I read a great book over the recent holidays, Strategies for Sustainability - A Business Manifesto by Adam Werbach the Global CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi S.

I read this book from cover to cover in one sitting and have been back to it several times. It now has a permanent place on my desk. I liked the idea presented of helping people create personal sustainability projects as a key to their work.

For many years now I have been helping organisations to ensure that personal and business goals are in harmony with one another as a key to successful performance management and people engagement systems and adding personal sustainability into the mix I am certain with further enhance the success of this concept.

I like Werbach's book because it is practical. Read it and you can get started on sustainability for yourself and your business right away.

Speaking of practical, Will Marre's Top 10 Things Every Business Leader Should Know About Strategic Sustainability is brilliant. You can read them here. And please spend some time on Will's Thought Rocket blog as I did. I am sure you will find such a visit worthwhile.

While we are on lists Fast Company has a good list here of 51 great sites for those wanting to refine their sustainability strategies and tactics.

I found this list on development crossing where I also discovered Will Marre. Development crossing is the best community site I have come across that focuses on one thing namely corporate social responsibility.

Be remarkable
Ian
Founder Differencemakers Community
Sign-up here for a least one free resource per month and to get your complimentary copy of my ebook Differencemakers - how doing good is great for business.

I like Werbach's book so much it has caused me to update my list of the top 21 books I recommend. You can download this list here.

Labels: Ian CSR Sustainability Innovation

I hear a lot of talk about life/work balance and I think most of it is nonsense.

The word balance for me implies equal. I prefer the word harmony, therefore life/work harmony.

My personal and business life are not equal or in balance and are never likely to be.

They are in harmony with one another, that is, they work together like a symphony, two sides of the same coin

Here are my 11 laws of life/work harmony. I trust they will help you live a more harmonious life.

1. The Law of Harmony

Opposites attract. There are always at least two sides to every story.

Possible Action/Results: Always think both / and, rather than either / or; accept the good with the bad; appreciate pleasure, gain from pain; focus on the positive, learn from the negative; and you will soon begin to find harmony in your life.

2. The Law of Possibility

The opportunities life offers us are endless. There are no limits, except those we place on ourselves. There is nothing we cannot achieve.

3. The Law of Personal Responsibility

No one else can make us feel or think glad, sad, bad or mad. How we feel and think are choices we make.

Possible Action/Results: We must own our feelings and thoughts and not get tangled in other people’s feelings and thoughts. We must let go of attachment to what other people feel and think. Soon we eliminate guilt and worry; two of life’s most useless and most debilitating emotions.

4. The Law of Attraction

Success is not something we attain, rather something we attract.

Possible Action/Results: Commit to life-long learning; focus on insight more than information and wisdom more than knowledge. The more we become who we are capable of becoming the more we attract success.

5. The Law of the Farm

You find fertile ground, plough it, seed it, and nurture it, and more often than not you reap a harvest. We get what we give. What goes around comes around. These are modern ways of describing an old adage; we reap what we sow.

Possible Action/Results: The message of this law is that we must focus on proven processes and detach from outcomes. If we are taking the right action, results take care of themselves.

6. The Law of Relationships

We gravitate to those we like, know and trust.

Possible Action/Results: Establish shared values with family, friends and work colleagues, and agree on how they will be lived; have shared goals and agree on the key strategies to achieve them; practice non-judgment; give genuine attention to others. Before you know it your relationships will be stronger and the great door of opportunity will open more often.

7. The Law of Service

Giving without attachment to getting back creates one of life’s great paradoxes; we get more back.

Possible Action/Results: Fully understand what others need and provide it; go the extra mile

By adding value to every transaction and interaction; co-create wow experiences at work, home and play. Before long others will be serving you in ways beyond your wildest expectations.

8. The Law of Confidence

Confidence is to maintain a positive inner and outer image and display them. The problem can be that confidence is often perceived as arrogance.

