Make a plan

by Sharmen Lane

No matter what you do in life, or work, if you want to ensure success the best possible way to do that is to make a plan. The second thing to do is execute on it.

You may have the best idea, invention, or product if you don’t make a plan on how you are going to promote, sell, market, advertise etc., then you likely won’t go very far. I once read a quote by someone that said, “If you fly by the seat of your pants, you better expect turbulence.” Basically, you want to have a plan, or it could be a very bumpy ride.

Planning is generally the one step that most people miss when it comes to goals or marketing. First you need to know the end result. Once you know what you are ultimately looking to achieve then you need to come up with the step by step instructions or directions to make that goal happen.

Think about it like traveling. If you are driving to a specific location a hundred or even a thousand miles away for that matter, and you have never been there before, you’re not going to get in your car, turn on the ignition and just start driving are you? I doubt it. You’re going to look at a map, go online or at least have a GPS device to tell you which route to take. The GPS or the directions you get are going to tell you what to do and when to do it. That is MAP’ing, Making A Plan.

When putting together your plan for success, “begin with the end in mind,” as Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People would say. Now that you know what the end result is, write down a step by step action plan that will lead you to your destination in small daily simple steps. If you are looking to accomplish your goal in one year, think of 12 big steps that need to be done. Then put them in order from start to finish. Put the first item on your calendar for the next month. Then fill in each of the remaining 11 steps for the following 11 months. This way each and every month you are doing the things necessary to reach your goal in the timeframe that you want.

After you have completed your monthly things to do list you will want to go back and do the same thing again but dice it up a little more. Now look over each month’s item and break it down into four steps, one for each week of the month. Then, for each week’s item, break it down into seven steps, one thing you can do every day.

That’s it. That’s all there is to planning. Most people are so excited about their goal that one of two things happen. Either the how to do it becomes so daunting that they take no action and forget about the goal altogether. Or, they hit the ground running and end up missing several important steps along the way which can turn out to be detrimental. Yes making a plan does take time. However, if you take the time to think it through from the beginning you will already have avoided roadblocks and obstacles ahead of time. It’s somewhat similar to building a house. You can put the studs up first so you can see immediate results. However, sooner or later that house will come crumbling down without a strong foundation, and you will have to start all over again. And that can be a timely and expensive mistake.

So, do yourself a favor and make a plan to make your goals happen. It will save you time and money in the long run and likely get you to where you want to be faster.

6 Main Reasons Businesses Succeed

Author, businessman, speaker, Randy Kirk gives his list of the primary indicators of business success. These are taken from his recently published book from Warner Business Books, Running a 21st Century Small Business. Randy is currently available to help you with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), internet marketing, or other marketing projects including e-mail blasts, product development, new market evaluation and planning, and complete comprehensive marketing plans for company or product launches.
Randy has a JD from UCLA law, and has just sold a $5m manufacturing business which he and his partner founded 26 years ago.

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Randy Kirk has a Juris Doctor from UCLA Law School and over 35 years of hands-on business experience in retail, wholesale, manufacturing, and various types of service businesses. He recently sold a $5m manufacturing business that he and his partner founded 26 years ago. Out of his experiences and what he has seen working with thousands of other small businesses, Randy has written 6 business books. This latest book was published by Warner Business Books. Running a 21st Century Small Business was published in 2007 and is available at Amazon.com and other major book outlets. Randy is available for SEO, search engine optimization consulting, as well as new product development, comprehensive marketing analysis, or any form of business writing.

The Financial Meltdown: Causes, Consequences, and Options

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Management Expert Robert Lorber: Doing What Matters"

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Put your thinking hat on: How Edward de Bono's ideas are transforming schools

Teaching children how to think has brought academic success to schools in Manchester. But will techniques pioneered by the guru Edward de Bono catch on?

Rapt in thought, the four-year-old is taking part in a discussion about improving playtime. With a scowl of concentration, he clutches on to Patsy, the black-hatted teddy, and says: "A football hit me in the face once."

This is the reception class at Ditton Primary School, near Widnes, and the teacher, Jackie Timmis, has asked him about the negative aspects of football.

His classmates have already made it clear they recognise what facts are – it is what Fred, the white-hatted teddy, encourages. Red-capped Fifi puts them in touch with what they feel about an idea. Patsy is fixed on the negatives, yellow-clad Hal on the positives, while cuddly Ivor is as fertile with creative ideas as his green hat. Blue-hatted Bella is "the boss" organising their thinking.

