Losing Focus On Your Goals – Those Pesky Little Distractions
The other night I woke up with a burning sensation in my left eye. It felt like something major was in there and my eye started watering like crazy. I spent 30 minutes flushing out my eye to no avail.
I was starting to think I would be heading off to emergency. My eyes seem to attract problems for some strange reason. I was also thinking there go my business plans for the next few days.
From past lessons I knew that rubbing is very bad. Scratched corneas take a while to heal and are quite painful.
I decided to have another go […]
You Can’t Do That!
I received my copies of “The 10x Rule” and “If You’re Not First, You’re Last” by Grant Cardone. I randomly flipped open a few pages in each (what I normally do when I get a new book) and stumbled on something worth sharing. I haven’t read the books yet but based on my last post, I feel compelled to share this message from Grant.
Be Deaf when Someone Says You Can’t
Grant Cardone
Be deaf when someone says you cannot do it!
Be deaf when someone says it is impossible!
Be deaf when anyone tries to put […]
Giving (Negative) Advice: You Could Be Wrong
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the influence of criticism and negative thinking on yourself and others. I have two major motivations:
- I want to grow as a person,
- I want to support our companies mission (To help people achieve their full potential).
Have you ever met someone who is perpetually positive about everything? How about the opposite?
Yet the reality is most people, myself included, are usually somewhere in the middle. We go through highs and lows emotionally and express those feelings externally in how we deal with others.
Our frame of reference, beliefs, other feelings and a host of other things […]
Taking Critcism Well?
This post is my comment in response to Bob Burg's post "Consider the Source". Since it ended up being one of those "epic" responses I thought I would put it up as a post myself.
Taking criticism well is one of the hardest things we need to master in business and life in general. It hurts and we are wired to react to hurt.
The thing is, the degree of hurt is often of our own making. By that I mean we let ourselves react as if our physical being is threatened and therefore some defense mechanism needs to be […]
Agile is Out, Lean is In… Work Management Options
In business, there are two main types of work:
- Ad hoc ongoing work, and
- Project based work where a bunch of work is lumped together to achieve a bigger objective.
Of course the lines blur a lot: large ongoing work versus small projects.
Ad hoc ongoing work tends to be mostly queue based for most people. How this work gets managed (or not) varies wildly.
For project based work I see that you have 4 main options for managing it:
- Schedule based – The standard planned up-front Gantt chart type project. A variation would be to plan/schedule only as far out as you need to until you get […]
How to Create a Marketing Persona – Make it Personal
Whether you are talking about product (or service) development or your marketing strategy or sales tactics it is important to understand who your customer is.
This is where personas can help you.
You start by creating a specific and detailed profile of the people you want to reach. Then create characters (or personas) to represent those people. I really like the idea of treating them as real people as long as you can remember they aren't.
Harry Potter is a character in a popular series of books and movies. When you mention his name, you can immediately bring up a picture of him, […]
Employees: Getting Them Thinking Like an Owner
Are you a business owner wondering how you can engage your employees and get them to think like you would when making decisions?
I recently read "Ownership Thinking: How to End Entitlement and Create a Culture of Accountability, Purpose, and Profit" by Brad Hams.
Brad talks a lot about entitlement and how it is "destroying companies, our economy, and crushing potential". Entitlement is basically the idea that you should get paid just for showing up at work; no matter what your actual impact is.
Brad's personal mission is "to eradicate entitlement".
Basically it starts with the idea that given a choice, people actually want their […]
Zumba Party with a Cause
This event has been cancelled due unforeseen circumstances. I encourage everyone to consider a donation to the Food Bank anyways.
'cause it is good for you and helps the Calgary Inter-faith Food Bank help others.
Have you been feasting on leftover Halloween candies and want to wear off some of those calories? Want to try Zumba? Don't know what Zumba is but want to have fun?
Bring some of your excess food and donate it to the Calgary Food Bank; join Dance Through Life and instructors Deborah Mandzuk and Paula Callihoo for […]
Who Are You (and Your Business)?
Today I was reading a post about "Being Right at Someone Else's Expense" by Bob Burg (recommended blogger).
I decided to comment on his post. Rather than take my normally more serious approach (in business anyways), I decided to post a fun comment where I started out in a negative over the top tone and then switched tone midway through. In fact, one commenter (Amy Wells) replied "Doug, LOL. I was gonna offer you a Jack Ass to carry all that rightness of yours…" which shows how over the top my intro was. See the post and the comments in detail for yourself. […]
Build Something You Know… Or?
Good business advice is to build products and services around things you already know well. Then you can focus on one hard thing at a time; building a great product.
But not all innovators do so with something they already knew. In fact sometimes innovators are successful precisely because they brought fresh insight into an area where the experts already knew everything there was to know.
You can build a product that relies on expertise that you have to learn as you go. This is a lot harder, but possible.
The trick is to truly commit to becoming an expert in the new area; […]