Strategy – Page 35 – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

Leadership Lessons from the Black Panther

February 21, 2018/0 Comments/in Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Chadwick Boseman has brought an incredibly powerful and entertaining hero to the forefront. We would all do well to learn some leadership lessons from the Black Panther.

If you haven’t seen the Black Panther yet, go. Now. Read this blog post later. There are probably spoilers in it.

I loved the Black Panther. The storyline was fantastic. The acting was amazing. The visuals were mind-blowing. It is deservedly receiving wonderful critical acclaim and achieving outstanding financial success.

So let’s explore what we can learn from Chadwick Boseman, T’Challa, and the Black Panther.

No. I haven’t fallen and hit my head. I know Chadwick Boseman plays T’Challa who is actually the Black Panther. But we can learn leadership lessons from all three people.

Chadwick Boseman

This man epitomizes class and humility. It’s been so much fun watching him during all the interviews. He has completely eschewed the Hollywood “I am awesome! Look at me!” dynamic in favor of talking about his cast-mates, the crew, the fans, and the opportunity he’s been presented with. The most powerful interview I’ve seen with him involved him telling the story of two young boys who were terminally ill. Boseman visited them and stayed in touch with them throughout filming. He was brought to tears when he explained how the boys said they were holding on as long as they could so they could see the movie released. Unfortunately they both passed away before the release. While they may not have seen the movie, I’m sure Boseman’s friendship and support meant a great deal to them.

My takeaway from Boseman’s professionalism, genuine concern for others, and humility is that this man is a wonderful human being. He deserves all the success that comes his way and it’s clear that his success will never change who he is as a person. He cares for others, credits everyone else around him for their great work, and focuses on being a positive force in others’ lives.

Do you embody these traits? When is the last time you made sure someone else got credit for great work? When have you gone out of your way to help someone else who is dealing with personal or professional challenges? Have you acted like Chadwick Boseman lately? If not, find an opportunity to do so and make the world around you a better place.

T’Challa

How would you characterize your approach to growing your business?

February 8, 2018/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Entrepreneur, Innovation, Leadership, Poll, Sales, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Our reader poll today asks: How would you characterize your approach to growing your business?

– I lean toward “structured” and focus on pragmatic planning and execution: 56%
– I lean toward “creative” and always generate new, interesting ideas: 44%

Balancing creativity with structure. It’s a pretty even split between structure and creativity, with the edge falling more toward structure for how to grow your business. Clearly, both sides are important. When you can find the balance between the two, you have the opportunity to build something unique, special, and fundamentally sound. Err too much toward one or the other and you either miss out on new ideas or you let your business stagnate. If you personally fall on one end of the spectrum, consider surrounding yourself with others who skew the other way so you have a good balance between creativity and structure for your organization.

Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

The Strategic Mistake of Overestimating Your Own Capabilities

January 31, 2018/0 Comments/in Entrepreneur, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

A common strategic planning mistake that people make is overestimating their own capabilities. It’s easy to overestimate your organization’s capabilities because we tend to have a favorable view of how good we are. We also have blind spots related to weaknesses that we might have.

Think about how many market leading companies you’ve seen fail. The belief that they were better than others is often the root cause of this failure. Viewing your organization as superior to competitors can lead to a flawed strategy.

I worked with one startup who came in and said “We’re the best in the market. Here’s why our technology’s better. Here’s why our strategy’s better. Here’s why our people are better.”

The investors challenged them on that assessment and the company still maintained their position of why the investor’s concerns weren’t relevant and why their competitor wasn’t as good as they were. Eventually they were blindsided in the marketplace and they went under. They seriously overestimated their capabilities.

Some warning signs that you may be overestimating your capabilities include things like:

– people saying “Oh we have no competitors. We’re the only one in this market.” Everyone has competitors. That’s a huge blind spot to say you don’t have any.

– using your old SWOT analysis versus doing a new one where you’re more rigorous around what your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are.

– relying on internal market research versus going to an external objective third party. That internal research can be very biased.

Some fixes for these risks are:

– Seek objective sources of capability assessments. Go out and get some consultants. Bring those people in to look at your business. Find some advisors or members of your board of directors to give you an objective assessment of what your strengths and weaknesses are.

