O MANNY's

Yahoo failed to be agile that’s one reason why they lost ground to guys like Google and Facebook. If you look at yahoo through out its years you will see not many significant innovation or product diversity. Many have also blamed its slow-footed, mediocre products, poor culture, and failure to get into mobile sooner. Now if we look at Google, so many products and innovation that I sometimes wonder if they’ve been smoking a magic innovation weed. They can keep pumping out products because all they have to do is embed ads into. Almost every android user is expose to the mighty Google ad engine. The point is individuals can learn to be more agile in life and business like the Google’s of the world.

Since this is not about comparing one human to Google the company, I will admit that change is in the water. A lot of us are individually battling a lot of toxic noise and friction while we eagerly try to make sense of our founder lives and personal lives. Noise such as terrorism, jihad, identity, sexuality, love, millennial underemployment, racism, gender, gig-jobs, guns, wantrepreneurs, urbanization, biased-authority, the have and have not gap, GMO, automation, Donald Trump, etc. The fact still remains that the common constant in life and business are still change and adaptability also known as uncertainty and agility. What does it take to achieve sustainable success in a growing noisy and changing world? So far what I can conclude is that we all must adopt a better agile way of living, operating a business and loving . 

The following great insights are being shared with my fellow Founders Under 40™ Group members, founders, leaders, and individuals. Also I recommend you check out my new toolkit which will help you plan your founder life better. It is called, “The Founders Life Plan Tool Kit”. Which was produced by myself and the BJ MANNYST (www.bjmannyst.com) team. Our key sponsor FOUNDERS UNDER 40™ GROUP. (www.foundersunder40.com)

ENJOY!!!



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TEN STEPS TO BECOMING AN AGILE YOU

When I started researching and writing for this post, I knew that I had to keep the founder struggle in mind. The founder struggle is like double the ordinary life of a 9 - 5 individual who doesn’t need to worry: if there’s enough money to cover payroll, safety, regulations, etc however might stress about leisure time. Nothing against the people who put in their time and work. Plus add the following: debt, frustration, discouragement, depression, anxiety, addictions, loneliness, and so on. Honestly, founder life and founder business life is more fun when you are agile. Some tips to consider

1.What are your strengths and weaknesses?

Before you start anything in life like running a Marathon, it is always helpful to assess what you already have so that you can allocate your time, money, support to areas that need it most. A good way is to take a personality test, assess your likes & dislikes, let people you trust assess strengths and weakness. Find out what is it that your friends, family, and co-workers value about you? How do you like to work and achieve? Do you make decision based on gut feeling or analyze it? Do your own research, find out what traits an agile person has and see if you have some traits.

2.The agility of the mind

The mind is a powerful tool however not everyone finds the will to rewire it. An agile mind is taking things the way they are however leaving room in your thoughts to reassess or reevaluate or even adopt a different perspective. Common example of none-agile minds is jumping to conclusion or assuming one already knows the answer when all facts are not presented. And getting caught finding it difficulty to drop: assumptions, pattern spotting or thinking differently. An agile mind allows you think constantly both critically and creative about everything in life. Basically be able to adapt your thinking and not be trapped in a box.

3.The agility of your task

This is a lot like multitasking. It is simply having the will to pivot an activity without beating yourself for moving on to other task but having the will to return to the task with little disruption. It is transitioning your resources as you go without regrets. It’s being comfortable achieving your goals going zigzag instead of a straight line.

4.The agility of your focus

To truly be agile in life and business is to be aware where, or whom you allocate your focus upon. It’s having the ability to give more to one thing and to reduce your focus in something else. Keeping in mind what is valuable to your life and dreams. The ability to enable an agile focus can also help in your daily and yearly planning while reducing distractions.

5.The agility of your belief and education

A lot of times it’s the beliefs that we hold that hinder our progress in life and business. You could carry the belief that because “I’m a woman I can not be a billionaire”.  Alternatively your belief could instead be “I can find a way to crush those thoughts and adopt new ones”. Beliefs shape our emotions, behaviors, responsibilities, values, decisions, our appearance, culture, choice of friends, etc.  So to be agile in your belief is to constantly evaluate them. One way, is to do a regular pro and con assessment. The pro side could be how’s this belief helping me and con could be how’s this belief hurting me. The decision simply means you are constantly evolving.

When it comes to the agility of your education, you might consider having the ability to unlearn certain things. Formal and informal education is always changing and for anyone wishing to thrive you must keep changing. One day you are categorizing your music CDs and the next year you have to retrieve and categorize your music from your smart phone. Today you travel by a plane in 2020 it will be a hyper-loop.

