While I regularly write about those topics on my blog, they are geared mainly towards a general audience and not for managers or business owners who deal with virtual teams on a daily basis in their jobs (like me! )

Based on the feedback I received, I decided to start a free newsletter to share some of my killer insights.

If you manage virtual projects as part of your responsibilities, then make sure you sign up by entering your name and email below (I’ll never send you any spam, and your privacy is guaranteed).

You’ll receive exclusive content that will not be featured on my blog!

Name:

Email:

Oh, and after you sign up, I’ll let you know how you can get my “How to Design the ULTIMATE home office” ebook for free

Cheers!

Professor Amy Cuddy from the Harvard Business School conducted research on “Power Poses” and the impact they have on your confidence and stress levels.

Apparently, doing simple power poses (like standing with your hands on your hips or putting your feet up on a desk) for only 2 minutes before a meeting, presentation, or performance could give you a significant confidence boost that makes you perform at a much better level.

It’s incredible how simple changes in your body language could greatly affect how you behave or feel.

Watch the short 6 minute TIME video here:

The next time I’m getting on a call with an executive, I’m trying some of those  poses out on my desk!

In the meantime, let me know if they work out for you

It is a line from Denzel Washington’s character, Joe Miller, in the movie “Philadelphia,” and it is hands-down the best comeback to use when you are confused about a complex situation that someone’s trying to explain.

In my job as a senior manager, I have to deal with different people from many different backgrounds, especially engineers who are a lot smarter than I am. So when I need to make a decision about a complex problem, I always ask my team members to “dumb down” the facts for me by using that statement.

In the movie, Denzel actually says 2-year-old instead of 15, but I like to use 15 because it is not as intimidating

Here’s the scene from the movie (scroll to the 4:40 min mark).

I think the phrase works for a couple of reasons.

First, it forces the person talking to you to avoid using any major technical words that an average person wouldn’t understand. Second, it’s self-deprecating, and people always empathize with a person in need.

Try it out and let me know if it helps.

Oh, and make sure you’re prepared for someone replying back with “maybe this is a bit too complicated for me to explain to a 15 year old” – which did happen to me once

Podcast Duration: 4 min

Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below or on my Facebook Page!

It’s called the Border Café and it serves the most amazing Tex-Mex / Cajun food (for those friends and colleagues who know me, rest assured, The Cheesecake Factory is still on top of my list )

In Massachusetts, the Border Café has locations in Burlington (the one we regularly go to), Cambridge and Saugus. They also have a couple of locations in New Jersey and Delaware. If you live close to any of those areas, make sure you try it out. You will not be disappointed – especially if you have kids.

So why do I like it that much that I’m writing about it? I’ll get to that in a second, but first I wanted to share the story behind how I found out about the restaurant.

Several months ago, I was taking a graduate course at Harvard called Managing Workplace Performance. As part of the course requirements, the students had to form separate groups and have dinner together at a restaurant of their choosing to analyze how well it’s managed from a customer perspective.

I was assigned to a team of 5 individuals and each of us started making suggestions of places to go to. One of the members suggested the Border Café. I had never heard of it before, but given that I like to try new places, and that it was close by in Harvard Square, I didn’t have any objections. However, a couple of other students pushed back and made some counter-suggestions.

The person who recommended the Border Café mentioned that she was very picky about food and that she couldn’t just eat anywhere. She basically said that if we all decide to go somewhere else, she would be happy to come along with us but probably won’t have anything to eat.

To avoid leaving anyone out of the experience, we all just agreed to go there. Plus, I now really wanted to see what this place was all about given that she spoke so highly of it.

Needless to say, everyone had a fantastic time and our overall assessment of the restaurant was superb. The service was extraordinary and the food was delicious.

The restaurant is by no means a fine dining restaurant. It’s very casual, the atmosphere has a nice laid-back vibe to it, and the food is very reasonably priced.

I called my wife on the way back home and told her we had to try this place together someday. When we did a few weeks later, she was also sold on it and it’s been one of our regular go-to places since.

How This Applies to Your Business

Whether you are an employee, a blogger or a business owner, you always have a customer. This could be your boss, your readers, or your clients. To get promoted, increase your blog’s readership or grow your business, you want to always make your customers happy.

