Jim Seybert - Strategic Planning Retreats - Strategy Audits - Executive Coaching

The recession cloud that’s been hanging over us for the past year or so has given some people the opportunity to examine their strengths and start over in ways they’d only dreamt about when they were riding high.

Even in the best of times, there are people who wake up every morning wishing they could step off the treadmill and pursue activities that give them strength. They dream all day about taking a less-traveled path that fuels their passion.

But they’re trapped - held hostage by all the things the wonderful things their current path has provided.

“I would love to quit my job and start something new, but I’d lose my house, my insurance, my retirement.”

Enter the worst economic climate since the 1930s.

Mergers, corporate bankruptcies, layoffs, stock market plunges - thousands of people who’d been stuck in jobs that drained their souls have found themselves in a position where starting over on a new path isn’t as risky as it once was because all the stuff they were afraid of losing has been siphoned away by forces beyond their grasp.

The New York Times recently profiled a few of these folks, like 44-year old Monty Wilson who left a Wall Street position to follow a decade-old dream of starting a floor-polishing business.

Now his navy blue and gray suits hang in his closet. He wears cargo shorts and golf shirts to work.

“I wake up excited in the morning,” said Mr. Wilson, who has taken a big pay cut and whose wife has gone back to work as a teacher to help support their three children under 13. He hopes that one day he will be able to earn what he did in the white-collar world.

“I am having fun and learning again,” he said. “Floors are living, breathing things. They expand when it gets humid, and they contract when it gets dry, and every floor is different.”

Perhaps you find yourself at the same fork in the trail. One is a well-worn path with clearly marked turns along the way and the other is a road less traveled and less certain. Let me encourage you to spend some time intentionally examining those activities that give you strength AND those that drain you dry. Keep track of them, catalog them and look for opportunities to do more of what charges your batteries, more of what makes you strong.

Then, if life hands you a silver-lined cloud of opportunity, take it and run with it. I think you’ll be glad you did.

You’ve most likely seen this.

I have the page bookmarked.

Every time I need a lift or a pep talk, this does the trick.

Richard Dreyfus narrates. Can you name all the crazy ones?

More importantly - are YOU crazy enough to change the world?

I’ve begun to think strategically about my social networking accounts and how to use each one most effectively.

People are most effective when they focus on their strengths. The social network tools also have unique strengths and it makes sense for me to develop a strategy to maximizes their effectiveness.

This is going to be a gradual process. I’ll add observations as they occur to me and tweak my strategy as I go along.

Observation 1 - I have many more Facebook Friends than Twitter followers.

Observation 2 - Many of those who interact with my Facebook feed are not on my Twitter list.

Observation 3 - The majority of those who follow me on Twitter are not Facebook friends.

Observation 4 - Nearly all of my Twitter connections are related to my professional persona.

Observation 5 - Many of my Facebook friends have nothing to do with my professional activities.

Observation 6 - For business connections who are Facebook friends, it is often more effective to ping them on Facebook than it is via email.

Observation 7 - I am personally annoyed when I check Facebook and Twitter and find every post from some people who are on both to be redundant.

Observation 8 - I am annoyed with some Twitterers who never seem to have an original thought and 100% of their contribution are Retweets or pasted URLs.

Observation 9 - It is far too easy to become obsessed with Facebook conversations that are not productive.

Observation 10 - Twitter seems to be a good tool for networking and connecting with people I don’t know who might either be interesting in themselves or interested in me.

So, the first element in my Social Networking Strategy Plan is to focus the majority of my Twitter activity on professional networking and mining for interesting new people.

Facebook is a mix of personal friends and professional contacts with whom I share some personal information, so I’ve not yet formulated a “policy” for FB posts. Stay tuned for more.

Here’s a very easy to understand and practical guide to getting started with Facebook and Twitter.

My daughter Noelle is Advertising Coordinator for Experts Exchange, an Internet problem-solving service for the tech industry. Part of her responsibility is to assess the value of social network marketing for the company and she wrote this overview as part of the task. It’s a good basic intro to using these much ballyhooed platforms.

