Each TED talk lasts 18 minutes, and some are worth every second of undivided attention. Consistent with Manylogue’s purpose to “…spread thoughts and ideas about doing business and running a business”, this post will draw relevant insights from a few great talks during the recent TEDxAthens event.

Look inside for solutions – look outside for problems

Juliano Tubino’s points sounded familiar to those of us following the technology business: the extreme lows in the business cycle offer fertile ground for new ventures. As he pointed out during a subsequent conversation, spin-offs are particularly promising. Financial Crisis, meet The Innovator’s Dilemma: If a company is not positioned and organized properly to meet new goals, it should either change — or give birth to a new entity that can start from scratch.

What resonated with me from Rory Sutherland’s talk was how easily we can mistake the forest for the trees. For instance, the company which invested large sums of money to improve a key metric from 98% to 99%, believed it was focusing on its customers. However, it turns out that these customers perceived this metric at 50%. In other words: you cannot improve what you cannot measure, especially if it is your customers’ experience!

Balance vs Entropy

Having followed Konstantinos Daskalakis’ views on mathematics and game theory for a while, I was enlightened when he used the word “balance” in a macroeconomic context. Konstantinos’ thesis, that our “systems” cannot even approximate balance, sounded thrilling when viewed from the viewpoint of a competitive strategist. Balance can be lethal for profits, as it is for the sheer joy of disrupting the status quo. The best antidote is orchestrating actions that introduce asymmetry into the competitive landscape, and create value in true “Blue Ocean” manner.

The crowd of 7 billion

On the surface, Joe Trippi and Matina Stevis could not appear more different. However, they sit across the same imaginary table of public policy and social media. The rules for this table are set by the power of the crowd, which can win elections and shift global markets. In business, most companies have opened up to the public via social media, but very few have gone beyond ticking the checkbox. It requires a radically different approach to actually listen to the market, but also to ignore the voices that are irrelevant, no matter how loud.

Finally, Nikos Mavridis took the notion of crowd-sourcing even further, by combining it with artificial intelligence to resolve complicated issues. In the era of “big data” and “internet-of-things”, business analytics can make the difference between analysis and paralysis. However, as Nikos demonstrated, lacking the right structure and the right people to filter through it, all this insight may turn into standard deviations and pretty graphs. And you know that these are great for blog posts, but not for running a business.

What do you think?

There were too many great talks to cover here. If you attended the event please feel free to bring forward any other business insights.

This is utter nonsense.

Even at a macroeconomic level, “the belief that low nominal wage growth vis-à-vis that of productivity will restore competitiveness and eventually lead back to growth is at best too simplistic and does not have strong empirical evidence” [1].

But this post is not about macroeconomics.

It is about a strong belief that the way to compete at an international level is by delivering better, more innovative, more desirable or in some other way differentiated products or services, not cheaper. This is especially true for Greece that does not have a mass manufacturing or heavy industry tradition. Unless of course Greece aspires to become a third world country.

Can any Greek company achieve global competitiveness by paying people less? Quite the contrary. If you want to build better products or services, you hire the smartest people out there and you set upon a very ambitious journey with them that handsomely rewards success. Top talent doesn’t (and shouldn’t) come cheap.

Even if you want to build a cheaper (yet high quality) product or service, you still need some very smart people to do that. I don’t think Salesforce.com disrupted a whole industry and killed giants such as Siebel by hiring the cheapest people they could find or by offering smart people less money.

When you pay peanuts, you (most often) get monkeys and that’s certainly not the way to build a highly competitive company.

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[1] Jesus Felipe and Utsav Kumar, “Unit Labor Costs in the Eurozone: The Competitiveness Debate Again”, Feb. 2011

This 1995 Steve Jobs interview by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, was shown on a recent PBS documentary.

What do you think?

Would Bill Hewlett answer the phone and give the parts to a twelve year old high school student today? Would his phone be listed in the first place?

While social networks and privacy and the cloud have made some more accessible and open, they have also created walls and barriers. Negativity and suspicion is part of reality – yet a sense of “giving” and “sharing” in some circles is stronger than ever. In the era of Occupy Wall Street, the 99 percent mindset and the moneygeddon jolly bad times, what is your experience? Have you asked and got rejected? And then what? Did you ask again someone else?  And did you take the risk and failed – and failed again – until you finally made it? What did you learn? What did you do differently next time and how did this make the difference – did it?

And is simply asking the questions and watching and reading about failure and success enough, unless you really take the plunge and simply go ahead and ask or do…

PS: Grateful to Maria Popova for her inspired curious mind and her links to some of Steve Jobs interviews.

Following up on my previous post on costs, it may be worthwhile to focus on Greece and the specific challenges faced by local companies.

With 73 Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) per 1000 inhabitants, far exceeding the European Union norm, Greece has a dominant SME segment [1]. This results in overly fragmented markets, hence companies often find that they overspend in order to differentiate and communicate their value proposition, as well as attract and retain customers.

Furthermore, the modest size of the local market hinders the development of scale and scope efficiencies, which can come only as a byproduct of strong exports. Even so, the swings in the business cycle of such a small market are very wide. In addition, expanding the business can get very expensive; consequently, strategic planning is lagging and investments are hard to justify.

As the impact of the financial crisis to Greek businesses accumulates, some risks are becoming more prominent. In particular, a convoluted and unstable corporate taxation framework affects companies’ net income, but also jeopardizes their business planning as they need to consider all those nested tax cases. Finally, lack of payment from corporate and retail customers alike, is growing at an alarming rate and “bad debt” becomes a major concern.

Principles to stand up to the challenge

To begin with, nothing can be improved before it gets measured. The common-sense advice to “(1) record (2) monitor (3) act” holds true for costs as well, and can bring substantial benefits even when performed at an elementary level. Moreover, lack of resources across the smallest of the Greek companies means that the bar is set fairly low, making cost monitoring a potential source of competitive advantage.

Monitoring costs and acting upon relevant insights should not be limited to cost-cutting. On the contrary, the most challenging and rewarding part of this process is identifying those expenses that make a difference, and increasing the share of resources dedicated to them. For instance, analysis may reveal that a free shipping promotion may be preferable to steep discounts. It is unfortunate that sometimes the Greek word for “investments” takes on a tone of negativity, because sustained profitability is based on a solid investment strategy that is aligned with the company’s goals and operating environment.

Achieving both long-term performance and short-term liquidity, however, may be more complicated than that – and more relevant to the current problems faced by these Greek companies. In this game, whoever optimizes operational expenses best, wins. Apart from renegotiating property leases, requesting additional lines of credit, and the like, it may be necessary to use creative payment schemes. For instance, modifying the payment terms with a key supplier to a revenue-sharing model can bring some relief; leveraging other pay-as-you-grow practices (like “software as a service”) may provide further flexibility.

Finally, the toughest costs to manage are related to a company’s workforce; unfortunately, the rigidity of Greek labor laws sometimes leads to extreme measures (including layoffs). The company’s leaders must proactively exhaust all possibilities of mutually beneficial arrangements (e.g. part-time work, telecommuting or performance-based compensation). This alone can make a big difference in companies of up to 10 people, which comprise the vast majority of the SME segment.

No silver bullet

The situation for Greek companies is far from enviable: the name of the game is “survival”. A sharp focus on costs, no matter how effective, is not sufficient to turn things around. It is, however, absolutely necessary.

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[1] Source: 2008 SME fact sheet at http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/sme/files/craft/sme_perf_review/doc_08/spr08_fact_sheet_gr_en.pdf

Revenues have always dominated the interest of the business community. Costs, on the other side, are reported and monitored, but in most cases they’re not as well understood.

Functional Costing

There are many ways to look at a company’s costs; perhaps the most prominent view is the functional one. For instance, costs for HR, marketing, sales, IT, raw materials, facilities and financing, are estimated and reported during budgeting cycles.

This view of costs is a well-structured, vertical one, neatly tied to the organizational structure of most firms. As such, however, it is more aligned with the company’s budgeting process, rather than its money-making process. The latter is a far more “horizontal” endeavor, engaging each of its functions to some extent.

For example, for a sale to a new customer to take place, the following are required:

• the product/service to be developed and priced;
• the market to be analyzed and the customer to be approached;
• the sale to be closed and payment to be received;
• the goods to be delivered;
• the relationship with the customer to be managed after the sale; and, of course…
• the right people with the right equipment in place.

Although the list of activities above is oversimplified, it certainly touches upon a vast array of departments, teams and individuals, from the store’s junior assistant to senior management. The more diverse the product/service and target market, the more complicated it is to put a price tag on each of them.

Activity-Based Costing

That is the job of Activity-Based Costing: it compiles a list of the business activities, and assigns the appropriate part of the company’s costs to each of them. It achieves that by going through past expenses (from invoices to payroll) and identifying the activities each of them contributes to.

Although it is not an exact science, it can offer executives a cost and profitability view that is more aligned to the company’s operations. At the very least, a P&L view per product/service, sales channel, or customer group offers a vastly different perspective of the overall profitability, down to a level appropriate for decision-making.

Further analysis can also reveal answers to questions like:

• What was the product requiring the highest IT costs per customer?
• How much money is spent selling to the bottom 25% of customers?
• What is the cost of post-sales service for customers acquired via distributors vs retail?
• Which retail store offers the most profitable repeat revenue?
• What is the profitability of all products sold by salespeople on commission?

So what?

This is key information for executives, but it is only a static X-ray of the business; unless it’s actionable, it will gather dust in a drawer. Instead of focusing on the last quarter’s cost structure and analyzing it to death, it is much more exciting to try to affect the next quarter’s profitability.

For this to happen, scenarios and activity tweaks can drive two kinds of decisions: (a) doing things differently, and (b) doing different things.

1. Doing things differently: For instance, decisions to outsource the product packaging process, decrease credit card fees, or reimburse the shipping of returned goods – they all rely heavily on the cost equation. Figuring out the inner workings of key activities, and the way their costs add up, may encourage a new approach to doing business.
2. Doing different things: When considering innovation efforts, it is important to understand the kind of expenses that can propel the venture forward. Moreover, a solid understanding of their impact on the rest of the company’s cost structure is essential before making decisions that could leave entire departments and activities struggling.

All of this may sound like a lot of effort towards mere optimization. Upper management, however, must ensure that the ultimate goal is to enable major decisions that will reshape the way the company conducts its business and earns its profits.

Without the pretense that this is a “survival guide” of any sort, I’m posting here some ideas for reacting and adapting to our current economic circumstances. The questions I’m trying to answer are “how can I stay alive?” and “is there a way I can actually benefit from the situation?” The answers will vary for each particular business, but the following topics are good starting points for figuring out the answer for your own business.

