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There is a cycle of building beliefs called the self-talk cycle. Our self-talk builds our self-image and our self-image determines our behavior, our actions, and our self-worth - how we feel about ourselves. If we want to change the way we feel about ourselves we need to change our self-talk. We need to build ourselves up.

Interview on Entrepreneurship

I was recently interviewed by Tino Mantella, President of The Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) for TAG radio.  Last November I ran a CEO and Advanced Entrepreneurship Boot Camp in Atlanta in partnership with TAG and we are running two in April and September of this year.  TAG is one of the largest technology membership organizations in the country.  They are on the cutting edge of providing the best educational programs and events for members with programs like the CEO Boot Camp, TAG Radio, and TAG TV.

Here are some additional Q & A excerpts from the material we prepared for this show which did not all make it into the time allotted.

QUESTION:  Okay, so the Competitive Positioning Tool or Competitive Landscape Maps are one of the tools you teach. This is the one available at the free teleseminar on March 27th.  I have heard you teach 12 different tools that are linked together in an overall system called "Rapid Growth by Design". Can you explain how this works?

ANSWER:

1. Rapid Growth By Design^TM is the entire process that you can go through to optimize or create any business or new product.  It is the chronological and iterative process that any company should go through regularly to morph into a big company from infancy.  It is not at all obvious and can be driven by crisis sometimes as a result.  This is how to be preemptive.  Once you learn it you can go through it to adjust your business easily, sometimes in minutes, to make adjustments because you are looking at just the changes needed, not everything.

2. It can also be used as your strategic planning process each year, or even quarterly.
    

QUESTION: I have also been told that this includes a tool for hiring, planning, and evaluating your management team. How does this compare to the various personality testing and interviewing systems and techniques out there like Meyers Briggs and DISC?

ANSWER:

2. 1. Well, I tell you I did a Google search on the Management team planning tool and I came up with literally ZERO matches! That is amazing as this is something that every CEO needs to be thinking about every day yet there are no real systems and processes because it is a very complex problem. It also naturally varies greatly by stage of development.

   2. This is not a personality model, though I like DISC at certain stages of business development for a management hiring tool.

   3. What this management planning and hiring tool do is look at the entire team and also break the problem down into its component parts to make it manageable.  As human beings, we live in a 3-dimensional world, and therefore we think in three dimensions plus time.  It is hard to think about a nine-dimensional problem. So we need to break that down into three different three-dimensional problems? We need to use models to help communicate and get input on these complex problems. There are natural limits to the human mind that must be taken into account, not just for us but for everyone we need to communicate with.   

   4. Many of the tools I have developed do just this, they help you tease your problems apart into manageable chunks so you can focus yourself and your team on getting parts solved and ultimately solve the big picture problem. This allows better analysis, input from all, and the ability to communicate the issues to others unambiguously.

QUESTION: What do you believe separates the most successful entrepreneurs from the many that try and fail and what can people do to be in the former pack instead of the later?

ANSWER:

1. The ability to listen and adjust is crucial. Many entrepreneurs get stuck on their first idea or vision and stop learning and listening to the marketplace.  You need to leverage the experience of others and not get so set too early on that initial vision.

2. Great entrepreneurs can select good people, help validate the vision, and then let people go do what they do without getting in the way. They get the right people in place.  Getting the right people on the bus as Jim Collins of Good to Great says it.

3. Entrepreneurs also need to be committed, just about everyone will try to tell them they can't do it.. Their mother, brother, even their friends will often dissuade them from taking the leap.  They need lots of self-confidence and experience to be successful. Albert Einstein once said: "Any idea which as first does not seem absurd has no hope". This is very deep on several levels - it says if everyone thought it was a good idea it could not be.  It also says you need to stick to your idea no matter what others say and explore seemingly crazy ideas.  This is not mutually exclusive with listening to the marketplace if you know where to draw the line - which is both art and science.

QUESTION: I hear you actually teach a segment on Developing Your Corporate Vision too.  I think lots of people think of a corporate vision as a future market position like Bill's Gate's "PC on every desktop".  You define the term more broadly with the idea of a process to flush it out more broadly than this.

ANSWER:

Well obviously the full answer to that is about an hour-long lecture, but in short, I define the corporate vision as everything about the business, all the business plans, marketing plans, sales plans, messaging, executive summary all areas of the business including Sales, Marketing, Product Development, finance, and operations.  The thing most people ignore is that this must be run as a simulation with the experience needed in each business area for validation and generally only CEOs can do that.  Each business area needs a plan that covers both strategic and tactical considerations and each plan must have a certain time frame. There is actually a free article on my website called "The 11 Elements of a Successful Vision" that you can get at Vision 

QUESTION: So what last words of wisdom can you offer aspiring entrepreneurs who may be starting a company?

ANSWER:

1. Learn to do good market research constantly and effectively capture and infuse it into your organization so everyone has contact with the market and customer on some level.

2. Adjust your management style and risk profile to the stage of development your company is at today, which needs constant reevaluation.

3. Never give up, adjust your plan based on new information and changes around you, but know what your core value and Unique Selling Proposition are that should not change, as that is the intersection of what you do best with your vision of the need in the marketplace. It should be your passion.

4. Always be on a learning curve personally and for the company, the world is changing much more rapidly than 10 years ago and businesses must evolve and change too.

5. Have a plan to develop your management team, as VCs say it is all about management, management, management. You need to create a win-win with your team and the company's needs by helping them develop too.

           and 6 never give up:

Bob Norton is the author of four books on starting and growing companies and entrepreneurship. He runs the Advanced Entrepreneurship CEO Boot Camp to help CEOs and senior executives cut years off their learning curve. He coaches CEOs at growth-oriented technology companies up to $150MM in sales. He has been part of eight startup companies and grown two of those to over $100MM in sales. He can be contacted at Bob@CLevelEnterprises.com.

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