Don't Let Your Thinking Shrink with the Economy

RECESSION-PROOF THINKING

If a recession continues, or if management believes it will occur, many company managers will slash their advertising and promotional budgets – again – as part of what they feel are a series of prudent moves. Their reasoning is that a recession will mean lower sales and lower net income. They believe that cutbacks in discretionary expenses such as promotion can be easily made, and there won't be any impact.

But, before making that move they have to ask themselves:

* What does advertising do for us, and can we achieve those same objectives with a smaller budget?

* Is there any cause and effect information available regarding companies that have cut their advertising budgets during recessionary periods as opposed to those who have maintained or increased their budgets?

* Can a recession be used to gain an advantage on the competition?

Smaller Budget

All too often, management not only looks at advertising as an expense but also as something that is carried out with the sole purpose of immediate sales.

With the industry's growing understanding and use of the marketing concept, advertising is being viewed as an integral part of the marketing mix rather than as an expense.

This would seem to indicate then that it is in the company's best interest to develop and maintain an aggressive advertising policy, assuming they can expect a favorable effect on the company's sales and income.

Cause and Effect

Today, there exists a large body of data that clearly shows there is a direct cause and effect of increasing or decreasing advertising during recessionary periods.

In summary, they show:

* Advertising builds strength: Companies that invest more for advertising over a period of years experience faster growth than those that spend less.

* Advertising speeds recovery: Companies that have increased their advertising during a recession have recovered more rapidly than their counterparts that have maintained or reduced advertising.

* Advertising affects sales: Organizations that have continuously increased their advertising investment have enjoyed similar increases in sales.

For example, Meldrum & Fewsmith Advertising and the BPA, studied 64 business-to-business companies that advertised during a recent recession. Thirteen firms cut advertising an average of 20 to 50 percent during the two years of recession, while the remaining firms increased their advertising investment 30 to 70 percent during the period.

Those firms that increased their advertising stance not only continued to grow but grew at a more rapid rate when the country's financial picture improved. This growth was achieved in both sales and net income.

Recessions and Competitive Edge

For more than 80 years, advertising agencies and publications have been telling client management that a recession provides a unique window of opportunity for those firms that are market driven.

Marion Harper, former president of McCann-Erickson once said, "A time of recession is the most favorable time for a change in competitive positions. Companies that are second in their fields, by applying extra pressure and devising creative strategies, can gain advantages that they can carry into times of prosperity. Whatever their position, if companies wish to be growth companies, they must certainly behave like growth companies."

Charles Brower, former president of BBDO, stated, "Instead of waiting for business to return to normal, you should be cashing in on the opportunity your overly cautious competitors are creating for you ... the fact that your competitors are pulling back can make your advertising dollars look and act even bigger. There are few things as detrimental as a lapse in advertising. It costs much more to get advertising momentum up than it costs to keep it going. Once you let momentum die, you must start almost from scratch again."

The producer who maintains his or her normal level of promotion when competitors have reduced theirs soon finds that they gain a similar increase in competitive share of market. It provides a rare opportunity for management to change market position. Then when business improves, they will grow at a much higher and more profitable rate.

The Life Cycle of Great Business Ideas

by Bridget Finn 9/30/08

With the right support and judgment, the corporate “heretics” of today could become tomorrow’s most effective leaders.

Thomas Huxley wrote that new ideas begin as heresies and end as superstition. He was referring to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. The same might be said of management concepts today. In August, at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management in Anaheim, Calif., Art Kleiner brought together a group of distinguished management thinkers and practitioners to explore the evolution of management ideas. Kleiner is the editor-in-chief of strategy+business and author of The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management, 2nd ed. (Jossey-Bass, 2008), which traces some of the leading management practices of our time to people who challenged the conventional wisdom of their companies in years past.

This edited version of the panel discussion shows how, in a variety of ways, the quality of management thinking has made a difference — and how the most compelling business practices often have countercultural roots. The panelists are known for their leadership in the domain of management ideas.

