Successful Blog

Simon Mainwaring says We First – Do You?

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We First: An Invitation to Build a Better World
By Simon Mainwaring
Founder, We first

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Let me start out by saying this is a big picture blog. I am seeking your support for a movement to build a better world. That’s a sizeable request, I know, but let me explain because this will be important to you both personally and professionally.Several years ago, I read a speech Bill Gates gave at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He asked corporate leaders to come up with new models to justify doing business in the poorest regions of the world. He exhorted that corporations have an obligation to raise the standards of living throughout the world, even if they cannot capture their usual profit margins. Gates called it “creative capitalism” and he challenged the business world to get involved.

Does this message resonate with you? Do you think the world could be in better shape were capitalism to function better?

I did. Gates inspired me and I began thinking. Since then, I have devoted myself to formulating ideas that could fundamentally alter how we practice business. I call it We First capitalism in opposition to Me First capitalism. It is based on the premise that we are now living in a complex, interconnected, globalized world of 7 billion people in which our economic decisions and business practices ripple everywhere to impact millions of other people. We can no longer accept that capitalism functions as an engine of selfish short-term wealth creation, winner-take-all, profit-for-profit’s sake system of commerce. Capitalism cannot remain an elite economic activity whose results provide happiness and prosperity for a limited group of stakeholders, leaving billions of others living without opportunity or hope, and our planet in shambles.

My purpose in formulating We First capitalism is to persuade corporations and businesses of all sizes that we all must accept greater social responsibility. Building a better world must become what our businesses do every day as part and parcel of our operations, not something we do after we make our profits. The scale of crises in the world needs more than charitable contributions reluctantly squeezed out of pre-tax net profits. Business itself must become a smarter engine of constructive contribution to solving the world’s problems, not just a mindless motor churning out profits from our consumer culture.

In recent years, we have seen many of the leading companies in the world start to tackle their social responsibility. Brands like Nike, Starbucks, Pepsi, Patagonia, and even the largest brands like P&G and Unilever are responding with programs to implement sustainable manufacturing, develop Fair Trade suppliers who support indigent farmers, and assist NGOs on the ground not just with their money but with their expertise, distribution resources, and leadership. We First is not wishful thinking for two reasons. First, research shows that consumers are increasingly attracted to companies that practice social responsibility. They prefer to do business with socially-oriented companies and they are even willing to switch brands to a product that supports a cause if the price is about equal, especially Moms and Millennials who are the major markets for many consumer products.

Secondly, social media is connecting up consumers and empowering them as never before to have a voice and communication outlets to talk back to irresponsible businesses. Through their fan pages on Facebook and twitterstreams, consumers have new opportunities to protest against the bad actors of the business world, to organize boycotts and buycotts, to reward the good and punish the offenders. New smart phone apps are giving consumers the tools to scan barcodes and get information right in the shopping aisle about a product’s ecological and social footprint so they can make smarter choices about which companies they want to support.

So whether you are a corporate executive, manager, entrepreneur, or small business owner, the movement to temper capitalism and bring social responsibility to the forefront is going to impact you and your business. If you are looking for guidance as to how to respond, I hope you will order We First and join other individuals and companies in building a better world.

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Simon Mainwaring is the founder of We First, a social branding consultancy that helps companies, non-profits and consumer groups build a better world through changes to the practice of capitalism, branding, and consumerism using social technology. You can find more about We First capitalism and its principles in his book, We First: How Brands and Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World (Palgrave/Macmillan, June 2011) at www.wefirstbook.com

Simon writes at SimonMainwaring.com and you find him on Twitter as @simonmainwaring

Thanks, Simon! It was easy to feature what you’re doing. I know your head is connected to your heart.

