Fisher Strategy

What makes you want to do something? What drives you to achieve your goals?  The concept of motivation, what drives people to act and make changes has fascinated me for years.

According to Wikipedia, Motivation is defined as “the activation or energization of goal-oriented behavior. Motivation is said to be intrinsic or extrinsic.”  Which means that the drive can be generated from within, or it can come from external stimuli, depending on the personality type and/or the  individual situation.

Setting and achieving goals is directly related to your level of motivation. First, you have to be motivated to go through the goal setting process. Second, you have to be (and remain) motivated to stick with the process and see it through.  An old friend of mine used to call this the “Effort to Pleasure Ratio.” If the ratio is too high, you are probably less than likely to take any initiative in that direction.  But when the ratio is very low, the effort is likely a no-brainer, and you take it on without much consideration.

Do yourself a favor: honestly assess what it is that you are “in the game” for. Take the time to honestly articulate your ultimate carrot – is it money? recognition? helping others? – and you will drastically reduce the amount of time and effort that will be required to achieve genuine satisfaction and greatness.

I’d love to be involved with your success.  I am genuinely motivated by helping others achieve their goals.  If you are interested, and would like to discuss, please contact me to set up a no-obligation FREE conversation about how you can achieve your highest goals.  Leave a comment and we’ll go from there.

Umair Haque does it again. He brings another much needed, fresh perspective to business strategy that disrupts and challenges 30 years of entrenched conventional wisdom and status quo.

In his latest posting, Haque proposes a new way for companies to define the essential value that they deliver to the world: the single word value proposition – or, in his words, the “Dumb Waiter Pitch.” Read the whole article here.

The Dumb Waiter Pitch, as opposed to the “played & stale” notion of the Elevator Pitch, forces business leaders (of any size business) to do the difficult work of truly identifying and articulating – in a single word – the essence of their their business, the briefest summary of the essential value the company delivers to the world. In his words:

“So you’ve got an elevator pitch — a short, pithy description of why your business is special, exciting, and unique. Yawn. Today, elevator pitches are the economic equivalent of speeches at a beauty pageant: predictable, often vapid, always bland.

Here’s a suggestion. Try a Dumbwaiter Pitch instead. It’s an exercise I often do with startups, giant corporations, social entrepreneurs, and investors. Its goal? To strip an organization right down to its bones, and see how compelling it really is.” Read more.

What is the one-word description of your business? Can you summarize what you do and what you offer the world in one word?  Most companies, Haque argues, do not have even a decent Dumb Waiter Pitch.  They either simply don’t know how to describe their value-add without lots of tricky word combinations, or – and this is sadly more common – they don’t care for what their value-add sounds like in a single word. Because they know that neither would the market.

This is a good exercise to go through – if you are brave enough to embrace what you find out. And fix what needs fixing.