The entrepreneur has made $5 to $15 million yearly for the past fifteen years, but believe it or not, was in a cash flow crunch.

This fellow’s business has done brilliantly in the past, but the whole business environment and market has changed so radically that he can no longer afford to be who he has always been, or get the old business model to produce the kind of income it previously did.

Fred, a brilliant, marvelous guy, acknowledged that he felt like a Volkswagen with a Ferrari under the hood who was stuck in ten inches of mud. It was hard for him to break the grip of his old way of being and old paradigm.

I had been talking to the Jack weekly for several months now about the fact that, if he wanted to get different business results than he was currently getting, he had do to what Jeff Bezos of Amazon says: Be different, Do different.

I said, “Look Fred, you have the power to shift your way of being and to shift your business model.”

He said he felt reminded of the book Who Moved My Cheese. Another words, what worked before for him, no longer did.

Yet it was tempting to go right back to the same spot, looking for that cheese, even if it was no longer there.

He started to acknowledge that, as smart as he was, he was going after the wrong target market and wrong business.

He said, “I feel like I am swimming around in a puddle which is a larvae pool looking for dolphins where all there are there are mosquitoes.”

We started to build out a new leadership development plan, as well as a well-crafted new business strategy which he was very excited about.

At that point, I thought he might say “Well, Robert, I see what I have to do now and I don’t need coaching anymore.”

I preempted, “Fred, let’s get serious. Can you count on yourself to not go back to the old Fred? To not go back to your winning business strategy, especially after it was previously so successful?”

He replied, “Clearly not. It’s just too easy to fall back on my old winning strategy, especially if I can find a new deal or two and generate some cash flow.”

I told Jack, “Coaching is intervening. Let me give you a graphic image which will serve as metaphor to explain…

Imagine you are in the back yard of your wonderful house. Over there, sitting around a table, shaded by a beautiful Swiss umbrella, is a group of people who fit your old target market, old value proposition, and old business model.

You could go over there and schmooze with them for a while and maybe pick up a customer or two that would give you enough cash to last half a month.

Now, beyond the table is a beautiful kidney shaped swimming pool, and at the bottom of the pool is a photograph of the new you, as well as a waterproof chest with your new strategic business plan in it, along with some other tools.

It’s tempting isn’t it to just go back and be the old you and do the old thing, even though you know that, if you do, you are going to get lost and most likely give up on the new you and your new thing.

The idea of going over to the swimming pool and doing a deep dive into unknown waters to retrieve your picture and the small chest can be a little scary, even if you know it’s the right thing to do.

Coaching is intervening.

My job as your coach, when you start walking over to that table with a smile on your face to introduce yourself to the new prospects who represent your old target market and business model, is to intervene.

I am going to say, softly, but firmly, understanding what it demands of someone to make a change, “No…no…no. Jack, don’t go there. Let’s go over to the swimming pool and take a deep dive.”

I admit, I don’t see half the things that happen on the field that a true football intellectual would see, but I do have an eye for what makes a successful organization. It may sound cliché, but it comes down to individual and collective character, versus mere talent. (Everyone at this level has talent.)

There were several things that impressed me in the pre-game and post-game interviews.

First of all, Bob Kraft, who played a huge role in preventing a football strike this year due to the fact that he has the wisdom of Solomon, was asked about how he felt about going to the Super Bowl. Again Kraft, who is a nice Jewish man, the kind of guy you would want your daughter to marry, responded by not saying a word about football.

He started talking about his beloved wife Myra who he lost to cancer this year, and whose initials were sewn into the Jersey of every Patriots player. He said he believed in spiritual things very much, put his hand on his heart and the raised it up to God, “She is helping us,” he said, “from the other side.” (Myra was known in NE for her tremendous charitable work.)