Financing risks

Banks are in trouble. Many of their debtors (including the Greek state who sold them a ton of junk bonds, other businesses who will default and individuals who can’t pay their loans) will not be paying them very soon, if ever. They will not be able to give you credit as easily or as cheaply as they did before, even if you are a healthy business.

This is the biggest danger you’re facing and it is how most businesses will fail. Even if your sales are healthy, cash flow can kill you. Reducing reliance on credit and paying off existing debt is perhaps the most potent way to improve your odds of survival. It may need sacrifices, negotiating new credit and cash flow terms with clients and suppliers, operational changes or altogether abandoning lines of business that work on large credit cycles.

On the positive side, this is an opportunity to create a more resilient financing and cash flow model, which will probably be a huge competitive advantage in an economy that will be troubled for years to come.

Revenue sources

Your clients will be in trouble. Some of them will default or be unable to pay you anytime soon. Even if they don’t die, you will probably be affected by their own budget cuts.

You need to review your revenue expectations with this in mind. Balance your budget with worst-case assumptions on future sales and payments of existing sales. And cut down your costs to fit these revenue expectations. Start thinking of ways to replace risky revenue sources with more reliable ones. Perhaps the best source of revenue you can seek is customers outside Greece that are not affected by the local crisis. In the Greek market you want to focus on healthy business customers (e.g. healthy cash flow and a product that will continue to sell to an impoverished market) or resilient consumer segments (the very rich, the very poor or the ones that need your product to survive).

Stay away from state-funded revenue sources, including non-state clients that rely heavily on the public sector money pump. Assume that the demand for non-essential products will drop and that you will lose market share to cheaper competitors or substitute products. This brings us to the next idea in our discussion, which is adjusting to the changes in the market.

Market shifts

The market in a period of financial trouble does not just shrink. The change is a primarily a structural one, as consumers and businesses are forced to make fundamental changes in their buying behavior and the way they seek to satisfy each need they have. This is an opportunity for those who can quickly adjust to the new demand structure, so it’s vital to think hard about what’s going to happen in your sector and anticipate the changes.

Business defaults, budget cuts and reduced family income are going to shape the new structure. Businesses and consumers will reduce spending on everything that is not critical to their immediate survival so you will have to adjust your expectations to those few, healthy clients that need your product.

Those who can still spend money on your product will have more leverage in the market and they will be more budget-conscious, so you need to find ways to be more competitive in price.

Some of them will buy a completely different product that satisfies the same need in a different way, (e.g. renting a DVD instead of going to a nightclub) so look for ways to modify, position and advertise your product as a substitute of something else that is more expensive.

So one way to stay competitive is to reduce your cost of production, thereby improving your ability to retain share in a shrinking market and your ability to capture new segments for product substitutes or cheaper alternatives.

This is the time for you to stake out a better territory right where the market is going to move. And if you think about it, in our current situation it is not too hard to predict how consumers will behave. Think of what your customers will actually be able to afford tomorrow and start building it before your competitors do. If you can move fast, you may actually benefit from the crisis.

Changes in the business ecosystem

Think of the dependencies and relationships you have with other members of your business ecosystem. These are your suppliers, your distributors, your partners, and your competitors. (and the banks, but we talked about them above) They are also the businesses that sell complementary products. (i.e. products that people buy together with your product) Your fortunes are tied with theirs and many of them will be in trouble.

Do you have a Plan B in case an important supplier defaults? Can you get better prices by offering better payment terms to a supplier that is struggling with cash flow? Is a struggling competitor opening up an opportunity to steal market share? Who will be your new competitors in the new market that is shaping up, and what can you learn about them before you have to face them? Are you vulnerable to lose business due to public unrest, outages in public services, elimination of distributors, etc? There is no recipe here because each business ecosystem is very different. But if you spend some time to think what can happen that will affect you, you stand a better chance to be prepared for it.

Rallying the troops

A company and its employees always have a strong alignment of fortunes and goals, but the crisis makes that alignment even more pronounced. Your employees need you now more than ever. Their family income is less certain (family members facing unemployment, reduced pensions, etc) and their alternative employment options are getting very thin. This is a time to stand by and reassure your staff, but to do this you need to show them that you are realistic and have a clear plan on how to survive. This is an opportunity to rally everyone around a common cause, and make everyone conscious about the need for efficiency, creativity and sacrifices. A cost-cutting effort can spread panic to employees if done carelessly, but it can also be seen as a sign of prudence by employees who understand what is at stake and that “we’re in this together”. Companies who become safe havens in a time of crisis by prudent management are going to be seen as good employers for years to come and they will find it easier to attract the best people in the labor market.

Grabbing talent

Unemployment is and will be at horrible levels, which means that job seekers in the market include some really talented people who are out of job despite their skills. This includes experienced people from similar companies that faced financial troubles or graduates from top schools that would otherwise join the more prestigious companies, and all of them are willing to do their best to get a job at a stable company. If you have managed to steer clear of immediate danger, this is possibly the best time to make a few good hires, or to find highly skilled people willing to do some freelance/contractor work for you.

Afterthought

The economic crisis is not the end of the world. A reshaped economy will gradually emerge out of the rabble and the most resilient companies can gain a lot in the process if they play their cards right. If your bring your finances in control this gives you tremendous leverage in a market where stability, cash in hand, timely payments, job security and track record for survival are going to be valued highly. Negotiate better prices from companies in need of your business. Snatch business from faltering competitors. Get the best people from shaky or failed companies. Use the circumstances as an opportunity to review and improve your business, open up to foreign markets, drop products that are no longer viable. Remember that so long as you can survive the storm, you will probably have many opportunities to come out stronger. You just won’t be able to do this with “business as usual”.

A manager’s day-to-day reality is ruled by an endless stream of cross-domain issues such as coordination of resources, purchasing decisions, crisis management, conflict resolution, approvals, people management & mentoring, cross-team collaboration, etc.  By definition a manager’s schedule is ruled by the one hour (or less) intervals required to deal with most of the issues that come up.  Many of these issues cannot be scheduled in advance or predicted and can rarely be postponed when they come up.  Furthermore, most of these issues do not require the manager to be a maker, at least in the sense that Paul Graham defines it.  In fact quite the contrary is true, namely what is required is quick decisions and actions, sometimes based on inadequate information.  The ability of a manager to make sound and quick decisions while operating on a manager’s schedule determines to a large extend a manager’s performance.

So, even before we throw in the countless meetings that managers are required to attend and the time spent in upwards reporting, it is clear that managers have very little time to be makers.  As Paul Graham says, a maker needs dedicated and extended blocks of time to be effective.  A manager rarely has that luxury and even if she tries to block “maker’s” time in her schedule, there are bound to be interruptions that cannot be avoided and that render any “maker” effort futile.

But there are more constraints.

A manager ends up having very little energy to be a maker.  Continuous context switching sucks all creative energy out of a person.  I am convinced that over time and if they don’t consciously work on it, most managers can end up losing their ability to concentrate on something specific for an extended period of time.

Even worse, managers may end up losing their capacity to be makers, since their mind ends up getting rewired to handle their day-to-day reality.

Finally, a manager’s schedule significantly reduces one of the biggest “maker” drivers (and rewards), namely the sense of accomplishment.  Working on and successfully completing something big and complex generates large doses of euphoria. Quite often, a manager ends up with a routine stripped of any such euphoria that creative work generates.

Of course managers still have to deal with very challenging tasks and difficult decisions.  Defining strategy, turning strategy into action, driving big initiatives, meeting yearly targets, managing people, streamlining organizations and processes, etc can be tremendous mind benders. Yet they still have to be attacked on a manager’s schedule.

Ultimately, a manager’s ability to be a maker when needed while operating on a manager’s schedule may be her greatest asset.

Having read a semi-sarcastic and justifiably fair assessment of the state of “professionalism” in the service industry and specifically the field of coaching, I thought back a few decades where a similar debate was going on. Several years later, and the issue of regulation in some service oriented fields has not been resolved.

Anyone can claim to be an expert in some fields where there is no scrutiny, no accountability, no regulation. But I am ambivalent on the issue. Can regulation and – I am specifically referring to state versus self-governance here, guarantee excellence and professionalism, responsibility, ethical conduct, and true value? Whether you are a public relations “professional,” a management consultant, an artist, a manager, a business coach or whatever – offering services to clients, giving advice, counsel and a piece of your brain and heart demands dedication, hard work, and solid foundations. Unlike lawyers, doctors or certified public accountants – to name just a few regulated fields – unregulated professions do not require licenses, minimum educational standards, continuing education and re-training and other prerequisites.

But, if education, certifications, licensing and all of the above worked in isolation and not in combination with many other attributes, we would not have to suffer bad teachers, incompetent architects, uncaring and greedy physicians or rule bending insatiable investment bankers who supposedly follow SEC regulations and take down global economies.

What makes a true professional? And can single elements work in isolation? Can you have just the education, only the passion, or rely solely on your experience? With no offense to the Ivy League schools, I have met my fair share of less than effective and competent Harvard/Yale and Stanford alums. It is the combination of many qualities including training, experience, dedication, commitment and personality match that attribute to professionalism. And in the end, it is an economic model of supply and demand. If clients feel they get value out of the service (whatever this may be) then the “expert” service provider will make it.

Plenty of “gurus” are followed by millions who believe in them almost in cult form.  Their personal charisma, business savvy and phenomenal sales apparatus with the army of sales people who try to squeeze every penny out of seminar inquiry and attendance, have propelled them to the top of “peak performance strategists,” sales and negotiation experts, counsels to the stars and leaders of the world, personal demigods close to those in power. Remember Nancy Reagan’s astrologer?

But, I can also argue the opposite point: Some great and charismatic ones hold no degrees, no certifications, and naturally no professional society memberships. While they are worshiped by thousands, quite a few academics and scholars abhor their techniques and accuse them of being “quacks.” In the end, such enlightened few get their power from the people who have been helped by them.

Real or not, perceived, imagined or “lived” it’s the clients’ experience that counts – as long as nobody gets hurt in the process – a condition that in some cases is difficult to gauge.

In a free society people will always have freedom of choice – some professionals will choose the solid route of education, training, supervision, hours of practice and conscientious study and research of methodology, applications and performance improvement. Others will self-proclaim whatever they may feel can earn them a quick buck and a living and surprisingly lots of them will more than survive.

So, live and let die. Let us leave people alone to experience what is good for them. And if a self-proclaimed “coach” who has sat through a 2 day seminar can offer his or her clients what they need – then let it be. The market will either rise the boat or sink it deep.

In the end that’s all that counts: value assessed by the recipients of the service, customers, clients – however you define them.  Simple, basic and fundamental.

