Photo by Nicholas T
Are you a goal person or a river person?  Goal people layout a roadmap of goals and set out to achieve them.  River people, on the other hand, go with the flow.  They live for the moment and don’t worry too much about the future.  Neither is good or bad, or right or wrong.  They’re just different approaches for the journey of life.
In the book,Goal-Free Living: How to Have the Life You Want NOW! , Stephen M. Shapiro writes about goal people and river people.
Key …

If your business doesn’t have productivity objectives, it doesn’t have direction.  If your business doesn’t have productivity measurements, it doesn’t have control.  In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter Drucker explains that productivity is the best yardstick for comparing management effectiveness.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Results are the best way to compare effectiveness.  Productivity is the best tool for comparing effectiveness.   Your yield is directly related to the effectiveness and efficiency of your production.
Quality of management is a key …

How do you get competitive groups to work with each other? How do you improve cross-group collaboration? Superordinate goals. In Social Psychology: Theories, Research, and Applications, Robert S. Feldman writes about how superordinate goals were effective in uniting competitive groups.
Two Groups in the Same Camp
Feldman writes:
“One of the best examples of how group goals can influence group formation comes from a now-classic field study held in a boy’s summer camp named Robber’s Cave (Sherif, 1966). Two groups of missle-class 11- and 12-year-olds – none of whom knew that he was …

What if you could step into your future, experience your success, and look back on how you got there? What if you could do a dry run or walkthrough of your future accomplishments and actually feel your results? In Brilliant Nlp: What the Most Successful People Know, Say & Do, David Molden and Pat Hutchinson write about a simple but effective technique from their Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) experience, that you can use to visualize your success.
Visualize Your SuccessYou can use this technique to set a realistic timescale for your …

The acronym PRIEST provides a framework for evaluating outcomes. In Brilliant Nlp: What the Most Successful People Know, Say & Do, David Molden and Pat Hutchinson share the PRIEST framework for well-formed goals.
PRIEST for Well-Formed OutcomesMolden and Hutchinson write how to use PRIEST for goals:

P is for Positively Stated.
R is for Resources
I is for Initiated and Maintained By Self
E is for Ecology
S is for Sensory Evidence
T is for Time.

P is for Positively StatedMolden and Hutchinson write:
A feature of the human mind is its inability to process a negative. Consider …

Goal setting is a powerful tool for personal development. In Your Road Map for Success: You Can Get There from Here, John C. Maxwell writes:
“Retail department store founder J.C. Penny declared, “Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I will give you a man who will make history. Give me a man without a goal and I will give you a stock clerk.” Penny recognized the power and importance of goals. While you work on them, they work on you. And what you get by reaching your goals …

Photo by Vanessa Pike-Russell
What if you spend your years climbing the corporate ladder, only to find that your ladder was up against the wrong wall? What if money can’t buy what you’re really looking for? What if there’s a simpler or more effective way to get what you want? In Work from the Inside Out: Seven Steps to Loving What You Do, Nancy O’Hara writes about an approach to help you figure out what you really want.
Key Take Aways
I had several take aways from this particular approach:

Frame out work goals, …

How can you learn whatever you want from any of your favorite heroes? By modeling what they think, feel, and do.   I’m a fan of “model the best.”  Whenever I focus on something, I try to find examples of the best of the best.  To model from them, I try to figure out what their mindsets, attitudes, and behaviors were that helped them achieve their success.  I look for both the strategies and the tactics.
In Think and Grow Rich, Napolean Hill writes about emulating the great.
Key Take Aways
There are a …

Your mission, vision and values are the foundation for your company’s success. It’s how you communicate your unique value, set goals and priorities, and create a compelling future. It’s ultimately your gauge for success (are you accomplishing your mission and moving towards your vision?)  In A Simple Statement: A Guide to Nonprofit Arts Management and Leadership, Jamie Grady writes about vision, mission, and values.
Creating Your Mission and Vision
The key steps to creating your mission and vision are:

Identify the values of the organization. You find these by observing how employees spend …