How to be Lucky in Business
Chris Brogan answers whether he’s been “lucky” in business. I love his challenge at the end of the video for all us to examine how we spend our time and whether we are getting what we want out of the business side of our lives. If you’re not – how about that old cliche I think of from time to time in these situtations:
Luck favors the prepared.
How to be successful AND stay married
I’m a huge fan of Inc. Magazine. I love two things about it. First, it just works – the magazine is laid out intelligently, offers great content and just looks good. More importantly, and the real reason I’m such a fan, is the real-world context that permeates almost all of the articles, whether written by guest columnist or staff writers. This pragmatism is in effect across the entrepreneurship spectrum – whether it’s a lifestyle entrepreneur writing about her five figure business, or executives discussing businesses with a couple additional zeros – I rarely read articles tainted by the arrogance of intellect or success.
I especially liked a quick little article in the recent December 2009 issue entitled House Rules: Ten gentle suggestions for keeping the domestic seas tranquil. Written by Meg Hirshfeld, writer and wife of Gary Hirshberg (who just happens to be CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt), the article lays out a list of simple suggestions Meg and Gary developed together for “entrepreneurs who aspire to a happy marriage and thriving family life.”
I’ll bullet the list here, but I highly suggest you click over to the article for Meg and Gary’s more complete thoughts for each suggestion. It’s a quick read.
- You are not the boss at home.
- Set the bar low. But set it somewhere. (As in, make time for time together. As Meg so aptly puts it “Being together reminds you that you enjoy being together. And that reminds both of you why this enormous undertaking is worthwhile.”
- Please, turn off the Blackberry.
- When a big business decision looms, give your spouse a seat at the table.
- Enter your spouse’s universe from time to time.
- Make her communications a priority.
- Don’t squeeze her in.
- Treat your spouse like she’s your most important client.
- Acknowledge her role.
- Take frequent inventory.
My thoughts
I’ve been doing a lot of research over the last year on the topic of interpersonal relationships: why certain people gravitate together, the dynamics of relationship stages, and the difficulties in developing and maintaining long-term, constructive, meaningful relationships. This focused research has taken place on top of my normal business reading, both books and magazines.
What’s surprised me a bit is not just how much both bodies of work have in common, but how applicable each is to the other. While Meg’s list above is written from the context of keeping your marriage happy when one spouse is a workaholic entrepreneur, the suggestions are just as applicable for any couple. Likewise, all the material I’ve been reading about interpersonal relationships contain a wealth of actionable thoughts on developing and maintaining authentic relationships based on respect and trust at work. Something I think we can all agree is often in short supply.
Perhaps my thoughts are colored by the stage of life I’m at. Being later in my career with much more responsibility than I had in earlier jobs, the line between my business and personal life has blurred quite a bit over the years. But while it’s a fair question to ask, I would suggest that the answer really doesn’t matter. If we can strengthen, even deepen, our relationships at work and at home, who cares what aisle of the bookstore helped us?
Comments are open
What do you think? Do you agree that relationships, whether at work or at home, follow similar “rules”? Is there a relationship lesson you’ve learned professionally that you applied in your personal life, or vice versa? What suggestions would you offer entrepreneurs to keep a happy marriage and a thriving family life?
Just in Time – Destressing the holidays
One of the “rules” I always read relevant to professional blogging is to subscribe to lots of blogs that stretch you in different directions, or you just find interesting. I follow that rule, and one of the blogs I follow is called Simple Mom. Her blog’s tagline (I assume “her”, but these days who knows) is “Live simply, stay sane.” I like that.
Simple Mom recently published a post on tips for handling “extended family holiday stress”. That’s a very polite way of expressing what most of us know to be a truth during this time of year, and what is succinctly described by the post’s author in the opening paragraphs:
My father-in-law aptly stated it this way: one of the best things about the holidays is seeing the headlights of family members coming up the driveway to visit. The second best thing about the holidays is seeing their taillights as they drive away.
I think we can all relate!
The post is much more than just inside jokes about family relations though, and offers some practical, and positive tips on coping with can be stressful family situations during what should be a joyous time of year. I particularly like the author’s point of view on what ultimately is most important, as tip #1 is “Your Spouse Comes First”.
This is a great little article and I highly recommend you check it out: 8 Tips for Handling Extended Family Stress During the Holidays.
Stay sane. Stay positive.
3 Customer Satisfaction Survey models
I’m always amazed by the number of companies that don’t do customer satisfaction surveys. And yes, I consider independent consultants “companies”. There is only upside to satisfaction surveys and very little downside, in my opinion. Among a myriad of benefits, post-project customer satisfaction surveys:
- Are a source for great testimonial quotes. Put these on your website, in your brochures, on your resume. Nothing helps make your delivery claims real like a quote from a customer.
- Offer yet one more touchpoint for your sales and/or marketing folks to ask for referrals, cross-sell and up-sell, etc.
- Present a chance to capture honest, real-world feedback on your products and services – potentially identifying opportunities for improvement or growth.
I am very bullish on customer satisfaction surveys and strongly feel they should be a component of every company’s sales and marketing strategy. For those of you who feel differently, I’d love to hear your thoughts via comments. In this post, I’d like to share three very different customer satisfaction survey models I’ve seen over the years and where each might be used most effectively.
