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 Mindset strategies and Systems Strategies are the two proven methods all entrepreneurs and business owners should embrace in order to ensure future growth. They work together, building upon one another over time - if you find the proper balance and strength to follow them.
According to Clate Mask and Scott Martineau, founders of Infusionsoft, "Mindset strategies are your preparation for owning, managing, and controlling your business. They give you the capacity to grow your business without being consumed by it. "Systems strategies are more tangible - they are the processes and tools you implement to grow your business and keep it running smoothly and profitably."
In their book, Conquer the Chaos, How to Grow a Successful Small Business Without Going Crazy, Mask and Martineau identify the three areas of Mindset Strategies and of Systems Strategies that business owners need to develop.
Mindset Strategies:
1) Emotional Capital
2) Disciplined Optimism
3) Entrepreneurial Independence
Systems Strategies:
1) Centralize
2) Follow-Up
3) Automate
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In their book, Seeing David in the Stone, James B. and Joseph E. Swartz identify the 12 actions of the great innovators and achievers throughout time. These are broken into three areas, each with a set of four actions:
- Finding Great Opportunities
- Mobilizing Support
- Seizing Great Opportunities
In Finding Great Opportunities, one of the keys is to differentiate yourself for opportunity. What is meant by this is to understand your passions and talents, and see where the potential rewards might be in those areas. Then search within them for opportunities where all three are high.
Three Key Success Factors:
- Be passionate about something
- Be good at it
- Potential rewards are high
For example, young Einstein became a telegraph operator because he had a passon for that, he was good at it, and it was the latest technology of his time.
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According to Psychology Today, the research estimates say that leaders are mostly made. What do you think? Take our poll here.
The fact that leadership skills can be developed is good news. However, the research suggests that there are some innate talents that are key to making a good leader. These include:
- extroversion - the ability to easily connect with others
- assertiveness - being unafraid to state your opinions
- risk-taking - being bold and willing to stick your neck out
- intelligence - being smart and analytical, but also
- socially intelligent - having an understanding of social situations and interactions
This doesn't mean that introverts don't make good leaders. They do. However, they need to create a leadership self-development plan to gain the skills needed to lead teams well.
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Pinterest is picking up steam. This relatively new social media site is now driving more traffic to websites than Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn combined, according to a recent Shareaholic study! In February this year, Pinterest's referral traffic surpassed even Twitter, considered the king of referral traffic because of the nature of the site.
 Its growth is also greater than the combined growth of those same three sites. This has made it the top traffic driver for retailers in particular.
Started in March 2012 as a visual pinboard to share photos and videos from sites across the internet, Pinterest received more than 104 million US visitors in February of this year. Ninety-seven percent (97%) of users are women, and 55% of those are between 18 and 34 years of age, earning $30k-$99k annually, and living in the Southern and Midwestern states.
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By Eric Denniston, Managing Director, Denner Group International
If evaluating the success of your organization’s strategic initiatives  seems to be an elusive endeavor, you should find the framework offered by the Strategy Implementation Model and the Strategy Implementation Maturity Survey (SIMS) very helpful.
Much has been written about strategy development, strategic planning, strategic thinking and executing strategy. However, not much has been done to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of strategy implementation systems and processes.
Much has been written about strategy development, strategic planning, strategic thinking and executing strategy. However, not much has been done to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of strategy implementation systems and processes.
It is common in mature organizations to find well-developed plans and clearly defined strategic objectives, but the consistent concern for those organizations is successfully “closing the gap” from where they are today to where they want to be in the future. Most likely this is due to both a lack of clarity of their roadmap to success and to weaknesses in evaluating their progress. This is, in fact, a major concern of executives worldwide.
