An Entrepreneurial Journey

Are you a Multiplier or a Diminisher?

We have all read and been told by the business guru’s that people are your most important asset. Given that about 70% of US businesses are service and information oriented, most of us have experienced that people are not only the asset, but also a good portion of the problem. In fact, one of the hardest things to do in business is to get people on the same page. It’s not easy to find a balance of working together happily and growing, without people fighting back thinking you are trying to control them.

Have you worked with someone that stifles the conversation and has all the answers? At the other end of the spectrum, have you worked with someone that brings people up and lifts the intelligence of the group?

What is Your Reality?

Are you creating the world that you want to live in, or is the world you live in creating you? Is your life what you want it to be, or one you plan to change…someday? If there were a proven method to create the life you want to live, would you use it? What if I said that there is one, and I’ve used it, and it’s changed my life?

Back in the early 90’s I read the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. I know it has one of those names that sounds too cliché to believe there is actually a powerful message found inside.

4 Steps to Creating Your Reality

Did you know that if you have 2 piano’s in the same room, and you play a note on one piano, it will cause that same note to vibrate on the other piano without ever touching it?

You can create that same kind of vibration in your life, where you radiate a belief that attracts like-minded people. These people can help you manifest the kind of life that you want to live. This is a follow up to my last blog on reality statements, so if you didn’t read it, check it out here.
1 Brainstorm all the positive things you want in your life.

The Economy Is Alive

Looking at the economy and how it operates can give you insight into a model of reality that helps to make business decisions that keep you alive and evolving instead of dying off and becoming extinct.

Many people think of the economy as a mechanical instrument that you can control and operate with the twist of a knob or a pull of a lever. This seems to come from the Newtonian perspective that the universe is predictable, stationary, and perfectly knowable with its mathematical formulas. This Newtonian approach was given life by economists of its time.

The Power of Forum

I just got back from a conference for EO Injected Forums in Sonoma, CA where I had a great time with my Forum mates sharing and learning together. It struck me that I talk about Forum lot in my blog, but not everyone has had the opportunity to be in a forum or even understand what a Forum is, so let me tell you about the Forum experience.
I am in two Forums. One is a local EO Forum that I have been in since 99, which meets monthly. The other is a regional Forum made up of EO members from the South East who have been in EO for more than 7 years, and meets quarterly.

When 1 + 1 +1 = 19…

As I’m writing this, I’m on a plane returning from the 2010 Fortune Growth Summit, where I was exposed to some amazing speakers and content on growing and making your business better.

Some of the speakers included David Sokol (who Warren Buffet calls his Mr. Fix it, more to come on him soon), Chip Heath with his bestselling book Switch, Liz Wiseman with her new leadership book Multipliers (very impressive!), Robert Bloom who is a marketing legend and David Meerman Scott who shared his new book Real Time Marketing & PR. The conference ended with Tom Adams, CEO of Rosetta Stone.

Are You in the Path of the Software Monster?

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I am on my way home from India and excited about what is going on at our office in Pondicherry, where we have our software development office. Each time I go, it is exciting to see what has manifested from a small 10’ x 15’ room with 2 people back in 2004 to a facility expanding 4000 square feet and about 40 people today! This team is filled with smart, highly analytic minds with a desire to grow, progress, and improve their lives while making a positive impact on their families. I have watched as they have matured, gotten married, had children, and bettered their lives, increasing their standard of living. It is a great feeling to see this evolution and connection we have with the team!

Who’s Driving?

Having been in business for a while I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what motivates people and what I can be doing to help increase their motivation. I wonder how they get excited about what they do or what outside forces motivate them to want to do more. I have seen the Carrot and Stick work, and I have seen when it did not push people to do better. This made me wonder if it was the people, the culture or other factors that didn’t follow the traditional Carrot and Stick model.

I’ve read some of Daniel Pink’s work in the past, but when he wrote Drive I was excited to see what he had to say about motivation and what drives people to want to do better.

How Clear Are Your Decisions?

I have tried many times to write a blog on bias in the decision making process, but other current events pushed the issue to the back burner. How we see the world is crucial to how and why we make decisions. Ultimately, our success in business and in everyday life is guided by how we perceive the world and how that affects our decisions.

Back in my investment days, I discovered a CIA report called the “Psychology of Intelligence Analysis.

Decision Biases: Anchoring (How Clear are Your Decisions – Part 2)

We are continuing our discussion from last week on the decision making process and the “Psychology of Intelligence Analysis” released by the CIA. Let’s look at the different types of biases and how they affect our decision making process.

The report discusses various preconceptions such as cognitive biases, hindsight biases, biases in perception of cause and effect, biases in estimating probabilities, and subsets of these biases like anchoring. Each of these affect how we view the information set before us and can slant our judgment from reality.