Business901

Thinking Process and System Thinking in Management eBook

business901 — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:00:00 +0000

This is a transcription of a podcast with Bill Dettmer, Senior Partner of Goal Systems International. Bill is the author of The Logical Thinking Process: A Systems Approach to Complex Problem Solving ) and Strategic Navigation: A Systems Approach to Business Strategy, two books around which Goal Systems International’s internationally renowned Thinking Process Course is based. An excerpt form the book.

Joe: One of the things that ? and this is going to be my Six Sigma side coming out. Don’t you have to support all this with data? You can’t be intuitive about everything because sometimes just the outward appearance of something lies to you if you don’t have the supporting data.

Bill: Yes, you’re absolutely right. Where does the data become most important? The data is most important in the identification of the problem. It’s not in the creation of the solution because that’s a projection of what should happen in the future. It’s not in the establishment of the goal and the necessary conditions because those are value judgments. But, when you start to analyze what the problem is, in other words when you’re building the current reality tree, that’s where data become really important. One of the key lessons I try to convey in my thinking process courses is the most critical of all of the categories of legitimate reservation is entity existence.

Systemizing your Approach to Management with Bill Dettmer

Thinking Process and System Thinking in Management eBook

U.S. manufacturing – Competing in a Value Driven World

business901 — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:10:00 +0000

This is a Guest blog Post by Dr. Eric Reidenbach, the Director of the Six Sigma Marketing Institute. I think Dr. Reidenbach’s thoughts are right on target. We keep basing Continuous Improvement efforts in areas that are making little difference to the bottom line. Most manufacturers constraints are in the marketplace and till we address and solve the issue of demand, improvement in operations mean very little.

Dr. Reidenbach’s Message:

Production is driven by consumption. Manufacturers will not add new shifts or open new plants unless there is consumption – demand. It really is that simple. No amount of targeted tax breaks, free trade zones, industrial policy, lean initiatives will create the demand necessary to drive production and employment. These are factors that operate on the production side of the equation, not the consumption side.

What will drive production is giving buyers a compelling reason to buy. That compelling reason to buy is value – superior value. Value is the interaction of quality and price. High quality products and services offered at a competitive and fair price are the drivers of value. Every undergraduate econ student that is paying attention in class knows that value is the lubricant that facilitates exchanges. The buyer seeks high quality at a fair price (value) while the producer seeks payment (value).

Recessions are often referred to as conditions of excess inventory that requiring an adjustment. The buyer is telling manufacturers that the value offered in the proposed exchange is not sufficient to complete the exchange. Until the producer understands value and its catalyzing effect, exchanges will be stultified.

There is a growing emphasis on retraining our manufacturing sector. Until this retraining includes education regarding the identification, creation and delivery of value, we will be doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. NAM (National Association of Manufacturing), state manufacturing associations, AME (Association of manufacturing Excellence) all have a role to play here.

Most manufacturers tend to be product focused. They believe that quality and value are a function of the product and product features. They ignore all of the other elements of the value delivery system such as product support, parts availability, technical support, and distribution – all of the elements that make it “easy to do business with”. This is what I call “value myopia” and it severely limits and restricts a manufacturer’s capacity to penetrate markets, domestic and global. They need to refocus on value – become value focused.

Manufacturers are also consumers. They purchase goods and services in their daily lives as well as their business lives. Do they buy automobiles solely on the basis of product features (blue tooth, gps, xm radio) or do they factor into their decision elements such as dealer service, repairs (timeliness of repairs, quality of repairs), availability to get the right parts, the ability to talk with someone at the dealership who knows, someone who tells them the truth, someone who does not talk down to a woman, warranty, cleanliness of the dealership, etc.

My bet is that they do. If they don’t they have to deal with their wives who are often saddled with the job of taking the car to the dealership for service and repairs. Why is it that while they recognize these elements as part of the value package, they don’t take this lesson back to their own operations? Is it because they are so focused on their definitions of quality and value? These are too often words that are abstractions that, in reality, have no meaning when they are divorced from the markets they serve. Quality and value, absent their linkage to the market become nothing more that “conformance” to specs that if the manufacturer is lucky correspond to actual buyer demands.