They don't know it, but they are using Edward De Bono's structured thinking technique, the Six Thinking Hats, that colour codes different ways of tackling a question, to give them a framework for problem-solving and exploring ideas. The hats have been turned into teddies, given the pupils' age.

These are advanced concepts for such young children but Ditton Primary is an accredited Thinking School, committed according to the head teacher, Carol Lawrenson, to creating "little thinking creatures".

This scene at Ditton may be played out in classrooms across the UK in the next few years, if thinking guru Edward de Bono succeeds in introducing the key concepts of his thinking framework, the Six Thinking Hats and lateral thinking, into the national curriculum.

The Edward De Bono Foundation has just set up the world's first university-based Centre of Serious Creativity and Constructive Thinking at Manchester Metropolitan University's Crewe campus. And Ditton is an exemplar school. Manchester Met is the largest university for the teaching of education in Europe, so work has already begun to teach academics De Bono's concepts via four-day courses in order to disseminate this to teachers. Manchester's academies are already showing significant interest in taking on the concepts.

Chief executive of the De Bono Foundation UK, Bob Rawlinson, is passionate about the need for a change from what he considers an overly Socratic to a more creative approach to thinking and learning in schools. "All my life I've believed in the development of people to get the best out of them," he says. "I believe passionately that this should be done at the earliest possible age to inspire children to achieve."

Research evidence obtained by the De Bono Foundation suggests his tools can have a positive impact on academic achievement and behaviour. As part of the Government's New Deal job-finding programme, teaching youngsters the De Bono thinking systems for only six hours improved their employment rate by 500 per cent.

Ditton Primary has been using the De Bono methods for the past six years alongside several other thinking methods – Hyerle's Thinking Maps, Art Costa's Habits of Mind and Spencer Kagan's Co-operative Learning – powered by Carol Lawrenson's vision to turn out children equipped to think for the 21st century: "We want our children to be respectful, responsible, resourceful, good creators and successful in whatever intelligences they show," she says. "That is more important than success in Key Stage 3."

Her school in one of the most deprived boroughs in the country, is also always in the top 15 per cent of primaries in the country for academic results. Bullying is rare and there have been only 11 disciplinary incidents since February 2008. Before the introduction of the thinking tools that figure would have represented a half term.

Traditional subject areas have been thrown out. Thinking books replace exercise books. The curriculum is taught entirely in seven themes such as problem solving and reasoning, creative development or knowledge and understanding of the world. But all subjects are taught with creative thinking tools at the fore. Images of the coloured hats crop up all over the school and lessons are peppered with references like "let's apply some green hat (creative) thinking" or "White hats on – what are the facts?" At the end of 2008, Ditton and two other nearby nationally-accredited thinking schools formed a consultancy – Halton Thinking Schools (HATS) – to train other schools.

According to Professor Chris Husbands, of London's Institute of Education, research evidence confirms the importance of teaching thinking. Ten years ago, the national curriculum gave few opportunities to teach it, not so now. He cautions, however: "The most important thing in determining the quality of education is the quality of teaching."

Thinking tools may be a way to improve teaching, but they are very time-consuming in the classroom. Their use is easier in primary schools, but in high schools they only work when incorporated into subjects by committed teachers, says Husbands.

This is what has happened at St Ambrose Barlow Roman Catholic High School in Swinton, Salford, which achieved 88 per cent A*-C passes at GCSE despite having many pupils from deprived homes. It has been designated a National School of Creativity – only the second in the North West.

The head teacher, Marie Garside, has overseen the introduction of a number of thinking tools including De Bono's across all year groups, for several years. The Thinking Hats add power to thinking across the curriculum on issues such as the destruction of the rain forest but the school also used it to work with Salford Council on plans for the regeneration of the deprived area of Langworthy. Eighty six per cent of pupils go on to post-16 education.

"The impact on the school of using these tools is that we now have more confident learners," she says. "Children need a completely new set of skills to deal with data than they did when I started teaching 33 years ago. I want to produce thinkers, not exam fodder.

