Inspiring Your Authentic Week

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Shout from the rooftops Posted: 30 Aug 2010 10:41 PM PDT One of the biggest advantages of authentic business is the support that you get from others. A regular business that seeks to redistribute wealth from the population and the environment to a few senior executives and shareholders is, effectively, in competition with everyone. With it's focus on profit it is always competing with staff, customers and suppliers to make as much as possible. Many staff end up finding that working to make someone else rich is not completely motivating. Authentic businesses generate their profit, through the pursuit of a profound and positive purpose. The purpose inspires and motivates staff, customers and others to support the business and generate profits. The profits provide the resources to more effectively pursue the purpose in a virtuous spiral of growth. Profit is a by product of the pursuit of purpose. So far so good, BUT, although having a positive and inspiring purpose gives a business many fantastic advantages it absolutely does not replace the need for good business discipline. Costs must still be carefully managed. Strategy must be excellent and efficiently pursued. Leadership needs to engage and motivate. Management needs to focus and deliver and key messages need to be communicated clearly and to the right audience. Henry Ford famously said that he knew that only half of his marketing worked, he just didn't know which half. Marketing is a complex area and becoming more complex. The internet, social media and now mobile have transformed the communication landscape, making it massively more interactive and changing most of the rules. For authentic businesses the starting point is your profound and positive purpose and your vision for how your company will make a difference and add value. These need to be articulated concisely, precisely and inspiringly. Once articulated they need to be shared as efficiently as possible, with the right people. Getting this communication right requires a dedicated and excellent team, or three. One for PR - managing your communication through the media. One for advertising - creating and managing your paid for advertising. One for managing your online communication including web site, social media and possibly online advertising (if this in not done by your advertising team). Maybe another for your sponsorship programme. These teams may be in house or external agencies, what is really crucial is how you choose the right people for the job. The traditional pitching model, is desperately inefficient for all concerned and often a very poor way of choosing. As an authentic business, one of the key considerations is alignment, you need to be working with people who are completely aligned with your message and purpose. Start by doing some research, who, in your broad market is doing great communication? How are they doing it? Is it in house or with agencies? If they are using an agency - you can start by talking to them. What you are looking for, above all else is a relationship where communication is easy, where you understand each other and where you get on well. If they do great work for someone else, you get on well with them and you are aligned in terms of purpose, the chances are you will get great results. No pitches, just do a deal. For businesses where you need to do the job in house there is a great deal to learn. On this weeks Authenticis, authentic business radio show we will be talking authentic marketing with Chantal Cooke of PR Demystified and Nicole Pukala of Pukala Consulting. Join us on our Authentic Business Radio show every Thursday at 5pm UK, 6pm Euro or 12.00 EST. This week we will be discussing "Shout from the rooftops" I am planning an Open Authentic Leadership event in Mallorca in October, with 15 - 20 places available. You can find out a lot more about the course here. If you are interested please let me know so I can gauge numbers for the hotel. Feel free to forward this to friends, post to your networks and to republish on your website. Please include the link. You can subscribe for free at www.neilcrofts.com Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter With love nx Neil Crofts Neil Crofts authentic business +34 646391384 neil@neilcrofts.com www.neilcrofts.com Skype - neilcrofts

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Inspiring Your Authentic Week