– Conduct a good rigorous Porter’s Five Forces analysis to assess competitive dynamics in your industry.

– Focus on the weaknesses section of your SWOT analysis. By the way, ask your customers and your suppliers what your strengths and weaknesses are. They’re going to uncover some blind spots you’re not aware of.

Having an accurate realistic understanding of your capabilities keeps you from getting blindsided from by someone who’s better than you are. Take the time to get objective perspectives and make sure you’re protecting yourself from the risk of overestimating your capabilities.

Misreading the Market

End of Year Thoughts on How to be Successful

December 27, 2017/0 Comments/in Career, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Another year is in the books. How was it? Did you achieve what you wanted? If not, what are you doing about it going into next year? Try improving your focus, prioritization, and perseverance. Those are three keys to success you can implement immediately.

2017 has been a great year for me and my firm. I’m hoping the same holds true for you. If not, we’ll cover that in a few paragraphs.

This year was another record year of growth for our firm. We added clients, courses, and instructors. We went to interesting places and worked with wonderful people. Our results followed suit.

But it wasn’t luck. Not by a long shot.

How does this happen? How does an organization continue to grow and thrive?

Focus. Prioritization. Perseverance. That’s it.

Focus

People ask me all the time “What have you been up to?” My response is “Nothing new. Just more of the same.”

Oh Mike… how boring.

Not boring. Focused. We know what we’re great at. We know where we compete (and where we don’t want to). That means we say “no” to a lot of things. New courses that aren’t core to our business? No. New industries where our courses don’t fit? No. New delivery models with dramatically different operational requirements? No again.

Focus is hard. It means walking away from cool new opportunities that could prove to be lucrative. The key is remembering that a great core business can be even more lucrative and at worst, can suffer if you let too many distractions take you away from what you’re great at.

I’m not saying we haven’t grown and changed over the years. We have. But we’ve always had a singular focus on what we do and what we’re great at. That serves as a guidepost to stay on a path we’ve found to be successful.

Prioritization

You simply don’t have the time or energy to get everything done. You don’t. I’ve had two heart attacks trying to prove that I could do everything. I couldn’t. I’m not conducting that test again.

The only way to manage through the myriad of tasks you have to perform is brutal prioritization.

Best of thoughtLEADERS 2017: Our 9th Year of Badassed Blogging

December 13, 2017/0 Comments/in Balanced Lifestyle, Books, Business Toolkit, Career, Communications, Entrepreneur, Innovation, Leadership, Sales, Social Media, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

It’s time again for our annual year in review list of the BEST posts we’ve published over the last 12 months. Welcome to the 2017 edition of The Figgies (our NINTH YEAR of em! Wow!) which are the awards we give ourselves for writing awesome blog content (here are the 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 editions of those awards).

This is an annual event at the thoughtLEADERS Blog. This list is comprised of our most viewed, most forwarded, quirkiest, most provocative work. Enjoy. Share. We’ve loved writing them. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading them. I don’t ask a lot of you folks so I have two small requests as your holiday gift to me (you are getting me something, right?):

1. Invite all your coworkers, friends, and family to come check out the blog and become readers. The only way we all get better is by raising everyone’s game. I’m not asking a lot here. If you found this blog helpful at all this year, here’s your chance to return the favor for all our hard work. Just email folks and tell ’em to come take a look.

2. Pick up a copy of my books. They make great holiday gifts for the professionals in your life. The titles include:

One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful Personal Leadership. In the words of Roland Smith (former CEO of Wendy’s/Arby’s) “This book could change your life.” To get a sense for what the book is about, read this free ChangeThis Leadership Manifesto which is based on the book. If you like the manifesto, you’ll love the book.

Lead Inside the Box: How Smart Leaders Guide Their Teams to Exceptional Results. “Finally, a leadership book that cuts through all of the noise. This book needs to be on every leader’s desk!” – Andrea Procaccino, Chief Learning Officer, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

The Elegant Pitch: Create a Compelling Recommendation, Build Broad Support, and Get it Approved. If you’re looking to get to “yes” for your idea, this book will give you the method for doing so in an efficient and effective way.

Thanks for your incredible support in ’17 and best wishes for ’18! We hope to be a part of your future success! Now on to the best of list!

