by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Collaboration, Creativity, Goals, Growth, Leadership, Mindset, Planning
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 14 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: When creating your business vision, keep these points in mind
— From Leadership 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know by John C. Maxwell
Walt Disney came up with his business vision after taking his two daughters to an amusement park. In there, he was captivated by the carousel. However, when it came to a stop, “he observed shabby horses with cracked and chipped paint. And he noticed that only the horses on the outside row moved up and down. The others stood lifeless bolted to the floor.”
This disappointment is what inspired him to create his business vision of “an amusement park where the illusion didn’t evaporate, where children and adults could enjoy a carnival atmosphere without the seedy side that accompanies some circuses or traveling carnivals.” From there, Disneyland was born and the rest is history.
As a leader, it is very important that you, too, create your business vision. John Maxwell, leadership guru and author of Leadership 101, says, “Vision leads the leader. It paints the target. It sparks and fuels the fire within, and draws him forward. It is also the fire lighter for others who follow that leader.”
To create a successful business vision, keep in mind the following points:
Vision starts within. “You can’t buy, beg, or borrow vision. It has to come from the inside… If you lack vision, look inside yourself. Draw on your natural gifts and desires. Look to your calling if you have one.”
The author says that, as you look within for your vision, you must listen to several voices:
The inner voice. “Do you know your life’s mission? What stirs your heart? What do you dream about? If what you’re pursuing doesn’t come from a desire within—from the very depths of who you are and what you believe—you will not be able to accomplish it.”
The unhappy voice. “Discontent with the status quo is a great catalyst for vision. Are you on complacent cruise control? Or do you find yourself itching to change your world?”
The successful voice. “Nobody can accomplish great things alone. To fulfill a big vision, you need a good team. But you also need good advice from someone who is ahead of you in the leadership journey. If you want to lead others to greatness, find a mentor. Do you have an adviser who can help you sharpen your vision?”
And this last voice is essential if you’re having a hard time coming up with a vision of your own. Maxwell suggests hooking up with a leader whose vision resonates with you. If you can’t come up with your vision yet, but you are in alignment with someone else’s vision, perhaps, for the time being, the best thing you can do is to help out and learn as much as you can from this other leader. That way, when you have created your own business vision, you will know how to execute.
Vision draws on your history. “Vision isn’t some mystical quality that comes out of a vacuum, as some people seem to believe. It grows from a leader’s past and the history of the people around him.” Look at the story of Disney and many other leaders; it was connecting the dots of past events to their present capabilities that lead them to create their vision.
Vision meets others’ needs. “True vision is far-reaching. It goes beyond what one individual can accomplish. And if it has real value, it does more than just include others; it adds value to them. If you have a vision that doesn’t serve others, it’s probably too small.”
Run your vision by a small group of trusted friends and ask for their feedback. They will come up with ideas and twists that would have never occurred to you. Take what works and discard the rest, and you will be able to broaden your vision to add more value to those whom you will serve.
Vision helps you gather resources. “One of the most valuable benefits of vision is that it acts like a magnet—attracting, challenging, and uniting people. It also rallies finances and other resources. The greater the vision, the more winners it has the potential to attract. The more challenging the vision, the harder the participants fight to achieve it.”
ACTION
TODAY: Do you have a business vision? This can indeed mean that you are starting a business, but not necessarily. It means that you have a vision for yourself in business, whichever path you decide to follow, whether your own, or as an employee for a company whose business vision resonates with you. If you don’t have one, give some thought to the points above and create one. Remember this awesome quote by Rosabeth Moss Kanter: “A vision is not just a picture of what could be; it is an appeal to our better selves, a call to become something more.”
FUTURE: As you grow in life and business, make a point of revising your vision from time to time. Your vision must be exciting and relevant to the stage you’re in, and it’s also important to make sure it continues to lead you to where you want to go.
