Ownership Isn’t For Real Leaders

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It’s ironic, isn’t it? We use social media super-widgets like Facebook; iPhones; and internet technologies to gain control over our lives. But in the overcrowded networking age they tend to reduce personal ownership of communications. This means less real productivity.

Think: how many of the last 20 non-salesmen you’ve tried to reach actually answered, maybe two or three? And if you’ve left messages, how many people returned your call in a reasonable amount of time–if ever?

Even friends or acquaintances, like strangers, seem too busy to talk. “Don’t call me, I’ll call you, when I want help or to chat about my priorities.”

This isn’t cruel or unfriendly behavior; it’s how we maintain ownership over our lives.

In a perfect world, everyone would be waiting for my call. Conducting business would be as easy as driving down the freeway at 2 a.m. But the communication superhighway is becoming snarled in a perpetual rush hour.

It’s the rare soul who’s willing to personally answer a call, or at least return it promptly.

That rare soul is also a Leader. Why? Because leadership’s no longer about status or position. It’s about offering more value to every task or interaction. And in our “drive-by” era, nothing is more valued than personal attention and authentic engagement.

Extraordinary leaders have always acknowledged others’ value, and relinquished direct ownership of tasks and solutions. Think of Kambei in “The Seven Samurai,” or the great CEOs. Each built teams respectfully, the way a conductor builds a great symphony orchestra. One superior participant and collaboration at a time.

This approach is also at the heart of Servant Leadership.

I feel like a celebrity every time I get through to the super-busy publisher of the local business newspaper. What a class act! And a few other folks are just as ready to answer and help when I call. Guess who I share my work or referrals with?

You carry your phone around to make calls with. Why not pull the autocratic little thing out of your pocket or purse when it rings as well? Your business will thank you for it.

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Uncontrolled Acceleration at Toyota?

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A stream of negative news has seriously tarnished Toyota’s reputation as the world leader in high quality production. Questions about its vaunted business methodologies are sure to follow.

I’m no project manager, and never studied The Toyota Way or its many profitable permutations. But I lived in Japan for 8 years, helped start a small business in Osaka, then worked for NEC and the Japanese Embassy in Washington DC. I also taught Japanese Business Culture to large companies for the state of Oregon.

And my best guess about Toyota’s deteriorating business problems comes from a scholarly article I translated from Japanese for the Smithsonian Institution, almost 20 years ago.

Describing Japan’s centuries-old rice culture, the author noted how an entire village’s survival would depend on neighbors’ concerted, democratic and selfless determination to plant rice at the beginning of rice season, then harvest it at the end.

Almost every worker was interchangeable to avoid lapses or gaps in orchestrated “production” lines. During those intense days, everyone in the village was either working or actively supporting workers. Malingerers were “murahachibu” or outcasts; that’s how important this annual cycle was to the village.

Now fast forward to Toyota not so long ago, when any line worker spotting a quality problem was empowered to halt car production by pulling a handy “cord” hanging nearby.

That dedication to quality helped Toyota become the world’s top auto manufacturer. But fast growth must have diluted their fierce work ethic and pride in quality. Otherwise, how could company executives have kept sweeping serious quality problems under the rug?

Knowing the Japanese as I do, it’s difficult to fathom the grief that company leaders felt, reading news articles about an American family of four dying in a fiery crash when their Lexus accelerator became stuck on a highway. It’s a good thing they no longer carry swords, or they might be tempted to fall on them.

A pale shadow of the Japanese hallmark sense of unity, shared purpose and dedication felt by those rice farmers is in the brainstorming process that drives my original social networking growth system. But the Marketing Mantra actually reflects pre-industrial community dynamics more than any particular cultural perspective.

Post-war Japanese companies managed extraordinary growth by transforming ancient cultural imperatives into corporate core values. Later, many Western experts made a living by translating those values into Western terms and contexts, so they could apply at least superficially to our workplaces.

