Competitive Behaviors versus Competitive Strategies

By Dan Coughlin

There has been a lot of talk lately about what the U.S. needs to do to be more competitive on the global stage. On March 13, 2009, Charlie Rose interviewed Michael Porter about his eight steps to fix the U.S. economy. Here is the link: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12809.

These types of conversations are about strategy. A strategy is a guideline for making decisions that affect the type of organization you will be and the type of activities your organization will do in the future. Strategies are important for businesses and for countries. Without a strategy there will likely be no connection between the types of activities people in the organization are doing or the people they are working to serve. Without a strategy, either written or unwritten, guiding your organization, you will likely end up with a very weak brand, virtually no effective innovations, and very poor results.

However, even with the most brilliant strategy, you cannot compete effectively as an organization if the people in the organization are not acting in a competitive way. In this article, I’m going to focus on how individual competitive behaviors can make an organization more successful. You can extrapolate these behaviors for the members of your organization, and for the citizens of the U.S. and for any other country in the world. We don’t just need the U.S. to be more competitive. We need every country to be more competitive. That’s how we raise the bar on a global basis. It starts with individuals behaving in competitive ways.

What Competitive Behaviors Are Not

There are certain behaviors that some people think demonstrate competitiveness, but I argue that they don’t. I call these behaviors The Three Killer B’s: bravado, boorish, and brutal. Bravado is synonymous with brag, bluster, and bombast, and it means a swaggering display of courage. Boorish is synonymous with uncouth, unmannered, and insensitive, and it means a coarse and blatant lack of sensitivity to the feelings or values of others. Brutal is synonymous with ferocious, gross, and rude, and means to act in a savage, cruel, and inhuman way. (Source: dictionary.com) Bragging about your past experiences, eating like an animal or dressing like a slob or swearing like a drunken fool just because no one will tell you to stop, and putting people down and having to win every single conversation in the hallway does not make a person competitive. Repulsive perhaps, but not competitive.

Talking with bravado, acting boorish, or being brutal might intimidate other people in the short term, but they do not help the intimidator or his or her organization compete more successfully. There is a dramatic difference between intimidating people and competing successfully.

Look for Analogous Competitive Situations

I suggest you think of a competitive situation you’ve been in outside of the business world. It could be sports, music, acting, academics or some other activity where you had to compete against other people or your own past performance in order to win. You can then use insights from that activity to see more clearly how to be competitive in the business world. For me, sports provide that analogy.

Competitive Business Behavior #1:
Define Winning

Winning in sports is very easy to understand. You get a schedule of games to play in, and then in each game you either win or lose. At the end of the season, you either win the championship or not. In practice many drills are set up to immediately determine whether or not you won in a particular activity.

Winning in business is not always as short term or easy to figure out. However, in order to compete, you have to define what winning means in your role as a business leader and you have to be able to measure it.

Some parts of business are easy to define in terms of winning: growing revenue, reducing cost, increasing profit, beating last year’s sales numbers, adding five new customers, and so on.

Other times winning is not as obvious, but these aspects can be more important in terms of being successful over the long term. This might include improving the reliability of small parts in a product that no one ever sees, reducing the complexity of a customer’s instruction guide for one of your products, or improving the impact of a presentation on an audience member’s future behaviors, which can only be loosely measured by anecdotal information down the road and somewhat by his or her actual results.

I like to think about Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios. It takes them four years to make a film, and then over the course of a few weekends their financial success is largely determined. Certainly they include box office receipts and DVD sales and video downloads as one way of defining whether or not they won, but I also believe they define winning as improving the quality of the images and the development of their characters and the impact of the message within the film.

Within your role in your organization, what would have to happen for you to be able to say you’re winning? I’m not talking about your title or income or authority level. Those are by-products of winning. Increasing your salary so you can do meaningful things for other people might very well be fueling your energy at work, but that’s not the type of winning I’m referring to. I’m talking about what would have to happen in terms of an outcome for your organization in order for you to say that you and your team have won? If you don’t know how to define a victory, then how can you compete?

In order to win in business, you can’t just plow through a ton of activities and work a million hours and call yourself a winner. You actually have to impact some outcome, some measure of success. What is yours?

Competitive Business Behavior #2:
Prepare to Win

If you’re a competitor, you don’t just show up and perform. You prepare as well as you can to deliver a winning performance. I think if people spent less time talking about being competitive and more time preparing to win in their organizations, they would actually become much more competitive. Talking about winning is in-the-public-eye, exciting and sexy. Preparing to win is behind-the-scenes, mundane, and ordinary. Take that improved instruction manual as an example. No one in the media is going to write a front-page story about how much easier it was for customers to understand the instruction manual or how it helped the customer to assemble the product in 40% less time, but that’s an example of winning within an organization that helps the organization to be much more competitive in the long run. To improve the instruction manual perhaps the person studied the competition’s materials and studied instruction manuals from other industries. Maybe this person prepared himself or herself by taking courses on effective writing. All of this behind-the-scenes preparation pays off in fewer customer complaints and more loyal customers.

Competitive Business Behavior #3:
Bring an Intense, Sustained Desire to Win

Do you show up just for the paycheck, or do you have an intense, burning desire to win within the framework of how you have defined winning?

Let’s switch back to my sports analogy. The athletes regardless of their sport who win consistently over the long term have a burning desire to constantly prepare and improve within their sport.

It doesn’t matter what role you have or what industry you work in. If you want to be a competitive person at work, you have to have a burning desire to do what you do as well as you can do it. I’ve been writing monthly articles on business leadership at this desk since September 1999, and right now I’m trying my very best to craft a message that will hopefully have a tremendous impact on your competitiveness as a business leader. This article might not help you, but I have an intense desire to try to help you be a great business leader. What is your intense desire at work? What are you willing to work for?

Competitive Business Behavior #4:
Persevere through Challenges

Life is difficult. These are the three famous opening words from Scott Peck’s book, The Road Less Traveled. They are powerful because they are true. On the road to winning you are going to face challenges on a daily basis. We all know that. We also all know that we have to persevere in order to win. The tricky part is to actually keep going. This is where a sense of purpose comes in. You need a purpose, a reason for working, a reason to be competitive, a reason to keep on keeping on. What is yours? Why do you want to win at work? Do you want a greater salary so you can provide for your family and pay college tuitions and help your aging parents? Those are noble reasons to keep on keeping on.

There are other reasons why people persevere. They want to leave a legacy of having mattered. They want, as the late Steve Jobs used to say, to put a “dint in the universe.” They want to fulfill something deep inside of themselves. These are also noble reasons to keep on keeping on.

For an athlete to compete, he or she has to persevere within a practice, a game, a season, and a career. For a business leader to compete, he or she has to persevere within a meeting, a project, an organization, and with suppliers and customers. You have to keep going in order to have an opportunity to win.

Competitive Business Behavior #5:
Analyze Performances and Improve in the Details

Being competitive doesn’t mean that you have to be always performing. Sometimes, or maybe more like a LOT of times, you need to stop doing and step back and reflect on what you’ve done. Look at your performance and ask yourself what you’re doing that is helping your chances of winning, what you are doing that is hurting your chances of winning, and what you could be doing that might increase your chances of winning. Reflection and discernment are perhaps the two most underrated aspects of competitive business behaviors, but they are two of the most important. Rather than wasting time on bravado and boorish, brutal behaviors, I encourage you to step away from your activities and really think about what would make them even more effective.

One caveat: don’t cheat. Cheating might help you “win” in the short term, but it can also ruin your career and destroy your organization. Winning only counts if you are competing in an honest way.

Competitive Business Behavior #6:
Be Comfortable with Other People Getting Uncomfortable

On the road to trying to win you will likely encounter people who simply don’t want to put in the physical or mental effort necessary to win on a consistent basis. It’s okay to be honest and professional with them and to point out in a very clear way why they need to make some adjustments. This is where your leadership skills come into play. To me, business leadership means influencing how other people think so they make decisions that improve results for the organization in a sustainable way. That’s a long way of saying that business leadership is about competing to win. As Tom Landry, the long-time coach of the Dallas Cowboys, used to say, “Coaching is about getting people to do what they don’t want to do so they can achieve what they want to achieve.”

Even if you have hired competitive people, you are likely going to make them uncomfortable in some way at some point in time. That’s okay. It may very well be that discomfort, okay let’s call it pain, that will help them to learn how to be more competitive in the future.

If you’ve hired people who are not competitive and who aren’t willing to learn how to compete, then you are facing a very difficult decision. Do you move forward with folks who are friendly and who do a good job but who are unlikely to do what it takes to win as an organization, or do you decide to move on without them? Competitiveness and competitive behaviors are essential elements in a winning organization. I encourage you to teach and develop competitive behaviors in your organization, but also realize that some people are not going to want to compete in order to continually improve and to press on for victory. In those cases, you have to decide what you are going to do. It’s not about bravado, boorishness, or brutality. You can still maintain professionalism and integrity in whatever you decide to do.

Conclusion

Intelligent strategies that affect the type of business you will be in and the types of activities your organization will do in the future are important to consider carefully and to create.

However, an organization will not be competitive in the marketplace, and a country won’t be competitive in the world, just because it has a good competitive strategy. What organizations and countries need are employees and citizens who consistently demonstrate competitive behaviors. There is nothing in the world that is wrong with being competitive, as long as we’re clear about what that means. Competitive behaviors include defining what winning means, preparing to win, maintaining a burning desire to win, persevering through obstacles, analyzing performances, and influencing other people even if it means causing them to get very uncomfortable.

About Dan Coughlin

Visit Dan at www.thecoughlincompany.com

Dan Coughlin works with senior-level executives and managers to improve their impact as business leaders on teamwork, execution, innovation, and branding. His clients include McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Abbott, GE, Marriott, Coca-Cola, Shell, Toyota, Boeing, BJC HealthCare, RE/MAX, Subway, St. Louis Cardinals, Jack in the Box, Denny’s, Prudential, Land O’Lakes, ACE Hardware, Holder Construction, Kiewit, McCarthy, and more than 200 other organizations.

New: Common Sense Leader Blog

I recently  started a blog on common sense leadership. Many people I talk to are tired of all the latest trends and fads in leadership and management? Me too. Leadership and management is really quite simple — the common sense application of it is what’s hard. Join a growing number of business people who are fed up with trendy principles and workplace hypotheses created in order to sell sensationalism and books. Check out the new blog and let me know your thoughts and the kinds of content you’d like to see.

Best Purchase I Made All Year

I love my new ScanSnap S1500M! I just do. This product paid for itself not 4 hours out of the box. Tasks that would have taken me days, even weeks, to do were accomplished in a short time.

Business cards that were piled up – done! Oh, and input into my contact manager! Conference manuals and notes stacked beside my desk – now digitized and searchable. Sweet! File cabinet print outs from previous projects are now converted to Word documents.No more paper clutter.

Did I say I love this tool?!

