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Do you have a plan for 2012?

 Only 15% of adults have a written plan for their lives outlining goals and strategies for accomplishing them. Most people will bounce around from one meaningless thing to the next.

To achieve your goals in 2012, you need to think like a manager – with a strategy.

Follow these five steps to create a strategy for you:

Step 1: Discover—Find Purpose through Self-Analysis. Resolutions to “lose weight, watch less TV, and eat fewer Twinkies,” are not achieved because people fail to create the strategies that lead to them. The key is to not just establish the goal but also the strategy to get you to it.  Example:

• Goal (resolution): Lose weight
• Objective: Lose 15 pounds in six months
• Strategy: Eliminate weight-causing behaviors and create weight-reducing behaviors.
• Tactics: Drink diet soda rather than regular soda. Purchase a treadmill and elastic strength bands to exercise at home for thirty minutes a day, five days a week. Go to bed forty minutes earlier and wake up forty minutes earlier to complete exercise in the morning.

Step 2: Differentiate—Identify Your Unique Strengths. Each day, too many of us strive for a life of mediocrity and unfulfilled potential—at least, that’s what our behavior indicates. We do the same things in the same ways as everyone else, and then we wonder why we haven’t found success and happiness. We conform to standards at work, at school, in the neighborhood, and within society as a whole. Instead of seeking out ways to positively differentiate ourselves, we see our social activities, entertainment preferences, and PowerPoint presentations at work looking more and more similar to those of the people around us. If familiarity breeds contempt, similarity breeds apathy. After all, excellence, by its very definition, is deviation from the norm. Begin to identify your unique strengths by answering these three questions:

1. What activities give me the greatest enjoyment?
2. What do I do that people find value in? How do I do this differently than others?
3. How can I intersect what I enjoy and what people find value in a way that is unique to me?

Step 3: Decide—Allocate Resources. Time, talent, and money. We all have these resources to varying degrees. The key is how effectively we use them in pursuit of our resolutions or goals. One way to more effectively use resources in support of achieving our resolutions is to take inventory of where we are currently investing them. For one week, carry a small notebook with you and record where you’re spending your time (i.e., 45 hours at work, 16 hours watching TV, 7 hours commuting to work, etc.). This can be an eye-opening exercise because it gives us a better indication of the strategic trade-offs we need to make—the things we have chosen not to do. Decide how much time each week you’ll need to invest in hitting your goal and any other resources you’ll need to incorporate into your strategies.

Step 4: Design—Develop Your Action Plan. If you don’t have your resolutions and the strategies for achieving them written down, they really don’t exist. “Out of sight, out of mind,” means out of luck when it comes to actually realizing your resolutions. Just as architects design blueprints to show what their structure will look like and the specific materials to create, a StrategyPrint® is an individual blueprint. It serves as a real-time strategic action plan, guiding you day in and day out, helping you stay focused on the strategies that will achieve your goals or resolutions. The StrategyPrint can include your purpose, situation analysis, goals, objectives, strategies, tactics and any other elements critical to your success.

Step 5: Drive—Execute Your Plan. The word drive can be defined as “to cause to move by force or compulsion; to carry and guide the movement of; to keep going.” There is nothing passive about it. Setting resolutions and strategies requires that you move from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat. Three elements essential to driving to the successful realization of your resolutions are preparation, communication and perseverance. Prepare to achieve your resolutions by thinking through the steps to develop appropriate strategies. Communicate your resolutions with those around you that can help and support your efforts. And realize that persevering through challenges is a part of the journey to get there.

Rich Horwath is CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, a former Chief Strategy Officer and professor of management. He previously authored the book Deep Dive: The Proven Method for Building Strategy. Horwath’s new book is “Strategy for You: Building a Bridge to the Life You Want” (Greenleaf Book Group, January 2012).

With less than 3 weeks until the August 2nd deadline for Congress to approve a plan to raise the debt-ceiling, Republicans and Democrats are playing a game of chicken with this country’s sovereign wealth.  Each side points to the other as inflexible as the odds increase that Congress will not raise the nation’s borrowing limit by the deadline.  President Obama said Republicans were refusing to allow any tax hikes in the deal, including provisions aimed at the wealthiest taxpayers, while Republicans said the White House’s insistence on tax increases and resistance to meaningful Social Security and Medicare reforms was the problem.

