05/09/2013

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8 Successful Entrepreneurs Give Their Younger Selves Lessons They Wish Theyd Known Then | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

I love asking advice. Sometimes great, encouraging and lifegiving… other times, harsh, painful and ends in soul searching. Check out these gold nuggets in an article for FastCo by Grace Nasri, good stuff:

8 SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS GIVE THEIR YOUNGER SELVES LESSONS THEY WISH THEY’D KNOWN THEN

EXECS AND INVESTORS FROM PANDORA, IDEO, ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ, SOUNDCLOUD, AND KLEINER PERKINS, AMONG OTHER MASTERS OF DISRUPTION, SHARE THE WISDOM THEY’VE GATHERED ON THE WAY TO THE TOP.

Looking at the success trajectories of today’s disruptors–from Pandora cofounder Tim Westergren to Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales–it’s easy to think that they had everything figured out from a young age. But many of today’s success stories learned lessons later in life that they wished they had known as they were beginning their careers. The eight investors and entrepreneurs below share the advice they wish they had gotten in their early twenties.

Tim Westergren: Avoid the risk of not trying and the regret of wishing you had.
Tim Westergren, the founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Pandora, said if he could offer his younger self one piece of advice, it would be to realize from an early age that it’s far more haunting to live with the regret of having not followed your instincts–even when those instincts required a diversion from the beaten path–than to have followed your gut and failed. Luckily for Westergren, he was one of the few who did follow his passions and that pursuit led him to found a company with a market cap of $2.5 billion.

“Be sure to ‘notice’ ideas when you have them. Stop. Take the time to consider them seriously. And if your gut tells you they’re compelling, be fearless in their pursuit,” Westergren said. “For most people, the idea of chasing a personal passion or being entrepreneurial is simply something they don’t think of themselves doing. We’re so programmed to walk well-trodden paths. But, we live life only once. So, rather than avoiding the risk of trying, avoid the risk of not trying. Nothing is more haunting than thinking, ‘I wish I had…’.”

Jimmy Wales: Spend wisely early in life so you can achieve the financial independence to follow your dreams.
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia–which according to its own Wikipedia page is a collaboratively edited online encyclopedia–said the advice he would share with the younger generation is to be strategic and thoughtful with expenses at an early age so that you can afford to pursue your passions.

“I think one of the things that most 21-year-old people should do is to recognize now that you can make life choices which control your expenses, and that controlling your expenses is one of the most crucial steps toward the kind of financial independence that you need in order to follow your dreams in the future. Whether it is a change of job, or an entrepreneurial dream, the less you NEED to spend each month, the easier it is to follow those dreams. There are several rules of thumb that can help with this, but one of my favorites is to never go into debt to finance any kind of luxurious consumption. Only go into debt if necessary for some kind of investment, like student loans, for example.”

Bill Ready: Surround yourself with great people and be fearless in pursuit of game-changing ideas.
Bill Ready, the CEO of Braintree–the mobile payments platform for online and mobile commerce that counts companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Fab as clients–shared two key pieces of advice that he wish he had known when he was younger.

“There are two main things I wish I had known when I was 21,” Ready said. “Back in the late 1990s when I was a 19-year-old engineer at Netzee–much like other bright, young, ‘hot-shot’ engineers today–I had this sense that I knew everything, and I didn’t realize the importance of really listening to those who were more experienced. What I have realized since then, is that one of the most important things you can do is to surround yourself with great people, and to listen to them. The second piece of advice I would give is to be fearless. Don’t be afraid to pursue revolutionary ideas, and don’t hold back simply because you’re going up against seemingly unconquerable competitors in your market space. At Braintree, many of our competitors are huge, established companies in the market with market caps in the billions–but we’re not afraid of going after them.”

Alexander Ljung: Realize the power of simplicity.
Alexander Ljung, the cofounder and CEO of SoundCloud–the popular audio platform that has raised more than $63 million in venture funding, according to CrunchBase–shared the importance of learning the power of simplicity in today’s complex world.

“In recent years, T.S. Eliot’s reported quote–‘If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter’–has stuck with me when making numerous decisions specifically around leadership, design, and product. The advice I would offer my 21-year-old self is to remember that it takes more mental (and sometimes physical) bandwidth to create something simple or communicate something complicated in basic terms, but ultimately, that’s a lot nicer for the user experience,” Ljung said. “It’s not about building every feature or understanding everything the first time around. It’s about creating the best, tailored experience for your community and company. I’d remind myself of the importance to leverage design as a decisive advantage and to not be afraid to challenge people to break down their knowledge into easily digestible, clearer statements.”

Philippe Courtot: Focus on what makes you truly happy.
Philippe Courtot, the CEO and Chairman of Qualys–the enterprise cloud security firm that went public last year–emphasized the importance of doing what makes you happy; pursuing what actually makes you happy ensures that you’ll put the needed energy, time, and resources behind your work.

“If I had one piece of advice to give my younger self it would be to stop doing what makes you unhappy and focus on what makes you truly happy,” Courtot shared. “This philosophy, strongly advocated by the Dalai Lama, seems simplistic but its power lies in the fact that it forces you to reflect on what is really important to you and not be distracted by what other people think. If I could give myself one more advice it would be to not be afraid of trying. This builds on the first piece of advice, as we can only learn what makes us happy or unhappy through our own experiences.”

Bing Gordon: Work as hard as you can, and then work harder.
Bing Gordon, a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers–who counts Twitter, Spotify, and Path in his portfolio of investments–was frank in his advice. Ultimately, hard work is what is going to make you successful. That, and the added benefit of having an influential mentor to help guide you on the path to success, is the combination that will get you to where you want to go.

“I’ve always regretted that I didn’t start working in business until I was 28 years old,” Gordon shared. “After decades of hiring college grads, I’ve learned that the people who get the most opportunities also start fast. They overachieve from the very beginning. They ask the best questions and always seem to have good ideas. As one Hollywood producer once said, ‘Work as hard as you can and then work harder.’ But the number one piece of advice I would share is to recruit a mentor. Find someone you admire who is at least one generation older, and has no direct authority over you. Lack of context and perspective can cost you months and years–with a bad career choice, an unwise relocation, short-term negotiating posture, and, generally speaking, sophomoric thinking. Jeff Brenzel, Dean of Admissions at Yale, has the best advice on how to recruit a mentor: ‘All professors desire acolytes; so carry their favorite book of theirs under your arm, and go introduce yourself with a question about their book.’”

Paul Bennett: Take the time to listen.
Paul Bennett, the Chief Creative Officer at IDEO–the highly creative global design consultancy that has done work for clients from Samsung to GE–said the one piece of advice he wished he had known in his early twenties, was to focus on listening rather than rushing to come up with a quick, yet uninformed, response.

“Listen more,” Bennett advised. “For most of my twenties I assumed that the world was more interested in me than I was in it, so I spent most of my time talking, usually in a quite uninformed way, about whatever I thought, rushing to be clever, thinking about what I was going to say to someone rather than listening to what they were saying to me. Slowing oneself down, engaging rather than endlessly debating and really taking the time to hear and learn is the greatest luxury of becoming older.”

Scott Weiss: Surround yourself with leaders in your field.
Scott Weiss, a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz–who counts Platfora, Quirky, and Skout in his portfolio–emphasized the importance of learning in the workplace, and pointed out that smaller companies are great places to learn and grow.

