Zane Safrit

Can we be like Akio Morita?

« The Uncertainty Principle

A Leap of Faith - The Death of the Walkman came Long After the Death of its Quintessential Innovator and Salesman

Today Sony announced that it would cease Japan-based production of one of the 20th Century’s most defining consumer appliances, the Walkman. via delphiinstitute.com

I was delighted to read this post. It's author is Tom Koulopoulos, founder and CEO of The Delphi Institute and author of The Innovation Zone. The post itself is an excerpt from that book.

Check it out. In the meantime, I have to share some excerpts of this excerpt:

Morita’s personal chemistry of defiance and fearlessness in the absence of hard proof, in fact in the face of utter disbelief and ridicule by colleagues and competitors, is the raw material of innovation in its most basic form.

Or this:

I asked [Peter] Drucker why he thought radical new products, such as the Walkman, always take the market and large incumbents by surprise. “Markets don’t know how to ask for what they haven’t yet experienced,” Drucker told me. Yet, had Morita not been as willing to fail and retry on the market’s own terms, his approach would surely have doomed Sony from the start.

Or this:

Because of Morita’s ability to fail fast and abandon his ideas in favor of the market’s ideas, nothing Sony developed ever got stuck as an invention. Instead, Sony flooded the market with one innovation after another.

And (Bam!), what's rarely talked about with innovation:

The risk for Sony ultimately was not the risk of new ideas, but instead the risk of not having new ideas. Innovation is a very unforgiving, constantly accelerating treadmill. Once you jump on, you have little choice but to move faster with each step with no graceful way to get off.

Consider Apple's iPod and how it redefined the music industry and replaced the Walkman. Apple gave market and large incumbents (SONY) they haven’t yet experienced.

Now, Apple continues to flood the market with one innovation after another. Their risk is not the risk of new ideas, but instead the risk of not having new ideas.

Now ask yourself:

If you could grow to the size of SONY, if you could achieve that level of success with all the metrics of revenues and cash-flows and market influence...would you be willing to:

• fail fast and abandon your ideas in favor of the market’s ideas

• face ... utter disbelief and ridicule by colleagues and competitors (even your employees, family, community, Board of Directors...) ?

And for how long?

At some point, that is the only question. Whether the topic is leadership or marketing, customer service or employee engagement, social media or innovation...in order to continue to grow our selves in order to sustain, possibly grow, our businesses, we will have to, in our own right, be like Akio Morita:

• Abandon our old ideas, ways and business models.

• Fail fast in order to connect with the ideas and ways and business models that better match with the market’s ideas.

•  Face ... utter disbelief and ridicule by colleagues and competitors (even our employees, family, community, Board of Directors...)

Do you see another option?

Tom Koulopoulos shared an hour of his time as guest on my radio show. You can listen to our conversation here.

 

Creating Cultures of Learning

Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies).

Ellen Weinstein

And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school. via www.nytimes.com

As I read this I thought about Gary Harpst's insight that in order for organizations to sustain their operations they need to continuously grow. And in order to continuously grow their members need to continuously learn. They need to continuously learn new skills and new tools and learn anew their strengths and passions. That process of learning, when successful, creates a new source of solutions and leaders to face the next round of challenges faced as a result of an organization's successes. That process of learning, when successful, creates a culture of learning.

And that, a culture of learning, is a culture of innovation.

I also thought about  Steve Denning's 7 Principles of Innovation he shared in his book The Leader's Guide to Radical Management. #3 was Short iterations, short cycles. In his book he titles it Client-Driven Iterations. He wrote:

The idea was to use client-driven iterations to determine whether there was a market, define the service he would provide, and then implement it. He wanted to fail as quickly as possible, recover, and keep honing in on what customers really needed.

This reads like Steve is describing an iterative learning process. That parallels the iterative learning process which seems to be advocated by educational experts in the above NY Times article. Consider:

The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time...

Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.

“What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting,” said Dr. Bjork, the senior author of the two-room experiment.

Maybe, routine work, in a routine cubicled environment, with routine sets of feedbacks (minus the customer) is not the key to creating a culture of learning, a culture of innovation or a culture of leaders.

And testing's equivalent in business is akin to a customer's feedback. Did it meet their standards, their needs, their wants?

Regular testing, regular customer feedback, in short iterative cycles is akin to testing on a regular basis.

When students studied the same material twice, in back-to-back sessions, they did very well on a test given immediately afterward, then began to forget the material.

But if they studied the passage just once and did a practice test in the second session, they did very well on one test two days later, and another given a week later.

Now the article points out that these different approaches won't turn an A- student into a A+ student without the magic M: Motivation.

The same applies to members of an organization.

But if you create a culture of regular, iterative, successes based on regular, iterative, conversations or tests with customers...if you create an environment where every member knows they will learn and grow in the value they bring, in their abilities to reach their goals, in an environment where their learning/growth/development can be recognized...it seems you will have a culture of Motivation, as each member will find their own metrics to motivate themselves and each other.

This is, as you can see, an open thread. So, what do you think?

If you want to hear more about Gary Harpst's thoughts on creating a culture of learning and its impact on your organization's ability to continuously grow, you can listen here.

If you want to hear more about Steve Denning's 7 principles of innovation and its impact on your organization's ability to continuously grow, you can listen here.

Infographic of the Day: The 28 Flavors of Online Conversation in 2010 | Co.Design

via www.fastcodesign.com

Through the Looking Glass...of social media.

I like this graphic. Do you? It's pretty impressive for combining our color wheel and all, most(?), of the social media tools we use to create the full spectrum (there I got it in) of our social media experience.

There's more (articulate and thorough) discussion at the link.

Radio Show Guest: Steve Denning, Author of The Leader's Guide to Radical Management

"Steve Denning is the Warren Buffett of business communication. He sees things others don't and is able to explain them so the rest of us can understand." Chip Heath, author of Made to Stick

Steve Denning is the author of 5 books. I have read two. The first one I read was The Leader's Guide to Storytelling. Excellent! Powerful. Crisp. Clear. Read this book, some or all of it, before any presentation. Great reminders and inspiring examples...stories to help us understand the power of a story well-told for the right audience who seeks its meaning.

The second one I read is why we have a chance to talk with Mr. Denning. The Reader's Guide to Radical Management.

Excellent, as well. Here he's not telling us a story but offering a guide with principles and tips that are livable and doable, respectively.  He brings together an excellent range of references that show both the need for reinventing or workplace as well as the benefits for those who are able and the penalties for those who ...choose to remain unable.

From his website:

From 1996 to 2000, Steve was the Program Director, Knowledge Management at the World Bank where he spearheaded the organizational knowledge sharing program.

In November 2000, Steve Denning was selected as one of the world’s ten Most Admired Knowledge Leaders (Teleos)

He now works with organizations in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia on leadership, innovation, business narrative and most recently, radical management.

I heard Steve speak nearly 2 years ago at the Author's PowWow conference in Chicago hosted by 800CEORead. (Thank you, Todd!) I was so impressed by his presentation. It was his story that stood out.

Now some speakers stand out more than their story. And you're left with an anecdote to share at a backyard barbecue. Hey, I saw x speak.

Other speakers leave you with a nice deck of PowerPoint slides and maybe one or two salient points tucked away in them.

Not so with Steve. Steve's presentation left me with a story, an experience, a journey's moment shared in mind's eye of what a good story can accomplish even when told against the odds, to an impersonal bureaucracy. And then I remembered who told me. And then I remembered I had a copy of his book.

And now, we have a chance to talk with Steve Denning, the Warren Buffett of business communication. We have a chance to glimpse a little more then of what he sees and maybe understand it and how it can help us.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, October 27 at 9:30 AM, Central.

Here are our two listening options:

LIVE

1). Listen in streaming mode at this link.

2). Call-in and listen, join the conversation, at 646-915-9212.

LATER

1). Listen in streaming mode at this link.

I hope you do.

Regardless, I hope you buy The Reader's Guide to Radical Management. Steve offers in it a reasonable, pragmatic, vision of how to reinvent our workplaces. And in doing so create sustainable workplaces and a sustainable economy. I think that's important.

 

 

2 Biggest Derailment Factors for Executives

 Erika Andersen, founder of Proteus International and author of Being Strategic: Plan for Success, Outthink Your Competitors, Stay Ahead of Change, joined our show recently. You can listen here for the insights and inspiration she shared.

During the show I asked her:

As people move up in a career ladder, move up in the standard hierarchical, top-down, command and control environment how do they avoid their own American Idol syndrome?

I read a study a few years ago that said the 2 biggest derailment factors for executives were:

• not listening to accurate data from the people around them, and
  

• not having those sources of data; not having people around them who will tell them the truth.

So, not having the people to tell the truth and not willing to hear it when it’s told to them when they do... are the two-sides of the same coin that is shown in this study to be the biggest factor of derailment for executives.

Erika does not present a problem without also offering a solution. She continued.

There are three skills to use to do this [avoid our own American Idol syndrome.]

1. Being a Fair Witness
2. Pulling Back the Camera
   
3. Sorting for Impact or Fit

If you know you have to be a fair witness to accurately envision and move towards the future for you and your company then you will find a way to get that data.

There are two ways to do this.

1. Good leaders put in systems that will collect the data. They have ways of doing employee surveys. They get real data about how people are doing....They have good metric-based ways of getting the data to allow them to be a fair witness.

2. They are smart enough to create the relationships with those that work with them that are based on trust and authenticity. Those people can and will them the truth. And how you do that is you listen to them. If you as a leader can never shoot the messenger...no matter what the message...then that person will come again and again when they have another problem or concern.

If you are engaged consistently with your team in being strategic it’s much more likely to come out as part of the conversation.

She talks more about these three mental skills, the deceptively simple definition of being strategic, and some inspiring client profiles of those who were able to live the daily habit of Being Strategic.

You can read highlights of our conversation here.

FTC disclaimer: Other than two free copies of her book and the joy of learning from her book and her conversations on our radio show there was no compensation. I am way ahead in my life as a result. I hope you are will be, too.

