Zane Safrit

Prevent Homelessness at Its Core

Prevent Homelessness: The Universal Living Wage from Richard Troxell

My friend Richard Troxell is President of House the Homeless, an educational and advocacy group that was founded in Austin, TX in 1989. Their mission is education and advocacy surrounding all issues of homelessness. He's also the author of Looking up at the Bottomline: The Struggle for the Living Wage.

He shared an hour of his time with me to talk about this problem and his cost-effective solution: The Universal Living Wage. You can listen to our conversation here or read the transcripts here.

This is a little bit outside the usual topics I discuss here. But only a little bit when you think about employee recognition and engagement. If you can't recognize their need for a livable wage, then Houston, we really do have a problem. Looking at the lagging economy and job growth that comes from a consumer-based economy dependent on consumers having enough money to spend...then I think Houston, we really do have a problem.

Tom Rath on Leadership, Strengths, and Increasing Employee Engagement

via www.youtube.com

 Tom's points are so good, I transcribed a few of them here.

* It’s possible to quantify that social and economic capital that’s created by people, emotions and relationships.

There’s nothing mysterious to it. It’s quantified throughout your financial reports, in all the metrics that are available to any organization...if you’re tracking it.

* Get the right person in the right job.

Well begun is half done, you have to have the right ingredients to bake a cake.;The quality of your manager is more important than the quality of your physician.

* Employee engagement is pretty serious business in terms of the effect you’re having on the person’s health and wellbeing and the family that surrounds that person.

* A disengaged employee is like the kid at school who looks at the clock waiting for the bell to ring for recess or end of the day.

* People can’t be anything they want to be. But they can be a lot more of who they already are. How do you continue to invest in the areas where people have strength?  Instead of spending 80% of that performance review focusing on their gaps or areas of improvement and 20% of the time on their successes or victories, the right answer might be to flip that around.

* If your manager is essentially not paying attention or ignoring you, there’s a 4 in ten chance you will be actively disengaged in your job on a day to day basis. Things get a lot better if your manager is always telling you what you’re doing wrong. Then you’re seeing only 2 in 10 are actively disengaged in their job.If your manager is primarily focused on your strengths, then there’s only a 1% chance of being actively disengaged in your job.

Wow! So, if you inspire your employees, build on their strengths, help them be more of who they are, then you can raise your engagement levels from 30% on average to 99%. What would that do to your company’s bottomline?

* Advice for those jobseekers: Spend more time getting to know their manager than looking at the details of their benefits plan.

* People who have a best friend at work are 7 times more likely to be engaged at their job.

* Praise needs to be individualized, as specific as possible and deserved and sincere.

* Brilliant leaders are never well-rounded. But it turns out teams do have a well-roundedness of talent.

I interviewed Tom Rath about a book he co-authored with James Harter titled Wellbeing: The 5 Essential Elements. You can read it here or listen to it here.

2 Questions, Really

Tom Rieger, author of Breaking the Fear Barrier: How Destroys Companies from the Inside Out and What to Do About It, was a guest on the radio show last year. About two-thirds of the way through our conversation, he talked about 2 questions he uses in his consulting practice.

He asked each prospective client these questions prior to the start of a formal agreement. If the client answered yes to both, then their relationship could move forward.

The two questions were:

1. Is everything on the table? Or tell us what it isn't.
2. Are you ready to look at yourself in the mirror?

I loved those questions. I loved how he phrased the first question. Hard to wiggle out of that one, isn't it?

The proverbial ding! went off, It was a two-prong ding, maybe a ding-dong, like a doorbell with good news knocking.

• The ding came from wishing I had asked these same questions in the past with client prospects.
• The dong came when I realized I could do that now, moving forward.

Tom's two questions, our conversation, hung around. It would revisit me when I would be out running. Two questions. So simple. Save so much time.

The other day, also out on a run, I realized at this point why that conversation kept hanging around, ringing in my head in quieter moments. Those two questions apply to all of our relationships.

1. Is everything on the table? Or tell me what it isn't.
2. Are we ready to look at ourselves in the mirror?

Trust me here, I'm not saying I can answer yes to these two questions in every situation. I certainly haven't in the past, always to my detriment. I understand that now.

But I am saying...whether we're frontline employees, part-time help, C-Suite executives, in school, out of work, ...these are two questions that determine our success. Environments where we can answer yes to them....are environments where we can be successful. Matter of fact, that's the only environment where we can be successful.

That's all. I mean, it's just two questions.

Have a great week.

* You can read notes from that portion of our conversation here.

* You can listen to our full conversation here.

19 Business Experts and Their Solutions for President Obama

We're in the early days of 2012.

And 2012 is an even-numbered year, evenly divided by 4 and with a leap day, February 29, too. Add all that up and we're in campaign season now. Wherever we live, work and play those campaigns are coming to our hometown or radio or tv or website or podcast or favorite social media tool.

We in Iowa just survived the Iowa Circus Caucus.

Like a moth to a flame I am drawn to politics, well political news. A political junkie, maybe.

But I'm recovering. Now I'm in a love hate relationship. I love the stories. They amaze me...On the other hand, they've become so amazing, on a bi-partisan basis, that I hate 'em.

That drove me to wonder:

• Where were the solutions?
• Was anyone talking about the solutions?
• Was anyone in the media pressing candidates and office holders for solutions as opposed to pressing them on their political posturing?

The answers to those questions in order are:

• Nowhere
• No one
• Nope.

Rather than be victimized by that group and its conversations and my flame-loving personality for that group and its conversations....I started to look for solutions.

Outside of politics. Crazy, I know.

Then I thought well, why don't I ask experts what their solutions are for the challenges we face as a country. You see, I interviewed business experts on my radio show. You can listen to these conversations here, read the transcripts of those conversations there.

One show, I finally asked an expert something to the effect of

Let's imagine President Obama invites you to the White House. He's heard our conversation, read your book and wants to learn more. What are three things you could tell him to fix x or solve y or improve z.

Asking that question is tricky, sadly. Asking business experts to share their ideas on how to fix national problems.

Each guest ventured forth with their ideas and perspectives. All were great. But with each one I noticed a hesitancy, a nervousness. That's sad, I understand it.

But it's discouraging to hear anyone be reluctant to share their ideas on how to make our country better. We have betrayed our selves and our families and neighbors when we delegate that conversation to professional politicians of any stripe. We relegate ourselves to being victims when we refuse to volunteer any ideas or engage in conversation on how to solve our nation's challenges.

Sure, these conversations can get...uncomfortable. But that's because we're so out of practice. The result is, that for our convenience....those  conversations to discover and refine solutions, solutions that can unite us in moving forward, have been co-opted by those whose voices are loudest, whose reactions are the most abrasive or abusive, and whose solutions represent their quest for a public forum, a stage, a base of power or a money from speaking or being a media personality.

Back to the point. Below is a list of those experts where I asked the above question and where they shared their thoughts. The link takes you to my post where I transcribed just this question and their answers. And with each such post is a link to the radio show and the complete transcripts of our conversation.

Check them out. See if these solutions make sense. So far, they all did for me. Think about your own solutions. Talk about them with others. Listen to theirs. Share your thoughts here or there or somewhere. See if a year from now we all have better skills to discuss and debate ideas from the basis of seeking a solution for our shared challenges.

Jim Clifton, author of The Coming Jobs War

Julie Steelman, author of The Effortless Yes! Demystify the selling process and discover: Your selling archetype,your natural asking style and your bankability

Tom Rieger, author of Breaking the Fear Barrier: How Destroys Companies from the Inside Out and What to Do About It

Jeffrey Phillips, co-author of A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowd-Sourcing: Advice from Leading Experts

Richard R. Troxell, author of Looking up at the Bottomline: The Struggle for the Living Wage

Dr. Hal Gregerson, co-author of The Innovator's DNA - Mastering the 5 Skills of Disruptive Innovators

Sam Harrison, author of IdeaSelling: Successfully pitch your creative ideas to bosses, clients and other decision makers

Rajeev Peshawaria, author of Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders: The Three Essential Principles You Need to Become an Extraordinary Leader

Elizabeth Doty, author of The Compromise Trap: How to Thrive at Work Without Selling Your Soul

Peter Sheahan, author of Making It Happen: Turning Good Ideas into Great Results.

Josh Linkner, author of Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity

Sybil Stershic, author of Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care

Doug Mitchell, author of The Multi Thread Marketer: How to Hire One or Better Yet Be One 

Scott Gerber, author of Never Get a "Real" Job: How to Dump Your Boss, Build a Business and Not Go Broke

Joan Koerber-Walker, CEO of the Arizona BioIndustry Association

Paul R. Williams, author of The Innovation Manager's Desk Reference

Bill Davidow, author of Overconnected: The Promise and Threat of the Internet

Derek Irvine, co-author of Winning with A Culture of Recognition: Recognition Strategies at the World's Most Admired Companies

Brad Szollose, author of Liquid Leadership: From Woodstock to Wikipedia - Multigenerational Management Ideas That Are Changing the Way We Run Things

 

Interview with Richard B. Sanford: Author of Success by Design, Part Three

Richard B. Sanford launched eleven successful small enterprises over a 40+ year career, creating 11 successful companies during that time.

He joined the show recently to talk about how he accomplished this and his new book: SUCCESS BY DESIGN: How to Create Ever-Increasing Income, Profit & Wealth in the World of Small Business.

You can listen here.

You can read Part One of our conversation here.

You can read Part Two of our conversation here.

In his book, Richard compiled what principles, steps, tip and practices brought him this success over 40 years. His book shows the reader how to think and use "SIMPLIFIED STRATEGIC BUSINESS PLANNING" to generate ever increasing income, profits and wealth in the world of small business.

One of the things you repeat in your monthly, quarterly and annual performance reviews is you repeat the positive, you repeat the accomplishments. In fact you start all your meetings with them.

Exactly. Just praise the heck out of them.

It’s just...positiveness opens the mind to new creative responses. It gives them courage:

“I’m not going to be criticized for contributing new, greater ideas.”

Why? Because successes are praised.

Praised in front of my fellows. Wow I did good. We really iced that one. This is working!

Ok, now. What didn’t work?

Well, we had this little problem here.

Then everybody pitches in with ideas that ‘maybe if we’d don’t it this way, it would work.”

Then they’re willing to accept improvement. If you’re already a success, there’s no harm in admitting something didn’t work. You’re building a team. Creative ideas are not restricted to one team or function in a company.

You cross-pollinate it, come up with great ideas. they come up with better ideas than I have. But, most entrepreneurs have the the only idea. They’re the leader, right? So, they must have all the great ideas.

Wrong.

A lot of good ideas come from every direction. Seeing with a different perspective.

I worked to grow a team. I can do it alone. I can’t grow it alone. Now, if you don’t want to grow, if you just want to muck along, that’s fine. Many mom and pop stores create a comfortable living, they have good intuition and they succeed in the marketplace. they perform a service to the community and it works for them.

But, growing and expanding requires a new level of management. You can no longer keep it locked up inside your head. You have to communicate it with people.

And that’s where strategic planning is vital is you expected to succeed.

Now what you’re describing is the solution to this vexing problem with employee engagement. Statistics show only 30% of employees are actively engaged in an organization. 10-15 % are actively sabotaging. The remainder are indifferent.

Truly. But that comes out of big business; that's where that concept was germinated.

It’s true.

You have a simple solution.

You can take every division in a large company and turn it into a small company, couldn’t you.

I just don’t understand how these big companies put up with failure in divisions and disguise it. Bury it with the total.

" Yeah, the company overall made big profits."

Ok. But what happened to that division? It should be a separate company held accountable for what? Creating ever-increasing levels of profit, income and wealth. Or you sell it or close it down.

That takes courage.

Yeah. And if you’ve created the kind of environment you describe, one of trust and accountability, focused on the positive and correct the problems, then that kind of discussion should be manageable for everybody.

Yep.

You're a very practical, pragmatic, business leader. But, we've still reached the imagination moment in our show. Let's imagine President Obama has listened to our conversation. He calls you.

Dick, he says, I like you passion for small business and your success. Would you come to the White House? I’d like to hear 3 things we can do to help small business heal itself from the inside out.

What would you tell him?

What would they be, huh?

Yeah. Putting you on the spot here.

Number one, government should never be involved in business. Doesn’t know how. Doesn’t have the right attitude about problems. They should involve themselves on public policy.

It might help by saying because government is so involved in our education that we recognize that the job creator is not big business it is small business and what can they do, what can government do, to increase the success results, lower the 80% failure rate for those first years. And if you do, then another 80% fail to make it through the 3rd to 5th year. How can we increase the odds for success?

Number one, you can go to small business and say:

Let’s create educational courses starting in high school on entrepreneurial leadership and strategic planning, specifically. And take it into college level and the MBA level. Entrepreneurial education, not big business.

That would be one thing they could do.

The 2nd thing they could do is significantly reduce the burden of taxation, double taxation. You tax the business, then you tax the leaders who make the most money, then you tax the employees. Reduce that tax burden as much as possible. You can’t reduce the Social Security and Medicare tax burden. But you can the income tax burden.

And why is that? Because the more the owners earn, the more the employees earn, the more taxes they pay to the federal government. You don’t want to tax the goose that lays the golden egg. And that’s what they do. That would be helpful.

I haven’t given much thought to going to the White House again. I did for a period of time in my life as a member of the US Small Business Administration’s National Advisory Board. And, um, probably shouldn’t get into politics - it’s personal and subjective. But those are two things that are non-political.

Start teaching what is needed for entrepreneurial free-enterprise development in the country. Recognize the really important role that small business plays in the health of our economy.

The other thing is get off the backs of small business. Get some of these regulations cleaned up.

You ever see a Congress go through regulations and say:

These are outdated. And these are no longer critical.

It’s like they are saying that:

" Once we made this law that life stops."

And that’s baloney. Our society constantly changes. And there are so many burdensome regulations that no longer make any sense at all. They just get in the way and they cost money for small business to have to perform certain regulatory responsibilities that are just unnecessary. But that are no fun in getting Congress to work on this. There’s no fame or fortune in that, is there?

No. And as you’re talking we could have bi-partisan agreement that Congress may be the last institution to acknowledge the changes that have occurred in the past 5-10-15-20-30 years.

Too bad we don’t have a law that says if you make a law you gotta find a law to get rid of.

Let’s go back. What’s the biggest change in thinking you have witnessed over the past 40 years with regards to small business?

