Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

How to Live With Purpose

By Robert D. Smith

You may be surprised to know that it’s not that difficult to figure out your life’s purpose. You can at least get moving in the right direction in less than 15 minutes. 

After determining your purpose, the next step is to figure out how to live out that purpose every single day. 

While there are countless ideas out there to answer that question, the following three have proven timeless for me since I started asking 40 years ago. 

1. Ask yourself the right questions.  

Andy Andrews, the author I have managed for the past 33 years, has taught me that the quality of our questions determines the quality of our answers. So why not ask yourself the best quality questions?  

Part of my purpose in life is to be a joy to others, to create lots of laughter. By asking myself How can I be a joy to this person today? or How can I make this meeting really enjoyable? my mind naturally starts to focus on finding an answer and moving me toward accomplishing that purpose. 

2. Write!  

Legendary business executive Lee Iacocca said, “The discipline of writing something down is the first step to making it happen.”  

When you write something down, it solidifies that idea. It’s also really helpful to review that material later on. I write down everything, my goals, my prayers, quotes, ideas... If you want to live with your purpose in focus, have your purpose written down always close within sight. 

3. Deal With Your Fear  

Deep down, we all start out fearing rejection. We want to be accepted. No one likes getting shot down. 

Here’s a great way to flip fear on its head—seek it out.  When I was first starting my career as a manager and was trying to get bookings for a comedian, I made it my mission to get 30 “no’s” every day.  Instead of fearing rejection, I was now seeking it out. 

The best part?  I never succeeded in getting 30 “no’s” in one day!  Inevitably, I always got a “yes.”  Whatever your fear is—reality is never as scary. Simply step up and face it. 

Stop waiting for the right time to live out your purpose.  Right now, determine what you can do in the next 15 minutes to begin living purposefully with massive action. 

Robert D. Smith is the author of 20,000 Days and Counting, a crash course in living every day with maximum purpose and intensity. He blogs on entrepreneurship, personal growth, and more at TheRobertD.com.

 Robert D. Smith: 20,000 Days and Counting: The Crash Course for Mastering Your Life Right Now

 

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Mars Incorporated: A Sweet Place to Work

With about $33 billion in global revenue last year, Mars would be in the top 100 of the Fortune 500, ahead of McDonald's, Starbucks, and General Mills. It employs 72,000 people, more than a third of them in America. 

Its diversified galaxy of brands for man and beast are iconic -- from chocolate favorites like M&M's and Snickers to Wrigley's Juicy Fruit and Lifesavers to pet-care products like Pedigree and Whiskas, as well as Uncle Ben's Converted Rice.

The company says it does 200 million consumer transactions a day. But despite that reach across civilization and into customer pockets, Mars is among the most secretive, insular, and little understood multinational companies around.

It is still 100% family-owned -- now by the three elderly offspring of Forrest Mars Sr., who launched Mars onto its trajectory as a confectionery colossus after taking over the business from his father, Franklin C. Mars, who died in 1934.  The three owners are all multibillionaires -- each is reportedly among the 20 or so richest Americans. Ask employees -- while officially called "associates," they sometimes refer to themselves as Martians -- about a member of the Mars family, and you're about as likely to get a revealing answer as if you'd asked about the proprietary process in which they stamp "m" on the little colored candies. 

For the first time, the company has made it onto Fortune's annual U.S. roster of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. At No. 95 on the 2013 list, Mars boasts employees who love not only the products they make but also the office culture and the company's long-standing principles.  The "Five Principles of Mars": quality, responsibility, mutuality, efficiency, freedom.  According to a regulatory filing for 2011 in the State of Delaware, where Mars is incorporated, there are six members, all grandchildren or great-grandchildren of Frank Mars. One is Victoria Mars, a great-grandaughter of founder Frank Mars and the company ombudsman. 

Today, Mars has 11 billion-dollar brands and not everything at Mars is about chocolate.  Mar's 78-year-old pet-care division lead by Linda Mars is the company's biggest business, employing nearly half its employees worldwide.

