Forget Jerry Maguire: Creating Mission, Vision and Values That Won’t Get You Fired
“Jerry Maguire” was a fictional sports agent and apparently a good one. Jerry had everything he wanted; the girl, the career, the fame. Unfortunately Jerry Maguire also aquired an ill that befalls many a successful sales person, he got a conscience. He looked around and saw the industry how it was and knew that the way they treated athletes wasn’t right. He had an altruistic plan to fix the sports agent industry. Then he created a mission statement. That mission statement got him fired. Around the time that the movie Jerry Maguire came out, mission statements were all the rage in business. Everyone had to have one and they were
How Do You Filter Your Decisions?
When you start a business one of the hardest things to do is turn down, what we perceive to be, an opportunity. Saying yes to too many things puts us and our business in a position of being stretched thin. How do you overcome this dilemma? Values based decision making. What is values based decision making? Values based decision making is based upon having a set of principles that you stand for as an individual and as a business that help guide the decisions you make personally and professionally. How does values based decision making help you? Focus- How many entrepreneurs do you know that seem to have their hands
Building Your Business One Value At A Time
The last time that I talked about core values, I was referring to using them as a tool for personal productivity. Core values are not only necessary for personal success but are also vital to an organization as well. Like your vision and mission, core values are another set of bricks that you use to build your business foundation. Despite the stain that certain companies have brought on businesses in general, there are a lot of companies that are still doing it right and core values are at the front of what they are doing. Two examples of this are Starbucks and Zappos. Before I get started talking about Starbucks,
Don’t Ignore Your Values
Having core values personally and professionally are extremely important to guiding effective decision making. I am positive I could have used them in college. Just having core values laid out is not enough if you don’t have a system for utilizing them within your organization. Because of this, when we make decisions about what new products and services to offer, we sometimes ignore our values altogether and utilize other criteria to judge the decision. A great example of ignoring values is when I started working for a consumer finance company in the late 90′s. Our job was to sell loans yet we had many tasks that required a lot of
What Do You Value?
In talking about managing your time on a day-to-day basis rarely do you hear people talk about values. When I talk about values I am essentially talking about your personal core values. I have talked about business core values but to be a successful entrepreneur or employee, it’s also a good idea to have personal clarity not just business clarity. The important question to ask is, what do I value? To illustrate personal values, I will give you an example of one of my own. One value of mine is family time. How do I use this to drive my professional life? An easy example I can give is that
People get a feel for you through your website
If you want people to really get a feel for what you are about in your business, make sure that your website represents your brand and what your core values are. Too many times we treat our website like a necessary evil or put one up because we know we need to have it but don’t take the time to do it right. The problem with this mindset is that your businesses’ website is an extension of you. If your website doesn’t express what you are about correctly then you have visitors that don’t properly understand what you are about. The problem with this is that you end either disappointing
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