How to develop S.M.A.R.T. Goals!
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“Many people fail in life, not for lack of ability or brains or even courage, but simply because they have never organized their energies around a goal.” – Elbert Hubbard
You can attain most any goal you set when you plan your steps wisely and establish a time frame that allows you to carry out those steps. Goals that may have seemed far away and out of reach eventually move closer and become attainable, not because your goals shrink, but because you grow and expand to match them. If you don’t have goals, you won’t use your time and resources effectively.
Making goals are good but making S.M.A.R.T. goals are even better.
The acronym S.M.A.R.T. has a number of slightly different variations, which can be used to provide a more comprehensive definition for goal setting.
A change is gonna come
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We live in a world where “business as usual” IS change. New initiatives, project-based working, technology improvements, staying ahead of the competition – these things come together to drive ongoing changes to the way we work.
Whether you’re considering a small change to one or two processes, or a system-wide change to an organization, it’s common to feel uneasy and intimidated by the scale of the challenge.
Change management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. The field of change management grew from the recognition that organizations are composed of people. And the behaviors of people make up the outputs of an organization.
The failure to address the human impacts of change is at the root of most failed change initiatives.
You cannot impose change – people and teams need to be empowered to find their own solutions and responses, with facilitation and support from managers, and tolerance and compassion from the leaders and executives. Employees need to be able to trust the organization.
John P Kotter’s ‘eight steps to successful change’
Invest your time wisely
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To quote Alan Weiss, author of the best seller Million Dollar Consulting, “Time should not be viewed as a resource issue, but rather as a priority issue.” All of us have the same amount of time to leverage and the only question is how we choose to invest it.
For example, quite often we say things like “I would love to do that but I don’t have the time.” What we really mean is that there is something else that we have made a higher priority.
One key way to get the most out of your investment is to delegate appropriately and to understand where you may lack certain expertise.
Repeat after me: “don’t do things that are easily delegated or for which you aren’t skilled.”
Unfortunately, delegation can be a difficult skill to master, especially for business owners. However, once you do this well, you can quickly build a strong and successful team that will help you grow your business.
How Facebook can help grow your business
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For the first time since September 15, 2007, Google.com was not the most visited U.S. website.
This honor went to Facebook.com by barely surpassing Google.com with 7.07% of U.S. web traffic for the week ending on March 13, 2010.
Though, Google.com received 7.03% of the U.S. web traffic, Facebook’s year-over-year growth far outpaced Google. In fact, the number of visitors to Facebook spiked 185% compared with the same period last year, while Google’s traffic climbed just 9%.
Matt Tatham, from Experian Hitwise says that “it shows content sharing has become a huge driving force online. People want information from friends they trust, versus the anonymity of a search engine.”
So as a business owner, why should a social networking website matter to me?
What is Lean and why is it important?
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So, you want to provide exactly what customers want with the least amount of expenditure on your part? Well, Lean is for you!
Lean, which is also known as “Lean Production” or “Lean Manufacturing”, is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination.
Put simply, Lean is about maximizing customer value while minimizing waste.
The elimination of waste has been an ongoing effort from the beginning of time. However, in the 1950′s, a man name Taiichi Ohno made a series of trips to the United States and began to formulate what is now called the Toyota Production System (TPS).