Successful Blog

Beach Notes: Waiting

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by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

It might not look like it from this picture but there is a big surf running here at world famous Snapper Rocks. Usually we see the surfers just plunging straight in and paddling out to the waves. On this day, we noticed everybody waiting, waiting: nobody was trying to get out to the break until they could see a short respite in the pounding surf. A little while later they had all paddled out, but for those few minutes as we were walking by there was obviously a collective “let’s all not do anything stupid here” experience.

Fortune may favor the bold but sometimes it’s really smart to wait till the right moment, not just dive in.

Map http://bit.ly/fqMlzC

waiting990

-Suzie and Des

Open Letter to Entrepreneurs: You Don’t Hold a Monopoly on the Right Answers

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A Guest Post by Scott P. Dailey

peacock1

You want a new Web site. You’re the boss and the company needs a new site. The existing one is home to static and dated talking points and lately you’ve begun to suspect that it is shouting at visitors and is thus, not developed with an evolving 2.0 culture in mind. There’s nothing, you conclude, social about. Your wife, mother-in-law and golf buddies all agree. You’re the boss and this is your mandate.

You want the thing redone and you want it redone now. Details are someone else’s problem. That’s what you pay the worker bees to do. You make the demand, they make it happen. You don’t care how; you just want the darn thing done and done well. You assign a small gaggle of your most qualified people to the task and they immediately spring into action. At the outset however, you make it clear that you want every phase of the project to pass through you before moving through each milestone. You’re Teddy Roosevelt. That’s just the way it is.

The talented group you’ve assembled begin doing all the heavy lifting as you expect it to be done. They do the research. They poll the best resources. They draft the Gantt charts and project time lines that denote, in graphically rich detail, the mile markers that will comprise the job’s lifespan. They have drawn up the wire frames, and the site map too. Nothing is left to guesswork. Your people got it right the first time. And you insist on being involved in every discussion.

The presentation

You call a meeting to review the team’s progress. The team sits down with you and proposes the solution as outlined in the project management materials and research data they’ve spent the previous week developing. The team is pumped. They know they nailed this thing and confidently cannot wait to see your reaction. Your project lead places the plan in front of you and you dig in, allowing her no opportunity to present. You give the proposal a flagrantly cursory look and are quickly ready to respond.

Here’s your appraisal:

The wire frames are bland and unsexy and the sitemap is nothing more than a confusing bunch of boxes with if statements peppered throughout.

Hmmm. The timeline calls for a 12-week project lifespan. 12 weeks, you exclaim, seems an excessive period of time to launch a new Web site. You have no prior experience launching Web sites, but that doesn’t stop you from being thoroughly convinced that you’re right to expect and demand it be done faster.

You don’t known what the terms, CMS, 301, 401 or Gantt all mean and that frustrates you. Instead of learning however, you use your entrepreneurial brawn to deliver a brief and condescending lecture to the lead on why spelling things out in plain English was not achieved and time, consequently, has been wasted. Your untrusted lead cautions you that these materials are internal project guides, intended for the technical eyes of the team and not necessarily a high level presentation meant for non-technical leadership. As the lead, you assure the boss that you’re trying to explain things in digestible terms, but the boss filibusters time and again and silences you’re every effort to simplify the conversation.

Intimidated further by your lead’s sensible rebuttals, you’re the big cheese you recall. So you dig your increasingly fragile heels in and quickly, loudly move on, even more confused now than you were before your initial objection to the amount of nerdy mumbo jumbo in the plan.

Suddenly it dawns on you.

Where’s the layout concept? “What’s this thing going to look like?”, you ask the team. The lead explains that this is a planning meeting and in the timeline spreadsheet, all of these milestones are addressed in their logical order. This frustrates you even more and you again explain to the team that you think 12 weeks is excessive and you now begin to suspect why. All this planning. All these spreadsheets (one in total, mind you). All these wire frames are giving you a headache. There’s no fun in any of this! You insist on seeing ‘something’ (a layout) within the week.

The team lead tries again to explain that designing the creative at this stage puts the sensible order of milestones grossly out of sequence and thus, hinders the team’s ability to get things right. You scoff and launch into a less-than succinct rant about how you built the company and how you met deadlines and adapted to ungodly pressures in far less time than this project asks for. The team tunes you out and, one by one, slowly begin to accept that you don’t give a darn about their expertise in designing and developing great Web sites. You don’t notice, of course, that your team has abandoned you, because you are too busy being certain that this situation is not unlike any other professional crisis you’ve experienced and in each of those, you were 100% in the right. You merely want to control every facet of the job and consequently grant no one beneath you the authority to succeed on terms unfamiliar to you.

10 Months Later…

The site was designed according to your project management sensibilities. It possesses all of the social channels you demanded it possess. It even went live ahead of that senseless 12 week calendar your former team lead recommended. Oh yeah, she quit like six months ago. If you had listened to her, you ponder, you might still be waiting for a site to go live. Your wife and golf buddies think it rocks and while you now have Twitter, Facebook and YouTube profiles, you have no qualified traffic hitting your pages and you’ve ultimately learned nothing from the exercise.