Getting Paid to Execute Your Strategy

November 1, 2017/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

If incentives aren’t aligned with your strategy, the likelihood of you reaching your objectives is pretty low. Be sure you clearly link your incentive plan to the strategic outcomes you’re trying to achieve.

People do what they get paid to do. If incentives aren’t aligned with your goals and strategic outcomes, you’re not going to get the results you want.

After you’ve defined the initiatives you want to pursue, laid out the priorities for the organization, and set goals, you have to link individual and team incentives to the successful completion of those activities. This may require changing compensation plans or offering bonuses contingent upon execution of strategic objectives.

I had one client that was trying to make a massive culture shift. They were moving from a mindset where it was great to drive sales to one where they wanted to improve margin.

Everyone’s incentive plan was tied to sales. The organization realized no matter how badly they wanted their sales reps to focus on selling more profitable business, they would never get there if they didn’t change the sales compensation plan. So they did.

They said “No longer will you get incentive only based on sales. We’re also going to measure the profitability of the products and contracts that you sell.”

Behavior changed pretty fast, and they achieved that strategic objective of expanding their margins.

Using Incentives to Drive the Right Behaviors

One organization I worked for had a bunch of field technicians. Those technicians were measured on their daily production. The incentive was based upon how much work the tech got done in an eight hour period.

Our organization had a strategic shift where we realized production matters, but we really needed to focus more on retention. We were losing too many customers. We knew the way our technicians interacted with customers drove whether a person stayed with us as a customer or not.

We realized we had to change the incentive plan. So, we layered on retention on top of technician production. We created an entirely new metric called “retention adjusted production.” The way that worked was a tech could do a great job and do a lot of production, but if they had really high attrition, their production score would get decreased. Their incentive went down too if they had too much attrition on their route.

Guess what?

Overcoming Strategy Communication Pitfalls

October 30, 2017/0 Comments/in Books, Communications, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Strategy execution is still a relatively new topic in business and leaders struggle how to do it. They face many execution challenges and the top one is communicating the strategy. If you understand the most common pitfalls in communication, hopefully you can avoid them.

Today’s post is by Robin Speculand, author of Excellence in Execution (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

What are your preferences?

Apple or Galaxy phones?
Working in the morning or at night?
Tea or coffee?
Work alone or in a group?
Window or aisle seat on the plane?

Just as everyone will answer these questions based on their own preferences, people have their own ways of answering the call to executing a new strategy. Leaders who achieve excellence in execution recognize this as they prepare to communicate a new strategy. They consider how to respond to people’s different preferences and strive to create the right first impression. Consider that you never get a second chance to start a good execution.

As an essential business topic, strategy execution is in its infancy. Yet it’s quickly evolving as leaders demand more knowledge, structure and resources on how to achieve it. When they address how to execute strategy, it’s not always with the same energy, drive and conviction they applied to crafting it. Often, they’re missing the skills and tools needed to excel in their execution efforts.

A leadership team doesn’t walk into a conference room and declare, “Let’s create a bad strategy!” Although they believe they have crafted a winning strategy by the end of the planning, they only know if it’s good once it’s executed.

How has your business shifted since the last time you wrote your strategic plan?

October 12, 2017/0 Comments/in Leadership, Poll, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Our reader poll today asks: How has your business shifted since the last time you wrote your strategic plan?

– Not at all: We’re right on plan: 6%
– A little: The plan is mostly intact: 32%
– A bunch: Parts have held but others haven’t: 32%
– A ton: The strategic plan is out the window: 16%
– What’s a strategic plan?: 13%

No plan survives first contact. Almost half of you have had major shifts to your strategic plan. That’s not unheard of. Markets move quickly and plans are constructed in states of ambiguity. What’s most important is your ability to anticipate and react to those shifts. Invest time in conducting a strategic plan update to account for these changes. For the scary 13% who don’t have a strategic plan, insist on creating one. Don’t fall into a “budget +10% is our plan” trap. You can’t reach your destination if you don’t know where you’re going. A leader’s job is to define that path.

Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

How to Lead Your Own Revolution

October 11, 2017/0 Comments/in Entrepreneur, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

There’s a lot of unrest out there in the world. Social issues dominate the headlines and people are taking action. Some movements feel like small revolutions. The question is, as a leader, what revolution are you leading?

