Another great post from Nathan Collier on the basics of running a business - engagement, alignment, and accountability. Actually he didn’t use those words but it always comes back to that.

See here for more.

At least that’s what my buddy Garry Duncan at Leadership Connections says in his recent email. The text is below:

Hope is a Strategy

The sign said, “Hope is not a strategy!”   Maybe so, but without it why bother?  Alone, hope is not a strategy.  But hope with action makes dreams and goals possible.  Are you hoping for success or do you have a goal and a plan?   Dreams, goals and plans make everyday productive.  Hope is defined as a desire of some good, accompanied with an expectation of obtaining it, or a belief that it is obtainable.   Average sellers just hope.  Great sellers define their hope in the form of goals and plans and then take action.  If your sales cycle is longer than three months you are now working on 2010 goals.  Have you defined them?  Do you know what actions you need to meet 2009 goals in this last quarter of the year?  Put your hope into action with a daily goal either in sales or activity.

Today’s Wall Street Journal article “Firms Try Alternative To Marketing” highlights how companies are reducing marketing spend and trying to get greater accountability from their pr and marketing efforts. This shows up as lower retainers and bonuses based on performance, such as earned media in specific magazines or improved website conversion.

This begs the question of how to manage and measure performance when you are selling something other than hours, reminiscent of the fable “The Mice In Council“.

The answer is using PositiveWare as your platform to track clients, time, and goals. Using our unique tree view to visualize your clients and their goals creates alignment for your team, and is a framework for setting expectations for clients and managing your own team’s performance.

Some clients ask me how to run PositiveWare when their computer starts up, or in a way that makes it look like a separate application. The answer to these questions is a Site Specific Browser, such as Fluid for OS X.

Fluid allows you to create a specific browser for PositiveWare, which is saved separately in the Applications Folder. This looks like its own application, and can be dragged to the dock for easy accessibility.

An alias of this can be put in the Login Items to be opened automatically when you login. To add an item to Login Items, click on the Apple Menu, then Accounts. Select the Account that you wish to open PositiveWare, the click on the Login Items. Click on the plus icon to add an item, and select the application you created using Fluid.

Did I mention Fluid is free?

PositiveWare champion and military entrepreneur Lt. Col. E.L. Vaughan IV was inducted into the Air Force Safety Hall of Fame, very much on the strength of the Disruptive Solutions Process he championed.

Congratulations Lawrence!

Beth at Weise Communications writes up a great Twitter case study.

friend writes that he was recently laid off from his job at a firm in Utah. My advice to him:

My quick take is that if you have any penchant for entrepreneurship I think there is always a crying need for outsourced help desk and support for SMBs. Companies between 1 and 20 are in a crack because they need computers but they are not quite large enough to justify an IT person. If you can add to that the ability to help them think strategically about IT, help in hiring when they do decide to hire and IT person and even placement, then you have the makings of a real and sustainable business.

As an example of what one of these offerings looks like, check out IT Handyman.

And of course don’t forget that PositiveWare is a great app for helping the SMB execute its plan.

I was surprised and a little chagrined to read about Microsoft’s PerformancePoint Planning a few months ago. Was this the PositiveWare killer? Were all our hopes of changing how people think about Performance Management irretrievably crushed?

Not so much.

Turns out MSFT is killing the product as of January 23 or so, in conjunction with other pain throughout the organization. Functionality from the application will be available through Sharepoint Server.

Of course we were never too worried because PerformancePoint Planning and products like it fail to recognize that the key to successful operations is not a dashboard, but people, people who are engaged, aligned, trained, and managed. Any effort to use software to reduce or replace the role of management is bound to fail (admittedly this is a strawman argument but what the heck, they killed the product.)

So why does PositiveWare not contradict this? Because we are more a system of record for managers and employees, a way to capture goals, projects, and tasks, and collaborate on them. We passionately believe that the best management is deeply personal, and that by removing administrative barriers to knowing what everyone is doing on everyone can focus on how to do better.

The new blog from Weise Communications comes with a provocative title.