Kevin W. McCarthy

The Professor of On-Purpose

Blog

Do You Have a Sense of Purpose?

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Look for it! You’ll hear it. Perhaps you’re even one who says it. “I did (such and such) and I had a real sense of purpose.” A “sense” is an inkling, a tiny bit, a nibble, a whiff, a morsel.

Why are you settling for so little? A sense of purpose is merely fumes on the combustible fuel found in truly knowing your purpose.

Invest 30 minutes to watch The POWER of Your 2-Word Purpose Statement. Learn what you’re missing and what you have to gain by knowing your 2-word purpose statement and learning to live on-purpose. Tip: When watching, click the “Listen” button. Next, place your cursor on the video controls and drag to minute 10 to the actual start of the webcast.

How Do I Focus My Small Business?

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As you stare at the walls of your office, your mind swirls with a hundred different items on your mental To Do List. You haven’t got a clue what to do next because everything seems important. By default you open up your email so at least you’re keeping up with something. A couple of hours pass at the keyboard and your list is only longer and you’re further behind than when you began. A sinking feeling leaves you even more overwhelmed and disappointed with yourself. Ugh! How do I go about organizing the business? How do I get more focused and productive? I’ll deal with it … tomorrow.

Admit it, you know this scenario all too well. And it bugs you because it is sabotaging your business, your dreams, and your finances. With so much on the line, you wonder, How can I be so stuck? 

Over the decades of working with business owners, this shallow pattern of performance is most often associated with an ill-defined or out of focus business. While brilliant ideas abound in your brain, there’s no blueprint to build the business. Would you hire a home builder to construct your house who didn’t have blueprints? Yet, you’ll build your business without the most basic of plans.

There’s a reason most SOHO (small office, home office) business owners don’t write their plans. It is called flexibility and responsiveness to opportunity. Unfortunately, keeping your options open typically results in a cycle of learning, but not one of earning. The secret to building your business is to create an economically efficient engine of profit. Once the engine is up and running, you can afford to invest in your other ideas. Depth, not breadth, is essential. This takes discipline and commitment … to a well designed, thoughtful, written plan.

Here are three On-Purpose® tools to help you gain focus and sustain it:

  1. Use The Discovery Guide to clarify which of your many options is the best. This “Want List and Tournament” tool is a free download and can be used for many situations, such as clarifying which opportunity makes the most sense for you and why.
  2. The Service Model is a simple tool to map out why and how to design and build your business on one page starting with purpose. 
  3. My On-Purpose Folder is a self or small group guided process to develop your personal leadership capacity. When you’re in mental disarray, your business will reflect it too.

You may think you have a plan, but you may not. Candidly ask yourself, Just how isFocus my plan working? If you’re not obtaining adequate results, speed to market, or profits, then please consider a small business advisory package. Let us help you bring order, focus, clarity, and direction to your business enterprise by guiding and documenting your business plan and model. Organizing the business is a couple of clicks and a few hours away.

Ambition. At What Price?

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Click on text for more information about the On-Purpose Small Business Package

The desire to make a positive difference is the sweet, soulful heart of ambition. In contrast is blind ambition that tramples all in its path to accomplish an end, perhaps even a noble end at that, which is fraught with unhealthy costs. Much of this rests on your view of people.  

Which will mark your life, career, and legacy?

Herein lies the rub for many a business person. To what lengths are you willing to go to realize your ambitions?

Results, especially in the form of company sales and profits, are outward and tangible measures of success. Measurable signs, however, tell just a portion of the story. If you want to know the full story, ask the people along the way who helped to produce the results.

Here’s a painful example. For 12 months spanning 2008 to 2009, I worked nearly full time with a CEO client to author a book that codified his corporate culture, leadership development moves, and business strategy for internal use. Intending for the company to go public via IPO, the book also targeted Wall Street analysts and investors so they could readily grasp what truly made this company great.

The IPO market at that time dried up with the challenges in the economy. Instead, the company was purchased by a national competitor for $130 million. By the CEO’s own admission, the book helped them get more than $15 million in greater value for shareholders over the IPO price, plus they kept their name, and the CEO was offered the position of President over the merged companies.

“Wow!” you may be thinking, “That CEO had to be a happy man.” You would think so. Eight months after delivery of the manuscript, a client satisfaction clause I wrote into the contract was used to deny issuing me an “earned” six-figure stock bonus despite personal assurances from the CEO to the contrary. My concern for my client’s satisfaction and best interests was used against me. Ouch! That hurts on so many levels.

