“Got here safe & sound, Y’all!”

AND STILL UNPACKING AND SETTING UP NEW OFFICES . . .

GUESS WHERE?????  Email your guess: Hal@Businessworks.US  (“New Office” in Subject Line) Winning guesses entered in drawing for a FREE first edition signed copy of HIGH TIDE fictionalized account of America’s biggest drug deal! See www.HighTideNow.com

Thank you for your visit.

If you’re new to this blog, please mark your calendar to return on April 16th for the beginning of Tax Return Recovery, and to help kickoff an exciting new series of posts you won’t find anywhere else!

If you’ve been visiting here regularly since the birth of my blog in April, 2008 (and now closing in on 1500 posts), thank you even extra!

You, especially, will want to return April 16th to see what’s in store for innovative, spirited business and healthcare professionals. You’ll get  proven new ways of thinking to boost your sales and make the most of your leadership skills — for profit and nonprofit businesses and professions alike. You’ll get coaching that works in the office and meeting room, on the phone and on paper, on the smartphone and the computer. You will get specific how-tos for building and enhancing your leadership posture in your industry, your marketplace, and your community.

When you return here April 16th, you will get the beginning of an input stream that no one else dares to share . . . on ways to feel better about your SELF (no product or service sales pitches, no lectures, no gimmicks). You’ll get ways to be encouraged, ways to make a difference with your career and family pursuits, ways to rise above the clutter.

You’ll get solid substance based on more years of experience than you probably are old. Not just passive observations, you’ll get frontline/hands-on experience with over 2,000 business consulting and return engagements AND with more than 20,000 students and management training participants. PLUS –as incredible as it’s always been–it will be free on this blog. Try it. You’ll like it. Send your friends.

In the meantime, to better serve our Entrepreneurial Clients (Including Business Startups, SalesPropreneurs©, Doctorpreneurs© and Corporate Entrepreneurs©), BUSINESSWORKS.US and TheWriterWorks.com, LLC will be in the process of relocating to another State. You’ll get the details as soon as we’re settled. In the meantime, Happy Spring!

See you the day after taxes!!!

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Every Entrepreneur

–And Every Business–

Experiences Exhaustion

The hardest part of being reborn, reinvented, revitalized is knowing when you need it, and then making the commitment to make it work.

For a business, the same entrapments lie in waiting. Does your business need help now? Are your organizational viability, adaptability, finances, and market position in lockstep with zooming technology changes? If they’re not standing tall, do they seem to be plummeting… or slowly disintegrating? Are you prepared mentally, physically, and emotionally to pick up the pieces and lead the charge?

The rate of business exhaustion will of course determine the pace and extent of your pursuit. And even if you’re thinking no special effort is needed, it’s never a bad idea to step back and assess where you and your business are headed. If the present path leads to a cliff, you’re going to want to have a pretty clear idea of  how long it will take to hit bottom.

Why? Because without some sense of the speed you’ll need to crank up, there’s no way to know whether you’ll have the resources, support, and personal energy it will take to get you where you’ll need to go. Being born the first time is pretty hard all by itself. Being born again is definitely not a matter of cruise control.

If you’re too entrenched or stuck or resistant to take the risk of jolting things back into place, or into an entirely new place, but know deep inside that some survival steps are, or will soon be, necessary, it may serve you well to begin thinking more about opportunities than about consequences. In other words, be aware of where you’re headed, but don’t dwell on the sunset. Take a hard look instead to the sunrise!

Avoid falling into a savings frenzy! Cutting back expenses does not make money. Only sales produce money.

So if you’re going to jump on something, jump on sales! Assuming you have a viable product or service and make it available at a price point that’s affordable for the market your business targets, then don’t waste time analyzing who did what to whom and when and why and what the circumstances were. Just jump on sales!

What can you be doing right this minute that

you’re not doing, to be able to help boost sales?

If you’re a true entrepreneur, odds are you’re good at representing your products, services, and business ideas to others. If this does not describe your skill set focus, find a great salesperson ASAP and tie her or him to a great reward system. Don’t give the farm away, but do pull out all the stops that bogged things down to start with.

Oh, and do remember when it comes to getting the support you need from others who work with you, that pulling teammates along gets MUCH more done than pushing them… every time… all the time.

If a bit of personal stress management or self-appreciation is in order to help your psych up for the task at hand, try clicking on a couple of links in this post. Good luck!

Catch you on the rebound

— you and your rebirthed business!

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 GUESS WHAT?  You don’t need

January 2014 to think NEW!

Seriously? Just because the new year has begun is no reason to start thinking about new business directions and goals. You can do that ANY time. It’s called attitude adjustment, and I’m not talking about some happy hour event.  It’s a fact that every one of your behaviors is your choice.

