Achieving Business Excellence with John Spence

It Is All About Perspective

May 12, 2013 By 1 Comment

John Spence on Perspective

 

 

 

 

 

As most of you who read my blog know, I read a lot… an average of 100 or more business books a year and a good number of books on other topics as well.  I also read fast, I can typically get through a 250 page book in just a few hours.  So it is significant when I get to a 157-page book that takes me literally weeks to get through because there’s so much great information.  This is how it has been reading “The Stoic Art of Living,” an absolutely amazing book written my very good friend and philosopher, Tom Morris.  As an example, it took me a good 10 days just to get past the first paragraph because it stopped me in my tracks and made me think and rethink what he was saying.  Let me quote the specific lines that captured me:

“If you live long enough and pay attention to what you see, you may come to understand one of the deepest truths about life: Inner resilience is the secret to outer results in this world.  Challenging times demand inner strength and a spirit that will not be defeated.  And, as a philosopher, I’ve come to understand that nearly all the times we live in are in some sense challenging. 

When things are really bad, it’s hard to keep your faith.  When things are very good, it’s tough to keep your head.  In tragedy, it’s difficult to be hopeful.  In triumph, it’s hard to be humble.  In either case, maintaining a proper perspective on life is the challenge. And in those occasionally long stretches of time when things seem to be not either great or terrible, it’s often tough to remember and prepare for the amazing extremes that life can hold.”

Perspective…gaining and applying perspective in life is so very crucial.

Let me give you an example:  On August 24th, 1992, I lived in Miami when hurricane Andrew came through.  My house was down on Biscayne Bay just a few hundred feet from the water’s edge.  The storm surge from the hurricane filled my home with more than 11 feet of water and destroyed everything I owned.  I lost all my photographs, paintings, wine collection, boat, furniture, TV, stereo – the only thing I escaped with was a bag of clothes and cooler with some food and water.  For 13 weeks I lived out of my truck and in an abandoned apartment sleeping on a mattress on the floor surrounded by broken glass, fiberglass and dead cockroaches.  And it is one of the greatest things that has ever happen to me…because now I know… it is all just STUFF.

When you wake up one morning and everything you own is gone, and you have no way to get it back right away, you have to learn a new perspective about “stuff.” Now don’t get me wrong, I love nice things, I enjoy beautiful paintings and family photos, and I surely love good wine…but if I found out today that my house burned to the ground, as long as my wife and my dog were fine, it’s no big deal at all – it’s just stuff.  So although hurricane Andrew was traumatic, challenging and very, very difficult, it was also an incredible lesson in perspective that has literally changed that way I look at my life.

Which brings me to one last, but extremely important point: you are the one that creates your own perspective.  You create the lens through which you see the entire world and all the things that happen to you.  You can choose a perspective of happiness, joy, adventure, excitement and love…or you can choose a perspective of pain, misery, unfairness, and pessimism.

Just remember this: the choice is always yours and yours alone!

 

 

Filed Under: Career Success, John's Rants, Life Success Tagged With: , , , ,

The Power of Face-to-Face Networking for Small Business

January 17, 2013 By 1 Comment

A guest post from Eric Jones

Technology enables aspiring small business owners to launch and operate enterprises from their own living rooms, but no matter the business, failing to pursue a human element limits potential and stunts the opportunity for long-term success. Expensive websites may convey more information than traditional business cards, but the priceless act of shaking someone’s hand and looking him or her in the eye establishes a rapport foreign to the digital world.

If you’re starting a business or looking for the edge to help your stagnant company grow, consider breaking eye contact with Google and enjoying some face time with a real-live person.

Focus on Relationships

To some, the term “networking” evokes a connotation of self-centered pandering for favors, and many people treat it this way. The kind of networking that supports business, however, values relationship over what you can get from someone. Similar to building a friendship, authentic networking values honesty, time and a natural give and take. While it may be counterintuitive, going into a networking situation looking to use a colleague for everything he or she is worth is the easiest way to ensure you won’t build relationships.

Relational networking offers a rewarding way to do business. As you and fellow prosperity seekers foster a relationship, you’re able to feed off of each other’s success and learn from failures. Perhaps a fellow small business owner is looking to invest in his or her business in a responsible way. You can share how American Express business credit cards offered business-related rewards, for example. And when you’re looking for new bookkeeping software, a reliable network of friends will give you the first-person insight that online forums can’t.

Know Your Elevator Speech

Business networking won’t bear any results unless you’re able to accurately and honestly describe your business, it’s struggles and how you are facing challenges. Forming an elevator speech will help spark business-related conversations without having to set up entire appointments. Certainly, there are times when the opportunity to build a relationship would involve your elevator speech, but short 2-4 minute summary of the state of your business can open windows when you don’t see a door.

