You’re the boss, but you still spend too much time on the day-to-day. Here’s how to become the strategic leader your company needs.

Adaptive strategic leaders — the kind who thrive in today’s uncertain environment – do six things well:

Anticipate 

Without “peripheral vision” you may leave your company vulnerable to rivals who detect and act on ambiguous signals. To anticipate well, you must:

• Look for game-changing information at the periphery of your industry
• Search beyond the current boundaries of your business
• Build wide external networks to help you scan the horizon better

Think Critically

To master this skill you must force yourself to:

• Reframe problems to get to the bottom of things, in terms of root causes
• Challenge current beliefs and mindsets, including your own
• Uncover hypocrisy, manipulation, and bias in organizational decisions

Interpret

A good strategic leader holds steady, synthesizing information from many sources before developing a viewpoint. To get good at this, you have to:

• Seek patterns in multiple sources of data
• Encourage others to do the same
• Question prevailing assumptions and test multiple hypotheses simultaneously

Decide

Many leaders fall prey to “analysis paralysis.” You have to develop processes and enforce them, so that you arrive at a “good enough” position. To do that well, you have to:

• Carefully frame the decision to get to the crux of the matter
• Balance speed, rigor, quality and agility. Leave perfection to higher powers
• Take a stand even with incomplete information and amid diverse views

Align

A strategic leader must foster open dialogue, build trust and engage key stakeholders, especially when views diverge.  To pull that off, you need to:

• Understand what drives other people’s agendas, including what remains hidden
• Bring tough issues to the surface, even when it’s uncomfortable
• Assess risk tolerance and follow through to build the necessary support

Learn

As your company grows, honest feedback is harder and harder to come by.  You have to do what you can to keep it coming. This is crucial because success and failure–especially failure–are valuable sources of organizational learning.  Here’s what you need to do:

• Encourage and exemplify honest, rigorous debriefs to extract lessons
• Shift course quickly if you realize you’re off track
• Celebrate both success and (well-intentioned) failures that provide insight

Test your own strategic aptitude (or your company’s) with the survey at www.decisionstrat.com.

 Full Article at Inc.com

]]> http://blog-connect113.com/2012/05/6-habits-of-strategic-thinkers/feed/ 0 http://blog-connect113.com/2012/04/get-your-resume-noticed/ http://blog-connect113.com/2012/04/get-your-resume-noticed/#comments Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:11:43 +0000 Connect113 http://blog-connect113.com/?p=815 What Recruiters Look At During The 6 Seconds They Spend On Your Resume

Although we may never know why we didn’t get chosen for a job interview, a  recent study is  shedding some light on recruiters’  decision-making behavior. According to TheLadders  research, recruiters spend an average of “six seconds before they make  the initial ‘fit or no fit’ decision” on candidates.

The study used a scientific technique called “eye tracking” on 30 professional  recruiters and examined their eye movements during a 10-week  period to “record and analyze where and how long someone focuses  when digesting a piece of information or completing a task.”

In the short time that they spend with your resume, the study showed  recruiters will look at your name, current title and company, current  position start and end dates, previous title and company, previous position  start and end dates, and education.

Read more: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-04-09/news/31311078_1_recruiters-study-position#ixzz1rwAJAR00

The 12-Step Landing Page

Rehab Program – According to

Unbounce

This is the intervention your landing pages have been crying out for, so take a deep breath… and let’s get started.

Study the 12-step infographic to see where each step in the program should be applied to the conversion funnel.

Infographic: The Changing American Dream

(Click image to launch)

In a time of continued economic uncertainty, Americans’ priorities are shifting, according to MetLife’s fifth annual survey of American ideals. They are less concerned with professional success and the trappings of material wealth, instead aspiring to a greater sense of personal fulfillment.

infographic created by Column Five Media
original article found on GOOD.is

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From the mind of Tom Kelley (GM of IDEO) via Harvard Business Review

” Today, the challenge for leaders at every level is no longer just to out-hustle, out-muscle, and out-maneuver the competition. It is to out-think the competition in ways big and small, to develop a unique point of view about the future and help your organization get there before anyone else does.  Of course, learning new things is all about exposing yourself to new ideas.

Here are a few ideas I’ve developed over the years about what turns leaders into learners

FIRST, the best leaders (and learners) have the widest field of vision – You’re not going to learn faster (or deeper) than everyone else if you seek inspiration from the same sources as everyone else. Educators know that we learn the most when we encounter people, experiences, and ideas that are the least like us. If you want to learn faster, look and live more broadly.

SECOND, and more tactically, the best source of new ideas in your field can be old ideas from unrelated fields. – Well established practices from one industry look down right revolutionary when you simply move them from one place to another…especially when they challenge the prevailing assumptions and conventional wisdom that have come to define so many industries. There is a place for R&D as rip-off and duplicate.

FINALLY, and most personally , successful learners work hard not to be loners -  These days the most powerful insights often come from the most unexpected places. But tapping this learning resource requires a new leadership mindset – enough ambition to address tough problems, enough humility to be willing to learn from everyone you encounter. Nobody alone learns as quickly as everybody together.

