Communicate perceived weaknesses

Planned Parenthood’s stance is that Komen is bowing to political pressure and that they were blindsided. Komen says that it just didn’t fit their criteria anymore. A partnership is an extension of your business goals and although those goals do change, what shouldn’t change is how you communicate what you need from your partner. You have to have conversations and those conversations have to be meaningful.

Align your values

While it’s true you are going to have staff members who don’t support the partnership, you need to make sure that their resistance won’t be used to terminate the partnership. Komen hired Karen Handel as the VP of Public Policy and it’s said that she is pro-life and publicly denounced Planned Parenthood. The moral of this story is that you can’t form a partnership without agreeing on some fundamental things and marrying another company that hates a big part of what you do is a recipe for disaster.

Have multiple sources of funding

Forming a partnership can create a lifeboat in your business, but just like revenue streams this situation has taught us that we need to be aware of multiple partnerships. As partnerships evolve and outgrow each other, there is a need to be aware of alternatives. It’s worth looking into multiple partnerships, because just one revenue stream is madness.

Headquarters doesn’t always know best

This decision was made at the national level and several state affiliates have openly disagreed with the decision. This is a powerful point that most businesses miss. Before you make a decision about your staff’s future you need to have a conversation with them. You need their input and you should have a good gauge of their reaction before you make any change, their acceptance or reluctance is going effect you whether you like it or not.

Partnerships are not easy, but they can be beneficial to everyone involved as long as you lay down some ground rules. Your business is your baby, do you really want to leave its future up to someone else?

This image is the FIRST thing that people will see of you and your business when they come across you online, so your brand needs to be an accurate representation of what you’re all about.

One of the biggest mistakes I see entrepreneurs making with their brand is a major lack of consistency. Their website looks one way, their business cards have a completely different design, and their Facebook page and Twitter profile have something completely different going on, as well. Nothing matches up consistently and the result is that they are communicating a very mixed message, which can be super confusing for people who come in contact with them!

Here are some of the amazing benefits of having a consistent, cohesive brand.

Look like the Expert in Your Field

When your branding is beautiful, professional and consistent across all of your marketing pieces it immediately gives people the impression that YOU are the expert in your field. It conveys that you know what you’re doing, you have it all together, and you’re serious about your business and helping your customers.

Look at some of the big brands that you see every day: Starbucks, FedEx, Coca Cola. Their branding is on EVERYTHING that they do, and it makes them look professional and you get the impression they are the expert and are serious about what they do.

Become Easily Recognizable

When you’re consistent with your branding, people will start to recognize you. They’ll come across you different places online, or come in contact with your offline marketing materials, and it won’t matter where they find you. They’ll be seeing the same image and it will start to become familiar.

Again, look at Starbucks or Coca Cola. When you see their branding, you know who and what it is. It’s familiar and recognizable, you feel like you know them. This familiarity builds trust, which is a very important part of getting people to buy from you.

Feel Confident about Your Brand

One of my favorite benefits of having a consistent, cohesive brand is that it makes me feel more confident about marketing myself. It gives me a feeling of being professional and irresistible. I love to see my website, Facebook page, email newsletter, business cards and everything else matching up and looking sooo good.

The truth is, if you don’t feel good about your brand and how your business is represented, potential customers will pick up on that. When you don’t feel good about it, you’re putting out vibes that say, “I’m not very good” or “I’m not really an expert” or other negative thoughts and feelings. And other people will sense that, usually subconsciously, and they’ll be turned off.

But when you feel great about your brand and how your business looks, it will draw your ideal customers right to you like a magnet. They will pick up on that feeling of being irresistible and will be attracted to you and your business. They’ll see you as the professional expert you are, because you’ll be feeling like it and portraying it in everything you do.

How’s your brand doing? Is it consistent and cohesive, or could it use some work? What action are you going to take today to make it more consistent?

You can also follow the link to read an op-ed piece that Lilly Ledbetter contributed to the Charlotte Observer on January 29, 2012 — the 3rd anniversary of the Lilly Ledbetter Act.

This month, President Obama released a new video asking for support of the Paycheck Fairness act, which would protect women who try to find out if they’re receiving equal pay and would make it easier for them to take action if they’re not. You can view that video below.

As President Obama says, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act brought us one step closer to equal pay for equal work, but there is still work to be done. Every step forward is a step in the right direction.

