InnovaBuzz Episode #56 – Playing a Bigger Game

Playing a Bigger Game

In this episode, Jürgen talks about transformation- Playing a Bigger Game. We also share a tip to improve your Systems and Processes documentation, together with the tool Clarify. Listen to the podcast to find out the details.

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Links

• Clarify

Books

• Michael E. Gerber: Beyond the E-Myth

Full Transcript

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Hi, I’m Jürgen Strauss from Innovabiz. Welcome to Episode No 56 of the InnovaBuzz Podcast – designed to help smart businesses with an interest in innovation become even more innovative.

This has been another busy week at the InnovaBuzz Hive! During the week, I met with a couple of my partner companies in what I call accountability meetings.

The first of those are a group of people from the WP Elevation community in Melbourne, who work together to support each other’s business.  I’m always grateful to have other business owners with similar challenges and concerns to share experiences with and who hold me accountable to goals and plans that I set.  I’d encourage every business owner to find communities like this that you can join, contribute to and who can hold you accountable to your goals.  Contribution is important as well – helping others is part of the deal.

The second group is a monthly coaching class, where we are now focused on getting our planning set in place for 2017 and beyond.  This week, we reflected on what we’ve achieved in 2016 and what was the most awesome achievement or transformation that our business experienced in 2016.  Reflecting back on our year at Innovabiz, made me realise how much we’ve done and achieved in the past 12 months and also how much has changed from this time 12 months ago.  Being “in” the business on a daily basis, means you sometimes forget how far you have come, on the journey you are on.  So reflecting on the successes and transformations of the past 12 months, and celebrating those successes was a very valuable exercise.  Of course, the other businesses in the group shared their awesome achievements and transformations, and it was inspirational to hear how far the other businesses had come on their journey in the past year, as well as rejoice with them in their successes!

Now to plan for an even more AWESOME 2017!

The other big highlight from this week, was the launch of Michael E Gerber’s new book, Beyond the E-Myth.  As one of the book launch ambassadors, I was privileged to contribute in a small way to the book launch, as well as reading a preview copy of the book, which I highly recommend to every small business owner.  In fact, for the next day or so, you can still get Beyond the E-Myth in Kindle version from Amazon for less than the price of a cup of coffee.  I strongly suggest you do just that.  You can go to Amazon and read the many reviews that are already there, including my own review of Michael’s new book.

And, of course, I had the great pleasure of interviewing Michael about his new book and the entire Beyond E-Myth movement in Episode 54 of the InnovaBuzz podcast – if you haven’t already, go check it out, it’s an epic interview!

The theme of this week’s podcast is Play a Bigger Game.  

I decided that there was a message that kept popping up in my head and being reinforced over and over by others over the past couple of weeks.  First my buddy Troy Dean, posted a Facebook Live video, urging everyone to “whatever you have planned for the next 12 months – 10 X it!”

Then some of my clients were talking about the need and desire to play a bigger game.

And of course, this came up in the goal setting and planning sessions I mentioned earlier.

Now playing a bigger game requires planning, setting up the right environment, structures and enlisting the help of others – team members, accountability buddies, customers and suppliers.  Above all, it requires ACTION (not procrastination) – imperfect action focused on the outcomes you have in mind.  It requires innovation and creativity (listen to Michael Gerber describing the difference between innovation and creativity).

We all know that the pace of change in today’s internet world is accelerating exponentially.  Just look at what’s happening to the Taxi industry worldwide with Uber and Lyft on the scene; what challenges the Hotel industry is facing with AirBnB as the biggest accommodation provider.   If you are not innovating, then be prepared to be disrupted and made redundant as a business, service or product!

So, at Innovabiz, moving into 2017, we too, will be playing a much bigger game and setting the environment, systems, actions and people in place to make that happen and most importantly to enable that to be replicated both in our business and in other businesses.

Thinking back to when we started the InnovaBuzz podcast back almost 2 years ago, I didn’t then imagine that I’d be interviewing Michael E Gerber on that podcast!  Effectively, I limited my own thinking, as we all so often do.  And then recently that opportunity presented itself and Michael came on the podcast.  Of course, in the meantime we’ve had a lot of awesome guests and great interviews, and great business people who’ve generously shared lessons they’ve learned with you, my audience.  We’re definitely going to continue to bring you great interviews, now with the added benefit of not limiting our thinking on who we might be able to bring on the show as a guest.

So we will be playing a bigger game with the InnovaBuzz podcast and I welcome suggestions and ideas from you, of topics that you’d like us to cover; guests you’d like us to have on the show and generally how we can make the podcast even more valuable to you.

Finally, I wanted to share a tip and tool with you.  Part of our playing a bigger game at Innovabiz, is updating and upgrading our Systems and Processes documentation within the business, and someone shared a tool with me this week, that may very well make the documentation process much easier.  That tool is Clarify – it allows you to compose a document, embed multiple screenshots from right inside the app, markup the document with text, arrows and signposting, numbering and much more, then export the document as a PDF of Word file, send it to Evernote, WordPress or the web. We’ll be putting Clarify through it’s paces over the next few weeks and I’ll update you on our findings in a future podcast.

I hope you enjoyed this episode and that there was something of value there for you.

All the show notes for this episode will be at innovabiz.com.au/56, that is the numbers 56, innovabiz.com.au/56, there you’ll find the links and everything we spoke about in this episode .

Thank you for listening.  Pop over to iTunes or Stitcher or Pocket Casts and subscribe so you’ll never miss a future episode.  While you’re there, you might leave us a review, because reviews help us get found and your feedback helps us improve.  If there is anything you’d like us to cover, or questions you want answered on a future InnovaBuzz podcasts, please send them to us.

Until next time, I’m Jürgen Strauss from Innovabiz, where we’ll be Playing a Bigger Game from now on.

Remember, if you don’t innovate, you stagnate, so think big (then 10x it!), be adventurous and keep innovating!

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