OODA Loop by Purpleslog http://www.flickr.com/people/purpleslog/

If you have engaged my services in a coaching or consulting capacity, then you have no doubt heard me apply various theories of John Boyd to problems ranging from thought leadership marketing and design thinking, to global business strategy, and executive (or personal) action planning.

While I could go on and on, about Col. John Boyd, I want to concentrate on the implications of his “Destruction and Creation” paper for content marketers and thought leaders everywhere.

I intend to share one of my applications of this creation-destruction concept. Namely, how thought leaders can become prolific generators of transformational ideas in virtually any industry space by defining and mapping the frontiers of their knowledge domain, and then systematically attacking them to create new constructs.

But First…

In this brief (and easy to read) 8-page paper, Boyd draws from works in a wide range of disciplines to decompose the process by which the mind makes decisions in a fast-changing environment. He argues that in such a dynamic environment, humans try to comprehend the environment by continually destroying and creating meaning.

In other words, we map “whole picture” concepts, which are analogous to “meaning”.

Next, we break down these concepts into sub-domains and reconfigure these sub-domains into new “whole pictures” that embody new concepts.

He frames these concepts as “mental patterns” which can then be used as decision models. Here is a brief passage as he elaborates on the creation of mental concepts:

There are two ways in which we can develop and manipulate mental concepts to represent observed reality: we can start from an objective whole and break down to its particulars or we can start with the particulars and build towards a comprehensive whole. Saying it another way, but in a related sense, we can go from general-to-specific or from the specific-to-general. A little reflection here reveals that deduction is related to proceeding from the general-to-specific while induction is related to proceeding from specific-to-general.

In following this line of thought, can we think of other activities that are related to these two opposing ideas? Is not analysis related to proceeding from general-to-specific? Is not synthesis, the opposite of analysis, related to proceeding from specific-to-general? Putting all this together: Can we not say that general-to-specific is related to both deduction and analysis?

As an aspiring creator of new frameworks, concepts or thinking tools in your space, it is probably already obvious to you how you may apply this kind of thinking. If not, here are some hints:

What would you get if you have a car (whole concept), and then subtract the top (remove a sub-domain)?

You would have a new concept known as a convertible (new concept).

What would you get if you have a convertible (whole concept), and you add an automatic control for the convertible top (add a sub-domain)?

You would have a retractable top convertible (new concept).

This simple act of creation and destruction accounts for the vast majority of “new” innovation and creativity on the planet! It is positively Edisonian in its practicality!

Suppose we shatter the correspondence of each domain with its constituent elements? In other words, we imagine the existence of the parts but pretend the domains or concepts they were previously associated with do not exist.

-Col. John Boyd

It works with theory generation, concept formulation, book authorship, new venture creation, business model innovation, and much more.

Let’s move on to…

In your transition from upstart to accepted authority, you will have two hidden allies to work with if you use the principles I’m about to share with you.

• The first will be what I think of as the “Gravitational Pull Of Accepted Doctrine” (also known as dogma).
• The second is the recurring phenomenon I think of as the “Tyranny of Representational Models”

Dogma Is Your Friend
Organizations, communities of practice, and even whole societies often develop strong attachment to “current dogma”.

And with good reason.

Once upon a time, the community had a challenge, and the current dogma was once fresh insight (doctrine) that moved in to mitigate the challenge. However, this insight soon expands by necessity into doctrine, and then hardens over time into institutionalized dogma (when you watch the video clip above, take special note of Boyd’s description of how quickly doctrine becomes dogma).

Your job as an upstart, or an ascendant force in your industry, is to identify areas of over-reach, of obsolescence, or of dynamic change; Sub-domains that have slowly lost cohesion with newly accepted realities, that are just out-of-step, or that hold some internal contradictions, either in theory, or in practice (observed results).

