This week we are going to start the last month of the year. Yes yes, yes. December is upon us. Before we get extremely busy with celebrations I would like to encourage you to take a little challenge of planning your next year. It is a time for a small reflection.

Making plans and setting goals is one of most important and often underestimated strategies for success.
Don’t choose too many as it may be too difficult. You need just a small number to allow you to focus on key targets. Please take a moment and think what is REALLY important to you, what are you going to fully commit to. This should help you to decide what in fact is important and what appears to be.

You may want to follow this process:

1. First brainstorm and write a number of goals that you can think of in a period of 5 minutes. You may use post it notes for it or just write a list on paper or if you prefer in a file.
2. You need to prioritise them as “critical (C)”, “important (I)” and “nice to have (N)”.
3. Review all of your goals and without evaluation mark each of them as “C” or “I” or “N”.
4. Drop those that have “N” next to them. “Nice to have” goals should not be on your priority list for next year. By spending time on them you may dilute your energy that should be dedicated to higher importance goals.
5. Look first at those that have “C” next to them. They are your critical goals, review them. Are they really critical? What makes them critical? What do you need to achieve them (information, access to resources etc)? What is the consequence of not achieving them?

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This is really an interesting article that anyone who is serious about success of their business. This article is absolutely a must read for anyone who wants to engage with international clients, business partners, suppliers etc.

It’s a little long but your time will be very well spent. Paula Klee Parish has done an absolutely fantastic job to develop a short yet very educational test for us all to use.
What’s the difference between the rising star and the counterpart who can’t seem to get out of their own way? Behavior is a critical part of mastering that all important first impression, along with dress, personal hygiene and a positive regard for others. And it goes well beyond that first impression…

Do you have the business savvy to pass the test?

This is a touchy one, so let’s start here…

1. Is the following a proper introduction?
   “I would like you to meet my boss, Mr. Strong. Mr. Strong, this is Ms. Young, our new client?”
   Answer: This is incorrect. The client is the person of most importance. They should be “introduced” first.
2. When shaking hands, should a man wait for a woman to extend her hand first or should he extend his hand without waiting?
   Answer: The shaking of hands has become gender neutral. Either can extend their hand.

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So many of us from time to time reflect on how little time we have. Our life seems to consist of running from meeting to meeting, taking care of urgent issues, answering a never ending flood of emails, answering phone calls and sms’s, attending teleconferences, reading truckloads of documents…

I am supremely confident that many of you know exactly what I am talking about. Have you ever wondered why you sometimes feel overwhelmed and question your efficiency? Well, well, well, it’s about time that we started talking about the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. We all know that I hear you say. Just a second, do we really? If we did would we have so many issues with lack of time?

Here are few tips on how to address it:

• To Do, or not To Do? All jokes aside, writing a “To Do” list is a simple yet powerful tool. It allows you to see what needs to be done, prioritise tasks and see if you are making progress.
• Not everything that you do can be equally urgent, so prioritise. Develop your people by allowing them to step up and take some of your responsibility. It will allow them to get a better understanding of the business. They may also come up with good ideas on how to make things better.  I know that this is very difficult but you have to. You know you can.

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Today I read a very interesting whitepaper. Why is it interesting you may want to ask? We all know how important collaboration is. In many cases approach to communication and collaboration is what makes enterprises great and perhaps in some examples not so great.  Akamai released whitepaper “Strategies for Successful Enterprise Collaboration: Balancing people, process and technology” By David Coleman. He suggests that in current ever changing workplace alignment of people, process and technology can be a challenge. This article predicts that “over the last decade the trend towards external collaboration with the value chain has been increasing and soon collaboration outside the firewall will exceed collaboration with colleagues in the enterprise”. Users will also get more involved and there will be increase of user generated content. David claims that collaboration will be “killer application” of this decade.

He shows us the evolution of collaboration technology. It started in 1900s with usage of phone, then in 1980s fax was introduced, 1990s is era of email, from 1995 – 2000 we started to get used to concept of virtual team space which was followed by web based collaboration tools (2000 – 2005) and social networks took off in 2005. What will be next we don’t know, one things is certain though. With introduction and evolution of technology our concept of collaboration is also evolving. He suggests that in 2005 we started to connect with other people on line.

Some of the benefits of Collaboration 2.0 will include:

• Connect Global Teams
• Reduce Travel Costs
• Multimedia
• Local Context
• Transparency
• Expertise Discovery and Serendipity
• Extended Enterprise Access
• Reduced Process Cycle Time
• Security
• Governance, Accountability and Initiative Coordination

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Yesterday’s post “Don’t forget the users” discussed the importance of making sure that users are the main concern during design end implementation stage. Today’s post  is a short video that introduces C Level Executives to 6 Factors For Highly Unsuccessful Products

1. The upgrade paradox
2. Simplicity sells
3. Pressure to ship
4. Marketing/Engineering breakdown
5. Too many cooks
6. PR and Marketing

Smart Leaders please read above six steps, invest a few minutes and see if your products and services follow the steps above. If they do,  you will know that you need to take action.