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Orchestrating Success

Hugh Ballou

Converting Passion to Profit is a podcast by Hugh Ballou, The Transformational Leadership Strategist teaching leaders to convert their ideas into income. Each session is packed with practical concepts for immediate application.

  • 38 minutes 45 seconds
    Brainpower with Nina Sunday

    Brainpower with Nina Sunday

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    24 March 2023, 10:00 pm
  • 25 minutes 24 seconds
    OS 123: How to Marry Creativity and Business Acumen

    How to marry creativity and business acumen and turn them into superpowers

    We creatives often get in our own way because of the stories we tell ourselves

    So our creative juices sometimes can become our worst nightmares that lead to overwhelm, burnout, and jeopardize our well-being and relationships

    But it doesn't have to be that way. Let me show you how.


    Yiqing (yee-ching) is an award-winning actor/filmmaker and a creativity coach for artists and entrepreneurs. 

    She is the CEO of Fearless Cutie Pie Productions - an all-female production company dedicated to telling cathartic stories with strong Asian female leads.

    She found her calling in helping people with their minds and souls through storytelling, after a miserable failure in a depression study when she was a medical student in China. 

    She helps heart-driven multi-hyphenates get unstuck, overcome burnout, and create more balanced, meaningful, and fulfilling lives. 


    She can be found here https://linktr.ee/yiqingzhao

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    9 May 2022, 8:42 pm
  • 30 minutes 39 seconds
    OS 122 Super Charge Your Profits with No Bid Federal Contracts!

    OS 122 Super Charge Your Profits with No Bid Federal Contracts!


    Federal Contracts are not just for the BIG COMPANIES, federal contracting is for small companies. Small Businesses are leaving SO MUCH money on the table. If you've never thought about federal contracting because there's too much red tape, no-bid contracts will open up this door of opportunity for you.

    Ron Imbach is the president of the Center for Business Innovation and the Executive Director of the International Association of US Government Contractors.  He and his partner, Chip Ellis, lead a talented team that provides coaching, consulting, and training to small businesses that want to thrive with federal contracts.

    Ron has spent the past 30+ years assisting small businesses, high-net-worth individuals, non-profits, and large companies.  With an undergraduate degree in accounting and economics and an MBA in marketing and public policy, Ron is very comfortable with the numbers, but thrives the most in relationship-building, including assisting his clients now in building relationships with federal government decision-makers.

    Since 2008, the IAUSGC has assisted over 2000 clients to secure federal no-bid contracts with the federal government, millions of dollars for their clients, without any of the mind-numbing red tape, complicated contracts, and expensive consultants.  CBI and IAUSGC serve clients in their Top 40 Industries.  Those industries are in the greatest demand for federal government contracts for goods and services.  

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    11 April 2022, 7:06 pm
  • 39 minutes 18 seconds
    OS 121: Scale Your Business by Following Evan’s C.A.S.T.LE. Methodology

    OS 121: Scale Your Business by Following Evan’s C.A.S.T.LE. Methodology

     

    Evan Tzivanakis is an Accredited Executive Coach (www.ExecutiveCoachAsia.com) and a Ph.D. candidate in Organizational Behaviour. Throughout his career, has managed more than 500 employees across 8 countries and led companies to expand across the Asia Pacific region by successfully crafting the right company culture and leading people from the front. With that experience, he helps executive leaders and organizations to enhance their leadership presence, have more engaged teams, increase profits, and live happier. He does that by offering some of the most educational, transformational, and impactful coaching & training solutions.

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    10 February 2022, 7:33 pm
  • 29 minutes 53 seconds
    OS 120: Ed Krow on Leadership

    OS 120: Ed Krow on Leadership

    With a proven track record in HR, Ed Krow is a people expert who uses his unique talent transformation process to leverage existing talent and align employees with organizational strategy to create change, drive sustainable growth, and maintain overall happiness.

    “I help solve people's problems and I write books about solving people's problems, but I’m also a business owner. It’s not only experience, it’s living with the same problems my clients do and sharing how to overcome them that people value the most.”     Ed Krow.

    Ed Krow is ambitious, educated, and dedicated when it comes to getting everyone on the same page. He values people at the heart of everything, so he became a talent transformation expert. As a regular contributor to Forbes.com, Ed Krow is a sought-after, down-to-earth leader in his field.

