Volkmar Völzke's BLOG

Most of the corporate visions I see are useless. So what makes a really powerful vision? In the video, I share three important characteristics.

When it comes to any kind of change – in your business, your team, or your life – I often use the spaceship analogy: to create any lasting change is like lifting a spaceship into the orbit: you need to escape earth’s gravity, which will inevitably pull you back to where you’ve been before should you fail to do so. 

For achieving escape velocity, you must give full power to your engines.

To translate this into business reality, you must take massive action. The emphasis is on “massive”. 

In my experience this is where most change initiatives fail: they take SOME action, but lack MASSIVE action.

Here is what I mean in 3 steps: 

1. Decide. With your leadership team, clearly decide how important the planned change is for each of you PERSONALLY (yes, the personal aspect is vital!). Only MASSIVE importance builds the foundation for MASSIVE action.
2. Start immediately. Every change initiative that you only start next week or next month...

Marketing experts know that it can be quite a good strategy to deliberately build a brand that a certain number of people would rather hate than like. The rationale behind this counterintuitive idea: it is better to be known for SOMETHING—even if this is controversial —than for NOTHING.

The more emotional this “something” is, the better. Logic (boring for most people) makes people think, but only emotions make people act.

The point is that if you play this game carefully, there will be more people who love your brand for exactly the same traits that other people hate it.

Basically, this is the same logic that applies to the Blue Ocean Strategy: find benefits, features, or values that make you stand out from the crowd. If you stay the same as many others, then—no matter how good you are—you will have a difficult business life, troubled with price war and/or the need to deliver ever-more features for less costs.

Here comes the twist: the same...

Maybe you know the comical question, "How do you eat an elephant?" The answer: "Bite by bite!"

The background is a very relevant one for changing behaviors and corporate cultures: Most changes never happen - even if you consider them important - because people never really start.

And by "start" I don't mean that you're attending a workshop or reading a book on the subject (although these can be important preparations), but that you're really changing something about yourself.

The order is always: awareness intent to change information execution perseverance.

Steps 1-3 can be seen quite often among individuals and in companies. Even step 4 sometimes still occurs. At step 5 we lost most of the people, despite our best intentions. The elephant mentioned at the beginning still stands tall.

So how can you overcome this obstacle? Here are three steps:

1. Simple process. Simply define the steps you want to take on yourself. Then implement them, every day. Example: If you want to be more...

When I work with my clients, we start with exactly one thing that makes a big difference in their later successes:

We set extremely ambitious goals (or exactly one). It has been shown over and over again that this is precisely the essential basis for achieving results that would otherwise hardly have been imaginable. More about this in the video.

 "Nothing makes you more successful than success!" Perhaps you know this saying. Behind it lies the interesting phenomenon that you are often more successful when you have just had success.

Put simply, this is because of how our subconscious mind stores how success works; it repeats the same ways of thinking and behaving.

With the same mechanics, some companies and teams manage to build successes on top of each other, while others have to fight again and again for every single success. The former have success systems, while others fight for anecdotal success.

The big question now is: How do you get from anecdotal to systematic? I have just written an article about this for the business magazine Organisator (only in German; click here to request a copy).

Below are three brief ideas:

1. Strategy. In your strategy work, pay particular attention to your business model and your unique positioning in the market. Instead of "something more and so on", I miss a radical discussion about...

The morning air is already a little fresher, you can feel that autumn is coming. It's always unbelievable in how fast time goes: there are less than four months left in this year! 

Which goals and dreams have you achieved so far, privately and in business, in your career? If you could rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 10, where do you stand? 

Are you fully on course, having fun and influencing other people positively? Are you helping your customers and colleagues more than ever before? Or did time pass by faster than you hoped and you are a little behind your goals? Or didn't anything not go very well this year? 

Wherever you stand, you still have all the possibility to make 2018 outstanding, for yourself and for others. Here are three ideas: 

1. Decision. If you are not quite where you want to be (or if you still see potential), then make the decision not to accept this situation. Help your team and your colleagues to do this. Most leaders I meet are far too...

It's a simple truth: the most successful companies and individuals have better strategies than the average. Or to put it another way: many of the average companies have no strategy at all, but at best an extrapolation of the past.

How do I know that? Well, quite simply: a strong strategy always needs a strong vision first of all: Where exactly do we want to be in 3 years?

Most companies I see just don’t have that. And there is no point in meeting once a year to define a "strategy". The result is usually, at best, a plan without ambition.

Here are the three crucial questions you need to answer for any true strategy:

1. Vision. What is the ambitious, emotional, relevant, clear and convincing image of our company or our team in 3 years? Test: If the vision does not cause fear or enthusiasm (or both) in you and the people, it is not a vision.
2. Self-image. Who must we become in order to achieve the vision? A true vision (see point 1) can never be achieved with today's ways of...

Recently, I watched the film, The Post, from Steven Spielberg and took some lessons that are crucial insights for any leader. 

Not only do Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks perform extraordinarily well, but they also highlight the dilemma of a serious decision, with two strong alternatives, under great time pressure. In the end, the film is about freedom of the press, but that is not my point here. 

When the Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham makes her most important decision with global impact within a few hours (in the end minutes), the same factors you see with every small business decision come into play: diverging interests, uncertainty, and values. 

What can you learn from this for your next decision-making situation? Three things:

1. Define strong values and your mission! Ms. Graham finally made her decision based on the strong values that had once been defined for the newspaper (e.g., serving the people and not the politicians). Such values can only be invoked...

I must admit, sometimes, I doubt whether what I contribute to companies as principles of success really works. But the clear answer is: YES! 

Why do I know that? Because I see the evidence at events, namely when business leaders - from any industry - report on why they are outstandingly successful. This was recently the case at the KMU SWISS Forum in Switzerland. 

Here are the three most important success levers from my perspective, which were unanimously reported by CEOs:

1. A clear and strong vision. It is an ancient wisdom, yet it continues to be disregarded by most managing directors: Only with a strong, concrete, and convincing vision can you create something outstanding. By when do you want to be there with your company? Many businesses exist only because of this vision; others have disappeared because of lack of vision. It is your choice!
2. Winning culture. This also runs like a repeated pattern through all success stories. Clearly, you can't be successful without...