What becomes striking is that Mars family board members are intimately involved in the business by visiting each plant location at least once a year along with the fact that Mars is a sweet company at which to be an employee. 

For example, a typical Mars plant manager influences associates by his or her ability to pace development of operational systems and innovative approaches.  These operational managers' value to Mars is they initiate or design positive changes.  And since these managers would increase their effectiveness with more warmth and tactful communication (read: effective team cooperation), Mars leadership encourages them to get a personal executive coach along with experienced mentors. 

The irony of the company's very privateness, employees stress, is that it turns out to be a boon.  Employees have autonomy to experiment with ideas and management has the patience to train.  It doesn't work that way elsewhere.  Debra Sandler, president of the chocolate division, said, "This is probably the only company in which I was told, 'You're not investing enough in your brand.'"

"A lot of really good companies invest in the wrong architecture," says Paul S. Michaels, the nonfamily president of Mars.  "Does it add value for the consumer [for] Snickers bars to pay for marble floors and Picassos?"  Perhaps, most significant, employees have great latitude for advancement, both within their divisions and in the larger Mars workplace.  The demographics of the Mars workplace in the U.S. -- about 70% of it in manufacturing, almost entirely nonunionized -- are diverse; women constitute 38% of the managers. 

Source: FORTUNE, February 4, 2013

  When Doing It All Won't Do: A Self-Coaching Guide for Career Women

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Strategy is Choice

Most people think that strategy is about analysis and plans, rather than about choice.

Where do you choose to play?  And on that chosen playing field, how do you choose to win?  Without clear choices, firms have no chance of winning.

For example, they analyze a lot of things before figuring out what is worth analyzing and important to analyze.  And then they lay out a strategic plan what they plan to do.  But that isn't very helpful.  What is helpful is making a few key choices about where to play and how to win (backed by some analysis and lots of judgment).

Without a clear strategy, it is hard to make an intelligent business choice.  Although it doesn't guarantee success, a strategy shortens the odds of success.  Organizations can't win consistently without well understood strategies.

Ask yourself these five questions to position your company to win:

1. What is your winning aspiration?  The purpose of your enterprise.

2. Where will you play?  A playing field where you can achieve that aspiration.

3. How will you win?  The way you will win in the chosen playing field.

4. What capabilities must be in place?  The competencies required to win in the chosen way.

5. What management systems are required?  The systems and measures that support the capabilities and the choices.

In "Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works" (Harvard Business Review Press), two of today's best-known business thinkers finally get to the heart of what strategy is for: winning, and what it's about: choice.

Source:  A.G. Lafley: Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

 John Agno: Can't Get Enough Leadership

 

Our Social Brain

There is a concept in cognitive psychology called the channel capacity, which refers to the amount of space in our brain for certain kinds of information.  As human beings, we can only handle so much information at once.  Partly its a question of time and energy.  For example, to be someone's best friend requires a minimum investment of time and emotional energy.  Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.  At a certain point, somewhere between 10 to 15 people, we begin to overload.

Perhaps, the most interesting natural limit is what might be called our social channel capacity.  The case for a social capacity has been made, most persuasively, by Robin Dunbar.

Over the past two decades, evolutionary psychologist Dunbar and other like-minded researchers have discovered groupings of 150 nearly everywhere they looked. Anthropologists studying the world’s remaining hunter-gatherer societies have found that clans tend to have 150 members. Throughout Western military history, the size of the company—the smallest autonomous military unit—has hovered around 150. The self-governing communes of the Hutterites, an Anabaptist sect similar to the Amish and the Mennonites, always split when they grow larger than 150.  So do the offices of W.L. Gore & Associates, the materials firm famous for innovative products such as Gore-Tex and for its radically nonhierarchical management structure. When a branch exceeds 150 employees, the company breaks it in two and builds a new office.

