Aug
14
co-operation is for sissies
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It’s easy to believe that co-operating with other people, other teams, and other organizations is a great way to build success in whatever form you might define that. But when you look at it, there’s a naiveté that just can’t be ignored.
Companies and business leaders at all levels are especially susceptible to this one. How many times have you heard “we need to communicate better and work together better and then we’ll achieve….” whatever it is someone wants to achieve? It’s a pretty common battle-cry: unfortunately it’s kind of empty.
The fact is that working with others can be really rewarding, just as it can be a pain in the ass. Often times we experience both with the same group of people. And I’m not trashing co-operation per se, what do want to do, however, is make some of its boundaries a bit more visible.
Co-operation is generally the notion of a bunch of people working together for a shared goal. Working together (as mentioned earlier) can be cool, and a pain. Having a shared goal is the part where it shifts to being for sissies.Here’s the thing, when you pull a bunch of people together and they share a goal, it’s actually fairly simple. You rally around the goal and the common interest is obvious, explicit, it’s what brought them together and likely compelled them in the first place. The problem is that most of the important things in the world just plain don’t work that way anymore.Co-operation is easy, collaboration is the tough stuff.
Now many people will use co-operate and collaborate interchangeably, but I don’t see it that way at all. I see collaboration as working with people across different kinds of borders where there is barely any common ground - until you take a systemic view. Let’s break this down a bit.
First, what is a systemic view? One way to think about it is like an ecosystem. I’m sitting in garden outside of an Inn in California today. I am breathing air from the environment; there are plants all around here that use water from the local water sheds; the amount of sunlight today has warmed the brickwork that’s now cooling in the night air; in short, I’m sitting here in an environment. If you were sitting here and we were having a heated argument about my sometimes fragmented sentence structure and what might border on run-on sentences at times. We could argue all day long. Then let’s suppose it started raining heavily - major downpour. We might unite in that moment to get inside and stay dry. Better yet, let’s say we found out that in one hour there would be no more breathable oxygen where we were unless you and I came up with a way to solve it. In that moment, we might set aside our grammatical assaults and handle the bigger issue.
Short version? When we focus on what’s happening in the system around us, that’s a systemic view. Going back to our understanding of collaboration, to collaborate successfully requires having a systemic view of relationships. This is how we start to get a grip on the “across different kinds of borders”.
When we are dealing with systemic issues, we need participation from voices that speak for all the different parties in the system because if we don’t, we’re just kidding ourselves in thinking we’re informed. If it were a business we might need to hear from our staff, our bankers, our suppliers and our customers. Pretty obvious stuff. But it would probably also include people who hate our industry, our competitors, people who refuse to do business with us, government groups, NGO’s and many others. That’s where the obvious ends, and the guts to step past being a sissy comes in. This is not easy ground.
Collaboration demands of us that we set aside mere success, and actually move toward significance. We may have to set aside some positions and perspectives that have been hard-won in our lives in order to serve what the system requires of us. Interestingly, with all the uncertainties and risks that can live in this arena of true collaboration, the only real surprise in the communication breakdowns that occur is that we’re actually surprised by them!
Some of the biggest challenges in business today, perhaps challenges that threaten our sustainability or even our viability in the not-too-distant future will only be fully solved when true collaboration across potentially uncomfortable boundaries takes place. I don’t have some magic formula for how to do this, but what I do know is where the battlefield is, and I’m stepping onto it.
Be outstanding - Chris
www.chrisvenn.com
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Jul
12
you can’t outsource your high dream…
Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment
In Relationship Systems Coaching there is a term called High Dream. Quite simply it means the best case scenario; what would be the most perfect outcome. And day in and day out, people have these incredible pictures of their future, even the short term future of what’s going to happen in the next few minutes, or next few seconds.
The High Dream is our ideal picture of what that will be.Along with the High Dream comes the Low Dream - the absolutely worst version of the story where everything goes wrong and we get the exact opposite of what we’d desired.