Kraft then recounted how Tom Brady, his future Hall of Fame quarterback, had come up to him one day when he first arrived looking like a long, skinny string bean and said, “Hello Mr. Kraft. You probably don’t know who I am.” Kraft replied, “Yes I do. You’re Tom Brady, our 6th round draft pick.” (Brady was 200 overall in the draft.) Brady said, “That’s right and drafting me is going to be the best decision you’ve ever made.”

Kraft reflected, “Maybe it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made,” Kraft said, “but hiring Bill Belichick (the coach) was also one of my best decisions.” Brady and Belichick have had more playoff victories (17) than any other coach/quarterback combination in history. Kraft went on to acknowledge many other people in the organization who made a difference, even though you may not even know their names.

Later, after the gut wrenching game was over, with NE coming out on top 23 to 20, the trophy for the AFC Championship was handed to Mr. Kraft by former Pats’ quarterback Drew Bledsoe (the number one draft pick that Brady replaced). I was impressed by the fact that Bledsoe said to Kraft, “Hello Buddy” (no rancor) and then proceeded to give him a kiss on the cheek. Kraft asked for another kiss on the other cheek. He then talked about how proud he was of this team and everyone in the New England Patriots organization, including the fans who are part of a big family.

The camera then cut to Bill Belichick (usually deadpan serious 24/7), who was smiling happily like a little boy who just got a new train set. Asked what led to the Patriot’s victory in light of the fact that Tom Brady didn’t make one touchdown pass, he proclaimed, “Playing as a team.” He said, “We talk in the locker room about mental toughness. Mental toughness is giving your best to the team, when things aren’t going that well for you personally.” Wow, I thought.

Tom Brady, when interviewed, was asked about how he felt going to the Super Bowl again. You could see from Brady’s expression that he wasn’t happy at all. He said, “I feel good for the team, but I have to say that I really sucked today.” While Brady didn’t throw a touchdown pass, it was his goal line jump for a touchdown over the opposing line, bending his back into a weird banana shape that was enough to win the game. One fan said the next day, “he could have broken his back.”

Finally, Vince Wilfork, the Patriots’ all pro tackle, who sacked opposing quarterback Joe Flacco and stuffed opposing rushers seven times in the game, came onto the interview platform. He was asked if he felt amazed when the Baltimore Ravens’ field goal kicker choked on a 20 yard field goal which could have tied the game with seconds left. He answered with a shy smile, “yes.” Then Wilfork’s face took on a serious demeanor, showing respect for the kicker, “It’s a lot of pressure for someone in that situation, a lot of pressure. And it’s a painful way to lose a game.”

Wilfork, a mountain of a man, then proceeded to walk out of the locker room at an incredibly slow pace. He had given everything and more that day. There was nothing left in the tank. And that’s why I say, while it takes talent to be a great organization, it takes something else that at the end of the day may be the deciding factor…CHARACTER.

I have been reflecting lately on how much of the coaching work I do with business leaders is about helping people climb the ladder to becoming CEO and achieving stellar levels of compensation. This is all well and good, but there is a discrepancy between this and the heart of Masterful Coaching, which is about helping leaders do something to make a difference in their worlds.

This point of view is expressed well in the title of my latest book: Your First Hundred Days, (and I would like to emphasis the subtitle) Powerful First Steps on the Path to Greatness. This isn’t just about getting to the top by climbing over a pile of bodies and winning. It is about taking responsibility for throbbing human needs and wants and making a contribution. I would challenge leaders who are reading this blog to expand yourselves to include this dimension. I believe this is what being successful in politics, business, education, and medicine is all about.

It’s my belief that every human being was born to be great…wants to be great…not average or mediocre. When people are not great, I see three reasons: 1) no one has ever encouraged them to find greatness in their lives; 2) they don’t know what greatness looks like for them or how to get there; or 3) they haven’t had enough of an experience of operating in a stratospheric place.

The first step is to change your personal ideology from defining success in in terms of making a living to defining success in terms of making a difference. Your life is meant to be lived in the most meaningful way you can. This means in business parlance that you not only have to have a game changing strategy, product, and service that has an impact on life, but you also deploy it effectively into the market. If you don’t do this, you are stealing from yourself, your family, and all the people whose lives you could be enriching.

