I really like Anita Campbell’s How to Put the Life Back Into Your Company post yesterday on the American Express OPEN Forum.
She starts:
After the past two years of the recession – watching expenses like a hawk and keeping a close eye on receivables – it wouldn’t be surprising if you ended up with a bunker mentality.
That certainly hit home for me.
Anita goes from there to some very good suggestions taken not from the standard small business cliches we’re all tired of, but rather, from real experience, related to real people. Like get out of the office for a while, for example; and do something just for you. This is good advice.
Here’s Anita’s list. My advice is
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Like it or not, your real priority, my real priority, our society’s real priority shows up not in what we say but in how we spend our resources, including, of course, how we spend our time. Time is the scarcest resource.
Author David McCandless at Information is Beautiful called it Cognitive Surplus Visualized in honor of Clay Shirky’s Ted Talk. I’m don’t love the phrase “cognitive surplus,” but I do get the point. And this chart speaks for itself. Well done.
When I see those two boxes, I can’t help thinking how huge the effort of Wikipedia; how much is there, information on how many different topics, how many people it took, and how many hours it took. Then I compare it to the big box next to it.
I admit it. I got really jealous of all the Zen of this and Zen of that writing, dating all the way back to the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I wanted to like, tried to like, but couldn’t. 
Yes, I gave into the horrible temptation, and even posted Zen and Business Planning here. I’m sorry. It was a moment of weakness.
Yes, I’m conflicted. Here I am after 30+ years of professional business planning fascinated by Gil Fronsdal and friends on Zencast, trying hard to reconcile Zen and business planning, and failing. Putting Zen and business planning into the same post is kind of like putting a dog and a raccoon into the same laundry bag.
Confession: my vanity license plate reads “not Zen.” If I could add a subtitle, it would be “… but trying.” After all, if I really were Zen, I wouldn’t put it on a vanity license plate. Right?
So
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Go ahead, you can ask: what do I know about this? I’m an old white guy, so take what I have to say here with some healthy skepticism. 
But I like to think my eyes were opened up to gender inequality by my pre-hippy question-authority mother back in the early 1960s, and kept open by 40 years of marriage to a smart, strong woman and 38 years of fatherhood to four now-grown-up, well=educated, and successful daughters (and one son).
So here’s what I know about this:
1. The statistics are confusing at best.
Statistics on entrepreneurship, startups, and the like are hard to decipher. It looks like women start more companies than men, but it also looks like those companies get less capital and financing. Some will argue that women-owned businesses perform differently, tend to grow slower, or stay smaller. The truth, however, is that we really don’t know. There a
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How do you spend your time? What you spend the most work time with ought to be what you value the most in the business. Right? That’s your real priority.
When I was an active consultant, one of the problems I had with business strategy consulting was getting the client companies to manage their spending and activities according to their own priorities. The danger was that they’d set strategy one way in the offsite strategy meetings, then go back to the office, get back in the routine, and follow a completely different strategy in what they actually do.
I don’t know if this is universal; I didn’t read it, I just started using the term strategic alignment, which I define as making your actual work match your strategic priorities.
In my consulting mode, with groups in larger companies, I did two things to help with strategic alignment:
- First, I’d help them build a strategy pyramid to relate strategies, tactics, and programs (business activities).
- Second, I’d build a database of spending and track program spending to tactics and strategies, to see how the spending matched the priorities.
So lately I’ve been trying to apply that kind of business strategy concept to my own work. It’s scary wh
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