As someone who works with all kinds of business leaders, I’ve heard about a lot of High Dreams. When people start businesses, start new jobs, start new relationships, or just restart themselves, they invariably have this picture of what it might look like. In my own life I have all kinds of High Dreams and I’ll bet that you do too.
Here’s the deal about High Dreams though - they’re yours. No one else has a High Dream that’s identical to yours; they might be really close, but not identical. And what that means is that no one is going to give you your High Dream, you have to create it.
Going further, you can’t hire people to create your High Dream either, otherwise it loses the emotional qualities that make it your High Dream. It’s true, you can’t outsource your High Dream.
So what has to happen? If it’s really your High Dream, your best goal, your best case scenario then it’s solely up to you to create it. I see business owners all the time who want to create big changes in their businesses and they want someone else to do it - an employee, a contractor, a coach, something like that.And there’s a reason they are rarely happy - the reason is, you can’t outsource your high dream.
Share your dreams and know that you alone are responsible for them.
Be outstanding - Chris Venn
Jun
9
you cannot become successful
Filed Under Big Picture Stuff, Business Thinking | 1 Comment
I have bad news - you can’t become successful. I know you’ve been working hard at it, indeed you might think you’ve already done it, but that just isn’t the case.
Part of the challenge we’ve got here is that we typically view success as being the achievement of some sort of worthy goal, making a pile of money, feeling “happy” - something to that effect. Let’s do some of the head-work and then we can look at this from a different angle.
Scenario: you’ve created a business for yourself and have busted your butt to get it to a point that’s profitable. Maybe you did that a while ago and now you’re making ridiculous amounts of money compared to others. Or perhaps you have a cool corporate job and you’ve been diligently climbing the big ladder and are getting to, or have made vice president, senior vice president, maybe even higher.
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So what did it take to get there? Did we sacrifice our health along the way? How’s our drinking been? How much time with our kids did we sacrifice? What did we do to the closeness of our family? Who did we piss off to get the result we wanted? How much sleep did we lose? How much did we increase our caffeine intake? What did we do to the environment along the way? Who did we make wrong?
I say “we” because I’m in this group. I’m guilty.
I have most definitely shoved work in between me and just about everything that’s important to me at one point or another - so I’m not talking to you, I’m certainly talking to us. And what I’ve learned of late is that doing all that stuff to get the “worthy goal” just plain isn’t success. It’s a result for sure, but that doesn’t make it success.
So if I can’t become successful, what the heck am I supposed to be doing !?
You cannot become successful, you can be successful.
The ends and means are absolutely not separate, so get out of this “cause and effect” thinking and understand that “how” you are in every moment, every conversation, every deal, every meeting, every phone call, every romantic moment, every second with your kids, every second period determines whether or not you are successful.
Achieving stuff is great. I like doing it. But it’s not what I do that matters, it’s how I do it. And when I do it by being real, by exploring the options, by respecting the people and environment around me, and by really caring, I am successful! Successful isn’t something that happens later, you can’t become successful. It’s something that happens right now.
Be successful (and outstanding) - Chris Venn
May
12
A client is a wonderful thing. Historically, I’ve really liked having clients and I imagine you have too. But having clients can be a disaster these days. Here’s why…
Somewhere along the way, the definitions got mixed up. Incidentally, you’ll probably find the more that you read through this blog that definitions are important to me - imprecise definitions lead to imprecise thinking. That can be dangerous stuff… but I digress.
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People keep coming up with different nuances and interpretations of what a “customer” is or what a “client” is. The challenge is that all of those definitions seem to orient around the transaction. A client might be someone who does all of their business in a specific product or service category with you. Or they might be someone who does business with you every month, or every week. The point is, it’s oriented around the transaction. But if you want to really grow a professional services business, you need to take your eye off the transaction and put your attention on the person you’re dealing with. You have to focus on the relationship.
If you swapped out the word “client” with the word “relationship”, you might notice some real differences in your business. For example, a relationship is often powerful because common values are shared. They are often powerful because there is frequent contact. Relationships are strong when everyone is being authentic and “real”. Relationships are lasting when they are oriented around everyone’s best interest. Real relationships are “in exchange” - everyone gains from them.