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Beyond Control Posted: 23 Aug 2010 12:07 AM PDT To some extent most of us share the delusion of control. We imagine that we are able to control people and things to achieve what we want. The control delusion is roughly the inverse of reality most of the time. There have been some very significant experiments with control, the most sophisticated was probably in the former East Germany. By some estimates there was one informer or Stasi officer for every regular member of the population. Some businesses today employ software (and people) to monitor internet use, email traffic and phone conversations (especially in call centres). The philosophy of control has it's own Orwellian doublespeak, "Calls may be monitored for training and security". If what you want is conformity and obedience these techniques can be effective, but there are side effects and attempts at control will always incite dissent. What might be gained in conformity and obedience is lost in responsibility, engagement, creativity and innovation. I ran an Authentic Leadership course for a Danish software company last week in Mallorca. We did one of my favourite exercises, a game I call "Leadership Football". The game is played in three "halves". In the first half there are no teams and everyone plays for themselves, trying to score as many goals as they can and prevent anyone else from scoring. The second half is played with two teams and two, non playing captains. The players are only allowed to act on specific and explicit instructions from their captain, they are not allowed to take any initiative and the captains are not allowed to give any general instructions. The third half is played with two teams, more or less normal football. What this piece of fun teaches us is that anarchy is only fun for a very short period of time, after which the lack of direction and support becomes tiresome, most people don't engage and therefore make no contribution. We learn that in hierarchical control systems "managers" quickly become a communication bottleneck and are unable to cope with the constant upward flow of responsibility. Their "reports" are continually looking to them for instructions and not being allowed to take initiative is both difficult and frustrating. In the third half communication shifts from top down to peer to peer, with leadership flowing around the team to where it is most relevant in the moment. Engagement, involvement and responsibility are all increased. These powerful lessons were further reinforced later in the day when we abseiled down a cliff and into the sea to be picked up by a boat. Literally putting your life into the hands of others is a great way to let go of the idea of control. The abseiling was integrated into the usual program by the team at Lifexperiences. On the whole control is an illusion brought on by insecurity. If you want to maximise your use of resources, to innovate and to be creative you have to let go of it. One of the most creative businesses in the world is Pixar. Ed Catmull, founder and CEO of Pixar, had the enormous advantage of being able to build the team and philosophy for over ten years in a completely non commercial environment, before making Toy Story. Here is a video of Ed talking about leadership at Stamford University. I am thinking about running an Open Authentic Leadership event in Mallorca in October, with 15 - 20 places available. You can find out a lot more about the course here. If you are interested please let me know so I can gauge numbers for the hotel. Join us on our Authentic Business Radio show every Thursday at 5pm UK, 6pm Euro or 12.00 EST. This week we will be discussing "Beyond Control" Feel free to forward this to friends, post to your networks and to republish on your website. Please include the link. You can subscribe for free at www.neilcrofts.com Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter With love nx Neil Crofts Neil Crofts authentic business +34 646391384 neil@neilcrofts.com www.neilcrofts.com Skype - neilcrofts

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Inspiring Your Authentic Week

