Get the answer to your question from Coach John G. Agno. What we all want is interaction with others to clarify our thoughts before taking action and to allow our perceptions to evolve over time.
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However, that competition is not always in the form of other coaches. It may come in the form of alternative approaches to resolving the prospective client's problem; through a consulting exercise, some mentoring work, advice from a professional associate, etc. It may be something as basic as a conversation with a trusted friend or family member. It may indeed be the old and comfortable approach of "doing nothing."
Competition is not normally an issue provided that you have engendered:
a sense that you have heard their issues at a deep level
an understanding of the benefits you deliver
In the case of business or executive coaching, selection onto a shortlist may be based on objective and emotional factors. These might include items such as formal coaching qualifications and individual certification by an organization like WABC (Worldwide Association of Business Coaches). There may be additional factors such as foreign language capability, physical location, past business experience and level of seniority attained. However, once you are on the shortlist, your ability to win business is once again down to the basic personal like-ability and trust perceptions you develop during the first meeting with the corporate client and person-to-be-coached.
There is little point in focusing on what the competition have that you don't....because focusing on the competition acts as a distraction. Focusing on maximizing the number of opportunities you have to connect with potential clients and holding the best on-line and off-line conversations will be your best chance of building a client base.
This school newspaper editorial, in The B.H.S. BUGLE published by members of the Sophomore Class, was written by Margretta Luff, Editor-in-Chief, in the Spring of 1933 and remains as relevant today as it was 80 years ago:
HONESTY IN SCHOLARSHIP
We, the pupils of Broadalbin High, should take some interest in our school life, especially scholarship. One of the most important things essential in scholarship is honesty. When we say honesty, we do not compare it with scholarship; we do not seem to think of it in that way. It does not necessarily refer to stealing and copying papers. Some of us are not honest enough with ourselves. We let our work slide along until examinations; then we think that we should receive just as high a mark as our friend that studies.
We have been climbing steadily in the past years toward scholarship; but we have not, as yet, acquired a desire for obtaining high marks. We indulge more in athletics than we do in study. We think that it has more effect on our friends. We secretly wish to give more time for our studies, but we think we cannot take time for that.
Last year, one of the Broadalbin girls won a scholarship which will help her through four years of college. We like to boast to other cities about it; but we do not really try ourselves for this high honor. Also last year, we turned out more college entrance diplomas than either Gloversville or Johnstown. We could do this for many years to come if we only would keep this spirit and try to be honest with ourselves.
The actual buying process for coaching seems to depend on the nature of the coaching sought.
However, in the vast majority of cases, the final decision on coach selection seems to rest with the person-to-be-coached. In the case of business/executive coaching, an initial shortlist may be made by the Human Relations (HR) or talent management department in the organization (at the request of a general manager, C-Suite executive or other leadership of the company). The final choice will usually depend on the personal chemistry between the prospective coach and the person-to-be-coached combined with trust that the desired personal development results can be delivered by the person-being-coached.
Coaching is such a personal and intense relationship that it is usually best for the client to select the person they feel best able to work with. It may prove necessary to transfer to another coach after a period of time when the person-being-coached is able to take advantage of a different, perhaps "tougher" approach.
In the case of career coaching and personal coaching, the selection may well be made by the person-to-be-coached with no formal external input or financial support. Choice may be based on referralsor in some cases search engine resultsfollowed by website review and a phone call that may then lead to a chemistry discussion or meeting. In some cases, the person-to-be-coached may rely simply on a referral as long as the personal chemistry is adequate.
Individual coaches therefore have an opportunity to use this situation to their advantage, with the help of an experienced mentor coach, in differentiating themselves from possible competitors.
Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, once said, "If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete."
The sole purpose of strategic thinking is to enable a company to gain, as efficiently as possible, a sustainable edge over its competition. This implies an attempt to alter the company's strengths relative to that of its competitors.
The corporate leader must isolate strategic technical and marketing strengths (absolute versus relative strengths) to determine how to compete wisely in gaining significant ground on its competitors at an acceptable cost to itself.