Steve Jobs was the best entrepreneur of our generation, leading a revolution no matter what he was doing—computers, iPods, iPhones, films, and so on. His life is a testimony to the fact that it is possible, if you have a commitment to building insanely great products and services, you can both make a difference and make money too. If he can do it, you can too.

The key to your success is going to be determined by how strategic you are, how you use your time to execute, and how you connect to other people. There are five philosophical pillars that every business leader should keep in mind.

1)    Personal Ideology. Why take a path to mediocrity when you and your company could take a path to greatness? You have the power to make, not just mediocre, but truly great products. You have the ability to not just sell people something that solves the problem in front of their noses, but also to transform theirs and their family’s lives for years to come, if not generations.

2)    Define an Impossible Future in Service of a Cause. In many ways, being great and making a difference is about helping people realize a goal or aspiration they didn’t know they had. Rattan Tata of Tata Motors realized that, given rising needs and aspirations, there was a huge car market for a car under $3000. With the introduction of the Nano, people who drove motor scooters in India and who were frequently getting in body-maiming accidents have been now able to purchase and drive a car. Tata now owns 17% of the car market in India.

3)    Strategy Innovation. To be great, you need to be strategic with respect to all the other “me too” competitors in your industry. If you do, your results will go from arithmetic to geometric. Most business people don’t have a game-changing strategy. They are absolutely tactical. Even if they have a game changing strategy, they don’t consistently deploy tactics that advance the strategy. Match your strategy to your cause, and implement tactics that support it.

4)    Marketing. Marketing isn’t about putting one over on people; it’s about educating the customer with messages about their aspirations and needs, and your company’s commitment to guide them to achieve that. Whether you are selling a college education, dream house, or smart phone, it’s the ability to provide people a vision that allows them to project forward where they can imagine having what you offer. It’s the ability to get them to trust you at an absolutely unquestioned level.

5)    Social Networking, Relational Capital, and Distribution. If the products and services you offer really do make a difference in people’s lives, it will be talked about over social networks. This gives you relational capital with all kinds of people and opens up relationships and distribution channels that were previously closed to you. In closing, a soon-to-be-famous entrepreneurial business leader once caught JP Morgan on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The entrepreneur said, “I have a great business idea, but I need capital.” JP Morgan said, “Ok, I like your idea. Just walk back and forth across the floor of the Stock Exchange with me four times, and when people see you with me and that I am interested in you, you will get all the capital you want.”

Yesterday, I visited a blockbuster exhibit at the MFA (Boston art museum) called “Degas and the Nude”. The gloves, or in this case, the tutus of Degas’ ballerinas are off at the new exhibit. Degas and the Nude reveals a more candid, dramatic theme: the beauty of unguarded moments.

The exhibit shows Degas to be a kind of voyeur who abandons the classical form of putting women on a pedestal in a drawing room in favor of catching them unguarded in their own time and setting, whether it’s a prostitute engaged in shockingly carnal acts or a women just stepping out of an ordinary bath.

I have always thought that one of the things that made me a natural as a coach was my own voyeuristic tendencies, which after long practice, allow me to catch people in unguarded moments, whether in a museum, coffee shop, or train, and gain insight into their souls.

I took a break after an hour from the almost exhaustive exhibit and had a coffee and corn muffin down the street at the Northeastern University Au Bon Pain coffee shop, where my instincts as a professional people watcher were immediately set on edge. I was struck, and indeed captivated, to see the utter indolence of the students, slumped in their chairs like over-ripe bananas, gazing into their smart phones like crystal balls, talking on Skype, nary a one studying.

I thought to myself that, for every young person sitting here just “hanging out,” there is a poor, fifty-year-old bastard slogging away at a soul stultifying job somewhere to come up with the $35,000 tuition so their kid can go to college, and have a shot at the American Dream. I suspected that little did they know about their kid’s lack of passion or purpose about the whole experience.