Start thinking about creating new relationships, not getting more clients.
Be outstanding - Chris Venn
Apr
20
high definition marketing
Filed Under Business Thinking | 1 Comment
Marketing is one of the most complicated pieces of business - do you know why? It’s because it’s a combined exercise of human psychology and personal psychosis. Psychology, because we have to enter the thinking of other people, and psychosis because we have to get over all our own personal stuff about who we are and if we’re willing to appreciate our own value or not (interestingly, it’s often the “appreciating our own value and being willing to declare we we really are a genius” that is the difficult part - not the actual “marketing”).
I work with a lot of professional services businesses such as financial advisors, coaches, seminar leaders, and software companies that are all working to increase their share of the market, do a better job than the competition, find better price points for their products and services, etc., etc. The challenge in their marketing, however, is rarely price, and rarely quality, and almost never competition. It’s something different altogether.
By far, the single biggest challenge in marketing is in its definitions. So we’re going to re-define a couple of things here so that we have a better understanding around all of it.
I’m amazed when I look at the different definitions out there. A quick google of define:marketing will give you about 27 versions of what marketing is, and some of them are very clever and sound really smart. However, very few of them go to the basics; the fundamentals.
If you think back to the beginning of selling wares at a market - marketing - you’ll likely start to see the basic building blocks. Imagine, you and all your neighbours who are farmers have taken the excess crop to the market to sell them or barter them. Most of you are selling the same or similar products. The question is, how do you get people to come to your stall, rather than someone else’s? How do you cut through the clutter? Why should someone come and talk to you in the first place!? If your strategy is “build it and they will come” you will probably spend a lot of time on the building, and that’s about it.
The point is this: marketing is about getting clients and potential clients to move closer to you. That’s it. Get them to come closer to your spot in the market. Closer and closer until they are in sales range, until you can reach out and touch them. Marketing won’t get you business - it will get you closer. Meetings get you business. Phoning gets you business. Asking for business gets you business. Marketing gives you the opportunity.
The Dramatically Clever and Secret Three Steps of Marketing
There are three big pieces to marketing. First, you absolutely must know who you are. What is your brand? How are you unique? What is it about you that should stand out in the market? The tough part here is that there is only so much you can do yourself because, like a fish that doesn’t know it’s in water (because it’s in it all the time), it’s very difficult to accuracy see ourselves and then express it to others (because we’re in ourselves all the time!). I’ve done personal branding exercises with all kinds of entrepreneurs and I still can’t do my own - I had to have someone else do it with me! So, who are you? Why should the market care?
Second, you must know who your market is. Now this one is a hot subject. A few business owners have gotten a bit “hot under the collar” on this question because the market is often not who we think the market is. To say that “my services are for business owners and professionals” is tantamount to saying that “my service is for anyone with a pulse”. While that may be true in the grand, infinite-wisdom version of things, I can almost guarantee you don’t have the marketing budget for it. Identifying your market is about declaring in clear, finite terms who you will have the greatest success with, in the shortest amount of time, with the lowest overall cost. Identifying an ideal client and a niche market allows you to focus. With increased focus comes increased speed and increased results.
Key Point: Marketing is about exclusion, not inclusion. Your marketing speaks to your desired niche, only your niche.
Finally, the third big element is your message. We could go on all day long about messaging, but here’s a really key message for you: you’re allowed to have one core message. The Law of Customer Arithmetic says that “a customer can only count to one”. That means, you get to hold a single spot in the client’s mind. What is that spot? What is the one thing they will know about you? What is that one message. Interestingly, this also applies to defining “who you are”. Each of us have all kinds of cool things that we could tell the market that make us unique - but what is the one thing your niche needs to know about you?
Now, these three points - who am I, who are they, and what’s the message - aren’t complicated. However there are two important things to know. First, you need all three pieces. Second, the sequence is critical. Unfortunately, a lot of people in business write a cool message for a market they haven’t defined and never even look at themselves. Even without help, exploring these three on your own will have a major impact on the quality and precision of your marketing.
Give it a shot, and be outstanding - Chris Venn