The Wall Street Journal ran the enclosed article on Page W11 on January 9, 2009 citing Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as Required Reading for members of congress.  I can’t think of a more appropriate time than now for them to all take up the mantle set out by this book.  The long and short of the philosophy is that politicians respond to crises, which they often have created by instituting new government programs, laws and regulations. These policies in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create even more programs … and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.

I am neither a fan of the Republican nor Democrat solution to the debt crisis.  However any solution is better than no solution.  Lest we forget that once we surpass the debt crisis, we have an ongoing financial and economic crisis of production to deal with.  The point is that the only way out of this mess is not to cut, or to tax, but to grow.  A rising tide floats all boats.

Some years ago when I worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, we used to label any new hire who had not yet read “Atlas Shrugged” a “virgin.” Being conversant in Ayn Rand’s classic novel about the economic carnage caused by big government run amok was practically a job requirement. If only “Atlas” were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I’m confident that we’d get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.

Getty Images

The art for a 1999 postage stamp.

Many of us who know Rand’s work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that “Atlas Shrugged” parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.

Rand, who had come to America from Soviet Russia with striking insights into totalitarianism and the destructiveness of socialism, was already a celebrity. The left, naturally, hated her. But as recently as 1991, a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club found that readers rated “Atlas” as the second-most influential book in their lives, behind only the Bible.

For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises — that in most cases they themselves created — by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs … and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.

In the book, these relentless wealth redistributionists and their programs are disparaged as “the looters and their laws.” Every new act of government futility and stupidity carries with it a benevolent-sounding title. These include the “Anti-Greed Act” to redistribute income (sounds like Charlie Rangel’s promises soak-the-rich tax bill) and the “Equalization of Opportunity Act” to prevent people from starting more than one business (to give other people a chance). My personal favorite, the “Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Act,” aims to restrict cut-throat competition between firms and thus slow the wave of business bankruptcies. Why didn’t Hank Paulson think of that?

These acts and edicts sound farcical, yes, but no more so than the actual events in Washington, circa 2008. We already have been served up the $700 billion “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act” and the “Auto Industry Financing and Restructuring Act.” Now that Barack Obama is in town, he will soon sign into law with great urgency the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.” This latest Hail Mary pass will increase the federal budget (which has already expanded by $1.5 trillion in eight years under George Bush) by an additional $1 trillion — in roughly his first 100 days in office.

The current economic strategy is right out of “Atlas Shrugged”: The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you. That’s the justification for the $2 trillion of subsidies doled out already to keep afloat distressed insurance companies, banks, Wall Street investment houses, and auto companies — while standing next in line for their share of the booty are real-estate developers, the steel industry, chemical companies, airlines, ethanol producers, construction firms and even catfish farmers. With each successive bailout to “calm the markets,” another trillion of national wealth is subsequently lost. Yet, as “Atlas” grimly foretold, we now treat the incompetent who wreck their companies as victims, while those resourceful business owners who manage to make a profit are portrayed as recipients of illegitimate “windfalls.”

When Rand was writing in the 1950s, one of the pillars of American industrial might was the railroads. In her novel the railroad owner, Dagny Taggart, an enterprising industrialist, has a FedEx-like vision for expansion and first-rate service by rail. But she is continuously badgered, cajoled, taxed, ruled and regulated — always in the public interest — into bankruptcy. Sound far-fetched? On the day I sat down to write this ode to “Atlas,” a Wall Street Journal headline blared: “Rail Shippers Ask Congress to Regulate Freight Prices.”

In one chapter of the book, an entrepreneur invents a new miracle metal — stronger but lighter than steel. The government immediately appropriates the invention in “the public good.” The politicians demand that the metal inventor come to Washington and sign over ownership of his invention or lose everything.

The scene is eerily similar to an event late last year when six bank presidents were summoned by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to Washington, and then shuttled into a conference room and told, in effect, that they could not leave until they collectively signed a document handing over percentages of their future profits to the government. The Treasury folks insisted that this shakedown, too, was all in “the public interest.”

Ultimately, “Atlas Shrugged” is a celebration of the entrepreneur, the risk taker and the cultivator of wealth through human intellect. Critics dismissed the novel as simple-minded, and even some of Rand’s political admirers complained that she lacked compassion. Yet one pertinent warning resounds throughout the book: When profits and wealth and creativity are denigrated in society, they start to disappear — leaving everyone the poorer.

