Category: Business

“In general, when we are unsure of ourselves, when the situation is unclear or ambiguous, when uncertainty reigns, we are most likely to look to and accept the actions of others as correct.” – Robert Cialdini

I just read about pluralistic ignorance, which I found fascinating.  According to Wikipedia it is: “A situation where a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but assume (incorrectly) that most others accept it…It is, in Krech and Crutchfield’s words, the situation where ‘no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes. “This, in turn, provides support for a norm that may be, in fact, disliked by most people.

Pluralistic ignorance can be contrasted with the false consensus effect. In pluralistic ignorance, people privately disdain but publicly support a norm (or a belief), while the false consensus effect causes people to wrongly assume that most people think like them, while in reality most people do not think like them (and express the disagreement openly).

For instance, pluralistic ignorance may lead a student to drink alcohol excessively because he/she believes that everyone else does that, while in reality everyone else also wishes they could avoid binge-drinking, but no one expresses that due to the fear of being ostracized. A false consensus for the same situation would mean that the student believes that most other people do not enjoy excessive drinking, while in fact most other people do enjoy that and openly express their opinion about it.”

I’m sure my workplace is like yours and if that is true, I see pluralistic ignorance daily.  How great would our society and the companies we work for (or run) be if we publicly (not privately) rejected something we disagree with.  How great would it be if everyone realized everyone doesn’t think like us (note: I think I tend to suffer from the false consensus effect)?  Your way of thinking may not be popular, but privately others may actually be supporting what you disdain.  Is the secret to take a stand and speak up?  I’m still learning…

We’ve all heard the saying “a penny saved is a penny earned” but I don’t think too many people really stop and think about that.  I read this and thought how true it is.  Make smart decisions in life everyone.  I’ve tried my best…sometimes it is easier said than done and life throws you a few curve balls to set you back.  If I’ve learned one thing in life it is to expect the unexpected.

“At age 25, Jim makes $100,000 a year. He’s constantly traveling for business. He has a large home in which he often doesn’t visit some rooms for months at a time. He eats out every single night. He drives a leased Lexus, which he updates every few years at the end of the lease. He buys a whole new wardrobe every six months, taking the leftovers to Goodwill. He spends everything he brings in.

At age 25, Bill makes $35,000 a year. He lives in a smaller home and doesn’t travel much. He makes most of his own meals at home. He drives a Toyota Corolla, which he owns free and clear. He wears clothes until they’re worn, then shops at Goodwill for replacements, often picking up Jim’s barely-worn clothes. At the end of the year, he usually has about $5,000 of his income left over, which he sticks into his stock investments which earn 8% a year.

In ten years, Jim’s net worth hasn’t grown a cent. In those same ten years, Bill has $72,000 in the bank.

At the twenty year mark, Jim’s net worth still hasn’t grown a cent. In those same twenty years, Bill has built up $228,098 in the bank.

At the thirty year mark, Jim’s still breaking even. Bill, on the other hand, has $566,416 in the bank.

At age sixty five, Jim hasn’t accumulated a cent and will be working for the man for the rest of his life. At the same age, Bill has $1.3 million in the bank and can do whatever he wants for the rest of his life – and probably already started doing that a few years earlier.

It doesn’t matter how much you earn. It matters how much you save.”

>> Read the full article

“If you accept all the praise, you have to accept all the critics.” – Chris Brogan

“Sales are vanity.  Profits are sanity.” http://bit.ly/dlg4N5”  – Jason Fried (@jasonfried)

Laura Gainor wasn’t always the PR & Social Media Strategist at Comet Branding and this is the story of how that came to be.  When Laura found out she and her husband were moving from Charlotte to Milwaukee, she reached out to companies in the area, including Comet Branding who tweeted about a job opening.  Laura set out to get herself hired by launching a #LauraGainorToMilwaukee campaign that mixed in Twitter, FourSquare and SlideShare.  Laura and her husband had already planned a trip to Milwaukee. She made a poster out of the Comet Brand logo and posted pictures of the poster in various venues at Milwaukee with a Foursquare check-in and a tweet. The campaign was fun, spontaneous and creative and showcased Laura’s personality and creativity.  But Laura also wanted to showcase her experience as well as creative and strategic talents. So she uploaded a presentation to SlideShare and periodically tweeted links to that presentation.

