True Secret to Success (It's Not What You Think)

via Geoffrey James @inc

If you're not exercising this emotional muscle, you're probably setting yourself up for failure.

I'm utterly convinced that the key to lifelong success is the regular exercise of a single emotional muscle: gratitude.

People who approach life with a sense of gratitude are constantly aware of what's wonderful in their life. Because they enjoy the fruits of their successes, they seek out more success. And when things don't go as planned, people who are grateful can put failure into perspective.

By contrast, people who lack gratitude are never truly happy. If they succeed at a task, they don't enjoy it. For them, a string of successes is like trying to fill a bucket with a huge leak in the bottom. And failure invariably makes them bitter, angry, and discouraged.

Therefore, if you want to be successful, you need to feel more gratitude. Fortunately, gratitude, like most emotions, is like a muscle: The more you use it, the stronger and more resilient it becomes.

Practice Nightly

The best time to exercise gratitude is just before bed. Take out your tablet (electronic or otherwise) and record the events of the day that created positive emotions, either in you or in those around you.

Did you help somebody solve a problem? Write it down. Did you connect with a colleague or friend? Write it down. Did you make somebody smile? Write it down.

What you're doing is "programming your brain" to view your day more positively. You're throwing mental focus on what worked well, and shrugging off what didn't. As a result, you'll sleep better, and you'll wake up more refreshed.

Reprogramming Your Brain

More important, you're also programming your brain to notice even more reasons to feel gratitude. You'll quickly discover that even a "bad day" is full of moments that are worthy of gratitude. Success becomes sweeter; failure, less sour.

The more regularly you practice this exercise, the stronger its effects.

Over time, your "gratitude muscle" will become so strong that you'll attract more success into your life, not to mention greater numbers of successful (i.e., grateful) people. You'll also find yourself thanking people more often. That's good for you and for them, too.

This method works. If you don't believe me, try it for at least a week. You'll be amazed at what a huge difference it makes.

The Key to Living An Integrated Life

by Dwight Frindt 

I posted about the power of “No” as a key to stress reduction and an access to personal power about 15 months ago. My purpose in returning to this “magic word” for today’s subject matter is to emphasize its importance in fulfilling our life purpose and strategic business intentions.

I recently spent a very powerful weekend with 83 very senior CEO Coach/mentors who meet once a year at the Hotel Boulderado in Boulder, CO to share, learn, develop their art, celebrate their relationships with each other, and most of all, to refresh themselves and their work.

They call themselves the Keepers of The Flame. The only real entrance requirement is an invitation and a minimum of ten years of successful experience as a Vistage/TEC Chair. All have very extensive experience in their work and have thought deeply about how to produce effectiveness and satisfaction in their clients’ careers and in their own lives.

We spent most of the weekend in a series of breakout groups, each examining a dimension of distinguishing and leading an authentic, purposeful life. To warm us up and get us in a creative mode for the weekend, we read “The Path of the Everyday Hero” by Lorna Catford and Michael Ray before arriving.

In one of the segments on “Balance and Prosperity,” we focused on a series of questions that you may want to investigate for yourself:

1)  What is balance for you?

2)  Who controls it?

3)  What is needed for this balance?

4)  What’s blocking you?

5)  What needs to be done?

6)  Your next steps?

It turned out all of the members of my breakout group on this topic could be regarded as very successful in balancing the rich and varied dimensions of their lives. In examining the “whys” and “hows” of their success, the discussion centered around the idea of leading an integrated life rather than pursuing balance, which we all felt was pretty much an illusion.

Focusing on a greater purpose or vision – a “Yonder Star” – living their values, and being the same person everywhere in their lives were the common access points to prioritizing and organizing activities and producing integration on a regular basis.

As very busy people, we realized the willingness to freely say “No” to many of the requests that come our way which are not high priority relative to our Yonder Star is essential to staying productively on the path and feeling nurtured in the process. To be able to say “No,” requires seeing that we always have a choice, in every moment. It is the act of choice that returns us to a powerful place as the authors of our own lives. While we may always be emphasizing one or two areas of our lives over the rest, we can redirect energy and attention to the neglected areas at the appropriate times.

Have you declared your Yonder Star? Do you have strategies and partners to assist you in fulfilling it? Can you identify places in your daily life where saying “No” will give you more time and energy for your priorities?

If You Don't Prioritize Your Life, Someone Else Will

by Greg McKeown via HBR

"A 'no' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble." So said Mahatma Gandhi, and we all know how his conviction played out on the world stage. But what is less well known is how this same discipline played out privately with his own grandson, Arun Gandhi.

Arun grew up in South Africa. When he was a young boy, he was beaten up twice: once for being too white and once for being too black. Still angry, Arun was sent to spend time with his grandfather. In an interview with Arun, he told me that his grandfather was in demand from many important people, yet he still prioritized his grandson, spending two hours a day for 18 months justlistening to Arun. It proved to be a turning point in Arun's life.

I had the opportunity to apply Gandhi's example of prioritization to my own life, hours before one of my daughters was born. I felt pressure to go to a client meeting the next day. But on this occasion, I knew what to do. It was clearly a time to be there for my wife and child. So, when asked to attend the meeting, I said with all the conviction I could muster...

"Yes."

To my shame, while my wife lay in the hospital with my hours-old baby, I went to the meeting. Afterward, my colleague said, "The client will respect you for making the decision to be here." But the look on the clients' faces mirrored how I felt. What was I doing there?! I had not lived true to Gandhi's saying. I had said "yes" to please.

As it turned out, exactly nothing came of the client meeting. And even if the client had respected my choice, and key business opportunities had resulted, I would still have struck a fool's bargain. My wife supported me and trusted me to make the right choice under the circumstances, and I had opted to deprioritize her and my child.

Why did I do it? I have two confessions:

First, I allowed social awkwardness to trump making the right decision. I wasn't forced to attend the meeting. Instead, I was so anxious to please that even awkward silent pauses on the phone were too much for me. In order to stop the social pain, I said "yes" when I knew the answer should be "no."

Second, I believed that "I had to make this work." Logically, I knew I had a choice, but emotionally, I felt that I had no choice. That one corrupted assumption psychologically removed many of the actual choices available to me.

What can you do to avoid the mistake of saying "yes" when you know the answer should be "no"?

First, separate the decision from the relationship. Sometimes these seem so interconnected, we forget there are two different questions we need to answer. By deliberately dividing these questions, we can make a more conscious choice. Answer the question, "What is the right decision?" and then"How can I communicate this as kindly as possible?"

Second, watch your language. Every time we say, "I have to take this call" or "I have to send this piece of work off" or "I have to go to this client meeting," we are assuming that previous commitments are nonnegotiable. Every time you use the phrase "I have to" over the next week, stop and replace it with "I choose to." It can feel a little odd at first — and in some cases it can even be gut-wrenching (if we are choosing the wrong priority). But ultimately, using this language reminds us that we are making choices, which enables us to make a different choice.

Third, avoid working for or with people who don't respect your priorities. It may sound simplistic, but this is a truly liberating rule! There are people who share your values and as a result make it natural to live your priorities. It may take a while to find an employment situation like this, but you can set your course to that destination immediately.

Saying "yes" when we should be saying "no" can seem like a small thing in the moment. But over time, such compromises can create a life of regrets. Indeed, an Australian nurse named Bronnie Ware, who cared for people in the last 12 weeks of their lives, recorded the most often-discussed regrets. At the top of the list: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." Next on the list: "I wish I hadn't worked so hard" and "I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings." (Read the Top 5 Regrets here).

We may not develop Gandhian levels of courage immediately, but surely we can do better than having to look back on our lives and regret that we lived by someone else's priorities.

GREG MCKEOWN

Greg McKeown is the CEO of THIS Inc., a leadership and strategy design agency headquartered in Silicon Valley. He was recently named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Greg did his graduate work at Stanford. Connect with him on Twitter @GregoryMcKeown.

Five Things You Should Know to Keep 'the Man' from Snooping on Your Digital Stuff

 Thorin Klosowski

Is it legal for someone to snoop on your email if you don't log out? Do you have to unlock your phone if a police officer asks? Can a private Facebook post be used against you in court? Digital rights are still in their infancy, and the laws regarding what people (and the government) can and cannot do are a little confusing. We're not going to exhaust the issue today, but here are five things you should know.

As cases are taken to court and new web services created, the laws about your digital rights have changed over the years. In practice, your rights to protect snooping on your computer are similar to your rights in real life. Still, knowing what, when, and how others can snoop on what you're doing is important so you can protect your information the right way.

1. Not Logging Off Email May be Tacit Authorization for Snooping

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In a recent case in New Jersey a woman filed a lawsuit against a man who read her email when she left it open. We've all probably done this on accident before: she logged into her email on a public computer, walked away, and never logged out. Then, a coworker of hers noticed it and decided to take a look at her email when he saw his name mentioned in a subject line.

The case went to court and the jury decided that since she left her email open the man wasn't at fault when he looked at her email. Think of it it like leaving your doors and windows open and complaining when someone looks inside. Legal blogger Evan Brown sums it up:

The court held that as a matter of law, defendant did not access the email account without authorization. Because the "index to the inbox" of the co-worker's Yahoo account was displayed on the screen when the coworker left the computer, defendant did not access the "facility" without authorization. The accessing of the facility had been accomplished by coworker. There was no evidence of hacking or other unauthorized access to her account.