Save files as PDFs, searchable PDFs, Word, Excel, add to your contacts and in color or black and white. Everything I have wanted to do the Fujitsu designers and engineers seem to have thought of. Even if there is a paper jam, a window pops up showing me the last item scanned and asks if I want to rescan it after I clear the rollers and continue with my project. Nice work.

If you are an information hound and collect research, periodicals, newspaper clippings, business cards, and more – you have to get a Fujitsu ScanSnap. If you do, let me know what you think. If you already have one, tell me of your experiences here.

Trends Come And Go While Direction Is Here To Stay

The company I work for, Five Q,  has Subject Matter Experts or SMEs (pronounced “smees”) on a variety of topics. Our staff has expertise in web and marketing related areas, including but not limited to web strategy, usability, SEO, social media, information design, mobile strategy, user experience, email marketing, and project management. Our SMEs are continually researching new trends and directions in web technology. The distinguishing factor between a trend and a direction is that trends come and go, but a direction is a solid shift and movement in web usage and technologies. For our client partners, here are some of the prominent directions we see for 2011 are:

• Mobile-optimized Websites: Web users are “going mobile” at an alarming rate. If you do not have your web content optimized for this platform, you will be behind the curve.
• Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Are you prepared for inbound marketing? Traditionally, we think of marketing as outward focused, but good customer service creates influence that leads to word-of-mouth marketing to generate sales and donations. Are you making an impact?
• Online Brand Management: How are you managing your online brand? Does your audience perceive you as relevant or as a “has-been”? What do people think of when they think of your brand? Taking control of your online reputation is something you can and should do.

How do these new directions fit with your web strategy? Is your plan flexible enough to accommodate change? Five Q can help. Contact us today for more information.

Tight Budgets Breed The Best Innovations

By Dan Coughlin

Innovative thinking means searching for and implementing a better way.

That’s it. Nothing more. Do not overcomplicate this topic. It’s not about pontificating on highly theoretical concepts and wasting a lot of money. Innovation is improvement in motion.

A business innovation is the process of creating additional value for your customers that they will pay for at a greater profit for your business. Your innovations have to do both: increase value to customers and increase the profits that your organizations make. Creating value that erodes profit is not a business innovation. It’s actually a self-induced death blow to your business.

The Process of Innovation

Step One: Focus, don’t spend.

For many years I worked with executives in one of the world’s largest companies. Each quarter we would study the business results of the industry in a wide variety of categories. Every quarter one of my client’s competitors, which was much smaller and had far fewer resources than my client, would win in several key performance categories.

I didn’t understand what was happening. The people at my client organization worked incredibly hard on a large number of projects to create and deliver more value to the customers. They invested enormous resources into these innovative projects. And yet this small competitor kept outperforming them quarter after quarter.

Then one day my client hired one of the key executives from this competitor. On her second week on the job I asked her, “How in the world did your former company keep outperforming your new company?” What she said I will never forget.

She said, “We had very, very limited resources. We couldn’t try a lot of things. We had to succeed with the few projects we could afford to do. We were forced to concentrate on delivering great value on one thing at a time. Here we have tons of resources. And that’s the problem. It allows us not to have to focus in order to survive. So we end up doing too many projects and overwhelming our front-line employees and customers.”

Within a few years my client’s organization was achieving incredible results that were lasting far longer than ever before. What was the difference? In spite of having massive resources to work with my client narrowed their focus to a few key areas. No longer did they allow themselves to go off on three dozen wild tangents. They poured all of their effort and concentration into improving just those few areas. Today they are achieving truly remarkable results quarter after quarter.

Note: recessions are good for innovation. It forces every company to operate within a tight budget and be extremely focused. This tight area of concentration generates far more useful innovations than the conceptual free-for-all that companies often use during good economic times.

In the past six months I have served as a business speaker to the National Automobile Dealers Association, National Association of Home Builders, and a national conference of a major residential real estate company. These were three of the hardest hit industries in the past three years. Yet I didn’t hear talk about gloom and doom at any of the meetings. I saw and heard a lot of ideas about how people were working to create greater practical value for their customers in a few concentrated areas. It was clear that everyone understood that innovative thinking was a requirement to survive through this recession and thrive on the other side of it.

What is the one area that you are going to focus on improving for your customers?

Step Two: Ask.

Of course, one way to find out the best area to focus on for customers is to ask the customers. I suggest a simple question such as, “If there was one thing about your experience with this product (or service) that you would like improved, what would it be?”

Now be patient. Customers don’t have the answer on the tip of their tongues. Allow them to think. If they can’t think of anything, you can follow up with probing questions on specific aspects of the product or service. Another approach is to ask, “What was of value to you with this product, what was not of value to you, and what would have been of greater value to you?”

Before you start to come up with an innovative product or service, identify the statement you are trying to fulfill. Write a one- to three-sentence description of the desired outcome. Say you want to create a new countertop in public bathrooms for the sinks and faucets. Your statement might say, “In the end, we want a countertop that stays dry so people can place a book or small bag on the countertop and the item won’t get all wet.”

Innovations don’t have to be about computers or cell phones or medicine. Innovation is about searching for and implementing a better way. That “better way” can happen in any industry.

Step Three: See.

Remember: insight comes from sight. If you want to understand the customer experience in order to improve it, then go see for yourself what it is that customers go through. Don’t just ask them for ideas on how to improve the experience. Go look for yourself.

A few weeks ago I bought a quarter-sheet cake for a Valentine’s Party at my church. I went to the bakery, and asked the baker if I could see the cake before I paid for it. She opened the box, and it said, “Happy Valentine’s Day, St. Lucas Women in Red”. I looked at the cake, I looked at the baker, and then I said, “Why does it say, ‘St. Lucas Women in Red’?”

She pulled out a sheet of paper, and said, “It says right here, ‘St. Lucas Women in Red’.” I looked at it, and I said, “I meant I wanted the frosting in red, not the words.” She said, “No problem.” She scooped off the red letters and replaced it with vanilla frosting.

At the party that night I told that story. Someone else said, “I had that same experience at that bakery.” If the owner of the bakery had been a customer of the bakery, then he or she may have gained the insight necessary to create a better experience for customers.

Step Four: Stop and start over.

Sometimes you have to start over from scratch. Don’t feel compelled to merely tweak what you’ve always done.

Several years ago McDonald’s sold Salad Shakers. The idea was to put the salad dressing in a cup with the salad ingredients. Then you shook it up and, voila, you had a salad. Only problem was there were a lot of problems. You had to ask for a plate to pour the salad onto after you shook it up, and the salad dressing oftentimes ended up on the customer’s clothing.

So McDonald’s stopped and started over. They gained insights from customers. They went and observed the Salad Shaker in action at restaurants. And then they came out with a completely new salad, their Premium Salad. This new salad has been wildly popular for several years and helped to significantly increase sales of Happy Meals.

Don’t be married to your current way of doing things. Once you’ve identified the statement you are trying to fulfill and have gained insights into what customers really want be willing to take out a blank sheet of paper and start with new ideas on what will deliver the value that you want to deliver.

Step Five: Improve.

A prototype is a model that represents what your idea will look like when it’s put into action. You can create simple prototypes for both products and services. Use cheap, basic materials to assemble your prototype. Use paper, napkins, paper towels, paper clips, cardboard, and Styrofoam. Don’t use expensive materials to make fancy looking models. That’s a waste of money.

When you are explaining your concept you can refer to the prototype and that may very well help the other person understand better what it is you’re trying to get across. My all-time favorite book on innovation is The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley, who is the general manager of IDEO. My favorite quote from that book is, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand pictures.”

Start with five or six prototypes under the area of focus that you selected earlier. Study the prototypes, capture the best ideas, and then continue to make prototypes as quickly as you can as better ideas evolve.

Notice so far you have not spent very much money. You’ve invested time in talking with customers, observing customers, and developing prototypes. The process of innovation is not expensive. The primary investment is a mental investment, not a financial one.

Keep improving the prototypes until you land on the one that you are ready to actually create and deliver into the marketplace. This is where the costs primarily occur. You will have to spend some money in producing the product, training people on the new service they will be delivering, and on marketing the new product or service. However, notice that if you hold off on the spending until this stage you are able to provide something into the marketplace that has a far better chance of success at a lower overall investment from your business.

Step Six: Sell.

At some point you have to attempt to sell your innovation. You can’t innovate in a vacuum forever. You’ve got to put your idea out in the market and see how people respond to it. Innovation does not end with the first sale. Innovation is an on-going process. Find out what customers like and don’t like in your new product or service. And then keep working to make it better and better.

Step Seven: Find out if the proper connection has occurred

One important question to ask after your product or service has been in the market for awhile is, “Do customers feel they received the value that we intended to deliver to them?”

There is value to you regardless of the answer to that question. If customers feel they are receiving the value you wanted to deliver, then you can tell how much this value is worth to them. If customers believe they are receiving some other value that was unintended, then what is it? Perhaps that unintended value can lead to great profits for your business. If customers feel they are receiving no value from this new product or service, then you can work to determine if you need to scratch the idea or merely modify it.

My point is that I don’t want you to just stop after you’ve sent the new product or service into the marketplace. Allow customers to teach you what you don’t know about this new innovation. It doesn’t matter what value you think you put into the marketplace. What does matter is what value your customers think you put into the marketplace.

Keep searching for and implementing a better way. It is the key to surviving in tough times and thriving in good times.

About Dan Coughlin

Dan Coughlin teaches practical ideas that improve business performance. His purpose is to work with executives and managers so they achieve great performances. He is a business keynote speaker, management consultant, executive coach, and author of three books on management performance, including Accelerate, Corporate Catalysts, and The Management 500. Dan’s new book Find a Way to Win: Management Insights from Terry Michler, America’s All-Time Winningest Soccer Coach, will be published in May 2010.

Python Programmers Twice As Productive As Counterparts

Saw an interesting article today by Kurt Grandis. After a six-month productivity study of teams using Python and C#, Kurt states, “Given our development processes we found the average productivity of a single Django developer to be equivalent to the output generated by two C# ASP.NET developers. Given equal-sized teams, Django allowed our developers to be twice as productive as our ASP.NET team.”

A programmer friend of mine says, “You have to write 3x more code in C# just to do the same stuff….”

Read the article on Kurt’s blog and tell me what you think about Python v. C#

Leadership – It Is Not A Label

By Dan Coughlin

It’s official. I’m at the halfway point in my career. Over the last 25 years of working with individuals and groups the topic I have focused on the most is leadership. It is my favorite topic of all. Here are five lessons I’ve learned about leadership.

Lesson #1: Leadership is Not a Label
In studying leaders and in working side-by-side with leaders as a management consultant in over 30 industries, I have always searched for what these individuals had in common. First, here is what they did not have in common: height, size, race, gender, sexual orientation, spiritual focus, political preference, or personality type. Leaders come in every size and shape. Some are men and some are women, some are tall and some are short, some are big and some are thin, some are light-skinned and some are dark-skinned, some are straight and some are gay, some are devoutly spiritual and some are atheists, some are conservative and some are liberal, some are quiet and some are loud. I found no title, income level, or authority that ever automatically made a person an effective or an ineffective leader.