"History records only the combined or aggregate actions of nations and can only give the biographies of a very few individuals whose positions have given them a predominant influence in the nation in which their influence has been specially felt in giving form and shape to great events and social movements, whose effects are felt and recognized for ages.
It seems, however, but a little reflection and consideration to satisfy us that each individual human being, however humble, has a personal history of his own, quite as real and quite as interesting to himself and his children and his near relations, at least, as that of the greatest historical characters has to the nation at large.
And, though the national history of any popular government is but the aggregate or result of the personal history and influence of all its individuals, it would be manifestly impossible to give a history of all such individual actions and influence.
The biography, however, of a comparatively few among the more prominent actors and thinkers, whose personal influence has been felt, tend to [show] them much light upon the great turning points and controlling events in a nation's history, and in this view, becomes an important part of history itself, and furnishes facts which serve as keys to unlock and explain the secret springs of action, and the true causes of important social movements which general history would leave in obscurity."
Isaac Peckham Christiancy [March 12, 1812 - September 8, 1890], who wrote those words at the age of seventy-one years, became a great jurist, a U. S. Senator from his adopted State of Michigan, and probably the most distinguished citizen of that State in his lifetime.
After leaving New York State in 1833, he went to Lansing, Michigan and there took up his home. He studied law, acquired a large practice for a time, was one of the founders of the Republican Party in Michigan and of the country, ran for governor of the state on that ticket, in 1854 was a delegate to the National Convention, in 1856 was elected to the Supreme Court of Michigan and later became Chief Judge of the courts of that state.
His chief work in life was, of course, that of a lawyer and judge. When Zachariah Chandler, the giant senator from that state, retired from the Senate, Christiancy was drafted to succeed him. He was afterward Minister to Peru during the Peruvian and Chilean War and finally retired to private life. He died in Lansing, Michigan on September 8, 1890 at the age of 78. His public career as a judge and legislator marks him as one of the most distinguished native sons of Fulton County, NY.
Like Lincoln, Jackson and Johnson, he was born in a log house. Like them his schooling lasted but a few weeks in the years of his boyhood. He enjoyed, through his own earnings, the benefits of a single term at the Kingsboro Academy (which was located in today's Gloversville, NY). He was self-educated and yet well educated. The text books on English in Michigan schools contained examples of Senator Christiancy's writings for the instruction of the pupils.
In writing his autobiography, speaking of the people of the section of the country where he once lived in the foothills of the Adirondacks (which section was typical of them all he says):
“I left them at the age of twenty-one and it has been my lot in the course of a busy life to become acquainted with the people of many other localities, and of every grade from the highest to the lowest, but I have found anywhere a community where the average standard of morality was higher, or the general sense of justice and moral obligation stronger or more uniform, where all the domestic virtues and genial social qualities were more general or more attractive, where a better or more cordial feeling of brotherhood or a purer spirit of charity or benevolence pervaded the mass of the community.
No crime was ever committed during my remembrance (and my memory of those times is very distinct and clear) in any part of the country or among any of the people I have described.
The country was poor in resources and unproductive.
Unremitting industry and strict economy were required to extort a living from the soil. The virtues induced by necessity had become habitual. They produced sobriety of thought and habits, and such thoughts and habits do more to humanize and civilize mankind and to purify the heart than all the sermons ever preached, always excepting the Sermon on the Mount.
It is among such a people that such practical teachings are most readily appreciated and most likely to become the controlling principles of action in social intercourse and in all the practical affairs of life.
And, could I be granted the privilege of beginning my life anew, with the hope of improving upon that I have now nearly passed (a boon which I would gladly accept), I should wish to pass my childhood and youth in just such a community as that which I made the first experiment, subjected to the same necessities for exertion, and relying upon the same maxims of doing the best I could and leaving the rest to Providence.”
Nothing finer could be said of a community than this description of our own people. Many of the children of those people have removed to other sections of the country and others have displaced them but, in the main, the present Fulton County, NY population is the descendants of those people.
