MIND - The 9 Mindset Secrets that Ensure Business Success

If you want to be among the handful of businesses that are really successful, you need a 'marketing mindset'.

Following these nine principles will change the way you think about your business and your attitude toward promoting it to others.

1. Vision and purpose: With the marketing mindset, you are 'strategic', so you have a clear 'vision' for where your business is going and you can easily identify opportunities that help get you there. 'Opportunists' change direction every time they see a new idea. You need a vision that's written, specific and has a series of milestones to monitor progress.

2. Focus: You stand a better chance of success by choosing a targeted niche than in a larger, broad field. A good niche is small enough to dominate and large enough to be highly profitable. It means being able to identify exactly who your customers are and what they have in common.

3. 'Reason why': Prospective customers need to know why they should choose you over your competition. You need to know the reasons and be able to express them in one or two sentences. This is your positioning and can break through the clutter in the most saturated market. You don't just want to exist in your niche; your positioning makes you the company of choice!

4. Marketing plan: A marketing plan should cover everything you do to promote your business. It needs to be written and measurable, using the most appropriate marketing tools. But it should also be simple - two pages are probably enough.

5. Profitable customer relationships: It's easier and cheaper to sell to existing customers than to find new ones. So put at least as much effort into keeping in touch with existing customers as attracting new ones. Show clients that you are looking after their interests by building up trust through regular, helpful contact.

6. Partnership: Successful businesses cooperate with others for mutual benefit. These might even be businesses that other people would see as competitors. Businesses which might make good partners are those which your customers see before or after seeing you.

7. Persuasion and influence: The skill of persuasive communication is crucial to business success. Everybody is different and you must tailor your marketing accordingly. To communicate convincingly, you need to focus on one clear message, and then structure your support message properly. If you want people to follow your advice, position yourself as an expert by speaking and writing articles. And set your prices high so that people recognize that as your value.

8. Productivity: The degree to which you get best use of your time determines your success. Work out the real value to you of an hour then ask: "Can I pay someone else significantly less to do this?" Make full use of automation and outsourcing to use your time more effectively.

9. Action: Failing to take action is one of the biggest roadblocks to business success. Avoid procrastination - putting off tasks you need to do - and perfectionism - waiting until something is 100% right.

To improve your rating for these principles, set a goal for the improvements you need. Develop a plan and take action on it right away. As you change your mindset, you'll quickly see your business results, your daily schedule and your lifestyle being transformed as well.

Easy Invention Ideas - How To Have Them

Want easy invention ideas? Dreaming up new products and inventions is fun, and it can be easy too. Try the following two techniques and soon you'll have a list of new ideas.

Easy Invention Ideas - Start With What's There

One of the easiest ways to create new ideas for inventions is to look at what already exists and find a way to make it better. You can start with things in your own home. These may even be the most marketable ideas - consider how many new kitchen gadgets are sold every year.

Look at the toaster, for example. How could it be improved, replaced, or the need for it eliminated? You could eliminate the need for it if you designed a stove with a toaster built into it. You could replace it with something like a waffle iron. You could improve it by making it faster, perhaps with a combination toasting element and microwave heater.

Look around the room and pick out any item you see. Imagine how it would be if it was bigger, smaller, faster, slower, or different in some way. As I write this, I am looking at a calculator. I would like to be able to talk to it. I could just say, "Mortgage payment, $140,000 loan, fifteen-year amortization, six point five percent interest rate," and it would announce, "$1219.56 per month." With all the latest voice-recognition technology out there, this is possible.

Want an easy way to create a lot of new invention ideas fast? Make a list of everything in your house. Then work your way down the list, thinking of some way to improve or re-invent each item. If nothing comes to mind, move on to the next item on the list after a minute or two.

Easy Invention Ideas - Use What Irritates

What irritates you? Do you hate the way the ice builds up on the edge of your roof? Do you get annoyed with the way the dog slops his water and food all over the kitchen floor? Annoyances and irritating things are not just problems, but excellent opportunities for easy invention ideas.