Lesson #2: Leadership Means Influencing How Other People Think
After studying leaders for a long period of time, I discovered that leadership really means influencing how other people think in ways that generate better sustainable results both for the organization and the people in it. It is the person’s ability to influence how other people think that determines his or her effectiveness as a leader.

Lesson #3: Leaders Answer Four Critical Questions
I did find one thing that all effective leaders have in common. They all actively worked to answer the Four Critical Leadership Questions. Now they didn’t call it that and most of the time they didn’t write down these questions. However, each person did work to find the answers to these questions and then persevered to implement his or her answers.

The Four Critical Leadership Questions are:

1. What outcome do I want to improve for my organization and why do I want to improve it?
2. Who do I need to influence in order to improve that outcome?
3. What do I need to influence them to think about?
4. How will I influence them?

Now let’s go through the four questions together and I’ll offer some additional thoughts for each of them. Take out a sheet of paper and write down your answers to these four questions as we go through them.

What outcome do I want to improve for my organization and why do I want to improve it?

Leadership is not acting. You can’t just walk into a room and say with a deep voice, “Let’s go out there and rock the world.” Leadership has to be geared toward improving some outcome. On your sheet of paper, write down the specific outcome you want to improve in your organization. Be as clear as you can be about what it is you want to have happen. Then write down as many reasons as you can think of as to why you want to improve that outcome.

Who do I need to influence in order to improve that outcome?

After you identify the desired outcome, then write down who needs to be involved in improving that outcome. Be clear about whom it is that you need to influence.

What do I need to influence them to think about?

Notice an important point here. The question doesn’t say, “What do I need to tell people to do?” If people are just doing something because they are told to do it, what happens when you’re not there to tell them what to do? The key is to identify what you want them to think about when you are not present. For example, if your desired outcome is to have customers who are vastly more loyal to your brand than your competitors, you might want to influence your fellow employees to think about the value of significantly more loyal customers. Once people start thinking about that outcome they can come up with all kinds of ideas on how to improve the customer’s experience. If they buy into the idea that vastly more loyal customers will improve their careers over the long term, they may very well focus to an even greater degree than you do and in more of a hands-on fashion than you can toward improving the customer experience on a consistent basis.

How will I influence them?

Now we are getting down to the act of leading, or influencing, others. There are 12 different types of leaders I’ve met or studied in my career. Each type can be effective in leading other people, and you can be more than one type of leader as you go about trying to influence your target audience to improve the desired outcome.

Lesson #4: There are Different Types of Leaders
In reflecting on the various individuals I have watched effectively influence the way other people think and generate significant and sustained results for their organizations, I have found that each of them provided one or more of the following types of leadership.

Types of Leaders

1. The Researcher – this person’s advice is based on data and carefully selected interviews and examples from the past.
2. The Exemplar – this person’s behaviors and personal choices model the desired performance so well that he or she influences other people simply by being watched.
3. The Teacher – this person breaks down the idea and explains it so well that other people truly get it and can run with it even when he or she is not present.
4. The Listener – this person simply listens while the other person shares the details of his or her situation.
5. The Visionary – this person describes a compelling dream of what the future can look like and that vision is what people hold on to as they go about their daily activities.
6. The Storyteller – this person tells stories that convey a powerful point.
7. The Coach – this person engages the other person in a conversation and offers advice based on observed behavior.
8. The Facilitator – this person asks open-ended questions and gets multiple people involved in developing the answers.
9. The Collaborator – this person exchanges ideas with the other person and works together with the other person to develop even better ideas.
10. The Organizer – this person influences other people based on the roles he or she places them in and the way he or she distributes resources.
11. The Motivator – this person provides inspiring words with an inspiring tone, but his or her impact oftentimes has a short shelf life.
12. The Dictator – this person tells people exactly what to do and how to do it, but this approach is generally only useful in dramatic life-or-death short-term situations.

To familiarize yourself with these different types of leadership, here are a few exercises for you to consider doing.

Exercise #1: Think of three leaders who affected your life in an important way. Then scan the list above and determine which type or types of leadership they provided.

Exercise #2: Think of a time when you were an effective leader. Then scan the list above and determine the type or types of leadership you provided.

Exercise #3: Write down how you will influence the individuals you identified earlier in question #2. Which type or types of leadership are you going to provide to influence them to think about what you want them to think about?

Lesson #5: You have to Earn Your Platform in Order to Lead

Regardless of the type of leader you want to be in any given situation, you have to earn the right to be the leader. Speaking from a platform is not difficult. You walk up three steps, walk over to the middle of the platform, and start speaking. The greater challenge is to earn your platform as a leader, which is the privilege of having people trust you and be willing to consider your influence. Tony Dungy, the former Indianapolis Colts head football coach, talked about this in his book, Uncommon: Finding Your Path to Significance.

What do you need to do to earn other people’s trust and their willingness to consider your influence? Essentially, you need to do what you said you would do and you need to be seen as being credible on the topic you want to influence them on. Anyone can be a leader, but no one is guaranteed to be a leader. Take the time to answer the Four Critical Leadership Questions, and then every day act in a way that other people can trust you and will want to consider your influence.

Once you have earned your leadership platform never take the privilege of having a platform to influence other people lightly. It can take many years to earn a platform as a leader and a few minutes to lose it.

Interviews with Experts on Leadership

A relatively new feature on my website is my Featured Book Recommendations section. In this section I provide an in-depth book review and conversation with the author(s). Currently this section contains interviews with three experts on leadership.

The first expert on leadership is Steve Jamison, who is in my opinion the world’s best author at interviewing extraordinarily successful athletic coaches and extracting their insights on leadership and teamwork. He has worked very closely in writing books with the late Bill Walsh, the former head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, John Wooden, the former UCLA men’s basketball coach and winner of 10 NCAA Division I Championships, and Brad Gilbert, the extraordinarily successful tennis coach of Andre Agassi and Andy Murray. I reviewed his newest book, The Score Takes Care of Itself, which he wrote with Bill Walsh and his son, Craig Walsh.

The second expert on leadership is Jason Jennings, who has studied in-depth more carefully selected business leaders than anyone I know of. In his most recent book, Hit the Ground Running, he studied the 10 most successful new CEOs in the first seven years of the 21^st Century.

The third expert on leadership is Roy Spence, CEO of GSD&M Idea City, who along with Haley Rushing from GSD&M Idea City, wrote the book, It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For. These two have worked closely with leaders at Wal-Mart, Southwest Airlines, BMW, and a host of other companies.

To read these conversations with the authors and the book reviews, click http://thecoughlincompany.com/featured_book_recommendations.html

About Dan Coughlin
Visit Dan Coughlin’s Free Resource Center on Business Acceleration at www.thecoughlincompany.com. Dan is a student and teacher of practical processes that improve business performance. His purpose is to work with executives and managers so they achieve great performances. He is a business keynote speaker, management consultant, executive coach, and author of three books on management performance, including his newest, The Management 500: A High-Octane Formula for Business Success (AMACOM 2009), which has been endorsed by Jason Jennings, Marshall Goldsmith, and Brian Tracy. Dan’s clients include Coca-Cola, Abbott, Toyota, Prudential, Shell, Boeing, Marriott, McDonald’s, Denny’s, and the St. Louis Cardinals.

Why You Do Not Want A Job

By E. Brown (Repost)

Did you know that many people use the words, job, career, and vocation synonymously? Are you one of them? These words are actually very distinct with distinct definitions.

The Dictionary says of these:

Job – A paid position, responsibility, or piece of work.

Career – Time spent in an occupation for a significant period of one’s life.

Vocation – A strong feeling of suitability for a particular career or a person’s main occupation.

When thinking about your work, how do you see yourself positioned? Many newbies to the workforce see themselves in particular jobs for the money. Yet studies have shown that after 5 to 10 years, money is not the prime motivator many thought it was. Many lack passion in what they do, but it pays the bills so they stick it out in an environment they dread returning to each Monday morning. Today, employees are asking themselves if they are truly making a difference with their lives in regard to work. After all, in the western world, work is such a big part of one’s life, you cannot help but wonder if there is any lasting impact. “Is this all there is?” many are asking.

So, how about you? Are you in a job, a career, or a vocation?

Dan Miller offers the following definitions as you think about your life and its purpose as related to work. Read on.

Job - A job is the most specific and immediate of the three terms. It has to do with one’s daily activities that produce income. The average job is 3.2 years in length, meaning the average person will have 14 to 16 different jobs in his/her working lifetime. Jobs will come and go….

Career - Career comes originally from the Latin word for “cart” and later from the Middle French word for “racetrack.” In other words, you can go real fast for a long time but never get anywhere. That is why in today’s work environment, even physicians, attorneys, CPAs, and engineers may choose to get off the expected track and choose another career. You can have different careers at different points in your life.

Vocation - Vocation is the most profound of the three, incorporating calling, purpose, mission, and destiny. This is the big picture many people never identify for themselves. It’s what you’re doing in life that makes a difference and builds meaning for you, which you can review in your later years to see the impact you’ve made on the world. Stephen Covey says that we all want “to live, to love, to learn, and to leave a legacy.” Our vocation will leave a legacy. The word vocation comes from the Latin vocare, which means “to call.” It suggests that you are listening for something that is calling out to you. Everyone has a vocation or calling. (48 Days To The Work You Love, pages 38-40)

Anyone can do a job. The question is, have you been listening for your vocation? Are you fulfilling a purpose beyond the weekly grind? Are you proud and excited about the legacy you are leaving?

These are not easy questions to answer. They will take some introspection but in the end you will find the time you took was worthwhile. You will approach work with exuberance.

You will have fun.

You will find yourself content.

Contentment is not a word used much anymore. Yet, isn’t that something we all want at the end of the day - contentment?

Go. Pursue your vocation and at the end of your life you will find contentment!

Now tell me about you — are you in a job or vocation?

Share This With Others

Is A Balanced Life Really Attainable?

Note: Reposted as a good reminder

This is one of those primary yet tough life principles for me. I have learned that I need others in my life to hold me accountable to this principle. Accountable to my dreams, goals, and aspirations as a businessman, father, and husband. What is this primary life principle? It is balance.

I can still hear Mr. Miyagi yelling at Daniel LaRusso in the movie, The Karate Kid, “Balance Daniel-san, balance!” There is some truth to this in the concept of “life-balance”. We’re all torn in two directions, as illustrated below:

Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Speaking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Productivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . Serving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Giving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Applying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Confidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Duty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . External Life . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Leisure Meditation Following Listening Recreation Waiting Receiving Learning Humility Solitude Freedom Sorrow Internal Life

So, how do you find balance? Is it appropriate or even possible in this day and age to find balance in life? With all the competing areas above, most people settle for focusing on one area alone.