One. The awareness that small business is not mom-and-pop cornerstore business. The awareness that it is the job generator, an economic booster, in our economy. It was always big business. But big business is touted only after a single person creates an idea that builds a big business. Every single one of these giant business, these big businesses, all started with a single American citizen’s idea for a better way to serve the needs of society. For a better product, a better service, a less-expensive way of performing it.

You can’t think of a single company. Take a look at Jobs, take a look at Henry Ford. Take a look at Thomas Edison. Every one of them. Great inventors. It was a single person’s idea. And that’s true today.

So, what aren’t we spending more time on improving the garden that grows small business? Because one by one a small business is not that influential. I think the biggest change was in small business recognizing it rattled the chains and forming the Small Business Administration. Unfortunately, those people are not small business people. They don’t have a clue about what the demands and responsibilities are for creating a successful small business. Based on which administration you are serving, they think they have the ideas. And they don’t. And they become arrogant. They don’t know. They’re guessing. Which is typical of government. They never look forward, which is why we have a funding problem with social security and medicare.

But in any event, changes in small business administration occurred in Jimmy Carter’s administration when he promised if he was elected he wouldcreate the first ever White House conference on small business. And, he failed to keep his promise until the last 6 months of his administration. And then the hoop and holler of small business forced him to conduct the first ever White House conference on small business.

And what did that do? What it did for us is we became acquainted with each other. Think about the character of a small business leader. We operate in our cocoon, in our little market area at home. Pay attention to our business and we don’t go looking for trouble.

But if you aren’t a collective force you can’t bring about change in this country. So, we became acquainted with each other, city by city, state by state. And out of that came the creation and growth of small business associations in most all states. And now there is a Small Business Association of America United. Many of the states small business associations can participate. And now you have some political muscle to attempt to inform and bring about positive change.

Beautiful. Great answer.

Readers are leaders. Jim Rohn says that. I just like it and use it with these shows. You're a leader. What are you reading these days?

I read for both entertainment and to improve my mind. Stay current. I read Lee Childs murder mysteries. They’re great. I like the discipline of solving crimes.

Right now, on the self-improvement side, I’m reading a text: George Steiner’s Strategic Planning. It was published in the 70’s. I was hoping it had a partial focus on small business. But as I read into it it is a typical big business book. You oughta see the graphs...you need a math degree to even understand him.

But, I read it because I want to see if there’s something I can use to improve my model. And the most interesting thing I’m reading right now is The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success by Wayne Breitbarth. He’s from Michigan. It’s a primer on social media, social networking. I found that I signed up for LinkedIn and don’t know how to use it. His book is a primer, how to do it, step-by-step. How do you get a password, how do you log in, how do you update it?

Young people intuitively know how to do this. But, I’m not a young person. But if we can get the how-to books.

So, that’s exciting. I’m going to expand that. A lot of people are following me but they don’t know what I’m doing. They don’t know I’m having this radio interview. And they need to know, those who are interested in.

I smile when you say Young people intuitively know how to do it. I tend to agree with you. On the other hand, I know that as they grow up, with the 10-15 years headstart on us, I’m 56, in using all this so that it looks so natural. But behind the scenes they went through the same learning process we go through right now.

You include in the back of your book a number of great quotes from business leaders and writers. What’s your favorite one?

Calvin Coolidge’s treatise on persistence. Just never ever ever give up. Keep searching. Keep digging. Keep looking. Keep reading. Keep learning. Just persevere. Never give up. And I love that.

But all the others work as well.

• You got to be committed.

• You got to think like a leader.

• You got to attract people.

 

Are you speaking anywhere?

I use to when I was really active in the Small Business Administration of Michigan that I founded in 1969. More recently, no. I’ve started getting a few inquiries.

At my age, I only have so much energy. I’m 80 years old. You have to know who you are. That’s why I’m not marketing to bookstores. I just don’t have the energy to travel around and do book signings. I pick the markets that I can reach electronically.

But, I do speak occasionally at Rotary Clubs on these issues.

I might consider...there are some of these Success Seminars where they bring in a whole group of speakers. Most of it is on attitude. You know how can you speak to a big audience on anything specific. But some of it is informative and I might consider something like that.

I enjoy Arizona in the winter and Michigan in the summer. Mrs. Sanford and I are so blessed. We’re so fortunate. Our family, 4 girls and 8 grandchildren and 1 great-grandchild. We enjoy that. We enjoy each other so I don’t want to act like a younger person with that time commitment.

I will do what I can to help promote your book and the solutions you provide for small businesses. It’s such a well-organized, clear, concise manual that any business of any size, even the bigger ones, could take and implement and begin to chip away at that failure rate of 80% in the first 3 years, another 80% in the next 3 years. We can add a few jobs, get the unemployment rate down around 45-%, see the economy grow.

Well, thank you for the compliment. If anyone wants to learn more specifically about me or the book they can go to my website. www.SSBP.biz and that stands for Simplified Strategic Business Planning.

Excellent. Your daughters or your grandkids will show you how to get on Twitter?

Nah, I haven’t done that. One thing at a time, Zane.

Well, when they do let me know. I’d like to connect with you there. I’ll connect with you at LinkedIn.

Dick, I’ve enjoyed the conversation, it was as rewarding as the book.

Interview with Richard B. Sanford: Author of Success by Design, Part Two

Richard B. Sanford launched eleven successful small enterprises over a 40+ year career, creating 11 successful companies during that time.

He joined the show recently to talk about how he accomplished this and his new book: SUCCESS BY DESIGN: How to Create Ever-Increasing Income, Profit & Wealth in the World of Small Business.

You can listen here.

You can read Part One of our conversation here.

In his book, Richard compiled what principles, steps, tip and practices brought him this success over 40 years. His book shows the reader how to think and use "SIMPLIFIED STRATEGIC BUSINESS PLANNING" to generate ever increasing income, profits and wealth in the world of small business.

One of the reasons I love your book is you wrote

There are many things out of our control. Customer Service is not one of them.

Dumb question, but it seems no one answers it well: why do so many companies either ignore customer service or control it by minimizing it?

They don’t have a strategic plan. And, in the strategic plan you address an objective about how are we going to treat the people who buy from us, the people we want to buy from us.

How will we consider them?

Why is it important to nurture them and in nurturing them does service play animportant part? Yes.

How will we define our service?

So, in reading these annual reports, it’s so interesting to read them not only in bug business, stock company’s annual reports but in small business. Look at the cars and trucks driving around the advertisements and they talk about service. And most, usually, it’s a joke.

“We’re the best in the valley!”

These big fat claims that are all subjective and not objective. You can’t evaluate them. how do you hold a business accountable, if you’re the customer and you’re buying pool services, which I did this week. And I needed a new pool service company because the company I’m using isn’t getting the job done. And so, I looked at the ads and I finally made a selection.

And I asked them how do you rate your service. And they said:

“Well, we give the best.”

“ I don’t know what best means. Could you define it for me? “

Several of the company stumbled all over themselves. They couldn’t define it. I want an objective statement.

About 25 years ago, I started working on that. I was preparing some sales and marketing materials about our service, which was incredibly outstanding. Finally, I came to the conclusion that you have to make the service statement quantifiable, so it can be measured by the customer. And I came up with a 3-part statement on our service.

And that reflected on my strategic plan about how I would manage effective service in the company. And it worked like magic. And I share that in my book as well. I give it to the world.

That’s such a great answer, especially the quantifiable answer. I see the same stock stuff of world class customer service.

Yeah, how can you hold them accountable for doing that? You say:

“You didn’t give me world-class customer service!”

“Well, what do you mean...?”

“It’s your statement. Define it for me.”

“I don’t know how to do it.”

“ What value is it?”

And right there is an integrity issue.

Your next step is the Action Plan and the Action Planning Process. What are the 5 steps with the Action Planning Process?

Well, first of all, that would be skipping over the next step in strategic planning. It goes Mission to Purpose and then doing your research and development and establishing objectives. And I establish objectives in the 5 or 6 or 7 areas of business function.

What will finance and accounting objective be, our personnel objectives be, our sales objectives be, our marketing and promotions objectives be, our manufacturing process objectives be?

Because in each of those functions of your business needs a values statement or objective. For instance, Finance and Accounting. An objective is:

“Never spend more than we take in.”

Sound pretty simple?

Pretty straight forward.

Secondly:

“Never fail to report every penny of income.”

Why is that important? Well, if you fail to report a penny of income you are defrauding the government. And there’s some pretty severe penalties for that.

Now, on the expense side, Thurgood Marshall - a Supreme Court Justice - wrote a treatise on the fact that you take every business expense you can then you can argue with the IRS is legitimate or not. And that is not breaking the law.

You report every penny of revenue otherwise there are serious penalties for defrauding the government.

And there are others. So, you set up these objectives.

And once you have your objectives then you say, the question comes:

“How will we do it?”

And there in lies your strategies and action plans.

Listening to you talk about the need to report every penny of income, there’s an adage that if you’re going to defraud the IRS on that level then you are likely to defraud your self or your partners on another level.

Exactly. It’s a value.

And that’s going to manifest into defrauding your employees, your customers, your investors.

I had to laugh when you pointed out what I overlooked. I tend to be impulsive and quickly assess what needs to be done and just jump ahead to the action plan.

Yeah. Most entrepreneurs do that.

“Let’s get in there and do some action.”

“Ok. What kind of action? How are you going to measure it? What do you do if it doesn’t work? ”

So, once you have your values in place, your values of business, meaning your objectives, in each of those elements then you can measure your action plan. That starts with a strategy, that’s followed up by the tasks and tactics and the timelines and who’s going to do that.

You have a strateguy. And that is to say Expand our marketing budget and reach this new market. That’s a strategy.

Well, what’s the task involved? Well, Charlie needs to sit down and create some new sales material. And then we need to decide which advertising medium we’re going to use. And what frequency and how will we measure it? And once that’s done, we let the contract. And, our timeline to complete this is 3.5 weeks by this date. And Charlie’s involved in making this happen.

There’s one unit of strategic action. And you write it down.

Well, why do you do that? Because next week you have a business meeting with your leaders or managers and you ask Charlie:

“What’s our progress? Show me.”

Simple.

Does that mean you always make your timelines? No. But at least you know you have to adjust them.

If you have a timeline then everyone can organize and prioritize their day to stay up with it.

Exactly. It stays in the entrepreneur’s head. And then you have people say

“Well, I didn’t know you had to have it done by March 1st. It will take longer than that.”

Then there’s always the discussion of why isn’t it done?

If you lock up the ideas in the entrepreneur’s head and don’t write it down, how can you expect anyone to perform? It gives manager’s confidence. Yeah, it puts them under pressure, but we’re all under pressure. But it gives them exactly what’s expected of them. And then if you have a personnel problem, then you can go back to your plan and ask what our objectives in the human resources area?

"Well, Number One is that we respect each employee.
We expect each employee to respect the responsibilities of the job.
Number three, failure to do so then we are obligated to help them find a job where they can perform, either inside or outside the company."

Where in your 40 years of business experience, where does this process usually break down?

One area where this process breaks down is when an entrepreneur is frightened to share their ideas and their plans for fear that someone is going to steal them and go into competition with them.

What that does is severely limit an entrepreneur’s ability to grow. And I discuss that in the book. Planning meetings where the entrepreneur finally has to say:

You know, if I treat my people right and I reward them for success, I’m not greedy, probably 75-80% of them will stay with me. And those that don’t often become the 80% that fail if they try to go into competition because they don’t pay the price. They’re the short-cutters. Not all of them...

I helped develop managers and several of them I helped go into competition with me in slightly different markets because I wanted the reputation in the company that

“ Work for Dick Sanford and his company. They do a great job, they do it right. They grow. He’s tough as nails sometimes; he expects performance. But boy I sure like making the money and the security of the job. “

That’s the kind of reputation I want.

And that’s another objective I want to have in human resources. We want to create an environment where we’re the best place to work. So, then, talent comes to you. Your employees recommend people to you. We never had a shortage of talent. And if we had a misplaced person, not at the clerical or primary function level, but in the supervisor level...not everybody is capable of performing at the supervisory and management level.

Who’s fault is that? Is that the person’s responsibility because they wanted more responsibility and money? No. It was my fault or one of my executive’s fault.

So, what are we going to do to help this person. Turn ‘em out into the community so they can hate us and say bad things about us? No, no. You call the manager in and ask them:

" Are you happy? Are you happy where you’re at? Because you’re not achieving..."

And they’ll blame everybody else but themselves but finally they’ll come:

“No, I’m not happy. It doesn’t fit here. ”

And you say:

“Well, what can we do? Can we change the job, the responsibilities, maybe outside the company?

They’ll say:

“Oh. You’re trying to fire me.”

“No. Not at all. If you need a job that we can’t fulfill in the company then start looking. I’ll pay. Go look. And we’ll give you a good recommendation.”

And it worked!

So simple. So clear.

I like your Chapter Six. Introducing Your Strategic Action Plan. And in bold you wrote:

You Cannot Do it ALL!

That's a big challenge sometimes for entrepreneurs. Letting go, letting others.

You can’t do it all. You become tired and stressed. Make bad decisions.

Run off the good talent.

Exactly.

He’ll say:

“Dammit. He won’t let me do it. I’ve got a better idea.”

Well, better ideas come out in the strategic planning, in the process. I show them how to do that. HOW. How to think. How to plan. How to execute. And that’s what’s missing out in the marketplace.

That’s what I’ve seen in my research. SUCCESS by DESIGN is the only entrepreneur book on how to do it that’s available.

Chapter 7 is all about the important of reviewing results. This next question may seem like a dumb question, but what’s the importance of frequent reviews?

A lot of our citizens in this country are church-going members. Possibly, you, yourself are.

Why do you go every week? Why do you hear the dogma every week? Why do you say The Lord’s Prayer every week? Why is that?

Why do we pledge allegiance in school frequently? Why do we sing the Star Spangled Banner?

Why?

To remind us of who we are, and where we are, and what we’re doing. Which means just saying it once, let’s say you have a strategic planning meeting and you’re woriking on the mission and you create the mission for a profit-making company I recommend - create ever-increasing wealth- why would we repeat it?

Because you forget it!

Ok, we’re going into strategic planning session. Let’s recite the mission.

Oh, we’ve done it.

No. Let’s recite the mission so the thinking that came up with it can be evaluated.

You come up with an idea...is that going to increase our income? No? Well, then we just don’t do it.

Or, we create increasing income but it won’t create any profit; it creates losses. Oh. So that’s the acid test right up front, isn’t it?