“Whatever vocation you decide on, track down the best people in the world at doing it and surround yourself with them. Aim high and be ridiculously persistent. Your happiness is at the intersection of your passions and learning from great people. Working at a big company sucks–avoid it. Smaller companies are 10 times better for learning. Be generous with your time and money–it has an amazingly fast payback. Be in the moment with everyone you love–and this frequently means tuning out work completely. And drive slow in parking lots.”

GRACE NASRI

Grace Nasri received her MA in international relations from New York University. After graduating, she moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked as an assistant editor at an international Iranian newspaper and later moved back to NYC, where she worked as the managing editor of FindTheBest.com. Grace currently lives in San Francisco, where she works as a Senior Associate at the Bateman Group, is a member of Women 2.0, freelance writes for Digital Trends and contributes to Fast Company.

8 Successful Entrepreneurs Give Their Younger Selves Lessons They Wish Theyd Known Then | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.

04/17/2013

By admin

in Business, Purpose & Design

with 2 comments

Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything – Harvard Business Review

Got to meet Steve Blank at SXSW this year, funny I was starstruck as anyone, meeting that guy. You’d have thought I met a hot movie star or a star athlete. Steve Blanks input in to the StartUp community has been awesome. Check out this article then go check out EP 245 on Udacity, which he teaches about the new business model.

Photography: Courtesy of the artist and the Wallace Trust

Artwork: Sara Hughes, Download, 2005, acrylic on linen, 1.5 m x 1.5 m, Wallace Trust Collection

Launching a new enterprise—whether it’s a tech start-up, a small business, or an initiative within a large corporation—has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. According to the decades-old formula, you write a business plan, pitch it to investors, assemble a team, introduce a product, and start selling as hard as you can. And somewhere in this sequence of events, you’ll probably suffer a fatal setback. The odds are not with you: As new research by Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh shows, 75% of all start-ups fail.

But recently an important countervailing force has emerged, one that can make the process of starting a company less risky. It’s a methodology called the “lean start-up,” and it favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development. Although the methodology is just a few years old, its concepts—such as “minimum viable product” and “pivoting”—have quickly taken root in the start-up world, and business schools have already begun adapting their curricula to teach them.

The lean start-up movement hasn’t gone totally mainstream, however, and we have yet to feel its full impact. In many ways it is roughly where the big data movement was five years ago—consisting mainly of a buzzword that’s not yet widely understood, whose implications companies are just beginning to grasp. But as its practices spread, they’re turning the conventional wisdom about entrepreneurship on its head. New ventures of all kinds are attempting to improve their chances of success by following its principles of failing fast and continually learning. And despite the methodology’s name, in the long term some of its biggest payoffs may be gained by the large companies that embrace it.

In this article I’ll offer a brief overview of lean start-up techniques and how they’ve evolved. Most important, I’ll explain how, in combination with other business trends, they could ignite a new entrepreneurial economy.

The Fallacy of the Perfect Business Plan

According to conventional wisdom, the first thing every founder must do is create a business plan—a static document that describes the size of an opportunity, the problem to be solved, and the solution that the new venture will provide. Typically it includes a five-year forecast for income, profits, and cash flow. A business plan is essentially a research exercise written in isolation at a desk before an entrepreneur has even begun to build a product. The assumption is that it’s possible to figure out most of the unknowns of a business in advance, before you raise money and actually execute the idea.

Once an entrepreneur with a convincing business plan obtains money from investors, he or she begins developing the product in a similarly insular fashion. Developers invest thousands of man-hours to get it ready for launch, with little if any customer input. Only after building and launching the product does the venture get substantial feedback from customers—when the sales force attempts to sell it. And too often, after months or even years of development, entrepreneurs learn the hard way that customers do not need or want most of the product’s features.

After decades of watching thousands of start-ups follow this standard regimen, we’ve now learned at least three things:

1. Business plans rarely survive first contact with customers. As the boxer Mike Tyson once said about his opponents’ prefight strategies: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

2. No one besides venture capitalists and the late Soviet Union requires five-year plans to forecast complete unknowns. These plans are generally fiction, and dreaming them up is almost always a waste of time.

3. Start-ups are not smaller versions of large companies. They do not unfold in accordance with master plans. The ones that ultimately succeed go quickly from failure to failure, all the while adapting, iterating on, and improving their initial ideas as they continually learn from customers.

One of the critical differences is that while existing companies execute a business model, start-ups look for one. This distinction is at the heart of the lean start-up approach. It shapes the lean definition of a start-up: a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

The lean method has three key principles:

First, rather than engaging in months of planning and research, entrepreneurs accept that all they have on day one is a series of untested hypotheses—basically, good guesses. So instead of writing an intricate business plan, founders summarize their hypotheses in a framework called a business model canvas. Essentially, this is a diagram of how a company creates value for itself and its customers. (See the exhibit “Sketch Out Your Hypotheses.”)

Second, lean start-ups use a “get out of the building” approach called customer development to test their hypotheses. They go out and ask potential users, purchasers, and partners for feedback on all elements of the business model, including product features, pricing, distribution channels, and affordable customer acquisition strategies. The emphasis is on nimbleness and speed: New ventures rapidly assemble minimum viable products and immediately elicit customer feedback. Then, using customers’ input to revise their assumptions, they start the cycle over again, testing redesigned offerings and making further small adjustments (iterations) or more substantive ones (pivots) to ideas that aren’t working. (See the exhibit “Listen to Customers.”)

During customer development, a start-up searches for a business model that works. If customer feedback reveals that its business hypotheses are wrong, it either revises them or “pivots” to new hypotheses. Once a model is proven, the start-up starts executing, building a formal organization. Each stage of customer development is iterative: A start-up will probably fail several times before finding the right approach.

1. Founders translate company ideas into business model hypotheses, test assumptions about customers’ needs, and then create a “minimum viable product” to try out their proposed solution on customers.

2. Start-up continues to test all other hypotheses and tries to validate customers’ interest through early orders or product usage. If there’s no interest, the start-up can “pivot” by changing one or more hypotheses.

3. The product is refined enough to sell. Using its proven hypotheses, the start-up builds demand by rapidly ramping up marketing and sales spending, and scales up the business.

4. Business transitions from start-up mode, with a customer development team searching for answers, to functional departments executing its model.

Third, lean start-ups practice something called agile development, which originated in the software industry. Agile development works hand-in-hand with customer development. Unlike typical yearlong product development cycles that presuppose knowledge of customers’ problems and product needs, agile development eliminates wasted time and resources by developing the product iteratively and incrementally. It’s the process by which start-ups create the minimum viable products they test. (See the exhibit “Quick, Responsive Development.”)

When Jorge Heraud and Lee Redden started Blue River Technology, they were students in my class at Stanford. They had a vision of building robotic lawn mowers for commercial spaces. After talking to over 100 customers in 10 weeks, they learned their initial customer target—golf courses—didn’t value their solution. But then they began to talk to farmers and found a huge demand for an automated way to kill weeds without chemicals. Filling it became their new product focus, and within 10 weeks Blue River had built and tested a prototype. Nine months later the start-up had obtained more than $3 million in venture funding. The team expected to have a commercial product ready just nine months after that.

