Business is a Work of Art

A work of art is challenging for its specific requirements. It is harder to draw without knowing what to draw. It can generates from creativity or reality. What we see can be harder to draw, especially when there are so many complexities in the process. Imagination accommodates flexibilities, which are less challenging to some artists.

It makes it easier to express your artistic mindset. Drawing a simple object is possible without mistakes. It depends on specifications for it. A ruler is used to ensure the part that is 8 cm. It might not requires any corrections. It has a wonderful end-result. This is a simple architect proficiency without any need for corrections.

Drawing a complex object and/or subject is harder without mistakes. It does not question your art skills, except the odds of doing it without mistakes is lowest. The most proficient artists have a pen and eraser close to them when working. They are confident in their skills, but they know mistakes are inevitable. The eraser is there to help smoothen the drawing process.

They says “one picture says a thousand words”. Others have found more than that in a single picture. This is similar to having a message behind the picture. For example a picture of someone in suit will indicates a professional. For a work of art to send any kind of message, it is important to find the pieces that sends that message. An architect gathers the pieces together, and connects them in drawing.

The work of art in business is like a brand. If the business’ brand says “Just Do It” as Nike, then the work of art is providing necessary materials and pieces that facilitate the customers to do it. The company does that very well. They gathers everything to structure the infrastructure that manufactures, market and promote anything in their area of expertise. A business normally works together with different components.

In some small, all medium and large companies, there is a department for human resources, sales and marketing, Research and Development, Managements that form the business. It is a work of art, because they are structured in a way that sends the brand to its customer segment. It is normal to find challenges for being extremely specific about what works for the business.

Most business improve on the process. They have been – still are – consistent update in policies. A new complexity leads to a new policy. Nobody knows it all, but everyone knows enough to move ahead. Updates are in the processes when improving. Businessmen/women normally notice mistakes, and make corrections. It is the same as erasing an error when drawing a complex subject and object.

Erasing something to correct an art still make it look beautiful. It is the same with business. Some parts of the business are obvious, and others are harder to notice until we dig deeper. These things improve what message a corporation sends. It is normal to correct errors, and know when to cancel a project.

The difference between an art and business is that you are consistently erasing and making corrections to the business, because it keeps improving and corrected. An entrepreneur is an artist with massive skills that consistently deals with complexity, ambiguity, risks and last but not least, people. Although, they don’t makes you an artist. What you structured to deal with them makes you an artist.

Conclusively, business needs an infrastructure that deals with its marketing, human resources, research and development and customer service. These are what you use with your architect skills to prepare an organized business. Because organizing a business makes you an artist. Erik Sherman’s article on Inc.com and titled “5 ways to Make Your Business, and Life, a Work of Art” provides in-depth knowledge on how to make your business a work of art.

Make Business Your Nature

When you have an idea, you have business in your nature. It is already your nature when you are the kind of person who keeps tactical and strategic in his vein. You’d have consistency in planning to reach a wider goal. The only complementary component is ambition, as I clarified in “Only Serve your Ambition”. This is the ultimate place, where your only driving power is your goal. When we are driven by a specific power, it is simpler to overcome most challenges that enhance motivation.

Sometimes, it get tough to keep progressing. Have you ever made an error before? Running an enterprise is more complicated. But when you make an error, you’d rather see it as a challenge than failure. Each approach will be different from the earlier ones. Then you keep tackling it until you resolved it. In “Treat Negativities as Opportunity”, I explored how current position includes corporate identity

Our main identity helps to ensure business works with us. We are consistently dealing with problems, making challenges inevitable. When we rather see it as a challenge than failure, we can make progress. I reformed the definition of failure in “Failure Never Stops Me”, where I discussed Thomas Edison’s experience. I argued that if Edison tells you about his failure, you will analyze it. When you analyze it, you will condemn the idea, and just motivates him to quit.

Every challenge fuels his engine to achieve the goals. In “Embrace Your Current Position”, I discuss human nature, with the famous story of a frog and scorpion. It clarified that despite current position, our nature always prevail. A business’/person’s nature is crucial. Most people believes that business is instant success or failure. However, reality says we probably start with some failures, before being successful. The results have varieties of circumstances leading to it.

As I said in, “Business Starters: 6 Steps for Creating a Vision, personal motivation is crucial. Don’t worry about how, just focus on why. When facing challenges, remember why you started. Motivation might get us started, but habit keeps us going. If you don’t know the personal reason you are in business, it’s difficult to keep up with business.

The reason we do what we do, in collaboration with ambitious goals, and exclude everything that suggests failure or misappropriate vocabularies that might stand in our way. These make us the great performer in business. On your way to serving your ambition, you need to exclude these phrases from your mind: “7 Phrases to Ban from your Vocabulary if you Want Success”.

