50 First Steps to a Breakthrough

Did you know that anxiety is an expression of creativity? Why not get creative today?
 
1. Smile–your brain needs more endorphins and serotonin
2. Reorganize your kitchen drawers
3. Paint something. Anything. With anything
4. Show a waiter or waitress they’re special
5. Read a favorite book to a child, upside down
6. Attend a wedding and toast the couple with a poem
7. Send a Christmas card to someone for their birthday
8. Carve something from a potato, then eat it
9. Make up a song with nonsense lyrics
10. Be thankful about something ordinary
11. Reframe an annoying sound as a call to action
12. Make a great breakfast for someone you love
13. Read the Heart Sutra while breathing deeply
14. Find two dissimilar things that have something in common
15. Record your first thought in the morning
16. Enjoy a casino with just $5
17. Write down a homeless person’s favorite story
18. Sing in the garage with your kids
19. Buy the first little thing you see in a store
20. Find something you like about someone you hate
21. Attach a picture to your ceiling
22. Convince an older person to do something silly
23. Write a sonnet about spare parts or produce
24. Pray for an acquaintance in need
25. Buy macaroni and cheese at an Asian supermarket
26. Write a speech about something you’ve just learned
27. Balance a coin on its edge and watch it for a moment
28. Open a branch office overseas just for fun
29. Transform your business lunch into a special event
30. Leave the computer off for a full day
31. Walk across a dark room without stumbling
32. Take a nap at night
33. Transform a hurtful comment into a compliment
34. Eat popcorn while smiling
35. Create an alcoholic snow cone
36. Listen to a type of music you never much cared for
37. Recall everything you ate yesterday
38. Share the story of your biggest mistake
39. Interview a child and post the video
40. Buy medicine for someone who’s sick
41. Put lemon in your coffee rather than milk and sugar
42. Give an acquaintance your favorite book
43. Thank your Mom until she believes you
44. Turn a picture into a short story
45. Let your dog take you for a walk
46. Massage the bridge of your nose for two minutes
47. Give someone you love a foot massage
48. Choose a cloud and make it your landmark
49. Tell people thank you until you begin to feel happy
50. Catch me if you can!

Clouds and Conversations

On Monday I was at a “slow media” event with four oil industry experts. In other words, a great conversation.

I helped the geologist, geophysicist, project manager and operations manager interview each other about a challenging job. They didn’t talk about what they were doing, as much as why they were doing it well.

It went great. The geologist even offered the operations guy an impromptu solution to his problem.

Why do such highly intelligent and well trained engineers, working at a leading corporation, rarely have these invigorating cross-discipline conversations? Must be the silo effect.

At most larger companies, it’s still normal to over-categorize their employees. Process experts keep projects “atomized,” broken down into parts so each part can be treated as a real object, analyzed and manipulated . . . forever.

But the internet and social media might bring real change to project management. “Clouds,” creative brainstorming and other post-industrial techniques are gaining momentum. Internet users prefer intuitive, collaborative projects in which they can indulge their curiosity.

Workable process will always be important. But truly productive process benefits from a spoonful of mystery. Systematic curiosity will be part of every great business conversation from now on.

Business conversations of the future will help bring social media thinking into your workplace.

New Hope For Recovering Salesmen

Hi, my name is Carey and I’m a salesman. A recovering salesman. And thanks to social media you can recover, too.

Don’t get me wrong, I love sales. It’s even addicting. But I love making a decent living more than sales, which has put me on the road to recovery.

It won’t be easy to give up the familiar sales rush that comes from enthusing across the bows of busy, preoccupied strangers about opinions and hopes that I hope will move them to action. Unfortunately, prospects knew the game as well as I.

My most important opinion: I deserve to get paid for sharing my employer’s opinions of his service or product. My fondest hope: a prospect will give me money before I can finish my pitch. That way I won’t have to ask him or her for the sale.

Most people don’t have the money or interest to purchase; so there was rarely a snowball’s chance in hell of making a sale. And that’s even before my carefully rehearsed pitch had a chance to kill any interest in me or what I’m offering.

