ENCORE! 2.5 INSIGHTS

By Steven K. Haught, MBA Today, I will continue developing the theme I began in yesterday’s article, Leadership Innovation: Sandpaper without the Sand. A company doesn’t have to rotate it’s personnel into wildly varying positions to achieve the goal of idea stimulation, or cross-pollination of concepts that merge into a new innovation.   It can be as simple as providing an environment which allows employees to easily work on various/differing projects, while discussing their work and outcomes in a group environment.  The idea is to create a multidisciplinary approach, where various activities and discussion can be happening with the purpose of seeing what outcomes are possible as each person shares in multiple projects at the same time. Some concepts will intuitively lend themselves to this type of thinking, others will not.  The key to creating innovation is to pour as much into the pipeline as possible and see what comes out. Creativity researchers Howard Gruber

By Steven K. Haught, MBA In the 1920s, a gentleman by the name of Dick Drew worked as a sandpaper salesman at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. One day Drew was thinking about the challenge of painting a car — it wasn’t a specialty of his but he could appreciate the problem. What he did know inside and out was sandpaper, and he intuitively realized that sandpaper could help solve the problem.  What he needed was a roll of sandpaper without the sand.  This became known as masking tape and it transformed more than just how we paint cars. That company we know today as 3M — Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company.  Dick Drew’s insight in the early 1920’s wasn’t an anomaly, it was an example of the type of innovation that has defined 3M as a company for 100 years. What made them so consistently creative and innovative? 3M has a “flexible attention” policy. In most companies, flexible attention means goofing off on the company dime. In 3M it means pla

By Steven K. Haught, MBA Do you build your Personal Brand without becoming an Expert or do you become an Expert first… which builds your Brand? The first time I heard the words “personal branding,” I did not know what was meant. After watching and observing the personal branding of celebrities and leading business leaders, I finally understood what it means to prepare, package and advertise “you” as a brand. I also learned the most important aspect of the personal branding phenomenon… building your personal brand without the underlying expertise is a recipe for disaster.  And there’s an important question that comes immediately to the forefront for anyone thinking of being the journey of personal branding… Are you building a personality or a brand?  If you are an expert, you don’t need to tell people that you are an expert. Your audience will know based on what you say, what you are doing and what you have done. Why is it important to become an expert before buildi

By Steven K. Haught, MBA Two-thirds of Americans do not expect their daily lives to return to normal for at least six months, and as states reopen, three-quarters are concerned that a second wave of coronavirus cases will emerge… a new NPR/ PBS NewsHour /Marist poll finds.  So maybe six months will be twelve or eighteen months or longer? What is predictable these days? What is normal?  Normal is far more subjective than we want to accept. There are behaviors that are considered necessary given the current pandemic situation and depending on how long this lasts… those protective behaviors will be part of our cultural,  the social and economic normal, or maybe everything is just abnormal. Business certainly has no grasp of a “normal” and may not find a definition anytime soon.  I cringe at the use of the terms “New Normal” as it suggests raising or lowering the bar to explain and justify what is happening.   An optimistic business strategy is nearly impossible for exec

This Memorial Day, it feels like a lot of what we’ve treasured is now gone. Did we appreciate it enough? Did we take too many of our blessings for granted?  Have we been living our lives immersed in a sense of entitlement?  What we had just a few short months ago seems of such high value compared to the losses, constraints and burdens of now. We had the strongest labor market of our lifetimes, perhaps the best economy too. We’d been at peace for more than a decade. The world was producing fascinating wonders – self-driving cars, the total of all knowledge available at our fingertips, the ability to speak with anyone on the planet, anywhere, anytime. We live in a time when every person who has ever lived before us would eagerly trade places in an instant. For many of them, our “now”  would seem like an incredible paradise. Were we sufficiently grateful for it all?  Grateful at anything? We can look back on January 2020 and wonder at the trivial things we let cons

By Steven K. Haught, MBA I could not resist posting that title… “Remotely Successful” means being successful remotely! Okay, n ow that you have decided to begin the process of reducing your operating costs, real estate footprint, and allowing teams to work remotely, its time to consider the practical necessities that must be implemented to ensure a successful transition from stationary office to working from home. While I’m not personally predicting that the office will go away entirely or in-person sales presentations and meetings are now extinct, I do think it’s likely that more and more of your prospects and clients will still prefer to “meet” virtually when things reopen. It is most than likely to be the mode of doing business for the remainder of 2020. Positioning your company to adapt to remote and regroup in pursuing its revenue streams, your sales team should be equipped with the following skills and assets: Know how to write emails and texts that are cle

By Steven K. Haught, MBA Has your company started preparing the foundation that will allow their sales teams to work remotely? The pandemic has raised the question once again as to the viability of sales teams working from their home offices. During the past two months, lots of chatter around the topic has raised concerns about whether companies are really thinking through the issues of a remotely based revenue producing organization.   Are you and your sales team prepared for the inevitable “virtualization” of the sales process in your company?  This is a major decision, and needs to thought through carefully, or you will be sadly disappointed. Your business needs to be prepared for the incoming “new normal” and that means, your organization and your sales team needs to start looking at specific standards for performance and in-the-field selling.  Quite possibly, at least for the near term, selling from start to close without ever meeting a prospect or client face-to