So, you repeat it and repeat it and you have them repeat it to their staff.

But you can’t ever let up or bad stuff comes in and blind-sides you.

I’ve had that happen. Things come in the back door and before we know it we’re losing money.

How did that happen?

Well, we never measured it against our mission. It just wasn’t designed to do that. What a stupid mistake! Not stupid, we’re all human.

Why do you tell people you love them? We need to be reminded every single day, the older you get. Why? You don’t want to forget and you don’t want them to forget.

Calvin Coolidge’s advice on persistence I value:

Persistence. Every day in every way, persevere.

Same way with your values, with your strategic plan. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Polish, improve. Repeat.

**********

Part Three of this conversation will be published Tuesday, November 22.

Interview with Richard B. Sanford: Author of Success by Design

Richard B. Sanford launched eleven successful small enterprises over a 40+ year career in Small Business.

He joined the show recently to talk about how he accomplished this and his new book: SUCCESS BY DESIGN: How to Create Ever-Increasing Income, Profit & Wealth in the World of Small Business.

You can listen here.

In his book, Richard compiled what principles, steps, tip and practices brought him this success over 40 years. His book shows the reader how to think and use "SIMPLIFIED STRATEGIC BUSINESS PLANNING" to generate ever increasing income, profits and wealth in the world of small business.

I very much enjoyed this book for its real world, do-it-now, approach to achieving success in the world of small business. That world, he reminds, is the world that creates new jobs. That world seems a bit dismal given our current economy. And this book can turn that around and our economy around.

Mr. Sanford. Thank you for being on the show.

You’re welcome, Zane. And, please call me ‘Dick’. I answer to that better than Mr.

Thank you for writing a great book.

Oh, you’re welcome. It was a pleasure to write.

I found it well-organized, well-written and eminently doable. You know it’s really more of a manual which is what I think small business needs.

I tend to call it a ‘handbook’.

Now who were you writing this book for? Describe the person that needs to read your book, where do they sit in an organization, what are their fears?

There are two audiences. First audience would be for a budding entrepreneur who is considering a startup small business and they have a dream in their head. And they really haven’t had any training or experience to guide them to come up with a good strategic plan for creating and building the business.

The 2nd audience are for those entrepreneurs who have survived the 1-3 year obstacle course you have to go through to become a success. Now, they’re looking to grow and expand their business. And here again, lacking strategic planning tools that’s not taught in high schools for small business and not taught in MBA programs...they’re all aimed at big business.

The tools needed in big business aren’t available to small business people - meaning a large staff of researchers and strategic planners and data banks and consumer analysis reports. Strategic planning in small business is done in the head of the entrepreneur with very limited resources and no real plan to guide them in doing so.

Somewhere in the back of my mind is a question, for probably another whole show, about the lack of strategic planning skills taught in high schools. I always think of strategic planning in many respects as the ability to organize an idea and lay out a plan and then be able to communicate it. That skill is not taught in our high schools says a lot of what our future holds for us.

Right on. Depending on who you listen to, 70-80% of all new business startups fail by the end of the first year. What a waste of resource and capital and energy!

Again, the purpose of my book is to increase the chance of success of those startup rates.

Now let’s talk a bit more about the purpose of your writing this book. As I was preparing for this show, I looked at your background and what stood out was 40 years in business, 11 successful startups. And I’m thinking you’ve probably got grandkids, you’re probably living somewhere warm and sunny in a relaxed setting. And here you are writing a book and a very good one.

You’re right on all of it and I even have my first great grandchild.

Yeah, you’re right. I’m in Arizona this morning, got up early, did my homework and prepared my mind for this show. I’ve been looking forward to it.

I watch so many people. I came out of a very poor family from an industrial workforce. And I watch so many of them lust for age 65 so they could drink all the beer they could drink and sit in front of a TV and die. That was not my idea of a rewarding retirement.

It’s fun to read, to think. It’s fun to create. It keeps you alive and vital. So, numbers of associates have told me:

“You can't fade out of this life and leave behind this model that you’ve pushed on to us and forced us to comply with to create successes. And you’ve gotta share it.”

In some respects, this book is a startup. What is your strategy for reaching that goal?

Very simple. I use the same model I use with all my businesses. I take it step by step and I’m underway.

Right now, I’ve identified the markets I want to reach and I’ve identified the methods in which I need to brand myself in the public domain before I start selling to those markets. So, it’s working. And evidenced by your wonderful invitation to talk about my book and my model on your radio blog. It’s a compliment.

I turn the compliment back to you. Thank you for being on the show. I‘ve looked forward to talking with you ever since I read your book.

And most small businesses start with a business plan. But you write that a strategic business plan is better than a business plan. What's the difference between the two and why's the former better than the latter?

Well, when I left big business and became an entrepreneur I’ve got some assets. I had some savings and some capital. So, I went to the bank and said I’d like some capital to start a business. And they said:

“Well, you need a business plan.”

And I said:

“ Oh, ok. What’s that look like?”

And they said:

“ Well, talk to your accountant.”

And what happened in retrospect was I had this dream in my mind about the business I wanted to create and launch. I told this dream, I described this dream, to my accountant and he replicated it with numbers. So, in other words, he took my dreams which were imaginations and he converted it into numbers and a business plan and the bank said:

“Oh, great! Great business plan. And we’ll loan you some capital.”

That is not a strategic plan. I hadn’t done research and analysis of the market - the products and markets I would provide - the space I would need and the business values I would applkly to a startup and running a business.

And as I progressed, I said:

“Gee. I need a strategic plan. I’m flopping all over the place, running around, do this do that.”

So, I went to the library, to the college. And said:

“Ok. Where are the books on strategic planning?”

And discovered that all of them, all of them, were written for big business. And all of the said:

“Here’s what you do. Do this. Do that. Do this. Do that.”

And none of them told me how to do it.

And that is true today. I search in libraries and I search in libraries and anything to do with strategic planning, without exception, they say “here’s what you do” and they never tell you how to do it.

So, I said to myself:

"How do I modify strategic planning for big business scale, modify this and simplify this for entrepreneurs?"

And over the years I developed my model called Success by Design.

That’s excellent.

The first step in creating a strategic business planning is defining the mission of the business. You write that there's only one mission for every business. You advise the reader to bookmark that chapter until he understands this. What is that central mission for all businesses?

First of all, I would invest if possible in American corporations and buy stock and look at their annual reports. They used to all have a mission. Today they disguise it.

And the mission was wonderful. They were flowery and told what they were going to do to change the world, benefit humanity.

Pretty soon, I got to thinking:

" That is not the purpose of a profit-making business."

There is only one mission that meets my definition. And that is for every profit-making business is to create ever increasing income and profit and wealth. Failure to do that, the business self-destructs. And big ones, big businesses are doing it every day. They lose their focus about why they were created and to whom they are accountable for their performance.

And all the good things that happen in business and our economy are a result of a profit-making business. And profit-making comes from ever-increasing income. Just for the purposes of inflation, if you don’t increase your business income 3-5% then you’re falling behind!

So, their missions...they don’t understand, apparently that that is their obligation to their shareholders, to their employees. What kind of employment is it in a business that is losing money. They’re heading for the failure circle, not the winner’s circle.

That’s the only legitimate mission I use.

Now, in my book I describe some reasons that businesses don’t want to lay that out because there’s a certain element in our society that has demonized profit-making which is kind of ridiculous. Because all of the good things in our economy, in the life of consumers comes from companies who create profit and invest it back in their employees, invest it back in their communities.

We’re the greatest charity giving entity in the world. I wonder where people think that comes from. You think that comes from a business that loses money? Not so.

That’s the mission that I use. But I give them some latitude. As you mention, I ask them to book-mark in my book and if they can come up with a better one, then use that mission.

Has anyone come up with a better one that they’ve shared with you?

Never have, Zane. When they start to think about it....that’s like saying

“Gee, I’m going to make society better by losing money. That’s my mission.”

When they speak it out, it’s very obvious what it should be.

Hand in hand or should I say step by step, comes this next step. And that’s the step of creating your purpose. What's the difference between a company's purpose and its mission?

The company’s purpose is what you will do to be beneficial to society and to customers and clients. It’s what you will do that will generate profit. That becomes specific as to the profit, the product, the markets, etc. And what business are you going to be in and how are you going to conduct that business.

So, that’s the description about how to think about creating a purpose. That’s chapter two in my book.

Listening to you, you’re so clear, you’re so crisp, it makes me wonder if there’s not some sorta mental malaise in our business leaders that they are not able to differentiate between the two or are afraid to differentiate between the two.

True. I discussed that in the purposes as well. Businesses today are demonized for making a profit which is ridiculous because all good things come from making profits. They don’t come from loss or failure.

So, they hide it. They use generally a purpose as a substitute for a mission. I don’t have any problem with that. If you want to hide the mission, that’s ok. I did when I created descriptive promotional and sales material for my business I did not lay my mission out for that to attract the detractors. So, I put the purpose out - how we’re going to benefit society and consumers, our clients.

I did the same thing as big business. When you’re being demonized for your mission no sense in adding fuel to the fires so you publish your purpose.

But, if I were sitting on the board of directors for a major corporation I could tell ya the first thing I would say is:

" Is this company making a profit? Or are you heading for the loser’s circle. And exactly what are you doing about it. From income comes profit, so what are you doing to control expenses and not waste our income. Convert it into profit and from profit creates wealth."

We share it with our investors. We share it with our communities. If you go out and just walk around the community and look at all the good things that happen from just the profit-making companies, it’s incredible.

As I’m thinking, and I didn’t have this question as part of the list we’re going to go over, and this might be a personal observation. I think people have no problems with companies making tons of profit, take Apple, when they’re bringing value to their lives, solving a problem, making their lives better.

All you have to do is to talk with your friends and ask them what kind of computer do you use. Is it ok? Should I buy it? And they’ll say yeah! Is it ok for Dell to make profit? Well, what isn’t ok to make profits?

These detractors...well, they’re never asked the question:

Do you like the jeans you’re wearing?

Is that a good product?

Is it ok for them to make a profit and stay in business?

And they’ll say:

"Oh, it’s those other giant big corporations, mystical...they’re terrible, they’re attitude."

It’s a lack of education from grade school on. We don’t teach enterprise. We don’t teach free enterprise. We don’t teach strategic planning.

**********

Part Two of this conversation will be published Monday, November 21.

Part Three of this conversation will be published Tuesday, November 22.

William Seidman: What Are You Reading?

Dr. Seidman is also CEO & co-founder of Cerebyte, which gives organizations the ability and the confidence to dramatically improve their performance. Their pioneering technology, based on the latest science of how we think and learn, enables them to quickly capture top performers' "secret sauce" and raise the performance of everyone else to that same high level. Their solution has been adopted by companies such as Intel, Jack in the Box, American Family Insurance, Nike to name a few.

Aligning with the latest research in positive deviance, fair process, neuroscience and mass customization, their solution makes it possible to quickly capture your top performers' expert knowledge, approach and values, and then systematically help everyone else apply them in theit work.

And he is the co-author of Strategy to Action in 10 Days: Creating High Performance Organizations.

From his website:

Strategy to Action provides a groundbreaking approach that quickly infuses any organization with the skills, attitudes, behaviors and culture vital to extraordinary performance. This practical, step-by-step approach guides readers to create a highly predicable, scalable and engaging environment that will have everyone in the organization performing like a superstar.

After reading it, understanding his principles and his methodology and as important the science behind it...I would have to agree. 

He's a leader. So, I asked him:

You’re a leader. I use this quote every week. Jim Rohn says that Leaders are readers. What are you reading these days... in all your free time?

And, he answered:

Yeah, in all my free time.

So, I must confess that some of my friends, I have a doctorate from Stanford and they say:

“ How could a doctorate from Stanford read some of the junk I read?”

I always read two books. I read junk. I’m reading a Clive Clussler book right now.

I also read a lot on the neuroscience. I’m reading a book called You Are Not Your Brain by Jeff Schwartz. Part of what we’re talking about is the response to Obama. You Are Not Your Brain shows that certain portions of the brain, particularly the pre-frontal cortex enable you to feel empowered, to feel energized and to quite literally educate the nay-saying, the negative, the fear-driven portions of your brain and make them less important.

It’s a very powerful book for how to become, the technical term is self-directed neuro-plasticity. In the best sense a continuous self-learner for whatever your purpose is in life. And it can absolutely enhance the quality of your life.

Fantastic.

Want more from William Seidman?

• Follow him on Twitter.

• Read his blog.

• Buy his book.

• You can listen to our conversation here.

• You can read Part One of our conversation here.

• You can read Part Two of our conversation here.

• You can read Part Three of our conversation here.

Tom Rieger: What Are You Reading?

Tom Rieger, author of Breaking the Fear Barrier: How Destroys Companies from the Inside Out and What to Do About It, joined the show recently.

Tom's an excellent author and a leader. So, I asked him:

Leaders are readers. Jim Rohn said that. I'm just smart enough to quote him. You're a leader. What are you reading?

And he answered:

If someone is interested in the concepts of the book then there’s a few things I’d certainly suggest to them from my list.

There’s a book out there called Advances in Behavioral Economics. If you are interested in what really drives people’s decision-making then I strongly encourage you to pick it up. It’s a collection of academic papers so it might not be for everybody. But I find it fascinating and I read it over and over again.

There’s a book called And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline and Fall of the American Steel Industry by John Hoerr ....which I think is an absolute great example of everything I talk about in the book as it related to the steel industry and Pittsburgh in the ’80’s.

You know, I was at Carnegie-Mellon, basically while all this was happening. The book is written very objectively and you can see how these entitlements and this fear of loss on both sides of the aisle; it’s not just a labor issue, it’s not just an industry or management issue, it was all three of those things. And how this all began, everyone trying to do the right thing. And this whole thing came crashing down and it’s a good example of just how much damage this kind of thing can do.

Now that the book is finally done and I can start reading again...there’re a few books on my reading list. I’ve heard there’s good book called Tribal Leadership by ....One person who reviewed the book said it’s a book I absolutely have to read.

Fantastic. I love the list of books and it helps me expand my reading list.

Want more from Tom Rieger?

• Follow him on Twitter.

• You can listen to our conversation here

• You can read the interview here:
  • Part One
  • Part Two
  • Part Three

President Obama: 3 Steps to Win the War on Jobs...Before It's a War.

Jim Clifton, CEO of The Gallup Organization and author of The Coming Jobs War, joined the show recently.  

From the book's website comes this truth, obvious for a growing number of adults around the world:

What everyone in the world wants is a good job.

