Liz, Author at Successful Blog Page

What’s the Most Surprising #ROI on Anything You’ve Bought?

October 20, 2010 by Liz

This is a sponsored announcement, part of a paid promotion. It’s rare that I do those. But the question behind it is so worth pondering that I felt compelled to write about it. So it’s with pleasure I invite you to read along.

Win a Napa Retreat for 6 and a Tech Makeover!

Our desks and our offices are fitted and filled with tools and equipment that we’ve purchased to help us do business. Office supply stores, computer stores, furniture stores, and providers online and offline shower us with information about products and services that will make our lives easier, faster, and more productive. But how often do we stop to consider which of those we invest in have given us the highest return?

We know the ones we like and the ones we don’t. We know the ones we use every day and the ones we reach for in emergency. But if we lined them all up in a row, which would be the winner as the most surprising, great investment we’ve made so far? Was it …

that bus ticket that took you to the best project meeting of your career?
that pair of ice skates that inspired you when your feet almost froze?
that video camera that captured the first cut of your documentary?
that ticket to a conference where you sketched out the idea for your business launch?
that chicken that changed the world?

Think about it. Tell your story and you’ll learn something about yourself and how you work.

HP’s “Reboot With ROI” Retreat Giveaway

HP has posed the question and made it worth your while to answer. They’re giving away an amazing prize: a trip to Napa for six people on your team and a technology makeover for your team! To enter, all you have to do is share a story about surprising returns on something you bought.

Here’s how it works:

Tell Your Story

The best user-submitted stories of surprising ROI will be featured on the site.

Complete prize details:

Grand Prize
A five-day trip for six to Northern California wine country, including:

* Round-trip coach class ticket to San Francisco International Airport
* Two full-size rental cars for the duration of the trip
* Five nightsâ accommodation at Fairmont Mission Inn & Spa (double occupancy in a Luxury Suite with a fireplace)
* Daily breakfast
* Six-hour wine country limousine tour, with tours and tastings at three wineries
* Ride on the Napa Valley Wine Train, including gourmet lunch and wine-tasting seminar
* Hot air balloon ride over wine country with Up & Away, including brunch
* $550 gift certificate per person for winnerâs choice of spa treatments
* A gift certificate for dinner for six at a fine-dining restaurant in Yountville

And, after your refreshing reboot in wine country, go back to work with new HP technology.

Grand prize:

* Four HP ProBook computers and 1 Palm smartphone
* Two HP Color Laserjet CM2320fxi printers
* One HP Color Laserjet CP2025dn printer

Silver Prize:

* HP ProBook 4520s computer with broadband included and free case
* HP Color LaserJet CP2025dn printer

Bronze Prize:

* HP Mini 5103 computer
* HP Color LaserJet CP2025n printer

The contest closes on October 31, 2010. ( http://bit.ly/95QWoo )

Read the detailsand find out how to get your story with those already on the HP ROI Giveaway site.

Now that you’ve thought about it. Do it!

Read some stories and realize how they connect us to the people who wrote them. Notice how each business became more interesting because of the story behind it.
Your story is part of what makes your brand and your business one of a kind.

The real prize here is what you’ll get by act of answering the question — share your story and you’ve already won a great brand insight.

Share it with HP and you might get another huge ROI story about your brand — the story of how writing about surprising ROI became a business retreat for six and a makeover for your business tech.

So you see now why I wanted to share this sponsored event. The insight gained from participation is in itself a prize.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

I’m a proud affiliate of

How Do You Recognize and Attract Heroes and Champions for Your Brand?

October 19, 2010 by Liz

(Updated in 2020)

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

10-Point Plan: Enlisting Heroes and Champions

Those Who Are Waiting to Lead

Finding the heroes and champions who already love what you do. It seems every time I give a presentation about growing business and social business a few CEOs and business owners find me to talk. They want to know to get started raising a barn — a vibrant internal community of fans focused on growing their business — rather than building a coliseum — a huge endeavor that employees work on for them. They want to use social tools to connect all of the people — employees, vendors, partners, and customers — who might have ideas and insights that will help their business thrive.

The first question is how to find and attract those heroes and champions.

How Does a Business Identify Heroes and Champions?

Last week, I wrote about assessing and benchmarking the community with two informal tools that allow people to offer their opinions on the state of things. The second tool, a sociogram, is often used in education settings to determine social networks and influencer hierarchies. It’s a gem of a tool for finding out who already has influence within a group.

To find the heroes and champions of the change toward a stronger community look to the sociogram to find the people who were chosen most often as

people others would ask to teach them something new. (training stars)
people others would invite to attend or a gathering of your friends. (social stars)
people others would ask to offer you a recommendation on the quality of their work. (leadership stars)
people others would ask to to do all three. (influence stars)
Identify and enlist a core team of champions to lead the quest.

It easy to see how these four groups, particularly the last would be the people that your team and your community look to for answers, advice, and how to evaluate and navigate change.