Revolution. It’s cleansing. It’s unsettling. It’s awesome.

The wonderful thing is you can start your own.

Revolution is that point in time when a critical mass of people get fed up with some kind of pervasive crap and collectively decide to do something about it. That “something” is usually scary, somewhat extreme, painful, brave, and life-altering.

The American Revolution. Occupy Wall Street. Civil Rights. Wakeup Startup. Revolutions large and small. They all center around a pile of crap, some fed-up people, a cause, and a spark.

When run correctly, a revolution can bring about fundamental societal change. When run poorly, a revolution can bring about fundamental societal change. It cuts both ways folks. The good news is you can start your own revolution pretty easily providing you can galvanize people around a few critical things.

Identify a Pile of Crap

To start a successful revolution, you first have to find a big pile of crap. It has to be something that’s not working in the system. From income inequality to tyrrany and unequal treatment to stupidity, there are plenty of piles of crap to choose from.

Pick the one that upsets you the most. The more unfair or inefficient the crap is, the better. Be able to name it (“I’m really mad about how much time and effort we waste talking about building startups in Columbus but never really making big things happen.” or “I don’t appreciate that Group A has one set of rules while Group B has to abide by another.”). You have to explain what’s wrong in the first place in order to build a revolution around it.

Find Fed-Up People

Hey Entrepreneurs – No One Cares about Your Technology

September 20, 2017/0 Comments/in Entrepreneur, Innovation, Leadership, Sales, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Building the technology that is the foundation of your business is the easy part of being an entrepreneur. If you want to build a great business, you need to focus on execution and operations. Without them, you’ve go nothing.

I recently spoke at a local entrepreneur event WakeUp StartUp and I was asked what matters most for entrepreneurs. My answer surprised a few people. Most folks think it’s all about having the coolest new technology. They’re wrong.

Tech is easy. Execution is what matters.

There. I said it.

Why is it that so many entrepreneurs believe the tech is the be-all, end-all? Where did the notion come from that if you have nothing more than a killer application, website, algorithm, or any other combo of 01001010101110110 that you can build a multibillion dollar company? (I probably just dropped an f-bomb with that combo of digits).

Wrong.

It’s about executing, people (note the comma in this sentence is *very* important).

Sure, you need good tech. It must solve a problem. But once it’s built, you have to execute. That’s a whole different skill set than writing code and drawing wiring diagrams. Think about how many awesome technologies went the way of the dodo because the company simply failed to execute. Lots of them.

So how can you get better at execution? Here are a few thoughts:

What it Really Takes to Run Your Own Firm

September 13, 2017/1 Comment/in Career, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Sales, Strategy, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

People tell me all the time “I want to do what you do.” They have some glorified vision of what it means to be an entrepreneur. The day to day grittiness of it is something that few understand. Here’s a view into that day to day.

Entrepreneurship is a great life – as long as you’re prepared for what that means. Running your own firm isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The day to day activities are the ones few people understand or appreciate. Add to that the complexity of running as simple a business as possible and you can have a real nightmare on your hands if you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.

Recently I had occasion to speak with Will Bachman, the founder and Managing Partner at Umbrex about what it takes to run a successful training firm. I guess I’m allowed to declare my firm as being successful considering we just celebrated our 13th birthday and we continue to grow every year.

We discussed my experience as an entrepreneur covering topics ranging from getting your business model right, dealing with clients, and making sure you’re taking care of yourself so you don’t run yourself into the ground.

Listen to the podcast here:

What do you believe is the most effective form of growth?

August 10, 2017/0 Comments/in Entrepreneur, Leadership, Poll, Sales, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Our reader poll today asks: What do you believe is the most effective form of growth?

– Organic: 49%
– Acquisition: 15%
– Geographic expansion: 10%
– New product introduction: 23%
– Other: 3%

Go organic. The large majority of you are fans of growing your existing business and taking it to new customers or growing customer bases you already have. While there’s a lot to be said for organic growth, it can be slow and it leaves you vulnerable to large changes in the market like competitors making acquisitions or launching new products that leave you in the dust. Evaluate your growth strategy on a regular basis. Be rigorous about understanding your growth options and choose the one most appropriate to the market environment. Sticking only to a “slow and steady wins the race” approach exposes you to other risks that can damage your business.

Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!