All posts by Roger Boswarva

Organization & Success

Organizational success and effective functioning both depend not only on the excellence with which the team’s individuals perform their duties, but, equally importantly, upon the principles applied in organizing the operation.

These are two different issues: a) effective function and, b) business success and prosperity.

At first glance, executives, seeing these two issues are often related, assume they are one and the same or otherwise depend on each other. Not so. One can have effective function without business success and prosperity, and visa versa.

Thus the following maxim: to ensure the continuing success and prosperity of any business undertaking, it must organize and align its functions correctly so it operates most effectively and toward optimum outcomes.

The organizational structures of most American corporations violate this maxim. Their organizational structures only express a vertical communication line of control and power: their structures do not express the flow of completed actions or inputs (useful or valuable outcomes produced) that must occur and pass between the functions of the operation if an enterprise is to have continuing success.

Look at your company’s organizational chart — does it only state the reporting relationships and vertical flow of power and authority ? Does it define the product produced by each department that is valuable to the next? Does it define the flow of these subsidiary valuable products through the organization toward the accomplishment of the enterprise’s ideal circumstance of an on-going viable exchange of something of value with its public ?

If it fails to show the myriad subsidiary products flowing as a sequence from one departmental function to the next for use or fuller processing toward the completed final, valuable, exchangeable, end product or service; you are missing vast opportunities and could be headed for disaster.

Ability Consultants, Inc., uses an innovative approach to enterprise organization. Firstly, we do not just rewrite the chart; we introduce the natural law of the production cycle to management. Second, we train management on the explicit sequence of basic abilities that must be naturally followed and fulfilled by any individual or organization hoping to succeed in any endeavor or production cycle.

When an organization’s operation is properly based on this natural cycle, and all functions are aligned to pursuing its correct ideal circumstance, it will prosper. Where there are violations of this, it will have difficulty . . . and be wondering why.

Proper Planning

PROPER PLANNING — VITAL TO OPTIMUM OUTCOMES
or
BAD PLANNING — A SOURCE OF DISASTER

Planning has gotten a bad name in corporate America. It is often very poorly done, grievously erroneous, or otherwise wasted due to existing plans not being implemented correctly when they are available.

This is true for individuals as well.

All of the spectacular failings of American blue-chip companies in recent decades can be traced to poor, or erroneous, or omitted planning. Apple Computers (when it was failing prior Steve Jobs’s return), IBM’s massive contraction in the mid–1980’s–early 1990’s, Woolworth’s, defunct major airlines, Xerox’s missteps and failure to capitalize on its inventions in computing, et al.

Conventional wisdom gives its reasons for these failures, but on close inspection these reasons can be seen as only statements of the conditions of the market place — not the real why of the failures.

The real why is poor, or erroneous, or omitted planning.

Proper planning is an exact sequence; an exact technology — and it is not taught in Business School, nor in corporate America. Indeed they do not have this technology — which explains why the process is so poorly done.

The technology of planning comes from research into the actions of human ability and its natural cycle in the producing of ideal scenarios or circumstances; and it contains essential, key ingredients, all derived from the principles of Knowledgism™.

First is a proper perception of the environment into which the intended plan is to apply, followed by an evaluation of the perceptions and data gathered: the technology, the market and environmental forces, and the factors that pertain and apply currently as well as those which are changing. (Note this is two actions: perception and data gathering, and then the evaluation and analysis of the gathered data — see our sheet on Data Analysis.) Next is the evaluation and determining of importance and priorities. Next is the stating or updating of the plan’s ideal scenario or circumstance that is to be its outcome. And finally, the correct sequencing of actions to be taken, outcomes to be produced, and corrective procedures to be employed.

A correctly formulated corporate plan of on-going operation that delineates specific duties, responsibilities, knowledges required, and outcomes to be produced that are all aligned to the correct ideal end result or circumstance, will, if faithfully implemented, ensure continuing success.

Omissions and/or errors in planning impede optimum success, if not cause downright failure.