If this citizenship is less prone to violent reversals of opinions than is that of some of the more crowded centers of population in the country, if we are a little slower in adopting the new because it is new and a little more averse to the present tendency toward asking the government to do as a collective agency what the individual can better do, it seems natural to believe it is because the “qualities of mind and the habits of industry and self-reliance” of these earlier people still reside in their descendants and are but little polluted by the continental standards now partially accepted in those parts of the country dominated by children of new immigrants.
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Michigan's University Research Corridor (URC) is proving to be a powerful business incubator for students and alumni, playing a dramatically increased role in nurturing start-up efforts and providing a boost to aspiring entrepreneurs, a new report shows.
Graduates of the three universities that make up the URC – Michigan State University, the University of Michigan and Wayne State University -- have started or acquired businesses at double the national average rate among college graduates since 1996. URC alumni were 1.5 times as successful as the average U.S. business owner at keeping those start-ups and acquisitions alive in the past five years, according to the Embracing Entrepreneurship report released today at the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Mackinac Policy Conference.
The survey included responses from more than 40,000 of the three schools’ 1.2 million alumni. The responses revealed that more than 19 percent of the URC alumni surveyed have started a company, and some have created more than one.
That entrepreneurial activity reached to every state and more than 100 countries, with nearly half the new enterprises started or acquired in Michigan. URC alumni are making an impact far and wide, as can be seen by the careers of venture capitalist and University of Michigan graduate Peter Farner in Kalamazoo, Mich., Michigan State University graduate Nzimiro Oputa and his New York City fashion design business, and Howard Birndorf, a Wayne State University graduate who started a biotechnology company in California that he eventually sold to Eli Lilly and Co.
The report was prepared by East Lansing, Mich.-based Anderson Economic Group (AEG) using alumni survey data collected by Survey Sciences Group LLC (SSG). It showed that URC alumni were more likely to have started a business if they held a degree in business, the arts, communications, computer and information sciences, architecture or law. Most URC entrepreneurs started a business in an area outside their major area of study, suggesting that the URC universities are preparing graduates with a broad base of skills useful in launching a business.
“We often think entrepreneurs are people with an engineering or scientific background, but the survey shows that Michigan’s entrepreneurs come from many fields of study,” said University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman. “In many cases, you’re just as likely to start a business if you studied architecture or the arts.”
The three URC universities have revamped their curriculum in recent years and taken other steps to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit in their students and graduates. They now offer more than 40 programs and resources for students, alumni and faculty, including classes and degrees in entrepreneurship, business incubators, special advisers and gap funding to help start-ups get off the ground.
“Every year the URC institutions are graduating more than 30,000 students. The study suggests that a significant number of these alumni are starting their own businesses, and more than 50 percent of those businesses are here in Michigan, contributing to our state’s economic prosperity,” said URC executive director Jeff Mason. “The URC is committed to supplying the tools that can lead to new companies and more jobs.”
That increased effort is one reason 70 percent of URC alumni entrepreneurs who graduated in the past decade are starting their businesses at an earlier age–between 23 and 31 years old, the survey showed, although alumni of every age are involved in entrepreneurial activity. Some, such as southeast Michigan Emagine Entertainment founder and Wayne State graduate Paul Glantz, started their own business as a hedge in an uncertain economy. Baby Einstein founder Julie Aigner Clark drew on her Michigan State University education degree to offer parents educational videos once she became a stay-at-home mom. Kalyan Handique started Handylabs while a graduate student, taking advantage of entrepreneur programs at the University of Michigan.
Michigan State University President Lou Anna K. Simon pointed out that the three URC universities conferred the most graduate and undergraduate degrees and the second-highest number of high-demand degrees among seven university innovation clusters nationwide in 2011. “Michigan’s three premier research universities are doing more every year to promote an entrepreneurial mindset while helping Michigan’s businesses grow by providing the talent they need,” she said. “By focusing on entrepreneurship at all three universities, we’re creating a deep pool of talented graduates who can help start-up companies succeed.”
