The slippery slope of sensationalism

I pay very little attention to the daily news in newspapers or on television.  My reason is simple. What is being provided is largely sensationalism and therefore is of no value to me.

Yesterday's Sunday Herald Sun was a great example with the feature all about how Olympic Gold Medalist Grant Hackett had supposedly trashed his luxury apartment (last October!).  It caught my eye because I met Grant once when we were both speakers at the same conference.  I warmed to his message then and was inspired by his humility.  What business is it of ours what Grant did or didn't do in his own home?  None of our business as far I as I am concerned.  Interestingly the feature article was written by a crime writer.  As far as I know Grant has not committed a crime or been charged with one.  Again none of my business anyway! 

Is is right that Grant should have his name trashed?  I don't think so.  The biblical story I heard as child has always rung true to me.  Apparently a bunch of self-righteous people had gathered to stone a woman found to have committed adultery.  Jesus is said to have intervened saying to the those gathered "He who is without sin cast the first stone." Of course everyone walked away.  As an aside I have often wondered why they weren't thinking of stoning the man involved as well, but that's another story!

Sensationalism or substance is our choice. It is easy to have a cheap shot at someone else.  It is quite easy to shock.  It is another thing altogether to provide material of substance and value.

Creating attention grabbing headlines is an art.  We all need to become artists.  What really matters though is the substance under the headline and whether or not our readers believe we are providing value to them.

Be the difference you want to see in the world.
Ian

Key choices in ensuring success in change

The vast majority of the time life goes according to plan providing we do what we know we should do.

Plans start with an authentic picture of where we are now (current reality) and an equally genuine picture of where we want to go (possibility).

Our next step is to get crystal clear of why (our motive, intention, purpose, reason) we want to move from current reality to possibility.

Lack of clarity on why generally means a hazy how and therefore poor execution.

Next is to create our how we will get where we are going i.e. strategy. Strategy is our compass.

Next we determine (and agree when other people are involved) on who will do what and when.

In the small percentage of the time when you are doing what you know you should be doing and things don’t go according to plan, you have choices to make.

In the gap between what happens and how you respond is choice. Sometimes your choosing moment is a milliscecond and other times it varies. Here is the key you have a choice.

Could it be that making the right choices for us in the gap moment between what happens and our response, has a lot to do with how much we are actually doing what we know we should be doing? My answer is yes. I would value your thoughts.

Please comment or email me ian@changingwhatsnormal.com

Be the difference you want to see in the world.
Ian

How Authors Can Use Webinars to Sell More Books

If you're an expert who has written a book about your area of expertise - or you're in the process of writing it - I'm sure you know already that it's not enough to just publish the book and wait for the money to come rolling in. You need to do more - much more - to promote it (if you want more sales) and you (if you're using the book for positioning as an expert).

Webinars can be a powerful tool to help you as an author. Here are three ways you can use them to help you as an author.

1. Market Research

Your readers are looking for you to help them with one or more of these four things:

• Solve their problems
• Answer their questions
• Meet their challenges
• Achieve their goals

The more your book does these things, the more successful it will be. Unfortunately, sometimes it's difficult to know exactly what readers want.

One way to find out is with a free Question and Answer webinar. You invite everybody in your network (and ask them to forward it to their networks as well), turn up on the day and simply spend an hour answering the questions that people ask. Don't promote anything; just answer their questions. You provide an extremely valuable service, and in return you discover exactly what your market wants to know.

I've seen people do this without any more structure than I've just described. But you can add a few extra features - and make it easier for you at the same time - in a few ways:

• Invite attendees to e-mail you their questions in advance, so you have time to prepare your answers.
• If you've already got some structure for your book (for example, you know it's in four main sections), arrange the questions in this same broad structure.
• Record the webinar, and get the recording transcribed - this might even provide some new material for your book.

2. Bonus Webinar for Customers

To encourage people to buy your book as soon as it's launched, offer a bonus webinar for customers who buy it by a certain date. When I published my book "Best Practice Conference Calls", my co-author Brandon Munro and I used exactly this technique to drive our initial sales.

In this webinar, you simply deliver a presentation outlining the main concepts of the book, answer reader questions, and perhaps even offer some bonus material. Don't worry about repeating some of what's in the book, because attendees will appreciate learning the information in different ways.

Of course, a webinar is just one of the many ways you can encourage "early bird" sales, but it has a number of advantages:

• A webinar has a date attached, so this creates a natural deadline.
• You can serve all these readers at the same time, so you don't have to limit the offer to a certain number of readers (as opposed to, say, offering a free 15-minute consultation to them).
• The recording can become a product in its own right, which you can sell individually or as part of a bundle with the book.

