Christmas is two days away and it's that time of the year when we tend to reflect on the past 12 months and think about the new year ahead. 

I'm currently in Peru, away from my normal day-to-day and off work which gives me the space to think about what I want to achieve and focus on in 2020. 

For every new year, I set goals. 

To give you some examples, my goal for 2018 was to publish my first book. My goal for 2019 was to find a new home.

I've achieved both of these. 

Success, to me, is a matter of goal-setting and planning of how you'll achieve those goals. 

But also on being realistic about what you can do and can't do - as you can see, I only set one key goal for the year. Do I want to do a million other things? Of course, but I prefer to stay focused on the one big thing that will make the biggest difference in my life. 

I recently watched a 10-minute TED talk which clearly explains why setting the right goals is the secret to success for companies. 

It's also about setting the right goals for the right reasons. 

But to do this, you must first answer the question why then the what and then the how.

I started my career in PR. 

That was a conscious choice, I wanted to do PR. 

When I was at university doing a BA in International Business in Germany, you could say that I fell in love with Public Relations during a module in Marketing where I got exposed to PR for the first time. 

That was also the time when social media started to pick up and businesses were trying to figure who owns it and how to do it for their benefit. 

Authors and prominent PR pros like Brian Solis and David Meerman Scott got me more hooked and so I decided the follow PR as my career.

But a degree in International Business is not the typical path to get into PR, especially because you don't learn anything about press releases or working with the media. 

So I had to learn all that by myself. How? Through books and internships. 

I decided that if I wanted to get a job in PR immediately after I graduated, I had to gain practical experience. 

So after my first year at university, I found a small social media agency in a town in Germany close to where I was living at the time and interned there for three months for free. 

Was it easy - for the first time working in such a professional setting and without getting any money?

Lots of people confuse projects and operations and oftentimes they consider operations to be an ongoing project. 

But there's no such thing as an ongoing project.

I've had to explain this multiple times and if you work in project management, you'll have to do this a lot too so that you can set expectations on where your work starts and ends. 

The handover between the project and operations needs to be clarified even before you start with your project so that it's clear who's going to take over and when. 

But let's take a look at the differences between projects and operations so you get a better idea of what I'm talking about. 

What's a Project?

I'm a certified Project Management Professional by the PMI and their PMBOK guide defines projects as "a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result."

Projects are: 

• temporary - they have a definitive beginning and end
• unique - they are a new undertaking, unexplored ground

Projects are characterised by:

There's no doubt that organisational culture impacts the behaviour, values and practices of anybody working at that organisation. 

As a program manager, I've always thought of myself as a different type of leader who acts as a change agent to help create a positive organisational culture among my project or program team.  

But since I've always worked in an international environment and with multi-cultural teams, that's not always been easy. 

I've written about cultural differences before and they play a huge role in the success of any project or program. 

In fact, knowledge and awareness of cultural values can enable leaders and managers to effectively manage and work through intercultural conflict and interactions.

To learn more, I found a research a while ago performed by GLOBE that maps leadership within cultural groups around the world. 

The GLOBE research team defines leadership as the "ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organisations of which they are members."

The team found that members of different societies have differing expectations from their leaders that are influenced by their cultural values. They also identified leadership attributes that were culturally-endorsed.

Every forward-thinking PR or marketing professional will tell you that top-down, “push” messages no longer work.

We live in a world that’s gone inbound. A world where to be successful with your communication you need to rely on methods that pull people into your brand rather than interrupt them with irrelevant content.

This is exactly what Inbound PR is all about – it’s a whole new philosophy on how to do PR in the modern, digital world.

Its methodology focuses on two key areas – content and measurement.

Remarkable content created and shared on the right mediums is the most successful way to reach your audience, or as we normally say in inbound – your personas.

Measurement then is essential to 1) gauge the success of your campaigns and 2) improve as you go.

All of this sounds very logical and kind of simple but its actual execution is what most companies and professionals have major difficulties with.

Through my work as a PR professional and an agency business consultant, I’ve found that most businesses struggle to transform towards Inbound PR because of fear.