So it follows naturally that the people who scored highest in these groups might be the first team of heroes and champions that we bring together to talk about the brand values they believe in and those that are the new mission.

Look for the Leaders You Already Know

Attracting and enlisting these heroes can be natural and easy if we really are set on raising on barn, not building a coliseum. We lay out the vision clearly, explaining the goal and the rewards of getting to it.

We’re going to build a business that will make work easier, faster, and more meaningful for us and the people who work with us. AND We’ll do it by aligning our goals and building something that none of us could ever build alone.

Are you in? What skills do each of you bring? What are the minimum processes and rules we need to keep honest, respectful communication? What problems do you see? How might we solve them before they begin? How can we best bring this message back to the rest of the team?

Yet people can respond to a clear vision for many reasons. Some are drawn to the work. Some come for personal reasons. Some come to build something they can’t build alone. Some may come because they seek approval and attention.

Look for those who show leadership qualities of their own.

Competence and core values – champions who love your business understand what moves the business you’re in. They add insight into how to bring the vision to life. They have integrity, are trustworthy, and respect others. They are examples of intelligence and heart.
Positive energy – heroes and champions bring out the best in others. They have the energy to invest in big ideas with a spirit of inclusion, gratitude, and generosity. Curiosity fuels their solutions, inviting ideas from all sources.
Strength of character– leaders who can carry a vision have a strength of conviction, no matter the power of their role or position.

Before you try to create brand evangelists why not reach out the ones you already know? As you look for the people you would call heroes and champions, you’ll find they’re connected to others who are much like themselves. Invite just a few to a meeting and begin planning a barn together.

How do you recognize the brand evangelists you already know?

Related
To follow the entire series: Liz Strauss – Inside-Out Thinking to Building a Solid Business, see the Successful Series Page.

Be Irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

How Do You Know When Quitting that Quest Is a Good Idea?

October 18, 2010 by Liz

It’s Something Like Business Infatuation

I just spent an hour working on art for a blog post that I couldn’t write. The concept was too hard, to convoluted and too stupid to deserve the time and space it would take to explain it. It didn’t deserve a diagram. It didn’t even deserve a blog post.

I’ve done that before. It happens when I get too involved with my own ideas and lose sight of the people I’m writing for. Lucky for me, I recognize the symptoms sooner and sooner each time.

Most of them have to do with working too hard to make something work right.

How to Know When to Quit

It happens with ideas, with projects, and with relationships. We get started on something small or something big. Somewhere along the line infatuation sets in. We’re inspired with a foolish or extravagant love for some part of it.

It may be that we’ve discovered a little known fact that’s fascinating to think about.

Why your friends will always have more friends that you do.

It may be the most musical sentence we’ve ever written, that doesn’t fit inside any paragraph of what we’re writing now.

When I give my soul room to breathe, everyone I know gets nicer.

It may be the person, the career, or the company that immediately caught our attention and got us thinking new thoughts. It may be the project or idea we just thought up that moved us to get to doing our most outstanding work.

Whichever it is that has captured our inspired commitment to work at some point, when things stop working, we don’t want to believe we were wrong. Rather than recognizing the problem, we keep fighting to make it right again. We unconsciously find ourselves committed to a failing course. It’s an emotional response. It’s irrational and time wasting at best. Costly at worst.

When we’re on a quest, we’re emotionally involved. Emotions filter judgment and skew our evaluations. They build cognitive bias which reinforces our beliefs and often clouds the truth. How do you know when to give it up? Here are questions you might ask to figure out if you’re working too hard to make something work.

Do you find yourself moving things around more than you’re moving things forward? Measure the time and effort you’re spending compared to similar situations.
Do you find that you’re talking more about how things could / should / might work than talking about the work itself? Talking about behavior and process is not the same as talking about the work.
Do you find that you’re spending time rewriting or reworking all around one detail, one person, one idea that you love? When a detail becomes more important than the work, stop to remind yourself of your goal.
When you try to explain to others what’s holding you up, do they suggest that you lose the exact piece that you care about most? Do you hear yourself arguing for the problem rather than looking for a solution?

If you’re finding yourself saying “yes,” you might want to get some distance to find a less personal view. Imagine what the situation or the project would be like without the part or person that you have formed a personal relationship with.

Suppose you were offered the option to move that “lovely dear” to another project where he, she, or it is a far better fit? If the feeling you get in thinking of your answer is relief, then you know you’re working too hard to make things work.

How do you know when quitting your current quest is a good idea?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

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Thanks to Week 260 SOBs

October 16, 2010 by Liz

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Jack Welch on Candor and Liz Strauss on High-Trust Culture

October 12, 2010 by Liz

Lack of Candor Is a Killer

Right at the top of the interview with Jack Welch (former Chairman and Chief Executive of GE) at the World Business forum, he spoke about leadership in many ways. The most interesting to me was his conversation about his famous policy of “Rank and Yank.”