It include phrase like, “that is impossible” and “I don’t have time”. Time and possibilities are always there for you to embrace. How you do it is what makes your goals most productive. Business is in your nature. Some people are managers, others are entrepreneurs that know how to improve existing things. Daily objectives are collaborative with the overall goal we strives after. In conclusion, these and other things collaborate in making business your nature. What we want is a goal, every challenge is not a failure, and our ambition is fuel to reaching the goals. Why we are doing it is the most powerful part of your nature.

Treat Negativities as Opportunities

If you run a company without negative experience, we will love to know how you do it. Wouldn’t you? The negativities that cause issues are boundless. Your company cannot exclude the negativities, just like life needs negative experience. And the corporation has a life of its own. A general path to improvement is still problems, control and resolution.

Our negative experience never condemns us. On the contrary, it improves us. A threat is a huge problem. We can’t sugar coat it in any way to make it any less of a threat. Some people avoid anything risky. Others will tackles the problem, and gain from the experience. Sophists believe that everything have a downside. They would argue that the aptitudes depends on what people do.

Philosophy tries to understand peoples’ experience. They rationalize and analyze it for a deeper understanding. They can argue that no matter your capabilities or intelligent level, it is impossible to go beyond your capabilities. For clarification, you cannot exceed your proficiencies. It does not underestimate your capabilities, nor does it depict your abilities to know what’s best. But it does inform you of something that the universe agrees upon.

Business might not be about philosophy. But great managers are also philosophers. They can understand a deeper meaning beyond what is visible to the naked eyes. Some experts have argued that managers use philosophic terms when making strategic decisions and socializes with other people for business purposes.  The company has already gone through some negative impact. At time, this problem will become something that gradually becomes a potential new business.

How you tackle a threat can makes it either a problem or opportunity. Resolving a problem do not go anywhere beyond resolution. Going further than that makes it an opportunity. It is where we extend our resolution to something to act upon. For instance, a negative event that we’ve solved becomes an opportunity to reach a new market. It is a new enterprise.

If you don’t know the problems, you don’t know its possibilities or opportunities that comes with it. For you to treat a negative experience as opportunity, you need to stop looking at it as your own problem. And consider how many other companies/people haves the same problem. Isn’t that the main reason most companies were established? We have seen companies establishing a competitor against themselves, because they sees the need in market.

Some big companies have subsidiary company that supplies different components/services to the company. For example, a company has a goal of producing a technological device. After some time, they establish another company, with goals to supply themselves and others with a specific component that contribute to producing the device. This in combine will result in building the device. Later, they establish another one to supply a complementary service/component for the company.

In some cases, they could have a manufacturing company for mass-production, when it is more productive than outsourcing it. Some will have a company that market their products and services, while marketing others’ products in the process. These subsidiary companies contributes to the company. They have different things that collaborate to make the company productive. Each one of them was due to a negative experience.

Opportunity is within your grasps. But the most important thing is to find and embrace it, in order to explore it. This is why ambition is the key component in expanding our businesses. This is where it becomes an opportunity. If we don’t see a problem as an opportunity, we can’t see it as a potential expansion for the company. But as something to solve and move on. After this experience passed, we’d know where to improve.

In conclusion, our business face negative experiences that causes problems. But even though it is a problem, it is easier to decide how productive that problem might makes the business. Our corporate problems can expand it. It is where our abilities are being tested, and enhance our capabilities.

Embrace your Current Position

As the business owner, your main objective is for the business to evolve and improve. This main goal is the driving power that keeps you going. Your business model has different components to move it forward. The business have the ability to acknowledge how to achieve something specific. You starts with tactical approach, reinforced with strategic decisions that in combined achieve specific objectives. You will use these as drivers. This is great.

But the first thing is to know who you are. Before you can evolve or improve the business, you need to stabilize yourself. For example, one of the most important thing in business is action research. It has to do with knowing the requirements for running the business. It should be the foundation of your business, prior to your business plan. When you have it, it is easier to know the things that explicitly identifies your business. It is not about what people sees, but your intimate knowledge. The same thing that identifies the business, also stabilizes it. If you know your branch, you’d know your position in it.

An enterprise normally have different positions in it. Even though they are in the same organization, they still have different set of responsibilities and roles. It is the same with a branch. The same thing that connects you to the branch also set you apart from competitors. You both sell services/products, but how they are delivered/manufactured varies from one another.

In order to successfully position your business, have an identity to it. The best thing with running a business is something you can work with. Something that perfectly suits your nature and challenge you. It should not be something for others to run, when the identity is made for someone like you. But note that qualifications differs from character.

