WHY IS CULTURE SO IMPORTANT?
Dean Shaw
Recent Posts
Entrepreneurs are constantly making decisions about where to best spend their cash. They generally have a list of opportunities to consider. But what is the smartest decision. Trying to decide what next strategic step to take with the business should start with an analysis of expected return on investment.
We Are Entrepreneurial Athletes!
We, as entrepreneurs, are athletes in our own right. We need to be disciplined in how we attack each day, just as football athletes, basketball athletes, tennis athletes and all other athletes are disciplined when they step onto their field or court. Entrepreneurs need to be disciplined throughout the entire day. Following are eight rules for Entrepreneurial Athletes.
Creating a financial road map is one of the most important roles of an entrepreneur. Giving financial direction to those involved in your business is important so that everyone is pulling in the same direction, thus creating synergy. Synergy is defined as: the simultaneous action of separate activities which, together, have a greater total effect than the sum of their individual effects. That is when one plus one equals a number greater than two.
Every good plan, whether business or personal, starts with setting goals; specific, quantifiable, written goals. If you know the outcome you expect, you will know when you have reached what you have set out to achieve. Having confidence is essential when you are managing a business.
Coachability has such an enormous impact on a business’s efforts to achieve its goals. An entrepreneur needs to “coach” his/her staff to create the most value. His/her ability to inspire and motivate each person on the team to perform at their highest level will dramatically impact the value generated by having a team. Synergy is the value that is created when people work together effectively. Synergy occurs when one plus one is greater than two.
Managers constantly struggle to create incentive systems to drive productive activity in the workplace. And while incentive systems are important there is compelling evidence that increasing the energy of employees and harnessing that energy is more important. Creating that energy comes from employees feeling they are making progress in the work that they do.
The challenge of the manager then is to do everything they can to create the perception as well as the reality of keeping progress moving forward. What happens when forward progress is being made? Many things happen, but they are really hard to quantify.
1) The worker is more confident.
2) The worker has the ability to make clearer and better decisions.
3) The worker has more energy and focus and is more “engaged” in the work that he/she does.
4) And with such focus the work actually gets done in a more efficient manner.
Progress is quantifiable only when someone knows what the goal is. You have to know where you are starting from and where you will be when the goal is achieved. It is only then that workers can feel they are making progress.
I received my latest issue of Harvard Business Review to find an article titled Finding Entrepreneurial Opportunity in Adversity. There was a comment in the article about something apparently Machiavelli had said. “Never waste the opportunities offered by a good crisis”. The article went on to pull a quote from Michael E. Porter’s book entitled The Competitive Advantage of Nations “Competitive advantage emerges from pressure, challenge, and adversity, rarely from an easy life.”