Tuesday, March 29, 2011

"You have everything you need to build something far bigger than yourself."


Seth Godin knows how to craft a good quote.

“Leadership is about finding the right people, agreeing where you want to go, and getting out of the way.”


"Faith in yourself, in your friends, in your colleagues and most of all, faith in your ability to impact our future is the best strategy I know.”


"Leadership is saying what you believe, and seeing who follows.”


Seth Godin is an entrepreneur, blogger, author (16 books at last count), and marketer-extraordinaire. His blog, Seth’s Blog, has been ranked in the AdAge Power 150 as the #1 marketing blog. (It is currently ranked #22.)

With a double major in computer science and philosophy, and a Stanford MBA, Seth Godin brings a rich and balanced perspective to leadership and business issues.

Godin coined the phrase “permission marketing.” As opposed to “interruptive marketing”, “permission marketing” is where the prospective client grants explicit permission for the marketer to send their promotional message. Permission marketers feel that this is a more efficient use of their resources because offers are only sent to those people who are actually interested in their product or service.

Godin is an insightful thinker and thought-leader. In a recent blog entry, he discusses the concept of accepting false limits. He says, “I don't accept for a minute that there's some sort of natural limit on your ability to do just about anything that involves creating and selling ideas.”

In this recent video, Godin expands on some of his leadership philosophies. There are some very good observations here…applicable to all entrepreneurs and leaders…and well worth the 7-minute listen. (Please ignore the annoying background music.)

“Hope without a strategy doesn’t generate leadership. Leadership comes when your hope and your optimism are matched with a concrete vision of the future and a way to get there. People won’t follow you if they don’t believe you can get to where you say you’re going.”...Seth Godin

by Chris Holman

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

"You define yourself by what you can do, not what you can't!"



You may have noticed the mythic tale of Anthony Robles, born without a right leg, who won the NCAA 125-pound wrestling championship over the weekend.

More complete stories of his heroically epic story can be seen here and here. What caught my eye was something this young man said:

“You define yourself by what you can do, not what you can’t.”

This reminds me of an excellent essay that I once read by Marshall Goldsmith, the author and executive educator, “Change the Way You Define Yourself.”

Goldsmith says that we all have characteristics and behaviors that we use to define who we are. On the success side, we might describe ourselves as, “intelligent”, “results-oriented”, or “persistent”. On the not-so-success side, we all have some self-definitions that frame us in a negative light, e.g. “stubborn”, “opinionated”, or “inflexible”.

Goldsmith points out that one of the greatest challenges that we face, when seeking to improve ourselves, is the challenge of changing the way that we define ourselves.
We do this by pigeonholing ourselves with absolute characteristics and say, “That’s just who I am”, or “It is what it is”.

The problem becomes that we use “That’s just who I am”, as a rationale NOT to change…even when change is desirable and possible.

As Goldsmith goes on to say, unless a behavior is shaped by genetic preconditions (born that way) or environmental factors (external factors that prohibit us from changing), very few behaviors are immutable to change…should we have the motivation and desire to do so.

And as Anthony Robles has demonstrated, sometimes “genetic preconditions” can’t stand in our way either!

by Chris Holman

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Crisis in Japan


Although the horrific crisis in Japan seems to be unfolding by the hour, we wanted to pass along this collection of interviews (dated 3/16/2011) from four experts, all who happen to be professors at the Wharton School.

"Crisis in Japan: What will the costs be?" addresses this event from three perspectives: the economic costs, crisis planning, and the global impact.

This is content-rich, with more than 60 minutes of informative discussion, and provides a good context for understanding the future global implications. You might also want to download a pdf of the entire interview to review at a future time.

by Chris Holman

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Big Hairy Audacious Goals


On this date, 15 March 44 BC, Julius Caesar was assassinated. Caesar was the Roman general who was too successful in achieving his “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” of centralizing his dictatorial power within the Roman Empire.

2040 years later, James Collins and Jerry Porras first proposed the term Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) or Bee-Hag in their 1996 article entitled Building Your Company's Vision. In the article, the authors define a BHAG as a form of vision statement, "...an audacious 10-to-30-year goal to progress towards an envisioned future."

“A true BHAG is clear and compelling, serves as unifying focal point of effort, and acts as a clear catalyst for team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines.”

In the authors’ view, BHAG’s are a powerful mechanism for highly visionary companies to stimulate progress, and stay on top. One of their corporate examples was that of Boeing in the 1950’s. At the time, Boeing had no presence in the corporate market; 80% of their business had been with one client…the US Air Force. All previous commercial attempts had been failures.

