Wow, the year is already half over! How can that be possible?
It's been a fantastic first two quarters. I completed 33 projects, for 17 clients in 12 different industries. Here are a few highlights:
Travel: Most of these projects required travel, so I had a lot of time in limos, taxis, airports and hotels. I took over 50 flights.- Programs: Repeatable Successful Acts - The behaviors of million dollar producers dominated my work in sales. We are now seeing the quantitative results from the sales teams that added the RSAs to their regular sales practices and to their sales processes. It's great news, as they have ALL seen sales bumps that they attribute in large part to the RSA work. I have also updated the 21 RSAs with new data and a new part of the program featuring the key behaviors of buyers at the million dollar level.
New Programs: The second quarter saw the launch of two new strategic platforms. The Opportunity of Meeting features a new way to gain a huge advantage with your meeting strategies, and Dazzling Blue teaches the truly short distance between ordinary and extraordinary performance.- Dallas Morning News Article: I had the honor of being a featured front page interview in the Sunday business section of the 7th largest paper in the US. (Page 1, Page 2)
Creative Ventures Projects: I have a number of new internal projects in full swing which include the new web site, a new look and feel for the blog, new videos (you can see some of them like "Invest In You" on YouTube), audio discussions (Windows Media Link), and a series of "short burst" articles that will be part of a series of different web and print-based media.
So, it was a fantastic first half of the year and I can hardly wait to jump into the second half.
Thanks to everyone who takes the time to read my stuff and the fantastic cadre of clients who allow me to be a part of their culture!
There is something special about movement, the motion that defines a successful company. It's often hard to see or define because it springs from such a wide variety of locations... from research and development, from design, from sales, from strategy, and most importantly, from leadership. Movement is about doing, about embarking on a forward-driven journey. It's about action.
Clarity: Do you have any idea how much undefined and unactionable crap undermines our ability to get things done? We are buried in it, those things that form road blocks on the way to our primary goals. They encroach on our vision, they drag on our productivity, and they often happen in a manner that disguises their detrimental impact. How do we clear this "restrictive fog" so that we have a better sense of clarity? One of my clients uses a very simple but powerful strategy - THE ONE (an adaptation of the One Level Above strategy from the RSA platform). Here's how it works:
The Void of Deciding: Three frogs are sitting on a log and one decides to jump in the pond. How many frogs are left on the log? Three. Deciding is NOT doing. Decisions by themselves are empty. What stops most decisions from becoming action? It's our obsession for making only the right choice. We want 100% impact. I call this the MYTH OF 100%. The reality is that nothing, no known system operates at 100%, and our search for this type of certainty buries us in data and meetings. David Kelley, the founder and CEO of IDEO (the award winning global design firm), said, "Enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects." Make a small shift in your strategy to discover how new ideas can be leveraged by taking a few small steps that carry with them a little uncertainty.
