Archive for the ‘Strategic Planning’ Category

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Enter the Chief Executive Gardener

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

Any gardener will tell you that gardening takes strategy and tactics.

  • long-term and short-term planning,
  • resources,
  • and daily maintenance.

Enter the Chief Executive Gardener

Here’s what Chief Executive Gardeners do. They

  • check the location, the values of the soil, the sunlight, the weather, the intangibles.
  • find the right plants to match those circumstances.
  • plant the seeds and seedlings in the soil — different plants across the landscape — to match variations in conditions.
  • keep watch on a regular basis.
  • remove weeds and other competitive threats.
  • amend the soil and keep plants cared for — pruned, fed, and strong — so that threats can’t harm them.
  • know that some plants will only live so long; some will die in storms; some will be weak from the start but that those should be rare, if the gardener is good.
  • watch the garden to see soil changes, to know what plants will continue to flourish and to know what new plants to introduce.

Every enterprise should have a Chief Executive Gardener. Without a Chief Executive Gardener, the Chief Executive Bean Counter has only luck to grow the beans to count.

To quote Joseph Jaffe

If you’re not busy growing, you’re busy dying.

He could have been talking about a garden. He wasn’t.

Great gardens grow to fit the world. They don’t try to make the world fit them.

That’s the garden analogy. Apply it where you think it works.

What will grow your business garden today? Would you start with an acre of social media listening and conversation?

Liz Strauss

Want a strategy to be irresistible to your core audience? See the Work with Liz.

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Posted in Strategic Planning, Strategic Thinking, Uniquely Liz, irresistible | View Comments

Alister Cameron on Social Media

Monday, February 12th, 2007

Alister Cameron makes four solid points today in his blog post on Social Media. The strongest take away was his no holds barred approach to defining links.

  1. Links are only valuable because people click on them. But they are valuable because people DO click on them.

    I would add to that. The value of a link that is not clicked on is a negative value. It takes space and is a missed opportunity for a link that might be useful to readers. A frivolous link also has negative value. Readers click and it wastes their time. So I recommend that you Think before you link.

  2. Comment numbers are a more accurate measure of you success than the number of visitors you receive.

    I would add to that if you are engaging your readers to the point where they comment conversationally, i.e. interactively responding to what is said both in the post and within the comment box, then they are probably also talking about what they read after they leave your blog.

  3. . . . there is such a thing as Blog Rage. . . . And the real villain is probably an overabundance of testosterone combined with too many hours of inactivity sitting in a chair blogging!

    One more case in which the solution is to breathe.

  4. Finally, building relationships is about trust. So determine to become an expert on how trust works online. People will trust you when you are credible, consistent, considerate and cooperative. They will trust you when they see other people trusting you.

    I might add that people trust you when you’re willing to trust other people. Why not be first?

Relationships are the key to business and the business of blogging. They are the key to any social endeavor. Learning to communicate with fluency and comfort is as much a part of being comfortable with ourselves as it is with interacting with others — it’s from a base of self awareness that we know how to respond to the actions around with grace and respect.

Liz Strauss

Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding Manager. — PVM

See also Work with Liz! at Successful Blog

Posted in Perfect Virtual Manager, Strategic Planning, Uniquely Liz | View Comments

Delegation: Will You Have More Time Then?

Monday, November 13th, 2006

One of the problems I see and have seen in every organization at every level is a very human one. It’s the problem of delegation. Most folks don’t know when to do it. They don’t let go soon enough.

What seems to happen in most cases is that we get working so hard that we find ourselves entrenched in too much work and too much stress. Long before we realize,.we have started to work from one minute to the next. Forward thinking, planning into the future gives way to those critical tasks that must be accomplished each day.

We are in tactics mode. Strategy is gone completely by then. Our to-do lists are managing our time, not the other way around.

When someone says get some help, the reply often is “I don’t have time to teach a person what we’re doing.”

STOP! When you hear yourself say that, stop. Think. Will you have more time in three weeks to teach someone? If the answer is no, take the time to teach someone now. Then in the next two weeks after he or she knows what you’re doing, you’ll not only catch up, but you’ll have another trained person who can move the project along.

Seriously. Stop to do that now.

Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding Manager – Perfect Virtual Manager

Liz

Posted in Leadership, Strategic Planning, Strategic Thinking, Uniquely Liz | View Comments

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