It used to be that the business landscape was a man’s world. Times have certainly changed!

Today, women are wielding more and more power on both sides of the business transaction.

First, let’s look at some facts from the consumer side. In family purchases that involve two adults (a woman and a man) women make:

• 94% of the purchase decision on home furnishings
• 92% of the purchase decision on family vacations
• 91% of the purchase decision on home purchases
• 80% of the purchase decision on healthcare
• 60% of the purchase decision on family cars
• 51% of the purchase decision on consumer electronics

It’s clear that in many cases, women are not just influencing the market; they are the market. And perhaps even more surprising is that these statistics have changed very little over the past ten years. In other words, women have been the market for some time now yet many executives have not taken action on this huge opportunity. And while these figures represent US households, the percentages are being exported due to technology driven globalization. Even in countries where you’d expect women to have no voice at all, thanks to computers and smart phones becoming more prevalent worldwide, people everywhere are getting informed and empowered, which ultimately has an effect on culture.

This brings us to the other side of the equation. Who is running and leading the companies that make the products women are buying for themselves and their families? Increasingly, it’s women.

In 2012, 18 of the Fortune 500 companies will have women CEOs at the helm. While at first glance 18 may not seem like a lot, it’s an all-time high and shows the steady pace of women leading the largest companies in the world.

Even more interesting is that we’re now seeing women lead companies in industries that have been historically male dominated. For example, for the first time ever, IBM chose a woman CEO, Virginia “Ginni” Rometty. Hewlett-Packard, another technology company, named Meg Whitman as their CEO in September 2011. These are just two examples of global, male-dominated companies now run by women.

And this trend isn’t just in the US. India, for example, has more women CEOs than the US. And over the past 30 years we’ve seen the number of women leaders in the Middle East, Africa, China, and Europe increase as well.

Now it’s important to note that so far we’ve just been talking about CEO spots at major corporations. Add in the number of female CEOs at small and mid-sized companies, female upper level managers, and female entrepreneurs, and you can see that we’re actually talking about a large number. And these are numbers you wouldn’t have seen twenty years ago. So women are definitely making their mark and exerting their business power.

The New Hard Trends

Some people may say the rise of female leaders is surprising. I say it’s 100% predictable. In my book, Flash Foresight, I make the point that in an uncertain world, you have to ask yourself, “What am I certain about?” Strategy based on uncertainty has high risk; strategy based on certainty has low risk. There are a number of certainties in today’s world that make the rise of women obvious.

Relationships are number one.

The number one certainty is that the future is all about relationships. Even though we live in a technology-driven world, it’s still a human world and relationships still matter. This is where women shine.

Most people and even scientists and researchers agree that women and men think differently in terms of relationships. Women are more adept at relationship building. If we have too many leaders in an organization who are men, we don’t have a balance and we don’t have the ability to grow relationships with a holistic approach. That’s because men tend to be informers while women tend to be real communicators.

This is important and timely, because we’re shifting from the information age to the communication age. Social media is all about communicating and engaging, and women have the upper hand here. So the shift in business from informing to communicating provides great opportunity for women leadership.

The big picture matters.

Women are intuitively great “system-thinkers.” In other words, rather than just look at the piece of the puzzle you’re responsible for and executing on that, which men tend to be very good at, women are adept at looking more holistically at the entire puzzle or system and seeing how the various pieces go together.

Obviously, it’s not that men can’t be system-thinkers. But over the years as men were in leadership positions—not just the CEO level, but all lead managers—they focused on “give me the job to do and I’ll focus and get it done.” That’s certainly important, but sometimes that mindset works against you as things become more interconnected.

Collaboration is key.

Women tend to seek agreement and work at being more collaborative. In fact, women seem to be far better at collaboration than men are. In the past, business was about cooperation, and we cooperated because we had to. Men are great at cooperating. But in this new totally networked and connected world, we need to find and develop new levels of collaboration.

Everyone has heard of “silos” in companies. We have massive silos in all sorts of industries. The key is to break those silos down and get people communicating, collaborating, and working together. No job is just a technical job; every job is also a human job.

Passion counts.