Stealth Mode’s Declining Popularity

Lean methods are changing the language start-ups use to describe their work. During the dot-com boom, start-ups often operated in “stealth mode” (to avoid alerting potential competitors to a market opportunity), exposing prototypes to customers only during highly orchestrated “beta” tests. The lean start-up methodology makes those concepts obsolete because it holds that in most industries customer feedback matters more than secrecy and that constant feedback yields better results than cadenced unveilings.

Those two fundamental precepts crystallized for me during my career as an entrepreneur. (I’ve been involved with eight high-tech start-ups, as either a founder or an early employee.) When I shifted into teaching, a decade ago, I came up with the formula for customer development described earlier. By 2003 I was outlining this process in a course at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.

In 2004, I invested in a start-up founded by Eric Ries and Will Harvey and, as a condition of my investment, insisted that they take my course. Eric quickly recognized that waterfall development, the tech industry’s traditional, linear product development approach, should be replaced by iterative agile techniques. He also saw similarities between this emerging set of start-up disciplines and the Toyota Production System, which had become known as “lean manufacturing.” Eric dubbed the combination of customer development and agile practices the “lean start-up.”

The tools were popularized by a series of successful books. In 2003, I wrote The Four Steps to the Epiphany, articulating for the first time that start-ups were not smaller versions of large companies and laying out the customer development process in detail. In 2010, Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur gave entrepreneurs the standard framework for business model canvases inBusiness Model Generation. In 2011 Eric published an overview in The Lean Startup. And in 2012 Bob Dorf and I summarized what we’d learned about lean techniques in a step-by-step handbook called The Startup Owner’s Manual.

The lean start-up method is now being taught at more than 25 universities and through a popular online course at Udacity.com. In addition, in almost every city around world, you’ll find organizations like Startup Weekend introducing the lean method to hundreds of prospective entrepreneurs at a time. At such gatherings a roomful of start-up teams can cycle through half a dozen potential product ideas in a matter of hours. Although it sounds incredible to people who haven’t been to one, at these events some businesses are formed on a Friday evening and are generating actual revenue by Sunday afternoon.

Creating an Entrepreneurial, Innovation-Based Economy

While some adherents claim that the lean process can make individual start-ups more successful, I believe that claim is too grandiose. Success is predicated on too many factors for one methodology to guarantee that any single start-up will be a winner. But on the basis of what I’ve seen at hundreds of start-ups, at programs that teach lean principles, and at established companies that practice them, I can make a more important claim: Using lean methods across a portfolio of start-ups will result in fewer failures than using traditional methods.

A lower start-up failure rate could have profound economic consequences. Today the forces of disruption, globalization, and regulation are buffeting the economies of every country. Established industries are rapidly shedding jobs, many of which will never return. Employment growth in the 21st century will have to come from new ventures, so we all have a vested interest in fostering an environment that helps them succeed, grow, and hire more workers. The creation of an innovation economy that’s driven by the rapid expansion of start-ups has never been more imperative.

In the past, growth in the number of start-ups was constrained by five factors in addition to the failure rate:

1. The high cost of getting the first customer and the even higher cost of getting the product wrong.

2. Long technology development cycles.

3. The limited number of people with an appetite for the risks inherent in founding or working at a start-up.

4. The structure of the venture capital industry, in which a small number of firms each needed to invest big sums in a handful of start-ups to have a chance at significant returns.

5. The concentration of real expertise in how to build start-ups, which in the United States was mostly found in pockets on the East and West coasts. (This is less an issue in Europe and other parts of the world, but even overseas there are geographic entrepreneurial hot spots.)

The lean approach reduces the first two constraints by helping new ventures launch products that customers actually want, far more quickly and cheaply than traditional methods, and the third by making start-ups less risky. And it has emerged at a time when other business and technology trends are likewise breaking down the barriers to start-up formation. The combination of all these forces is altering the entrepreneurial landscape.

Today open source software, like GitHub, and cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services, have slashed the cost of software development from millions of dollars to thousands. Hardware start-ups no longer have to build their own factories, since offshore manufacturers are so easily accessible. Indeed, it’s become quite common to see young tech companies that practice the lean start-up methodology offer software products that are simply “bits” delivered over the web or hardware that’s built in China within weeks of being formed. Consider Roominate, a start-up designed to inspire girls’ confidence and interest in science, technology, engineering, and math. Once its founders had finished testing and iterating on the design of their wired dollhouse kit, they sent the specs off to a contract manufacturer in China. Three weeks later the first products arrived.

Another important trend is the decentralization of access to financing. Venture capital used to be a tight club of formal firms clustered near Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York. In today’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, new super angel funds, smaller than the traditional hundred-million-dollar-sized VC fund, can make early-stage investments. Worldwide, hundreds of accelerators, like Y Combinator and TechStars, have begun to formalize seed investments. And crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter provide another, more democratic method of financing start-ups.

The instantaneous availability of information is also a boon to today’s new ventures. Before the internet, new company founders got advice only as often as they could have coffee with experienced investors or entrepreneurs. Today the biggest challenge is sorting through the overwhelming amount of start-up advice they get. The lean concepts provide a framework that helps you differentiate the good from the bad.

Lean start-up techniques were initially designed to create fast-growing tech ventures. But I believe the concepts are equally valid for creating the Main Street small businesses that make up the bulk of the economy. If the entire universe of small business embraced them, I strongly suspect it would increase growth and efficiency, and have a direct and immediate impact on GDP and employment.

There are signs that this may in fact happen. In 2011 the U.S. National Science Foundation began using lean methods to commercialize basic science research in a program called the Innovation Corps. Eleven universities now teach the methods to hundreds of teams of senior research scientists across the United States.

MBA programs are adopting these techniques, too. For years they taught students to apply large-company approaches—such as accounting methods for tracking revenue and cash flow, and organizational theories about managing—to start-ups. Yet start-ups face completely different issues. Now business schools are realizing that new ventures need their own management tools.

As business schools embrace the distinction between management execution and searching for a business model, they’re abandoning the business plan as the template for entrepreneurial education. And the business plan competitions that have been a celebrated part of the MBA experience for over a decade are being replaced by business model competitions. (Harvard Business School became the latest to make this switch, in 2012.) Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia are leading the charge and embracing the lean start-up curriculum. My Lean LaunchPad course for educators is now training over 250 college and university instructors a year.

A New Strategy for the 21st-Century Corporation

It’s already becoming clear that lean start-up practices are not just for young tech ventures.

Corporations have spent the past 20 years increasing their efficiency by driving down costs. But simply focusing on improving existing business models is not enough anymore. Almost every large company understands that it also needs to deal with ever-increasing external threats by continually innovating. To ensure their survival and growth, corporations need to keep inventing new business models. This challenge requires entirely new organizational structures and skills.

Over the years managerial experts such as Clayton Christensen, Rita McGrath, Vijay Govindarajan, Henry Chesbrough, Ian MacMillan, Alexander Osterwalder, and Eric von Hippel have advanced the thinking on how large companies can improve their innovation processes. During the past three years, however, we have seen large companies, including General Electric, Qualcomm, and Intuit, begin to implement the lean start-up methodology.

