Tag Archives: leader

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How to Make Your Business Stand Out

I recently attended a keynote from Claire Diaz-Ortiz. Diaz-Ortiz is an author, speaker, founder of the non-profit “Hope Runs”, ex-executive at Twitter, voted one of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business” and is known as “The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter!”

Besides being articulate, intelligent, and successful in the business world, she has a very compelling personal story that she is able to effectively weave in with the business side of her life.

So, when she defines a system to make you and your business stand out, we should listen!

Her keynote outlined the framework for this system that she uses to help her and her organizations standout in the marketplace.

She calls the system “SHARE.”

S.H.A.R.E.

Diaz-Ortiz’s framework for how stand out is built around the acronym SHARE. I have briefly summarized the components below.

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Hunch

Turn Your Everyday Insights Into The Next Big Thing

The book review for this week is Hunch by Bernadette Jiwa.

Jiwa explains her thoughts and research behind; ideas, intuition, deep thought, rationality, questions, genius, and many other concepts commonly associated with breakthrough ideas.

In today’s distracted and plugged-in world where we can Google answers for anything, we are at risk of losing our ability for innovative thought. Jiwa does a great job of outlining techniques for reengaging our creativity and intuition and generating the next big thing by leveraging our everyday insights.

My takeaway from this book is Jiwa’s definition of a hunch.

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Can You Complete the 15 Minute Business Challenge?

If you cannot write out the plan for where you are taking your business in 15 minutes or less, chances are, you do not have a plan!

If you don’t have a plan then you and your business are just floating through time and you are at the whim of the marketplace and all of your competitors! Basically, if you cannot articulate what you are building or why you are building it then how do you know what you are doing or where you are going?

For those that regularly read my posts, you know that Thinking Business has a very detailed business blueprint that you can download (from our Business Tools) and apply to your business. We call it the Thinking Business Blueprint. It takes you through all aspects of your business to ensure that your business model and strategy are defined clearly at all levels.

However, I was recently challenged by a client to come up with a simple, high level, tool that would allow a business leader to summarize their business and their strategy in one simple page. This one-page tool must be simple to implement yet powerful enough to capture the very essence of an organization. A leader must then be able to take the completed tool and easily communicate it to any and all of it’s stakeholders.

To meet this challenge, I have come up with the “15 Minute” Business Blueprint described below.

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Nothing Great Was Ever Built on Minimums!

I recently attended a conference in Anaheim, CA and one of the presenters, Earl McClellan, made a statement to the effect of “Nothing great is built on minimums!”

It took a minute or two for that to sink in . . .

My mind raced through business cases, famous start-ups, and concepts like Minimal Viable Products (MVPs from Eric Ries). There are so many examples of great movements and uber-successful businesses starting from precarious, humble, and minimalistic origins. So how could this statement be true?

However, after a few minutes of thought, I concluded that I agree with the statement and this is why!

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How to Stop the Email Madness and Save a Boatload of Money!

There are literally billions of emails sent each day and many of them are simply not needed and result in “make work” projects. This is a huge productivity drain on your business!

According to a Washington Post article the average worker spends 4.1 hours per day doing email while this Forbes article suggests 2.5 hours a day per person for email!

If you have 50 staff working for you at an average cost of $50/hr and they are each wasting 2.5 hours a day on email, you are losing $6,250 dollars a day. This is $31,250 a week or $1,625,000 a year just because you don’t have better systems in place for business email!

So, what can you do about it?

Here are 12 tips that you can implement in your business to stop the email madness and reduce the flow of money down the drain!