What does success mean to you?

We all want to be successful. The trick is knowing how to define what success means.

Is a business successful if it has strong growth and high sales? Or is it successful when it is a nice place to work and fulfils its core purpose?

If you are a business owner, should business success come at the price of personal happiness?

These issues are highly subjective and too often we only understand them after the event. If we run full tilt at what we think success should be, we may discover we have gone down the wrong path.

Visualising success is a vital step in planning. Once the whole team knows what success looks like, it helps them to:

• Contest issues and make decisions on an objective basis
• Identify opportunities that will benefit the business 
• More confidently analyse what is waste

Complete this sentence. "My business will be a success when we . . ." Will this inspire and excite your customers, your staff and your stake-holders?

Andrew Wylie, Director of Pandemonium Creative, strategic thinkers in marketing, sales and creative.

What beliefs stand in the way of your marketing success?

One of the interesting aspects of being an external supplier is watching how companies approach marketing activity. Like many chaotic systems, it sometimes seems there is no pattern at all. But step back to see the full spectrum of personalities, inter-departmental empires and embedded supply chains and some of those weird decisions start to make sense.

5 Key Needs for a Successful Team

The Hierarchy of Team Needs 

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is an interesting model to investigate our behaviours and motivations. In essence, he believes each layer of need must be satisfied before we can focus on the layer above. First we must address our biological needs of food and air, then our safety, followed by family and friendship, then self-esteem. Only when all these issues are addresses can we focus on creativity and problem solving. Critics have argued over the order and categorisation of the needs but it stands to reason that it's hard to focus on the future when your house is on fire.