The frustrating part here is in this case it's at the jury's discretion whether or not you can hold someone liable for accessing your account if you leave it open. The lesson, of course, is to remember to logout of your accounts when you're on a public computer. Photo by Colorado State Library.

2. You Do Not Have to Give Out Passwords or Phone Passcodes without a Warrant

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Your computer is protected from police searches in the exact same way as your house and body. Police cannot search your computer without a warrant specifically stating that the computer is part of the search.

Your phone, however, is a bit different and the laws vary from state to state whether a police officer can look at your phone without a warrant. However, you have one simple way to protect yourself and your phone's contents from prying eyes: passcodes. Under the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination you are not required to hand over passwords or phone passcodes to the police if your device has incriminiting data on it. However, a judge or grand jury can force you to.

If you're arrested, police can try to crack your password or hack into your phone. Still, the passcode will slow them down a little bit. You might also want to consider encypting data on your phone to make it even more difficult to get into. Photo by Florian Pfeifer.

3. Employers Can Legally Monitor Your Computer and Smartphone Usage

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It shouldn't be surprising that if you're using an employer's computer or cell phone then your employer has the right to monitor what you're doing with it. However, it's not just your general computer usage your employer can peek at. In some cases they have the right to monitor all your conversations. In general, your rights don't extend too far if you're on an employer's computer. Theoretically, an employer could even install a keylogger on your phone if they wanted to snoop on all your actions.

We've talked about how you can tell if you're being monitored, but the overarching point is pretty simple: don't use your work computer or phone for private conversations unless you're okay with them snooping into what you're doing. Photo by Janet McKnight.

4. Most Web Services Can (and Will) Snoop On Your Data and Hand it Over to the Man

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We've talked a lot about how everyone's tracking your every move online, so it shouldn't be surprising that many web services snoop. In short, when you sign a Terms of Service you're often giving a web service access to everything you're doing.

While that's an issue in its own right, it also means that the government only needs to file a subpoena with a web service to take a look at your files (assuming they have a good reason). Dropbox has talked about this (you can encypt your data for better protection) and Google's Terms of Service gives them access to your creations. Every other web service will do the same thing and will comply with a request from the law.

Here's the issue. A government entity would require a warrant to search your home computer. If your computer is password protected, you have the option to remain silent and not hand over your password. However, if that entity sends a subpoena to a web service and the service complies, they can hand over all of your private data, including files, without you ever knowing.

If you want to keep your data completely private your only real option is to avoid web services and cloud storage. Most web services don't want to hand over your data to governments, but they will when they're served a subpoena.

5. Public and Private Posts on Social Networks May Be Used Against You

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We've seen plenty of incidents where people are caught by police for posting pictures or status updates of illegal activity. The lesson is that if you're doing something illegal you should not post about it in a public forum because the police may very well find it with just a little snooping.

More interesting is that even private posts are often made available in litigation. You won't find a hard and fast law on this, but in several civil cases people have been forced to hand over a Facebook password to show private pictures and status updates.

The general rule here? Don't post about doing anything illegal online publicly or privately. While it might seem like common sense with something like robbing a bank, a judge can order you to hand over Facebook passwords in a divorce, Twitter was forced to hand over Occupy Protestors tweets, and you might even lose a disability case due to a status update.

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As a general rule your digital rights are similar to your real world ones. If you're doing something illegal publicly and online you're just as accountable as if you do it out in the world. However, you always have the right to refuse to hand over information to police, but not a judge or grand jury. All of that said, with a subpoena a web service may hand over information, which makes it all the more important to actually read those Terms of Service agreements. For a quick look at the laws check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation's one page guide to your rights.

The above tips are meant purely as a guide for beefing up your knowledge on your digital rights and aren't meant as legal advice. If you feel like you're being illegally snooped on you should seek legal counsel.

Title image remixed from Anton Prado PHOTO (Shutterstock).

Being There For One Another

I have been asked a lot what motivates me to chair a Vistage group of CEO's.  The honest answer is that I want to build a group that creates value for each member and shows tangible results in business and life.  I benefit from that as well by participating, sharing in successes and leading.  The article below articulates the attributes of the kind of group we are building.  If you or someone you know would benefit from this lind of experience, please let me know.

Being There For One Another
by Leo Bottary

A number of years ago, United Way produced a video that cleverly poked fun at itself, while at the same time making a powerful point.  The scene was set in an elementary school classroom where a student brought her Dad (a United Way exec) to class to talk about what he does for living. As Dad launches into his “United Way speak,” the kids quickly look confused and bored.  The daughter immediately senses the problem, stands up, and proclaims, “He helps people!” Fortunately, Dad picked up on the cue and began engaging the class.  The confusion and boredom quickly gave way to comprehension and smiles.

I couldn’t help recalling that story after Vistage Chair John Younker responded to my post What Core Values Drive Your Peer Advisory Group? and shared the unifying principle that guides the Vistage Group he leads in Texas.   John and his group cut to the core with the same elegant simplicity that the daughter of the United Way exec articulated in her classroom.  For them, it’s about “being there for one another.”  Saying it is one thing, delivering on it is quite another.  John and his group do so in two important ways:

1) They give their statement meaning through a code of conduct that guides the specific behaviors of the group members.  The group’s code of conduct reads as follows: 

 CANDOR – We will be open and candid with one another; we will say what we are thinking.

 CARE – We have permission to caringly confront another member, even when doing so makes that member feel uncomfortable.

 OPENNESS – If we feel a member is holding back and/or not being totally open and candid with us, we will confront that member.

 TRUST – We trust that we can trust in one another; we can count on each other to honor the confidentiality agreement that we all made when we joined TEC/Vistage.

CONFIDENTIALITY – We will alert/inform the whole group whenever we feel there has been a violation of rule of confidentiality; it will be a group issue to address and resolve.

SUPPORTIVE – It is encouraged to ask for support and assistance when we feel we need it at any time, even between the times of our monthly meetings.

RESPECT – We will show respect to one another and our commitment to being present and on time at our meetings.

2) To assure that their unifying principle and accompanying code of conduct are more than just words, the group holds a retreat at the end of each year, where they evaluate the group’s performance and effectiveness, based largely on their code.   After the retreat, the members draft a memorandum to the Chair identifying what can be improved for the following year, and they hold one another accountable for delivering on the recommendations.

John’s Vistage Group walks the talk by “being there for one another ” in word and deed.  It’s what makes for a successful group and it’s among the reasons John and his members find the peer advisory experience so valuable.  I invite you to share your peer advisory group’s values and tell us not only how you came up with them, but how your group stays true to them throughout the year.

The Best Bosses

Leading Strategic Transformation: The Three “I”s / “Eyes” of Change

by Joe Evans 

A majority of companies say they struggle with strategy execution and even those that don’t admit it find it challenging to do. Problems in execution is sometimes due to poor mapping of strategic goals to projects and tasks. That lack of detailed planning certainly undermines execution, but there is often a more subtle reason at play as well responsible for organization’s struggles with execution. It has to do with failing to properly manage change.

That failure may be the result of not engaging employees in the planned transformation, from overly complex plans or changes that are introduced too quickly and ambitiously and therefore begin to unravel during execution. This article discusses the three “I”s of change and how they can help set execution on the right track and smooth the transformation process from beginning to end.

The First “I” of Change: Introduce

Introduce: Managing change begins with sharing the vision of the future-state with those who will be effected and need to know what is afoot. Information and communication are essential in order to help ease resistance to transformation. Introducing change through a well constructed communication plan is the first critical step in the transformation process.

Change that is introduced without setting the proper vision falls flat in terms of being accepted. This happens because employees (and even management) must see a reason and an urgency behind such initiatives; one that motivates them to accept changes to their daily routine. Even with a shared vision and good communication plan, expect change to be feared, resented or passively rejected by the workforce.

So how should change be introduced in order to succeed? The answer to this question is slightly more complex. One viable solution is to create “personas” for the different audiences where change is being introduced. A persona is a sample profile of the target audience, containing the basic attribution of someone the change leader will be communicating with as the business introduces change. Change leaders need to know their audience well enough to understand what various aspects of the changes being introduced will mean to them.  The idea is to get inside their shoes and try to see it from their perspective. Think of personas as a tool used in developing our messaging for our target market. Once messaging is ready, it must be disseminated in cycles to reinforce key points and make sure that the audience has internalized the information. This is the first “eye” of change, seeing it through the employees eyes.

The Second “I” of Change: Implement

Implement: Implementation is the roll-out of planned changes. It may seem at first blush that implementation would be straight forward, enough so that no other explanation is needed. There are, however, actually a few points worth mentioning about how implementation should work.

Implementing change would be easy, if it were easy. Unfortunately, it is not and it confounds many businesses that find themselves in the midst of failing to do it well. That is because organization’s get over zealous and try to do too much too fast.

“We’re going to implement this program, so let’s jump in and get it done now.”

Enthusiasm for accomplishing a goal is terrific, but it is crucial to break up transformations into smaller chunks that can be accomplished and touted as successes along the way. This lessens the complexity of the change roll-out while helping build momentum for the transformation. Positive momentum gradually helps breaks down resistance to change. This is the second “eye” of change. Employees must see accomplishment with their own eyes and the accomplishments need to come often and at a steady pace.