In a provocative book for business and government leaders, Gallup Chairman Jim Clifton describes how this undeniable fact will affect all leadership decisions as countries wage war to produce the best jobs.

You can listen to our conversation here.

You can our transcripts of our conversation here:

• Part One

• Part Two

• Part Three

I thought he would be a good person to ask how do we create jobs, achieve victory before war in this case. I asked him:

We've reached the imagination moment in our show. Let's imagine President Obama has some interest in creating jobs now. And it's an interest he may pursue with some conviction in the face of resistance. He picks up his Blackberry and calls you.

Jim, he says, because he's the President.

Some of us here in DC have heard that there may be an unemployment problem here in the US, outside the Beltway. And some of us see job creation as a key aspect of our national security. But we still have this problem.

We want to hear your thoughts, maybe 3 things that we as a nation can do to avert the danger that has not yet come, win this war now before it becomes a war, and create good jobs on a sustainable basis for the next 30 years.

What do you tell him?

And he answered:

Well, I’d say he’s got to focus every decision, every policy he makes, on small to medium-sized businesses. I’m going to call them ‘business builders’. Now, we’ve got a lot of people that need to be taken care of from the aging to unemployed to union workers and all that kind of thing. If he doesn’t consider business builders in every decision that he makes and he doesn’t lighten their saddle rather than make it heavier, we have no chance at all. We will not have sustainable growth with ‘shovel jobs’ or by propping the place up.

We have to have organic job creation that comes from startups and shootups. Or we will not retain our leadership of the free world. That’s first.

The 2nd thing is that the emphasis has gotta be put on entrepreneurship not innovation. And we’ve got to develop all of those sciences. Put your billions into that not innovation. We’ve got enough innovation. We’ve got innovation on the shelves all over this country.

But, the 3rd thing is we gotta make it intentional that cities are the places where these chicks can hatch because that’s where all the variation is.

Those would be the three things right now that would come out of our conversation.

And I appreciate this conversation very much.

Thank you for that. Your answer was very concise. And it’s music to my ears when you talk about the role of small business in creating jobs andcommunities and sustainable economies.

Want more from Jim Clifton?

Visit the Gallup Organization's website. Their researchers, authors and Mr. Clifton, all speak from the same page.

Buy his book.

**********

Some may say this is inappropriate.

This is politics! And you never discuss politics at Thanksgiving Dinners, backyard barbecues and on a business radio show.

I disagree. As long as only politicians can discuss solutions for our country then those solutions and their interested audiences will remain off-limits, political, for those who make this brand, our country, run. And only politicians, these days that's only career politicians, can discuss those ideas and spoon-feed solutions to the public.

I see our times as an all hands-on-deck opportunity and not a crisis.  That opportunity is for each of us to lend our hands, our conversations, our ideas to find and share solutions. In our absence those challenges are left to ideologues, vested interests and politicians of all stripes and partisan persuasion. We...are the only ones with vested interests. And now we have, with social media and the urgency of today, the opportunity to reclaim our place at this table and discuss our ideas to solve our challenges. At the very least, we can listen to a discussion until we are ready to speak up.

Julie Steelman: What Are You Reading?

 Julie Steelman joined the show recently.

Julie is the author of The Effortless Yes! Demystify the selling process and discover:

• Your selling archetype
• Your natural asking style
• Your bankability

I wrote this in Parts One and Two:

After our conversation and reading her book, I am not sure that the copy on her website does her justice; it may be understated.

I stand behind that, still. Great book, great solution. Get it, read it, do it.  

Julie's a leader. So, I asked her.

Leaders are readers.  Jim Rohn says that. I just quote him. You're a leader. What are you reading in all your free time?

And she answered:

You know, I kind of go back and forth.

Right now, I gotta tell you I just read my first Stieg Larson book: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. So, I love really good rich fiction.

My favorite business book is The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. And that’s about mastering the inner game. And he teases me all the time.

“ It’s not a business book!”

But it should be. It’s a really good mastering the inner game book.

Want more from Julie Steelman?

• Follow her on Twitter.

• Read her blog.

• By her book.

• You can listen to our conversation here.

• You can read Part One of our conversation here.

• You can read Part Two of our conversation here.

• You can read Part Three of our conversation here.

 

Interview w/ @MethodMan and @Adam_Lowry, Founders of Method - Part 3

Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry, co-authors of The Method Method: 7 Obsessions that Helped Our Scrappy Start-Up Turn an Industry Upside Down and co-founders of Method home products joined the show recently.

You can listen here.

You can read Part One here.

You can read Part Two here.

I'm an avid reader. I read 1 or 2 business books a week. And I found this book one of the best written, most useful, best-organized, most entertaining, imminently doable books I've read in a long time.

How good is it? I haven't finished it yet. Almost every paragraph inspires, ignites, aggravates me to keep writing notes, scribbling them in a notepad or typing them in Evernote.

If you're in a startup, a small company, a mid-sized company, if you're in a department within a big company getting ready to launch something new...you should read this. And make sure you have a notepad handy. Seriously. Even if you just like good writing...you should read this.

You talk about the different types of reasoning and its role in your decision-making process. Two types of reasoning, I’m kind of familiar with, inductive and deductive, I use occasionally in my business. You describe a 3rd. Abductive. And I looked it up on Wikipedia and it describes it as guessing. But I think it’s a bit more than that.

Both: Laughing.

Eric: Awesome. I never looked it up in Wikipedia.

Adam: What counts is that we’re smarter than guessing.

Eric: You blew my entire cover of what everybody thinks I do around here. I have a vision, inspire what can be versus what is...and it turns out all the time I was guessing.

Yeah, this comes from bringing together great business thinking and great design thinking. My career was I grew up working with creatives. And a lot of it rubbed off on me over time and it’s about most people look at something and they’ll explain to you what is. And they’ll have a really hard time what can be. And that is the core skill of a designer or a creative is creating something that hasn’t been. I would argue it’s also the core skill of an entrepreneur who has the ability to like we did, in a wall of sameness in cleaning products and be able to imagine what possibly could be in that place that was there today.

Adam: Otherwise known as guessing.

To be honest, I just looked it up as we were talking and I’d ever heard of it and I thought:

Wait a minute. That is a form of reasoning. And the first sentence in Wikipedia is that sentence.

Why is it so rare, why are you guys so fortunate to have such an active skillset with abductive reasoning. Or why is it so rare in other businesses?

Eric: Because most businesses as they mature and grow, people who naturally get promoted to the top tend to be the best managers who have a really rigorous approach. They’re analytical. They have the ability to create predictability, right - the person who ultimately can deliver predictable results time and time again.

Who gets squeezed out, ultimately, are the individuals who are much more the creators. They’re not going to be the managers. And so, what we try to do is balance that at a leadership team level, that design thinking and business thinking where we have an industrial designer who sits there as a peer to a CFO.

And, it’s rare. But it’s getting much less rare. Apple’s probably the best example where a designer or a creative sits there at the same level as the operations.

We talked a little bit before the show about failure. You guys have failed a number of times. In fact, you devote a section at the end of each chapter to a failure and what you learned from it.

I say this with a big smile...but given the number of your failures, big and small, you guys should be consider big failures. I say that with the utmost respect. But you kept right on failing until you were successful and you had the guts to share many of those failures in your book.

Adam: Well, it starts off with the belief, and I mentioned it before, Eric and I we’re not really into trite things like “striving for perfection” or “striving for excellence” sorta vacuous statements like that.

Instead of focusing on being the best, we’re focused on being the best at getting better. It’s interesting that we’ve learned from stories like the space shuttle disaster. You know that classic NASA story about the fear of bringing the O-ring forward to superiors within that organization and the disaster that occurred there in that organization.

What’s really important is not that you come up with the perfect strategy that can’t fail. It’s much more important to have a strategy that’s just ok and execute it really well. And then learn what didn’t work. And adjust that strategy and execute well again. If you do that, in a couple of iterations you’re going to be by far the best. And that will get you there much more quickly than trying to sit around and think about the perfect solution.

We’d rather get towards doing, learn what works and what doesn’t, and then just keep doing. And it’s sorta painfully simple. But it works.

And what it does is that it means you got to have a company culture that says:

“It’s ok to fail but we gotta learn from it.”

Now that you’re over 10 years old and your quarterly revenues are meaningful, how do you keep that willingness to fail and that openness to it alive and well in your culture?

Adam: I think it’s important to note we’re still a tiny company in the grand scheme of our competitive set. We have competitors that are a 1000 times our size. We’re still really little, even though we’re bigger. But we do believe that small is a state of mind. And it’s about a way of doing things where people remain scrappy and resourceful and focused around making the best of the resources we have.

Eric: Yeah, I think that fear of failure starts at the top and setting examples. When Adam and I screw up, we admit those mistakes. It’s modeling that behavior that’s probably the most important thing you can do as a leader.

You list 3 mistakes, 3 learning experiences with your Bloq product line. Which one proved the most valuable?

Eric: That line taught us a lot of mistakes that we were able to carry forward. I would argue probably the one that is:

“Lack of Alignment”

There were some really simple decisions we made really late in the game that if we had not done that we would be ultimately...none of this would have happened. So, it’s something we push really really hard on...we’ve got complete alignment before we move forward on new decisions.

Early on in our conversation we talked about your principle to aim small and over serve. That sounds so clear for a small startup company. But your muse, Andy, also reminds you that the bigger you get, the smaller you need to act. Now, you're a big company. A bigger company. When did you catch yourself acting like a big company?

Eric: I think probably one of the best examples was when we launched the brand. If you read the copy on the back of the label, you probably would have just laughed out loud. We would go on to make ridiculous claims, like our cucumber dish soap claim, we would say:

“We own the right to the cucumber in all countries except Guam.”

Things would just come out of left field. And couldn’t really be explained but it would be very entertaining. And it would also bring a little bit of fun to the dish soap. I was amazed at the all the letters we would get, some of them arguing with us:

“Guam is not a country, it’s a territory.”

And wanting to keep dialogue going.

And as we got bigger that voice got squeezed out more and more. We started sounding a bit more serious and taking ourselves a bit more serious.

And that’s a lot of what Andy means. The bigger you get the more real you need to be in order to lot lose your connection with those human emotions.

We worked hard with the more recent things we’ve done. If you look at the bottom of our bottles now we’ve started embossing them with little sayings that, for the consumer to discover. Just those little winks, those little quirks, that you don’t typically get from big brands.

Nice. Nice answer.

You sprinkle your book with quick profiles of your favorite muses. Andy Spade, Tony Hsieh, Dan Germain, and others. Was there one muse you left out?

Eric: Yeah, we had a lot of muses we could have done. I would give a couple for me.

Chip Connelly, who’s the well-known hotelier here in San Francisco. His ability to create experiences and elevate those experiences is amazing.

Blake Mycoskie who founded Tom’s Shoes. His ability to create inspire advocates and his leverage of social media for his one-to-one model is just world-class and somebody who I continue to get inspired by.

Adam: Yeah, there are some people who were inspirational to us that we mentioned in the book, not as muses but who served that role. People like Yvon Chouinard founder of Patagonia who’s created a business model unlike any other as it relates to sustainability. People like Michael Braungart and Bill McDonough behind the cradle-to-cradle model of business which we very much build into things.

Those are great inspirations and muses for us. I think there are some very personal ones for both Eric and I. Both of us look to our parents and grand-parents as great inspirations and the reasons why we’ve ended up doing what we’re doing.

We've reached the imagination moment in our show. Let's imagine that President Obama is calling your assistant right now. In fact, they are waving at you and mouthing the words...President Obama, as we talk. You’re laughing and she drops him into your voicemail. He says:

Guys, love what you're doing. You and your company turned an industry upside down. Right now, we've got an economy that remains upside down. I need to hear your ideas on how we can turn it upside down one more time, bring it right side up and start growing, generating jobs. Would you come to the white house, bring some product to keep me and the first lady happy, and talk about 3 things we can do now to bring this economy right side up.

What would you tell him?

Adam: I’m not politician, but since you gave me the liberty to answer when you brought it up I’ll go ahead and jump into it.

The first is I think we really need to invest in the green economy. I don’t know why in political discourse there’s still this weird belief that if we do something good for the environment it will be bad for the economy. That’s just plainly false. In fact, the reverse is true. By making investments in the green economy we can create, by making investments in green things we can make growth happen.

I’m a big believer in that.

The 2nd is education. Education is always something that is critically important for the development of a nation. I think we need to do that at a lot of different levels.

The last one is a little bit political. I believe the issue of campaign finance reform is a critical issue in the United States. I think it’s an apex issue. One of the reasons it’s so hard to invest in the green economy and one of the reasons the deck is stacked against companies like Method that integrate social and environmental considerations into their business model is that our politicians are really run by the people that fund them. And the the people that fund them are big entrenched businesses whose interests are to keep things the way they are. As long as the big corporations, who don’t want things to change, are funding the politicians then we’re not going to get the level of change we seek.

Eric: I guess I would just tell him, like, stop calling me and continue to let me work, so I can make more soap and hire more people.

Readers are leaders. Jim Rohn says that, I just quote him. What are you reading these days in all your free time?

Eric: You know, I’m a magazine junkie. I find it hard to find the time to get into a new book. I had a flight this morning that left at 5:30 AM and in hand I had the Economist, Business Week and Fast Company. But, I’m also, I spend a lot of time on digital media and blogs but I’m still magazine junkie at heart.

Adam: I’m reading two books right now. One’s called The Ripple Effect by Alex Prudhomme and it’s about fresh water and the fate of fresh water in the world going forward. I read a lot of non-fiction, stuff like that, instead of a lot of business books.

The other book I’m reading, Redesigning Leadership (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)  is by John Maeda  from Rhode Island School of Design.

Both great books about different topics. One’s critical if business is going to provide more leadership in the world.

Fantastic.

This has been a fantastic conversation. You start your book talking about the importance of a company's culture. And you end your book talking about culture, too. In this case, it's the personal culture. Share with us your conclusion.

Adam: Um, I’m not sure I understand what you mean.

Well, as I’m reading aloud, I’m not sure the question was very clear. I apologize.

Adam: I’m sure it was at the time.

You start the last chapter with a great conclusion:

Sitting down to write this conclusion, we couldn’t help but think,

Shouldn’t you be drawing your own conclusions from the book?

We’ve spent over two hundred pages giving you all of the wit and wisdom we have to offer, and you want more? ...

Really, if there is one thing we want you to take away from this book it’s...buy our soap. Lots of it!...

