The Hindu Business Line : Don't wait to set your goals

CHOOSE your goals, stay motivated, and attract success. How easy to say all that! But that's what Wendy Buchingham advises in Ready Set Goal! if you want to make your dreams come true, and if you want to take control of your life. A sampler:

Take a sheet of paper and rule it down the middle. Head the sheet with one area of your life, say your career. On the left side, list everything that is working for you in your position just now. On the right side, list everything that is not working. A way of identifying what is not working is to ask yourself: "What am I putting up with?" or "What would I like to be different?"

For every time you think you have failed to achieve a goal there is most likely an achieved yet unacknowledged goal you have overlooked. Going past an achieved goal without due acknowledgement and celebration can be the beginning of a downhill run. Your spirit needs the completion of acknowledgement.

Make sure your goals honour and reflect your values. Your values are what is really important to you and define who you are: the things you are naturally drawn towards to stimulate and fulfil you; the direction you want to go in without anybody telling you. Taking the path to goals that are not in tune with your values will bring you no real joy and fulfilment, and in all probability won't work.

It's amazing how the simple act of getting out of your office or business for half an hour can fuel your inspiration and motivation. Go for a walk for half an hour; sit in the park; have a coffee. A home office, in particular, can become quite claustrophobic. Adopt a favourite coffee shop as your `other office'. Use it as somewhere to go to plan or consolidate your ideas away from your desk.

What (or even who) irritates you, frustrates your efforts. Make lists of these barriers and distractions in the various areas of your life: professional, business and personal. Now set about eliminating them. Some may be big things that need big solutions that are almost goals in themselves, such as needing to move house, change jobs, end a relationship or replace a partner, supplier or employee. Others may be small and niggling but nevertheless irritating distractions that, when removed, will free up an amazing amount of energy.

Plug in this book in your reading goals.

Surviving at the top

IT IS tough to be a CEO these days, because there is savage press coverage, boards could get warring, and public is distrustful. All this puts more pressure on the man at the helm and Jack Trout offers a top management survival guide in A Genie's Wisdom to teach things such as: how branding works, how to design a product strategy, how to get pricing right, how to choose and use logos and how to avoid the most common marketing mistakes. Interestingly, the book is "dedicated to those who have had it with the academics, consultants, and con-men (women) who want to make marketing far more complex than it has to be". Read on:

Rank product opportunities. This is where the numbers come in as you determine which products offer the most profit potential if the job gets done properly. Can this product or service command a price premium? Is it a new-generation idea that can help you establish leadership? Is it a commodity business with established competition?

Opportunities are hard to spot because they do not look like opportunities. They look simple and obvious — a lighter beer, a safer car, a store that sells only toys, a pizza with better ingredients.

When a company has offices full of marketing people, you've got to expect endless tinkering with a brand. It's how they keep from getting bored. Unfortunately, what people inside the company may perceive as `improvements' only cause confusion inside the mind of the prospect.

In the long run, every market becomes a two-horse race. In batteries, it's Eveready and Duracell. In photographic film, it's Kodak and Fuji. In mouthwash, it's Listerine and Scope. In hamburgers, it's McDonald's and Burger King. In sneakers, it's Nike and Reebok. In toothpaste, it's Colgate and Crest.

Researchers may promise to reveal attitudes, but attitudes are not a realistic predictor of behaviour. People often talk one way but act another. When you ask people why they made a particular purchase, the responses they give are often not very accurate or useful. This is why what they call focus groups are a waste of time and money.

Arrogance is the first sin. It works like this. Success often leads to arrogance and arrogance leads to failure. Objectivity is what's needed.

Lot of wise words.

(Books courtesy: EastWest Books (Madras) Pvt Ltd. ewb@vsnl.com)

Genius inside

WHAT is creativity? Why do some people seem to have so much of it? What's their secret? Can their methods be learned? Michael Michalko seeks to answer all these questions in his book Cracking Creativity, providing all `the secrets of creative genius'. A few snatches:

When Einstein thought about a problem, he always found it necessary to formulate his subject in as many different ways as possible. He was once asked what he would do if he was told that a huge comet would hit and totally destroy the earth in one hour. Einstein said he would spend 55 minutes figuring out how to formulate the question and 5 minutes solving it.

Pure thinking is a dynamic, shifting, active thing. It is condensed and telegrammatic, and only when it is expanded in form and made communicable to others does it lose its active, volatile, and creative character. A way to capture your thought before it loses its active nature is to mind map it.

Thomas Edison guaranteed productivity by giving himself and his assistants idea quotas. His own personal quota was one minor invention every ten days and a major invention every six months.

Similarly, if you force yourself to come up with 40 ideas, for instance, you put your internal critic on hold and write everything down, including the obvious and weak.

Many breakthroughs are based on combining information from different domains that are usually not thought of as related. One way to combine talent is to elicit advice and information about your subject from people who work in different domains. Almost all scientists cross and re-cross the boundaries of physics, chemistry, and biology.

There is a clear relationship between wishful thinking and creativity. You are more likely to have a creative idea when you are wishing than when your thinking is extremely intellectual. Wishes help us deliberately oversimplify.

The mind makes ruts very quickly, and even more so when it stalls and spins its wheels.

Making your problem more abstract may suddenly create a space between thoughts sunk in the details of some perception. Instead of getting mired down classifying the mite or fungus, Darwin asked the grand question, "What is life?"

A book that should be read by the creative ones to find out how to go beyond what Michalko says.

(Books courtesy: Landmark, Chennai. www.landmarkonthenet.com)

Tailpiece

"I usually allow judges' cars to overtake mine."

"Because you revere them?"

"Not exactly. I just want to let my car tread the path of law, even if I don't."

hindubusinessline@hotmail.com

D. Murali

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Don't wait to set your goals