A company’s president recently faced this basic question. The topic made for perhaps one of the most interesting, fresh topic, posts I’ve read in a while. So, do you sling mud too, or, ignore it, push forward, and take the high road?

Here’s something to think consider

Personally, I agree with the sentiment to avoid slinging mud. But there’s a difference between participating in the same behavior and standing up for yourself. In today’s social media world of broad transparency, you cannot afford to ‘not’ say anything.

Borrowing from a Harvard Business Review post yesterday, a happy coincidence:

"Customers also want to hear from the CEO. They want to know your product is better than your competitors’. They want to know you’ll still be in business to service that product a year from now. And they want to know you’re listening. Especially if you’re in a B2B business where purchases are expensive and the product is critical to your customer’s success."

Today, not defending your position can be hazardous. By default, others will assume it’s true. If you use the ‘old’ reasoning, that (1) customer that called you might suggest (10) others that won’t take an effort to actively call. They’ll assume what they’re hearing about you is true and, just leave.

Defend, state your response, and then keep sprinting forward. Defend your honor but don’t let your team get bogged down in the process.

Final thought, this is the ‘meat and potatoes’ of social media.  Whichever channel(s) you choose to employ, start building, developing, growing your customer relationships (B2B or B2C).  There are numerous examples where, when someone has been egregiously wronged, those they have relationships with come to their defense or otherwise help in mitigating damage.  Even if a claim is true, how you deal with it (hint: honestly<g>) can serve to further strengthen your foundation, your relationships.

(photo credit: Anry Ermolaev)

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Consider these common responses:

I am:

• Accustomed to a fast pace and will hit the ground running
• Will be a valuable asset to your organization
• Able to handle stress and pressure
• Think quickly on my feet
• Am a team player

Great! Excellent! Not!

These are, all, generally assumed to be true statements. Can you imagine hiring someone who can’t handle stress?  Someone who won’t be a valued asset?  These are almost “necessary truths”.  Otherwise they likely wouldn’t be talking with you.  Let alone thinking of hiring you. Any ‘one’ of these might be optional, such as thinking quickly on your feet.  Let’s face it, some jobs just don’t seem to require mental agility.

But, if you weren’t any one of these, why should they hire you?

The reality, boiled down and brutal, is that there are two reasons someone will hire you.

• You contribute to $$ revenue growth (make more money);
  and/or,
• You contribute to increased productivity (lower cost).
  

If you’re not either helping them make more money ($$) or improve productivity, they don’t need you.

Depending on the role, answers might be more like:

Hamburger Joint:

I’ve read the typical burger-flipper averages 3 burgers/minute. I’ve tried timing myself and can regularly do 5 burgers/minute…. That’s a 66% productivity improvement.

Executive Role:

Based on my understanding of the role and mutual expectations, I believe there are ways to improve revenue at least 10% while keeping costs from growing more than 3%.

In a pinch, if you’re asked and don’t know the answer, as a mature professional, you should be able to reasonably say:

As a [My New Role], my key focus will be delivering productivity and revenue improvements.

These are the sort of answers that will catch their interest—especially if deemed credible. Everything else is just nice fluff in my opinion.

(photo credit: Konrad Mostert)

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One of his questions struck me as being worth discussing with my readers: What If…you were only allowed 5 hours a day to do your job?

Here are some suggestions:

Shorten, the default time increment in your calendaring app from :30 to :15 minutes

• Increase, the time between inbox refreshes to :30 minutes.
• Make time to develop and share agendas for planned meetings
• Review ‘recurring events’.’
  • Reconsider which ‘regular’ meetings to keep attending, and why.
  • Do you need to be there the whole time…
• Focus on relationships, meet more people, preferably face-to-face, but through any medium possible otherwise
• Practice saying No a bit more often.  Or, rather than ‘no,’ let them know when you can help (perhaps 6 weeks from now)
• Be pleasant, recognize the need for, but trim excessive pleasantries in phone calls
• Manage email effectively – use filters (by color, by topic, by sender, by prioirty…whatever makes sense)
• Stay focused. Multi-tasking’s a myth.
• Take a break.
• Go home.  Seriously.  At some point, putting in ‘more time’ simply doesn’t matter. And, no one wants face time with you if your cheeks can’t curl you lips upward anymore<g>.