Panelists included former National Training Laboratory (NTL) President Edith Seashore, an eminent organization development figure whose work there as one of the “four horsepersons” championing diversity was chronicled in The Age of Heretics, and who later cofounded American University’s AU/NTL graduate program. Edith’s husband, Charles Seashore, is the faculty chair of the doctoral program in human and organizational development at the Fielding Graduate University and a mentor and guide to many people throughout this field. Phil Rosenzweig, a professor at the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland, is the author of The Halo Effect...and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers (Free Press, 2007), an exploration of the (often unreliable) substantiation underlying business ideas. P.V. Kannan is the CEO and a cofounder of 24/7 Customer, an international outsourcing service company that has actively applied ideas such as self-managing work teams and customer-oriented data streams. Steven Wheeler is a former partner with Booz & Company and currently performs research, with the University of Southern California’s Center for Effective Organizations, on organization and leadership drivers of agility and sustained company performance.

During the roundtable session, the panelists focused on three primary questions: Is there a life cycle to valuable management ideas? How do we learn to tell a good idea from an idea that’s not worth much? And what one idea most intrigues you as a harbinger of the next wave of management thinking and practice?

Anatomy of a Great Idea
S+B: Is there a life cycle to valuable management ideas?

ROSENZWEIG: I don’t think it’s that simple. Not all good ideas begin as heresies, and not all heresies turn out to be good ideas. We have to be a little cautious before we overlay this sort of pattern.

We also need to be careful about what we mean by “valuable.” In management, ideas are of value to the extent that they can prompt people or organizations to do things differently to achieve more effectiveness and performance. And if we’re looking at the firm as the unit of analysis, performance is often more relative than absolute. A company adopts a new idea, it does things differently, and it gains some advantage. Once its competitors begin to do things in the same way, then that relative advantage dissipates, and the idea goes from being wise to being obsolete.

E. SEASHORE: My experience has been that the heretics — the people who really get excited about new ideas — have special leadership qualities and a different concept of authority. They want to make the organization very different from what it was when they entered the system. I recently worked with the commander of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Colonel Patty Horoho. She was brought in after two generals, both men and both surgeons, were dismissed from the position. For the first time in the hospital’s 98-year history, they chose a woman and a nurse to head it. That in itself was heretical. But more important, Horoho had to turn a climate of chaos into a working unit in just 18 months, and she did it by doing things differently. She understood that the way people communicated had to change; they had to build more solid relationships and exchange information more openly.

KANNAN: My first company developed software to manage e-mail and chat. I remember evangelizing the idea of online marketing to companies just starting to use the Internet. And I ran into a lot of resistance. For example, I told the head of customer care at a major bank how our technology could help make it easy for consumers to ask questions. He said, “We don’t want it to be easy for them to reach us. That’s a cost.”

I sold that company in 1999 and came up with the idea of handling customer care calls from offshore locations. I pitched it to the former real estate and travel company Cendant, which owned Avis and Ramada. The man said, “We’d like to start with 200 or 300 agents at an offshore location.” I said we could do that, and he asked, “How big is your company?” I told him I hadn’t started it yet — it was just an idea. So he asked, “Where do you plan to start it?” And I told him Bangalore. Naturally he asked if I had lived or worked there, and I told him I’d visited about 15 years ago.

He asked me how many employees I’d ever managed, and I told him: 60.
“Let me understand,” he said. “You’re proposing to start a call center in India, where you’ve never lived or worked. And you want to start with 300 people, and you’ve never managed more than 60? If this darn thing doesn’t work, nothing will.” Today, we have about 7,000 people worldwide, thanks to one individual who believed in an idea.

WHEELER: It’s unclear to me that there are that many truly new business ideas out there. Instead, I see a lot of rehashing and reconfiguration of existing ideas. One thing that brought that home to me recently was Peter Drucker’s book The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. In 1967, Drucker wrote that the most enlightened executives complement themselves with people whose skills work alongside their own. In other words, the notion of team-based leadership, especially to make change happen, as opposed to the typical sort of single-person-in-charge leadership approach, is not a new idea. But people lost track of it in the heyday of godlike leader figures like Jack Welch. These ideas come and go, and after a while, you start to see patterns. With experience, you can pick out the ideas that will endure versus those that will be fads.

C. SEASHORE: There are cycles within cycles. There will often be a very broad, historical wave of progress in advancing an idea, but within that we’ll see the sine wave pattern coming and going.

I have seen the concept of interdisciplinary teams come into and fall out of fashion four different times. Each time, the power of the group has been undone by leaders who get nervous about distributed authority. At this moment, teams are a well-accepted part of any management process. But right around the corner, the issue of authority and control could change that. We’ve seen that kind of shift back and forth in our U.S. national policy, in politics, and in our organizations.