Such convergence is the foundation of many “new” industries – the child of a marriage of equals. A classic example is in the area of technology, where IT and telecommunications have joined forces to form the “ICT” domain. Another flourishing union is that between medicine and statistics, leveraging the vast amounts of data becoming available to health professionals working on disease diagnosis and treatment. An evolution is also forthcoming in the energy sector, as technology allows it to borrow more concepts and applications from operations research.

What could this mean to industries, organizations and individuals?

Much has been said about industry disruption from quantum leaps in productivity, technology and the like. While cross-pollination of disciplines could have similar impact, the extent of convergence in some industries may lead into their total redefinition. The music industry, for instance, will never be the same after loudly colliding with advanced consumer devices and new distribution models. Industries with ample access to resources and a diverse ecosystem are best positioned to discover new frontiers – with energy and pharmaceuticals among the key candidates.

Organizational inertia is perhaps the biggest roadblock to moving closer to the intersection of disciplines. Convergence demands information sharing among business units and functions, and close attention to transformational efforts in adjacent industries. Furthermore, it mandates agile processes and rapid prototyping capabilities – although the inner workings can be much more complicated. In airlines, for instance, which company is likely to gain the most from discipline convergence: Lufthansa or Easyjet?

Lastly, individuals can benefit immensely from the forces of confluence – being members of the society at large, but also being employed in a particular discipline. New opportunities arise from the additional degrees of freedom, and those with diversity in their personal genetic code, as well as in their social and professional groups, can both drive change and benefit from it. After all, convergence is a gradual process, and a critical mass of individuals can become the catalyst which will solidify the bond between those different disciplines.

I needed to remember the freedom to detach, step back and simply walk away and renew my thinking, so I could then re-focus. That was important (highly important) to me.

Those who know me, can attest to the fact that my energy level is usually higher than average high. And grit, perseverance and yes- stubbornness to a certain extent – make it easy for me to focus and dive deep into whatever it is I am doing.  The fact that I am in love with what I do and how I do it, having the freedom to just walk away for a short time to look at things from a different perspective also counts.

So, what do you do when you are in a similar situation? And please don’t talk to me about the luxury of being able to do it or not. Not tuning in and ignoring your inner eye may be more harmful than you think. As a matter of fact, not taking the crucially mandatory time-out will hamper whatever it is you are doing.

Legendary Steven Covey said it best: “You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, non-apologetically, to say ‘no’ to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger ‘yes’ burning inside.”

His acclaimed 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People - is a great read – classic and for some hollier than the Bible. One of the more provocative concepts in the book is that of the four quadrants of activity management.

From Steven Covey's book "7 Habits of Highly Effective People"

The separation of urgent from important is not as simple or straightforward. Depending on the moment, the mood, the personality and the level of maturity and experience, we all have a tendency to focus on urgent stuff, mistaking crises, pressing problems or deadlines (quadrant I) and interruptions such as “unavoidable” meetings, phone calls, chit-chat (quadrant III) as important. You must recognize the pattern. You know instinctively exactly what Covey means.

So, take your own time-out. Ask yourself that critical question: How important and how critical is what you want to do/think/make/say? And don’t assume that just because something is urgent, that it is also important.

Knowing how to objectively tell which is which and act on what’s TRULY important may make all the difference in your world – and hopefully somebody else’s, too.

In this bleak market, I have been fortunate enough to be part of an organization that over the last six months has been steadily growing, looking for and hiring highly skilled people in numerous positions. Through this post, I would like to offer my point of view from the other side of the table, namely hiring in a jobless marketplace, and why I believe that smart people can stand out and find good jobs even in such dreary market conditions. This is by no means a recruiting guide or a best practices post, but rather my own very personal view of things after reviewing hundreds, if not thousands, of CVs and interviewing dozens of people.

Setting the Stage

I am in charge of the technology & operations team at Upstream. This means that I am involved in and oversee the recruiting efforts for a wide variety of positions, ranging from junior positions, such as Support Engineer, to highly technical positions, such as Senior Software Developer and Systems Engineer. Given the wide range of these positions, I am not the right person to evaluate in depth the technical expertise of every person that I interview. I leave that to others, more qualified to do so, while I focus on other areas of assessing a candidate. In addition, given that we are a relatively small company with limited resources and time for recruiting, I often get involved very early on in the recruiting process, even scanning through all of the incoming CVs and picking the ones that we want to move further with.

To sum it up, both for practical reasons and because finding the right people is critical to the success of a company that is trying to grow, I get involved in most of the recruiting phases for all the job openings that are under my responsibility.

So here are my thoughts on how you can stand out in this process.

1. Make it easy for me

Going through hundreds of CVs is a very time consuming and repetitive task. As such, it is a task for which most people, myself included, have devised quick schemes and shortcuts. The bottom line is that every CV must within a few seconds (certainly less than a minute) clearly convey key information, such as education, past experience, etc. This means, among other things, that it must be well structured with clearly delineated sections, cleanly formatted with proper spacing and appropriate font size, and short enough to be fully scannable, but long enough to convey enough information. Any CV that is hard to read stands very little chance of being carefully read, let alone stand out.

I am amazed at how many unreadable CVs are out there, especially given the vast amount of information and guidelines (even templates) available on the internet.

2. Make it relevant to me

You may not have all the required qualifications for a job opening. You may even have very few of them because you are changing paths in your career. All the more reason, then, for you to outline in a cover letter why you are applying for the position. And I don’t mean the generic ‘I am a hard worker’ stuff that I often see in the (very few) cover letters that we receive. I mean a real honest and convincing explanation about why you think that you are a good fit for the position, even though you may not have (all of) the required qualifications.

(Corollary: if you don’t have the qualifications and you are not planning to send a cover letter, don’t bother sending a CV. Qualifications on job descriptions are not there just to fill space, they are meant to be minimum selection criteria)

Even if you do have all the qualifications, help me understand why you are applying for the position and why you are better than everyone else. Your CV presents facts and information that may be powerful on their own, but a cover letter states your case loud and clear. In other words, make your application relevant to me in a way that it is impossible for me to ignore.

Given the very few cover letters that we receive and how boilerplate they are, I believe that that cover letters are just not part of the job hunting culture in Greece.

3. Show me that you care

The extent to which you undertake the previous two suggestions is also a very good measure of how much you care about the particular position and your job hunting success. Spending time perfecting your CV and crafting a carefully written and targeted cover letter shows that you put some real effort in your application (which means that you will probably put some real effort in your day-to-day work as well) and that it is not just a shot in the dark. It shows that you care. Job hunting is as much about quality as it is about quantity. Firing off hundreds of CVs to any and all positions that our out there without putting any effort does not increase your chances of finding a job.

Same goes for interviews. Come prepared (more on this to follow) and show me that you care. How? Ask questions. Any questions. Even canned questions. Even questions for which you know the answer because you asked the previous interviewer (maybe I will give you a different answer).

For better or for worse, I am the most senior person in the company that every candidate for a job opening will get to see during the interview process. Yet, I am amazed at how often I hear that a candidate does not have any questions for me. Not a single one. The interview process is as much a process of the candidate evaluating the company (through the interviewers) as it is the other way around.

How do you expect me to know that you care about the company and the position if you don’t ask me any questions? And there is no way all of your questions have been answered already, if you really care. If you are worried about the impression that you will make, you can save the tough questions for later, after you receive an offer.

4. Do your homework

Come prepared. In every possible way.

Your preparation on the answers that you give is almost as significant as the answers themselves. By preparation I don’t mean memorizing the pre-canned answers that you read in a lot of job hunting books, even though these are better than no preparation at all. I mean answers that demonstrate that you have spent time thinking about all the important questions that you expect to be asked, such as why you are changing jobs, what makes you good, etc.

But even more than that, do your homework on the company and the people that you will talk to (ask in advance who you will meet, it is not offensive to do so).

There is an incredible amount of information available on the internet about almost every company that you will interview for (web site, press releases, news stories, etc). Read as much of it as you can. And come prepared to discuss it. Going back to a previous theme, it shows that you care (if nothing else).

Same goes for the people you will meet. Most of us nowadays have some sort of public profile. I have a linked in profile, a twitter account, a facebook account and a blog. That’s probably more than enough to prepare you for a conversation with me.

5. Surprise me

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I have a small public profile in the social media. Anyone researching about Upstream can easily get to my public profile, as they can get to the public profiles of other people in the company.

Despite this, I am yet to receive a single meaningful contact by any candidate in any of the social media in which I maintain a profile regarding any of the job openings at Upstream. This is true even for people I have interviewed. I am not sure why, but my guess is that it is not part of the job hunting culture in Greece.

It all goes back to what I said before: show me that you care. Surprising me is a good way to do that. The social media contact is just one out of many ways.

Conclusion

All of the above may sound simple and straightforward, but that’s exactly my point: it doesn’t take that much to stand out even in these dreary job market conditions in Greece. None of my suggestions require a lot of time and effort, yet when done right they can go a long way towards differentiating you from the crowd and creating a lasting impression. And that’s really half the battle when trying to land a job.

And in hindsight, this is where I realized I said and probably meant the wrong thing. I do believe that gender is symptomatic in this case. The job requirements apply to a dozen individuals I know – men and women equally. Yet, the appearance of homogeneity and equality forces us to stop and think about what the differences are, how we feel vs. think, how we look vs. how we really are (Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus typologies need not apply here please). Is there really a difference in viewpoint between men and women? Or is it the experience, educational background, psychographics, personal and family history and everything else that colors the actual oratory view point?

And the question is so simple really: having diversity of any form, Muslim, gay, Buddhist, female, handicapped, senior citizen, soccer fanatic and anything in between –be a competitive advantage or like in some exclusive and greatly segmented businesses, it would be totally irrelevant and useless? And can we use the same prescription for all maladies?

I don’t want to turn this into a feminist or diversity post. I have been in male dominated environments all my life – often being the only woman in board rooms and conference rooms in countries where the western concepts and politically correct habitual mores are nowhere to be seen. I have never felt harassed, different or terribly female – my power, self-assurance and absurdly low timidity have always been on my side in this domain. Yet, as an observant of business life – correction – life in general – I pause and listen to the pulse. Being open and expressive allows for dialogue – manylogue – if it’s between many instead of only two participants.

And I love the plurality – so, I decided to forgive my transgression and happily join the forum…Happy New Year, gals and guys!

In business, customer satisfaction is a critical challenge, one that is clouded by complications and unknowns. As we analyze, prioritize and identify critical success factors, we often tend to focus on a single dimension of the problem.

Such efforts can be quite successful, but suffer from the “silver bullet” fallacy: the quest for a master key that will magically unlock all doors.

Plenty of silver bullets masquerading as the key to customer satisfaction demand our attention. Some come in the form of catchphrases, like “content is king”, or “the killer app”; others deal with product attributes, like its price or packaging, while some highlight the importance of subjective qualities, including brand equity or affiliation.