Recognize the Gate-Keepers, the Routine Makers. Week 24 of the 52-Week Employee Recognition Plan

I announced in May, 2010, the 52 - Week Employee Recognition Plan. This is the 24th week. The lesson this week is:

Reward the gate-keepers, the routine makers. 

The rage in business books and experts and coaches today is...change. Change. Innovation. Disruption. How to handle it, create it, embrace it, live with it. Make money from it. Survive it.

Who are lost, forgotten, overlooked? Those who make change and innovation and disruption possible. The gate-keepers, the routine-makers.

They build and sustain the foundation for your business. Their success allows you to experiment with all those ideas, innovations, projects, skunk works, disruptions. Some prove successful. Some prove failures.

But without the efficient execution of the routines, the manning of the gates, for your business processes you would not have the chance to grow.

So, who are these gate-keepers, routine-makers? Everyone in your organization. We all have routines. Our efficient execution of them is what provides the cash-flow and the time and room to raise our heads up, look around us and consider white space innovations, new products or services, new vendors or markets, a new ap, a what-if conversation. We all have gates to keep whether it’s a conversation on social-media or a customer’s unreasonable request (Yes, customers make unreasonable requests.) or a wild-eyed idea that’s at odds with your purpose.

Recognize those efforts and their success for the doors it opens for your organization. It’s easy to overlook them. But without them, you have nothing to stand on.

**********

You can start with any week of the 52 - Week Employee Recognition Plan and make that your first week.

You can take one of those weeks and turn it into a month or commit to an accelerated pace and complete 6 of the weeks in one month.

You can create your own week of employee recognition. Share that journey here. Share it in your blog or Twitter or Facebook.

But, do something to recognize your employees! They set your brand apart as your ultimate competitive edge.

And the more you recognize their achievements, the more achievements you'll see and they'll enjoy, along with your customers and and shareholders, partners and vendors.

Highlights from My Conversation with Murray Smith, Co-author of The Answer

Murray. Thank you for hiring Sean, your book and being on our show!

I don’t encourage stalking but I do encourage our listeners to follow our guests. Where are you on the web? And what cool project are you working on right now.

I’ve dedicated the rest of my professional life to helping small business owners to try to change their failure rate. I’ve got 3 business I’m working towards that end.

Mainstreet is my most recent endeavor. And you can reach me at AccessMainstreet.

Get The Answer is my personal site where I do a lot of personal work and philanthropic work and scholarship programs.

We have another program we work with to give as much access for free as possible to entrepreneurs through our initiative called Business Growth Makeover. There, what we want to do is reach out and provide the basic principles, the first three steps before anyone spends any time and money on any lead generation efforts. These three must steps are stongly recommended which we provide at no cost at that site.

Let’s talk about your great book.

Who was the reader you pictured in your mind as you wrote this book? Describe them for us. What need of theirs does it satisfy?

We wanted to write a book for people in business. Anybody in business that felt that that business could be the vehicle to achieve their financial success. It could be an employee, it could be as a partner, it could be as a direct sales person. Anybody that was looking for abundance in life and that were willing to consider doing things differently and were open-minded.

73% of people want to get in and start their own business. This book was written for those people who have that mindset, they want abundance and the instruction manual for how to be successful.

Your introduction talks about the Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. What is it? And why does it matter.

That’s a very big word for a very simple statement. The statement is when you look at something different the very thing you look at changes.

We’re dealing with a client who was in the process of developing a website. They had built a $25,000 website and only to find out after they had gone through that exercise and they went through our attract more clients exercise and determined who their ideal client was did they realize their ideal client did not use the web as a means of identifying and finding where they are. They use other strategies to do that.

And this client then realized they had a $25,000 white elephant website with no traffic to it and won’t have any traffic to it because the customers aren’t looking for it as part of their decision-making process.

And we got them to change the way they were looking at their website from being a major lead generation device to being a supportive device and in this process it shifted the way their clients perceived them from being a web-based organization to their clients being able to them to go to other distribution channels to buy their products.

The Heisenberg Principle suggests that when you have a new set of parameters, a new set of considerations, for when you are looking at that thing... then that thing can change for what it references for you.

I wanted to ask you about how you mentioned in your biography that you were diagnosed with a learning disability early in your life. Clearly, that diagnosis was incorrect. And I’ve read where a high percentage of successful business leaders had learning disabilities.

There are a limited number of styles of learning. There are 37 possible styles of learning . And the public schools offer only 3. Reading for me...I couldn’t comprehend what the words meant.

Obviously with schools being reading and intellectual based I was several years behind the other students.

I was told I would never amount to much.

My first job when I got out of school was sewer cleaning. I began to study the owners of the company. They were no smarter than I. They were focused on the critical things responsible for revenues.

The owners of successful companies all focused on the same critical few things.

All I knew when I got into business was to focus on these critical few things. it worked. The formula for driving revenues became absolutely key for me and I spent 30 years perfecting it.

Success is not directly linked to intelligence. It’s linked to another set of criteria and another formula that has not been so easily fleshed out for other people to embrace it.

That’s what we believe The Answer does. It gives people the insight and the knowledge base to align themselves with the right mental conditioning and then to align their business those critical few strategies that drive revenue.

It’s almost irrespective of the industry and the predictability of success is very measurable.

15:00

Your book has 15 chapters. And at least 7, maybe as many as 9 of those chapters have nothing to do with strategy or tactics, execution or marketing. You don’t mention social media....Instead you talk about the brain, our thinking patterns, dreaming, big thinking, changing our minds, the universe inside our brains...

Why did you choose to spend so much time on this topic: our brain and how it works?

If you looked a race car and a race car driver and asked yourself which of the two were required for that race car drive to win a race 100% of the people would say both.

Yet, when it comes to the most complicated thing you’ll ever do in your life which is to start up and run a business some people think that the business can run on its own.

You need both. You need you as the business person and you need the business as the vehicle to get to where you want to go. And both have to be in alignment.

The driver in this metaphor needs to be excellent at what he does. He needs to have the right mental conditioning, the right training, the right belief system. The vehicle itself needs to have an engine that’s tuned to perfection, needs to have the the best tires. And they both need to be in harmony.

And when you get them working in harmony and then you put them on a race track with 50 other drivers one of them is going to win.

Same thing in business. We spend the first half of the book talking about how you can develop the right belief system, the right mental conditioning and we’re not talking about airy-fairy, personal growth stuff, we’re talking about the proven principles that give you an operators manual to tap into the most powerful resource in the universe, that’s the brain.

Get yourself ready to be the race car driver in your business.

If 95% of small businesses close their doors within the first 5 years and 95% of business books fail to mention that resource, our brain, maybe we’re on to something.

More interesting is the reason why they fail. It’s because they lose the hope and belief that their business will deliver the lifestyle they hoped when they began their business.

And that’s the power of the human brain. It can get you jacked up, so hyped on wanting to something, you can go out and run a marathon or scale a mountain. It’s also equally powerful going in the other direction: depression, doubt, fear. These are not so positive emotions that hold people back. As you start to slip down that slippery slope, you start losing confidence, you ultimately get to that point where you give up.

If you look at every other living thing in the universe it has a period of time to develop. A human being is 9 months. An oak seed to an oak tree is predictable. They are all predictable and scientifically proven.

Every idea has the same gestation period and manifestation period. It takes a certain amount of time for it to develop. The only thing is that scientists haven’t figured out how long that gestation period is. Ideas have a thing about them that manifest and change all the time whereas those other examples are more physical.

So at the first sign of trouble we start doubting our idea is a valuable one or a bonafide one. We start digging up and not continuing to give the nourishment and we end up digging it up and abandoning the idea.

This is nothing to do with strategy or tactics. This has got to do with you, the individual. Could you imagine if a race car driver gave up when they were in the 15th position?

When we’re first conceived as humans from the time that happens throughout the course of our lifetime we’re surrounded with coaches to advise us, parents, mother to carry us, teachers guiding us, sports coaches, doctors. We’re looking to them to give us advice.

And, then when we come to doing the most complicated thing of all, to step out, take responsibility and to take an idea and birth it in the marketplace as a business, we think we can go it alone. And all of a sudden we think we can do it ourselves.

That’s right those failure rates are so high.

I love business strategy, theory and models. I love those who say that the key is execution. How are you going to bring execute that strategy, apply that theory, make money from your model. But you write that People tend to be focused on looking for the how, thinking that is where the answer lies. But it’s not.

If the answer rests not in the how, then where does it rest?

Most people have been taught that the answer is in the how. There are three parts of why people become successful. Back in the 70-90’s people used to focus on the what. Those are the secrets that were being uncovered. There are no secrets. They just are unaware.

What you need to know. Tell me what I don’t know, tell me what I need to know and what I need to focus on.

Why. Tell me why that’s important. If you get my why big enough I’ll swim an ocean to get to the other side, I’ll do what it takes to succeed.

How. And THEN the how falls into place.

We call it the what, why and how.

Tell me how to do it. Make it very simple. We refer to it as a grade 6 language. If we can do that with a grade 6 language we should be able to do with anybody on the planet.

This may be a good time to talk about neural reconditioning. What is neural reconditioning? Why is it so important for an entrepreneur or anyone really if they want to live a life of abundance?

I’m 55 years old. I’ve been conditioned my whole life by my environment, by my actions, by the people I’m involved with. Professionally or personally I am who I am because of my environment. I have a certain conditioning for the way a I believe and the certain priniciples and morals. They are what make me what I am.

By the time someone is 16 years old we’ve been told no 155,000 times in comparison to yes only 7,000 times.

That amount of bombardment conditions you to become who you are and what your propensities are.

We can’t change them on our own. It’s not easy to change them on our own.
It’s not easy to change our conditioning on our own.

Neural reconditioning is the ability to change your mental conditioning over the course of about 30 days with about 5 or so minutes of exercise every day. If you’re not willing to do that neural reconditioning process anything you attempt to do is not sustainable.

It’s not just related to business. It could be it’s related to business or training for a marathon.

