Archive for February, 2007

Linda, the business officer of a very successful private school, has been wrestling with a significant challenge; “How do we reposition our school to attract and retain more students?” To make this happen, management decided to hire an outside marketing firm to give the school direction and to outline its future.

The marketing company’s first strategy was to uncover the school’s image in the market place, after that, the “consultants” offered suggestions on how to move forward. Most of what they offered was fluff and no meat.

I asked Linda a simple question, “If you were to sit down for dinner with your best friend and husband, and they were to ask you, “Why should I send my child to your private school,” what would you say to them that would guarantee that their child would be enrolled next year?

Her response was typical. Here’s a summary. “We offer a great student teacher ratio. Our focus is not only education, but your child’s growth and welfare. The campus is one of the best in the nation.” When she was done, I asked her to close her eyes and picture herself as any one of her competitors, then ask herself if any one of them could have said the same thing? Or would they say they don’t help kids grow and their student ratio is one of the worst in the nation?

Of course not. What Linda did not realize in as much as she’s phenomenal as a business officer is that she’s lacking one of the most important skills of any manager. That’s the ability to sell. Management and leaders sell to clients, media, employees, boards of directors, attorneys, friends, vendors…everyone.

In Linda’s case, it’s not that she does not know her product; it’s that she’s not learned the basics of repositioning her organization. Repositioning requires what all great salespeople tend to do: create differentiated products and services based on a value proposition AND succinctly transfer this knowledge.

Linda’s marketing firm did not know how to do this.

In this case, Linda, a key manager and leader, should realize that every transaction in the organization requires an understanding what product and services the organization offers and how to articulate these benefits well.

My recommendation was simple.
1. Come up with 5 benefits to attending the school that are clear.
2. Avoid generic terms such as best, quality, or service. They are too ambiguous.
3. Generate the benefit and then offer the value for the benefit. For example, we have a 5 to 1 student ratio which has translated into 87% of our children being accepting in to an Ivy League School.
4. Make sure that you create the exact words for everyone in the organization to use when presenting benefits about the organization. I have a client in New Orleans that teaches every new employee working the floor to say, “Our inventory moves very rapidly here. I’d like to confirm the price before _____…the script keeps the new employee engaged in a sale versus the demoralizing position of being nothing more than a statue on the floor. Besides, the message being sent is to buy now because things move fast.
5. Close your eyes and ask yourself if anyone else can make these exact claims. If they can you may not be focusing on the right values. If they can, you might still win the sale because you’ve empowered your organization to give a laser-focused answer versus a response that rambles.
6. Teach everyone in the organization from the president to the front-line management the exact same sales lesson.

I’ve asked numerous managers-leaders if they’ve taken time to learn sales strategies to use in their everyday work. Less than 2% have said yes, and yet it’s one skill that’s required every day.

By applying sales skills to repositioning, Linda realized she already had many of the answers that the marketing firm was offering. She also realized they fell short on delivering a real solution to repositioning her school. She and her staff were too focused on websites, brochures and ads instead of focusing on what the organization represents. The latter can be translated to every part of their future strategic planning to insure that the school doesn’t become a me-too organization: in other words, a commodity.

She’s not alone. Repositioning is a constant management challenge, and as environments change, so must all organizations adapt to leverage their assets.

(Federated Department store’s Terry Lundgen just announced that they wish to change their name to the Macy’s Group as their way of more specifically aligning themselves with their product and services.)

Ralph has a valid concern. He’s afraid that with all the technology being introduced into today’s business climate, his employees and his children may not have the same opportunities that he’s had in his life time.

He cites call centers shrinking due to self-service automation, manufacturing plants that used to require hundreds of employees now being managed by only one person in a booth, and business functions such as accounting being automated as areas of concern. He asks, where is the future employee to find hope?

Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book titled The End of Work. In it, he outlined how work is disappearing in the world.

My take is, Ralph, don’t worry, there’s going to be plenty of work for your children and your employees if they realize the future of work will be based on intelligence more than brawn. These robots and automated systems need to be managed by people who can think.

Don’t worry; from my recent trips to New Orleans, NYC, Miami, Denver and consulting with the construction industry, there’s plenty of work available and not enough hands to get the work done. The trouble is that too few people want to do the work…getting cold and dirty.