GE’s Energy Storage division, for instance, is using the approach to transform the way it innovates. In 2010 Prescott Logan, the general manager of the division, recognized that a new battery developed by the unit had the potential to disrupt the industry. Instead of preparing to build a factory, scale up production, and launch the new offering (ultimately named Durathon) as a traditional product extension, Logan applied lean techniques. He started searching for a business model and engaging in customer discovery. He and his team met face-to-face with dozens of global prospects to explore potential new markets and applications. These weren’t sales calls: The team members left their PowerPoint slides behind and listened to customers’ issues and frustrations with the battery status quo. They dug deep to learn how customers bought industrial batteries, how often they used them, and the operating conditions. With this feedback, they made a major shift in their customer focus. They eliminated one of their initial target segments, data centers, and discovered a new one—utilities. In addition, they narrowed the broad customer segment of “telecom” to cell phone providers in developing countries with unreliable electric grids. Eventually GE invested $100 million to build a world-class battery manufacturing facility in Schenectady, New York, which it opened in 2012. According to press reports, demand for the new batteries is so high that GE is already running a backlog of orders.

The first hundred years of management education focused on building strategies and tools that formalized execution and efficiency for existing businesses. Now, we have the first set of tools for searching for new business models as we launch start-up ventures. It also happens to have arrived just in time to help existing companies deal with the forces of continual disruption. In the 21st century those forces will make people in every kind of organization—start-ups, small businesses, corporations, and government—feel the pressure of rapid change. The lean start-up approach will help them meet it head-on, innovate rapidly, and transform business as we know it.

Steve Blank is a consulting associate professor at Stanford University and a lecturer and National Science Foundation principal investigator at the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University. He has participated in eight high-tech start-ups as either a cofounder or an early employee.

Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything – Harvard Business Review.

02/26/2013

By admin

in Business, Purpose & Design

with 0 comments

Failure and Redemption | Steve Blank

Check out this great article on failure by Steve Blank. Praying we get to the point of insight quickly:

“What’s gone and what’s past help
Should be past grief.”

William Shakespeare - The Winter’s Tale

We give abundant advice to founders about how to make startups succeed yet we offer few models about dealing with failure.

So here’s mine.
——–

In my experience, living through failure has 6 stages:

Stage 1: Shock and Surprise
Stage 2: Denial
Stage 3: Anger and Blame
Stage 4: Depression
Stage 5: Acceptance
Stage 6: Insight and Change

While I had been part of a few failed startups, none of them had fallen squarely on my shoulders until Rocket Science Games where my business card said CEO. It was there that I lived through all 6 stages and came out the other side a changed man.

Failure

Stage 1: Shock and Surprise
We raised $35 million and after 18 months made the cover of Wired magazine. The press called Rocket Science one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley and predicted that our games would be great because the storyboards and trailers were spectacular. 90 days later, I found out our games are terrible, no one is buying them, our best engineers started leaving, and with 120 people and a huge burn rate, we’re running out of money and about to crash. This can’t be happening tome.

Stage 2: Deny any of it was your fault
In my mind, I had done everything the investors asked me to do. I raised a ton of money and got a ton of press. We hired everyone according to our plan. It was everyone else who screwed up. I did everything right.

Stage 3: Get angry and blame everyone else
This was the fault of my cofounder since he was in charge of game development, it was the engineers who bailed on me, it was the sales and marketing people who didn’t tell me how bad the games were, it was the VC’s who refused to put any more money in the company, it was Sega’s fault for making a bad gaming platform…

State 4: Get depressed
When the inevitability and magnitude of the failure sunk in, I slept in a lot. There were days I’d get up late and go to bed again at 5 pm. I lost interest in anything associated with my past industry. (To this day I still can’t play a video game.)

Redemption

Step 5: Gradually accept your role in the failure
A few weeks after leaving, I began to think about what I should have done, could have done and pondered why I didn’t do it. (I didn’t listen, I didn’t act, I didn’t own my role as CEO, I wasn’t prepared to do what was right or leave.) This was hard and didn’t happen overnight. My wife was a great partner here. I often reverted to Stages 2 and 3, but over time I took ownership of my primary role in the debacle.

Stage 6: Gain insight and change your behavior
This was the hardest part. While I stopped blaming others, understanding what I could change in my behavior took long months. It would have been much easier to just move on, but I was looking for the lessons that would make my next startup successful. I looked at the patterns of behavior, not just at my last company but also across my entire career. I learned how to dial back the hubris, get other smart people to work with me – rather than just for me, listen better, and act and do what was right – regardless of what others thought I should do.

Epilogue
For my next startup I parked the behaviors that drove Rocket Science off the cliff. We established a team of founders who worked collaboratively. When my co-founders and I got the company scalable and repeatable, we hired an operating executive as the CEO and returned a billion dollars to each of our two lead investors.

Now when I listen to entrepreneurs who’ve cratered a company, I listen for their stories of failure and redemption.

Lessons Learned

Six stages of failure and redemption
Don’t get stuck in Stages 2, 3 or 4 - move forward
Don’t skip acceptance of your role
Get to insight so you can change your behavior—then commit to the challenge of doing it differently the next time

Failure and Redemption | Steve Blank.

02/04/2013

By admin

in Business, Purpose & Design

with 1 comment

The 5 Questions Every Company Should Ask Itself | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

IN INTERVIEWING SOME OF THE BIGGEST INNOVATION EXPERTS, INCLUDING CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN AND ERIC RIES, WARREN BERGER FOUND THAT ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS CAN BE MORE CHALLENGING THAN FINDING ANSWERS.

“One does not begin with answers,” the legendary business consultant Peter Drucker once said. “One begins by asking, ‘What are our questions?’”

The notion that questions may at times be more valuable to a business than answers is counterintuitive. But in my research into the value of inquiry, I’m finding a growing number of today’s leading business consultants share Drucker’s view on the critical importance of getting company leaders to focus on asking the right questions. “It’s the number one thing I spend my time thinking about these days,” says Dev Patnaik of design firm Jump Associates. Eric Ries, meanwhile, finds that as he trains companies in Lean Startup methodology, one of his biggest challenges is getting his clients to “acknowledge uncertainty and ask the seemingly dumb questions.” According to Keith Yamashita of design consultancySYPartners, “In business, our ability to ask questions is an opportunity to reframe the challenges in front of us.”

But as Yamashita notes, that can only happen if business leaders are willing to question boldly. He says we’re coming off an era of “small-minded questions” geared to efficiency: How can we do it faster, cheaper, where can we cut? “But in order to innovate today,” Yamashita maintains, “companies must ask more expansive questions.”

What follows are five big, bold questions every company should be asking, according to Yamashita, Ries, Harvard Business School professor and author Clayton Christensen, and consultants Jack Bergstrand of Brand Velocity and Tim Ogilvie of Peer Insight.

1. WHAT IS OUR COMPANY’S PURPOSE ON THIS EARTH?

Keith Yamashita

Sure, it’s a bit grand, as Yamashita acknowledges. But the business environment of today and tomorrow demands a company mindset that goes beyond mundane corporate concerns. To arrive at a powerful sense of purpose, Yamashita says, companies today need “a fundamental orientation that is outward looking”–so they can understand what people out there in the world truly desire and need, and what’s standing in the way. At the same time, business leaders also must look inward, to try to clarify their own core values and larger ambitions. In trying to unearth all of this, Yamashita doesn’t just use one big question; he employs a series of them. What does the world hunger for? What are the big challenges? Who have we (as a company) historically been when we’ve been at our best? Who must we fearlessly become?

