The everyday life of an independant professional is characterized through project work or consulting, administration and various sales activities to keep or to improve your position in your professional environment. Focussed self-marketing is one of the upcoming challenges in the work environment in the 21th century.

Have you ever thought about your personal value proposition which makes you as a person more interesting than the others in your competition for new projects? Work it out! It helps you spending time on sales activities with the highest chance to close a deal and at the end of the day the highest chance to increase your productivity:

• What is your customer aiming to achieve?
• Why does your customer need to act?
• What are the critical success factors for your customer?
• What is your solution?
• What are the benefits for your customer (measurable if possible)?
• And at the end: Why you and not anyone else?

If you don´t find a clear and transparent answer to one of this 6 questions – spend your time on more promising sales possibilities. It saves time and increases your efficency.

Whipping yourself into shape – acting instead of postponing. Self-discipline is for many people an unpleasant thought. But it all starts in the head…

But what exactly is self-discipline? It’s one of the key attributes that characterizes a samurai – and hence, an additional contribution to our blog series. Steve Paulina defines self-discipline as “the ability to get yourself to take actions regardless of your emotional state.” It is needed to follow through on your intention. Willpower and self-discipline help us to choose our behaviour and reactions instead of being their slaves. It makes you feel more powerful and consequently, more happy and satisfied. Self-discipline becomes therefore a powerful “team-mate”.

Steve Paulina states that self-discipline consists of five pillars: Acceptance, Willpower, Hard Work, Industry and Persistence. To better remember the five pillars, take the first letters of each word and you get the acronym “A WHIP” – a nice way to keep it in mind as it can be associated with whipping yourselve into shape.

Acceptance means that “you perceive reality accurately and consciously acknowledge what you perceive.” Willpower stands for the ability and strenght to put a course of actions into practice. The great challenge hereby is hard work. Whatever goal you want to achieve, you can get there if you’re willing to work. The term industry stands for time investment. Persistence also plays an important role in connection with self-discipline. It is defined as “the ability to maintain actions regardless of your feeling”. Even though you might feel like giving up on a project because it seems to be infeasible at first sight, nevertheless you will keep on going in order to reach your goal.

Holding self-discipline is not easy, it requires a lot of strenghts and time as well. One way to develop and improve these abilities is to practice doing things in your daily business activities that you do not like to do. By doing so, you can overcome your subconcious resistance, train your abilities and gain inner strength. Take actions that are necessary right away – even though they might not be a pleasure – and do not postpone it till later. With a certain degree of self-discipline, you will accomplish your goals and hence, succeed in business.

So, the next time you face a challenging task – just think about the “A WHIP” formula before postponing it.

Although knowledge, technology or methodology are main success factors in the modern business world, we believe personal success also depends to a high degree on personal values and ethics. In our opinion, a business codex similar to the “codex” of the samurai of ancient Japan could serve well as a set of guiding principles in today’s business world.

Just think about it for a minute while reading this article and you will find out that there are a lot of similarities between the samurai of ancient Japan and today’s business professionals. Both, the samurai and the professional, are employed or hired because of their personal attributes: their professionalism, their skills and their reputation. It is all about the professional. Their values are not based on external resources, on man power, infrastructure or even money, but just on themselves. Thus, their value can not be observed upfront, but needs to be trusted upon.

However, the value of a samurai or a professional can be judged by looking at the past. Here, results and behaviour are the relevant metrics. While most people pretend to only look at results, behaviour is at least as important. Take an engineer, for example, who is designing an innovative product for a company. If he then turns around and is developing a similar product for a competitor (assuming he is not acting illegally), people will notice. If he does it again, people might become hesitant to involve him in critical situation. One could construct numerous examples where professionals are not only measured by actual results, but also by their behaviour while achieving these results and by their behaviour towards their customers, partners or colleagues.

Here, the need for a business codex comes into play. We believe that such a business codex could draw a lot by having a closer look at the codex of the samurai. (more…)

The work environment of the 21st century has dramatically changed – lifelong employment in a company belongs to the past. Today’s trend is towards self-employment with flexible work conditions. It is not uncommon anymore to change the employer after a few years or to start up an own business.

A full calendar, tight schedules and deadlines as well as a high work load are typical characteristics of professionals who work on parallel projects with different customers. Due to their expertise and long experiences in specific areas, professionals have a strong competitive advantage compared to others. Every day, they face the challenges of the modern business world and have to demonstrate their expertise to prevail among competitors.

We believe that knowledge alone is not enough to stay competitive and be successful in the market in the long run. It is also the spirit and the attitude that makes the difference.

Why? Today’s professionals have the skills and knowledge, but this alone is not enough. They also need to win the trust of their customers to win new business.

In our highly complex world, it is getting increasingly difficult for a customer to properly judge the work of a highly skilled professionals. Whether it is IT architecture or market research: an in-depth evaluation of the work would usually require to repeat the work. Therefore, a customer need to trust a professional that he will get the proper advice or the best solution. “Trust” is the key word here. Not only trust in the professionalism and skills, but also trust in the person that he will do his best to serve the customer.

Like the Samurai of ancient Japan, it was not just their skills that made them famous, but also their “Bushido”, their ethics and spirit. Professionals could learn a thing or two by studying the way of the Samurai…