When women are excited and passionate about a product, a service, a company, or whatever they are doing, they become extremely driven from that emotion. Men, on the other hand, strive to hide their emotions. Having an emotional drive can be very powerful in leading a business, product launches, and any initiative. This is not saying that men can’t be passionate. It’s just that male-dominated groups are one-sided and tend to downplay the positive benefits of emotion and passion as a force to drive innovation and growth.

Taking risks (carefully) is essential.  

Women are now starting to do something that’s been a male trait for a long time: They’re becoming risk takers. Men are hard-wired to be risk takers, and they make decisions fast. Sometimes it’s not always the right decision, but it is a decision. Unfortunately, this often becomes a ready-fire-aim approach. Women, on the other hand, tend to analyze, think things through, weigh all the elements, and then make a decision. Today we’re seeing more women taking bigger risks in shorter amounts of time. Part of this is due to the increased speed that information is available. This combination of thinking first and acting fast is certainly good news, because the old rule of business was the big eat the small; now the fast eat the slow.

A Brighter Future

Granted, some people may say all these elements are generalizations, but there is truth in generalization. So while all these traits may not apply to every woman, if you look at the group as a whole, these things tend to be true.

So the bottom line is that diversity has always been an unbelievably powerful force in any company—not just racial diversity, but male-female diversity too. All diversity gives you better solutions to challenges, allows you to solve problems faster, and enables you to see opportunities better. This is crucial, because over the next five years we’re going to be transforming how we sell, market, educate, train, communicate, collaborate, innovate, and much more. Thanks to today’s rapidly evolving technology, we’re witnessing the biggest game-changing transformation that any of us have ever lived through. And we’re going to need a variety of thinking, diversity, and people working together in a collaborative, communicative way to make a positive and productive transformation possible.

As we look to the future, we’re going to see the number of female business leaders growing even higher because we need the balance. We need the creativity. We need men and women working and leading together in business and in government. So if you’re a man reading this, support the women in your organization to reach new heights. And if you’re a woman reading this, think about your career. Plot it out. Make it happen. We need you!

About the Author

Daniel Burrus is considered one of the world’s leading technology forecasters and business strategists, and is the founder and CEO of Burrus Research, a research and consulting firm that monitors global advancements in technology driven trends to help clients better understand how technological, social and business forces are converging to create enormous, untapped opportunities. He is the author of six books, including the NY Times bestseller Flash Foresight: How To See the Invisible and Do the Impossible as well as the highly acclaimed Technotrends. Be sure to check out Volume 2 of Daniel’s Know What’s Next Magazine; an annual publication on strategies for transforming your business and future.

For the love of money!

One of the best leadership teachers in any era comes in the form of paper or metal.

We love it, hate it, covet it, or disdain it.

Our romance with money belongs in every leadership development program on the planet.

Ever hear the expression “You can never be too thin or too rich”? First, too thin is called anorexia and you can die from that. Too rich, question is what does the word really mean?

Rich in cold, hard cash, rich in love, rich in friends, rich in _________. You fill in the blank.

Money is so much more than a means of exchange for goods and services. It determines how we relate to family, friends, colleagues. Money can cause dissonance or harmony, it can make us serape or angry, and it can be a dream fulfiller or a dream destroyer.

New research, especially the work of Dan Ariely, whose book “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions”, delves into the behavioral aspects of why we buy, or hoard, or share; how we decide what we prefer and how money shapes relationships. This is eye opening information as we continue to learn in this time of economically induced stress (at least for so many of us).

The hidden aspects of money are fascinating to bring to the surface. And in this year of per-election presidential debates the theme of money is front and center. Mitt Romney is proud of making a bundle, Ron Paul is okay with much less, Newt Gingrich confuses us with where he got his money, and Rick Santorum has to make sure he has enough for his family of nine.

This is a good time to take stock personally. One of the most important areas for leadership training is money education. Start by understanding the subtle (or overt) messages that reverberated in your family as you were growing up. Think back about how power games around money were played.

Were decisions shared about what to buy or did one person have all the say?

Was there money for vacations, luxuries, or surprises?

Start to observe your reactions to partners, parents, co-workers, bosses, and children. Even pay attention to your thoughts at the gas station and the super market.

What is your tale about money? Careful the tale you tell, that is the magic spell!