Ok, if there are two things you take away from this book, here’s the second: Find your own obsessions.

Eric: Success only comes from really understanding and articulating what drives you. And taking that up to a higher purpose in your career and life. It’s such a cliche’, but it’s a true one. It’s hard for most people. We’re very lucky to find early in our careers what really drove us and to be able to lean into it in a big way.

Adam: I’m glad that Eric remembered what we wrote in the conclusion. I remembered it in more general terms in that when we were sitting down to write the conclusion we thought usually a conclusion ties a bow around the end of the book. For us, the conclusion was another introduction into the next step into the thinking of the reader.

We’ve shared this open-sourced business model with people as a way to say:

“Hey, we’ve had some success; we’ve had some failures. We’re certainly not doing it perfectly. But some of this stuff is working. Why don’t you read this? Why don’t you take it and apply it to whatever you do, hopefully for your own personal success, but more importantly to build on a business model to help us create some really positive effect for the world.”

Beautiful. It’s a beautiful way to end the show. I would love to keep on talking but you guys have a tone of things going on. I appreciate you taking the time out to spend an hour talking about your book and what’s driven you to success and helping others.

So, I’m always terrible at ending a show.

I’ll just say Thanks!

Oh, where do we find you on the web?

Adam: I’m Adam_Lowry.

Eric: I am MethodGuy.

Great! Where can we find you on the web?

Eric: Method Home dot com.

I’d say good luck, but it sounds like you have everything under control. And if it’s not under control in the future, you’ll get it. Congrats on your success!

Adam: Thanks for having us!

Eric: Thanks. It’s been great talking with you.

Interview w/ @MethodMan and @Adam_Lowry, Founders of Method - Part 2

Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry, co-authors of The Method Method: 7 Obsessions that Helped Our Scrappy Start-Up Turn an Industry Upside Down and co-founders of Method home products joined the show recently.

You can listen here.

You can read Part One here.

How good is this book? I won't write notes in the margin, nor will I turn down a corner of a page to mark something. That would touch on sacrilegious. That's almost over the top, but it's not. This is a great book.

If you're in a startup, a small company, a mid-sized company, if you're in a department within a big company getting ready to launch something new...you should read this. And make sure you have a notepad handy. Seriously. Even if you just like good writing...you should read this.

Tell us about your new friend Nathan, who you refer to as your helpful ally, loving adversary, and ideal brand advocate.

Eric: He’s not a new buddy, he’s an old buddy. He’s been around since pretty early in the business.

We’re very fortunate and of course we use it as a barometer check for how we’re doing with inspiring advocates. You know, if we can’t get people to really fall in love with the Method brand and the philosophy we’re putting out there, then we’re not doing our job. So, we’re lucky to have many of those individuals.

Nathan was one who was so excited about what we were doing, he was kind enough to start a blog dedicated to it. And by no way did we ask him to do that, did we pay him to do that. This is just purely out of love as a fan.

I guess it’s kinda similar to sports. Fans have the right to applaud you and cheer you when you’re doing well. And they have the right to tell you when you could be doing better.

Adam: Yeah, they act as a mirror to your performance. And I think that’s incredibly important.

When you first discovered Nathan's lust for Method, what was your reaction?

Eric: It was pretty cool. The thing we were amazed on is how detailed he would get and how insightful he would get. I would often go to his blog for inspiration for new ideas. He just articulated it so well.

That’s fantastic. I think a lot of brands ignore these fan pages. What’s the thinking on why they would do that? Or do we even know or care?

Eric: You know, I don’t know. I came from an advertising background so I would speculate that a lot of it comes from organizations unlike ourselves aren’t as passionate about what they do.

The reason we get excited about Nathan is he’s passionate, we’re passionate. And there’s kind of no walls between who we create for and ourselves as consumers. In bigger corporations it may be more distant. But there isn’t just that pure excitement that’s shared.

I think there’s also the hesitation of reaching out to something like that on a media stage. There’s the fear of saying something wrong or doing the wrong thing. You’ve got to be completely comfortable with authenticity and transparency. You know, we know we may say something that is really good and we may say something that you disagree with. And that’s ok, because at least we’re out there talking.

Nathan and your ad budget, or its lack, and The Big Shift from paid media to earned media all describe the difference between P&G/Unilever and Method or the difference between a mass-market brand and a belief brand. What is that difference between mass-market and belief brands?

Eric: The difference is that mass market brands, of course, have been built to appeal to the broadest audience. And when they do that , obviously you need to bring it down to the lowest common denominator of what everybody may like about a product but not what they necessarily love about a product.

So, for example, if you’re selling a glass cleaner you need to bring it down to a single attribute which is streak free because what do most people look for when they’re choosing a glass cleaner which is to leave no streaks. And the difference between that and a belief brand is we sell a particular philosophy or point of view.

Ben and Jerry’s is another great example. They don’t build their ice cream off of a single attribute of taste or quality. Instead it’s the experience of what they stand for.

That’s the way we approach it. We want the consumer to be part of what we’re doing and believe in what we’re doing. And we’re not selling a product attribute; we’re essentially selling a way of looking at the world.

Another great answer. Thanks so much.

Here in America, we're the land of opportunity. Aim for the stars, Kid. No limits to what we can do, so shoot for big. You say the exact opposite. Aim Small and Over-serve. Why has that worked for you in rowing your company and disrupting a well-entrenched billion dollar market?

Adam: Well, if you want to run a mile you’ve got to take one first step. And, our aspirations are very large. But we learned a long time ago that you can’t focus on the finish line. You can’t focus on that big goal and winning that big prize. You need to focus on the things you need to do in order to win that big prize. thethings you need to do to take that next step down the road.

And for us that really is about focus. And what aiming small and over-serving means is we’re going to make the best darn cleaning product that money can buy. If we do that, and we serve those people that are interested in the very best...and we do that as well as we possibly can then that’s going to be something that over time is going to be much more appealing to a much larger group of people.

And there is an inherent irony in it, that the way to get big is to stay small and focus. But, as long as you stay small and focus and you continually get better every day and you build that thinking into the way that you do things then the great thing about getting better is that eventually you become the best.

Beautiful!

You used your own savings to launch method. Now, speaking of aiming small and overserving, you spent 50% on designing your product. Why did you devote so much of your startup budget to design?

Adam: It was pretty simple, really. People don’t buy the marketing, they buy the product. And for us, our product is the differentiator. Our product is better. It’s superior to the other things on the market.

And so we wanted to invest in rather than trying to manipulate people’s perception about a product that was ordinary, we wanted to build just simply a better product. And that meant putting in as much money as we had into making it the best product that we could.

Eric: Yeah, when you look at other consumer products that broke out over the past several decades, packaging was the primary marketing vehicle. - particularly when you are starting out without so much of a marketing budget. So, Altoids had their tin can. Absolut had their minimalist bottle. Red Bull had the slim can. And for us we wanted to create a really iconic package that would ultimately serve as our marketing vehicle.

You've carried that passion for design into all areas of your company particularly the design of your offices. Tell us a little bit about the design of your offices and why it's so important to your success.

Eric: So, I came from advertising where I always grew up believing that great environment design would have a great influence on the work. I saw, working in other agencies, what a good office design can do to to help you recruit talent and what a good design can help you not feel so bad when you were working late hours or screaming to get out of your ugly office or your Dilbert cube - you actually enjoyed being in your environment.

And we also so how it opened up creativity and imagination and collaboration. And so for us, even in the very beginning and we chose our office space even though we had no money by no means were we spending a lot of money on it. We chose a space that was inspiring - it was an old Victorian house on Union Street. When we did our first build-out a couple of years later we always made sure we had a high sense of aesthetic.

The thing that always blows my mind is that when you go into a lot of companies that have a creative or a design department there will always be that one design floor or that one design area that’s really cool. But then the rest of the area will be completely detached from it. When you walk into Method we don’t have a design floor. The entire company feels like a design company from the lobby to the bathroom to any department within here, even our other offices.

Fantastic.

Now, you're manufacturing soap right. Manufacturing is all about Six Sigma and Lean and economies of scale, efficient processes and all that. But you insisted on building a workspace that inspired creativity in design. How do you balance those two dynamics?

Eric: Well, first, we tried to invent 7 Sigma. We spent a lot of time on it. But once we realized we couldn’t beat Six Sigma Adam came up with some other ideas.

Adam: Yeah, both are important. We do manufacture soap. Method is a place of wonderful tensions. We have wonderful tensions between low-cost and high-design, between creativity and discipline. Those are universal. Those are skills that really every business must have.

For us, we bring those together into one space. We have people that are focused on low-cost; we have people that are focused on high-quality, people that are focused on sustainability and high-design. We create an environment and Eric and I work on this explicitly, personally, every day. That it creates an environment where collaboration can occur between these seemingly opposite ends of spectrum in a way where we can create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.

And it is a little bit of the special sauce of Method. It is something we talk a lot about in the Culture chapter and exactly some of the techniques we use to manage those tensions. And we pretty much work on it every day. In any given day, we’re not going to get it perfectly right. But we’re constantly focused on it and we’re asking:

“How do we get better?”

The good news is we have 10 years of practice at it.

10 years? You guys have been around for 10 years?

Yeah, a little more than that.

That’s awesome.

**********

Part Three will be published Friday, November 4 Saturday, November 5.

Interview with Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry, Founders of Method - Part 1

Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry, co-authors of The Method Method: 7 Obsessions that Helped Our Scrappy Start-Up Turn an Industry Upside Down and co-founders of Method home products joined the show recently. You can listen here.

With the flood of business books organized around numbered lists, I find it an overworked publishing theme. That being said...this is an awesome book.

I'm an avid reader. I read 1 or 2 business books a week. And I found this book one of the best written, most useful, best-organized, most entertaining, imminently doable books I've read in a long time.

How good is it? I haven't finished it yet. Almost every paragraph inspires, ignites, aggravates me to keep writing notes, scribbling them in a notepad or typing them in Evernote.

How good is it? I won't write notes in the margin, nor will I turn down a corner of a page to mark something. That would touch on sacrilegious. That's almost over the top, but it's not. This is a great book.

If you're in a startup, a small company, a mid-sized company, if you're in a department within a big company getting ready to launch something new...you should read this. And make sure you have a notepad handy. Seriously. Even if you just like good writing...you should read this.

Guys. Adam and Eric. Thanks for your time and writing a great book.

Adam: Thanks for having us, Zane.

Eric: Glad to be here.

Your book cover includes many testimonials. My two favorites were one from Tony Hsieh, bestselling author of Delivering Happiness and CEO of Zappos, one of my favorite companies. And the other was a joint testimonial from Pam Ryan, Pat Lowry. How did you convince your moms to give you a testimonial for your book, other than the obvious that it's a great book?

Eric: It was not easy, particularly since my mom spent a lot of years probably pestering me to do my grammar homework, so, uh, despite that we finally proved to our moms that we were worthy of their endorsement.

Who were you writing for as you put this together? Describe the reader you had in mind, what do they do, what are they facing, where do they sit in an organization?

Adam: Yeah, Zane, we really wrote this book for anyone who is trying to change the way business is getting done - both as someone running a business or somebody within a business, ie, any entrepreneur or any intrapreneur.

We also wrote it as a way for any business to create positive social change in the world. The book is really, it’s our open-sourced business model, written and provided for people to examine and hopefully use the best of, learn from our mistakes and build something better.

Perfect. What's in it for them, why should they care about these 7 obsessions and your method method?

Eric: What is very unique about our business and it’s pretty typical for an entrepreneur to take on a goliath...we’re basically foolish enough to take on multiple goliaths in our space. The soap industry has been dominated by the same players for the last 100-plus years. And, so, coming into these categories we had to change the game, not just one level but on multiple levels. And the way that we tapped into what we call our obsessions which essentially is our competitive advantages we strongly feel are relevant to any business today because they are all grounded in macro-trends.

Who would MacGyver have written this book for? How would he have organized it? Did you ever get stuck and have to ask yourself "What would MacGyver do?

Adam: Well, Zane, as you read in the book MacGyver is a big value at Method and it’s about being scrappy and resourceful when you need to. We have to do that in order to compete against the big companies we compete against in the household cleaning space.

For us, there were many MacGyver moments in the writing of this book because Eric and I are busy every day with our jobs, our day jobs. We’re not authors by profession. So, there are a lot of times when we were trying to figure out how to get this done and there are a lot of times when we examined:

“What are the ways we’re going to MacGyver this book to be the most useful to those intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs I just mentioned.”

One of the most interesting ways we did that that I think was interesting as well was sharing our mistakes. And, the error-autopsies. And as you read in the book, each chapter ends with an error-autopsy which is an examination, a case-study we made that others can learn from and try to avoid.

What we’re trying to do has never been done before. And if you’re going to do that you’ve got to learn from your mistakes.

I think that’s one of the many reasons I loved your book was you were so forthcoming with your mistakes and their value in helping you grow.

Eric: Absolutely. We really do feel that Richard Dean Anderson would write a killer business book if he would just decide to do so.

My friend, Erika Andersen, wrote a great book titled Being Strategic. She asks the reader to define their reasonable aspiration or hoped-for future. What was yours, what was your reasonable aspiration or hoped-for future, when you wrote this book?

Adam: For us, it was about making it clear for people that business is the largest and most powerful institution on the planet has the opportunity and we believe the onus to create positive change in the world.

That’s a very lofty aspiration. But the way that you get that done is the everyday tactical things and learning from your mistakes.

And that’s really what we hope people get out of this book. You can take on really big industries and succeed and in the process do something meaningful and purposeful.

Love that answer! Having founded a successful consumer goods company, I know metrics are important to you. But let's talk about the metrics for this book. What metrics are you using to measure your progress towards that hoped-for future with your book?

Adam: Most of them are soft metrics. As I mentioned before, Eric and I are not professional authors. We’re not writing this book to try to maximize the number of copies sold the way an author might.

Really, what we’re trying to do, we’re going to measure this with how effective was this book in changing people’s minds about the role that entrepreneurs play in creating positive change in the world and to a lesser degree how is this book increasing people’s understanding of the real mission behind Method. This business is very deep in its commitment to social change and that might not be something, when you’re shopping grocery store shelves, is immediately obvious to you.

We hope that a lot of people, by reading this book, understand the deeper story behind Method.

We've all heard about the 7 sins and the 7 virtues. You guys, on the other hand, have 7 obsessions. We could spend an hour on each of them, I'm sure, but let's run through them. What are those 7 obsessions?