What do you think? I encourage you to add some of your own thoughts.  If you had your work day trimmed to 5 hours, what would you immediately start doing differently?

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If your life revolves around using PowerPoint or Keynote, how can you do better? Yes, you can add snazzy graphics, spinning tops, and whiz-bang animation.  And if you do, you’ll likely just come across as someone using distracting, confusing, dizzying images.  One way to avoid this latter problem, is to take a look at Garr Reynold’s book, Presentation Zen.

You’ve likely heard of this thing called social media.  You’ve also likely noticed it’s just about ‘everywhere.’  Even if the majority of the country still doesn’t understand it (Fast Company found, ’…69% of U.S. adults still have no idea what it is.’), they’ve likely been exposed.

And, therein lies the opportunity—to begin showing the relevance to your audience, to your organization. Demonstrate the value.

Here’s one way to do it—and have some fun at the same time:  Use Twitter during your presentation for dynamic feedback and for soliciting audience questions.

There are a number of solutions available.  Just search on the string, “how to use twitter with powerpoint” in Bing or Google.  Many of the results show solutions with a specific focus, such as how to do a live poll of your audience and display it in PowerPoint or Keynote.

The easiest solution I’ve seen so far, simply uses TweetDeck and a dual-monitor set up.  Set up PowerPoint so it is using Presenter View on your primary screen (e.g. laptop display), and the audience display on the second screen.  Next, narrow the TweetDeck window so only a single column is displayed visible and set it off to one side on the audience screen (see image below).

Here’s why you need to operate PowerPoint in Presenter View mode:  If you advance slides by clicking on the audience screen, the presentation (like any application) will become the ‘active’ window, be brought to the front of the display list (on top of all applications), and hide TweetDeck.  However, if you launch the presentation, then put TweetDeck on top of the slideshow, you can run the presentation via the Presenter View and it will leave TweetDeck displayed as in the image.

(If you don’t want tweets scrolling while you talk, then simply move TweetDeck to the primary screen, out of view.  You’ll still be able to skim comments).

What else do you know for this to be successful?  Create a hashtag specific to your discussion and let attendees know it exists.  Then, using the #hashtag in their tweets, you can have your TweetDeck column set to filter out everything except tweets using your hashtag.  Now you have a semi-exclusive discussion forum for your attendees.  (Ideally, you’ll let them know the hashtag exists as soon as possible, but you can always do it right at the start of your presentation. Some conferences do this ahead of time enabling discussions to start even before the event itself is underway.)

This is just one approach toward more directly engaging your audience and building a stronger sense of community.  Certainly, you need to practice, and you can only do it live.  But you’ll be learning together with your participants.

What other examples, tying social media into presentations, have you seen (successful or not).  Interested in hearing.

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• Passion
• Guts
• Team
• Cash Flow

Passion.  Guts.  In past entrepreneurial discussions I have heard people use these two terms (or equivalents) interchangeably.  But, really, there is a difference between passion and guts.

Here’s the difference.  Passion is your love for what you’re choosing to do.  It is what drives you forward, overcoming daily distraction, motivates you to stay up late (or get up early) to accomplish your dream.  It’s the fire in your belly.

Guts, or call it fortitude, backbone, grit, perhaps even chutzpah, is the conviction underlying your efforts.  When everything seems to be going against you; everyone’s telling you how wrong you are; the bank won’t give you money; or, you need to reconstruct your dream from scratch, guts is what keeps you on track.

Think of it as being firmly planted and the strength to keep from bending (too much) in the wind.

Do you have the Guts to stick with it?

Ok, so that sounds like something philosophical, detached from daily reality, that some guy at the coffee shop might tell you.  So let me share a very practical example from my own life.  Once upon a time…

My wife and I decided to do real estate investing and become landlords.  Our intention were somewhat noble, as a means of making money and building our investments, we would provide good, clean housing to those who needed it.

The family we selected as our very first tenants were wonderful.  We got along well and, for the first few months, everything worked as planned.  And then, a month’s rent was late.  No problem, she caught up in a couple days including the late fee.  Then another month was late, and another, and each time the catch-up was later than before.  We were bending in the wind…wanted to give the benefit of the doubt…but at some point it became a practical business decision: Do we let this continue.