The Third “I” of Change: Institutionalize

Institutionalize: In order for change to stick, it must become the new routine. This means fighting against human nature, which is intent on resisting change and returning to “normal” as quickly as possible. Remember that lasting change is a continuous process; to make change and a new vision part of an organization’s core, the leadership team must keep the vision at-hand. New employees need to be trained and shaped around the vision in order for it to become institutionalized.

To help change persist and becoming part of an organization’s fabric, talk about progress often. Recognize success frequently. Publicly recognize those who contribute so they feel valued. Finally, as key leaders who helped institute the change move on, create a replacement plan that will keep their contributions going.

This also brings up the third “eye” of change. Employees must adopt the vision of the changing environment, accepting it and becoming passionate about it. Without passion the old ways might creep back in – undoing the changes accomplished thus far.

Summary

Managing change begins with sharing the vision of the future-state with those who will be effected and need to know. Chunk up change into manageable pieces and tout successes frequently along the way. For change to last, it must become institutionalized and become the new norm.

Stand In Your Employee’s Shoes and View Change Through Their Eyes

Help those that will be touched by the transformations throughout the organization truly see the vision and understand it. Plan change through there eyes as well, so that obstacles to acceptance can be understood and anticipated. Allow the organization to see changes happening and accept the small success along the way as evidence that the transformation is working. Continue to train and educate about the change program so that employees adopt the vision of the changing environment and see ownership of their own role in accomplishing lasting transformation.

Summary of the Three “I”s	Meaning
1. Introduce	Unveiling of the future vision and publicizing it through well thought out messaging; perhaps developed using personas.
2. Implement	Implementation must be done in small chunks in order to show successes and claim victories along the way. Momentum is important; therefore a steady pace of completed transformational steps along the way helps get buy-in.
3. Institutionalize	For change to last, it must become a way of life. This is what is referred to as institutionalizing change. The implemented change must become the new normal in order to avoid reverting back to the old ways.

Is Click Fraud A Ticking Time Bomb Under Google?

Clem Chambers, Contributor

It was a long time ago when Google enjoyed the reputation for being the “do no evil” un-corporation.

The studied PR that created Google’s reputation as the coolest corporation ever has slowly eroded away.

After years of using Google as the window on the Internet people have begun to realize Google knows more about them than they know about themselves. The penny has dropped that all is not well–you go to a humor site and Google serves an ad about a subject you’d surfed in the past and realize Google is targeting you.

The famous “creepy line,” espoused by their ex-CEO has become clearer and scarier to many as their Internet sophistication has increased and it is making people nervous.

Videoing your door step with a roving camera car was a turning point for Google’s reputation. Only the most innocent amongst us felt this was a benefit. The latest generation of burglars thought it was great, but it was a violation of privacy that set off Google’s reputation slide.

Google once owned the hearts and minds of the Internet but it was the ripping of open, private Wi-Fi connections by its camera car that set off Google’s fall from grace.

You have to be very forgiving to see this as a simply mistake. As forgiving as the British government are, they were still shocked to discover that the explanation given to the U.S. Feds was both different and more sinister than the innocuous one they got from Google and accepted.

With its engineer reportedly taking the Fifth amendment, the once saintly Google seems to have donned a more sinister cowl.

Yet these outrages are as nothing to the real bomb threatening to nuke Google. War dialing is just the tip of the iceberg.

At the last count (December 2011) Google had sales of $38 billion USD. This is a colossal sum of money with the bulk (96%) of this cash coming from advertising. This revenue comes from AdWords/AdSence. To put this sum into perspective, per year it is about $100 for every U.S. citizen and a week or two of the U.S. national deficit.

A large proportion of this money, $10 billion, comes from advertising Google places on third party Web sites. You can start a Web site, put your content on it and place Google AdSence ads on it and start earning money right away. It’s the spigot of money many Web sites rely on to stay in business.

Google has a monopoly on this, at least as far as the definition goes by the regulators that define them. In any event, Google is the $39 billion gorilla in this business and $10 billion of  third party advertising is a lot of money.

Click fraud is the ticking bomb. It is also a term I was unable to find in Google’s recent year end statement but it exists, Google won’t deny that. Apparently Google click fraud is less than 2%, whilst Click Forensics says overall it was 19% in 2010.

You can Google the numbers yourself and they are astounding.

So let’s forget the percentage of click fraud on Google search engine because whilst it’s still fraud and it is nasty only Google is making billions from it. Let’s instead focus on the Google network of third party sites.

Google thinks that click fraud is 2%, that’s $200,000,000 of third party Web site fraud. This is a huge theft from advertisers everywhere. $200,000,000 is drug baron scale criminality.

Put another way, by that calculation the yearly carve up of this ill-gotten loot is $101 million dollars a year to criminals and $99 million to Google.

But wait, what if it is the 19% Click Forensics say? That is a $1 billion dollars hit for criminals. This is a Madoff or Stanford scale scam. Who are these criminals earning a billion dollars in click fraud?

A quick Google search reveals that at Christmas the FBI busted a single outfit that was generating $14 million from click fraud. In this case they were Estonians and Russians. Then there was the case of Android apps infected with click fraud bots in China, it doesn’t take long to realize that criminals from around the world have been draw to this ocean of money like flies to honey.

In the old days, when butter wouldn’t melt in Google’s mouth, being the platform for hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud didn’t seem to attract anyone’s attention. But with Google now at war on many fronts with regulators around the globe, cookies, unfair competition and war dialing the knives are out.

When they ask about click fraud and start wondering about the kinds of people around the world enriching themselves with illegally gained income it will open up a can of worms for Google they will find hard to close.

The governments of the west have tried hard to keep criminal cash out of the financial system so that terrorists, drugs and mafia kingpins find it hard to launder their money. It is hard to get criminal cash turned into bank balances, click fraud gains however go straight into the financial system without touching the sides.

This billion dollar money laundering short circuit is not just a concern for those in authority, it is a magnet from those looking for illicit gains that come ready laundered.

It’s the perfect crime and as the news flow underlines–it’s organized.

Google is a mammoth company, with an income torn from old media who are failing under the onslaught of a World Wide Web that Google effectively controls. Click fraud is the dirty secret of the Web and while it’s extent is kept under wraps and its scale unacknowledged, it will remain a ticking bomb under all the search engines, and as the king of the hill, Google’s in particular.

Clem Chambers is CEO of leading financial markets Web site ADVFN.comand author of 101 Ways to Pick Stock Market Winners or A Beginners Guide to Value Investing now out on Kindle.

Less than 10% of Your Facebook Fans See Your Posts

By David Felfoldi 

So you finally worked your way up to 10,000 Facebook fans? Congrats! Now the bad news: only 10% of those fans will every see a post on any given day. What’s more, the more fans you build, the fewer that will see your posts — among Facebook pages with a million likers or more, less than three percent of their fans are seeing their posts daily.

Why such abysmal numbers? Whether or not your fan will ever see one of your posts is based on several factors, including:

• How often do they engage your posts? If rarely, it’s possible they never will again even if they are fans. Their past behavior dictates what they will see in the future.
• How many other fan pages do they subscribe? A serial-fanner won’t see a post from every fan page they subscribe. If your fan is also a fan of a lot of other pages, there is only so much real estate to display your posts.
• Have they hid you from their news feed? A low viewership percentage may indicate your fans have been driven to hidding your bad content from their news feed. It could have been worse — they could have unliked your fanpage.
• You are posting at the wrong time of the day. A post has a relatively short-lived existence before it disappears from news feeds. Your goal is to ensure you post at the times with the most engaged viewership, not necessarily the most viewers. Sure, Friday night is a busy time on Facebook, but most of this engagement is photo sharing and status updating, not necessarily Fanpage post reading.
• You are not posting enough. Think about it, your daily post is still only getting to only 10% of your fan-bases. That means it could possibly take up to 10 daily postings to get to all your fans, assuming you were able to appear every time. Consider testing daily posts and measure its effect.

Ultimately, the number of fans you have is a meaningless number. Instead, the question should be what percentage of fans view your posts? Engage them with a comment or like? Or the Holy Grail — share the post?

Facebook Mobile Ads Are Clicked 13X More, Earn 11X More Money Than Its Desktop Ads

Read this post with a grain of salt.  Yes, Facebook ads have a higher click through rate.  However, interactivity on mobile devices is still somewhat limited compared to desktops and laptops.  CTR tells only a small snipett of the conversion story.  Mobile is a great platform and Facebook (like everyone else) is monetizing on the basis of cost per click.  It's new, new novel, it's mobile... but when interactivity, engagement and geotargeting improve on mobile devices, only then will significant dollars flow from advertisers.  Tom

via @ techcrunch by

JOSH CONSTINE

How will Facebook monetize mobile? Its organic-seeming Sponsored Stories ad format may be the answer. Mobile Sponsored Stories are getting over 13 times the click-through rates and earn 11.2 times the money per impression (eCPM) on mobile compared to all of Facebook’s desktop ads, and 1.93 times the CTR and 2.65 times the eCPM of Sponsored Stories on the web in the two weeks since Facebook began selling them separate from web ads.

