The Only Way to Change

Posted on April 7, 2011 by 2goodthings

Yesterday afternoon, my daughter’s Nanny said to me “I finally get it.  The only way to change is…to, well…just change.”

“Yeah?” I said, smiling.

“I can’t keep waiting for things to change, for other people to change, that’s never going to happen. The timing is never going to be perfect.” She continued, “The only way things are going to change, the only way I’m going to change, is to just do it.  To change myself.”

I wish I’d been that smart when I was 20.

For much of my teens and early 20s I put myself into holding patterns where I was waiting for something or someone to change.  Eventually I realized that by changing how I engage with others – how I interact, how I react, what I tolerate and what I refuse to accept – as well as how I conduct my business – how I enforce my policies, how I communicate and how I spend my time – I could build a more satisfying life and career.

We all hold the power to control our lives and our destinies.  That power lies in our ability to change ourselves.

Posted in Business, Getting Unstuck, Job Satisfaction | 1 Comment

What’s Your Vision?

Posted on March 17, 2011 by 2goodthings

For years, I’ve been telling anyone starting a new business (or diversifying an existing one) to begin by fleshing out a comprehensive vision of what they’re building. Without articulating and internalizing what you’re aiming to build, it’s almost impossible to figure out how to build it.

In a recent Inc Magazine article, Creating a Company Vision, Ari Weinzweig, founder of Zingerman’s Delicatessen in Ann Arbor, Michigan provides 8 steps to “Visioning” as he calls it.  The process he outlines, which nicely supplements  the Values Analysis & Dream Job Analysis found under Satisfaction in the Exercises tab above, will sound very familiar to anyone who’s taken my “I Need to Jumpstart my Business” seminar:

Step 1: Pick your topic
Before you can begin the process, you have to define what you’re trying to build.  Is it a whole new business?  A diversification?  A change in role?  Outline the scope of what you’re defining through this exercise.

Step 2: Pick your timeframe
Weinzweig offers a range of 2 to 20 years but recommends 5 years out as a good starting point for most projects.

Step 3: Put together a list of “Prouds”
Spend just 10 minutes crafting a list of past accomplishments.  This will help you recognize the skills and knowledge you already have that you can bring to bear on this new endeavor.

Step 4: Write the first draft
Spend no more than 30 minutes describing what you hope to accomplish.  Weinzweig notes that writing DRAFT across the top of the page helps most people get their thoughts on paper without overly stressing over language or process.

Before you start your draft, keep the following tips in mind:

  • This is your dream so aim for what you really want and don’t shortchange yourself.
  • Put down what’s really important to you, regardless of whether other people believe you can do it or it fits other people’s needs.
  • Write from the future looking back – describe what this thing you’ve built is like, how it functions, what it’s accomplished.
  • Get all your thoughts on paper – don’t edit (or self-edit) until you’ve allowed yourself to really imagine what’s possible.
  • Don’t separate the personal from the professional – build your passions into this dream and make sure it will fulfill all your needs.

Step 5: Review and Redraft
After allowing your original draft to sit for a few days, make a copy and start editing.  Make sure that you add in very specific information – saying you want to be successful doesn’t cut it, you have to define what successful means to you.

Step 6A, 6B & 6C: More redrafts
Under Weinzweig’s system, you’re allowed up to 3 more revisions.  If you haven’t nailed it by then, you’re heading down a path that’s not really right for you.

Step 7: Solicit input
Here’s where you take your vision to trusted friends and advisers.  Pick people who are open-minded but willing to give you constructive criticism.  Above all, pick people who are comfortable with the idea that it really is possible to earn a living doing work you’re passionate about.

Step 8: Share the vision
The final step is to get everyone who will be working with you to build this dream on board with your vision.  Partners, collaborators, spouses and employees need to understand and be fully invested in what you’re building together.  If you’re not all pulling in the same direction, your boat’s going to capsize so make sure you give the people who are going to help you build this business input on how they see their role and how your vision meshes with theirs.

Posted in Business, Job Satisfaction, Planning | 1 Comment

Brands in Hands

Posted on March 8, 2011 by 2goodthings

My friend, Barry Schwartz, recently forwarded me this link to Brothers and Sisters, a London based ad agency, whose animated video on marketing and audience, Brands in Hands, proudly proclaims (in a tasty Scots accent which makes clicking the link even more worthwhile):

“We are more powerful than those that think they own the brands.  We are more powerful than those that think they control the media.  We are more powerful than governments. We are the people formerly known as the audience…and the only thing that we fear is boredom.”

Nicely put!

The answer, according to Brothers and Sisters, is to entertain your audience and through entertainment convert them into your best sales people ever.