Without a doubt, these are absolutely essential – but no longer sufficient. Customers are extremely demanding, and the fragments making up their collective needs point to multiple (even conflicting) directions. As customer satisfaction starts to resemble a multivariable math problem, achieving it necessitates a holistic approach.

Such an approach may start at the “courtship” phase, when customers feel that their needs are understood even before spending a penny. Well-designed learning material offers a glimpse of how their life, work, or everything in between, will change once they become a believer. A smooth purchase process, with minimal paperwork or small print, reassures them of their choice.

It could extend to the use of the product or service. On that front, intuitive interactions can make customers wonder what took them so long to indulge. Consistently delivering on expectations builds up their confidence to make it an integral part of their lives. Personalization and hidden gems contribute to customer delight.

Finally, the approach could include the courteous after-sales support, consisting of people and processes built around the customer and their need to make the most out of their purchases.

Businesses are learning to be attentive to all those elements, and every interaction and every opinion that can be formed. The game has changed and requires a deep understanding of the multiple dimensions composing the overall customer experience. Winning this game is hard, as it requires relentless focus on the entire chain of interaction.

However, it may be exactly what customers demand: a Premium Experience.

In companies where bureaucracy and politics rule, people tend to react in a fully defensive way. They mostly try to lay low and play it safe. They avoid any new initiatives or any risky projects in an effort to minimize the possibility of visible mistakes that will turn them into an easy scapegoat. Instead, they spend most of their time lobbying and following the gossip trail.

The end result is a complete freeze of any productive company activity other than the day-to-day operational stuff. No new products and services, no investments, no initiatives to improve processes, no risks whatsoever.

On the flip side, people working in companies that have fostered initiative, ownership and a politics-free environment are likely to be a lot more aggressive in times of crisis. Many of them see this as an opportunity to undertake initiatives that will make them stand out from the crowd and position themselves as indispensable for the company. They assume that their job is at risk anyway and believe that the best lobbying strategy is to produce measurable and visible results.

The end result is a company that continues to be productive even in the face of adversity.

Sure, traditional organizations are not famous for their adventurous mindset and quick decision-making. Even those that have managed to become poster children of corporate innovation programs tend to behave like their slower-moving peers most of the time.

For good reason, too: this is hard stuff. Despite all the infrastructure and resources, starting up anything new inside such a company is problematic (imagine having only one VC firm to pitch to!). Implementing change is not easier – the bigger the ship, the more resistance you need to overcome in order to achieve even the slightest course alteration.

If you have read this far, you probably appreciate a good challenge. Here’s yours for today, tomorrow, and until the free pens and notepads run out: Become an intrapreneur.

Pitch

The product you came up with while cooking dinner; the branding campaign that distracted you from the movie; the niche market you thought of after observing those teenagers waiting in line at the cash machine… They could work wonders for your company, but they all freeze the following day when you sign on and get reminded of the next to-do.

On the other hand, the office can become your idea-hatching space as well, and the opportunities to create value for your team and the entire company are plenty.

Discussions with colleagues can be very insightful, and their diverse backgrounds and contacts can help test and enhance these ideas, but also push them further. The corporate research resources usually contain hidden gems; spreadsheets have trends waiting to be discovered.

You have strong allies in the organization: the other decision-makers. “Sell” your ideas for a new service. Explain how the software from a Malaysian startup can help your design teams. Highlight the capabilities of a prospective partner company you believe will help minimize time-to-market. Walk them through the potential of the “blue ocean” strategy your team has been devising, and ask them to tweak the numbers in your business model.

Every opportunity to influence your company is a chance to gain experience, to improve, even to fail safely.

Change

Companies hate change, but it is necessary – and it does not need to be evil. Next time you utter “I hate it when…”, chances are that everyone around you agrees – and someone needs to step up and take action.

Projects offer a great opportunity for change, since they affect many teams and their internal and external customers. Soon after a project is completed, therefore, run a postmortem. Find out what went right, what went wrong, and what can be improved next time. The outcome will be quite applicable to the entire department.

Feeling really ambitious? Lead a change initiative across the company’s divisions. Collaborate with the diverse mix of colleagues down the hall offering a different perspective and experience. Facilitate information sharing, understand their teams’ objectives, check for misalignments and omissions. Keep in mind that your customers don’t care about reporting structures or silos.

Transformation efforts are complicated, but “boiling the ocean” is not the goal here, so focus on employees and customers. Sometimes evolution is better than revolution at confronting organizational inertia.

Own it

How would you work if you owned 20% of the stock of your company? 50% of your division? 80% of your team?

Next time you craft your unit’s strategy, allocate budget, hire, fire, and plan for the next quarter, do so as if this was your startup. How would you make it more efficient and effective? Would it be well-equipped to outperform competition? What would its balance sheet and income statement look like? What is the company’s return on investment on it?

Owning part of the company, you would certainly be compelled to learn everything about your competition. Details of their strategy, organizational structure, financials, senior leadership, among others, can really affect your own team.

Finally, but most importantly, manage your team members as if they were the only employees in your startup. Empower, motivate, train them, and respect and listen to them – especially when they Pitch or push for Change!

…Simple, isn’t it?

Certainly not, especially when juggling 7 projects across 3 timezones on 12-hour days full of meetings. Besides, the rewards often do not match the extraordinary efforts. It is only through such extraordinary efforts, however, that one can gain and contribute so much while employed in an established company.

A loss making business can sustain itself for a long time as long as it has access to credit. If a company can borrow from banks or get equity financing, it can continue to post losses without any consequences. The interesting part is that even if it does not have access to debt or equity financing, it can still survive as long as it can extract cash from its working cycle. It can either reduce current assets or increase its current liabilities. If a company can collect money from customers more quickly or if it can reduce the amount of inventory, it will release cash enabling it to endure losses. The same effect is made possible if a company can extend payment terms and therefore tap on its suppliers for credit. There are many examples of companies that were loss making for 3-4 years, but could sustain themselves because they were generating positive cash flows.

On the other hand, an otherwise successful and highly profitable company may become insolvent or may have to stop growing, if it is cash flow negative. An example can be a company that has to pay its suppliers in cash but gets paid by its customers in 30 days. This creates a cash flow problem for the company and even though it can be profitable, it is in need of financing to continue operating and bridge the gap between paying and collecting.

Therefore when examining the solvency of a company one needs to look into its cash flow statement, not just the P&L.

I’d personally call it as one of the two major problems of the local business ecosystem, with the latter being the risk-avert mentality. Let’s keep risk phobia out of the picture for now; I’d like to dig a bit further into the market size issue.

Many will argue that size is not that much of a problem; yet underestimating a problem is a safe way to make it a real one. For example, in the greek case, a pretty popular perspective goes along the lines of “aren’t 11 million clients enough for you?”. The answer, unfortunately, is an emphatic no; and here’s why.

A shallow market has numerous implications into your business, many of which are not easy to detect in first sight. I’ll attempt a short and incomplete summary here, while also trying to provide some more or less profound workarounds where applicable.

Market
Even if you create consumer products for the mass market, arguing that the whole population stands as your target is, well, naive. Well-known and already mature products target specific demographics and end up getting just a piece of the pie; assuming that you’ll perform better will probably lead you to mistaken decisions.
In fact, you need to start with a small set of clients anyway, to optimize your product and validate the market need; however the question is if the size of the market that you finally address is big enough for your company to grow beyond being a family business. With market size being the amplifier -or precipitator- of your efforts, a balkanized market is far from the place to be.

Product
Products are not entities separated from their environment. On the contrary, they cannot but embrace customer needs in a darwinian process which lets them -and the ecosystem- to evolve. If the environments’ constituents are innovation averse and shortsighted within their comfort zone, ground breaking products cannot get used and mature, and start-ups get essentially trapped under a vision cut but the very limitations of the market itself. In this context, rare successes remain within the local boundaries, further fueling the introvert status quo, thus also partially canceling their disruptive nature. In short, product development for a local opportunities often ends up to be self-fulfilling on the market’s limitations, and you’d better break all those in the first place.

Team
Great expertise cannot be made by anything than extreme focus, heroism is not a sustainable work ethic after all. It takes time and commitment to develop a specific skill; the only way to become a world-class expert is to put years of hard work on a very narrow vertical.
Guess what, this is not what you end up to get while doing pretty much everything to serve the various shallow needs of the local market and sustain your business. And, due to this very cause, you also cannot find people with exceptional skills to partner with; not affording to built expertise results to an ecosystem not affording to innovate, a shallow talent pool is a safe path to remain uncompetitive.

After all, a small market does not only affect your business with regards to its target size, but also ends up to be a brake for the product and team development as well, essentially acting on all core parts of your operations.

Is there a solution? To me, there is; by reverse engineering the problem. Instead of effectively spreading your resources thin on serving those numerous yet shallow opportunities, break the cycle and focus on a single very specific need. It will be hard at the beginning, you will be leaving money on the table and you’ll struggle to survive. But, you will finally be able to take the time and create a unique product, innovating against the international competition thus enabling you to go after bigger markets. At the same time, you will also be building top level expertise within your team to stand up from the crowd at a personal level as well.

Most of the above may sound profound to many of you, but I’m unhappy to realize that they have yet to reach common sense in many european markets. And, like every problem, the very first yet truly important step into solving it us realizing it’s existence and essence. No matter if the tips and tricks and jacks of the trade provided are sound and applicable in your very case, I do hope that you now have a more spherical understanding of the problem at it’s core and I’m looking forward to learn more by your approach and solutions.

Photo by fuzzcat on flickr

One of the most telling characteristics of successful entrepreneurs is their undaunted optimism, even under the most difficult circumstances. This optimism in the face of adversity is so strong that it is often perceived by others, insiders or outsiders, as unfounded, misguided and even financially dangerous.  Yet, entrepreneurs simply refuse to consider failure as an option.  Their relentless belief in the ultimate success of what they are doing is what guides them through tough times and what justifies the risks they take, risks that are unthinkable for others.

Taking it a step further, many entrepreneurs would tell you that even considering the possibility of failure undermines your chances of success.  They will say that thinking about failure means you are not thinking (enough) about success.  That coming up with plan B takes away focus and energy from plan A.  And that if you don’t obsessively believe in the ultimate success of what you are doing, you will not be able to overcome the obstacles along the way that make the difference between success and failure.

Paradoxically, though, failure is an integral part of entrepreneurship.  Many successful serial entrepreneurs insist that failure is a part of the game and that instead of being feared, it should be accepted and leveraged as a learning experience.  In fact they go as far as saying that you cannot succeed if you don’t fail first.  One of the main reasons the US startup scene is by all accounts the most successful in the world is the fact that the system allows for failure, giving entrepreneurs the opportunity to move on and start over.