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10 Question With… OPT Solutions
I’ve known Laura Pettit Rusick for quite a few years now. I was originally introduced to her through the regional IT Leadership group I sit on the Board of. Eventually Laura was also recruited to the Board and she and I ended up co-chairing the Programs position. If any of you have ever been responsible for pulling together a schedule of high quality speakers for monthly meetings, you know it can be quite a chore and take a lot of hard work. Laura was a pleasure to work with and shared my passion to “go the extra mile” to program the best speakers and the most interesting topics we could come up with. Our planning meetings were often held at her house, and there was always ample red wine to help the planning process!
After holding a number of senior management positions at a handful of companies, it was a natural evolution for Laura to start her own company and use her expertise to help small- and medium-sized companies on complex business process and technology issues. While I was aware of Laura’s technical and business expertise, I wasn’t aware that she had the entrepreneurial fires burning. So in looking for my next 10 Questions With… interviewee, I didn’t have very far to go.
So, on with the interview…
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Amen, brother!
Seen on a sign outside a church on the way to work this morning:
We believe in the separation of church and hate”
Submit your Leadership qualities
I’m putting together a post on qualities of Leadership you don’t often find in the popular literature. Nothing against those books – there are some fantastic authors out there writing on the topic of Leadership and the qualities that leaders possess.
Along the way however, as I watch the leaders I respect and admire, I’ve noticed some qualities I don’t see mentioned. One day it dawned on me that these qualities were more on the “softer” side. I’ve been jotting a couple of them down here and there and I’m close to having a decent post about them.
I’d be interested in hearing about your undiscovered leadership qualities. What have you noticed in the leaders you admire that you’ve never seen covered in a Leadership book?
Progress
Finally had the first brainstorming meeting on the smartphone application I surveyed you all on a while back. It was a really good session. Not only did the company I’m working with say that my original design could be fairly easily programmed, we came up with an entire new “other half” to the application that really complements the overall goals of the application quite nicely.
Next steps are for the consultant to put together both functional specifications (for development costing), and wireframes (for user interface design and review). The ultimate deliverable for this phase is a cost to develop the application – basically so I know if I can afford to do it or not!
Plans at this point are to develop for both the iPhone and the Blackberry out of the gate. This is still open for discussion as all the phone platforms have their own development language, so every platform you develop on adds cost to the project. As it stands right now, there is no code translator or utilities to facilitate cross-platform development.
Also up in the air is the business model. Add tons of value to the application from the start and charge for it, or offer a “lite” version for free to drive adoption, then charge for advanced features? There is quite a discussion going on between the consultant and myself on this issue – we are definitely split on the topic. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
The first cut of documentation is promised for next Friday. I’m really excited to finally be moving forward!!
30 second MBA?
I finally got around to reading through the recent Fast Company magazine, and saw a little promo for one of their online features: The 30 Second MBA. Normally I never check those kind of online features out; they are almost always characterized by little value and/or over the top marketing. I respect Fast Company though – if you haven’t subscribed or checked it out, it is very well done. And with contributors to the program including Alan Mulally (Ford CEO) and John Chambers (Cisco CEO), it seems worth checking out.
It’s a pretty simple little mini-site. Each week a management topic is covered. Topics include some basics like “How to retain and nurture talent” and “How can teams make better decisions?“, to more interesting topics like “In a highly networked global world, has the meaning of leadership changed?” and “What do you do when you don’t know what to do?“ The topic of the week is then covered via a 30 second video Monday through Friday, with a different “faculty member” each day.
I watched a handful of videos on some of the topics and, as you might guess, there is only so much wisdom you can impart in 30 seconds, no matter how smart you are. That said, the faculty members are all incredibly successful individuals and the 30 second format really forces them to succinctly present one clear thought per segment. A bonus is that the site is basically ad free, expect for a small banner ad that pops up in the video for a few seconds.
So if you’re looking for inspiration, have a passion around a particular topic, or are just curious, check out Fast Company’s 30 Second MBA site, and let me know what you think.
If we did it for them…
There are many ways to learn, and part of the path to personal and professional excellence is not only making the commitment and focusing on self-development, but also discovering and creating learning opportunities. While we can create many of our learning opportunities on our own, I also believe that learning opportunities perfectly suited for where we are at in life come our way naturally from time to time, if we are just aware enough to notice.
One of those learning opportunities came my way over the last couple of weeks. In no less than three fairly strategic discussions, at some point in the discussion someone said:
But if we did it for them, we’d have to do it for everyone.
I don’t know what it is about that comment that drives me nuts, but it always has. Maybe it’s that too often it’s used as a door-closer to a discussion. Maybe in my mind I interpret it as the person using the comment as a smokescreen when they really just aren’t interested in change. After some reflection over the last few weeks, I think my real problem with the statement is what I perceive as it’s inherent negativity; especially when the comment is made by a leader.
So, having noticed that his learning opportunity was sent my way, I set about to take advantage of it, in two ways. First, I started upon some reflection of why this phrase bothers me so much, and positive ways I can process the statement and keep the conversation moving forward. Second, since every time the comment was made it came up amid discussions I was having with some very smart people that I truly respect, I paid particular attention to how they responded.
In a couple short weeks, I have a completely new toolkit on how to deal with this potentially deadly comment. Here’s what I came up with:
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