In “Creation”, Boyd argues that because we use gestalt-type “whole picture” concepts to model reality, creativity (or the creation of new domains) must be preceded by a “destruction” of a previously held concept and that this is how our perception changes.

Organizations and professional communities who display an aversion to this “destruction” are often especially vulnerable to disruption from innovative new insights. In other words, those insiders who are smarter than you, more widely accepted than you, and more experienced than you are – who should have been making these discoveries – often have a “destruction avoidance” mental block.

Presumably, you do not… or at least, you will not after reading this article.

Models Are Your Friends
Before Einstein postulated his general theory of relativity, somewhat careless thinkers may have considered the Newtonian principle described as the “1st Law of Thermodynamics (or the law of conservation of energy), to have been some kind of “truth”.

It wasn’t. Instead, it was a model.

It was the most accurate model we had at the time for describing a much more complex reality. And like most effective models, in its heyday, it was co-opted as “truth” by many of the people who used and misunderstood it.

One of my favorite business thinkers and authors, is the Israeli Physicist Dr. Eli Goldratt. In the introduction to his masterful novel, “The Goal”, he indirectly alludes to this very tendency of “model as truth” when he said:

Science for me, and for the vast majority of respectable scientists, is not about the secrets of nature or even about truths. Science is simply the method we use to try and postulate a minimum set of assumptions that can explain, through a straightforward logical derivation, the existence of many phenomena of nature.

The Law of Conservation of Energy of physics is not truth. It is just an assumption that is valid in explaining a tremendous amount of natural phenomena. Such an assumption can never be proven since even an infinite number of phenomena that can be proven by it does not prove its universal application. On the other hand, it can be disproved by just a single phenomenon that cannot be explained by the assumption. This disproving does not detract from the validity of the assumption. It just highlights the need or even the existence of another assumption that is more valid. This is the case with the assumption of the conservation of energy which was replaced by Einstein’s more global – more valid – postulation of the conservation of energy and mass. Einstein’s assumption is not true to the same extent that the previous one was not “true”.

-Dr. Eli Goldratt, introduction of “The Goal”

Goldratt was attempting to counter the “model as truth” mental framework of his readers, before launching into his ground-breaking work which brought the “Theory of Constraints” model to the management world.

Consider the case of Einstein as a thought leadership model.

Einstein was largely an outsider during his glorious “miracle year” of 1905. Nominally, he accomplished his breakthrough by sacrificing the sacred cow of Newtonian physics upon the altar of his “relativity theory”. He reached his insights precisely because he tried to find a way to explain observations in the electromagnetic field that he felt were not explained by Newtonian mechanics.

Einstein had to mentally destroy the “Law of Conservation of Energy”, before he could create the “Law of Conservation of Energy and Mass”.

To the extent that the would-be thought leaders in your space are unconsciously wedded to “models as truth” (and they invariably always are), you have an opportunity to break these models and reconstruct them along the lines of your own observations.

In future explorations of concepts in thought leadership and thought leadership marketing, I will explore other insights arising from my study of Boyd’s Creation and Destruction paper and other works of his.

For every theory or model that exists, there is a real world application it does not adequately or accurately describe. Why?

…Because a model, by definition, is a “simpler” representation of a more complex reality.

By definition, it has to take some shortcuts – make some assumptions. By systematically examining the gap between reality and its cousin (the model, framework or theory), you greatly increase the chance that you will find a disconnect where the model does not fit, or even contradicts reality.Many fortunes have been made exploiting that disconnect. This is what I refer to as conducting an intellectual invasion.

In his paper, Boyd asks the reader to “imagine” the content domains as circles. Today you don’t have to imagine. I use simple mind mapping software to visualize and document new content domains I wish to research, understand, or define. Options like Xmind, Freemind, and TheBrain have free versions, and there are even more sophisticated information visualization-mind mapping tools that allow you to draw a web of connections between concepts you record.