Just because one can take advantage of another person, does that mean one should? Best-selling books on the art of war and being a prince would say go for it. But I say there’s nothing noble in selfishness and greed. True nobility is knowing one has the upper hand and using it to raise up the other person instead of jamming them down further.

The deeper value is seeing people as being above things. Translation: relationships are greater than transactions. Results with responsibilities and citizenship can coexist and produce true greatness.

For a couple of decades I’ve worked with my CEO clients to get them to stop saying things like, “Our people are our greatest asset.” Assets are bought and sold as in slavery. Relating people to assets dehumanizes them and places them on par with the photocopier. By the way, the investment in the photocopier maintenance agreement often far exceeds the equivalent “maintenance agreement” for the people in training, development, and benefits. How sad is that!

Along this same line, the term Human Resources certainly isn’t endearing and doesn’t advance the cause of people as human beings. Resources is just another name for commodities or assets that are traded, discarded, and otherwise moved about indiscriminately. The Human Resources Department is a blind co-conspirator in the loss of human identity and dignity. Instead, rename the department to something like, “People Development” or “Talent Management” but not “human resources.” It is degrading.

I hold no delusions of grandeur that either the perfect person or company graces the face of the planet. Self-serving serpents slither the planet preying on others. We are all capable of being this way, yet deep within our spirit we yearn to a higher self, call, and standard. We’re better to aspire and fail than to have no aspiration at all.

Gazing with admiration upon the shells of “successful” men and women may provide inspiration, but it tends to deliver little instruction. You know better. Get the true back story from the secretaries, bookkeepers, janitors, clerks, delivery persons, and cafeteria workers in corporate headquarters. Look at their personal life. Are their personal lives as captivating as their business headlines? You’ll soon discern whether the person capturing the headlines and your attention is gold-plated or 24 karat solid gold.

Do this: Whether you’re leading your life, a team, or a business, you need to decide: Ambition, at what price? Knowing your purpose and defining your values is a great start to building a life and a career where you can put your head to your pillow at night and sleep soundly.

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Here are some famous quotes about money for your consideration and amusement.

“Money makes the world go around.” $100 bill stack

From the song Money (Watch the performance!) in the Broadway play Cabaret sung by Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey.

“For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”

 1 Timothy 6

“A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.”

Jonathan Swift

“Get all you can [money], without hurting your soul, your body, or your neighbor. Save all you can, cutting off every needless expense. Give all you can.”

John Wesley

“With money in your pocket, you are wise and you are handsome and you sing well, too.”

Yiddish Proverb

Are You Doing Business By Design?

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Chief Leadership Officer book cover
Today is the last day you can pre-order Chief Leadership Officer. Click here or on the book cover above to be one of the first to read it.

 

Chief Leadership Officer presents an On-Purpose® based advanced alternative to the traditional CEO–run management system and method. It takes a choice to lead a business in this manner.  

Most start-up businesses begin with great intentions, but too often wind up being haphazardly led with little to no regard for the founder’s spirit or original intent—even if the founder is still running the business! It is a costly loss of strategic advantage, employee and customer engagement, and business profits!

Most susceptible to this drifting from the founder’s intent are large organizations and institutions where work is highly fragmented across divisions or countries. Specialization must be paired with a sustainable corporate culture that honors and innovates upon the strengths of its past and informs the future.

For example, did you know that universities and colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other Ivy League colleges were started as seminaries to train and equip ministers in the Christian faith? Today, these academics bastions of intellectualization and secularization are so far from their founders’ intent that their roots are obscured, if not outright ridiculed. So much for the founders’ idea of a truly “higher” education.

Large businesses are very susceptible to losing a measure of their soul. The pressures to produce profits can create expedient behaviors that diminish sustainable brand value and equity. When ethical issues arise the tendency is to resort to conveying and communicating corporate values as a “fix.” In truth, authenticity was lost long before and expediency started rotting the roots of the tree long before the “harvest” went bad. When values need to be more codified and communicated than caught, then real business problems are predictably on the horizon.

Solo owners or one person entrepreneurs are susceptible too; but they face a different challenge, however. Founders of these SOHO (small office, home office) businesses are typically wearing far too many hats and are preoccupied with production, sales, or customer care. They’re easily caught in a vicious swirl of learning, working, and selling or overwhelmingly stuck in procrastination. Fortunately, their passion to perform typically enables them to muscle through and deliver on a small scale basis.

Solo owners are alone and that’s a disadvantage when it comes to doing business by design and being ethical. The perspective of oneself is limiting. If the solo owner is willing to be transparent, here’s where a business coach or advisor can lend perspective and accountability. 