My dad ran a marathon when he was 70 and he just went out got a college credit for French when he’d never spoken a word of it before.

The answer to this next question seems obvious. But sometimes the obvious answers need to be repeated. Why is it so important to go through this neural reconditioning.

Einstein said it best. If you want something different from what you presently got and you’re only willing to do the same things over and over, that’s the first sign of insanity.

If people are looking for abundance in your life and they don’t have it, doing the same thing over and over again is not the answer. Working smarter is the answer.

Working smarter is first understanding the power of the human brain and being given an operator’s manual to tap into its power. If you could in 30 days develop a millionaire mindset, ie, think like other successful millionaire’s think like, almost clone a millionaire’s behavior and mindset, you would some time in the future get what they got.

What are the elements of neural reconditioning?

I'm going to talk about three that I know work.

Affirmations, visualizations and meditation.

30:00

Affirmations by saying things as though they already exist. Let’s say I wanted to be a successful business owner, I would have affirmations like this:

• I am a successful business owner.

• I have all he money I need to live the life that I want.

• I have a small business with a dozen people who love working together in a collaboration to serve the customers we are serving.

The brain needs to hear it is though it is the present.

The other way is visualization. I have a vision board in my office. A bus plan is nothing more than a vision board. On my vision board I have my financial objectives, my non-financial objectives, and my personal objectives.

Another very powerful way is meditation. 10 years ago I started to meditate. I meditate every day.

Through the combination of all three of those I am constantly reprogramming and updating for the current market conditions for my current belief system and for my current wants and desires.

One hesitation I had for bringing you on the show was your use of affirmations. Don’t laugh. I see so many people use affirmations and the Law of Attraction as their sole tool for success and yet they never reach it. What are they missing?

They’re missing the single most important aspect and why The Secret doesn’t actually work. They’re missing the law of GOYA. And the Law of GOYA is Get Off Your Ass and Do Something. Or in other words, referred to as the Law of Action.

If you knew the combination of a safe with a million dollars in front of you and you knew the combination to the safe but you never reached out to turn the dial...that safe would never open for you.

The Secret gave you information for people who wanted the easy way out: to wish, believe and receive

The Answer gave you insights for taking the action to get what you believe.

If you don't get up and take action, action is the most important thing, once you have the right mindset, the right strategies. It’s the secret sauce.

Pablo Picasso had the saying that "Action is the foundational key to all success."

You talk about there are 5 Musts with the Law of Action. What are the 5 Musts?

• You must find something that stirs your soul. That’s something you’ll do whatever it takes.

• You must become excellent at it. You cannot slide by. Excellent goes far beyond good or great.

• You must condition your mind to believe you have it in you and can achieve it.

• You must figure out how to make money from it.

• You must take daily action. If you’re not taking the action, then you’re not going to be achieving the goals you set out.

Each one of these has a whole show in itself. But this is a wireframe.

Which is the most important one?

Number 5: The Law of Action.

What is the mental financial capacity and how does it effect our success?

This goes back to our own mental conditioning both from creating on our own with our limiting belief system and our family’s limiting beliefs.

Everyone sets a thermostat at what they’re capable of earning based on what their belief system is. We all have this mental condition belief system that says we should earn $70,000 a year. If we set our thermostat at $70,000 we will never earn $700,000.

Many businesses these days may think that any paying customer is their definition of the ideal customer. But you have a more specific definition. What is your definition of an ideal customer?

If we’re going to leave the brain for a moment and step into the business, the ideal client is the single most important factor for business success. If you don’t have your ideal client to market to you’re wasting your time and money marketing.

You offer a great real-world plan to identify your ideal customer, the gap between your current and the ideal customer. I encourage everyone to recognize this as one more reason to go buy your book.

[Great discussion of Dave and Buster’s process of discovering their ideal customer]

The profile is only one aspect of it. How they make decisions is a huge consideration.

What makes up the ideal client is nothing more than matching up what they want and what you want from them.

So what are the top 5 things they want from what you provide and what are the top 5 things they could provide you.

What makes it ideal is not that they buy from you but it is the enjoyment you get from their buying from you.

To know that is to know the combination to your safe.

Your ideal client is the foundation of your business. Whatever you put on top of that will be successful. If people are interested in finding their ideal client they can go to BusinessGrowthMakeover we’re giving access to a 55 page workbook, an hour coaching session, an hour interview...we’re giving that for free to help out during these tough financial times.

What role does need and want play in defining the ideal customer. Why’s that important?

People buy what they want not necessarily what they need. If they’re looking at it from a need standpoint they’re putting it off until the need is greater.

It’s the emotional side of the business process.

People buy what they want and not what they need. If you sell to someone’s needs you won’t be nearly as successful as if you sell to their wants.

Erika Andersen was on the show a couple of week’s ago. She’s authored a great book also titled Being Strategic. As part of that process she asks that we define our reasonable aspiration or hoped-for future. What was your reasonable aspiration or hoped-for future with writing this great book, The Answer?

We wanted to impact the lives of 1 million small business owners worldwide. We wanted to positively impact those lives. If we impacted a million lives then word-of-mouth would take over and we’d impact 10’s of millions.

What are the signs that will show your progress? What metrics are you using to measure you progress?

It’s the success of any of our businesses because they’re all in alignment with helping small businesses.

For example my attract more clients business growth system is licensed to more than 10,000 businesses worldwide.

Our Business Growth Makeover has helped more than 100,000 businesses.

The Answer has been translated into 37 languages and sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

If we can get to that critical mass of 1 million then our message will be heard.

49:00

There are 7 great laws of the universe. The Law of Compensation says that you will be directly rewarded for the number of people you help.

Our focus has got to be finding the cure for small business so that our economy and our future has the hope.

Jim Rohn wrote that Leaders are readers. You’re a leader and I assume an avid reader. What are you reading?

Unfortunately I’m not an avid reader. I’m an avid reader of bites and soundbites of information.

If you go to the back of the book, we have a list of current and great reads. My co-author and I have gone through them and I’ve gotten the nuggets of inspiration from them.

• How to Think Like a CEO

• Success Principles by Jack Canfield.

• Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham
  

• How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.

We’ve gone out beyond the business books to some of the more newer reads.

What is the one thing you would do different with one of your successes? Had I know this I could have done more...?

Had I embraced the concept of understanding how the brain works and the idea that you are a bigger piece of the puzzle than your business is.
I had great success. My biggest challenge was thinking that after 2-3 years that I had done my part and it was time to move on.

In most cases my passion and drive is not duplicatable. My biggest regret is not sticking with any of the deals for longer than 2 or 3 years and then watching them collapse in my wake.

Thanks, Murray!

Baby love makes our brains grow

Going against centuries of assumption about the brain power of moms are the results of a new study published by the American Psychological Association showing that the brains of new mothers actually grow, especially when they tend to gush over their perfect little offspring. via holykaw.alltop.com

It makes sense. A new born baby...you feel alive, even holding one for a moment. Brain tingles, you smile, you engage, you're alert to them, what's around the both of you.You're learning them, their world, creating your world's together.

And, I'm not a mom.

I wonder if this same experience is found in entrepreneurs with their babies: their startups. Brain tingles, you smile with anticipation and excitement about the day, about what you can accomplish, you're engaged, you're alert to the needs of your new baby...you're learning from them, you're creating a new world together.

Disclaimer: By no means do I compare the gift of motherhood nor its costs or joys with that of a startup entrepreneur. On the other hand, it seems the two share some things. Right?

64 Percent of the World’s Largest Company CEOs are Not Social...

NEW YORK, Oct. 12, 2010 – In a new study released today, global public relations firm Weber Shandwick found that the majority of CEOs from the world’s largest companies—64 percent—are not social, that is, they are not engaging online with external stakeholders. “Socializing Your CEO: From (Un)Social to Social” examines the publicly visible communications activities of CEOs in the world’s top 50 companies.

“Strong evidence exists that CEOs are not silent in these turbulent times. They are extensively quoted in the business press, frequently deliver keynote speeches at conferences and participate in business school forums.

via www.webershandwick.com

I wonder if this title could just as easily say:

64% of World's Largest Company CEO's Are Not Social...Period.

And then the article would read:

NEW YORK, Oct. 12, 2010 – In a new study released today, global public relations firm Weber Shandwick found that the majority of CEOs from the world’s largest companies—64 percent—are not social, that is, they are not engaging  with external stakeholders. “Socializing Your CEO: From (Un)Social to Social” examines the communications activities of CEOs in the world’s top 50 companies.

Strong evidence exists that CEOs are not silent in these turbulent times. Their press agents and investor relations departments prepare carefully scripted sound bites for public consumption and well-written keynote speeches which they practice and perform well.

But neither do they listen.

And the disconnect between their words, their lack of listening and their actions are reflected in the declining rates of employee engagement in their companies.

Maybe that is harsh and unfair. To that I say...

Buck up. Life's harsh, sometimes, but always fair. 

Consider this:

Since 1965, return on assets [ among publicly traded companies] has collapsed by 75% - Edge Perspectives.

And what is the number one asset for these same companies? People. Their employees.

Consider this:

One study found that "only one out of every 5 workers is giving full discretionary effort on the job - going well above and beyond what's required..."  - The Corporate Lattice, Page 6.  Closing the Engagement Gap: A Road Map for Driving Superior Business Performance, Towers Perrin Global Workforce Study 2007-2008

Consider this:

Companies with high engagement scores deliver better results than those with lower scores:

• Return on assets is 100 percent higher.

• Revenue growth is 150 percent higher.

• Productivity is 78% higher. The Corporate Lattice, Page 7

Or, consider this:

The number one strategy to create engagement, to raise the ROA on investments in a company's most important asset, its employees is...Be Social. - Me. And a lot of others.

Here's a few resources from the others:

• 7 Employee Engagement Tips for Team Leaders

• 9 Ways to Keep Employees Engaged.

• 42 Rules of Employee Engagement

• David Zinger's Employee Engagement community

• Michael Stallard and his book Fired Up or Burned Out. Check out his blog post: Servant Leaders Out Perform Because They Connect.