Suppose you are tired of burning your tongue on hot coffee. What could save you from this irritation? Perhaps a cup with a built-in thermometer that shows green once the coffee has cooled enough? Maybe a cooling device to set a coffee cup in, like a small fan that blows across the coffee when the cup is set on the device?

Annoyed with the necessity of brushing your teeth so often? Maybe there is a Teflon-like coating that could be applied, so food wouldn't stick. If it was anti-bacterial as well, you might avoid plaque even after days without brushing.

Looking at what is around you and imagining small or large improvements is easy. It also isn't too difficult to train yourself to look at problems as opportunities. There are dozens of other techniques that will give you easy invention ideas, but start with these two simple ones and you can have a hundred new ideas today.

Habits Of Mind - A Key To Brainpower

Develop good habits of mind and you will have not just intelligence, but brainpower - the ability to use that intelligence effectively. Life is easier and your actions more effective when these subconscious "programs" are installed in your head.

Your mind is already programmed in many ways. You may have consciously learned how to type, for example, but now the process is largely unconscious. In fact, if you were to think about what you were going to do with each finger before you did it, your typing would be far slower. Developing these unconscious programs, then, starts with conscious effort, but eventually pays off with essentially effortless and effective action.

Habits of mind are more like "meta-programs." They determine how your mind operates in various circumstances. They are created unconsciously throughout your life. For example, you may unconsciously look for a way to escape any situation that becomes uncomfortable.

The good news is that these habits can also be much more beneficial. Habitually stopping to assess a situation from an objective perspective would be an example of this. Even more hopeful, is the fact that these habits of mind can be consciously developed.

Developing Good Habits Of Mind

Many "experts" will tell you that it takes three weeks to develop a new habit. Repeat the actions or thoughts you want to become habitual every day for three weeks and they become programmed in your mind. Whether or not the three-week rule is accurate isn't important. If it takes four weeks, that's okay too. The important point is that by consciously repeating certain actions and thoughts, you can program yourself for success.

For example, if you want to bet a more effective problem solver, you can consciously change your approach and practice new ways of thinking. Less effective problem solvers look at problems as an annoyance to be avoided or dealt with only as far as necessary. A more effective approach is to look at problems as an opportunity to create new solutions.

Suppose you want to think this way, however. How do you make it a habit? Start by looking for problems instead of avoiding them. Keep a list of problems you see each day, ranging from personal problems like not enough exercise to business-related problems, like expenses being too high, to any random problems you can identify.

Carry a list of simple questions to ask for each problem. These are questions that are designed to give you a more productive frame of mind. "How could this problem be useful to me?" is a good start. Others might include. "What are the benefits of finding a solution?" and "What do i know about this situation that can help me find a solution."

Using your motivations might help as well. If you imagine the praise you'll get for finding a solution to a problem, this could make you want to confront and resolve problems rather than avoid them. Whatever works, do it consciously and daily for several weeks.

Once you have done this enough times over a long enough period of time, the thinking patterns become unconscious. You'll find yourself looking at problems differently, and trying to solve them spontaneously. Then you can repeat this process with other mental programming you want to have.

One last example: Suppose every time you needed greater brainpower, you unconsciously sat up straight and took a deep breath? Both of these actions have been shown to improve brain function. Of course it takes conscious effort and discipline at first to develop good habits of mind, but the eventual result is greater brain power for less effort.

Ten Amazing Brain Facts

What part of you is only 1% to 3% of your body's mass, yet uses 20% of all the oxygen you breathe? Your brain! Here are ten more brain facts.

- Your brain needs a continuous supply of oxygen. A 10 minute loss of oxygen will usually cause significant neural damage. Cold can lengthen this time, which is why cold-water drowning victims have been revived after as nuch as 40 minutes - without brain damage.

- Your brain uses a fifth of all your blood. It needs it to keep up with the heavy metabolic demands of its neurons. It needs not only the glucose that is delivered, but of course, the oxygen.

