Category Archives: Strategic Planning

Are business problems wearing you out? Try these eight steps…

“The only business without problems is a dead business.”

~ Dr. Ichak Adizes, Author, Corporate Lifecycles

I love this quote, because it simply normalizes the fact that your business will have problems. Kind of takes the sting out of it. Makes you feel less…inadequate.

So let’s just be honest with ourselves. Running a business means solving problems.

Not just occasionally. Daily. Hourly.

And these business problems can just wear us slick.

Our time as leaders is not best spent on solving problems. It is best spent on creating possibilities and opportunities.

So here’s another powerful quote to help move you in the right direction.

“Fast and roughly right decision-making will replace deliberations that are precise but slow.”

~ Rita Gunther McGrath, Professor, Columbia Business School

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a handy little guide to help you think problems through and make the best decisions possible, as quickly as possible?

Here are eight simple steps to consider in any situation that requires problem solving:

Inhale. Exhale. Repeat. Seriously, just like yoga. Because taking in a long slow deep breath and exhaling slowly two or three times instantly lowers your heart rate and your stress level. So relax. Breathe.
Suspend your assumptions. Yup, you have them. You just have to be intentional about naming them. It might even help to write them down. “I assume______.” We hold on to assumptions because they create a safety zone, preventing new thinking and new ideas. But they can be fatal unless we check them out.
Ask “Why” five times. This takes you deep into the core of the problem. You’re looking for a real solution, not a Band-Aid, so find the core of the problem and fix that. For example: The printer won’t work. Why? It says the print cartridge is damaged. Why? I don’t know, but this happened before. Why? Tech support says it’s a known issue with this model. Why? There’s a bug in the software. In just four Whys you realize that you don’t just need to replace the print cartridge. You need a different printer model.
Define your desired outcome. What are you looking for, ideally? Wrap your decision about what really matters most. Of the five or six strategic objectives you want, which is really the top priority? Of all the people you are trying to keep happy, which one is the most important?
Think possibilities. Every problem holds an opportunity. You don’t need a short term solution that leaves you in the lurch long term. Look down the road. What you are facing might look like a huge mountain to climb. But on the other side of that mountain is a lush valley. Think bigger.
Apply logic. Whether we realize it or not, most of our decisions are based on emotions. We simply use logic to justify them. Emotions like anxiety, dread, or fear lead to bad decisions. Know your facts. Be very intentional about applying logic to the problems you face.
Run your options past a “devil’s advocate.” Years ago another consultant and I had an intense heart-to-heart with our client, trying very hard to talk her out of a very risky decision. We were the devil’s advocates. She decided to pursue the opportunity anyway, but the objections and concerns we expressed provided valuable information that she used to mitigate her risk. And her project was over-the-top successful!
Make a decision. Speed matters. Procrastination is deadly. We can gather information indefinitely, but if we delay difficult decisions to long, all that information will change anyway. There are very few decisions that can’t be undone. Get it over with. Remember, there really are no “perfect” solutions. We always have to deal with an uncertain future. One decision leads to the next.

Above all, teach this problem-solving method to your employees. Print it out and discuss it at your next staff meeting.

Never neglect an opportunity to train and educate those who work for you. Don’t just teach them WHAT to think – teach them HOW to think.

The more capable they are of solving problems and making decisions, the fewer problems that will land on your desk!

Take care,

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My Embarassing Near-Drowning Story

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It took near-drowning for me to learn tht working harder is a trap

by Darcie Harris

Like most 17-year old girls growing up in southern California, I spent weekends at the beach. My girlfriends and I would pile into a car and head to 17^th Street at Newport.

We slathered ourselves with a toxic combination of baby oil and iodine to acquire just the right color summer tan. (I’m dating myself, right?)

Of course the real purpose for our beach time was not tanning. We went there to meet boys.

I loved to swim, and in those days I was a good swimmer. But my girlfriends rarely went into the water. Why? Because you’d get your hair wet. Who wants to meet a boy when you have wet hair?

One day I did the very thing you are never supposed to do — I went into the water alone.

I swam out beyond the breakers, and cooled off. After a while, I noticed I couldn’t see my friends on the shore. I had ended up much farther out than I usually went.

I started to swim back in. But no matter how hard I swam, I couldn’t get any closer. I just kept swimming harder.

My arms burned. My legs burned. I was gasping for breath.

I paused to tread water, to catch my breath, and that’s when I saw the red warning flag at the lifeguard station.

It was a rip tide. A strong undercurrent was pulling me farther out and farther down the beach.

By this time I could barely breathe. I was exhausted but I started swimming again.

