I want a leader who pushes me and everyone around me to do better – to raise the bar.
I don’t want them to give me excuses as to why I can’t do it, create long stories to rationalize my shortcomings, or make it so cozy that I just don’t mind missing my targets.
I want them to tell me clearly what the goal is, describe honestly where I am at, and then demand that I get rid of any discrepancy between where I am and the objective I have. If the goal is what I want then I’m going to be into it, I’m going to be inspired to be pushed to achieve it. If I’m not inspired and I don’t really want it then a true leader is going to push me to poop or get off the pot, so to speak.
This is leadership from my perspective. It aligns mutual goals and pushes all of us to achieve more than what we could without it. Too bad it is such a rare commodity.
Live within your means or spend money you don’t have on a gamble that could pay off big.
I’ve done both and my personal experience has been that I have always done much better slow and steady, living within my means. Despite how much I hate admitting it.
There is allot of truth to the expression “necessity is the mother of invention”. Sticking to what you can afford and letting necessity drive your creativity rather than creating by throwing cash you don’t have at something seems to always work better for me – and if it doesn’t work, it is so much easier to recover from.
I’m running so fast I can’t stop and talk to you. I have to get there right now and have no time for all your questions about where “there” is. Get out of my way! Coming through!
Too bad. Because they will probably run in circles before they find “there”, or run right past “there” and never find it, or run head down into a wall and not live to see “there” or worst of all get to “there” and realize it isn’t where they wanted to end up anyways.
Sound familiar?
Software creation is never easy. I personally have had more failures than successes but I feel the odds are starting to swing in favor of success over crash and burn.
We can now manage development virtually and have extremely tight review cycles – daily – all while allowing each team member to contribute from whatever time and place works best for them. And more importantly we can do it for almost no start up or ongoing costs.
There are no more barriers to creating amazing software, the only limits are the bounds of your creativity and your ability to inspire it in the team around you. For absolutely nothing you can use software development tools, application hosting, shared docs and spreadsheets, wiki’s, video and telephone conferencing, and video sharing. The tools are incredible. And you can even share how you do it with one click for free. Check out how we do it here.
Our fiscal year just ended in September. And like for most of us in business this wasn’t the easiest year that I have had to navigate through. Advertising networks dried up and customer bad debts piled on, revenue targets were missed, cost over-runs and missed deliverables proliferated.
But despite all of this we didn’t run, we didn’t put our heads in the sand, we looked at the situation for what is was and didn’t fool ourselves. From this honest, albeit painful perspective, we made tough decisions and adjusted. My thanks to Robert Fritz and crew for teaching us the importance of “reality”. Can’t recommend him enough and if you can’t get to see him in person do yourself a favour and read at least one of his books – my favourite is The Path of Least Resistance for Managers.
How did we adjust?
We restructured our SaaS company, repositioned the offering and lowered our cost base.
We parked a new company with a great product that was about to launch so that we could consolidate and focus our resources. Hopefully to be reborn before the close of this fiscal year.
We invested in our complete digital signage solution product and went looking to make acquisitions (more on that soon if all goes according to plan).
And it all worked. In the end revenues beat budget by 9% and grew by 47% over last year while our digital signage management subscriptions grew by 200%.
My hat goes off to my peers! What a year, what a turn-around.