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

7 Solid Business Outcomes of Comradeship, Cause, Communication, and Compassion.

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All Leaders Motivate People

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The day before SOBCon 2011, Jackie Mitchell, (@Your_MsSunshine) of the Red Cross Chicago, stopped by the event site. I was explaining to Terry St. Marie, (@Starbucker) my business partner, that Jackie is that rare person who hires to a team — meaning that she interviews people to find individuals whose skill sets will add up to a stronger single unit simply by the act of teaming them together. During that conversation, Jackie mentioned how stunning it was to her to realize that the majority of the people who work for her (80% ?) don’t get paid cash for the hours they work.

Volunteers are motivated by a currency other than money.

Paid employees aren’t motivated by money either. Peter Drucker proved that money is a disincentive … rather than moving us to work more — money has the most powerful effect when it’s missing or too small.

Leaders understand that more powerful currencies attract, engage, and motivate people.

7 Solid Business Outcomes of of Comradeship, Cause, Communication, and Compassion.

If you’re looking to build a team of employees as volunteers or volunteers as employees place your investment in offering comradeship, cause, communication, and compassion. These deeper currencies will draw other leaders to build something they can’t build alone. The call of a community quest to build something strong, lasting, and meaningful is a powerful payoff in itself.

Thinking minds perform amazing feats when we are dedicated to purpose they believe in and love. We rise to our better selves when we find a group willing to invest in us and each other for a quest bigger than any one of us alone.

When an organization offers meaningful engagement of head, heart, and purpose, it reaps seven deeply solid business outcomes.

  1. Self-Awareness — Remembering. The unique value is the person, his or her skills, talents, experience, and wisdom, not the job.

    Employees who see themselves as people who do a job, rather than people who are a job offer perspective, humanity, maturity, and balance that people filling a role have lost. The faster paced the situation, the more we need time for reflection, to check in, to ensure that we don’t leave behind the learnings of our failures AND our successes. We can’t remember, reenergize, and reignite what we’ve forgotten, devalued, or not taken time to realize, claim and internalize.

  2. Meaning — value and values. Meaning — the “why” we work — it is the values inside our value proposition.

    Money can’t buy love … or loyalty. To invest our best in a common vision, we have to know what we offer and how our contribution has meaning. Meaning allows us to express our value and attracts other who have value to offer. Meaning gives us a reason to show up to become a part of something bigger than ourselves – the ultimate share the risk, share the benefit of a common cause, building a business that no one person can build alone.

  3. Peak performance — productivity. Loving you do is a simple shift to seeing that doing good work is less stressful, more fun, more fulfilling, and more profitable.

    People who love their work bring more, invest more, do more, go further for the company and the customer.
    They’re constantly seeking faster, more efficient, better answers. They get satisfaction from satisfying coworkers and customers in ways that makes the company grow. They recognize and protect the company where that’s going on. Peak performers attract other peak performers who love

  4. Communication — Value-Based Leadership. Employees who love their job find ways to communicate their values and their level of commitment in clear ways that other people can understand and trust.

    We value what we earn and what we love. As employees undercover their core values, they learn how to communicate what those values are and what they are not. That values base line helps them sort their own stories. Employees begin to see how their values build as confidence, clarity, competence, integrity, respect, and more predictable behavior, the hallmarks of leadership. That leadership inspires and attracts the other leaders who hold the same values.

  5. Focus — Balanced View. Employees who view their role as integral to the business zoom out to see the customer (values) and the company (value proposition) and back in to focus their best balanced thinking to deliver for both.

    The people who conceive, design, build, and share with customers what we sell have always know what works best and delivers value. Whether the job is building a product, answering a phone, responding on Twitter, closing a deal, or moving a box in the warehouse, a meaningful view toward serving both customers and company is within every employee’s grasp. Thoughtful decisions happen where they make sense, at the right moment, and by the person at the right level. Time is saved. Costs decrease. Quality goes up.

  6. Teamwork — Problem-Solving. Employees doing what they love have more patience, time, and energy for problem solving and for each other.