Know someone who would like this post? Please share! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Collaboration, Creativity, Goals, Growth, Mindset, Opportunity, Planning, Tools, Wellbeing
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 7 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The 10 Es of great customer service
— From Woo, Wow, and Win: Service Design, Strategy, and the Art of Customer Delight by Thomas A. Stewart and Patricia O’Connell
As we get closer to Thanksgiving here in the U.S., I’ve been seeing more and more offers from retailers who have started their Black Friday sales early this year.
Thinking how much people like to buy stuff, I was surprised recently when I read, “people derive more happiness from new experiences—a day by the sea, a night at the opera—than from new things.”
It makes perfect sense in light of the fact that “the pleasure of a new object diminishes over time (as every child knows on December 26), while the pleasure of experience grows (as every adult knows, enjoying those warm holiday memories).”
So, knowing this, how can we create great customer service and a memorable experience, no matter how big or small a product or service we sell?
The answer for designing great service that is delivered expertly, according to Thomas A. Stewart and Patricia O’Connell, authors of Woo, Wow and Win, is to find “alignment among your strategic goals, your customer’s wants and needs, and what actually happens between you.”
And that alignment is a function of the following 10 E’s working together:
1. Empathy: “Developing products, services and experiences from the customer’s point of view; taking full account of how your customers use and interact with you.”
2. Expectation: “Ensuring that customers know what to expect from their interaction with you.”
3. Emotion: “Knowing the emotions your customer brings to your relationship, and guiding customers to a satisfied feeling about working with you.”
4. Elegance: “Providing offers that are clean, simple, easy to work with, and complete—nothing superfluous, nothing omitted.”
5. Engagement: “Communicating with customers—and they with you—at every point of contact, to understand their experience and how to improve it.”
6. Execution: “Reliably meeting all the expectations you have set.”
7. Engineering: “Possessing technical excellence (for example, compared to peers, but also general business standards) and eliminating waste of materials, time and effort, so that no extraneous effort is necessary on the part of you or your customer.”
8. Economics: “Pricing your services appropriately, so that the customer gets value for money and you the profit you expect.”
9. Experimentation: “Building processes for improvement and innovation into the daily work of your business; developing capabilities to develop and roll out new offerings.”
10. Equivalence: “Managing the customer, your team, and partner organizations so that you, the seller/service provider, are satisfied too.”
As you can see, the first five Es are focused on the customer’s side of the equation, and the last five ones are focused mostly on you.
These elements come together to create a system to build great customer service. But, “To what end?” the authors asked an expert in service design.
The answer?
Relationships. The goal of great customer service is to build a relationship with the customer; otherwise it’s merely a transaction.
“It is difficult to think of a transaction between a buyer and a seller that cannot be made more valuable to both parties by adding at least the possibility of a relationship beyond the transaction itself.”
What’s an instance of great customer service that you have received where you were happy to create a relationship with the seller? Please let me know here in the comments, I always love to hear these kinds of stories!
ACTION
TODAY: Think of the role you play in selling your products/services. How many Es can you apply toward creating great customer service in your business?
FUTURE: Study the customer’s journey and look at every touch point. What kind of relationship would you want to build (or strengthen) with your customers?
Want to build great customer service? Please share this post with your colleagues so that all of you can be in alignment: Email, Facebook or Twitter.
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Creativity, Goals, Growth, Habits, Mindset, Planning, Tools
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 6 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: What’s the difference between performance goals and learning goals?
— From Who’s Got Your Back: The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep, Trusting Relationships That Create Success–and Won’t Let You Fail by Keith Ferrazzi.
When setting goals, it’s important to understand the difference between performance goals and learning goals. “Not knowing the difference can harm the way you think about the future,” says Keith Ferrazzi, author of Who’s Got Your Back.
“Certain goals, known as ‘performance goals,’ imply a finite result, like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow… far more important is developing a process and a roadmap that help you achieve that income in a given time. In other words, you should be thinking about the rainbow, not just the pot of gold.”
