by Rick Baker
On Dec 24, 2009
This is blog #2 in an 8-blog series about Powerful Answers to 7 important business questions. The series is intended to be an introduction to strategic intuition and strategic planning.
Preamble: Perhaps you have life-goals, including a life-goal for the business-work part of your life? If you do then that makes it easier to answer Question 1. If you do not have a life-goal for business and would appreciate a simple tool designed to help people write one out then let me know. I created a tool called My Business© about 10 years ago. I can email a copy of it to you.
Question 1: What will your business look like when you are finished building it?
'The Manufacturing Innovation Network (MIN) is the central place for local manufacturers in the Waterloo Region to:
- Build Awareness - raise awareness of products and services manufactured in the region both on a local and global scale.
- Network - improve collaboration and knowledge sharing between companies and industry professionals in an effort to create shared best practices, standard protocols and new innovations. Members can join peer groups, create professional profiles and access experts in blogs and online discussion forums.
- Trade - a centralized e-marketplace for buying, selling and promoting goods and services online, such as classified ads, job board and a comprehensive company directory.'
Postamble: Question 1 is around business Vision and Mission. Waterloo MIN expresses its raison d'être in a clear, straightforward statement. Clear, straightforward statements are powerful. Written statements are powerful.
Trivia: according to William Duggan, the word strategy did not enter the English language until 1810. The word tactics had been in English dictionaries almost 200 years before the word strategy arrived.
Footnotes: Statements of
Vision apply to organizations and also to people. Napoleon Hill [
www.naphill.org] called this
definite purpose and
chief aim in life. My observations indicate - if a person has a personal
Vision then it is easier for that person to create a
Vision for his/her organization. So, I created a 'tool' many years ago, to help people set and write out their thoughts about
what they want to accomplish during their business careers. I called the tool
My Business©. Heres a link to that tool -
My Business©.
The next blog will consider Question 2:
What HUMAN strengths will you use to build your business?