Once you create these ecosystem maps of ideas in your space, you can begin to systematically examine the ideas (assumptions) that underpin them. Where are these assumptions shaky? Where do they falter in practice?

At a time when many financial planners were (and still are) teaching that everyday investors should consider their home an investment, Robert Kiyosaki came screaming that “your personal house is a liability” and that “anything that puts money in your pocket is an asset and anything that takes money out is a liability”. It was commonsensical.

He has built a massive publishing empire on the back of an insight that contradicted what most financial planners teach. He was proposing a “cash flow” approach to identifying assets and liabilities.

Think about taking some accepted framework in your industry or market niche, and see if you can use some of the ideas I have shared to create a new breakthrough. You don’t have to be correct because in this way of thinking, there’s no right or wrong.

Just consider whether the idea is defensible in the moment and context, or not. Of course, it is easier to defend and build on if it is rigidly logical and the sub-components of your own theories do not contradict each other. Your frameworks should be logical.

The concepts I explore in this article might seem a bit hard to grab for some people. However, it will make a lot more sense to you if you read the work by the late military strategist and systems philosopher.

1. Can you think of at least one commonly accepted principle (or practice) that seems to have no basis in common sense? seems illogical? or seems to be a relic of an earlier era but is ill-suited for the conditions to which it is currently applied?
2. Can you list the arguments, biases, or presumptions, that underlie its broad acceptance?
3. Do you know where you can find facts, statistics, theoretical frameworks, or anecdotal (commonsensical) insights that could authoritatively contradict these “commonly accepted doctrines”?
4. How can you make the insights above better or more complete? Is there any part of my case above you think I might have forgotten?

So, for comedy, let’s talk about “The debt ceiling”.

This famous (or infamous) topic has been dominating the news cycle for weeks now, and the question remains:

Um…What Is The Debt Ceiling Anyway?

When we have questions like this, that are so serious they demand an authoritative answer, I like to turn to one of the few thought leaders I think is capable of properly handling a subject so sensitive and delicate…

…Jimmy Kimmel!

Enjoy the video below!

You know I had to click on that link!

I expected to find some cheesy, semi-corny blurb with the type of self-congratulatory, tongue-in-cheek humor that some of these niche websites online are so good at. I was wrong.

What I ran into was a masterful piece of work that motivated this piece on thought leadership marketing and how to create branded ideas that can communicate your value, accelerate your sales cycles, and help you justify higher prices on your services and information products.

Background
The “Hot Crazy Scale” comes from an episode of the TV show “How I met your mother”, and is supposed to help guys make the sometimes hazardous decision of whether to date a “hot” girl, or whether to move on.
It places these young ladies on a graph of “hotness” vs “craziness”, under the assumption that more craziness is permissible the hotter the girl.

The video below explains:

Now, you might be saying to yourself:

What Does This Have To Do With Thought Leader Marketing?

Everything…

In the video above, the question (or problem) is fairly familiar and straightforward. That is,

“How do you know when the benefits outweigh the costs of a dating relationship?”

Obviously, the answer above is a very subjective one, one that is likely to resonate with the intended target audience for Barney’s message (single guys driven more by lust than by common sense). And that’s the first principle.

PRINCIPLE #1 – Thought Leadership That Sells Must Be Intuitively Accessible. It must be commonsensical to its intended audience.

But that’s not all. It’s not enough to be both target audience-friendly and commonsensical. That’s just the price of entry.

It should also be somewhat analytical or seem to be analytically derived. So…

PRINCIPLE #2 – Thought Leadership That Sells Must Include Analytical Tools that flesh out your frameworks.

This step is what takes also-ran books, workshops or frameworks, and turns them into higher-priced, premium-valued packages.

Even better if those analytical tools include branded ideas and language like “the Vicky Mendoza Diagonal” and the “Shelly Gillespie Zone”.

PRINCIPLE #3 – Thought Leadership Marketing That Sells Must Include Branded Language with which your audience can speak in code to each other, and co-create new original experiences.