The process and the roadmap that the author is referring to are the learning goals. And when setting goals he recommends having both types.
Performance goals are the goals that we normally think of: specific outcomes such as losing 10 pounds, getting a new job, traveling to Hawaii, getting married, etc.
Learning goals “emphasize acquiring new skills and knowledge to push and expand your skills and career forward.” Learning goals are key to accomplish our performance goals.
Here are a few examples that the author offers to make even clearer the distinction between these two goals:
| PERFORMANCE GOAL |
LEARNING GOAL |
| Lose 10 pounds |
Learn to cook healthier meals |
| Increase Web traffic by 50 percent |
Find five new marketing tactics |
| Boost sales 10 percent |
Learn how to hone your best pitch |
Ferrazzi goes on to say that “performance goals can be motivating [but the] flip side is that, set inappropriately, they can be intimidating and sometimes debilitating when we fall short.”
Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA states a similar thought in this post.
Kaufman says that when we set performance goals that are not directly under the control of our efforts we may become terribly disappointed if something happens that prevents us from attaining our goal.
For instance, he notes that if we set a performance goal of losing 20 pounds, and something happens that makes our weight fluctuate on any given day, we might feel very frustrated. Instead, if we make our performance goal something that we can indeed control, such as 30 minutes of exercise every day, we can then be satisfied with the outcome once we’ve performed the task(s) needed to fulfill our goals.
Further—and this is probably the most important thing to take away from today’s idea—Ferrazzi says, “With learning goals, failure is an impossibility.” He explains:
In the course of creating and carrying out your goals, of course you are going to make some mistakes. It’s part of learning. No one with ambitious career or life plans gets ahead without experiencing glitches and setbacks. […] But once you switch your attention to learning goals, the whole idea of “failure” starts to make less sense.
When you are constantly learning from everything you do, failure ceases to be an option.
With learning goals, since you are learning, putting into action, tweaking and adjusting to make the outcome better, and repeating often, you are naturally moving into the direction of your performance goal with actions that are under your control. That is why I love it when the author says that failure is an impossibility—it truly is!
ACTION
TODAY: What performance goal are you working towards where you’ve had mixed or variable success? Examine what you are doing and determine what learning goals and actions under your control you need to add to the mix so that you can get the results you desire.
FUTURE: When setting goals in the future, create the habit of doing so incorporating performance goals that you can control and learning goals that will make it impossible to fail.
Know someone who could benefit from reading this post? Please share it! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Celebration, Creativity, Mindset, Opportunity, Tools, Wellbeing
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 55 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: Sharing accomplishments on social media? Be generous, authentic and enthusiastic
— From The Art of People: 11 Simple People Skills That Will Get You Everything You Want by Dave Kerpen
In The Art of People, Dave Kerpen recalls sharing accomplishments via social media and the reactions from his friends:
“So excited! We won the WOMMIE award for word of mouth marketing excellence for the second year in a row!”
After this announcement, a casual friend of Kerpen sent him the following private message: “Enough already, Dave! I know you won an award or two, I know you’re excited about it all, but stop shoving all this self-promotion in our faces!”
That message stung “probably because there was some truth to it,” says Kerpen. His company had just won the award for the second year in a row, and he was very happy about it and had been sharing accomplishments (this and others) “proudly and liberally” on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Very likely, the person that messaged him saw the posts on all three networks and got tired of it.
Kerpen remembers being upset and confused. “I was genuinely proud of our work and wanted to share the good news… On the other hand, I certainly didn’t want to get attention for being an egomaniacal braggart.”
He took the feedback to heart. “[He developed] a more modest attitude toward posting to social media… [being] humble, grateful and not overly self-promotional in [his] social media updates.”
In the meantime, unknown to Kerpen, the word humblebrag was being added to the Dictionary to describe exactly what he had started to do when sharing accomplishments.