Eric: Yeah, just to set this up with this is not something we put together to write a book. This is the way we operate our business. And they were part of the business plan from very early on. Writing the book was fairly easy when we were just reporting on what we have done already.

Number one: Create a Culture Club. At Method everything starts with culture. And we really believe in culture as a competitive advantage and this idea that you build a brand from the inside out.

Obsession Two: Inspire Advocates. We just don’t want to have customers. We want to create advocates who help us build a brand.

Three: Be a Green Giant and really personalize sustainability to inspire change on a grand scale as Adam just talked about.

Four: Kick Ass at Fast. If you’re not going to be the biggest, you better be the fastest.

Obsession Five: Relation Retail. Today, it’s no longer enough to have a shallow relationship with a lot of retailers. You need to have deep relationships with fewer.

Six is Win on Product Experience. At Method, we’re very much a product centric organization that is focused on delivering amazing and remarkable product experiences.

Obsession Number 7 is Design Driven and really building design leadership into your DNA.

Fantastic.

I ask the next question with the usual disclaimers and caveats.

Let's say God likes sins and virtues, but not obsessions. Still, he likes you guys, so he’s willing to compromise. You can have one obsession. Consider this an exercise in detachment and pick one obsession and let the others go... Which one do you hold on to? Why?

Eric: For me, I would hold on to Design Driven because I am so passionate about design. Its a big part of why I jump out of bed every morning to use design to make the world a more enjoyable place.

Adam: Yeah, and I’ll not surprisingly pick Be a Green giant. That’s my half of the founding vision.

I think it goes without saying that it is a slightly unfair question that it is a slightly unfair question. I think what Eric and I each brought to this business was multiplied many times by the other. So, individually they are a lot less interesting than they are put together.

Absolutely. You’re right about it being an unfair question. But I wanted to see which one was a personal favorite.

Adam: Yes, And those are the reasons we put the business together.

Of these 7 which is the one most companies lack?

Eric: I would argue that it’s culture. It’s one of those intangible things that is hard for companies to get their arms around. And, it’s about human behavior. It’s how we treat each other. And it’s so hard to name companies that you know that have great cultures.

True. Very true. I don’t know any that come to mind.

Eric: Yeah, and in the book we always pick out a muse. A muse is someone who does something better than us. And our muse for culture is Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos. We definitely consider ourselves to be a very weird, unique, human place. And then I go to Zappos and I go:

“Oh, my god. We are so corporate.”

They do a great job with it.

How can customers or prospects, even employees, tell a company lacks this important obsession? I mean in some respects so few companies have a culture worth championing. We’ve become number to it. Maybe we should ask if a company has good culture?

Adam: I think there’s one easy way to measure our culture. And that’s:

“Is there any different way that people are at work and the way they are at home?”

If people are exactly the way they are at work as they are at home, you’ve pretty much got it right.

That’s an excellent answer. I was not expecting you to describe it like that. It’s a great way.

One of the first ways I knew your list of seven was going to be excellent was when I saw you made Culture your number one obsession. We’ve already spoken about it a few times. But I think it’s so important that we talk a bit more about it. Why is culture so important, especially since it’s ignored so much?

Eric: I think so much of a culture is the emotional aspects of it. Again, we’re dealing with human behaviors. There are absolutely ways to measure in an analytical way, a rational way, to understand a culture whether it’s working or it’s not working.

But, it’s one of those things that it’s really hard for companies to understand and measure because it’s based in emotions.

That’s that squishy stuff that businesses like to avoid.

Eric: Absolutely. You typically see the values of an organization’s mission. It’s usually put on an ugly walnut plaque in the wall. They tend to be such watered-down meaningless words, you can tell their words by committee. You know great cultures are about language and having a point-of-view that is unique and that everybody can rally behind. That’s hard to do as a group It takes a real kind of leadership and vision.

Adam: Yeah, think about the word “culture” outside of business context. It’s really about a shared set of values, a shared set of traditions. Things like that. If you then think about culture in a business context, you realize that there’s very little done in most businesses to actively cultivate culture as a shared set of things, values, that people subscribe to.

Now, is this attitude, this lack of attention to culture a relic of our manufacturing, economies of scale, mass produced business environment?

Adam: You know, I’m not really sure. I think it’s probably a function of not enough attention and recognition that with the right culture as the underpinning of a business and you can actually make a business far more productive and innovative.

Perhaps, it’s a luxury that we’ve had at Method in having to innovate in order to survive. We’ve realized that we can’t innovate unless we have a culture that allows us to collaborate, clash and resolve tension, all in a productive and creative way so that we can produce stuff that’s unique and different.

If we don’t do that, we’re nothing. So, for us, culture is very important, obviously a critical piece of our success.

Maybe, businesses have been around so long and been analyzed so hard that people in the name of efficiency or whatever just decide it’s not that important. I think you lose something really important when you do that.

You wrote and I’m quoting:

You've got Procter & Gamble ..which spent $2.4 billion on advertising in the US alone. Unilever spent another 1.3 billion. It's safe to assume these guys have a toilet-paper budget that's bigger than our entire marketing budget...Method didn't have a dollar to spend at launch.

Right there, coupled with your success, is The Big Shift as you call it. And it' a huge shift, a huge opportunity for small businesses. What is The Big Shift?

Eric: So, what we call The Big Shift is the transition away from interruptive media. The brands in our space, these are the first multinationals, the Lever Brothers, Proctor & Gamble. these companies were built from the rise of mass media. They were the first ones to do a great job of positioning themselves for that entire shift towards interruptive media, which is you’re watching TV and you’re interrupted for a 30-second spot.

And, of course, The Big Shift is getting us away from that because it’s getting easier and easier to avoid these interruptions as we’re shifting towards social media and media that you choose to participate in. And along that shift is an opportunity for a new brand to be born and an old brand to die.

Baseball is a great example of how sports even shifted as the different mediums have changed. Baseball was America’s favorite past-time as the radio was the biggest medium. And it’s a beautiful sport for the radio. And as television took center stage we saw the rise of football.

For entrepreneurs these shifts are wonderful opportunities to exploit to your advantage as all the rules start changing.

Now, if you don’t mind, I want to drill into this Big Shift present such a significant opportunity for startups and disruptors and small businesses? How do these take advantage of this transition away from interruptive media to earned media?

Eric: Well, obviously the rise of online in itself, which is a whole different topic, from Facebook to Twitter, completely... businesses have been born on that rise.

But, if you get away from technology, I think the opportunity for the entrepreneur is that it puts greater emphasis on good content and good products. We now live in a world where a good product can easily get discovered and get shared among peers through social media in ways where you needed that muscle to be able to buy the advertising to interrupt somebody to get that message out there on a mass scale.

For me, that’s the real opportunity is that we can focus on putting a truly better product or service or better content out there and having a better chance of succeeding than somebody who is doing a very efficient but mediocre way.

Excellent. Excellent answer.

**********

Parts Two and Three of this interview will be posted on Thursday, November 3 and Friday, November 4 Saturday, November 5.

President Obama: 3 Steps to Get the Sales We Want & Need to Grow this Economy

Julie Steelman joined the show this week. Julie's the author of The Effortless Yes! Demystify the selling process and discover:

• Your selling archetype
• Your natural asking style
• Your bankability

Julie Steelman’s credits read like a Who’s Who of big-name corporate giants with Apple, Microsoft, Toyota, CBS, Sony Studios and Universal Pictures in her rolodex. She has generated over $100+ million in sales during her 30 year sales career. Julie is known as The Entrepreneur’s Selling Mentor.

Now retired to her personal paradise in Hawaii, living debt-free, Julie developed the easy-to-master “Effortless YES! Selling System”™. She spends her time helping business owners overcome their aversion to selling in an honest, transformational and interactive style.

You can listen to our conversation here.

You can read your conversation here:

• Part One

• Part Two

• Part Three

It made sense to me to ask her how our country could generate more sales. You see, sales are the driver of our economy and the source for new jobs. So, I asked her:

We've reached the imagination moment in our show. Let's imagine President Obama has a few moments. He’s found your book. He picks up his Blackberry and calls you.

Julie, he says because he's the President.

We can't seem to get companies to say, effortlessly or not, to buying into our economy.

And they're not getting customers to say yes, in any way, to buying. What do I need to do to entice you to leave Eden and come to DC, an eden of its own sort, I guess.

We want to hear your thoughts, maybe 3 things that we as a nation can take to find a way to demystify our selling process, find our selling archetype and get the sale we want, we need and grow our economy as fast as we'll ever need.

What do you say to him?

And she generously answered:

Well, there’s no big question there!

I’m actually going to refer to something you said Mr. Obama that was in your inaugural speech. You said:

Our society was founded on the idea that our products and services as businesses would serve the common good.

And what I’m going to tell you Mr. Obama is we have forgotten about that.

The first thing we could do to fix it is to shift from putting profit over purpose. And instead put purpose over profit.

You’re going to make your profit. Don’t worry.

The companies are going to grow. Don’t worry.

But what we’ve done is create a society of overly skeptical consumers and they’re not willing to buy and do business with companies that they don’t trust any more.

That’s the first thing.

The 2nd thing is we need to find a way to have CEOs paid really well, but no longer take salaries and have golden parachutes when companies are not making a profit. That cant be the way it works anymore. Sorry, everybody. Do you trust a CEO that does that? I don’t think so.

The 3rd thing we need to do is invest in putting our workforce back to work. The whole crux around the 3 things I’m going to tell you to do Mr. Obama are instilling trust back in corporate America because there isn’t any. Financially, products or services or customer service. I’d rather buy a Mercedes than Cadillac. You’ve got to get our products back up to snuff.

We need to put, I think we’ve sold off too much of our industrial abilities and we need to bring it back here.

That was too much. I know I gave you more than 3 things. But, that would be my answer, Mr. Obama.

Thank you. I love all of them. Thank you for the 4th one, too.

Want more from Julie Steelman?

• Follow her on Twitter.

• Read her blog.

• By her book.

**********

Some may say this is inappropriate.

This is politics! And you never discuss politics at Thanksgiving Dinners, backyard barbecues and on a business radio show.

I disagree. As long as only politicians can discuss solutions for our country then those solutions and their interested audiences will remain off-limits, political, for those who make this brand, our country, run. And only politicians, these days that's only career politicians, can discuss those ideas and spoon-feed solutions to the public.

I see our times as an all hands-on-deck opportunity and not a crisis. That opportunity is for each of us to lend our hands, our conversations, our ideas to find and share solutions. In our absence those challenges are left to ideologues, vested interests and politicians of all stripes and partisan persuasion. We...are the only ones with vested interests. And now we have, with social media and the urgency of today, the opportunity to reclaim our place at this table and discuss our ideas to solve our challenges. At the very least, we can listen to a discussion until we are ready to speak up.

Ray Schwemmer, Co-Author of Dynamic Collaboration: Part 3

RAY SCHWEMMER is the president, CEO, and co-founder of CollabraSpace, a software company that has focused on secure collaboration solutions for industry and government customers since 1998.

He just co-authored an excellent book for anyone who now considers how to unleash the power of collaboration within their organization and on a secure basis. His book is Dynamic Collaboration: How to Share Information, Solve Problems, and Increase Productivity without Compromising Security.

He joined the show recently to talk about his book, his company's solutions and the changing dynamics and expectations in the collaboration conversation.

You can listen to our conversation here.

You can read Part One of our conversation here.

You can read Part Two of our conversation here.

You talk a lot in your book about Cloud Computing. Big topic, it’s a hot topic. Great opportunity there for startups who lack the resources for an enterprise solution. Great opportunity for lost data. Where's the balance? What are some steps you recommend in your book for a company to consider to best balance those risks?

Yeah, the cloud is big today, a big buzzword of the day. Big technology out there. So, a lot of large companies are as well. We deal with a lot of large companies and large organizations. Smaller ones and larger ones are really looking to go to the cloud.

What we really talk about for those customers who want to go to the cloud and there’s people offering all sorts of services in the cloud today. Just like in your internal architectures, you need to make sure that you control the data and the data stays internal to your organization.

So, if you’re outsourcing that make sure you know where the data’s being stored. Some companies have, maybe if you’re in the medical field you will have government regulations that say it must be stored in the U.S.; it’s not allowed to go overseas - so you need to make sure you know where that data center is being stored.

I would make the assumption but you need to check that that data is redundant in case of failure of some sort. But you need to know where your data is going.

In addition, a lot of these data centers they’re standing up a separate collaborative tool. That’s what we talked about and said that’s not really the best way to do it. We kinda encourage people that if you want to go to the cloud, ask them how their collaboration tool fits into the other services that they’re provding you. So, if you’re getting your HR system from a cloud, or your getting your accounting system from a cloud, are they also offering you collaboration in both of those so that my HR department and accounting departments can talk to each other. If not, you’re kinda going down that previous path of:

“I’m standing up a separate collaborative system and all my departments are going to have to go that system to collaborate.”

Cloud has some great advantages but you want to make sure what you’re purchasing in there is fitting the needs of your organization.

Let's talk about the cart and the horse, social media and enterprise collaboration. Which one is the cart, which one is the horse?

I wish I knew.

Depends on the day.

You know, social media is all the buzz today. Maybe, it’s not the horse but, maybe, it’s the carrot you’re leading the horse with.

Social media is just the buzz. Everybody’s looking at how do they take Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn, and how do I get all these things internally and have my employees all working together just like they do at home.

So, that’s probably, that’s the carrot out in front of the horse and the horse is pulling another thing. That’s definitely the buzz out there today. Organizations are figuring out how do they do that. But if they bring in a social networking tool that let’s them see who all is online and be friends with them and I still want to be able to do my web conferencing and share my documents because we’re really not sharing our kids’ soccer photos with each other; we’re trying to do work here.

So, what we look at in that case is social media running the buzz, the hype. But when we talk to people we tell them:

“You need to make sure that capability is connected with your other collaboration capability.”

Again, all this should be embedded with the tools you a re currently using. So, it would be great to come into work one day and tell me:

“You might want to be friends with Suzie, who’s in the Chicago office because you have these things in common. “

And, maybe that’s a good thing.

Social networking is driving it. Maybe, it’s the horse in your analogy.

We have reached the imagination moment in our show. Let's imagine for a moment that on line 2 is President Obama. He's leaving you a message from his Blackberry that works this week. He says:

Ray. After reading your book and listening to you, I think you might have some solutions we need to hear. The country seems to have a problem right now collaborating, dynamically or sluggishly. And we see the results in our economy and our education...Can you come to the White House, bring your co-author Rick Havrilla. I'd like to you to talk about 3 ways we can create some dynamic collaboration, share information, solve problems, and increase productivity...on a nation-wide basis.