So how does an entrepreneur transition from failure being an anathema to failure being accepted as a necessary step in order to move on?  How does he/she know when to call it quits?

The answer should be simple: when things just don’t add up any way you look at them.  There has to be a point when all the raw data (not just the numbers) that an entrepreneur has access to are convincingly pointing to a doomed future.  Some telling signals would be that the market is not there, the revenue is not there, the product is subpar, people are demoralized, investors are nervous, etc.

I am not an entrepreneur, but I don’t think it’s that simple.  Entrepreneurship is all about overcoming the odds.  I believe that if all entrepreneurs decided to quit when the data were telling them to, there would be very few successful startups.  As Nicholas Nassim Taleb puts it in his insightful book “The Black Swan”, “some blindness to the odds or an obsession with their own positive Black Swan is necessary for entrepreneurs to function”.

My guess is that entrepreneurs decide to call it quits when they just don’t “feel” it anymore; when deep inside their gut feeling and their undaunted optimism are just not there anymore; when they don’t have the strength to dismiss another round of gloomy data as yet another obstacle to overcome; when they themselves lose faith in the ultimate success of what they are doing.

At that point it becomes evident that if they don’t “feel” it themselves, then there is no way they can make others (customers, employees, investors) “feel” it either.  Clearly, that’s the right time to move on.

A business ecosystem apart from the customers and the owners comprises 3 more constituents: the suppliers, the creditors of the company (bankers), and finally the often undervalued employees. A company should be respectful and responsible towards all parties for moral as well as for practical reasons.

Starting with its suppliers, even if the company has an advantage being the customer, it should address its suppliers with respect. The situation in the future may change and the supplier may find himself in a position to demand his own terms for cooperation. If the company was unfair in its previous business dealings with its supplier, in the new situation it will not be able to have a smooth cooperation.

The same applies for banking relations. Economic cycles or other unexpected events give the upper hand some times to banks and other times to companies. If in an era of prevalent liquidity and strong banking competition, a company had ruthlessly exploited its advantage squeezing banks and deciding on its banking relations solely based on costs, in an era of scarce funding provided by only a few banking players the company will not be able to  rely on good banking relations.

Respectful and fair behavior towards employees has a more direct effect because in the cases discussed above, an abrupt change may never occur and therefore the company may never pay the price of bad behavior towards its suppliers or banks. On the other hand, employees continuously serve as contact points with customers; therefore a positive working environment definitely affects the image the employees project for the company. Employees affect the company’s reputation both when they work and interact with customers, but also in their social circle when they discuss with friends.

At the end of the day a successful and responsible company should create value for all 5 parties involved: owners, customers, suppliers, creditors, and employees.

Coco Chanel is credited with single-handedly (albeit accidentally) turning sun tanning from a sign of poverty into a global fashion trend when in a 1923 cruise from Paris to Cannes she stepped off the Duke of Wellington’s yacht with a startling suntan.

In a less haphazard turn of events, Steve Jobs is credited with single-handedly turning Apple upon his return in late 1996 from a company having to accept a ‘humiliating’ $150 million investment from Microsoft in 1997 and eliciting comments such as Michael Dell’s suggestion that Apple should close up shop and return the money to shareholders, to the largest technology company in the world in terms of market value in 2010.

Individuals can make a huge difference.  They can change the fates of wars and nations, they can establish global trends, they can inspire millions of people.  That’s why throughout history people and nations have been looking for their ‘messiahs’.

Interestingly enough, looking for smaller scale ‘messiahs’ is not uncommon within today’s organizations as well.  Whether it’s a new CEO that will turn a slumping company around or a leader who will spearhead a foray into a new market or a manager who will bring order to a department in disarray, companies are always on the lookout for people who will make a monumental difference.

Is that a sound strategy?

There is no question that staffing critical roles with superstars is something to aspire to and put effort into. Even more so when today’s global market has significantly expanded the pool of candidates and skills to draw upon.  The right person in the right job can have a big impact on the bottom line.  The right team of people in the right jobs can take a company to a whole different level.

Naturally, the more daunting the challenges of the role to be staffed or the problem to be solved, the more likely it is that companies will look for true superstars. When the challenges get truly dramatic to the point where desperation starts to settle in, then it seems that only someone with a ‘messianic’ profile can step in, take control of the situation and make everything right.  It is quite likely that Apple would not have survived for much longer hadn’t Jobs stepped back into the driver’s seat.

But there are also many risks.

With the stakes at play, placing all hopes on a single individual is a gamble.  The wrong person in the right job can do a lot of damage and even companies with very elaborate and sophisticated recruiting processes find themselves picking the wrong person.

In addition, bringing in a ‘messiah’ is often coupled with enormous, if not unrealistic, expectations. Even an extremely capable person can fail at meeting such expectations. This is more pronounced in situations where the end goal has not been clearly defined, making success even more elusive.

To complicate things even more, quite often a problematic situation gets attributed to the lack of the right person to handle it, while simultaneously failing to recognize and address other critical organizational and/or external factors. Thus, finding the right person becomes synonymous to solving the problem.

Finally, the search for a (usually external) savior carries with it the implicit (or explicit) admission of failure or lack of talent within the organization.  And while failure or lack of talent is sometimes a reality, a repeated pattern of finding saviors outside the company can be very demoralizing for all those already there.

In the end, there is no clear one-size-fits-all strategy.  It is certain that some situations call for uniquely gifted individuals.  But such situations are probably fewer than we think so when we are in the heat of battle and under enormous pressure to fix things.  Understanding when it is time to look for a ‘messiah’ and how to give him/her a fair chance of succeeding is as important as finding that person.  Otherwise the ‘messiah’ may never come.

While there are no universal laws applicable when it comes to anything social (which is a hard thing to accept for those of us with a quantitative background), I strongly believe that there are some patterns worth decoding on what it takes to start-up and I’d like to attempt and break these requirements down, based on my humble and very limited experiences so far.

To me, at the end of the day, it’s quite simple; it all ends up to three major constituents, there they go:

i) A rock star and fully committed team
The latter is the most important one. Let’s face it, startups do not succeed at once; they need to change, pivot and adopt a number of times before positive signals start to emerge. In nature (I plan to follow up with a post on evolutionary startonomics), a new form of life is not likely to survive and someone who only has skin in the game but not her very existence aligned with her startup’s success is naturally expected to quit after the first existential turmoils. However, success may be waiting for you right after the next turn, and only those absolutely committed end up to experience it.

ii) A big market
People usually tend to focus on, for example, the number of clients required just to sustain their business and perceive this group as their target market. The fact is, success spans a wide spectrum and sustainability is at its low end; that low that almost nobody cares about. To put things into perspective, let’s take an example from the enterprise software market. It’s usual for inexperienced entrepreneurs to attempt creating a product targeting at a market of, say, 5 potential enterprise users, arguing that if they get one they will be able to sustain their businesses, and if they get more they’d be ‘really’ successful. In practice, though, one often needs to contact 100 potential leads to get 10 meetings and finally a single paying client. Do the math on your chances to survive when you target 5 clients, then go create a product for a much bigger, international clientele.

iii) A clear way to make money
Again, there are cases suggesting the opposite. In general, though, it always helps to start with a crystal clear plan and a straightforward way to monetize your business. There are markets being already saturated, subsidized or commoditized, after all far from viable for a new product to make business sense. To avoid such a trap in the first place, you need to validate your assumptions with market experts, also get feedback from potential users on what you are up to and their willingness to pay for such a service, one way or another. The earlier you’ll get money in the discussion, the more honest and valuable your feedback will be; put this into good use.

Take a moment to think about it, I bet all of the above are far from infeasible after all. Come up with your complementary team and idea, satisfy each one of the prescribed essentials and do not mind about anything else to begin with. When you get these into place, you will already have reached a stable balance; work hard and rest assured that things will converge to working solutions and recipes for success instead of anything else.

Entrepreneurship means selling constantly.

From day 1 when an entrepreneur sets his mind on a business idea, he needs to sell the idea to his co-founders and his initial financial backers: friends, family and/or angel investors. As soon as he has successfully done that, he needs to sell the idea to potential employees. The less recognizable a company or a startup is, the more difficult it is to attract the best employees. After the setup of the company the entrepreneur needs to convince his suppliers. The better he is at convincing them on his potential, the better pricing as well as payment terms he will get. Of course, selling successfully continues to be indispensable when the time comes to attract customers.

Most people would focus on selling successfully only to customers. If we think about it, though, it is equally if not more important to achieve both good personnel morale as well as competitive pricing on your purchasing. In the first situation your employees serve indirectly as promoters of the company. They build a positive image, influencing their circle of friends and acquaintances. Additionally and more importantly they serve your customers better. Higher job satisfaction leads to better service rendered to the customer and therefore higher customer loyalty. With regards to purchasing, selling less at a higher gross profit margin is preferable to selling more at a lower one. An improvement in your purchasing affects all your sales, whereas incremental sales require incremental costs.

In a nutshell, as an entrepreneur you are not selling only to your customer. You are “selling” all the time and the sooner you realize it the more successful you will be.

After 10 years in Executive Recruitment, I have seen the following 3 most common mistakes:

Mistake #1: Going “from” rather than “to”. Instead of planning their career moves, employees very often decide on a job change under pressure because they are not satisfied with their current work conditions or their direct boss. They jump on the first job offer without exploring other opportunities in their current company or asking themselves if they would do the move outside if their direct boss would one day leave.

Mistake #2: Not doing the necessary “homework”. Before changing job, one has to consider the current market conditions in general, and in the specific sector in particular, in order to position oneself accordingly in the market. Also, in-depth research on the new employer is critical (financial situation, growth opportunities, management team.) Equally important, but very neglected and harder to check is the culture and values of the new employer and the potential fit. This can only happen if the employee discusses with as many people as possible during the interviewing process in order to feel the company’s culture and values.

Mistake #3: Pursuing more money. While job seekers do not admit it during the interviewing process, often the real motive behind their decision to change jobs is money. Unfortunately, successful career changes seldom happen when the number one priority is money. The right priorities should be the following in descending order of importance: 1. The new company and the context of the new job. 2. The people with whom one will collaborate. 3. Remuneration package and benefits.

There are of course various other mistakes one can make, however I believe that these are the most common and most critical ones. Unless their career is not a priority, employees nowadays should see it as a portfolio of experiences and perform as much research, if not more, on a company before joining, as before buying its stocks.

