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Never Enough Time It's a cliche of executive life: you don't have time to do everything. Whether you use little slips of paper, a planner, scheduling software or a Palm Pilot, all attempts at time management fail. Rather than throwing in the towel, I suggest that you need a new frame of reference. Change your focus from time management to priority management. Create a list of priorities Your strategic plan should highlight your business priorities. If you don't have one, take a look at ... How To Get Things Done: A Guide To Strategic Planning A step-by-step program for creating a strategic plan and tactical plan guaranteed to help you get more of what you want done. You are pursuing a strategy en route to your vision. Whether it is revolutionary or evolutionary, it does not matter. You are on the road, committedly driving your business in a direction of your own choosing. The important thing is that you have, in fact, chosen this course. And, once you have made this choice, how are you going to realize this ... How To Communicate Value Proposition And Return On Investment As part of my continuing series on Value and Pricing, the following article shows you how to position your company's value contribution to support the highest value-for-value exchange. Too many business owners, when asked about the value or ROI of their product or service, shrug their shoulders and say, "I can't really put a value on it." If you can't put a value on it, think how hard it is for your prospects and customers! And if they can't put a value on it, how likely i... 5 Ways To Beef Up Sales...Immediately Last week, one of my clients—we'll call him Rick—had a demo scheduled with a prospect. The standard "show up and throw up" they typically did early in the sales cycle. Trying to shorten the sales cycle, I asked naively, "Why does the customer want to buy? What are they trying to accomplish?" Rick couldn't tell me. I asked if he thought the salespeople knew. He said no. I gave him an assignment: he had to find out "Why," "Why now," and "What's it worth." Otherwise no demo. ... Equity: The Golden Handcuffs Last month, I wrote about positioning your company to attract and keep top performers. One very effective way to do both is to compensate your key employees with equity. Performance pay has become a critical factor in keeping top talent; combine it with a sense of ownership and a stake in the future of the business, and you've got a powerful set of incentives. That is what equity does. The basic theory behind equity compensation is simple: generously pay your people in ... Creating Breakthroughs "The world we've made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking" - Albert Einstein Runaway success is never based on incremental improvement. I know this is a very bold statement, but bold statements and even bolder results are what breakthroughs are all about. What about in your company - what would constitute a breakthrough? Would you like to increase overall productivity by 40%? Of course ... Attracting (And Keeping) Top Performers Good people are hard to find, the saying goes. For example, by the year 2000 over 190,000 computer programmer and other information technology jobs will be vacant, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report. (This is now a bit out of date, and although the dot-com bustups and the 2000-2001 recession has eased things a bit, it is still difficult to lure top talent.) It may be easy to fill these empty positions if you are a software giant like Microsoft, but there is a tr... Thinking About More Business What does an old Russian joke have to do with getting new business? Did you increase your business in the past 12 months? Don't discriminate between more new clients or old clients spending more money -- count the increase either way. If you didn't, you really should be asking yourself why not. Yes, I know -- it all started with the Internet implosion. Then came terrorist attacks. Next, the global recession. And after that, a war that threatened to destabilize the worl... The Secrets Of Strategy - Part 2 Of 2 Of course you've heard that when you do what you've always done, you'll likely get what you've always got. In this case that means playing the tactical game: coming up with acceptable--or worse--comfortable options and executing them as time permits. Likely, what you'll get is business as usual, and things will be... well, they'll be fine. But "fine" may not be what you're after, and you are probably reading a series called "How to Create Strategies That Work" so you can d... The Secrets Of Strategy - Part 1 Of 2 A step-by-step guide to creating a growth strategy based on your current situation and future possibilities. I'll bet you think you already have a strategy. And well you may, but strategy as a concept is just like love: much used and little understood. Many businesses (and that includes small entrepreneurs, large corporations, non-profits, community organizations, governments, NGOs...the works) neither know what strategy really is, nor how to get one. And even if ... 10 Questions To Consider When Growing Your Business Here's a provocation for the coming year, decade, century or millennium. By now, you've set a working direction for the year, established clear-cut objectives. Your first-iteration plan to reach them should be in place. This now seems like an ideal time to rethink the whole thing, doesn't it? After all, one of the effects of internet time is that plans are subject to change just as soon as - or perhaps even before - they are written. Along these lines of thinking, perha... What Stops You? Have you ever had a terrific idea which you didn't act on? Of course you have. I don't mean anything fancy either. Nothing earth-shattering. Just a plain old-fashioned good idea which would have made you more money. But you didn't get moving on it. Oh well. I have a friend I'll call James. James is an independent management consultant and a deep, creative thinker. I have great respect for his abilities to understand his clients and develop unique solutions for them. But... What Not To Do And How Not To Do It How can you get more done? Can you really do more than you already do? Is there still room left on your plate for even one more thing? The truth is I don't know anyone (successful) who has too little to do. Not one of my many clients--nor any of my friends, acquaintances, or people I meet on planes--none of them has ever said they have too little to do. Doing more to get more done is simply not an option. The answer to doing more is doing less. Less? Do le... Unreasonable Requests "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists It is probably the number two task of leadership -- asking. You ask people to do things, and when they do -- well, stuff happens. But what really extends your ability to make big things happen is asking for things that are "unreasonable." Wha... Which Is Better: Repeat Business Or New Customers? - Part 2 Of 2 Recently we asked which was more important: new customer growth or repeat business? The answer depends on your business goals. If you want fast-paced quantum growth, you should concentrate energy on adding new customers. But if your goals are more incremental - if you envision continual year over year growth in the 10 to 20 percent range - booking repeat customer revenue is far easier than adding new customers. (Of course, don't lose sight of new customer acquisition; d...

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