You have to love the clarity and power of numbers.
Now that school’s started up again, homework is ramping up as well and my wife and I had a great ‘tutoring’ session with my daughter on her math homework. My daughter was struggling with one of the concepts and wanted to argue that the answer we had led her to wasn’t right….
But that’s the beauty of math and numbers…they are either right or they’re not. You may be asking the wrong question, but when the answer is in numbers, it’s very clear where you stand. 43 is bigger than 35 – and it’s always going to be bigger.
That’s why when you’re analyzing your business and your goals, the more things you can tie to a number, the better off you’ll be.
Sometimes you need to mix in a little philosophy with your business…
I’m re-reading the classic business book – The EMyth Revisited by Michael Gerber (prepping for a workshop I’m doing next week) and I was inspired by some philosophy in a chapter that I hadn’t thought about in a while.
For those that haven’t read the book (it’s one of the Top 100 Business Books of all time), it’s a story about a struggling entrepreneur who owns a pie shop and how the author helps her realize why her business is struggling (along with most small business owners at some point and time) and the shift in perception that’s needed to avoid the all too common downward spiral of business failure.
A few weeks ago I wrote about Daniel Pink’s new book Drive, which is all about the science behind what motivates people and how the business world (and the educational world) aren’t keeping up with that science and using motivational techniques that really don’t work very well anymore.
Well I stumbled across the perfect primer on the book and the topic – it’s a short video speech from Daniel Pink on the core concepts and it’s illustrated with an animated technique that’s really engaging and adds a lot to the presentation.
Here’s the link if you can’t see the video for some reason: RSA Animate – Drive
Let me know what you think about it – share your thoughts in the comments below.
A lot of thought over the years has gone into what makes a business great. In the business classic “Good to Great” by Jim Collins, 5 years of painstaking research led to a lot of interesting conclusions about what separated great companies from good companies (and all the rest).
Some of the key drivers included things like great leadership, and disciplined focus but one of the fundamental keys to a great business is that they have great people. In other words, using Collins terminology you have to get the right people on the bus if you want to succeed.
But what are the Right People? How do you evaluate them? Let’s hear from Jim Collins first:
The internet continually offers up all sorts of cool things – some of them are just entertaining (like the picture above) but a lot of them are world class educational resources, tools and ideas that most of us wouldn’t have seen 10 or even 5 years ago.
If you’d like to make your web browsing more productive, I’d strongly recommend using a tool like Delicious (I wrote about Delicious here) not only as a way to save and reference the cool stuff you find, but it can also help you find new things that other people find valuable.
Today I wanted to share a presentation on Social Media that I thought was outstanding!
You can learn some pretty cool things on vacation sometimes. It’s may be hard to tell, but the picture above is a pod of humpback whales engaged in Bubble Net Feeding (here’s a bigger view).
What is Bubble Net Feeding and how does it apply to business? Read on and find out!
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