Two Years Later…

You’re broke and out of business. You’re getting older and you haven’t the fundamental computer savvy to impress interviewers. You have enormous debts and the culture that rewarded your business ideologies so many years earlier has now made you virtually unhirable. Humility sets in if you’re lucky and it is then, if you’re luckier, that it dawns on you that you don’t possess a monopoly on the right answers.

That’s when you learn to listen again.
Listening leads to life-long learning.
It’s your chance to start over.

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Scott P. Dailey is a Web designer, copywriter and network administrator. Recently Scott launched ( http://scottpdailey.com ), his social media blog that makes connections between social networking etiquette and the prevailing human social habits that drive on and offline business engagement patterns. You can connect with Scott via Twitter at @scottpdailey.

Creative Commons License photo credit: bkang83

Thanks, Scott!

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

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7 Steps Get the Best Leadership Thinking from Your Team

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10-Point Plan: Teaching Leaders to Think

“I Don’t Pay You Think” Doesn’t Work Anymore

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For years we marketed one-size-fits-all solutions, it worked to grow the numbers higher and higher by allowing companies and corporations to focus on how to give us more for less. We had access to more products at lower prices because of it.

And in that one-size-fits-all environment, it’s fairly certain that at least once in your career you heard a manager say the famous words, “I don’t pay you to think.” In fact the system relied upon carefully controlled decisions … only a few people were allowed “to think.”

Rogue thinking upset the carefully constructed system of industrial production that made the whole thing work. Even customer conversations were perfected down to scripts so that no maverick thought could undermine the “perfected” process of handling relationships.

Except customers never did find those scripts the making of a perfect relationship and now as customers have ways of connecting with each other, they’re letting us know that they’re spending their attention, time, and money with companies and corporations who build one-of-a-kind things, offer customized and personalized service, and develop true and loyal relationships.

What 20th century company or corporation was designed to manage that?

7 Steps Get the Best Leadership Thinking from Your Team

It’s been decades of businesses that have preached the mantra “I don’t teach you to think.” Leadership reaches out to build together what can’t be build alone. Ironically, it gets stronger when everyone thinks.

How does a leader build a team that leaves behind black-and-white safety of scripted relationships to the gray decision making that actually serves customers and the company? Without the right environment, support, and commitment in place it’s likely to be a mess of good intentions that foul up things.

Here are 7 steps to building a thinking, influential leadership team.

  1. Trust your team. It goes without saying that if you picked the right team, they’ll do the right job. If after reflection, you find that trust isn’t going to come. It’s time to change your own thinking about the people you want on your team.
  2. Start with a small crew. A change in management style cannot be made via a toggle switch or a pendulum swing. Rather than announcing new “rules of behavior.” Enlist a small crew who has already shown they understand both customers and what drives the business.
  3. Agree on the definition of a good result. Strategy always begins with knowing where we want to go. Set a goal. Define what a successful completion of that goal would be.
  4. Let the crew plan how to get from here to success on that one thing. You’ve agreed on the outcome and you’ve chosen the right crew. Let them show you their most efficient process for achieving it. Let them work out the details without you.
  5. Review the plan by asking questions. Have a short meeting for the crew to show you what they’re going to do. Limit yourself to questions rather than advice. You now have the benefit of being outside the thinking and so you can test it for holes and hidden assumptions — something you couldn’t do when you were part of building the plan. You can learn from the new ideas they bring to it.
  6. Stay out of their way as they execute. Ask them to keep you apprised via status updates and meetings, but stay in question so that you can be tester of the thinking rather than the only thinker in the room. When people look to you for an answer, answer with, “You have more information, than I, what seems the most appropriate action to you? Why do you think so?”
  7. Celebrate Success and Value What You Learn Every status meeting take a moment to celebrate successes. Invite the crew to do the same with you. Also take time to highlight and value new things, surprises, and misfires that teach what not to do.

The days of “i don’t pay you to think” are thankfully long over. True leaders are people who don’t want to do all of the thinking. Leaders are people who want to build something innovative, elegant, and useful that they can’t build alone.

Care-filled thinking, well-thought action, and thoughtful response has become the gold standard of business growth, innovation, and loyalty relationships. When everyone is thinking, the customer and the company become a community and the business thrives. Thinking is the new ROI.

The way and the level at which we value our teams’ thinking is directly proportional to the value of the thinking they return.

How do you get the best thinking from your team?

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

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Beach Notes: Did Santa Surf Here?

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by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

We saw this Santa hat on the beach at world famous surfing spot Snapper Rocks. The amusing thought of a portly Santa on a short board was quickly dispelled by realising it was probably just a leftover from a Christmas Day lunch.

Strange as it may seem to those who live where Christmas means cold and maybe snow and ice, in Australia it is the height of summer. On Christmas Day on the beach here it is not unusual to see people having a family picnic, celebrating in swimsuits, sunburn cream and Santa hats.