Many manufacturers are products of engineering programs. I did a search of a number of prominent engineering programs and found no mention of customers, value or markets. I did find a lot about typical engineering subjects such as calculus, trig, aerodynamics, etc. – things you would expect to see in engineering programs. However, the world has changed significantly since many engineering curricula were developed. Buyers are smarter and competition is greater and stronger. The question is – Will U.S. manufacturers have what it takes to compete in this new world? Will they become the superior value providers that dominate global markets? They won’t unless something changes.

Related Information:
Best in Market eBook
Six Sigma Marketing Institute has just released (for a limited time at no cost) a Customer Value Assessment Program which can obtained at http://DrivingMarketShare.com. The program enables an organization to evaluate their organization based on Customer Identification, Customer Value, Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention and Customer Monitoring. This assessment will expose your weaknesses and strengths in each of the 5 Cs of Driving Market Share.

Developing Predictive Measures with Throughput Accounting

business901 — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Dr. Charlene Spoede Budd was my guest on the Busienss901 Podcast and as you would expect our discussion was about the Theory of Constraints Through-put Accounting methods and the application of the knowledge that we gain from this information. We discussed the use of accounting throughout the organization for developing predictive measures versus reactive. This is not your regular accounting discussion.

Dr. Budd was a contributor to the recent Theory of Constraints Handbook on two separate subjects:

Charlene Spoede Budd is a Professor Emeritus from Baylor University, where she taught management accounting and project management classes for a number of years. She is certified in all areas of the Theory of Constraints and is the Chair of the Finance and Metrics Committee of the Theory of Constraints International Certification Organization. Her research has been published primarily in practitioner journals and she has been awarded three Certificates of Merit for articles published in Strategic Finance. Dr. Budd has co-authored two accounting textbooks with her most recent book, A Practical Guide to Earned Value Project Management.

The subject matter may seem a tad dry but give this podcast a chance, I do not think you will be disappointed!

Six Sigma Discipline is Good for a Creative Process

business901 — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:00:00 +0000

I have been promoting Lean Marketing and Six Sigma Marketing for quite a while and have typically been met with steadfast resistance. However, I am seeing more and more mentions of this and it is not coming from the Six Sigma Black Belts. It is being driven by Marketers and Accountants. Listen to one marketer’s view below.

Why a Little Discipline Is Good for the Creative Process by Avi Dan the is CEO of Avidan Strategies. It was published in June, 2010 on Advertising Age.

In the article Avi Dan points out:

Companies that implement a methodical process, such as Procter & Gamble or Microsoft, tend to deliver consistently better communications and business results, and their brands enjoy greater value. They tend to beat competitors on such key attributes as “cycle time” and “speed to market,” and have a higher degree of success when it comes to new-product launches. Most important, a meticulously executed process can deliver savings of more than 30% and improve productivity, as the need for redirects and errors is minimized.

These people believe that creative organizations are often built on the principle of trial and error, and the rigorous confinement to the norm is too stifling. Yet others believe that a disciplined process is essential to optimize the client-agency relationship. I tend to agree with the latter view. Marketing spend is the No. 1 investment for most companies — more even than IT or training. It behooves CMOs to install a precise process to insure that creative development is as effective and efficient as it can be. Yet I believe that while CMOs should adopt the spirit and attitude of Six Sigma, it should be applied with a light hand.

He listed suggestions on how to apply discipline to the creative process with good explanations of each. A list of them follows:

Call it Three Sigma.
Prioritize accuracy.
Move fast.
Avoid the iterative process.
Integrate effectively.
Get involved early.
Engage senior executives.
Speed up cycle time.
Codify standards.
Improve continuously.
Measure ROI.

His suggestion on how to implement

So do what agencies often do with controversial products, or when a client faces a PR nightmare: rebrand. Rebranding it as a more user-friendly process, emphasizing areas that are important to the agency, like better briefs and improved, faster client buy-in, will make for a more pleasing reception when implementing Three Sigma.

I encourage you to read the article, Why a Little Discipline Is Good for the Creative Process and the reactions to it. There is another take on this article from a Kellogg School of Business faculty member, Gad Allon. He titled his blog post Lean Advertising.

Lean and Six Sigma Marketers step forward and start Driving Market Share! Most practitioners of these practices or any other continuous improvement philosophy seldom see the opportunity that exists for them. They just can’t get away from the operational side of things. I hate to say this but I have more hope in the area of Marketing and Accounting to see this bigger picture.

