I think the definition of Vision has been so corrupted it has begun to make it irrelevant. It is difficult to tell the difference between most Mission, Vision and Strategic Objective statements. This is tragic because they play such a vital role in business. 

Vision

 A vision statement accomplishes several objectives. It states who the company is going to be when they grow up, who they are or will become from the minds of the founder(s). 

Ø      It develops long term client and stakeholder loyalties, connects people to the company long term. 

Ø      It engages stakeholders in the process, makes participants out of bystanders. 

Ø      It needs to be fueled by a foundational statement which is the founders motive passion, or motivating passion. It needs to identify how the vision is manifested and how it is communicated. 

Mission

 I like Jack Welch’s definition of what a Mission Statement is; how are you going to win. Again, this statement has to show how a company is going to win at business.  

It has three components: 

Ø      A foundational statement, which is derived from the strategic objective 

Ø      How the mission is to manifested in the real world  

Ø      How it is to be communicated. 

Strategic Objective

 The strategic objective assures that everyone in the company is working on the right things first, and then that they are doing them right.  

A strategic objective also has three components. 

Ø      Foundational statement, the founders motivating passion. 

Ø      How it is manifested in the business, what form does it take when implemented? 

Ø      How does are the passion and form communicated to stakeholders. 

If these three cornerstones of business are developed in this light they are indispensable for business growth and sustainability. If not, they just confuse the issue and become irrelevant.

http://www.emerald-business-services.com/v3-outline.html 

http://www.emerald-business-services.com/V1-Vision.html

Time management

If You Cannot Do it, You Cannot Manage! 

Quotes

 Do The Right Thing Right.
Noted management expert, Peter Drucker, says “doing the right thing is more important than doing things right.” Doing the right thing is effectiveness; doing things right is efficiency. Focus first on effectiveness (identifying what is the right thing to do), then concentrate on efficiency (doing it right). M. Scott Peck
Until you value yourself, you will not value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it. Samuel Smiles
Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever. Time is a non-renewable resource, once it is gone, you cannot buy more. If you cannot manage time, you cannot properly manage anything. Therefore, learning time management is the first and primary skill in management. It is also the most poorly executed management discipline. Time Management Tips 

• Begin daily activities by setting goals for the day
• Make sure the goals you list are things only you can do
• Block out time in 1/5 – 2.0 hour increments for task oriented activities
• Schedule your week; don’t let it schedule you
  • Schedule days and times for vendors, customers, tasks, personal activities
• Command your time, it is like money command it or it will command you

With 10 startups over the past 30 years I have more than three, but if I have to boil it down, here they are.

1 - Knowing the right things to do through strengths based strategic planning, read everything from Peter Drucker you can get your hands on. He does a good job of getting to the root of this in “The Effective Executive” if you don’t have the time to read more.

2 - Team with and hire people that cover my weaknesses and share my values. Your personal strengths will most likely limit you, finding others who can cover for you makes all the difference, if you are a product person, get an admin person and a sales and marketing person to fill in the gaps, and make sure they are well designed for the task, do a 360 assessment on them before you get into a relationship.

3 - Become a student of business and a student of your product, most of us find it easy to become a student of our product, that is easy, but if you are not a student of business, and do not want to be, find someone who is and turn the company over to them to run it.

Do you have three you would like to add? Please comment and I will post them.

http://www.emerald-business-services.com/

http://www.leadertoleader.org/knowledgecenter/thoughtleaders/drucker/index.html

http://www.emerald-business-services.com/Strengths-Profile.html

A marketing strategy is developed to control and guide the overall marketing efforts, it is like the DNA of your marketing plan, and it guides the development of the marketing plan and the marketing itself.

A marketing strategy must have as its foundation the company’s strategic objective.

The strategic objective must have as its foundation the motive passion, (motivating passion) of the organizations creator, not the software developers passion, the founders passion, without it, the guy with the purse strings will stall at every opportunity to try and readjust your strategy, a real killer.

Once you know both of these, and they should already be in place, you can develop the marketing strategy.

A marketing strategy has three components.

• Foundation - Takes into account the strategic objective of the company
• How the foundation will be manifested - how the foundational aspect be manifested
• How it will be communicated - how the foundational aspect be communicated

It is upon this foundation you can build a true marketing plan, the reasoning behind why this is all-important is way beyond the scope of what I can explain in this short response, but I hope it answers some questions. Please contact me if you have questions or need some help.

I believe the answer to success in our health, in our marriage, in our spiritual lives, at work, in our businesses comes down to giving things up, but I firmly believe that if one gives up enough, stops doing enough of the wrong things, they can be successful in each area.

Examples:

Give up wasting time; if you cannot manage time, you cannot manage anything, so learn how to manage time. Time is the only un-renewable resource you have. Learn how to manage it and you will have more to utilize to make you successful in all areas of your life.

Stop doing things you are not designed well to perform; if you are not designed to do them you will be ineffective at them and waist time. If you work on things you are well designed to do, you will perform at a level of excellence that will bring more success.

Give up doing the easy things you want to do and do the things you should do.

Give up working on things that don’t matter, in all areas of your life. Learn what the right things to do are, and do those. Things that matter are things that only you can do.

Give up on fear, the more fear you conquer in any part of your life means more success now and in the future. So make the call you dread, as long as it is the right call and you are the best one to make it. Move into a new more successful peer influence group so you become one of them, etc.

Give up reading garbage and read things that help you grow.

Give up on friends and co-workers who bring you down with gossip, idle talk and negative outlook.

Give up on your talent for avoiding risk at all cost, face risk for what it is, learn to define the issues related to risk and conquer them.

There are many things to give up in life which bring greater levels of success, if we give up enough, we can have success in every area of life, we first have to give up on the misconceptions we are fed about what is and what is not possible.

