Nicholas Bate

Create The Thing

you want to exist in the world.

Build A Better Business: Exec Summary: 1-18

1. Do the maintenance: clear the gutters of leaves.
2. Test the interactions with the business: be a secret shopper.
3. Dig deeper:don't make decisions solely on the summary PPT.
4. Stay special: don't allow the chase for business to weaken the story that gets you the best business.
5. Less, less, less. Vital few not trivial many
6. Forget mission, vision, values, goals etc for a while.What's your story?
7. Attend to the big 5: competition, innovation, people, systems, customer service.
8. Find 1% improvements. And multiply them together.
9. Fewer slide-decks, more innovation.
10. Close the gap between marketing story and real story.
11. What's lurking in your business?
12. More War Zone, Less Country Club.
13. Don't just talk to customers, listen to customers. Don't just provide for customers, innovate for customers. Don't just please customers, amaze costomers.
14. Get rid of the fuzzy thinking and ask who?, why?, where?, when?, what? and how? Stop talking in PowerPoint
15. Ask those at the front line.
16. Really, really thinking about profit generation tends to solve the revenue problem.
17. The business model must work in tough times. It must work in uncertain times. It must work in times of stiff competition. It cannot only work in easy times.
18. Most 'motivators' of people don't.

Er, Waiting For What? 7

1. A better mood. Mood improves with goal focused activity.
2. More energy. Energy grows with progress.
3. Tomorrow. Never comes. Never has, never will.
4. The cool idea. Ideas will flow once you start. Build momentum and you'll get one or two cool ideas.
5. Your friend. They are not a true friend if they are keeping you waiting.
6. A view over the ocean. Absolutely not. That's the reward not the incentive. Now it would simply distract.
7. Permission. Haha: last thing you need.

It's Not About The Start of Summer Nor Barbecuing Weather

It's US Memorial Day Weekend. This and more with Eclecticity.

The 5am Dilemma

with Kurt Holden.

Music

with Jet Boy and Dog Skip.

How To Do Your Best Work 7

1. Have a daily routine.
2. Work hard every day to get really good at your chosen things.
3. Walk daily.
4. Look up daily and remind yourself: life's good.
5. Be abundant in you willingness to help others. Every day.
6. Read daily for wisdom.
7. Write to find your best thinking and ultimately your best work. Every day.

Marvellous Wade 101

Routine can be the spice of life. Workplace turf wars resemble a squabble over the best seat on a bus. If you want the important stories, don't look on the front page of the newspaper. The president's popularity would increase if he started chain-smoking. We might learn which we value the most if we had to pay for contact with - or isolation from - others. It must be terribly demoralizing to teach foreign languages in an American high school. Most college classes could be shortened with no loss of substance. Continued with Michael Wade, the blogger who got so many of us started.

Love Cameras?

Read this and be sure to check out the comments.

100 Word Story

It was a long weekend ahead: no more excuses for not starting her novel. It would be set in a quiet sea-side town in Cornwall. It would hark back to the days when men were men, women were women and there was still a daily talk of pirates. Her heroine would seem plain and unadventurous but by the end of the novel would be revealed as beautiful and full of wisdom. Wrongs would be righted. And villains clearly brought to justice. It struck her as she sipped her Earl Grey that she had just drafted her college Personal Vision Statement.