Maybe you’re a Black Belt, Sensei or a Jonah. You have completed projects that saved the company money, improved flow and increased quality. You have done it extremely well but in today’s market place it means little. Fact of the matter; if you are not competitively priced, can’t deliver product and have good quality, you are simply not in business. If you are still talking that game you are out of touch because the problems and constraints are not internal for 90% of the companies. It is external; it is a sales/market constraint.

What stops a Continuous Improvement Practitioner from jumping into marketing?

The first barrier is that you put your foot in your mouth the first time you talk to marketing or management. The words that come out of your mouth are getting rid of waste, reducing cost, standardize, data collection, reports, measures and audits.
The next step is that you start talking about culture change and journeys. You might tell sales not to be so number driven (by the way we need data from you to make this all work).
If you do get your foot in the door, you bring out your toolbox and start trying to quantify, reduce variability and my favorite is bringing the control point to manage this inside the company.

I could go on but the culture and internal part of all this is wrong! Sales and marketing are external functions and if you want to play the game you need to get on their side of the fence.

Your first step is to consider how to increase revenue and drive market share. There is not anything that will perk up the ears of management, sales or the CMO.
Don’t talk about culture, talk about how you can increase a salespersons face time with customers through creating an effective and efficient marketing effort.
Don’t bring out your toolbox. There is ample time for that but truth be known, till you have learned about sales and marketing your toolbox probably won’t work. It works internally developing a call center or an identified problem later on but initially you will bog down the process and loose support.

Promotional Copy: Eric Reidenbach of Six Sigma Marketing Institute has created that bridge between marketing and the Continuous Improvement Practitioner through the development of a new program called the 5Cs of Driving Market Share. It enable the CI Practitioner the necessary marketing knowledge and basic toolset that will provide a path for your organization or if you are a consultant, a client’s organization. On the other side of the bridge, it provides the CMO the necessary knowledge to understand a modified DMAIC approach to marketing and provide real meaning to his data and a way to use it to drive market share.

Six Sigma a great companion to marketing

business901 — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:24:52 +0000

Received an excellent response on my post yesterday (Measuring The Customer Experience) on Twitter from a @pricingright that said; “With all due respect, it is far too simplistic to use customer advocacy as a measure of customer experience & it is wrong to draw causations. Correlations they speak about are from cross-sectional studies. Interesting but rife with selection, survivorship and other bias.”

I posted the Forrester video because I felt the point being made about keeping measurements simple were important. What needs to be simplistic in measurement is the collection of data. Without simplicity or automation in handling these tasks seldom will they be sustained or not manipulated to get the numbers in!

Do I believe that Customer Advocacy is to simplistic as @pricingright points out? You Betcha! I am from the school of Six Sigma, we don’t make anything that simple do we? ;) In the soon to be released 5 Cs of Driving Market Share program, I had asked Eric Reidenbach, the founder of Six Sigma Marketing Institute what the Net Promoter Score meant to him. An excerpt from an article he sent me.

What drives the NPS calculation? What is the best predictor of whether a customer is willing to recommend it to a friend? Let’s start with what does not predict NPS.

Most organizations would point out that they do some kind of customer satisfaction work. However, Reichhold correctly points out that “most customer satisfaction surveys aren’t very useful…. Their results don’t correlate tightly with profits or growth…Our research indicates that satisfaction lacks a consistently demonstrable connection to actual customer behavior (recommendation) and growth. ..In general, it is difficult to discern a strong correlation between high customer satisfaction scores and outstanding sales growth.”

What does correlate highly with profitability and sales is loyalty which Reichhold defines as “the willingness of someone – a customer, an employee, a friend to make an investment or personal sacrifice in order to strengthen a relationship. For a customer, that can mean sticking with a supplier who treats him well and gives him good value in the long term even if the supplier does not offer the best price in a particular transaction.”

Value, like the NPS, is specific to a product/market. The factors that define value for a credit card will be different than those factors that define value for mortgages. Similarly, farmers will define value differently when talking about tractors than will golf course maintenance personnel. Value, the best predictor of loyalty and NPS, will vary from product/market to product/market and accordingly, must be managed differently from one product/market to another.

Value is conceptually defined as the relationship between a product’s quality and the price paid for the product. Our research also indicates that the brand and/or corporate image may play a significant role in the value definition.

Simplicity is important to measurement. It is imperative that we make the collection of data to include asking the right questions of the right people to get meaningful data. Numbers can be crunched! Customer Advocacy measurements can be a great tool used properly and/or in context with product/market classifications. Creating the correct data sets and manipulating these numbers is what makes Six Sigma such a great companion to marketing.