The data comes from new studies by TBG Digital, AdParlor,Nanigans, and Spruce Media, three of Facebook’s biggest Ads API partners that help brands buy ads. Since Sponsored Stories slip into content feeds so seamlessly, Facebook may actually be better equipped to handle the shift to mobile advertising than other web-first tech companies. Let’s check out the early proof.

Much of the doubt surrounding Facebook’s IPO came from evidence that the social network’s user base was shifting away from the web to mobile, where Facebook only began testing ads in February. On the web users are shown up to seven ads per page and some spend big sums on social games, but on mobile they’re only shown a couple of ads per day and few pay for games on Facebook’s HTML5 gaming platform.

Fears about Facebook’s mobile future are partly to blame for its share price sinking from its $38 opening to around $31.50 today. But earlier this month, Facebook began allowing advertisers to specify that they wanted their ads only shown on mobile, and now the world is getting its first deep look at how Facebook mobile ads perform. The results could make investors more optimistic.

TBG Digital’s CEO Simon Mansell tells me “this is huge news that show mobile is potentially going to be the big revenue driver that Facebook needs, especially because the usage in there.” Here’s the results of two data sets shared exclusively with TechCrunch plus more confirmations from the ad industry.

Facebook Ads Performance: Mobile vs Web

According to a new study by TBG Digital on 278,389,453 Sponsored Story ad impressions across 17 clients, mobile news feed Sponsored Stories (the only ads Facebook shows on mobile) have a stunning click-through rate of 1.14% at a $0.86 CPC. That means Facebook earns $9.86 per 1000 impressions (eCPM), and that could actually rise as more advertisers realize the power of mobile Sponsored Stories and compete for impressions there.

Compare those numbers to the desktop news feed Sponsored Stories that get a 0.588% CTR at $0.63 CPC and earn Facebook an eCPM of $3.72, and Facebook is getting 1.93x the CTR and earning 2.65x as much on mobile sponsored stories compared to what it makes on the web.

And look at Facebook’s desktop ads as a whole, including both Sponsored Stories and the traditional sidebars ads. They’re getting just 0.083% CTR at a $0.88 CPC earning Facebook an eCPM of only $0.74, so mobile Sponsored Stories have 13.7X the CTR and earn Facebook 11.2x as much as its combined desktop ad offering.

Meanwhile, a quick look at a campaign in the tens of thousands of dollars by AdParlor showed that mobile ads have a CTR of 0.821% while traditional Facebook ad campaigns that mostly show up in the web sidebar with some presence in the web and mobile news feed had a CTR of regular ads have a CTR of just 0.032%. That’s a 25x better CTR on mobile. The campaign at gaining new fans for a Facebook page, and while the click-to-fan conversion rate on mobile was slightly worse – 55% on mobile versus 72% across placements – the improved in CTR makes up for it many times over.

Other sources in the ad industry confirm the high performance of Facebook mobile ads. Another Ads API giant Spruce Media told MediaPost that its tests with Facebook mobile sponsored stories have seen click-through rates from .8% to 1.7%, the same range as TBG Digital and AdParlor. Update:Nanigans, a top Ads API choice amongst gaming companies, says it’s seeing an average of 0.79% CTR for mobile Sponsored Stories, but with smart additional interest targeting layered on, CTRs range as high as 2%.

This all doesn’t seem like users are just clicking the relatively new, three month old ad units out of curiosity. It looks like users are actually perceiving them as content, and are clicking through to learn more about the Pages and apps their friends interact with.

Cracking The Code For Mobile Ads

Attaining such a high click-through rate for mobile Sponsored Stories is game-changing for Facebook, because there’s simply not as much room for it or any service to advertise on mobile.

There’s no space for an ads sidebar and if far too many ads are injected into the content feed, users could get angry and stop browsing. But the impressively high CTR and eCPM mean Facebook doesn’t have to show too many Sponsored Stories to make a ton of money off of them.

And advertisers are lining up to buy them, says AdParlor CEO Hussein Fazal, “By allowing advertisers to show ads only on mobile – Facebook is definitely going to be able to generate more revenue. We have seen a ton of interest from advertisers who want to advertise just on mobile.”

Other social sites like Google+ and Twitter don’t have the scale, social graph, or on-site activity to serve Sponsored Stories that are as effective as Facebook’s. While Twitter and G+’s interest graph can power accurate ad targeting, only Facebook know who your closest friends are thanks to photo tags, wall posts, messages, and more. Its massive time-on-site also produces lots of interactions with brands and local businesses that can be turned into Sponsored Stories ads.

And Facebook is just getting started. Sources say it’s working on a hyper-local mobile ad targeting product that could serve extremely relevant local business ads to users within a few hundred feet of a brick and mortar store. Thanks to the new Facebook Exchange real-time bidding system, Facebook could drive up CPC or CPM prices by getting advertisers to compete to reach specific mobile users, including ones who’ve been retargeted after visiting sites that indicate purchase intent.

Legality is one of the last hurdles to the success of Sponsored Stories. Facebook settled a class-action lawsuit in California last week for using people’s likenesses in ads. It doesn’t currently offer an opt out for Sponsored Stories, but may eventually have to. Still, the setting would likely be buried deep enough to avoid too many people turning the offer the money-maker.

In the last two weeks, Facebook’s stock price has climbed nearly 20%, regaining a big chunk of what it lost since the IPO. Those who bought in at the bottom are looking wiser now. High mobile Sponsored Story CTRs indicate at least some users don’t hate the ads, and wouldn’t rebel if they see more.

Now Facebook has to strike the right balance of how many mobile ads to show. If it succeeds, it could walk the tightrope of the shift to mobile, end up a very rich company on the other side, and generate the returns that so many have hoped for.

The 5 traits of radically successful people

by Alex Banayan

I have a crazy idea: success isn’t just about hard work. We hear about hard work all the time—it’s what Olympic champions talk about when they get to the top of the podium and it’s what the media credits as the sole force behind of multimillion-dollar Internet entrepreneurs. But there has to be something else in the equation of obtaining unimaginable success. What other traits tipped the odds in favor of the world’s most successful people?

What helped propel their careers before they had track records?

For the past year I’ve been fortunate enough to interview some of the world’s most successful people to find the answers to these very questions. Below are just a few of the traits I’ve noticed that have stood out in the personalities of people who have truly made it big:

1. The Audacity to Break the Rules

In his early twenties, Tim Ferriss, bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, was running an online sports nutrition company and realized that he would be risking his businesses’ survival if he followed the industry standard of accepting payment up to twelve months after the product was shipped.

“Everyone followed those rules,” Ferriss revealed to me. “I realized I was inviting disaster and financial ruins if I risked my cash flow that way by following the standard protocol, so I insisted on prepayment. Nobody had ever done prepayment. I think that is one of the reasons why my sports nutrition company succeeded where a lot of other startups of that type failed.”

Straying from the norm isn’t easy when you’ve spent your whole life following rules laid out for you at school and at home. It takes a major cognitive shift to understand that the way things are, and have been, can be challenged.

Ask yourself what rules in your industry you accept as fact. Why do you follow them? If the excuse is “that’s the way it’s always been,” it’s time to consider pulling a Tim Ferriss.

2. An Irrational Level of Commitment

Growing up, Sugar Ray Leonard would wake up, get dressed for school, and walk with his siblings to the bus stop. As the yellow bus would pull to the curb, his friends and siblings would step up into the school bus, but young Sugar Ray Leonard, who is now a six-time world champion boxer, would refuse to get on. As the bus drove away, Leonard tightened up his sneakers and ran behind the bus all the way to school.

“The other kids thought I was crazy,” Leonard said, “because I would run in the rain, snow—it didn’t matter. I did it because I didn’t just want to be better than the next guy, I wanted to be better than all the guys.”

My generation is used to instant gratification. But Sugar Ray Leonard demonstrated the necessity to be able to buckle down for the long haul and accept that you won’t see any return on investment for years. You have to be able to stay passionately committed even when you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. And remember, Sugar Ray Leonard, now one of the greatest boxers in history, was running behind that yellow school bus at a time when others thought he wasn’t “boxing material.”

Sugar Ray Leonard kept at it, to the point that others thought was irrational. Turns out irrational commitment leads to irrational success.

Does what you’re working on excite you so much that it inspires an irrational sense of commitment? Are you willing to chase the school bus for years—before seeing any return? If so, keep running. If not, maybe it’s time to think bigger.

3. A Hunger to Solve Problems

Peter Guber, former CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, was in his mid-twenties as a new hire at Columbia Pictures when he realized that the way the studio heads were selecting directors was archaic—based on esoteric chatter instead of real data. Guber personally took on the task of solving this industry-old problem.

He went out and got a corkboard the size of his office wall and created a matrix: all the directors in Hollywood listed down the side and all the relevant information sprawled across the top—think of it as a primitive Wikipedia for the entertainment industry.

Word spread around town about the young guy who had this crowd-sourced wealth of data on every director in Hollywood mounted on his wall. In addition to adding value and helping others do their jobs more effectively, the corkboard allowed people to take notice of Guber’s ingenuity.

“It became a tool that allowed people to recognize that I was willing to do things differently. It shined the light on me and it and gave me more currency to make more daring choices,” Guber said. He explained that, “You are in the ‘problem solving’ business—always. That’s the way it works.” This was a key trait that allowed Guber to go from being a new hire at Columbia pictures to the studio chief—in just three years.