Why then, are we so afraid to fail? Why is being wrong an embarrassing experience that we try to avoid at all costs? (even at the cost of denial, a behavior commonly mistaken for ideology) I believe it’s because we have a biased, distorted view of the ratio between good and bad ideas. Nobody remembers the bad ideas. It’s the good ideas that survive, spread and make a mark in the world. So we get the false impression that creative or successful people just have better ideas. Odds are, that they just have more of them, along with the courage to share them, the determination to try them and the wisdom to learn from and abandon the bad ones.

We just don’t see the silent evidence, the graveyard of ideas. Thus we fail to appreciate the value of being wrong. This gives us the illusion that creativity is a talent, the ability to somehow come up with better ideas. But creativity is a process. It’s the ability to consider a large number of ideas without prejudice, as well as to quickly kill the bad ones without empathy.

Sadly, our social norms, especially those prevalent in many business environments, are stifling or preventing this process. Bad ideas carry a stigma, we place a premium at avoiding risk, we make no allowance for failure, and this makes us think defensively. We train ourselves out of our ability to be playful and challenge what we know or believe to be true. The emphasis is on “training out of”, since we seem to be born with this ability, as anyone who has spent a day with a 5-year-old can confirm.

The same aversion to admitting failure often leads to the other extreme of the problem: getting emotionally committed to an idea, refusing to see evidence that it’s wrong and ultimately wasting time on a futile direction. When you’re used to articulating and trying 10 things every week, you’re also comfortable with dismissing 9 of them. You’re trained at admitting failure. When you only articulate an idea if you’re comfortably convinced it’s safe, you’re not prepared to truly judge it or dismiss it, it’s too precious and there’s too much prejudice about it. Not only you miss out on the wisdom of the many possible ways to fail, you also get emotionally biased to prove that you were not wrong – an intellectual dead-end.

On the other hand, creativity cannot be brute-forced. You can’t just try out any crazy thing that comes up, simply because nobody has the resources to. So, I’m not advocating a blind, anything-goes approach at creative thinking. Equally important to the ability to come up with ideas (even bad ones), is the ability to quickly and dispassionately shoot them down (particularly the bad ones). There is no good recipe for this. This is where insight and good judgment are tested. But test them, you must. They need the exercise.

What is also true, but often forgotten, is that an opportunity should not be considered dead until it is rejected by that same person and nobody else along the way.  Yet, it is very common to see sales deals fade away at middle levels of large organizations, rejected by managers who don’t have the power to approve them.

This is somewhat expected.  Mid-level managers usually operate within very well defined boundaries of approval power.  For anything that is outside these boundaries, they act as gateways to the higher levels of the organization, tasked with filtering out whatever does not have enough value to move up the chain.  In most cases, they have to be sold first on any idea, before further selling it internally or allowing any outsider to do so.  So it is not surprising that they end up saying many NOs.

But this makes no sense.  Let’s say that you have to ask for an exception to an established rule.  Would you accept a negative response to your request from somebody who is just following rules that he/she does not have the power to change or circumvent? Probably not.  Just to mention a few examples from day-to-day dealings, you don’t let that happen when talking to customer service representatives; you ask for the supervisor.  Same is true when dealing with banks, government agencies and so on.

There is no reason why it should be any different when doing business development.  Finding the right person to say the ultimate NO is the only way to be sure that a deal will not happen.  Until you get to that person, a rejection by somebody else along the way may be for all the wrong reasons: he has his own agenda, he doesn’t understand the value of what you are selling, he doesn’t want to bother, etc.  It is certainly not easy to do, but the bottom line is that you should not accept a NO from somebody who does not have the power to say YES.

Back in ancient times, the classical period arose when the authority of god was displaced by reason. Today, we are lucky to have almost gotten rid of the first, in the context of business at least. However, the very problem of authority versus reason is still there, taking various forms to influence our actions. Quite frequently, for example, expertise is at odds with common sense, and I think it is of value to bear this in mind when making decisions.

Let’s take an example to make this more clear. You have no expertise on legal matters, so you consult a lawyer to ask for advice. You describe your problem and he gets back to you with a solution. “You need to do a, b, c.” {…} “Why?” “Because that’s how x, y, z works.” {…} “This doesn’t sound very logical to me. Why is it like that?” “Because that’s how it is.”

X, y, z may typically vary from the law to the market to the “system” to your partner’s knowledge and expertise and extra-terrestial superiority; the common denominator is that the argument alone doesn’t make sense, thus the call to this ‘authority’. My humble advice? Don’t buy it.

Authority may serve as a catalyst in a decision, but not as an argument per se. No matter what the discussion topic is, or your level of knowledge or ignorance, everything at the end of the day needs to make sense; for both insiders and outsiders.

Challenge everything under this prism and cut off anything that fails this fundamental test. Demand to be convinced at first, with data, facts and rational arguments. Skip any authorities. Then proceed. And rest assured that the building block of a golden era -maybe yours- is not authority, but reason.

Enter LinkedIn. The barrier to entry just got lowered by a lot. Anyone with a browser and a brain can get a massive information head-start in a matter of a few hours. So here’s my list of actually productive things you can do with LinkedIn to improve your networking reach without leaving your desk. Note: I’m focused on business development tasks here, so I will skip the more obvious tasks that relate to hiring people or finding a job for yourself. You already knew about those, right?

1. Break the ice: Chances are that you share something with someone in this meeting or event tomorrow. You went to the same college, their previous job was with your best client, your wife is from their hometown, there’s always something. 5-10 minutes spent looking up someone’s profile can break the ice and make for a smooth start in your conversation. It also shows you’re interested enough to look them up. Indeed today, many people are coming to expect that you’ve looked them up before you meet them in flesh and bone.

2. Watch your clients: If you’re a B2B business, changes in the management structure of your clients can have an effect on you relationship and business development strategy. There’s a “follow company” feature on LinkedIn that allows you to keep track of who’s moving in, out, up and sideways. A new Strategy Director in one of you clients? Probably a good idea to ask for an introduction and discuss how your product can fit into his needs and future plans – before your competitors do.

3. Discover opportunities: If you’re doing something right, there will be people from client companies that trust you and appreciate your product. Chances are they will someday get promoted to a position with more decision-making power, or take up a job in another company that you’d like to do business with. When that happens, you want to know. A Director you’ve worked with at an old client just got promoted to C-Level? Call for congratulations and find out if and how your product can play into his future plans.

4. Find the right events: For most industries there’s 1-2 events that are well-known and popular and a gazillion smaller events that you have no way of knowing if it’s worth attending. The “worthiness” of an event usually comes down to whether the type of people/positions you want to meet is actually attending them. Look up the event on LinkedIn and check the list of people who have signed up for it. It’s not accurate of course (only people who update their profile regularly tick the events they attend) but it will give you a better sense about the event than you could get by the brochure.

5. Keep an eye on competition: Much like clients, management changes in your competitors are worth knowing and understanding. Profiles and past experience of new hires (or posted positions) also indicate something about their plans and focus. A new regional sales director for Latin America tells you they’re working on opening or restructuring their business there. Looking up his past company and the clients he handles there tells you what strong relationships (and sales targets) they might have just inherited.

6. Assess a company: Whether it’s a future partner, supplier, competitor or client, a company’s management team and employees’ profiles tell a story about who they are and what skills they have. Beyond the current employees, searching for the company you’re assessing as “past company” you can get a sense of the turnover, or find direct references from people that have worked there (you may be connected to some of them).

7. Get advice: The best people to help you start with something new are often the ones who have done it already. Want to start business in a new region? Find a non-competitor company that is well-established there and look up their current or former business development director in the region. Investing in selling your product to a different industry? People who have worked in the industry for a long time can help you understand how business works in that market, what are their needs, what are their priorities, who are the decision makers, etc. Find them, approach the ones closest to you in your network.

Did I miss a clever way to use LinkedIn? Post a comment and share your wisdom.

But it’s tempting to try to build consensus. To avoid taking a stance. To try to please anyone. To cover your ass. To brainstorm. To dilute responsibility and design by committee. It’s so tempting, and so (superficially) democratic, that many organizations have distributed responsibility and decision-making processes in a way that you need to take the middle of the road if you are to make any decision at all. But some of the most critical decisions just can’t happen that way.

One of the most challenging exercises in trying to run a business is to tell which are the decisions that deserve to be opinionated and which are the ones that benefit from consensus. The skill to make this call lies at the heart of good leadership and business strategy. It doesn’t guarantee you the right decision, but it does give you a chance to try and find out.

In other words, try to change or remove serious performance blockers, accept and spend little time on all other weaknesses and focus on leveraging the strengths.

Although I agree with the proposed approach, there is one nagging issue: the majority of serious performance blockers are very hard to change or remove, since they are most often linked to innate personality traits or long-established behaviors and habits.  Thus, changing or removing these blockers requires a significant amount of effort and energy, leaving little of either for focusing on one’s strengths.  Furthermore, quite often the results are mediocre, if not disappointing.

Simply put, you should be prepared for performance blockers not going away, no matter how much time and effort goes into it.

The best way I have found to address the above issue is to follow the advice that any doctor would give you: prevention is better than cure.

1. Identify true performance blockers that you can’t live with.  Some of them will be universal; others will be related to a particular job description or the dynamics of your organization.
2. Single out those behaviors and personality characteristics that are most likely to lead to the undesired performance blockers.
3. When interviewing a candidate, invest a lot of time in trying to discover whether he/she exhibits these undesired characteristics and behaviors. If he/she does, don’t go any further, no matter how strong the candidate may be in other areas.  The strengths will probably never make up for the weaknesses.

Don’t get me wrong: I am definitely not suggesting hiring everyone that passes the above test.  What I am saying is that it is risky to hire anyone who fails it.

Sid Meier famously defined a game as “a series of interesting choices”. In a world of infinite possibilities and finite resources, any course of action is implicitly a choice. Your business strategy’s primary role is to suggest the way in which you intend to approach the “interesting choices” that will carve your action path.

And while we tend to think of action paths in terms of “what we will do”, an equivalent and equally salient way to understand it would be in terms of “things we won’t do”.

You know you have a strategy when you have the ability to say No. If, in the face of hypothetical decisions, your strategy does not provide you with clear reasons to say “we won’t do this”, then what is it good for?

This quite obvious relationship, while recognized and heralded in several facets of human activity, such as sports and arts, is quite often ignored or misinterpreted in a corporate environment. Most people would agree that to be a top level football player, one certainly needs among other things talent, great coaching and the motivation of a lucrative contract, but one must also really love playing football.

Yet in corporate environments, top performance is mostly associated with the desire to acquire wealth and power, stripped of any real enjoyment and love for the work itself.  At best, hard work is regarded as a means to an end, the necessary evil that one has to endure in order to succeed.

Thus, the paradox of corporate top performers who excel in their work, but don’t really enjoy what they do.  They are just in it for the money.

