Reptitive, Powerful, and Gentle - Intrinsic Motivation

We sense the motivation of a leader is a step above that of follower. Business owners, managers, and consultants have all wanted to capture some of whatever motivates the leader, The Active Investor, and spread it throughout the entire organization. In an 18 minute TED presentation Dan Pink sheds a bright light on the nature of that difference and what some organizations do about it. His message is that business ignores what science already knows about motivation.

Creating Products from Services

An objective of The Active Investor blog is to inspire the thinking of small business owners and professionals to create greater lasting value in their business. There is perhaps no better way to do this than to find ways to create products from services.

A product without services eventually becomes a commodity with business going to the lowest cost provider. Selling only services is a bit like selling air. You can't really sell time. You can only rent your expertise for some time. Expertise is intangible and difficult to either prove or differentiate and in the end the amount that can be sold is always capped by a time limitation. If you want to sell the enterprise, because it's your expertise and you're leaving, the residual value is relatively small. However, when the business offers a deliverable solution that can be named plus is easy to understand and refer, you have hit a "value-added" sweet spot. Here is a personal example.

Names are important. They give the offering tangibility. As a Texas business broker, I create marketing plans for my clients, as do many other business brokers. Since most small business buyers come from the internet, this plan includes multiple internet directory listings, which again, other brokers do. So far, we're still at the services level. I've then created a unique product offering on top of these services named Business Opportunities Bulletins (BOBs). With some creativity and technology, each client listing can appear on the first Goggle results page of significant search terms used by potential buyers. If a client wants to be found by potential business buyers, here is a product, a BOB, that does exactly that.

A BOB is easy to understand. The art of selling your business is to be presented to interested parties and still keep the sale confidential. Prospective clients can see how this is already working for existing clients. They "get it" immediately.

In this example, the product's name is a take-off of my own name. If a need for my business broker services gets touched upon by someone in my network, it's easy for them to explain and refer my product (my service).

Building BOBs takes time,  expertise, and technology but their existence adds critical value both to immediate marketability and to the ultimate value of the brokerage practice. A product has been created out of services common to the industry. How many products can be developed from your services? Something with a name that is easy to understand and refer. I can't image anyone who can't develop at least one more.

Image credit: EraPhernalia Vintage (catching up)

Shaping the future

In President Obama's address to Congress on Healthcare this month, he reminded them that they came to Washington not to fear the future but to shape it. What an inspirational remark and what a great definition for an Active Investor. Active Investors are more than just business owners and professionals; they are the individuals who have made a decision not to fear their future but to take responsibility to shape it.

Once we get beyond the inspirational feelings of that remark, we're left with the reality of exactly how does one go about shaping their own future? For Congress and Healthcare, it involves agreeing to passing enabling legislation. What's involved for us as individuals?

We cannot know the future; however we can understand it through System Dynamics. Our core principle is structure will determine behavior. The future will play-out according to the structures at that time. Our nation will have better Healthcare if a better Healthcare system is in place. An Active Investor will have a more successful business if better business structures are in place.

Each day is a new opportunity to:
1) Faithfully respond to the needs currently presented to us, and
2) Imagine how we can build structures to be even better in the future.

This is a big step beyond "making money." This is building lasting value. The profits earned at any given time will be consumed; but the structures are a lasting value. We see this in business brokerage all the time. Business owners who have created structures cash out handsomely. Those that have just made money get by.

Shaping our future is building our structures. What marketing, sales, management, HR, compliance, fulfillment, etc. resources need to be in place for our complete success? This question is never conclusively answered in our expanding universe. The mere passage of time is enough to continually create new opportunities for everyone. New structures will first form in our minds and later find their way into our reality - shaping our future.

As for politics, our President's speech did affect me. I've decided to believe there is a viable solution to the nation's Healthcare problem. Congress only has to imagine it.

