Water lily at Sangsurya, Bryon Bay

Slowing down

Today I got a card in the mail. No, it wasn’t a Christmas card (today is Christmas Eve). It was a card from myself. Yes, really.

A few weeks back I had the luxury of attending a five-day Total Balance retreat at Bryon Bay run by the lovely Kate James.

It was an amazing experience and one made possible by the Reflection Leave policy we have at work. This gives all staff an additional week a year to spend ‘reflecting’. (You can read more about our Reflection Leave Policy in this interview with SANE Australia CEO Jack Heath). This policy is truly a gift.

During the retreat we were tasked with writing a card to ourselves that Kate promised to send back to us a month down the track. We were to write to ourselves to remind us of the things we had hoped to take away from the retreat.  I opened the card quite curious about what I had promised to myself.

At the top of the list was “take time to be quiet and slow”.

Wow, timing! The lead up to Christmas is traditionally super busy.  Rush. Rush. Rush. Often we find ourselves stumbling across the finish line exhausted after a busy year. Usually. Surprisingly, that has not been my experience this week. I have noticed the email has slowed appreciably and as my major deadlines have passed I have been enjoying a peaceful week. I have been able to leave work on time and enjoy some quiet evening walks. On one of those walks I was appreciating the feeling of peace, the beautiful early evening sunshine and reflecting on the challenge of slowing down.

So it was a bit serendipitous that my card arrived today and hence this post!

I rush around a lot. ‘Slow’ is not something I do well. Nor is ‘quiet’. But I am working on it. I am excitable; I really thrive on activity, on creating things, on transforming stuff. I have been described as a ‘whirlwind’. But rushing around does take its toll and not just on me. It can be a challenge to those around me too! So I have been working on ‘slow’ and the retreat (and the arrival of that card) was a good way to refresh this commitment.

What do you do to calm yourself when you can feel the adrenalin is pumping way to hard? How do you do ‘slow’?  Here are some of my favorite tips for slowing down. Some of these come from the retreat experience, but others have come from some very special workmates and mentors who have shared their wisdom with me over the years.

Five tips for slowing down

1. Walk more slowly. Try it! This is surprisingly hard to do when you are pumped.
2. Talk more slowly. Again, hard to do when the ideas are flowing and you have a million things running through your mind.
3. Exercise. Find the time. It helps to relieve stress and burns some of that pent up adrenalin; it both stimulates and calms. Yoga and walks are my favorites.
4. Meditate. This is one I struggle with. I know it takes practice and I will keep at it as the benefits to health are now well established.
5. Get in touch with your creative side. Art as therapy. Without getting too technical, doing something creative, be it cooking, painting, writing, playing music etc., puts the right brain in charge and allows us to quiet that over-active left-brain. For me this is easier and as effective as meditation, but remember, its not about the end result here, just the ‘doing’.

Happy holidays,

Corporate entrepreneurs operate within a company or organisation to “instigate renewal or innovation”, (Sharma and Chrisman 1999, p.18). They will do this by combining materials and forces in new ways. This may involve producing a new product or service, adopting a new method of production, entering a new market, developing a new source of raw materials or even reorganising an industry.

The overall aim is to create or sustain competitive superiority. (Spring and Gillin 2005).

The role of the entrepreneur in setting organisational strategy is to ensure that the organisation builds strategic intent.

“it is the individuals within that innovate”

In an increasingly complex and competitive world, the role of setting organisational strategy is increasingly one focused on innovation and creativity rather than on the traditional strategic analysis. We need to encourage participation in the entrepreneurial process at all levels of the organisation as it is the individuals within that innovate. Building strategic intent will encourage individuals to ‘see’ opportunities. Senior management needs to build and nurture a culture that supports innovation and enterprise by setting clear and credible policies that increase the perceived feasibility and desirability of entrepreneurial activity and build the perception of competence across the organisation (Krueger 2000). Individuals need to be encouraged to ‘see’ opportunities regardless of existing resources and beyond existing competencies, (Krueger 2000).

Developing a cohesive strategic intent – a rich and engaging organisational purpose will convert employees into “committed members of a purposeful organisation” (Bartlett and Ghosal 1994).

“This is not about strategic planning, but strategic thinking.”

It is about synthesis – it involves intuition and creativity (Mintzberg 2000). It requires an observant and empathetic view of the world and starts with having fresh, original insights about your sector or market and your customers. Such insights come observing directly what’s happening in the market (Tim Brown, Fast Company 2005). We often ask the wrong questions. Replicating what the competitors are doing will not lead to competitive revitalisation. Strategic thinking driven by strategic intent can.