(By Rachel Pugh/The Independent)

Leadership is moral authority: Stephen R Covey

There comes a time in every professional’s life when putting in 90-hour weeks at work and devoting the remaining hours to family and sleep makes him reach a point which the Japanese refer to as karoshi (that is, sudden death from excessive work). Somewhere around this point, a good number of overworked professionals around the world, over the last 19 years, have discovered Stephen R Covey’s best-seller, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Around the world because the book has been translated in 38 languages and has sold 20 million copies since it published in 1989. Covey’s Seven Habits enjoys a big following in India, which has seen a sharp rise in the recent few years.

Covey is also the co-founder and vice-chairman of FranklinCovey, a global professional services firm with offices in 123 countries.

By his own admission, Covey, who has been recognised by the Time magazine as one of 25 most influential Americans, is a big admirer of Gandhian philosophy. He is coming to India at the end of January 2009 to speak on present-day leadership challenges at several seminars. Speaking to Aanand Pandey over the phone from Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, Covey put forth his views on leadership, moral values, creativity and other less profound matters. Edited excerpts:

Have you been to India before?
Yes, many times. My last visit to India was about two years ago. However, this will be the first time I will be in India in the new economy.

The new economy...?
By new economy I mean the hitherto unseen conflicts that economies are facing around the world.

What impression do you have of the country?
I must tell you that I admire the spirituality of Indians. The other impression I have is the polemical nature of Indians that Amartya Sen referred to so articulately in his book The Argumentative Indian.

It is interesting that you mention spirituality and Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian in the same context. Sen has written in this book that India is wrongly seen as primarily a spiritual culture — it has many other talents as well. It has a strong tradition of science, for instance. Is this not a good time that the world looks at Indians from prisms other than that of spirituality?
I would rather see this point in a way that the inherent spirituality of Indians makes them lean towards areas that require application of knowledge. This is the reason they are moving to build a knowledge-based economy. In fact, with the help of technology that globalised the world, India’s natural leaning towards knowledge has already made it a powerful force in the world.

You mentioned Mahatma Gandhi’s name at one place in The Seven Habits. You have also written in your blogs about lessons one can draw from his life. Where does the Gandhian way of living meet with the philosophy that you advocate?
If you study Gandhi’s life, you will see that he took an inside-out approach. He worked within himself, to begin with. When he pursued his vision of an independent nation, he had a whole culture following his lead. It is worth nothing that he did not hold any formal position after Independence. His authority was moral authority. In the same way that Nelson Mandela’s authority was moral authority that he developed when he was in prison. Likewise, Václav Havel, the Czech playwright, writer and revolutionary, developed his moral authority in prison. Leadership is not a formal authority one exercises over others. It is about developing moral authority within oneself.

You wrote The Seven Habits in 1989. Fifteen years after that, you penned The Eighth Habit: From Seriousness to Greatness. What made you propound the eighth habit? What took you so long to come up with the eighth one?
The seven habits dealt with personal and interpersonal qualities. In the following years, we moved from an industrial age model to an information age model. However, I felt that we were still using the old model of industrial age leadership in the new model. That is how the book The Eighth Habit took birth.

The Eighth Habit helps people in aligning structures and systems of an organisation with moral principles. Even today, most organisations don’t know how to do that. The recent economic meltdown is born out of a failure on the part of companies to align systems with spiritual and moral principles — due to a prevalence of the “what’s-in-it-for-me” type of leadership. It is because of this approach that people were rewarded for selling toxic assets, as a consequence of which the capital systems of these institutions collapsed to the ground.

How would the new school prevent people from selling toxic assets?
You would not reward greed, you would reward teams who come up with synergised, creative solutions.

Speaking of creativity, it is a common refrain that Indians are not as good with creativity as they are with systems and processes. What, according to you, will it take for Indians to come up with creative forces such as, say, a Pixar or a Dupont?
I think this is not only true with India but with many nations in the world today. I recently visited 10 European countries and also Brazil and Korea and found that they all are facing the same problem. They need to unleash the creative energy of their culture. The problem is that they are trying to put new wine in old bottles and there is a risk that the old bottles may break at some point.

The key is in moving away from the old school leadership of top-down demand and control to building a stronger synergistic and spiritual foundation of a culture. It requires a much deeper involvement than what is being shown by today’s leaders.

I want to become the CEO of my company or perhaps the prime minister of my country some day. What would be the most effective habit I can learn that could help me realise my goal?
You will have to begin with becoming a change catalyst. Build your own circle of influence with moral authority so that people would want to follow your leadership. That will be a good beginning.

(by Aanand Pandey/Business Standard)