• Or just Google the term employee engagement tips. I found 286,000 results.

As you go through those and other resources you will notice the key principle involved is connection. And to connect you need to listen. Listen > Connect > You're Social...regardless of your media.

Now, it's my turn to be quiet. I'm listening.

 

Poverty, Core Inflation and Cash Balances

via holykaw.alltop.com

In a consumer-based economy, an economy like ours, you cannot expect stability much less growth if an increasing number of its contributing members, consumers, show incomes that fall below the poverty line. They do not have money to...consume.

Oddly, our economists talk more often these days about our core inflationrate. That is the rate of inflation without the impact from fuel and food costs. Those two categories continue to rise. And the core or consumer good prices do not.

For some reason, the economists hail this as a victory, a sign of strength.

Now, if more consumers show incomes that fall below the poverty line and fuel prices and food prices continue to rise there will be even less disposable incomes for consumer goods. Minimal inflation in this context is not a victory then for two reasons:

1. The newly crafted definition of inflation is meant to confuse and obfuscate the easy listener;

2. Declining purchasing power is not a sign of strength however you define inflation. 

Oddly, again, companies hold nearly $2 trillion in cash on their balance sheets. A record for our economy.

Record levels of cash on corporate balance sheets and record levels of consumers below the poverty line. Those are both records and reflect trendlines that are not sustainable.

And neither is our economy.

Four Simple Guidelines to Make Work Great

Ed Muzio is CEO of Group Harmonics and the author of the excellent book Make Work Great: Supercharge Your Team, Reinvent the Culture and Gain Influence - One Person at a Time, shared an hour of his time as a guest on our radio show. You can listen here.

During the show I asked him:

What are the four simple guidelines that define the process to Make Work Great, a process you call a special type of moderation?

And Ed answered:

The four things are:

1. Don’t put your career in jeopardy. Do things that help you, not hurt you.

2. Don’t compromise your ethics. Never. Again, common sense. The book talks about ways to be overt and honest about the work you do.

3. Don’t use all your time. Don’t look at it like you’re going to spend 20 hours a week or 40 hours a week and change the culture. Make small changes and realize the benefit. This is about slow changes with lasting effect, not quick changes or programs du jour. Make small changes, realize the benefit, then change again.

4. Don’t get impatient. That's the flip side of don’t use all your time. Develop good discipline and then wait for the rest to take care of itself. It’s like planting a tree. It won’t grow if you keep digging it up and looking at it.

Simple, clear, doable.

I suggest one step to compliment these 4 principles:

Buy Ed’s book: Make Work Great: Supercharge Your Team, Reinvent the Culture and Gain Influence - One Person at a Time.

Here’s a couple of quick reasons:

• His writing is simple, clear, on-target.

• His solutions are simple, clear, doable, pragmatic, logical...low-risk, high-return.

• Personal responsibility. That’s what rang loud and true in his book. We, individually, have the responsibility and the means now to Make Work Great.

Thanks, Ed.

You can follow Ed on Twitter at EdMuzio.

You can join him on Facebook at Ed Muzio.

( I promised I'd try to get him 2-3 more followers...I think he's doing fine on this all by himself. But, a promise is a promise.)

Oh. For the FTC’s disclosure requirements...Ed’s publicist sent me a copy of his book. For free. After that, the only compensation was the opportunity to both read the book and discuss it with the author.

Priceless? I don’t know. But inspiring, useful, and well-worth my time?....Definitely.

Share your failures. Week 23 of the 52-Week Employee Recognition Plan

I announced in May, 2010, the 52 - Week Employee Recognition Plan. This is the 23rd week. The lesson this week is:

Share your failures.

May readers may have just turned away. Involuntarily they inhaled, a silent gasp, before they clicked away.

Share my failure, you say? Are you crazy, you ask?

Um, in a word...no.

If you share your failures, openly and honestly, you set the right table. That’s the table where successes and failures are shared. Even celebrated. That’s the setting where fear is removed. In its place are found recognition and trust and respect.

Recognition and trust and respect are some of the building blocks of engagement among members of an organization. They are recognized for their contributions. They trust their ideas will be respected. And they know their failures will be treated with respect.

A setting where failures are openly shared is a setting where ideas can be offered and explored. You know what happens with ideas, don’t you? Some of them turn out to be useful. Some of them contain solutions for new products and services, invitations to enter new markets and serve new customers and generate more revenues.

And all of those conversations that convert ideas into solutions, invitation, new customers from new markets and new revenues from old and new customers....all of those conversations create engagement. They create excitement.

And you’re shown as...well, human. A human that’s comfortable with compassion, kindness and forgiveness. That makes you someone they can trust. They can trust you with their ideas, their dreams and yes, their failures. That trust, those conversations begin the process of building a culture of learning. You need to learn daily in order to grow daily to conquer the new challenges you face daily. those conversations begin to happen daily.

Share your failures.

**********

You can start with any week of the 52 - Week Employee Recognition Plan and make that your first week.

You can take one of those weeks and turn it into a month or commit to an accelerated pace and complete 6 of the weeks in one month.

You can create your own week of employee recognition. Share that journey here. Share it in your blog or Twitter or Facebook.

But, do something to recognize your employees! They set your brand apart as your ultimate competitive edge. And the more you recognize their achievements, the more achievements you'll see and they'll enjoy, along with your customers and and shareholders, partners and vendors.

Highlights from My Conversation with Gail Martin, Author of 30 Days to Social Media Success

Gail Z. Martin is the creator of The Solopreneur Survival Guide, the host of the Shared Dreams podcast and the author of 30 Days to Social Media Success: The 30 Day Results Guide to Making the Most of Twitter, Blogging, LinkedIn and Facebook. Gail is an international speaker on marketing and social media, and in her spare time, she writes a bestselling fantasy adventure series of books. She founded Dream Spinner Communications in 2002 and now works with clients through the US and Canada.

She joined the show recently to talk about her great new book: 30 Days to Social Media Success: The 30 Day Results Guide to Making the Most of Twitter, Blogging, LinkedIn and Facebook.

You can listen to our conversation here.

Gail. Thank you for being on our show. I don’t encourage stalking but I do encourage following. So where are you and what are you working on right now?

Well you can follow me on Twitter at GailMartinpr, I’m on Facebook as Gail Martin and a couple of brand new fan pages. That’s:

• 30-Day Results Guide that’s specific to the book
• Gail Martin Marketing and Dream Spinner Communications.

These pages are brand new and I want to fill them up.

You inspired me for several reasons including your books. But one thing that inspired me was your background in traditional PR and your ability to embrace social media. How did a nice, successful PR person like you end up walking into the non-stop, unmanaged, global cocktail party known as social media?

My fascination with the computer’s possibilities for PR goes back a long way. Back in the mid-80’s when I did my MBA I doubled up between marketing and computer systems and marketing and everyone told me I was crazy....marketing has nothing to do with computers.

From the mid-90s I was helping companies with their websites... that’s an eternity in internet days. There I was first having to educate CEOs on what a website was and why they needed one. And social media was just a logical extension. Marketing is just about communication and social media is a great way to do that.

I think the PR industry has been late to the business for social media for a couple of reasons. In any business people like to stick with what they know. Traditional PR has a long history. Social media is a component of a successful campaign. But I’m not going to tell you it’s a silver bullet. But I do think it is an important element.

I also think control is another big piece of it. When you send out a traditional pr piece it’s all nice and neat and approved. You send it to reporters you already know. There’s a nice little formalized dance about how PR coverage is supposed to go.

Everyone says they want word of mouth. Word-of-mouth is messy and viral and you don’t control it any more. And that’s exactly what social media is.

Let’s talk about your book: 30 Days to Social Media Success: The 30 Day Results Guide to Making the Most of Twitter, Blogging, LinkedIn and Facebook. It’s an awesome book. I like it for its real world, let’s do it today, approach. And I like it for all the practical tips and steps. Anyone even someone who’s never been on a social media site.... could pick this book up and have social media success in 30 days, 30 minutes a day.

Who were you talking to as you wrote this book? Describe them for us.

Why should they read it?

The people I wrote the book for are small business owners and solo professionals, people who are out there in the trenches have a limited budget but know that they need to let their audience they are in business and what problem they can solve for their customers

A lot of those people are afraid of social media. Many folks are coming in to being a business owner, maybe a 2nd career after having left corporate, but a lot of folks aren’t sure what they’re getting into with marketing their business. They bring a lot of subject matter experience but not much in the way of marketing their business.

I want to help those folks succeed through marketing and make their dream come true.

It’s interesting you mention that small business is afraid of social media. On the fear scale, I had the impression that Fortune 1500, 500, Fortune 15 companies had the greater amounts of fear for social media whereas the smaller businesses would see the opportunity.

I think you have fear on both sides for different reasons.

The huge companies are afraid because it’s not something they are faamiliar with and of not tightly controlling the message or knowing what’s going to happen or unfold every hour of the PR launch.

There’s a different fear on the small business side. They have limited amount of time and budget. They’re not really sure why they need to be on social media although everyone tells them they should be. they are leery about getting into something they’re not sure they have the time to manage and they’re not really clear of what to expect.

The biggest question is people say I’m on Facebook and now what. Everybody told me I needed to be here and I put up a profile and here I’m staring at the computer screen and now what.

The other thing is that I get this question from people who put up a Facebook profile and they get these messages from people who they don’t know and who want to follow them....What do I do!?!?!?

Last week’s guest was Erika Andersen. She also wrote an excellent book titled Being Strategic. And in it she coined the phrase: reasonable Aspiration or hoped-for future. What was your reasonable aspiration or hoped-for future with writing this book?

My reasonable aspiration was that I wanted to publish with a major business publisher and get a book in the hands of small business owners and solo professionals and they could get quick results and get strategic results.

My hoped-for goal is that it really becomes the go-to book for that same audience and that it eventually goes viral. But I’m happy getting the books in the hands of those who need to read it.

Metrics are important for social media success. What metrics will you use to measure your progress towards this reasonable aspiration or hoped-for future?