So, when the following year his company won the WOMMIE Award again, he posted: “So honored and humbled to have received the WOMMIE Award for the 3rd year in a row! Thanks to the whole team @Likeablemedia!”
And to this post, came a different reaction from another one of Kerpen’s friends: “Dude, what’s with the humblebrag? Just gloat man, no need to fake being humble when you are dominating the award circuit!”
Kerpen was exasperated: “It seemed that no matter what I did, I couldn’t share my joy about accomplishments without offending some people.” The author goes on to say, “The problem with sharing accomplishments on social media… is there is no tone or body language to help convey your meaning, and that means it’s very easy for people to lose the context and not get your intention right.”
So, what to do? Does this mean no more sharing accomplishments? Never ever?
For Kerpen, the answer to that question is no, with two important caveats:
1. Be unafraid but as authentic (noncontrived) as possible in sharing accomplishments on social media.
2. Heap lots of authentic praise on others via social media as well.
The first point is simple: You’re going to be judged by people no matter what, so just be your authentic self and stand behind that authenticity no matter what people may say.
The second point is important too: Be quick to praise others in social media (and face-to-face). Authentic praise and compliments make people feel good, help them feel more comfortable in sharing their accomplishments, and, most important, show the world that you’re not all about yourself and are just as apt to sing another person’s praises as your own.
And the author sets out a challenge for us: “Scroll through your social media news feeds looking for opportunities to praise, congratulate, and promote others: your friends, colleagues, and followers. Be generous in retweeting people. Promote the heck out of everyone.”
My take on this?
As long as you are sharing your accomplishments with generosity, gratitude, authenticity and enthusiasm, your true friends and the people that love you are going to be genuinely happy and excited for you. And if you return the favor in sharing that excitement and congratulating people on their accomplishments and important milestones, everybody wins and we make this world a happier and better place.
ACTION
TODAY: What do you have to celebrate today? Big win or small win, share what makes your heart smile! Your circles will be very happy for you, and if you tag me on social media (Facebook, Twitter) I will be delighted to read about your accomplishment and happy to share!
FUTURE: Kerpen, a master of social media suggests the following: “Take a look at your last twenty social media updates and do a quick audit. How much are you promoting yourself versus promoting others? Ideally, you want to strike a balance of no more than 30 percent promoting yourself and at least 70 percent promoting others. […] Audit your next twenty social media updates and compare them with the previous twenty. Have you helped people see you as someone willing to praise others and unafraid to share his or her own accomplishments?”
And speaking of sharing… please do! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Collaboration, Creativity, Goals, Growth, Marketing, Opportunity, Planning
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 51 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: The best definition of marketing you’ll ever find
— From REWORK: Change the way you work forever by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
I love marketing, and this is the best definition of marketing I’ve found so far. It’s just one word:
EVERYTHING.
Whaaaat?!
Yes: marketing is everything.
Most people tend to think that Marketing is a Department or a few, specific activities within a company. It’s not. At least that is not the definition of marketing that Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, abide by in their book Rework.
The authors say the following about Marketing:
“Marketing is something everyone in your company is doing 24/7/365.
Just as you cannot not communicate, you cannot not market:
- Every time you answer the phone, it’s marketing.
- Every time you send an email, it’s marketing.
- Every time someone uses your product, it’s marketing.
- Every word you write on your website is marketing.
- If you build software, every error message is marketing.
- If you’re in the restaurant business, the after-dinner mint is marketing.
- If you’re in the retail business, the checkout counter is marketing.
- If you’re in a service business, your invoice is marketing.
Recognize that all of these little things are more important than choosing which piece of swag to throw into a conference goodie bag. Marketing isn’t just a few individual events. It’s the sum total of everything you do.”
Very few people and companies recognize and embrace that marketing is everything that you and company do: from beginning to end of the buyer’s journey.
Isn’t this the best definition of marketing you’ve encountered too? Let me know in the comments here.
