Work Environment Matters

This does not involve the company’s impact on environment in general. It only involves where we work. A working environment enhance your productivity. It might has its own distractions, like people calling your phone – but works 95% of time. When we work on academic projects, we are at the library. With web designing project – at a conference room. The places are different, but they boost the creativity.

Sometimes when we get stuck, we take a break. Surprisingly, we return with different solutions. This prove that diverting attention towards something pleasant helps productivity. How is your work environment? All businesses are alike. The similarities lies in how their environment looks like. An electronic store will surround itself with all kind of technological devices.

A restaurant is filled with chair, table, plates and other utilities for fulfilling its functions to customers. An office has different kind of equipment: computers, coffee machine, chair and table, couch and so on. Unless you have your own office, don’t negatively contemplate on these things. Office is not necessary to be productive. Let’s walk through a scenario.

When working on a fully planned serious project, the first thing I do is ask myself: where can I be most productive for this project? At the office, home or library? I just visualize the environment, thinking of what I need, considering things that might get in the way, and to see what mostly works. Where you work greatly matters to your productivity. We all have some kind of home office. Some people work directly from home. Our environment is critical to what we do, because productivity starts from somewhere.

You can’t really find an environment that 100% works for you when you are on budget. However, with low budget, you can still boost productivity. If we work for others we might have work hours that we follows. Working for ourselves is more difficult – we only earn from our productivity. As a business owner, you don’t have time – only goals, objectives, strategies and plans.

This means if the environment do not enhance our capabilities, then we should change it. Keep in mind that it does not specifically include how you treat the employees – that is another topic. This focus on where your creativity and productivity is at its best. The fact that you are working in the team in a gentle and proactive manner indicates you don’t need help with it.

If a group of people can work as one, the rest is minor. The team has high performance – they work as one. They will proactively simplifies the process, which boost productivity. The best environment could be based on this statement: “I want a stab me in the chest culture, not a stab me in the back culture”. A culture like that comes with extra stress, because it leaves no issue unsolved – they will be dealt with or acknowledged immediately.

It allows people to be open-minded and honest in front of the team members. They do it in a respectful and proactive manner without causing a problem. The team can move forward. In conclusion, where you work is about where your productivity is at its best. The place that people can be open with one another makes it easier. It is better than, “it’s not my problem” that might occur if they can’t be upfront in the beginning.

Entrepreneur is a Way of Life

In a previous blog, we clarified that the only reason you contact a business is because you need something from them. How you live your life determines if you are a worker or an entrepreneur: we solve problems. You are living a problematic life, filled with consistent planning, strategic decisions, and taking different actions. You have to be the kind of person that people goes to when they need help.

As an entrepreneur, you can capably deal with problems. Problems are your life. You are always on the go, consistently dealing with problems – and probably never have a dull moment. There will be time when these problems makes you uncomfortable. You are reading this blog for different reasons, and we write it because we know that being an entrepreneur is about being a problem solver.

Don’t be too pessimistic now, about dealing with problems. The fact is you deal with them all the time. It is simply a matter of perspectives. When you feel hungry, which is a problem, then you eat. This is a perfect example, but we don’t see them as a problem, but as a day-to-day life. Business life is the same, but more complex.

The point is that it will be in our nature as eating and drinking. The only difference are the options, stimulations and dynamic of what to come. Do I dare compare that to options of food to eat? When people starts a new business, they mostly focus on getting it off the ground. They can focus on several things at the same time. It could be breaking even on the financial statement, or what to do with all the money we will make, before they even make it.

They could also consider how far the business will go – financially. Very few people focus on the non-financial part of the business to impact its revenue. In the complexity that occurs, you need to always plan the next step, and not dwelling in current problems. In this lifestyle, every success will lead to the next plan, and it will continue in that order.

With strategies, we will be executing plans, because it is in our nature, and we can’t shake it off. Even when dealing with the normal activities that involve us personally, because we will consistently think strategically, and contingency plan will be on the back of our head. You should just go out and do something like other businessmen.

Know What YOU Do

Questions are source of knowledge. Everything we questioned have been processed, until we got the answers we are looking for. These answers will then lead to action. You can’t enrich your knowledge if you don’t ask and experience if you don’t do. Things we do proofs what we know. A friend once said, “If you are not proficient in what you are doing, you will be overwhelmed and guarantee failure”.

What is the easiest part of your business, and HOW takes home the price. This is where you really need to know what you are doing. Let’s put the HOW into two different scenarios. You want to accomplish one of your business objectives – providing the best services at affordable price – and you are considering what would happen. This objective is stable, and we have probably consider them and more in the business plan. That is great in theory, but the best question is how?

How will the business accomplish this? Will it involve cutting prices on equipment, or do you have to use less resources? How will you use these resources to achieve your goals? How will you achieve this and still gains the necessary monetary resources to keep operating the business? These questions can generate a lot of different perspectives. And nobody can tell you exactly how to do the things you want to do, but provide insight about what could work.

A second scenario is where we set a stable goal, and have consulted a prospect that could facilitate the goal. When the company sent someone to interact with us, it happens to be someone we have a bad history with, which puts us on an ambiguous path. Luckily for us the person could differentiate his professional objectives from his personal feelings.