One could take each of the company failures above and, analyzing that failure against the above formula, correctly discern the exact errors made that caused the failure.

Knowing the correct why of any failure, one can often rescue any company.

As an example: was there omitted or erroneous perception? or incorrect or omitted evaluation of what was perceived? Did this lead to the pursuit of incorrect targets, or the failure to provide the correct product or service to the correct public? Did it cause the company to fail to provide for itself the correct resources? Each of the steps of the formula can be analyzed out in this manner.

Planning is a big subject: an important subject: an exacting subject.

Executives trained by Ability Consultants, Inc., on our proprietary Corporate Planning Technology™ get it right, and their companies prosper.

Women Are Better Managers

MEN MAY DOMINATE AS EXECUTIVES BUT WOMEN ARE BETTER MANAGERS

The pundits will cite various reasons for this, and some may even disagree with the notion — but if we actually study what’s going on in corporate America, we will see that a basic dynamic of behavior is at play. It is evident, even, in very small children. Boys tend to want to dominate; while girls tend towards cooperation, wanting to get along with each other, and wanting to exchange understandings. This is not theory, not some new hype or vogue in management consulting, but a well demonstrated fact that corporate America can benefit from utilizing.

It seems the boys have a lot they can learn from the girls.

The first thing to analyze here, is not the difference between boys and girls, but the difference between executive and manager. We tend to think of them as being synonymous, as one and the same, but they are not. Consulting a good dictionary for their definitions, and for the definitions of their stem words, execute and manage, is very instructive. An executive is one vested with the power to act, to execute, perform. A manager is one who handles, controls, guides, conducts and directs the affairs of. In the affairs of corporate America, it is possible for an executive to actually act in isolation — he need not deal with anyone, just paperwork — but management requires the interface of human contact.

And it is here that so many men do so poorly, and women do so well. Good management requires a precise set of skills that men are often very poor at, if not utterly lacking in.

The domination game is not a game where everyone wins — there’s only one apparent “winner,” the dominator — though in truth that’s only appearance as all lose in reality, and in particular those companies lose who unwittingly allow this behavior. And domination can be extremely subtle, polite but just as damaging.

The exchanged understandings game, on the other hand, is a game where everyone can win (everyone who is honest, that is) — and those organizations who foster this dynamic in inter-personal relations win big time.

So, how do we implement this pearl of wisdom? The first thing to do is to recognize it is not all in our genes! (Though some pundits will disagree with that point as well.) The second thing to do is to recognize there are two aspects to it: the male aspect and the female aspect; and each are approached differently.

The fact is, we adopt certain behavior patterns because we think they are right, survival, beneficial to us; and this is why mere education and attempts at behavior modification fail to resolve the situation.

Men have a lot they can learn from women, but it takes a precise process of enlightenment for it to occur; for there are none so blind as the dominator, as he has to not see the consequences of his behavior in order to continue it. He has to ignore and blind himself to the consequences of his actions.

Women have a lot they can learn from the men, but their reciprocal behavior to the dominance game played by the men has left them in need of a proper validation of their natural powers and abilities, a need for a knowing way of dealing with the dynamics of male-female behavior in work interaction, and a need for a way to express and use their natural talents on a par with the men.

Ability Consultants, Inc., employs a precise series of enlightenment drills and reading materials that strip away the underlying precepts and paradigms that determine unwitting and automatic behavior dynamics. We restore to the individual the power to act knowingly and with full ability and volition in his or her inter-personal relations — the ability to think completely, to act with precision and power, and to appreciate and realize empathy and shared understanding. And this is something that both men and women can benefit from. And the bonus we deliver is that our graduates become brilliant and effective communicators!

Motivation

Motivation is a much misunderstood subject.

Motivation is the key to all accomplishment. This is true for all the endeavors we engage in, whether as individuals, elite athletes or as business enterprises or in other team endeavors.

It is also an issue of concern to executives in the effort to achieve corporate performance.