How ironic it would be if Toyota’s stupendous growth has undermined its future, by forcing the company to abandon still powerful rice-grower values in favor of industrial processes now being challenged by many Western technocrats.

The University of You

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Every entrepreneur and small business owner should feel energized by famous stories of new-paradigm businesses that were born in universities.

Many great modern companies, even entire industries, started out as class projects. Think FedEx and Google. And James Watt, who invented the steam engine, worked at the University of Glasgow (possibly alongside my great-great-great-great-granduncle).

What made such historic success possible wasn’t ivy covered walls or cavernous libraries. It was the university’s culture of ideas.  Genius emerges with the support of other students and academics, both inside and outside the classroom.

This should encourage anyone to develop a vision and a better idea in 2010. Why?

Because just like a university, the internet provides lateral-thinking stimulus and collegial support. Our electronic version just happens to work on several dimensions–and on steroids.

Think. What have you been doing online over the last week? Found entertainment, shopped, socialized, educated yourself? A lot like when you were in college or university!

Next, think of your life since graduation. By sharing your acquired knowledge with other people on the information superhighway, in a sense you become an international one-man or -woman university built around your total value.

If you are indeed a university, your next blog or comment might even inspire someone to create the next FedEx or Google. The question then becomes, why waste time and attention on entertainment or super-widget sites like Facebook?

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The Internet as “Experiential Marketplace”

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(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.”

Social Media, Coming Soon To Your Workplace?

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Social media is making it easier than ever to find a mentor and learn, to network with other people and organizations, or to take ownership of whatever interests us. Individuals and corporations are coming to prominence and losing everything–virtually overnight.

This is a brand new world; but it also reflects Americans’ centuries-old need to become authentically engaged with one another in associations.

In 1835 the French traveler and writer Alexis de Tocqueville published a book about his travels around the new nation in his epochal book Democracy in America. He opened Chapter V with this observation:

“Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.”

Sounds something like social media, doesn’t it?

In one sense American history has always been driven by associations–BPOEs, Rotary, KKK, AAA, countless national non-profits, etc. From this perspective, social media might be merely the newest manifestation of our passion for associations; the harbinger of a real paradigm shift fueled by that passion.

Are Americans really hardwired to associate? If so, using social media principles and culture in the workplace might not be much of a stretch.

The internet and social media are already changing the business landscape. And we’re just getting started. Businesses will have to adjust to accommodate self-educating employees and their new expectations of greater professional engagement and room for new causes. More employee input will change the way work gets done, and businesses grow.

So a new human-scale tool is called for, one that can foster stakeholders’ active involvement even in traditionally lackluster corporate programs like Quality, Safety etc.

Over the last few months I’ve seen this kind of tool help a company identify a strong, inclusive and unique new core message. Any progressive CEO can use it to nurture a homegrown culture in his or her company that enriches even the most unstable business environment, by presenting change as a cause worth supporting.

Every day the brick-and-mortar business model loses credibility or relevance; even CEOs now come and go like temps, and public distaste for secretive shenanigans keeps growing.

In the future, corporate cultures once established by corporate leaders like GE’s Jack Welch or Delta Airlines’ Tom Beebe–visionaries who persuaded their stakeholders to accept powerful new brands–will be crafted by startling combinations of employees, managers, executives and even customers.

Here’s a prediction for the next decade: the social media phenomenon will outgrow its digital playpen, fostering a renaissance of associations and business innovation that Alexis de Tocqueville would really appreciate.

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?

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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”

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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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Build a Corporate Culture The Social Media Way: Orchestrate It

In a great follow-up to my last article about institutionalizing corporate culture, business owner Frank Hurtte asked,

“When I founded the company, I had a vision of what we would be. I have shared this vision with our staff. Can you toss in a few suggestions to move it from vision to culture?”

To answer this pivotal question about marketing a vision to their “inside customers”–their employees–so it becomes a great culture, let’s take a quick look at how businesses market to their “outside customers” in the social age.

