Leadership – Supportive Leaders
Published April 2, 2012 | 
Baseball is one of only a few fields of a man’s effort where he can succeed three times out of ten and be considered accomplished and highly-successful, the other is business.
Leadership Lessons of Baseball
If you have kids like mine, they play sports and participate in all types of athletic activities.
I’ve either played or been deeply involved in sports of all kinds for most of my life, from a high-school athlete to martial arts, to fitness training, to Little League baseball. It’s quite safe to say that I’m a huge proponent of kids playing sports.
Baseball in particular teaches us lessons that can be directly applied, and serve as a great guide for being an effective leader in both business and life. Let me show you why…
Be supportive of your child by giving encouragement and showing an interest in his or her team.
Supportive Leadership has become extremely powerful in today’s economy where relationships have become a force in business success from employee to consumer relations, and is founded on the principle that leaders can positively influence and motivate followers to support a common goal of successful results. Understand that this leadership style does not believe in issuing followers a series of directives, orders or commands. 
Rather, realizing their importance in motivating employees/team members supportive leaders want to build and encourage focused relationships with each team member, create a trusting and genuinely authentic bond that makes each individual feel like they are appreciated and highly-valued.
Accordingly, supportive leadership, by way of sustaining the positive relationships with team members who in turn strive with their best and most effective efforts, not only continues supporting the business leader, but in turn, their support will successfully accomplish the leader’s and team goals.
Remember, that as the leader of your business, you need to give frequent support through encouragement and genuine interest in your employees, which in turn serves to motivate them and directly boost their performance.
Entrepreneurship – Milestones and Your Business
Published March 29, 2012 | The straightest road to failure is one without milestones, signposts, and the final definitive goals.
Think of business milestones like checkpoints or signposts on the road to success for entrepreneurs, indicators that a business endeavor is both thriving and growing. In reality, milestones are the actual events or markers that occur on the path toward achievement of the desired end results of associated business goals. When we looked closely, milestones can be either short-term or long-term goals, or both, and can be easily achievable or quite challenging. Understand that effective development of milestones for your business could very well require some time and effort, but it is an extremely valuable exercise, particularly if your business is new or has yet to launch.
Your first step should be to set both short-term and long-term goals for your business. The goals may focus on different desired outcomes including profits, marketing, brand recognition, and even community outreach to name just a few. For example, if you own an online eCommerce store, short-term goals may include the redesign of your website and reduction of your shipping costs. Now, your long-term goals may include opening a retail brick-and-mortar storefront and in addition, establish an annual book drive and sale. This of course is what more often than not, occurs in reverse, with the online eCommerce store added to brick-and-mortar storefront. 
What’s important to understand before you get started, is that if you initially experience difficulty assembling the list, start brainstorming, and write down anything that comes to mind related to your business.
Your next step is to revise your list of goals through the elimination or change of the goals you determine to be currently unfeasible. For instance, if your list of goals from brainstorming includes the goal of your eCommerce storefront processing 50 new orders a day, you may be likely to realize and discover that this goal, though not automatically impossible, may prove very difficult to achieve. Consider revising that goal to gaining 30 new daily orders within a year. You should remove enormously unrealistic goals from your list, since they in turn have completely ineffective milestones. Remember, the simple essence of a milestone is to drive you toward ultimately reaching your goals, not to be an obstacle of discouragement to you by being unreasonable.
Entrepreneurship – Neutralize the Negative Energy
Published February 24, 2012 | Neutralize Your Negative Energy Activators
It sounds so easy to say, “Stop letting outside or peripheral events activate negative thoughts.” But, although easy to say, it’s much easier said than done.
So let’s suppose you’re making your way to meet with a customer at the customer’s business location, but unfortunately you keep running into red lights and the resulting traffic delays. Of course that’s always a big problem, but if you allow it to get you anxious and disconcerted, you just went from one problem to two. The simple fact is that you’re late, along with the additional problem that you now have negative energy within to deal with.
Guess what? You’re not finish at two problems, because if you go into the meeting upset from the negative energy, the customer is most likely going to start wondering if you’re always moody and therefore decide that you’re too unreliable to do business with. So that gets you up to three problems.