    Invested employees see the value of teaching newcomers the culture and helping those learning new skills. They align their goals to protect the environment which benefits them, the community in which they work, the business that is growing, and the customers they serve. The essence of teamwork is the idea of building something no one can build alone.

  7. Influence – Benefits of Relationships. Leaders who love their jobs understand the value of aligning their goals to build lasting relationships.
    They reach out to coworkers, vendors, partners, customers, clients, stockholders and families and make them a part of building the business. They live collaboration without fearing mutation, knowing that their values and value proposition will guide the big decisions. They talk benefits and focus on others when they build and handle the product, when they tell the company story to the customers, and in how they talk about the company as a value in serving others. The respect of a loyal community shows in everything it does.

    They build a barn, not a coliseum, inviting everyone who picks up a tool to help them. They are mission critical to their coworkers’ and customers’ missions. That loyalty becomes its own barrier to entry. No competitor can that knock that off.

And those seven outcomes result in powerfully persuasive ROI — Market Share, Market Differentiation, and Market Value. Rolling all seven into one, nothing beats the 360 degree investment of brains, heart, energy, resources, goals, and dreams all in the same direction. Any financial firm worth its salt looks for that combination when funding a business.

So when we look to engaging a great team for our business — large or small. Focus first on finding leaders who want to build something they can’t build alone. Focus fast on finding ways to bring them fully into the experience. And fund them and their work the best you are able, knowing that money can’t buy love.

How might you build more comradeship, cause, communication, and compassion into every role you offer the people who work with you?

Be irresistible.

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

What Soundbyte Do People Use to Describe YOU?

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The importance of a professional personal identity isn’t hard to explain. We all want to let business contacts see us as high caliber individuals with strong positive qualities and competence. A strong professional personal identity can differentiate and position us an irresistibly attractive asset when we want to work with a most prestigious team.

But a great professional identity more than clever packaging. It’s more than a 30-second pitch on who we are. To set our personal potential into action takes self-awareness, reflection, information, conversation, consideration, reorganization, and a vision that we can translate into action.

By identifying personal and professional brand synergies, aligning your personal brand goals to your professional pursuits you can have your cake and eat it too. By identifying opportunities that serve both your personal and professional brand objectives, you can effectively multitask, utilizing the professional support and resources at your disposal while building your own brand. Dan Schawbel

It takes work to identify, understand, define, and articulate the unique value that is your personal value proposition. But it’s worth it to get the right words, the right values, and the right talents and skills to talk about when we talk about ourselves in a business context.

It’s harder yet to take that down to a shareable sound-byte that’s clear, concise, and dead on true.

What Soundbyte Do People Use to Describe YOU?

Call Tony. He can fix anything.
That Vanessa, she’s so sweet.
If you want it organized, accurate, and complete, Anne’s the one.
Ryan’s a problem solver. He’ll have this figured out in a matter of minutes.
David will give you the shirt off his back. Don’t take it. He never forgets that he gave it.

Those soundbytes, mini-descriptions, might be accurate, or they might be legend. The point is that the people talking believe and share them. The people they’re describing have communicated those traits strongly over time.

What do people share about you when you’re not around? Being able to articulate and highlight your value can define and even change what folks share with each other about who you are.

You probably have a sense of your strengths and some of your weaknesses. It’s hard to get through school and get a job without having a sense of what they might be. But few of us actually take some time to pinpoint what they are. Take the time to determine your most outstanding assets–your highest proficiencies, your core competencies. Ask yourself these questions to gather the relevant data.

  1. What am I often asked to teach others?
  2. What responsibilities are often delegated to me?
  3. What kinds of meetings and tasks am I asked to lead?
  4. What special skills and competencies do I have that others rely on?
  5. What parts of my job description would be hardest to fill?
  6. What traits make me a valuable and unique member of the team?
  7. What work isn’t work at all?