One hears of corporate executives looking to motivate their people, or of “motivational speakers” or seminars being used to attempt to motivate the individual. One even hears it said that such things as money or fear are great motivators.

But these and other notions that depend on some agency outside of the individual in need of “motivation” are erroneous. Individuals are actually not motivated by factors or agencies outside of themselves.

The motivation, the energy and driving force, that is the stuff of accomplishment and excellence is native to the individual and comes from within the individual himself.

We each innately know this.

The key to being blessed with a highly motivated team of associates is to recognize this, and to then know how to unleash and focus the powers and ability to perform that is inherent in each of the individuals of one’s team. And it is particularly true for elite athletes and other individuals who wish to excel.

And the secret of this is to know what the essence of the motive power is that drives each individual’s intent to perform, produce, and have a passion for excellence.

And what is this essential element of life and career motivation? It is the individual’s wants; the specific wants of the individual that underlie all his dreams, all his aspirations, and all his actions.

The value of knowing and applying this in the contemporary corporate setting is, that to rekindle the wants of an individual is to rekindle his life. It has even been said that it is so powerful an action that it can almost raise the dead.

The scenario corporate America faces today, in too many places, is one wherein the individual wants of its team members have been abused, opposed, suppressed. The individual had been diverted away from a passionate pursuit of his purpose; blocked, stopped and invalidated, the wants that should be sparking the motive power of the individual are submerged and lost sight of. And with that submerging went the individual’s motivation, power, driving force — and, of course his performance.

Part of that unwanted scenario are the myriad practices indulged by management and amongst team members themselves (and in life in general) that heap abuse upon the individual’s wants, and thus his motivation.

At Ability Consultants, Inc. we have the answer to this. Our Motivation Restoration Handling™ is important because it restores not only the drive and passion for performance in individuals, but it aligns these wants and drive to perform with those of the team and the corporation. And this achieves stellar results for the bottom line of clients who use it.

Actualizing The Vision

Many dream big and have huge ambition: but few accomplish all they envision.

A magic few get exactly what they envision. Nikola Tesla, the genius who gave us the benefits of modern electricity with his discovery of how to transport and harness alternating current; and who is the true inventor of radio, having demonstrated a radio controlled model submarine to the U.S Navy in a flooded Madison Square Garden in New York City some eight years before Marconi managed to send a few dots and dashes through the air, was famed for having the ability to create a spiritual-mental, three-dimensional, holographic working model of his discoveries and being able to test and refine these models till they were perfected before he constructed them in the real universe.

At Ability Consultants, Inc. we don’t claim that we will deliver this kind of phenomenal ability on one of our basic courses, or in five or ten hours of private counseling — but it is an ability you will acquire with the application of sufficient of the ability enhancing exercises and processes we have available.

In the meantime, executives, elite athletes and others who are finding it slow going or unnecessarily hard to accomplish their true wants, objectives, or dreams and aspirations, will benefit from the “Set Ups for Success”™ technology and processes employed by us.

The accomplishment of one’s dreams and visions requires the application of a precise set of skills and abilities. They are a specific set of abilities and actions that must be applied exactly and in the correct sequence. Too often, ambitious individuals fail to achieve what they intend; and fail to fulfill their wants, dreams and visions because they lack this knowledge and do not apply correctly the needed technology.

At Ability Consultants, Inc., we have delineated the exactitude of this correct set-up, and have the technology that clients can learn and apply in order to guarantee success.

It is called The Set-ups for Success™ Course, and generally takes only twenty or so hours for a client to complete and learn how to succeed brilliantly at accomplishing whatever he or she intends.

Success Profiles

Many moons ago a wise man gave the advice to his fellows to “Know Thyself.”

It is very good advice — but the immediate question that follows, then, is: in what way, and toward what end?

And these are important questions.

It is currently a vogue in corporate America to employ “Personality Type Profiling” of executives and key managers in order to “ensure the right pegs go into the right holes.”

