Maguire here.

Y’know, if we were to really take the time to actually cultivate an awareness of the significance of each moment –  instead of just passing through it on our way to the next and then the next and then the next — we just might learn something. About life. About the world around us. About ourselves.

The trick is, to be able to hear a moment, you have to be silent.

Stop. Turn off the noise. Listen.

Each of us is unique. Most of us are sound asleep.  Pay attention to what is going on around you. Find the lesson inside.

Driving down the freeway., surrounding yourself with noise. Just might be the perfect time to start listening to yourself. Turn off the radio. Roll up the window. Eject the CD. Give some thought to the moment. Reflect on the people you’ve met, the places you’ve been, the things you experienced today…and be grateful.

There are lessons to be learned out there. They are yours by simply turning down the noise of your everyday life. Call it meditation or the communion with self or the pursuit of a higher consciousness. Call it an “awareness tune-up.” Whatever you call it, it’s yours by turning the background noise dial to “off” and listening to the music that rises up from inside you.

Try it. You just might surprise yourself with what you learned today.

Passion. Attitude. And the third element of “The Trinity for Changing Times? ”  Relationships.

When you were a child, your mother taught you to hold hands when you crossed the street. Holding hands is important. Those hands can be your lifeline in tough times and they can be your bridge to the opportunities that are out there.

Listen – really listen — for the opportunities. Learn from others, use what works for you and then pass it on to someone who can use it too. Give, take, share. Build relationships…and your clients will come.

I’ll be talking more about the pursuing and building relationships  in the first seminar of my series entitled “What Do I Do Now.”  You can catch me live on Thursday, 4/13/09 (5:30 – 7:00 ) at Fiamme Restaurant in Westlake Village, CA. Just call 818-865-8055 to reserve your seat…and this one’s free!

P.S. — Don’t worry if you can’t make it this time. There will be more live seminars…and we’ll be featuring them on video, on site in the months to come.

Bob Dylan was right, then and now. The times they are a changin.’ The question that any organization – big or small, local or global — is  faced with in these changing times, tenor and territories is “ How do we feel about it? Beginning of the end or beginning of a new era? Time to dig in or jump in?

Attitude, my friends. Attitude tells the tale. Attitude is the difference between

“IMPOSSIBLE” and “I’M POSSIBLE.”

The fact is, times like these constitute a golden opportunity for leaders, entrepreneurs and organizations to retool, refresh or reinvent themselves, their company, their employees. It’s an exciting, resolve-testing time to be alive – not the “me” decade or the “we” decade, but the “re” decade.

I’m in the “re” business. Always have been. Changing times demand new solutions and I’ve had to constantly retool, refresh and reinvent myself — adding, augmenting, and fine-tuning my service offerings in response to the changing global climate. Along the way, I’ve learned valuable lessons about the nature of leadership and the power of a positive attitude.

And brother…it counts for everything.

I’ll be talking more about the importance of attitude in the first seminar of my series entitled “What Do I Do Now.”  You can catch me live on Thursday, 4/13/09 (5:30 – 7:00 ) at Fiamme Restaurant in Westlake Village, CA. Just call 818-865-8055 to reserve your seat…and this one’s free!

P.S. –  Don’t worry if you can’t make it this time around. There will be more live seminars…and we’ll be featuring them all on video, on site in the months to come.

Maguire Here.

Change. It’s a constant in all our lives – more so now than ever. It’s all around us. The world is changing so rapidly and so dramatically that the greatest challenge is just keeping up, let alone taking full advantage of the abundant opportunities which present themselves on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis.

Question: How do you feel about it? Do you tend to look upon change as the beginning of the end…or are you actually in touch with the fact that it represents a golden opportunity to retool or refresh or reinvent yourself, your company, your employees?

Are you passionate – truly I-can’t-wait-to-dive-in passionate — about what you do? If not, now is the perfect time for a change. I mean a change to that thing or pursuit or dream that you do feel passionate about. Intensity is critical to success and if you can’t feel it, why bother? Find your passion or you’ll find yourself left behind.

I talk more about the necessity of passion in the first seminar of my series entitled “What Do I Do Now.”  You can catch me live on Thursday, 4/13/09 at Fiamme Restaurant in Westlake Village, CA  Call 818-865-8055 to reserve your seat…and this one’s free! See you there.