Learning to Discern
S+B: How do we learn to tell a good idea from an idea that’s not worth much?

ROSENZWEIG: We need to have some notion of the performance impact we’re looking for and how to measure it. Over the years, I have found that most executives are smart and hardworking, and want to do the right thing. But they are terrible at critical thinking and analytical rigor — usually because they confuse the factors that lead to high performance with attributions based on that performance. They confuse drivers and results. We see this in everything from corporate culture to leadership to employee satisfaction to customer orientation.

The key idea in my book The Halo Effect is the importance of ensuring the independence of data. If you’re testing a hypothesis and your dependent variable is some notion of performance, you’ve got to make sure that your independent variables are truly independent of that. If you violate that principle, you may have a wonderfully compelling story, but you really won’t know what’s driving those results.

KANNAN: We learn by observation. Recently, one of our large clients had a consultant come to us and say, “At the end of each call, we should ask customers, ‘Is there anything else I can do to help you?’ and then end the call with ‘Have a nice day.’” So we put these rules in place, along with an elaborate measurement mechanism, and agents were dinged if they didn’t comply. Then, at our management meeting where we start off by listening to calls, we quickly realized that this policy wasn’t working. Most customers today want to end the call quickly. The agents, on the other hand, were taking their sweet time, because they knew they were being measured on this. They would say, “Is there anything else I can do to help you?” and before they could say, “Have a nice day,” the customers had hung up.

WHEELER: Sometimes it’s only the long-term comparison in performance that shows you what works. Jim Collins, a high school classmate of mine, wrote the best-selling book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. If you had taken the 18 companies that were profiled in that book and invested in each of them over the next 10 years, you would have gotten about a 150 percent return. That’s not too bad — until you compare it with an S&P 500 index fund, which would have given you a 250 percent return. And if you’d had the foresight to pick up a copy of Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For each year over that same period and just invested in the public companies, you would have gotten a 600 percent return. So one way to build a successful business is to create an environment where people enjoy their jobs and are eager to work — in other words, a “best company to work for.”

E. SEASHORE: These days, we often face the challenge of seeing great ideas start at the top but move down too slowly — and then the person who came up with the ideas leaves the company. The next person comes in with a different set of ideas, and the people in the organization get whipped about, wondering what’s going on.

I have some wonderful ideas for organizations and can easily get the top leadership team excited about them. The real challenge is implementing these ideas before the heretical leader who liked them in the first place leaves the firm. I’ve just begun a set of management courses called Triple Impact Leadership. They’re designed to help leadership teams ingrain key management concepts throughout their organizations. Executives pass on their knowledge by teaching their managers these concepts, and the managers then teach their staff, and so on. But many groups haven’t yet figured out how to garner company-wide acceptance for intelligent new ideas. Take performance appraisals, for example. Most companies use them, and it’s assumed that they are useful tools for measuring employee performance. But they’re time-consuming, cumbersome, and expensive, and feedback comes only once a year. What if, instead, people in the organization could ask for, and receive, candid feedback on their behavior and performance from anyone, whenever they asked for it? That would be truly heretical.

C. SEASHORE: To develop really good ideas, you need to have lots of ideas and throw out the bad ones. And for that you need a culture that is respectful of diversity. When everyone in the room comes from a similar background, it’s very likely they’ll have similar ideas. It may be more difficult to build consensus in a diverse group, but that’s how long-term positive results are achieved. Conformity will lead to success only in the short term. In this results-driven culture, we’re finding out how difficult it can be to respect differences and build consensus simultaneously. But they’re parallel processes — if they get out of sync, you’re in trouble. That is, if you build conformity and then throw it out and honor diversity for a while, you’re going to end up with a truly uneven product.

KLEINER: I want to throw in a contradictory perspective, which starts with a quote from the management theorist Elliot Jaques: “Management is in the same state today that the natural sciences were in during the 17th century” — before the discovery of the circulation of the blood.
In other words, there are barber surgeons everywhere, applying leeches and creating theories out of their limited experience and saying, “Well, you know, the leech worked; the company improved. This must be the right way.” And then the next time, the company fails, but the barber surgeon argues that this was an idiosyncratic case; the leech still works.

One could believe that this kind of multiplicity of thinking is the way that human nature, human sciences, and social sciences have to operate. Or one could believe we just haven’t gotten to the circulation of the blood yet. We don’t yet have the unified field theory of knowing how organizations work. And maybe it’s around the corner, or maybe we just don’t have the microscope that can allow us to see it.