In terms of tackling the first two questions, Yamashita believes companies “must develop a culture that is excessively curious about the outside world”–and be able to identify deep needs as well as the right “hairy problem” to focus on. Rather than try to save the whole world at once, companies should zero in on the challenge that’s most compelling and appropriate. In his client Coca-Cola’s case, Yamashita says, because of the sheer volume of bottles they put out into the world every day, the need to develop local, closed-loop recycling emerged as a pressing grand challenge.

The “who we’ve been” and “who we must become” questions require a willingness to look back (because at the finest moments in a company’s history, Yamashita holds, its core values come shining through) while also looking ahead, to envision a version of the company that does not yet exist. At the intersection of these questions resides the big overriding one about purpose–the question that matters above all else: “In the end, as a human being or an institution, you have to understand why you were put on this earth,” he says, “and what actions you’re going to take to deliver on that purpose.”

2. WHAT SHOULD WE STOP DOING?

Jack Bergstrand

There’s a natural tendency for company leaders to focus on what they should start doing immediately. But the harder question has to do with what you’re willing to eliminate. If you can’t answer that question, Bergstrand maintains, “it lessens your chances of being successful at what you want to do next–because you’ll be sucking up resources doing what’s no longer needed and taking those resources away from what should be a top priority.” Moreover, if you can’t figure out what you should stop doing, it might be an early warning sign that you don’t know what your strategy is.

And yet, Bergstrand notes, it is very difficult for most companies to decide to stop doing things–especially programs or products that were once successful. “We don’t like to kill our babies,” he says. Corporate politics can get in the way, too; individuals or groups within a company are naturally inclined to protect and defend their own projects. On top of all that, it’s just a lot more fun to focus on the new than to deal with the old. “Even asking the question about ‘what should we stop’ makes people inside a company uncomfortable,” Bergstrand says. “It often takes an outsider or a new management team to even be willing to raise the question.”

3. IF WE DIDN’T HAVE AN EXISTING BUSINESS, HOW COULD WE BEST BUILD A NEW ONE?

Clayton Christensen

Christensen, who pioneered the concept of disruptive innovation, observes that business leaders can sometimes use hypothetical “what if” questions to temporarily impose artificial constraints: What if we had to sell our $100 product for a buck; how might we go about doing that? Such questions can also be used to temporarily break free of existing constraints and biases.

Christensen’s big question is a classic example of the latter, and he loves it because it enables leaders to stop focusing on pre-existing beliefs and structures–“the stuff they’ve already invested in”–and come at the business with a fresh approach. He says the question is most useful “if, at any point in the future, you see the possibility that the core business might slow down.” But even if your company is going great guns, answering this question can point to future opportunities and help your share price to outperform the market by showing “that there’s more growth here than analysts may have thought.”

Christensen’s question could be seen as a cousin of the famous one asked by Intel’s co-founder Andrew Grove when the company was trying to decide whether to shift its focus away from making memory chips. If we were kicked out of the company, Grove asked his partner Gordon Moore, what do you think the new CEO would do? They reasoned that a new leader would feel no emotional attachment to the declining memory chip business–and would probably leave it behind. Grove and Moore did likewise, as they shifted Intel’s focus to microprocessors.

4. WHERE IS OUR PETRI DISH?

Tim Ogilvie

Ogilvie’s question is really asking, Where in the company is it safe to ask radical questions? As Ogilvie sees it, you can’t necessarily do that everywhere. “As an established business,” he says, “you’ve got all these promises you’re keeping to your current customers–you have to stay focused on that. But that may not have a future.” So the question becomes, “Where, within the company, can you explore heretical questions that could threaten the business as it is–without contaminating what you’re doing now?”

In answering that question, it’s up to company leadership to “provide permission and protocols for experimentation,” he says. That means supplying the time and resources for people to explore new questions, as well as establishing methods: “how might we” questioning sessions, ethnography, in-market experimentation. It can also mean cordoning off this area of the business, but not too much. There should be a clear line of visibility between the core business and the “Petri dish” part of the company–so that each can influence the other.

Ogilvie says another way to phrase this question is, Where is the place we can be a startup again? And surprisingly, he thinks it’s a question that even startups should ask themselves. “Startups are so desperate not to be a startup,” says Ogilvie (himself a former startup CEO). “They’re so anxious to be post-revenue and post-profit that you can almost give up what’s great about being a startup too soon. They get built for execution, and once they’re having success they’ll very quickly start thinking, ‘We’ve got to stick to our knitting.’” All of which means they’ve outgrown their original Petri dish–and might need a new one.

5. HOW CAN WE MAKE A BETTER EXPERIMENT?

Eric Ries

Shifting emphasis from Ogilvie’s where to the how of experimentation, Ries’s question is counterintuitive for most managers, who tend to think in terms of “making products,” not “making experiments.” But as Ries points out, anytime you’re doing something new, “it’s an experiment whether you admit it or not. Because it is not a fact that it’s going to work.”

So how do companies get better at experimenting? Ries says you start with the acknowledgment that “we are operating amid all this uncertainty–and that the purpose of building a product or doing any other activity is to create an experiment to reduce that uncertainty.” This means that instead of asking “What will we do?” or “What will we build?” the emphasis should be on “What will we learn?”

“And then you work backwards to the simplest possible thing–the minimum viable product–that can get you the learning,” he says.

Just this one change–before you get to any of the more complex Lean Startup methodology–can make a world of difference, Ries insists. For one thing, it can help unlock the creativity that’s already there in your company. “Most companies are full of ideas, but they don’t know how to go about finding out if those ideas work,” Ries says. “If you want to harvest all those ideas, allow employees to experiment more–so they can find out the answers to their questions themselves.”

In the second of this two-part series, we’ll consider five more bold questions from Christensen, Ogilvie, Patnaik, consultant/author Noel Tichy, and creative consultant Min Basadur.

[Images: Sketch and Petri via Shutterstock]

The 5 Questions Every Company Should Ask Itself | Co.Design: business + innovation + design.

01/23/2013

By admin

in Business, Productivity & Creativity, Purpose & Design, Random

with 0 comments

Unstuck from Unstuck on Vimeo.

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“What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.” —C.S. Lewis

unstuck tools, unstuck rally your resources

12/13/2012

By admin

in Productivity & Creativity, Purpose & Design

with 0 comments

Seth Godin Quotes – Sources of Insight

Lessons Learned from Seth Goden - 4

This is my collection of Seth Godin quotes. They’ll make you think and ponder as you wonder around from one idea to the next.

Seth’s sweet spot is marketing but his quotes easily span business, change, greatness, innovation, leadership, mediocrity, and strategy. Seth’s quotes teach us that the individual is a powerful force, that multiplies when we dare to be different, take action, test our ideas, stay true to our authentic self, tell inspiring stories, make things meaningful, and lead tribes of like minds and shared values.

Perhaps the most important lesson we learn from Seth Godin is this: Think and do great things. And do the tough stuff, because it’s worth it.

Enjoy.