“SlideShare allowed me the opportunity to publicly explain what I did and how I did it, to get the attention of Comet Branding,” said Laura.  Laura pulled together photos to create a virtual resume as well as screenshots of her Foursquare check-ins from Milwaukee.  “My goal for my SlideShare presentation was to create a story about who I was, my professional experience, showcase my talents that would make me a good fit for Comet Branding, as well as pull together my #LauraGainorToMilwaukee story into one place,” Laura explained. 

The very day Laura’s presentation was uploaded, it made it to SlideShare’s ‘Most Popular’ and was passed around on SlideShare and the Twittersphere. She got tweets and direct messages from all over.  There were even teachers downloading the presentation to show their classes and example of presenting yourself as a brand to possible employers.  Comet Branding also noticed Laura. They contacted her to setup a first interview. On March 1st she went in for a second interview and was immediately offered the position!  Laura says, “I feel very honored to have had my first day in my new desk at Comet Branding on Wednesday, March 3rd.”  If you are looking for a job, take a lesson from Laura’s book – showcase yourself through a presentation and use Twitter or Facebook to get the attention of the company you want to work at.

If you haven’t heard of Zappos.com, you may be a new reader to my blog because I write about them a lot.  I’m a big believer that what gets measured and focused within a company tends to get done.  The slides below were presented by Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com’s CEO at an “all hands on meeting” at the Amazon.com headquarters (Amazon recently acquired Zappos.com).  Zappos.com’s customer service is top notch and there aren’t too many companies which treats it’s employees and customers better.

What are Zappos’ core values?

• Deliver WOW through service
• Embrace and drive change
• Create fun and a little weirdness
• Be adventurous, creative, and open-minded
• Pursue growth and learning
• Build open and honest relationships with communication
• Build a positive team and family spirit
• Do more with less
• Be passionate and determined
• Be humble

Every year, the company reinforces its core values by publishing a 500-page culture book with unedited contributions made by employees and vendors. They distribute it company-wide, as well as to anyone who wants to purchase a copy. The company even opens up its Las Vegas offices for free tours, and welcomes companies like Southwest Airlines to spend time watching Zappos’s call center operations, recruitment practices, and training.

I enjoyed reading this interview with Tachi Yamada, M.D., president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program.

Q. How did you first learn to become a manager?

A. I think the most difficult transition for anybody from being a worker bee to a manager is this issue of delegation. What do you give up? How can you have the team do what you would do yourself without you doing it? If you’re a true micromanager and you basically stand over everybody and guide their hands to do everything, you don’t have enough hours in the day to do what the whole team needs to do.  Learning how to delegate, learning how to let go and still make sure that everything happened, was a very important lesson in my first role in management. And that’s where I learned a principle that I apply today — I don’t micromanage, but I have microinterest. I do know the details. I do care about the details. I feel like I have intimate knowledge of what’s going on, but I don’t tell people what to do.

Q. Talk about how you hire.

A. You have to have people in an organization who are willing to truly embrace change, because if they don’t, then what you have is an organization that’s constantly fighting to stay at the status quo. And, of course, that leads to stagnation. It’s also an unsustainable model.  I’ve made an observation about people. There are people who have moved. Take somebody who’s a child of an Army officer — they will have moved 10 times in their lives. And then there are people who’ve been born and raised and educated and employed in one town their whole lives. Who do you think is willing to change? I think, in this modern world, you really have to be sure that your work force has the experience of being elsewhere. That experience then has the ability to ensure that you will be comfortable with change.  The biggest problems I see in a group of people who don’t embrace change is that they will always fight anything new, any new idea, any new concept, any outside point of view. And, of course, there are many examples of companies that have failed because of that. So I think that’s a critical point. Almost all of the people on our staff have traveled all around the world, have lived everywhere.

Q. What else are you looking for when you hire?

A. Native intelligence is critically important. I don’t think you can train people to be more intelligent.

Q. How do you test for that?

A. I really try to understand people, what their values are. So it’s usually quite an unstructured interview — where they come from, their family members. And then I try to understand how they deal with difficult interpersonal issues.

Q. Why?

A. Intelligence is often more displayed in what I would call complex abstract thinking, and there’s nothing more complex and abstract than human relationships. And if they can work their way through a human relationship problem intelligently, my guess is that they’re very smart people. Not that they can’t add and subtract six-figure numbers multiplied by whatever, but that they can take a complex problem, break it down into its pieces and figure out the best way forward.  I also look for people who’ve moved. Did you move when you were a kid? When you went from one high school to another, what was it like? How did you deal with it? This kind of thing is often very informative about how people have had to deal with crisis, different circumstances and how they’ve had to adapt or change.