Disclaimer: At the present time, I am working on a project with Six Sigma Marketing Institute

Measuring The Customer Experience

business901 — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 12:06:00 +0000

Even Forrester Research keeps their measurements simple.

Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent technology and market research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology. For more than 24 years, Forrester has been making leaders successful every day through its proprietary research, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. Learn more at www.forrester.com

Define your Business by Value Stream not Product

business901 — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:30:00 +0000

How do you identify your prospects? Many organization have a tendency to provide the solution without really spending time identifying the specific market that their solution fits. That is one of the ideas that have made Eric Reis’s Lean Startup movement so strong. He calls it the Pivot. Which in very basic terms: Creating a minimum marketable product and getting it in the hands of real people to provide the feedback in the early stages of development.

It is a great concept for a startup but what if you are an existing company? You have existing markets and products. In fact you may be saying this, “I am a 20-year old company with an existing database. Sales are down because of the economy. We just need to create more awareness and get more opportunities. Our products will work in others markets; we just need to start talking to more people.” There may be a little truth in what you’re saying, but I want to emphasize “little.”

The economy has changed, it may get better but there are some fundamental changes that have taken place. You better learn how to make money in this economy because even with a shift for the better, I doubt that it will ever return to yesteryear. Creating awareness and opportunities will help but this is the most expensive means of selling products, can you afford it? If you are looking at selling your products in other markets, guess what? There is already an established company fulfilling that solution for that market? You better discover a significant advantage for your product and be willing to spend more than the existing provider to take market share away from them.

The secret sauce for any marketing improvement begins with identifying the correct product/markets for growing your business. All opportunities are not equal. The Six Sigma Marketing Institute uses a modified DMAIC procedure in their 5 Cs of Driving Market Share Program (Disclaimer: I assisted in the creation of this program) and starts with the Define or Customer Identification phase. Maryland World Class Manufacturing Consortium after having gone through the define stage of Six Sigma Marketing was amazed to find that they were spending the majority of their time and money on a market that was providing a scant 5% of their returns.

You have to identify your markets. Many companies identify their markets by product line. Products are sold, people buy things. The best way to identify your market is “Who are the buyers?” Without doing this you lose sight of your market and how they place value on your product. Ultimately, what we seek in identification is an understanding of value from the customer of that particular product. I think an interesting concept is not to have Product Managers within a company but Value Stream Managers. As Drucker said, “Marketing is revenue, everything else is an expense.”

After you have identified your prospects another method used in Six Sigma Marketing is defining the opportunity or product/market based on your ability to compete. If there is already a provider in this segment that provides a better solution at a better price with better delivery, you may have a problem. You can save yourself a lot of money by assessing how attractive this market is by doing your research. Some markets are worth more to an organization than others. Your organizations capacity to compete within a potential market or customer segment is critical to any strategy.

Using a Value Stream Marketing Channel is an interesting visual tool to consider. If you create a Value Stream Map for your marketing process and a map of your competitors marketing process, you may discover some very interesting analysis. For example, one of you may have a more direct sales channel or purchasing may be through engineering driven request or through a dealer, etc. A blog post of mine that takes a deeper dive into this: Providing Clarity to your Marketing Process.

If you are doing a startup or attacking a new set of prospects many of these items may seem overwhelming to do. However, they are very worthwhile. The easiest way I have found to start is by identifying and segmenting an existing product into a product/market. Discover your customer and quit hiding them within your product. Get rid of Product Managers and create Value Stream Managers!

Transforming Healthcare with Lean eBook

business901 — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 11:55:00 +0000

Transcription of my recent podcast with John Toussaint, M.D., CEO of the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value. The lessons Dr. Toussaint learned in healthcare are equally applicable to many other organizations. Learn about the partnership between the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) and the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value (TCHV) that brings together two of the world’s leaders in “lean thinking,”

Transforming Healthcare with Lean eBook

Related Podcast: Transforming Healthcare thru Lean

Buy the Book(Amazon): On the Mend: Revolutionizing Healthcare to Save Lives and Transform the Industry

Six Sigma Marketing Institute releases Customer Id Program

business901 — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 11:59:00 +0000

Customer Identification Program has been released by Six Sigma Marketing Institute and can be found at http://DrivingMarketShare.com. Customer Identification is the first step in the 5 Cs of Driving Market Share and identifies specific product/markets that offer an organization its best options for growth. The program enables an organization to evaluate product/markets using metrics such as current market share, market growth rate and competitive intensity to assess the best targets for the organization.

