain’t so bad afterall.  I mean like a WRITER can’t run around saying “ain’t” and stuff like that, write?  Er, right?  Well, a blogger can. 

     Okay.  I’ll take it.  I’ll take “blogger.”  I don’t like it.  I’d much rather be just a plain old WRITER, but blogging IS what’s happening.  I hear people shout “Que Passe?” and other people shout back: “Blogging!”  

     Somehow, I just can’t imagine renting a car in Ireland and telling the desk person I’m a blogger, and having a big whoopdewhoop go on, but maybe quieter is better, you know?  At least if it’s quiet, I can write.         halalpiar    

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“The difference between 

the almost right word

and the right word is 

really a large matter— 

’tis the difference

between

the lightning-bug

and the lightning.”

     Whether for business or pleasure, for commercial reward or literary accolades . . . when you’re writing an advertisement, commercial, website, direct mail piece, news release, brochure, billboard, matchbook cover, a poem or short story, a fiction or nonfiction book chapter, a technical report, business plan, magazine or newspaper item or feature, a speech, photo caption, letter to the editor or a letter to your lover . . . remember Mark Twain’s words above.

     He was right, indeed! 

     Ah, you may say, but he’s ancient, and that was in the days of yore!  The truth?  He might just as well have said it this morning! 

     Writers will do themselves (and their readers) the greatest justice, achieve maximum impact, and most effectively march their persuasion skills to the beat of a different drum when they follow one simple rule of thumb (or pen, or keyboard). 

     It is the single most dramatically productive guideline that directly addresses the sentiments of Mark Twain’s quote, and where oh where does it originate? 

     Why from surgeons of course!  Where else?  And where did those super skilled, robotic, ice-water-veined ER and OR scalpel-slicers learn the trick? 

     Why, where else but from the friendly neighborhood carpenter. And guess what?  If you, dear communicator friend, will follow their lead (the surgeons and carpenters — not the hammering, drilling, screwing and scalpeling), you too will discover that getting through skin, wood, paper, airwaves, and cyberspace all have one thing in common! 

     You will (I personally guarantee it) end up putting your message across more clearly, more effectively, and more persuasively than ever before if you’ll simply remember to:

Measure twice and cut once! 

And so, the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning is not far from the difference between the Conscious and the UNconscious.

They are not extreme opposites.

In the case of the bug and the lightning, one begets the other (grammatically). Consciousness also often prompts UNconsciousness, and vice versa.

In business decision making, FLEXIBILITY is king! And when there’s no time to measure, gut instinct has to kick in!

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“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!”   [Thomas Jefferson]

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