That’s really where having a strategy comes in. Because what I advise readers in the book to do is to know what their number one business goal is and how to measure it. I recommend everyone have really measurable goals. Don’t just say I want more business...say I want 15% more profit by the end of the year or I want 25 more regular clients. You can measure that.

You’re looking at 30 touches to go from a prospect to a buyer. You need 7 - 30 contacts to get people to where they need to buy.

Social media is a terrific inexpensive way to make many of those touches: educate your prospect, answer their questions, showcase your credibility and expertise. Customers buy on their time-frame. Not when we the providers are ready to sell. The key thing is to touch the right people who are likely to be your best prospects and then stay in touch until it’s the time they are ready to buy. And social media can really make that happen.

I’ve noticed that many social media experts and gurus they tend to avoid the icky subject called profits and cash-flows and paying customers. Some even say these metrics aren’t important. You went right there. First point.

If you’re a business owner that had better be your first metric. Eyeballs and impressions and reads are great to see if anyone has really seen something. But, what really matters is pulling people into your orbit so they gradually go from window-shopper to buyer.

There are certainly other ways to tell social media is happening for you. If you’re seeing an increase of traffic to your website or more peple opting into receive a newsletter from you...that’s certainly a tangible result. Getting great comments to your blog or twitter to see people are on topic. Getting great questions. The point is you are starting a conversation with people who are likely to become a a customer and you wouldn’t have met those people without social media.

These touches are much less of an interruption than if I am always interrupting you to say "hey, wanna buy my stuff, wanna buy my stuff..."

You discuss 4 social media resources, primarily: Twitter, Blog, Facebook, Linkedin. In my little world I see them serving 4 distinct audiences and conversations. Is that correct. How do you blend them together?

The genius with social media is you can use social media to leverage and reinforce the other kind of marketing you’re doing. You can also use the sites to reinforce each other.

Facebook is like a networking luncheon. You pay your money for a chicken lunch and the chance to walk around and trade your business card and have short conversations with other business professionals and everyone hopes to come out of there with a few business leads.

Twitter is more like a cocktail party. You move around a lot from person-to-person and you don’t get into any in-depth conversations. You hope you leave around a few witty sparklers behind you so people will remember you. Twitter and Facebook is all about meeting new people you wouldn’t meet any other way.

Blogging is much more like in depth conversation with a circle of people who are interested in engaging. It’s more of an in-depth focused conversation.

LinkedIn is more about sitting down with someone you know and seeing how I can be a resource for you and you can be a resource for me. And the Blackberry’s come out and you really oughta talk to this person.

Many folks see the business plan as the document that once prepared is never seen again or is only shown the bank loan officer. But you describe the Business Plan as the most powerful marketing tool. Why?

A lot of people, if they put a business plan together at all, write it in the first months of starting a company and then put it in the drawer and never look at it again. Or, they put it together for a very specific purpose like getting a loan, so it’s very detailed and very focused with a lot of detailed graphs and charts.

My business plan approach is not related to either of those. What I want readers to focus on is their top business goal. That could be a specific percentage increase in profits or a target increase in clients or getting their product showcased in 4 new retail outlets. But it needs to be something measurable.

Once that top goal has been set now you have a focus. And a screen you can look through every opportunity that you can say yes, I could do that but is it getting me closer to my goal?

That’s a huge thing for owners. So many people are wracked with doubt about their marketing and they are bombarded with choices. They don’t have any filter that let’s them know reliably which choices are good and which choices are not going to help them. When you focus on that top business goal and you’re using it for a check for that reality then those choices become much easier and the choice of which social media to use becomes much easier.

Besides a 30 day plan, using 30 minutes a day you also have a 30 Rule for each chapter. What was the idea behind your 30 Rule and if a reader could only follow one 30 Rule...what would it be?

My Rule of 30 comes back to that idea that it takes 30 touches to convert a window-shopper into a buyer. There are so many ways to find 30 ways. Start with the people in your address book. Start with your blackberry. I’m willing to bet you can invite 30 of those in a half hour per day.

If you can do anything 30 times you’re going to break through that barrier.

Maybe it’s 30 emails or 30 press releases or 30 people you’ve friended on Facebook.

Which one did you find most useful for your work?

I think the idea of coming up with 30 distinct touches for the same prospect that were unique. Not necessarily hitting them with 3o issues of the same newsletter but you send them a newsletter, then a follow-up email, and then you send them a call, and you follow them on twitter, and you send them a personal card. You see how spread out over time you’re chipping away like water on rock. They should remember you from sharing information they want.

Am I touching them in 30 different ways over a few months time? That’s significantly increasing your close rate.

My lists push people out of their comfort zone. 30 is a stretch goal. But think about how many people you could contact in a short time contacting 30 a day.

You list 5 myths about social media. What are these? Which one is most commonly held by small business?

The first myth is that it’s a fad. It’s going to go the way of Pet Rocks. It’s here to stay because it works. It’s such a valuable way of communicating.

Another prominent misconception is that it’s only for teenagers. People saw that this was a really cool way to communicate and it had value. the fastest growing demographic is people over 35 years of age. And these adults want to talk business.

Another misconception is that if you have a local business then soc med has nothing for you. You can use soc med to be intensely local. People fr om your hometown will start to gravitate to your fab page. you can be the source of local news.

Another thing is people have this idea that social media is a black hole. If you’re out there to achieve a goal and you’re clear about what you need to do in your 30 minutes then it’s easier to skip the Mafia Wars, the Farmville’s et.

Another idea is that it’s like walking down skid row with all of these crazy identity thieves and serial killers who are waiting for you to put a Facebook page so they can get ya. The internet has some scary side alleys just like any city does. I assume business people are adults and they know how to meet other adults in a business setting without giving over their bank account numbers or their social security numbers.

What’s usually the first eureka moment in this 30-day journey?

I think when you go out there with a plan and you start to find other people, in fact a lot of other people, talking about your topic and these are people you could help and they’re already interested in your topic and you just need to get to know them.

It’s like discovering all of these networking groups you could find and they’re free. That’s phenomenally helpful.

There’s a great conversation going on and just waiting for you to jump in.

And then what’s the first push-back moment where they encounter a little friction or resistance. How does your book help them continue?

Many people get the impression that if you build it they will come. Social media is this magic bullet and you can put up a Facebook page and you’ll come in the next day and have 10,000 followers and have more business than you can handle.

All good things take time.

If you planted a garden and went out the next morning and said "well that’s a waste of time; nothing's growing."

Seeds take awhile to sprout.

So do results in any kind of marketing. I see the same thing in social media.

It takes persistence. It takes commitment to find the people that you want to connect with and wooing them to connect with you and then it takes the commitment to be present until the time in their life to buy from you.

Most of the time it’s about establishing that relationship to get to know you before they’re ready to buy from you.

It’s not a cash machine, just putting in your password and letting cash spew out.

Can you describe a client story who used 30 days, 30 minutes? Maintaining confidentiality of course.

She wasn’t doing a hard-sell. She was just going out offering advice, being a good neighbor. And in a few weeks she had 150 visits and comments on her website to at least check out her services.

That’s a terrific lead generator.

You get 150 lookers to your website. Some percentage are going to become buyers. That’s a pretty good result for a few minutes of your time going out and being a good neighbor.

You have a separate chapter for social media with non-profits. What’s the key difference for using social media with a for-profit vs. non-profits?

For-profits are ultimately looking to find customers. Non-profits are looking to change the world. Non-profits understand the long lead a little bit better than for-profit.s. Non-profits understand how important is the need for community education and the need to give free information. Non-profits have been more receptive to social media first of all because it’s free and they have a limited budget.

But, there’s also a tremendous amount of creativity in the non-profit arena. It ranges from fund-raising to volunteer organizing to animal rescue matching abandoned pets with homes. They’ve just waded in.

You talk about other social media tools besides the Big 4 of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. What are some of these? How important are they?

YouTube is a great tool for adding video to your site. People get a better sense of who you are when they can see and hear you and not just read you.

All of these all have aps that make it easy to add YouTube video.

Flickr and other photo-sharing tools are great way to add pictures out there. Flickr takes a dim view of heavily commercial photos. But you can share photos from your latest trade show or event.

Social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Del.ici.ous if you’ve ever torn an article out of amagazine and put a sticky note on it for your significant other or your partner with ‘hey you gotta read it’ well, you get the idea with these tools. It’s a way to let the world know ‘hey, you have to read this.’ It’s a wonderful thing when people find what you share is valuable.

Let’s talk about ROI, return on investment. This topic seems to get everybody, social media users, businesses, social media agencies all excited either proclaiming the metrics or proclaiming that metrics really aren’t important in social media. I think agencies in that last camp want to be paid upfront, too. How does a company measure its ROI from social media? Take us from the start to the bottomline.

One measure of ROI is are people responding to your friend request. Are you getting people who find you and friend you that you didn’t reach out to? Is your friend and follower list growing. Side note: I don’t think people need to have 1 million followers the way Lady Gaga does. But if a company has a 500 or 2000, you know 2500, people who are REALLY interested in what you have to say then you can generate more business than you know what to do with.

Sure, you can generate a bigger list of people who are really interested, then your odds are having more people ready to buy are going to increase. The trick is reaching out to people who want

Maintaining and building those connections is one measure of ROI. If you were to spend money to buy a list or spend money to go to a trade show to be exposed to 2000 people in your industry is a return on investment.

So, early on that exposure is a ROI. Maintaining those connections and seeing people stick around.

Then getting people to talk with you. Now you’re starting to move down the sales funnel into going from listeners and lurkers, those who walk around the edge and are now starting to reach out and engage you. You pay money for that opportunity to get. That’s another form of ROI.

When someone moves further to go out to yourwebsite because they found you on social media and signs up for one of your download products. And they put themselves on your opt-in email list and now you have another of the 30 ways to make touches.

When you reach out to your social media contacts and ask for help and your group of people respond to you with valuable input. That’s tremendously valuable. That’s a ROI that I really love.

To me, all of those are bonafide ROIs for my time to cultivate social media...in addition to the sales.