Sacrifice For The Sake of Excellence
Excelling in one area is good, right? Where would Michael Jordan be, or Donald Trump be unless they excelled in one focused area? By no means am I suggesting we stoop to the level of mediocrity. Yet, while unbridled attention in one area may bring success, it almost always brings failures in many other areas. For example, “it is not uncommon to discover a physician who fails as a parent, an entertainer who fails as a spouse, a pastor who neglects personal health, or an executive who fails at all the other areas,” says author and educator, Dr. Richard Swenson. Stanford Physicist, Dr. Richard Bube, recommends a more balanced approach so that we do not fall into, what he calls, “negative excellence.” A person who chooses to strive for high degrees of excellence in one or two areas often fails in others. While, the person who choses to live balanced has no outstanding levels of excellence but, they do not have any areas of failure either.

There Is An Answer
You’ll be glad to know that life balance is attainable. It starts with time. You thought I was going to say priorities. Business people practice prioritizing a lot. The mistake is, prioritizing dictates that one area is more important than another. What I am saying is that all these areas are important and that to attain balance we need to start with the time we give to each.

Learn to say “no.” In today’s Western society it is easy to overload and overbook ourselves. Saying “no” puts you in control of your time demands. This leads to the next item: Get better control of your life.

Getting control means overthrowing the tyrannical rule of the urgent. Reorient your life around the important, not the urgent things of life.

Next, watch out for the circular trappings of trying to find the imbalance in your life. In doing so you run the risk of becoming even more unbalanced. George Rust warns, “We respond to our sense of imbalance by committing more time and energy to an area in which we feel deficient.” The last thing you need is to commit more time than you have.

Finally, be considerate of others trying to live a balanced life. If someone tells you “no”, learn to accept it. Just because we choose to overburden ourselves doesn’t mean we have to do the same to others.

Balance is attainable. It takes work but it can be done. You might consider sharing your desire to live a balanced-life with a close friend and then ask them to hold you accountable. Give them permission to ask you how you’re doing on a regular basis — and, be honest in your reply.

Related Links
- Living More With Less
- The Overload Syndrome
- Margin
- A Minute of Margin

Saying No Drives Great Careers

By Dan Coughlin

Great organizations are defined by what they say no to. The same is true for great individual careers.

A great career is one where the individual made the type of contribution he or she believed was the optimal use of his or her talents, passions, and values and generated the types of desired outcomes that he or she wanted. In other words, the person generated both the desired input and output.

Manifesting such a career requires saying yes to a few key opportunities and saying no to a huge number of good, and possibly great, opportunities.

Dedicate Yourself to a Proposition

What’s up with Abraham Lincoln? There have been literally hundreds and hundreds of books written about him. These include the most introductory of children’s books to the most sophisticated of adult books. Why did he have such a memorable career? I think it all comes down to one thing. He dedicated his professional life, his career, to two propositions: “united we stand, and divided we fall” and “all men are created equal.” These two propositions guided his career choices and his decisions within his various jobs. In the end, I think that’s what made his career so successful: he remained committed to two very clear, important propositions.

What is the proposition that you are dedicating your professional life to? This will help you a great deal in deciphering what to do and what not to do in your career.

More than twelve years ago I dedicated my professional life to this proposition: mastering business basics drives better sustainable results. Not quite as catchy or life-changing as Lincoln’s propositions, but it’s been clear enough to help me make decisions on what to do and what not to do.

I then determined that the best contribution I can make toward improving performance in organizations across all industries is to uncover these business basics, these processes for improving results in a sustainable way, and then explain them in a user-friendly manner. In other words, I see myself as a teacher. Not a teacher who has all the answers because there are no set answers in business, but rather a teacher who causes people to focus on understanding and executing the basics of business at a very high level. In choosing to be a teacher, I simultaneously chose not to be a manager or an executive.

Before reading on, take out a sheet of paper. Decide on the proposition that you are willing to dedicate yourself to. Write it down. You may end up rewriting it many times over the months to come. With a clear proposition in hand, you can then decide where to place your time and where not to place your time. Your proposition will help you to choose which roles you will want to fill and which roles you will not want to fill.

Choose Your Opportunity Costs Carefully

My third-grade son, Ben, came home with his folder of papers. One of them said, “Explain the idea of opportunity costs using the example of Pizza Hut.” Ben smiled and said, “That’s easy. I like sausage pizza and I like pepperoni pizza. If I choose the pepperoni pizza my opportunity cost is the sausage pizza.” What a great explanation. He learned something valuable that day from Mrs. Edwards. When you choose something that means you are also choosing not to have something else.

As you go about building a great career always take the time to clarify your opportunity costs, the things you are choosing not to have. If you choose to work as an employee, then you are choosing not to be an entrepreneur. If you choose to be an entrepreneur, you are choosing not to work for someone else. Both choices can be good, but you can’t have both simultaneously.

Fifteen years ago I was considering starting my own business. I was a full-time, tenured teacher at a very well known high school in St. Louis. I wrote down my opportunity costs if I left, which included the following: really wonderful students would no longer just show up for me to teach, I would not have colleagues to bond with between classes or at lunchtime, I would not have a guaranteed paycheck every month or a guaranteed job for life, I would not have three months off in the summer time, and I would not have my curriculum to teach handed to me. To me that was a lot of opportunity costs to give up. Only once I became comfortable with what I was giving up was I able to go out on my own. However, once I left I didn’t go back and try to teach at the high school while trying to run my own business.

I know people who did just the opposite. They were entrepreneurs and chose to teach or to work for someone else. They had considered their own opportunity costs of not running their own businesses and they chose to work inside an organization. My point here is you have to choose what you think is the best route for your career. I’m just encouraging you to step back and clarify what you will do and why you will do it and what you won’t do and why you won’t do it.

You have to choose your opportunity costs as much as, and maybe more than, your opportunities. As you consider your next career move, take out a sheet of paper and write down all the things you are not going to get as a result of going in the direction you are considering to take. Make sure you are comfortable with what you are giving up BEFORE you get comfortable with what you are going after.

The Choices of Charlie Rose

Charlie Rose is my favorite interviewer. I knew who he was, but I didn’t really study him until I recently read an article about him in Fortune magazine. Here it is if you want to read it: http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/25/magazines/fortune/charlie_rose.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2009092811

The proposition that Charlie Rose has dedicated his career to is, “wanting viewers to feel like they were eavesdropping on a conversation each night – fully engaged if not actually participating.” He honed his craft over a number of years until he got the opportunity to do The Charlie Rose Show on PBS Television in 1991.

He had walked away from a well-paying program called Personalities in 1990 because he wanted to do a more serious talk show. He also said no to a full-time anchor slot on Sixty Minutes II in 1996 that would have earned him a great deal more than he makes on his own show on PBS. He turned it down because he felt doing his own show was, as he said, “the chance to find your own reality – for yourself, not for others, what no man can ever know. In the end I have not finished the journey.”

In saying no to a variety of opportunities, Charlie Rose defined who he was and who he wanted to become. He wants to do serious interviews with people on important topics without any pretense whatsoever. And he does it very well. I encourage you to invest a few hours at www.charlierose.com and soak in the lessons that are extracted during a variety of his interviews.

Actively Accept Limitations and Consequences

At some point, and I happen to think this is as good a time as any other, you have to get comfortable with the ideas of limitations and consequences. You can spend your whole life trying to be everything in the world and keep chasing one career dream after another. Or you can say, “I’ve chosen this path for my career. Here is the general path where I believe I can make my greatest contribution.” And then be ok operating within the limitations and consequences of the career you have chosen. Actually, there’s real power in deciding on the limitations you are going to accept. It means you are willing to get seriously focused at work that you have chosen to pursue.

In studying hundreds of really successful people, I’ve noticed that the best of the best stick with their chosen path. What’s Steven Spielberg doing these days? He is still making movies. What’s Oprah doing now that she’s made billions? Still interviewing people to find out what they have to offer her audiences. What’s Steve Jobs up to? He’s working on guiding Apple to make electronic technology incredibly useful for consumers. What is Charlie Rose at the age of 67 doing tonight? He’s interviewing one of the world’s movers and shakers. Now that Bruce Springsteen has turned 60, what’s he doing? Putting on great concerts. What’s my mom doing today at the age of 80? She’s still being a great stay-at-home mom as she has been for the past 54 years and caring for other people.

Be OK with who you are and who you are not. Stop wasting time always wanting to be someone else and always wanting a different career path. To manifest a great career you have to stick to the path of your own choosing, and not feel bad about all the paths you have chosen not to pursue. In reality, the more you consciously say no to alternative paths, the more sincerely you say yes to your life’s work.

About Dan Coughlin
Dan is a student and teacher of practical processes that improve business performance. His purpose is to work with executives and managers so they achieve great performances. He is a business keynote speaker, management consultant, executive coach, and author of three books on management performance, including his newest, The Management 500: A High-Octane Formula for Business Success (AMACOM 2009). Read Chapter One from this new book free of charge. Dan’s clients include Coca-Cola, Abbott, Toyota, Prudential, Shell, Boeing, Marriott, McDonald’s, and the St. Louis Cardinals.

Are You A Dreamer?

Do you feel misunderstood?

Do you have trouble remembering details and instructions?

Do you love positive feedback, yet not desire to conform to the cultural mold of expectations?

You are not alone.

Lately, I have been doing reading about cognitive styles. Primarily, there is plenty of information about strong-willed children/adults and High-D personalities as well as compliant children/adults. Yet, there is little information out about “Dreamers.”

Dr. Dana Spears and Dr. Ron Braund have a very interesting book on Dreamers, the passionate-creative-culture-changers of the world. Join me soon for a more in depth look at this type of individual and see if you are a mold breaker.

The Economics Of Social Media

This provocative clip gives you some data to chew on if you are wondering about the ROE and ROI of Social Media. Thanks Socialnomics – Social Media Blog.

Visualizing Your Next Job

By Dan Coughlin

I’ve learned that writing a book is an exhilarating experience. Essentially an author is handed 250 blank canvasses and is allowed to create whatever he or she wants. However, the canvasses do have to fit under a certain theme and the chapters, while being able to stand alone in terms of their uniqueness and contribution, have to connect to one another in some meaningful way.

Your career is like a book where you fill in the blank canvasses.

Writing a book requires a person to both step back and visualize how the chapters fit together and step forward to the keyboard and fill in the words. To build a great career you need to step back and visualize how the various jobs you take on fit together in a meaningful way and step forward to each job and execute your responsibilities masterfully. This article is about stepping back and visualizing how your next job will fit meaningfully within your overall career.

Move within Your Purpose, Passions, Strengths, and Values

You have roughly 1,000 different things you can do as your next job. As a starting point to narrow your job search, I suggest that any job you take on should fit within your purpose, passions, strengths, and values. Take out a sheet of paper and answer these four questions:

1. What is the purpose I want guiding my career?
2. What gets me excited when I do it?
3. What am I good at doing?
4. What beliefs determine my behaviors?