When these small opportunities present themselves, each word must make an impression. As you begin to describe your business, lead with the point that you most want the listener to remember. Perhaps you’re struggling to facilitate new business after a major breakthrough, or you’re trying something no one has ever done. Outline why your business has succeeded and what stands in the way of further growth. If you see an opportunity, ask if the listener has experienced similar successes or hardships.

Harvard Business School’s Elevator Pitch Builder is a useful tool to crystallize your business testimony.

Give Before You Get

When meeting up with someone in person, your business sense may tell you to get whatever you can as fast as possible, but the relational aspect of face-to-face interaction makes this position easily transparent. When building a network of colleagues, be the first to offer a favor, and don’t negotiate for repayment. Maybe you can code websites for a fellow business owner that needs to get his or her business online. This act of service will establish trust and further accelerate a professional relationship.

Filed Under: Business Excellence, Career Success

A Powerful Success Habit

December 1, 2012 By 5 Comments

A guest blog from my very good friend, Matt Tenney…

Typically, when considering approaches to improve business outcomes, we compartmentalize.  We look at ways to improve overall strategy, the skills of our leaders, sales, customer service, etc. 

What if there were something very simple that we could do personally, moment-to-moment, that has a significant impact on nearly every area of our professional or business success – a sort of “success habit”? 

The simple practice of mindfulness is just such a habit.  This is why many leading companies like Google, Intel, Raytheon, General Mills, and Genentech offer mindfulness training for leaders and employees in all positions.

Mindfulness training is just a simple shift in perspective that allows us to create and maintain some space between ourselves and our thoughts/emotions.  As simple as this sounds, making mindfulness a habit has numerous links directly to the bottom line.  Below are three examples:

 

 

1.       Increased Stress Resilience – Perhaps the most well-researched benefit of the practice of mindfulness is helping people to face stressful situations with a reduced adverse stress response.  Reducing the adverse effects of stress has a direct impact on profit because it helps people to be more creative, make better decisions, be more productive while at work, miss less days due to illness, and reduce health care costs. 

2.       People Skills / Emotional Intelligence – There is now a tremendous amount of research demonstrating what thought leaders like Dale Carnegie had said for decades: The single most important ingredient for high levels of performance, especially as leaders, is emotional intelligence, commonly referred to simply as “people skills.”  Mindfulness is arguably the most effective method there is for increasing emotional intelligence, which is why one of the most popular training programs at Google is a mindfulness-based, emotional intelligence program called Search Inside Yourself (there is a great book by the same name, written by Google exec Chade-Meng Tan, which I highly recommend). 

3.       Mental Agility – Mental agility allows us to quickly adapt to a rapidly-changing business environment: an invaluable skill.  Also, in cutting edge research in behavioral finance, mental agility has been identified as one of the two most important predictors of whether or not a person will be profitable over the long term.   Mindfulness was designed to increase mental agility and has been shown in research to do so.

Although not easy, mindfulness training is very simple.  We can create the aforementioned shift in perspective simply by mentally noting what we’re doing now.  If we’re sitting and waiting, we just silently say in the mind, “Sitting and waiting.”  If we’ve done that, we’ve just created space between ourselves and our thoughts/emotions.  The trick is maintaining that perspective!  To do that while still, we can simply maintain awareness of our breathing.  To maintain mindfulness during activity, we can simply be curious about what our present moment experience is like, keeping our awareness open to what’s happing now.  When we get pulled into our thoughts again, we just mentally note, “Distracted,” and open our awareness once again.  Repeat as necessary.

In service,

matt tenney

Matt Tenney is a professional speaker and trainer, a mindfulness teacher, and author of the book From the Brig to the Boardroom: Why Mindfulness Is the Ultimate Shortcut to Success.  To contact Matt, visit www.MattTenney.com.

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Three Levels of Leadership

November 20, 2012 By 1 Comment

In the last week I’ve had the opportunity to work with three great organization on leadership development. I started the week at Duke University with the National Association of Federal Credit Unions for their Management Development Institute, then spent two days with the Florida Recreation and Parks Association for the Abrahams Academy Leadership School and finally I ended the week with the wonderful folks from the Florida Hospital for their Leadership Development Institute.  I learned a TON of great things and wanted to share them with you… this video is a little long (25 minutes) BUT – it has many very powerful ideas for being an “Ideal Leader” — how to be a great self-leader — and what you need to focus on in order to be a superb organizational leader. I hope you enjoy that video and please share it with everyone you feel might find value in the ideas I share.