A strategy implementation model is now being used to help organizations evaluate their own sense of gaps in execution, compare themselves with others, and to know how and where to best improve. The model concentrates on four critical dimensions:
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Strategy Creation: Methods used to gather, synthesize and manage vital information to support plans and actions
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Alignment: The degree to which the organization coordinates, cascades, shares and aligns plans and actions
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Execution: The deployment, management and refinement of plans, projects and actions
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Accountability: The utilization of metrics, process indicators and performance management to measure and drive results
Metrics
Following the maxim “you can’t manage what you can’t measure,” the SIMM’s framework is carefully designed to support current best practices in strategic management and to be flexible to adapt to future changes as those practices are further refined. The SIMM offers a thoughtful structure for considering the critical elements nearly all organizations must address in conducting a self-evaluation of the success of their strategic objectives.
The twelve data points that appear in the graph on the right represent each of the 12 questions in the survey. In turn each group of three questions relate to each of the four critical dimension of the Maturity Model.
How well are you evaluating your organization’s ability to cascade and share strategies? How deeply do you reach for feedback on your strategic initiatives? How clearly are team, department and division initiatives aligned with corporate strategies? How effectively are you tracking performance on the prior three questions? The SIMM tool will help you gain answers and clarity on these questions and many more.
Benchmarks
Once you have some introspective feedback with a self-evaluation or by having a number of members of your organization participate in the survey, the SIMM provides valuable data to gauge your organization’s performance levels in the four dimensions of the Strategy Implementation Model. Furthermore, you will learn how your firm is performing in comparison to aggregated data from all the SIMM’s participants.
 In these early stages, the aggregated data will be limited until a sufficiently meaningful sample can be used to provide industry and market comparisons. For example, above is the type of graph that might help you see where your gaps are between where you perceive your current level of performance to be and where you would like it to be.
The graph on the right includes aggregated benchmark data overlaid on your firm’s data for further comparison. What is interesting is that the aggregated benchmark data roughly parallels this firm’s responses to the survey. Additional graphs are provided along with your firm’s results.
Closing the gap
For a limited time, companies that have more than 100 employees are invited to participate in the beta version of the Strategy Implementation Maturity Survey (SIMS). Participating companies will provide input and receive results about their comparative performance. They will also receive valuable tips to help them improve.
The survey contains a total of 12 questions and will take 10-15 minutes to complete. You will likely find this a thought-provoking activity that is intended to stimulate a higher level of performance in your firm. As this is a beta version and will continue to be adapted over the next few months, you will be asked at the end of the survey to provide feedback and suggestions.
We will send you your organization’s results, as well as the overall results, as soon as the number of responses from other target companies is large enough to provide reliable conclusions. We will also send out and post articles on the web on strategy execution best practices and lessons learned. Please contact SIMM below to participate in the survey. We would also welcome your contributions.
Strategy Implementation Consortium
Strategy execution experts have partnered together to establish the Strategy Implementation Consortium. The model and survey have been designed by this consortium. The consortium’s purpose is to help businesses significantly improve their ability to successfully implement business strategies. This purpose is supported by:
- A strategy implementation maturity survey to best help businesses quickly and accurately assess their strategy implementation maturity levels
- Collecting strategy execution best practices and lessons learned in various environments
- Providing training and consultant services to help businesses apply best practices based on their current maturity levels and desires to improve
The Consortium can be reached at:
Email: info@SIMaturity.org
Telephone: 510-573-1582
Website: www.strategy-keys.com/Strategy-Implementation.html
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A quote by Industrial designer Paavani Bishnoi in the article, Why Women are Pinterested, Daily News & Analysis, caught my attention: “I no longer feel like logging in to Facebook when I am bored. I do not want to know what others are doing this minute. Twitter is all about giving an opinion. Pinterest, on the other hand, is relaxing. It’s just about sharing good stuff. It’s like window shopping on the laptop.”
 For those unfamiliar with Pinterest, it's the hottest new social sharing site on the internet allowing you to create virtual boards of pictures and videos around a particular theme.
My pinboards are eclectic because I have many interests - from gluten free cooking to personal self-development, art, and spirituality.
Studies show that 80% of Pinterest users in the US are women between the ages of 25 and 54 (30% are between 25 and 34 years of age). Perhaps that's because women tend to be more visual than men and are accustomed to creating "vision boards" of pictures and magazine clippings around a theme.