The best question is how will you operate then? Your strategy might be dynamic, and you need to accomplish the objective, despite the fact that you are on unsecure ground or in ambiguous level. Knowing what you are doing give you power over it, and vice versa as the case may be. For you to know what you are doing, consider how you will accomplish what you are doing because “what” is traditionally broad.

This simplifies how you can be extremely organize, because things are done in sequence for a reason. And as we know even though we know what we are doing, we can still be overwhelmed if we are not organized. The only way to organize is to divide the big pictures into little pieces. These pieces will then be tackled one after the other in specific sequence that simplifies the overall process.

Know where you are going

Knowing where you are going with your business has a lot to do with your personal life. I love working with scenarios, so I will walk you through one scenario. I don’t know what to do for the week, and analyzing it shows that the team and I have not gone through the weekly process. I spent hours pointing finger somewhere else, until the team leader asks a simple question – “where were you during the weekend?”

My response was, “I could not finish working on assignments from previous week until around 8pm on Sunday”, and I instantly stopped pointing finger. The solution popped into my head. I need a framework surrounding around the solution, so planned for the week. This plan set an organized week, so we’d know what to do within the week.

The best and most supportive path in life is not just what we see, but also our framework. As a person, an independent perspective tells you what to do. In a day to day framework, you will traditionally wake up earlier to prepare for your day. You know how you want your day to go. It is a procedure that people normally goes through. The best place to find where you are going is within yourself. What you want and where.

A lot of things might weigh you down on a daily basis, which affect our perspective on where we are going. A problem puts us in the state of weighing us down, we will be directed by what is weighing us down. Many things could be weighing people down, but people that knows where they are going, consider the requirements and specifications for getting there.

SMART-method clarifies that the goal set as specific as possible. But, the main thing is knowing what we will get from what we are doing, we have the focus and motivation to move ahead with the overall process. In the case of our example, we want to get the best productive week, and the only way to do that is to use the right method and consume the effort required to build the plan.

The plan serves as a tool to direct the week, and know what to do. Knowing the path enlightens where to focus to get to the destination. We want something specific, which means we know what we want from it, giving us the best productive path to a result. We want the best solution, and we cannot get it until we know where we are going.

Knowing where we are going makes life easy and directs us to the best action to move forward. This is due to the fact that our destination is not long, but have many stops (places we will need to stop). We cannot dwell in the stops, because our destination is our motivation. Where we are going is the reward we get after we reach there. Yogi Berra says it best, “If you don’t know where you are going. You will end up somewhere else”, which shed some light about where you are going.

We’d have the need for acknowledging our destination. What you get is your motivation that boosts you. If you leave your house, you will know where you are going, right? It could be going to the store, office or anywhere else. But, you left your house for a specific destination – same thing goes with your life. Don’t lose that focus, because it might come back to hurt you. In conclusion, where we are going drives us, and when we get there, we reap our rewards.

Getting Back on the Track

If you have worked on a business plan, then you are familiar with the Murphy’s Law: anything that could go wrong would go wrong. Two categories could go wrong. Risk avoidance is one of the strategies that tackles foreseen issues. You acknowledge these risks, and know what to expect. You can assess, prioritize, analyze and respond to them.

You are an expert at using the risk avoidance, which means re-planning to avoid risks. You already know about the strategies. The second one is unforeseen. Because you can’t see it, you can’t prepare for it. However, your personal life causes more trouble than the foreseen and unforeseen risks. Have you ever face personal problems that affects your professional or business life? You are not alone, because most people – millionaires and billionaires included – face similar problems.

Imagine what you would do when you feels like the entire world is against you, while your business is facing challenges. Some people have the strength to quickly move on, while others will beat themselves up. People tends to make rational and logical decisions when we are at our best state of mind. These rationality and logical abilities fade away when we are facing some kind of personal challenges.

Our world crumbling can have high effect on the ways we respond to business strategic decisions. When this happens, we ends up in a problematic situation – dragging our business along with it. People faces tons of problems, and I don’t know what you are going through. But you needs the ability to separate personal life from professional one. Because some people tends to responds to business situations – unrelated to the personal life – using a perspective from their personal situation.

And whatever it is, simple steps can get you back on track. These simple steps should be taken, and you could skip some of them. Accept you can’t control your feelings or some of what would happens in your personal life. It is even impossible to determine if this will have any impact on your business. But, if you finds yourself in any situation that makes you feels like you’ve lost your ways or less significant, then consider how to personally process the personal issues.

Don’t make any significant decision in your business, and have a partner control the business while you process your personal situation. How you choose to get back on track depends on what is troubling you, and there is no direct guidelines to it, except to process it, and we process things differently. The only thing that matters is get over your personal problem, and get back on track.

The best personality that top businessmen/women capitalize on is their abilities to disconnect. They have the ability to just let go of their personal feelings, and deal with business. The thing that clearly separates the two is your personal life is about you, and your business life is not! Working in team prevents some problems generated from personal life. But only if you are not the one making the final decisions. Because if you are – regardless of how big your company is – the consequence/problem will be inevitable.