Years ago, a client was starting an IT business. He got so lost in his software development, he soon forgot why he started a business. His intent was to help clients, employees, and his family, but he lost sight of the larger picture as he was buried in the details.

It sounds so basic, but the fundamentals of business really don’t change because ultimately business is about people serving people. In my client’s case, lines of code were the means for creating value and making a contribution. He, however, got caught up in the making of money versus creating an “everyone profits” culture. The true value of his business wasn’t code or cash, but grounded in how his software improved the lives and productivity of his client companies. By refocusing his attention on his original “why” and design for starting the business, he was able to turn around the business.

Any kind of plan or business plan for small businesses tends to be scarce. Who has the time to plan? or so the thinking goes. Understandably so because they’re really not all that appropriate or useful in many businesses (See: What is the Purpose of a Business Plan?). Nonetheless that doesn’t mean strategy and planning are useless and meaningless. They have a specific and powerful place in a company of any size.

(Special plug: A couple of years ago I met Jim Horan, creator of The One Page Business Plan. Here’s a great planning device for businesses of all sizes. It is, however, especially apropos for solo owners. Also take a look at The Service Model, a one-page organizing tool for businesses.

Regardless of whether you are an entrepreneur of a one-person show or the CEO of a billion dollar business, as your business advisor and designer, you don’t call me until there’s a problem in the business that your team or you can’t fix yourselves. Your SWOT Analysis only takes you so far.

Let’s assume that you are competent at delivering your product or service, but the business isn’t growing. That means the problems lie in the design of the business or the leadership or both! Conversations and conventional wisdom swirl around business infrastructure, business planning, and the business model, but it is like a fish swimming in water trying to see water—you won’t see it because you’re too close to the matter.

Times like this demand depth, not shallow manipulations of the status quo under the guise of change management. In the strategic depths of an organization, a slight adjustment in understanding, a tiny shift in strategy, or an orientation toward greater alignment ripple powerfully into positive results. The simple articulation of a 2-word purpose statement is the tiniest of acts, but the most potent of all strategic initiatives.

Tweaking the fundamental design of the business is not for the faint of heart. Eventually, failure to do so will be manifest in every facet of the business … and that’s costly at every line item on the budget. Strategic business design can TOPBPerson coverelevate the business to the next level of performance, profits, and expression of its purpose. 

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The On-Purpose Business Person provides a solid framework for any person at work to learn how to treat their work as a business. Click here or on the image to the right to purchase it for $16. It is also available on Kindle for $9.97.


How Solid is Your Core?

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Be sure to watch the bonus footage in today’s On-Purpose Minute for a visual analogy about the cost of having a hollow core versus a solid core.

Core Strength is at the Heart of Leadership

Inner strength lies at the core of our being. Your 2-word purpose provides the strongest defense you have when you come under attack. Like any strength, however, it must be nourished and developed or it will dwindle and decay.

CLO hard book cover open
Pre-orders close this Thursday, June 30, 2016. Click here or on the book cover to be one of the first to get it when it is released.

Your core is also the source for going boldly into the world. If you’re frustrated, disheartened, or disappointed, then chances are your core is suffering. Pain is inevitable. The difference between this hurt crushing us in defeat or stirring us to rise to the challenge is our core.

In my upcoming book, Chief Leadership Officer, one of the key messages is personal leadership precedes leadership of others. Who wants to follow a jerk? Leading one’s life requires us to resist the natural gravity of decay. Leadership requires thoughtful upkeep and exercise to avoid becoming weak and rotting. You are the only true caretaker of your core. Others may feed it and some may deplete it, but only you control it.

A solid core is the source of inner strength that enables us to withstand the harsh forces that would come against us. This isn’t to say that fears, doubts, and concerns don’t creep into our lives. They do. The difference is when they do creep in, do they find an unguarded home to invade? Or do you have the presence of your purpose in the heart of your heart to resist the assault of your soul?

Be On-Purpose!

Kevin

Leaders: How Is Your View of People?

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In Chief Leadership Officer, you’ll be introduced to “The Complete Competence Model” which is the next generation of “The 3 Views of People” model shared in this On-Purpose Business Minute.

Click on the image to pre-order Chief Leadership Officer until June 30, 2016 and get bonus rewards.
Click on the image to pre-order Chief Leadership Officer until June 30, 2016 and get bonus rewards.

How Is Your View of People?

Your response reveals your preferred place for leading. It tends to reveal how you view others as being competent. Until we learn otherwise, many who lead teams will project their preferred perspective onto others. It is a subtle form of, Why can’t they be more like me? Setting yourself as the standard sets everyone else up to fail which undermines the business performance.