As an entrepreneur with 10 startups over the last 35 years, I wish I knew then what I know now. Here are some of the things I have learned, most over the last 10 years. Oh if I had it to do over again!

A great entrepreneur is different from an average entrepreneur; we have lots of average entrepreneur’s.
A great entrepreneur is someone with the following attributes and traits.

An entrepreneur has:

1. A passion for business, he is a student of business
2. A passion for the product, he is engaged in what it is he offers
3. Ideas that feed his passions in these two areas
4. An uncanny eye for opportunities

He knows:

1. That the right person is as important if not more important than the experienced person
2. That building the people is as important as building the product
3. That leadership and management are different, leadership is about doing the right things and   management is about doing things right
4. What strategy and tactics are and the difference
5. That planning is at the core of success
6. That working from his strengths is a competitive edge
7. How to motivate people to be all they can be

He understands:

1. That until he can learn to manage time, he cannot manage at all
2. The use of strategy is more important than the use of process
3. Passion is at the core of greatness
4. Tactics are best utilized within the context of principles and concepts, not process and   procedure.

He has wisdom:

1. He knows his job is to poor his life into his people and trains his direct reports to do the  same with theirs, at least 25% of his time
2. He endeavors to lead instead of manage whenever possible
3. When he sees a big problem, he knows he is looking at a great opportunity
4. He knows the real problems are the ones you cannot write a check to fix
5. He understands that strategy has to come before tactics
6. He knows what “working on your business, not in your business” means
7. He is listens, learns and takes action on what he finds out
8. He understands that noble men make noble plans
9. His humility is genuine
10. His ego is spent on his passion for business and product, not on himself

I hope this makes since, and that it is useful!

If you are in business and have not read Guerilla marketing, you should take a look at the series. Packed full of great ideas on how to market as inexpensively as possible, and teaches the basics of marketing a small business, which is very different than marketing a large business.

Coined by Jay Conrad Levinson, guerilla marketing usually refers to using innovative and aggressive tactics to market on a very small or even non-existent budget.

If you have been following the practices of larger companies, stop, they don’t work well for small companies. Guerilla marketing will help you understand the issues.

Years of owning and running software development companies have taught me a few things.  

1. Project management is critical to success and keeping the costs down.
2. A successful project has good specifications. What you do not define will cost you time, and usually money or you have to live with what you get.
3. Outsourcing requires extremely good project management and specifications, without them your results will be worse than what you have now.
4. Get the website design specification to something you can live with in the form of specification, turn that spec over to your developers along with an agreed upon project plan and start working on the specs for the next release. Make sure the next release has enough changes to keep the team busy, make sure you have good specs for the next release.
5. Let the team do the development on each release and adjust it until it meets your needs, deploy that version once tested. You should only be doing a couple of releases a year to your users, unless they are cosmetic changes and small patches to fix things. Any thing more confuses users.
6. If you can be successful at these steps, outsource the work, in some ways it is helpful to outsource, it forces you to at least provide some specs and you will learn to do project management, or pay the price.

 Here is a firm I have used over the years in India, very good work and reasonable. Give him my name please. I use them for the SEO and RPL services I provide my clients along with any coding that we might need, see the links below. Samyak Online - Indian Offshore Outsourcing Company 

info@samyakonline.net

I work primarily with small and startup companies. One of the first things I have to determine is how they are designed, relative to strengths, so I know how to help them proceed.

I use a football analogy with them. If after taking my 360 strengths assessment I find they have all the right attributes of a pure entrepreneur, they can take the ball up the middle, so to speak.

If they are the creative type they might have to run off left tackle and so on.

Because a company reflects its founder, it is vital to know this information going in, otherwise the risk of failure is greatly increased (”Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer.” –Peter Drucker)

When I get done with the assessment, I know what the entrepreneur is missing that will cost them in development of their business so we can plan to fill the void; no one has all the right stuff.

The purest entrepreneur I have ever done a 360 assessment on scored very low in the customer service area and in administration. So we are filling that void immediately for obvious reasons.

In testing myself I found I am all about thinking themes, I don’t have any of the strengths that are action oriented.

There are a couple of strengths that the Gallup Strengthsfinder test identifies as action themes, one is called Activator, If I could have one thing to make me a better entrepreneur it would be that strength.

Here is a description of that theme.

Activator

People strong in the Activator theme can make things happen by turning thoughts into action. They are often impatient.
Here are my actual strengths:

Ideation

People strong in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.

Learner

People strong in the Learner theme have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. In particular, the process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites them.

Belief

People strong in the Belief theme have certain core values that are unchanging. Out of these values emerges a defined purpose for their life.

Strategic

People strong in the Strategic theme create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.

Input

People strong in the Input theme have a craving to know more. Often they like to collect and archive all kinds of information.

You can find a description of all 34 here http://gmj.gallup.com/book_center/strengthsfinder/default.aspx

If I would have only knew what I know now before I founded 10 companies, I would have done things much differently.

What are your strengths?

http://www.emerald-business-services.com/Strengths-Profile.html

Here are some helpful quotes on the purpose of business from some of the best:

      “The sole purpose of business is service. The sole purpose of advertising is explaining the service which business renders.”
 Leo Burnett quotes (Pioneer American advertising Executive, 1891-1971)
 
      “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”
 Peter F. Drucker quotes (American Educator and Writer, b.1909)
 
      “Profit is not the legitimate purpose of business. The legitimate purpose of business is to provide a product or service that people need and do it so well that it’s profitable.”
 James Rouse

I would add that I think one of the purposes of a business is to unleash the human spirit to execute effeciently the passion of the founder and therefore embrace the talents, passions and gifts of all who work in the business in order to improve the lives of targeted customers.

Do you have any ideas on the subject, comment and I will make sure it gets posted.