Now, if you take the word entertainment at face value, we’re talking about a seriously screwed up world.  But if you allow “entertain” to cover more than light frothy fluff. If you make “entertain” synonymous with “engage” so it becomes the umbrella under which any interaction that we, the audience, willingly give our attention to can live. Then Brothers and Sisters have given us a very smart take on a very real cultural shift.  One we business owners cannot afford to ignore.

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In a Rut?

Posted on March 2, 2011 by 2goodthings

Luke Copping, who runs a terrific blog out of Buffalo NY, asked me and 17 others to guest post about what to do when you find yourself in a creative rut.  If you’ve ever been there, you know how awful it feels, how hard it is to climb out of and how tough it is to avoid getting stuck in the first place.  Lots of great collective wisdom here – check it out!

lukecopping.com/blog

To go straight to the Creative Rut post, use the permalink

Posted in Getting Unstuck | Leave a comment

Collaborative Learning

Posted on February 15, 2011 by 2goodthings

I’m in San Marcos, TX attending the Platypus Workshop – a week long immersive digital video training bootcamp led by Dirck Halstead and David Leeson.  Our first day started with a brief explanation of the rules for shooting “vox pox” aka talking head interviews and “b-roll”, the close, medium and long establishing shots that show the audience the place or space you’re in. Then they threw us into the deep end of the pool – loosing us onto the Texas State campus with nothing but a dSLR and video viewfinder to shoot three 90 second interviews and ten minutes of b-roll.

The result?  Almost all of us blew the assignment – some of us didn’t control the subject or the environment well.  Others didn’t pay enough attention to composition, lighting or exposure basics.  We shot close, long or medium but rarely all three consistently.  We each had some stuff that worked but all of us did at least one thing completely wrong.

The critique was long, often brutal and amazingly effective.  In the 4 hours it took to watch and discuss our efforts, I’d learned more about what works and what doesn’t work than I’ve learned in weeks of poring over polished, professional pieces.

Obviously, as professionals we’re all under pressure to only put our best work out there – to hide our mistakes and learning process so clients, colleagues, bosses and peers won’t see any weaknesses or shortcomings. But learning in isolation is so much harder and takes so much longer than working with a group of peers who are struggling to master the same skills or knowledge.

For years, I’ve been teaching people to build support systems for growing their businesses by networking with other small business owners, finding a planning partner or building an accountability team but I’m now realizing this kind of support can go much further.  Finding people who can act as creative sounding boards, people you can share experimental ideas and work product with, people who’ll provide honest but productive critique is just as important.

Posted in Business, Creativity, Risk Taking | Leave a comment

Creative Collaboration

Posted on January 31, 2011 by 2goodthings

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had a number of conversations with clients and colleagues about new approaches to business relationships: competitors shifting into co-marketing relationships, vendors and suppliers functioning more like partners and neighbors on the food chain working together to reach the same audience.   The enthusiasm with which these more creative approaches to collaboration between businesses is being embraced thrills me – I love, love, love it!

BUT there’s a potential downside that we all have to watch out for: failure to communicate expectations.  Through bitter experience, I’ve learned that if everyone working together does not share the same vision and goals, things can turn really ugly really fast.

Before diving into a new collaborative business relationship, I recommend asking everyone involved to write up their vision of what you’re building together, what they see their role to be and how they see your role.

Answering these questions may help:

  • What is each person’s role?
  • What are each person’s responsibilities?
  • What legal relationship are you comfortable committing to?
  • What financial relationship are you comfortable committing to?
  • What’s going to happen if someone doesn’t fulfill their role or responsibilities?
  • What if they think their performance is great and you don’t?
  • What are your vision and goals for this collaboration?
  • If everything works out as perfectly as possible, what do you think will happen?
  • If everything goes badly, what’s the worst thing that could happen to you?  to your collaborators?
  • What are your personal ambitions and dreams for your work?
  • How does this collaboration tie into them?
  • Are you willing to set aside your individual name recognition to benefit this collaboration?
  • Are you willing to allow one or more of your team members to gain name recognition if you don’t also?
  • How will you handle decisions when there’s a disagreement between team members?
  • What policies can you develop now for handling internal conflicts?
  • What happens if a client is unhappy with one team member’s portion of the project?
  • What policies can you develop now for handling conflicts with clients or vendors?
  • How will income and expenses be distributed between members?
  • How will boring or distasteful work be distributed between members?
  • How will risk be distributed between members?
  • What else do the other team member(s) need to understand about you before you make this commitment?
  • What other sources of conflict can you think of that need to be addressed?

Taking the time to hammer out a clear vision of how you’re going to work together – while you’re still friends and before there’s any money at stake – is a crucial first step towards building collaborative relationships that work.

Posted in Business, Job Satisfaction, Marketing | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Help Wanted

Posted on January 28, 2011 by 2goodthings

Like many businesses responding to change, my partner and I are thinking about diversifying our studio’s offerings.  Before we jump whole hog into anything, though, we’re doing a bunch of informational interviews.

