Strategy – Page 38 – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

3 Common – and Dangerous – Myths About Business Plans

September 2, 2015/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Customer Service, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Sales, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Business plans aren’t only for entrepreneurs. Any new venture requires thorough planning before you launch it if you want a reasonable chance of success. There are a lot of myths about business plans out there. Today I’d like to debunk three of the biggest ones.

It’s exciting launching a new business. Whether you’re building a new venture from scratch or creating something new within a large corporation, remember the old adage that “only fools rush in.”

One of the biggest mistakes you can make during an exciting launch is saying, “I’m too busy to write a business plan.” More often than not, that lack of planning will come back to haunt you.

There are three common myths about writing a business plan—and buying into them can signal the beginning of the end for your venture.

Myth 1: Business plans are only for new startups seeking funding

“I don’t have to write a business plan! I’m not launching some brand new startup.”

Notice it’s called a “business plan”—not a “startup plan.” If you’re going to invest in building a business venture, you need to think things through. You’ll be risking money, time, energy, and effort in the hopes of building something great. Isn’t that investment worth a little planning?

A good business plan will help you think through how you’re going to spend those investments wisely. It’ll also point out where your biggest risks are and provide direction on how you can mitigate them.

If you are launching a startup, you absolutely need a business plan even if you’re not seeking outside funding. You’ll be investing your own personal time, energy, and funds and those investments come with a true opportunity cost as well.

But business plans for existing organizations looking to expand or build new divisions are even more critical than business plans for startups. The stakes are much higher for larger businesses simply because the investments are larger and a failure of the new venture can also harm the existing business.

Myth 2: Writing a business plan is a huge ordeal

“Business plans take forever! I don’t have time for that! I need to be working on launching the business!”

11 Business Lessons You Can’t Survive Without

August 26, 2015/1 Comment/in Balanced Lifestyle, Books, Business Toolkit, Customer Service, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Sales, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Running a business is an exercise in fear, excitement, fear, elation, fear, hard work, and fear. Did I mention fear? In the 11 years I’ve been running my firm, I’ve learned a few indispensable lessons that apply no only to entrepreneurs but to business folks in all walks of life.

Yesterday was our 11th birthday. 11. thoughtLEADERS, LLC turned 11 yesterday. I’m still in shock over the milestone.

“Why are you in shock, Mike? Don’t you believe in yourself and your business?”

Absofrickinlutely. That’s the only reason it’s survived 11 years. I believe in it more than you can imagine.

During that time, I’ve learned a great deal and I’ve grown as a businessman every single day. Every setback was a learning opportunity. Every success has pushed me closer to the next chasm to jump. What I’d like to do today is share 11 pieces of advice that can hopefully help you be more successful in your work (and life) as well. This guidance doesn’t only apply to entrepreneurs. It’s for business people in all walks of life. I hope you find them helpful.

1. Your business will change. Either you can change it or the market will change it for you. Change is the constant. It’s easy to get locked in on a model that works to the exclusion of other opportunities or ideas. For the longest time I railed against putting our content in video form. “You can’t learn our stuff from online videos.” It took me a while to come around and only once I met the amazing folks at lynda.com did I warm to the idea. My fear was putting our stuff on video would cannibalize our core in-person training. Instead, it’s reinforced that training and has given us broader visibility to new customers. So far I’ve put a bunch of our courses online and more will follow. I’m thrilled with the results. Be open to changing your business. When the market makes changes for you, it usually sucks.

2. A deal’s not a deal until it’s a deal. I’m an excitable guy. If I had a nickel for every deal I thought would go through that subsequently fell through for some reason, I’d be retired by now. Early on, I placed a lot of value in those “tentative but definitely coming through” deals and I planned for that. When they didn’t materialize, fear and panic ensued. Since then I’ve learned to temper my enthusiasm. In my eyes, it’s not a deal until I’m stepping onto the podium. Be sure you balance your expectations with reality and have contingency plans for when things don’t go as expected.