ROSENZWEIG: Or maybe it’s the wrong question. I think the analogy of the circulation of the blood is fundamentally misleading — and I’ll tell you why. There’s been a lot of thinking the last couple of years about evidence-based management. Management professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton have written about this in their excellent book, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management. However, evidence-based management comes from evidence-based medicine, and there’s a big difference between medicine and management. If you have a ward of patients who are ill with the same disease, and you find a new molecule or treatment that heals one of them, it might heal the whole ward. Or if it’s ineffective, maybe none of the patients will get better. The recovery of each patient is independent. That’s fundamentally different from the performance of a company in a competitive marketplace, where performance of the organization is relative and not absolute.
When we ask, “What works in all companies?” we’re looking for an absolute formula in a field — competition in a marketplace setting — that is inherently relative.

The answer is, “There isn’t one formula.” If everybody in the industry follows the same prescription, they won’t all be successful. Once we accept this, we’re in the realm of making judgments under uncertainty that are different from the judgments our rivals make. If everybody knew how to be different from their rivals in the best way and everybody did it, they would no longer be different from their rivals. That’s why P.V.’s comments are so instructive. He told a great story about having very little experience yet achieving great success. Some people may look at that and say, “Wow, I guess the way to be successful is to hire a novice. It seemed to work here.” I would guess the reason why his company has been successful is not because of those things. He has probably made some very shrewd decisions and executed them very well. And that gets a little lost in this nice story.

That’s why this whole notion of heresy is important, because it’s a leap into the dark. We don’t know what the result of heretical actions will be. There are ways to make strategic choices under conditions of uncertainty, by recognizing customers, economics, and rivals that have the chance to improve our probability of success. And that’s what we ought to be teaching.

KANNAN: I’d like to add that I read Phil’s book twice, and I agree that people tend to keep turning to different theories, rather than looking at the data. Today we can often make informed predictions based on data. For example, there are predictive models that show who will make online purchases with about 85 to 95 percent accuracy. But when we go to a new company and try to look at their data, they’ll say, “No, no, our big priority this year is to optimize Google.” Or something like that. The point is that people get attracted and fascinated by these one or two solutions that sound sexy. But they don’t want to take the time to actually collect the data, manage the data, build models, and use them.

The Next “New Truth”
S+B: What one idea most intrigues you as a harbinger of the next wave of management thinking and practice?

KLEINER: I think there’s a link between successful organizational change and obsessive-compulsive disorder [OCD] — I think that true intervention requires the same kind of meticulous attention to day-to-day events that people with OCD have, if they can keep it under control.

E. SEASHORE: I think that it would make an enormous difference if our culture could change from a blame culture to an accountable one.

C. SEASHORE: When we look worldwide, a few people are getting rewarded for diversity, but more people are getting punished for the implementation of that idea. So if you want a heretical idea, promote diversity.

ROSENZWEIG: I thought The Red Queen among Organizations: How Competitiveness Evolves, by William Barnett, was the best strategy book of the year. It argues that you’ve got to run as fast as you can even to stand in the same place, which, of course, is the nature of relative performance in a competitive marketplace. Perhaps we can replace some of these simplistic notions about predictable accomplishments with a more relative notion of success.

KANNAN: For me, it’s about finding ways to make better predictions. Web 2.0 technologies have allowed us to marry the data inside companies to what’s available outside. The traditional model of forming a hypothesis and testing it is pretty much dead in our world, because things change so fast. Instead, our focus is on using data to improve predictability.

WHEELER: I think the most interesting changes will come when people start being strategic about building the capabilities they need for long-term success and avoiding the boom–bust cycles that most companies go through.

Author Profile: Bridget Finn is the Web editor of strategy+business.

The Whole in Your Head – Part 3

Were Most of Us Just Created Left-Brained?

In the beginning God… We are created beings made in the form of our Creator - “Man was created by God in his image, according to his likeness” (Gen 1:26-27). And God is 100% fully creative. Now you may be asking how I know God is 100% creative. That means, you might say, He’s 0% logical. And if we’re made in his image then we must be 100% creative and 0% logical as well. Well, yes and no. Let’s look at what creative and logical mean. Then let’s look at God’s creation and determine his creative and logic ratio.

