Your Role In History As An Entrepreneur

 Imagine Leadership

and Management

The traditional organizational chart is a construct left over from Alfred Sloan’s leadership at General Motors in the early 20th Century. That, my friends, is 100 years ago.

Adapted from the book 30 DAYS TO THE NEW ECONOMY written and published by Peggy Salvatore

In the 1980s, the hierarchical organizational chart was challenged by enterprises that found products were better built when workers had ownership of their production. The philosophy of pushing decision making down to the employee flattened the organizational chart somewhat and relationships became “matrixed.” In other words, people sometimes had multiple layers of reporting and responsibility as well as accountability and all those layers were spread throughout the organization.

The shift away from top-down thinking has been gradual. It paved the way for entrepreneurs in the New Economy to be comfortable spreading responsibility, accountability and rewards across the organization — based on performance, not role.

Leadership and management in the New Economy is about vision— and goal-setting.

It’s about being able to get out in front of the parade with a baton while respecting the fact that without a parade, Internet Joe is leading no one.

And here is where the distinction between leadership and management takes a leap.

True leadership isn’t conferred as much as it is earned.

True leaders are people who others follow, in fact emulate, for their innate qualities. This harkens back to our first and most important quality of leadership, and that is integrity. People naturally follow someone they trust; they know they will wind up somewhere worth going. That requires a bit of a track record.

Management skills can be learned. Management is about the ability to align and assign resources to achieve goals. Managers don’t require the kinds of rigorous traits of a true leader but they do require consistency, persistence and organization.

Managers don’t need to be leaders.

But great leaders get nowhere without great management of resources. If an entrepreneur is not a great organizer, it is critical she or he hires one.

A great idea, even with enthusiastic followers, goes nowhere without someone to arrange the resources in straight lines, all headed in the same direction.

Leadership and management don’t have to be embodied in the same individual. They do, however, need to be together at all times for efficient allocation of resources. An entrepreneur in the New Economy needs efficient organizational alignment with wise distribution of responsibility and accountability — even though your business map will not resemble, even remotely, Alfred Sloan’s hierarchical organizational chart at GM.

A successful Entrepreneurial Leader today

is not at the top of her or his organization.

He or she is in the lead, and that is a very different position.

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For more information on Peggy Salvatore’s book: 30 Days to the New Economy [© Peggy Salvatore 2015. All Rights Reserved.] click on ENTREPRENEUR NEWS or visit ow.ly/RysnP for the E-book

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Hal@Businessworks.US     

Open Minds Open Doors

Thanks for your visit and make today a GREAT day for someone!

How much “mental litter”

is cluttering up your brain,

. . .  your business?

Overwhelmed with what my wife calls “Crapola”? (She’s a super organizer; I’m not.) Are you ready for the Litter Patrol? Do you need to schedule a Department of Corrections van full of orange or blue or yellow-suited guys with plastic bags and spiked sticks to descend on your workspace? Crawl inside your brain?

 Okay, well maybe you could do without spiked sticks in your brain, but odds are pretty good that if you’re a small business or professional practice owner or partner or manager, you’re an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are born of creative ideas and innovative pursuits. That usually translates into a trashy, cluttered workspace.

1. When did you last check your computers? Virus scan? Defragment? Clean out email files? Clean out Word files? Reorganize your record-keeping? Update your username and password list? Trash Bin everything that’s long over with and has no future app or reference value (especially pre-Bing and pre-Google historical data).

2. Kill the paperwork! Are you holding on to 10 or 20 years worth of tax records, owner manuals, documentation for old business plans, no-longer-relevant presentation materials? If these kinds of paper files (or cartons of) no longer have any real value for you, they have confusion value. Kill ’em! If some or chunks of some have value, just save those.

3. When did you last see the surface of your desk? No need to clear it off, but if you can’t organize it better (and keep it organized), you’re wasting time and energy and money. Entrepreneurs can’t afford to waste any of these, ever! Seeking negative attention? There couldn’t be a more feeble excuse. 

Is your workspace starting to look like one of those TV hoarder shows? Piles of magazines and newspapers you can’t get to? Toss ’em. The news will be the same in the next issue. You won’t miss a thing; I promise! The fewer old letters, thank you notes, sticky note reminders, children’s drawings of your dog on Santa’s lap, the better.

Photos, awards, small treasures? No problem. But all the other “crapola” (I’m starting to like that word), the more distracted becomes your brain, the more disorganized become your thoughts, the more convoluted becomes your business.

It’s hard to think OR act when you’re up to your knees (ears?) in trash. And you DO need to think AND act!

So, is this all about “letting go“? No. That’s 50%. What’s the rest? Keeping what you’ve let go of, gone! Making sure you stay on top of this physical, mental, and emotional litter problem. It does no good to make a token effort. Token efforts serve no purpose. Choose to clear your pathways and enhance your options.

Drive your imagination forward with reality. 

Open minds open doors.  

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Hal@Businessworks.US

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone! 

Don’t be waiting for unions,

government, big business,

banks, or Fairy Godmothers! 

     It’s a good idea to step on the scale every once in awhile. It’s easy to let your business get too heavy from feeding it too much fat and not exercising it enough, or making sure it gets the sleep it needs. Whaaat? Well, sure: your business has a life too. The question is–since it’s YOUR business and dependent on YOUR choices–what exactly are you doing to keep it healthy and growing?

     When’s the last time you stepped outside your business and re-entered it, pretending you’ve never been there before? Just as trying to draw conclusions about your own health from just stepping on the scale, weight is merely one indicator. Many other factors need to be inventoried.

     Beyond the obvious business health ingredients, like first-impression appearances (e.g., parking, signage, displays, employees, facilities, waiting areas) and all the components like lighting, colors, cleanliness, etc., there’s a myriad of interrelated factors, issues, concerns and pursuits that warrant your assessment or reassessment.

     When, for example, did you last–or when do you next plan to–launch a new product or service program or initiative? Have you been holding back until the economy is “better”? Considering the growing evidence that that could be a very long time, could a launch delay now drag your company’s energy level down, perhaps to a point below a more aggressive market competitor? In other words, is it worth waiting?

     If you’ve already launched your exciting new Zilch-Zapper product line and support services, are they dying on the vine while you’ve preoccupied yourself with tap-dancing around your bankers and investors? There comes a point–as with humans–when a business becomes so over-burdened, so dis-stressed, that it collapses or has a stroke. Could you possibly be cultivating that kind of trauma?

     The good news is that business trauma is easily reversed. It requires only two things:

1) Recognitionthat the negative places your business health dwells in or is headed toward are the result of your conscious or unconscious choices (It’s as easy to choose to UNdo a bad choice as it is to choose to stay with a bad choice), and

2) Awareness that a burning commitment needs to be made to act on and directly treatthe diagnosis your inventory produces, and to be made by standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the immediate and long-term business healthcare and growth goals you set.

     Bottom line: If YOU don’t balance the life of your business (as well as your own… in order to grow your business from a position of strength vs. a position of weakness), who is going to balance the life of your business? Certainly not the government, unions, banks, or big business… I guess the answer kinda doesn’t leave much to the imagination. But that’s okay, because imagination is plentiful, and it’s what you need to exercise in order to get the job done. 

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Input welcome anytime: Hal@TheWriterWorks.com (”Businessworks” in the subject line) or comment below. Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals, good night and God bless you! halalpiar  # # # 

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