Hubspot's April 13, 2012 blog puts Pinterest as the 3rd most popular social networking site in the US in terms of traffic. As of February this year, the site had accumulated more than 10.4 million unique users.
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Mobile marketing is truly the next frontier for online marketing. More than sending text messages  to your prospects' and customers' smart phones, Mobile Marketing incorporates a variety of tools which include mobile websites, scanning bar codes and QR codes (Quick Response) like the one here, and smart phone apps which make it easy to do research and shop using a mobile phone.
Text messaging is still the least expensive and most popular means of reaching the mobile consumer. And it's no wonder. 94% of text messages are read within 3 seconds! That's not true for email.
Imagine these scenarios:
1) you're heading out to lunch with friends and trying to decide where to go. One of you gets a text message from a nearby restaurant offering a two for one special - good today only between noon and 2 pm. Decision made. You head to the restaurant to take advantage of the deal.
2) you're driving through a neighborhood where you'd like to live and notice a house for sale. The flyer out front shows a QR code. You get out your smart phone and scan the code, and it takes you to a website for a virtual tour of the house where you can clearly see the interior space, the price, and the realtor's name and number.
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ACT
Executing our project is now probably a lot easier. We done a lot of hard work up front, used some good practices and using some proven structures and processes, we have laid out our plan or road map, with metrics and milestones that should allow us to make only minor, instead of major, adjustments in deploying our tablets. We will also be much more certain that we are on track to deliver our desired outcome: “Greater value for our customer”. Our strategies have been translated into budgets and key action items with a clear direction.
Our strategies can now be supported by clearly identified people and processes, the technology required and we are clear how we will cascade the execution of our project throughout the organization. We have determined that either Apple’s iOS, or Windows or Android best fit our company’s needs. We have narrowed our prospective tablets down to size, form factor, ruggedness, battery life, application availability or developer resources. We know we can develop custom apps and that we can manage auto-updates from our vendors. We are prepared to handle proper usage by the end user.
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PLAN
Now, as we begin to plan what we’re going to do about deploying tablets in our warehouse, let’s keep our parallel involvement process going to mitigate any other potential unintended consequences. A good step at this point is what can be called plan to plan. This means, layout a road map that outlines what needs to be done to have a solid plan. For instance, listing and engaging the various stakeholders in the planning process to ensure their input is both present and relevant. We should also ensure we have the financial and human resources to carryout our project. Well-facilitated meetings with stakeholders that interrelate are a high priority. The stage must be set to exclude personal and political agendas. This is a content issue that can help immensely to avoid time lost due to unnecessary and distracting conflicts. Having absolute clarity on the desired outcomes, “how this impacts the customer” is a really good way to avoid distracting agendas. Everyone can more easily focus on those over-reaching goals.
During this planning phase it would be a good idea for us to conduct some internal and external assessments that will help us flesh out some key strategies and alternatives that will keep us on track to our desired outcomes. We can preempt some of the pains we will encounter and will have identified some key enablers to a successful project.
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THINK
As we move into the THINKING stage of this exercise, let’s consider what the thought styles should be. How you think is really important in achieving results. We are engaged in a project that is intended to have a lasting effect on the enterprise and thus must include strategic, or systems, thinking. Best practices in Systems Thinking show us the importance of defining the content of the project, the thinking processes such as facilitated meetings and the structures such as clear rules for meetings and engaging cross-functional groups in meetings to have more timely information exchanges.
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Join me to touch on all four stages of Lead, Think, Plan, Act as we take a tour of the now very hot tablet market. What I’m talking about are those book or folder-sized computers that include the ubiquitous iPad and Kindle variations and a whole bunch of mostly Windows-based computers, and now Android-based ones, we all call tablets.