We can learn much from how Howard Moskowitz transformed the spaghetti sauce (and food) market in the 1980’s (Malcolm Gladwell 2005). When determining how Prego could compete with the lesser quality but more successful Ragu product, Howard looked at the concept of variability versus universality. Rather than looking for the perfect spaghetti sauce he determined we should be looking for the perfect spaghetti sauces. He created 45 varieties of sauces and through sampling was able to cluster customers into three key categories – those that liked their sauce plain, spicy or chunky. Now up until this point there were no chunky varieties on the shelf as focus groups had never mentioned ‘chunky’ when asked what they looked for in a sauce. Prego then reformulated its sauces, made $600 million on their chunky variety and the importance of horizontal segmentation was realised. Prego’s use of Howard to reinvent their lines was smart and focused on competitive innovation rather than imitation. It is about looking to the blue rather than red oceans. As discussed by Hamel and Prahalad (2005) further examples of competitive innovation are evident in the global expansion of Japanese companies. Their approaches included:

• uncovering ‘loose bricks’
• Building layers of advantage
• Exploring the possibility of competing through collaboration

The role of entrepreneurship in setting organisational strategy is thus about developing and building strategic intent, encouraging creativity and strategic thinking so that the organisation will reach beyond its present grasp and set targets that engage and encourage effort. It will require us to be smart and focus on innovation rather than imitation.

Janet Hopkins

First published July 19, 2012

References:

Bartlett, C., Ghoshal, S, 1994, ‘Changing the Role of Top Management: Beyond Strategy to Purpose’, Harvard Business Review
Nov/Dec 1994.

Brown, T, 2005,   http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/95/design-strategy.html?page=0%2C1, Issue 95, June 2005. Viewed March 26, 2008.

Garvin, D., & Levesque, L. ( 2006) ‘Meeting the Challenge of Corporate Entrepreneurship’, Harvard Business Review, October 2006.

Hamel, G & Prahalad, C.K. 1989, ‘Strategic Intent’, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2005.

Krueger, F Jr., 2000. ‘The Cognitive Infrastructure of Opportunity Emergence’,

Published in Entrepreneurship; Theory & Practice, Spring 2000, Vol. 24 Issue 3, p5, 19p.

Malcolm Gladwell: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce Feb 2004. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/20  viewed March 23, 2008.

Sharma, P. & Chrisman, J. J. 1999, ‘Toward a reconciliation of the definitional issues in the field of corporate entrepreneurship.’ Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, 23, 1999 Spring, p.18

Spring, S., & Gillin, M. (2005) International Research Exchange

Mintzberg, H, 2000, ‘The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning’

Harvard Business Review, Jan/Feb 94.

All in all I am constantly deluged with useful information and it is a little scary sometimes to think that I might miss something really awesome with my quick scans of the information streams. I do take some comfort from the fact that the good stuff usually rises to the top across multiple channels, so eventually I will spot it! And so it was with this one.

This Ted Talk is from Dan Pallotta and it is fabulous! It has long frustrated me that the Not For Profit sector in general has been slow to recognise the value of branding and marketing and understand the need to experiment, innovate, take risks and accept failure. This talk though has given me a new perspective.

Dan talks about the very different rules for business (for-profits) vs not-for-profits and how these that stand in the way of the organisations within this sector being able to fully realise their mission. Dan discusses four of these in his talk. We are now, more than ever, aware of our scarce resources and the increasing belt-tightening at Government level. We are also well aware of the scale of the issues that confront us. The general thrust of Dan’s talk is that we are going to need to change the way we view this sector for it to grow to the scale required to make an impact on the issues that matter to us.

Thought provoking…enjoy!

I’m new to this tool so I thought it would be interesting to learn how it works and I started by exploring something of interest to me. I thought I’d take a look at the trends around the search term of ‘mental health’ in web searches. I started with a worldwide focus.

The numbers on the graph which is created (see below) reflect how many searches have been done for the search term ‘mental health’, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.
You can see that over time it appears our relative interest in searching on ‘mental health’ has declined. It is important to note that although the line is trending down this does not necessarily mean less people are searching out ‘mental health’, but rather its relative popularity as a search term actually decreased percentage-wise.