The definition of “creative” has two parts – 1) being creative is the ability to originally manifest something from nothing and, 2) creativity is anything brought about by human invention or imagination. We only have to look around us at what Genesis describes as God’s creation, His manifestation of something from nothing brought about through is own divine imagination. The very extent of His creative “thinking” is testimony that we were created and exist in a world that is totally creative and totally not logical. Here are a few of God’s more interesting creatures that illustrate the vastness of creativity and the utter absence of logic.

The Bombardier Beetle
It defends itself by mixing chemicals that explode; firing through twin tail tubes that can swivel like gun turrets. The bubbling liquid that shoots out at 212 degrees Fahrenheit is enough to deter most predators.
The force of the "round" fired should be enough to blast the little beetle into orbit, if not pieces, and it would be if it was discharged at one time. But slow motion photography has revealed that the crafty beetle actually lets go with a stream of up to 1,000 little explosions. What logic does it make to equip a creature with enough force to destroy itself?

The Giraffe
Then there’s the giraffe, whose long neck necessitates a powerful heart to pump blood all the way to the brain. By rights the blood flow should blow its brains out when it bends to drink water, but the lofty animal has a delicate series of spigots and a sponge that dissipate and absorb the rush of blood. Why create an animal that could die trying to take a drink to sustain itself?

The Woodpecker
The woodpecker, whose rat-a-tat hunt for tree grubs, should send it home each night with a mighty migraine. Between each pounding blow, the bird closes its eyes every millisecond. If it misses just once, the force would blow its eyes out. The bird also has a piece of cartilage that acts as a shock absorber and an extra-long tongue that can reach into the tree to pluck out its meal. It also has a glue factory that makes the bug stick until it is in the woodpecker's throat and produces another secretion to dissolve the glue on swallowing. How logical is that? http://bibleprobe.com/beetle.htm

We are unique reflections of the Creator and caretakers of the creative capabilities given from Him.

These examples don’t make any logical sense at all. Why? Because God is 100% creative. His creation only makes sense to us when we try to put it into a much more simplified form in order to try to explain its existence in the first place.

But wait, let’s look at evidence that God is also logical. God said, “Let there be light.” Genesis 1:3. Out of this simple four word sentence came incredibly complex systems of “light” that scientists are still struggling to fully comprehend. There are dozens of properties within this small breath of God that are irrefutably logical. Electromagnetic waves and wavelengths, light speed, the laws of reflection and refraction, dispersion, diffraction, light spectrum, visible light, invisible light, constructive and destructive interference, wave particle duality, light pressure, are just some of the properties and characteristics of light that God simply spoke into immediate existence.

All the natural laws that light must exist within and that have taken scientists hundreds of years to even begin to grasp were completely, logically, pre-written in the twinkle of God’s eye. Isn’t it interesting that God’s creative side created the concept of light that artists (right-brained folks) continually strive to manipulate through color and texture and shapes and forms, while simultaneously challenging the scientists (left-brained folks) to understand the total extent of its influence on almost every other aspect of the physical world.

So we see that God is 100% creative, and 100% logical. Since we’re made in his image, then we too are fully creative and fully logical.

Bottom line: It takes the whole of you head to be a Prosperous thinker!

Next time someone asked if you’re left or right brained, just say you’re Logical. Interestingly, the word logic comes from the Greek logik (tekhn ), which is translated as ”the ART (right brain stuff) of reasoning (left brain stuff)”. I love it!

Sometimes is not a question of left or right, but of a brain at all.

"Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff," -- Mariah Carey

"Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life," -- Brooke Shields, during an interview to become spokesperson for a federal anti-smoking campaign.

"I've never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body," -- Winston Bennett, University of Kentucky basketball forward.

Cheerleaders are the ultimate right-brainers. They are programmed to be motivators in spite of obvious and often hopeless left-brain observations. When you are down by 40 points with 5 seconds left and you are still cheering on for victory, that is ultimate right brain thinking completely void of any left brain reasoning whatsoever.

The Whole in Your Head - Part 2 of 3

Here’s How the Left-Brained World Continues

Here’s a good illustration that we do indeed live in a world ruled by left-brainers.
Think of words you typically use to describe someone who is “left-brained”? Logical, analytical, process oriented, managers, learners, organized might be some common descriptions.

What occupations come to mind when we think about left-brained people? Accountants, scientists, business managers, financial analysts, strategic planners, techies, auditors, are probably a few you’ve heard.