As evidence of this, just take this show “How I met Your Mother”. Fans of the show have conspired both to edit and share tons of episode clips on youtube, but have also edited many of these to create brand new pieces. Since I only occasionally see the show, I can’t actually tell how some of the YouTube clips are tampered with.

PRINCIPLE #4 – Be prolific with new problem-solver tools, new ideas and new frameworks.

In the Academic field, the professors who publish the most often get most of the perks. Think that same way. Continually wrestle with the frontiers of your field to come up with new ideas, or new ways to frame the issues. Barney, the prime character in the TV show examples above, is absolutely prolific at developing new stuff – his own “days”, “rules”, “theories”, “analytical tools (i.e. graphs)”, “codes”, etc.

One of my favorite speakers and thought leaders in this arena is MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson. Here are 4 videos made years ago that are still very full of insight for just about any business.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Businesses of just about any size can benefit from some of the themes discussed in this lecture. Here are some key take aways:

How can you design “constant experimentation” into your business model? (marketing, processes, etc)
Do you give your customers many ways to “divulge” their preferences?
How can new collaboration, publishing and data storage tools change your industry?

You’ll probably notice that he shares some of the same recommendations I gave in the last post. Anyway, here’s the video:

Randy Fishkin at SEOMOz breaks down Farmer/Panda Update

My Own Thoughts

Recently we signed on a business development consulting client whose top people had a lot of questions about SEO and developing business online for their B2B focused firm. One of the insights I gained during the process of educating them was that it has become very, very important to articulate a difference between traditional, common SEO practices, and a new way of doing business that locates SEO within a larger, more strategic approach to online marketing. Leveraging the internet for lead generation, nurturing, and customer acquisition should be a common sense objective of SEO professionals.

Because I’m so fanatical about taking the strategic approach to anything, all our marketing services (including SEO services) already took on this quality. Yes, it chases away some of our prospects because it’s just a tad more expensive (and requires more patience) than the average SEO process, but it also gives us much more power to affect the top line and bottom line results of our clients.

Why would we want to do things any other way?

Even in talking to graphic designers, I always advise them to take a more strategic, customer-centric approach to understanding the value of their work and communicating that value to clients.

I think because the digital marketing world has been able to convert clients just by showing up (in many cases), many well meaning pros never got around to including strategy in their selling conversations.

Google Panda is apparently forcing a “re-think”.

A Brave New World

Watch (and re-watch) the Rand Fishkin video above. Stand-alone SEO as an effective marketing method is now too risky to undergird strategic business outcomes in many sectors.

I have written about the Content Marketing Vs. SEO framework in other places and won’t delve too deeply into that right now. What I will say is that for most B2B and B2C businesses, Google’s continued evolution, and the continuing evolution of the internet likely means that a multi-pillar marketing approach is no longer an option. This is also a key cornerstone of our broader marketing philosophy.

Just in case you think I’m just saying this to just you big deal B2B and industrial marketers, even some of my smallest coaching and consulting clients have been converted to this way of thinking about marketing online – content, connect, close!

If you have an average annual client value of $5,000 to $500,000 dollars, and you are not heavily investing in multichannel content marketing, you should probably contact us at Idea Age Consulting.

I created screenshots, edited paragraphs and created what was already over 10 pages of content (in Microsoft Word)…and yes, I was planning to drop all that content onto one post. I was almost ready to go, and then it happened…

The Google Panda Update

Google Panda is the nickname given to the most recent Google algorithm update that drop kicked thousands of websites off their perch atop the search rankings and erased as much as 80% of their traffic overnight. Even very well established websites like Ezinearticles.com and tons of other previously high traffic websites were affected.

Click on the Infographic below for a history of Google algorithm updates (and attitudes):

Infographic by SEO Book

The truth is that Ezinearticles featured heavily in the link-building phase of my strategy, and I just felt very uncomfortable with publicly pushing that strategy until I figured out what would happen in the aftermath of the pummeling ezinearticles.com and others took.

