Organisations where “The Value of Human TALENT is above Everything”,
Where talent is rewarded & respected, and importantly treated above everything else.
For it will be TALENT that will rule in the future and build lasting success for organisations and its people.
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9 Questions To See If you are caring ENOUGH
Courtesy, Tom Peters.com guestblogger Rajesh Setty
Teddy Roosevelt said, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."
So, how do you know you are caring enough?
1) Do a self-assessment on your level of caring by thinking through these nine questions:
2) Are you REALLY listening when they are talking OR are you thinking about what you will say next?
3) Do you care for them OR do you care about their opinion of you? (Inspiration from the book Leadership and Self Deception by The Arbinger Institute]
4) Do you usually call them when you want something from them or when you think you can offer something of value to them?
5) Are they in your "network" or are you both in each other's "networks?"
6) Do you leave them impressed with you OR do you make them feel good about themselves?
7) What do you see when you see people? (From a quote submitted by Mike Wagner of White Rabbit Group)
If time is money, they are making an investment by spending their time (money) with you. How are you ensuring that they are getting the right return-on-investment for this interaction (ROII)?
8) Are you treating them the way you want them to treat you?
9) Are they REALLY better off because you are in their life?
Your turn now. What question should you ask yourself to see whether you are caring enough?
November 18, 2009, 9:00 am
Leadership - Social Intelligence
Interesting interview of Dr Dan Goldman by Harvard Business on The importance of emotional intelligence for leaders
Interesting interview of Dr Dan Goldman by Harvard Business on The importance of emotional intelligence for leaders
The Future will be driven by emotion...
Futurist Patrick Dickson talks on emotion as a driver of technology, management, trends & customers.
Imagine Leadership
Yes Leadership can help change the world ! A brilliant video from Harvard Business School
The Next wave of Technology Transformation
Interesting interview with Reid Hoffman, founder of Linked-IN talks on new forms of data, and the way it will be used in creating the next wave of transformation..
Your business is bursting with profits
Yes Leadership can help change the world ! A brilliant video from Harvard Business School
The Next wave of Technology Transformation
Interesting interview with Reid Hoffman, founder of Linked-IN talks on new forms of data, and the way it will be used in creating the next wave of transformation..
Your business is bursting with profits
2009 Readiness: Part 1 Posted by Steve Yastrow , Courtesy Tom Peters
Your business is bursting with profits Ask yourself this question: Where is the latent profit in our business? No business, in the history of the world, has created all of the profit it could possibly produce—including yours. There is always money left on the table. That is especially true in tough times like this. Our world has changed, profoundly and quickly, and we have yet to adjust to our new reality. Many of us are so shell-shocked at what's been taken from us that we have yet to acknowledge what is left for us to take.
Your business is filled with unrealized opportunities. It is bursting with latent profit, just waiting to be unleashed. The real question is whether you will identify those opportunities and grab them. I am 100% convinced that the state of your business on January 1, 2010, has less to do with the Dow Jones Average, the unemployment rate, or the price of gas than it does with how YOU act in the meantime. (And it is in your best interest to believe this, also.)
As a first step, you want to identify the best sources of latent profit for you in this economic climate. To do this, start out by dreaming. Get in a quiet, undistracted place, and imagine it is one year from today. As you dream, imagine that 2009 was the best, most profitable year you have ever had. (Yes, this is a good dream.)
Open your mind, and imagine what happened in your business to make 2009 so successful. If you open your mind, and let yourself think positively, you'll be surprised at the ideas that flow to the surface. I did this exercise with a client a few weeks ago. Despite the economic situation, the CEO sensed that significant opportunity was lurking below the surface.
I asked the CEO and his key senior leaders to imagine the company had an incredible 2009 and 2010, and to describe the company to me on January 1, 2011. Although the company produced $15 million in revenue in 2008, it didn’t take this team long to identify a very credible, achievable $30 million business in two years. Where did we find this opportunity?
The first place the business's leaders identified was in their existing customer relationships, where a very large percentage of customers were only buying a fraction of what was possible. The executives admitted that they hadn't spent nearly enough time developing these existing customer relationships. • They recognized a large number of retail outlets that could carry their products, but which they had not pursued. • They had recently experimented with some new product combinations, presented as comprehensive solutions, which were showing initial success with a small number of customers.
They didn't have a sales plan to take these ideas to other customers, but realized that there was great potential if they did so. • They had recently made a big sale to an entirely new kind of customer, that they had never served before. This first sale now gave them credibility and a track record with other companies in that category.
Was it hard for the company to identify these opportunities? No. Had they articulated them clearly before our conversation. No. This idea of "bringing the future forward," by imagining that it is now one year from today, opens your mind to seeing the possibilities in your business. Like my client, your company is likely sitting on a mountain of opportunity, despite the economic situation. All of us are sitting on mountains of opportunity. But this result really isn't all that surprising.
You have left many opportunities unrealized for years. It's only natural; after all, we can't chase everything that it's possible to chase. Life in business is all about making choices about what we do, and what we don't do. Many of the things you chose not to do in the past may be ripe to be done in the present. As I've been going through this simple exercise with my clients, and with my own business, it's been invigorating to see the ideas that we bring to the surface.