How dumb is this? I was about to drown but my 17-year old pride wouldn’t let me admit I was in trouble or, heaven forbid, look weak by yelling for help.

Thank God a lifeguard saw me bobbing around like a cork and dragged me in so that I could live to tell this humiliating tale.

It took nearly drowning for me to learn one thing.

Trying harder isn’t the answer.

I hope it doesn’t take near-drowning in work for you to learn that working harder isn’t the answer either.

Our business lives are increasingly demanding. The economy may be improving in some places, but it’s still a very competitive marketplace. Technology changes and improvements keep all of us scrambling to keep up. Social media has become a black hole we can fall into, emerging hours later with…what?

The myth is that if you work harder, you’ll finally get on top of things.

Let’s finally face the fact: if you are a female business owner or executive, there will always be more work than you can finish.

Instead of swimming harder, try these four things:

Get very clear on your goals and what you want out of life. Make two lists: what are the five most important desires in your personal life and what are the five most important goals in your professional life. Then make sure that your professional goals will get you to your personal goals.
Change your strategy — and perhaps even your business model — to make sure you reach those personal and professional goals. Think strategically about how you can work smarter and not harder. What can you delegate, outsource or stop altogether? Ruthlessly analyze what gets results and what doesn’t, so you know what to stop.
Be ruthlessly diligent about prioritizing. Each week list out your Top Five Priorities and your Top One of Five. Use that as a guide to make good choices about what goes on your to-do list.
Quit feeling guilty about saying “no” to things that don’t add joy or value. Make peace with knowing some things won’t get done. If it doesn’t move you toward your personal goals or your professional goals, this may not be the time or the season for it. No need to feel guilty about that!

I was reminded of this lesson that “Working Harder is a Trap” when I met a friend for a drink this week.

She told me that when she first started in her current business, she worked lots of extra hours — nights and weekends — thinking she’d “get ahead of the workload.” She was single and didn’t mind, so for two years she worked like a dog.

Then…she met a guy. Lo and behold, she’s found more to life than working! “It’s a trap,” she told me. “There’s no such thing as getting ahead of the workload. Looking back I can see now I had unrealistic expectations about what I could accomplish. Working harder just meant more work.”

Is a rip tide pulling you farther out to sea?

Falling in love was my friend’s “red flag” that working harder was not getting her what she wanted. What’s your “red flag” to indicate that you’re caught in a rip tide, and that swimming harder won’t help?

So, all you female entrepreneurs, if you’ve already figured out that working harder isn’t the answer, tell me what you do to help you make those tough choices about what to pursue and what to stop. I’d love to know! Leave me your comment below. Don’t forget to Get your free Webinar – “Working Harder is a Trap” and write your own job description!

You Don’t Need to be a Creative Type to Think More Strategically

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Let’s agree that strategy is important. Really important.

I just Googled the word “Strategy” and came up with 166,000,000 results. Seriously. It’s an even 166 million. I poked through the results and found:

Definitions of strategy
Articles about how important it is to HAVE a strategy
Books about strategy
Lots of advice about strategic planning

What I don’t see is anything about HOW to think strategically, how to come up with a strategic idea.

Strategy is your compass point, the big picture that sets your direction. It’s not the step by step details of precisely how you will get things accomplished.

If strategy is important, learning to think more strategically is a good thing. And the good news is that learning does not require trying harder, or working harder.

It’s about letting go. It’s about trusting yourself.

William Duggan’s book Strategic Intuition explains how to cultivate those moments of brilliance, those creative strategic ideas. His research shows:

Good ideas are the combination of information you already have stored in your brain from your own expertise, your own past experiences and your knowledge in other areas.
Intuition is the automatic combination of what is stored and retrieved in your brain. It’s like connecting the dots to form a picture.
Good ideas come to you as flashes of insight, often when you don’t expect them. They happen In the shower, in traffic, falling asleep, in your dreams. For a moment you are not really thinking at all.

Don’t get stuck thinking that you are not a “creative type.” Scientists no longer believe that one side of the brain is creative and the other side is rational. Our brains fire on both sides at the same time.

That gives women a huge advantage in the area of strategy, because the right and left sides of their brain communicate better with each other than men’s brains.

Women’s intuition is just what’s needed for great strategy!

You can nurture the ability to think strategically and be open to intuition.

No more multitasking: It literally ruins your brain. The less you hold in mind at once the better. Memory starts to degrade when you try to hold more than one idea in mind.
Limit time on email, text & social media: Ouch! It’s true. Constant emailing, texting and jumping back and forth on social media sites reduces mental capability by an average of 10 points on an IQ test!
Don’t overload your brain: Every time the brain works on an idea, it uses up measurable & limited resources.
Prioritize before any other attention demanding activities: The most important mental processes, like prioritizing & decision-making, take the most effort.