3. Webinar Series

One disadvantage of a book is that it only gives you one point of contact with your customer. Most people won't read a book more than once, and very few of them will even read it in full even once!

You can address this by offering an on-going webinar series about the content of the book, either to customers only (as a bonus) or to anybody (as a promtional opportunity). I do this with my "Internet Business Revolution" webinar series, which is a spin-off product from my book "Fast, Flat and Free".

The purpose of your webinar series is not only to promote book sales - although it will do that anyway. It's also to continue positioning yourself as an expert, and to remain in front of your target market's mind, so that when they're ready to buy what you've got to sell, you will be their first choice.

Again, webinars are not the only option available to you. But if you're willing to make the commitment, they can be a very powerful option, because your attendees get to engage with you live.

Sustainability is a reason and a result

I was honoured to present the keynote address at the Association for Sustainability in Business Conference on the Gold Coast yesterday morning.

Although I don’t use slides in such presentations below are the slides provided to delegates that share the substance behind the stories shared.

My key points:
Profit is not a reason for being in business, rather a result of being good at business.

Sustainability is both a reason and a result.

We have crystal clear choices as illustrated below.

What choices are you making?

Sustainability - a reason and a result

View more presentations from Ian Berry

Be the difference you want to see in the world.

Ian



I work with leaders to conceive and achieve highly successful change initiatives.

Change management is an oxymoron

Change management in my view, like strategic planning, is an oxymoron.

Change initiatives are highly successful when leadership (both as something we do for other people as well as for ourselves) and management, are thought about and acted on in partnership rather than as the one discipline.

People everywhere confuse strategy and planning, two completely different disciplines.  Think about the two together at your peril.  Strategy is about how and planning about execution, who will do what and when. The consequences of confusing the two, or thinking about the two at the same time, are usually that great strategies never see the light of day, they get buried in massive documents that just gather dust, or worse, great strategies never get executed.

Confuse change and management or think about the two at the same time and likely that you will suffer a similar fate, what you want to change, won’t.

Successful change is about primarily about leadership.  Leadership as John Maxwell has observed is “about influence, nothing more, nothing less.”

I define leadership as the art of inspiring people to bring everything remarkable that they are (that one-of-a-kind each of us is) to everything they do

Leadership falters and usually badly, without management.

I define management as the practice of making it simple for people to bring everything remarkable that they are (that one-of-a-kind each of us is) to everything they do

Change like people can’t be managed.  What we can do is manage the systems and processes that will help us to bring about the change/s we are leading.

In all of my work with clients on change initiatives I follow the famous 8 steps of leading change put forward by John Kotter in his 1996 book Leading Change.

I reread this classic book on a plane recently more than a decade after first reading it. Kotter's work has lost none of its power and I still think it is a must read book for anyone leading change particularly as there is a lot of talk about change management when in my view clearly, successful change is much more about leadership that it is about management.  It is about both however, together in harmony.

How well are you succeeding in the change/s you are leading?

Please consider carefully my 13 reasons why most change initiatives fail:

#1. The people charged with making the change happen don’t really believe in it and therefore their work is half-hearted at best

#2. The change program is designed to take too long and the status quo wins

#3. The expectations are unrealistic

#4. People are not genuinely appreciated when they do well

#5. People are not held to account when they fail to perform as they agreed they would

#6. Measurements of progress are poor or non-existent

#7. Desired change is actually problem solving which usually means a return to the status quo rather than real innovation

#8. Intentions, emotions, and thinking doesn’t change and therefore any behaviour change that may happen doesn’t last

#9. There isn’t a real shared-view about why the change is crucial/essential

#10. There isn’t a real shared-view on how the change will happen and who will do what, and when

#11. Leaders don’t understand all change is personal first, relationships second, and organisations third

#12. Leaders don’t personally change

#13. Broken relationships remain broken

Great leadership in partnership with great management removes all of these reasons for failure.  Crucially the first step on any journey to success is about great leadership and it is great leadership that sustains  change.  Great management supports great leadership.  Great management is very little help to poor leadership.

The people I meet generally fit into one of five categories as illustrated below. And a further general rule is that the people in the two categories on the left often don’t know that this is how their employees perceive them!



How do the people you work with perceive your attitude to change?

Change is hard say some.

I believe change is simple when we observe and adapt the principles of thriving on the challenges of change that we can see and experience every single second of every single day in the change happening to us and all around us. 