After you answer these questions you’re in a much better position to select your next job. Some people might argue that during a tough recession all of those things should be put on the back burner and that making money should be the driving force. In other words, the only question that should be answered is, “How much does the job pay?”

I don’t think that is a good idea. If you take a job just for the money and you find no purpose in your work, you have no passion for doing it, you are not particularly good at it, and the work does not match your values, then you are destined to fail. So how worthwhile will that good paycheck be then?

Put in place the four critical career screens of purpose, passion, strengths, and values first, and then begin to consider various career moves that fit within them.

Career Move #1: Same Organization, Expanded Responsibilities

The grass is not always greener at the next organization. And if you keep chasing greener grass eventually you will run out of grass to chase. Sometimes the very best career move for you is to stay within your organization.

Two organizations I worked with for over a decade as a consultant are McDonald’s Corporation and Marriott International. I admired these two companies long before I worked with their executives and managers, but in being side by side with these individuals I learned one of their most important keys to success: they provide opportunities for people to expand their responsibilities. At McDonald’s USA, many of their top executives started working in a single restaurant. Then the person became in charge of the restaurant, then oversaw four restaurants, then 16 restaurants, then 500 restaurants, and ultimately all 13,000 restaurants. And with each expansion of responsibilities the person’s breadth and depth of leadership and management skills grew and grew. The same pattern is true within Marriott. I’ve seen a bellman become general manager of major Marriott hotels.

Is there a possibility that you can expand your responsibilities within your organization as your next career move?

Career Move #2: Same Organization, Different Responsibilities

I have a good friend who received her degree in Economics from Northwestern University. She started her career in finance at a large national company. After a few years, her boss offered her a brilliant piece of advice: learn different parts of the business and it may help you later in your career. So she went on to take jobs in marketing, sales, and operations. Today she is the Chief Global Marketing Officer of a massive company that spans countries around the world, and she never had to change employers.

If you’ve become a great performer within a particular function in your organization, then your next best move might be to leave that function and dive into a different one. If you know operations, apply for a job in human resources or marketing or sales or business research. What makes Roger Federer such a great tennis player is his mastery of all of the different aspects of the game. Master the different aspects of your organization and make yourself dramatically more valuable.

What function within your organization could you step into to expand your skill set?

Career Move #3: Same Industry, Different Organization

Sometimes you just need to refresh your perspective, opportunities, and relationships. A lateral move to a different company in your same industry may be just the ticket to reignite your career. Like a professional baseball player who finds new levels of success with a different team, you may find that people view you differently when you walk through a different door.

A friend of mine went from a sales manager position at Procter & Gamble, which was his first employer out of college, to a sales manager position at Brach’s Candy. He was still in the consumer goods retail industry, but he was seen in a new light. Instead of bosses seeing him as the 21-year-old college grad with no experience, he became seen as a fast-rising 25-year-old with experience at one of the world’s greatest companies. Suddenly he was given opportunities that he never would have received as quickly at P&G.

Assess your situation. Are you being perceived by your boss and peers in ways that are keeping you from receiving meaningful new opportunities? Is it them or is it you that is keeping you from advancing in the organization? That’s a tough call to make, but it’s a crossroads we almost all face at some point.

Can you leverage your industry knowledge into a new job that may lead to an even brighter future for your career?

Career Move #4: Same Skills, Different Industry

This is the move that opens up your career chessboard considerably. It is where some careers accelerate to new heights and where others crash and burn. Leaving an industry is fraught with challenges. For one you’re leaving your contacts and relationships and reputation behind you. The personal brand you’ve built for yourself is no longer going to win you new opportunities. You have to start over and build a new brand one for yourself. If you’ve been a star performer, this can be a daunting mental challenge to overcome. You also are leaving behind all of the industry knowledge you’ve developed that allowed you to resolve issues quickly and move forward effectively.

However, if you move forward with your enhanced experiences, maturity, sense of purpose, passions, strengths, and values, you may very well build a far stronger brand in the new industry. This is certainly a viable option if you want to create a variety of new opportunities for your career. My friend went from Brach’s Candy to a tremendous opportunity in the medical device industry because he was willing to let go of one industry and step into the challenges of another industry.

Career Move #5: Turn a Dead End into an Eight-Lane Superhighway

Considering the incredibly high percentage of layoffs among white-collar workers over the past 12 months, this next career move might apply to you now or in the near future. Managers and knowledge workers in virtually every industry have lost jobs in huge numbers, and the end may not be in sight yet.

Rather than seeing the end of one job as the end of your career, I encourage you to see it as a valuable time to step back and rethink the future of your career. Go back to the four questions at the beginning of this article and really clarify the purpose you want to fulfill in your work, the things you are most passionate about, the strengths you bring to the table, and the values you absolutely, positively want guiding your life and your work.

Invariably it was the forced stops in the game that caused some of the world’s greatest performers to step back, rethink their next move, and come back with renewed focus that made them vastly more successful in their new job than in their previous ones. In 1981, at the age of 39, Michael Bloomberg was fired at Salomon Brothers. He went on to build Innovative Market Systems (later named Bloomberg L.P.) that today is worth $16 Billion. In addition, he has been Mayor of New York City since 2001. None of this may have happened if he had not been forced to deal with a dead end.

If your career has suddenly run into a dramatic dead end, I encourage you to step back and start over. Go back to the original questions concerning your purpose, passions, strengths, and values. Then go through each of the career move options discussed in this article, and visualize what your next job might look like.

Do you want to seek a different position in your company, possibly in a different function?

Do you want to seek a job at a different company in your industry where you can leverage your industry knowledge?

Do you want to seek a job at a company outside of your industry where you can leverage your passions and strengths while still operating within your purpose and values?

Or do you want to start your own business where you can create an organization that reflects your purpose, passions, strengths, and values?

In his autobiography, The Other Side of Me (Warner Books 2005), Sidney Sheldon, whose books sold more than 300 million copies, told a powerful story. He wrote that in 1934 when he was 17 he tried to commit suicide because there didn’t seem to be any opportunities for him. His father found him at the last second and after a little warm-up conversation said,

“Sidney, you told me that you wanted to be a writer more than anything in the world. You don’t know what can happen tomorrow. Life is like a novel, isn’t it? It’s filled with suspense. You have no idea what’s going to happen until you turn the page. Every day is a different page, Sidney, and they can be full of surprises. You’ll never know what’s next until you turn the page. If you really want to commit suicide, Sidney, I understand. But I’d hate to see you close the book too soon and miss all the excitement that could happen to you on the next page – the page you’re going to write.”

Sheldon didn’t commit suicide. Instead he went on to become a prolific writer of stories in Hollywood, on Broadway, and in his 18 novels.

Your career consists of a series of chapters. Choose each job carefully, execute your responsibilities as well as you can, and take time to step back and visualize your next chapter.

About Dan Coughlin

Visit Dan at www.thecoughlincompany.com. Dan is a student and teacher of practical processes that improve business performance. His purpose is to work with executives and managers so they achieve great performances. He is a business keynote speaker, management consultant, executive coach, and author of three books, including his newest, The Management 500: A High-Octane Formula for Business Success (AMACOM 2009).

Strengthen Your Mantle for Greatness

By Dan Coughlin

Assume success.

Assume that all of your hard work over all these years has suddenly paid off in the form of you achieving what you’ve always wanted. You now have the income, title, responsibilities, authority, scope of influence, skills, reputation, clients, and flow of opportunities that you’ve always dreamed of having.

Now the real work begins.

It is far harder to handle success successfully than it is to persevere through tough times. Are you really ready to demonstrate long-term greatness if great success suddenly comes your way?

A Brief History of Being Good with Bad Times and Bad with Good Times

Over the past one hundred years, Americans have demonstrated they are very good at dealing with bad times and very bad at dealing with good times.

During the U.S. involvement in World War I (1915-1918) Americans pulled together and demonstrated extraordinary levels of sacrifice, commitment, and teamwork to pull through the country’s worst catastrophe since the Civil War. This was followed by the Roaring 20s when many Americans thought they had discovered the secret to wealth in the stock market and danced their hearts away.

That was followed by the Great Depression and World War II, a time once again marked by long-term sacrifice, focus, commitment, and teamwork. In the relatively affluent 50s, American companies flourished and Americans bought toasters, washing machines, televisions, cars, and refrigerators like they were going out of style, which they often did. This was followed by the tumultuous late 60s and the economic recession throughout much of the 70s.

The materialism and economic growth of the 80s were followed by the recession of the early 90s. The wild prosperity fueled by the dot com craze of the late 90s was followed by the dot com bubble burst in March 2000 and the ensuing recession that marked those years. U.S. citizens bonded together after the terrorist attack of September 11th 2001 in ways many people had never seen before. The rise in home prices and the stock market in 2003-2006 were followed by the prolonged recession from December 2007 through today. Once again Americans are becoming good at sacrifice, commitment, and teamwork.

But why are we so bad at handling good times in ways that could allow us to continually improve our results? Why are we so often are own worst enemy when we are in the best position to generate long-term sustainable success? And what lessons can be learned from history that an individual can apply in his or her own career to sustain greatness when success finally arrives?

Lesson #1: Remember there ain’t no free lunch, no silver bullets, and no secret fountains of money.

During good times, Americans have consistently thought they had it all figured out. Somehow we forget that we’ve had short-term success in the past that didn’t work out very well.

In the mid-1920s, mid-1980s, late 1990s, and mid-2000s, many Americans thought buying stocks would automatically move them up the economic ladder. The greatest piece of business advice I’ve ever learned is “there ain’t no free lunch.” In the late 1890s people thought finding gold was the key and in the late 1990s people thought buying dot-com “gold” was the answer. Don’t ever assume that a stock purchase, a good relationship with your boss, a degree from the “right” university, or employment at a “great” company will ensure your long-term greatness. It won’t. The stock market collapses in 1929, 1987, 2000, and 2008 have shown what goes up doesn’t necessarily always continue to go up.

Based on the amazing sales of American manufactured products and the extraordinary rise in the standard of living for Americans in the 1950s, many people thought that U.S. managers had discovered a silver bullet and would continue to generate incredible economic growth forever. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. Many key U.S. executives in the 1960s focused more on profits than on constantly improving the quality and safety of what their companies were producing and they made their companies and industries vulnerable to attacks from a host of other companies.

They quickly learned through the painful 70s that customers don’t care about their profits. They also learned that customers do care about quality, safety, and value. Many executives in the financial industry from 2003-2007 thought they had figured out a way to turn bad loans into great products until one day they found out that wasn’t a secret fountain of money either.

When your great day of success shows up, don’t waste any energy thinking you have it all figured out. Keep striving to get better. Success just means you have a better foundation to work off of for the future. It doesn’t mean you have a guaranteed incredible future.

