What must I do to be Successfully Innovative

Recently one of my Business Associates, Marcia Potts, sent me this brief question on Facebook:

Coach, what to do to be innovative and creative in order to earn some of this kind of doe (Like Apple recent record sales)? I am hoping to have some...even if it is 0.50%.

After some thought I responded as follows:

Hi Marcia, I agree with your wishes. The challenge is (1) To see the immediate future, (2) Understand your customers hopes and aspirations in this new future and (3) Be willing to take calculated risks in helping them achieve their dreams.

A brief question and a brief Facebook answer. But not so easy to do!

To really see the immediate future is to be constantly scanning your particular industry and associated industries and capturing the immediate trends. This is more of an art, a skill really, to differentiate what are just fads from what are truly trends. This is not analysis but synthesis, not breaking down and analyzing information and data but being able to pick up the varying clues and snippets of information and joining them to make a judgement or intuition. I believe Steve Jobs and Apple understood the shift away from desk-work to mobile social communication coupled with entertainment and its implications before most of us.

Then to understand your customers' hopes and dreams in this new evolving environment is not so much asking them through focus groups and questionnaires but in anticipating their aspirations even before they have them. In a sense it is knowing them better than they know themselves. Again the Apple Team understood the evolving dream to be able to easily create and consume personal multimedia content while on the go. This also is not analysis but insight through brainstorming.

And then the final step, to be willing to take calculated risks in helping them achieve their dreams. Apple did this by creating the new MacBooks with iLearn software, combined this with the iPod, iPhone and then iPad. Here again the genius is in the design. As Disney another mega successful creator says in their Process...First Dream and then Dare.

If you are interested in growing your business through Innovation send me an email at coachbengo@gmail.com and I'll be happy to visit you and chat on the possibilities.

Celebrating 8 yrs as a Business Coach

I can't believe it. But its true! When you are having fun time flies.

Its already eight years since I nervously left the security of a high paying/high flying Corporate Marketing Executive job and embarked on the adventure of being a self employed Business Coach specializing in Sales, Marketing and Customer Service. And what a ride it has been. Surprisingly, it has been the best years of my working career.

There have been times that I have missed the corporate flights to exotic lands, the VIP invitations to grand special events, the pictures and name in the newspapers, rubbing shoulders with the who's who and of course the guaranteed monthly salary and pleasant smiles of the bankers.

But I have gained so much more: the opportunity to chart my own course, more time with my family, being able to build a family business along with my wife, developing my God given talents, having time to devote to my church and surprisingly achieving better financial security. And all this in addition to: no more unending office meetings, no more office games and no more manipulated end of year reviews.

Its been an exciting eight years and the adventure has just begun. I have so many more plans, so many more paths off the beaten track to explore. No doubt some will be dead ends but with God's help a few will lead on to Glory.
"Sancho..my armour, my sword...Our destiny calls, and we go
And the wild winds of fortune
Shall carry us onward"

If you are interested in growing your business through Business Coaching send me an email at coachbengo@gmail.com and I'll be happy to visit you and chat on the possibilities.