It may not be a conscious or present-moment choice. It may be the result of something you choose subconsciously (or “unconsciously” as scientists now define the phenomena) and may therefore be a choice you don’t recall or claim you never made, but the truth will out!

You chose your every behavior (and attitude)

and continue to make those choices every day.

So, what’s with the calendar programming? Many of the most successful businesses in the world were conceptualized or began or expanded or were revitalized in months other than January. I’m not suggesting you ditch your New Year’s brainstorm. I am simply saying it’s your choice to not limit your “NEW” thinking to any time period.

Playing the odds that your competitors are also planning some kind of new year launch right now can set you up for taking the best path to stand out from the pack — by planning to not be part of the pack. Any new business activities you kick off in January or start planning in January can get lost in the hubbub.

Besides, delaying your target date helps ensure you get it right. Being first is not always being successful.

Are you choosing to put undue stress on yourself? You can just as easily choose to make the implementation of your decisions be easy. In other words, it’s just as easy to choose for something (including a new product or service launch, a revitalization program start date, or a new business launch) be easy as it is to choose for it to be hard!

It’s your choice.

and

you become what you think about!

When you choose to push yourself and others to get something done by some imagined deadline, you are choosing increased stress for yourself and all involved. Stress is not always bad, but when stress turns into DIStress, emotional, mental and physical health become threatened. Choose courageously, but choose carefully.

It’s like driving cross country: stay alert!

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God Bless You and Happy,

Healthy. Peaceful 2014!

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Watch where you’re going,

O.D.  or  D.O.A. ?

When O.D. (Organizational Development) fails to resuscitate a dying enterprise, there are seldom more than two options to pursue. The first, and most prevalent, is to simply roll the victim organization over and declare it D.O.A. (Dead On Arrival).

The second is more challenging and sings to the accompanyment of opportunities: It’s called O.R. (Organizational Rebirth) and is cornerstoned by an massive infusion of E.L. (Entrepreneurial Leadership).

Every size and type of organization —profit AND nonprofit— comes face-to-face with life-threatening problems at some point (and at least once) in it’s lifetime. Most often, it appears that the malignancy stems from some form of poor management, and more often than not appears to evidence itself as an issue of financial shortcoming.

Example: You can’t run a nonprofit organization that’s not conducting ONGOING fundraising and grant procurement efforts. Regardless of good intentions, without money there’s nothing to run.

When the principals who are involved decide that it’s time  to overhaul, restructure, refurbish, rearrange, rebuild, reinvent . . . go for it! BUT, call it something that organization people can relate to, feel positive about, commit to and enthusiastically support. Ask THEM to brand the project with a name and identity.

It’s the leader’s job to determine the purpose, intent, mission, goals/objectives, strategy, and tactics. It’s the leader’s job to “rally the troops,” motivate and guide, to solicit feedback, to listen 80% of the time. Make-believe leaders push. Real leaders pull!

Remember leaders can delegate authority,

but not responsibility.

When it’s time to choose to fold up or buckle up, don’t choose to make it hard. Don’t choose to make it daunting. Don’t choose to make it more stressful than it may be. Don’t choose to make it overwhelming. Don’t be a drama queen. Don’t be overbearing. Choose instead to think like a leader and act like an entrepreneur.

Reinventing yourself as a person or as an organization doesn’t have to be drudgery or negative or threatening unless you choose it to be. Choose for it to be fun! Choose for it to be easy! Choose for it to be positive! Choose to go with the flow instead of over-analyzing what went wrong.

Choose to keep EVERYTHING

in the “here and now”!

Reality: It’s a far deeper process than changing facepaint. The reinventing-survival experience is rarely a simple one, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun and easy. Simply choose –and constantly REchoose to reinforce– for it to be easy and fun. With vigilance, the challenges can turn into opportunities in a blink.

Oh, yes, and it’s okay to blink.

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Hal@Businessworks.US

MASQUERADING AS 

SOMEONE YOU’RE NOT?

Think about it.  Are you representing your SELF in some way that’s not truly you?  Is it to make a sale? Get a date? Be accepted? Make points? Save yourself from losing face? Is it what you like to see other people do? No? So why pull the covers over the real you? Do you think others can’t see through the façade? Can’t you tell when someone else is faking it?

Authenticity isn’t a make-believe attribute that can be manipulated to suit the occasion. By its very definition, it means being genuine all the time. Authenticity, in other words, cannot exist on a parttime basis, or be in effect one minute and not the next. You either are who you represent yourself to be or you aren’t.

Yeah, some say, but there are always exceptions to everything. Not true! You either believe in God or you don’t. You either love someone or you don’t. You are either real or you’re not. There are no two ways about it. You can’t use Bcc emails to have someone else (or others) know your “secret ” communications and then pretend you are sending someone a private message.