Lesson #2: Great performance creates great value, and poor performance ruins it.

Jason Jennings has written a tremendous new book called, Hit The Ground Running: A Manual for New Leaders (Portfolio 2009). I’ve decided to rename the subtitle: A Manual for Leaders Who Aspire for Greatness because I believe any executive or manager in any for-profit or not-for-profit organization would benefit tremendously from this remarkably powerful book.

Jason Jennings is the rare person who has the energy to climb the massive mountain of research necessary to really understand an issue and the patience to climb down the mountain and explain what he has learned in practical ways that people can actually use. He and his research team took the 1,000 largest publicly-owned U.S. companies and searched for the best performers from 2001-2007. He wanted the whole focus to be on performance that occurred in the 21st century. Through a series of extraordinarily stringent filters, he narrowed his list to the nine best-performing American companies in this century. He then personally interviewed the ten CEOs (one company has co-CEOs) of these companies. What he found re-energized me. These ten CEOs did, and did not do, some very unusual things.

They were clearly anti-fancy. When they inherited large personal offices, they got rid of the fancy furniture, brought in conference tables and whiteboards, and created working functional spaces for themselves and their team members. One took out his private bathroom and asked why in the world he would need his own bathroom.

They were anti-buzzwords. None of them talked about six-month strategic development processes, stated lofty and complicated visions, spent insane amounts of money for big-name consulting firms to tell them what to do, or hung posters with catchy themes at every one of their business locations.

They talked with employees, board members, managers, and past CEOs. These high-performing CEOs are very down-to-earth individuals. Consistently, they said they didn’t have all the answers and wanted to get to know and learn from as many people connected with their organizations as they could. They were not acting like the proverbial superhero action figures ready to save people from peril. They were genuine individuals who simply wanted to learn anything they could to help their companies succeed in the short and long term.

They clarified a destination and practical steps to achieve that destination in a reasonable time frame. They simply refused to get caught up in making wild predictions to drive their stock price higher. They were maniacal about establishing practical plans and continually monitoring progress to make sure those plans were on track. They remained flexible in making adjustments to hit their desired destination. They kept their businesses as simple as they possibly could in order to optimize efficiency and productivity.

The single biggest takeaway for me from the very best CEOs and their companies is that they maintained a singular focus on improving the performance they felt would benefit their customers the most in terms of creating real value for them.

If you want to be able to strengthen your mantle for greatness, the absolute key is to always improve your performance, which is the actual creation of value that other people will want to use and will benefit from in a meaningful way. If you develop the ability to always do exactly that in good economic and bad economic times, you will be able to handle success and maintain the capacity for greatness over the long term.

Lesson #3: Avoid the “So what are you up to lately?” dilemma.

I think this is the most subtle and pervasive problem in the history of U.S. economics. No matter how successful a company or an individual becomes, the first question asked of him or her by friends and family is, “So what are you up to lately?” In other words, “What have you achieved lately, what is your salary, what new homes are you buying, what vacation homes are you building, and where is the next fancy resort you’re going to visit?” The problem isn’t with the question or the questioners. The problem is the distraction that individuals allow it to create.

This obsession with more, more, more, bigger, bigger, bigger, and faster, faster, faster throws out of whack the steady, plain, simple, consistent, and boring process of creating greater value that customers will want to purchase at reasonable fees that will generate long-term growth. This is not a modern phenomenon. At least since the 1920s, and then repeated at least every couple of decades, Americans have become maniacal about taking some short-term success and wanting to convert it immediately into much greater success. Whatever happened to the tortoise beating the hare?

I encourage you to improve, create greater value, achieve some success, and then repeat that formula consistently over the entire period of your working life. It is what made you successful once and it is what will consistently make you successful in the future. Just don’t force the future into today’s envelope. Be patient and let your improvements generate greater success when the time is right.

Lesson #4: Values matter and so do lack of values.

Nothing has ever destroyed future greatness faster than a breakdown in personal values. Values are beliefs that determine behaviors. You get to choose six. What six values do you want guiding your behaviors? Ok, if you really want, you can choose eight, but that’s it. Here are mine: integrity, curiosity, friendliness, open-mindedness, innovation, and empathy. OK, two more: tenacity and accountability. That’s it.

Choose your values carefully. If you want to build a personal mantle that can handle success and sustain itself for a lifetime of greatness, then you have to live by the values you’ve chosen carefully. I’ve never met the person who chose cheating, lying, and stealing to be the values that would guide his or her life. For some people, those things snuck in when they weren’t watching their values. Watch your values carefully and let greatness sneak in when you’re not looking.

If you lie about little things, you’ll lie about big things. If you’ll take more money than your company can realistically afford to pay you just because you can get away with it, you’ve shown where your priorities are for the long term. Don’t reward yourself today based on dreams for tomorrow. If you’re honest in little things, you will be in big things as well. Values have a way of repeating themselves.

Be ready for success. It can happen at any moment.

About Dan Coughlin

He is a business keynote speaker, management consultant, and author of ACCELERATE: 20 Practical Lessons to Boost Business Momentum. He speaks on leadership, branding, sales, and innovation. His next book, The Management 500: A High-Octane Formula for Business Success, which is about practical management lessons from the history of professional auto racing, will be published in May 2009.

Passion Comes From Purpose, Not the Other Way Around

By Dan Coughlin

Raison d’etre.

I just love that phrase. It means, “reason for existence.” If you want to maintain the enthusiasm and make the effective decisions necessary to accelerate through this economic crisis, it is critical to take the time necessary to clarify the purpose of your career, the purpose of your work group, and the purpose of your organization. Being excited all day won’t help you find a purpose in your work. Knowing the reason why you, your group, and your organization do what you do will generate a steady flow of passion even in the worst of times as long as you really believe in the purpose of that work. If not, then find the work that has the purpose you want.

My next book, The Management 500, is about management lessons from the history of auto racing. As I peeled back the layers of the auto racing onion, I found a heart. A great big pulsating heart. Actually I found a lot of hearts. The secret to the success of NASCAR, IndyCar, and Formula 1 racing is passion. Drivers, engineers, mechanics, crew chiefs, crew members, and fans alike derive incredible passion from a simple purpose: a desire to win the race.

One of my favorite pieces in my research was finding an original copy of Enzo Ferrari’s  1964 autobiography. One sentence stands out above all the others. He wrote,

“Fate is to a good extent in our own hands if we only know clearly what we want
and are steadfast in our purpose.”

Sports
Carl Edwards was named the NASCAR.com 2008 Driver of the Year. How did he do it? He finished in 2nd place in both the season-long NASCAR Sprint Cup Series AND the season-long NASCAR Nationwide Series. This means that from February through November of 2008, Carl Edwards competed successfully over the course of 36 races in two different leagues. It would be like a professional basketball team coming in second in the NBA and second in the top Spanish League in the same season. And where does his passion come from? He has an extraordinary desire to win races.

Not-For-Profits
Dan Harbaugh is president of Ronald McDonald House Charities in St. Louis. Dan Harbaugh is one of the most consistently passionate people I’ve ever met. I’ve known Dan for ten years and have seen him present to hundreds of people, have discussions in small groups, and attend seminars as a student in the very best of economic times and the very worst. In every situation he brings an extraordinary degree of passion. Where does this passion come from and how can he possibly sustain it so consistently? The answer lies in his purpose. He absolutely believes in the purpose of RMHC, which is primarily to provide a home away from home for the families of very sick children. With that purpose in mind, he continues to march forward with enthusiasm.

Small Businesses
Elaine Floyd is a small business owner with two busy teenagers and a very busy husband. Elaine Floyd is one of the most passionate people I’ve met in the past fifteen years. She is the president of EFG, Inc., which helps clients craft their messages into really powerful professionally published books. And where does Elaine draw her passion from? She finds enormous excitement and satisfaction in helping other people get their message out by intersecting cutting-edge computer technology with the creative flair of high-end book publishing.

Schools
Matt Miller is a grade school principal. Matt Miller brings more passion to his work than almost anyone I know. I’ve seen him get four hundred kids to scream and yell about reading books and comprehending what they know. I’ve seen him get students to cheer for each other for being kind to one another. I’ve seen him wander into classrooms, accept trays in the cafeteria, and pat kids on the back. I’ve seen him snap two fingers and get hundreds of loud kids to become instantly quiet. And where does his daily enthusiasm come from? He wants kids to succeed in life, and he understands that it’s the little things that make for long-term, life-long success.

Big Businesses
Roy Spence is Chairman and CEO of GSD&M Idea City, which over the past twenty years has been the advertising agency for BMW, AT&T, Wal-Mart, AARP, Southwest Airlines, the PGA Tour, American Red Cross, and a host of other major organizations. Roy Spence is the most passionate person I’ve ever met, and his purpose is to help organizations make a difference in the world. And he’s very, very good at it. Over the course of three years, I worked as a consultant with a few dozen people at GSD&M Idea City in a wide variety of functions and up and down the org chart. Every time I walked into their building I felt as though I was stepping into the Disney Company back in the 1930s when Walt Disney was actively involved. The creative energy pulsated throughout the building.

In the more than forty meetings I attended there a single common theme came up every time. In every meeting, the common question was, “How will this idea support the purpose of this client’s business?” Everything at GSD&M Idea City revolved around this question. If the idea did not support the client organization’s purpose for existence, then it was rejected. It was this passionate commitment to finding and supporting the client’s purpose that helped lead to extraordinary breakthrough results for many of these organizations.

Roy Spence, and GSD&M Idea City’s chief purposeologist, Haley Rushing, have written an extraordinary new book called, It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For. I encourage you to read this book. It is packed with practical advice and real-world examples on how to intersect the idealism of purpose with the pragmatism necessary to generate extraordinary business results.

I believe that as you read it you will find yourself, as I did, thinking more and more about why you do what you do, why your groups do what they do, and why your organization exists. You will also find the key questions to answer on how to convert a business purpose into a driver of better sustainable results. This book is really a masterpiece on making the purpose of an organization the driver of effective decision-making. Through its ideas, suggested tactics, and real-life examples at Southwest Airlines, BMW, the PGA Tour, and many others you will clearly see how a well-defined purpose can impact your operations, research and development, hiring, and marketing, and produce extraordinary sustainable results.

Downtime is a Terrific Time to Prepare for Greatness

If your business has slowed down, don’t waste a minute worrying. Instead use this time to clarify your answers to these three critically important questions:

i.    Why do I do what I do for a living?
ii.    Why does my work group exist?
iii.    What purpose is our organization trying to fulfill?

The first step to building an extraordinary career, team, and organization is to know the reason behind the activities. This clarification will help you and others decide what to do and more importantly what not to do. With a clear purpose, you can sustain a focused effort over the long term and generate extraordinary results.

Comprehensive List of Best Business Books

Once again, friend and author, Dan Coughlin does his research and puts together a very comprehensive list of some of the best business books through the ages. I hope you find this list helpful. If you see some you have not read, I recommend adding it to your library this year. Enjoy!