Google Slap XXXV – Google Algorithm Update Difficulties

For me, the primary challenge of Google Panda is (was?) that over 107 articles authored by me and hosted on article directory websites suddenly lost their online visibility, which means that the web publishers and ezine owners I depend on to republish my articles and link to my website just don’t see these articles as much.

Some pretty authoritative sources accused Google of maybe not playing fair when the updates first happened. Aaron Wall, for one was quite vocal about his perceived “Demand Media Google bias”, but also documented the vicious hit Google later unleashed on Demand Media.

In his view, Google was forced to go after Demand Media (Ehow.com, in particular), or risk lasting damage to its brand!

The challenge in all this, is that many small web publishers also saw their search rankings take a direct hit. Those who escaped (like most SBi! customer websites whose traffic actually INCREASED 3% on average), tended to emphasize original, creative, first person content with very distinctive voice.

As for me, and my 100+ articles on directories, over 90% of these high quality articles took a sharp dive in traffic after the initial Google panda update, and yet many web pages that automatically (and nonsensically) scraped content from these articles are still showing up atop search engine results pages after panda!

Tell me how that makes sense…

At least there are rumors that Google is about to take them out soon.

Another thing about timing of the hit is that I had planned to re-publish the same content to my website, which would have resulted in over 100 pages of great relevant content, and all written by me! Unfortunately, this update has made clear that having a website dominated by content that can also be found elsewhere is now a fairly dangerous SEO practice. Regardless of authorship.

In any case, since I spent quite a bit of time researching the effects of the Google Panda update on this website and others, I have some recommendations to share with you now.

Post-Panda SEO Tips

1. The “Quality Content” standard has changed

   Just writing an article with topical relevance is no longer good enough. Is it bringing something new and unique that the current page 1 results don’t? Does it have enough voice, personality, tools (like infographs) to bring another dimension of value to searchers for that term? If not, try again.

 

2. Deep, not wide

   Deep relevance is hot. As in, “deeper into your website topic domain”. The theme-based content websites that Dr. Evoy first pioneered with his classic book, “Make Your Site Sell” will apparently stand the test of time in search. Your website content should be within the same domain – don’t have articles on “how to remodel your kitchen” on your social media themed website. 

   Don’t be a content farm – that’s who Panda was aimed at. And don’t specialize in “me-too” content because Google users can now block you from their results, and this is what probably took down Ehow.com (Demand Media). You won’t pass manual reviews after you get hit with a nasty Google algorithm update.

3. Video Marketing Rules…Unless You’re in “Make Money” Niches

   If you’ve been dancing around your webcam and avoiding your youtube account, it’s time to shape up. You should be working on your video content editorial calendar right now, as we speak. Target your top 100 keywords and their variants for your videos, make sure your videos are creative and relevant, and that they provide actionable information in less than 2 minutes (for Youtube in particular).

 

4. Guest Blogging & Guest “Contributor” Writing Are In

   If you’re a locally themed business, like say, a “Tampa Credit Repair company“, or a “Denver Marriage Counselor”, you should be concentrating on other local websites or other blogs themed around where you are or what your expertise is. 

   Finding these websites can be as simple as logging on to your personal Google machine (at www.google.com), and searching for something like ["Guest post" + Denver] (if you’re looking for Denver blogs that accept guest posts) and other searches like that. Scan the results and contact them after reviewing their blogs for fit. Of course there’s much more on this topic.

 

5. Get Beyond SEO Pt 1 – Become a Content Marketer

   If you have followed the history of Google algorithm updates, or studied the infograph above, you’ll quickly come to the conclusion that there’s a lot of fools gold in “flavor of the month SEO”. Unless your average customer value is enough to justify paying professional SEO consultants to win that particular arms race, you had better concentrate more on content marketing than on stand-alone SEO! 