Top 10 Seth Godin Quotes

Here are my top 10 favorite quotes by Seth Godin:

“Are you a serial idea-starting person? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person.”
“Change is not a threat, it’s an opportunity. Survival is not the goal, transformative success is.”
“Don’t try to please everyone. There are countless people who don’t want one, haven’t heard of one or actively hate it. So what?”
“Expectations are the engines of our perceptions.”
“Go ahead, do something impossible. “
“Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death.”
“If you could do tomorrow over again, would you?”
“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.”
“Why waste a sentence saying nothing? “
“You can’t shrink your way to greatness! “

Business

“As an organization grows and succeeds, it sows the seeds of its own demise by getting boring.”
“Choose your customers, choose your future.”
“Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.”
“Developing expertise or assets that are not easily copied is essential; otherwise you’re just a middleman. “
“Don’t try to be the ‘next’. Instead, try to be the other, the changer, the new. “
“Everyone is not your customer. “
“Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a deal breaker.”
“Give up control and give it away … The more you give your idea away, the more your company is going to be worth. “
“If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either. “
“In a world of free, everyone can play.”
“It’s better to make a decision, even the wrong one, than to be in limbo.”
“Lack of resources (payroll), time and competing priorities are why so many nonprofits haven’t done well. It’s that simple.”
“Make a decision. It doesn’t have to be a wise decision or a perfect one. Just make one.”
“Once you have permission to talk to someone, finding new products or services for them is a smart way to grow.”
“One way to think about running a successful business is to figure out what the least you can do is, and do that. “
“Playing safe is very risky. “
“The application process changes the list of who applies. Your applicants reflect your methods.”
“The best time to do great customer service is when a customer is upset.”
“The market and the consumer and idea trump the system.”
“Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.”

Change

“Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late.”
“Change is not a threat, it’s an opportunity. Survival is not the goal, transformative success is.”
“If you want to dig a big hole, you need to stay in one place.”
“Knowing what to do is very, very different than actually doing it.”
“Little changes cost you. Big changes benefit you by changing the game, but only if you go first.”
“No, everything is not going to be okay. It never is. It isn’t okay now. Change, by definition, changes things”
“Sometimes we spend more time than we should defending the old thing, instead of working to take advantage of the new thing.”

Choice

“If religion comprises rules you follow, faith is demonstrated by the actions you take.”
“If there’s time for an emergency, why isn’t there time for brilliance, generosity or learning? “
“If you could do tomorrow over again, would you? “
“If you’re not proud of where you work, go work somewhere else. “
“Just saying yes because you can’t bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work.”
“Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities. “
“We notice what we choose to notice.”
“Who gets to decide what you want?”

Greatness

“Art is what we’re doing when we do our best work.”
“Be personal. Be relevant. Be specific.”
“Becoming a superstar takes about 10,000 hours of hard work.”
“Doing justice to the work is your task, not setting a world record. “
“Go ahead, do something impossible.”
“If there isn’t a good reason, go home. If there is, then do something … loud, now, and memorable.”
“Positive thinking is hard. Worth it, though.”
“Tribes makes our lives better, and leading a tribe is the best life of all. “
“When kids grow up wanting to be you, you matter.”
“When the legacy you leave behind lasts for hours, days or a lifetime, you matter.”
“When the room brightens when you walk in, you matter.”
“When you see the world as it is, but insist on making it more like it could be, you matter.”
“You are not your resume, you are your work. “
“You can’t shrink your way to greatness! “

Ideas

“Are you a serial idea-starting person? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person. “
“Big ideas are little ideas that no-one killed too soon. “
“Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death. “
“No organization ever created an innovation. People innovate, not companies.”
“There’s no correlation between how good your idea is and how likely your organization will be to embrace it. “
“You can’t have good ideas unless you’re willing to generate a lot of bad ones.”

Leadership / Management

“Are you a serial idea-starting person? The goal is to be an idea-shipping person. “
“If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader. “
“Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead.”
“Leadership on the other hand, is about creating change you believe in.”
“’Teamwork’ is the word that bosses use when they actually mean ‘Do what I say’”
“The easiest thing is to react. The second easiest thing is to respond. But the hardest thing is to initiate. – When people ask you to tell them what to do, resist.”

Marketing

“Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.”
“Bullhorns are overrated: having ten times as many Twitter followers generates approximately zero times as much value. “
“But this is a remarkable egg, an egg worth talking about, an egg worth crossing the street for, an egg worth writing about. “
“Good marketers measure. “
“Good marketers tell stories. “
“If you can’t make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. “
“If you can’t sell to 1 in 1000, why market to a million? “
“If you’re a marketer who doesn’t know how to invent, design, influence, adapt, and ultimately discard products, then you’re no longer a marketer. You’re deadwood.“
“Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing though, that’s efficiency.”
“Market-driven design builds the success of the product’s marketing into the product itself.”
“Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your return policy.”
“Marketing management is now tribal leadership. “
“Most of the time, creative entrepreneurs lose interest long before their marketing message loses its power. “
“People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves. “
“People rarely buy what they need. They buy what they want.”
“Perhaps marketing is about to transition to a new kind of profession, one that requires insight, dedication and smarts. “
“Relying too much on proof distracts you from the real mission–which is emotional connection.”
“Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t. “
“The best marketing strategy is to destroy your industry before your competition does. “
“The reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is that you haven’t given them anything else to care about. “
“Why waste a sentence saying nothing? “
“You can win with consistent benefits, delivered over time. You win by incrementally earning share, attention and trust.”

Mediocrity / Status Quo

“’Good enough’ stopped being good enough a long time ago. so why not be great? “
“If you make a difference, people will gravitate to you. They want to engage, to interact and to get you more involved.”
“It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo.”
“It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.”
“In our desire to please everyone, it’s very easy to end up being invisible or mediocre.”
“Once you free yourself from the need for perfect acceptance, it’s a lot easier to launch work that matters.”
“Successful people are the ones who are breaking the rules. “
“The reason they want you to fit in… is that once you do, then they can ignore you.
“The status quo is leaving the building, and quickly.”
“You can raise the bar or you can wait for others to raise it, but it’s getting raised regardless. “
“You don’t have to settle. It’s a choice you get to make every day.”

Passion

“If there was ever a moment to follow your passion and do work that matters, this is it.”
“If you have no wish, how can it possibly come true? “

Relationships

“A long walk and calm conversation are an incredible combination if you want to build a bridge.”
“Be with the ones you love (and the ones that love you.) Ignore everyone else.”
“You can be right or you can have empathy. You can’t do both.”

Strategy

“Don’t have any meetings about your web strategy. Just do stuff. First you have to fail, then you can improve. “
“Put aside your need for a step-by-step manual and instead realize that analogies are your best friend.“
“The scalable, profitable strategy is to change the game, not to become the most average.”

Seth Godin Quotes – Sources of Insight.

11/28/2012

By admin

in Goals, Purpose & Design

with 3 comments

Zig Ziglar: See You At the Top | SUCCESS Magazine | What Achievers Read

Sad to hear of Zig’s passing. You will be missed. Good dude.

Few have had as great an impact on as many people as Zig Ziglar. As a sales trainer, motivational speaker and best-selling author, Ziglar has helped millions of individuals improve not only their perspective on life, but, more important, their results.

