Meaning and Purpose

Pablo Picasso said, “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”

We all know Picasso to be a great artist, but who knew he was also a great philosopher? 

Have you found your life's meaning? Are you exercising your life's purpose?

Are You Truly Client Centered?

Have you ever thought about identifying your clients' natural method for problem solving so you can serve them better? 

Have you ever considered matching team members to clients according to their shared instinctual approach? 

A financial firm in Minnesota has and does. Read about it here:
http://minnesotabusiness.com/article/defined-approach

Is Trial and Error Really Error?

I ran across this quote from Thomas Edison: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

It made me think, is "trial and error" a misnomer? 

For quick starts (those folks who thrive on taking risks and challenging the status quo), failure is in many ways a form of success...it's a stepping stone to the true, viable solution. Error is necessary - a welcome part of the creative process. 

Are you discouraging error in your organization or are you embracing it as a means to innovation?

Call It Like It Is

I came across this product online and had to laugh: Crap Stamp

Truthfully, it would be a really good thing to have around. A lot of wasted time, energy, resources and money could be saved if people were willing to call a doomed project what it is...crap. It takes courage to halt a project in the middle, and even more so near the end, but part of being productive is recognizing when an effort is not steering you toward the right result. 

The best solutions is to stop, call it like it is, and redirect all efforts.  

Conative Check-Up

A New Start

It’s a New Year, which means a fresh start. Most likely, you are taking this opportunity to review your personal and company health. So, why not take this chance to engage in an Annual Conative Check-Up?

What is an Annual Conative Check-Up?

An Annual Conative Check-up is a quick reassessment of your “mind health.” If you or your team is straining under significant conative duress, than your productivity and physical/emotional health are doomed to a downhill spiral.     

Your brain is literally less efficient when you work against your grain.

Ready to Start Your Check-Up? (It will only take a few minutes but, if taken seriously, could change the course of your entire year.)

Ask Yourself These Questions: 

1) What tasks exhaust me, while also producing little results? 

Solution: How can I delegate, automate or rethink these tasks? 

2) What tasks do I naturally gravitate toward? 

Solution: How can I maximize, replicate or take on more of these tasks?

3) When does my team experience gridlock, frustration and progress-killers?  

Solution: How can we fill the “missing gaps” in our team? How can we remix partnerships/work groups for a more effective collaboration?

The more time you spend thinking through these questions, the more productivity-boosting benefit you will gain from the evaluation process. And don’t feel limited to an annual timeline; feel free to revisit these core questions every 6 months, quarterly, or even monthly.

BIG, BAD Productivity Myths (#6)

BIG, BAD Productivity Myth #6: I want someone to work with me who has opposite talents.

Opposites may attract in love, but not in the workplace. We often think that our professional foil will be the perfect balance to our lackings. In theory, that may be true. Someone with opposite talents does bring entirely different capabilities to the table. However, it is nearly impossible to have a successful, long-term working relationship with an individual who possesses an opposing instinctual method.

So if not your opposite, then who?

It is far better to seek out someone who offers complementary talents. This combination creates a healthy challenge to your comfortable ways, while avoiding outright conflict. You'll find that your effort, when combined with a complement, grows exponentially. I'd say that's a much better option than having your effort canceled out by an opposite. 

Transformation as Innovation

I confess...I am a reality TV junkie. A recent addition to my repertoire is "The Next Iron Chef" competition featured on The Food Network. In last week's show, the chefs' challenge was to take a well known ingredient (mustard, hot sauce, ranch dressing, mayonnaise, etc) and reinvent it into something unrecognizable (yet still tasty) to its original form. So: same ingredient, completely different use and perception. The host referred to it as "transforming" the ingredient.

Transformation as Innovation

Someone once told me she didn't feel innovative because she never created anything "new." Yet, as illustrated in the Iron Chef challenge, sometimes you do not have to create anything new to be innovative. Merely looking at something from a new perspective or putting existing items together in new ways is just as contributory to the world of invention and creativity.

Are you struggling to create something out of nothing in your business for the sake of "innovation?" Maybe you should adjust your goal to the transformation of people, resources, or ideas that you already possess.