What would you tell him?

I thought we were focusing on jobs...

No, I would say, first off within the government agencies, we talked at the beginning about what is collaboration and what is secure collaboration. I think a lot of government agencies in the past have been tasked with ‘standing up collaborative environments.’ I would say they have checked that box and said:

“Yes. We have stood it up.”

How many people are using those systems? I would argue that it’s a very small percentage of the workforce.

So, I think the first thing I would say is the government agencies should be asking is:

“ What percentage of my people are online?”

And if it’s not 100%, you have a problem. Because you should be able to look at what tools your people are using today. If you integrate collaboration into those tools then by definition you are going to have 100% of your people online and able to work with others.

That would be step number one: Stand up these internal collaborative tools and make the government more efficient.

From the external piece, we had talked about customers being able to get in, so, you know maybe instead of calling the IRS you can set up a chat room with them and share documents. My tax return vs what they have and work through our issues. That might be more complicated. So, that would be Phase Two of how to do that.

On the other hand, I see if you look at it even broader, the White House and others are having talks and things like that on Twitter and LinkedIn and things like that. I think they are adopting some of these social media tools to share information with users, the US population. So, from that point I think they are doing something. But I think they could do a lot more internally for efficiencies and probably offer a lot more online capabilities for constituents and interact with their elected officers.

Leaders are readers. Jim Rohn says that, I merely quote him. You're a leader. What are you reading in all your free time.

I didn’t know I had free time.

I just finished Power of An Internal Franchise which Marty O’Neill had written.

I’m in the middle of one of Zig Ziglar’s books. I think it’s the Secrets of Closing the Sale. I think it’s probably the 3rd time I’m reading it. I just always pick up something different whenever I read it.

I’ve been busy with the book and work recently. I haven’t had as much time to read as I’d like.

I’m a big fan of Marty O’Neill and I’ve had him on the show to talk about his book: The Power of an Internal Franchise. That’s a great book.

Yeah. Yeah, I enjoyed it. There’s a couple of things in it I need to implement here.

At the end of your chapter on The Future of Collaboration, you write:

...there will soon be a time when instead of a query result returning a list of over 1000 documents for you to read, it will instead return the names of 5 people whom you should talk with to be answers. In addition, the system would report that two of the five are online now and provide links to collaborate with them.

Love that. That's what collaboration is all about. Or I should say that's who collaboration is all about, isn't it? People.

Yes! And again, it’s where I go back to a lot of people in the past have seen to stand up, I take the consumer model, and they stand up a Facebook and get millions of users and to stand it up and they will come mentality. For every successful system out there I think that there are hundreds or thousands of systems that have failed.

Our approach in the corporate world is bring the collaboration capabilities, the tools the users have on their desktop, are currently using on a daily basis.

Why make ‘em switch context to collaborate? People want to collaborate. We’ve collaborated for hundreds of years before this technology came along. Whether it’s the pone or traveling, whatever it took to get the job done, technology just makes it more efficient. But, it’s all about bringing the tools to the user to make their lives easier.

So, yes, it’s all about the users, the people.

Fantastic.

Where can our listeners connect and collaborate with you in an online, unsecure setting?

I’m around quite a few places.Obviously they can get to us with email. They can go to Collabraspace website. We also have a website for the book. There are links there to follow us on Twitter and Facebook; we have a blog there. They can get in touch with me, Ray dot Schwemmer at Collabraspace dot com.

Ray, this has been a great show. I appreciate your time and your patience here with this show.

Thank you for having me on. You asked some very good questions, a few I’ve never heard before. It’s always nice to have to think about them before answering. I appreciate your time in having me on.

Ray Schwemmer, Co-Author of Dynamic Collaboration: Part 2

RAY SCHWEMMER is the president, CEO, and co-founder of CollabraSpace, a software company that has focused on secure collaboration solutions for industry and government customers since 1998.

He just co-authored an excellent book for anyone who now considers how to unleash the power of collaboration within their organization and on a secure basis. His book is Dynamic Collaboration: How to Share Information, Solve Problems, and Increase Productivity without Compromising Security.

He joined the show recently to talk about his book, his company's solutions and the changing dynamics and expectations in the collaboration conversation.

You can listen to our conversation here.

You can read Part One of our conversation here.

Chapter 2 is about plugging into your existing infrastructure and chapter three is about existing architecture. When I think about the first steps of dynamic collaborative tolls and resources, particularly the first challenges, it's not the external infrastructure or architecture, it's the internal. The users and their psychology of trust and their emotions and willingness to learn new ways to trust, accept change and failure.

You’re right there.

You’re not going to put a collaborative tool in an organization and everyone’s going to suddenly start trusting each other. Trust has to come from within the organization.

Now, within the organization, they have to set up the principles by which people share data and trust each other. Collaborative environments just makes it more efficient.

But, within a collaborative environment, if a company does set up those trust principles so that I’m sharing data with others and I trust others who are not going to share it any further or keep it within the confines it’s supposed to be in. And that’s usually guided by corporate principles, corporate rules on who shares what data with each other.

But, corporations should, and we’ve seen this too, where they don’t want to share. They need to go out of their way to make rules or encourage people to share by who is sharing, rewarding those who do and are basically collaborating and being efficient.

And you’ll see as collaborative environments go on, teams will form and they’ll solve problems better, faster, than other people. And if those people get rewarded, and it’s reminded back to the employees that:

“These people collaborated and here’s how they did it.”

That’s a good lesson learned for the rest of the organization. So, you can help build that trust in the collaborative environment that way.

But again, if the organization doesn’t have trust to start with then bringing in collaborative tools is just not going to bring that trust in.

Excellent point there.

Staying in this soft, squishy content, you talk about the importance in understanding that collaboration is a service and not a product. And services are experienced. Why is that distinction so commonly not understood and why is it important to understand it.

If you go in a lot of organizations, you know the IT shop, the accounting department needs an accounting system so they stand that up for them. And they acquire a product and install it and everybody in accounting uses it. They go to HR, the same thing. They work their way around the organization.

There are certain sets of tools that the entire organization needs to use. And collaboration is one of them. So, if you go out and get one tool and plop it down in there. Now, first of all you got to get all these different organizations to use the right tool. And that’s a problem right there. If I’m the HR guy, I may or may not go to this collaborative tool. And accounting department’s the same way and legal, so on through the organization.

IT departments have looked at bringing those tools where they are needed across the organization. A great example for that is a single sign-on solution. So, that when you log in to one application you log in once every day and you log in to every application.

There used to be a time where every application you logged into you had to have a separate password for. Organizations have stood up a solution for that.

Our argument for that is that collaboration should be at that same layer because it is across the organization. Just like that same way with that package you bought that integrated a single sign-on tool, you should be able to do that with collaboration. So, I sign-on and I can see everyone who’s logged in. Same thing with the accounting tool. If I’m in HR and I need to talk to someone in the accounting department I can see if they’re online and click on them and suddenly we’re away collaborating.

So, thats why we stress this idea of a service. It’s been proven in other areas where services that need to be used across the organization and as opposed to a product that’s used in one organization.

At the tip of the collaboration experience is the Presence Awareness Tool. Such a simple thing, but so critical. Why is the Presence Awareness Tool so critical?

The easiest thing is if you went on Facebook and nobody was there, what would you do? If you log in, it’s all about the people. You want to see who else is online and I can reach out to and collaborate with.

I have a problem and I need an answer so who’s online. Without that, it’s like shooting darts in the dark. If I could just see someone from HR is online then I could just reach out to them. Maybe the system can tell me their skillsets and that’s a good match for me. Maybe the system’s smart enough to say:

“Hey search for someone with these skills.”

So, you type in you need someone who handles these types of things with HR and it pops back 3 people and tells me that 2 of them are online. Well, now i can click on one and be engaged with them. If I don’t know who’s online then what’s the point of my collaborating - I don’t know who to collaborate with.

That’s excellent. That’s a great description, too.

Back in the day I ran a conference call company. And this Presence Awareness Tool was just coming out with some of the web conference services, 7-8 years ago. And the first reaction was fear.

Why do people need to know if I'm at my computer or 'available'. Won't that add to my work or encourage interruptions?

What has driven this change in thinking from fear to cool?

Um, that’s a good question.

Part of it’s probably generational. Younger people today, you know people who grew up with these kinds of technologies, they’re used to being online 24 x 7 and being contacted. you bring them to a 2-day conference and tell them they’ll have to leave their cellphones at the door they’ll probably have a heart attack on ya.

Part of the workforce today is just so used to being connected. The other part of the workforce, maybe some of the people who’ve resisted it 7-8 years ago, they probably have seen some of the successes of it.

“Hey, if I use some of these tools, you know, it will help me perform my job well.”

That’s a great motivator right there. If they see someone having some successes with it, then they’re going to get over their fear pretty quick.

I think people also realize that they could send you a chat message right now and you don’t have to answer even though you’re online. I could call your cellphone right now. How many times have you et a call go to voicemail?

I think people have become accustomed to:

“I’m online right now, but I’m not going to talk to you right now.”

And some of the tools today will allow you to say,

“Hey, I’m online right now. But, I’m busy.”

Some of the tools allow you to say:

“Hey, I'm in a conference right now. If you send me a chat, I’m not going to get back to you.”

It’s probably wrapped up in there somewhere.

It’s amazing how far we’ve come in 7 or 8 years, isn’t it?

It is.

As we spoke at the beginning, you currently are CEO and founder of CollabraSpace, working with private and government clients on collaboration solutions since 1998.  Within your clients and prospects, who drives the decision to contact you: employees or executives?

I think both. Maybe the executives are looking at trying to plan a collaborative environment. Sometimes they push it down a couple of layers to actually implement it. Then you get the people who are implementing contacting us and asking us our opinions.

And then sometimes you even get a corporate environment that has a collaborative tool ready, but it’s not being used or it doesn’t integrate into what a project is doing. So, we’re also seeing some projects where they’re saying this type of thing where:

“I’m building this kind of capability for a group of users and it would be cool if all the users could collaborate with each other while they’re using the tool.”

They’ll contact us.

But, it’s pretty much at both levels I guess.

This leads us to the next question. One of my favorite topics is employee engagement, particularly its positive impact on a company's bottomline. Do you see dynamic collaboration as a key experience increasing levels of employee engagement?

Absolutely. If you set up a collaborative environment properly and your employees are motivated to use it, we talked about trust and that kind of stuff earlier, so you got those pieces in place, being able to have a problem and reach out and find a team to have you work on it, is a great enabler for people.

If I can go in and just say:

“I have this kind of problem and I need it solved today.”

Then I can search and see that these 3 people may have worked on something similar to that or may even have the answer to my question, it enables me so much more as an employee to product results.

I think it is definitely a key.

It seems obvious. But sometimes I think our listeners may not have the time to make the connections.

And dynamic collaboration is key to creating customer evangelists, a loyal volunteer sales force as Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba called them. How do companies create a secure collaborative environment and at the same time open the door for their customers to join them?

That’s a very good question. So, let’s assume that you have this collaborative environment stood up internally in your organization. And it’s secure. So, I would argue that as part of that security piece you can segment off who has information to what pieces of this virtual environment.

I could create a space, a virtual space, where customers can come in and interact with my employees. I could set it up so they could only see employees from the sales organization. I don’t want them to see my accounting and HR people. When they log in, they’ll basically get the capability to look at whose online from the sales team or maybe only their particular sales people are logged on and if so then they can collaborate with them.

It gets a little trickier trying to figure out now where are you giving people access to. Are you giving them access to something that’s on your intranet? And how do they traverse your firewall and things like that. So, you may need to stand up a 2nd server...where external users can log into and your internal users can log in as well and collaborate with them.

That gets a little trickier. But it’s all possible. And it’s based on what level of security do you want in your system.

But, bringing your customers in and allowing them to engage with people online is a great step for companies to take.

I’m not an IT guy but when you mentioned the separate server for this collaborative environment where you could partition off certain data, that sounded like a great idea.

Do you have an example of a client who did this, obviously keeping client information confidential ?

Yeah. I’m trying to think. I believe we’ve done it for one or two customers. And I think we basically set something up in a DMZ so that external customers would not get inside the company firewalls for some fear they had there. And what happened was you basically end up with 2 different collaboration servers, which are talking to each other through the firewalls. And the entry to one internally let’s them see the external people and they can in essence go to that external server and collaborate with them there.

That’s a little more technically difficult, but it is possible.

**********

Part Three of this conversation will be published tomorrow, Saturday, October 22.

Ray Schwemmer, Co-Author of Dynamic Collaboration: Part 1

RAY SCHWEMMER is the president, CEO, and co-founder of CollabraSpace, a software company that has focused on secure collaboration solutions for industry and government customers since 1998.

He just co-authored an excellent book for anyone who now considers how to unleash the power of collaboration within their organization and on a secure basis. His book is Dynamic Collaboration: How to Share Information, Solve Problems, and Increase Productivity without Compromising Security.

He joined the show recently to talk about his book, his company's solutions and the changing dynamics and expectations in the collaboration conversation.

You can listen to our conversation here.

Ray, I know as a CEO you're superbusy. Now, you're a co-author and leading the charge changing the world. Thank you for taking the time to be on the show.

Thanks for having me on.

Before we jump into you book, let’s get a little background. You co-founded CollabraSpace in 1998, right?

That’s correct.

What was the market like in 1998 for collaboration solutions?

At that point, a lot of the tools that were out there did one or two things. You might have a chat tool or document-sharing. Even back in those days when we started the issues were:

• whether you had it running on every desktop as opposed to a browser like most systems do today.

• how do you deploy these systems out to the many different locations?

• was code written in C?

It was quite different than where we are today.

What was the thinking among your clients back then, as far as their concerns and what drove them to contact you?

I think back then people were just starting to look at this thing called ‘collaboration’. Most people had looked at some chat rooms they’d seen on the internet and they thought:

“Hey maybe we can bring this internally here...Maybe there’s a better way for us to share some information.”

Those were the main things that came in.

I think also back then there was the cultural thing. There were also the times when people would stand up some things and sit back and look at it and say:

“What is this?”

It could have been the generational thing. We also had people who hadn’t used chat rooms on the internet. The internet wasn’t as big at your house at that point. So, bringing in new technology that people weren’t familiar with as they are today.