Recently, IBIS World conducted a research study of the fastest rising industries in 2012. The Los Angeles-based publisher of U.S. industry research based its findings on the projected revenue growth, forecast enterprise growth over five years, 2011 profit margins, the low barrier to starting such a business, and the amount of capital required.

Top 12 up and coming industries of 2012:

Relaxation Beverages: Marketed for their relaxation or sleep promoting capabilities, the industry of relaxation beverages had a profit margin of 6.8 percent in 2011, as well as a low barrier to entry and minor capital requirement and 68.7% growth over the past 5 years..

Social Network Game Development: Now that smart phones are prevalent everywhere, the demand for game-related apps has accordingly increased

Internet Publishing and Broadcasting: The continued popularity of smart phones and tablets has made the industry of internet publishing and broadcasting more in demand than ever.

Corporate Wellness Services: In an effort to keep healthcare costs down, many employers are looking more and more to using corporate wellness providers. The fact that these services also improve employee productivity makes it doubly popular.

Online Survey Software:  More than ever businesses are looking for a way to track and predict their customers shopping habits. While the barrier to entry is low, it’s capital costs are considered high.

E-Commerce and Online Auctions: No longer the new kid on the block, with almost 2,000 U.S. based e-commerce firms expected to join the industry, IBIS World, suggested that niche startups have the highest likelihood of success.

Wineries: What helps make this such a promising business to start is the rising per-capita consumption of wine, and the increasing acceptance of American wines by those in overseas markets. The profit margin for wineries in 2011 was 7.6 percent, which goes to show that there is a high demand for this market.

Human Resources and Benefits Administration: Now that the economy is recovering, many companies are looking to strengthen their human resources department by hiring outside firms to manage employees and their benefits.

Scientific and Economic Consulting: Consulting industries are also on the rise, with medium entry barriers and low capital costs, they have the highest employment growths through to 2016.

Street Vendors: While fast food and food service industries experienced a decline, street vendors has steadily been increasing. During the past few years, the industry surged ahead because of new consumer demand for unique and gourmet food trucks.

Ethnic Supermarkets: Like street vendors, ethnic supermarkets are a niche market with a lot of projected growth. IBIS World predicts that these industries will continue to grow “with changing consumer tastes and demographic trends.”

So if the economy is recovering at too slow a pace for you, and you’re ready to determine your own future, it helps to start looking at different industries to see which ones have promise. If you find the right balance between passion and aptitude for a business, you’ll be able to count yourself among the profitable numbers in no time.

At TEDxSydney, Rachel Botsman says we’re “wired to
share” — and shows how websites like Zipcar and Swaptree are changing
the rules of human behavior.

In her TED talk Rachel speaks on the power of collaboration and
sharing through network technologies, and on how it will transform
business, consumerism and the way we live.

To make good decisions, you need good data. That’s a given, right?

But in a start-up, what data should you be looking at?

In the early days of a startup, sometimes there isn’t much to measure. A comparison of this year’s sales compared to last year’s isn’t all that helpful if you’ve only been around for eight months. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start collecting data right away.

So where can you find relevant information?  As an investor in early stage technology companies, Don Rainey,  offers three metrics that will give you some insight into your current operations and help you do some short-term forecasting.

According to Don, “The beauty of these three metrics are that they apply universally. CEOs can use them to better understand what’s working and what needs to be changed in order to meet short and long-term goals. For a company seeking outside funding, knowledge and management of these metrics is critical to allowing investors to understand your business and potential.”

1. Pipeline coverage

The sales pipeline is a listing of all your sales prospects. Typically, you’d include the projected sales amount and estimate the probability of success for each account. You’d update the information regularly.

Sales pipeline coverage is a fraction. The total amount in your pipeline is the numerator, and the sales goal is the denominator. So sales pipeline coverage measures everything in the sales pipeline against the sales goal. As the business matures, you’ll get better at estimating closure rates, and you’ll be able to tie closure rates to milestones.

In practice, you want your pipeline coverage to be over 2.5x. That should virtually assure you make your target, as long as you’ve got a reasonably competent sales effort and have done a good job qualifying your customers.

2. Sales per employee

This metric is simple enough, and it’s good for businesses of all sizes. Just take the gross sales number and divide it by the number of employees. Since small businesses typically scale too fast ahead of their prospects – the optimism of entrepreneurs is both their blessing and their curse – sales per employee is a critical measure within growing companies. Warning: Once you start focusing on this number, you’ll quickly see the intrinsic appeal of hiring salespeople over other personnel.

3. Customer payback period

The very best metric for evaluating your business, customer acquisition cost, takes a while to assess. Ultimately, everything your business does will either make sense or not depending on how much it costs you to acquire a customer. If you can acquire customers cheaply or profitably, you will do well.

At first, customer acquisition cost is just a rough guess. But once you have that in hand, you can start thinking about the customer payback period. If the cost to acquire a customer is known, the logical question is how many months it will take to recover that cost.

Don Rainey is a General Partner with Grotech Ventures, which invests in early stage technology companies. He was named to the Washingtonian Magazine Tech Titans List and earned the Northern Virginia Technology Council’s Lifetime Navigator award for his support of entrepreneurs. Don blogs at VC in DC at http://startups.typepad.com.

http://www.inc.com/don-rainey/three-numbers-all-entrepreneurs-should-know.html?nav=linkedin

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