- Your brain feels no pain. There are no nerves that register pain within the brain itself. Because of this, neurosurgeons can probe the brain while a patient is conscious (what fun!). By doing this, they can use feedback from the patient to identify important regions, such as those used for speech, or visualization.

- The cerebellum is sometimes called the "little brain," and weighs about 150 grams (a little over five ounces). Found at the lower back side of your brain, you need your cerebellum to maintain posture, to walk, and to perform any coordinated movements. It may also play a role in your sense of smell.

- The human brain weighs an average of a little over three pounds, or 1.4 kilograms. Albert Einstein's brain may have been smaller than yours, because he was smaller than average. There is a general correlation between body size and the size of our brains.

- An elephant's brain is huge - about six times as large as a human brain. However, in relation to body size, humans have the largest brain of all the animals, averaging about 2% of body weight. A cat's brain? It weighs about one ounce, a little over 1% of body weight.

- There are about 100,000 miles of blood vessels in the brain. If they were stretched out (there's a nice thought!) they would circle the earth more than four times.

- If you have an average sized brain, you have about 100 billion neurons up there. You'll be happy about that after reading the next item.

- Approximately 85,000 neocortical neurons are lost each day in your brain. Fortunately, his goes unnoticed due to the built-in redundancies and the fact that even after three years this loss adds up to less than 1% of the total. Oh, and look at the next item.

- Recent research proves that your brain continues to produce new neurons throughout your life. It also proves that it does so in response to stimulation (do those brainpower exercises). Scientists refer to this as brain plasticity or neuro-plasticity. You may find this one the most encouraging of these brain facts.

Thoughts on Empowerment

People are empowered when they are given the authority and responsibility to make decisions affecting their work with a minimum of interference and second guessing by others.

Empowerment is an overused and under practiced term. When people are empowered they bring their minds to work. They are engaged in making decisions that affect their part of the business. They take responsibility for their actions. They work free from the petty bureaucratic hassles that diminish value and waste time. They add value to the organization by embracing the principles of quality and service. They search for ways to make a difference.

WHY EMPOWERMENT IS CRITICAL

Most organizations need knowledge workers men and women whose chief resource is their ability to think and act on what they know. Computer programmers, systems analysts, accountants, lawyers, managers, sales teams, and even factory workers must use their best judgment to solve problems and respond to opportunities.

Nordstrom is legendary in its customer service because it encourages and expects staff to make decisions that will make customers happy. A local Nordstrom store gives new staff a one page employee handbook to illustrate this point. It reads: Use your best judgment at all times.

WHY EMPOWERMENT WORKS

In Caught in the Middle (Productivity, 1992), I suggest that most people want a few basic things from work: meaning, results, challenge and an opportunity to learn, respect and recognition, control over their own part of the work, affiliation or knowing they are part of a bigger team.

These six items form the foundation of all good empowerment efforts. Remove any of them and you weaken the individual's commitment to his or her work. Fortunately, with regard to motivation, what's good for the individual is also good for the company.

MAKING EMPOWERMENT WORK

Build on the six basic things people want (these are listed above.) Consider these items as a bedrock for all initiatives to increase empowerment. In addition, consider the following:

Clear Vision and Direction. Corporate leadership must know why it wants empowerment.

What do you want to achieve from it?
What would empowerment look like here?
How committed are you to making empowerment a reality?
Is empowerment essential or simply something that would be nice to have?
Examine Corporate Actions.

Policies. What gets rewarded gets done. What gets punished gets avoided. Corporate policies and procedures such as performance review and merit increases show people what is really important to senior management. For example, if people are told to work collaboratively but their performance reviews pit them against each other in forced appraisal ranking, people will protect their own self interests. If you encourage cross functional teamwork, but performance reviews only acknowledge work accomplished within a department, interdepartmental cooperation will suffer.

Unwritten Rules. These norms tell people how the game is played. People learn that these unwritten rules are as important as any written policy. For example, a manager may tell staff to always tell him or her the truth, but proceed to punish the messenger who brings the bad news.