We all know great sales professionals who are making money. For example, my friend and advisor Frank Hurtte of River Heights Consulting does his homework, carefully chooses the best prospects, qualifies them, and presents compelling reasons to buy during his carefully orchestrated campaigns.

Times change, of course; and technology will help ease the pain of recovering salesmen. Because online opinions are often bundled with solid information, we can use them together and “sell” even some knee-jerk opinion to somebody–with a stray fact or two as evidence. And when we pass on a favorite blogger’s opinion, we have their gazilllion followers as proof that it has merit.

So take heart. recover and prosper! In the social media age, we have nothing to lose but . . . the nothing on those commission checks.

How can legions of recovering salesmen make a decent living? Stay tuned. But remember: You’ll only be getting one man’s opinion.

How To Monetize Brilliant Ideas

Of course you have brilliant ideas. But to monetize them you need a responsive team of expert advisors, and a doable process that allows you to tap into their expertise.

This isn’t new. Almost a century ago, the sainted Napoleon Hill told businesses to create a kind of Mastermind group.

Business incubation companies usually help established companies. Sole proprietors and startups often rely on Mastermind support groups, or agencies like SCORE.

You know a little about business incubators and how well they work. Wikipedia says:

“Business incubators are programs designed to accelerate the successful development of entrepreneurial companies through an array of business support resources and services, developed and orchestrated by incubator management and offered both in the incubator and through its network of contacts. Incubators vary in the way they deliver their services, in their organizational structure, and in the types of clients they serve. Successful completion of a business incubation program increases the likelihood that a start-up company will stay in business for the long term.

“Historically, 87% of incubator graduates stay in business.”

Wow, 87%? That’s about the same as the depressing percentage of new businesses that close within their first few years. Incubators clearly help, and could do even better if the business had a home grown Mastermind group, and was ready to fully tap into its skills and talents.

You could hire an incubator company, or invest time and effort into working with SCORE and SBDCs. But most of their experience is in industrial age business. Even if that approach still worked in the internet age, you’re probably not ready to follow their suggestions without educating yourself first.

Every day you spend hours online educating yourself. It’s quick and easy because so much information is modularized and partially filtered by super-widgets like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or StumbleUpon.

Why don’t more businesses create greater value from all that information? Why can’t they organize and tap into this unlimited pool of expertise? Simply because they lack the right implementation strategy and plan; a customized “Social Media Business Incubation for Dummies” process.

One simple, disruptive-technology process helps transform raw ideas–yours or others’–into productive, sustainable action. Why not start “incubating” your own business this week?

First, create a clear vision of what makes your business unique. Not what you do, but why you do it so well. You’ll stay focused, and easily screen out unhelpful bits of information and false prophets. Next, build authentic, long-term engagement with your stakeholders, tapping into all their wisdom and experience. Finally, plan and execute world-class communications that will really build your business.

The tools you need for viral success are already familiar to anyone who uses social media. Begin your new business incubation program and thrive.

The Internet as “Experiential Marketplace”

Image via Wikipedia

(Dedicated to my friends at Jobs Ministry Southwest)
It makes the news when an 89-year-old man straps himself onto the top of a plane for his 20th wing-walking jaunt over the English Channel (http://bit.ly/7IQpwR). He’s one example of the growing experiential marketplace.

It’s not as newsworthy when a laid-off executive sees his or her job status as “just another stage of exploration” and actively begins “tossing aside presumed limitations” by creating or enriching opportunities on the internet. But these men and women achieve much more in the long run than aging thrill seekers.

Their families, industry and community all benefit every day from their vision and bravery.

It takes guts to put aside years of identifying yourself with a title or job description, and adopt entirely new modes of communication. It’s scary to join in the hunt for online success alongside much younger people. First you have to unlearn many outmoded “secrets of success” that you learned over your long, often illustrious career.

You have to see yourself as a leader rather than one more cog in some corporate machine.

You do whatever it takes to stand out, because you’re determined not to fade out.

