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What’s Wrong with Instant Messenger?

Culture

The short answer is nothing! However i am hearing more and more about companies either banning or strong suggesting that employees dont use messenger and other similar applications. This got me to thinking – why?

For me, banning messenger is like banning the phone or email. I guess in days gone by bosses were banning email and the internet however imagine work life today without either of these.

The real issue is trust and understanding.

For of all messenger is just a communications tool. In many ways no more intrusive than email or the phone. However i think that many managers are of the old school and think that if someone is using messenger then they are not working. How wrong.

I once had a manager who banned messenger in his part of the business. In many ways this was the beginning of the end for him. His team felt like they were not trusted and therefore began to question why they were there. They went from a team that often went above and beyond to get the job done to one that tended to watch the clock and not over extend themselves. While banning messenger was not the sole cause, it did contribute and indicated to the team what the manager really thought about them.

What compounded the problem was the selective people were allowed to use messenger thus creating classes in the busines.

The real issue is trust and you need to trust people in your team to get on with the job without having to strickly manage each of their interactions. Sometimes people will take liberties however a simple discussion about what is right or wrong is usually easier than blanked banning.

Put trust in your team and they will repay you many times over.

Source : myceolife

Is Life a bed of roses ?

Is Life a bed of roses ?

Roses are beautiful, even though they come with thorns;
If you know your reason why you want to grow roses,
You will not let the thorns hinder you from growing the flowers;
Only then may all enjoy the smell & the sight of the beautiful bed of roses.

Life is beautiful, even though it comes with challenging experiences.
If you know your reason & purpose in this lifetime,
You will not allow past negative experiences to hinder you from growing.
Only then may all enjoy the beauty, & sight of, a beautiful you.

I hope that everyone will find their journey a purposeful and fulfilling one, like I have. And I sincerely thank Mind Transformations for being the provider, like a gardener providing its tools & nurture in the Garden of Eden.

How to Market in a Recession

The signs of an imminent recession are all around us. The spillover from the subprime mortgage crisis is weakening both consumer confidence and the consumer spending–much of it on credit–that has been buoying our economy.

Companies should bear eight factors in mind when making their marketing plans for 2008 and 2009:

1. Research the customer.

Instead of cutting the market research budget, you need to know more than ever how consumers are redefining value and responding to the recession. Price elasticity curves are changing. Consumers take more time searching for durable goods and negotiate harder at the point of sale. They are more willing to postpone purchases, trade down, or buy less. Must-have features of yesterday are today’s can-live-withouts. Trusted brands are especially valued and they can still launch new products successfully but interest in new brands and new categories fades. Conspicuous consumption becomes less prevalent.

2. Focus on family values.

When economic hard times loom, we tend to retreat to our village. Look for cozy hearth-and-home family scenes in advertising to replace images of extreme sports, adventure and rugged individualism. Zany humor and appeals on the basis of fear are out. Greeting card sales, telephone use and discretionary spending on home furnishings and home entertainment will hold up well, as uncertainty prompts us to stay at home but also stay connected with family and friends.

3. Maintain marketing spending.

This is not the time to cut advertising. It is well documented that brands that increase advertising during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times. Uncertain consumers need the reassurance of known brands–and more consumers at home watching television can deliver higher than expected audiences at lower cost-per-thousand impressions. Brands with deep pockets may be able to negotiate favourable advertising rates and lock them in for several years. If you have to cut marketing spending, try to maintain the frequency of advertisements by shifting from 30-to-15 second advertisements, substituting radio for television advertising, or increasing the use of direct marketing, which gives more immediate sales impact.

4. Adjust product portfolios.

Marketers must reforecast demand for each item in their product lines as consumers trade down to models that stress good value, such as cars with fewer options. Tough times favour multi-purpose goods over specialised products and weaker items in product lines should be pruned. In grocery-products categories, good-quality own-brands gain at the expense of national brands. Industrial customers prefer to see products and services unbundled and priced separately. Gimmicks are out; reliability, durability, safety and performance are in. New products, especially those that address the new consumer reality and thereby put pressure on competitors, should still be introduced but advertising should stress superior price performance, not corporate image.