   What does this mean? Well, it means that if you market directly to consumers, you should be on Facebook, youtube, and twitter. It means you should be creating ebooks, resource guides, interactive marketing channels, webinars and teleseminars.

   And if you are a B2B marketer, it means that you should be doing multichannel marketing online – combining organic seo with email marketing, and social media strategies like Linkedin Groups and Webinar programs. It means you should consider having a strong contributor presence on the major trade association websites and networks where your target decision makers hang out online.

   Finally, for you B2B marketers, it means that your online marketing should be executed within the framework of a strategic plan that accounts for the necessary investments in tools like marketing automation platforms that will make your online presence a true profit center and strategic differentiator. Don’t go half-way in your internet marketing strategy…you’ll just put yourself at risk from your more forward thinking competitors!

 

6. Get Beyond SEO Part 2 -Become a Brand Name

   There’s a great cliche which has guided decision makers for decades (if not longer). It says,
   

   “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em…”

   There are some bloggers and experts who would purport to tell you how to “beat Google”. Unless you own more than the estimated 1 million computer servers that power the Google search box, you haven’t a prayer of beating Google. And we haven’t even counted having some of the best “search minds” money can lease. Ask yourself, “Can I afford to pay a staff engineer $3.5 million dollars to keep him from leaving?”

   I didn’t think so.

   You can’t beat Google. You need to think about “joining ‘em”. How? Well, the closest thing you can do is to leverage Google properties (youtube, blogger, Adwords PPC), and become a brand name in your niche as fast and as aggressively as possible.

   Some industry experts argued (quite persuasively) that Google was favoring big brands with its supposedly algorithm-driven Florida update a while back, and I think there’s a lot of truth there. It just makes business sense.

   So the two things we can assume will be true about Google long into the future of its search leadership (if it persists) are that:

   • Google loves theme-focused websites with highly relevant, original content.
   • Google makes money from advertising ($20 billion+ annually) and will favor big brands.

   One important thing to note about this love of brand is that it applies to both “big money” brands and “big reach” brands. Not only will the BMWs of the world get outsized Google love, industry niche leaders and influencers will also get respect from Google.

   There’s some important SEO advice I once read (unfortunately, I’ve forgotten the source). It goes something like this.

   
   

   “Market your website as if Google doesn’t exist. But optimize your website as though it does.”

   This means that you should be doing all the online and offline activities that you would ordinarily have done before the search engines were ever sophisticated enough to find you. Leverage both. Ride the search engines and ride your off page (and offline) branding. Just Do It!

As I watch my now 11-month old grow up, one of the core issues I’ve had to confront is the question of whether my business (and my life) is where I want it to be, and whether I am ahead of the biggest goals I have set for myself in life. The answer, to both questions, honestly, is a big, fat, “No”!

I know from my life experiences (both successes and setbacks) that you cannot accomplish anything major in life if you do not take 100% ownership (read: R-E-S-P-O-N-S-I-B-I-L-I-T-Y) for your reactions to events that take place and for undertaking a goal-directed response. Anything less, and you’ll die without accomplishing your biggest dreams.

This was the context in which I looked around at my accomplishments over the past year, measured them on the scale, and found them wanting. Yes, a lot has gone right for me, and for my business. I have the best consulting and coaching clients in the world, I have a great group of marketing experts as partners and increasingly, Denver business owners, who search on Google are learning that they should call us when they need business consulting work.

But not enough…

Although I feel somewhat embarrassed to share this, I will because you honor me by being here and reading this. Last year, I publicly shared my income goals in a blog post. Unfortunately, I did not even reach one fifth of my goal!!

I have begun to realize that in many ways I sabotaged the effectiveness of my own progress. And it boils down to one single fact… I was not competitive enough!