Social media is just a fantastic tool for getting more people from more places into the top of the sales funnel.

Why is that so difficult for new social media users, particularly business and small business, to see?

The things we know very well and take for granted in the real world seem strange when you interpose a computer into the mix. So people knows if you go to a luncheon you know it’s unlikely you’re going to come away with $1000 in business. But if you stop going you won’t come away with any business. They will be the first people to say they’ve been on Facebook for 3 months and haven’t generated any business.

It’s the same way. It seems strange and unfamiliar because it’s on the computer.

Social media is a networking event that crosses time zones and geographic border. And they’ve got money to spend.

There is so much free information from some of the biggest leaders in the business world. You can get a business information for free. And then you can pick from that and decide who you want to come back and spend some more time and money.

You’re a leader. You’re an avid writer, also. Jim Rohn says that Leaders are readers. What are you reading in business or for fun?

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on speaking. I’ve been reading a lot of books on how to be a better professional speaker.

I re-read Michael Port’s book Book Yourself Solid now for about the 6th time. I’m constantly reinventing my business so that book and his sequel to that are very valuable.

I’m also always reading books about social media and the internet...because it’s always changing.

And on your non-business reading list...?

In my free time, I write an international best-selling fantasy adventure series The Chronicles of the Necromancer.

Lately I’ve taken a detour into reading mysteries with a paranormal bent. They’re kinda popcorn books I can read in the car waiting for my kids or with a cup of tea at the end of the day.

Where are you speaking?

The best place to find this is on my Gail Martin marketing site.

For the fiction books, there are a lot of book signings and events ranging from here in Charlotte to Philadelphia and parts in between.

What’s the most important rule, bit of advice, you want our listeners to remember about social media?

Go in with a strategy and a commitment that you’re going to stay there and nurture your social media connections like you would nurture a garden. It’s not a magic bullet. It’s not an overnight success. But if you approach it strategically. And if you stay committed it can become an incredibly powerful tool for growing your business.

Let’s remind our listeners where they can follow you on your blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

My blog and twitter feed my home page at Gail Martin Communications.

My blog is at Marketing Turnaround.

You can find me on Twitter at GailMartinPR.

Thanks, Gail!

Show Them Your Scars

But when you show us, leader, that you can face your own screw-ups, when you can publicly acknowledge that you crashed and burned, when you can–metaphorically speaking–hoist your shirt in front of a hundred people to show us the scar that you earned when you drove off the road or fell off the mountain, we’ll be closer to you as human beings.

And we follow human beings; we don’t follow idealized icons of unattainable perfection. via stevefarber.com

Questions?

Their Word-of-Mouth Needs Your Encouragement

Word of mouth isn’t luck. It’s a planned effort to encourage happy customers to recommend you. via www.damniwish.com

Andy's right. Word-of-mouth isn't luck. And, wings and prayers don't help either.

It's a planned effort, an all hands-on-deck kinda effort. That one hand not on deck, that one person in your organization not on deck with everyone else can sink your ship.

What then? So, you have on board and on the right deck to encourage word-of-mouth from your customers... now what?

* Well-Begun is Half Done.

Word-of-mouth begins with their first experience. That's usually your website.

• Have you looked at it lately? This year? Go no farther here unless you have updated your website in the past 30 days.

• Is it simple, well-organized, with clear directions for your visitors?

• Does it answer their questions?

• Does it provide solutions for their needs, not your designer or copy-writer's skills?

How do you welcome their calls?

• Do you answer them live?

• Do you have immediate solutions for them?

• Will their first call to your company inspire them to tell others about your company?

* Measure

• Measure the word-of-mouth.
• • Use tools like Google Alerts to track the mentions of your company.

• Measure your referrals. Tally the number of referrals your company receives from the word-of-mouth you have encouraged.
• • Which customer said what to whom?
  • And what product or service did that referral buy as a result?

• Use the Net Promoter Score. That's a 3-question survey that quantifies their likelihood to recommend you to a friend or colleague. And they can describe in their own words, why.

Word-of-mouth is nice. But revenues that result from that word-of-mouth are the revenues that best sustain any business.

* Give Thanks.

• Thank the customer who gave that word-of-mouth. Regardless if it generated a referral or even a new customer. Thank that customer who put their reputation on the line for you.

We sent inexpensive floral bouquets here. Easy to administer, pleasing to the recipient's eyes, flattering and stands alone as a testimony to our care for our customers. Passerby's always stop to ask about the flowers and who sent them.

* Deliver on Your Promise

Follow-up is important. But it is empty without a great service, a great product, a great experience. Deliver on your promise. No amount of cutesy ads or viral videos will overcome your failure to deliver.

* Follow Up

Andy's post is about follow-up after the sale. Again, he's right. After you have made a customer happy, don't stop. Make them happy again. And again.

• Follow up with a follow-up call. Are you sure they were happy about their experience? Or, do you just assume from their silence that they are now golden.

• Have an Executive Call Your Customer. I did. As CEO of a small company I regularly called existing customers. Low-key and polite was my approach. 30% of those calls generated upsells and cross-sells. 100% of those calls gave that customer something to talk about.

Now, for that moving company that Andy describes in his blog post...I would offer a few quick ideas:

• House-warming gifts. A basket of fruit, bread, cheeses, wine. After a long move, this could be a great little celebration package... compliments of the moving company.

• A bouquet of flowers for the new home or office.

• A Welcome Wagon greeting for the new residents.

• A package of discounts or gift certificates to local businesses.

Bottomline. The only bottom-line with word-of-mouth is that your business is sustainable with thriving program to inspire word-of-mouth on your behalf. And without it, your business will not survive. Eventually, your ex-customers will out-talk your ads.

 

Radio Guest: Murray Smith - Author of The Answer

Murray Smith has started or turned around 13 different businesses including Indian Motorcycle, American Brands and Dave and Busters (Canada). He has spent the last 20 years building a system to reduce the learning curve for entrepreneurs and has had many lessons learned in business and life during that journey that he will be sharing with us today.  He currently owns 3 businesses dedicated to helping small business owners achieve their dreams. Murray loves seeing other business owners succeed and has dedicated the rest of his life to this single purpose. 

Murray co-authored with John Assaraf  the newly published book titled:  The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life. This is an excellent, excellent, book.

Our conversation starts at 9:30 AM, Central, tomorrow, Wednesday October 13. Your listening options are listed below.

We’ll talk with Murray about his new book and its answer from lessons in these two key areas:

Lessons learned relating to the business owner:          
    •    Think like a successful business owner to ensure your success is more certain (Vision, Focus, and Action)
    •    You must be willing to be open minded to do things differently
    •    When you change the way you look at things; the very thing you look at changes
 
Lessons Learned relating to the business:
    •    Focus on the critical few things needed to grow your business and not the trivial many.
    •    Buyers are not responding the same way to persuasion marketing tactics as they did previously.
    •    There are only 3 ways to grow your business, more profits, more sales and more clients.

And we’ll also talk about his passion for business, for entrepreneurs and his journey helping business owners around the world achieve their success.

Here are your two listening options:

LIVE:

1. Listen in streaming mode at this link.

2. Call 646-915-9212 during the live portion of the show, 9:30 AM to 10:30 AM, Central.

LATER:

1. Listen in streaming mode at this link.

Invest in Their Health... Week 22 of 52-Week Employee Recognition Plan

I announced in May, 2010, the 52 - Week Employee Recognition Plan. This is the 22nd week. The lesson this week is:

Invest in their health.

Why wouldn’t you invest in your number one asset? Why wouldn’t you invest in its upkeep, its maintenance, its repair, its need to reboot, the proper fuel, the adequate security, and operate at a pace consistently below red-line?

If your business has a car, you buy insurance for it. You take it in for regular maintenance and repairs. You add the proper fuel, the best fuel. You keep the tires inflated. You protect it with alarms and park it inside your garage. You keep its RPMs below that red-line.

If your business has a computer, you buy support packages. You install the updates for operating systems and applications. You install the proper security. You train your other asset how to use this tool. You conduct diagnostic checks and security checks. You run scan disc and defragmenter...(You do these things, right?)

But for some reason...too many companies look at their most important asset, their employees, as a disposable, dispensable asset whose maintenance they choose to ignore, whose repairs they choose to forego and whose redlines are exceeded...all day, every day.

And then when that asset is burnt out and unproductive...well, these same businesses then blame the asset whose care and support they chose to forego.

It’s no wonder that ROA, return on assets, have fallen by over 75% for public companies since the mid-60’s. ( Link at Edge Perspectives. )

And maybe that's why only 11-24% of employees proactively help their organization towards its goals. *

Companies who ignore the health of their number one asset often see that their product quality declines, more customers are less happy, more employees are less motivated, fewer sales conversions are seen, their sales conversion rates decline,, more customer churn, more employee turnover...higher recruiting and training costs. And too often the choice is let’s hire a new marketing director or ad agency. Hurry up, too!

But what have they got to sell? A burned out shell of a company, one created by that same company ignoring the health of its number one asset. That's just like the burned out shell of your hard drive or the burned out engine of your car when you choose to forego their upkeep.

Now. There’s more to our health at work than the terms, accurately stated or not, of the current healthcare legislation.

• There’s the health that comes from training and motivation and building the right culture.
• There’s aligning incentives and purpose and tasks.
• There’s the emotionally healthy and simple act of saying thank you and encouraging that simple act to be a daily if not hourly habit.
• There’s recognizing the families of your employees and the sometimes unplanned needs of those families.

All of these are omitted from any health insurance or healthcare legislation. They do require the investment of your most precious resource: time. Time to listen. Time to care. Time to learn. Time to wait. Time to fail. Time to change.

But that investment is an investment in your number one asset: your people. Those people are your company, their company.

And that investment can turn that declining ROA into a resurging ROA. And that turns those assets again into people. The ones who create your, all of you’s, success.

**********

You can start with any week of the 52 - Week Employee Recognition Plan and make that your first week.

You can take one of those weeks and turn it into a month or commit to an accelerated pace and complete 6 of the weeks in one month.