Simplify, Simplify Simplify

This is the best part of the strategy, even though the J.C. Penney strategy is really not simple. They have a three tags system: red for everyday low prices, white for monthly value and a blue tag for the cheapest price. What is simple is creating a normal price tag with the everyday low prices, showcasing the monthly value in a sales display and simply letting the customer see for themselves that the monthly value merchandise is the cheapest. The customers are going to continue to comparison shop. They don’t really need you to do it for them. The lesson in this is don’t complicate the simple strategy, if you say it’s easy then it should be easy.

Communicate Changes

Whether the changes are simple or not, J.C. Penney is doing the right thing by communicating the potential changes with its customers. Many CEO’s forget that they are in business because of their customers and when customers stop seeing that you are fulfilling a need, they go somewhere else. Communicating changes before they happen also puts J.C. Penney in a position to perform a litmus test for the strategies, if customers like it they can move forward and if they don’t they still have time to adjust it. I think this is a great strategy.

Acknowledge your weaknesses

The most important thing to take away from J.C. Penney’s new strategy is that they weren’t afraid to acknowledge what was wrong. This is not an easy thing for a company to do because it creates the potential for criticism and staff confusion.  It’s a good thing because it creates an opportunity and that’s what business is all about. You get to step out of your role and say ‘well, that didn’t go well. How do I fix it?’ This is a powerful opportunity and running a business is an intimate relationship with your customers. To fix a problem you have to acknowledge it, and that’s exactly what they have done.

Strategy is a tricky part of business, but it’s also a chance to innovate in ways that your competition isn’t aware of. This is where the spirit of an entrepreneur is alive and well, and this is where we shine.

So why does your website need to be irresistible? Here are 3 benefits that you will see when you have an irresistible website:

1. Attract Your Ideal Customers

Having an irresistible website will help you to attract customers. And get this, it will not just help you to attract ANY customers, but will attract your ideal customers, those people that you MOST want to work with you or have buy from you.

In fact, your goal with your website should be to specifically make it irresistible to that specific target market that you want to do business with. When you focus on what will be irresistible to them, what they will be attracted to, and what kind of information or solutions they are specifically looking for, you end up with a website that speaks directly to them and makes them want to find out more.

And that right there is the sweet spot.

2. Boost Your Own Confidence

Having an irresistible website will make YOU feel good. When you have a site that you love, and that you know is attracting your ideal customers, you’ll feel more confident in really putting yourself out there as the expert that you are. You feel good about sending people to your site, instead of embarrassed because you think it’s not good enough.

And this feeling of confidence will permeate everything that you’re doing! You’ll be more confident in what you write and what you say, and you’ll feel great knowing that you and your business are accurately represented online.

3. Make More Money through Your Website

One of the fabulous things that an irresistible website does for you is to help you actually make money! When your website is irresistible, it portrays you as the expert in your field and lets your ideal customers know how you can help them, and what action they need to take to get your help. As it does this, it makes it far easier for them to make a decision, and to see that they do really need your products and services.

As your irresistible website attracts your ideal customers and provides the perfect solution for them, it has a cascading effect. That happy customer tells a friend, who comes to your irresistible website and becomes a customer. It’s a ripple effect that grows and spreads as you help more and more people, and as you continue to be irresistible and attractive to them and provide what they are looking for.

As you can see, there are some very powerful benefits to having an irresistible website!

If your website is not yet irresistible to your ideal customers, what are you going to do today to start to change that?

Off to the office, you battle the traffic, thinking about how to tell your rebel employee that there have been complaints about his behavior.

You dread the meeting and yet know it can’t wait.

Pulling into the parking lot you feel a wave of frustration, seeing that someone has parked in your reserved spot and the rain is now coming down in buckets. Glad there is an umbrella on the back seat, you make a run for it hugging folders from last night’s homework close to your chest.

The demands for your time never stop.

By noon, it feels like this Monday has been a month long and you start to wonder what it’s all about, why you work so hard and why there are so many demands on you that just don’t stop. Then you take a deep breath and realize,

“Ah, this is called BLUE MONDAY”.

This Monday, at the end of January, has been dubbed the most depressing day of the year, and you’re in the thick of it!

Now, step back and take a minute.

How many other Mondays do you feel depleted, discouraged, depressed?

This is a perfect time to take a cup of green tea, sit quietly for, oh, five minutes or so and quantify the amount of time you take care, really take care of yourself.