5. Support distributors.

In uncertain times, no one wants to tie up working capital in excess inventories. Early-buy allowances, extended financing and generous return policies motivate distributors to stock your full product line. This is particularly true with unproven new products. Be careful about expanding distribution to lower-priced channels; doing so can jeopardise existing relationships and your brand image. However, now may be the time to drop your weaker distributors and upgrade your sales force by recruiting those sacked by other companies.

6. Adjust pricing tactics.

Customers will be shopping around for the best deals. You do not necessarily have to cut list prices but you may need to offer more temporary price promotions, reduce thresholds for quantity discounts, extend credit to long-standing customers and price smaller pack sizes more aggressively. In tough times, price cuts attract more consumer support than promotions such as sweepstakes and mail-in offers.

7. Stress market share.

In all but a few technology categories where growth prospects are strong, companies are in a battle for market share and, in some cases, survival. Knowing your cost structure can ensure that any cuts or consolidation initiatives will save the most money with minimum customer impact. Companies such as Wal-Mart and Southwest Airlines, with strong positions and the most productive cost structures in their industries, can expect to gain market share. Other companies with healthy balance sheets can do so by acquiring weak competitors.

8. Emphasise core values.

Although most companies are making employees redundant, chief executives can cement the loyalty of those who remain by assuring employees that the company has survived difficult times before, maintaining quality rather than cutting corners and servicing existing customers rather than trying to be all things to all people. CEOs must spend more time with customers and employees. Economic recession can elevate the importance of the finance director’s balance sheet over the marketing manager’s income statement. Managing working capital can easily dominate managing customer relationships. CEOs must counter this. Successful companies do not abandon their marketing strategies in a recession; they adapt them.

Another Suggestion :

1. Spend Smarter
You may spend less on marketing. Not because marketing should be cut first or most (it most certainly should not), but rather because your company may cut budgets across the board. In fact, by showing how you intend to spend smarter you will make it easier to fight for your resources (see below). By “spend smarter”, I mean create a clear-cut justification for the investment. While you won’t always be able to measure the ROI (this is marketing after all), you can have your people create a compelling business case for each investment. Then, when it comes time to justify the investment, you will have established sound business reasoning behind it. And that’s what the CEO and CFO need to see in a recession.

2. Double-down on your current customers
Sure it’s more fun to get new customers, but it’s more practical in a downturn to provide more value (and get more in return) from your current customers. When customers make decisions in a downturn, they’re more likely to go with a more trusted source. If they’re more likely to go with you, then you want to make it easier and more obvious to them to go with you. Market to them. Enable your sales teams to be more effective with them. Ask current customers what they need from you. Care for them and they will be even more likely to stick with you if the going gets tough.

3. Outsmart your competitors
You have an opportunity to win market share from your competitors in a downturn. If you pay close attention to what’s happening in your target markets and how customers are reacting to a recession, you can act early and often with changes in product (if you can change it quickly), price, and positioning (especially as perceived needs change). For example, in the last technology downturn, software companies became very creative in their pricing schema, creating many variations of software as a service (SaaS) that enabled them to sell when their competitors were stuck in an old paradigm.

4. Invest in Growing Market Segments
In every downturn there are market segments that grow faster than others. It’s your job as a marketer to help your company see and understand these market segments, and determine if you can quickly win business in these fast-growing market segments. These may be segments you’re already selling to, but not particularly focused on, or they may represent new segments – and new opportunities for your company. At the same time, you want to reduce your investments in the segments that will get hit the most in the downturn.

5. Fight for Your Resources
As I’ve argued before (see “CMOs as True Leaders” http://www.achievemarketleadership.com/?p=198) it’s marketing’s responsibility to drive strategic issues. In a recession, this becomes even more important. Knee-jerk reactions of companies where the CMO is not deeply involved in strategy, are often to cut budgets and people in marketing disproportionately. This results in marketing playing a less important role, and an extremely inefficient pendulum-swing of dollars and people that result in being caught flat-footed and losing out to competitors very shortly after the cuts are made. It’s marketing’s responsibility to fight for it’s resources, and doing the four items above will help you win that battle.

(Source : Collected from many sources)

Don’t Wait Too Long to Become an Entrepreneur

Posted by Noam Wasserman

Are you one of the many executives who’d love to leave the corporate battleship to skipper a speedy, nimble start-up? And are you using a variety of rationales for why it’s not yet time to go?

