Recovering From An Epic Fail

April 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you start a business you need to be prepared to fail. No business has a perfect track record, though some are worse than others. What really makes a difference is what you learn from the mistakes you make. If you don’t learn you’re doomed to repeat that failure over and over again. Here are a few ways to get the most out of, and recover from, your epic fails.

The first step in failing successfully is to fail quickly.

The last thing you want to do is let a mistake take up more of your time and resources than it has to. Think of your fails as a learning experience and use them as a process for research and development. Try something out with a small sample group and if it doesn’t stick, move on! Keep trying until you find something that works.

“People never fail at anything–they just give up.” – Harvey Mackay

The next step is to empower and encourage your team to fail. 

Most people fear failure but if you’re encourage your team to embrace failure as a result of trying new ideas, you will experience more good failures than bad. Empower your team to try out new ideas, this empowers them to drive the growth of your company. Make sure they know that failure is acceptable… as long as they learn something from it.

Identify your strengths and your weaknesses.

Succeeding all the time can lead to mediocrity. A good old fashioned fail can teach you what you’re good at and what you’re not. It also gives you insight as to what your customers really want. Make sure that every time you fail you learn something about what you’re good at and how to use it as well as what you’re not good at and how to avoid it.

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What has been your best failure? Share in the comment box below or on Facebook and Twitter.

 

Filed Under: Advice For Entrepreneurs, Business, Business Strategy, Epic Fails Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Seth Godin’s Advice

December 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Seth Godin’s most recent post caught my eye. Partially because of how short and simple it was and partially because of the message.  You might have to read it more than once to let it soak in but there is A LOT of great advice embedded in this simple post.

Insulate yourself…

from anonymous angry people

Expose yourself to art you don’t yet understand

Precisely measure the results that are important to you

Stay blind to the metrics that don’t matter

Fail often

Ship

Lead, don’t manage so much

Seek out uncomfortable situations

Make an impact on the people who matter to you

Be better at your baseline skills than anyone else

Copyedit less, invent more

Give more speeches

Ignore unsolicited advice

 

Check out Seth’s blog here.

 

Wh advice do you have going into the new year? Share in the comment box below and don’t forget to connect with me on Facebook andTwitter.

Filed Under: Advice, Business, Business Tips, Leadership Tagged With: , , ,

Is All Publicity Good Publicity?

November 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The short answer… NO. You do not want to overload the world with news on every little thing you or your company do.  You also don’t want to aim your PR into a crowd in hopes that it might hit someone who cares. There should be a very specific strategy and purpose behind your publicity efforts. Here are a few of the drawbacks of publicizing aimlessly.

1. You may be promoting your news to people who would never do business with you, wasting a good chunk of your resources.

2. Bad PR can actually push people away. Bad press releases can train your press contacts to stop paying attention to you.

3. Your mediocre news may show up on unsavory sites, tarnishing the brand you have worked so hard to build.

The best use of your public relations and content marketing dollar is to target your appeals to editors, reporters, bloggers and other influencers who have previously shown an interest in covering your news or industry. You might also focus on outlets whose audiences care about companies like yours or who may like your products and services.

More Publicity and PR Tips Here.

Don’t forget to connect with me on Facebook and  Twitter or share your thoughts in the comment box below.

 

Filed Under: PR Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

How To Filter Your Search For Ideas

July 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

As a leader in your organization you never ever want to miss a good idea.  You also rarely have the time to evaluate and separate everything you hear and see into the valuable and worthless categories they need to be in.  Information is streaming faster than anyone can comprehend, so how do we sort through it all without losing our minds?  You have to create a filter or several filters that let you find the best ideas and information based on your priorities and needs.

The best way to start is to get specific.  Telling your team that you want them to look for ideas to help the company is too broad a mission statement.  Try to target one area that needs to improve the most.  From there you can break it down in to problem areas and areas that have a lot of room for improvement.  Decide on whether you need a solution or an idea before you begin the hunt and make sure everyone is clear on the specific goal.

To create a mental filter based on what is most important you need to identify your top priorities.  Think about what problem needs to be solved to free up your time and/or other resources.  Let your team/employees know that that finding a solution or idea is a priority.  You will then have several different sets of eyes and minds sorting through the information highway to find the best idea or solution. You can also use tools like Google Alerts to help target the information you are looking for based on keywords.

Once you use your resources to narrow down your search you have to start doing some of the thinking.  You may have 20 different solutions for the same problem the difference, like with anything, is in the context.  The next think you have to do if find out which of those situations is most similar to yours.  For example, you might not be able to use an idea or solution form a huge corporation if you only have three people working for you.  You also need to consider your time restrictions.  If you don’t have a the time to make one of the ideas work move on to the next one.

Filtering applies to any information source you come across, even your personal ideas.  Most people don’t have the time to really explore every idea that presents itself so it helps to have a way to narrow down your search.

 

For more business and innovation tips and ideas you can follow me on Twitter and connect with me on Facebook.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Ideas, Innovation Tips, Leadership, Managing Creativity Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Conan The Barbarian or Conan The Businessman?

June 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Fast Company ranked Conan O’Brien as the 8th most creative people in business for 2011.  They also got his input on several different topics that I thought were entertaining and insightful for anyone in business.  I grabbed a few of my favorites to share with all of you.

Preparation

Team Building

Creativity

 

For more business and innovation tips and ideas you can follow me on Twitter and connect with me on Facebook.

Filed Under: Business Tips Tagged With: , , , , ,

How To Fill Your Company With Ideas

June 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

If you develop a good supporting foundation and environment for creativity and innovation in your company you will never run out of ideas.  There are several things you can do to make sure you are getting all of the good ideas out of your teams head and on to something more concrete like say, paper.  Here are a few tips and tricks that I consider to be essential for developing an innovative workplace.

Never ever ever judge and idea.  Just because it doesn’t hit the genius button the second you hear it or think it doesn’t mean that it isn’t genius.  Most raw ideas need a little room to grow.  Make sure everyone in your company knows that every idea is considered valuable and while you may not use all of them you definitely want to hear them.

Visualize every idea.  No matter what context the idea there is probably a mental picture to go with.  These don’t have to be master works of art but enough to help share the vision with the idea.  Even if it is a bunch of stick figures on a piece of paper it will help.

Encourage constant brainstorming.  As we mentioned before there are not very many raw ideas that are perfect.  It helps to bounce an idea around from brilliant mind to brilliant mind.  By the time the idea has fully formed and everyone is excited about it you have a lot of questions answered and a workable idea to move forward with.

The last and final idea is to encourage problem solving.  Too many companies silently encourage employees to keep their complaints and ideas to themselves.  Those companies are missing out on their most valuable assets.  Encourage your employees to identify every problem that they can and come up with ideas to solve the problems.  These can be personal, company, or customer problems but no matter which of those it is, you are fixing a problem that will help your business.

For more business and innovation tips and ideas you can follow me on Twitter and connect with me on Facebook.

Filed Under: Building Creativity Tagged With: , , , , ,
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