Leadeship dashboards

This week has been a slow but good one.  Travel to client site was a very insightful conversation, I was asked where I saw myself in next 3 year?  Maybe outside the organization I answered.  I am trying to eliminate dependencies from my job.  The fellow  traveler was a bit surprised by my answer  I guess, he might have wanted to hear me say that I wanted the next level in the corporate ladder but it is really not my desire.  Reading Robin Sharma a couple years back got me thinking that its about what and who you are on the inside and not on the outside.  I feel like I'm already a leader, I don't think I need to prove it to anyone.  I am not looking for personal glory in any specific company, I am looking out for my family and these are my goals and my motivators.  

My friend asked why I didn't see myself in the organization and rather outside.  I simply stated that I don’t mind, but I know that I am just a resource and don't want to be at somebody's mercy so I am taking control of my life and future. 

In the meantime, this week was a good lesson to reflect on whether I am good or great. Yeah, I may see myself a bit good, but I want to get to great. How do I score as a leader my self?

I started creating a leader dashboard based on the items that we have learned from the book summary. Good to great. 

An interesting week

Well this is a bit odd, strange or staged from above.  This week was a short week in both my classes, it was also a week that needed a lot of attention at work and home. I was having several thins to do and just felt like dropping the ball on some, as I was watching this weeks material, the concepts resonated with me.  Keep going said one.  Ok, I thought so I started doing budgets and planning again.  Another problem came up and root cause analysis was incorrectly done by one of our team leads twice.  Well, there was the video of The Five Whys and solved our problem, human problems.  Guess that works out.

We had a short brainstorming session at work and people only came up with a few ideas, low hanging fruit said David Carrington.  I invited our team to think a bit more and come up with a few more ideas.

 

This is something I need to remember, seems like a magic formula for increasing business so I’ll just leave it here.

1)      Increase number of customers

2)      Increase frequency of purchase

3)      Increase the average order

But what I like most is Elder Hollands advise to keep going “Victory at all cost”  I thinks whatever we are doing like a web business or at this moment building a future for my family.  The same applies, keep going.

 

Advertising with a purpose

Amazing, I have learned something new this week. I used to think that this activity of creating ads was just as simple as throwing some words on to the add and what ever made sense.  I realized today that there are some best practices that everyone shares.  For example. Headline 1 an Headline 2 are not just two spaces, they have a purpose. one is related to what the user is looking for and the second to what we can offer.  I also had not realized that the URL can have a path, but now that I think about it, it only makes sense.  By having different paths associated to different ads, it is possible to have different groups and different adds showing different information all on the same website.  how call is that?

Things to remember from this week. Ads need to have the same domain, google will verify the domain, no all caps allowed, and no special symbols either.

Habits

This week we have read about habits, a topic which I personally like a lot, I had the opportunity to review the 7 habits of highly effective people.  Don’t recall how long ago was when I read this book and I constantly think that I need to review again. I just did a quick analysis of myself to see how much I had learned the concepts I learned long time ago. Can I call myself a highly effective person?

It was interesting to find out and the approach I took to do a self-evaluation was a simple checklist.

1.       Am I Proactive? – Yeah, I think most of the time yes. I don’t wait for others to push or boss me around.

2.       Do I think about the end result? – I would say that yes, I do.  I like to know where we are supposed to be headed.  I am thinking about a workshop I had with the team not too long ago at work. It was the first thing that came to mind.

3.       Do I set right priorities and work on the most important things  first? – Ouch, this is something I need to work on. I understand and overall I think I work on the important things but have noticed that I sometimes miss opportunities.

4.       Do I collaborate or just think about my own interests? – I don’t see my self as a selfish person, I don’t mind helping others so yes.

5.       Do I take the time to understand others before being understood – Yup.  I just took the time to understand what was going on in Argentina and my local team, did this before trying to impose something.

6.       Do I “create” synergy?  Yup, I like to build teams. I am actively involved in this at work and at home.

7.       Do I sharpen the sawy? – I thought this was where I was failing until I took a moment to ponder and realized that I have read several books lately and am also enrolled in this course.

6.5 out of 7 . I would say its not a bad score….

Keywords keywords!

This week I had the opportunity to research about keywords on google ads. First problem I encountered was that I had signed up for adwords express account. I could just not figure out how to get past that part because it kept giving me the simple interface and I could not get to my keyword planner. I had a hard time trying to figure out where I was.  I did a google search for ads.google.com and it keeps taking me back to the same place. I then realized it did not look as it should according to my class material.  I just had to go back and read the course material once more to figure out what I had done wrong. I then realized that I was warned to not sign up for adwords express.  Since I did not find a way to undo this, I simply used a different google account to open ads. google.com, and it worked.  Remember:  There is a difference between adwords express and ads.google.com.

What I learned from these two google ads platforms is that they are both by google, they are both using the same platform and everything but one is simple and the other is for expert mode.

Adwords express is a simple interface that is intended to make things simpler for the new user, but comes at the expense of not having control of the campaign strategy. Google makes the decisions according to what it thinks it is best.

Google Ads is the full version of the tool, it is a little bit harder to use, needs more knowledge of what you are doing but gives you full control of your campaign.