As a matter of fact, whether due to some misinterpretation of my Christian beliefs, or from my family background, it has been years since I showed any competitive nastiness (fire); the kind of competitive hunger that I now believe is essential to winning success on a grand scale.

I recently conducted a personal audit which included an assessment of my past history, my successes, my failures and my personal epics. I came to the realization that I walked away from the competitive spirit when I was about 10 years old. That was some 22 odd years ago…imagine that!

You see, I grew up in a family of educators. My grandfather, Chief Isaac Dagogo Erekosima, was probably responsible for sending more young boys from remote Africa to Harvard, MIT, and Oxford than any other single individual. He had turned down his own Oxford admission because the medical requirements conflicted with the dictates of his faith (or his church, more specifically).

My own father, who would spend his life as a scholar and an educator, also turned down his admission to Oxford a decade or two later (much to the chagrin of his father), but for a completely different reason. He was hell-bent on going to America. And he did, by obtaining a Ford foundation scholarship and jumping onto a France-bound ship on an eventual journey to America.

By the time, I was growing up in Nigeria, my father was the head of his department at the University.

This was the world into which I was born. And my early academic career held no indication that I would not continue in the path that was set before me. In other words, elementary school (or grade school) was an effortless romp.

I remember the first time I received the award for the best all-around student (out of all the 5 classes of the grade level). I had no inkling I was to receive an award… in front of all the gathered students, parents and university officials (it was a university school).

Earlier that day, a few of my friends and I had decided to take the extraordinary gift of the end-of-year celebrations to head to some nearby college dorms where we could hang out around.

Racing back to the school compound (to make sure we would be back before parents started coming in), I found myself abandoned by my friends…they scattered off.

Why? My name was announced over the loudspeakers…just as we got into the school compound.

In total confusion, I approached the main field where to my surprise a huge crowd of students, parents, and officials were seated under huge tents that hadn’t been there when I last saw that field.

DA-GOGO! E-RE-KO-SI-MA!!

There was the Assistant Headmistress bellowing out my name again…

Did she really expect me to walk out into there in that opening? Right in the middle of the field…and the crowd?

Even though I felt like a plucked chicken about to be dunked into the Christmas pot, I walked out to the clearing at the center of those huge tents to meet her.

What on earth could this be about?

It turned out I was being awarded the “Best Student” Prize!

…Wow! Who knew?

However, that was the first time.

By the time I was 10, I had experienced that achievement at least twice. And like I said, because it was grade school, it was completely effortless up till that point.

Then something happened…

When I got to Primary 5 (roughly corresponding to 6th grade), 3 new students joined our school. In particular, they joined the “A” class which is where I was…and these guys were brilliant!!

And, Oh boy were they competitive!!

I was used to gentler academic surroundings. Dealing with friends whom I helped when they needed help, and then proceeded to trounce during exam time.

Now, suddenly, I was dealing with not one, not two, but 3 competitors who hid their grades until they knew what you got, and then would promptly laugh in your face and embarrass you!

I was not ready for this…

22 years later, and I still remember the teacher asking, “What type of fuel does a Jet use”? (I can’t imagine what class that would have been?)

The whole class was silent. I decided to give a try. “Aeroplane fuel”, I said.

“Wrong!”

Apparently, she was looking for a better answer than what I had. Then one of my new classmates somewhat smugly raised his hand, and volunteered, “Octane, jet fuel, or Aviation fuel”.

“Correct!”

That was the first time in my life I had ever heard the words, “aviation fuel”. At that point in my life, I read newspapers, and my father’s collection of Encyclopedia Britannica…and I had never come across that term.

“How, on earth does he know this stuff?”

That was all I could think to myself. Sometime after that day, I checked out. I punked out … or whatever you want to call it.

Now, mind you, I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t realize that I’d checked out. But I had. I moved out of the “academic significance” bunch of kids, and slowly slid into the “lackadaisical” bunch…and my grades went progressively downward.