In research for my book “GUTSY: How Women Leaders Make Change” I was shocked that women STILL take so little time to nurture and nourish our personal selves. You would think that after the entire “stand up and be counted” era from the 1960’s till now, we would have gotten the message that self-care is a #1 priority.

In our GUTSY WOMEN WEEKEND RETREATS we teach that “self-care is not selfish care”. We spend time looking at the individual behavior patterns that we learned from our mothers and grandmothers and from the culture in which we grew. Then using this image: “A hungry waitress makes a very poor server”, there is time to develop YOUR action plan that includes personal time to do whatever makes you feel enriched.

It’s late in the afternoon and you find yourself calling your favorite massage therapist.

Tonight you will tackle BLUE MONDAY to the ground. You go girl!!!

A sincere thank you is a million times better than a well-crafted one.

I agree that there are certain guidelines you should follow for keeping a thank you short and sweet, but ultimately if it isn’t sincere it isn’t going to make a difference.  The key to a great thank you is acknowledging that an employee saved your behind and really came through for the company, the structure of the thank you is not as important as the spirit of it.

Be relevant

Many times a thank you is off the mark because this may have been the only positive light for the employee; in that case you shouldn’t try to make their situation look better. Say thank you for what they have done now, don’t try to create a trail of good deeds if there isn’t one. Let this one incident serve as positive reinforcement. Be sincere.

Feedback is best received when it’s true

Many leaders think that if something is wrapped in the right delivery it will be better received. While that is true to a point, an honest thank you will serve as the kind of feedback that is remembered. I think back to when I was a kid and the teacher or coach that offered out thanks only when you had truly done something amazing was the approval that I wanted.

You shouldn’t say it if you don’t mean it

I’m going to go against my mother here and wager that you shouldn’t say thank you if you don’t mean it. It’s like an insincere apology. It doesn’t accomplish anything but the other party knows that you don’t really mean. When I thank my staff, I want them know that they really saved my butt out there and I could not have done it without them.

Showing gratitude is a great for staff morale and employee engagement, but done for the wrong reasons it can actually do more harm than good.

If you don’t feel irresistible inside and out, then it’s going to be difficult to figure out how to be irresistible online. Because even your online presence and marketing has to start with YOU. And if you’re not feeling it, the people who come in contact with you are going to pick up on that.

Harness the power of your imagination to start feeling irresistible.

Imagine for a moment that you were irresistible. Close your eyes and picture what that would look like. How would you act? How would you look? How would other people respond to you, and how would you respond to them?

Now think about how you will feel when you are irresistible. What does your body feel like? What emotions do you feel? Do you feel strong and powerful? Or maybe you feel relaxed and sensual? Describe and feel those emotions right now as you imagine you being irresistible.

Doesn’t that feel GOOD? Wouldn’t you like to feel that way all the time?

Now imagine what it would look like and feel like to take that online! When you’re already feeling irresistible in and of yourself, what difference will that make in your website, Facebook presence or Twitter conversations? How will you act and how will other people respond to you? What will your website look like and how will visitors feel when they come to your site?

And by the way, you may want to take notes on this and write down what you’re picturing and feeling! This vision will help to guide you when it’s time to get some help with your website, or make some improvements on your own.

When you come from this irresistible, feeling good space, it will help to lead you to the branding and strategies that will convey that same irresistibility online! And if you decide to hire someone to help you, these notes can be a great resource for them to help them see your vision and what you want.

Keep seeing and feeling it!

Now that you’ve started to see and feel what it is like for you to be irresistible, hold on to that vision. Come back to this exercise as often as you like and spend time imagining, feeling the feelings and picturing how it will look. As you tune in and focus on this vision more and more, it will start to shift you toward actually being more irresistible! You’ll find yourself taking actions, saying things and thinking thoughts that make you more irresistible. It’s inevitable!

As this irresistibleness starts to grow and build inside you, it will also radiate out into the world around you. You’ll start to attract more ideal clients, your relationships will blossom, and most importantly, you’ll feel better than you ever have before.

And that irresistibleness will start to permeate and reflect through your website and the rest of your online presence.

If you want to take this further and get some help to really tap into your own irresistibility and fall in love with yourself, I am giving away one ticket to Release Your Inner Vixen, a program by my friend Kimberly Riggins from The Art of Eating Chocolate Naked that will help you use the power of pleasure to create the life of your dreams. You can find out more about the program and how to enter to win a ticket by clicking here.