I trust you will have the same experience and will find this to be a positive step toward your success during this economic meltdown.
[This is the first in a six-part series by Steve Yastrow, which parallels six ideas he presented in his 2009 Readiness Teleseminar, in which he addresses Six Readiness Questions to help you thrive in 2009.
February 24, 2009, 9:55 am
Attn Entrepreneurs: Mark Zuckerberg Isn’t the Role Model. Reid Hoffman Is.
Forty-plus weeks traveling the emerging world has taught me many things. Chief among them is that most entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley learn the wrong lessons looking in.
Your business is bursting with profits Ask yourself this question: Where is the latent profit in our business? No business, in the history of the world, has created all of the profit it could possibly produce—including yours. There is always money left on the table. That is especially true in tough times like this. Our world has changed, profoundly and quickly, and we have yet to adjust to our new reality. Many of us are so shell-shocked at what's been taken from us that we have yet to acknowledge what is left for us to take.
Your business is filled with unrealized opportunities. It is bursting with latent profit, just waiting to be unleashed. The real question is whether you will identify those opportunities and grab them. I am 100% convinced that the state of your business on January 1, 2010, has less to do with the Dow Jones Average, the unemployment rate, or the price of gas than it does with how YOU act in the meantime. (And it is in your best interest to believe this, also.)
As a first step, you want to identify the best sources of latent profit for you in this economic climate. To do this, start out by dreaming. Get in a quiet, undistracted place, and imagine it is one year from today. As you dream, imagine that 2009 was the best, most profitable year you have ever had. (Yes, this is a good dream.)
Open your mind, and imagine what happened in your business to make 2009 so successful. If you open your mind, and let yourself think positively, you'll be surprised at the ideas that flow to the surface. I did this exercise with a client a few weeks ago. Despite the economic situation, the CEO sensed that significant opportunity was lurking below the surface.
I asked the CEO and his key senior leaders to imagine the company had an incredible 2009 and 2010, and to describe the company to me on January 1, 2011. Although the company produced $15 million in revenue in 2008, it didn’t take this team long to identify a very credible, achievable $30 million business in two years. Where did we find this opportunity?
The first place the business's leaders identified was in their existing customer relationships, where a very large percentage of customers were only buying a fraction of what was possible. The executives admitted that they hadn't spent nearly enough time developing these existing customer relationships. • They recognized a large number of retail outlets that could carry their products, but which they had not pursued. • They had recently experimented with some new product combinations, presented as comprehensive solutions, which were showing initial success with a small number of customers.
They didn't have a sales plan to take these ideas to other customers, but realized that there was great potential if they did so. • They had recently made a big sale to an entirely new kind of customer, that they had never served before. This first sale now gave them credibility and a track record with other companies in that category.
Was it hard for the company to identify these opportunities? No. Had they articulated them clearly before our conversation. No. This idea of "bringing the future forward," by imagining that it is now one year from today, opens your mind to seeing the possibilities in your business. Like my client, your company is likely sitting on a mountain of opportunity, despite the economic situation. All of us are sitting on mountains of opportunity. But this result really isn't all that surprising.
You have left many opportunities unrealized for years. It's only natural; after all, we can't chase everything that it's possible to chase. Life in business is all about making choices about what we do, and what we don't do. Many of the things you chose not to do in the past may be ripe to be done in the present. As I've been going through this simple exercise with my clients, and with my own business, it's been invigorating to see the ideas that we bring to the surface.
I trust you will have the same experience and will find this to be a positive step toward your success during this economic meltdown.
[This is the first in a six-part series by Steve Yastrow, which parallels six ideas he presented in his 2009 Readiness Teleseminar, in which he addresses Six Readiness Questions to help you thrive in 2009.
February 24, 2009, 9:55 am
Attn Entrepreneurs: Mark Zuckerberg Isn’t the Role Model. Reid Hoffman Is.
Forty-plus weeks traveling the emerging world has taught me many things. Chief among them is that most entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley learn the wrong lessons looking in.A lot of that is the fault of publications like TechCrunch: We get excited about new things. If it’s exploding like Groupon, all the better. But we even go nuts over things like Foursquare or Quora that have pretty muted user-bases. That’s what being evangelists and early adopters is all about. We tend not to write about all the apps that launch and go nowhere, with good reason: If we’re doing our job well, we probably thought they sucked to begin with.
But the bigger disservice we do is not writing enough about the boring companies who work every day to build something that becomes huge, giving the impression that starting a business is easy in the Valley. That somehow people wake up with an idea, and roll out of bed onto a pile of venture capital, press and adoration. A lot of times the companies we should be writing about more than we do are admittedly boring infrastructure or enterprise software names. But there’s a category of consumer names that should be sexy, but for whatever reason don’t get the hype.
I’ve always thought of Yelp in this category. Local plays like Foursquare and Groupon have always gotten more attention. Another one is Pandora. Spotify has gotten far more attention, despite Pandora pulling off what almost no other music startup has– surviving the full-barrel onslaught of the record labels. But the king of them all for the Web 2.0 crowd is LinkedIn.