Their legitimacy in the business world is literally on the pace of a Southern California firestorm. Today we are going to explore some Systems Thinking techniques that can be applied to the deployment of tablets in the workplace. Mind you, many topics we’ll cover actually apply generically to mobile computing devices in general (e.g.: smartphones), so please keep your mind open, yes, like an open system, as you take this journey with me today. I will use the Lead, Think, Plan, Act framework to illustrate how Systems Thinking can be applied to a project involving these tablets.
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If you've been wondering about the impact of social media and whether or not it really matters, consider the recent uproar surrounding Susan G. Komen foundation's decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood. MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell, a breast cancer survivor, interviewed the foundation's founder Nancy Brinker about the backlash (here's a link to Tanya Somanader's LinkedIn post about that) Brinker's response? That the responses were nothing but "very, very favorable." Huh?
MSNBC ran a comprehensive segment on this issue. Click here to see that program.
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Nearly all small businesses struggle greatly with most everything having to do with planning for their business. The most obvious obstacles are the basic resources of a small business: time and money. I have no doubt that the two most overlooked obstacles are the lack of management commitment to planning and the lack of skills in planning. Planning skills are not a subject generally taught in school at any level but perhaps graduate degrees and beyond which mystifies me.
So much really good material has been produced about best practices in business planning but it’s not emphasized enough. If you, dear reader agree with me, read on. If not, you may be among the few who are well-practiced in the disciplines, skills and arts of business planning.
Most small business owners, naturally, wear many hats. This has the effect of preventing one from devoting the discipline and concentration to actually doing the planning, and much more importantly, to establishing the processes and structures to support the execution of those plans. So, what can business owners and managers do to effectively and efficiently introduce profitable planning activities to their organization?
First, I suggest you recognize that planning skills are learned mostly through practice. However, in addition to courses at your local colleges, a great resource is a local or online consultant that can also more easily tailor some instruction to your needs.
Second, also recognize there is a learning curve that might delay your progress in planning. This you can overcome by hiring a consultant to facilitate some planning sessions for you. The big advantage here is that you can learn along the way. A good consultant trains and coaches you through the planning process so you and your staff can build the skills your organization needs.
Third, become serious about having discipline in your planning programs. Keep it simple at first but plan on building your programs to an optimal level for your organization. When you set schedules for planning meetings, stick to them. If you don’t, you are telegraphing to your staff that it really is not that important to you as the owner or manager. And insist on attendance at the meetings. Make is part of staff evaluations to participate in planning meetings.
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 Februrary is Black History Month in several areas of the globe, the US included. Whether we refer to them as Blacks or African Americans, US history is filled with examples of leaders who have made extraordinary contributions in their fields of music, sports, entertainment, education, the military and politics, just to name a few.
Who can forget the impact of Oprah Winfrey on millions of people through her TV shows and her leadership? Or that of Maya Angelou with her beautiful poetry? Or Michael Jackson's impact on the music world with his unique style, despite much of the later controversy surrounding his life?
Or the changes brought about by the efforts of Martin Luther King? Or Gen. Colin Powell, who paved the way for other blacks to aspire to greatness in the military? And yes, even President Barack Obama, who has shown that the US population can rise above its racial differences to elect a black president, not because of his color, but because of the vision he holds for the country's future?
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Did you know there is a non-profit organization, National Mentoring Month (NMM), dedicated to promoting mentoring? President Obama, Maya Angelou, former President Bill Clinton, Clint Eastwood, Senator John McCain, Quincy Jones, General Colin L. Powell, Cal Ripken, Jr., Bill Russell and Usher are just a few prominent people who have participated in NMM's campaign to build awarenesa around this concept.
What are the responsibilities of a mentor? How do you find a mentor if you don’t have one? How do you become a mentor? These are some of the questions you may consider about being a mentor or finding one within your organization.
Why should you do this?
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This is the age of the untethered consumer, the mobile user who does everything on his/her smart phone or tablet. They read blogs and news reports, check email in between appointments, visit sites recommended by friends who texted them a link, post updates to their social media sites, check prices while at a store to see if the product is cheaper elsewhere, and read parts of a book or magazine during spurts of free time.