The 16th Century Word That Gives You a Strategic Advantage

August 3, 2015/1 Comment/in Books, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

By changing the way you approach stakeholder interests, you can drive better performance. Instead of using a sequential and conflict-driven approach, you can take a different tack that promotes harmony and collaboration.

Today’s post is by Nancy Falls, author of Corporate Concinnity in the Boardroom: 10 Imperatives To Drive High Performing Companies (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

The year was 1531. It was the beginning of what is known as the Age of Discovery. Humans were busy mapping the world, constructing the first rudimentary watch, building empires in Persia, China and the new world. They build St. Peter’s in Rome, the first music conservatories and made discoveries in medicine, economics and astronomy. They brought potatoes from the new world to Europe. They started transatlantic slave trade, only to denounce it 50 years later. Machiavelli declared that the ends justify the means in The Prince. And just 13 years after that someone decided he was wrong and invented a word communicating the opposite thesis, that how things are done matters very much. That word was concinnity. The year was 1531.

If you are like most English speakers you probably don’t know this word. You should learn it.

Concinnity is the skillful and harmonious fitting together of the parts of something.

Many see the word and think consensus, which must be its grammatical first cousin. I look at the word and see lots of curves and circles. It just looks like unity to me.

And the word offers a breakthrough way to look at organizational leadership and governance.

How to Use Your Power to Make Things Right

June 22, 2015/0 Comments/in Books, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

You have the ability to wield great power in your organization. A great purpose for doing so is promoting fairness and equality.

Today’s post is by Ron Carucci, author of Rising to Power (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

“It’s not fair” is probably one of the greatest laments of organizational life. People see advancement and compensation decisions, performance ratings, organizational configurations and resource allocations, and scratch their heads often unable to reconcile those choices with the principles and policies the organization claims to live by.

Here is the risk for you as an executive: when people participating in any communal activity (like an organization, a school, or a nation) believe that their contribution matters and they will be rewarded accordingly, they commit differentiated effort to the cause. However, when they have been conditioned to expect capricious leadership, and rewards distributed to a privileged group despite their lack of contribution, they withdraw trust and minimize their contribution – doing the least amount to get by safely without being singled out. So it behooves executives to shape their leadership around justice and meritocracy to the fullest extent possible, even if that means unseating long standing mediocre performers and shifting resources to those leaders and businesses with the greatest promise of success.

Somewhere in the organization you lead are stories of injustice; poor performance that has been over-rewarded and great performance that has been under-valued. See your positional power as a resource that, while unable to right all of the wrongs of the past, can resolve not to perpetuate them, and can shift your organization to one people can trust and participate in confidently.

4 Ways Your Competencies Drive Your Strategy

June 3, 2015/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Core competencies can help you decide which initiatives to pursue and which ones to avoid. By appreciating what you’re great at and applying it to your initiative portfolio, you can achieve a much higher level of success.

One critical aspect of strategic planning is deciding where you will or will not compete. A way I encourage organizations to think about that is to look at their core competencies. A core competency is something your organization is great at. I know your organization is probably good at a lot of things. But what are the two things you would hold up and say “we’re better than anyone else at these two competencies”?

Core competencies could be things like the quality of your product, your ability to innovate, the efficiency of your supply chain, the strength of your brands, or your technology infrastructure. There are a lot of things that you could be good at, so take a step back and ask “how do we compete in the marketplace?” Your organization likely has a primary and secondary core competency. The primary competency is the one you’re going to play to first. The secondary competency is often a “platform” for making your primary competency strong.

Allow me to offer a couple of examples.

Starbucks. I would argue that their two core competencies are the quality of their product (primary) and their service (secondary).

Procter & Gamble. Their core competencies would be product development (primary) and marketing (secondary).

Once you’ve identified your two primary core competencies, it’s helpful to evaluate your initiative portfolio using those competencies as a lens. Look at Competency One and Competency Two relative to one another. Get an understanding of whether the market, the product, or the initiative you’re pursuing relies upon that core competency. Analyze the relative importance of those competencies as they relate to your ability to successfully complete that initiative, launch that product, or enter that market.

