A variation of Aristoltle’s saying goes like this “consider your skill set, your passions and the needs of the world – where they intersect, lies your calling”.

It’s pretty obvious really! Find something you’re (A) good at (B) interested in and which would (C)  benefit mankind, and then go an do it. It’s often said that the difference between start ups in the US and the UK is that the ones in the US look first for a problem that needs solving, and then they go and solve it. Whereas (rumour has it) the ones in the UK come up with some whizzy idea and then hope to foist it on the market. Some UK start ups succeed with that model. Many US start ups succeed using theirs!

And then there’s Gladstone. He was the British Prime Minister (on four separate occasions) from 1868 to 1894.  I’m not sure that these are his actual words, but they are attributed to his government during the Victorian era.

“There are two ways to make money. The first way is to move things, from their position relative to the centre of the earth, to a new position, relative to the centre of the earth. That’s incredibly hard work and it doesn’t pay very well. The second way is to tell other people to do the first way. That’s incredibly easy and it’s also highly rewarding!”

So there you have it! The secrets of success according to Aristotle and Gladstone!

However, that could mean that we should all choose to live in apartments on top of shopping malls and have the office next door. So, I want to take Putnam’s idea one step further and propose the 5 pointed star – with the inclusion of a measure of distance.

And the distances involved are there, in order to promote walking, and thereby to promote health. At the moment my office is 5 miles from my home, and I walk that journey on 2 or 3 days a week.  I’ve included the place were my offspring go to school, and  my “club”. That could be your gym, your pub, or your weekly outing to wherever you socialise.

And these two extra elements are important – healthy exercise and social interaction. I don’t want to live on top of Blue Water and I don’t want to commute long distances. The diagram above illustrates my perfect arrangement for these five places.

What would be the perfect arrangement for you? And what’s your next step in achieving that?

Right now (that’s December 2011) the European Union is mired in deep discussion about how to rectify the decline of the Euro, unstable economies in PIIGS countries (and beyond) and the prospect of an even deeper recession. The focus of the discussion, if we are to believe the media (and I do) is the implementation of greater austerity measures and more financial restrictions.

Nobody, it appears, had said anything about growth or about boosting output. So today, I want you to think about this:

• Are you s sovereign nation?
• Are you running a business?
• Are you an ordinary household?

It doesn’t matter which one of those three you are, as this plan holds good for all of you. And it’s an easy philosophy to grasp. Export more and import less.

Do that at a national level, at a business level, and at household level, and what would that do for you own welfare? Output a bit more and consume a bit less! Or as Benjamin Franklin put it “no nation was ever ruined by trade”.

The only corollary I would add is that you need to offer something that people want to buy. Europe seems to have a problem becuase the market for Financial Derivatives is small and volatile. What are we hot wired for? Germany does VW and BMW. Japan does Honda and Toyota. The UK does Reliant and Morgan!

It works in service industries too. Ever heard of Singapore Airlines, or Emirates? Even small nations can punch above their weight. You can too. You simply need a compelling proposition that people will go for.

The concept is easy. Maybe the implementation is harder? That’s what my web sites are all about. Success! Take a look at this report to start with . . .

The universal problem solving technique!

. . . and then, actually try and implement something!

The first speaker in a long list was Don Norman, who at one time was one of the leading thinkers at Apple. He had a good deal to say, and he invoked an extraordinary eruption of tweeting from the floor of the auditorium. In essence, his message was that product design needs to move beyond “user experience”  and to begin to work on engendering “positive memories”. Amongst his many anecdotes, he told his audience that you can endure the bad experience of the long queues at Disneyland, yet still come away with treasured memories, and probably a photo or two to keep reminding you of “how good” it was!

Quite why a number of Twitter users took exception to his content and to his delivery baffles me.

Kelly Goto reminded us of the ubiquity of ritual behaviour . . .

• When you turn on your computer, what’s the first app that you use (and why)?
• When you get into the driving seat of your car, what’s the first thing that you do (and why)?