God bless all those old-timers who challenge their physical limitations to try something completely different. But let’s also honor those who reinvent themselves and transform society into a new and better experiential marketplace.  These pros are charting a more elusive and uncertain territory, and helping improve the life experiences of millions of us uppity “younger folks.”

How not to connect

Image via Wikipedia

One evening many years ago I was standing in line at the train station in Maebashi, Japan. A middle-aged man came up and started practicing his limited English with a rapid-fire series of unrelated questions.

I answered in fluent Japanese, so he knew conversation was possible. But that wasn’t what he was after; he finished his half dozen questions and disappeared down the boulevard; mission accomplished.

For years I laughed at the memory. How could anyone confuse irrelevant, unsolicited phrases with meaningful engagement?

I’ve stopped laughing. Millions of social media users do the same thing and think they’ve accomplished something. The internet has come to resemble an enormous room full of strangers busily talking over each other, and believing they’re maintaining real relationships or selling teeth whitener.

The latter group even thinks they’re trembling on the brink of money for nothing. No really, nothing.

Yet this is how engagement doesn’t happen–it’s “empty calories.”

As our traditional safety nets and sources of recognition evaporate, we all need more personal validation and growth. And belonging to a supportive new culture or “tribe” is what most Americans are seeking. Always have, always will.

The internet is history’s greatest engagement tool. It will also help businesses tap into the greatest asset we could dream of: our internal and external customers. We just need to use it better.

Every tool you need to make authentic engagement your business‘s hallmark is available and waiting. But to paraphrase the Zen saying, you must stop confusing the tools that point toward real engagement with engagement itself.

Stop being unwelcome and irrelevant like that guy in Maebashi. Get in touch.

Time to Reinvent ROI?

Today’s business news included a stark report on the American workplace. Only about half of our country’s workers are happy with what they are doing–a 22-year low.

Workers under 25 are the most unhappy demographic group, apparently. And unhappy older workers are less inclined to share their knowledge, skills and experience with younger counterparts.

Both facts relate to workplace education and training. Younger workers, who spend the most time online, are educating themselves and feel less dependent on corporate training programs. And older workers’ decreasing contributions to overall worker development will add pressure for a company to invest in high quality training programs.

But the biggest losers will be large, well-established and very expensive internal programs such as Quality and Safety. Even before the recent business downturn, companies were dealing with an erosion in employee commitment to these initiatives. And the more unhappy and demoralized a workforce becomes, the less likely its members will be to keep their workplace safe and their output quality high.

Given the soaring Cost of Quality figures that most companies face–even those using Six Sigma, Lean or similar management improvemnt methodologies–such news can only have a negative impact on ROI. And where Quality standards go, so goes customer satisfaction; more bad news.

If the downturn was almost over, finding solutions to these significant problems might be easier. But most signs point to a full U.S. recovery being weak and far off. Some immediate action to initiate meaningful change and increase real engagement of rank and file workers is called for.

The first place to look may be our traditional definition of ROI.

Would new measurements and standards help executives develop strategies more pertinent to our changing business landscapes? What would it take for corporate leaders to tap into the positive aspects of social media (sense of ownership, new willingness to teach and learn, a more dynamic engagement model, etc) while presenting viable alternatives to some of social media’s inherent weaknesses?

Some type of change is already on the way. More and more Americans are accepting responsibility for their own success, and uncovering innovative ways to ward off failure.

Tweetups and Meetups, Stumbling and unfriending, viral posting and roasting . . . a whole new generation of investment opportunities and potholes is emerging. How well companies can get some bottom-line return on such changes may determine the severity and longevity of our current business malaise.

The World’s Happiest Leader: A Personal Tribute to Tom Beebe

“Imagine that the key to happiness is following your own intuition instead of other people’s opinions and advice.” Alex Ostrowski

Great leaders never stop following their intuition. They maintain a child-like faith in their insights. The rest of us mostly flit from one opinion du jour or breathless bit of “wisdom” to the next, like butterflies fading in the grass.

The greatest leaders create a culture in which employees or followers have faith in their own intuition. Because happiness happens, too.