Although HR reps fail to mention it on the first day on the job, it seems that taking risks, solving other people’s problems, and creating value—even in a formal corporate environment—could have huge payoffs for your career.

Are there any problems, even outside your job description, that you could solve? What opportunities can you create to add value to both help people as well as supercharge your career?

4. A Ferocious Drive to Do More

Growing up in a village outside of Shanghai with no running water or electricity, Qi Lu (pronounced: chee loo) had no idea that one day he would have a corner office at one of the world’s biggest technology companies. As the President of Online Services at Microsoft, Lu has made a drastic journey to the top thanks to what his colleagues call “Qi Time.”

“During college, the amount of time I spent sleeping really started to bother me,” Lu explained to me. “There are so many books I can read and so many things to learn. It feels like, for humans, 20% of our time is wasted [during sleep] in the sense that you’re not putting that time towards a purpose that you care about.”

Although he admits it wasn’t easy, Lu has engineered his body to function on four hours of sleep a night thanks to an unusual regimen that ranges from timed cold showers to daily three-mile runs.

Driven by an unusual hunger to do more, Lu’s sleeping schedule has added an extra day’s worth of work time per week, which aggregates to nearly two months of productivity latched on to every calendar year. And he did it while still in college.

Ask yourself how badly do you want to do more. And what are you willing to give up for it?

5. A Sharp Focus on Playing the People Game

Shortly after graduating high school, Steven Spielberg began reducing the time he spent at college and increasing the time he spent hanging within the Hollywood inner circle. “[Spielberg] was going off to Sonny and Cher’s place all the time,” said Don Shull, Spielberg’s childhood friend. In a personal letter to Shull, Spielberg revealed that he would directly approach directors and Hollywood stars on the studio lot and ask them to lunch. And keep in mind—Spielberg was only nineteen years old at the time.

“Spielberg arranged his class schedule so that he could spend three days a week at Universal, watching filmmakers at work and trying to make useful contacts,” writes Joseph McBride in his detailed biography on Spielberg’s career. “He frequently slept overnight in an office at the studio where he kept two suits so he could emerge onto the bustling lot each morning looking as if he hadn’t slept in an office.”

“Steve knew at that early age that filmmaking is not just filming—it’s a people game. And he played it well,” said producer William Link.

While he definitely had talent on his side, so did handfuls of other aspiring directors. What helped Spielberg become the youngest director signed to a long-term studio deal was his focus on building relationships. This has nothing to do with “networking”; this has to do with making friends and focusing on people.

What little changes can you make in your life, starting today, to put a greater focus on people? What investments can you make, in both time and money, to hone the way you play the people game?

Wrapping up

Success can come in different fields, but the principles behind it are one. From Sugar Ray Leonard chasing the school bus to Peter Guber’s corkboard, these stories show the unique personality traits that tipped the scales in favor of the world’s most successful people.

Success—while defined by everyone on their own terms—is something that truly manifests itself once you make that mind-set shift and tell yourself it’s go time. Are you ready to make that shift?

Alex Banayan is a venture capitalist at Alsop Louie Partners in San Francisco. His upcoming book will feature 25 of the world’s most successful people and will focus on the little things they did to propel their careers. He is 19-years-old. For more, sign-up for Alex Banayan’s newsletter here.

The Path from Dysfunctional to Functional

by Beth Miller 

Utilizing your team to drive business and maintain productivity is the goal of building a team in the first place. But sometimes, the grand dream of teamwork becomes a nightmare. When this happens, how can you get your team back on track and better than they were before?

The first step is to identify the signs that your team is dysfunctional; you may not even realize that the actual state of things unless you are monitoring your team to see if they are experiencing temporary difficulties, or if they are truly not working together anymore. The International Institute of Management lists many symptoms of a dysfunctional team, among them

• Ineffective meetings
• Negative office politics and backstabbing
• Continual crisis mode
• Looking good instead of acting effectively
• People leaving the company

When these sort of things are happening around you, the work atmosphere has become toxic, and it’s only a matter of time until it explodes.

The journey back to functionality takes time, but your team will come out of it stronger than before.

It’s necessary to start out with an atmosphere of security: people who are scared of losing their jobs are going to do anything to keep themselves safe—and that’s not going to be what’s best for the team as a whole. Maybe later in the process you will find that one person is bringing down the group and it will be necessary to remove them, but at the beginning, your team needs to know that they are in a place where they can ask questions, talk about conflicts, and bring up alternate ideas for the future without being afraid of recrimination or condescension. If you just fire the troublemakers from the beginning, you’re only getting rid of a symptom of a nonfunctioning system, and within months, that system will produce another troublemaker. (And who’s to say the person causing turmoil isn’t actually the person brave enough to stand up and point out where things need to be fixed?)

This leads into the next step, improving communication. Many teams become dysfunctional because members are unclear on their roles, hear different information from different sources, and as a result are unable to rely on their leaders or colleagues. If you are working on a project, share as much information as you can with your team; refuse to let rumors and confusion grow. When they are allowed to sprout, your team members will start working in opposite directions, to the detriment of the entire team.

Last of all, make sure that your team members know they are valued. Validate their efforts to let them know when they are on the right track, and acknowledge them for jobs well done—not only will they feel appreciated, but you will get more productivity out of them when they trust themselves and the skills you hired them for in order to perform excellently. There is nothing that kills morale faster than knowing there is no light at the end of the tunnel when they’re having a hard workday, so figure out appropriate rewards for the goals they meet, both individually and together as a team.

Measuring and Maintaining Employee Happiness

via @vistage by Joe Evans

Organizations thrive on having happy employees, yet our own actions as leaders constantly serve to compromise that happiness. It is not intentional, mind you. Good leaders introduce strategic transformation in order to evolve and improve the business. We all know that organizations are in a continuous cycle of change and that strategies unfold through corporate initiatives, causing impacts to structure, process and people. What is all to often forgotten in all of this is that strategies and plans themselves do not capture value; value is realized only through the sustained, collective actions of the dozens, hundreds, thousands or perhaps the tens of thousands of committed employees who are responsible for designing, executing, and living with the changed environment. This article offers some practical methods for measuring and maintaining employee happiness.

Be Mindful Of and Measure Employee Happiness

In major transformations of large enterprises, leaders conventionally focus their attention on devising the best strategic and tactical plans, without regard to the changes their plans may mean to the people of the organization. These very employees are the ones bearing the brunt of the emotional impact corporate changes produce. Knowing that in our role as leaders we routinely disrupt employee happiness through the changes we make within our organizations – we should work harder to know how employees are feeling along the way and take appropriate actions to boost morale as it sinks in a sea of uncertainty and fear.

Regardless of how happiness is measured, it must be gauged more frequently than most organizations take time to do. Employee satisfaction and productivity are two of the main ingredients for a successful organization, therefore business performance will be impacted by ebbs in overall morale.

Methods For Measuring Happiness

Tom Gilb, a well know systems engineer, consultant and noted author of software engineering books related to the development of software metrics, software inspection, and evolutionary processes has a measurability principle named for him.

The Gilb Measurability Principle states, “anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all.”

1. Surveys: Measuring employee happiness usually is done by testing satisfaction and productivity levels – requiring the use of employee surveys and measurements of productivity performance indicators such as: timeliness, quality, quantity and yearly performance appraisals. The disadvantage of relying upon surveys and historical performance measures as indicators of employee happiness is twofold. First, survey data is usually collected too infrequently to be of much use in truly managing and improving the overall mood of employees. The data collected has a short shelf-life and is stale by the time management gets its hands on the information. Performance measures are historical in nature and the data does not reveal enough detail on why morale may be suffering. While most companies still use questionnaires and surveys to measure employee satisfaction, there are other more effective means to accomplishing an ongoing understanding of the picture.

2. Walking Around: One of those methods is to have managers get into the habit of walking around to talk to employees. By doing so, managers show interest and can attempt to get candid feedback from their direct reports on how things are going and how they are feeling. The challenge with this approach (where employees are asked to discuss subjective feelings directly with a manager) is that self-censorship is always a risk.  No employee wants to be seen as “whining” by management or by team mates.

A more subtle approach to getting truthful “emotional” feedback on a routine and frequent basis requires an out-of-the box technique.

3. Niko-niko Calendars: The Japanese word “niko” means “smile”. Following a common pattern of word doubling in Japanese, “niko-niko” has a meaning closer to “smiley”.  The Niko-niko Calendar (or Smiley Calendar) is indeed a Japanese creation.  This powerful tool functions as a “ mood board” of sorts and can be used to capture employee or team member’s psychological states for each day, providing up-to-date emotional feedback directly from employees to team leaders and managers. The value of this practice lies in making the factors of motivation and well-being (generally seen as entirely subjective and thus impossible to measure and track) into “somewhat objective” terms which can be measured. When used correctly over time, Niko-niko calendars succeed in elevating motivation and well-being to “front and center” status as important elements of employee / team performance.

Practical Implementation Methods

Niko-niko calendars can be implemented in a variety of ways, ranging from a low-tech / high-touch method to higher-tech software driven approachs.

