Monthly Archives: August 2015

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Five Habits That Can Transform You And Your Business

Have you ever wondered what qualities and talents uber-successful business people have that contributed to their success and whether you could leverage these qualities and talents as you build your own career and business?

I read an article in the 2015 spring version of Strategy + Business titled “What Self-Made Billionaires Do Best”. The authors of this article did some research and found that the billionaire business people they studied practiced five habits of mind that contributed directly to the success of their business ventures. The authors call these people Producers. Producers are defined as people who “look beyond an existing business or market to envision something new, develop the often divergent resources necessary to make it real, and sell it to customers who didn’t even know they wanted it.”

The Producers five habits of mind are as follows;

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Seven “Diligent” Steps To Business Success

“The plans of the diligent lead to abundance.” Solomon

This simple quote contains some amazingly profound advice. One of the things that stood out to me in this quote was the key word “lead.” Success or abundance is not instantaneous, it is a process. You cannot just build a plan and blindly execute it and expect success to be immediate. Success is a process that happens over a period of time during which your plans will be tweaked and your product or service will morph to meet the needs of the marketplace.

So, how does this apply to your business?

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Are You An Integrative Thinker And Why This Is Critical For Your Success

Are you flexible and open minded when confronted by an issue or do you quickly determine a solution and charge headlong into implementing it?

In his book The Opposable Mind, Roger Martin introduced a concept called an “Integrative Thinker”. An Integrative Thinker is someone who can look at a problem that has two or more opposing solutions and work objectively with these to come up with a third unique solution. This third solution considers ideas from each viewpoint but provides a superior solution that none of the viewpoints could have provided on their own.

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Are Rules, Processes and Tools Killing Or Improving Your Business?

Have you ever been frustrated by an organization’s overbearing rules, tools and processes? I think most of us can come up with quite a few examples really quickly. Things like our schools, healthcare systems, insurance companies, tax systems, frequent flier points, and governments just to name a few.

What about the opposite situation? Have you ever been frustrated by an organization’s lack of rules and processes? This might be a little tougher but I am sure we have all seen things like;

  • coworkers getting random promotions or salary increases
  • inconsistent service and quality at a restaurant or other business