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Money - the root of all evil? Posted: 16 Aug 2010 12:45 AM PDT Money gets a lot of blame, but money is a very basic technology designed to simply facilitates the exchange of energy between people. It is not evil. A spade is also a basic technology deigned to facilitate digging. It is not evil either. Like a spade money can be used as weapon to exploit or harm people. Unlike a spade money can also contribute to harm when it is used to gamble. Money is by far the most common tension that people feel holds them back from living their purpose and their dreams. I have done my Life Purpose exercise with over 3000 people and, one way or another, people feel that money holds them back. Either they have a job and an income and don't feel they can leave the job, because they need the income or they don't have a job and they don't have enough income. Money is a tricky one to come to terms with, no question. There is so much conditioning about the importance, the scarcity and the "cost" of money that it is extremely hard for most of us to get any sort of objectivity about it. Myths about money that we are conditioned with include: 1 - We are not allowed to evaluate our own worth. 2 - Money is scarce 3 - If you want money you have to work hard/ sacrifice your personal values to get it. None of these are true. I would argue that one of the reasons that people with money have money is because they don't believe these things. 1 - One of the core lessons of our education was that evaluation had to be done by someone else, preferably with a red pen and preferably without consultation or right of appeal. The result is that most of us don't have any real idea of what our time or energy are worth. This is bad in a job situation where largely we just accept what we are offered, it is worse in an independent scenario where we have to price and sell ourselves. The truth is we are the most important evaluators of our work and it is a skill we need to learn. We need to do the research and understand the value that we bring to a situation. We need to balance that with the income we need and the time and effort we have put in; and arrive at an amount which we can negotiate towards. 2 - In one of the later books of the HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy, leaves are used as money. This is obviously ridiculous, there is a virtually unlimited supply of leaves and everyone can help themselves. Is this really more ridiculous than money? In fact the supply of leaves is MORE limited than the supply of money. The difference is that under our system only a privileged few can help themselves. Leaf supply is limited by the number of trees and the number of leaves per tree. Money supply is limited by the amount of debt banks can sell and the amount of leverage they can apply (times they can multiply it). Money is a human invention. These days with most money being digital it is effectively free to create. It's supply is not, as you might imagine, carefully controlled by wise financial geeks in the government or central bank. It is created by all banks every time they make a loan, they then securitse the borrowers asset and turn it into money (and charge the lender to borrow it). This is exactly what went so horribly wrong in the credit crunch. For more on the problems with the way that we create money see The Bank of England Act. 3 - Hard work is a common "Christian" value, and we are told that we will be rewarded for it. The myth is that the reward is proportional to the work, it is not. The richest people in the world are not necessarily the hardest working, the poorest are not necessarily the laziest. In fact you would probably find a fairly even split of hard workers to lazy throughout the wealth spectrum and hard work does not inevitably lead to wealth. There is no linear relationship between hours worked/effort put in and wealth. Of course there are many wealthy people who work extremely hard and there are also many who do not. Equally there are many poor people who work extremely hard and many who do not. So how do we stop money from holding us back from living our purpose? 1 - Change our relationship with money. Shift our perspective towards seeing it simply as a tool we need to help us exchange energy with other people. 2 - Decide how much money you want and work back from there to establish a strategy. If you want to earn 200,000 per year - how much of what and at what price do you need to sell to make it happen? Work it back to even a weekly level and then work out how you are going to make it happen and over what time frame. You can do the same sum if you have a job, how much of what do you need to do to justify that income, what is your strategy for doing it? How can you sell that strategy to your employer? Don't leap directly to a big figure, start in a small and manageable way and grow it from there. Christian Owens did it at 16 - why not you? 3 - Embrace the idea that your values and your purpose are what makes you valuable, not just your hours or your muscle. Our purpose gives us huge motivation and our values guide us and give us strength. We can use them to enhance our lives and our value to others. If you need help with articulating your purpose, your values or your strategy - give me a call. Join us on our Authentic Business Radio show every Thursday at 5pm UK, 6pm Euro or 12.00 EST. This week we will be discussing "money - the root of all evil?" Feel free to forward this to friends, post to your networks and to republish on your website. Please include the link. You can subscribe for free at www.neilcrofts.com Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter With love nx Neil Crofts Neil Crofts authentic business +34 646391384 neil@neilcrofts.com www.neilcrofts.com Skype - neilcrofts

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Inspiring Your Authentic Week