ACTION
TODAY: Embrace this new definition of marketing and the fact that marketing is indeed everything: as part of your company you and your employees or colleagues represent it all the time. What is the image of your company that you, your colleagues, and all your actions give to the world? Is this image in alignment with what you want and should portray according to the company’s mission, vision, and values?
FUTURE: Make it a habit of conducting a periodic marketing “audit” where you look at the touch points for the customer/client. Determine what the best way to represent your company would be for each particular point to be in alignment with your mission, vision, and values.
Help someone see how everything is marketing by sharing this post via email, Facebook or Twitter!
by Helena Escalante | Accountability, Creativity, Goals, Growth, Productivity, Time, Tools
Estimated reading time for blocking your time: 3 minutes, 23 seconds:
TODAY’S IDEA: Blocking your time
— From The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months by Brian Moran and Michael Lennington
“If you are not in control of your time, you are not in control of your results,” say Brian Moran and Michael Lennington, productivity and execution gurus and authors of The 12 Week Year. Yet sometimes things come up throughout the day, mainly unplanned interruptions that “will eat up your valuable minutes” here and there.
What to do?
“Trying to reduce these interruptions usually doesn’t work well and it can be more difficult that just dealing with them… The key to successful time use—intentional time use—is not trying to eliminate those unplanned interruptions, but instead to block out regular time each week dedicated to your strategically important tasks.”
The authors call these blocks of time Performance Time, and they say, “It is the best approach to effectively allocating time that we have ever encountered.”
Performance Time uses a time-blocking system so that you can be in control of your time and maximize your effectiveness, thus, controlling your results.
The time blocking system is simple; there are three different kinds of blocks. Let’s look at each:
Strategic Blocks: A strategic block is a three-hour block of uninterrupted time that is scheduled into each week. During this block you accept no phone calls, no faxes, no emails, no visitors, no anything. Instead, you focus all your energy on preplanned tasks—your strategic and money-making activities.
Strategic blocks concentrate your intellect and creativity to produce breakthrough results. You will likely be astounded by the quantity and quality of the work you produce. For most people, one strategic block per week is sufficient.
Buffer Blocks: Buffer blocks are designed to deal with all the unplanned and low-value activities—like most email and voice mail—that arise through a typical day. Almost nothing is more unproductive and frustrating that dealing with constant interruptions, yet we’ve all had days when unplanned items dominated our time.
For some, one 30-minute buffer block a day is sufficient, while for others, two separate one-hour blocks may be necessary. The power of buffer blocks comes from grouping together activities that tend to be unproductive so that you can increase your efficiency in dealing with them and take greater control over the rest of your day.
Breakout Blocks: One of the key factors contributing to performance plateaus is the absence of free time. Very often entrepreneurs and professionals get caught up in working longer and harder, but this approach kills your energy and enthusiasm. To achieve greater results, what’s often necessary is not actually working more hours, but rather taking some time away from work.
[…] An effective breakout block is at least three-hours long and spent on things other than work. It is time scheduled away from your business during normal business hours that you will use to refresh and reinvigorate your mind, so that when you return to work, you can engage with more focus and energy.
For Performance Time to work better, the authors suggest going beyond merely scheduling these three blocks in your weekly calendar. “The more you can create a routine in your days and weeks, the more effective your execution will be.”
Moran and Lennington say it’s ideal—if you can—to schedule routine tasks at the same time on the same day each week. However, more important is to know when you are at your best (Morning? Afternoon? Evening?) and schedule your most important activities for that peak time when you’ll be super effective.
ACTION
TODAY: Take a look at your calendar and figure out when you can clear up some time to add Performance Time. If not today, schedule it between now and next week and stick to it.
FUTURE: Give Performance Time a shot and try it out for a week or two, or three… Tweak to where it works out best for you and stay with it for a while to start reaping its benefits.
Know someone who would benefit from reading this post? Please share this post via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