A total of 589,840 URC alumni live in Michigan. Some bring their talents to businesses statewide, while others tap their talents to start their own enterprises. “The three URC universities see themselves as the leading engine for innovation in Michigan and the Great Lakes region, with a focus on increasing economic prosperity and connecting Michigan to the world,” said Wayne State University President Allan Gilmour. “Our coordinated efforts should encourage even more entrepreneurs and start-ups in the future.”
At the behest of the URC, Anderson Economic Group studied the contributions URC alumni entrepreneurs have made, their economic footprint, and the steps that the three universities have taken to encourage entrepreneurship. Surveys went to nearly half a million living alumni, and more than 40,000 responded.
“The careful steps taken by our research team, the URC and other partners, accompanied by the very large number of responses, mean we can be confident in the findings,” said Patrick Anderson, principal and founder of AEG, and a URC alumnus. “Companies of the future are being started by URC graduates, and this study shows that the universities are preparing students in Michigan to take on roles as business owners.”
Successful commercialization combines the "science" of formulating a winning physical product/process with the "art" of marketing strategy and implementation. In a way, this combination of product science and marketing art emulates the craftsmen of yesteryear who applied crude tools with a system of methods and principles into a skillful performance that could not be learned solely by study.
In today's high-tech world, most technically-oriented product developers would be well advised to seek out a marketing artist to work with — rather than trying to become the all-in-one craftsman.
For more self-coaching tips on commercializing your start-up, get a copy of the new "Ask the Coach" ebook or paperback at your online bookseller.
GOLD suffered its biggest two-day fall in 30 years on April 12th and 15th. When an asset falls so sharply in price, it is tempting to believe that significant economic changes must be afoot.
Like the government-backed paper money that gold bugs despise, gold is precious only so long as enough people agree that it is.
Exactly; when too many people agree that gold is precious, it’s a top. When too few agree, it’s a bottom.
Successful market analysis is rooted in irony and paradox. Our gold and silver analysis at the peak two years ago relied heavily on five arguments directly opposed to those offered everywhere else we look.
On Tuesday afternoon (April 23), Robert Prechter, a famed market technician known for calling the roaring bull market of the '80s, the 1987 crash and the March 2009 stock market low, published an urgent new issue of his Elliott Wave Theorist.
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Due to the timely nature of this issue, EWI cannot make the first two pages available indefinitely, so they've set a date of May 8 to end this special promotion -- at which time the first two pages will no longer be available for free.
When in doubt, it is rare that your stockbroker will tell you to get out. We don't always agree with Bob, but we do respect his outlook. This special two-page Theorist is worth your time. Follow this link to read it now.
Self-coaching is about coaching yourself. As powerful and effective as professional coaching can be, it is only affordable to less than one percent of the workforce.
Coach John G. Agno shares his decades of professional coaching and consulting knowledge to create a better life for many through proprietary self-coaching guides; delivered to your smart phone, tablet, eReader, and computer or via low-cost paperback books.
Self-coaching invites and encourages people to reflect through learning by reading and listening to themselves, asking questions and empowering themselves to facilitate their own development and improvement in performance.
"Ask the Coach," provides free and low-cost self-coaching resources. These human resource (HR) coaching tools include online self assessments to provide more self-awareness.
Being unaware, we unconsciously engage our default behavior. Only when we become aware of something, are we able to make choices as to the action we wish to take. Sometimes, just being aware, allows the problem to solve us--rather than requiring us to solve the problem.
Self-coaching tools are about designing and using the information in a way most appropriate for its purpose. Often, coaching tools are labeled with the prefix "coaching" because they are more sophisticated, flexible, adaptable or customized than other standardized, off-the-shelf solutions. Please note that the term "self-coaching" may apply to specific as well as general tools. Terms like "leadership coaching tips," "career women coaching tips," and "baby boomer life coaching tips" may emphasize that these areas are understood and done in a coaching way.
Frequent self-coaching keeps you abreast of what's effective in your area of interest. Also, people learn better and are positively motivated when supported by regular coaching.
This new self-coaching (via Internet access) using mobile smartphones, tablets, eReaders and laptop computers can be seen as more eclectic, proactive, pluralistic, dynamic, inclusive, differentiating, sophisticated and integrating than previous approaches.