Each person is unique and can bring a measure of unique contribution to even the most routine of work.

For example, On-Purpose Partners ships books and products from the Winter Park, FL Post Office branch. At the counter is a postal clerk named James. He resembles the comedian Joe Piscopo. James is literally a stand-up clerk offering ongoing entertaining commentary and laughter all day long. He brings out the best in his peer counter clerks as the banter between them all keeps things moving along. By the way, when the other clerks have a problem it is James they turn to. He knows his post office stuff. Many a postmaster might try to make James conform to a more “professional” decorum. Instead, he makes the wait tolerable and the service more than acceptable.

There are 3 Views of People:

  1. Expert — aspires to technical proficiency and sees the world through tasks to be done
  2. Manager — organizes teams of people and sees the world through projects
  3. Leader — sets culture and sees the world through results

Purpose informs all three points of view. This is one of the many reasons why The On-Purpose Principle is the essential basis for unifying people.

Few of us fully reside in a single view. Rather we’re a blend of all. Knowing your dominant preference, however, provides insights to job satisfaction, performance, and even future advancement. 

This speaks to the nature of fit. As a business advisor for over 3 decades, I’ve come across all kinds of challenges in organizations. One of the best disguised is this problem of poor fit between a person’s view of people and their role and responsibilities on the job. It is an often overlooked dimension that can create disasters or delights.

Years ago when I worked at a company, I was part of the hiring process for a property manager. When I asked this woman what she thought was her weakness she bluntly stated, “I don’t like people.” I shared my concerns with the hiring manager who hired her anyway. She was a good property manager (technical), but wreaked havoc in the office relationships and with tenants (manager). She so fouled the workplace that no one wanted to work with or for her (leadership). Even vendors complained.

The Complete Competency Model isn’t just a makeover of the Peter Principle which states that people eventually rise to their highest level of incompetency. People view may be one of the underlying causes of poor job performance and fit.

When there’s good alignment or fit between the person and the work, people view melts away and can often be taken for granted. Like good health, when we have it we’re prone to forget about it. But once we’re sick or injured we so appreciate what we used to have.

After watching this On-Purpose Business Minute, assess your people view with your job fit. What you discover about yourself could be very enlightening and rewarding to your long-term health, job satisfaction, and earning capacity. Coming to terms with this, however, may be another matter all together.

Having worked with business leaders and CEOs over my career, I’ve seen firsthand the price that is paid by a person and an organization when there is a clash of people view and the requirements of a job. Because my work is most often in the C-Suite, I’m especially alarmed when I find a “leader” who is really put off or bothered by people. They may be respected experts in their field, but they have little to no aptitude for leading and managing. That’s fine, but why have them lead? (When I raise this matter, it often gets tenderly complicated for me, the business advisor, when the misfit is the managing director, owner, or CEO of the enterprise. In some cases, however, this brings a sense of relief for the person because they better understand who they are and we can develop a plan of improvement or a workaround.)

On the other hand, the best leaders love and care for people, are effective at managing, and have mastered tasks sufficiently to have paid their dues and risen through the ranks to have the respect of their reports. Ultimately, it is their people skills that create the separation from good to great leadership.

True leaders are culture creators by design, not by default. Typically, they’re not the go-to expert in various fields, disciplines, or technologies. Their currency comes in denominations of their presence, decisions, manner, and tone. They get people working together. Leaders press the flesh and are visible. This isn’t out of ceremonial duty, but from a genuine love and respect for the people who follow their lead. Leaders are often reflective and thoughtful, and they know how to set healthy boundaries to avoid burnout and bitterness for others and themselves.

CLO cover 1
Chief Leadership Officer will rock your leadership perspective for good! Click the cover to learn more.

Do yourself a favor and take today’s message to heart. Where are you? Where would you like to be? If you need help creating your culture so it is on-purpose, then email us to consider some On-Purpose Executive or Personal Coaching. 

What Is Personal Leadership?

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Leadership is a broad term that, like beauty, is often described as “being in the eye of the beholder.” Ask ten people to define leadership and you’ll likely get ten facets of this brilliant diamond. Most can agree that leadership involves other people but that’s an incomplete understanding.

Whereas leadership involves working with others, personal leadership is about working with yourself. You can’t delegate this responsibility nor should you miss this opportunity to better your body, mind, and spirit. Here is the only place in the world where you possess a significant measure of control through choice. The power of choosing can be exercised and strengthened or avoided and diminished.  