I stopped keeping score. Other than a brief period of my life (in high school sports), and in a much narrower context. I lost my stomach for kicking butt, keeping score, and taking names. At the age of 18, I became a committed Christian, and that just made it worse. Right on through 3 torturous bouts of college, I coasted.

Because like many Christians, I found it very easy to ignore all the signs of very competitive, and yet very Godly people, both in the bible and outside. Instead, because I didn’t necessarily want the things others wanted, I forgot to demand competitive fire from myself. It didn’t offend me if you beat me in class, I still assumed I was smarter than you.

I’ve now come to believe that it’s all been a defensive mechanism. A “withdrawal” (escape) from the game.
I have asked God for forgiveness. For not demanding myself to be my very best, and to leverage the spirit of competitiveness which is given as a gift. Not a gift to do wrong, but a gift to do right by…to be harnessed by me so I could gain momentum toward my purpose.

I don’t know if you’ve read through this whole letter…but if you have, and you think that you can relate to what I’ve just shared, then I’m going to ask you to do what I’ve resolved to do.

Take stock, think of what you want to accomplish and be in your life before your time is up, and then think about all those who are out there accomplishing … achieving … doing, and winning… and you keep score!

You don’t have to win. But you must play the game. And play the game to the best of your ability.

As for me, FORGET THAT…

… THIS TIME, I AIM TO WIN!

There are just too many other factors that result in business opportunities…like:

• Niche specialty in an industrial frontier (clean tech, green, networks, nanotechnology, new media, retail innovation, medical engineering, transportation & logistics).
• Connecting two worlds (many highly educated US-professionals of Chinese, Indian, or Isreali birth) or having a professional background that bridges two or more worlds (emerging markets experience + current tech, finance, or big brand expertise).
• A strong background in direct selling and information publishing combined with exposure to internet distribution channels, or newly emerging international consumer network.
• A massive personal network of highly placed contacts in various fields based on professional, academic, or even social background.

All these factors may coalesce into the kinds of opportunities that have always turned seemingly “non-entrepreneurial” people into entrepreneurs in a very brief period of time.

Having said that, there is something to be said for having the purposeful disposition to recognize and act upon entrepreneurial opportunities.

Take, for instance, the “other” Kate Middleton. If you don’t know who Kate Middleton is, she’s soon to be married to William, Prince of England. Her engagement to William was announced less than 3 weeks ago…

…and that’s all the time it took for 21 year old Kate Bevan to launch her career as a “Kate Middleton look alike”. Since then, she’s been on TV interviews, getting paid appearances and preparing for her life as “the other Princess Kate”.

In her “speed to market”, she illustrates what many entrepreneurs and business leaders need to do to be successful. By being open to opportunity, and ready to strike, Kate Bevan (recently married herself) took the proverbial “predatory leap” and has staked her claim to the “look alike” bandwagon that will undoubtedly get crowded over the coming months, years, and maybe even decades.

Successful entrepreneurs are generally known by their agility, adaptability and flexibility when it comes to responding opportunistically to new market realities. If you are reading this article, take this opportunity to ask yourself some really important questions.

1. How open are you being to the “plain facts” of your customer base, your markets and the trends?
2. Are you ignoring strategic directions that you should be considering because you’re not adaptable?
3. Is your organization structured in a way that makes it agile and responsive to market conditions?
4. Are you easily able to extend your business model or value proposition through partnerships?
5. Do you have a personal/organizational system for increasing your “change readiness”?
6. What new conditions have arisen in your business, target customer base or industry recently?
7. How can you exploit these new conditions to create new products/services or reach new markets?
8. How can you harness these new conditions to create new business models for doing what you do?

These questions above can help you recognize and tap into entrepreneurial opportunities that come your way. Developing a systematic process for recognizing opportunity-filled situations and for assessing them will take you much farther than a potentially limiting belief that you need to have some sort of vaguely defined “entrepreneurial spirit”.