By Dan Coughlin

In her terrific book, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, Alice Schroeder wrote, “Benjamin Graham’s book, The Intelligent Investor had mesmerized Warren. For years, he had been going down to the library and checking out every book available on stocks and investing. Warren wanted a system, something that would work reliably. Warren more or less memorized the course textbook, Security Analysis, by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd. Buffett says, ‘The truth was I knew the book even better than Dodd. At that time, literally, almost in those seven or eight hundred pages, I could quote from any part of it. I had just sopped it up.’”

Through intense reading and experimentation, Warren Buffett became the world’s greatest investor and one of the richest individuals in the world. Imagine what such in-depth reading can do for your career.

Here are a variety of books I’ve read that I encourage you to consider. My hope is you will scan this list of more than 100 recommended titles, purchase two books for yourself, and read them. I really believe that business leaders are readers, and that one way you can improve your performance is by reading. But don’t just read your two books. Read them, capture a few key ideas that you want to implement, and move those ideas into action.

Here are my recommendations, which have been organized by topics:

Productivity
Less is More by Jason Jennings
Think Big, Act Small by Jason Jennings
It’s Not the Big that Eat the Small, It’s the Fast that Eat the Slow by Jason Jennings

Leadership
On Leadership by John Gardner
Personal History by Katherine Graham
My American Journey by Colin Powell
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. edited by Clayborne Carson
My Experiments with Truth by Mohandas Gandhi
Walt Disney by Neal Gabler
Sam Walton: Made in America by Sam Walton
They Call Me Coach by John Wooden
Wooden by John Wooden
Leading with the Heart by Mike Krzyzewski
Leadership & Self-Deception by The Arbinger Institute
The Education of a Coach by David Halberstam
Gifted Hands by Ben Carson and Cecil Murphey
Think Big by Ben Carson and Cecil Murphey
Leadership is an Art by Max Depree
The Gettysburg Gospel by Gabor Boritt
Abraham Lincoln Great Speeches unabridged by Abraham Lincoln, John Grafton, and Roy Basler

Management
Inside Steve’s Brain by Leander Kahney
The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
The Practice of Management by Peter Drucker
The Unofficial Guide to Power Managing by Alan Weiss
Winning by Jack Welch and Suzy Welch
Setting the Table by Danny Meyer
The Spirit to Serve by Bill Marriott

Teamwork
Organizing Genius by Warren Bennis and Patricia Biedermann
Sacred Hoops by Phil Jackson
Gung Ho! by Ken Blanchard
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Russell Rules by Bill Russell
The Winner Within by Pat Riley
A World Waiting to be Born by Scott Peck

Strategy
Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove
Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
The Discipline of Market Leaders by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema
Profit from the Core by Chris Zook
Beyond the Core by Chris Zook
Top Management Strategy by Ben Tregoe and John Zimmerman

Marketing/Branding
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Purple Cow by Seth Godin
Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin
Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout
Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy

Innovation
The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley
The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley
The Elegant Solution by Matthew May

Organizational Performance
Built to Last by Jim Collins
Good to Great by Jim Collins
The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker
The Google Story by David Vise and Mark Malseed
Leading By Design by Ingvar Kamprad and Bertil Torekull
The Pixar Touch by David Price
The HP Way by David Packard
The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt

Personal Effectiveness
Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin
Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
Living a Life that Matters by Harold Kushner
Raising the Bar by Tim Rosaforte
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
It’s Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong
The Dip by Seth Godin
Big Russ and Me by Tim Russert
Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman
From Promise to Power by David Mendell
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
The Other Side of Me by Sidney Sheldon
Secrets for Success and Happiness by Og Mandino
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
I Dare You by William Danforth
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
First Things First by Stephen Covey
The Essence of Success by Earl Nightingale
The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale
Law of Success by Napoleon Hill
Success through a Positive Mental Attitude by Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
A Treasury of Albert Schweitzer edited by Thomas Kiernan

Investing
The Snowball by Alice Schroeder
Warren Buffett Speaks by Janet Lowe

Sales
The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino

Inspiration
The Greatest Miracle in the World by Og Mandino
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

Consulting
Million Dollar Consulting by Alan Weiss
Getting Started in Consulting by Alan Weiss

Physical Fitness
The Best Life Diet by Bob Greene

Problem Solving
The New Rational Manager by Ben Tregoe and Charles Kepner

Presentations/Writing
Pop! Stand Out in Any Crowd by Sam Horn
Presenting with Pizzazz by Sharon Bowman
Ask Not by Thurston Clarke
The Dream by Drew Hansen

Global Trends
The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas Friedman
The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan

Management Lessons from Auto Racing
One Helluva Ride by Liz Clarke
At the Altar of Speed by Leigh Montville
The Enzo Ferrari Story by Enzo Ferrari
Winners are Driven by Bobby Unser
Racing to Win by Joe Gibbs
McLaren Formula 1 Racing Team by Alan Henry
Racing Back to the Front by Jeff Gordon
Michael Schumacher by Christopher Hilton

Management Lessons from the American Revolution
A Leap in the Dark by John Ferling
1776 by David McCullough
The Summer of 1787 by David Stewart
American Creation by Joseph Ellis
Thomas Paine by Craig Nelson
Thomas Jefferson by R.B. Bernstein
Common Sense by Thomas Paine

About Dan Coughlin
Dan Coughlin works with large and mid-size companies to improve their business momentum. He is a business keynote speaker, management consultant, and author of ACCELERATE: 20 Practical Lessons to Boost Business Momentum. He speaks on leadership, branding, sales, and innovation. His next book, The Management 500: A High-Octane Formula for Business Success is due to be published in May 2009.

Sacrifice Is A Sustainable Strategy

By Dan Coughlin

My parents majored in sacrifice and minored in thrift. Every day for the first thirty years of my life I heard the word “sacrifice” as in, “We sacrificed a lot so you could be better off.” And they weren’t kidding. My mom wore the same winter coat for at least ten years. Going out to eat was a rare treat saved only for birthdays. A fancy dinner included my dad going up to McDonald’s and getting a dozen cheeseburgers and then going to the grocery store and buying a half gallon of vanilla ice cream. Then my parents, my five siblings and me sat around our kitchen table and ate it. At least 85% of all the clothes I wore in the first twenty-two years of my life were bought at garage sales.

Two Problems with Sacrifice
There were two problems with this approach.
Problem #1: Sacrifice was used like a jackhammer.

I heard the word sacrifice so many times that when I finally went on my own I was determined to go out to eat. I was determined to buy books and not go to the library. I was determined to enjoy today and not scrimp by every minute of my life. And there were these wonderful new inventions called credit cards.

Problem #2: My parents were right.

Despite all my frustrations with hearing that word over and over and over again, my parents were right and they are still right. The upside of sacrificing far outweighs the downside. A very high percentage of businesses and individuals in the U.S. have acted a lot like me for the past twenty five years. We all need to learn from my parents and make sacrifice a sustainable business strategy.

Stop Thinking About the Next Quarter, Start Thinking About the Next Decade
Beginning in the 1980s when the stock market began to grow exponentially, individuals and businesses began to obsess over quarterly returns. This obsession with short-term results caused executives and managers to think about what could be done today to make a good showing in ninety days. Think about how absurd this is. Over the course of ninety days, you might have seventy days of actual work. Imagine your results for last quarter weren’t very good so now you feel the pressure to produce great results this quarter. What will you do? You could slash your prices or come up with a hot promotion to get sales moving. You could dramatically cut costs to make the numbers look good. You could fire people or sell off assets. You could cheat and make up numbers to make the quarter look good. Or you could do something dramatically different: focus on improving the value your customers receive and remain patient over the long term.

Pixar Animation Studios didn’t overtake Disney Animation Studios overnight. They did it by remaining remarkably patient and steadily improving the quality of their films. Google didn’t become the best search engine in the world overnight. They steadily and patiently improved the quality of what they had to offer. Apple didn’t become the Most Admired Company in the World as named by Fortune magazine overnight. They steadily created more value for customers.

Stop focusing on making this quarter look good and start focusing on making the next decade truly remarkable. Ironically, as you focus on generating ten years of greatness you will steadily make the performance of each quarter better and better.

Use Credit Very, Very Carefully
Cash is annoying. First you have to have it, and second you have to have it with you. Credit cards are so much easier. You can just whip those puppies out and pay for everything from fast food to fur coats. The same is true in a business. Having a credit line makes everything so much easier. If you have a good product idea or marketing campaign, you can just plow ahead. You don’t have to think through whether or not you can really afford it. You can implement immediately because you know your good idea is going to generate a great return on investment. Except sometimes it doesn’t. Actually sometimes it generates a zero percent return on investment. That’s right. Some new products and some marketing campaigns deliver no revenue. None. Zippo. However, you do still have that little problem of the bill to pay.

My mom would search for extra pennies in the house at the end of each month to pay the bills, but she would never buy anything on credit, mainly because she was scared she wouldn’t be able to pay it off. However, being scared of credit turned out to be a very smart thing because it forced her to think through her purchases. It turns out that credit cards are a good thing, just like car loans and house mortgages and business credit lines are good things, as long as you pay them off on time.

The big problem with credit occurs when a person stops thinking through his or her purchases. Suddenly frivolous purchases seem mandatory. And paying them off today is annoying since tomorrow will always be a better day. Think long and hard before you make a purchase today that can be paid for tomorrow. Identify your margin of safety. Can you really afford it? Is there a reason why you’re not paying cash today?

Is that a Meeting or a Roman Festival?
I love a good business meeting. As a speaker, facilitator, or observer, I really get a kick out of a productive meeting where ideas are being generated, discussed, and selected for implementation. Having said that, I’m really confused by many meetings that I attend. If the attendees are going to be in the meeting room for 95% of their stay, why bother taking them to a fancy resort with expensive rooms and even more expensive food? Either go to a moderate hotel or give the attendees time to enjoy the surroundings. Some people argue that the surroundings are necessary to convey the message that the business is doing well. To which I have a very technical response: baloney! I’m writing this article on a desk my mom found at a garage sale twenty-five years ago for $20. Does my desk, which works just fine, make this article better or worse?

Get in Shape
This one is going to cut a little close to the bone. Folks, we’re out of shape. I know, I know, you might be in good shape, but the vast majority of Americans are not in good shape, including me. This concept of sacrificing goes beyond just financial waste. We eat like every meal is our last meal for the next thirty days. We need to get lean and hungry again. We need to eat right and exercise more. Isn’t it a strange dynamic that we fill our days with activities so we can’t exercise, but then we’re tired so we need to eat more to keep our energy up?

Imagine no money owed on past bills, savings in the bank, a trim waistline, and great personal energy.
Now imagine more bills than you think you will ever be able to pay off, no savings in the bank, a huge waistline, and very low personal energy.

Q: What’s the difference between these two scenarios?
A: Sacrifice.