When you need strategic ideas — a big picture, a compass point andndash; let your brain rest. Give yourself time to flow through these four steps:

Reflect on memories of previous experience: What do you know, what’s worked in the past, what impresses you from other industries, other models?
Clear your mind: Let go of all expectations and previous ideas of what you might do, or even what your goal is. Develop the state of “beginners mind.”
Be open to a flash of insight: In a free mind, selected elements from past examples come together in a new combination.
Be resolved: You’ll need determination and force of action to propel you forward, even in the face of criticism, to do what you need to do.

Just imagine the strategic ideas you can create when you trust your women’s intuition and give yourself space to have an open mind. I hope you’ll share with me your most creative, strategic thoughts at darcie@ewfinterhational.com.

andcopy; 2012 Darcie Harris

A Table, A Bathroom and A Risk

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I undertook quite a project this fall when I purchased a grand old home that had been converted to office space years ago. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it was charmed by the beautiful woodwork and hardwood floors.

downstairs bath cropped.jpg I knew it could be the perfect place for my office, but it definitely needed a facelift. The colors were dull, the kitchens and bathrooms were dated (I don’t even want to talk about the urinal in the upstairs bathroom), and the floors were worn. But I knew it could be transformed. (Some of us fall in love with “possibilities.”)

I had a vision of how the finished building would look and jumped in.

I chose contractors and paint colors, then made the rounds of antique stores, looking for interesting tables, mirrors, and other fixtures to complete the vision.

My first purchase was an old table to replace the seriously ugly vanity in the narrow downstairs bathroom. Just the right size and shape for the small space, with graceful legs and stretchers, I could picture it painted glossy black, topped with a vessel sink and an ornate mirror.

But here’s the best part. It was only $50! It would be a stretch to call the place I found it an antique store. More like a “collectables” store. Okay, more like a flea market. Nevertheless, here was the perfect table at an unbeatable price. What a find!

I sanded, painted, distressed, steel wooled, buffed and polished until it was perfect.

Then came the time to move it from the workroom into the bathroom so that the plumber could set the sink the next day. Only one small problem: the table wouldn’t fit through the bathroom door. Okay, so we’ll take the door off, no big deal.

Now we could get it into the narrow bathroom, but it couldn’t be turned to sit flat against its freshly painted wall. We tried everything — lifting, turning, sideways, vertical andndash; but unless this table could magically bend, it couldn’t be placed where I had planned. I thought all my hard work and pretty plans were about to go down the drain.

In the words of Jim Collins, it was time to face the brutal facts. I had three choices. I could start over and find a smaller table for the bathroom. I could cut a hole in the wall (hmmm, old plaster wallsandhellip;not a great option). Or I could cut the legs off the table so that I could get it turned into position, then glue the legs back on.

I took a deep breath, got the saw, and just kept telling myself, “It only cost $50. It only cost $50.”

It worked! If you saw this table-turned-bathroom-vanity today, tucked firmly in its place with its vessel sink and ornate mirror, you would never know what happened.

Cutting the legs off the table was a risk. Maybe the legs would be sturdy, maybe not. Maybe the table would be ruined, maybe not. But it worked. Maybe I was lucky. Let’s just say I’m a big fan of Gorilla Glue.

I bet you face those kinds of situations every day in your businesses.

You have an idea, a vision. You can picture how it will turn out. You plan, you measure, you work hard.

Then you hit a bump in the road. Things didn’t go like you planned. You hit an unexpected obstacle. A key employee leaves. A competitor comes to town. Costs go up. The market shifts beneath your feet.

Now what? Do you go forward or pull the plug? Do you pursue your vision or give up? Do you play it safe or take a risk?

A few important questions help you evaluate the risks you face:

How important is your vision? More than any other factor, a bold vision is what fuels taking a risk. Take a hard look at your vision and your strategy for accomplishing it, then ask yourself, does this risk, more than any other, move you closer to your vision?
What are the alternatives?
What happens if you don’t take the risk? Can you still accomplish your vision?
What exactly are you risking? Can you live with the loss?
What can you do to mitigate the risk? That doesn’t mean settling for less. It means doing all you can to make the risk pay off.
How will you know when the risk is too great?

Life throws us curveballs. When you’re faced with a risk, look at all of your alternatives. Weigh the options. Weigh the risks. Look at best case outcome. Look at worst case scenario.

Then make your move, with no regrets.

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