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    1 February 2022, 6:51 pm
  • 27 minutes 21 seconds
    OS 119: Know, Like and Trust and Other Sales Lies

    OS 119: Know, Like and Trust and Other Sales Lies with Sara Phillips


    Website: superiorperformancecoaching.biz

    Free Ebook for listeners:  https://www.hotsalestips.com/habitsofsuccessfulsalespeople

    Sign Up for a Free 30 Minute Consultation to get personal tips to up your sales game:  https://calendly.com/saraphillipssolutions/complimentary-30-minute-advisory-session


    Bio: Sara Phillips is a person who has sales running through her veins. She paid her way through college by buying candy and reselling it to other kids beginning in elementary school. She has spent a lifetime building a highly successful sales career. Now living in Clayton, NC, she is single and has one four-legged fur baby named Coby. From her home there she continues to grow her health insurance business but is now using her additional career as a school teacher to help others learn a different way to view sales. As a sales coach, she frames sales in a different light that allows the sales professional to build a predictable stream of high income while, at the same time, removing the stress from the process. In short, she helps sales professionals put the life back in their life. 

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    24 January 2022, 9:12 pm
  • 12 minutes 59 seconds
    OS 118: 5 Leadership Myths That Kill Entrepreneurial Ventures

    5 Leadership Myths That Kill Entrepreneurial Ventures

    Hugh Ballou

    The Law of the Lid

    Your leadership is like a lid or a ceiling on your organization. Your church or business will not rise beyond the level your leadership allows. That’s why, when a corporation or team needs to be fixed, they fire the leader.

    - John Maxwell, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership

    Starting and maintaining a profitable enterprise as an entrepreneur is very difficult, at best. However, research shows that 90% of businesses that fail do so because of a lack of leadership skills.

    Fortunately, leadership is a skill many people can learn. In my opinion, however, learning great leadership means that many of us must unlearn most of what we’ve previously been taught or observed.

    Best practice for building and sustaining a profitable business is often a reverse paradigm from the things business schools and prevailing leadership experts teach. Leadership best practice, from my perspective, requires the same skills a conductor uses to build the high-performance cultures we call “ensembles” in the musical world. “Ensembles,” in the non-music context, are high-synergy teams. These teams develop only with the intentionality of the leader.

    The entrepreneur who operates as a “solopreneur” might not perceive that synergistic teams are important. Wrong! If you are talking to at least one other person, such as a salesperson, consultant, alliance or venture partner, advisor or board member, then you have a team. It is important for entrepreneurs to surround themselves with capable people. It is also important to learn from other businesses you admire. Being an entrepreneur is a choice to stay out of corporate systems, so why do things in the same way as a company you don’t want to work for?

    Team effectiveness starts with the leader and branches from there. First, you equip yourself, then you empower others. With this in mind, here are the 5 top leadership myths that kill entrepreneurial ventures:

    1.     I Must Be in Command

    2.     Always be Right

    3.     Improper Language or Behavior

    4.     Pretend to Know What You are Doing Even If You Don’t Know

    5.     Delegation is a Weakness of Leadership

    Are you ready to go to the next step? As you study these myths, I suggest you share your personal and organizational goals with at least three people you respect and with whom you have a valued connection. Check with them every 30 days to let them know how things are progressing. Being accountable to others is frightening at first until you realize that the people you are accountable to are the people who will bring the highest value to you because they understand where you’re going.

    But most important of all, for your venture’s success, when you hit the leadership lid, raise the ceiling!