I asked if I could post it on my site and use it in Strategic Planning workshops with my Executive Coaching clients.

[This is the blog version of my monthly column for June 2009]

Most organizations these days are doing too much stuff.

Activities undertaken in a robust economy have lost their shine. Tossing off marginal products that chew up limited resources has become a common theme.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, winners actually do quit. Seth Godin points out in The Dip that knowing what to quit and what to keep is a key element in success.

And this process of clearing away over-burden isn’t new. At the suggestion of a Facebook friend, I have been reading the Meditations, Objections and Replies of 17th Century philosopher Rene Descartes.

Descartes wrote in 1641:

Several years have now passed since I first realized how numerous were the false opinions that in my youth I had taken to be true, and thus how doubtful were all those that I had subsequently built upon them. And thus I realized that once in my life I had to raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations.”

The philosopher’s “product line” were his opinions and ideas and he had reasoned that he needed to scrap them all and start afresh. He’d reached a point where the old ideas were no longer valid, so he . . .

. . . freed my mind of all cares, secluded myself for a period of leisurely tranquility, and [withdrew] into solitude.”

Descartes went on a strategic planning retreat. During his “period of tranquility” he set about to . . .

. . . attack straightaway those principals which supported everything I once believed.”

No cows were sacred. No assumptions given a Free Pass. He destroyed the past to make room for the future. His objective was to find one thing of which he could be absolutely certain and to use that as a foundation for building a new set of opinions.

Bringing It Home

Lest you determine that I have finally stepped off the curb, here are the lessons I think we can learn from Descartes:

1. Take nothing for granted. Allow no sacred cows, put everything on the table. This doesn’t mean you are going to scrap everything, but unless the review includes everything it isn’t worth doing.
2. Take your time. Reading through the Meditations you get a sense that Descartes was very thorough in his process of thinking through each conclusion and its subsequent result.
3. Seek outside counsel. Before publishing his work, Descartes asked people he respected to challenge his new assumptions. Your first step could be a Strategy Audit.
4. Give this a high priority. He cleared his calendar and his mind before secluding himself in a planning retreat. It is impossible to to question the status quo when you are sitting in the middle of it.

Similar to Descartes, your objective is to find the one thing that you do better than anyone else, your reason for existing. For Rene, the one thing of which he could be certain was that he thought. What’s yours?

Jim Seybert

Thank you so much for spending time with Counter Intelligence each month. You can be absolutely certain that I appreciate the time you invest in reading my stuff.

If you’d like to chat about this or anything else, pop me an email and we’ll set something up.

Short-term gratification is Counter Productive. 

This short video from TED U will make you smile because it features small children captured on hidden camera when they are told to NOT eat a marshmallow that’s been placed in front of them. As you watch it, think about the pressure and long-term damage that’s done to organizations whose leaders and stockholders demand time-based short-term gains. 

There are probably more bad decisions made to “improve quarterly numbers” than any other single reason. Brushing it off with “well, that’s business” doesn’t make it right, nor does it mitigate the almost certain long-range decline resulting from too much focus on the marshmallow.

Wouldn’t you rather eat the whole bag, not the single treat.

It’s happened more than once:

I am sitting on an airport shuttle at LAX when someone from out of town will ask, “Where’s the nearest In ‘n Out?”

This iconic fast food brand with nothing save burgers and fries on the menu is an amazing story in consistency and loyalty to the workers who maker it happen. The food is decadently tasty, but flavor isn’t the only reason an average store outsells other QSR brands in the same neighborhood. 

It’s the people behind the counter who make the real difference. You can tell they’re treated fairly and respected by their managers. Starting wages at In ‘n Out are above the industry average and unit managers typically earn over $100,000 a year. Turnover is very low, which translates to better tasting food because the person frying your burger or salting your fries isn’t practicing on YOUR order. It’s extremely rare to see an In ‘n Out store with dirty floors, over-filled trash bins or a confused kitchen crew.

Writing this is making me hungry. Go ahead and read this piece from AOL’s Daily Finance while I jump in the car and head for my nearest In ‘n Out.