One low-tech way to implement a Niko-niko system involves installing calendars on a wall of a room where a team is situated. Each team member is asked to record their mood at the end of every workday. This graphic evaluation of their mood during that day can be either a hand-drawn “emoticon” or even a colored sticker following a simple color code (e.g. blue for a bad day, red for neutral, yellow for a good day).

Another approach is to capture the daily emoticon in weekly status reports. Each team member can record their mood daily and include it with other data in their weekly status report submitted to their team leader or manager. Regardless of the method used to implement Niko-niko calendars – over time the data will reveal patterns of change in the moods of the team or of individual members. Managers or team leaders can utilize the trend information to help resolve issues and better affect performance and overall happiness of their employees.

Summary

Strategic transformation unfolds through corporate initiatives, causing impacts to structure, process and people. Although organizational changes are made to improve business performance, they can have immediate and sometimes lasting impacts on the employee morale and performance. Employee satisfaction and productivity are essential ingredients for a successful organization, therefore they must be measured to be managed.

There are good alternative approaches to measuring employee happiness beyond simply taking periodic surveys. Niko-niko calendars are one such alternative and can be viewed as an illustration of the Gilb Measurability Principle.

Measurement does not have to be perfect or even very precise, as long as the intent is to get a quantitative handle on something that was previously purely qualitative. The important thing is to take that first step toward quantifying.

The Art of Letting Go

by Tony Scwartz

It's one of the hardest things in the world to do, probably because it runs so counter to our powerful and primal need to feel safe, loved, and successful.

For most of my life, I prided myself on relentless perseverance in the face of obstacles, and a refusal to give up on any goal or client I was pursuing. Letting go felt like failure or rejection, and both were nearly unbearable to me.

I have no doubt that pushing so hard has influenced whatever success I've had. Increasingly, though, I've come to believe it exacts a toll that no longer makes sense or feels acceptable.

At the most practical level, pushing continuously against resistance burns down our available reservoir of energy, and makes us less capable of doing anything well. Beyond that, pushing too hard can end up getting you what you think you want, only to discover, too late, that there was a good reason it didn't come together in the first place. Resistance is an early warning signal.

Several weeks ago, a senior HR executive at a large company invited me to dinner after hearing me speak. He spent much of the dinner explaining why his firm wasn't inclined to create a more flexible work environment for its employees, and how he hoped he could find a way to introduce our work under the radar, and then slowly build interest in it.

"You know what," I heard myself saying, "I don't think our work is right for you at this point." He looked slightly stunned. In all honesty, so was I.

I couldn't quite believe I'd let go of a potential client who had explicitly expressed interest in our work. But by the end of the evening, I felt lighter, as if I'd done the right thing for both of us.

The next week a CEO who had long claimed high interest in our work, but had never moved forward, wrote asking if we could introduce our work to his team in one-third the time we had suggested.

Sure, it was possible. But we'd have been eviscerating the heart of what we do, which is grounded in giving leaders sufficient time to truly reflect on the way they're working, and to recharge. I wrote back and declined.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not suggesting the way to build a business is to regularly turn down opportunities. But not every one makes sense. I believe deeply in the value of the work we do, but I also know it only sings in a supportive and nurturing environment.

Letting go of half-hearted clients frees up time and energy to invest in clients who passionately share our commitment to reenergizing the workplace in a world of infinite demand.

The larger point for me is that foregoing opportunities may be less a sign of failure than of careful prioritizing and intelligent sacrifice.

Likewise, learning to let go when it's clear you're not getting what you're after — to accept a "no" without trying to turn it into a "yes" — not only saves energy, but also dignity, which is no small contributor to our well-being.

What makes it hardest to let go of anything we want is the assumption that we'll feel an enduring sense of loss. In reality, we're terrible prognosticators of the future. "Negative events do affect us," as psychologist Daniel Gilbert put it in his book, Stumbling on Happiness, "but they generally don't affect us as much or for as long as we expect them to." Nothing is as important as it seems in the heat of the moment.

With all that in mind, I've come up with four questions I now ask myself each time I begin to wonder if it's time to ease back on something or someone I've been pursuing.

Here they are:

1. Do I have a feeling in my gut that this dog just won't hunt? 
2. How important will this seem to me in six months? 
3. How important will this seem to me in two years? 
4. Is there a more enjoyable and productive way I could be investing my time and energy right now?

If the answer to 1 and 4 are "yes," or the answers to 2 and 3 are "not much," it's time to let go.

 

TONY SCHWARTZ

Tony Schwartz is the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything. Become a fan of The Energy Project on Facebook and connect with Tony at Twitter.com/TonySchwartz and Twitter.com/Energy_Project.

If Time is Money, How Can There Be Free Time?

by Leo Bottary

I couldn’t help but look up the old axiom, “Time is money,” just to find out who first uttered this quote.  Not surprisingly, it was Benjamin Franklin.   In the future, I should just save myself some time by attributing anysuccinct, wise quote to Ben Franklin and be comforted with knowing that I’d probably be right at least 50% of the time.  That said, this post isn’t about Ben Franklin, but about the age-old paradox that if one subscribes to time as money, then by definition, carving out “free time” is a false pursuit.  It’s something we dream about (during periods where we could be doing something more productive no doubt), imagining if that if the world would just stop spinning for a few days, we might be able to catch a breather and recharge our batteries without believing that we are somehow sacrificing our livelihood.   So how do we serve our life and our livelihood?  How can we use our time more wisely?

Last week at Vistage, my colleagues and I talked about the top reason CEOs and senior executives balk at joining a peer advisory group.  Know what it is?  Time’s up.  It’s time.  It’s not about added expense for dues, questions about the potential value (personally and professionally) that can be gained, or a lack of willingness or understanding about how much there is to be learned from a group of peers from diverse backgrounds and industries.  It’s about the perception that as a CEO or senior executive, you believe it to be impossible to reserve one day a month to attend a peer advisory board meeting.   Here are five reasons I suspect are at the core of this issue:

1. You believe in your heart of hearts that your company can’t live without you for one day per month.  If you take a moment to think about it, it shouldn’t take you much time to concede the point that this is a flawed excuse.
2. That the peer advisory group meeting is time “away” from your company.  Physically, maybe, but as a practical matter, not at all.  By working with a board of advisors, you’re learning and receiving practical advice that can help you take your business to the next level and address some of the shared challenges you all face, particularly during these times of economic and political uncertainty.
3. A lack of understanding about the personal benefits that can be gained by engaging with your executive peers.  At the office, you can work on your business, but it’s not so easy to work on your life.  As a peer advisory board member, you help one another do both!
4. If you really believe that time is money, then it stands to reason you should be just as concerned with your Return on Time as you are the Return on Every Dollar you invest in your people, your company, and your myriad stakeholders (including yourself).   If you’re a business owner or have risen to the rank of CEO, follow Marshall Goldsmith’s sage advice that “What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There.”  If you’ve never joined a peer advisory group, you’ll be investing your time in a pursuit that can take you THERE.
5. Admitting to yourself that your employees might actually benefit from a day where the boss isn’t in the office.  That’s not to say they don’t love you, but they could use a day a month too – maybe engaging ininternal peer groups of their own.

So if you believe time is money, it’s hard to go wrong joining a peer advisory board in your local area; or if you have an impossible travel schedule, live in a rural market or prefer to engage your peers online, you could always try this!  I may be partial to Vistage, but I wholeheartedly encourage you to seek the peer advisory experience that best meets your specific needs.  Working on your life and your livelihood with a group of peers doesn’t serve as a withdrawal on the limited time we have in this world, it’s a deposit.  Just remember what Ben said.

Three Myths about What Customers Want

by Karen Freeman, Patrick Spenner and Anna Bird 
via @harvardbiz
 

Most marketers think that the best way to hold onto customers is through "engagement" — interacting as much as possible with them and building relationships. It turns out that that's rarely true. In a study involving more than 7000 consumers, we found that companies often have dangerously wrong ideas about how best to engage with customers. Consider these three myths.

Myth #1: Most consumers want to have relationships with your brand.

Actually, they don't. Only 23% of the consumers in our study said they have a relationship with a brand. In the typical consumer's view of the world, relationships are reserved for friends, family and colleagues. That's why, when you ask the 77% of consumers who don't have relationships with brands to explain why, you get comments like "It's just a brand, not a member of my family." (What consumers really want when they interact with brands online is to get discounts).

How should you market differently?

First, understand which of your consumers are in the 23% and which are in the 77%. Who wants a relationship and who doesn't? Then, apply different expectations to those two groups and market differently to them. Stop bombarding consumers who don't want a relationship with your attempts to build one through endless emails or complex loyalty programs. Those efforts will be low ROI. Chances are there are higher returns to be had elsewhere in your marketing mix.

Myth #2: Interactions build relationships.

No, they don't. Shared values build relationships. A shared value is a belief that both the brand and consumer have about a brand's higher purpose or broad philosophy. For example, Pedigree Dog Food's shared value is a belief that every dog deserves a loving home. Southwest Airlines' shared value revolves around the democratization of air travel.

Of the consumers in our study who said they have a brand relationship, 64% cited shared values as the primary reason. That's far and away the largest driver. Meanwhile, only 13% cited frequent interactions with the brand as a reason for having a relationship.

How should you market differently?