After a bumpy start, Ziglar built a wildly successful career in sales. But the more he learned about selling and personal achievement, the more interested he became in motivational speaking. He wanted to help others attain the success he enjoyed. In 1970, while in his early 40s, Ziglar made a career shift and began to speak full time. Since then, he has engaged thousands of audiences and sold millions of books and audio programs, including the best-selling See You at the Top: 25th Anniversary Edition, which sold more than 1.5 million copies, and the audio program How to Stay Motivated. Exactly how many lives has the 83-year-old Ziglar touched? “We began counting the number of people Zig has impacted and had to stop at 25.5 million people,” says a spokesperson with the Zig Ziglar Corporation.

With his unique cadence and strong Southern drawl, Ziglar admonishes people to be specific about what they want to achieve, to be purposeful in their approach to personal development, and to help as many others as possible along the way. And though he is a dyed-in-the-wool believer in the power of positive thinking, there is nothing secret about his philosophy on achieving success. “Positive thinking won’t let you do anything,” Ziglar says. “But it will help you do everything better than negative thinking will.” His constant message is that success requires full engagement and hard work. When combined with an unshakable positive attitude and character, success is inevitable. Here are a few more of Ziglar’s tried-and-true strategies.

Live a Balanced, Focused Life

Success is never about acquiring what you want in one area of life, but in every area of life. Reminiscent of I Corinthians 13, Ziglar asks audiences to consider the fallacy of one-sided success. Take a moment and ask yourself these questions:

+ If I earn millions of dollars, but destroy my health in the process, is that success?

+ If I become the best in my industry, but neglect my family and friends, is that success?

+ If I acquire great wealth and notoriety, but compromise my integrity and faith to do so, is that success?

The obvious answer to each of these questions is “no.” Success isn’t one-sided. Our achievements aren’t fulfilling when we neglect or destroy our relationships, health or faith.

Through the years, Ziglar’s axiom has been, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” But what exactly do people want? What do you want? Getting clear about your goals and desires, after all, is the first step to achieving them.

Ziglar says there are eight basic things people want to feel successful. “People want to be happy, healthy, reasonably prosperous and secure; they want to have friends, peace of mind, good family relationships and hope,” he says. With a focused goal to continually improve in each of these areas, we can enjoy life to the fullest.

“You are here for a reason. That purpose is to get everything out of you that is humanly possible so you can make your contributions to mankind,” Ziglar writes in See You at the Top. “Goals enable you to do more for yourself and others, too.” He also notes that goals must be specific. “You’ll never make it as a ‘wandering generality.’ You must become a ‘meaningful specific.’ ”

Goals give us a target and bring meaning to our mission. Without goals, life simply happens. But when we have a target, we can move with purpose, helping us achieve more. “People often complain about lack of time, when lack of direction is the real problem,” Ziglar says. “Time can be an ally or an enemy. What it becomes depends entirely upon you, your goals and your determination to use every available minute.”

Action → Don’t confuse activity with accomplishment. You must have specific, clearly identified objectives. In the How to Stay Motivated audio program, Ziglar advises listeners to write down everything they want to do, be or have. Once you’ve created your list, pick five things you want to accomplish this year and outline a plan for each by defining daily, weekly and monthly targets. Then get started!

Take a (Mental) Bath Every Day

Getting motivated to improve in any one of these eight areas of life is relatively easy. But staying motivated enough to maintain the behaviors required to realize real change is challenging.

Ziglar illustrates the point by recounting the story of going to the gym on Jan. 2 one year. Normally, finding a place to park wasn’t an issue, nor was finding an empty workout bench or treadmill. But on his first visit of the new year, he was forced to park at the back of the lot and had to wait in line to use the equipment. When he questioned the trainer at the front desk about the influx of patrons, he was told not to worry and that things would go back to normal in about three weeks. Sure enough, before three weeks had passed, there were once again plenty of vacant spaces in the parking lot and several empty workout benches.

We are easily motivated to start a life-improvement project, but staying motivated takes work. Ziglar comments that people frequently complain to him that the effects of motivational seminars, books and audios don’t last. His response: “Neither does bathing; that’s why we recommend it daily.”

In his Christian Motivation for Daily Living audio program, Ziglar references a study that indicates 80 percent of what our minds take in each day is negative. Be it from talk radio or what Ziglar refers to as the “income suppressant” (aka the television), or the gripes and sour attitudes of our friends, co-workers, family members and acquaintances, we are inundated with negative thoughts, comments and messages. We can spend a full day at a motivational seminar or sales conference and get pumped with enthusiasm. But, as soon as we step out into the “real world,” the onslaught of negativity is akin to having someone dump garbage into our freshly cleaned mind.

“If I were to come into your home with a pail of garbage and dump it on your living room floor, we would have problems—fast,” Ziglar writes in See You at the Top. “The person who dumps garbage into your mind will do you considerably more harm than the person who dumps garbage on your floor, because each load of mind garbage negatively impacts your possibilities and lowers your expectations.”

To offset the negativity and to stay motivated to reach our goals, continual affirmations and belief-building messages must be part of our daily routine. That’s why, in addition to practicing positive self-talk, Ziglar recommends listening to and reading motivational materials repeatedly and regularly. “You are what you are and where you are because of what’s gone into your mind,” he says. “You can change what you are, you can change where you are, by changing what goes into your mind.”

Action → Block out 30 minutes a day (at a minimum) to read or listen to a positive, inspiring or motivational message. Doing so will help you stay committed to your goals and bolster your belief in your ability to achieve them.

Help Others Get What They Want

If helping others get what they want is the true path to success, sales is the ideal profession. “People buy because they either need or want something,” Ziglar writes in Ziglar on Selling. “If we can give persons a reason for buying andan excuse for buying, the chances that they will buy inprove rather dramatically.” The key, he explains, is developing an attitude of curiosity and a sincere interest in your prospect’s needs. With those needs clarified, you can then offer a solution that satisfies both you and the customer.

At a recent conference, author and keynote speaker Bob Burg pointed to Ziglar, a fellow panelist for the event, and shared how this master motivator and successful salesman had impacted his life. Early in his sales career, Burg attended one of Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale seminars. At the end of his presentation, Ziglar pitched his sales training program, which was available for purchase at the back of the room in cassette format.

As he made his way down the aisle to the sales table, a few of Burg’s co-workers tried to stop him. “They said, ‘You can’t afford Zig’s program—none of us can.’ And I said, ‘Exactly, that’s why I’m going back there to get Zig’s program… so one day I’ll be able to afford Zig’s program and anything else I want,’ ” Burg says. Burg says he “devoured” the program, listening to it repeatedly. The 16th time he listened to the audio, he heard a key point that he then incorporated into to his sales presentation. Immediately, he began to close more sales. “I’ll tell you what, that product that I couldn’t afford to buy, but bought anyway, made me hundreds of thousands of dollars through the years. I owe so much to this gentleman because he allowed me to provide more value to more people than I would have been able to without being equipped in that way.”

Action → Commit today to become others-focused. With your spouse, your children, your prospect and your peers, keep the question, “How can I help you?” as a primary focus in the relationship.

If you want to be happy, healthy, reasonably prosperous and secure, and if you want to have friends, peace of mind, good family relationships and hope, it makes sense to listen to this motivational master’s positive message of personal responsibility. Millions have and credit their achievements to what they’ve learned from Ziglar, a man who created a successful life by helping others do the same

Zig Ziglar: See You At the Top | SUCCESS Magazine | What Achievers Read.