Listen to the audio description of the 5 Cs of Driving Market Share.

Customer Identification is just one module of the soon to be released 5 Cs of Driving Market Share Program. The Five Cs will give you excellent background knowledge on how to build an effective and efficient marketing data set based on customer value. Customer Value is the only true measure for Driving Market Share. This program is based on five components:

Customer Identification
Customer Value
Customer Acquisition
Customer Retention
Customer Monitoring

Though the best value is achieved in utilizing all five components, the programs are designed so that each module is completely self-supporting.

Six Sigma Marketing is a fact-based, disciplined approach for growing market share in targeted product/markets by providing superior value. The Six Sigma Marketing Institute is dedicated to the advancement and deployment of Six Sigma Marketing. At the heart of SSM is a modified DMAIC process that provides the architecture for growing top line revenues and market share.

Dr. Eric Reidenbach is the Director of the Six Sigma Marketing Institute, the leading organizations and authority of Six Sigma Marketing. Dr. Reidenbach has developed a number of unique approaches for measuring and managing value, the best leading indicator of market share growth. His consulting services are absolutely unique. They are filled with proprietary measurement and management techniques designed to help you grow market share and top line revenues. Dr. Reidenbach is the author of over 20 books on marketing and market research.

Disclaimer: This is a shameless plug, as I was part of the development of this program..

Systemizing your approach to management, Podcast with Bill Dettmer

business901 — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:49:00 +0000

My guest on the Business901 podcast was Bill Dettmer Senior Partner of Goal Systems International.

Bill is one of the most recognized expert in the Theory of Constraints field and more specifically the Logical Thinking Process. He has Eight years graduate level teaching of systems management, systems analysis, human factors, management control systems, organizational behavior and development, Theory of Constraints, Total Quality Management, and management of research, development, testing, and evaluation. More importantly, he brings a level of experience to these subjects that few in the world are able too.

His simple recommendation of one book on the practice of utilizing a systems approach to management immersed me into over 12 hours of reading, research and learning. I have not been that captivated in a particular subject for quite awhile. I hope you enjoy the podcast as much as I did hosting it..

William (Bill) Dettmer is the author of The Logical Thinking Process: A Systems Approach to Complex Problem Solving ) and Strategic Navigation: A Systems Approach to Business Strategy , two books around which Goal Systems International’s internationally renowned Thinking Process Course is based; Brainpower Networking Using the Crawford Slip Method . Co-author (with Eli Schragenheim and Wayne Patterson) of Manufacturing at Warp Speed: Optimizing Supply Chain Financial Performance (The CRC Press Series on Constraints Management) and Supply Chain Management at Warp Speed: Integrating the System from End to End.

If Nothing Bad Happens, You Must Be Doing Something Right?

business901 — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 12:11:00 +0000

You have been struggling for a while and now the recession is really hitting hard. You are starting to wonder… Where have my customers gone? Are my competitors just buying jobs? How can I cut expenses? It seems like a lot of people standing around? How did I get here? That is precisely how a mental model could work and it may be a result of if nothing bad happened, you must be doing something right. So as time moved on, bad practices became part of our business model.

Despite signs of trouble, we adjust our mental models to accommodate larger deviations from the norm. Without a mechanism for reframing our behavior or redefining our group, the effects are ignored, as they were at NASA, until a catastrophe happens.

As the investigating board put it, both Columbia and Challenger were lost also because of the failure of NASA’s organizational system: both actions were failures of foresight in which history played a prominent role.

So influential board NASA’s models and scripts, and so delusional self-confidence bred group is, that even after Columbia broke up, killing all on board, the space program manager told the press that he was comfortable with his previous assessments of risk and didn’t think the foam debris could cause the accident. But remember that a key feature of this system is that, taken one small step at a time, each decision always seems correct.

In a culture that evolved at NASA, each returned from a successful mission was another moon landing. NASA was silly. Applause that was by the time of Columbia, more than 30 years old. So instead of appearing more deeply into the problem, they gradually revised their models until they were literally interpreting failure as success. The final report of the commission said:

Engineers and managers incorporated worsening anomalies into the engineering experience base, which functioned as an elastic waistband, expanding the hold larger deviations from the original design. Anomalies that did not lead to catastrophic failures were treated as a source of valid engineering data to justify further flights.

