Etiqueta: Decision making

What People Do on Your Site and Why – thnkz to @TheGrok


http://www.bryaneisenberg.com/

In the most general scheme of categorization, we’ve learned that each of the millions of different personalities falls into one of four main groups, which my brother and I labeled in 2001 in our book “Persuasive Online Copywriting” as Driver, Amiable, Expressive, and Analytical, and later renamed them to:

  • Competitive. Fast-paced decision-making, logically oriented
  • Spontaneous. Fast-paced decision-making, emotionally oriented
  • Humanistic. Slow-paced decision-making, emotionally oriented
  • Methodical. Slow-paced decision-making, logically oriented

It doesn’t really matter what you call them. The thing is, you need to become intimately acquainted with these personalities. They are your website’s visitors. And once you know who they are, you have the inside track on how you shape your design and writing to persuade them most effectively.

At the most fundamental level, all people are motivated by a single, critical question: what’s in it for me (WIIFM)? Their dominant personality types strongly influence how they ask that question, perceive value, and consciously – or more typically, subconsciously – approach a decision-making task.

You can certainly see this behavior when you listen to people during usability tests. In fact, check out this video for people searching for “black diamonds.” Listen to their choice of words, how certain things make them feel, and what moves them forward or causes them to stumble.

 

Usability pundit Jakob Nielsen shared the results of an eye-tracking study he performed in 2007 on the U.S. Census Bureau’s home page. He uses gaze plots to describe four main types of visitor behavior: “search-dominant,” “navigation-dominant,” “tool-dominant,” and “successful.” If you were to look at these four types of behavior through the lens of the personality types you would naturally see beyond what people gazed at and clicked on, and into why they acted the way they did. It’s a natural preference.

Branding & Women By Randal Radic | brandingmagazine.com


» Branding & Women

According to Forbes and CNN, women make up 50% of the population and control 80% of consumer purchasing decisions. More importantly, women now own 30% of all businesses in the United States, and this number is growing. Women directly control over $7 trillion dollars. By the year 2010, it is predicted that women will control private wealth in the amount of $13 trillion. This fantastic growth in income is changing the face of marketing. Women are being targeted. Charles Schwab, Citibank and Merrill Lynch now have marketing aimed specifically at women.

Although married couples lead the way in home buying, the number two-position is held by single women. Women buy homes. Women invest their money. Women take luxury vacations. Women buy investment properties. Ignoring the affluent female customer is a mistake that no seller can afford to make.

The psychology of affluent female customers is different than that of affluent male customers. Now do not interpret that statement to mean anything more than what it says. For ultimately, affluent men and women purchase luxury goods and services for the same reasons, which will be discussed later. What is different between men and women is the way their brains actually function. Newsweek reported that brain-imaging technology has demonstrated definite distinctions between the functioning of male and female brains. Here are some of the distinctions:

– When asked to think about nothing, women think about the word “nothing.” Men think about sex or sports.
– Men are more adept at reading road maps than women.
– Women are more adept at perceiving emotions in people’s faces.
– Women’s brains are more flexible than men’s brains. Which means that women are better at multi-tasking because they are less channeled into one way of thinking than men. Leer más “Branding & Women By Randal Radic | brandingmagazine.com”

A Great Leader’s Year-end Checklist | Inc. |


Inc.com - The Daily Resource for Entrepreneurs

The year is almost over. Great leaders know how to tie up loose ends and make sure their employees are happy and ready to move forward.Salespeople live and die by the annual review. Auditors have built an entire industry around it. For the next month, print and television media will pour out gallons of coverage of the past year in review.

And yet, as leaders, we often move from one year to the next with little or no time spent reviewing the year just past from a purely leadership perspective. To help counter that, here’s my five-point year-end leadership checklist: Leer más “A Great Leader’s Year-end Checklist | Inc. |”

(+) relevante ‘ outstanding | game-changer.net | Jorge Barba…


Powerfule Strategic Thinking technique for non-strategic thinkers


how to get better at strategic thinking

How can you get better at strategic thinking? Or in other words, “How do you improve your thought process?” One of the keys to becoming a great leader is to constantly improve your strategic thinking, so you can adjust to new global realities.

The first step is to accept that you are not right most of the time. You have to “constantly” question your own opinions. One way to do this is to surround yourself with people who don’t think like you. People who will question you. Make these people a key part of your team because what you don’t want is to be surrounded by YES men.

Another tip is learn game theory. Game theory is the study of strategic decision making. And strategic thinking is all about making better decisions. Game theory provides you tools to help you gain added perspective to generate alternative views. If you have added perspective, you’ll be able to anticipate and think critically about what may lay ahead; which are key strategic thinking habits.

Anyway, here a few simple and cost-effective ways to begin developing your strategic thinking ability: Continue reading →

Managing in a Multipolar World


First mover advantage

First mover advantage (Photo credit: rennygleeson)

Joyante’s Blog

Why global companies need to rethink their operating models.

In high-growth emerging economies, first-mover advantage is crucial, and having a coherent and flexible global enterprise management model that can adapt to (and get ahead of) rapid evolutions in the market can make all the difference. (An exerpt from an article inStrategy+Business by Paolo Pigorini, Ashok Divakaran, and Ariel Fleichman).