. . . and if your business could understand your customers’ ritual behaviours, how could you use that knowledge to help you to deliver a better product or an improved service? And in turn, how could you use that understanding to help give your business a boost?

For me the surprising story of the day, and the most profound story of the day, came from Frank Chimero who discussed the importance of getting yourself organised. And to illustrate this, he showed us a David Attenborough clip about the Bower Bird. Unlike many business owners I have met, the Bower Bird is an expert at:

• finding things,
• collecting things, and
• arranging things.

The BBC will not permit the Attenborough clip on YouTube to be embedded, but you can see it here . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1zmfTr2d4c

Arranging things! That’s the key! We can all find things! We can all find data, or customers, or cash. We can all collect data, or customers, or cash. But can we all arrange data, or customers, or cash in a purposeful way? That last element “arrange” is why your database works, or doesn’t. It’s why your credit control works, or doesn’t. It’s why your cashflow works, or doesn’t!

It’s also why some of the malcontents in the audience felt compelled to fling barbed tweets at the speakers and at the organisers. They simply have not yet learnt what the Bower Bird has learnt, and that is to arrange things properly. To arrange their thought patterns appropriately, and to follow good advice!

As a delegate, what are we expecting from a conference? To learn things. And I learnt many things. I learnt things that will make hundreds (or possibly thousands) of pounds worth of difference to my business. And if I’m willing to arrange my thoughts differently, and to adapt processes and adjust systems to make them fit in with the good advice I’ve received, then my business and my customers will benefit.

• What are the last words of a dying business?
• “That would never work here!”

And quite possibly that explains why the complainants were sitting in the audience, and the most successful business people were standing on the stage.

More than 50% of small businesses fail to reach their 3rd anniversary, because by that time they have gone out of business.  And the biggest reason that businesses fail is a lack of cash. In order to give yourself a sporting chance, your new business has to focus on bringing in cash. If you can’t do that in the early days, then you really don’t have much of a business.

Once the theory starts working in practice, you then need to refine your systems. Document it, delegate it and duplicate it. That is the recipe for success. You’re never going to make a mega profit out of a micro business and so you need to start thinking about scalability. How could you take your business and do it on an industrial scale? Like Dell, or Starbucks, or iTunes?

I’m not suggesting that you actually launch it at the “industrial” level, but simply that you start thinking about building a team around you who help you make more money more quickly.

I recommend Michael Gerber’s book “The E-Myth” to help you do that. The sub-title says it all “What is wrong with business, and what to do about it”!

So the story goes, that in the days when businesses in Finland were growing at an exponential rate, some of the less successful ones wanted to emulate their more successful cousins, and so the industry that is business coaching really began to take off. One enterprising coach, wishing to stand out from the growing crowd that was the burgeoning business coach fraternity, decided that his unique selling point was to be “brevity” rather than “depth”.

He offered “The 6 second coaching session” at a price of FIM10,000 and he gained a lot of customers.

He also added that “the bright ones amongst you will need just 6 seconds in order to make full use of the information, and it might take a couple of hours to help you if you’re inclined to question the advice”.

In effect, that meant that he would earn his fee, either within the space of 6 seconds, or within 2 hours. Either way, he was onto a good business model and he made a tidy sum of money. Naturally, there were only so many cases that he could take on, until word got out about the content of the infamous “6 seconds”. Quite what he said in the full 2 hour sessions I cannot tell you, but having worked as a business coach myself, I have a pretty good idea what sort of material he covered.

As for the 6 seconds, the best translation I can provide you with is “plan the work, and work the plan; and decide what you’re going to do together and, do what you decide to do together“.

Neither of those two bits of advice are really secret. And as I say from time to time, the “secrets of success” are no secret either. Everything is out there in the public domain. The key is to actually take the advice and do it, as the candidates of the 6 second sessions evidently understood!

