Total, Relaxed Organization, The Blog

What’s the best strategy for personal, business, or career growth in a rapidly-changing world? What’s Priacta up to right now? The same answer addresses both questions. This quick article will give you an instant life, productivity, and business skill and provide insight into our company.

As innovation and better communication accelerate the pace of change, how do you survive and even thrive? To find the answer, first recognize that programs (specific approaches) change, but principles (fundamental truths packaged for application) remain more-or-less invariant. Look for correct principles and live by them.

Here’s one powerful principle for success in a sea of change.

Golden Opportunities, Sudden Threats

Donald Sull’s 2005 Harvard Business Review article (“Strategy as Active Waiting“) points out that golden opportunities are essential to success. However, they come rarely and you can’t force them. You can only 1) watch for them, actively scanning the horizon, 2) prepare so you have resources to seize them as they arise, then 3) commit those resources at the right moment.

Simple, powerful, relaxed strategy. However, timing is everything. Windows of opportunity open and close quickly, so you have to be ready, you have to act fast, and you also have to choose your opportunities carefully.

Donald also points out that sudden threats also arise and have to be addressed head on or else. In my experience, threats and opportunities appear simultaneously with increasing frequency. Innovate or languish. Apply now or other job candidates will do it instead. That’s the nature of competition, and competition, in business, creates a better world for everyone. Compare the level of service you receive from many government agencies with the level of service you receive from companies in highly competitive markets. Which do you prefer?

So how do you prepare and respond to these opportunities and threats?

Marshall Your Resources: Time, Not Just Money

When in active waiting mode, you don’t just mark time and hope to win the lottery. It doesn’t work that way. Instead, you must organize and accumulate your resources so you can bring them to bear at the critical moment.

Businesses talk of accumulating a “war chest” of funds they can tap into when opportunities become apparent. True, access to funds is important, since that gives companies staying power. However, I think the greatest resource is often overlooked. Time—or rather, how we choose to use the time we have—is critical. Windows of opportunity open and close quickly. Since we all have the same 168 hours per week per person, you need 1) visibility on your commitments and opportunities (so you know the opportunity costs of moving in a new direction, or in other words, what it costs you to not do things you could do or have been doing), and 2) the ability to instantly change directions when the right opportunity opens up without fear of what might happen.

That’s one huge benefit of Priacta’s Total, Relaxed Organization task and time management training. With all your commitments (tasks) and opportunities (someday/maybes) poised and ready for action, you have ideal visibility on everything in your world. You naturally make faster, informed decisions about the costs of seizing a new opportunity and whether you have sufficient time resources to make the move. You minimize the fear of things that won’t get done by having visibility on them, so you move forward with confidence. Your sense of relaxed control gives you uncanny calmness in the face of rapid course changes. It’s incredibly empowering. In fact, it’s downright fun.

Priacta’s Opportunities

Priacta is living this approach. We’re always watching for new opportunities. We have the advantage of agility—we can move on a dime because we are smaller and have less infrastructure to maintain. Our company uses a distributed model so we can hire almost anywhere in the country or world on short notice, making use of the latest Web technologies to keep effective channels of communication open.

All this makes it easier to weather storms like the US recession. In fact, a recession is really a huge opportunity for a company like Priacta. In a steady-state environment, larger, long-established companies might have an edge. However, when people and businesses feel a pinch, they have to look for alternatives to stay afloat. The trick is seeing what you really have to offer and how it can really help resolve your world’s pain. With that clearly in focus, then the golden opportunities become apparent, and it’s decision time. Change or status quo? Go for it or not?

We decided to go for it a couple of months ago. We’re pioneering new business models. We’re tapping into some incredibly cool new markets. The opportunity cost? Trog Bar development slowed during this time as we reassigned resources to build key infrastructure for these new strategic systems. Blogging diminished. That’s a good thing, not a bad one, because you can only use your time for one thing at a time, and you need to allocate it to your Most Profitable Activities to get the greatest result. Seizing golden opportunities is definitely an MPA.

The benefits will soon far outweigh the cost, both for us, for you, for the productivity industry in general, and even for Trog Bar. What we’re doing will truly be a win-win arrangement, which is exciting for us because that’s our #1 core value.

Your Opportunities

Start watching and preparing now for those golden opportunities of your own. It’s a rewarding, exhilarating, fun approach to strategy and change. You and the rest of the world will be better for it.