Ask yourself the following personal leadership questions:

  • What am I feeding my mind, my body, my heart, and my spirit to be a better person?
  • Am I reading books, articles, blog posts, and other content that inspire me?
  • Who in my life uplifts and calls upon me to rise above my problems?
  • Am I investing my time in healthy exercise, eating, and behaviors?
  • Do I have a plan to learn something new in the next 30 days … or the next year?
  • What is one thing I can start doing today to make my life better?

Self-care is not selfish; it is essential. The more you develop as a person, the more others are willing to follow your lead. The better you know yourself, the stronger your leadership potential will increase. In other words, as you win in your inner life, then your outer life is likely to thrive.

CLO Personal Leadership
Pre-Order Chief Leadership Officer by June 30, 2016 by clicking the image above.

In this On-Purpose Minute, personal leadership is defined as “The proactive process of meaningfully aligning and integrating your life around what matters most.” As this On-Purpose Minute briefly explains, there’s more here than meets the eye. You hold the key to the ignition to start the process. Be thoughtful and intentional about exploring possibilities to think about how best to align and integrate your decisions to produce alignment and integration about what truly counts.

Here’s where a personal 2-word purpose statement pays dividends. When you know your purpose, you have a personal, universally applicable point of reference for alignment and integration. Life becomes simpler because you’re aware of who you are, and you have a growing appreciation for what’s right for you. 

The sooner you decide to be the leader of your life, the better off we all are. That, by the way, is true prosperity—everyone profits.

Personal Leadership involves the person you see in the mirror. Most of us will readily admit we have different “voices” within us competing for our “best” interest. No one escapes temptation. The following expressions offer insightful evidence of our inner demons of discontent and the desire for a more integrated life:

  • “I have my own demons to battle,” a la Flip Wilson‘s famous line, “The Devil made me do it.”
  • “I must not be in my right mind.”
  • “I’m torn. My head says one thing, my heart another.”
  • “I need some time to get my head together.”
  • “I can’t seem to get my act together.”
  • “Why am I so easily distracted?”

Get started leading your life right now! Not tomorrow. Not next week. Right now!

Not sure where to start? Write down what you want. The Discovery Guide can help you sort it out simply, quickly, and meaningfully. Download the free preview with instructions and the forms you need to take the next step toward being an on-purpose person in creation, being the Chief Leadership Officer of your life!CLO hard book cover open

Pre-Order Chief Leadership Officer today!

Download the Opening Chapters here.

 

CLO: When the Company & People Lead Alike

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CLO cover 1
Click the cover to pre-order CLO

In 1994, I sat in the corporate headquarters lobby of Tupperware in Kissimmee, FL waiting to see my appointment. On the table was a pamphlet that touched on a bit of the history of Tupperware.

Brownie Wise was the woman who took Earl Tupper’s products from the retail hardware store shelves (where it wasn’t selling) to the direct sales party plan model of business. She built an empire that today spans over 100 countries and over $2 billion in annual income.

At that point The On-Purpose Person was relatively newly released from 1992. The On-Purpose Business Person was in development stages. I had created The On-Purpose Principle years before either book was written. I used this guiding principle to help my client companies create healthy, sustainable growth that allowed them to do right by the business and people.

Brownie Wise QuoteWithin the pamphlet the following quote jumped off the page! Brownie Wise said, “If you want to build the business, build the people.” What a brilliantly simple way of keeping the priorities straight for leading a business. Brownie’s words breathed readily understood life into The On-Purpose Principle.

Her quote opens Chapter 8 of The On-Purpose Business Person. Clients hear me say it often. We’re all so susceptible to getting lost in the operational and financial details of running a business that we forget that without people to serve and to be served the business has no sustainable reason for existing.

As prior blogs posts have stated, the Chief Leadership Officer is charged with two primary responsibilities:

These simple, yet powerful two sides of the same coin are inextricably essential to the success of the enterprise. A Chief Leadership Officer can not achieve one without the other for the organization to be a true success. A business can be a leader in its chosen field, but if it burns and churns people, it will not sustain its leadership position. On the other hand, a business does need a myriad of disciplines and activities to integrate strategically and structurally into a productive whole.

This duality of positioning is a bit like the age old question, “Which came first? The chicken or the egg?” Except in their instance we know beyond a doubt that the people come first.

CLOs welcome this duality of leadership because they understand that one without the other inevitably creates a false positive success. Peter Drucker said, “The executive who works at making strengths productive–his own as well as those of others–works at making organizational performance compatible with personal achievement.”

While CLO may seem similar to CEO, they are only as similar as your current smartphone is to the flip phone you had a decade ago. It has some similar features and functions but it is so much more — a new category of leadership available to all.

Preorder Chief Leadership Officer