(Keep in mind that the days of manipulating people to give you business are dead and buried. You can no longer “sell” to the quality people you’d want as long-term customers. Build a community around all of your customers, so buying your product or service helps them improve their lifestyle or prospects every time)

The best businesses no longer try to find customers for their products or services–including new services such as monetized blogs. No more “push” or “pull” marketing. They develop products or services that meet the needs of authentically engaged customers. These customers become members of a dynamic yet always demanding “tribe” they will keep supporting, as long as the vendor or service provider offers enough real or perceived value.

It works the same in business. Think of your staff or employees as musicians in a symphony orchestra. They need to be accomplished musicians to get their jobs, and be willing to participate in a new culture that’s unique to that orchestra.

The conductor’s primary role is not to “push” or “pull” them into following his lead. The best conductors genuinely appreciate the sometimes hidden talents and passions of each orchestra member, and creates a culture in which musicians will constantly interact and learn. If the conductor is a Leonard Bernstein, he creates a culture for his orchestra in which their willingness to grow and help each other grow is constantly being recognized. The orchestra’s success is built on preparation and teamwork, so each public performance becomes a celebration rather than an act of closure.

If the orchestra’s culture has been nurtured one member/musician at a time, each of them spends as much time supporting his or her fellow musicians as they do following the conductor. That frees the conductor to focus on the vision of each musical piece. They can lead the “celebration” that happens before a live audience or in a recording studio.

Now let’s get back to Frank’s question, and clearly differentiate modern business cultures from the industrial-age culture building that we saw in Wal-Mart’s cheer circle. Your vision of the company is comparable to what a conductor sees in the symphonic score, Frank. Find an effective way to build a culture in your company and attract the most skilled new employee/customers; just as a great orchestra can get its pick of the best musicians.

Make the process of growing and nurturing your unique culture a requirement and reward of working for you. Then you can stop trying to find employees who accept your processes and operational requirements. As CEO your job-one will become meeting the needs of your authentically engaged employees and staff members. Given the chance to be recognized for the right reasons, helping their fellow employee members will become as natural to them as helping fellow musicians is to members of the New York Philharmonic.

There’s one major difference between modern companies and a fine orchestra: unlike first-tier professional musicians, many employees won’t already be adequately trained professionals. But if you apply the right tools such as the four-step Marketing Mantra process, you can quickly help them acquire the skills they need as they bond in a new community, and become fully and productively engaged in your now shared vision.

Are SEO Junkies Just Desperate For Attention?

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There are benefits to growing older. You don’t have to show your ID all the time, and . . . uh . . . you’re not so obsessed with getting the attention of strangers.

Okay, so there aren’t many benefits. But that second one is a biggie.

Nothing shouts “immature” like being noisy in public places: rattling windows with the high volume in your souped-up car radio. Showing passersby how drunk and disorderly you can be. Complaining loudly for no good reason at a checkout line, or in an airplane.

It’s normal for young people to confuse attention with respect; they’ll learn the difference as they grow up. But when mature adults start to equate “eyes” with “the prize” (success) we’re just kidding ourselves.

Could our passionate quest for getting an obscene number of hits be simply a sign of our second childhood–or laziness?

In the end, what exactly do those thousands of followers get you? If just two of them decide you have something of value and give you a little business, you haven’t accomplished much of anything. To be blunt, your ROI sucks.

You would have been better off going to a free networking breakfast and picking up two solid leads. At least then you’d have gotten a decent meal.

Everybody knows that Google and certain experts have made millions–or more–with good SEO tools. But unlike the millions of wannabes out here, they offer something of real value to every visitor. They’re leaders because they’ve brought the most value to the table, not because they’ve brought the most visitors to their site.

Eyes aren’t really the prize. Stop filling the coffers of SEO technicians because of dreams of sugarplums dancing in your head. Make your online brand quality, not quantity.

It’s time to stop trying to rattle more windows, and start getting authentically engaged.