Done well, informational interviews can be an enormous source of invaluable, real world information.  The trick lies in finding the right people and asking the right questions.

To find the right people, we’re using our network.  We’re asking everyone we know who they know that might be able to help us.  We’re then trying to find out as much as we can about the people we’re calling before we pick up the phone.  A little background research goes a long way towards figuring out what questions to ask.

Some of our leads will be great people to get general technical and technological information from. Others will be better to run ideas for prospects, markets and opportunities by.  The rest we’ll look to for information about how we should expect this decision to impact our lives.  How will this affect the number of hours we work, how much we travel, how we spend our time, and the roles we play in our business? What will each of us need to learn? What new team-members will we need? What is working with clients in this environment really like? What do we need to watch out for? What do we need to do differently?

One thing we’ve learned from the interviews we’ve done so far is that if we don’t get off the phone saying “WOW! we just learned something amazing that we couldn’t have gotten any other way,” then we’re not asking the right questions.  Another is to ask each person we talk to who else they know who might be willing to talk to us.

Gearing ourselves up to make these calls isn’t easy but the pay-off has been so worthwhile.  I honestly can’t think of another way that we could have learned so much so fast.

Posted in Business, Decision Making, Job Satisfaction, Risk Taking | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Rock Your World

Posted on January 25, 2011 by 2goodthings

Got back late last night from the ASMP’s Strictly Business 3 conference in Los Angeles.  Took the entire morning just to brain dump all that I learned into my partner, Mike’s, head.

If you are a photographer, want to become a photographer, know a photographer or know someone who wants to become a photographer you (and your friends) have 2 more chances to get inspired, get connected and get all the tools you need to make it in this crazy upside-down world we call professional photography:

SB3 is coming to Philadelphia February 25-27 and Chicago April 1-3 (no foolin’).

Those of you who were with me in LA know what I’m talking about – so follow the wisdom of Colleen Wainwright, our brilliant keynote speaker: be awesome, be useful, be nice and share some of your Ah-Ha! moments from SB3LA so everyone else will get the picture of why they owe it to themselves to get off their duffs and get to SB3.

PS To my fellow SB3LA attendees – thank you for rocking my world.  I am in AWE and so very very grateful to be part of such a vibrant and supportive community!

Posted in Announcements | 1 Comment

Strategic Reinvention

Posted on January 17, 2011 by 2goodthings

This weekend, I’ll be presenting several seminars for the ASMP’s Strictly Business 3 conference in Los Angeles.  The conference promises to be amazing – a dozen speakers, 2 keynotes, 22 workshops. The LA stop is the first of 3 – we’ll hit Philadelphia in February and Chicago in April. I strongly recommend it!

Anyway, one of my workshops, Strategic Reinvention, is a brand spanking new program in which I pretty much take all of the most important things I’ve learned about strategic thinking, managing change and building a business you love and smash them into a fast-paced, hard-hitting 60 minutes.  Whew!

To wrap my head around how to even do that, I came up with a nifty little flow chart outlining the process I’ve developed for navigating change while still building the business you want.  There’s a lot of punch packed into this simple little diagram. Check it out:

Strategic_Reinvention_Flow_Chart

Posted in Announcements, Business, Job Satisfaction, Planning | Leave a comment

D’oh

Posted on January 11, 2011 by 2goodthings

After working on my annual brain dump, I’m finding myself opening up to new ideas and possibilities. After all, nature abhors a vacuum and it seems my brain is no exception.

Of course these lightning strikes never come at a convenient time so this past week I’ve found myself saying repeatedly “Oh, I had the best idea for X” or “Oh, I thought of a great name for Y” followed by my embarrassed admission that I can’t remember what they were anymore.

I hate that feeling.

The cure is mind-numbingly simple: record your ideas the moment you have them.

Personally, I still like pen and paper (though that may change when the Verizon iPhone finally becomes a reality) so I’ve started stashing small notepads all over the place – in my purse, my car, my nightstand, my bathroom.

When inspiration strikes, I grab the nearest pad and scribble the thought. The sheet of paper gets torn off and stashed in a folder until it’s convenient for me to enter the thought into my task management system.

Like I said, it’s simple. So simple I’ve hesitated over posting such an obvious message. But while putting a system in place so you have a way to record your ideas quickly and easily no matter where you are is easy, using it religiously is not.

But here’s the thing. Every time I have one of those “D’oh” moments I can feel something inside me freeze. It’s like a little jerk that stops me in my tracks. Those little jerks add up and soon the ideas just stop.

Keeping the ongoing flow of information from your brain to your system year-round, keeps the vacuum in place. For me, it’s worth doing whatever it takes to stop worrying about remembering and start focusing on imagining.

Posted in Creativity, Getting Unstuck, Productivity | 3 Comments