Spend serious time reflecting on each question. Reflection is how we understand what we know. You might think about one question for set time or for a few minutes at different points in a day. As you get ideas and remember things, take notes. Write down what comes to mind. When you’ve got notes on all seven, roll up what you have gathered into one single big idea — the short bio that we hear people use all of the time — something like …

Liz can articulate what could make any product irresistible and how to turn any problem into a win.

Make your big idea a statement of your unique value in ways that others can see it, can believe in it, and can share it easily.

What is the sentence that people should be saying about you?

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

5 Ways to Appreciate Yourself and Enjoy Your Life!

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A Guest Post
by Dia Thabet

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“The way you treat yourself sets the standard for others.” ~Sonya Friedman

Self appreciation is an important component for building self esteem and confidence. Appreciating yourself is necessary for your growth in this world as you won’t be able to grow if you think and view yourself negatively.

To learn how to appreciate yourself, follow the 5 steps below:

1. Love yourself

You can not appreciate yourself if you don’t love and value yourself. Loving yourself is not a form of arrogance and narcissism. It is appreciating the gifts that God has given you and the beauties that God has bestowed upon you.

Start today taking 5 minutes a day to express your love for yourself. The more you do this exercise, the more it will become ingrained in you. You can’t ask for a better habit to acquire than loving yourself.

2. Laugh

This is simple, yet people don’t do it often. Make it a habit to laugh every day. Spend time with your children, watch a comedy show, and look at funny pictures. The important is you take action and make laughter a habit in your life.

If you can’t find anything to laugh at, then just fake it. Studies show that even a fake laugh has powerful effects on the individual’s overall well being.

Remember when you laugh, you are showing that you are appreciating your health, hence you will reduce anxiety and stress in your life.

3. Meditate

Taking 15 minutes a day to quiet your mind and thoughts is necessary. Most of the great people who accomplish great goals in life know the importance of meditation; hence they appreciate the art of silencing their thoughts.

Guess what? You are great too and taking those 15 minutes a day to meditate shows that you appreciate inner peace and that you are willing to take the time to clear your thoughts from the negative and harmful thoughts.

4. Exercise

Let’s face it; your body needs to move to stay healthy. Do yoga, aerobics, swim, jog, walk, or join the gym. Find whatever type of exercise you like and enjoy doing and start doing it daily.

5. Talk kindly to yourself

Let me ask you, do you talk to yourself in a kind way? Do you use encouraging and positive words or negative talk? According to studies, more than 80% of people’s self talk is negative. When the majorities make a mistake, instead of looking for the lessons, they start blaming themselves.

Make a decision right now to start talking to yourself in a kind and compassionate way. God has sent you to this earth for a purpose. Know that you are a beautiful person and true gift to the world. Remember, the more appreciation and kindness you show to yourself, the more kindness you will be able to give others.

“Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.”
Kahlil Gibran

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Dia Thabet writes for the coaching site 2 Achieve Your Goals , You can find her on Twitter as @Dia_Thabet

Thanks Dia! Great start to a weekend!

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

Does Your Business Embrace Technology Meaningfully?

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A Guest Post by
Matt Krautstrunk

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As bloggers we understand how important interacting with a community on social media is for exposure. We tend to refer to social as “new media,” however when you think about it, some of the ancient social media channels (Myspace, corporate blogs) have been around for over 7-10 years now. The progress that marketers have made on social media channels has almost pushed the medium to maturity, it’s time for corporate structure to follow!

Building Social Media Into Your Corporate Culture

Social media is being used by more and more people to accomplish almost everything from a job search to answering common questions. Just to reiterate how fast social media is growing. See below: According to Econsultancy

  • Tweets grew 250% since January 2010
  • LinkedIn Users grew 100%
  • Facebook grew from 350 million users to 640 million users in one year

But in the B2B marketing industry, social media should extend deeper than just having a LinkedIn. It should be controlled internally and leveraged within each employee. Your employees can be used as vehicles to spread messages about your company’s products and services. With this obviously comes inherent risk, but since social media such a transparent vertical there should be internal social media policies in conjunction with your marketing strategy.