You could understand if LinkedIn was just paling next to Facebook. I mean, who doesn’t? Facebook is one of those once-a-decade phenomenons. But LinkedIn started out as the less-sexy social network next to Friendster. And then it graduated to the also-ran next to MySpace. It has officially trounced both now that its IPO has priced at $45 a share, or $4 billion-plus valuation– the highest valuation for an Internet company debut since Google.
More than ten years ago, Reid Hoffman– LinkedIn’s founder– was one of the first people to believe in the comeback of the consumer Internet, investing in a host of startups, but putting the bulk of his money, personal brand, time and firepower behind LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is one of the only social networks that survived from the first social media frenzy. That’s quite an accomplishment when you think about it. Hoffman wasn’t exactly up against entrepreneurial slouches. All the big Valley venture capital guns were behind Friendster. Markcenterfold-of-Vanity-Fair-this-month Pincus was behind Tribe. And Sean You-Know-What’s-Cool? Parker was behind Plaxo.
One of the reasons LinkedIn outlasted that early generation of social networks was that it was boring and practical. In the early days of social networking, the only reason anyone could think to use these sites was for dating. But Hoffman knew that would always be a customer acquisition headache: Either a dating site solves your problem and you stop using it, or it doesn’t and you stop using it. LinkedIn on the other hand would be this thing in the background you would need your entire career.
You could argue the flaw with LinkedIn was the rational strategy that saved it worked too well. For many people, it became an indispensable tool for certain moments of professional panic, but not something you used daily or even monthly. I’ve always compared it to a AAA card, a comparison that visibly annoys Hoffman and usually results in suggestions of other ways I should be using it. But back in 2007, even he admitted the site’s biggest flaw was they weren’t giving people enough to do.
When the Web 2.0 craze took off in 2006 or so, Hoffman’s star soared, but shockingly it wasn’t really because of LinkedIn. It was his angel portfolio that got the bulk of media attention. That includes out-performers like Facebook, but also stars that shined bright and burned out like Digg and Six Apart. Ever the gracious interviewee, Hoffman would answer questions about the sexier companies, but always be sure to work in a LinkedIn plug. A favorite was regularly betting me an expensive dinner at the restaurant of my choice if LinkedIn couldn’t help me do a certain aspect of my job as a reporter better.
Hoffman wasn’t in his early twenties or a college dropout, and he’d be the first to admit he wasn’t a natural CEO. He’s said in previous interviews that he has a hard time firing people quickly enough– a skill that Mark Zuckerberg has excelled at. He’s left the CEO chair several times, only to come back when other candidates haven’t worked out. But even though he could easily throw out that old cop-out of “I’m just the guy who starts stuff; I’m not the CEO type” and wash his hands of the company, Hoffman cared about LinkedIn too much to ever be very far even when insanely sexier jobs were his for the taking. Even now in his role at Greylock, he spends the bulk of his time working on LinkedIn.
And yet, given all this, it’s LinkedIn that is the first social network to go public, the first multi-billion Web 2.0 IPO. It’s more than double the exit of sexy YouTube. And, in a rare case of startup justice, his day-in, day-out work building the social network no one ever wanted to get excited about has paid him handsomely: Netting him a boost of nearly $1 billion to his net worth. Few entrepreneurs who’ve spent a decade building a company get that kind of personal return, because few personally invest so much of their own cash along the journey.
Hoffman can’t comment on any of this of course. I haven’t talked to him in weeks. These are all my observations after ten years of interviewing him about LinkedIn, watching him shake his head at the unfairness of the hype cycle and keep slogging away at building LinkedIn regardless. Hoffman should be the role model for entrepreneurs star-struck by the seeming glamour and ease of Silicon Valley’s consumer Internet world. He’s the living incarnation of the reality of the Valley: It may be easier than ever to start a product, but building a company is just as hard as its ever been.
As for the brain-dead commentators wondering if LinkedIn’s IPO represents a bubble, somewhere Hoffman has to be laughing and shaking his head again. What part of spending a decade of building a business with more than 100 million users that no one hyped, that represents one of the few large-scale working examples of a freemium business model screams “BUBBLE” to you people? These are the same people that said Google was wildly overvalued when it priced at under $100 a share.
As most people with common sense have argued, we’re not in an Internet bubble now, because the soaring valuations are mostly contained within the frothy insider ecosystem. Secondary markets are starting to change that, but so far, there are exactly two $1 billion + Web 2.0 exits that I can count: YouTube and LinkedIn. Maybe you count a few more. It depends on your definition of “Web 2.0.” I count it as the wave of consumer Web social media companies started with the Friendster explosion. Some could count Skype (twice,) but I’d argue Skype is more of a sandwich generation company. But even if your definition is more generous, I bet you can count them on one hand. Five or fewer isn’t a bubble.
There’s exactly one aspect of Silicon Valley right now that I will concede does feel like 1999: It’s easy to start a company. Stupidly easy. And entrepreneurs like Hoffman are the antithesis of that archetype not a symptom of it.
The above article appeared on Techcrunch.com on 18/5/2011