The last decade has seen a disruption in the nature of consumer markets on an unprecedented scale. The shifts on the demand side are well known: Emerging nations have displaced mature economies as the engines of growth, attracting Western multinationals in search of millions of new consumers. What has been less appreciated is a quieter shift on the supply side. The iconic American and European companies that have dominated the economic world order for the past several decades are ceding ground to an increasingly influential set of emerging market “champions.” Adding to the complexity, these high-growth markets are often distinct from one another in terms of the speed of the market, the drivers of demand and consumer preferences, and the regulatory and investment climate.

These developments have created a multipolar world that moves at different speeds and presents a more diverse range of requirements for success than the global marketplace of years past; one with multiple centers of power and influence that are changing the way business is done. Yet many companies are reluctant to move away from their legacy hub-and-spoke model — which evolved to support the old, more homogeneous business environment — to a global enterprise management model that allows for greater nimbleness and adaptability.

How can companies balance local autonomy with the need to achieve global scale and standardization? Does it even make sense to have a headquarters anymore? And where should the talent that runs the company come from? Such questions are critical, because they ultimately determine a company’s long-term viability. The answers, of course, are not universal, but in our work with multinationals, three key themes consistently emerge as enablers of success: a rebalanced organizational structure and operating model, more dispersed decision-rights mechanisms, and an approach to leadership and people management that emphasizes diversity and local talent.

A New Balance of Power…  Leer más “Managing in a Multipolar World”

Successful Leaders Don’t Need to be Present by Stephan De Villiers


http://switchandshift.com

If you’ve not read Stephan’s writings then welcome. For 21st century leaders, the over dependence on managers to make decisions is a bottleneck to progress. Though it may keep change resistant managers happy, it leaves many dissatisfied. Stephan offers up some insights to move away from the staleness inherent in inflated importance. This is part one of two.

If Your People are not Thinking, You are Failing as a Leader

Meet Gary.  He is the leader of a small organization and a very “hands on” guy.  He makes a point of knowing about every single detail in the organization and gets involved in the detail 90% of the time.  He further prides himself in his problem solving abilities. He is the “go to guy” and likes the fact that people look up to him when they have a problem. He gets involved in all the decision making processes in the organization.  In his mind he plays a vital role in solving problems and making important decisions.  Gary is convinced he is a very effective leader and his contribution plays an important role in the success of the organization.

Making People Dependant

The sad truth is Gary is not a very effective leader.  The way he leads people creates a culture of dependence on him as leader in the organization.  This results in people not thinking anymore, becoming lazy to solving problems and losing confidence to make decisions on their own.  Through his behaviour Gary stifles the creative genius of the people he leads.  By not affording them the opportunity to think and come up with solutions to problems and challenges, he has made them dependant.

Gary is not only doing the organization a disservice, but himself as well.  By focussing so much on solving other people’s problems, he neglects development areas in his personal leadership, such as coaching and setting direction.  He spends most of his time involved in problem solving mode, stealing time he could have spent more productively.

Successful Leaders Don’t Need to be Present

Successful leadership means your followers don’t need you around for them to be productive.  They can operate without you.  Once you set the direction, they move on their own accord towards the goal.  This means as leader you can spend your time on motivating, coaching and course correcting.  A successful leader allows people to make their own decisions.  It means they must be able to face problems and come up with solutions, without involving the leader in the process of getting to the solution. To achieve this, people in the organization must think for themselves.

People need to be trained to think. It may sound strange, because doesn’t thinking come rather naturally? The truth is very few people actually learn to think in terms of problem solving. Thinking skills like lateral thinking, thinking out of the box and analytical thinking, unfortunately does not come without training.

As a leader it is your job to help people to develop these skills. At first it will take a lot of effort and will not be easy, especially if your organization has a culture of dependency. It will also take effort from your side, because you will have to trust people to come up with solutions and make the right decisions. You will have to deal with wrong decisions and mistakes as part of the growing pains.

Being available as coach to guide and give advice will become your primary function during this transition. The good news is there is a process you can follow to make it easier to train people in their thinking processes.

The Think Training Process… Leer más “Successful Leaders Don’t Need to be Present by Stephan De Villiers”

Innocide!!!

Some organizations have an innovation process that includes assessment of successes and failures – but they measure what’s already gotten into the innovation pipeline, not what didn’t even make it in! Innocide is pre-process murder. It’s subtle, pervasive, socially acceptable and pernicious…which makes it hard to measure and harder to fix.


http://mills-scofield.com

Last month, my friend Whitney Johnson wrote a great post about entitlement being an innovation-killer.
Please read it if you haven’t.  I’m sure we all know examples of this in many aspects of our lives.  In some corporate cultures, Innocide is brazen and in others incredibly polite and subtle.  Perhaps the subtlest of all is Suinnocide – killing innovation within us.  Most of us are masters at that!

Some organizations have an innovation process that includes assessment of successes and failures – but they measure what’s already gotten into the innovation pipeline, not what didn’t even make it in!  Innocide is pre-process murder.  It’s subtle, pervasive, socially acceptable and pernicious…which makes it hard to measure and harder to fix.  Leer más “Innocide!!!”