Making Better Decisions

Do you sometimes make quick decisions that come back to haunt you? Do you often find that your emotions get the better of you when making critical choices? Do you sometimes jump to conclusions based on previous experience or prejudices?

I know that these problems can adversely affect our decision making at times. However, by learning, mastering and employing the decision-making frameworks that deliver critical thinking processing skills, you can minimize the risk of any of these factors impacting on your own decision making.

Think about developing the following habits around your decision making:

• Give yourself time to get the full picture of the circumstances in and around the decision that needs to be made.
• Ask others for help in making important decisions.
• Use an ordered, common sense approach to reaching decisions.
• Take time to carefully frame the problem, before deciding what action you need to take.
• Understand that often the situation that requires you to make the decision can be much more complex than you may initially think. Be sure to analyze it fully.
• Once you have analyzed the situation appropriately, be sure that you make the decision and follow through on it.

Emotional Intelligence and Presentation Skills

When faced with making business presentations, all of us have probably suffered various awkward moments. Our self confidence may lag, and we may feel tense and nervous in front of an audience. A difficult question may throw us off our stride and result in either being tongue-tied or blurting out something inappropriate.

Working on our own Emotional Intelligence is one area that can help us overcome some of these problems and thereby improve our presentation skills. Basically, Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify what feelings are welling up inside of us and the capacity to manage them. Improving these skills is an ongoing learning activity that requires constant practice.

In terms of gaining composure and being more comfortable making presentations, several tips to consider include:

• When you find yourself feeling tense or nervous, take a second or two to calm yourself. Take a couple of deep breaths, and do not speak.
• If your audience includes people who seem to trigger this nervousness in you, take some extra time to prepare for the meeting.
  
• Talk to yourself and rehearse what you are going to say beforehand, so you can feel better prepared.
  
• Always learn from what works and what doesn’t.
  
• Plan well, including practicing answering difficult questions.
  
• Remember, there is no shame in saying that you do not know the answer to a given question. You can always promise to find out and get back to people.

Delivering Total Superior Value

One of the most important things to do in business is to estimate the worth of what you have to offer to your customers. Being able to put a dollar value on what you provide is essential. In assessing that value, one should remember to consider such factors as the social, emotional and mental benefits of a product.

For example, in my business, one of the most gratifying experiences is to help people think through the critical issues that they face in their business and see them through to discovering their own solutions.

Customers measure this kind of intervention differently, but they all agree that it is of immense value in taking the angst out of decision making.

I have discovered over the years that business coaching is valued in many ways.

In listening to what my customers have to say, for instance, I notice that one of the real values assigned to it simply reflects the fact that there is someone else outside of the business environment who listens.

Setting time aside to think through the business concerns and having a practical framework for sorting out what we think returns huge benefits. Some of these benefits are reported as being less worry, finding a way through and reaching peace of mind.

All of these outcomes and results are part of delivering superior value. Remember, such elements must be taken into account in estimating the value of what you have to offer in business.

Congratulations To Professor Muhahammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank

What a wonderful achievement! It is very gratifying indeed that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006 has been awarded to a visionary entrepreneur who started out by giving small loans to disadvantaged people.

The Grameeen Bank offers credit loans to poor people who ordinarily could not access traditional lending institutions. This enables poor entrepreneurs to access finance, so that they can establish sustainable businesses.

It shows what can be done to address poverty in the world, when a passion develops into a sense of mission, vision and a commitment to a set of values. This, combined with using sound business practices, achieves worthwhile humanitarian objectives and goes a long way toward alleviating poverty for many individuals.

The Grameen Bank now has five million people who borrow money through its Microcredit system. Visit their website here for more information.

Work is Fun

Some of the most energetic and enthusiastic people that I associate with in business see what they are doing as fun. ‘I’m paid to do this?’ is a question often posed by such people.

Their need to have fun is fundamental to their motivation for being in business. In fact, to them, work seems effortless, and they even describe their work as play.

‘If my business isn’t fun anymore, I know its time for me to get out,’ a business friend of mine recently said to me.

Fun in business, in my experience, comes through exploring the new. That is, meeting new people, gaining fresh insights and new ideas. It is a product of being curious and always striving to learn something different and applying it to see if it works. Building a business is a very creative activity, indeed.

Having fun in business is also about being authentic, that is, being natural and being yourself. It is not something that can be put on in an artificial sense, but must come out of a genuine sense of wonder and joy.

Business is a very serious undertaking and demands rigor of thought and disciplined action. At the same time, business is about not taking yourself too seriously and seeing work as a worthwhile, enjoyable, productive and meaningful activity.

The Natural Tendency for Order

Business is an environment that can be messy and chaotic at times. The fact is that high performance in business comes about as we clarify our thinking, establish order and have a disciplined approach, in both organizing ourselves and our business, as it evolves into greater levels of complexity.

The emergence of order as a natural way of being at the personal level results in the formation of our identity and the ability to gather and incorporate information. It also underpins the building of lasting and trusting relationships with others.

In business, order is established through having a clear and common sense of Mission, Vision and Values, planned approaches and so on. New information becomes readily available through simple, agreed channels, and achieving results is always accomplished with and through other people around us who are committed and dedicated to the vision of the business.

Effort Is The Decisive Difference

What separates one business from another? What is the key factor that makes a successful business owner or manager better than an average one? What is the difference between two highly competitive and talented sports teams?

Quite often, the answer is effort.

Recently, in an informative article in the Scientific American entitled ‘The Expert Mind’, the author, Philip E Ross, reaches the conclusion that what creates mastery in any given field is practice.

He concludes, “The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made not born.” Over extended periods of time, training, practice and ‘effortful study’ combine to create high performance in any field of endeavor.

In business, what makes the big difference in performance is the motivation and sheer effort we put into it. Dedicated, motivated single-minded effort can prove the winning formula for the successful business owner and manager.

The Map Is Not The Road

Recently, I was part of a group discussion in which a number of people, engaged in a research project, were concerned that the ‘scientific method’ that they had constructed was being thwarted.

The neat map of how they thought things should be going bore little resemblance to that which was being experienced by the people delivering the particular product to customers.

In business, we can sometimes fall into the trap of becoming so enamored by the way we think things ought to be that we ignore what is actually happening on the ground.

Therefore, we must take care not to confuse our mental images with the road. We do so at our own peril. We should always be keeping our eyes on what is actually happening and questioning our theories of management against this reality.

It is in our examining the gap between what is and what should be happening that we discover our greatest insights and opportunities for innovation in our business.