At Ability Consultants, Inc., we know there is a more workable approach available. We have found the notion that one is pre-ordained as to “personality type” or that one cannot change or add to one’s competencies or ability levels is erroneous.

We also disagree with the notion that the “experts” know more about you than you do. And we don’t like the idea of people being pigeon-holed or of people being treated as cogs in a machine. We don’t view people as though they are some sort of computer chip or some other kind of “component.”

As the new president of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman, was reported as saying in The New York Times on 28 April 1998:
“Psychology has essentially been negative for 100 years. Theories have generally focused on damage, as have techniques for intervention. Social science has believed negative things were authentic and strengths were coping mechanisms. But what I see in my own children are pure, unadulterated strengths that are not compensations for trauma, but intrinsic. I find myself beginning to believe psychology needs to ask, what are the virtues? We need to delineate them, assess them, ask causal questions. What are the interactions? How does it grow? Let’s talk of growth and questions of strength.”

We practitioners of Knowledgism™ at Ability Consultants, Inc., heartily agree. Indeed, this has been our focus and practice for more than 30 years. We can show that an individual’s abilities, capacities, interests, wants, and style of interface with his or her fellows can all be upgraded, enhanced, added to, made more of, improved, and changed to be more in line with each individual’s own desires, dreams and visions.

Hence our approach to individual analysis is that of Success Profiling™; not typing, labeling, and pigeon-holing. Our approach is that you have an innate sense of what you are truly capable of, and how well you are doing as compared to that measure.

Ability Consultants, Inc., employs two proprietary analyses with the individual. One is the Life Analysis, which profiles how the individual has set him or herself up for the game of life; and the other is the Skills Analysis, which profiles how ably the individual has developed his or her talents to play the game.

But the critical thing that sets our approach to client testing apart from other practitioners, and as being of more benefit to clients, is that our Success Profiling™ does not measure or compare the client to some imagined “norm” or theorized classification system in which “all humans fit.”

The Ability Consultants, Inc., Success Profile™ measures the client’s perception of his or her own life-setup and the client’s own measure of his or her level of success, attainment, and skills levels as compared to the client’s own true potential and standard of his or her ideal.

The importance of this is that the individual can then knowingly address the areas of his or her life-setup, and skills and abilities, that can be upgraded, enhanced, added to, made more of, improved, and changed to be more in line with the individual’s own desires, dreams and visions.

As the wisest man I ever heard said to a boy once: “You can be whatever you choose to be son, it only takes that you know what you want, that you pursue it, and that you set yourself up for it and develop the skills necessary for its attainment.”

The Ability Consultants, Inc., Success Profiling™ and Life Setups Services™ reveals and helps accomplish for the client what the client truly wants and feels he or she should be attaining.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SUCCESS PROFILES™

The Ability Consultants, Inc. Success Profile™ comprises the analysis of three fundamental aspects of your existence:

The Life Analysis — this analyses how you have set yourself up in life: how you have created your beingness.

The Skills Analysis — this analyses how you have created and developed your various key skills and ability levels: the ability and skill with which you do what you do.

The Financial Fitness Analysis — this analyses your ability to have: your acceptance level, your ability to enjoy, use, have, own the fruits of your actions.

Thus the Success Profile™ gives you an accurate picture of your state of Being, ability to Do, and willingness and capacity to Have.

It is these three factors that are the essential keys to true success

One could also view them as being profiles of how big and powerful you are willing to be, how big are your wants, dreams and visions versus your true potential; how skilled and able are you to implement and attain your dreams and visions; and to what extent are you letting yourself be successful and attain and have your wants, dreams and visions.

With these factors understood, one can knowingly address the correct areas in need of improvement, enhancement, empowering, or change.

THE VALUE OF A SUCCESS PROFILE™

We each innately know we can do better; that we can improve. But the notion that one can actually address specific critical abilities and faculties and make them more available, improve them, upgrade them, and make them more powerful; or that one can change one’s style of interface with others to make it more in line with one’s dreams and aspirations, is new.