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    14 December 2021, 12:27 am
  • 9 minutes 52 seconds
    OS 117: 5 Top Challenges for Today's Leaders
    Top Challenges for Today’s Leader Leadership is a general topic that people understand in different ways; in fact people have contrasting and conflicting perceptions of how leaders should behave and what leaders should do. Therefore, there are many gaps between theory and effective performance for leaders. Over the past 31 years in working with leadership in many types of organizations doing different kinds of work and leading different sizes of groups, I have observed these 5 things that are my vision of why many leaders don't make the progress that they are capable of and don't’ get into a stride of continuous improvement that propels them into the place they deserve. So, consequently leaders are over stressed with too many demands on their time, have lower performing teams than expected, and earn less income than possible. Here are my thoughts as to why these leadership gaps and ways to address each one: 1) Not Understanding True Leadership: We have had leadership bad models and have been taught things that aren’t working today, and may have never worked. The “Boss” or autocratic leader is a thing of the past. Many people in positions of authority use power of position as the leverage to get people to perform. If we truly have a team of competent people, then it’s crucial to let them perform, as they are capable. Telling people what to do isn’t the answer to getting the best results, unless the leader only wants to be around to boss people all the time and do nothing else. This doesn’t develop capacity for anyone and wastes the energy, time and talent of the leader. True leadership in my world is Transformational Leadership where the leader is the influencer, visionary, and empowering agent for others to perform. Leaders lead. Others do. Whoever taught us that we should be willing to do anything we ask others do to most likely didn’t mean that we had to actually do it. If so, why have others anyway? 2) Not Being Vulnerable: Fear of being wrong comes from the misconception that leaders must have all the right answers. It’s more important for leaders to ask good questions and empower others to have the right answers. Saying, “I don’t have the answer” is a true way of being vulnerable. One strength of leadership is being vulnerable by letting other know we don’t have the answers and that we don’t have all the skills. We lead by example and not by bluffing. When we bluff, then people intuitively know it, so we lose credibility. Being authentic is a top trait of the Transformational Leader. In face, we should have a team of people with contrasting skills to ours and people who fill in the gaps of our competencies. What a novel thought, eh? 3) Not Understanding the Value of Relationships: Leadership is based on relationship. Always work on relationships with those in your charge. This is misunderstood by many as having to be “friends” with employees. No, that not the only choice. And it does not mean that the leader must make decisions so that people will like them. The inverse is true. Make principle based decisions so people will respect you. Value and respect people over results, then they become more focused on results along with you. Leadership is relationships. Communication is also enhanced through good relationships. 4) Not Understanding How to Manage Self: Writer Richard Rohr says that, “Transformed people transform people.” He also says, “Wounded people wound people.” Not managing self is a start of building a dysfunctional team. If the leader is anxious, then the team is anxious. If the leader is dishonest, then the team is dishonest. You get the idea.

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    18 March 2019, 7:03 pm
  • 7 minutes 44 seconds
    OS 116: Complexity vs Simplicity
    Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler.- Albert Einstein There are at least 200 working days a year. If you commit to doing a simple marketing item just once each day, at the end of the year you've built a mountain.- Seth Godin (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/09/the-simple-power-of-one-a-day.html)* Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.- Steve Jobs Complexity to Simplicity: The Transformational Leader Creates Clarity Our world already has too many choices. I can remember when we only had the telephone to contact people. In fact, when we needed to call long distance, we needed to have the operator place the call. It was a big deal when we could dial 1 to make a long distance call. Then we got FAX machines. We could send documents over phone lines. This saved sending packages by special delivery mail. Then, the next big deal was email! This was an amazing breakthrough allowing us to communicate with people around the globe. Then came pagers. Then we got cell phones. Then came texting. We kept adding things and not taking away anything. More is not better. We are bombarded each day with so many messages that it's difficult to discern what's important. We live in a mostly over-stimulated world. In music masterworks, some of the most profound moments are those with complete silence or a passage that's pianissimo, following a loud, dramatic passage. There's unique power in the quiet times and the times of silence. It's in silent, quiet times that the presence of God is most felt, not in noisy praise sessions. It’s the leader’s duty and delight to pay attention to what’s happening and how it happens and separate the noise from the essential messages. It’s the leader's job to make the complex simple. This is not a simple task. Cutting through the noise and confusion takes focus, concentration, and a lot of effort. Like the Jobs quote above points out, it’s hard work making things simple. When I was a young piano student, I heard Van Cliburn play a solo concert in Atlanta, Georgia. I was so impressed that he made playing the piano seem easy. It appeared easy because he had practiced. He had done the hard work. He had prepared in order to release his creative energy in performance. Mozart’s music is seemly simple, however it’s so transparent that every note is exposed. It’s delicacy in motion. It’s difficult, not in playing lots of notes, but in precision. Paderewski was known to have said that playing Mozart was simple for the student and very difficult for the teacher. In other words, the simple is difficult. We want to hide behind complexity as leaders to protect our deficiencies, our insecurities, and our lack of knowledge. Leadership is identifying our gaps. Leadership is asking questions and not knowing all the answers. Leadership is about integrity, honesty, and open communications. We get things done and we know how things get done. If we don’t know, we find out how. When the musical conductor prepares for a rehearsal, they spend 2 to 3 hours preparing for each hour of rehearsal. There’s no substitute for preparation. To get to simple takes work. It takes lots of work. The complexity of leadership is in being able to make things simple so others can follow. We want stimulation. * http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/09/the-simple-power-of-one-a-day.html (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/09/the-simple-power-of-one-a-day.html)