Three Levels of Leadership from John Spence on Vimeo.

 

 PS — if you have not connected with me on LinkedIn – please send me an invite!!!

Filed Under: Accountability, Business Excellence, Career Success, Employee Engagement, High Performance Teams, Leadership, Life Success Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Impact Equation

September 25, 2012 By 4 Comments

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Career Success, John's Rants, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Some Thoughts on Personal Branding

August 5, 2012 By 9 Comments

 Recently a good friend of mine who is in the financial services industry asked me for my thoughts on personal branding, because he was preparing to make a presentation to his team of associates about how critical it was to their career to create a strong and focused personal brand. Here is the note that I sent to him…

 

Dan, great to hear from you this week. Here are some thoughts on branding/marketing /sales – and especially personal branding – I hope you find this helpful.

Branding is about creating an image/feeling/connection with the customer. There are many branding experts that say that the customer actually owns the brand and creates the brand – but I believe that an organization/person can have a great deal of influence on how the brand is perceived in the marketplace by the consumer. An excellent example of branding would be products that are automatically tied to thoughts/emotions. Some examples would be:

 Volvo equals safety — A diamond is forever — Pepsi is for the new generation — Nike: just do it! — BMW, the ultimate driving machine — The little blue box from Tiffany’s — Ritz-Carlton = ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen — With a name like Smuckers it’s got to be good!

All of these organizations have done a fantastic job of linking their brand to a belief/emotion. The goal of branding then, is to understand the emotions, thoughts, beliefs that you want your customer to have – and then attempt to present your brand in such a way that it will elicit those thoughts and feelings when your customer thinks about you.

 Marketing is much more about getting someone to want to purchase your product. Marketing focuses on features/benefits/price – and your USP or Unique Selling Proposition. There are two major marketing strategies – the “push strategy,” which says you push information out in the marketplace and drive the end-customer to go buy the product at whatever place you want them to go to, for example – think of a computer or electronics company that tells you about their awesome new product and says,  Available at Best Buy now! The other major marketing strategy is the pull strategy which says that you create awareness and interest in the customer and get them to request your product  from the supplier – so that the customer “pulls” the product into the marketplace. A good example might be soy milk – it isn’t until consumers start asking for it that major chains will pick it up – that is why a lot of new products from smaller companies use guerrilla marketing to build up a big fan base – and then have their raving fan customers demand their products from their local suppliers – think: micro beers. Advertising is the tool used to implement the marketing strategy.

 Sales, is the last step in the process which is convincing the consumer to buy the product. This is where it is critical to understand the customer/client at the deepest possible level – and understand the decision-making/ purchasing process. I have a saying here that is one of my very favorites: Whoever owns the voice of the customer – owns the marketplace. Whoever gets the closest to the customer, has the strongest relationship, and understands them at the deepest level – has a huge advantage in the marketplace.

 Now you can take all of these things and apply them directly to personal branding.

Each of us, as a professional, and especially those of us that interact directly with our clients – need to consider the importance of creating a personal brand. In other words, what are the thoughts, beliefs, emotions you want to come into people’s minds when they hear… your name! Do they think: “trusted advisor,” do they think about someone who is highly competent, caring, a true expert? Or does your brand not have a distinctive and unique position in the customer’s mind? Today, to create a successful career as a person who delivers professional services – such as a lawyer, insurance salesperson, real estate agent, financial manager… or “business expert” such as myself, it’s critical that you take the time to think through the images, feelings, thoughts, emotions and connections that you want your clients to make when they think about you – and when they refer you to their friends and colleagues!!!

 Let me use myself as an example:

After more than 17 years as a business consultant and professional speaker I have listened to my customers closely enough to understand that they hire me for three very specific reasons – what I call the 3R’s.

 Research – you would be hard-pressed to find any other business consultant or professional speaker in the world who spends as much time, energy and effort as I do in reading 100+ books a year, listening to another 50 on audio, reading hundreds of white papers, magazine articles, blogs – truly investing a major part of my life into becoming as knowledgeable as I possibly can about the topics I teach.

 Real Life – not only do I read and study an enormous amount of information and data – I have been the CEO of 10 companies – two of them multinational – so I don’t just teach, I have been there and done that. I know what it’s like to have to make payroll – I know what it’s like to make bets with hundreds of thousands of dollars and many people’s jobs on a strategy. I have been in the trenches and continue to be there with my clients right now. I don’t teach theory – I teach what I know works from direct personal experience.