-Suzie and Des

SOB Business Cafe 01-07-11

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SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking — articles, books, podcasts, and videos about business online written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the titles to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

Business Insider
First, only 8% of American adults use Twitter. This is more evidence that, despite its enormous popularity among tech and media folks–and its massive global user numbers–Twitter has yet to go mainstream.

Second, fully half of these Twitter users basically never listen to a word anyone else says. In other words, half of Twitter users use Twitter as a sort of digital closet that they go into once in a while to mutter to themselves, with no one else listening.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-usage-2010-12#ixzz1AH3h8pV0

Top Rank
I know the right thing to do is talk about social strategy and broader level considerations before getting into the tactical details and specific tasks. Sometimes showing minute by minute examples of what a Community Manager does is jumping the gun for a new discussion on social media but it might be the only way to reach those that will perform the new role. Think of it as bottom up social media strategy if you have to. The more front line and middle managers that “get it”, the more powerful winning executive support will be.

Cloud Ave
Yet in 2010 I noticed the impact that Technology/Brand Evangelists are having on their companies. I noticed how they’re using social media to create real sales opportunities. I noticed how they’re creating exceptional buzz around their brands that was once the domain of the world’s largest media powerhouses.
And I noticed why Robert Scoble exemplifies this phenomenon.

Bottom line: These Evangelists are creating real shareholder value. Allow me to make the case.

eMarketer
“Bringing Facebook profile data into retail sites makes sense because it influences consumers when they are close to conversion,” said Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer principal analyst and author of the new report “Social Commerce: Personalized and Collaborative Shopping Experiences.” “In contrast, many consumers on Facebook are mainly socializing with friends and further removed from making purchase decisions.”

Ask Spike
The one point that I would like to make is this: the words are gone. And ultimately, don’t you want your icon – your company – your brand – to be so well-known and ubiquitous THAT YOU DON’T NEED YOUR COMPANY NAME in your logo any more?

Smashing Magazine
The performance of a website including a background video depends significantly on the speed of the user’s internet connection. Video backgrounds certainly do not fit in every setting; they wouldn’t be meaningful in online magazines or blogs. However, they can work really well in entertainment and certain corporate settings which are supposed to communicate artistic qualities, exclusivity, branding or even high quality standards.

Related ala carte selections include

Adrian Chan at gravity7

Sit back. Enjoy your read. Nachos and drinks will be right over. Stay as long as you like. No tips required. Comments appreciated.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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Be Less Busy

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by Patty Azzarello

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Chances are, you have no extra time.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called
WHEN do you think? about the importance of giving yourself time to think strategically.

As we begin the new year, it’s a great time to spend time thinking and planning how to make this year better than the last one — in your work and in your life.

As a leader, it’s critical to not just get the work done, but to make sure that you and your team are more capable next year.

If you don’t grow capability, you get stuck.

Your main job as a leader is to build a highly capable team beneath you so that you free yourself up to solve higher order problems.

You need to always be finding new ways to add value to the business.

But to do that requires you to make sure you have time to do the longer term tasks that build value and capability — things that will create a meaningful, strategic difference.

Some examples:

This year…

  • How will we improve our ability to get customer references?
  • How will we deliver more quickly or at less cost?
  • What new process will improve our quality?
  • What new behaviors will eliminate chaos in our business and create more time?
  • How will we learn more about our customers really care about?
  • What new way of serving customers will differentiate us from our competition?

To work at this level requires time.

If you have no time, YOU need to make yourself less busy.

Here are a few realities to consider. I call this my Over-busy Manifesto.

The Over Busy Manifesto

No one other than YOU has any motivation whatsoever to make you less busy. Your boss, your peers and your team only benefit from your endless work output.

If you are overwhelmed by the activities of your job you are not ready for a bigger one.

The most successful people were not the ones who were less busy along the way, they figured out how to rise above it.

The Hard (but important part)

No one will ever give you permission to be less busy. It can feel scary to stop appearing really busy if you associate your value with the amount of time you spend working.

Just know that it’s not the “work” that matters, it’s the outcomes you deliver. You don’t win the game for running up and down the court, it’s the points on the board that count.

Refuse to burn all your time up on things that are not so important.

Trust that giving yourself time to think will help you find ways to deliver higher value business outcomes, and get the right work done in less time.

People will see you delivering real value, getting smarter and faster, making strategic advances — not just working really hard. It will get less scary.

My New Book

I wanted to give people a useful framework to take more control of their success.

The book is filled with big insights and practical things you can do right away that make all the difference between getting ahead and just working really hard.

You can get the book or take a look at the reviews on Amazon, and here is a short video of me talking about what’s in it.

Please share this with anyone whose career you care about.
Thanks!

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Patty Azzarello works with executives where leadership and business challenges meet. She has held leadership roles in General Management, Marketing, Software Product Development and Sales, and has been successful in running large and small businesses. She writes at Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership Blog. You’ll find her on Twitter as @PattyAzzarello

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