 These consumers trust recommendations from friends more than they do the promotional messages from product manufacturers. They'll check first with their friends to get their feedback on a product before they buy - regardless of how great the deal might be. And they let their friends know in a very public manner when they love or hate something.
Communication is instantaneous, and marketers need to be monitoring this all the time.
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 I was re-reading the book You Can Create an Exceptional Life, by Louise Hay and Cheryl Richardson, and came to a list of themes that Louise Hay has used to guide her life's decisions.
They seem like the perfect way to start a new year. If we can remember to follow these themes on a daily basis, we can all create the life we were intended to lead. When you review these, think about the changes you might make in your own life and work and how following these might make a difference. They are part of a holistic approach to life and work, encompassing spirit, mind and body.
Simplicity - focusing on small, simple, and manageable steps instead of making things complicated. Break big issues down into small pieces and tackle the small bits one at a time.
Optimism - putting attention and energy toward solutions rather than focusing on problems. Whenever you're facing a challenge, ask yourself, "what are the possible solutions, or how might things be different if this problem didn't exist?"
Patience - experiencing the journey fully and consciously rather than rushing to achieve a particular result. An excellent reminder for the changes ahead in 2012. We are living through unprecedented, tumultuous times. Focus on the journey and solutions, and enjoy the ride.
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Mulit-millionaire Mike Dillard has been studying the economic situation for several years, learning how to safeguard his family's future. This video reviews the past year (2011) and predicts what's ahead for us in 2012.
If you want to position yourself well to preserve your net worth and profit during the challenging times ahead, I recommend you watch this video. Information and knowledge are the key to creating a better future for yourself and your families.
Here is Part 1 of his 2011: The Year in Review
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What is Systems Thinking and why should it be important to ALL business people? The easy answer is that it’s the way the natural world works. The more difficult answer is that it means looking at organizations as living systems existing within a universe of nested systems. In the USA we have deliberately been educating ourselves and others to focus almost exclusively on analytic or tactical thinking. This has been to the detriment of using or building our abilities to think strategically, which is, in fact, thinking systemically.
The answer to WHY it should be important to any of us is that in our environment of increasingly rapid change, we absolutely must have long-term strategies that keep us focused on long-term outcomes and that also permit and support us in making the tactical adjustments to stay on track. In essence, this means managing a business with strategic intent and operational flexibility. Sounds straightforward right? It really is, but it does take some skill, and more importantly some discipline, in applying strategic and tactical thinking correctly to address and solve problems.
This does not mean we have to change how we think about everything all the time. It means we need to learn and practice thinking strategically and systemically, and know how and when to do so.
Having formed or altered our culture to make it unimportant to think strategically, we have only begun to learn how to think this way to enhance our business management over the past 60 years or so. Management thought leaders agree that only during the last 20 years has Systems Thinking begun to be acknowledged as one of the most important skills that managers and leaders at all levels of an organization must master. Not as a panacea, nor to replace analytic thinking, but to know when to use each type of thinking and how to leverage them in the workplace.
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 The St. Lucia parrot has a vivid turquoise blue face, lime green wings and a beautiful red shield on its breast. It exists only on St. Lucia, where the people frequently ate it or used it as a pet. By 1977, there were only 100 in existence.
In their book, Switch, Chip and Dan Heath give the example of Paul Butler who succeeded in bringing the St. Lucia Parrot from the brink of extinction to nearly 700 parrots. In the process he changed St. Lucians' attitudes about the parrot from one of disinterest to one of national pride and identity. On the heels of that success, he moved from St. Lucia to St. Vincent to replicate the process, saving the St. Vincent parrot from near extinction as well.
How did he do this?
According to the authors, one way to motivate people to "switch" is to shrink the change, making people feel "big" in comparison to the issue at hand. But in Butler's case, he grew the people. The challenge was huge. He focused on making the people proud of their parrot, a bird that exists only on the island nation of St. Lucia.
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