What drove that change to embrace this technology? Novelty or global competition or just the kids doing cool things.

Probably a combination of all of the above.

I think there were some successes early on. The pace of business has increased dramatically over the past 10 years. So, companies were looking for how to do they stay competitive, how do they bring the workforce to produce more.

Combine that with the fact that you had a new generation of kids coming up who came to the workforce with the expectations that they have all these cool tools on their computer at home, why don’t I have them here at the workplace.

It was all those things. People coming to work expecting all those things, corporations looking maximizing employee efficiencies, and people using the tools and getting more comfortable with them.

Again, congratulations on writing a great book. I have a copy here with me. I hope everyone goes out and gets a copy.

Who did you write this book for? Describe your intended reader, where do they sit within an organization? What's their biggest challenge or fear? How does your book help them?

We wrote it for anyone who was interested in standing up collaborative environments. We didn’t want it to be too technical. We have a technology background; it delves a little bit in to the technologies.

But, we really want to talk about looking a different way at collaboration. A lot of organizations have stood up collaboration, internally in their organization. We’re definitely not looking at the consumer market. We’re not saying:

"Hey, we’re not standing up collaborative environments for people to use on the internet for sharing pictures of their kids or something."

That’s kinda been done.

What we’re talking about is how do you take some of those technologies that you see on the internet and how do you bring them into your organization and have the viral effect that you’ve seen on the internet in some sights.

As I’ve said, people have tried this in the past. People stand up a tool and then it doesn’t get the use that they thought that it would. Our approach was to write this for people who have stood something up and said:

“I really thought that everybody should use it and they have not.”

We can give them some lessons on different things they can try. Well, companies now have people coming to them and saying:

“Why can’t we build in collaboration into this tool we are building? Why can’t we stand up collaboration?”

And hopefully we can give them a different perspective on that.

You did. I think you did a great job.

Thank you.

My friend, Erika Andersen, wrote a great book titled Being Strategic. She asks the reader to define their reasonable aspiration or hoped-for future.

What was yours, what was your reasonable aspiration or hoped-for future, when you wrote this book?

We have a different view on collaboration. As I kind of alluded to there, people stand up collaborative environments and you can go on the internet and use the examples of Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn. For those who are successful, there are thousands who have failed. In a corporate world, there are some successes and lots of failures.

Our approach here was to educate people on what we think is a different approach in a corporate world. In a consumer world, you stand up a site, you go out and promote it and try to get users to log in. In a corporate world, the corporation already knows what tools people are using, what they log into, how many hours people are using different tools.

So, the way we looked at it was instead of standing up a separate collaborative site and hoping people use it, why don’t you integrate it into your existing tools that people use.

“This way when I bring up my accounting tool or my HR tool, I’m logged in and I can see everybody else on line and I can collaborate with them.”

So, it was really about educating people in a different way of looking at collaboration in a corporate world. That was our goal here.

Being a CEO I know metrics are near and dear to your heart. What are the metrics you're using with this book to measure your progress towards that reasonable aspiration?

So, maybe I failed at CEO school for the book. We didn’t really set any major metrics. We didn’t say:

“Hey, we want to sell a thousand books or we want to sell a million books.”

We’re really hoping, we’re looking at some things. We’ll look at how many books we’ll sell. You know, we’ve set up a blog, things on the internet. People are following us a little bit on Twitter. We’re looking at the community we’re growing. How we’ll effect that. We’re also looking at how people will call us up after reading the book and say:

“Hey, we want to get your advice on something.”

We’ll measure that.

We’ll measure a lot. But we didn’t set goals to like sell a million books and help 400 companies in the future. They would be nice numbers.

Ok. So,everybody has a definition about collaboration. What it means, what it entails. Not many include secure in their definition. So, let's start with that umbrella term, Collaboration. How do you define it?

You’re right. I think it’s one of the biggest problems we see out there.

If you do a google search on ‘collaboration’, you’ll find companies that offer email services and they consider that collaboration. And it is.

We really look at collaboration as allowing people to work together virtually just like if they were working in the same office together. So start thinking about that. How do you do the things you do in an office environment.

You need to be able to talk with the other people. That can be with chat or a phone call.

You’re going to share documents with each other. You’re going to drop them on their desk. How do you do that virtually if my desk is on the other side of the world?

How do we have meetings in a conference room, and get 20 people together, and all view a powerpoint presentation or draw on the whiteboard?

We look at what people do today to work. And, now, how do you take that to a workforce that is distributed around the world and is also mobile.

So, that is what we look at collaboration. So, it could be blogs, it could be whiteboards, it could be audio-video conferencing, it could be web presentation. A whole list of things go into that.

But the core question is how do you take people who are working around the world now and bring them together so that they think they’re in one room, one office, one conference center, one building.

Perfect.

So, now how do you define Secure Enterprise Collaboration?

Well, security. That’s a big part of any collaborative environment.

You get on the one hand the people how want to share information. On the other hand, you need to make sure you don’t share it with everybody.

One of the things we talk about a lot is if you went out and used internet services and all your employees are going to go on to Facebook, and that’s where they’ll collaborate, You have to keep in mind that your information is now outside your corporate walls. Your corporate secrets are out there. For instance, I have one of my friends who happens to be a competitor.

From a security point of view, collaboration has many great benefits. People working together, coming up with better solutions, quicker. You also have to be aware that if you let the information go too far it could be detrimental to your company.

Going back to my previous case of you want to be like your office environment. Your HR department doesn’t share payroll data with everyone; it’s locked in some drawer. You need to make sure your collaborative environment has the ability to say:

“This piece of data over here, this series of information is not available to everyone. “

Security is very important.

And it’s why a lot of people stumble in setting up a collaborative environment. They get wrapped around an axle of:

“We can’t share this data. We can put it in a collaborative environment because we can’t share it with everyone.”

You need to make sure your collaborative environment can segment data that can be shared with various groups.

Perfect. Thanks.

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Parts Two and Three of this interview will be published on Friday and Saturday, October  21 and 22 respectively.

President Obama: 3 Things To Break The Fear Barrier

Tom Rieger, author of Breaking the Fear Barrier: How Destroys Companies from the Inside Out and What to Do About It, joined the show recently.

• You can listen to our conversation here

You can read the interview here:

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three

From Tom's profile page at Gallup:

Mr. Rieger is a Senior Practice Expert for Gallup, has pioneered the study and science of organizational barriers. Rieger is an expert in applying behavioral economic principles to uncover how complex systems self-destruct -- and how to correct those problems. Through this work, he has become a recognized leader in developing methods and frameworks to identify and remove barriers to organizational and societal success.

Rieger joined Gallup in 1994. In addition to his work as the leader and chief architect of Gallup's consulting on organizational barriers, he is an expert in international research and polling methods and developing and applying statistical models to complex organizational issues.

Tom's book is imminently readable and includes imminently doable tips and steps you can take within your own organization to reverse this rising tide of fear that only serves to threaten your organization's sustainability. He's pulled the company's global research across a dozen countries spanning six continents to identify the "fear barrier" and to show how and why fear destroys companies. The book explains how to transform a fear-plagued organization into one that is courageous and unstoppable.

Fear seems to grip our country right now, particularly in businesses and jobs and the economy. So, it made sense to ask him how can we address this problem. I asked him:

We've reached the imagination moment in our show. It's not that big a leap. Fear is an emotional response to a perceived, often imaginary, threat. Let's imagine President Obama is on line two in your office. He’s on vacation, but he’s listening in. He leaves you a message.

Tom, he says. This is President Obama. I think our national conversation is dominated by fear and its manifestations. What are three things we as a nation can do to break the fear barrier? Can you come up to the White House or over to Martha’s Vineyard and share your thoughts?

What do you say to him?

He answered:

Well, first of all I’d say:

“Yeah I would love that opportunity to come. I’m essentially a patriot at heart so anything I can do to help my country I’d love to do."

But to answer that question...

First I’d say we need a mission to rally around. We need a place to plant a flag in the ground and stand behind. You look back at the ’60’s and the space race. Look at what happened in this country. You had industry of all different types and people all around all working together trying to achieve something important.

The side benefits of that were huge. If you look at the innovations and the manufacturing, especially in the world of micro-processing and computers. But, the sleeping giant needs to be awoken; it needs to be focused on accomplishing something. This country can accomplish absolutely incredible things when it’s aligned with and around something and we’re all on the same page.

That’s number one.

Secondly, I think we need to shift the paradigm. We need to start thinking about:

“Well, how can we remove the barriers that exist to job creation. “

Every job you create creates more and more people paying into the system rather than draining it. When that happens you have a lower deficit, you have a more prosperous nation, without having to just focus on who’s giving up what to whom. And that, I think, is what leads us to the 3rd thing.

There’s way too much focus on that. We gotta stop acting like a couple of dogs fighting over a bone trying to think about well who’s going to have to give up something. If you look at the whole concept of fear of loss, there’s some great work by a Nobel Prize winner named Daniel Kahneman that showed there’s twice as much pain with loss than trying to gain. What that means is people will fight twice as hard to avoid a loss even if that means forgoing a gain because there’s so much pain in that perception. If all we focus on is what we’re giving up and nothing else, then that fear of loss, I guarantee you will lead to barriers and those barriers will bring any hope of progress right down to a screeching halt.

So, if we can align around the mission, focus on removing barriers to job creation, both for private companies and public sector, and then stop focusing so much on who has to give up and what and instead on what we can achieve together, then I think we can actually make some progress here.

 Want more from Tom Reiger?

Follow him on Twitter.

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Some may say this is inappropriate.

This is politics! And you never discuss politics at Thanksgiving Dinners, backyard barbecues and on a business radio show.

I disagree. As long as only politicians can discuss solutions for our country then those solutions and their interested audiences will remain off-limits, political, for those who make this brand, our country, run. And only politicians, these days that's only career politicians, can discuss those ideas and spoon-feed solutions to the public.

I see our times as an all hands-on-deck opportunity and not a crisis. That opportunity is for each of us to lend our hands, our conversations, our ideas to find and share solutions. In our absence those challenges are left to ideologues, vested interests and politicians of all stripes and partisan persuasion. We...are the only ones with vested interests. And now we have, with social media and the urgency of today, the opportunity to reclaim our place at this table and discuss our ideas to solve our challenges. At the very least, we can listen to a discussion until we are ready to speak up.

 

Solving Minimum Wage Debate and Providing Affordable Housing

How Can We Solve the Minimum Wage Debate?

Richard Troxell Reveals How a Universal Living Wage Can Help Solve
Homelessness and Stimulate the Economy

Richard Troxell knows what it is to be homeless.

After serving his country in Vietnam, he returned home to an ungrateful nation. He was homeless for several years before finally finding work as a mechanic and a place to live.

Troxell, a relentless advocate for the homeless and author of Looking Up at the Bottom Line, serves on several committees and works with numerous charity organizations with the aim of ending homelessness. In 1997, he designed a formula to fix the Federal Minimum Wage, an idea that he believes will have as many benefits for the homeless as it holds for businesses and the economy in general.

Homelessness is a vicious circle, because in order to find a home you need to find work, but without a living wage job the work ends up not sustaining the worker, who again becomes homeless.

The problem is that in any city in the USA, the minimum wage isn’t enough to support a full time worker. Housing costs in major metropolitan areas are far beyond the reach of minimum wage earners, and once someone gets a job, they no longer qualify for support programs. So, it’s a catch 22 – if they find work, they still can’t afford to live on their own. So they stay homeless and accept whatever public assistance that is available to them.

But, what's important to recognize is that most folks want to work! No one feels good if they are not working.

Troxell’s solution is to replace the minimum wage with a Universal Living Wage, which would create a minimum wage that is proportionate to the living expenses of where the worker lives and works. Troxell’s formula is simple and it’s based on the concept that if people are willing to work a 40-hour week, they should at least be able to afford an efficiency apartment regardless of where they live. The formula includes three basic established ideas:

• Work a minimum 40-hour week

• Spend no more than 30% of income on housing

• Index the minimum wage to the local cost of housing, as set each year by the US Department of HUD (Fair Market Rents)

This is a win-win situation for both businesses and employees that can help start rebuilding the fabric of the American family. It first enables people experiencing homelessness to find jobs, housing and be able to feed themselves without any public assistance. This is huge. This will help reduce the economic burden on taxpayers, while at the same time it will stimulate the economy.

It adds consumer dollars to the economy, while simultaneously eliminating the need for tax dollars that were previously spent on supporting people experiencing homelessness.

Troxell also believes that businesses will benefit from the plan.

While the initial response may be to complain about having to pay workers more, the truth is that this plan will create far better retention rates for the business where they are employed. Businesses incur costs for high employee turnover, including retraining and productivity losses when a worker resigns, because they found higher paying work or are rendered homeless due to the low wage. What little extra they might pay in addition to the current minimum wage would be offset by higher productivity, higher employee retention and lower retraining costs.

Besides, what could be better for business and taxpayers than to introduce more consumers into their marketplace, while stimulating the economy naturally rather than counting on bailouts? The Universal Living Wage is a consumer-friendly, taxpayer-friendly, business-friendly idea whose time has come.

Yes, it has.

About Richard R. Troxell

Richard Troxell has become both a successful entrepreneur and a prolific philanthropist, and an advocate of the homeless. Today, he is the creator and Director of Legal Aid for the Homeless, and founder and President of House the Homeless, where he has daily interaction with the disabled homeless citizens of Austin, Texas. Currently, he sits on the Board of the National Coalition for the Homeless. His work has been recognized by the Pennsylvania Senate, The Governor of Texas, The United Nations, The Philadelphia Bar Association and countless others. His work is culminating in his drive to "fix the Federal Minimum Wage" as the National Chairman of the Universal Living Wage Campaign.

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I've had the pleasure, the honor really, to interview Richard Troxell twice.

You can listen to those conversations here and here.

You can read transcripts of those conversations here and here.

Why do I interview a passionate champion for the rights and needs of the homeless? The answer sounds callous. But 300-400-700,000 homeless are 300-400-700,000 individual resources we invested in with education and healthcare and military training and job-training with now outdated skills that now go...unproductive. By unproductive I mean their talents find no means of expression, no ways to give back to the economy. And their inability to generate baseline incomes for themselves means they have no means to...well, spend in our consumer-based economy. That's the callous side.

The other side is how does the economy with the world's biggest GDP and the greatest number of millionaires and billionaires create an ever-growing number of homeless? How many dreams are lost, how many entrepreneurs or doctors or positive community contributions are lost in the slow gradual slide to being homeless?