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“Get rid of the crappy stuff” Posted: 09 Aug 2010 12:16 AM PDT Regular readers will know that I am something of an Apple fan. I bought my first Mac (an LC2) in 1989 and, apart from a short gap during the dark days, before the second coming, have had Macs ever since. I am not just a fan of the products, I am also a fan of the business, these days, it seems, most people are. Apple are notoriously secretive about their business, but there are a few gems we can learn from. Steve Jobs has a reputation for being very demanding and a perfectionist. Like all extreme talents, he is an extreme person, not necessarily the easiest to be around, but effective. At the Fast Company Innovation Uncensored conference earlier this year incoming Nike CEO, Mike Parker, revealed the advice Steve Jobs had given him as he started. "Get rid of the crappy stuff." This was no reflection on Nike, their products or their business, more a reflection of Jobs's personal and business philosophy; Get rid of the crappy stuff. Fundamentally this is an austere philosophy of excellence, focus and confidence. It requires first that you work in an area you are not just an expert, but you are devoted to. It is only through devotion that you can develop the kind of confidence that enables you to know, at a glance, what is crappy. It is austere because it is about removing everything that is extraneous, everything that might drain energy from the value. Many of us are over stretched and tired because we give too much energy to things that are not adding value. It is about focus, because once the crappy is gone all focus is productive, valuable and rewarding. Another aspect of the Apple philosophy is their ability to operate in "start up" mode much of the time. When Apple started working on the Macintosh in the early 80's it was already a hugely successful company. The Mac division was set up, by Jobs, as a start up, with a start up mentality. They called themselves "The Pirates of Silicon Valley" and set out to rock the industry they had started less than a decade before. Apple still operates in start up mode with small teams of brilliant people operating with high levels of autonomy and the flexibility to shift people between projects depending on where they are needed. According to Posterous founder and ex Apple engineer Sachin Agarwal on his blog the Apple Remote iPhone app was created by a single person. Steve Jobs summed up his philosophy in his inspirational speech at Stamford University: "You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do." If you are still looking for what you love or cannot always tell what is "crappy" right away either in your work or home life - give me a call. One to one personal coaching summer offer: As usual I have a summer three for the price of two coaching offer for sessions completed before the end of August. In these sessions we will articulate your personal Purpose, Vision, Mission, Values and Strategy and get started on making it happen. Email me to book your sessions. Join us on our Authentic Business Radio show every Thursday at 5pm UK, 6pm Euro or 12.00 EST. Feel free to forward this to friends, post to your networks and to republish on your website. Please include the link. You can subscribe for free at www.neilcrofts.com Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter With love nx Neil Crofts Neil Crofts authentic business +34 646391384 neil@neilcrofts.com www.neilcrofts.com Skype - neilcrofts

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Inspiring Your Authentic Week

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Reset to zero Posted: 02 Aug 2010 12:44 AM PDT Last night we watched a film, The Lives of Others. Set in East Germany in 1984 it focusses on the inhumanity of the dictatorship and the discovery of his own humanity by one of it's operatives. We watched the film with three others who had all been born in 1988. The year before the Berlin wall came down and just before the close of the film. All three are very well educated, none had heard of the GDR (DDR), Glasnost or the Stasi. George Santayana warned us that, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' We are in a time of tumultuous change, thinly disguised as normality under control. Politically, economically, environmentally and spiritually the norms that we grew up with are being challenged, and this means we have a choice. In Greece there are already some who are choosing violence as a way of protecting their society or community from the forces of change. Self pity breeds violence. We have been down that road before, we know where it goes. We need to remember the lessons of our history, we need to take this opportunity to move on from it. We need to learn a different way of being that will create a better future for us all. We need a vision around which we can align, towards which we can collaborate and by which we can evaluate our efforts. The summer break is a time for evaluation and reflection, a time for reading and planning. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could all come back from this summer break focussed on creating a peaceful, sustainable and loving society? Perhaps that could be our vision. Perhaps we can reset our society, heal the wounds and redesign the structures, if we start by redesigning ourselves. One to one personal coaching summer offer: As usual I have a summer three for the price of two coaching offer for sessions completed before the end of August. In these sessions we will articulate your personal Purpose, Vision, Mission, Values and Strategy and get started on making it happen. Email me to book your sessions. Authentic Leadership, find out what leadership is really all about through one to one coaching or a workshop for your team. I have the opportunity to run an open Authentic Leadership workshop in Mallorca in October, if you are interested please help me decide whether to run it by letting me know. More on Authentic Leadership at http://www.authenticleadership.me Authentic Transformation is the process we use to help businesses benefit from their authenticity through a mixture of coaching and workshops. If you would like your organisation to be more successful by being more authentic take a look at http://www.authentictransformation.com Feel free to forward this to friends, post to your networks and to republish on your website. Please include the link. You can subscribe for free at www.neilcrofts.com Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter With love nx Neil Crofts Neil Crofts authentic business +34 646391384 neil@neilcrofts.com www.neilcrofts.com Skype - neilcrofts

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