Structure. To borrow a phrase from David Hannas book, "Organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get." NUMMI is a highly successful auto manufacturing plant that relies on high worker commitment and skill. It replaced a terrible GM plant in which absenteeism was running at 25% the year it closed and where quality was a joke. Ironically, when NUMMI opened it hired back many of the same seemingly unmotivated workers from the old plant. The only major difference between NUMMI and its predecessor was how it was managed. People were free to stop the assembly line to solve quality problems. They were encouraged to learn many different tasks so they could add greater value to the assembly process. In short, they were empowered.

WHY IS IT SO DIFFICULT TO ACHIEVE?

Tom Peters once said, "we are only at the advanced lip service stage." I agree. We often are afraid to trust that others will actually do the work without close scrutiny. I never met anyone who said that a rigorous performance appraisal system helped him or her do better work. Yet most managers believe that it is an essential tool to use to motivate others. (If only those other people were as trustworthy as we.)

Watchful eyes breed dependency. When people try to please mom and dad they fail to take the risks and initiative needed to help a dynamic organization thrive. People wait to be told what to do. As the sign in a French civil servant's office read, "Never do anything for the first time."

If your work is going to be reviewed, folded, spindled, and mutilated by five others up the line before it is approved, why bother giving your best effort?

Our view of organizations is based on hierarchy and chain of command. People above you make the decisions, people below carry them out. This model is firmly entrenched. Sometimes I think it is encoded in our DNA. It can only change when we see that it works against initiative and empowerment, and when we are willing to step back and take a cold sober look at they ways in which our own actions may be creating the dependency and lackluster performance we abhor.

THERE IS HOPE

There is a revolution going on in corporations. Since Peters and Waterman's watershed book, In Search of Excellence and our discovery of W. Edwards Deming in the early 1980's, organizations have been experimenting with ways to increase employee involvement. Even the federal government is trying to reinvent itself using principles of empowerment. Some organizations succeed, others fail but we can learn from them all. These brave companies and agencies are providing the living textbooks that can point the way to new models of organization that treat people with dignity and respect and serve the interests of the business.

Here are some examples of how others are using the principles of empowerment.

Large System Change. Organizations such as Corning get everyone (or at least a representative sample of all levels of the organization) in a room to reengineer their portion of company. Since this planning process involves those who must implement the changes, resistance decreases and commitment increases, planning and implementation time are compressed, and the quality of the plan often far exceeds what outside consultants or a small team could have created.

Cross functional Teams. Companies such as Conrail pull together talented people from the middle of the organization and empower them to tackle pressing business challenges. These teams are more than task forces they have the power to recommend and implement change.

Access to Information. Many organizations are examining how work is done in an effort to streamline service to customers. They develop new procedures that ensure the people closest to the work have immediate access to the tools and information they need. (In traditional organizations information is power and often kept away from those who need it most.)

Promote the Best. Back in 1991, Jack Welch introduced his theory of leadership in General Electric's Annual Report. (At the time, I called these few pages the best leadership book of the year.) In it, he said that GE needs people who keep commitments (meet deadlines and financial targets) as well as people who promote the values of the company (empowerment, etc.). In the past, they only gave lip service to the values goal. It was nice, but it didn't drive promotions. To get ahead you had to meet the numbers. Welch went on record as saying those days were over. He wanted men and women who could accomplish both goals. To prove his resolve, he timed the firing of some visible old line managers with the publication of the report.

TO BEGIN THE CONVERSATION

Here are a few random questions to begin a conversation on empowerment.

Do we agree that empowerment is a key ingredient in our continued success? If so, why? If not, why not?

Does our performance review process support or hinder participation and commitment of all staff?

Do we compensate and promote those who embody the values we espouse?

Do our communication channels promote or inhibit free exchange of information and ideas between individuals and departments?

What informal messages do people receive about our culture? What impact does this have on productivity and morale?

What do we suppose employees say about Fannie Mae when we aren't in the room?

Once people are trained and have proven their competency, do we have the courage to trust them?

What happens when someone takes an educated risk and fails?

Of course the list could go on, but these should be sufficient to begin a provocative dialogue on the subject.