Integrity is often defined as doing the right thing even when no one is looking.

As stampeding technology sweeps us all into lower levels of sociability — actually redefines sociability to be global instead of personal– we can often find ourselves distancing ourselves from others who are physically and emotionally close, in favor of socializing with total strangers who may seem less threatening and who may be more conveniently available to be in contact.

Is this behavior in our best interests career-wise? Possibly. In terms of personal growth and development as a human being who wants to make a difference in the world? Not likely. Performance track-record and familiarity breed trust. People accept and buy from one another (including health services, by the way) because of trust more than any other factor, including price!

How do we take the first step toward becoming more authentic? By recognizing that it is a choice, and then by choosing to live more honorably, and finally by setting up support systems to help ensure continuation of that practice. Is that difficult? If you choose to make it difficult, yes. But, YES,  you can choose to make it easy. Behavior is a choice.

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Hal@BusinessWorks.US  931.854.0474

Healthcare Management Problems

Go Far Beyond Technology Tangles

Thanks to what many doctors regard as excessive and medically-uninformed government intervention, excessive and medically-uninformed insurance company intrusion, and financially inept hospital consolidations, America’s private and hospital-based medical practices are suffering from excessive (and medically-unacknowledged) stress.

Doctors and Staffs find themselves having to be caught up with power-play control battles instead of with innovating and nurturing methodologies for improved case management and patient care. This is not a condemnation of medical technology advances by any means. It is in fact an endorsement for more tech exploration while simultaneously getting back to basics.

Positive stress enables healthcare managers to answer the wake-up call for effective practice management to realistically occur on two fronts at the same time. EMR and EHR systems and skills represent focal point one. Case management, patient care, and patient family care, focal point two.

But negative stress (or “dis-stress”) surfaces when one of these (like, for example, the current fad for dedicated insistence on “lean” healthcare) enslaves the other.

Relentless interruptions of non medically-trained government and insurance regulators who seek to satisfy their self-importance at the expense of doctor, staff, and patient stress levels, have the same effect as throwing gasoline on a fire.

Whether rulings require doctors to spend just 12 minutes per patient (likely headed toward 8 minutes!), or to conduct patient gun ownership surveys, the result is negative stress.

Negative stress feeds medical errors. It takes its toll on the lives of trained professionals and their families. Often, patients and patient families suffer needlessly because of mixed or contradictory signals lost in busy day-to-day clouds of smoke.

Even monster teaching hospitals, including the highest-rated in the country, fail miserably at basic communication skill levels. Doctors don’t talk with one another. They are too pressured to take the time to advocate on behalf of the very patients they serve.  And –worst of all– they fail to communicate with their patients and patient families meaningfully and consistently.

Practice Managers get the short end of the stick.

My best guess: Most Practice Managers end up absorbing 3/4 of all the stress generated by the madness of keeping Herculean time schedules, by catering to the administrative needs of the doctors they serve, by managing the daily barrage of staff, task and insurance management issues, and by having to deliver “customer service psychotherapy” to patients and families.

There are solutions, but they are not one-dimensional. Healthcare can never have universal value unless those charged as providers can have the freedom they need to function without constant government interference and insurance company strangleholds.

The first step to fixing a leak is to stop the leak. This means making extraordinary efforts to channel stress productively and to commit to implementing improved personal communications.  CHECK OUT  Medical Practice Managers

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Hal@Businessworks.US

ENTREPRENEURIAL

LEADERSHIP MEANS…

Being passionate about your ideas and making them work with the help of others. This means, of course, being emotionally committed to what you’re doing 24/7. By doing that, odds are you’ll never have to solicit and recruit others to your crusade. They will see a place for themselves and gravitate there on their own.

When that happens, others’ commitments will be more solid and grounded than if you had gone out hunting for them and then had to talk them into joining forces. It’s a fact: When people make their own decisions about what they want to do, they are happier and more dedicated to achieving results!

Often acting first and planning second. This does NOT mean rashly jumping from the frying pan into the fire. It instead suggests that over-indulgence in evaluating, assessing, diagnosing, and long-term planning (I call it “analysis paralysis”) wastes time, money, energy, and opportunities.

Entrepreneurial leaders take action, make adjustments, act again, make adjustments, and act again. Except for formal loan and investor-required formal business plans, they limit their planning to the short term — hour, day, week, month. And even those plans are temporary and flexible. Watching the finish line causes stumbling and falls.

Always responding instead of reacting. A key ingredient in the success of this pursuit is stress management. Bottom line: If you always respond instead of react, you can never over-react. If you never over-react, you will be faithfully followed. Built snugly into this thinking is this important awareness:

HOW you respond to someone who

or something that is out of control

. . . IS WITHIN YOUR CONTROL.