And P.S. –  Don’t worry if you can’t make it. We’ll be featuring it on video, on site in the months to come.

Maguire here.

To continue on with a recent thread…Customer Satisfaction Is Not Enough! Consider this: 60 –80% of customers who defect report that they are “satisfied.” Mere “satisfaction” is by no means the whole picture. Repeat business comes from going beyond customer satisfaction — to customer delight. Customer delight leads to customer loyalty.

According to B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, authors of “The Experience Economy” the “key to differentiation in the market is experience.” Mssrs. Pine and Gilmore consider customer experience to be the “fourth economic offering” — beyond commodity, beyond goods, beyond service.

Experience. Pine and Gilmore go on to state that “When a person buys a service, he purchases a set of intangible experiences carried out on his behalf. But when he buys an experience, he pays to spend time enjoying a series of memorable events that a company stages – as in a theatrical play – to engage him in a personal way.”

Companies create an “experience” whenever they engage customers, connecting with them in a personal, memorable way.

Think Geek Squad…Starbucks…Nordstrom…Southwest Airlines, et. al. In order to differentiate your service in today’s crowded marketplace from everybody else’s, you need to create an experience for the customer that will make them feel good about doing business with you.

Experiences are sensations and feelings evoked by interaction with the customer. Experiences can be positive or negative (and they cause a physiological change in the customer’s body). Experiences are memorable.

The creation of consistently positive experiences is the key to loyalty.

When a customer experience engages, customers walk away with indelible impressions. Impressions are the “take-away” of the experience. When the customer walks away with the impression of being valued — that they are cared about and appreciated — they are more likely to want to come back again and to tell their friends to do so as well. Differentiation comes from being treated differently…being made to important, welcome, comfortable – special!

What a delight that is. More next time. Frank out.

Maguire here.

Recently came back from a very enjoyable, particularly stimulating speaking engagement in Panama. Ideas flowing, all systems engaged. Maybe it was the exhilarating sight of those famous canals. Maybe it was the attitude imparted by the new, smartly styled Panama hat that I picked up to commemorate a great trip. Maybe it was that particular brand of clarity that comes from the combination of foreign soil, security lines and travel fatigue. Whatever it was, it all comes down to this: I’ve got something terrific I want to share with you.

It came to me on the plane ride home. A number of corporate executives and business leaders from Southern California have enjoyed my informal Leadership on the Lake sessions, where we climb into my boat and take a slow trip around my own little Westlake waterway.  We talk about whatever leadership topics come to mind — bringing our intellect, our experiences, our individual expertise to bear in the interest of brainstorming new topics, new directions, new solutions to the problems that plague all forms of endeavor  — from the entrepreneurial to the corporate to the personal kind.

We have fun, too. Seeing the world from beyond the office helps everyone’s thoughts to flow, but it also encourages it’s own brand of focus – similar to the clarity I spoke of earlier, but more easily achieved. Creative viewpoints emerge. Alternative strategies pour forth. Innovative solutions take shape.

I love seeing the “aha” moments coalesce as my clients derive visions of how to successfully navigate the challenges and opportunities of their own leadership work. Anyone who has seen me speak to an organization knows that I thrive on the warmth of a gathering, and enjoy exercising my gift for inspiring the troops about what a contribution they make, and how they can set their sights even higher.

It occurred to me that I really don’t need a boat or a lake or a trip to Panama to go exploring.  It also came to me that one-on-one coaching is a valuable offshoot and a natural progression of the group success sessions for which I am presently (and globally) known. As it turns out, some of my Leadership on the Lake alumni have inquired about just such one-on-one coaching sessions – for the express purpose of  helping them explore their own specific tasks and challenges more deeply. So, because Leadership on the Lake (and my Panama epiphany) has shown me that the Mind of Maguire is also highly effective for close-focus work, I’m inviting all you out there to come exploring with me. Let’s get together and talk about you, your organization, your dreams and some experience-tested ways to increase your forward momentum.

Buy a new hat…and give me a call.

Maguire here. Consider this…

Life responds to your outlook.

Life is largely a matter of expectation. In order to succeed, you must expect to succeed.