Unfortunately, we had to evict our very first tenants.  But the choices were simple.  This was a business and we were not providing free housing.  We had to know our limits, how far would we bend, and whether we had the strength to take the actions we knew to be necessary.  Let me tell you, it takes some intestinal fortitude to evict someone, and then follow up in court.

So, yes, there’s a difference.  Passion, you have to feel strongly about what you want to do.  But you also need raw guts to stick to your dream and not let the wind blow you off course (or let customers/partners/others take advantage of you).

We’ve discussed Passion, and Guts.  Next, we’ll talk about Team and Cash flow.

Photo Credit: Mitch Law

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Starting my presentation, I wanted to address four key strengths that are must haves for an entrepreneur to be successful.

• Passion
• Guts
• Team
• Cash Flow

You Have to be Passionate

As a potential new entrepreneur, you have to ask yourself, “Am I passionate about what I want to do?”  Do you truly believe in the product, service, or other offering that you are going to build and take to market?

Passion is, perhaps first and foremost, the most important trait for any entrepreneur.  You have to truly believe that what you are going to do will add value for your customers.

A fire in the belly is what it will take for you to work the 12, 14, 16 hour days necessary at times to get your dream off the ground.  That same fire will keep you moving even when best friends, family members, Mom or Dad, are telling you it’s all wrong, you can’t do it, you won’t succeed.

Beyond the doubters, you will face uncounted obstacles, distractions, and daily-living events. If you’re not passionate, if there’s no fire in your belly, these events will overtake you, remove the luster of your once-shiny idea, and make it harder to stick with.

Next, I talk about Guts, Team, and Cash Flow.

Photo Credit: www.sxc.hu #793479

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This high-level presentation discusses:

• Do you have what it takes…to be an entrepreneur
• Key topics important for successfully moving the Idea for a product, through development, and ensuring it survives to reach fruition.

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For those of you not familiar, Agile development focuses on smaller development teams, working on smaller deliverables, in highly iterative, somewhat less structured approach.  Part of the thinking is that if you are delivering in smaller, more discrete ‘chunks’ of working product, that the overall process will be more ‘agile,’ more adaptive to ongoing change during a product’s overall life cycle. The idea is to move away from ‘heavy’ less flexible disciplines, and back toward lighter, freer, approaches.For this meeting, the discussion focused around panelists discussing how Business Analysts work with the development team.  At a very high level, a Business Analysts (BA) represents customer needs, and formally crafts the requirement documents (we need the product to accept X as input, look like Y, and output Z).

The discussions were interesting.  The challenges varied by size of the organization represented, including how well BA inputs truly communicated what needed to be done, as well as where Agile methods frequently had been seen to fail.

What I’ve found is that Agile development meetings tend to migrate into a discussion of how organizations communicate internally.  This meeting was no exception.  Key issues were quality of BA deliverables; Development’s keeping track of dependencies; mapping work against planned deliverables—either within a team or when working with other teams; and, anticipating or working around structural ‘platform’ issues.

The recurring theme though was—how individuals and teams communicate—in order to overcome their difficulties.  The examples are really not significantly different than with any other software development team. The quality and completeness of BA deliverables (including acceptance specifics), development estimation and progress tracking, and including such things as user acceptance testing (or lack thereof), are the same regardless of the specific discipline(s) used within a software organization.

The key to success is clear: Smooth, rapid, delivery of a product demands effective, clear, and complete communication between all involved parties.  It is better to risk over-communicating than the alternative.  And, only through frequent communication can teams hope to adapt to change (they need to know about it).

Maybe we should call these Software Anthropology meetings.

(image credit: Artiom (Artem) Chernyshevych)

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I’m pleased to let everyone know, March 17, I will be speaking at the It’s a Duesy II Manufacturing Revival Conference.  You’re encouraged to come.

Dennis Jeffrey of Tekni Consulting is the event’s organizer.  Heading into 2010, we begin to catch our breaths, having simply survived 2009.

Now, is the time for revival!  But, not revival just as a dictionary would describe it.  One definition is, ‘…restoration to use…’  We need not to simply revive, restore, or return to pre-‘09 conditions, we need to find ways to thrive, to strengthen ourselves and move forward positively.  With this in mind, I was happy to accept Dennis’ invitation to speak.

My discussion is part of the event’s Management track, focusing on Change.

The world around us continues to evolve; nothing new there.  But many organizations, even as they change what they look like, have largely stayed the same inside.  Social, technical, global evolution has now come so far organizations simply have no choice but to finally begin changing who they are inside.