Here are 5 things I learned from the restaurant to do just that:

1. Excellent Quality: People go to restaurants for many reasons, but the main one is to have a great meal. The food at the Border Café is outstanding and quite tasty. My wife and I have tried several dishes now and they have all been remarkably well done. Regardless of what industry you work in, never lose focus on what you’re creating – whether it’s a service or a product. If you produce high quality work, customers will love you. No one enjoys a lousy meal.
2. Freebies: As soon as you get seated at the restaurant, you get a basket full of fresh, great-tasting tortilla chips and a side of salsa for free (with unlimited refills). Kids get a couple of nice freebies as well: crayons with a coloring sheet, and a helium balloon. People just love free stuff. If you’re working for a customer, give them a valuable freebie such as a complementary consulting session or a coupon for a sample. If you’re working for a boss, surprise him or her with an additional helpful report when they don’t expect it.
3. Value for Money: I mentioned earlier that the food is very reasonably priced. That was an understatement: it’s actually exceptionally priced compared to other restaurants in the area. Most meals at the Border Café are in the $10 range and the portions are very generous. Kids’ meals are only $3.98 and can actually feed a not-so-hungry adult (a good-sized entrée with fries, a drink and either M&Ms or Starburst for dessert). Simply put, you get a lot more than what you pay for. Give your customers more value for their money and you’re golden.
4. Continuous Improvement: The first time we ordered chicken strips, they were a bit dry. So the manager came out to ask us what was wrong with them and happily took them away.  A few visits later we heard from someone that they changed the chicken batter recipe, so we ordered them again and they were delicious. I don’t know whether they had received a lot of negative feedback or they just saw that their chicken strips weren’t selling as much. What matters is that they did something about it to keep their standards high. By listening to your customers and continuously improving, you’ll always have an edge. This reminded me of the “permanent beta” concept I wrote about in my previous post.
5. Consistency: All of the above doesn’t matter if it’s done only once. The key is to do it every time, all the time. I’ve been to the restaurant so many times and it has never disappointed me. Consistently producing quality content of good value will establish a certain reputation about you with your customers. Make sure you always deliver on their high expectations.

A couple of things happens when you implement all those lessons.

First, people talk about you and you end up with free word of mouth marketing (I’ve never seen an ad for the Border Café, but I found out about it from my colleague, and now I’m spreading the word about it on my blog).

Second, you get repeat customers who are willing to wait in line at your doors when they have thousands of other options to choose from.

My professor summed it up nicely. This restaurant has been around since she was a student at Harvard, so they must be doing something right. Most restaurants don’t last that long.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below or on my Facebook Page!

The book did not disappoint.

I just finished reading “The Start-Up of You,” by Reid Hoffman (co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn) and Ben Casnocha, and I thought it was phenomenal. The book is an absolute must-read and I highly recommended it regardless of what industry you work in or how old you are.

In essence, the book’s main point is that you need to treat yourself and your career as a start-up – a company which is just being established, struggling to stay afloat and can go under at any time.

The reason behind this is fairly straightforward: lifetime employment is not guaranteed anymore, and external factors, such as outsourcing trends and the global economy dynamics, can leave you without a job at any point.

The book’s advice is to do something about it now and shows you how to plan accordingly.

If you’re not too convinced, Hoffman and Casnocha point to a reality-check billboard sign they saw in 2009 which puts things in perspective:

“The Start-Up of You” has a lot of interesting insights, from the concept of “permanent beta” (always focusing on your personal growth in test mode), to intelligent networking (not in the traditional business-card-sharing sense) to weak ties (relationships with people you don’t interact a lot with).

I read the book on my Kindle Fire (my favorite new way of reading books), and highlighted a lot of notes in it. The following are six quotes from the book that inspired me, categorized into two buckets:

On developing new skills

• “[Andy Hargadon] says that for many people “twenty years of experience” is really one year of experience repeated twenty times.”
• “If you’re in permanent beta in your career, twenty years of experience actually is twenty years of experience”
  
• “Establish an identity independent of your employer, city, and industry…This way, you’ll have a professional identity that you can carry with you as you shift jobs.”

 On networking

• “[Mark Granovetter] summed up his conclusion in a paper appropriately called “The Strength of Weak Ties”: The friends you don’t know very well are the ones who refer winning jobs.”
• “One lunch is worth dozens of emails”
• “As you meet your friends and new people, shift from asking yourself the very natural question of “What’s in it for me?” and ask instead, “What’s in it for us?” All follows from that.”

Have you read the book or are thinking of reading it? Let me know in the comments below or on my Facebook Page!

“You’ve spent years learning how to read and write, years learning how to speak. But what about listening?” – Stephen Covey

So true. Whether you listen as a salesman, a consultant, a CEO or a parent, you’ve probably spent very little time honing your skills as a listener.

In Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which I just re-read after reading it around 13 years ago, the chapter on Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood (which happens to be my one-sentence summary of the book), he focuses on the art of listening, and has some interesting insights about it.

Before getting into that, I thought I’d share a quote a very smart person once told me:

According to Covey, there are 5 levels of listening :

• Ignoring (no idea what you just said)
• Pretending (you think I’m listening)
• Selective Listening (I hear part of what you’re saying)
• Attentive Listening (I’m paying full attention)
• Empathic Listening (I fully understand & feel what you’re saying)

The empathic level is the hardest, but this is the level most effective business leaders and executives function at. It’s about putting yourself in the other person’s shoes, and really feeling what the other person is going through. As Covey puts it, it’s getting “inside another person’s frame of reference.”

The key to empathic listening is to repeat what the other person is saying, which any experienced manager or parent would agree with. However, according to Covey, this repetition has 4 different developmental stages (I’ve quoted Covey’s examples of a conversation between a child and his father that explains each stage):

The idea is that if you practice Stage 4 on a regular basis, of reflecting feeling and rephrasing content, then you’ll be very effective at really understanding what the other person is saying, and can make a deeper connection with them.

I’ve been trying this for a while, and even though I can’t always perform at that level of concentration & empathy, training my mind to be aware of it has brought on some pretty phenomenal results (both professionally and personally).

As a side note, in a virtual team environment, it’s quite important to focus on words that cover the Stage 3 part (reflecting feeling), mainly because unlike face-to-face conversations, your body language and facial expressions cannot do that part for you.

Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below or on my Facebook Page!

Based on my observations, I’ve noticed a lot of attributes and characteristics that differentiate between managers who are considered average in their performance and those that are considered great.

However, there is one particular trait that always stood out to me which clearly sets both groups apart – particularly in virtual teams.

Here’s a sketch that explains what that attribute is (let me know in the comments section or on my Facebook Page if you agree!):

They help people understand a problem and see its solution in a much more efficient way than talking about it or writing it out.

I’m not referring to the usual PowerPoint diagrams or Excel charts (even though those are definitely helpful), but rather to plain old hand-drawn pictures.

I can guarantee that regardless of what industry you’re in, you can always use some form of drawing to help simplify an idea or get a point across much faster.

During my days as a management consultant, nearly every major problem I had to solve with my team was hashed out on a whiteboard at some point. On a typical project, we’d lock ourselves in a conference room for a day, roll up our sleeves, and the lead Partner would kick off our meeting by saying “Pens to the Board!”

As a couch manager who leads remote teams, the benefits of using hand-sketched drawings are even greater. You can portray an idea in a much more effective way that “sticks” with your virtual teams. For example, all the information I just wrote can be summarized in the following simple sketch:

Of course, it takes a bit more time to create a drawing, but the return on investment is definitely higher.

You Don’t Need to Know How to Draw

Some people cringe at the thought of having to draw anything – including myself.

I was terrible at drawing pictures during my undergraduate years. That was one of the reasons why I left pursuing a degree in Architecture to a less “drawing-intensive” Civil Engineering degree instead.

However, I learned two things over the last few years:

1. You don’t have to be perfect at drawing to convey an idea. In fact, some people actually prefer to look at a semi-baked, imperfect drawing. I’m not sure why, but I guess it’s because people can relate more to it that way, so don’t get too obsessive about creating the perfect picture before sharing it.
2. You can become phenomenal at drawing by reading one book. A couple of years ago, I came across THE book about creating drawings for solving problems and selling ideas. It’s called Unfolding the Napkin: The Hands-On Method for Solving Complex Problems with Simple Pictures (affiliate link) written by Dan Roam. Highly recommended. As a side note, the book was based on a previous book Dan Roam wrote called The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. I only read the Unfolding the Napkin book and I was set, but you might want to read both if you’d like to become an expert.

In any case, even if you don’t have the time to read either book, here’s what you need to know to create any hand drawn picture.

4 Steps to create any hand-drawn sketch

Step 1: Gather the Stuff You’ll Need

Technically, you’ll only need the following three things: I like to use regular letter-sized plain white paper, and a couple of different colored felt-tip pens: red and black, for a nice contrast.

For the scanner, I use my all-in-one Canon Pixma MX350 Wireless Printer (affiliate link), which produces excellent scans, but you really don’t need anything fancy. Any regular cheap scanner will do.

