How I, as a strategic consultant, university educator, and model/actress, accomplish (most) everything on my ‘To Do List’ and still have time to cook Sunday dinner. And how you, too, can accomplish anything you set your mind to.
Recently, I rebranded and relaunched my consulting company to focus on the company’s superpowers of strategy and optimism to ensure we’re developing the most innovative solutions for our clients. The strategies I use to identify, research, develop, implement, and evaluate an initiative can be applied in one’s personal and professional life.
Identify the Initiative: Chicken or fish for dinner? Grow or downsize the business? Identifying the initiative helps build and strengthen your decision-making and strategy of action.
Research: How many dinner guests are allergic to fish? What is the fiscal impact of growing or downsizing the business? Research provides information that can help you establish facts, generate concepts, methodologies and understandings, and reach conclusions.
Develop The grocery (shopping) list. The growth plan, including financial projections. Developing an initiative includes providing content and instructions or directives intended to stimulate a call to action in order to achieve an objective.
Implement: Prepare dinner. Then, eat dinner. Grow the business. Implementing the initiative or strategy is the necessary step that transforms the goals into action to achieve an outcome. An implementation plan might include the project goals and objectives, the steps involved in a project, associated timelines, and a list of the resources necessary for success.
Evaluate: Did guests ask for a second or third helping of dinner? Did we grow the business on time and on a budget? To evaluate the success of any project or initiative, you should:
- Restate the initiative: Is that actually what you did or tried to accomplish?
- Review the research and provide a critical evaluation of the information available and how relevant it was to your efforts.
- Draw logic to the instructions or directives used. Did they actually help to achieve the objective? • Identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your implementation plan. Seek to rectify or improve these realities.
- Celebrate your success or reflect on your setbacks (for better results next time). A good example of this might be if the actual number of dinner guests was lower than the number of guests who RSVP’d they’d attend – not as a result of poor strategy (or the fact that you were serving chicken instead of fish), but rather, because some guests got sick, the babysitter didn’t show up, (or worse, got into a car accident) right before your party and were unable to let you know so you could make adjustments to the seating plan.
Often, the ‘To Do List’ seems more daunting than it actually is. The key is to have a plan of attack, lean on your superpowers, get the job done, reap the rewards, benefits, or accolades, and have someone else wash the dinner dishes.
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