Financial Strategic-Planning

How to Focus Your Financial Strategy : A great deal has been written on how great businesses move forward on gut instinct and how so many bad business decisions are borne out of over analysis. Think about this. Take a close look at the word 'analyze'. The first four letters are a giveaway! This is the part of their anatomy that accountants talk and look through! Don't worry, it's a joke - For my sins, I started my career as a tax consultant and accountant - but I'm getting over it! Seriously, seventy years research in psychology has determined that the normal mind is all over the place, is almost incapable of achieving focus. And fifty years psychological research in the field of team dynamics proves that the senior management teams of almost all organizations are dysfunctional. This should come as no surprise if the majority of the team players are normally-minded. The key point is that you will only ever get more of the same from the normal, dysfunctional people who make up your time until you actually give them something that focuses their minds, that excites them, that says to them "this is how our lives will look and feel when our business is an out-of-the-ordinary success". The normal mind needs an abnormal amount of focus to achieve anything worth talking about. Let's take a look at a couple of examples of how two very different businesses approached the challenge of exciting their people. I was contacted a few weeks ago by a bank which will remain nameless for reasons that are about to become obvious. I was told by the bank's Director of Strategy that the bank was hemorrhaging customers to its competition because "there is no concept of customer service here at all". I learned that the bank had decided that a 'customer service culture' should be central to the bank's resurrection - but that the initiative simply wasn't working. I did some digging and realized that the great minds on high - the Board - actually thought that they could bring about some miraculous transformation by coming up with a mission statement that said - and I quote - "we will delight customers by delivering a memorable and extraordinary customer experience." Why bother saying this to normal crazy people who really and truly do not care? The subconscious needs to be turned on. The subconscious mind, at its most powerful, is open, excited, focused and determined - just like a young childlike mind. And children are most focused by exciting things. The normal adult state of mind is, unfortunately, unfocused, disinterested, unexcited. If you want to achieve the spectacular in and for your business, you're going to have to give everyone an idea, a mission, a goal that they can actually get excited about. Otherwise, forget it. Your business might be successful - but don't forget what your comparing yourself to - what normal pathetic companies think of as success - don't mind them, remember that they're all normal, all crazy, all dysfunctional. Don't put yourself up on a pedestal for that kind of pathetic success. Now, compare that nonsense to the tiny start-up business that was trying to make its mark in an already competitive marketplace. This small company only had one mission - to crush the then market leader. Do you think that such a challenging goal might focus the mind? Do you think that this bunch of guys might just have been on a mission - as compared to simply physically turning up for work? The market leader as Adidas - the fledgling was Nike!

You've got to be bold, different, way out there. A few weeks back, a group of business leaders asked me how you'd recognize the difference between true gut feeling and what could be described as conventional wisdom (which is, by the way, a contradiction in terms!). The answer is that real gut instinct is bold, different, way out there. Burn your management books - if the recent turmoil in developed economies has taught us anything it is that existing ways of managing and leading are not working. Forget your MBA courses - it's impossible to become extraordinarily successful when you've been taught by normal crazy people in a lecture room. Take a few minutes and think about how it would feel to have it all, to have arrived at the strategic outcome. Consider how you and your key players would feel. What would they be driving? What exotic location would you go to for holidays? And where would you be and what would you be doing at the special event that you'd organize to celebrate an extraordinarily successful business year? What would people come up and say to you at business conferences? How would your friends in the tennis club look at you? How would you feel about yourself? These are the things that excite the subconscious mind. If you cannot concentrate the mind, focus the subconscious, you're never going to achieve anything of any great value.

Tips for Financial Planning : The following tips will help get you in gear to start your financial planning. Once you have made financial planning part of your routine, it won't seem so difficult. But getting your financial planning started can be the most difficult thing. These tips will help motivate you to make financial planning one of your main goals.