Don’t worry; your parents questioned your future as statistics 20 years ago decreed that my generation would not be able to achieve the same levels of earnings as our parents’ generation, yet there are more millionaires and billionaires in the world today then there were just 15 years ago. Yes, I know that some individuals don’t feel as if they are doing as well as their parents.

If you feel this way, ask yourself if you, too, had your parents’ beliefs or grandparents’ beliefs to live for both the present and the future? Did you spend $2500 on a big screen TV? Did you purchase a house for your 3 cars? Did you remodel your kitchen? Do you live in a house that’s at least 30% larger and up to 150% larger than your parents? All this requires cash and the loss of investment opportunities.

But I digress.

The need for all this automation is just the way the game is played. It’s been the same game for ages. That is, put the best technology to work to leverage human capital and assets. Surprisingly, those companies that do make such decisions end up hiring more employees, because they need more talent to make the next best step for the organization.

So if you’re looking for the plan for your future, try these ideas.

1. The future is about thinking. Those who have the ability to make sound decisions will always be in demand.
2. The future is about continuous education, not just academic learning, but the ability to be current with each shift cultural and economic shift that happens.
3. The future is about controlling your spending and your life to build for tomorrow. Those that learn about creating passive income early in life make money while they sleep, and therefore, can usually lead a more manageable life.
4. The future is about balancing what is necessary both personally and professionally. Given that we now have more technology, you need to ask what is enough. Ralph’s kid goes to private school, and he’s challenged with not seeing her except for only a few times per year. Peter Drucker, one of the most successful business management consultants ever lived in a relatively small home in California until the day he died. My uncle Irving, also a very successful businessman who could have purchased any home he wished, lived in the same modest house until his death.

Don’t worry. There’s plenty of work, and my guess is that in 50 years, our children will be asking the same questions.

I’m p—d off that I have to keep unsubscribing from one particular spam mail that keeps coming over my network. I’m not upset because it’s a pornographic site selling sex, one of the bazillion emails offering Viagra, or that my “friend” in Nigeria wants to give me a small sum of money for helping him with a little $20,000,000 errand.

I’m upset because the spammers are the Society of Corporate Compliance & Ethics! And they want me to join their organization, go to their conference and purchase their products.

It would be similar to a “Save the Whale” activists using whale oil, a tree hugger burning trees as their main source of heat, or an anti abortionist getting an abortion.

What makes matters worse is that I’ve tried to delete my name from their database and that, too, has been a problem in that sdunbar@davidgoldsmith.com does not work at our company. The Society has spidered our web site and found the name S– Dunbar under a testimonial and then converted the email to the spam mail sdunbar.

To View The Entire Image Click Here

Considering that we have at least 300 testimonial quotes on our website; you can imagine how many solicitations we’ve had over the past month. To make matters worse, we own at least three dozen domains and several of them are mirrored sites so that sdunbar is under davidgoldsmith.com AND metamatrixconsulting.com. A double whammy.

The second irony is that they believe that by offering an opt out, they’ve been good little children.

I guess their “leadership,” (both are attorneys,) need a course in government compliance and with a stretch, ethics.

http://www.corporatecompliance.org/

No lesson necessary. It’s an obvious.

David Grim, Champlain Valley Exposition’s General Manager, did something smart. I’m sure a lot of people in his industry wished they’d come up with the idea, first.

Here’s the story.

Several years ago, David began collecting annual information about the activities of Fair organizations around the state. which he complied into an annual report. Data including the number of visitors, vendors, figures on hotel and travel gains, revenue generated and taxes collected and deposited in the coffers of state government were just a few of the statistics.

Once he held the compiled data, he requested the opportunity to report the findings to state decision makers so that they were in the loop as to the value of fair activities locally. In the first year, his reports translated into the legislature offering an impressive $25,000 in state grants. Any fair group that reported their statistics and that were members of the fair association (alliance) were given the right to share the grant money.

As the years passed and the reports continued to be generated and publicized to the state so did the contributions. Beginning at US$25,000, the legistature became smart to the idea that supporting fair endeavors would raised state revenue. There were right. Fairs drew crowds from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Canada and other surrounding states. When all was said and done, the $25,000 grant money grew to US$200,000, while state sales tax contributions reached US$3 million.