Multiple scenario suggests that a weak state of mind is a source of weak business. A happy mind influence happy environment, and happy environment generates happy people, and happy people makes money. If the happy mind is gone, then we could not take control. It’s hard to see life as it is when the situation seems too difficult, and business do not symbolize your life, but your vision and responding to your callings. In conclusion, process your personal problems, and make big decisions when it is necessary and with a clear and objective mind.

Driving Power Motivates and Build Focus

Can you tell me about your driving power? What drives your relationships to your employees? Your business? Your identity? I’m confidence everyone has a personal driving power. The source of your business – and mine. Everything we do have a driving power, and all of them are not redeemable. Driving power is more dangerous than we think.

Some are so powerful that when it fades away, we cannot do it anymore. It is arguable that this is the reason most business professionals recommend that businessmen/women should put their names on anything they published. One motivation I heard was, “anything could happen, you could decide to sell your business, or you just don’t have passion for it anymore.”

I have heard of many successful and innovative businesses that start from a garage, lawn or other places in the house. The business was successful. But, it is not the driving power. They are doing it because they’d love what they do. Doing what we love is rewarding enough, and any financial earnings are additional benefits. We’d need money to run our business – but we won’t feel it.

It is like spending money on our basic needs. What drives us is often found in the core of our business: it is our identity, strength and change could stop it. Its common function is why the business exists. One powerful thing about the core is perspective, because it determines our action and how to act. Sometimes, when this driving power changes, we could see patterns that suggests how to handle it.

Unfortunately, the driving power of doing business sometimes fade away. When this happens, the motivation goes with it. Imagine what happens to a business or your personal relationship when the foundation faded away. All currently successful businesses are intelligent at deciding how to position themselves in a way that sustains their positioning power. Some no longer exists, because their driving power faded away like the Rockefeller magic faded away.

I like competitions, and have no problems competing against any company. But only when necessary. For example, when a new business enters your area of expertise, then you wages wars. Sometimes, if we explore this new business closely, it could be an ally, which potentially makes their customers yours without making them a competitor. This perspective might surprise you – we are all in business to make money and take out the competitors.

Just remember, there is a huge different between necessary competitions and the optional ones. The necessary ones are actually competitors, while the optional ones are troubling you for no or little strategic reasons. For example, it is understandable for Facebook and Twitter to compete against one another, but a clothing store compete against any of them changes things.

It is obvious that they are not even in the same class or branch. The clothing store could showcase and market its products on both F & T. A driving power builds perspectives that lead the path, which directs where to put focus and improves success possibilities. When the core is helping people, we can think of millions of ways to help, but when narrowing down how (perspectives), then we will see what to focus on.

These will strengthens your capabilities and knowledge about where to go on the overall success. In conclusion, driving power is the foundation that motivates you against all obstacles and boost your abilities to overcome most – if not all – challenges. It tells you where to put your focus, and where you are going. You can begins your path there.

Possibilities and Innovation: Business’ Improvements

Our business is extremely important, but so is our will to improve. I have studied a lot of business cases that consistently connects innovation to possibility. All business cases suggested that business has to keep improving, until 99 percent of mistakes are eliminated. The main point and end-result of innovation is producing or solving something.

The foundation to problem solution has always been quenching a quest for something. When you innovate, you are on the quest for improving something. It can be about almost anything innovative. Leonardo Da Vinci has a comprehensive perspective on it. He clarified that there has to be a quest for continuous learning. This is what you becomes, when you are running a business.

You’d have a quest for learning, until you reach a point where you are an expert in your field. Even then, you are still learning, because you’d like to expand the business. Do not forget the people you add when expanding, and dealing with people is a very complex topic. When you expand, new challenges emerge, and you’d be learning new things.

The main reason we study business cases is to learn from people’s mistakes. Further, we wants to learn from their success. We should try and avoid too-much-knowledge. As you’d know, when we have too much knowledge about a particular subject, they will most likely collide with one another, leaving you action paralyzed.

As Da Vinci said, if we do not learn from our mistakes, we cannot improve the business or product. Learning from mistakes are part of being innovative, and improving the business. A glance at a potential opportunity could be what takes your business to a new level. Pursuing opportunities are part of what makes innovation so great. The only thing greater is scanning for it, because if you can’t see it, you cannot pursue it.

It is an ability that defines the capabilities of the business. One thing that scares people off is ambiguity, because business is about embracing it. It does not matter how many case studies we made, because we do not know if what works for other businesses could work for your business. It is what makes ambiguity so powerful, and best strategy against it is being dynamic. We’d have to find a balance between our left and right brain.

We needs to know how to balance the two, and then cultivate a style that was purposely meant for expressing different ideas, and recognize the systems relationships. In conclusion, our business needs something productive, something that seven principles can achieve, according to Da Vinci. These seven are striving after consistent learning, having the wiliness to learn from pass mistakes and having the ability to scan for opportunities.

Further, we needs to have the will to embrace ambiguous part of business, know how to balance right and left brain perspectives, cultivate a style that can simplifies how to express the ideas, and recognize the ‘systems’ relationships for further exploration.