Image credit: dmitryku

Powerful Symbols of Structure

Today's performance is the result of the strategic resources we had available when we woke-up this morning. Toyota will build many more cars today than I will because they have the resources and intent to do so and I don't. On the other hand, Toyota's contribution to this posting will be a mere mention of their name. My contribution will be its creation because I have access to these resources.

Structure determines behavior. In our past we have intended certain results which has caused the accumulation of necessary resources to accomplish them. These resources for an Active Investor might include things like cash, reputation, customer base, staff, inventory, equipment, technology, supplier relationships, and so forth. What happens in the present is the unfolding result of the levels and structures of our current resources. This is why accounting and business valuations work in the present. We can accurately know our resources as they exist now. Forecasting future performance is another matter.

Financial methodologies are scalable to almost any level of detail complexity; however, they are often not well suited to deal with dynamic complexity. As we move out of the known present and into an unknowable future, resource levels will be dynamically affected. Things will generally not happen in a linear fashion like we tend to imagine. Understanding the dynamics of how we arrived at the present is far more valuable in forecasting than understanding the details. Unfortunately, the study of system dynamics is somewhat challenging (although if it's possible, an Active Investor will greatly benefit from taking a formal system dynamics course).

The rest of us take an intuitive shortcut. We look for symbols that indicate the underlying structure and use that to get clues about dynamics.

Experience in audit and business brokering have helped me develop a sense of symbols. Walking into a business the cars in the parking lot may be symbols that the owner (and therefore the business) is doing well. The maintenance is a symbol of their attention to detail. The decor may become symbolic of their perceived customer preferences.

For all the time and effort spent on marketing assets, it's often our symbols that communicate the most about us to others. They are most powerful communicators that indicate our structure and will be used by others to predict our future behaviors.

Our symbols are both advantageous and dangerous because they communicate instantly. And yet, we frequently are not even aware of what symbols we currently display. The Active Investor benefits from paying attention to them. It takes an examination of our structures to best see our symbols. By being alert to symbols in our markets, we learn both about others and how to better present ourselves.

Image credit: avixyz

Entrainment - Power in Prayer and Meditation

An emerging theme in this blog is identifying key drivers of value by recognizing 3 necessary characteristics. Value Drivers of lasting consequence can be recognized because they are always Repetitive, Powerful, and Gentle (RPG). Certainly prayer and meditation are candidates. They are Repetitive and Gentle; but what about Powerful? A part of their Power may lie within an effect scientists have called entrainment.

Entrainment is the stuff of scientific legend. That legend goes back to 1666. The noted Dutch physicist, Christiaan Huygens, had to adjust the clock in his study each day because it ran about a minute slower than the one in his living room. Both were governed by swinging pendulums. One day he moved them side-by-side. With no other adjustments, the clocks began to keep synchronized time. Any discrepancies disappeared. This observation lead Huygens to the discovery or labeling of entrainment, which is the tendency for adjacent oscillating systems to synchronize.

Where ever there are cycles (Repetitions) there is the potential for the effects of entrainment. The clocks are an example of entrainment in a mechanical system. A striking example in natural systems is the synchronization of menstrual cycles among women who live or work together.

Entrainment is a Powerful effect. Can that power be accessed by prayer and mediation? For one oscillator to affect another, the entrainment has to operate through some medium. Call it the universe, God, or the Zero Point Field, we all must be connected for this scientific effect to occur.

Now consider the processes of prayer and mediation to be bringing yourself side-by-side with God. As you repeat these processes entrainment begins it's subtle work which ultimately results in the changes we call answered prayer. Was the change in the universe, or was it inside of us? Entrainment leads us to the possibility it could be either or both.

Jesus instructed the we should ask to receive (Matt 7:7). His half-brother James later wrote that we can ask but not receive because of our motives (James 4:2). Apparently asking works, but only when a level of entrainment with God has synchronized our motives.

Active Investors have very busy schedules. Repetitive prayer and mediation takes away available time; but if ignored, what will our lives synchronize toward?

Image credit: theilr