Register Now! Early Bird Pricing until February 15th! Price is only $89/ person, group rates available.

For those of you who have followed my blog, you understand that my focus is on providing thoughtful business leadership.  Come listen as I discuss areas often neglected by leaders, allowed to fall by the wayside, which are increasingly important in today’s world—areas that need to change.

In preparation for this event, I am actively interviewing business leaders and soliciting input—including yours, dear reader.  I encourage you to provide your input regarding how businesses need to change in order to thrive, moving forward.  Feel free to Comment, or send me an email (results@jtpedersen.net).

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While I’ve not been an assembly line worker in a literal sense, it took me awhile (couple dozen reiterations) for what Seth was talking about to truly sink in…appreciating how much of it related to my own life.

Life was relatively easy, for a long time.  With a clear goal in front of me, I could move mountains to achieve it.  I would feel a sense of accomplishment, and life was grand.  So, for the first 3/4 of my life, this is how it worked.  Goal, after goal, after goal.  Going into the service, I bought a map out of the carousel, having chosen to go into aviation.  Once there, the Navy gave me a nice [flight] bag of additional maps to follow (exams, flight certifications, instructor certs, regular performance reviews, etc.).

After the Service, I chose to go to college.  Once I picked a particular map from the carousel; I was given another bag of maps, routes to take, to reach an end goal.  Drive I-75 South to I-40 East, to ‘74, to ‘28 to…  Great.  Along the way, I chose to get an MBA (more of someone else’s mapping), get married, vehicles, house, and kids.  Great!  I had arrived.

But a funny thing began happening about then.  I think it’s what is loosely referred to as mid-life crisis.  Now I can recognize it for what it is… Mid-life crisis isn’t that we reached mid-life.  Hey! That’s grand.  I’ve got my health, my house, my kids, and without question, a wife that loves me. 

It’s not a Mid-Life Crisis because ‘45’ is nearby—it’s not knowing what the next 45 look like.

The crisis then is now what?!?!.  Looking about me, I’m certain I’m not alone.  My mid-life crisis was the result of so many having run out the maps others laid before me…covering the first 35-40 years of American Male life.  Increasingly, I suspect the problem is not so tied to just ‘males’ nor Americans, either.

Somehow, personal life seems easy to separate from professional.  At work, as a product manager, it seems relatively simple to look at market research, talk with customers and sales folk, develop a strategy, and begin moving forward—to figure out what’s next.  Personally, in many of our own lives, this seems a real challenge.

Why?  In part, when you’re busy with someone else’s work (i.e. your ‘job’), it’s easy to discount the importance of paying attention to your own life.  For perhaps five years, I personally struggled with the what’s next for myself.  Sound like you?

One of my prior life’s roles was as a consultant.  Being a consultant taught me two basic lessons.  As a new consultant I was continually anxious, waiting for customer situations to begin repeating, letting me begin to ‘know’ what to do.  In every prior job, at some point, things would begin to repeat themselves, I’d learn the new pattern, and then anxiety waned.  In parallel, there was fear I’d be ‘found out,’ that I wasn’t the expert the customer thought I was.

Odd thing, after about six months of consulting I came to realize two things.  One, while there were some common ‘components’ from customer to customer, there was no two customers alike.  Every one was different.  The lesson learned was simply, accept there is no [map] and get on with figuring out what to do.  Create my own map.  Second, there’s no need to fear being caught-out as a non-expert.  Sure, at the onset I was relatively ignorant going in.  Funny thing is—they didn’t know what to do either—or I wouldn’t be there in the first place!

Finally, after this past year of unemployment, what I learned as a consultant has taken root—personally.  Perhaps it’s a risk being so open with you, but I hope those of you who may be in a mid-life crisis, or, an economically-driven life-changing crisis, can benefit.

If you’re in college still, if you’ve selected a pre-created map with routes you want to finish traveling, by all means do so.  But if the job you had went away, if the routes on your map have faded so you can’t read them, stop looking.  Realize you have to create your own map.  Do the best you can to free yourself of anxiety (fear about fear), figure out what you have to offer the world, and start making your own maps.

It’s Okay to use Crayons(tm). Your 5 year-old will probably lend you one or two:).

(photo credit: Brad Harrison)

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