Reasons such as: I need to work on my resume, acquire more credibility, learn to manage better, figure out how financing really works, maintain stability at home while my children are young?

Those are legit reasons, of course, but while you’re waiting for everything to fall into place, you’re acquiring big-company habits that can hurt you if and when you ever make the move.

Long tenures in corporate jobs keep you from becoming the self-reliant jack-of-all-trades that a new venture requires. You get used to having HR specialists take care of HR issues for you, finance aces prepare reports for you, and IT whizzes maintain the company infrastructure. You become accustomed to delegating and to distancing yourself from “real work” — a luxury that just isn’t possible in a start-up.

Senior people in big companies are successful “because they can manage a team,” Barry Nalls told me. He was the founder and CEO of Masergy, a Texas-based telecom company he started after working for GTE for a quarter century. But “in an early-stage company, there’s no such thing as a manager.

“Everyone is a contributor, including the CEO.” The backers of his start-up coached him not to hire people “who can only be successful if they have a team around them.” Another founder-CEO, when describing his own first hire from a big company, complained, “He wasn’t comfortable creating something from nothing. It’s like if you have a crank, he can crank, but he can’t actually build the crank. Building something from nothing requires a different skill set.”

Entrepreneurs are more effective at building ventures from scratch once they have attained a certain level of maturity and self-knowledge, but they can achieve this without spending most of their working lives in corporate jobs.

In my research on thousands of founders of high-potential ventures that had succeeded in raising capital from professional investors, 76% of founder-CEOs had worked for 20 years or less before founding their first ventures — they had made the leap by the time they were in their early 40s.

Waiting for the “perfect time” to make the jump is usually futile, for there’s no moment that’s truly perfect. So even if you’re early in your corporate career, when a winning new-business idea comes along and sparks an entrepreneurial passion in you, carpe diem.

Noam Wasserman (

nwasserman@hbs.edu) is an associate professor at Harvard Business School in Boston. He blogs about his research on founders at http://founderresearch.blogspot.com.

Leadership is a Series of Conversations

Leadership is an interactive conversation that pulls people toward
becoming comfortable with the language of personal responsibility
and commitment.

Since ‘coaching’ is a leadership competency, here are five principles
that guide respectful conversations.

1. When peers connect change happens. Effective coaching can
happen on the dance floor of conversation.

2. It’s OK to begin a conversation by confronting the other person
with questions that seem awkward but set the stage for a respectful
exchange. Why waste time on small talk? Just ask to-the-point
information-seeking questions, like: ‘What are you here for?
How do you want to spend our time together?’

3. Conversations are not meant to be structured. Be open to
conversations that you are unprepared for and focused on the
interests of the other person (not your purpose).

4. Don’t get pulled into solving problems that may not matter to
the other person. Allow time for the person to get to what’s really
important. Provide spaces where they can express their doubts and
fears by being a thoughtful listener–without taking on the responsibility
to fix or debate the issue. After all, you have invited the person to talk
about what matters to her or him, not you, so allow time for the
articulation of those thoughts and feelings.

5. Personal transformation happens when the right questions get
asked–not by providing answers. When you focus on the solution,
you are trying to sell the person something. When you allow people
to answer their own questions, they discover what they were not aware
of—and what is needed to move forward.

Personal transformation leads corporate transformation–one person
at a time.

Source/Writer : John G. Agno

The 30 Minute Meeting

How often is it that you get invited to a meeting that goes on and on and on.  You get there and there is no formal agenda, the other attendees are late, some don’t know why they have been invited, there is no real leader of the meeting and an hour or so later you leave with no real outcomes and you are left wondering what that was all about.

Well i think there should be a different approach – the 30 minute meeting.  In fact, if it can be shorter, thats even better.

If someone wants to have a meeting with me, i generally allocate 30 min to the meeting and ensure that there is another one right after it – saves me going over.  In the meeting i usually like the person who has called the meeting to have an agenda and a clear outcome they want from the meeting.  I am not a big fan of presentations, i just want to know the facts.  Long power point presentations may impress some but i generally skip ahead if given the presentation on paper.