Here is a list of free and low-cost self-coaching and access sources:
We can learn a lot about improving the 21st-century world from an icon of the industrial era: the steam engine.
Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book "The Most Powerful Idea in the World." Among the most important were a new way to measure the energy output of engines and a micrometer dubbed the "Lord Chancellor" that could gauge tiny distances.
European Pressphoto Agency Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Such measuring tools, Mr. Rosen writes, allowed inventors to see if their incremental design changes led to the improvements—such as higher power and less coal consumption—needed to build better engines. There's a larger lesson here: Without feedback from precise measurement, Mr. Rosen writes, invention is "doomed to be rare and erratic." With it, invention becomes "commonplace."
In the past year, I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition. You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal—in a feedback loop similar to the one Mr. Rosen describes.
This may seem basic, but it is amazing how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right. Historically, foreign aid has been measured in terms of the total amount of money invested—and during the Cold War, by whether a country stayed on our side—but not by how well it performed in actually helping people. Closer to home, despite innovation in measuring teacher performance world-wide, more than 90% of educators in the U.S. still get zero feedback on how to improve.
An innovation—whether it's a new vaccine or an improved seed—can't have an impact unless it reaches the people who will benefit from it. We need innovations in measurement to find new, effective ways to deliver those tools and services to the clinics, family farms and classrooms that need them.
I've found many examples of how measurement is making a difference over the past year—from a school in Colorado to a health post in rural Ethiopia. Our foundation is supporting these efforts. But we and others need to do more. As budgets tighten for governments and foundations world-wide, we all need to take the lesson of the steam engine to heart and adapt it to solving the world's biggest problems.
One of the greatest successes in terms of using measurement to drive global change has been an agreement signed in 2000 by the United Nations. The Millennium Development Goals, supported by 189 nations, set 2015 as a deadline for making specific percentage improvements across a set of crucial areas—such as health, education and basic income. Many people assumed the pact would be filed away and forgotten like so many U.N. and government pronouncements. The decades before had brought many well-meaning declarations to combat problems from nutrition to human rights, but most lacked a road map for measuring progress. However, the Millennium goals were backed by a broad consensus, were clear and concrete, and brought focus to the highest priorities.
When Ethiopia signed on to the Millennium goals in 2000, the country put hard numbers to its ambition to bring primary health care to all of its citizens. The concrete goal of reducing child mortality by two-thirds created a clear target by which to measure success or failure. Ethiopia's commitment attracted a surge of donor money toward improving the country's primary health-care services.
With help from the Indian state of Kerala, which had built a successful network of community health-care posts, Ethiopia launched its own program in 2004 and today has more than 15,000 health posts staffed by 34,000 workers. (This is one of the greatest benefits of measurement—the ability it gives government leaders to make comparisons across countries and then learn from the best.)
Last March, I visited the Germana Gale Health Post in the Dalocha region of Ethiopia, where I saw charts of immunizations, malaria cases and other data plastered to its walls. This information goes into a system—part paper-based and part computerized—that helps government officials see where things are working and to take action in places where they aren't. In recent years, data from the field have helped the government respond more quickly to outbreaks of malaria and measles. Perhaps even more important, the government previously didn't have any official record of a child's birth or death in rural Ethiopia. It now tracks those metrics closely.
The health workers provide most services at the posts, though they also visit the homes of pregnant women and sick people. They ensure that each home has access to a bed net to protect the family from malaria, a pit toilet, first-aid training and other basic health and safety practices. All these interventions are quite simple, yet they've dramatically improved the lives of people in this country.
Ethiopia has lowered child mortality more than 60% since 1990, putting the country on track to achieve the Millennium goal of lowering child mortality two-thirds by 2015, compared with 1990. Though the world won't quite meet the goal, we've still made great progress: The number of children under 5 years old who die world-wide fell to 6.9 million in 2011, down from 12 million in 1990 (despite a growing global population).
—Mr. Gates is the co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the co-founder of Microsoft. This piece is adapted from the foundation's annual letter from Mr. Gates, to be published Wednesday, January 30, 2013.