Tag: Positive Action

Is Your Message Clear or Are You Contributing to the Noise?

This post is part of the Guest Blog Grand Tour over at Life Without Pants – an epic journey of over 75 guest posts. Want to learn more about Matt Cheuvront & see how far the rabbit hole goes? Subscribe to the Life Without Pants RSS feed & follow him on Twitter to keep in touch!

If you’re an avid reader of my blog…wait, you’re not reading it yet? What are you waiting for?

Ehem, anyway, if you’re an avid reader of my blog you know that I am not a man of few words – in  fact – if there’s one thing I continue to work on as a writer, it’s condensing my long winded thoughts into concise, easy to digest ideas. Because when it comes to writing, sometimes less is truly more.

Seth Godin, Carlos Miceli, & Tim Jahn are three guys I admire for their ability to say a lot without saying a lot. They represent a ‘big picture’ concept that a lot of bloggers and businesses neglect. They’re able to get their message across without clutter – they cut through the noise and get to the point. When you get wordy, when you throw a lot of messages and signals at someone, you run the risk of losing them in translation.

I’m a freelance web designer myself – and there are three things I always tell the clients I work with who are building their website or blog.

Your calls to action must be obvious

If I want to subscribe to your blog, send you an email, or buy your product. I don’t want to figure out how to do it; I just want to do it. Make sure it’s easy for your visitors to do what you want them to.

Provide easy navigation

Again, this goes along the same lines as creating clear calls to action – your page navigation needs to be clear and consistent. Leave a trail of breadcrumbs that is easy for your visitors to follow and navigate through.

Define your takeaways

On each page of your site, there needs to be a clear takeaway – whether it’s simply to read and comment on a blog post, subscribe to a newsletter, or sign up for a service – you need to define a purpose for every single page of your website – and make that purpose easy to define for your visitors.

You don’t hold your breath all the time. Sometimes a grandiose 1000 word blog post is in the cards – but never underestimate the power a few impactful words can have. Sometimes, in fact, often-times, less truly can be more. There is beauty in simplicity.

How To Be A Great Leader – It's Your Choice

Wow! Just when I thought it was all going to go quiet for Christmas, my friend Jonathan Wilson comes up with a powerful piece on leadership in response to a question on our LinkedIn group. Take it away Jonathan:

I have had the pleasure of working closely for airline entrepreneurs Sir Freddie Laker, Sir Michael Bishop and Sir Richard Branson. They were all very different but each shared similar qualities:

1. They learnt to simplify appropriately so that people knew what they were supposed to do and why it was fun and important to do it.

2. They learned to listen extraordinarily well with genuine interest and respect. Then they (mostly) acted on what they heard, especially if they heard it from a ‘junior’ member of the team.

3. They practised and developed very good memories.

4. They engendered a sustained sense of enthusiasm and made people feel they were very important.

5. They made people trust them enough to believe what they said and that they believed what they said themselves. They had the self-confidence to trust other people. Their confidence enabled them to take accountability and to hold others accountable without interfering with how their people discharged their responsibility. This meant that they delegated very well, which meant that they increased their personal power literally thousands of times over.

6. They were overwhelmingly positive, optimistic and future-focused.

7. They had all been, at least once, within days or hours of losing their businesses to bankers or bureaucrats without any vision beyond the procedure they were myopically, even blindly, following – and they had all learned from the experience

8. They were all motivated by something other than money. The money was merely a way of indicating the value they had created, but short-term profits were never important compared to capital growth, At the same time, they were always cash-conscious because cash is freedom. They did not try to motivate their staff with great financial rewards, but were personally generous.

9. They were much more active than reflective, but when they did pause to reflect, they showed pretty high self-awareness.

10. They were very persistent. Very persistent indeed.

I could go on (and on), but enough! I wish there was a secret code, some insight that people could bottle and have to keep, but I’m afraid that if there is one, I have never been able to find it, except perhaps these two insights:

1. Leadership is not something you have or don’t have. Leading is something that you can choose to do, or not do – and you make that choice anew every day and every moment of every day.

2. Practice, practice, practice.

Merry Christmas!

Common Causes of Project Failure

Spotted an interesting report primarily aimed at managing and delivering projects across Government. But hey, why should they have all the learning eh? Strikes me that this is a lot about trying to do too much. Headlines discussed include:

1. Lack of clear links between the project and the organisation’s key strategic priorities, including agreed measures of success.
2. Lack of clear senior management and Ministerial ownership and leadership.
3. Lack of effective engagement with stakeholders.
4. Lack of skills and proven approach to project management and risk management.
5. Too little attention to breaking development and implementation into manageable steps.
6. Evaluation of proposals driven by initial price rather than long-term value for money (especially securing delivery of
business benefits).
7. Lack of understanding of, and contact with the supply industry at senior levels in the organisation.
8. Lack of effective project team integration between clients, the supplier team and the supply chain.

You can download the full report from here.