One memorable moment in “Atlas” occurs near the very end, when the economy has been rendered comatose by all the great economic minds in Washington. Finally, and out of desperation, the politicians come to the heroic businessman John Galt (who has resisted their assault on capitalism) and beg him to help them get the economy back on track. The discussion sounds much like what would happen today:

Galt: “You want me to be Economic Dictator?”

Mr. Thompson: “Yes!”

“And you’ll obey any order I give?”

“Implicitly!”

“Then start by abolishing all income taxes.”

“Oh no!” screamed Mr. Thompson, leaping to his feet. “We couldn’t do that … How would we pay government employees?”

“Fire your government employees.”

“Oh, no!”

Abolishing the income tax. Now that really would be a genuine economic stimulus. But Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Washington want to do the opposite: to raise the income tax “for purposes of fairness” as Barack Obama puts it.

David Kelley, the president of the Atlas Society, which is dedicated to promoting Rand’s ideas, explains that “the older the book gets, the more timely its message.” He tells me that there are plans to make “Atlas Shrugged” into a major motion picture — it is the only classic novel of recent decades that was never made into a movie. “We don’t need to make a movie out of the book,” Mr. Kelley jokes. “We are living it right now.”

Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

On March 6, 1974, Ayn Rand gave the commencement address to the graduating class of the United States Military Academy at West Point.  Among other salient points she is credited with the following profundity:

As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation - or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.

Not unlike philosophy, Google is a mass collection of data about the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence.  — This includes you or your organization. 

The question has become, what is the Internet’s philosophy about you and does it mesh with who you are?  Preemptive reputation management has become a critical vocation.

If someone searches for your name in Google, what would the results tell them about you? How would this affect their opinion of you professionally or socially?  It is clear.  You need a strategy.  If you choose not to manage, you still have made a choice. 

So, how can you manage what is out there about you?

Google results are generated by a trade-secret, dynamic and proprietary algorithm that Google owns and shares with no one.  However, a handful of programmers, web developers and hackers have established some of the more influential factors that Google uses to evaluate the relevance of a page to a search.  Google is so good at what it does that most users will rarely go past page 1 of Google results before clicking on one of the results, nevertheless page 2.

Although taking something off the Internet is nearly impossible, burying it in the noise isn’t.  ( Try this Internet time machine out http://wayback.archive.org/web/ )  With this knowledge in mind, one of the best strategies is the following. 

It is called Positive Cache Management. (“PCM”)  If you think of your Google results as a live resume about yourself, you want it to be constantly updated so that searchers get the most accurate depiction of who you are and how you want them to see you.  The side-effect of PCM is that you push negative items downwards in the results and off the page and onto the subsequent pages where they are less likely to be seen. 

So what keeps certain items at the top of a Google search and what can fill those  critical first 20 results with your desired information? 

Get the newest, most relevant content you have, on the oldest domain names you can find.  In other words, a page on a www.google.com/profiles for example would be very high on the list because google.com was registered a long time ago. 

Google likes old domain names. So get a facebook page, get a Google profile, get a twitter account, get a foursquare account, get a Wikipedia page if you can.  Start and regularly update a blog on either Wordpress or tumblr.  Load up those first results with pages about you on websites that have been around a while.  This will drive up the content listed. 

Coordinate your posts and status updates across all services, twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, etc.  Use a service like MailChimp or Constant Contact to email out the updates that you write every time you write one.  Think of these like press releases when you write them.  They should be sobering, analytical and of interest from a journalistic perspective. If there are negative articles that exist about yourself in major media publications, like the New York Times for example, those articles are given a very high page rank.  To push something like that onto another page of Google results  requires other posts with the same or higher page rank to compete with it.  The only way you can be effective at this is by exposing yourself to the press.

It is important to note, that by most standards you will then become a public figure under the law.  By becoming a public figure you are being exposed to a greater level of publicity and therefore are expected to bear the consequences of negative publicity, even if untrue.  This would make it very hard to sue the character assailant because you would have a higher standard of proof than the average private individual.  The truth is, it is getting harder and harder to stay a private individual as anyone can blog about you or your organization on the Internet.  As long as you want its power and opportunities, the Internet demands that you trade some of your privacy.

For more information or help with anything in this article, please contact Robert Agresta at ragresta@agresta1.com. 

The take away: Quite simply you have to keep it fresh and relevant.