This is the importance of the SUCCESS PROFILE™. It enables one to correctly define the specific areas in need of change or that one wishes to upgrade and improve, and it leads to a course of action that makes sense for the individual.

Knowing your profile for the six aspects on each of the Life, Skills, and Financial Fitness Analyses enables you to apply the correct processes needed to upgrade your success potential and quality of accomplishments.

Keynote Speaking & Group Presentations

There is more to addressing a group than being entertaining or “motivational”.

Real value should be imparted.

For example: what point of enlightenment or regained ability or rekindled dreams and aspirations should be made occur? What is the long-lasting, hopefully life-changing, benefit to be achieved?

This is the kind of value we at Ability Consultants, Inc., see as being important to deliver with our group presentations.

Because of this, none of our presentations are generic, cookie-cutter, razzmatazz, hyper-ventilating pitches that are long on “personality” but short on real substance. We take the time to ascertain what it is you want to precisely achieve or impart to your audience, and we research and work with you to get it exactly right so you get the results you want.

And we can be funny too, outrageously funny we are told, in a dry, Australian kind of way. After all, the good Aussie attitude is: “Life is supposed to be enjoyed, Mate!” But the humor has an explicit purpose; it is a key to the easy conveyance of your main message. It is the carrier-wave upon which the benefits you wish to impart are transmitted.

Thus, no matter the subject, no matter the industry specialty or area of activity of your group, we at Ability Consultants, Inc., deliver a memorable, impactfull, highly entertaining, but beneficial presentation.

Roger E. Boswarva and/or Virginia Koenig will work with you in this regard.

The Enlightened Employer

The enlightened employer facilitates and enhances the personal well-being, abilities and wants of employees.

Enlightened employers know that a work environment which helps its employees achieve their personal wants and which benefits them has more productive, better performing individuals working with it.

Enlightened employers know that to neglect the enhancement and benefit of its employees, or to in any way neglect or threaten their personal dreams and aspirations results in under–performance of its team, low morale and upset for its employees.

Thus the primary target of Ability Consultants, Inc., is individual enhancement and beneficiation for employees so that the team members of the company are enlivened, can work together more optimally, are happier and stress free, and do perform better on the job.

Ability Consultants, Inc., thus has two targets on assignments: one is the corporate client’s wanted result, the other is individual enhancement.

Personal Enhancement

What more valuable asset is there than you, yourself, and your abilities and natural talents?

Thus it would make sense to invest in oneself and one’s personal enhancement.

But the real question is, in what way? What do you want to empower, make better, or change the condition of ?

We each have a number of faculties, abilities, and capacities. If you are to increase your success, become wealthier, have better relationships, be more effective, or become free from unwanted conditions, it is your basic abilities that need be addressed so you can rise to the heights you aspire to.

“Piling on top of” your existing condition with advice, opinion, belief systems, tricks or techniques, doesn’t work because it only adds complexity to the existing condition — and very often actually causes confusion and instability. The underlying unwanted condition or incapacity isn’t changed for the better, it is merely masked or altered.

At Ability Consultants, Inc. we introduce fundamental principles you can test and verify the validity of, and we have you apply specific processes that enable you to enhance your ability and power levels; just as we do with champion athletes, with proven workable techniques. You will also use other processes that enable you to “clean the slate” so that your current impediments and misdirectors of power and ability such as inapplicable or erroneous precepts or belief systems, reluctances, or self-sabotage are removed (hence “cleaning the slate”).

We stress the word “you” here because it is not we who effect the change you want with these processes; but you. We believe in putting you in charge and making you more capable and more powerful; and this is not accomplished by doing things for you, or to you, or by practicing “our brilliance upon you” and telling you how to think.

At Ability Consultants, Inc. our mission is to make you more able; not to position ourselves as gurus or wise men upon whom we want to make anyone reliant.

Intelligence

INTELLIGENCE & YOUR SURVIVABILITY IN THE COMING NEW AGE

Have you got what it takes? Have you got what separates the great from the mundane, the star from the mob?