I don’t buy it.

You feel more connected to more friends of yours than ever before. Still, SMS, e-mail and facebook tend to fully replace your good old habits of phone calls, or even physical meet-ups, too. You don’t look out for news anymore; news now find you. In real time, you get streams of content filtered by your friends (Twitter and Facebook); you also have an inbox for the web (Google Reader) and plenty of platforms to digest it (Kindle and iPad).

After all, you are happy to live at the era when creation, contribution and consumption (the 3Cs) of content just got fully democratized. And, no matter of the popular belief that “people don’t read anymore”, the fact is that the uberconnected you consumes more textual content than ever.

In this context, the definition of a ‘good read’ may have to be revisited; today it probably is more important than ever.

As the content you have access to grows exponentially on a daily basis, and your scarciest of resources -your time that is- cannot but remain the same, selections are valuable and recommendations matter. So, what’s the criteria to use so as to pick wisely? Over the not-so-recent period of time that a 180 degree shift to my personal reading habits unfold, I came up with a very basic criterion that has served me really well and I’d like to share.

“A good read is the one that gets you to think about it, more time than it took you to read it.”

It’s simple, yet quite restrictive. We have little time for reading, and even less -typically zero- time for thinking about and digesting what we just read. But, to me, the latter is a prerequisite for a really efficient allocation of your reading; if you don’t stop, think and squeeze the juice out of it, applying the text’s ideas to your very own experiences, then you are far from the fruitful incident of ‘a good read’.

I’m probably missing the purely informational value of a news item here, or the core satisfaction of recreational reading and I do look forward to your constructive criticism on all of the above. But I can’t help but wonder what the value of a 500 pages business book is, when its concept is neatly summed up within 5 pages; same for the flat blog post that you quickly skim to get it finished and move to the next one.

A text’s added value is in the thoughts that it creates; the more thoughts generated in the less amount of text, the better essentially this read is. Or, as Edwin Sschlossberg puts it, “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think”. At least, that’s what Manylogue is up to.

PE professionals agree that the return on their investments relies heavily on the people whom they assign with running their portfolio companies. A great percentage of executives who have a thriving career in public companies ultimately fail in a PE portfolio leadership role due to a cultural misfit or limited experience in change management and problem solving within a new environment.

Which are the key competencies which PE firms seek in order to employ the management of one of their portfolio companies? Some of them are:

• Proven track record in leading change and transformation.
• Entrepreneurship and risk orientation.
• Generic managerial excellence rather than industry specialization, as well as exposure to a variety of functional disciplines.
• Self-reliance and decisiveness.
• Hands-on and multitasking ability.
• Strong financial expertise, including P&L, cash flow management, debt repayment experience and headcount optimization.
• Ownership mentality rather than corporate mentality as they are often required to invest personally in the deal.
• Focus on longer-term results (a typical exit strategy is after 3-5 years) with a view to a variety of potential exit strategies (an IPO, recapitalization, a merger, or a sale of the company).
• The ideal age group is mid 40s to mid 50s. This target group with the right mentality is in such great demand that some PE firms hire candidates without a specific role in mind, and then look for a suitable portfolio company for them to manage.

As demand for such executives will grow again, it will become very challenging to recruit the most appropriate leaders for these positions. To attract this type of talent PE firms offer:

• Aggressive profit-sharing bonus plans, the cost of which would be far from affordable for a publicly traded firm since it would damage short-term quarterly results.
• Clear-cut objectives and short communication paths to the board without bureaucracy.
• High-level consulting from industry veterans who act as advisors to the private equity boards.
• Freedom from strict regulation requirements (like SOX Act) and pressures regarding quarterly earnings expectations and daily stock price fluctuations.
• A business environment focused on results rather than waste too much time on “massaging” shareholders, analysts, the media and corporate politics.
• High-level networking through the PE director’s access to markets, decision makers, Executive Search firms, lawyers and the like.

During this troubled economic situation that we all experience, job security is far from given in any organization. Morale is down; your manager’s door is mainly closed; new clients are missing; new projects from existing clients are postponed; budgets are reviewed more often than ever; your subordinates look to you for reassurance; people from your professional network have lost their positions. Although the chances are that all these look familiar to you, the last thing one should do is to panic and be passive.

Rational planning, being proactive and looking reality in the face are of paramount importance in career management, regardless if we are in danger of redundancy or not. Here are some survival tips:

• Behave like a survivor. This might seem like an oxymoron since preparing to be out of work implies pessimism, however reality is out of our control. Besides, everybody within a firm, regardless of seniority, prefers to work with people who demonstrate a winning attitude and enthusiasm, and not those who continuously remind everybody of how miserable the situation is. Survivors visualize a better future and are therefore driven by achieving it.
• Focus on your company’s customers. And this is valid regardless of your function and seniority. The customer is the only factor that a company’s existence depends upon. Find ways to serve your company’s customers and make this contribution visible internally. Your job will have many more chances of survival if customers find your existence important.
• Contribute in more than one way. During a heavy storm each crew member forgets his/her “job description” and contributes in any possible way in order to save the boat. During layoffs and consolidations various opportunities may appear to display your capacity and how necessary you are.
• Swallow your pride. During a re-organization you and your department may be down-graded. In such a case, focus on the company’s benefit, demonstrate commitment to the new hierarchy and be certain that your loyalty will be rewarded once the economy recovers.

Obviously, no advice can guarantee that the worst case scenario will not happen to you. Therefore, you need a plan for facing a job loss. First of all, it will psychologically help you to realize that this is not personal but business reality. Activate yourself: update your Resume, ask for references from your previous employers, approach prominent headhunters and utilize your business and personal network in any possible way. Prepare yourself for any job interview not only regarding your technical competencies, but also your personality strengths by reviewing the personality assessments and analyses from your previous positions. A final note: perhaps this situation will lead you to an alternative route, what you have always wanted to do but never dared it. Remember, the recent film “Up in the Air”, where George Clooney convinced an employee whom he laid off that this is THE opportunity to start his own restaurant business.

Guy: “If I gave you a million dollars, would you sleep with me?”
Girl: “A million dollars is a lot of money, and you don’t look that bad, so I guess I would consider it”
Guy: “Ok, since I don’t have a million dollars, would you sleep with me for $100?”
Girl: (outraged) “What kind of girl do you think I am?”
Guy: “We’ve already established the answer to that question. Now we’re just negotiating the price”

(Edit: I first saw the story told by Richard Feynman, although readers point out that it is often attributed to several other sources, such as Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx or G. Bernard Shaw)

Without the million-dollar question, moral choice is easy for this girl. Yes, she won’t sleep with someone for $100 and that doesn’t take a lot of thinking. She’s just not that kind of girl. The million-dollar question is interesting because it forces her to really decide what kind of girl she is.

If a principle is subject to revision past a price point, then this is no longer a question of principle, but a question of finding the price point. Surely not $100, but possibly less that a million.

How many business decisions have you taken without the privilege of considering the million-dollar option, and its moral consequences? If you’re like most people, it’s happened to you several times and you weren’t even aware of it.

I think of this little anecdote every time a cost/benefit question comes up at work. It’s not uncommon in business to be faced with the opportunity to do something that is against your standards and professional practices, but would bring in some extra revenue. In such circumstances, it’s typical for the people involved to debate whether it’s “worth” doing X or not. And, inevitably, the “worthiness” of the action is measured in dollars. Sure, no big company will put its reputation or professional standards at stake for $10,000 (if they’re at all serious about their business) but for an amount that has an actual impact on its bottom line, morality get fuzzier.

So here’s a handy tool that may, in some cases, bring more clarity to your decision-making:

1. Would it be easier/harder to decide if the amounts at stake were dramatically lower/higher?
2. If so, then what kind of girl are you?

Legislators and moral philosophers have invented fancy terms for the two possible answers to the “what kind of girl are you” question.

Consequentialist reasoning suggests that morality is context-sensitive, in the sense that the results of an action have a real effect on our judgment of its morality. Torture is morally reprehensible, but what if torturing one man can give you information to save the lives of thousands? In other words, the potential outcomes of an action, i.e. what’s at stake, need to be considered in moral judgments.

The girl of our story is a consequentialist kind of girl. (if it bothers you that the difference between the options is just a bit more money, consider a case where instead of a million dollars she was offered the formula for a drug that will cure cancer for all humanity – and consider whether she should feel equally or less “dirty” for sleeping with the guy to get it as with the $100)

Categorical reasoning on the other hand suggests that the morality of action is independent of results. The morality of exchanging sex for money is the same regardless of the amount. We can debate if it’s good or bad, moral or immoral, but we would not be prepared to revise our moral judgment based on what’s at stake. In other words the girl should happily take the $100 assuming that this is a fair value for the time she will spend on the activity.

The philosophical debate is in no way decided (it wouldn’t be a philosophical debate otherwise) and that is really why making decisions generally sucks. In each case, we have to first decide whether we are a consequentialist or a categorical girl, whether we will always be that kind of girl, or whether we will take some decisions categorically (and set up “commandments”, “golden rules” and “honour codes” to defend from consequentialist creep) while allow for consequentialist thinking in others (and use methods such as “cost-benefit analysis” and “risk valuation” to determine our moral inflection point).

I find it helpful, before I consider a dilemma, to at least debate whether I’m in that girl’s situation, and what kind of girl I’m going to be for this particular question. Imagining different stakes for the available options is perhaps one of the easiest ways to abstract any business decision to a level where the consequentialist/categorical dichotomy is obvious.

Isn’t it paradoxical then, that most employee assessment and development programs focus on improving people’s weaknesses? (“areas of improvement”, if you place a premium on political correctness) Shouldn’t we, instead, accept that people are going to be imperfect and focus our attention in cultivating their strengths? Why is it so common to assume that improving your weaknesses is equally or even more valuable than further improving your strengths?

Don’t get me wrong: surely there is value in knowing the strong and weak points of an employee, acknowledging the fact, and perhaps nudging the employee towards amelioration of shortcomings that are inhibitory to basic performance. Beyond the basics though, isn’t it a bad investment of effort to push someone to improve on his/her weak points? Wouldn’t the same resources be better spent in building star performance on the aspects that a person is naturally inclined to?

The odd thing is, that in other walks of life this is indeed the unquestioned approach. Our entire educational system is built around the idea that people will progressively cultivate their stronger areas by specializing and capitalizing on what they’re naturally better at. You will not see “must improve on goalkeeping capabilities” in a striker’s performance review – you will however see training programs to perfect his already proven talent in goal-scoring.

So here’s a thought experiment for your next performance review: Assume that your people will continue to be just as bad on the things they’re bad at, and make zero effort to change them. Then see if you could change your management structure in a manner that’s workable despite individual shortcomings. Instead of pointing our their weak areas for improvement, ask your people to become even better in what they’re good at.