And it has given rise to a range of tech meet up groups from the Anglophone ApéroEntrepreneurs to a new group who style themselves “The Silcon Roundabout MeetUp Group“. And they had their first meeting today, and I was there.

What sort of people are they?

No, they do not resemble the Simpsons!

Bu I did learn an interesting story about employing people. If you’re starting up a new business anywhere (and not just in the field of hi-tech, or near a silicon roundabout) it’s a story you may want to think about as you take on staff.

There are four types of employee who resemble the four stages of the Simpsons. Note that we are talking here about maturity in terms of the “attitude to work” and not in relationship to biological age.

The Maggie – This employee is useless. After a period of nurturing “the infant” never masters the basics and is a perpetual waste of time.

The Bart – By and large, this employee can do the job, but as “a juvenile” he is prone to questioning authority and has wayward ideas about what constitutes proper behaviour and what constitutes proper productivity.

The Homer – Or “the mature” employee who has come to recognise that there is merit in getting on with the job, keeping quiet, not rocking the boat much, and getting a reasonable pay packet for a reasonable day’s work.

The Grandpa – habitually the Grandpa has been through the mature stage and is (or was) valued. When he figures that out, as “a geriatric” he gradully reduces his commitment to work, takes the same money (or more money) for less output, and is sitting there, keeping quiet, waiting for retirement.

Look around you. Can you see any of these four characters in your work place?

The idea that you need clever, stupid people (like Homer Simpson) may not necessarily lead to a robust HR policy, but it gets a mention on Secrets of Success simply because this “new” angle deserves some thought. How often have you been told that you need to hire bright, young people with leadership qualities?

If that’s all you ever do, then who are they going to lead?

Think about it for a minute . . .what are you naturally good at? What can you do that seems to be completely effortless from your point of view, yet for others it seems to be almost impossible. In fact, you’re so good at this “thing” that you find it hard to imagine that anybody could ever find this “thing” hard!

For me, it’s getting up early in the morning, or it’s reading maps. These two things seem to be in my genes, it’s what I’m “hot wired” to do. Have you identified one of yours yet? Well don’t stop at one, think about a few more, there must be a handful of things that are easy for you.

Now, the second part of this . . . what do you do for a living?

If your work and your ” hot wirediness” are one and the same sort of thing, then you know where this blogpost is going! What exams did you take at school? Did you choose the subjects you were good at, or did you choose the subjects that you wanted to do? There’s a difference. I sing and I play guitar, and my school forced me to do music at “O” level. However, I had intended to do the three sciences because that’s what I’m good at. It wasn’t long before I baulked and then forced a change upon the school. I play by ear and I am hopeless at reading music. However, I did pass a lot of  “O” levels including all three sciences.

Are you doing something that’s not right for you? If you had a magic wand, what would you do instead? As a fourteen year old school kid, my school had a lot of trouble persuading me to drop Biology in favour of doing Music. Six weeks into the course, I had even more trouble persuading the school to let me revert to my original options. Evidently, I had the determination and the willpower to stand up for what I was good at.

Here’s the point – plan the work – and work the plan! I shouldn’t have let the school bully me and I should have just stuck to my original plan. And these days I use that concept on a daily basis. I have things to do and I do not need other people telling me how I should change my plans – at least, not in order to suit their immediate whims and desires. So my day goes a bit like this:

I’m a morning person. I get up early and I plan my day. And, unless the building is on fire, I tend not to deviate form that plan. People will phone me and email me with “stuff” that needs to be done. As one of my friends at Mega Global Thingy Corp says:

The trouble with clients is that they phone up today, expecting something
to be done yesterday, when in fact “tomorrow” would be just as good.

Lock in your day. And when somebody calls with a problem, all you have to say is “this is a very important issue – I have lots of important things on my agenda for today – I won’t be able to look at this until 9am tomorrow morning – then I can work out the best thing to do – would that be OK?”.