As a child I was very fortunate to have a Sunday School teacher named Tom Beebe, and will always remember climbing happily onto his lap for a story. At the time he was VP of Personnel at Delta Airlines; he was eventually its President, and Delta became famous as a truly great company to work at (featured on page 253 of In Search of Excellence).

Mr. Beebe built “The Delta Family Feeling” on his amazing intuition about what people need and respond to. He was too smart to leave the fate of his company to impulsive or copycat decisions. For example, every stewardess was chosen from thousands of applicants, interviewed twice and screened by the company psychologist.

But all the procedures didn’t blanket his intuition, they validated it. Every employee gained a new confidence in the intuition that Delta recognized and celebrated. That confidence stayed front and center on the job, and every customer felt special to be served.

Delta made its employees so happy to work there, they once chipped in to buy their company a new airplane.

Today it’s much easier for great leaders to recreate at least part of that excitement. Like Tom Beebe, you’ll acknowledge your intuition and instill it in your employees or team members. All in a matter of hours. With the right tool and a world full of self-educated people, anyone can become a great leader like Tom Beebe.

Other people’s opinions and advice are fine, as far as they go. Just don’t confuse them with what brings real happiness. Use your intuition.

Are people the means to an end, or the end itself?

Image via Wikipedia

I give great marketing advice to my clients. It always gets them to see their business and value in a whole new light; from 20,000 feet and ground level too. And then I help them create great content.

Marketing myself is harder, partly because every conversation is such an energizing experience. It’s a “rush” to discover what people do, then think out loud about how I can help them succeed.

To this day, my great-grandmother Mimi’s dictum drives everything I do: “Make yourself useful.”

Getting that much pleasure from every conversation makes each one a goal fulfilled.

At the same time, I care deeply about my current business project and would love to see many people use it. It will only work if people use it. So in that sense, every person is the means to an end.

Have to get that straightened out.

How about you? Is gaining many online “friends” a worthy goal in itself, or are you trying to get their money, respect, retweets? It’s easy to leave that decision unmade, but you’ll be more successful if you straighten that out for yourself.

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$ — Social Media’s “Lost Symbol”

Image via Wikipedia

Does SEO really generate serious money for the average small business? Here’s a surprising fact: even its own gurus aren’t sure.

At first blush this proposition seems like a no-brainer. Selling means “keeping the funnel full.”  So the bigger your “funnel” and the more eyes you attract, the more money you should make, right? And does anybody not want to be like Google?

Google has huge resources and a growing family of great products. We don’t. If hundreds (or even thousands) of online followers join your list of strangers, have you really filled your sales funnel, or just installed a heating duct in your marketing plan?

There’s a big difference between a funnel and a heating duct. Using a funnel, you qualify your leads and focus your efforts on the best prospects. SEO’s heating duct approach just brings in lots of hot air.

SEO experts say you’ll make money by improving your search engine ranking, and therefore traffic. But even they admit that even major social media sites are money losers and that SEO’s success is uncertain. One of them wrote in a LinkedIn discussion group,

“Rank does not necessarily lead to traffic and traffic doesn’t necessarily lead to conversion. Conversion is the real business goal that we should be delivering in my view.”

Another one asked, “Is social media ROI unmeasurable?” How can he keep taking your hard-earned money if he doesn’t know?

And those same experts dismiss branding and engagement as mere distractions, “intangible excuse[s] we use to avoid the fact that we have nothing to measure.” Sorry, Charlie; there’s actually plenty to measure when you connect with real people. It’s just nothing that moves your money to the experts’ bank accounts.

So you decide. Is your business goal having big numbers that look good on a chart, or smaller numbers that generate real conversion numbers–and lasting relationships. Quantity or quality?

The Marketing Mantra doesn’t try to generate huge numbers or first-page rankings. It will, however, generate measurable results for your branding and engagement efforts. It also documents what led your audience from “stranger” to “supporter” status in their own words.

You can pay experts a lot of money for big readership. Or invest a few dollars and build market leadership. It’s time to authentically engage with identifiable people who’ll keep supporting you because you offer them so much real value.

To learn more, please visit http://www.yourmarketingmantra.com.

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