Lionel Messi

Sure elite athletes like Tiger Woods, Lionel Messi and Kobe Bryant are extraordinarily gifted. Each of them, however, are also renowned for their fanatical work ethic. They are dedicated to practicing their sport to perfection.

Elite athletes practice 90 percent of the time preparing for the 10 percent when they actually do perform. In practice, they are focused working on their weaknesses more than on their natural strengths. They repeatedly fail in certain parts of their game until hard practice
prepares them for potential success.

Yeah, Kobe Bryant may make a fade away jumper look effortless but that was only possible after hours and hours of sweating in many different gyms.
There are countless stories of the next great “Ken Griffey Jr.” who flame out never living up to their natural potential. In most cases (barring injuries) these athletes never had the same drive to practice like the true elite athletes. Practice can make perfect.

True successful business people are just the same. Many have natural gifts, but almost all of them are tireless workers who practice their trade. Yet, businesses often do not recognize this. They do not allow for proper “practice” of their people and create a culture of continuous improvement (learning), particularly with their sales and marketing teams. Hard and adequate practice makes better business teams in a highly competitive marketplace.
Product groups need to practice listening repeatedly to adequately meet customer demands. The organization needs to improve its process for attaining customer and market feedback in agile but structured manner, which takes practice and trying different approaches regardless of failure.

A company needs “practice” selling its solutions over and over again from a product marketing, sales as well as customer support perspective. How much time does your sales team really “practice” selling versus just performing in front of customers against competitors? In my opinion, most organizations do not value sales training enough.

Elite athletes all put tremendous effort to their trade. They have succeeded with both hard work and natural talent. Businesses need both from its people as well to become elite in their own right. Invest in training and create an environment of continuous improvement through hard work. And play to win!

After traveling across country, she and the boys were among the some 750,000 mothers and children rallying around the Washington DC National Mall. At one point, she thought she had lost the younger son when they were separated in the mass of humanity. She later found him in the designated meeting spot much to her relief.

The convictions of Shari Song have always been that strong and obvious. She wanted our boys to grow up in a safer environment. She wanted to teach our sons that each of us has a voice in America.

Since then, the US has seen more horrific gun violence in our schools with mass killings in Columbine (Colorado), Newtown (Connecticut) and Blacksburg (Virginia). While the march itself was somewhat controversial with strong emotions on both sides of the debate, there was no doubt where our family stood at the time.

Today, we all continue to stand for tighter gun control laws. However, my older son is now a gun owner. Neither his mother nor I am happy about that but he is old enough to make his own choices. In fact, we’ve learned a few things about why people would even want to own guns. It’s always good to understand different perspectives.

He still says he is for tighter gun control including stricter background checks for gun permits. He is very safety-conscious and takes gun ownership seriously. The other son has never had any interest in guns.

For this Mother’s Day, I’d like to remember all the mothers and everything they do on our behalf, and for being so passionate about their convictions in life. They are not just nurturers, they are also role models.

Unfortunately, access to these conversations has always been limited to a privileged few throughout most of history. That was until the recent advent of social media. Now, billions of conversations are accessible through technology. The problem no longer is about getting access to conversations, but finding the relevant ones amid the enormous clutter of noise. The late 18th century French university pubs were obvious places to hear the ideas of a revolt. Within the social data set how can you find the “country club” conversations if you are a hedge fund manager looking for sentiments on different stocks?

Social media is a universe of unstructured data that can be overwhelming. Understanding the general sentiment of conversations or changing daily volumes are only superficial information compared to what social media has to offer. Moving forward, the industry will introduce better ways to structure the social media data set for deeper insights. We will better understand the right “places” within social media to uncover leading indicators on any particular topic. That is why the social media data set offers such promise of predictive capabilities.

Currently, the social intelligence/analytics industry is still immature with only a few new compelling concepts reaching the market. Our social intelligence group at SDL has just launched a framework by which you can measure the customers’ commitment to a particular company’s product(s), brand(s) and content. By measuring the social conversations within this framework, we can provide data-driven insights that help marketers be more effective.

No doubt others will follow and come up with their own frameworks and algorithms.  Meanwhile we will continue to try to lead the market with improvements and innovations of our own.

While each of these diets work in the short term by generally cutting your caloric input, the best way to lose weight sustainably is to change your lifestyle. Today’s fads for losing weight are not very sustainable for the average person. For me, just the thought of dieting is a sure way to start gaining weight because I get stressed about giving up something that I want to do (eat). It would be much more sustainable to develop a lifestyle that avoids massive amounts of calories and promotes physical activities. The subconscious habits of the your day should naturally promote a healthier lifestyle. This means a more slower, deliberate change but one that has a chance to stick.

This is exactly the same for persons wanting to change other areas for self-improvement. Reading a book about how to be more empathetic may get you to be more sensitive in the short term but unless you are able to incorporate into your lifestyle (ingrained into your subconscious as a habit), your efforts will wane over time. I’ve been trying to improve myself most of my life but only a few things have really made itself into my subconscious. What I’ve learned is that a few gradual changes are sustainable while a dramatic wholesale change usually is not.

Obviously, this concept is true for business as well. We see so many new management fads and new “disruptive” market approaches. There’s already a DNA to your business and making wholesale changes probably won’t work in the long term. Identify a few key changes for your organization and work to ingrain them into the fabric of the company culture – and keep evolving your business that way.

To show his concern for the region, Warren created a heartfelt presentation on Slideshare that incorporated public images distributed on social networks around the world in the days following the Boston Marathon bombings. In my opinion, the presentation has captured the sentiment of the city and resonated with viewers globally. In the past 3 days, more than 30,000 people have viewed the presentation. As a result, the presentation was honored with a ‘Slideshare of the Day’ award yesterday. Warren said, “As a Boston native, I was moved by the events over the week and the images published on friend’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Curating this presentation was a labor of love and made me feel particularly connected with my city.”

The events this week in Boston impacted all of us around the country. The SDL family is a tight community and we really came together during this dramatic week. We will never forget and always remain #BostonStrong. Warren’s presentation expressed how we all felt and we are proud that his passion for his home and community was recognized by Slideshare.

Wealth in of itself doesn’t make people happy. Absence of money or other stresses in life can adversely affect relationships, but money cannot buy happiness on a sustainable level.

I’ve seen this to be true time and time again as I’ve traveled around the world. The poor young Vietnamese boy taking care of his sick father can be “more” happy than the young affluent American teenager with absent parents.

If we all know this, then why do we tend to take the “good” relationships we have for granted? Why don’t we invest more into our relationship with our loving grandparents, a supportive co-worker, a dependable friend or our spouses? Strange we humans are.

However, building trust can be difficult within groups of people. There can be cultural, personality, leadership, environmental and many other barriers to trust.

Some societies are naturally more trusting than others. I believe the US, despite its reputation as a nation of individualistic citizens, has people with a high degree of propensity to trust one another.  Americans tend to be able to form groups that can innovate rather easily. Such propensity for societal trust has led to a rich and vibrant financial market that gives good access to capital for entrepreneurs and businesses.

Others in parts of the Middle East, may unquestionably trust family members but can be naturally suspicious of everyone else.  This would lead to many successes at the family-business level but less so at a global business scale.

The ability to pull together and innovate and reach big goals is largely based on how easily people come together to solve problems in a trusting environment.

The difficult thing about trust is that it cannot be just prescribed.  People must come together and learn to trust one another on their own personal terms.

Whether in a marriage or in a work environment, trust is a vitally important human ingredient to accomplishing great things collectively together. It’s worth your time to consider carefully.