Is Leadership and Management the same thing?

These terms are often used interchangeably but they really are distinct and very different.

• Leadership is about creating a vision and strategy which inspires and attracts Followers. 
• Management is the process of taking action to achieve results.

Every organisation needs Followers who can be clients, citizens, students, patients or anyone else defined as your audience. And you attract Followers by being a “Thought Leader” - someone with a unique viewpoint which makes you stand out from the crowd. 

But attracting Followers is the first step; you really want to create Advocates who continue to follow you and spread the word, because this attracts even more Followers.

Leadership must be woven into the fabric of an organisation, because it covers everything from how you create the environment to attract the brightest talent, to the way you develop products and services and how you describe and communicate these to your audience.

Some Leaders also have the capacity to be great Managers, but are the best Leaders really good at the detailed stuff? Some are, but the best of the best know what they are good at and they leave the detail to others. They delegate and make it their primary goal to attract Followers - or at least they should!

Maybe we need a new metric of performance, a new KPI called the Fi or Follower Index? It may sound slightly odd but that's the basis on which many businesses were built. In the dot-com era that I was intimately involved in, it was all about attracting 'eyeballs'. Maybe it wasn't such a crazy idea after all!

The key to success in sales is ... Asking Great Questions!

There is an urban myth that great salespeople are good talkers but in reality, the opposite is true. Great salespeople are in fact wonderful listeners.

They ask excellent, incisive questions that uncover the information that helps them to solve problems and win business. The key skill needed here is called Fact Finding and Qualification (FFQ).

Understanding where you are in any sales cycle is critical to your success. It’s an ongoing process to ensure you are spending your sales-time wisely; with someone who is interested in what you sell, and has the ability to make a decision to buy. This is why FFQ is so important. 

At the heart of FFQ is the ability to ask the right questions and the best way to do this is in a conversation. And remember, a conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. This is where many salespeople fail, because they try to talk a prospective client into buying. 

Grilling someone to demand information on budget, timescale and decision making process on an initial call is a very bad idea. One of the keys to success is to establish rapport and build trust. And you only really do that by sharing information and delivering on your promises.

The questions you ask will depend on what you are selling, but as a minimum you must understand the following;

• The problem they are trying to solve (this is what drives a decision to buy) 
• What is driving the urgency (this is the motivation to take action)
• How they make a decision (the process, people and criteria they use to decide)
• When they will make a decision (this is related to urgency)
• What you need to do to win (unless you now this you have no plan ... and that's very bad!)

When you think about it, FFQ is something you should do all the time. It makes sense really because the more you know about the people you do business with, the better you can serve them. And that's ultimately what drives strong and sustainable sales growth in any business.

14th Century lesson for today's complex world

Occam's Razor is a principle for understanding the world that was developed over 600 years ago by an English logician and Franciscan friar, William of Ockham.

He wrote "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem" 

... and if your Latin is as patchy as mine, this translates as "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." 



The term razor describes the act of shaving away unnecessary assumptions to get to the simplest explanation. Occam's Razor is often used to illustrate simplicity in many areas such as Science and Philosophy, but it also applies to business for example;

"The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct."

We are bombarded with information from so many different sources today that it's hard to focus. The ability to develop messages that are clear, concise and compelling is more important today than ever before. William of Ockham was clearly onto something! 

Thinking differently about how to succeed in business

A business that’s in balance has a clarity and simplicity of focus. 

It develops great products and services and There's a laser-sharp focus on building relationships and winning business. There’s almost an obsession to provide excellent customer service. 

And because everyone shares a determination to continually improve, achieving success is that little bit 
easier.

To do this requires a different way of thinking, and that’s where the Holistic Sale comes in. 

This is a model of best practice business development processes, strategies and actions based on decades of research and experience.

It’s an integral part of the Ithaka Leadership Development Model, and we use it to identify the underlying causes of underachievement in performance.  Then we provide with the right mix of training, coaching and mentoring to help you achieve your true potential.

Learn more about the Holistic Sale Model 

The easy way to create great presentations

The ability to communicate a message or idea to an audience is a core skill. Whether you are a salesperson, manager, teacher or student, if you know how to present well you will feel more confident, get better results and actually enjoy doing it!

Unfortunately many people get this so wrong and this is mainly due to lack of confidence, preparation and know how. It's simple to make a rapid and dramatic improvement by remembering a few golden rules;

1. Understand why your are presenting. Is it to educate, inform, entertain or persuade? 

2. Know who your audience is and what you (and they) want to achieve. 

3. What's your Big Idea? What's the key thing you want them to remember?

4. Develop your story ... before you open Powerpoint or Keynote!


This simple guide will give you the rules you should obey every time you put a presentation together.

Create strategy with focus

Developing a marketing strategy for your business can sound like a time consuming and a complicated process and it can be unless you decide to take a minimalist approach. 

This means keeping it as simple as possible by focussing on the absolute basics. In this case I'm talking about generating revenue through sales.

The basic requirement for any business is a viable market with long term growth potential. Stagnant, saturated or declining markets are not a good idea, unless you plan to revitalise them. So the starting point for any business is to assess the market potential, which is code for “How much money can this idea make?”

And the simple equation to use is this;

Average Sales Value x Number of Sales - Costs

This will give you a very high level view of the net revenue potential, which is the right starting point.

Identifying opportunity is one thing but achieving it is another. This is where strategy meets execution and to succeed you need the following;

• Messages that attract attention, arouse interest and motivate action;
• A plan to communicate your messages and engage with potential clients to create a vibrant supply of sales enquiries;
• The right sales skills to win business and develop relationships;
• A focus on customer satisfaction to win repeat business and referrals

Obviously there is detail behind each point, but if you start from this position you will have a clear view of the important things you must do to succeed.

As American military commander George S. Patton once said, "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week". And that's exactly the same in business.

Are Great Leaders Born ... or Made?

A CEO recently asked me if I thought that great leaders were born or could be developed through training and experience.This is a pretty loaded question to someone involved in Leadership Development and Training!  

This is interesting though, because I’ve worked for some incredibly inspirational  leaders and others who were completely out of their depth. Obviously personality plays a part, so what parallels can we draw from the  nature versus nurture debate, which is one of the oldest issues in psychology.

The debate has raged for centuries on the relative importance of genetic inheritance and environmental factors on human development. 

Great thinkers like Plato and Descartes suggested that certain things are inborn, or they occur naturally regardless of environmental influences. Others like John Locke believed in what is known as “Tabula rasa” which is a Latin term that roughly into ‘blank slate’ and it believes that personality and social development comes from experience and perception. 

Both schools of thought were partly right because today we believe that both have an influence. There are many examples of people who come from poor, disadvantaged backgrounds and still achieve great things.

What we do know is that great leaders create the right lens through which to view the world. They see things differently and this allows them to motivate others to see the same thing. They help the team see the ultimate goal and then challenge their brightest people to build strategies to get there.

There are many examples from famous explorers who ventured where no-one else had been to inventors and businesspeople who changed the world and created entire industries. But they didn’t do it alone. They had collaborators, supporters and stakeholders who also believed in their vision of what was possible.

So my answer to the CEO was that whilst I do believe that good leaders are born, truly great leaders study and emulate the best. She shared my view but that's just our opinion, what do you think?