Social Media Policy

Companies are still trying to find a balance whether they should encourage or hide employee social media use. Everything from, the decision to associate your businesses name with employees on social media to governing social media use, social media policies can be laid out to leverage your marketing strategy internally.

For instance, some companies have requested their employees create a separate Twitter account that is strictly professional. This has two key benefits, one is the fact that businesses are able to gain awareness and engagement from each employee’s Twitter, and the other is minimizing the risks associated with standing behind an employee who tweets inappropriate personal material. Businesses should design a clear policy framework for how social media can be used to create synergies not catastrophes.

Improving Workflow

Embracing social media within your company may have some risks, but empowering employees with social media embrace can help your cause. For example allowing employees to tweet during workdays can improve morale and communication efforts. Strategically integrating tools to work within your business can give meaning to each of your departments, according to Charlene Li, analyst at Execunet (http://insights.execunet.com/index.php/comments/creating_winning_social_media_strategies/best-practices/more) , “Anyone can be influential with these tools. Salesforce.com has a new Twitter-like product and calls the people in the company using it, the “Chatterati.” “This internal social group is the connective tissue in the organization,” Li noted. “There is real value being created as people use these tools to get the job done.” Social media is a core element of these innovative companies communication technology, making their employees better, more informed workers. There is an opportunity here for collaboration in the cloud; your employees will have the ability to express opinions and suggestions easier than ever before.

One of the biggest challenges to embracing social media internally is letting go of control. Executives should embrace this technology meaningfully instead of fearing the repercussions.

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Matt Krautstrunk is an expert writer on document management systems for Resource Nation an online resource that provides advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs. You can find him on Twitter as @mattkrautstrunk

Thanks Matt! Great case for taking social media seriously.

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

From Neil Patel to Ben Franklin: Do You Learn from History?

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Guest Post
by Riley Kissel

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Old Word Wisdom Ensuring New World Success

Upon sitting back and listening to Neil Patel ( @neilpatel )discuss some of his greatest achievements and losses he didn’t skip a beat when asked what his biggest professional failure was. In fact, in Patel’s eyes, failure isn’t quite the correct word. Patel referenced a time when he lost million dollars on a web hosting business in Rockwall Texas. From that loss came something he prizes most in his profession; learning a valuable lesson. This is part of the dogma that has made Patel so successful. It’s not out of a revolutionary idea or approach but it’s his good business sense coupled with old world wisdom that’s allowed him to become a top 100 blogger and consultant for numerous Fortune 500 on SEO, and all before the age of 21.

As the co-founder of KISSmetrics and a founder of Online Poker Lowdown , a poker tip site, Patel has always valued the strength and endurance of wisdom and lessons over the fickleness of ideas. He values each triumph and failure in equal measure and upon loosing those million dollars he states that, “I learned that you don’t invest in ideas. You invest in people. Ideas can change over time, but good people will always stick it out until they can figure out how to make a business succeed.” This is just a part of the tapestry of Patel’s approach and has enabled him to climb to such great heights.

Patel attributes much of his success to the lessons that he learned as a child. In various situations he references bits of wisdom handed down to him from two of his most valued mentors: his parents. It’s been through leaning from mistakes and applying those lessons that has enabled him to be such a success. Patel states that his parents, “didn’t groom me into being a businessman, but instead they just taught me what their parents taught them”. These lessons ranged anywhere from getting the most from your money to using the resources that are available to you instead of buying something you don’t necessarily need. These lessons were basic but their efficacy has been substantial at ensuring Patel’s success in the online world.

One can’t help but notice a strong resemblance in Patel’s approach to the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin.

Where does your approach fit with what has historically built success?
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Riley Kissel is a freelance writer who covers many industries with style. You can find out more about him at RileyKissel.com

Thanks, Riley, for simply showing how great thinking has built great success.

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