To be successful does require work and often hard work but change itself is not hard.  Consider the foal as she struggles to stand for the first time almost immediately following her birth.  Consider more the leadership of her mother inspiring her offspring to take the natural first step into life.

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
John Lennon

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."
Charles Darwin

Be the difference you want to see in the world.
Ian

I work with leaders to conceive and achieve highly successful change initiatives.

No BS Mentoring It takes you further than you've ever imagined.

Presentations that solve your problems.

The Changing What's Normal Tribe - Candid conversations monthly online. Exclusive 24/7 access to remarkable personal, relationship and organisational change resources.

Change programs that fulfill their purpose and promise

Changing what's normal master-mind groups that guarantee you succeed in the change/s you lead

"The best way to bring home the bacon is to raise your own pigs"

For this weeks sparkenation I couldn't go past the following from the Name Tag Guy Scott Ginsberg:

“Why torture ourselves listening to voices that don’t matter when we could be executing work that does? Seems to me, the best way to bring home the bacon is to raise our own pigs. That way, when we’re hungry, all we have to do is grab a knife and go outside.”

Please read more from Scott here.

Be the difference you want to see in the world.
Ian

I work with leaders to conceive and achieve highly successful change initiatives.

PS If you live in Melbourne or Sydney please consider attending the Key Person of Influence event.

I have read Daniel Priestley's Key person of influence book, applied it's great content in my own way and got to know the folk who lead the business here in Australia. I highly recommend this event. I am going in Melbourne myself! It will be a great day to learn how to bring home your own bacon!

You can get your ticket here.

Your Immediate Business Potential is the Average of Your Inbox

I made a startling discovery the other day as I reviewed my sent items and looked through my email archives. 

We’ve all heard the concept that you become a product of your environment, and that your income will be the average of your five closest friends; or is it business associates?

Revenue had taken a bit of a dip in recent months and I was contemplating why. This wasn’t the reason I went searching through my email program. It simply struck me, as I looked at the recipients, the number of email threads with specific people, and the number of emails per thread with those people, that I was spending a lot of time talking to the same people with no outcome. 

So I invested some more time in looking back historically and without being too analytical, working off memory instead of comparing bank accounts and running complex formulas in a spreadsheet, I compared income during different periods to the type, volume and complexity of the email traffic. Here’s what I discovered.

I earned more money when I sent less emails to more people. The overall volume of emails during times of higher revenue generation was approximately 23.5% of the total and generated more than 87.3% of the revenue for the period reviewed. BTW I looked back over a period of almost 9.5 years. Also the ration of revenue in for effort expended in delivery plus hard COGS (cost of goods sold) was much higher … i.e. more profitable.

I earned less money, worked longer hours, and was generally unhealthier (later reflection) when I sent more emails to less people. Upon further reflection I realised I was a lot less happy and this rubbed off on my family.

What does all of this mean? Well I’ll leave that to your own individual interpretation. What’s clear to me is that less is certainly more. The clue though is to recognise what you are doing, interpret it in the context of the situation, and   lead yourself out of what could become a very self destructive parttern of behaviour. It is very easy to become wrapped up in a cycle of business busyness with the same people and delude oneself that the outcomes will follow. There is a time when it is appropriate to cut your losses and change direction. One of the greatest challenges is having the perspective to be able to do that at the right moment!

I encourage everyone to look at their email communications or whatever medium it is you use primarily for your business communications and unless you are very specialised in  your field with less than a handful of other people with whom you need to communicate regularly you may find similar patterns. If the patters are the good ones (i.e. lead to high revenue and profitability) keep doing what you are doing. If they are the negative ones, consider adapting your approach to the way you conduct your business immediately.

About Paul J. Lange:

Paul J. Lange is a business mentor and business performance coach who helps small to medium enterprise and entrepreneurs to apply big business, enterprise disciplines and solutions to gain a competitive advantage and increase profits. 

Paul's 'Business DIET'© system has helped countless entrepreneurs and business owners around the world to launch start-ups, expand existing operations, and greatly improve bottom lines.

Paul is also one of Australia’s most connected management consultants, and leading business strategists, with a passion for helping corporate leaders, entrepreneurs and business owners who are committed to achieving outstanding results.

Paul’s support will help you to develop strategic direction, implement it, execute and make more money. He will have you starting to work on your business, instead of in your business, right from day one; and if you have already started down this path, he will help you to complete the transition to business owner from business manager.

Web: http://www.paullange.com.au

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