You can create your own week of employee recognition. Share that journey here. Share it in your blog or Twitter or Facebook.

But, do something to recognize your employees! They set your brand apart as your ultimate competitive edge. And the more you recognize their achievements, the more achievements you'll see and they'll enjoy, along with your customers and and shareholders, partners and vendors.

* Brad Federman, author of Employee Engagement in his interview with Success Factors.

Want to Motivate People? Get Them Out of Maslow's Basement

Excellent!

The presentation is by Dan Heath, co-author of Made To Stick (great book!).

Here's a link to the full article.

7 Signs Your Company May Not Be Ready for Social Media

So you think your company is ready for social media?

• You researched Facebook fan pages.
• You researched Twitter and its numerous 3rd party applications and rules of etiquette and grammar?
•  You're ready to write a blog post...fairly regularly?
• You have your Google Alerts all set up?
• You have  you decided who will do all this?

Check, check, check and check. And check.

But have you looked at your company?

• Are you a social company?
•  Are you ready to be social on social media?

Here are 7 possible signs you may not be ready for that first tweet or blog post and the conversation that ensues. 

Monologue Meetings Only one person speaks during your meetings. Not one person at a time. Just one person: the team leader, manager, executive. There’s no discussion, no conversation.That person talks. They are told to listen (or appear to listen). And the meeting is over when that person stops talking.

It’s All You, Baby. All the ideas, all the solutions, all the rules and policies come from...you. The Big You: the executives, the bosses, managers. No other ideas, no other's ideas, are part of the monologue, er conversation.

IT Still Studies the Safety of Social Media. One of the very important functions of the IT Department is security. Secure the network from the constant assault of electronic invaders.

On the other hand, with a few billion users of social media and a few million companies using it, its security has been, well, well-documented. That is unless walking outside your home is considered risky behavior or going to chamber network meetings is at-risk behavior.

There Is No Laughter. There's no crying in baseball and there's no laughing in your offices. This may not be stated in your employee manual. But, it’s a rule none the less.

Laughter is a sign of openness, acceptance, joy, tolerance, conversation....it’s a sign of strong, healthy people interacting in a strong, healthy, unscripted way. It's a sign of people interacting comfortably in a...social setting.

HR and Legal Have Not Written Your Social Media Policy. HR and Legal have convinced you that A. employees are not to be trusted; B. employees need the permission of HR and Legal to speak; C. employees need approved phrases, times and places, to speak as well as a list of who they can speak to.

You Would Be Shocked! Your employees already have a social media policy in place. For themselves. And it works. They wrote it, implicitly or explicitly, by themselves, separately or collectively. That’s right. They already use social media. And the only permission they needed was theirs. And the only enforcement is from their friends. And they wanted to let you know, when you're ready, that they are doing just fine.

No Fraternization. Employees, managers, executives....there’s no fraternization after work. In fact, there’s no fraternization at work.

The list of solutions is simpler and shorter:

* Make Meetings Meaningful...for Everyone. That means everyone is welcome, invited, encouraged to participate. Now you're socializing during your meetings. Now more enthusiasm is found before, during and after the meeting. That little ripple of enthusiasm starts to spread. And you notice when it is missing, too.

* It's All About...Everyone Else, Baby. Their ideas, their solutions, their enthusiasm, their problems that interfere with their work....it's all about everyone else, baby. Everyone is involved in building a brand, talking about how to make it better, finding solutions, making customers happy. Now you're socializing. Now you have conversations.

* Let Laughter Ring. Laughter, freedom, participation, enthusiasm, ideas, innovations, market niches, growth, new industries, new markets...they all go together. That is how our economy and country grew. It worked for a country; it worked for 200+ years. It'll work for your company. Let Laughter Ring.

* Your Employees Author Their Own Policy. Seriously. Your employees are adults, right? They know how to conduct themselves. They know when to use their indoor voice and their outdoor voice and when not to talk about indoor things. They have used social media for a long time. Successfully. Let them write the policy that has worked for them.

Bottom-line:

Social media offers a wonderful range of tools and resources to reach a wonderful range of audiences.

Social media is about being...social. It's not about rules or tools, policies or procedures. It's about being social. You with everyone else. Everyone else with you.

Have fun. Come join the party. Meet and learn and converse with lots of wonderful people.

Highlights from My Conversation with Erika Andersen, author of Being Strategic

Erika Andersen, founder of Proteus International and author of Being Strategic: Plan for Success, Outthink Your Competitors, Stay Ahead of Change, joined our show recently. You can listen here for the insights and inspiration she shared.

As founder of Proteus International, Erika Andersen has built a reputation for promoting learning and change in ways uniquely tailored to her clients' challenges, goals, and culture. She does that by focusing on thoroughly understanding each organization and on collaborating with her clients in ways that are engaging, direct, and "learner-friendly." Erika uses metaphor and models to help people learn about themselves and their organizations, and then to decide how to move toward the future they envision.

She has served as consultant and advisor to the CEOs and top executives of a number of corporations, including MTV Networks, Hewitt Associates, Turner Broadcasting, MillerCoors, NBC Universal, Union Square Hospitality Group, CBS, Madison Square Garden, and Comcast Corporation.

Her book, Being Strategic, is one of my favorite books. It's one of the three books I keep handy. Why? In an ever-changing environment it is important that I assess opportunities while Being Strategic.

Erika, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here, again.

Thank you for a wonderful introduction.

How are you? Where are you? What project are you working on now with your clients Being Strategic?  

 So many wonderful things....As you know the book came out in paperback last month. And I was talking with my editor and wrote a forum about what’s changed since the hard cover came out that so many people are interested in our approach to be Being Strategic. We have more work than we can do. We’re training our consultants and hiring a few more people to help with this process.

It’s a combination of many things. One is we’ve been very helpful to clients and they tell others. And one very positive thing I’m seeing is that A lot of executives, and a lot of business owner as they’re starting to find their way out of this economic difficulties, they very strongly don’t want to drive their back in the ditch. Revenues are up, expenses are down.

Let’s not mess up again A lot of people who weren’t thinking this way in years past are now starting to think the way I propose:

• What are we solving for?
• Where are we starting for?
• What is our hoped-for future our reasonable aspirations?
• What do we need to do to get there...?

We’re having a wonderful time helping people trying to figure it out.

These are some of the core questions in the process for Being Strategic.

I was just talking to someone recently, a very smart guy and he was saying the things you talk about are not easy, but they are simple. I love that distinction. I think it’s absolutely accurate.

To have the kind of mental discipline it takes to be strategic in the way I define it ...consistently making those core directional choices that will best move you toward towards your hope-for future. Those are not complicated.

• Understanding the problems you’re trying to solve.

• Be clear and accurate about where you are relative to that problem

• Getting a good 3-dimensional sense of the future you want to create for yourself.

• Figuring out what are those core directional choices that will get you there.

• Being consistent in following them.

It's not a complicated process. It requires disciplines, courage, ongoing clarity and being willing to hold yourself accountable for making those choices.

You wrote a great column in Forbes magazine titled: The Basics of Being Strategic about Change. And in it you define nicely what being strategic means. What does being strategic mean?

The sentence I always use is "consistently focusing on those core directional choices that will best move you towards your hoped for future" and then, as we discussed, outlined the steps for how to do that.

I really more and more think that this is a Swiss army knife that what we call being strategic is an approach and a set of mental skills that is almost always universally applicable.

And I find it’s especially useful during times of great change. If you as the leader work with your team to create a clear and clearly articulated and compelling vision for the future, that is hugely reassuring. If the leaders can get clear about the future, and "it might change, but we’ll keep you posted"... it’s my experience that productivity will go way up.

You say this definition is deceptively simple. I agree. I looked at it and thought...Yeah, very concise, very clear.

What don’t we get about that very clear, very simple, one sentence definition of being strategic? What’s the biggest surprise in this process?

I think there are a whole series of surprises.

There are so many things implied in that sentence. First of all, it say it will move you towards your hoped-for future. That says you are clear about where you are headed. Sometimes when we start working with clients they say they’re clear about the future they want to create x percent ebitda or x percent revenue growth. etc.

I say "Yes, those are financial goals". They are good to have them, but those are only one aspect of a future you want to create.

But, there are all kinds of ways to get to those goals. What kind of business do you want to have?

• Do you want to get to your EBITDA goal by paying people lousy wages...?
  
• What kind of a company do you want to be?
  
• What kind of a company do you want to have?

But what I found is that when companies or individuals 3-dimensionalize their vision of the future it is both much more accurate and much more compelling. Then you can decide more clearly what you need to do to get to that hoped-for future.

Erika shares a great story from one of her clients: Danny Meyer from Union Square Cafe and Union Hospitality Group. And she shares the 5 tenets of their Enlightened Hospitality:

• Take care of each other
• Take care of the guests.
• Take care of the vendors.
• Take care of the community.
• Take care of the bottom-line.

Speaking of those 5 tenets of enlightened hospitality. You describe 5 steps for this process of Being Strategic. What are they briefly. Which one is the one we stumble on most often?

The first thing is to get clear on the problem you’re trying to solve and the challenge you’re trying to address. The reason we have that there is that THAT is the first stumbling block. People try to solve a problem before they have agreed on what the problem is. People are arguing over dueling solutions before they have agreed on on the challenge or problem they are trying to solve.

The 2nd thing is Where are you starting from relative to the challenge. If you think of the challenge ass the hill you are trying to climb then the next thing is it’s important to know where you are relative to the hill you are trying to climb.

The third step is the castle on the hill. What would it look like if you climbed the hill? What would a successful future look like a future in which you had addressed the challenge? The clearer, the more 3-dimensional, the more accurate the description of this future, the better.

What are the trolls on the hill on the way up? What are the things you’re going to have to get over, get around on the way up?

Now, you have the whole picture.

The final step is how are you going to get up there? That’s strategy and tactics. Those next one is what are the strategies or tactics. What are the core directional choices you will have to make? What are the tactics, the actual steps you will have to take to get up that hill?

