Fortune Magazine recently ranked the Walt Disney Company number one for quality.
Intel was number two. UPS number three. Apple number four.
Big names. High expectations. Focused on excellence. Every single day.
What does that mean to you and me?
We Can Do Great Things
It is helpful to remember the big picture, isn’t it?
Do you have creative and effective ways to remember the big picture? I mean everyday. Do you?
Currently, writing five daily blogs has helped me make a dramatic leap in the way I perceive excellence and act on excellence.
The dramatic leap didn’t happen a year ago when I was writing single digit monthly blog posts – November 2008.
It didn’t happen when I wrote nearly 20 monthly blog posts – December 2008.
And it didn’t happen in the first two months of this year, when I wrote even fewer.
But something magical happened in March, ten months ago.
I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. Wishing you the best day of your life -today! Carpe diem.
jungle jeff on Vacation
Woo-hoo! jungle jeff is on vacation!
Now I can really get some work done. Here’s my list:
Will let you know how this goes. Carpe diem.
jungle jeff loves vision. Being able to see? You love that? Well, yes, and that’s not what I meant. Not seeing what’s in front of us now, but seeing what could be in front of us well into the future.
“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” - Japanese proverb
If you went and looked in the mirror and were compellingly honest, which side of the Japanese Proverb would you fall into? The left side or the right?
“A frog in a well can not conceive of the ocean”. — Japanese Proverb
Hope you can comprehend the first proverb. If you have the title (real or assumed) and you don’t understand it, go look in the mirror again. Are you an amphibian?
It’s been said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. Carpe diem.
My friend is a small business owner. He’s been in business for over 30 years. Yesterday he told me, “This is the worst I’ve seen it”.
No one is coming into his store. He has gotten creative and started, for the first time ever, going out looking for business. If business won’t come to him, he’s going to go to it.
I congratulated him on being successful for so long, and mentioned I started an LLC in January, and the odds are (overwhelmingly) stacked against me. In fact the odds are stacked against anyone starting a (small) business.
History and statistics don’t lie.
What to do?
Figure it out. Failure is not an option.
History and statistics do not lie.
Is Social Media a fad? It is if you’re utterly foolish or senseless.
(This You Tube video is oversized so we can view/read it better)
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Is Social Media ( socialnomics ) a fad? Did you know an utterly foolish and senseless person is defined as an idiot? Strong language? No. Simply a fact.
Did you know that ignoring facts (say, global warming) doesn’t make them go away?
MBA courses insist you take accounting. Ever hear an MBA student rave about their accounting classes? Wouldn’t it make more sense to teach students what to look for in a good CPA?
Don’t leaders in organizations have finance departments?
Isn’t the leader’s purpose to lead? To set the course? To dream, to communicate and to inspire the vision?
Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe I’m not.
So, just wanted to get our minds thinking about this.
All I’m pointing out is that society places a certain “worth” on an MBA degree. I’m not disagreeing with that.
Society also places a certain worth on reading the best selling business books. Not disagreeing with that either.
For me, what it all comes down to is that degrees, or books, don’t matter much if you can’t translate what you know – into something much better than before.
It’s almost like buying a gym membership, or exercise equipment, but not using it.
Business Consultant
Ever ask a nine-year old for business advice? I did recently.
Pondering the pros and cons of going solo versus partnering, on a special project. So, just for kicks, I asked my son (9).
He said, “Two heads are better than one”.
For the next few minutes, my son and I waited for our friend to arrive.
The correct answer in hand, we had a great meeting.
Last weekend, my son (9) and I were relaxing in our pool at sunset. I asked him, “You know why I’m working so hard on the business, right”?
“In case you lose your job”?, he said, questioning.
“Well sort of, but not really because of that. I would like to have more control over the impact one can make on our world. Being a business owner doesn’t guarantee that, but it sure does increase the odds”.
Reminded him of the power of hard work and how it’s harder at the beginning, in virtually everything, because there’s so much to learn.
Funny thing, for a nine-year old, he gets it. And it’s easy to see why.
When his Dad became a parent, he worked really hard at the beginning, because there was so much to learn.
PS. What I didn’t tell him is the “business” is my attempt to help raise enough money to find a cure for his disease.
“You can observe a lot by watching”. — Yogi Berra
Google dominates search engine. Disney dominates family entertainment.
I enjoy watching and learning from them.
They say, “To teach is to learn twice”.
As a 35-year business professional, including 25 year here in Central Florida, I’ve become quite the Disney expert.
I really hadn’t noticed, until I started to do the math.
For the past ten-plus years, I’ve been a professional speaker, teaching world-class business strategies and business tactics – averaging four days per week teaching.
Assuming 46 weeks per year teaching, multiplied by four days per week, multiplied by 10.3 years teaching - roughly 2,000 days of keynote speeches, multi-day workshops, etc.
Even more staggering, to me, is to roughly estimate the average audience size to be 250. The largest group I taught was 3,000. The smallest, ten.
Bottom line?
I’ve taught over one-half million people.
That’s 500,000! Wow! Who knew?
Carpe diem, jungle jeff 