Additionally Vermont’s legislature thought that the fairs might need an additional boost in aid to help maintain infrastructure, realizing that an unkempt fair means less revenue. Currently $180-$200K each year is allocated to such progress, translating into updated electrical systems, building maintenance activities to fit code, and proper handling of water and sewage.

David’s foresight has been instrumental in connecting the fair organizers with local and state government. Instead of being adversarial, the state has turned proactive in helping support education for fire, food, safety, water, sewage, and transportation needs so that that problems are solved before they have a chance to evolve.

One director had a state safety inspector show all the vendors what is legal and what is unsafe. The year this program began, most of the troubles involving safety disappeared. Considering that if you’ve got 80,000 people walking through your doors in 4 days, it’s not fun to add 46 inspection problems. Plus, with vendors understanding the rules, they easily played by the game.

Other fairs around the country are not so lucky. In New York State, a fair director said his largest challenge is state interference and red tape. “They’ve got their wallets out for every dime and hands in all our work. I spend most of my time dealing with people who have no clue how a fair runs and how it makes money.”

David’s actions in Vermont however were future oriented and proactive. By compiling data first, he took a CEO sales approach to reaching his objectives. This is not much different than internally selling your new initiatives to your management team on down to the front line. By offering concrete information and the benefits to the state for participating, David gained buy in at an early stage and has reaped the benefits for his and other fairs.

Core77 is one site you need to put on your radar if you’re at all interested in innovation. Each time I visit I see something new. My favorites are the photo gallery and blog.

http://www.core77.com/

I don’t know about you, but I’m a goal setter. I set goals continually and follow through on whatever I set my mind to achieve. For years, I’ve been recording my successes in a binder at my bedside.

I tell you this not because I believe you, too, need a goals book. You don’t need to work my model to achieve for yourself. It’s just to me that having this book keeps me on focus to lead what I consider to be a balanced life. Not only does the book have business goals, it has personal goals like spending time with my children…before they grow up and move out of the house and spending time with my wife, so that marriage is not just one transaction after another.

Until recently, the only other person who’s seen the book is my wife, Lorrie. My sons learned of it when they expressed an interest in goal setting.

Having done this for years I’ve thought I had a great model. That was until I read Bill Bartman’s approach. His comment is that he believes that if you promise something, you’re more likely to finish what you’ve told others you’d achieve. At that moment I realized this promise thingy is more than just a promise; it’s a gauge.

Ever think of how many times you make promises versus telling others you’d do it, if you could. Most people, I would guess, limit promises as they require you to gauge your time and energy. You can’t promise everything or nothing gets done.

When I started making promises to myself instead of setting goals, I realized that if I were to make a promise, I must be able to achieve the desired outcome. The shift is pretty powerful.

When I exercise, I now make a promise about time or weight, and I don’t let myself down. I make some of my promises public so that others hold me accountable to the promise. And it’s working faster than my old model!

Maddy from AT&T confirmed this little transformation as she promised yesterday to finish some work for another individual and even though it was 8 PM she stayed even later to finish the job as it was a promise. Maddy said, “I might have gone home if I had said I would try to get it completed.”

She describeded the CEO of AT&T, Edward E. Whitacre Jr. as a promise maker and one with confidence. Ed promised that he would complete their acquisions by the end of the year and yet even with all their regulatory issues, politics and troubles along the way, they completed the job on December 29, 2006.

She felt confident and comforted in the fact that Ed made promises and stuck to them. Perhaps a goal could be broken.

So the next time you set a goal, ask yourself if it’s a promise or a dream. If it’s a promise, I think you are on your way.

I had to laugh when I saw the design on this cake. (There’s been some discrepancies about the validity of the story behind it, so take it with a grain of salt–pardon the pun.)

As the story goes, someone from Italy ordered the cake, however, when the email was sent, some coding was off. The result was the HTML printed out along with the message.

What’s more challenging is how to stop such a situation from happening again.

If you don’t know HTML then you might assume it’s the correct message. If you leave this up to the discretion of the person making the cake then…you may end up with an HTML Cake. Creating a checks and balance system could eleviate the problem, although it’s tough to put rigorous tests into the production of an $8-14 item.

Before I made the move to change anything, I’d ask how many times has there been such error and then move from that point forward. It may be important and yet the cost and time not worth the effort.

http://nonumnos.livejournal.com/