If there are resistance to education or reeducation or unlearning things, then you might want to weigh why you are refusing it and ask is it justifiable.

What’s also crucial to your education agility is being able to self-motivate yourself to educate yourself without others pushing you to.

6.The agility of your commitment

The word commitment can seem like a negative thing. Just the idea of not having flexibility makes some of us terrified in some situations. However commitment agility is sort of like a dance with several potential girlfriends without making a single one mad at you. In simpler words, it’s designing your decision, action, and commitment that enables you to follow through on critical commitments or re-prioritize others. So this requires being very disciplined how you allocate your yes, maybes, no and you heartbreaks.

7.The agility of your expectation

Expectation can be a blessing or simply a way to become very disappointed. However an agile person can manage expectation by not getting too caught up in it. You can state what your expectation are however you leave yourself flexibility to work with what you have or just be realistic. You deal with it by reassessing the situation or do what Steve Jobs does...demand great expectation.

8.The agility with others at home & work

Our work place in some way or another is made up of diverse people. Being very savvy how you navigate the personalities and egos can make a difference to your bottom-line. There are standard universal values that one must possess to maintain order and lead others to achieve. There are different ways people get motivated. Clearly being tolerant of diverse opinions helps. Ability to empathize. Are you being fair  founder, do you have a trustworthy environment. Do you know your working style and can you change it if needed? Can you get out of the comfort of a office space and be comfortable getting your hands dirty at a construction site.

9.The agility of your self improvement and fears

It’s a law that It is a lot easier to change at your own will than to be dragged and kicked into change. At least a law of nature. It simply means that you need to identify areas in your life that needs improvement. Once identified, seek ways to improve it whether it’s taking a class or starting your own class or picking up a book. It could be public speaking, attitude, knowledge, experience, character, tolerance, fear, communication, social skills, etc

10.The agility of your actions and accountability

Take the time to evaluate all your options and possible directions. We are all meant to take action. Our hunt for financial means. Our hunt for a mate. Our action to keep threats away from our livelihood. The inability to take action is a poor way to live. It’s sort of like a bear refusing to come out from hibernation. Action and agility in your actions requires a complete knowledge of what outcome you’d like and learning what ways will get you what you want. Some people use a deadline and a starting time. So people use visualization however never shutting out alternatives.

Be prepared to keep yourself accountable by making sure in some way you see what you’ve done so far, what you failed to do, and what you succeeded at. At the end of the day this part is really on you.

However that stuff about action must provide room to shift priorities and unexpected events. For example, if you set out to go to the gym to work on your abs, so you have a sexy six pack, but getting there you notice all the machines are taken. You don’t just go home, you consider what could I be doing towards my other life goals?



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STEPS TO BECOMING AN AGILE MARKETER

Being agile in business and in your personal life  means you always have “wiggle room”. Enough room to enable you to evolve, kill components that are no longer helpful and keep improving the components that are helping you survive or thrive.

“Many CMOs are acutely aware of these symptoms and the underlying causes. Transforming marketing into an agile, more collaborative organization, however, is a significant challenge. Agility requires a strategic mix of standardization and flexibility, enabling leadership teams to efficiently anticipate change, execute quickly , and create value not just for a single experience, but for the company as a whole.” - Unknown Source

“At its core, agile marketing is a tactical marketing approach in which teams identify and focus their collective efforts on high value projects, complete those projects cooperatively, measure their impact, and then continuously and incrementally improve the results over time.” - Unknown Source

An agile marketer framework might vary from other marketer however the core fundamental consist of setting out a task or project that will be complected in weeks or just a couple of month also called Sprints.

Then you set out periods within the sprints that you and your associates need to meet to quickly checkout progress or catch problems or ask questions. Keep it short and sweet.
A key dashboard or whiteboard or online tools that displays project progress. Basically one key spot everyone can see what’s happening.

Full team participation is crucial to the success of your agile marketing discipline. It’s almost like a Legion moving as one unit.

Benefits:

• Act on new opportunities without too many steps
• Be informed of threats in the market
• Conduct micro tests to see what gets you a better response or better return.
• Get feedback from diverse individuals, experts and team members
• Develop and implement accountable measuring tools
• Your workforce become more invested in the organizations success
• Acquire and serve customers more efficiently
• Simply processes while keeping cost down and increasing value.
• And many more

To be continued...part 2 the steps to being an agile marketer.