Use identity to position yourself in the market. Everything in life has a nature. Every human being has its nature, so does a business. Have you ever heard of the story of frog and scorpion? The scorpion wanted to cross a river, and persuaded the frog to transport it, by arguing that it wouldn’t be in its interest to bites it. But in the middle of transportation, the scorpion bit it, and when the frog asked why it killed both of them, the scorpion replied, “It’s my nature.” Having a nature tells what perfectly defines the business.

In our nature, we need something that makes the business something to fight for, and having a nature tells what define the business. It should be the general process that helps you grow the business. Don’t give it to it though, but rather looks at it, and find the things that truly defines its nature. The best nature comes naturally. When a business has a nature, it has to grow naturally.

Everything is part of its identity. Nothing is forcing it to do doing something it does not want to do. But it does have something that naturally demands the growth, which is where we can naturally accommodate the growth. If we don’t grow by nature, it might be too overwhelming for us to maintain and sustain the growth. Moving forward includes allocating resources and utilizing them to achieve the goals. As we move forward, errors will emerge in the process.

Because as we evolves, we notice some issues to deal with. It improves us, while detecting the most incompatible part of it. We could either change or improve it. This is not failure, but a chance to improve. At the matter of fact, I am a huge believer of the phrase “small failures helps us move forward”. This is a fantastic way to run the business.

For you to naturally grow, ensure stabilities in the source behind the reason you are doing it. One of the best way to do this has consistently been embracing the current position and nature of the business. It is not because of intelligence or smartness. But because it is the most efficient way to define the kind of growth your business needs. Embracing the nature of business help to know the good nature for us in our ways to the promise land. We will use our resources to move our organization forward.

Forcing the business to grow will simply lessen the productivity. For example, knowing that the business performance will be better if we do this is simply the same as thinking a different approach to an objective is better than the current one. That is by nature, but growing based on that should be made if the productivity of new ways will be consistent.

We need to let the business grows naturally, otherwise we might find ourselves in an undesirable position. In conclusion, stabilizing your business, establishing its nature and allowing yourself to naturally grow starts with you embracing your current position. If you don’t embrace today, you may not be able to prepare for tomorrow.

Dynamic Mindset

Imagine that yesterday, you spent hours preparing for the week. Objectives were allocated to respective team-member. You woke up dedicated to start working on it. But when you started, people disrupted your dedicated mindset before you truly dig into the work. When everything is set anything that gets in the way is a problem. The longer the disruption, the harder it gets to have required mentality to start working. It is how you work.

You are a morning person who consistently starts morning duties before being disrupted. If the job doesn’t really start before the disruption, then it is hard to start it. It is like a source of procrastination. This is the source of considering how important a dynamic approach is. Have you ever been in a position where you have to make quick decisions? Did you found the decisions satisfying or did you wished you made a better one after a while?

I mean, if you are in a room and the door suddenly locks, do you knock on the door or go MacGyver? I choose this character because of his dynamic character. He has a stable goal, but doesn’t plan anything more than current event. He only look for things within his current vicinity. Instead of dwelling in what he doesn’t have, he rather look around and use the resources in the vicinity to achieve his objectives.

Setting up a goal with SMART-method clarifies where the constraint lies. Most companies – if not all – use it to measure the business overall performance. They do it directly or indirectly. Make sure you clarifies the aim when setting where you are going with the objectives. You have prepared your ways to reaching the objectives, shattered into pieces. One million small objectives combined together becoming a big one.

It’s not aim settings that puts dynamic mindset in action, but the path to achieving the objective. Things doesn’t always work out. Things happens on the road, and we should have the ability to tackles them as they occurs. Each objective could start a small problem, or inabilities to finish, and one objective might be insufficiently applicable to the other ones – and you were so sure it would when you started.

What you have specified as aim is not as important as how it would be reached. Antoine de Saint-Exupery said “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” Have you ever been in a position, where the gathered puzzles refuse to link to one another? The mind was set on that incompatible piece of puzzle. I don’t know about you, but I truly hates when it happens.

When things does not work our way and the goal is still stable, it put constraints on our dynamic frame of mind. This put things in order. Everyone loves the idea of having a clear goal in mind, but hates the possibilities of them not working in their favor. Things doesn’t always turn out as expected. This is why we are prepared to pick the pieces and turns it to something productive. It is where we learn to turn what is currently happening into what we want.

Have your mind set on where you are going, but dynamically measure the path to the destination. One of the most important thing is our dynamic capabilities, because they drives our most powerful strength. The way you approach one person is not the same as you would someone else. Another thing is that sometimes we don’t get exactly the same response from two different people. In short, don’t change your goal, rather have a dynamic path to it. It is the only way you can measure how you are doing on the process, and gets enlightenments about any potential problems coming your way.

