Small Business Confidence: It Depends On Who You Ask

Two differing views on small business owner confidence:

• Optimism among small-business owners took an unexpected tumble in March. The NFIB Small-Business Optimism Index lost 3.5 points, falling to 98.0 (1986=100), two points below the 30-year average. The good news is that profit trends improved, inventory investment was up, and reported sales trends remained strong (virtually unchanged from February).

• Chief executives of small and mid-sized businesses nationwide have increased confidence in a strong economy throughout 2006, according to TEC International’s quarterly CEO survey, the TEC Confidence Index. While CEOs anticipate growth, they are still concerned with staffing, health care costs and implications of an avian flu pandemic. (TEC is now Vistage Corporation)

Be Excellent™ To Host Carnival of Entrepreneurship #12

This Thursday, Be Excellent™ will be the host of the Carnival of Entrepreneurship.

This is our first time hosting the Carnival. You may have seen these listed previously -- and it just keeps getting better.

Here's how Carnival of Entrepreneurship works: Each week, a different blogger hosts the traveling roadshow featuring some of the best tips and inspiration for starting and running your own business. (Hardest part if you're the host? Limiting the number of posts to only seven - there's so much good content out there - it's tough to choose.)

Scott Allen, over at About Entrepreneurs is the creator of this Carnival.

Make sure to come back on Thursday!

Six Disciplines for Excellence - #1 Top-Rated Book in Targeted Keyword Categories

"Six Disciplines for Excellence" was recently listed as the #1 Top-Rated book on Amazon for the following targeted keyword categories:

Excellence + Quality Control

Excellence + Success in Business

Excellence + Success in Business + Total Quality

Excellence + Quality Control + Small Business

Excellence + Small Business + Total Quality Management

Gary Slinger's Review of Six Disciplines for Excellence

Gary Slinger, a Solution Architect from Tampa who publishes a great blog called "Thoughts" recently published his review of Six Disciplines for Excellence. Gary's also big into ITIL and MindMapping, which you'll understand more as you read his review.

Thanks Gary, for your insights!!

A few comments from the review...

"...this is a circular, continuous improvement methodology, with outputs from one section readily feeding into another, and that there are linkages throughout the methodology..."

"Frankly, I wish I’d had this book a few years ago, when I was part of a project that DID create a global IS department, from several smaller departments, and set visions, mission statements, processes, and so forth in place, many of which are still in operation today. We got it done, but at times it seemed like we were winging it, as there was no central reference like this to go to..."

"In reading the book, I’m struck that the author spends time focusing on HOW to achieve maximum benefit from each of the six interdependent Disciplines, and not just providing a laundry list without explanation."


BOTTOMLINE: Read the entire review here.

How Does Your Job Compare?

MONEY Magazine and Salary.com researched hundreds of jobs, considering their growth, pay, stress-levels and other factors.

These careers ranked highest.

How does your career/title rank on this list?

Accountability and Integrity

Over at Hilbilly PhD, is a great article on "Do It Right The First Time."

The essence?

"Have you ever noticed that most of our problems in life tend to come about as a result of trying to evade being accountable. It is not always easy to be accountable. When we are accountable we have to be responsible or answerable for our actions. When we are managers or leaders we are often accountable for the actions of others in our organization or on our team. In order to be accountable we must embody integrity."

BOTTOMLINE: "It is not always easy to do the right things, but, we can save ourselves a whole lot of time and trouble if we invest a lttle more time to do things right the first time. It is much more difficult to clean up a mess than it is to avoid it. "....Personal strength is based on your character. character is a by product of your integrity and your sense of personal accountability."

How Did Six Disciplines Come About?

Want to find out how Six Disciplines came about? What were the events that led to its founding, and more importantly.....why are we doing what no other company has done before?

Watch and listen to John Crawford, General Manager of the Six Disciplines Leadership Center of Northwest Ohio, as he explains how Six Disciplines Corporation was founded.

National Small Business Week

This week is "National Small Business Week."

To celebrate, we'd like to point out some of the key advantages that small businesses have over larger enterprises.

• Small Business Advantage #1: Connecting People to Purpose
• Small Business Advantage #2: Effective Communication

More small business advantages to come....stay tuned!

Pouring Your Heart Into It

George Ambler, over at The Practice of Leadership, offers his take on the book of passion and inspiration “Pour Your Heart into It : How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time” by the chairman and CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang.

Key assertions:

• Pursue a Bold Vision
• Passion
• Leadership
• Pushing Boundaries
• Business is About People

BOTTOMLINE: "The Starbucks success story is inspiring and very motivating. I would strongly recommend this book to leaders, managers and especially entrepreneurs. The book is written with the same passion and conviction that made the Starbuck’s brand great."

Powerful Thoughts

From Skip over at Random Thoughts, comes this gem:

Be careful of your thoughts,

for your thoughts become your words;

Be careful of your words,

for your words become your deeds;

Be careful of your deeds,

for your deeds become your habits;

Be careful of your habits,

for your habits become your character;

Be careful of your character,

for your character becomes your destiny.
- Author Unknown

More on SWOT

According to the folks at BPlans:

"SWOT is probably the best tool there is for taking a strategic look at a company. It's named for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It's a very good first step towards analyzing any company, or developing business strategy."