11/02/2012

By admin

in Purpose & Design

with 0 comments

5 Rules for Tech-iquette | RELEVANT Magazine

The social graces you’re missing when you’re constantly checking your phone.

Really cool article from a really cool Magazine. Posted on Facebook by Mindy Leichter and Chris Avery

I was out for dinner with a friend when I noticed a couple at the next table—she was holding her phone and rapidly firing off a text or a tweet, while her date dutifully chewed away at his burger.

“How rude,” I thought, “to be typing a conversation with someone who isn’t there, when you’re sitting across from someone you could have a real conversation with.”

The opinionated little character in my mind jumped up on her soapbox and began preaching against the potential evils of mobile technology—how our addictions to technology, social media and instant gratification are slowly eating away at the most important “real” relationships in our lives.

Ten minutes later, I felt that familiar buzz in the back pocket of my jeans, offered a quick apology to my friend, and pulled out my phone. “But this is different,” I muttered to the still-preaching soapbox character in my head. I, after all, had been waiting to hear back from my brother so we could finalize holiday travel plans.

But, of course, it isn’t “different.” Or another way to look at it is that it’s always different—there’s always some explanation, excuse or imperative when it comes to our own cell phone use. The reality is that most of us find it almost impossible to create personal policies we can stick to, let alone a broader social etiquette everyone can agree on.

The easiest response to this conundrum is taking the Wild West approach: It’s a whole new world, where personal freedom trumps rules. But new territory comes not just with new opportunities, but new responsibilities, as well. Today’s college students, as the first generation of adults who grew up with cell phones, are in a unique position to help shape how we can make the most of technology without sacrificing our face-to-face connections.

So what should the etiquette be around the use of our mobile devices? And is etiquette always shaped by rules, or can it be shaped, instead, by desired outcomes?

I think focusing on our desired outcomes best suits the rapidly changing nature of technology (as well as what it means to be 20, and what it means to be a New Testament Christian). In other words, it’s the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law, that truly inspires and changes us.

When it comes to cell phone use—whether you’re in class, hanging out with a group of friends, or sitting next to grandma at the Thanksgiving dinner table—here are some outcomes we might strive for, along with some thoughts about how those outcomes might shape our actions.

1. Compassion.

One way to think about compassion in our day-to-day lives is being more tuned in to the needs of those around us than we are to our own needs. When it comes to our interactions with others, does your curiosity about how people are responding to your most recent Facebook status trump your curiosity about what’s going on in the life of the friend you’re meeting for coffee? Does the urgent buzzing of your phone trump the urgency of the very real world that’s carrying on, all around you?

2. Effective communication.

Whether we’re responding to a Facebook status, sharing an opinion on Twitter, or in a conversation with someone sitting across from us, we need to keep in mind how powerful words are. They have the capacity to hurt others and cause enormous rifts between people and groups. They also have the capacity to help us grow—to increase understanding and healing, to encourage and offer grace. When our communications are divided and distracted between too many people and platforms, we’re not able to give any of our communications the attention they require.

3. Self-control.

We all like to think we are in control—especially over something like our pocket-sized electronics. But there’s something about the intrusive, insistent nature of these devices that often results in their control over us. Whether we’re constantly checking our phones out of habit or compulsive curiosity, it seems clear that most of us, most of the time, are being ruled by our devices rather than the other way around. If that sometimes feels like the case for you, perhaps occasionally turning your phone completely off, or leaving it at home, is the best way to show it who’s boss.

4. Respect.

The people around us don’t always have urgent demands or needs, but they’re still people who deserve our attention and respect. The professor who stayed up late the night before preparing her lecture; the dad who got up early on Saturday to make his family breakfast; the little sister who is telling a story about soccer practice; the barista who is making our coffee—they all are real people who are trying to connect with us in some way. When we pick up our phones—even if we tell ourselves it’s for a good reason—we are shutting down that connection and telling others that their efforts are not valued.

5. Grace.

Part of what giving grace to others is all about is extending the benefit of the doubt—trusting that others are doing the best they can in the moment, and that we don’t know all of the circumstances. Grace involves being less demanding, less accusing. It means not taking things personally, and accepting that everyone can’t be perfect all the time. We need to offer grace when we text someone and don’t get an immediate response, and when we’re sitting with people who are distracted by their phones. It’s possible, when it comes to our cell phone use, that grace is the most important outcome to strive for—both in what we communicate and how we communicate. What might like look like for you?

5 Rules for Tech-iquette | RELEVANT Magazine.

8 SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS GIVE THEIR YOUNGER SELVES LESSONS THEY WISH THEY’D KNOWN THEN

GRACE NASRI

1. WHAT IS OUR COMPANY’S PURPOSE ON THIS EARTH?

2. WHAT SHOULD WE STOP DOING?

3. IF WE DIDN’T HAVE AN EXISTING BUSINESS, HOW COULD WE BEST BUILD A NEW ONE?

4. WHERE IS OUR PETRI DISH?

5. HOW CAN WE MAKE A BETTER EXPERIMENT?

Top 10 Seth Godin Quotes

Business

Change

Choice

Greatness

Ideas

Leadership / Management

Marketing

Mediocrity / Status Quo

Passion

Relationships

Strategy

1. Compassion.

2. Effective communication.

3. Self-control.

4. Respect.

5. Grace.

Standing on the edge of a life about to change, I am still amazed at the wonder of it all. How things can be fast tracked and placed at the very front, then how others can be placed on the back burner. Many times the placement is of little choice of your own.

Officially a week past due date, waiting on this kid has been the most excruciating few weeks of my life. From moments of complete excitement to moments of complete exhaustion (and baby isn’t even here yet.)

So ready to meet our little. Ready to see Kaitlin as a wonderful mother. Ready to be a dad.

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8 SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS GIVE THEIR YOUNGER SELVES LESSONS THEY WISH THEY’D KNOWN THEN

GRACE NASRI

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1. WHAT IS OUR COMPANY’S PURPOSE ON THIS EARTH?

2. WHAT SHOULD WE STOP DOING?

3. IF WE DIDN’T HAVE AN EXISTING BUSINESS, HOW COULD WE BEST BUILD A NEW ONE?

4. WHERE IS OUR PETRI DISH?

5. HOW CAN WE MAKE A BETTER EXPERIMENT?

Share this:

Share this:

Top 10 Seth Godin Quotes

Business

Change

Choice

Greatness

Ideas

Leadership / Management

Marketing

Mediocrity / Status Quo

Passion

Relationships

Strategy

Share this:

Share this:

1. Compassion.

2. Effective communication.

3. Self-control.

4. Respect.

5. Grace.

Share this:

Share this:

Standing on the edge of a life about to change, I am still amazed at the wonder of it all. How things can be fast tracked and placed at the very front, then how others can be placed on the back burner. Many times the placement is of little choice of your own.

Officially a week past due date, waiting on this kid has been the most excruciating few weeks of my life. From moments of complete excitement to moments of complete exhaustion (and baby isn’t even here yet.)

So ready to meet our little. Ready to see Kaitlin as a wonderful mother. Ready to be a dad.

Share this:

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Follow Us

Meta

Categories

Calender

Blogroll

Pages