Colin Myles's Blog, page 22

The Path to Respect

The Path To Respect

Truth leads to trust
Trust leads to credibility
Credibility leads to respect

There is no other path

Truth is defined in the dictionary as " sincerity in action, character and utterance "

Trust is defined in the dictionary as " assured reliance on the character, ability, strength or truth of someone or something "

Credibility is defined in the dictionary as " the quality of being trusted and believed in "

Respect is defined in the dictionary as " admiration for someone or something caused by their abilities or qualities "

Truth leads to trust
Trust leads to credibility
Credibility leads to respect

Colin Myles Author

P.S.
Respect commands itself and it can neither be given nor withheld when it is due
Eldridge Cleaver

Trust . . . A Business Philosophy

" If they like you, they will listen to you. If they trust you, they will do business with you " Zig Ziglar

There are five steps to trust, a business philosophy.

1. Tell the truth
The truth about what your product/service can do. Do not embellish

2. Reliable
Say what you do and do what you say. Excuses are for amateurs. Being reliable is professional.

3. Use Value
" Give more in value than you receive in cash " The most important line in The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace Wattles.  Think long and hard about this statement.

4. Service Attitude
If you don't serve your customers, they won't stay your customers. Without customers, you have no business. Without happy customers, you will struggle to generate profits. You yourself don't pay the wages or dividends. You just mind the money your customer rewards you with for excellent service. This can be a challenging concept to get your head around. Remember you are just the custodian.

5. Timekeeping
Professional business people value the time of others. They expect others to value their time. Time is a fixed commodity. There are only twenty four hours in a day. You cannot generate an extra two hours tomorrow to catch up for the hours wasted today.. Respect other people's time and they will respect yours. You don't want to be known as a " Time Thief ".

Colin Myles Author

P.S.
" Trust is like the air we breathe. When it's present nobody really notices. But when it is absent everybody notices " Warren Buffet

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How To Curate and Generate Great Ideas

Recently came across this line " you can't serve good food, if you don't eat good food " Unknown

Lets change it slightly for you to generate great ideas
" you can't create good ideas, if you don't see good ideas. " CM

You must be aware and recognise good ideas, no matter where they come from. This is important when the ideas aren't yours. You have to remove your ego. Just because you did not come up with the idea, does not mean it is a bad idea and should be ignored or put down.

When you come across a good idea, write it down. Whether it is something you read, heard or saw in action. This opens you up to receiving and seeing good ideas all around you. You stop the tunnel vision thoughts leading you into the disused station that was abandoned years ago. You don't want your business to be abandoned by your customers ?

When you write down these ideas, they seep into your memory. There they stay until they are awakened by a conversation, a problem to solve or a challenge. Thing is, if you don't write them down, they will be lost. The physical act of pen on paper is the mechanism which allows the eyes to see and record to memory what you have written.

Also, keep an idea journal. Being able to access all these great ideas when you consider your next move, will prove invaluable in the long term. Someone said, " ideas are the business of the 21st century ". But without recording those ideas you won't be able to generate great ideas, for yourself or your business.

Colin Myles Author

P.S.
Discipline weighs ounces, regret weighs tonnes"  Jim Rohn

The Paradigm Change

As I work my way through the excellent book The Story of Philosophy and the chapter on Herbert Spencer, these lines and a way of changing how you see things, created a change in looking at words. The old and the new.

The old way of thinking went like this " Individuals exist for the benefit of the state "
The new way of thinking went like this " The state exists for the benefit of the individuals ".

Now lets take a classic old fashioned way of looking at business and see what happens, when we change our paradigm.

Old Way
" customers exist for the benefit of the business "
New Way
" Your business exists for the benefit of your customers "

When you change your paradigm about your customers, your business changes also. Every business, big and small exists to solve problems. The bigger the problem you solve, the bigger your rewards.

Without customers your business would not exist. The question and your focus becomes more on the benefits to your customers as opposed to " they need us ". They don't. Your customers want problem solvers not headache givers.

Colin Myles Author

P.S.
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Top Ten Areas of a Success Philosophy

1. Knowledge ..... of your area of expertise

2. Financial Literacy .... learn how the numbers work and how they are assembled

3. Read

4. Write down your ideas and thoughts as they occur ... don't rely on your memory

5. Journal . . . Who, What, Where, Why, When.

6. Learn to be happy with oneself

7. Meditate / Practice being present

8. Listen more than you speak

9. Ideas + no action = Wishful thinking . . . Ideas + action = Something useful

10. Provide great service

If you believe I have missed out an area of a success philosophy, please let me know in the comment section below

Colin Myles Author

P.S.
Commit the same errors time and time again, you compound the failure.

Fool's Gold

Today's post was inspired by an article in HBR by Piero Formica ... Read here
But mainly by these lines

" Venice reached a point where it focused more on exploitation than exploration. Established practices and preferences became more popular than exploration and speculation. Merchants and traders played the game of incremental innovation by focusing on efficiency and optimisation. "

This is as much a challenge today as it was centuries ago. One can fool oneself by focusing on the minutiae and ignoring change and innovation, going on all around you.

It leads to that overused word disruption. I prefer to think that this is what happens, when you ignore the new ways people are looking at old and staid industries Airbnb and Uber are two prime examples.

People when they travel will always require a place to stay and reliable transport. They took this need , added in big data and hey presto, two big new companies were born.

For the merchants in Venice, it was advances in shipbuilding that sunk their location from viable and hustling to redundant.

When you look at your industry, do you look at it with disruption in mind ? Or do you prefer to see something whose golden age will never end ? At minimum twice a year you should take time out and look at your industry and your place within it, through the eyes of a person bent on disruption.