Human civilization has progressed through several “ages” or cultures: the hunter-gatherer, the agrarian, the industrial, and now the much touted “information age”.

Each change-point was the result of an application of the human faculty of intelligence by an individual who stood out from the mob.

And this is an important point: the fact that all advances in our civilization were brought not by wars, political change, ideology, discovery, adventure, beliefs, or change in circumstance — or any one of a number of other wrongly touted reasons for progress — but by the application of a native faculty: intelligence.

It might be instructive here to consult the dictionary definition of Intelligence:

1. a. The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge. b. The faculty of thought and reason. c. Superior powers of mind. (The American Heritage Dictionary)
1. a) the ability to learn or understand from experience; ability to acquire and retain knowledge; mental ability. b) the ability to respond quickly and successfully to a new situation; use of the faculty of reason in solving problems, directing conduct, etc. effectively. c) in psychology, measured success in using these abilities to perform certain tasks. (Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language: The World Publishing Company).
(Each dictionary defines additional senses, but they do not apply for our purposes here.)

If one is to survive and prosper in this period of vast change into the next age (and it is happening, even though the pundits haven’t gazetted it yet), it is not enough to simply be bright; nor enough to rely on hard work alone. Brilliance of discovery by itself doesn’t change civilization, nor make its discoverer rich or famous — the fact is, the steam engine was invented two thousand years ago, but wasted! And hard work doesn’t do it; many work ferociously hard for little reward and absolutely no advancement. No, if one is to make it, one must have and use the capacity to observe and learn, to then be able to conceive of the applicability of what has been learned, and to then plan and execute its application.

The ability to learn, as well as the faculty to correctly conceive of application, and the power to effectively implement that application, are each needed if you are to star and rise above the mundane. Many executives lack this capacity: they fail at one or more of its components, and so fail to recognize or realize opportunity. While they may consider themselves to be suffering from “information overload,” in reality they are failing in the ability to rapidly discern what is relevant and applicable versus irrelevant or inapplicable, they are failing to see how what is learned can be applied, and have a lack of facility to implement.

At Ability Consultants, Inc. we explicitly address these factors. We have exact processes and procedures you can use to increase your ability to know and to learn, to evaluate, and to raise the horsepower and clarity of your application.

And what is this age we are moving into? It is the age of applied knowledge — the age of Knowledgism™; the age that is the mature expression of this chaotic moment we have superficially called the “information age,” but which in reality is only a time during which we are learning to process and transfer at colossal speed vast amounts of comment and information about knowledge or what is assumed to be known.

Information is not knowledge; we as a civilization have yet to grasp this. While information and knowledge are seen as synonyms, they are quite different things. Good dictionaries make that distinction: Information applies to facts that are gathered in any way, as by reading, observation, hearsay, etc., and does not necessarily connote validity (inaccurate information). Knowledge applies to any body of facts gathered by study, observation, etc., and to the ideas inferred from these facts, and connotes an understanding of what is known (man’s knowledge of the universe) [Webster’s as above]. Knowledge includes both empirical material and that derived by inference or interpretation; Information is usually construed as narrower in scope and implies a random collection of material rather than orderly synthesis [American Heritage as above].

When this civilization fully appreciates knowledge as being of the utmost of importance and information as being mere comment about knowledge or supposed knowledge, and when we routinely operate on the basis of discerning applicability and putting into use what we know rather than choking ourselves on useless dross, we will soar to the heights of our visions and imaginings.

If an executive is to star and to personally survive in this current age of extreme change, and if he or she is to lead his or her team and discharge his or her corporate responsibility in a winning fashion in these times and in the new age, then he or she must have his or her faculty of intelligence operating optimally. He or she must be able to perceive and learn, must be able to evaluate importance and discern applicability, and must be able to envision, plan, and implement the application of this knowledge.

These are each imperative skills, and not all executives have or currently use them.