Questions.

Where do you draw the line between possible and impossible?

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?

Do you let yesterday use up too much of today?

When will you ever have more time than you do right now?

When we talk about resources for leaders in economic terms three usually come to mind:  labour, capital and land.  There is a fourth resource that may be considered for an individual to be far more important – that of  TIME.  

Time management experts have developed a model which helps prioritise leadership activities and to make the use of time more effective.  This is broken up into the areas of Important and Non-Important, Urgent and Non-Urgent.   On the left hand side of the quadrant graph is the area that effective leaders spend their time.  The area on the right hand side of the graph is potentially the leader who is run by crisis management.  Lets take a closer look at the left hand side of the graph:

Urgent and Important:  There activities are deadline driven, importance based on consistency, potentially demanding problems, response to a specialised area with the business.  This area of the quadrant should take up 40% of a given week.  These activities are generally prioritised first, however they can cause stress because they sit in a time sensitive zone.

Important, but Not Urgent:  There is no doubt that the best leaders spend the most amount of time in this area of their business.  It includes preparation and planning, execution of projects, crisis prevention, long term diary management, recruitment and skill improvement.  Whenever a leader in a business is undertaking these activities they can focus on the future successfully and begin to prioritise the direction of the business. 

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The creation of a brand within a brand has become the hallmark of many successful companies as they diversify their customer base from Commercial Importance to Very Important.

How do they do at it? Should more of us being looking into this growth area rather than leaving markets unexplored?

The airline industry has been able to achieve this thinking and in most instances been a regular part of their long haul services.  Everyone gets onto the same plane, the branding is consistent for each customer yet the experience of travelling economy to travelling first class is distinctly different and the value to the airline also is based on a per customer spend.  The level of loyalty between customers in different classes is known to be much more successful when better levels of service are offered.  Clearly the price you pay with an airline can determine the service that you get. 

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Never Assume                    

Always Presume                

When I think back over the past week most of my errors in judgement and dissapointments have come because I have assumed and most of my creativity and best decisions have happened when I have presumed.

So what is the difference?

When we assume we do so when something is supposed to be the case but without proof.

When we presume we do so when something is the case based on probability.

I look at my actions and when I base my thinking or my responses on assuming what other people are either thinking or doing then I am always going to be less certain about the way I can go about making decisions.  There are many areas of our daily lives that we make assumptions but there is a clear difference in most cases between assuming something and presuming something. 

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Last week I was fortunate enough to travel throughout New Zealand with a leading real estate knowledge expert, Mark McLeod.  Mark’s style of presenting is very much about the change that people have to achieve in their thinking before they can enact a programme that will lead to success.  We spoke about one particular area of business, being that of the core product and to think about how the core product can make a business more decisive, responsive and to give the possibility of delivering outstanding sales results. 

What is the core product for a salesperson, an individual who on a daily basis has to understand their core business, potentially has to deliver a company’s core product, but what is a salesperson’s core product?

The definition of core product is described as ‘the prime purpose for the product to exist’.  This differs from the core business which is ‘the essential activity’ that makes the business exist.  When a individual or business understands its core product it then becomes focused on the customer needs but exactly how do you define a core product within a business and how do you know that it will match the needs of the customer? 

Take for example, McDonalds.  From the very start its business was based around standards and repetition.  Ray Croc began the concept of McDonalds through the sale of a milk shake machine, he offered this throughout a number of businesses that then standardised their milk shake menu and also prices.  But what does this all mean to the core product of McDonalds?  Read the rest of this entry »