What is fun about this tool is that it gives you the ability to view the changes over time and across different regions. If you take a look at the Regional Interest chart you can press ‘play’ and watch how the numbers have changed over time in different areas. It is interesting that in both Australia (99) and the UK (100) interest in searching on ‘mental health’ is stronger than in the US (74) and Ireland (56) for example. The analysis also tells us the ‘mental health services’ is a more popular search term than ‘mental health care’. Zooming in on Australia we can see fairly consistent results since 2007, although there has been a slight decrease during 2011. What is interesting is that there seems to be drop in search popularity over December and January each year – a time I would have thought searches might increase in popularity, given that Christmas can be a stressful time for many people. I guess more of us are interested in other things at that time! Also of interest is that in regional terms, the National Territory shows the strongest interest in searching on ‘mental health’ relative to other things and Western Australia the least interest. Meanwhile, searches worldwide on Wellbeing are trending upwards and this term seems to be relatively more popular in Australian than other parts of the world. It also seems mental health is searched more than mental illness and ’Psychiatric’ as a search term is relatively more popular in the US than Australia. By playing with other terms we can see that ‘depression’ is as interesting to Americans as it is to Australians and within Australia there is consistent interest across all states in this term. Relative interest in ‘anxiety’ is increasing over time in both the world view and across Australia and interest is strong both in the US and Australia. It seems it is the symptoms of anxiety that attract the most search interest when looking at the topic of anxiety. You can add multiple search terms and search multiple regions for comparisons. For example here is a graph of the terms ‘heart disease’ vs ‘mental health’ vs ‘anxiety’ worldwide.

Given I am new to this tool I am not sure exactly how much we can rely on this data, but I did find it interesting and I can see that it might be helpful when we are considering how we might choose key words or meta tags for our websites and campaigns. It might also be useful in giving us some insight into the relative likelihood that one term might be more useful than another for attracting searchers to our campaign or cause.

Food for thought…

I cannot tell you how exciting and enjoyable it is to build your own page. I know mine is nothing special in the big scheme of things, but it is special to me and it’s been lots of fun to do. So lets get to it…

First step, register a domain if you haven’t already and then find a place to host your site. It’s a bit like when you buy a car you then need to find a place to park it. If you are not sure how to do this I would start by taking a look at the auDA site. Lots of helpful information here to steer you in the right direction.

Next I headed off to my favourite website developer and asked them to install WordPress on my site and make sure my site was up and functioning. This took less than an hour, so it shouldn’t cost you the earth. (People more clever than me will be able to do this bit themselves, but I wanted to put it in the hands of a professional.)

I now had a basic empty WordPress template ‘live’ on my website. I could now log into the back-end (or dashboard) of my site and play around with the content. The look and feel of the site is determined at this stage by the theme which was installed with WordPress by default -Twenty Eleven. Now, I could have left things there until I had finalised how I wanted the final site to look like with my designer. Alas I am still not sure about that! So whilst I fine tune my thoughts about where I want to take this Blog in future and how I want it to look, I thought I would put up some content and just get it moving. I figure that by building some content and getting some feedback  I will get a stronger sense of where it is going to go in the future.

At this point I started to get a little bit addicted to taking things further. Each time I would bravely venture into the back-end and make one further change to the site, I would quickly ‘refresh’ and see how it looked. It was such fun that I could not leave it alone. Eventually I changed the main image, posted up my first Blog posts, created a second page, added a sidebar with my twitter feed, a subscribe now option, an opening caption, and lastly the relevant social media icons to both the side bar and to each post. How? The magic of YouTube!

When I used to teach people how to use various computer software packages I was always on about the power of the ‘right mouse click’. Now it seems I am evangelical about the power of YouTube as a learning resource.

Here are the key links I used to teach myself how to do each of the steps that have lead me to the site I now have. I have no vested interest in any of these, if you don’t like a particular one just do a new search and find another…its that easy!

1. Changing the image from the theme. (Note I got my image by heading to Flickr and searching out images that were free under creative commons.)
2. Add the twitter feed to the right side-bar.
3. Add a subscribe option so I can update people when I add a new post (I use MailChimp to manage my email lists).
4. Adding the social media icons to my sidebar.

They came in boxes of 12, 24, 36 and the ultra special, aspirational 72.

I could never afford the pack of 72 but I did buy the smaller packs, saving up my pocket money until I could afford them.

To me my pack of new Derwent pencils represented possibilities. Shiny and new, round, smooth and beautifully sharpened.They were full of  potential, ready to be applied to new creative projects; to put colour and form to ideas.

As such the Derwent is a great representation for when I am now with life and career.

I am in an exciting period of transition having just left Lantern after many years, the past three as CEO. I walked away proud of what we had achieved and satisfied that it was in great shape and safe hands for the future. Now I stand in front of a landscape full of exciting possibilities, totally confident that whilst I cannot yet put detail around it, it is going to be wonderful, and this website is just one part of the many new beginnings. Welcome to this work in progress.

I am currently working on a new site, so this one is what you might call transitional. I have lots of exciting ideas and I can’t wait to put them into action, I hope you will be part of this new journey and join in the fun. I welcome your feedback and support and of course ideas!

Please check back in soon. If you would like to be updated when my new site goes ‘live’ please shoot me an email and I will add you to my list.

Cheers

Janet

Twitter: @janethopkins

Delicious – for all my internet bookmarks

*Main photo with thanks to Kain Kalju.