Q. What is your best career advice for young people?

A. I think one of the hardest things to do is to figure out what your North Star is. What is it that you really are interested in? This helps you to weigh one option versus another. And then keep your eyes and ears open.  Be open to new challenges. I don’t think anyone should do one job for too long a time. I think every five to eight years you should be willing to take on some different challenges. It’s so easy to get stale. Every time I’ve left a job, I was loving the job that I left. But I never regretted the next move that I made.

Q. What else?

A. A second key lesson was from a doctor named Marcel Tuchman. He was the most compassionate person I have ever met in my life — I mean, full of human kindness. And every time he met somebody, you had the sense that he cared more about them than anything else in the world.  So what I learned from him is that when you actually are with somebody, you’ve got to make that person feel like nobody else in the world matters. I think that’s critical.  So, for example, I don’t have a mobile phone turned on because I’m talking to you. I don’t want the outside world to impinge on the conversation we’re having. I don’t carry a BlackBerry. I do my e-mails regularly, but I do it when I have the time on a computer. I don’t want to be sitting here thinking that I’ve got an e-mail message coming here and I’d better look at that while I’m talking to you. Every moment counts, and that moment is lost if you’re not in that moment 100 percent.

I recently replied to a Internal Communication LinkedIn group question and wanted to share it with a larger audience in hope others would be able to benefit and reply to it.  Evidently others liked it so hope you do as well.  Don’t forget to comment on it so we can all learn from one another!

The question: “What messaging and tools have you used to convince the non-believers that your intranet site will benefit them.”

My answer: “This may not help you and you may have done much of this, but I’d start with asking your users what new and existing features on your intranet site would/do benefit them the most. If you need a quick answer another option is to look at your site analytics to tell you much of what users are going to today and look to improve upon that.

I see our intranet as the “one stop shop” for global communications so the more you can aggregate global communications to show value (while still retaining usability) may help. So many employees have to check email, the Intranet, hard copies, voicemail, calendar, tasks, and more which takes time so find a way to aggregate those conversations to one location and make it dead simple. Post communications that are going to provide value as well because if you are not careful the communications your Executives ask you to communicate sometimes is not what your audience finds useful or relevant so never forget to focus on what your content consumers want and need to read.

Make your intranet social so your audience is more engaged and if possible implement features which allow the audience to share, subscribe to, and filter so the content is more valuable and applicable to them. Part of the reason society likes Facebook and Twitter are they are giving us very personalized content from sources we want to get our information from (except all that Farmville and Mafia Wars stuff).

Keep your content fresh and add polls on your site which engage your audience and at the same time allows you to get insight into what they want. Think about Facebook for instance, they have polls and applications surfaced on them all of the time and they can use that information to better target advertising to you and ultimately be successful (make money).

In Jack and the Beanstalk Jack found some magical seeds which grew the giant beanstalk right? I think of the beanstalk as the Intranet. I feel there are 4 essential things for beanstalks to grow which are soil, fertilizer, water, and sun. I see the soil being the infrastructure, the fertilizer being new Intranet functionality, the water being its users/audience, and the sun being your company’s culture. The only problem (at least one of them) with my analogy is eventually Jack’s Beanstalk was chopped down and the giant fell with it. 🙂

Now its time for the full disclaimer which is I wish I could take my own advice! Hope to hear from everyone else…”

I was at a Starbucks drive-through when I noticed the license plate frame of the car in front of me.  The license plate read “Outta my way I’m going to Starbucks!”.  The reason I took the picture was it was interesting to me that I was in a long line of cars for a $4 latte and the car directly in front of me loved the company so much they proudly displayed it on their license plate.  What does it say about a company when people (not companies) make and sell license plates which allow you to display your affection for a particular company?

I don’t think it is too difficult to create a company people will love and respect so much they will tell the world about it.  Companies of course try to attract customers to get them in their door but are some companies simply looking to get customers in the building, or are they looking to build relationships with their customers?  I think you can build a relationship with your customers through your brand, transparency, serving the community it serves, customer service, quality products, and differentiating products.  I think if you do any of those things to a high standard (not too difficult these days) customers will come back and they may even be so passionate about your company they will tout it on their license plate.  Is there a recipe for the success of a company?  If you were to make the perfect recipe for a company you love so much you wanted to share it with the world, what would it consist of in your opinion?