Many brands have a demonstrable higher purpose baked into their missions, whether it's Patagonia's commitment to the environment or Harley Davidson's goal "to fulfill dreams through the experience of motorcycling." These feel authentic to consumers, and so provide a credible basis for shared values and relationship-building. To build relationships, start by clearly communicating your brand's philosophy or higher purpose.

CEB has done extensive work on shared values, showcasing how brands like Mini, Pedigree and Southwest use them to engage with customers. You might also check into Jim Stengel's examination of growth ideals and David Aaker's latest work on brand relevance.

Myth #3: The more interaction the better.

Wrong. There's no correlation between interactions with a customer and the likelihood that he or she will be "sticky" (go through with an intended purchase, purchase again, and recommend). Yet, most marketers behave as if there is a continuous linear relationship between the number of interactions and share of wallet. That's why, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, you see well-established retailers like Neiman-Marcus, Land's End and Toys R Us sending customers over 300 emails annually.

In reality, that linear relationship flattens much more quickly than most marketers think; soon, helpful interactions become an overwhelming torrent. Without realizing it, many marketers are only adding to the information bombardment consumers feel as they shop a category, reducing stickiness rather than enhancing it. (For more on consumers' cognitive overload, see the sidebar "Too Much Information" in our recent HBR article.

How should you market differently?

Instead of relentlessly demanding more consumer attention, treat the attention you do win as precious. Then ask yourself a simple question of any new marketing efforts: is this campaign/email/microsite/print ad/etc. going to reduce the cognitive overload consumers feel as they shop my category? If the answer is "no" or "not sure," go back to the drawing board. When it comes to interacting with your customers, more isn't better.

How To Hit the Ground Running When Returning from Vacation

I found this useful!
via @lifehacker 

Dear Lifehacker,

I'm about to take a much-needed vacation, and while planning my trip is a blast, planning for my return is always the hard part. I'll be mostly disconnected, and don't like the idea of checking in just to make getting back to work and life easier when I return from my time away. Do you have any tips on how to quickly re-integrate with my day to day activities when I get home without immediately feeling like I need to take a vacation from my return-from-vacation?

Sincerely,
Burnt Out on Burnout

Dear Burnt Out,
That's a good question! A lot of us have the same problem, and it's one of those insidious facts of work life that actually keep some of us from taking much-needed vacations in the first place. There are definitely some ways you can ease back in to the normal routine of work and life while still retaining the benefits you get from being away from it all long enough to recharge your batteries. You can also use the opportunity as a fresh start to try and cement habits that'll keep you from getting too burned out in the first place. Here's what we mean.

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Prepare Before You leave

The old adage is that the last few days before a vacation are often the busiest. They don't have to be, but proper preparation is key to making sure it's easy to get back into the mix when you get back from your vacation without wishing you never left in the first place. Here's how:

• Delegate. Make sure you give your work away. Whether it's your boss, your colleagues, or someone else, make sure that you work with your manager and your team to make sure that your regular responsibilities are covered while you're away, and little things that anyone can do don't just pile up while you're away. If someone else can do it, make sure someone else is doing it, so you don't have to play catch up while you're gone—and your clients or customers don't feel slighted because you took a few days off.
• Get the word out. Whether it's an out-of-office notification in your email client, calendar appointment to the people you work with most often, an email, or a face-to-face conversation, let everyone know you'll be gone. You may even consider setting a calendar appointment with a reminder 48 hours before you actually leave, or an out of office during the last week before your vacation that you'll be gone the following week so everyone knows you'll be out in advance. Don't give anyone the opportunity to say "Oh, I didn't know you'd be gone!"
• Clean Out That Inbox. Whether you have to declare inbox bankruptcy to get it cleaned out, it'll help you to know that the only email waiting for you in your mailbox are messages you missed while you were out of the office. If you have a to-do app or some kind of tool where work is assigned to you, make sure you clean it out as much as possible before you go as well.
• Shift the responsibility to follow-up. Whether you put it in your out-of-office message, voicemail greeting, or just tell everyone, let them know that you'll be gone for a while, and if the issue is important, ask them to follow up with you when you're back at the office, on whichever day it is. Of course, that doesn't totally absolve you of the need to follow up with people when you get back, but it does remind your colleagues to come see you when you're back in the office instead of waiting around for you to answer an email that could be weeks old.

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Make Your Home Easy to Return To

In addition to preparing your professional life and making sure everyone knows you're headed out and will follow up when you get back, take some time to do the same thing for your personal life, around your home or apartment. When you get back from a long, relaxing vacation, the last thing you'll want to do, for example, is clean up a house in disarray. You can make coming back from vacation a little easier on yourself with a few simple tips:

• Clean up your house before you leave. Take out the trash, change your sheets, vacuum your floors, tidy up the bathroom—you know the drill. When you get back home after a long vacation, you'll be happy to be home, but you'll be happier if your home is clean and tidy, you have a nice freshly made bed to fall asleep in after a long trip home, and most importantly you don't have a long to-do list of chores around the house to do. If you take care of that stuff before you leave, it'll make unpacking and settling back in that much easier.
• Lay out a set of fresh clothes for your morning back. If you're getting back on the day before you go back to work, lay out of your work clothes before you even leave so you don't have to think about it on your first morning back. If you get back a few days before, lay out your around-the-house clothes—anything to make it easier for you to relax a bit and to make your first morning back painless.

Ultimately, do what you can to make getting home and back into the swing of things as easy as possible before you leave. The last thing you'll want to do when you get home after a vacation, whether it's around the corner or across the globe, is start working as soon as you walk through the door. You'll likely be exhausted but happy to have had your vacation—don't make coming home more difficult than it already is.

Disconnect and Stay Disconnected

Once you've done all of that preparation, go take your vacation and really enjoy it. You've set the stage so you know that returning can be easy and you won't have a ton of work to do as soon as you get back just to make yourself at home. Whether you disconnect completely when you're on vacation or don't is up to you, but we're big proponents of disconnecting from your work at least as much as possible. Your vacation is just that—you won't get the full benefits of being away to recharge your batteries if you're half-working and spending time cleaning out your inbox while you're supposed to be relaxing.

Come Back Recharged and Refreshed

We've discussed some great ways to make your first days back easier to deal with, like getting started early, eating a good breakfast, and tackling your email and other responsibilities by importance and not by when they came in. Don't get overwhelmed when you return from time away—in fact, you might do yourself a favor and ignore your inbox entirely and make the rounds talking to the people you work most closely with on your first day back at the office—that way you don't waste time following up on emails or other requests that have been resolved while you were away.

You might also consider declaring inbox bankruptcy upon your return. Shoot an email to your team to let them know you're back and that if there's anything important they need you for, invite them to catch up with you. Many of us don't have the luxury of just deleting everything in our inboxes and starting over, but you can safely make assumptions about what needs follow-up and what doesn't. Take it easy, and try to make your first day back at work or school as hassle-free as possible. You don't have to take care of everything on your first day back.

Finally, take some time to relax and remember how great your vacation was. Maybe you can hang up a photo from your vacation, or bring in a memento of your trip—something to help you stay grounded and reminded that you took some great time away from work or school and had a chance to recharge. Put it front and center where you'll see it. Every now and again, look at it and meditate on how much better you feel now or having taken that time off. After all, you just recharged your batteries—it doesn't make sense to drain them again in your first day or week back to your dayt-to-day life.

You Can't Control Everything, So Don't Worry Too Much

If you're looking for some more tips to make coming back from vacation easy, check out some suggestions from our readers, like coming back in the middle of a workweek instead of the beginning, and taking off a few hours early for the first couple of days you're back so you're not overwhelmed. We're also big fans of using a vacation as a logical place to start new positive habits, like trying to get out of the office at a reasonable hour every day, and scheduling your breaks and relaxation time to make sure you get them.

Finally, keep in mind that you can't control everything. The unexpected may happen, you may get back from your vacation to a tragedy or some big issue that needs your immediate attention, or something you trusted would go well without you went poorly. That's okay—remember that your company, your classmates, your colleagues will all survive just fine without you—you need to take care of yourself. Put yourself first and try to stay positive: a good attitude goes a long way!

Good luck,
Lifehacker

What are the key drivers of an innovative culture?

Robert Reiss

Pat Charmel, CEO of Griffin Hospital, explores the concept of innovation in his organization.  He begins by linking innovation to creativity.  In re-inventing the then-failing organization, Charmel says creativity was a must.  He drives his point home with the recent construction of Griffin Hospital’s cancer facility, in which the concept of “experience mapping” was put to use.  Charmel goes on to explain that the strategy determines and prioritizes the needs of the patient, by walking through or experiencing renderings of a health facility in the eyes of the patient.

In another example of Griffin Hospital’s innovation, Charmel points to their principle focus on comfort by de-emphasizing what he calls the intimidating and frightening look of technology.  Whereas other health care providers celebrate expensive machinery as ‘centerpieces’ in their facilities, Charmel says Griffin would rather colorize million-dollar technologies in neutral tones.  This approach, he says, helps make otherwise-daunting machines disappear in the patients eyes.

When asked about Griffin’s innovation practices outside of healthcare, Pat Charmel explains the innovative steps that Griffin has innovated to turn their company around. See the full interview here.