Understand that to achieve a better attitude which means better results, you have to change the way you interpret exterior events that lead to the activation of negative energy and the consequences thereof. Once you consciously make the change, the events that you face daily in your life take on a whole different and much more practical and positive meaning, they no longer will activate negative energy and the accompanying bad attitude.
So from a positive perspective of the events, while the delays may still be causing you to be late, you should always use the extra time to collect your thoughts, consider your options, and decide on an effective damage control strategy. At the same time, to keep it from occurring again, use the time to come up with a better schedule that takes into consideration delays that may occur for whatever reason. As a result, you always leave plenty of time ahead, just in case there’s traffic.
Finally, understand that above all else, we as entrepreneurs must have the courage and meet the challenges to remain positive and optimistic, grateful and content, regardless of the negativity of any chaos, turbulence and confusion in our lives, and despite the consequences of any obstacles and pitfalls in our life’s path. By doing so, we accelerate our positive momentum, insuring achievement of our ultimate success.
Entrepreneurship – Engage and Employ Innovators
Published February 13, 2012 | An Entrepreneur’s destiny is never a question of coincidental and unplanned, it is a matter of carefully selected and well-chosen, and not something to be waited for, but rather something to be skillfully achieved at the right moment in time.
Always avoid typical run of the mill questions, rather you should ask a lot of uncommon and rare questions not normally heard when interviewing someone. The main reason is because routine questions always produce equally routine predictable answers. So, when you are trying to gauge the level of self-confidence in the person you’re talking to, throw an unexpected question at them, something like, and “Are you smart?” Then watch closely, as their initial reaction will reveal all.
Never dismiss dissenters or rebels too quickly, instead dig deeper for compelling reasons including rebelling against authority in the name of a just cause or strong belief. As a true entrepreneur, you should never be automatically prejudice against someone who has been jailed for talking back to a cop or fired for telling his boss to shove it.
When we look deeper at the traits of real Creators and Innovators, there is strong evidence they have, and will always swim against the stream.
Look for a strong history and proof of the ability to think big, matched with big achievements including what kind of big goals have they set (and met) or innovated in the past? When you are fortunate enough to engage with someone like this, it is an excellent sign you have met the right person, and one you shouldn’t ignore. “Why?” you ask, because this kind of person is a “diamond in the rough,” and doesn’t come along very often.
Remember, that you’re looking for Innovators whose drives and motivations are similar to yours.
Entrepreneurship – Promote Innovation within Your Business
Published February 10, 2012 | The most successful entrepreneurs are leaders that get the right people to work with them and to do the right thing, understand all the right reasons, and perform and accomplish tasks the right way, at the right time, using all the right resources and achieving the most successful results.
Support competition with rewards by creating a dynamic work environment in which employees with the most talent get to earn rewards and the best ideas always get recognized, endorsed and promoted, regardless of age, experience or position. Always understand that talent is talent, and never discourage it. This not only creates an atmosphere of healthy competition, but it encourages your employees at the same time, to be vocal and participate in the bigger vision with a sense of ownership or buy-in to your business.
Host regular brainstorming sessions constantly with your employees. Not only does it help you identify and understand the talent in your organization, but it’s the by far the quickest method to access the best ideas in the room. Call it something like your Brainstorm Maximization System.
To get the most successful results you should narrow down your focus and define your goal explicitly, all the while strongly encouraging free-flowing brainstorming action, then go back to sharpen and clarify ideas as many times as you need to. 
Then when you feel like you’ve completed the process to your complete satisfaction, allow the employee team members to vote on what they consider the best ideas.
Always lead by your example and if you’re not moving with a strong sense of urgency and momentum, and adding your own ideas to the mix, it becomes extremely difficult to highly-motivate an innovative team with a lot of talent and potential to really produce great results.
Remember, leadership is constant pursuit including the pursuit of excellence, of elegance, of truth, of what’s next, of what if, of change, of value, of results, of relationships, of service, of knowledge, and always of innovative ideas of something better and bigger.