There was one young Chinese woman who stood out from the crowd, because she had such a purposeful demeanor. She sat straight up in a deep state of concentration, furiously taking notes from a book. She had come to America, perhaps from a poor family, to get a degree from a good school, find a good job, and to create a better life for herself and her parents.

Sitting at a table next to me were three female students, who sat chatting as they sent texts on their iPhones (another entitlement from their moms and dads). One of the girls, who was very well padded, got up and said, “I think I will go to the gym now.”

Even though the Korean economy is down right now, everyone seemed to be hustling about with “places to go and people to see,” whereas many Americans seemed to be hunkered down and glaciated.

I spoke to a friend the other day who went on and on complaining about Obama and the bad economy. “We need an election,” the friend said. His comment seemed to typify so many American people I meet who are using Obama and the economy as a lame excuse.

My repy, “We don’t need an election, we need passion and hustle.” Do you really think that the morning after the 2012 election that the economy is going to kick into high gear, and our dysfunctional government in Washington is suddenly going to start to work?

There is an old quotation I came across years ago from George Bernard Shaw, “If circumstances have knocked you down, get up and create the circumstances that you want.”

Gary Hamel in his book, “Leading the Management Revolution,” says that today we need organizations that are not only fit for the future, but fit for human beings. Today, according to a huge study by the George Gallup 30 to 40 percent of the USA workforce is “disengaged,” at a cost of over a $trillion dollars. Why?

The management model every Fortune 500 organization operates from is one that was invented about a 100 years ago, during the industrial era and was basically designed to turn people into robots. Today, new times, call for a new management model one that is based on creating a workplace where people give the gift of their passions, talents, and ideas.

Gary Hamel, the Gallup organization now call for today’s CEOs to lead a management revolution. They know the “what” but don’t offer much insight into the “how.” It’s my beliefs that the management model that is required is a shift from management to coaching.

Good coaching is not the same as “good management.”

Coaching is a totally different paradigm that requires a different way of being, thinking, and interaction.

1. Managers see their role as directing or controlling people’s actions to accomplish predictable results. Coaches see their role as a “committed partnership” that is about empowering people to realize an impossible future and accomplish unprecedented results on their own.

2. Managers get their power from authority. Coaches get their power from their relationship with the people they coach and their mutual commitments to objectives,

3. Managers tend to tell people what to do based on goals and tasks that have been previously set. Coaches listen to people in a way that ignites their personal and organizational ambitions.

4. Managers try to get people to work exclusively on the boss’s goals and immediate needs of the organization. Coaches ask people to spend at least 20% of their time working on impossible goals they feel passionate about .

5. Managers solve problems within constraints and limits. Coaches use constraints and limits to achieve breakthroughs unprecedented results.

6. Managers are reasonable. Coaches are unreasonable.

7. Managers think employees work for them. Coaches work for the people they coach.

8. Managers maintain and defend the existing organizational culture. Coaches create a new organizational culture.

Last night, I got another call from Hal saying that his trip had been a huge success and that my ten tips and conversation had helped him “pull the rabbit out of the hat.” The deal was approved by the Chinese and their government. It would be signed pending approval by the USA government.

“One of your tips,” Hal said “was that the Chinese like long-term relationships, where there is confidentiality and trust, and a win/win spirit. That was the first thing I talked about, and it really worked.”

Hal went on, “Another tip said that the Chinese like the whole idea of taking on the ‘impossible’ when it comes to being a global player, and so the deal I put forward was very bold and ambitious, and they really went for that.”

Yet here was the deal maker. A third tip I mentioned had to do with the fact that in both romance and business, the Chinese don’t like sweet words, but prefer actions that demonstrate true feeling. One way that comes across is through gifts, especially those that involve brand name luxury items.