Prioritizing Your Efforts Based on Competencies

Which of these threats pose the greatest risk to your business?

May 28, 2015/0 Comments/in Leadership, Poll, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Our reader poll today asks: Which of the following poses the greatest risk to your business?

– Lack of diversification: 14.29%
– Rapidly changing markets: 22.53%
– Access to the right talent: 31.68%
– Aggressive competition: 19.6%
– Shifts in technology: 11.9%

Many Threats. Threats abound. Market shifts, lack of talent, competition, and lack of diversification all threaten us every day. The question for leaders is are you proactively assessing these threats and steering your organization past them? If not, you’ll constantly be reacting to the changes and your business will always be a step behind. If you take some simple steps today (for example, taking these measures to diversify your business) you can avoid major headaches down the road.

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

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

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5 Key Skills for Sharing a Vision

May 4, 2015/0 Comments/in Books, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

To get your team to rally behind your shared vision, there are 5 key skills you must build and employ. If you’re able to create that shared vision, your team’s performance can soar.

Today’s post is by Jeff Wolf, author of Seven Disciplines of a Leader (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

New leadership roles require new leadership disciplines. Three of the most critical disciplines are building shared vision, surfacing and challenging mental models, and engaging in systems thinking. These disciplines can only be developed through a lifelong commitment. And in learning organizations, these disciplines must be distributed widely because they embody the principles and practices of effective leadership.

How do individual visions become shared visions? A useful metaphor is the hologram, the three-dimensional image created by interacting light sources. If you cut a photograph in half, each half shows only part of the whole image. But if you divide a hologram, each part, no matter how small, shows the whole image intact.

Likewise, when a group of people come together to share a vision, each person sees an individual picture of the organization at its best. Each shares responsibility for the whole, not just for one piece. But the component pieces of the holograms are not identical. Each represents the whole image from a different point of view. It’s something like poking holes in a window shade; each hole offers a unique angle for viewing the whole image. So, too, is each individual’s vision unique.

When you add up the pieces of a hologram, the image becomes more intense, more lifelike. When more people share a vision, the vision becomes a mental reality that people can truly imagine achieving. They now have partners, co-creators; the vision no longer rests on their shoulders alone. Early on, people may claim it as their vision. But, as the shared vision develops, it becomes everybody’s vision.

Building shared vision involves these five useful skills:

SWOTting Your Strategic Problems Away

April 29, 2015/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Understanding the strategic environment you’re competing in is the foundation of any worthwhile strategic plan. Fortunately there’s an easy way to get your arms around the complex market dynamics you face.

Strategic planning requires you to understand the competitive landscape in which you’re operating. A great tool you can use to assess the environment is called a SWOT Analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

For strengths and weaknesses, those are typically within your own organization. They’re capabilities you have or don’t have. As far as opportunities and threats, they can either be internal or external market-facing opportunities and threats.

As you build a SWOT Analysis you’ll want to have the team together and have people throw out their ideas in each of those quadrants. It’s generally a brainstorming session. Your job is to capture all the ideas. We’ll synthesize them later. Let me walk through an example.

Strengths

Perhaps we start our SWOT Analysis and we look at our strengths. Our strengths consist of:

Eliminating Your Blind Spots – Your Worst Enemy is Within

April 20, 2015/2 Comments/in Books, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Business blind spots can lead intelligent leaders to make uninformed, poor decisions. Having regular access to new perspectives is key to avoiding blindspots.

Today’s post is by Dr. Ben Gilad, author of Business Blindspots.

In September 2014, RadioShack announced that it may be closer to bankruptcy than previously thought. The venerable electronic retailer which opened its first store back in 1921 didn’t die overnight. Its slow decline matches the rise of online retailing, the competition from huge wireless service providers, and its failure to bring unique value to customers. All of these developments were obvious for more than a decade and yet RadioShack kept its same basic strategy in place until 2013.

What makes smart, informed executives cling to a strategy that no longer works?