Maybe, just maybe you will still be relevant long after those who preferred to optimise the making of the horse drawn cart [ your industry ]

Colin Myles Author 

P.S.
Think clearer, see further, stand taller.

P.P.S
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Happy Customers Generate Your Profits

Think about the above headline for a moment. Have you ever heard of a business with unhappy customers generating enormous profits ?

I haven't either. The idea is so simple, I often wonder why people feel the need to complicate things. A happy customer is someone who will buy from you again and recommend you to others.

Of course you must have a product or service people want. But if said product or service doesn't deliver, you end up with unhappy customers. Unhappy customers generate losses in your business.

The ultimate aim of every business is to generate profits. Again a quick reminder of this simple business maxim.

Happy customers generate your profits
Unhappy customers generate your losses

One word of caution . . .

Don't cheat your customers by debasing the quality of your product or service to increase profits. They will find out an when they do, their wrath will be merciless.

Colin Myles
Author

P.S.
" The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten " Unknown
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The Worship of Bureaucracy

" When keeping record of what has being done, becomes more important than what actually has being done "  Alan Watts .... The Watercourse Way

The above is from a paragraph on bureaucracy. It is deep and may appear at first to be a contradiction. Read it through six times and it's true message will appear.

Is the culture in your organisation one where the pen pusher is revered, over the person who does ?

Keeping good records is a vital part of your business. But when the keeping of records becomes more important than serving your customer, problems arise. Your customer doesn't care about the pen pushers. They want a product or service that works. This is what they pay you for, a solution to their problem. No more, no less.

Yes you have to keep good records for tax purposes and to ensure the health and safety of the people who use your product. When you allow the keeping of these records to get in the way of what your customer is saying to you, strange things start to happen. Your customer wants their voice and concerns to be heard and acknowledged, when they speak. Failure to do so will lead them to seek out an alternative supplier. One who makes them feel appreciated.

When your customers start moving away, your sales fall back. Leading to a slow period of stagnation, before you realise your business has stopped moving forward. If you continue to worship your systems above your customers, your customers will go worship at the altar of another business with a servant's heart.

Colin Myles
Author

P.S.
No customers, no business.

I Will Put Manners On Them

A couple of weeks before Christmas, while in line waiting to place an order for coffee, I overheard something shocking. In front of me were two gentlemen, who I recognised as working for a sales firm.

As they were waiting for their order to be prepared, they were talking about work and the people within their company. One of them paid the other one a half compliment, half commiseration on his new promotion. His response was " I will put manners on them in the new year ".

If they had turned around they would have seen the look of shock on my face. Both for what was said and the age of the person making the statement. The young man was probably all of 25 years old. Yet he was expressing a style of management that belongs in the dark ages.

No mention of his new team's potential. No mention of the skillset within his new team. No mention of how he was going to assist them attain their potential. No mention of looking forward to working with them. All he was concerned with was hammering them into submission.

I would be surprised if this young man's promotion lasts. I am sure he is capable at his job, but because his way of viewing his new team was one of, command and control. Do as I say, not do as I do.

But what really saddened me the most, was that early twentieth century management philosophy was still alive in the twentieth first century. His new team, live and work in the twenty first century. They expect to be treated as twenty first century people, not as an object to berate, belittle, humiliate and exploit.

I hope I am wrong in my conjecture. Guess time will tell.

Colin Myles
Author

P.S.
Brave is doing the right thing, because it is the right thing to do" Colin Myles

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New Book & Free Chapter

Over the weekend, I published my latest book LIFE POSITIONING. Today I would like to share with you a free chapter from the book.

CHAPTER 14

The fourteenth success habit in Life Positioning is . . . Nothing.

Nothing lasts
Nothing is finished
Nothing is perfect

The above is a Buddhist saying. When you take the time to reflect upon the words, you will come to realise, these are probably the truest words spoken.

Your time at elementary school doesn't last. It ends and you go on to high school, maybe even college or university. But your learning hasn't finished. You go to work. Maybe the job is not perfect, but when you know nothing lasts, it frees you to seek the next step on your journey. When you embrace nothing and know nothing is permanent, you gain and grow.

The bad day you had at work today, it doesn't last. The project you finished and handed in, is not really finished. It could be given the green light to take it to the next stage. The people you work with may not be perfect. I have yet to come across a team that was perfect. When you know and understand it is not perfect, but also won't last, just means it is not finished evolving.

Knowing nothing lasts, means everything changes and this is liberating. It prevents you from becoming attached. The reason people and companies stagnate is because the become attached and believe things are permanent. The one's who know nothing lasts, is perfect or finished are free. Free to change, move and evolve.

The other side of nothing is being able to sit still and do nothing. How many of you right now, could sit in your favourite chair and look out your window for thirty minutes ? Doing nothing except watching the world go by. No smartphone, no TV, no tablet, no laptop, nothing.

Sitting there your mind is free to wander. As your mind wanders, ideas come and go. Solutions appear and disappear and in time you realise nothing is permanent. The flowers bloom, wilt and grow again. The birds fly in, fly away. The seasons come and go, none of them last and none of them are finished.

Nothing is one of the most liberating habits in Life Positioning. The value it brings to you as an individual, cannot be measured in money or status symbols. The freedom from attachment, the freedom to let your mind wander off is priceless. It will set you apart and separate you from the majority with the attachment mindset. It is not the majority who become successful and distinct in the mind of others. It is the few who are free to do nothing, who are the exception. You can be exceptional and distinct when you remember ........
Nothing lasts
Nothing is finished
Nothing is perfect

Be Nothing

Colin Myles 
Author

P.S.
I hope you enjoyed this sample chapter and because some books are just meant to be read ...
You can grab your copy here