Stick to your agenda. Look at this new “important issue”  tomorrow morning at 9am . And if it is important, then add it to the plan for that day. And once you have a plan, lock in your day and don’t let others make you deviate. Do this every day. You’ll get a lot more work done, and you’ll get a lot nearer to what you call “success”.

It’s a habit of mine to do daily plans, and because I am “hot wired” for mornings, it works well for me. Now, I know that not everybody is a morning person, and I should not assume that because it’s easy for me that it should also be easy for you. So this is the idea – take the core of this concept and adjust it to suit you – to fit in with your biological clock, and to fit in with your working day, and to fit in with your demeanour when handling customers.

And once you have adapted the principle to suit your circumstances, stick to the plan. Make it a habit. Do it all the time.

Aristotle said “excellence is not a singular act, but a habit. You are what you repeatedly do.”

If you could adopt the “lock in your day” habit and do that every day, would that make you more successful? And if you cannot, what exactly is stopping you? Talk to me – on this blog – on Twitter – or on Cofacio the help engine. I want to help!

* Open-source
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And in order to go paperless, they needed bullet proof IT systems. How good are your systems? What would happen if your laptop was stolen, or your desktop PC died, or your office caught fire? How long could you stay in business? Ninety per cent of businesses that suffer a fire, go out of business within one year of that fateful day. That’s a sobering thought isn’t it?

So how are you going to minimise the risk of a total failure of your IT systems? Put everything in the cloud?

If you’re not sure what the cloud is, ask a 10 year old!

So, what’s the risk when using the cloud? Proactive looked at that, and in the beginning they were highly enthusiastic about the cloud. As an early adopter of the new technology, they started with a wiki on Zoho and then realised the constraints! One day, Zoho’s servers suddenly went down for several hours and then Proactive lost access to some critical systems. In effect, they endured one day of doing very little work. Yes, there was a back up, and yes it was only 24 hours old, but the Zoho wiki is a unique solution which works only on a Zoho platform.

Even though the back up had been done the previous day, there was no way that the back up could be run locally (within the four walls of the building) and so it was only any good if you could actually restore it to the established Zoho platform. When the Zoho servers did come back online the original wiki was intact, so no restoration was necessary and it was not the disaster that it might have been. Contrast that with what Microsoft and T Mobile did to their Sidekick customers. They lost everything!

Don’t rely on other people’s IT infrastructure. Build your own, and have back up systems which you can use locally. Proactive did that. They now have their own private little bit of the cloud and they have internal systems to replicate it. You don’t have to go totally paperless to benefit from reading The Paperless Expert and everything you’ll ever want to know about multiple back ups is set out in Chapter 3 of the book. Have back ups on site and have one back up off site but under your control.

Then if the worst happens, you’ll still be in business!

Imagine for a moment, that you are an Olympic rower in one of those boats that they call a single sculler. Olympic rowers will tell you that you get to a certain level of activity where you and your boat are working together and you’re going pretty damn fast! Once you get to that level, the amount of effort required to keep you there is not actually that difficult. It’s a lot easier maintaining that speed, than it was in trying to get there in the first place.

In fact, you feel quite relaxed and at one with your boat, and somewhere deep inside, you feel that you can actually do more! So you try – and you push yourself a little bit harder – and then what happens is that every little additional effort and every heightened movement actually has a detrimental effect. And, although you are trying harder and you want to go faster, you are in fact creating more friction and slowing the boat down!

The trick is to know when you have reached that state, which sportsmen call “Flow” or “being in the zone”. And the magical thing is that it is possible to achieve “Flow” in your business. Imagine that! Making money without really having to work very hard! It takes a bit of effort to get started and then it’s easy to work smarter, not harder.

Start thinking about the days when you’re work is like that, and the days when it isn’t. What makes the difference? What are the practical steps that you can take to start bringing about a permanent improvement? Write them down. And, don’t just stop at two or three! I’m expecting you to list twenty or thirty things that you can do to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.