Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the category “Vision and Goal Setting”

18 Aug 2008
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Strange Bedfellows: The Relationship between Mood and Time Management

Cumulus 4 by Marcin Rybarczyk

Cumulus 4 by Marcin Rybarczyk

Again, it must be where my mind is at the moment. The challenges of time management and personal effectiveness all seem to be appearing in the shadows and the greyness conscious, rational, systematic approaches to the problem.

I think I need to start to believe the statement made in  Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s excellent Fooled by Randomness

‘We will see that we are not genetically fit to be rational and act rationally’ – there is a divorce between those who have ideas and those who carry then out in practice

(Here is the link to the string of posts on the impact that Fooled by Randomness has had on me)

I make this observation as I monitor myself into a next phase of effectiveness. I am getting a lot more focused on My3Things for each of my areas of accountability/ personal vision and goals (I have extended out my own use of the term My3Things from its use within Madgex for 360 degree feedback – just a useful way of managing a ‘dashboard’ of top 3 priority actions over seven areas of accountability/ vision & goals)

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Posted in Conscious and Unconscious, Creativity, Focus, Happiness, Time Management, Vision and Goal Setting and tagged , , , ,
30 Jul 2008
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Specialisation and the Power of Focus

Dart by Asif Akbar

Dart by Asif Akbar

I had an excellent MDHub100 work group today. The work groups I think of as being most like AA for CEOs and MDs. A place where you can relax in the company of trusted peers and share your deepest, darkest issues.

It was attended by Paul Feist from Feist Hedgethorne and Zoe Porteous from Boutique Communications. Most ably facilitated again by Fi Shafer from Omega Blue.

A lot of the conversation was about business specialisation. I was arguing that specialised businesses – those with a niche focus – had a number of advantages:

  1. Enforced creativity: you have to innovate products and services to maintain a strength and grow revenues in your chosen niche
  2. Ability to cross-propagate best practice and ideas across clients
  3. Continually increasing expertise/ knowledge in the area
  4. Reduction of noise/ thrashing in switching focus between different areas. One industry/ one niche = one focus
  5. Ability to act as a forum for industry interaction (roundtables/ seminars etc.)

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Posted in Creativity, Focus, Happiness, Management, NLP, Strategy, Vision and Goal Setting and tagged , , , , , ,
01 Jul 2008

Goal Setting makes things less Scary

I’ve just come back from our six-monthly strategy away days with the Madgex shareholders. Now these are always good events. We get through a lot of stuff very productively.

This session was particularly productive because since we have tightened the focus of our mission to be the global leaders in job board software and services, our ‘flamenco dancing’ of innovation and creativity has significantly step-changed for the better.

Over the last two days we agreed a set of targets for the five years from 1.2.9. We’re into our fourth year of targets set four years ago which we’ve achieved in each of the years. Now this next set of targets should have ‘filled us with the fear’. We’re talking triple-digit millions. Yet it didn’t.

The reason why I think that it didn’t is that we’ve taken the time to plan the scenarios and imagine what it would be like. We’ve done the sales capacity modelling. We’ve got a big A3 map full of our ideas. We’ve allocated responsibilities and modelled in our heads what it will feel like when we’ve got there.

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Posted in Business, Focus, Leadership, Management, Vision and Goal Setting and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

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