 ROI – the number one reason that people hire me is that I don’t waste their time or money – everything I teach, every idea I put forth, every workshop I deliver is focused intensely on delivering a strong Return On Investment for the money they have invested not only in me – but the sometimes very substantial expense of bringing in a large group of people, flying them in from all over the place – putting them up at a hotel – feeding all of them - and letting them spend a few days in training with me. The investment can be massive – the return must also be significant.

To my clients my brand is pretty straightforward: John Spence is a human Cliff Notes who can teach my people extremely valuable ideas in a simple and easy to understand way – and he constantly drives for turning the ideas he teaches into action in my company!

 As you can see I have a very clear and specific understanding of the brand that I am trying to portray – and that my clients have told me reflects who I am and the work I do for them. Actually, I have a 15-page “brand platform” that my team and I wrote to help us stay extremely focused on what the “JohnSpence” brand is and how to communicate it effectively.

 That is exactly the idea of personal branding, just like any company would, you sit down and figure out clearly what you want the brand “YOU” to stand for the marketplace and how you want your customers – and potential customers – to think about you and the services you offer. And in this day and age if you want to be successful as someone who delivers professional services it is absolutely essential that you take the time and effort to carefully craft a unique and compelling (compelling – as defined by the customer) personal brand and then become and expert at using social media and personal referrals to market your brand aggressively. But that’s an entirely different topic…

 I hope you found this helpful – let me know if you have any questions at all. Take good care — John

 

Filed Under: Branding / Advertising, Career Success, John's Rants Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

The Four Biggest Challenges Facing Industry Leaders

August 2, 2012 By 2 Comments
I was extremely honored  when asked to contribute this article to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association’s fantastic news site the SIFMA SmartBrief. They consistently offer superb information and ideas. I hope you enjoy this article and I have put a link at the bottom to sign-up for the SIFMA SmartBrief – it is FREE and VERY useful!
 
 

In My View: John Spence on the 4 biggest challenges facing industry leaders

By John Spence on July 31st, 2012

During the past eight years, I have had the opportunity to present leadership and business improvement training sessions to more than 1,200 CEOs from firms worth between $2 million and $500 million, as well as dozens of similar programs for senior leaders at a number of Fortune 500 companies. During these intensive workshops, I force the participants to make a critical self-examination of the current operational strengths and weaknesses of their organizations through a combination of audits, benchmarking and highly focused discussion questions. One of the key questions I ask in every session is “What are the three or four biggest challenges you’re facing in your business right now?” Even with an incredibly diverse sample of businesses from every imaginable industry, it has been fascinating to see a clear pattern emerge of four specific issues that the vast majority of these leaders identify as the things that are holding their organizations back and keep them up at night.

1. Lack of a vivid and extremely well-communicated vision
Even though these leaders are personally obsessed with the vision and direction of their company, they reluctantly admit that if you were to go just one or two levels below them in the organization, you would likely find very few, if any, employees that truly understand the vision, mission and core values of their organization. One especially frustrated CEO asked me, “John, when do you know that you have communicated these things enough?” My reply was “When you have talked about the vision, mission and values so much that you feel like if you have to say it just one more time you’ll get nauseous. … It is at that point that the lowest person in your organization just heard it for the very first time.” A major job of every leader, whether you lead two people or 20,000, is to relentlessly communicate an exciting and ennobling vision for the future of the organization. In one-on-one meetings, town halls, e-mails, voicemails, team meetings …  the goal is to help people clearly see where the business is headed and what they need to focus on to make sure you all arrive there together successfully.

2. Lack of open, honest and courageous communication
The inability or unwillingness to put difficult, uncomfortable and awkward topics on the table for candid and transparent discussion was identified by these leaders as a major inhibitor to their ability to build strong teams and get their organizations fully aligned. As Patrick Lencioni points out in his superb book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,” in large part this lack of candor stems from a fundamental absence of trust that leads to unwillingness by people on the team to be vulnerable and completely honest. However, the desperate need for courageous communication and high levels of transparency is powerfully demonstrated in Kouzes’ and Posner’s seminal book “The Leadership Challenge,” which unequivocally shows that honesty is the single most important driver in establishing credibility as a leader. Especially in times of great turmoil like we are facing now, employees crave as much information as they can get about how things are going in the company and what they need to do to keep it moving forward. Where there is a lack of a well-communicated vision mission and values, you quickly see fear, politics, rumor-mongering rushing in to fill the void.