In Boeing’s case, they bet the company (one-quarter of their corporate net worth) on building the prototype for a jet. In 1957, on a rainy day in Renton, Washington, the first 707 flew off into the clouds and revolutionized commercial travel by introducing the “jet age”. Competitors, like Douglas Aircraft, never caught up.

When organizations set goals, BHAG’s are seen as an important element in setting a high-performance culture. By setting extremely ambitious targets, it can cause one to think creatively about achieving these goals, and be energized and motivated to move the organization forward.

There is an art to setting stretch targets. On the one hand, research has shown that having some anxiety about the achievement of a goal is a good thing. However, goals that are set arbitrarily, without the participation of all who are expected to work toward this end, can be problematic. Moreover, goals must be realistic. If one doesn’t believe that a goal is attainable, the entire exercise can be counter-productive, and possibly demotivating.

To Tame Your BHAG, Try This

  1. Exhibit courage, and a willingness to take on risk. Even small increases in productivity can have profound, knock-on effects.
  2. For teams, build the confidence of the team-members to embrace the new reality...breaking through self-imposed limits and expectations.
  3. Increase team involvement to raise the bar. Leaders should be clear about expected outcomes, but allow employees the freedom to decide how the tasks are implemented.
  4. Follow through and stay the course. Don’t shift priorities each week, or each month.
  5. Identify, and emulate, peak performers.When high performers are not recognized or rewarded for exceptional effort, overall performance often declines.
  6. Utilize the support that emanates from team dynamics. Indeed, among some teams goals become overly ambitious and must be scaled back.
  7. Improve processes. Great teams, and great leaders, lower the process barriers.
  8. When a lofty goal is met, celebrate and reward.
On a cautionary note, not all attempts to best the BHAG are successful. In 1999, Durk Jager, a manager with a reputation for ruthlessness, ascended to the CEO throne at Procter & Gamble. Jager was known for his motto, "If it ain't broke, break it!" Jager announced job cuts that amounted to 15,000 in job losses, tore up the company's multi-layered bureaucracy, and pushed "stretch goals" on all employees. Eighteen months later, P&G had missed profit forecasts on three separate occasions...and had lost $75 billion in market value. In hindsight, Jager had pushed P&G, a company with a corporate culture that was somewhat risk-averse and inbred, too far and too fast.

"The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark."...Michelangelo

by Chris Holman

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Closing the Loop Builds Trust


There’s a good reminder from a recent blog by Jodi Glickman on the importance of “closing the loop”. Ms. Glickman is a speaker, author, and blogger for Harvard Business Review. In a recent post, “The Biggest Mistake People Make After Receiving a Favor”, she describes the importance of the last step in the asking-for-a-favor process…closing the loop.

“The right way to close the loop is simple: no matter the outcome, no matter if the news is good or bad, be sure to follow up and share what happened. Don't leave someone hanging after they help you out, wondering about the outcome. It's rude, it looks bad, and it actually has the potential to create negative consequences.”

Sound advice!

We see this, on occasion, with financial professionals who ask for referrals from their clients, friends and acquaintances. (Actually, we have observed that “asking for referrals” is not the best way to get referrals…but that’s a topic for another time.)

For financial professionals who receive referrals, it is fundamental that one “closes the loop” and share what happened with the referring source. As Ms. Glickman points out, it’s discourteous and incredibly bad form if one doesn’t follow this protocol, but there is another vitally important reason to do this.

Closing the loop demonstrates that you have follow-through skills. Most importantly, following up builds trust.

In the referral dynamic, the referral source has taken some personal risk by opening a small piece of their network to a financial professional when they provide a referral. Regardless of the eventual outcome of the referral, financial professionals build trust with referring sources by simply letting them know that the contact has been made. Indeed, studies have shown that one of the main reasons that referral sources stop providing referrals is for this very reason; they get left in the dark as to what actually happened, and whatever trust they had in the financial professional in the first place…quickly dissipates.

Speaking of the referral process, our proprietary research indicates that financial professionals have some gaps of their own. In a recent survey of top-performing financial advisors, 90% admitted that they do not have a clearly-defined referral strategy, and 87% indicated that they do not track where their referrals come from.

Summing this up, for most successful financial advisors, referrals are the #1 growth driver for new business. The likelihood of receiving referrals is greatly enhanced by having a process, which includes seemingly innocuous steps like...closing the loop.


On another completely different note, Happy March 10th! It was on this day in 2000…that the NASDAQ hit an intra-day high of 5132.52.

Seems like just yesterday…not!

by Chris Holman