Believe in Yourself with 3 Simple Steps

The first time you think about a business, you are probably driven by passion and excitement of running one. You are about to run your own show, be your own boss and all the benefits that comes with it. Problems are mostly identified as risks. You don’t know how it will work out – no matter how smart you are, future is based on probabilities. It makes your business ambiguous at best.

Business doesn’t always works out, and whether you like it or not, you’d have to pay the bills. It is high risks high reward kind of thing. Some motivational speakers says you should bet big in order to be at your best. Others will say you need a safety net, in case things doesn’t work out. In other case, being in the middle of it makes you the best in the market.

It is doing what you do best, the way only you can. It identifies you and helps you segment the market. For you to please anyone, identify them. The more specific you are, the better you are at identifying the people you want to please. This is one way to live up to Bill Cosby’s quote, “I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” 

A failed business starts your path to success. It gives you intimate knowledge about the failure. If you sits down and study it, and your feelings is overwhelming, that’s when it is hardest. It’s not the strategic decisions that mostly affect you, but the personal feelings playing a more significant role. This is the place, I need you to believe in yourself. I know that it is easy to sit on the sideline, and say that. But it might be harder to say when I put myself in your position. But he whom dwell in negativities is caged.

Billy Connolly said, “Before you judge someone, walk a mile in their shoes.” This is how we get full understanding of things, and how to excel your capabilities. It is not about how many times you’ve failed, nobody cares about that. The truth is most successful companies have failure in their history. It’s either you don’t know about them or they keep it private. The world is filled with optimistic spirit. But every negative event represents challenge, and each one makes you stronger and better. For you to believe in yourself, I need you to do 3 things.

1.      Learn from your past

Look at what happened in every failure, and learn from it. Remember, creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes, and art is deciding which ones to keep.

2.      Let go of your past

One great way to do this is look at your life history. Acknowledge what happened when you make mistakes, emphasizing the problem doesn’t help. Just let it go, because nothing is lost, when you learned lessons. Holding on to past failure when you’ve learned from it do more damage than good.

3.      Focus on the future

You have intimate knowledge about what you have been through. You experienced the consequences, which feels like the only return on investment. You’d got more though. You get better, stronger, and smarter with it. It is a reward itself. If we’ve learned from a mistake, then we have to get better and have a better future.

Oscar Wilde says it best, “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future”. In conclusion, let go of your past and believe that the dark history enlightens weaknesses. You need to know them, to know where to improve, and every dark past is your path to start working on the future.

7 Requirements for Success

The moment you initiate the process of starting a business, you instantly becomes an investor. Yesterday, I saw this lovely article “The Top 5 Requirements for Success” that says time, energy, knowledge, confidence and taking actions are the most important requirement for success. Then it reminds me of a humble entrepreneur who said, “in order to pay the bills, I do not need a job, I need an income”.

It is very important to protect all proprietary assets. It could be patent, trademarks, copyright and so on. Patent and copyright can either be sold or licensee. This also enables protection to our investment as well as differentiating ourselves from competitors. It makes attracting investors easier.

What are you investing? These are:

·         Your time

·         Your money

·         Your energy

·         Your expertise

To be as successful as possible, have success in mind in order to bring it to reality. Your endeavor needs the allocation that motivate you to move forward. It is important to think like an investor, and then consider how to thoroughly allocate the resources to complete the business. Do you have good ROI today? Will you have good return on investment tomorrow? Before you focus on how to allocate the resources, you need to understand 7 essentially requirements for you to be successful. These 7 requirements are the glues that holds everything you do together.

1, Vision – Vision is a necessity to success. Without a clear vision, everyone related to the company will be confused. They will be asking, what are we doing? Others won’t be able to make good conclusions for the company. 2, Strength – Working without strength is bad. Working in an unnatural way produces bad result. Making it necessary to work double shift to deliver promises to customers.

3, Passion – Burn for what you are doing, if you don’t, nobody else will. If you are unmotivated, change branch. 4, Resources – There is nothing more frustrating than having a good idea, but lack the resources to bring it to reality. But remember our previous blog “Success Begins in Mind”, where we clarified that you don’t need huge resources to start. 5, Partners – You are not strong alone. Rather use other’s network and accept 10% of 100 million than 100% of nothing. Doing everything alone put limitation on success.

6, Tactics – You might have good product for right price.  However, if you have a bad marketing tactics, weak results are inevitable. 7, Action Plan – Failure to plan is planning to fail (either way you are planning). There’s no action without planning. The only thing we have is talkative and false up-starter. This make action plan a necessity. These seven are chosen for their impact on your business. Which one has your strength, and where are your weaknesses? How do you deal with the weaknesses? I don’t know, but I believe you do.