And we know this because? Because every behavior — yours, your employees’, your customers and prospects — is a CHOICE. It’s just as easy to choose to make a situation easy as it is to choose to make it hard. It may require some conscious stress management effort but, in the end, leadership is measured by ability to gain results through control and responsiveness!

Learning as much as you can about yourself –your SELF– may be the single most important determinant of entrepreneurial leadership because it is the foundation, the cornerstone, of each of the above criteria, and of any others you might add to the list. Without knowing what makes you tick, you cannot pretend to understand others enough to be a true leader. TALK TO YOUR SELF. Oh, and remember to listen!

Hands-on specifics? Keep a journal. Date every entry every day. Separate facing pages into “What Happened” on the left and “How I felt” on the right. This discipline helps sharpen your skills to separate fact and observation from opinion and feelings. Write, draw, diagram, paste photos, spit, whatever floats your boat. It’s YOUR journal.

Attend group and individual “personal and professional growth and development”-type discussion and counseling sessions. Take advantage of local adult education programs that focus on self-expression — from giving speeches and stand-up presentations to writing or painting or photography or music or handicraft courses. DISCOVER YOUR SELF!

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WANT TO BE MORE OF A LEADER?

TALK AND WRITE LIKE A LEADER.

Over 30 years of writing and training business, industry,

healthcare, and academic leadership have taught me

some important words I now share with you . . .

People who regularly incorporate the use of the following kinds of words in their daily conversations and written messages stand tall among the most successful of worldclass leaders.

This magic pack of words is just for openers. You need to be willing to raise your own consciousness about whether the words you use every day are helping you perform to the best of your own leadership ability. This list can, in other words,  get you started. But only you can decide what works best for you and your personal leadership comfort zone.

The point is: Take a couple of minutes to review this list, think about it and assess yourself. If you can change some words you may presently be emphasizing that are not helping you perform, change them! It’s your choice.

Opportunity. Becoming. Challenge. Team. Can. Forward. Focus. Here and Now. Let’s. How? What will it take? Go! Do I understand you correctly to mean . . .? Us. We. Our. Fun. Enjoy! Together. For example. Passion. Try. Enthusiasm. Empathy. Customer. Diagram.  Innovation. Client. Partner. Listening. Self-esteem. Service. Needs. Desires. Learning. Facts. Exciting. God. Illuminating. Choice. Value. Timing.  Self-confidence. Trust. Authenticity. Genuineness. Objectives. Goals. Strategies. Tactics. Specific.  Flexible. Realistic. Ignite. Timeline. Activate. Boost. Stimulate. Care. Compassion. Spark. Consistency. Measure. Hustle. Effort. Reward. Share. Accurate. Recognition. Implement. Respond. Energy. Responsive. Responsible. Behavior. Spirit. Assist. Invigorate. Results. Invest. Humility. Grace. Please. Thank you. Respect.  Grow. Patient. Happiness. Family.

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When Followers Lead Leaders

You think only a weak leader would step aside when followers close rank and try to take over? Maybe you’ve seen too many wild-eyed-pirate-and-rats-desertion-of-sinking-ship themed movies. You may want to revisit your thinking because in a lot more than some cases, stepping aside is an indication of truly superior and truly successful leadership!

There are probably as many avenues to leadership roles as there are leaders, yet none of them reflects the inherent strength-of-leadership qualities of authenticity and transparency as –like raising world-class children— being able to move confidently out of the way when followers (or your kids) take up the flag and charge forward with it.

No one ever said that being a parent or playing a parental role in business and professional practice development would be easy. In fact, parenting of any kind may well be among the hardest of life challenges. On the heels of committing to the ongoing practice of nurturing and investing in self-responsibility, personal and career parenting is certainly job one.

Why would self-development come first? Because if you cannot be true to yourself, you cannot be true to others. If you don’t know and aren’t continually searching out what makes you tick, you can’t possibly be in a position or mindset to lead others. If you don’t value your self and appreciate your own strengths and weaknesses, how can you measure and guide others?

When followers lead leaders, it may be because the leaders have faltered or it may be because the leaders have thrived on showing the way, on lighting the path, on motivating others to see that light AND the path, and on stepping out and onto it.

Weak leaders work at keeping followers following.

Truly great leaders

inspire followers to become leaders.

Which are you? Which are you becoming? Where are you aiming? What’s your target? Your goal? Your objective? How will you get there? The more you help others to grow as leaders, the more you grow as a leader. And since all of this swirls around what you think and how you behave, it’s worth remembering that thoughts and behaviors are a choice.

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