Your process turns the Stephen Covey’s model of begin with the end in mind...upside down. Why?  

I know that’s a very popular thing.

My problem with that is the American Idol syndrome. Unfortunately too many of the contestants don’t know where they are starting from. A lot of them don’t have a good idea of where they are relative to their goal of being the next American Idol.

American Idol should be a cautionary tale. That some persons really are not capable of that. That is not a reasonable aspiration. If they were to aspire for something within their capabilities they would be a lot happier.

Why do you want to be the next American Idol? How can you have a career with very modest singing talents?

I want to help people become what they are capable of becoming.

One of the things I talk about for being a critical mental skill is that of being a fair witness. Being a fair witness is a key discipline in the process of Being Strategic. That is a thing we tend to stumble on. We tend to not be a fair witness of our own reality. We tend to do a lot of wishful thinking cherry pick the data. A lot of la-la-la, no don’t tell me that. The more you can hone that capability, the more we can serve as our own fair witness, in an accurate and objective way the better it will be for you.

 You recommend Being Strategic become a daily habit. In fact, that’s the first recommendation in your book. Can we revisit why it’s so important to make being strategic a daily habit? 

To talk about that I want to pick up on the PBS event called "Being Strategic with Erika Andersen." The folks at Detroit PBS really got this. What they got and what I was able to communicate on the show was that this is a set of skills you use to create the life you want.

That’s why it’s a daily habit. We are all up against daily challenges we want to solve, to be successful. Whether it’s relationships or careers or kids I have yet to find an area where it is not important to think in this way.

When we last spoke you were jetting off to Detroit to film a PBS show about your book, Being Strategic and its solutions. Tell us about that experience and response.

The audience was so enthusiastic. We handed out to them a planning tool. I had them write down their biggest challenge. And the camera shots showed them nodding and writing down vigorously.

What indicate you are making progress towards your reasonable aspiration for this project with PBS?

There are some that are very clear: book sales, are we getting more work, are more people wanting to engage us, are we getting more emails.

Now, we have a couple of new measures. We have started Erika’s Insider List. People have often asked for more follow-up and we made an offer that people who want to participate, that twice a month I’ll send out an email like a newsletter with more content, asking for people’s input, early announcements about what I’m working on.

We want to build a community around that conversation around work, and making it and teaming and how to create the life you want for yourself. And a measure for that will be how many people want to join in on that.

We have a number of tools to enliven that conversation. We have a Facebook fan page , Erika Andersen, and a new website at Erika Andersen.

You have a great new site. Congrats on that.

Thank you for that. We worked with a wonderful group led by Tim Grahl from Out:Think. I really like the website.

That’s where they can sign up for the Erika Andersen Insider List.

We just started a new conversation on the Erika Andersen Facebook fan page on curiosity.

Your 2nd skill in Being Strategic is pulling the lens back to pull in more data. An executive might have more resources to pull in data. What resources can an aspiring executive use to pull in more data, to step back and pull in more data?

Let’s talk about that in context. There are three mental skills that are most important in Being Strategic.

• Being a Fair Witness

• Pulling back the Camera

• Sorting for Impact or Fit

I love the metaphor of pulling back the camera. It’s so precisely accurate. Everyone watches TV. everyone know if there’s a close shot on a bottle, the top of the bottle, a little round thing. You don’t even know what it is. And the camera pulls back and it’s a water bottle and it pulls back and you see it’s on a table...and they’re having a meeting.

You get enough data to understand context for what you’re seeing.

When people say someone aid to be too tactical in my experience what they mean is that person consistently operates with their camera pulled in too tight to the action.

I’ll give you a business example. Let’s say that there’s someone is a salesperson and they’ve always done pretty well. Always met their quota. And then suddenly they stop meeting their quota. It would be easy for her manager with the camera pulled in too close to say they’re no longer a good salesperson, they are not meeting their quote so I need to fire them.

But let’s say he pulls the camera back and says "let’s look at the circumstances around her selling."

And what he finds out is that the line of products she’s responsible for selling has been really revised and they’re have been a number of problems with that product. It’s not working properly, people are returning it and there’s a low number of re-orders. 80% of her missing quota is this product.

Once he pulls the camera back and gets more data then the whole problem is solved.

Can you describe a client whose biggest obstacle was the American Idol phenomenon or his own echo-chamber and how you helped them through it? Maintaining confidentiality of course.

This happens in large ways and small. This client has been having some problems with folks who work for him. 2 of his reports and he and I sat down together. He’s a great manager and he’s pretty conflict averse.

I called him a week later and asked how’s it going and he said "I think it’s going pretty good."

And I asked him if it was going good or did he think it was going good?

I reminded him that he promised to be the keeper of the flame. And that meant he had to regularly check in to see if those agreements had been met. And the next day I got an email saying he’d sat down with them and found that about 75% of the agreements had been met.

My bias is that if you have the real information and you don’t just float in your own information if you really check, if you really get curious, gather the real data then you can know whether you are moving up the hill towards that castle or wandering the woods someplace.

It’s just so important to continue to look for what is really true.

Being strategic is not a one time thing. It’s a habit of mind and action. You have to stay open and stay curious to stay on that path.

It’s like you’re using a GPS in our car and the bridge goes out. You have to reroute yourself.

As people move up in a career ladder,  move up in the standard hierarchical, top-down, command and control environment how do they avoid their own American Idol syndrome?

I read a study a few years ago that said the 2 biggest derailment factors for executives were:

• not listening to accurate data from the people around them, and
  

• not having those sources of data; not having people around them who will tell them the truth.

So, not having the people to tell the truth and not willing to hear it when it’s told to them when they do... are the two-sides of the same coin that is shown in this study to be the biggest factor of derailment for executives.

These three skills, Being a Fair Witness - Pulling back the Camera - Sorting for Impact or Fit, are the mental skills to use to do this. If you know you have to be a fair witness to accurately envision and move towards the future for you and your company then you will find a way to get that data.

There are two ways to do this.

1. Good leaders put in systems that will collect the data. They have ways of doing employee surveys. They get real data about how people are doing....They have good metric-based ways of getting the data to allow them to be a fair witness.

2. They are smart enough to create the relationships with those that work with them that are based on trust and authenticity. Those people can and will them the truth. And how you do that is you listen to them. If you as a leader can never shoot the messenger...no matter what the message...then that person will come again and again when they have another problem or concern.

If you are engaged consistently with your team in being strategic it’s much more likely to come out as part of the conversation.

How do you incorporate it into your very busy schedule? How do you accomplish the daily habit of Being Strategic?

We absolutely eat our own dog food. My wiring is such that it would be very difficult for me to tell people to do stuff in their business that I don’t do in my business.

Last summer we rebooted our whole vision and strategy based on the kind of understanding that we now have 2 brands: the company brand and the Erika Andersen brand. Updated our vision. New strategies. New tactics. And we refer to it and come back to it and hold ourselves accountable.

What are some daily habits you use to sustain the daily habit of Being Strategic?

There are a couple of things I do to help. To help me be a fair witness I’m really trying to be quite active in managing my self-talk. the part on the DVD is about 12 minutes is with me and my partner Jeff. I notice I become aware of what I’m saying to myself. You notice you are trying to talk yourself into things. And that is not being a Fair Witness.

I try to change that internal monologue into a I need to get curious about this. I really monitor my self-talk to help me become a fair witness.

That’s one thing I do.

Another thing I do is I consciously pull back the camera. If there’s a problem that’s happening in the business or a challenge I don’t understand, I just consciously pull back my mental camera so that I’m having in the view finder the data or the circumstance so that I’m seeing that problem or challenge clearly.

Where do we get that DVD?

The easiest place is to go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble and put in "Being Strategic."

You mentioned on our previous show you have a list of 10 books you want to write. And you have just posted the title of your next book: Leading. What is your reasonable aspiration for that book?

I’ve outlined and written the first couple of chapters. It’s based on a leadership model I created about 15 years ago and we’ve been using.

It’s a leadership model based in folk and fairy tale. I extracted these patterns as I read to my children 15 years ago. There’s a fairy tale that exists in every culture. cultures. The shape of the fairy tales is that there are three brothers. There’s a task. You know, and you have to get the princess off the glass mountain. The two older ones fail miserably and in very predictable ways. The youngest does it. He rescues her and marries her and they are the king and queen and they live happily ever-after.

There were always certain characteristics that this guy had to develop or demonstrate in order for to be successful and be their leader.

I extracted the pattern and found 6 characteristics that are invariably necessary in these stories in order for people to follow him. These are characteristics that we are wired to look for in our leaders. It’s part of our DNA. If you think about it until a hundred or so years ago the leader we chose to follow was a life and death decision. If you chose badly then you’re in big trouble.

That’s what the book is about:

• What are these 6 characteristics?

• Why are they so important?
  

• What do they look like, how do we recognize them?
  

• How do we develop them so we can become those leaders so people will follow us?

I’ve noticed this fascinating phenomenon in organizations that the anointed leader is NOT the real leader. The unofficial leaders in these organizations much more often have these characteristics that people are looking for.

Jim Rohn wrote that Leaders are readers. I know you’re an avid reader and have an eclectic taste in reading. What are you reading for work or not?

Shogun. My new husband turned me on to it. A huge bestseller by James Clavell. East meets West. It’s about culture clash and learning and curiosity and the huge differences in cultures. The only way he stays alive is he’s extremely curious, a fast learner and not afraid of questioning his own assumptions.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It’s about this African-American woman in the ’30’s who had cancer and had cells taken from her without her awareness and turned out to be hugely important in the study of cancer.

Forgive my manners or their lack. I should have asked you this most important question: How’s married life? Congratulations, too!

Married life is super fantastic. I’m married to the most wonderful man in the world. I used Being Strategic to find this perfect man. My life with Patrick exceeds my every vision.

Let’s go over your website and Facebook and Twitter.

• Website is Erika Andersen

• Facebook fan page is Erika Andersen

• Twitter is Erika Andersen

It’s another delight. Thank you for coming on the show to talk about your book.