3. Lack of accountability
As a direct result of the lack of honesty and courageous communication mentioned above, one of the difficult conversations not occurring is a frank discussion about tolerating mediocre performance. After taking a good, hard look at their business, many of the participants in my sessions realize that they have a few mediocre performers in key positions in their organization and that every day they leave them there is another day they are in effect saying to the rest of the company,” we were just kidding about pursuing excellence.” For example, I am currently working with three large companies that have long-established reputations for being exceedingly “nice.” On one hand, people that work in these organizations are very proud to be part of such wonderful and kind company, yet on the other hand, they realize that major issues and serious problems continue to go unaddressed strictly because people don’t want to “hurt someone’s else’s feelings.” The truth is it is not “nice” to let someone jeopardize the organization and destroy their own career because their leader did not have the courage to tell them the truth about their poor performance. Here is a test will bring this into sharp focus:  Think of a person in your organization that consistently delivers subpar work, turn things in late and has a poor attitude. … Now realize that, because they still have their job, this individual is the person who establishes the level of acceptable work for every other employee in your company. How does that make you feel?

4. Lack of disciplined execution
For the last five years, I have been a guest lecturer on strategic thinking at the Securities Industry Institute at the Wharton School of Business. Each year, I have about 120 executives in my session and I always ask the same question, “What percentage of the time do companies that have a solid plan for how to succeed in the marketplace … actually effectively execute to plan?” The answer has remained the same year after year: 10 to 15%. That number is shockingly low, but unfortunately my experience indicates it is accurate. What is even more devastating is to realize the monumental waste of talent, resources, opportunity and money that terribly low number represents. Because this was such a serious issue for many of my clients, I decided to do a “deep dive” and really study the topic. After more than 5,000 pages of reading and dozens of interviews, I discovered the process for ensuring effective execution was really very straightforward and simple. Just a handful of key steps need to be applied with vigor and total accountability. I also discovered that nearly every leader pretty much knew what the process was, they were just unable or unwilling to impose the level of discipline needed to drive higher levels of execution in their organization.

So if you had the chance to talk to nearly 2,000 senior leaders and ask them what the four most important things they need to focus on right now to fix their business, their answers would be:

  • Relentlessly over-communicate a clear, compelling and focused vision for the future of the organization to all stakeholders.
  • Foster an environment that demands honest, transparent and courageous communication in order to develop high levels of trust and respect.
  • Be clear about establishing specific and quantifiable standards of performance and then be rigorous, but never ruthless in absolutely holding every single employee 100% accountable to meeting or exceeding the agreed upon standards.
  • Develop a culture of disciplined execution by establishing the systems, processes and checkpoints to ensure consistent flawless execution of all critical initiatives.

At the end of the day, none of the things I have listed here are particularly new or revolutionary. Actually, I am sure that most of us will recognize them as well-established fundamentals for leading a world-class organization. However there is a huge difference between knowing something … and living it every day in your organization.

John Spence has twice been recognized as one of the top 100 business thought leaders in America and is the author of “Awesomely Simple: Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas into Action.” For more information on John and his work, visit www.johnspence.com.

 

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Filed Under: Career Success, John's Rants, Leadership, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

90 Quotes That Will Change The Way You Think

June 11, 2012 By 41 Comments

I was surfing the web and came across the following blog on Marc and Angle Hack Life: Practical Tips for Productive Living. Their 60 are awesome, but I added another 30 that were impactful to my thinking.  I welcome, no, I strongly encourage you to PLEASE add your favorite quotes in the comments section below – let’s make this a truly life-changing list!

 60 Quotes That Will Change The Way You Think…

In your quiet moments, what do you think about?  How far you’ve come, or how far you have to go?  Your strengths, or your weaknesses?  The best that might happen, or the worst that might come to be?  In your quiet moments, pay attention to your thoughts.  Because maybe, just maybe, the only thing that needs to shift in order for you to experience more happiness, more love, and more vitality, is your way of thinking. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Career Success, John's Rants, Life Success Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The Most Important Thing I Have Ever Learned…

March 24, 2012 By 39 Comments

Recently I was deeply honored to be asked to give a TED talk at the University of Florida TEDx event. Ben Erez and his team did an amazing job setting up the event and brought in a sell-out crowd of 1,600 TED fanatics. I thought since I was a “Top 100 Business Thought Leader” they would ask me to speak about business excellence or leadership… but Ben had a different idea in mind for what he wanted me to talk about!  I truly hope you enjoy this video and PLEASE share it with as many people as you can – I think there are a few very good ideas here. Enjoy!!

I hope that if you found value in this video –  that you will take a moment to leave a comment AND share it with everyone you feel might enjoy watching it – thanks so very much – John

John Spence is the author of “Awesomely Simple – Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas into Action.” He is an award-wining professional speaker and corporate trainer, and has twice been recognized as one of the Top 100 Business Thought Leaders in America and also as one of the most admired Small Business Experts in the nation.

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