Possible Action/Results: Demonstrate openness to learning and not asserting your way is the only way while at the same time believe in yourself; believe in others; speak and communicate from your heart; and confidence will rarely get mistaken for arrogance.

9. The Law of Actual Communication

Not all talk is communication. We often talk just for the joy of it. To actually communicate is to agree on some course of action even if it is to agree to disagree.

Possible Action/Results: To communicate better speak with a specific goal in mind and listen simply to understand, and when speaking and listening ask for feedback to ensure message effectiveness. You will most likely find you will speak less and listen more. The result however is to eventually eliminate misunderstanding, one of the great negative stress causes in life.

10. The Law of Adaptability

I heard a great saying one time “better to adapt than be a sitting duck and get run over”

Possible Action/Results: Our willingness to adapt, be flexible, and go with the flow are keys to a negative stress free life. A key seems to be to realize it is not what happens to us that is important rather our response to what happens. Take responsibility for your responses to life and life will respond to you.

11. The Law of Synchronicity/Interconnectedness

Everything is connected in some way to everything else.

Possible Action/Results: Seek coincidence, follow your heart, “do what you love” says Steven Farber “in the service of people who love what you do”; and your life will soon change for the better.

Have a personal sustainability plan (thank you Adam Werbach for the idea from his book Strategies for Sustainability) i.e. do what you can personally for the good of people and our planet. Imagine if everyone did this. We would have universal harmony.

Be remarkable
Ian
Founder Differencemakers Community
Partnering passionate people to change what’s normal for the good of people, our planet, and for profit.

Labels: Ian, self-leadership, sustainability

1) Politicians will be less seen as world leaders due to their monumental failure to lead in Copenhagen. World Leaders will be the social entrepreneurs and business people who actually do things that make a difference. I call these folk insightpreneurs™ and differencemakers™. Insightpreneurs™ are experts at turning information into insight into inspiration into ideas into innovation, fast. Differencemakers™ are folk who innovate for the good of people and our planet.

2) Social media will continue to evolve and grow and influence us. The movers and shakers will be those people who turn conversations online into real world collaborations that make a difference.

This is what we do at differencemakers community. Please join us here.

3) Greed and stupid business practice will continue in some sections of the financial services sector. Some folk haven’t learnt their lesson. People with demonstrable ethics, genuine corporate responsibility, and general good business practice will thrive.

4) The number of double (social and environmental) and triple bottom-line (social, environmental, and economic) businesses will continue to grow.

5) Sustainability will still be the zeitgeist of our time.

6) Business leaders who have sustainability and innovation linked and as a core of their growth strategies will thrive

7) Local Government and Non Government Organisations (NGOs) will continue to be the non business places were things that really matter get done.

8) There will be more meetings held online that ever before however savvy people will also begin to reinvent how face to face meetings (1:1, teams, and conferences etc) work and they will do very well.

9) Twitter or something similar not yet invented will replace email as the main means of staying in touch online

10) ebooks and other means of online learning will thrive in 2010 particularly those that focus on self development that is practical and real, making social media work for business, sustainability, innovation, leadership.

I wish all of earth's citizens your best year yet in 2010.

Be remarkable
Ian
Founder Differencemakers Community
Partnering passionate people to change what’s normal for the good of people, our planet, and for profit.

Labels: Ian CSR Sustainability Innovation Collaboration

Twenty-ten…am I the only one still struggling with years starting in ‘twenty’? Yet the 1900’s really does sound like last century now, doesn’t it? Remember last century? That was when most of the sales and leadership models we still use were invented – for a different time…a different place…and a very different pace.


20/10 is also a measure of vision. It is based on the more familiar term 20/20 vision which describes ‘normal’ vision; that is, a person standing 20 feet from an eye-chart can see what the person with ‘normal’ vision can see at that distance. Someone with worse than ‘normal’ eyesight might have 20/40 vision (they can see at 20 feet what ‘normal’ eyesight can see at 40 feet). Consequently, someone with 20/10 eyesight can see at twenty feet what someone with ‘normal’ eyesight would need to be only 10 feet away to see. It could be said that they have eyesight that’s twice as good.