Funny thing…When you expect things to happen, strangely enough, they do happen.

Expectation energizes your goals and gives them momentum.

The dreams you believe in come to be. Believe something good can happen, and it will happen.

Set your goals high. Begin with wild expectations, succeed beyond your wildest dreams.

Maguire here. Every once in a while I’m auditing, updating, organizing my files and I find something that was once shared only with one client that has great relevance to virtually anyone who deals with clients, customers, the public at large.

This time, I ran across some coaching notes I’d made for an executive of a large company. He was on his way to Hawaii to meet with the rest of the management team and he wanted some help writing a speech. He wanted to convince the rest of the team that the “Customer Experience” was so critical to their business that they should be making a large investment in training everyone who touched the customer to go above and beyond, to add discretionary effort, to go the extra mile.

If you’ve ever had trouble getting your boss or your team or anyone to understand why this “customer care thing” is so important, here’s your opening argument…

Customers become “regulars” when we provide them with what they need. When we provide them with the product they seek, at a price that is fair, in a way that is easy and a sales location that is pleasant.

Customers become “loyal” customers when we consistently create a Positive Emotional Experience for them. Loyalty is an emotional attachment, one with a big pay back. Single-digit increases in customer retention and loyalty cause double-digit increases in profit.

Customers get attached when we provide for both their business needs (product, convenience, safety, price etc.) and their personal (emotional) needs (courtesy, respect, trust, comfort, security, recognition). According to studies that were done originally by the Rockefeller Institute and then by US News and World Reports,  68% of the customers that quit going back to a company do so because  they think, perceive or feel that the company does not care about them.

Customers bail when you fail to take care of them. In short, when they feel a company is indifferent to them or their needs, they are open to the idea of  leaving that company. That “care thing” is looming larger in the scheme of things, eh? Food for thought.

More next time. Frank out.

Maguire here.

Suddenly we’re in trouble? I’m not buying it. And neither are the American people. Sweeping change and immediate turnaround are not the way to go, because nobody believes. To foster such a belief — that immediate turnaround is even remotely possible — is just one more lie, one more evasion, one more mis-communication.

Too Little Too Late? No.

But the journey has just begun. And communication with the people that are going to save the day has to be the first order of the day – because literally  every day we’re party to “news” that should not be “news” to us…information and situations and conditions that we should have known about long ago.

Y’know, I spent enough time in Washington to know that you never know the whole story. I also know that if President Bush hadn’t initiated rescue measures before the holidays, the principles would have gone home for their Christmas vacation not knowing whether there would be a business when they got back and that very easily could have dealt a mortal wound to the heart of the organization…its people.

The Real Heart of the Matter

All people and companies and businesses are being affected. All are impacted by these woeful financial crises. So we have the opportunity to find the gift here — the opportunity to effect change on all fronts – technological, professional, personal, financial, spiritual, cultural. We have a new administration, new leaders, new purpose and new regard as a part of a truly world vision. And now, perhaps more than ever, the whole world is watching. Waiting. Wondering.

Let’s get them communicating. There’s a pony in there somewhere…a herd of ponies. Let’s find it together…let’s make the change that changes everything for the better.

Maguire here.

So. We’re going to help the auto companies. Going to bail them out.

Big surprise? Shouldn’t be. Not really.

Everybody knows that if you close down the American automobile industry, it’ll take down the economy…because it hits us where we live – and not just personally and professionally, but perceptually. Spiritually even.

The real question is…How are we going to do it? Decades of evidence shows us that what these companies have been doing to stay alive and productive and solvent is not doing it at all. In fact, the American auto industry was so bad at it, they virtually – and some time ago - invited Toyota and Nissan and Honda to take the industry away from them.

What needs to change? What will change?

I think that people understand that change is needed, but they don’t necessarily understand what change means. The very nature of the change is key here. We’re talking cultural, spiritual, psychological – not merely in technology or financing. Not just the process, either…but in how people think.

New thinking creates new opportunities, new orientations, new life – change in the truest and most impactful sense.  The people do the thinking…and people are the heart of an organization. Not the process, but the people. Not the technology, but the ticker.

Change. New thinking. Heart.

How to do it? Communication.

Honest. Open. Complete communication.