More than Money

Self-motivation is worth more than money
If you have the MONEY to hire the best advisors, but lack the motivation to actually use their advice, you will quickly lose the money. However, the person with the self-motivation to take intelligent action can have as much money as he or she is committed to earning. This is why people can go from rags to riches and why many rich people, end up not only broke – but broken.

In my business, I work hard to avoid people, who want to hire me as their marketing coach, just so we can have lots of interesting conversations. This is because I know that unless someone is motivated enough to get off their butt and work with the ideas and answers I provide to them, they won’t achieve anything. However, a self-motivated person working to a great plan, is simply unstoppable!

Faith is worth more than money
No matter how rich a person is financially, if they lack faith in; them self, their spouse, their friends, their company or product etc – they won’t feel very wealthy. Personally, I find that during the crunch times in life, and we ALL have those times, it’s also great to have faith in something that’s bigger than we are. In my case, that’s faith in God.

It’s impossible to move forward, unless we have faith in others and ourselves; from faith that the brakes on your car will work, to faith that if you work hard enough doing the right things, your business plans will work.

Knowledge is worth more than money
If someone dumps a million or two into Bob’s bank account, he better quickly learn how to be a millionaire! Otherwise, Bob won’t be a millionaire very long.

The reason lottery companies provide financial experts to work with the lottery winners, who win the major prizes, is that they were worried about all the negative stories, of multi-million lottery winners, who went broke and often ended up with less than they started with. That’s because money without knowledge, tends to disappear very quickly. A fool and his money, and all that! Of course, many lottery winners still went broke after getting great financial advice, because they lacked the self-motivation to use what they were told.

My mentor, the late Jim Rohn, used to say that the real value of building a million dollar business is NOT the million dollars. It’s the learning and knowledge we acquire earning that fortune. Take a million away from a millionaire, who made that money themselves, and they can make another million. This has been proven again and again to be true.

Chris Brogan Video of Inspirational LeWeb Speech on Value of Social Networks

The New York Times Best Seller with Julien Smith

Click on the book and get connected to Chris Brogan's blog!

Project Management Adds Real Value and Cost Savings to Organisations

Project management is certainly not overhead. Project management, if implemented and performed in a structured and professional manner, adds real value by reducing waste, controlling costs and improving performance.

Good portfolio management will reduce waste by weeding out projects that should never be started. Often we start these projects and later cancel them after wasting effort and money.

Practicing good project management in the area of initiation, planning and execution will greatly increase the success rate and performance of your project execution. Resources will be better utilised and the team will be more communicative, motivated and organised.

This will reduce duplication of effort, control costs and ensure that risks, issues and dependencies are dealt with in an optimal and effective manner, maximising effort and minimising waste.

Performing proper project closure, and learning good lessons from our past successes (and occasional mistakes), will improve the performance and effectiveness of future projects.

Finally we need to monitor, review and control our projects. We learn in six sigma that you do not improve what you do not measure.

Taking metrics during each phase of your product development process is key to learning and improving your future performance. You can start taking these measurements at any time.

As you improve your implementation of project management you will also see an improvement in the performance of your projects. These project improvements will provide a 'gearing' effect and the same amount of effort as before, will create a greater momentum and more energy in the implementation of your projects. Simply by the introduction of good, strong project management methods.

With due regard for the creation of real value from dilligent effort, the Project Manager's mantra follows Vaughan's Equation: VO > EI (Value Out is greater than Effort In) You will find that strong project management follows this equation, very closely and will always be well worth your time and effort to implement.

Project management is certainly not overhead. I hesitate even to include the word in the same sentence to avoid establishing a subconscious association.

Project management, if implemented and performed, by a professional, in a structured and professional manner, adds real value by reducing waste, controlling costs and improving performance.

Project management provides better ROI, lower TCO and better TQC.