In 2010’s fast moving, ever-changing business environment you will need to have 20/10 vision – that is, twice the vision of your competitors to stay ahead of the pack. Fortunately, this is easier than it sounds once you recognise the fundamental limitations besetting businesses going into the second decade of this century – and what you can do to rid your business of them.

These negative factors can be listed under two headings:
1. Businesses are trying to engage and retain staff using techniques from last century designed for a different generation.
2. Businesses are trying to sell to their customers using models designed in a sales-driven market; whereas today’s (and the future’s) market is buyer-driven.

Last century, with a worker/boss relationship that had many parallels with the serf/lord relationship of Feudal times, extrinsic motivators were all that were required to achieve the desired outcome. It was all about carrots (commissions, bonuses) at one end, and sticks (target achievement, performance reviews) at the other. In July of this year, leading thinker on motivation, Daniel Pink (A Whole New Mind, Drive), very eloquently defined the three most important intrinsic motivators as autonomy, mastery and purpose. (See this presentation at http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_pink_on_motivation.html.)

These align with what all the experts say are the motivational triggers for Generation Ys (and many others from different age groups). They want a sense of control over what they do or how they do it (autonomy). They are attracted to the concept of becoming exceptionally good at certain skills (mastery). And, they want to feel that what they are doing is furthering a purpose that is greater than themselves. Those with 20/10 vision will be engaging and motivating their staff using more intrinsic motivators.

The buyer/seller relationship is changed forever. This is because of the way that the buying and selling cycle are out of synchronisation – caused by the buyer’s increased access to information. Last century (or, at least, for most of it) they were aligned. One of the main reasons for this was that the buyer’s primary source of information was the salesperson.

Nowadays, the buyer is likely to know more about the features of the product than the salesperson. For example, before I bought my current vehicle I was able to access every feature, accessory and variation on my preferred car. I had read all the experts’ reviews and every comment made in owner’s forums. There was nothing the salesperson could tell me about the vehicle that I didn’t already know.

In today’s market, the buying cycle has often begun before the seller even realises that a cycle exists. For decades, I – like many of my fellow sales managers – espoused the theme: It’s not about selling; it’s about helping them to buy…then went on to impose the sales process on our clients. Well, now, we simply have to act that way – because buyers are so powerful. There is also an increasing trend (as identified by the Harvard Business Review last August) towards ‘mercurial consumption’, that is, an increased ability and tendency to switch suppliers – further challenging the old-style sales relationship.

Smart sales professionals and managers will be moving towards a buyer/service model: it’s not about selling your product; but assisting them to choose the right solution for them. For the typical business buyer today, life is much tougher than a generation ago with many more competing forces to satisfy. For salespeople to have any confidence in their ability to gain and hold on to clients, they need to be skilled in assisting the buyer to deal with the decision-making challenges facing them.

This skill – which goes way beyond traditional sales methodologies – is best described by Sharon Drew Morgen in her latest book Dirty Little Secrets. She is the creator of the Buying Facilitaton® Method – the high-level skills that manage the confounding array of decisions buyers must make off-line to get buy-in for their purchasing decision. (Read more at http://www.newsalesparadigm.com/)

2010 and beyond will need 20/10 business vision – in the way we deal with both our staff and our customers. The methods, processes and skills that got us here will not be enough to take us to the top in the upcoming decade; yet the opportunity is there for those with the vision to take the lead. Leave behind – or, at least, modify – those skills and processes designed for a different time, employee and customer. Focus on the latest thinking in both employee and client engagement and reap the rewards.