Step 2: Decide What You Want to Draw (using a little trick)

When I was creating a logo for The Couch Manager blog, I wanted to draw some form of couch, but had absolutely no idea how to do so. I tried looking at my couch at home, and attempted at hand-sketching it like an artist, but that ended up a disaster.

I then discovered a neat little trick that helped me decide what to draw.

I simply logged on to Google.com, clicked on the “Image” tab at the top, and then searched for the word “Couch.” This got me tons of images of couches to use as a reference.

However, the images were more of actual pictures than sketches (which makes them harder to imitate), so what I did was I added the word “Sketch” to the search (i.e. I searched for the phrase “Couch Sketch”), and I got over 2.4 million sketches to choose from.

That’s how I ended up getting an idea for sketching out my blog’s logo:

The words “Drawing,” “Cartoon” and “Hand drawn” also work if the word “Sketch” doesn’t give you great results.

The additional cool thing about using Google Image search is that it also helps you come up with ideas if you’re stuck.

Step 3: Draw It Out (using another little trick)

After you figure out what you want to draw, you can eye-ball the image and draw a similar sketch directly on plain paper (that’s what I usually do; again, the picture never has to be perfect to be effective).

However, if you’d like to avoid testing your artistic abilities, another trick you can use is just print out the picture from Google Image search, and then put it underneath the plain paper as you trace the lines on top.

You can also use the same trick if you’d like to write out free-hand text that’s horizontal. Just use regular lined paper underneath the plain paper and follow the faint lines across the page to align your text.

Step 4: Scan, Modify, and Share

After you’re done with your drawing, you’ll need some form of software to edit the sketches (like cropping, color adjusting, resizing etc.).

I use MS Office Picture Manager (free with Microsoft Office) to crop the pictures and then adjust the midtone settings so that the black and red colors pop out.

For more sophisticated picture adjustment, you can use GIMP (which is free software that is very similar to Adobe Photoshop).

I then just save the picture as a JPG file and then simply import it into a presentation, email it out to the team or upload it to my blog!

And that’s it! Let me know if you found this post helpful by commenting below or on my new Facebook Page.

The very next day, on January 1, 2011, right before that day ended at around 11:30pm, I published my very first blog post. Mission accomplished.

In less than a week, I’ll be celebrating a full year of starting this blog. I never thought that would happen. I assumed I might write a few posts, and then get bored and move on, especially with the hectic schedule that I have.

However, thanks to you (yup, you, reading this right now), I kept going, even though I knew at times that only a handful of people were reading what I was writing.

To those of you who commented, subscribed, shared on Facebook, tweeted on Twitter, and referenced The Couch Manager on your own blog, a big and very special thank you for taking the time to do so. I saw and read every single mention and I am genuinely appreciative of your support.

Looking Back at 2011

I thought I’d share a quick summary of what’s happened with The Couch Manager over the past year:

• I received a little over 1000 subscribers (around 70 of those through email, and the rest through WordPress follows and FeedBurner RSS subscriptions)
• I got featured on Freshly Pressed 3 times in 6 months, and wrote a guest post on ProBlogger about how I did it
• I published a whitepaper at the Project Management Institute (PMI), and created a slideshare presentation about it
• I wrote an ebook about designing a highly productive home office
• I was featured in several blogs, including Reader’s Digest

looking Forward to 2012

Here’s what I have planned for 2012:

• I just started a Facebook page, and I plan to be quite active on it. If you’re reading this and you have a Facebook account, please click on the page and “Like” it. Facebook is a lot more fun and engaging because you can interact with people on a more personal level (especially since most people spend more of their time on Facebook as opposed to RSS readers). Plus, I’ll be featuring stuff which is exclusive to Facebook that I won’t include on my blog, so make sure you like the page if you’re interested in getting those updates
• I’ll be conducting some video interviews with experienced entrepreneurs and business leaders who work remotely, and I’ll share the video snippets on my blog
• I’ll be publishing more guest posts on other blogs. I only published one this year, but guest posting is apparently one of the best ways to gain more subscribers and engage with audiences that aren’t even aware you exist.
• If I have the time, I’ll be writing another ebook (which might end up being a short manual that I’ll give away for free).

I hope you’ll stick around with me for the coming year – exciting and fun times are ahead.

As always, I’d love to hear from you about your thoughts, feedback and your own plans for 2012 (you can comment below, or on my newly-minted Facebook Page!! )

Happy New Year, and see you in 2012!