"Of course you have to manage a SWOT meeting well. Like any other meeting subject, SWOT can degenerate into useless discussion. A SWOT meeting should focus on the SWOT agenda and avoid unrelated side discussions. It should invite contributions without reprisals for negative comments. It's a variation on brainstorming, so contributions -- as in suggested bullet points, suggested items on the list -- are all positive as long as they are well intentioned."

BOTTOMLINE: How does Six Disciplines approach SWOT? First, it's an integral part of Discipline VI. Step Back, of the Six Disciplines Methodology. Second, it's built right into our software, the Six Disciplines Business System. Finally, it is further enhanced by the use of the unique 100 point exercise application, which enables each stakeholder to rank how important each item raised in the SWOT is to themselves. Gone are the flip charts, napkins and random pieces of paper to record SWOT - and replaced by intuitive software that records, tracks, trends and enables execution to occur.

How Bill Gates Gets Work Done

Interesting article here from Fortune Magazine called "How I Work: Bill Gates."

The essence?

• Go paperless
• Use email as the first communication medium
• Use email filtering to drop down the number of incoming emails to an acceptable level
• Email as the central universe of workflow
• No to-do list. Use email, folders and online calendar
• Use email notification icon, but have the discipline of ignoring it
• Use desktop search for files, other than navigating through folders.
• Use whiteboard to brainstorm

Trust Makes a Leader Great

Steve Sherlock, over at the Blog Synergy, posts this review of leadership characteristics, in which he sums up the one key characteristic of great leaders as being trust.

BOTTOMLINE: Our research showed that one of the key differentiators of top-performing organizations vs. lower performing organizations was the level of TRUST within the senior leadership team and team members.

How To Deal With Daily Stress

Tom Asacker, over at A Clear Eye, poses these solutions to dealing with daily stress:

• Be passionate - About how your work improves people's lives
• Be clear - About precisely how you provide that value
• Stay focused - On what customers truly care about
• Communicate unceasingly - Your passion, vision and strategy
• Stay tuned in - To the rapid and endless changes in today's marketplace
• Be kind - If you want your people to be kind
• Stop lying - To your people, shareholders, customers and, especially, yourself
• Trust others - Which is not the same as telling them what to do (see #7 above)
• Give back - To customers, employees, the needy, and the environment
• Take risks - Brand is a verb, not a noun

Entrepreneurial Growing Pains

Dr. Jeff Cornwell, over at the Entrepreneurial Mind, had the pleasure of having Eric Flamholtz (author of Growing Pains) as a guest speaker at Belmont University.

Some highlights from his lecture at Belmont are included below. (NOTE: I've inserted relevant references from Six Disciplines for Excellence...)

"What you can't measure, you can't manage." (Disciplines II, III and IV - Define Measures, Align Measures, and Monitor Measures)

"Set a specific quantitative goal for your business and develop a plan to get there." (Discipline II. Set Goals That Lead)

"A mission should have a qualitative and a quantitative component." (Discipline I. Decide What's Important - Renew Mission)

"Companies compete not just with products and within markets, but through their operating systems, management systems, and culture." (Discipline III. Align Systems)

Business Improvement Overload?

Want to be overwhelmed by business improvement ideas?

Here's more than you can shake a stick at!

Web seminars - conducted by many of the top "business improvement experts" -- all available to you for free, from our good friends at Microsoft.

BOTTOMLINE: Do we really need "more" business improvement ideas? Perhaps what we really need is just to pick a comprehensive set (a methodology), use some (technology) to make it practical, and have an external (coach) to keep us on track and keep us accountable. At Six Disciplines, that's EXACTLY what our research shows - will make business improvement and business EXCELLENCE - last.

The Courage To Lead

EmoryLeadership.org has a great piece on "The Courage To Lead."

Their premise?

• The single biggest barrier to implementing strategy is courage.

Why?

• Many people (and firms) lack the guts to stick with the plans and goals they have set for themselves.
• They lack the courage of their own convictions

In short, executing a strategy takes courage. You must be willing to practice what you preach, when it is convenient and (most important) when it is not.

BOTTOMLINE: "If you’re going to pursue a strategy, you must be willing to make hard choices and act as if you truly believe in your own strategy."

Quotes for Today

"Vision is not enough; it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs." - Vaclav Havel

"It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do." - Elbert Hubbard

"Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.“"- Dee Hock

"Talk does not cook rice." - Chinese proverb

Amazon.com, Execution and Six Disciplines

When you think of Amazon.com, one thing is for sure: execution is the key to their continuing success.

Don't believe it?

Here's a flip chart of what's on CEO Jeff Bezos' mind...

BOTTOMLINE: "The reasons most businesses fail is not strategy - it's execution. Know what to do is not the problem: doing it is! The Six Disciplines Methodology has been specifically designed and optimized for execution. " (page 55, Six Disciplines for Excellence)

Customer Relationships - Making Them Great

Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson, in his unpublished manuscript, Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management, makes this observation about human nature:

"You remember 1/3 of what you read, 1/2 of what people tell you, but 100 percent of what you feel."

BOTTOMLINE: What customers are most likely to remember about you is their emotional reaction to working with you. One bad experience can make the difference. Fortunately, the opposite is also true. One great experience can make a relationship last -- for the long-term.