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    12 March 2019, 10:14 pm
  • 6 minutes 9 seconds
    OS 115: Choosing Vs. Not Choosing
    “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” ― Robert Frost Choices are very important in leadership. Making the wrong choice costs money and potentially damages the organization. The burden is on the leader for making effective and wise choices. Not making a decision is a choice. Sometimes, paralyzed by the gravity of the choice, leaders stall and can’t decide. Not making a choice is certainly a choice. What’s the impact of the decision on the organization? What’s the impact of the decision on relationships? What’s the impact of the decision on revenue…customer satisfaction…client engagement…stakeholder involvement…? Asking these questions before making a decision helps leaders recognize the consequences of the decision. Maybe asking those questions before not making a choice would be good, as well. Making wise, informed choices is the duty and delight of the leader. Making poor choices can cost a lot more and, certainly, waiting to make a decision increases the cost or impact of the problem to the culture or to profit as the situation gets worse. The most difficult of choices typically centers on people issues, such as when to terminate the employee, when to give a salary increase, when to correct their behavior, when to challenge a nonparticipating board member, etc. Each of these scenarios causes leaders to shy away from confronting controversial issues. Pay the upfront cost and deal with the situation as soon as practical. That might be before you get the chance to confront someone on an issue. Waiting only complicates things and provides an opportunity for the conflict, if that’s the issue, to get worse. A small matter becomes nuclear over time. Delegate action items so you can free up your schedule and your mind to think effectively about complex leadership decisions. To decide or not…that’s the question.

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    4 March 2019, 7:51 pm
  • 9 minutes 56 seconds
    OS 114: Being Emotional versus Logical Thinking
    The point is not to take the world's opinion as a guiding star but to go one's way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause. - Gustav Mahler   Thinking versus Feeling is Transformational Leadership Leaders lead. The question is…do we lead with our brains or with our hearts? In my studies in Bowen Family Systems, a profound paradigm for leadership by managing and differentiating self, I have discovered a better way to make difficult decisions. The way is to define guiding principles for self and for the organization we lead, and utilize those principles for making good decisions. This leadership perspective is crucial. Bowen defines “Basic Self” as following those principles. When the leader makes decisions for other reasons, like to please others, Bowen defines that as “Pseudo Self.” The bottom line for me is that when I make a decision to please someone else, I’m not serving myself or my vision. Ultimately, the person whom we attempt to please will lose respect for us and completely negate the reason we thought was good for making that decision in the first place. Many leaders lead with their heart and are considered compassionate and caring. Principled leaders who utilize rational thinking and think in systems, are sometimes regarded by feelers as uncaring and insensitive. The latter is not generally true. Making effective decisions in line with principles brings value to everyone and, ultimately, those critics will respect the leader once the results are self-evident. Leadership perspective is the key. To counter the feelings of being uncaring and insensitive and maybe inflexible, here are some tactics to consider that are Transformational Leadership basics: * Define Your Ultimate Vision: Know exactly where you want to end up, and write it in compelling language expressed in present tense. Define it as having already happened. Share the vision with anyone in your space who cares about you or your organization, and with those who will benefit from accomplishing that vision. Check for alignment with the vision with key stakeholders and collaborators. * Write Down Core Values: Yes, I have blogged about values being useless. That’s true if the values are the final product. Values are the first step in defining the cultural norms. Values are static statements. That’s fine. Just don’t think that these static statements are going to create value just because they have been created. Moving forward, use these values to create Guiding Principles, and build out the goals without violating those values. * Create Guiding Principles: Guiding Principles are statements that provide guidelines for making effective decisions, both for the leader individually and for the organization as a culture. When you go to a Disney park, it’s very clear that each employee you come across is operating within the company principles…you are the guest and they entertain you. Write separate principles for yourself on how to manage self and how to make thinking decisions. Create a separate, but compatible, set of principles for the organization in collaboration with those in the organization who will support, protect, and teach them to others. Check my post on Guiding Principles (http://transformationalstrategist.com/principles/)for more information. * Review and Update Principles Regularly: Once written, the principles must then be activated and applied in every decision. To ensure that this happens, develop a routine for evaluating the principles and revising them as necessary. If you hold weekly meetings, review one principle each week and evaluate how effectively the group is following that principle, and review if the principle still reflects the culture, values,

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    25 February 2019, 9:58 pm
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