I like to use my hands and build stuff . Mainly guitars. I assemble Stratocaster replicas sourcing bodies, necks and electronics from different places, sometimes I even use original pickups and hardware. Then when I’m finished, I play my guitar a little. After a while, I put it on its stand and look at it. I run my fingers on the fretboard, checking its smoothness and consistency. I paint and polish its body, smelling the wood and studying every vein in it. I feel an immense sense of accomplishment in building something physical, that I can look at, touch, smell.
There is a lot to be said in favour of focus. In business, the general accepted wisdom is that if you focus you can achieve better, faster results and avoid wasting time and resources. Focus on your upcoming challenges, on the short- term objective, on picking the right markets and customers and things will work out best for you. Sportsmen call it “being in the zone”, and the general consensus is that focus equals good. A presentation in a meeting or at an event is meant to be the beginning, not the end, of a conversation. So why are you bombarding people with copious and irrelevant information in your slide deck? And why are you so boring? Yesterday I helped my daughter with her homework. The assignment was to analyse and comment on the best theories for motivating and rewarding employees, so naturally it implied looking at the work of some globally recognised authorities in such field like Maslow, Taylor, Mayo and Heltzberg. I’ve written about motivation before, because it’s a topic I’m quite passionate about, so it was refreshing to find quite a lot of neatly articulated theoretical rationale to support my hands-on, experience-based findings. Well actually not really the end. More likely the start of a new course, a much improved way of performing the marketing function, ever changing but remaining true to its core nature. The practice of marketing, although fairly recent in its modern definition as a discipline which focuses on the promotion, advertisement and sale of goods and services, has historically been prone to being heavily influenced by technological innovations. So what we experience today is not completely new. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.” — A. Einstein Sounds familiar? This is how most sales organisations work. As a new fiscal year approaches, the sales planning sessions start. Although we know that past performance is no guarantee for future success, still we project the previous year’s sales figures into a dry formula to determine a growth rate for our business, based on more or less accurate/proxy market and client opportunities, and come up with figures that will hopefully please our managers. Part 2 of 2. In “Delivery Rules” I highlighted the three key principles that, I believe, are required to deliver a great presentation: content, structure and speaker. In part 2, I’m focusing on the personal skills that you need to develop to become a great presenter and speaker (I like to call it a “business communicator”), and that will set you apart from the others. If the delivery of a speech is more important than the content, then obviously there is a lot of work that we need to start doing on the most important element: us. (Article 1 of 2). Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, constitutionalist and one of Romeʼs greatest orators, famously asserted that the “delivery of a speech is much more important than the content“. I’m a music addict. I love listening to music, making music and being part of the local music scene. Hence as a music lover I like to go see musicians play live. But frankly, I’m not a big fan of mega venues and stadium tours. |