Tag Archives: success

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How to Know When It’s Your Turn To Step Up And Make A Difference

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about Seth Godin’s customer service entitled How to Wow Your Customers and Increase Your Sales. The book that Godin was shipping me was his latest project entitled “What To Do When It’s Your Turn (And It’s Always Your Turn). It is written in the typical Godin style; thought provoking, short, insightful and witty.

The basic premise of the book is that each of us needs to step up, take action and make a difference. We should not be worried about failure or what others think. We should concentrate on what we do best, our areas of strength, and put these strengths to work.

I found the book challenged me as I am often guilty of procrastinating and not stepping up to do something that I know I can do well. Because of this challenge, last week I posted How To Get Unstuck and Start Moving Towards Success. This post was more personal and how on a personal level we need to step out and start moving to get unstuck.

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What I Learned This Year And Why Its Important

This past year has been a very busy year for me. I have been “on the road” for about 3 weeks out of every month, traveling all over the US and Canada, twice to Europe, twice to India and down to Mexico City. My main role on these business trips is to review projects and provide insights, connections, suggestions and guidance wherever possible for the managers that are running these projects. The project managers are as diverse as the projects themselves which vary widely from around $20 million to upwards of $350 million. This has made for a challenging year!

Besides striving to provide value on these projects, I also try to learn as much as possible wherever I go. One of the interesting observations I have made is that regardless of culture, business environment, language or time zone, everyone wants to be successful. However, only those that are willing to take responsibility for their success actually achieve it. What I mean by this is that the people that take responsibility for their success do not let anything stand in their way to achieving success. For example;

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How Do You Track Your Strategic Priorities?

Recently I came across a nice little tool called the QPM or Quarterly Priority Management. It is essentially a simple table that can be used to effectively manage progress against your top five strategic objectives.

The QPM tool itself comes from Kraig Kramers in his book CEO Tools: The Nuts-N-Bolts for Every Manager’s Success (Book & CD) although it is not a unique idea. I have also seen very similar tools from Les Hewitt in The Power of Focus Tenth Anniversary Edition: How to Hit Your Business, Personal and Financial Targets with Absolute Confidence and Certainty (7 Day Focus) and Bill Hybels and his book Axiom: Powerful Leadership Proverbs (6 by 6 concept – Axiom 16). However, the QPM tool is uniquely focused on monitoring your top five strategic objectives and the progress against those objectives each quarter. The following table is an example of this.

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Are You and Your Business Prepared for an Up and Down Economy?

Over the last couple of weeks I have posted a few articles on measuring key business indicators, How Do You Measure Success, and formatting a report for these indicators, What is a 12 Month Rolling Trend, so that you can look for important trends in your business.

One aspect of watching for business trends is to look at the general state of the economy so that you can ensure that your business is prepared for potential marketplace shifts. One of the best tools I have seen for doing this is from Peter Navarro and his book Always a Winner: Finding Your Competitive Advantage in an Up and Down Economy
. In this book he lays out and defines the following formula;

GDP = C + I + (X – M) + G

Where;

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What is a 12 Month Rolling Trend?

In my blog post How Do You Measure Success, I wrote about the need to pick key business indicators that show important elements of the state of your organization. Once these key indicators are selected, the next question that needs to be answered is; “How will we report and view this key indicator?” A really good answer to this question is a Rolling 12 Month Trend report.

A Rolling 12 Month Trend report does not sound too exciting but it is a valuable tool for any organization to use to track its progress and to show trends. Essentially, it is a report that uses the running total of the values of last 12 months of an indicator. Each month, the indicator that is 13 months old is dropped from the total and the new month’s indicator value is added.

Why use this trend report rather than looking at the actual values? Well, the actual values are important for many reasons but they do not show any trends that can point to growth, flattening or decline.

Take the following chart for an example. This chart shows actual monthly indicator values over the last 8 years (the example shows revenue but it could be for any data type). Although you can see the data is choppy, it is hard to pick out any trends in where the data is going.