What words do we typically use to describe someone who is “right-brained”? Creative-type, artsy, free thinker, disorganized, unconventional, “different” are some of my favorites.

What occupations come to mind when we think about right-brained people? Artists, designers, writers, advertising/marketing people, singer/song writers are probably among the more common right-brain occupations often listed.

Hey entrepreneurs, I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be on the left-brained bus because it sounds like it’s headed to Successville, at least by the world’s definition of successful. The only problem is good seats are very hard to find and someone besides you is always driving. But wait, there’s a different bus to Prosperousburg and there are lots of great seats left the best thing is, you’re in the drivers seat.

Remember, being Prosperous is not a goal to be reached. It’s a journey of forward motion, positive change and upward growth.

read more at http://www.growthminded.blogspot.com/

The Whole in Your Head – Part 1

Making decisions and behaving in a prosperous way begins with what you think. What you think begins with HOW you think. How do prosperous entrepreneurs think? Are most left-brained or right-brained? What’s the difference? The difference according to most people is that the left side of the brain is logical, and the right side is creative. Assess yourself. Are you predominantly left brained or right brained?

An exercise determining your dominant eye may reveal more than just which pupil is preferred. Make a circle with your right hand putting the four fingers on your right together, and then bending your thumb so that it touches the tips of both your index and middle finger at the same time. Now you have a nice little tube to peer through. Extend your arm half way to full and with both eyes open, find a distant object that will fit into the size of your little tube. When the object appears to be in the center of the tube, close your left eye. If the object is still in the center of the tube, your right eye is dominant. If the object is in the center of the tube when you close your right eye, then your left eye is dominant.

If you’re like most people, your right eye is dominant. And since the right side of the body is controlled by the left side of the brain, then it’s logical to say that the left brain of most people dominate their right brain. Let’s face it, we live in a left-brained world. How did this happen? Were most of us just created this way?

Here’s How A Left-Brained World Happened

The ancient Greeks believed since the heart was on the left side of the body that the left hemisphere of the brain must be crucial to life itself. Later, when scientist discovered that our ability to understand language belonged to the left hemisphere, we thought the left hemisphere must surely then be more important than the right. When it was discovered that the left hemisphere controlled the right side of the body, and since most people in the world were right-handed, we were convinced that the left hemisphere was certainly the most important side of the brain.

Here’s what we know today.

Characteristics of the Left

1. sequential
2. specializes in text (what is said)
3. analyzes the details (if this, then that, manager mentality)
   converges on a single answer
4. focuses on categories
5. can grasp the details
6. thinks in words

Characteristics of the Right

1. simultaneous
2. specializes in context (how it’s said)
3. synthesizes the big picture (big thinking, vision setting, entrepreneurialistic)
4. diverges into a Gestalt
5. focuses on relationships
6. only the right hemisphere can see the big picture
7. thinks in pictures
   
   (A whole new mind, pg 22; Blink, pg 119)
   
   
   Read more at www.growthminded.blogspot.com

Entrepreneurialism: chemistry or destiny

Internet startup guru Bo Peabody once observed, "One does not decide to be an entrepreneur. One is an entrepreneur. Those who decide to be entrepreneurs are making the first in a long line of bad decisions."

In a recent article in Strategy+Business magazine (http://www.strategy-business.com/) Des Dearlove and Stuart Crainer (issue 42, p. 1) write that others take the opposite view from Mr. Peabody. In 1996, Lloyd Shefsky, a clinical professor of entrepreneurship at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, studied more than 200 entrepreneurs and concluded that the most successful among them were made, not born.

So which point of view is the right one? Take the GrowthMinded poll and let us know what you think.

Future Vision or Rear View

“Everyone ends up somewhere in life. You could end up somewhere on Purpose!” – Andy Stanley.

Do you know where your business is going? I’m not talking about results. I’m talking about achieving the reason your business exists in the first place. This isn’t for those who are in business to get rich. You already have your reward and you can click on. But if you’re in business for a purpose greater than earnings, check this out..

RearView Reports
There’s a natural imbalance between where to business “could be” at some point in the future and the immediate needs of the business today. Why? Think about what you fill your mind with when it comes to your business. Most likely it’s full of the day to day mechanics of running the business. This imbalance is created and perpetuated every day, week, month and quarter through the reports most entrepreneurs thrive on: the Sales Report and the Profit & Loss statements. The problem with this is that these tools are like review mirrors; they report on where the business has been, not where the business is going.