Can you modify your work structure to accommodate this approach? If so, then it is perhaps a better, safer work structure. It’s easier to ask people to be a bigger, better version of themselves, than it is to become a different one.

And it’s lazy to design a management structure that only works if everyone’s perfect. They won’t be.

I decided that bringing along my laptop to every meeting would give a hefty boost to my productivity since it would allow me to:

• take notes directly on my laptop, saving me all the time it takes to transfer notes from paper
• take advantage of idle meeting moments to do other things
• respond to any e-mail emergencies immediately

I thought that after years of honing my multitasking skills, I was ready to take on the last bastion of distraction-free work time (yes, meetings have turned into this).

A year later, the results were nothing less than disheartening.  Most of my meeting notes were incomplete or incomprehensible, since proper note taking proved to be quite a challenging task, while working on other things.  Furthermore, the meetings were too noisy for me to be able to adequately concentrate on other things and I really couldn’t ask anyone to keep their voice down.  And finally, I realized that any e-mail emergency is not (or should not be) a real emergency.

In the end, I was neither contributing nor taking away much from these meetings. In several occasions, I could not properly recall many of the things that took place during the meeting.  This is not surprising.  In a 1957 Harvard Business Review article by Ralph G. Nichols and Leonard Stevens called “Listening to People” the authors concluded – after a series of studies on listening skills – that “immediately after the average person has listened to someone talk, he remembers only about half of what he has heard—no matter how carefully he thought he was listening”.  Multitasking is not really careful listening.

I was also missing on one of the key benefits of being in a meeting: observing body language and people dynamics.  But most of all, I realized that I was being uninspiring, if not disrespectful, to other meeting participants.

So I have decided that my laptop will not be attending any of my meetings and that if a meeting gives me an opportunity to work on other things, it is definitely a meeting I have no business attending.

Nobody would disagree that today “information” is everything. As a result, business leaders have started to recognize the strategic role that technology plays in the enterprise. They no longer treat technology as a cost-center or stand-alone function and implementer of the business strategy, but as an enabler of the strategy and a source of innovation and growth.

Consequently, now is the time for the IS/IT leaders in an organization to take advantage of this opportunity and upgrade their role. Their objectives and responsibilities need not to be just operational and technology driven (for example cost controlling and systems availability) but rise to a strategic level as business facilitators through the utilization of technology. For example, the ability to understand how their company acquires and retains customers in order to make money will prompt them to make the best IT investment decisions. Especially in technology intensive market sectors, like banking, retail or telecoms, IS/IT leaders can help the organization see what is possible and transform the way business is done. Organizations that are tapping this power already, achieve exceptional business results, leaving the competition behind.

Business leaders demand the following abilities and competencies from today’s IS/IT leader: strong organizational and financial management skills, the ability to execute and deliver by balancing short-term inquiries against long-term objectives, strategic decision making capacity (for example whether to build internal skills versus outsourcing), but most of all the ability to build, lead and inspire high-performing teams.

Moreover, communication and influencing skills are of paramount importance, in terms of the ability to translate complex technology projects and investments into business concepts. It is a mistake though, when IS/IT leaders see their role as interacting only with top management and their subordinate teams; relationship building and networking with peer business managers are even more important. Today’s IS/IT heads must be business people who can win the respect of corporate leaders in all the other strategic functions (finance, sales, operations, HR etc.), who have developed the business fluency to sell their ideas to their organization, who can manage expectations and understand business drivers.

Define your “product”. Determine why your profile is unique. What are your special skills and talents which are valuable in the global workplace? Compile a list of job accomplishments, expectations exceeded, extra responsibilities assumed and anything else that will clearly show you have “walked the extra mile” and not just met your job responsibilities. Also demonstrate exceptional interpersonal skills such as flexibility, adaptability and cross-cultural sensitivity.

Determine your market. Acknowledge that you compete in a global job market. Develop a deep knowledge of the industries that interest you globally including trends, market shares, M&A’s, competition and labor challenges.

Make a plan. Create your own marketing plan and follow on the implementation details. All your efforts and activities should support your goal to pursue a global career. This requires making connections and staying in touch with a network of people. Furthermore, attend to your reputation and build your personal brand. Take your intellectual property public through publications, media and events.

Use effective marketing channels. To gain visibility outside of your country, join professional, industry or community organizations, not as a passive member though. Become active on corporate committees, contribute to newsletters and volunteer to organize programs, especially if these relate to multi-country activities. An expatriate assignment with your current employer will surely strengthen your credentials. Job boards may be a waste of time and energy, since top-level job listings are rare. For Executives, networking through social networking sites is a more effective strategy since through them they can identify and connect with useful leads.

Excel on your interviewing and negotiation skills. Many talented and successful Executives who have not searched for new positions in years do poorly when they first begin interviewing. They are not aware that both recruiters and companies now use more difficult interview questions and techniques and are caught off guard. While practicing, remember this tip: “Do not tell it to me. Sell it to me.” Each of your answers should clearly communicate that you are a strong leader and performer who gets results.

Remember that job hunting is a full time job in itself especially within today’s board less workplace. If you accept this premise and approach your search with enthusiasm, dedication and clear focus, you will outshine your competition. Create an effective strategy and search materials, conduct an integrated campaign and you will improve your chances of making a global career move.

Put plainly, where the head turns and looks, the body will follow. This is true even in cases of a sharp change in direction.  In such an event, the windsurfer’s body will instinctively resist at first, thus creating some imbalance, but if the windsurfer keeps his/her head steady towards the direction he/she wants to go, then eventually the body will follow and any imbalances will be smoothed out. Of course, skill is paramount in the proper execution of this transition.

The “look where you want to go” principle is no less fundamental when it comes to executing corporate strategy. Once clear strategic choices are made, top management must immediately shift the focus of the entire company towards achieving these strategic goals.  This shift must remain steady and unwavering, even under the resistance generated at first by the inertia of a company’s set structure and processes, as well as people’s natural resistance to change.  Shifting incrementally will only lead to missing the original target.  Hesitating or even looking back can destabilize the entire process.  Looking steadily towards the set goal is the only way to turn the entire company towards the right direction and overcome the unavoidable hurdles and imbalances of the whole process.

So is face-to-face contact in the workplace destined to become a relic of the past?  Is it even needed anymore?

The telecommunications revolution of the last two decades has forever changed the way we work, communicate and collaborate. Distances have shrunk and borders have disappeared.  Virtual offices, offshore development and internationally distributed teams are just a few examples of an unmistakable move towards a virtual organization.

The financial woes of the last couple of years have only accelerated this transition.  Most organizations have introduced dramatic cuts to travel expenses and are investing in communications technologies that can spur big cost savings.  Employees are encouraged to phone conference, video conference, chat, do online meetings and use tools that make them productive anytime/anywhere.

Yet there is a danger in all this.  Somewhere between technology advancements and cost savings, we seem to be forgetting about personal relationships.

Personal relationships take time and effort to develop, but most of all they require personal contact.  Shaking hands, sitting next to each other, seeing and feeling body language, sensing personal aura, chit-chatting during breaks, socializing while smoking a cigarette are only few of the myriads of up close and personal experiences that lead to truly personal relationships.  And no technology, no matter how advanced, can ever replicate these experiences.  The demo I attended was technologically brilliant, yet failed to generate any real human connection between the participants.

But how important are personal relationships in the workplace?  My experience has been that in most organizations efficiency is directly related to eliminating all dependencies on human emotion or behavior.  And rightfully so.

Yet, if I walk through every project I have ever participated in, there have always been some turning points that ultimately defined the success or failure of a project.  And what consistently weighed heavily on the outcome, were the personal relationships between all those standing at the crossroads.  These relationships led to someone going the extra mile, someone else making a concession and all together finding common ground and working towards success.

In critical moments, caring is more powerful than knowing what to do.  And to care, one needs to be personally involved.  We get involved by building relationships. And in a time of need, we tend to rely on these relationships more than anything else.

Let’s not forget that while building the virtual organization of the future.

Left to its own devices, such a process can lead to an extremely productive company that is very efficiently working its way towards an untimely death:

• either its competitors will outwit it with new and better products and services
• or it will become such a stale work environment, that its brightest people will look elsewhere for a challenge

In order to disrupt this efficient downward spiral, it is imperative that leaders at all levels of an organization continuously set goals for their teams that are initially considered impossible to achieve.  If a goal is not considered impossible by the team, then it is not ambitious enough.

Impossible is the only way to disrupt well protected comfort zones and generate innovation, creativity and out-of-the box thinking.

Impossible is the only way to force people to take a step back and re-evaluate what they do and how they do it.

Impossible is the only way to break down a puzzle into small pieces and then put it back together in a different way.

And in most cases, possible is what seemed completely impossible a few months ago.

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others – a very small minority – who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

This is the closest I could get to a personal definition for the purpose of this blog. It is not a place to post about what I know (there are better ways to do that). This is not about educating the world or sharing expertise. Instead it is a place to set down the things I would like know more about, the ideas and thoughts that seem compelling, important or intriguing, the stuff that’s fleeting yet worth coming back to later on. Books can “stare at you menacingly” from the shelves of a private library, but where the heck do you put your good (and bad) ideas to achieve the same effect? This blog, for me, is a personal anti-library of ideas.

And it is only getting worse.

Our whole communication model is rapidly becoming a wordy Twitter replica.  People write long e-mails, send them to tens of recipients and expect everyone to have carefully read every single word.  [Or even worse, they think their job was done when they sent the e-mail, but that’s a whole different story].  The multitude of modern communication tools has turned effective communication, which is based on a continuous back and forth until a common conclusion is reached, into disconnected chunks of information flying around several mediums.  The probability of different people piecing together in the same way these disconnected chunks and reaching the same conclusion, is practically non-existent.  Even worse, most people don’t even try, since they assume that everybody else is on the same page.

So here are a few suggestions on bringing some sanity back to the way we communicate:

• Stop broadcasting.  Communication is a two way street.
• Don’t hate meetings. Face-to-face conversation is (and always will be) the best way to properly communicate.
• Walk over to someone’s desk (if possible) to discuss an issue, don’t just send an e-mail.  Interrupting someone from their work to talk to them is equally disruptive to an e-mail, but it is way more effective.
• Put the disconnected communication pieces together in a document (or a diagram when possible) and share it over e-mail.  Then walk over or have a meeting to discuss it!
• Double check that everyone involved in a conversation has understood and agreed on the exact same thing.  It is always surprising to find out how often this is not the case.

Don’t get discouraged by folks that think that summarizing the findings of a meeting is an unnecessary and time consuming task. They are the ones most likely to have misunderstood what was discussed.