Leaders’ Blinders

Back in the early Precambrian era (circa 1994) I wrote a ‘pioneering’ book titled Business Blindspots. Business Blindspots refer to the failure of executives and their companies to recognize the (changing) competitive reality in their industries and in their markets until it is too late. (For a full treatment of the cognitive processes behind blind spots I urge you to read the excellent book by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow). In a nutshell, the message is: Leaders can be lulled into believing they are well informed when they are not.

The Biographies’ Worshipers

We all like to read about success. We devour the biographies of luminaries like Buffet, Jobs, Welch, Gates (and ironically also Iacocca and Trump). Unfortunately, in our search for “positivity,” we avoid learning from failures brought about by wearing “blinders.”

They’re Not All Bad, But When They Are…

A Simple Fix for Better Board Meetings

April 8, 2015/3 Comments/in Communications, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Board meetings are a total pain. They can also be some of the most powerful get-togethers for your company. The difference between the two is how you approach the meeting itself.

Before you say “I never present to the board” and stop reading, allow me to expand the definition of a board meeting. A board meeting is any meeting where a group of impartial outside observers of your organization get together to discuss your business with you in a candid and long-term focused way. Board meetings can be with your advisory board if you’re an entrepreneur, an executive steering committee if you’re running big projects, or any other assemblage of brain power that is willing to focus on improving your business. Now keep reading.

Most board meetings suck. Bad (or should that be “badly?”). That’s because folks want to update the board on all the great things they’ve been working on. Between that dynamic and the insecure paranoia of not wanting to have any question unanswered for the board, most organizations completely overprepare for the meeting. That overpreparedness becomes totally dysfunctional very quickly.

The good news is you can make board meetings productive, insightful, and enjoyable. You merely have to understand the current unproductive behaviors and shift your thinking on how you want to approach the board and what you want out of them. Here’s how to do that:

When it Comes to Strategy, are You Sitting at the Kid’s Table?

January 21, 2015/3 Comments/in Communications, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Looking back on past holidays, you may remember what it felt like to be stuck at the kid’s table. But you’re a grown up now – so how come you’re still sitting at the kid’s table at work?

I was recently interviewed by Anita Bruzzese for the Intuit blog. I figured you folks would like the perspectives from that interview. Here you go:

Take a look at comments posted on workplace blogs or on social media sites, and it won’t be long before you find an employee complaining that they’re often left out of the loop regarding business decisions.

These employees complain that their boss doesn’t keep them informed of strategic business decisions, what’s in the pipeline for the next year or even how their work is part of the bigger picture. Senior leaders are even worse, they contend.

It’s a frustration Mike Figliuolo has heard before, and he has a simple response: “That’s crap.”

Figliuolo, managing director of thoughtLEADERS, LLC, says that employees who complain that they don’t know what is going on within their company simply aren’t trying hard enough.

“If anything, it’s easier than ever,” he says. “Just look at your company’s organizational chart and find someone about two levels above you. Send that person an email and ask them to send you their department’s latest strategic plan.”

With that information, you’ll be able to see what’s going on and then be able to ask additional questions to determine how you or your department are affected by pending plans or possibly involved in a new initiative.

“It’s just pure laziness to sit back and say, ‘I’m not being included,’” he says. “If you can’t take the initiative then sure, you’re going to sit at the kid’s table and eat chicken nuggets.” Read more

Best of thoughtLEADERS 2014: Seriously Our Awesomest Stuff Yet

December 10, 2014/0 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 in 2014. Welcome to the 2014 edition of The Figgies (our SIXTH of em! Wow!) which are the awards we give ourselves for writing awesome blog content (here are the 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 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 One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful Personal Leadership (especially if you’re looking for last-minute holiday gifts for bosses, team members, or your mom – she’ll love it). I talk a lot about the book because I’m evangelical about the topic. Buy it. Read it. In the words of Roland Smith (former CEO of Wendy’s/Arby’s) “It 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.

Thanks for your incredible support in ’14 and best wishes for ’15! We hope to be a part of your future success! Now on to the best of list!