This example is taken from a Laurence Gonzales book Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things and should make it obvious why you must not only have a systematic process in place for continuous improvement but also outside eyes observing your practices mindful not to leave your organization slip into doing; STUPID THINGS!

Rant: So many times our acceptance of our culture allows us to get sloppy in our practices. Good enough is a common word. When I discuss Lean in marketing it is typically met with resistance. When I use the words Six Sigma Marketing; alarms, bells, whistles and even fireworks seem to take place as a result of the connotation of “Six Sigma”. I seldom ever get understanding that you should look at Six Sigma as a methodology rather than the strict mathematical definition of Six Sigma. It is the mental model that is in place.

Having a systematic process in place allows us to deal more effectively with the problems and even the future. Our choices of how we do things and what we see (data) have significantly multiplied. Decisions have become increasingly more difficult. Having a proven process such as the Six Sigma tool of DMAIC will result in better informed and more accurate decisions. I use Six Sigma as an example. There are many methodologies and tools out there to solve problems. However, even these processes can become “intuitionalized” and allow good enough to creep in. Keep striving for perfection and always keep asking Why!

Bootstrapping business Survival

business901 — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 15:48:32 +0000

If you want to survive, what do you need to do?

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales officially distilled these observations down 12 points the seemed to stand out concerning how survivors think and behave in the clutch of mortal danger. Some of the same steps for staying out of trouble. Here’s what survivors do:

1. Perceived, Believe: Even the initial crisis, survivors perceptions and cognitive functions keep working. They notice the details and may even find some humorous or beautiful. If there’s any denial, is counterbalanced by a solid belief in the clear evidence of their senses. They immediately begin to recognize, acknowledge, and even accept the reality of their situation. They may initially blamed forces outside themselves, to; but very quickly they dismiss that tactic and recognize that everything, good and bad, emanates from within.
2. Stay calm: In the initial crisis, survivors are making use of fear, not being ruled by it. They understand at a deep level about being cool and never ever on guard against the mutiny of too much emotion.
3. Think/analyze/plan: Survivors quickly organize, teams, and institute discipline. In successful group survival situations, a leader emerges often the least likely candidate. irrational voice emerges and is often actually heard , which take control of the situation. Survivors perceive that experience as been split into two people and they obey the rational one.
4. Take correct, decisive action: Survivors are able to transform thought into action. They’re willing to take risk to save themselves and others. They are able breakdown very large jobs into small manageable tasks. They set attainable goals and develop short-term plans to reach them. They are meticulous about doing their task well.
5. Celebrate your successes: Survivors take great joy from even their smallest successes. That is an important step in creating ongoing feeling of motivation and preventing the descent into hopelessness.
6. Count your blessings: This is how survivors become rescuers instead of victims. There is always someone else they are helping more than themselves even if that someone is not present.
7. Play: Since the brain and its wiring appear to be the determining factor in survival, this is an argument for expanding and refining it. Just as survivors use patterns in rhythm to move forward in the survival voyage, they use the deeper activities of the intellect to stimulate, call and entertain the mind. Careful, careful, they say. But they act joyfully and decisively. Playing also leads to invention, an invention may lead to a new technique, strategy, or piece of equipment that can save you.
8. See the beauty: Survivors are attuned to the wonder of the world. The appreciation of beauty, the feeling of awe, opens the senses.
9. Believe that you will succeed: All the practices just describe lead to this point: survivors consolidate their personalities and fix their determination. Survivors admonish themselves to make no more mistakes, to be very careful, and to do their very best. They become convinced that they will prevail if they do those things.
10. Surrender: Survivors manage pain well. Resignation without giving up, it is survival by surrender.
11. Do whatever is necessary: They know their abilities and do not over or underestimate them. They believe that anything is possible and act accordingly. Survivors don’t expect or even hope to be rescued. They are coldly rational values in the world, obtaining what they need, doing what they have to.
12. Never give up: There’s always one more thing that they can do. They are not easily frustrated. They are not discouraged by setbacks. They accept that the environment is constantly changing. They pick themselves up and start the entire process over again, breaking it down into manageable bits. They come to embrace the world in which they find themselves and see opportunity in adversity.

If you are in tough times, I recommend pinning these 12 points up and reviewing them several times a day.

P.S. Buy the book, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why