When Jack first took over GE in 1981, America was facing high unemployment and high inflation. GE had 178 people in strategic positions and 3 business showing losses for 20 years. Welch became known as “Neutron Jack” because of the tens of thousands of positions he cut. But that single campaign left the company and the remaining employees with a streamlined organization prepared for future growth.

Hard choices and candor were his management tools. Welch is passionate and straightforward about candor in business. “I would call lack of candor the biggest little dirty secret in business, ” Welch says in his book, Winning. It “basically blockes smart ideas, fast action, and good people contributing all the stuff they’ve got. It’s a killer.” Jack’s deifnition of the difference between candor and abrasiveness is the corporate level from which the words are said. From higher up it’s candor, from lower levels it’s called abrasiveness.

I agree with Jack, nothing can break down trust (and build fear) more than lack of candor — inconsistent truth. People get fired when no one has said a word to them about their performance being less than it might be to be “great.” Then they wonder why no one told them the truth.

At GE, Jack held his managers to a policy of Rank and Yank — that every manager had to rank his or her employees and fire the bottom 10% once a year. When speaking on that at the WBF, Jack Welch seemed to have moved from firing those who might improve to retraining them. In this one minute interview, Jack explains who to keep and retrain and who to let go.

Here’s another one-minute interview with Jack on integrity, learning, and mentorship.

At the World Business Forum, Jack was clear and cogent on what makes a winning team. “You get the right players in the right positions and you will win.” Jack spoke of mentors and leaders and managing from the top, at one point delivering my favorite quote of the two-event.

“Fear as a management tool is dead.”

Jack and I are so aligned in that single statement.

How to Build a High Trust Culture

Fear cannot exist in the same space as trust. Here are a few of my best practices on how to wipe fear out of your organization. Ironically, in this grassroots social business world, developing a high trust culture a process that builds its roots from the to.

Leaders build a values system that resonates with everyone who helps the business thrive. This happens when leaders let go titles to be human, get their hands dirty, and invest their hearts as well as their heads outside of themselves — the higher cause of the business.
Incorporated core human values into your value proposition. Repeat both the same sentence every time you speak — to every audience.
Talk, walk, and live the truth online and offline, inside and outside the company. Trust is the hard truth spoken gently. Leaders are charged with defining the reality under which we serve the cause. Make it easy to see, hear, and understand what is valued and what is not.
Invite ideas and diverse thinking. Explore those ideas and thoughts that are different from our own.
Celebrate and reward people who live the values as well as the performance goals of the company.
Invite people outside the business who exemplify the same values and performance ideals to participate, engage in, learn from, and add to the culture and community you’re building.

Watching Jack it’s easy to see that the world is his natural habitat. He lives his values and feels no need to apologize for what he believes. He knows his losses, learns from them, and makes them part of his repertoire of strengths. It’s a irresistible combination of humanity and leadership.

And that sort of candor is easy to trust.

How will you contribute to building a culture of candor and trust in any business or any size?

You’ll find Jack as @Jack_Welch on Twitter — He does his own tweeting.
Read more about the World Business Forum 2010 at WBFNY.com and WBFNY-bloggershub

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

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Five Ways to Manage the Present and Create the Future at the Same Time

October 11, 2010 by Liz

Do You Over Focus on the Present?

I had the privilege of listening in and live tweeting for two days as world-class thinkers spoke to an international audience about business and the state of the world at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. It’s been my experience that when leaderships gathers to share current thoughts, though they might prepare and speak individually, if you listen carefully to their words and the big ideas an overriding theme evolves.

One overriding theme this year at the World Business Forum was the character of leadership is the foundation of great business, innovation. Vijay Govindarajan — a leading expert on strategy and innovation — spoke to three strategies for creating the future.

Manage the Present
Selectively Abandon the Past
Create the Future

Vijay says stratefy has nothing to do with competing for the present, but everything to do competing for the future. However, we cannot compete for the future if we are not taking care of the present. The thinking process it takes to excel at managing the present is fundamentally different from that of managing the past and future to grow.

This three minute video gives a great summary of Vijay Govindarajan’s points.

Vijay speaks to the enterprise, but any small business owner, entrepreneur, consultant or freelancer knows that living in the present and building the future is the only way to survive.

Here are five of my ideas for managing the present while creating the future.

Reserve time to claim what you’ve learned. Take a hour a day, a day a week, or 3 days a month to do the work of keeping your business in line.
Study your losses to find the lessons. Keep the lesson and leave the losses behind.
Assume that every new idea holds an opportunity in the form of a problem.
Keep the realistic present in focus and keep asking people What a future version of this might look like? <-- Note: that's a different question than What is the next ____?
Surround yourself with people who will tell you when your ideas are brilliant and when they are brilliantly stupid.

In an ever-changing venue with an increasing influx of information, the winning objective is not to know what we know, but be able to respond and react to changes with solid experience and a learner’s mind.

How do you manage the present and create your future at the same time?

Read more about the World Business Forum 2010 at WBFNY.com and WBFNY-bloggershub

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Successful-Blog is a proud affiliate of