Corporate Strategy: 5 Critical Alignments To Assess

By Joe Evans

As businesses muddle out of the recessionary hangover, the fundamentals management matter more than ever. For multi-national enterprises and small businesses alike – it is all about the results. With the pressure to perform ratcheted up to an all time high, corporate strategy and crisp execution are top of mind with business leaders. Crisp execution requires business strategies to be aligned with methodically planned actions. This article addresses five of those key areas where alignment to corporate strategy are essential to business effectiveness.

1.  Strategy and mission alignment

If organizations cannot succinctly explain what they do, how will their marketplace consumers understand it? An organization’s mission statement must be defined broadly enough to allow room to maneuver, yet be direct and purposeful in defining the market(s) served, the products and / or services provided by the firm and the distinguishing characteristics of those offerings.

Let’s look at Target’s mission statement as an example and then break it down into parts.

Target’s Mission:  “Our mission is to make Target the preferred shopping destination for our guests by delivering outstanding value, continuous innovation and an exceptional guest experience by consistently fulfilling our Expect More. Pay Less.^® brand promise.”

What are the key elements?

-  Market Served: economy and quality minded shoppers

-  Contribution: exceptional guest experience

-  Distinction: outstanding value, continuous innovation and an exceptional guest experience by consistently offering more for less

This same information must align with the strategy of the organization. Strategies are broad in scope, but should also be capable of being summed up in strategy statements that employees will understand and embrace. A strategy statement, while being simple in structure, must also anticipate the need for adaptability. Too much specificity in the statement will undermine flexibility down the road.

At a minimum, for strategy to yield competitive advantage, it must address three key questions:

- “What do we do?”

- “Who are our customers?”

- “How do we do what we do better than our competitors?”

The aligned strategy statement “shell” for one of Target’s brands might be stated as follows:

“Our strategy is to _____ by offering _____, at a cost that brings value to our customers unmatched by our competition through  ___ and ____.”

Note the alignment of elements in the mission and strategy:

Contribution = “What do we do?”

Market Served = “Who are our customers?”

Distinction = “How do we do what we do better than our competitors?”

2.  Strategic goals and core values alignment

Strategic goals and organizational core values are both extremely important aspects any business, so overlooking the alignment of these elements is a serious mistake.

Strategic goals should define the outcomes the organization desires to accomplish in measurable terms.

Core values serve as the compass to help steer strategic decision making. Businesses should know what these values are and state them in no uncertain terms.

If a core value of the organization is to respect employees and promote quality of life, then setting goals that are unrealistic and are sure to drive employees into the ground is a violation of that core value. Such a violation represents an alignment issue. While super-human feats may bring about short-term benefits, sustaining them over time is not realistic – therefore, no long-term advantages will be gained.

3.  Strategic goals and operational capacity alignment

The best way to ensure alignment between strategic goals and operational capacity is to face realities during planning and do not allow over zealousness projections to take over. Ask questions.

-  Do our internal systems have the ability to support goal achievement?

-  Will suppliers, distributors and partners be able to keep pace in support of goal attainment?

-  Can our managers and employees step up to the added workload an pressure we will be asking of them?

4.  Strategic goals and core competencies alignment

Strategies should follow a simple alignment rule related to business core competencies. Compete where you have an advantage, otherwise do not. Do the skills and knowledge exist in the right levels within the organization to accomplish the strategic goals? In strategy development, the question of “what should we do” is a corollary to the “what we do” question.  This perspective relates to building competitiveness in your offering and exploring tangential markets that might be exploited, provided that the barriers to entry are not too high and organizational capabilities match the opportunities being evaluated.  Truly gauging core competencies is key to ensuring alignment exists in this area.

5.  Strategy and operational execution tactics alignment

Operations-level planning describes the tactics of execution, correlating strategy to action. Misalignment often occurs here, primarily because companies skip over operational planning altogether or do a poor job of paying attention to details.

The goal of the operational planning is to create realistic and comprehensive work breakdown structures (project plans) for the work entailed in all identified initiatives related to the strategic goals of the client. Additionally, accountability and responsibility structures get established at the initiative and project levels when operational planning is done correctly. This activity has an important alignment to budgets, as it affects resource plans, infrastructure and schedules that might have downstream consequences to sales, marketing and other functions.

In conclusion

It is critically important to build alignment into strategic plans as they are constructed and each time they are refreshed. Alignment refers to sensibly attaching strategies to actions while remaining true to the organization’s mission, core values, actual operational capabilities and core competencies along the way.

How to Stop Sleeping with Your Smart Phone

In visiting with a CEO this week he was describing an underperforming employee who could not get the "work-life" balance right.  In this case, too much "life" and not enough "work"!  That is not normally the case.  This balance is critical both for ourselves as leaders but also for those we lead.  I am a big believer in working toward finding and excercising proper balance.  The article below has some very practical tips...

By GARY BELSKY | @garybelsky

In her new book, Sleeping with Your Smartphone, Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow details her years-long research project with the Boston Consulting Group, an attempt to improve the work-life balance at the hard-driving firm with incremental but meaningful changes in attitude and behavior. It was a worthy goal, given that by most measures, overconnectedness is a real problem in the workplace.

 By all accounts — Perlow’s, the firm’s, even clients’ — the experiment was a success. And not just because the professor scored a book deal from it: she outlines a plan that any organization can implement, which has the advantage of both simplicity and acronymability. She calls it PTO — Predictable Time Off — and it’s almost sure to pop up soon at a staff-building meeting or HR conference near you.

In the meantime, here are Seven Lessons You Won’t Learn in School About … Breaking the 24/7 Work Habit. (Interview edited and condensed by Gary Belsky.)

1. We’re becoming a nation of success addicts. “People are often labeled as workaholics, but we’ve come to think of them as ‘successaholics.’ Very few hard-driving people want to be answering e-mails in the middle of the night. What they want is to be perceived as being available and responsive.”

2. Even well-meaning firms can burn out employees. “BCG had lots of work-life policies and programs before we entered the picture. But when we first spent time with the company, we found they were losing many of their best people, and a lot of it had to do with being too connected with work and with a lack of control over the schedules and unpredictability in their lives in general. We came to recognize that at the source of this problem is what we call the cycle of responsiveness.”

(MORE: Why Companies Should Force Employees to Unplug)

“If you work in a culture where being ‘on’ is valued, you feel pressure to be available. So you adapt. Then, because you’re more available, clients and colleagues naturally make more requests of you. That leads to more pressure to be available, so you adapt again. It’s a vicious cycle. By always being connected to work  you’re reinforcing, even amplifying, the pressures that cause you to be available in the first place. Most of the people we surveyed reported spending 20 to 25 hours a week monitoring their work while not actually working.”

3. Everybody needs predictable time off. “In many industries and at many companies, even when people aren’t working, they’re still on: catching up on reading, preparing presentations, checking and responding to e-mails. People check e-mails constantly: at night before they go to bed, soon after they wake up, on weekends. When we first started doing our research, we asked people two questions: How easy is it for you to make a plan for a Wednesday night? And, Would you be interested in working 80% of the time for 80% of your pay, if there was no stigma attached? It became clear that making personal plans was extremely difficult, and people — younger and older, married and single, with young children and not, men and women — were working so much that they would happily give up money if they knew they were gaining more control over their time.”

4. The business world should take a cue from the medical profession. “Doctors have call schedules. They are on, on-call and off. In the business world, we are only on or on-call. We don’t have off. And yet doctors are the ones saving lives, not us.”

5. Looking for big changes? Take small steps. “The magic, if you will, of PTO is that it’s very achievable if a team is committed. First, team members have to agree on a specific unit of time each week that everyone can turn off. Not at the same time, obviously, since team members have to cover for each other. In our first experiment, it was one night a week. But whatever the goal, it has to be valued by the team, as a group. It has to be small but doable. And it has to be concrete and measurable.”

“Second, the team needs to meet weekly to discuss the challenges and successes they’re facing as they try to achieve the goal. These meetings are crucial for PTO to work, but they offer much more. They’re a regular forum for productive conversations about work, conversations that empower people to speak up. In theory, people are speaking up about process, which allows the team to meet the time-off goal. But really they’re speaking about all aspects of the work experience.”

“Finally, the team’s leaders — bosses, managers — have to show support for the project and for team members’ efforts. That’s not just about allowing colleagues to speak up and to use their time off. It’s also about doing the same themselves.”

6. Schedule predictablity is contagious … “We started with one team of six consultants at BCG, and that eventually led to office-wide change. Four years after we conducted our first experiment, 86% of the consulting staff in Boston was on teams engaged in PTO projects. And the changes in culture were extremely positive: 72% of people in PTO experiments said they were satisfied with their job vs. 49% of their colleagues who were not doing PTO; 54% of people were satisfied with their work-life balance vs. 38%; and 51% said they were excited to work in the morning, compared with 27% of those not using PTO.”

7. … and good for clients too. “There was a shared sense within BCG that PTO was having no negative effects on clients and in many cases was having profound, positive effects because of the improvements made to the work process itself. To confirm, I interviewed the clients myself. Most didn’t even realize BCG was engaged in the process. Upon learning, people were pleasantly surprised that nothing had dropped through the cracks. There was an appreciation for the fact that people were getting their time off while still meeting the client’s expectations. Few of us want the people we hire to be miserable. There was a sense that by having to cover for each other in each other’s absence, the client was getting more minds focused collaboratively on their problems.”