Kevin Ryan CSP
Creator of TILT! Selling & TILT! Sales Leadership
http://www.tiltsell.com/

Labels: buying facilitation, leadership, sales, tilt, tiltsell

In a report for IBM Global Business Services, George Pohle and Jeff Hittner make some excellent points from a survey of 250 global leaders that clearly advocate the business case for CSR/Sustainability including:

“A growing body of evidence asserts that corporations can do well by doing good. Well-known companies have already proven that they can differentiate their brands and reputations as well as their products and services if they take responsibility for the well-being of the societies and environments in which they operate.

68 percent are now utilizing CSR as an opportunity and a platform for growth.

Today, a surprising number of companies already regard corporate social responsibility as a platform for growth and differentiation. the shift in thinking from CSR as a cost or risk mitigation effort to CSR as a strategic goal that brings in new revenues.

Over two-thirds (68 percent) of the business leaders surveyed by IBM are focusing on CSR activities to create new revenue streams.

Over half (54 percent) believe that their companies’ CSR activities are already giving them an advantage over their top competitors.

The traditional adage, “buyer beware,” has now become “seller beware.”

A company’s most valuable asset is its ability to convert brand power into customer buying decisions. Only the company that shares reliable information can be a trustworthy “partner in sustainability” for customers who are ready to buy.

What happens when a customer walks into a store, a bank, a showroom, or even a factory floor and asks if the products they see are fair-trade or sourced sustainably? Do employees have the information at hand? Can they answer questions about the company’s labor practices and energy consumption as well as product disposal? Not usually. Are they prepared to have a real dialogue, one in which they learn about the customers’ needs? Not frequently enough, according to the respondents of the survey.

All too often in corporate life, the CEO announces a vision and the average employee is mystified or indifferent. With CSR, it can be different."

Please download the full report here.

I would also highly recommend an article published in the New York Times by Jared Diamond, distinguished author and professor of geography at University of California, 'Will Big Business Save the Earth?' You can read this article here.

Is CSR/Sustainability key to your growth strategy?

Be remarkable
Ian
Founder Differencemakers Community
Partnering passionate people to change what’s normal for the good of people, our planet, and for profit.

Labels: Ian CSR Sustainability Innovation

2010 will be my 19th year in business. I know it will be my best year yet because like every other year I have plans to execute that will change what's normal.

What are your plans?

If you feel, think, and do like you did in 2009 the most likely scenario is that 2010 will be a shocker (that's Aussie for bad).

To help you avoid this scenario I have prepared an exercise for you in the ebook Expect More From 2010.

My thanks to Gihan Perera of First Step for making this ebook happen for the 4th consecutive year. There are many great ideas from 43 different authors you might consider in this ebook, all designed to help you make 2010 your best year ever.

Please download the ebook here. My exercise is on page 8.

Be remarkable
Ian
Founder Differencemakers Community
Partnering passionate people to change what’s normal for the good of people, our planet, and for profit.

Labels: Ian, Innovation, making a difference, self-leadership

I watched an interview yesterday with Tony Abbott the newly elected leader of the major political party in Australia not in government. He said "our job is to oppose the government." He later in the interview tried to correct himself by saying "our job is to hold the government to account."

Mr. Abbott got elected after extraordinary scenes in his party where one minute they were supporting the governments climate change bill and then they weren't. These decisions and indecision followed 5 weeks of collaborating and the former leader Malcolm Turnbull telling the government our collaboration has been successful, lets pass the bill.

Australia now has egg on its face going into to the Copenhagen summit this weekend on climate change. Our Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, unless there is yet another change of mind by Mr Abbott's party, will go to Copenhagen a follower instead of a leader.

Seems to me that Mr Abbott, like most old school politicians, hasn't yet realised we live in an age of collaboration. My hope is that he and everyone who thinks and acts like him will soon come to their senses or we vote these kind folk out and replace them with people who will do what needs to be done for the good of people and our planet.

Be remarkable
Ian
Founder Differencemakers Community
Partnering passionate people to change what’s normal for the good of people, our planet, and for profit.

Labels: collaboration, Ian, role model