Hal said, “I went out and bought three Mont Blanc pens. Then I took two gift cards I had brought with my company’s name on them and handwrote a message on each. The message said, ‘This gift marks the beginning of a great partnership between ourselves and our two companies. The next time we use these pens, we will be signing this deal.’”

The Chinese were enchanted. Their hearts and minds had been won over.

1. The Chinese are an intensely patriotic race. Use praise. No disparaging remarks. Not even mild jokes.

2. Exchange gifts. It cements relationships. Don’t just accept gifts, take gifts to give and wrap them. Cash gifts are standard practice in China.

3. The Chinese are very interested in long-term commitment. Build long-term goals and objectives into your proposals. They have a very low divorce rate.

4. Actions speak louder than words. Chinese show they value a relationship through actions. They suspect sweet words.

5. It is difficult for the Chinese to say ‘no’ directly. Anything other than a direct ‘yes’ could mean ‘no’. Be circumspect and reflect on seeming agreements reached. Consider: has an agreement actually been reached?

6. It can take several, very long meetings before any tangible progress is made. Patience is essential if you wish to capitalize on the situation.

7. Chinese will make a deal, than look for openings to lay tricks. Cover the back-end of the deal rather than assume you will work it out later. Make sure they deliver. Have clear contract terms. Search for problems before they materialize. Do risk analysis.

8. Do not assume comprehension. It is often useful to go over the same point several times from different angles in order to aid comprehension.

9. If you are going to have employees in China, prepare a formal written code of conduct and require that all new employees sign the code as part of their employment contract.

10. Saving face is important. Never allow your partner to become embarrassed. Make people look good.

MASTERFUL COACHING TIP # 1 Coaching takes place in the domain of accomplishment, not therapy.

MASTERFUL COACHING TIP #2 Start with an IMPOSSIBLE FUTURE, not a homogenized leadership competency list.

MASTERFUL COACHING Tip #3 Leverage the power of questions: What do you want to achieve that looks impossible that, if it could be achieved, would change everything?

MASTERFUL COACHING TIP #4 Go for an Impossible Vision or Big Game, then secure early wins that build personal credibility and momentum.

MASTERFUL COACHING TIP #5 Set visionary goals, then create three reasonable goals that are achievable and measurable and can be connected to the bottom line.

MASTERFUL COACHING Tip #6 Have a “teachable point of view.” Don’t be afraid to give your opinion.

MASTERFUL COACHING TIP #7 Give people the gift of your presence. Draw out: listen to their story. Listen for what will get them in trouble.

MASTERFUL COACHING TIP #8 Transform the person, not the behavior.

MASTERFUL COACHING TIP #9 People transform when they distinguish themselves from their history. Suddenly they have the freedom to be who they need to be.

MASTERFUL COACHING TIP #10 Help people break the grip and excel beyond their winning strategy. What got you here, won’t get you there.

Follow me on twitter @masterfulcoach

Social networking has changed the game by giving entrepreneurs a reason to get rid of the worn-out, burnt-out, expensive advertising and media platforms of the past, so as to be able to open up markets (customers) that would have never have been accessible only a few years ago.

The thing is that just having a presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and so on, doesn’t guarantee you will get more customers, because your competition already knows about that too.

So how are you going to differentiate yourself from all the other “me too” competitors in your niche? The prevailing wisdom is to have good content. That’s a good idea, especially if you are in a niche where people are relatively ignorant—“how to grow grass,” “how to make pickles,” or “how to buy wine.”

Yet if your business is in an area like leadership development, coaching entrepreneurs, advertising and marketing, there are just too many would be experts out there with good content for content alone to be the differentiator.

You can differentiate yourself more by building a personal brand, being a bit provocative, and telling what you think, versus just quoting others or linking to articles. You can also differentiate yourself by the way you talk. As Gary Vaynerchuk says, “Keep it real, very real.”

Instead of trying to look smart or look good, just speak from the gut. Show some real feeling. Share some vulnerability. Talk to people vs. talking at people. If you do this, you will be able to get inside people’s heads and hearts and connect with them.