How can you look forward into the future if you’re focusing on the past? How can you make sure you’re driving the business straight down the road to your vision of where it could be some day if you’re looking in the rearview mirror?

The danger with this imbalance is that over time you will lose sight of your vision and become reactive instead of staying true to your envisioned future. Instead of being in the driver’s seat, you let the opportunity-of-the-day bus take your business where ever IT wants to go.

Andy Stanley, founder of North Point Ministries and senior pastor of North Point Community Church in Atlanta tells of many opportunities his growing church has had for growth. At one point, they were in a perfect position to begin a private school. Andy was being pressured to move in this direction and all the reports indicated they had the resources to do it. If he had been consumed with last month’s business reports, or last quarter’s P&L, he may have seen the private school idea as a way to react to how the “business” has been doing and voted in favor of expanding the brand. But this would have only served as a distraction to Andy’s vision of what he believed God had for his church from the beginning.

Crystal Ball?
I’m not suggesting you replace your business reports with a crystal ball, but I am encouraging you to correct the imbalance of what you fill your mind with. Here are some ideas:

Pull Out! You can't work ON your business if you're always working IN your business. Include time in you calendar to step away from the business for one day a month (yes an entire day) and process what’s going on NOW in the context of where you want the business to go IN THE FUTURE. Each month ask yourself these questions:

1. If the future you wished for was an absolute certain occurrence regardless of money and other resources, what future would you like to see?
2. What am I working on that’s BIG? Does it get me to my vision or send me off course?
3. What 3 changes could I make in my business that would be most pleasing to God?
4. What are 3 things I can measure that will tell me how well I’m moving toward accomplishing my vision?

(Bobb Biehl has a little book full of more great questions – Asking to Win.)

Delegate Looking Back. Make someone else responsible for pouring over reports. You establish the goals and determine when and how you want to become involved in the event the goals aren’t met. But as long as
they’re being met, don’t be bothered by them.

Don’t think FOR yourself. Determine to begin each day spending 30 minutes (not in your office!) reading books by forward thinking people. Here are some of my favorites thinkers and their books:

o Tom Peters, Re-imagine
o Michael J. Gelb, How to Think Like Leonardo de Vinci
o Collins & Porras, Built to Last
o Rosamund Zander & Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility
o Andy Stanley, Visioneering

Don’t think BY yourself. Find someone from a different industry who is a thought leader; someone who has a big vision and a clear path to getting there (or someone who already has). Regularly get together to discuss the future of business, both his and yours.

Futurelab is a great blog that brings together many cutting edge thinkers in one place. A must read.

Secret to Prosperity: Letting Go & Grabbing Hold

LETTING GO

When you’re led by God (and I mean you have truly given your career comprehensively to the Lord) what you’re saying is,

“God, I believe that you have a mysterious plan for eternity that is infinite in its detail and definite in its completion. And I believe that you created specific people to play specific roles and that I was created by you for one reason:

To grab hold of the role you have created expressly for me and only me, and to live it out to its fullest regardless of what pain or joy, suffering or celebration, it may bring. And I begin by dedicating my career to You by offering it up as a stage on which to speak the role you have created for me.”

In this way I am unquestionably an instrument of God Almighty - an active participant in the activities that will help bring God’s plans to fruition according to his divine timing, not my selfish ambitions or definitions of success.

Prosperity is not about being a leader, it’s about being led.

GRABBING HOLD

When you’re there, then the Creator of the Universe himself takes charge of your career, not the person on the other side of the desk. You no longer have to be concerned with political positioning, jockeying for advancement, winning the favor of others for self-serving reasons, playing corporate politics, or manipulating the latest gossip. Since God is above all of these things than he will create situations and circumstances that places you above all these things as well. All you must do then is to work as though you are working for Christ and to be significant where ever you are you'll see that God will take your career to greater heights than you ever thought possible.

The Bible is replete with people who, left to their own resources, never would have achieved what they did. They would have been lost in a cast of thousands, but they grabbed hold of the role God had created them to play - people like Moses, Nebekanezzer, David, Joseph, Ruth and the disciplines. Only when they prayed for God to reveal to them his divine burden did their selfish ambitions melt away as the Creator revealed his role to them – the role, the reason, they were created.

Go get to prospering.

Let go of selfish ambitions and grab hold of the role God created you to play.