I tend to find it a bit “sucky” when people present whizz bang high tech presentations – as it usually means they have spent more time moving pixels around the screen than actually thinking about what it is they are trying to say.

Finally, i always try to make a decision by the end of the meeting.  I think that it is important that people have clear direction and can get on with it.  Now these decisions are not always right and sometimes are driven by gut feel more than anything. However i will take 7 or 8 out of 10 decisions being right any day.

You Get What You Tolerate

In medicine you look at how “well tolerated” a drug will be related to its side effects.  At work and at home, many people evaluate new opportunities related to what can be well tolerated. Yet after life, most people don’t want their tombstone to read, “He tolerated stuff for other people because they paid him.”  Especially, when we realize that we can make more money and have more fun doing work that engages our passions.  Life is too short for doing work you don’t enjoy for people you don’t respect.
“No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him.” James Russell Lowell

The message is: Life is not a dress rehearsal. You can solve your problems using the mind you know you have. You can stop seeking answers outside yourself. You can look within.

Source : home.att.net

What is life?

In highly developed countries, there is a growing percentage of people thinking about the meaning of life. This genuine spiritual concern is broader than traditional views of religion practiced in numerous countries of the world. Yet, it is unclear to most how they want to live their life in a meaningful way.

A Redirection of Focus

A Newsweek-Beliefnet poll taken in August 2005 reveals that of 1,004 Americans, 55 percent consider themselves “religious and spiritual,” while another 24 percent describe themselves as “spiritual.” Two thirds say they pray daily and a third meditate. Prayer, meditation, chanting, visualization are all about focusing attention to achieve a higher level of consciousness.

You can use the power of your thoughts to focus on potentially positive outcomes, instead of potentially negative ones, and change your life. Is it time to turn your attention toward intentions you’d really like to make happen?

Marlee Matlin, the “What the Bleep Do We Know!?” movie actress who portrays the young woman learning how to apply the power of intention in her own life, says, “I’ve learned to eliminate things that don’t give me good energy. Some of us want to overcome our addictions, and some like them. It all depends on who you are and who you want to be.”

“I’ll be happy when….” is the way many people think they are living their lives. Yet, happiness is not something that happens to you. Happiness is inside you now. You are motivated from within. You only have to allow happiness to surface.

Happiness = K (knowing who you are) X D (discovering your life’s work) X L (learning not to tolerate what’s not important).

That’s Coach John Agno’s formula for happiness–know yourself, your true calling and that you get what you tolerate.

Source : home.att.net

Born to be happy ?

The circumstances in life have precious little to do with the satisfaction we experience. Married churchgoers tend to outscore single nonbelievers in happiness surveys, but health, wealth, good looks and status have astonishingly little effect on what the researchers call “subjective well-being.”

Psychologists have amassed a heap of data on what people who deem themselves happy have in common. Mood and temperament have a large genetic component. In a now famous 1996 study, University of Minnesota psychologists David Lykken and Auke Tellegen surveyed 732 pairs of identical twins and found them closely matched for adult happiness, regardless of whether they’d grown up together or apart. Such findings suggest that while we all experience ups and downs, our moods revolve around the emotional baselines or “set points” we’re born with.

In his book, “Authentic Happiness” (Free Press), University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman tells us that happiness is not about maximizing utility or managing our moods. It’s about outgrowing our obsessive concern with how we feel. He says, “The time has arrived for a science that seeks to understand positive emotion, build strength and virtue, and provide guideposts for finding what Aristotle called the ‘good life’.”

Beyond pleasure lies what he terms “gratification,” the enduring fulfillment that comes from developing one’s strengths and putting them to positive use. Half of us may lack the genes for bubbly good cheer, he reasons, but no one lacks nascent strengths or the capacity to nurture them.

Source: The Science of Happiness by Geoffrey Cowley (with Anne Underwood) in Newsweek, September 16, 2002

There is an ancient tale of happiness that appears in many cultures, and it goes something like this: Once there was a prince who was terribly unhappy. The king dispatched messengers to find the shirt of a happy man, as his advisers told him that was the only cure. They finally encountered a poor farmer who was supremely content.

Alas, the happy man owned no shirt.

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“Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.”

Robert Frost

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