Let me try that again.
Imagine a business with no money owed to anyone, employees who find purposefulness in their work, and great energy in the business for the long run.
Now imagine a business with stacks of unpaid bills, employees worried about keeping their jobs, and very low morale for the long run.

Q: What’s the difference between these two businesses?
A: Sacrifice.

Ok, I’ll add in one more word: patience. When you have to have results today and you have to try every idea today no matter the cost, then you have no patience. When you don’t have patience, you won’t be able to sacrifice. And if you don’t sacrifice today in order to improve tomorrow, then you will continually be in the second scenario.

Why Sacrificing People is a Really Bad Move
Firing people is suddenly the in-thing to do. Each month we read about hundreds of thousands of jobs being eliminated. This is an extraordinarily good move to cut costs in the short term and an extraordinarily bad move to improve profits in the long term. There are only a few resources that generate profits. Having money in reserve can improve a company’s ability to invest and generate more money. Of course, that theory hasn’t exactly worked out very well recently. Owning real estate is a good investment for the long term, although it hasn’t worked out very well recently either. And the other great value-generator is people.

But it’s not enough just to have employees; you actually have to tap into their minds to gain the ideas for profit generation. I suggest you gather employees together in groups of five to seven people and ask the following questions:
Without letting go of any of our employees, what ideas do you have on the following questions:

1.    What can we do to cut costs without decreasing value to our customers?
2.    What can we do to increase value to our customers without increasing our costs?

Let me encourage you one more time. Before you let go of any of your employees, gather them together in small groups and engage them in meaningful conversations. Just as executives and managers are too quick to spend frivolously in good times, I think they are too quick to fire employees in tough times. I’ve never met the executive or manager who had all the answers on any topic. The best ideas always come from group discussion followed by a single individual making the final decision. Gather your employees together and engage them in a meaningful discussion about how to cut costs without cutting value to your customers and how to increase value to your customers without increasing costs. And do this every quarter in every year regardless of whether the economy is doing great or doing badly.

Make Old-Fashioned a New Way of Life
As I’m writing this I feel old. It sounds so old to me to talk about sacrificing and being patient. Those were the words I heard from my mom and dad when I was growing up. It doesn’t feel hip or cool or young to talk about sacrificing and being patient. However, winning does sound cool. If you want to build a great career and be part of building a great business, then make old-fashioned a new way of live.

During really tough economic times like we’re living in right now, the word sacrifice gets used a lot. It’s easy to talk about sacrificing when you have no choice. Everybody has to sacrifice when the stock market falls by 45%, jobs are being eliminated, and cash flow is drying up. It’s also easy to lose weight when your doctor says, “Lose forty-five pounds or you will die.” The harder part is to sacrifice when times are great and to eat wisely and exercise when you’re in great shape.

To build truly great businesses and to get in truly great physical shape for the long term, we need to make old-fashioned a new way of life. We need to sustain our sacrifices for decades, not quarters. In doing so, I think we will all find that sacrifice creates freedom. When you choose not to buy something or eat something that you want right now, you enhance the belief that you are in control of your decisions, not someone else. That’s freedom. When you have to buy or eat something as soon as it appears, then you are not in control of your decisions. That’s lack of freedom.

My parents didn’t sacrifice for six months and then spend $10,000 on a lark. They were consistently frugal over a period of several decades. Decide on the value you want to deliver to your customers, and then consistently, patiently, and steadily sacrifice other options in order to build a great business for the long term. Be consistently frugal and you will be ready for the strategically rainy day. That’s the day when investing your carefully saved money can generate an extraordinary advantage for the business. But that advantage won’t happen if you’ve spent every dime you could borrow.

Sacrifice, be patient, and maintain that approach over and over and over. It’s actually an exciting and freeing experience.

About Dan Coughlin
Dan Coughlin works with executives and managers to improve their business momentum. He is a business keynote speaker, management consultant, and author of ACCELERATE: 20 Practical Lessons to Boost Business Momentum. Dan’s clients include Coca-Cola, Abbott, Toyota, Boeing, Marriott, McDonald’s, AT&T, American Bar Association, YPO, Vistage International, Roush Fenway Racing, and the St. Louis Cardinals. He speaks on leadership, branding, sales, and innovation. His next book, The Management 500: A High-Octane Formula for Business Success is due to be published in May 2009 by AMACOM.

Reasons Why Leaders Fail

I saw this on Twitter and visited the site. There is an interesting slant from a psychological point of view. They list 7 reasons why leaders fail. Are there only 7? What are other reasons?

Around two-thirds of workers say the most stressful aspect of their jobs is their immediate boss, their line manager (Hogan, 2006). While this will come as no surprise to most, this statistic suggests a massive number of unhappy working relationships. So, does this mean that leadership is failing on a massive scale? Well, not exactly…

A recent article published in American Psychologist beautifully explains why so many people experience their managers as piping hot geysers of stress (Vugt, Hogan & Kaiser, 2008). What emerges is that bosses aren’t inherently bad people (mostly), but that the modern culture of work sets them up to fail. Here are the seven main reasons I’ve picked out from this article for why leaders fail:

1. Strict hierarchies.
2. Poor decision-making.
3. Huge pay differentials.
4. Impossible standards for leaders…

Read more

How Blogging Can Help Or Hurt Your Personal Career

By John O’Connor

Blogging has become an impulsive contemporary art for careerists. Should you develop your own blog or shouldn’t you? Will it help or hurt your career? Let me present this canvas to you as a primer of sorts to think about this issue.

Much of my career practice and coaching involves an organizing thought: You own the business of your career. It’s your worklife mission, your vision. For years I coached and, some would say, admonished my clients to take ownership of their career paths as they work for someone else. When you do not own the business, one of the greatest ways you can help or hurt your career centers around your own online and offline reputation. With so many choices and so much information at the click of a computer key we may feel information overload no matter what our career field might be. We may also feel empowered to create or destroy.

What’s easy can be fun or dangerous. In a matter of minutes you can set up your Blogger, WordPress, Typepad or related blog site. And the minute you post? Your words can be accessed by billions of people around the world. No web designer needs to be hired. No technical guru at x dollars an hour has to listen to and potentially kill your ideas. You own this medium. You have freedom. You can say or site anything. There’s no waste of time and no need to white-board everyone else’s ideas.
It’s so easy but don’t let the impulsive ease of blogging let you forget about the eyes that watch your art, your views, your passions, protests, observations and objections.
How might this medium help – or hurt – your career direction and path?

How it can help:

1. You have an audience. Keep it positive. Blogging may add to the company’s brand and your position as an authority or subject matter expert within your company or your field. Jane S. worked at a powerful, regional advertising company. She cleared her personal blog through her boss, her boss’ boss and her company human resources department. They said she didn’t have to but with my advice she did. During a recession she has received two promotions and her blog has since been incorporated into the main site of the corporation because of its powerful, business development prowess. She says, “Now 40 percent of my time is incorporating my personal brand or blog into the company’s brand with the complete blessing of the executive team.”

2. Paint the right picture. Drive customer confidence. As you cite critical sources and make intelligent, important observations your personal blog augments your position within your company and promotes your company. You never bash your company. You can be yourself and be authentic. James P., a salesman, asked for permission from his company to comment on his business travels and business adventures as a technology sales consultant. Customers love the funny, idiosyncratic stories. James says, “My blog has been a business generator for the company and earned me four speaking engagements on behalf of the company and four speaking engagements locally that were sponsored by local sales networking organizations. I can’t believe it. It’s made me kind of recession-proof in my career!” His first book is being self-published and his company uses him to teach and train all new sales personnel.

3. Get a raise and a promotion. Defend the faith. Blogging helps you document and publish your ideas while associating with great people. Again, Alice P. published her blog under a pseudonym two years ago. Today she has kept the quirky observations about life, travel, art and kids quite eclectic. Her blogging has incorporated funny observations about office life without offending anyone at work. It’s been serialized by the company and referred to. The CEO thought her site should be commented on, featured and linked to by the company to help with esprit de corps. Alice states, “Now I have an in-house company editor who helps me promote and publish my blog. We’ve added videos and more fun stuff. The company pays me monthly.” She keeps her comments happy, funny and still personal.

How blogs can hurt:

1. One small step. Negative posts can be fatal. Blogging can open you up for many legal, liability and employment questions, problems or crises. Last year, Jim C. came to me after he had posted a rather nasty post on his Top Ten Worst Retailers in the World blog. His company did business with two of those retailers and as nosy or highly-sensitive corporate personnel found out about his lambaste it caused a rift at the company. According to Jim, “This year for other reasons I was let go. It was not the economy. I crossed the line.”

2. Pictures tell a thousand stories. Larry seemed to pipe up at work a lot about things that bothered him. So he decided to publish a seemingly anonymous blog. As a techy he posted hundreds of comments on political ideas, people he thought should be impeached and railed against what he considered bad taste and fashion. He did this anonymously under a lot of different names. But when he decided to take pictures at the year end Christmas party and publish captions that offended nearly everyone, he was, well, suspended without pay forever (fired).

3. Beautiful art can be destroyed. Craig became disillusioned after an 18-year career. Nearing retirement, his company had promoted three people younger than him to the technology director level. Years ago he had engineered their web presence. Knowing that having no blog presence left his company vulnerable, he found it increasingly interesting and titillating when he created a blog presence, added negative comments to company products and dumped a list of customer complaints onto the proverbial, anonymous IHATEXCOMPANY.com, the site a former employee developed to stick it to the man. Under pressure, the IHATEXCOMPANY.com author faced legal entanglements and gave up Craig’s name as a blogger. Now Craig is in litigation. It’s not looking good.

Imagine you’re an artist like Michelangelo dipping brush to paint; a seemingly limitless creative well. You’re halfway done with your masterpiece, the signature of your worklife and rather spiritual mission. As you take your impossible position on the scaffold to paint more of the Sistine Chapel you have a thought. Imagine you could destroy your Sistine Chapel with one strike of the match. Like the great artist, blogging can help you take ownership of your career and worklife vision. Of course, it can also be just for fun too. But let’s also realize you, like the great artist, have the power to create or destroy your career future with just a few strokes or decisions.

Make sure you know your audience and you understand the potential impact of your newly -minted blog posts. It could make a lasting impression and a permanently positive or negative impact on your career picture.

Paint yours. Paint it well.

John M. O’Connor, MFA, is the President of Career Pro of NC, Inc., a comprehensive career services organization specializing in Executive Outplacement, Corporate Outplacement, Federal/Military Career Transition and Consulting. He was appointed to the Board of Directors (2006) for Raleigh-Wake Human Resources Management Association (RWHRMA.org). He is also a Certified Career Coach, Certified Resume Writer, and Credentialed Career Master.

Guy Kawasaki’s Reality Check

I am reading Guy Kawasaki’s book Reality Check. Here’s little bit about the book from the author. Enjoy!

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Source: BNet.com