For Dunbar, there’s a simple explanation for this: In the same way that human beings can’t breathe underwater or run the 100-meter dash in 2.5 seconds or see microwaves with the naked eye, most cannot maintain many more than 150 meaningful relationships. Cognitively, we’re just not built for it. 

In general, once a group grows larger than 150, its members begin to lose their sense of connection.  “The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us,” Dunbar has written.

While Dunbar has long been an influential scholar, today he is enjoying newfound popularity with a particular crowd: the Silicon Valley programmers who build online social networks. At Facebook and at startups such as Asana and Path, Dunbar’s ideas are regularly invoked in the attempt to replicate and enhance the social dynamics of the face-to-face world.  Software engineers and designers are basing their thinking on what has come to be called Dunbar’s Number. 

As group size grows, a dizzying amount of data must be processed. A group of five has a total of 10 bilateral relationships between its members; a group of 20 has 190; a group of 50 has 1,225. Such a social life requires a big neocortex, the layers of neurons on the surface of the brain, where conscious thought takes place.   To come up with a predicted human group size, Dunbar plugged our neocortex ratio into his graph and got 147.8.

Dunbar actually describes a scale of numbers, delimiting ever-widening circles of connection. The innermost is a group of three to five, our very closest friends. Then there is a circle of 12 to 15, those whose death would be devastating to us. (This is also, Dunbar points out, the size of a jury.) Then comes 50, “the typical overnight camp size among traditional hunter-gatherers like the Australian Aboriginals or the San Bushmen of southern Africa,” Dunbar writes in his book How Many Friends Does One Person Need?   Beyond 150 there are further rings: Fifteen hundred, for example, is the average tribe size in hunter-gatherer societies, the number of people who speak the same language or dialect. These numbers, which Dunbar has teased out of surveys and ethnographies, grow by a factor of roughly three. 

At Facebook itself, Dunbar still comes up often. “We do talk about it.  In a lot of contexts it’s a compelling framing of some of the data that we have about people’s relationships,” says Cameron Marlow, a sociologist and the head of the company’s data science team.

A paper published in 2011 found that on Twitter the average number of other people a user regularly interacts with falls between 100 and 200. And though the limit on how many Facebook friends one can have is a generous 5,000, the average user has 190—more than 150, but within what Dunbar sees as the margin of error.

In smaller groups, people are a lot closer.  If your group gets too large, you don't have enough things in common, you start to become strangers and that close-knit fellowship starts to get lost.

Sources: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, January 14, 2013

 Malcolm Gladwell: The Tipping Point
Discover how ideas, messages and products spread like outbreaks of infectious disease.

 Prof. Robin Dunbar: How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks

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Virtually Selling

From itinerant Yankee peddlers crisscrossing the U.S. after the Civil War to Dale Carnegie’s best-selling books on the art of salesmanship, American capitalism has often been driven by advances in the plying of wares.  Arthur Miller’s 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Death of a Salesman, placed the occupation at the heart of the American middle class and its longing for social mobility. 

Now companies from software and health-care providers to manufacturers are radically remaking that model, shifting from expensive field staffs to more cost-efficient employees who use phones and computers to reach customers. Inside selling, which keeps pitchmen off the road, is growing far faster than in-person sales—and by some estimates it’s 10 times cheaper.

With virtual meeting software such as GoToMeeting.com and WebEx, communication tools such as Skype, and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, it’s become easier to sell with few if any face-to-face meetings.

About 46 percent of such employees are at company headquarters, about 37 percent work both at the office and at home, and 17 percent work fully at home, according to data compiled by consultants at Bridge Group. Inside sales workers have an average base salary of $53,000 and total compensation of $98,000, according to Bridge data.

Do you use a proven sales process?

Understanding and executing a proven sales process makes all the difference in face-to-face or virtual selling.  Most salespeople fail because they don't understand the impact of their personalities on the person at the other end of the call....and....they are blindly 'winging it' by operating without a proven sales process methodology.

Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Everyone lives by selling something.”  Yet most people don’t understand the sales process and their part within it.  Business owners constantly worry about the selling function and how it affects their ability to manage the firm’s cash flow.   

As a business coach, I don’t sell “coaching” but do sell the results or benefits of engaging in a coaching relationship: improved business management, sales & marketing, planning, productivity/effectiveness and leadership.  I do sell the value of brainstorming with, being accountable to, being listened to, receiving encouragement from someone who brings an independent viewpoint to the conversation.  

Just like me, you have to come up with how you help your customers get better at what they do (or want to do) through satisfying their wants and needs.  When you do, you will know what selling is for your business. 

Source: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, January 14, 2013 and "Ask the Coach"

 John Agno: Ask the Coach

 John Agno: Can't Get Enough Leadership

 

 

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Achieving Sustainable Growth

The "New Normal" defines the business environment where individual companies must shape their own paths to growth.  Within this environment of hypercompetion, complexity and uncertainty, companies need to rethink and expand their methods and tools to achieve sustainable business growth.

"GrowthThinking" is the new blueprint for sustainable business growth.  "GrowthThinking: Building the New Growth Enterprise" removes some of the mystery, myth and misconception about business growth by making the topic more accessible at all levels of the organization.  The perspectives in the book offer ways for companies to transform the many challenges of the new normal business environment into opportunities for growth.

A core belief of GrowthThinking is that growth-focused knowledge, skills and abilities can be developed, learned and diffused throughout an organization.  GrowthThinking organizations integrate social learning networks that foster growth-focused knowledge, employee engagement, and knowledge diffusion strategies coupled with specific growth-focused roles that equip the company (from boardroom to front-line workers) to achieve strategic growth outcomes.

Companies must continuously rethink how they create value.  Taking an investment return point of view breaks dominant operational effectiveness and cost cutting behavioral patterns, and focuses on the return on invested capital and long-term value creation that separates "good" growth strategies from "bad" growth strategies.

GrowthThinking answers three fundamental questions:

Will the demand for business growth remain unrelenting? 

Why is business growth so illusive?

Should business growth be left to chance?

This book is not designed to provide all of the answers associated with sustainable business growth; rather it is meant to spark new thinking, new conversations and new actions.

Source:  Wayne A. Simmons: GrowthThinking: Building the New Growth Enterprise

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Entrepreneurship Science: focus on the 20% who represent 80% of your business

Single out your best customers and create a strategy to serve them better. 

The old "80/20 Rule" applies: In an established business, 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. These are the customers to focus on.  If you don't know who they are -- if you can't list them in order of decreasing sales -- find out. Analyze your sales and make a list -- and hang that list where you can see it every day. And every day, ask yourself, "How can I build my sales with these customers?  How can I strengthen my relationship with them?" 

It's as easy as growing award winning pumpkins.  Here is how the pumpkin planning process works:

1. Plant promising seeds.

2. Water, water, water.

3. As they grow, routinely remove all of the diseased or damaged pumpkins.

4. Weed like a mad dog.  Not a single green leaf or root permitted if it isn't a pumpkin plant.

5. When they grow larger, identify the stronger, faster-growing pumpkins.  Then, remove all the less-promising pumpkins.  Repeat until you have one pumpkin on each vine.

6. Focus all of your attention on the big pumpkin.  Nurture it around the clock like a baby, and guard it like you would your first Mustang convertible.

7. Watch it grow.  In the last days of the season, this will happen so fast you can actually see it happen.  

Pumpkin farmers hold the secret formula for big-time entrepreneurial success.  Your get-out-of-jail-free card.  The Holy Grail.  The missing link.  There it is, in black and white...and orange.  The answer you have been looking for, for years.  Treat your company like a giant pumpkin.

Here is what I hope you understood when reading the above:

1. Identify and leverage your biggest natural strengths.

2. Sell, sell, sell.

3. As your business grows, fire all of your small-time, rotten clients.

4. Never, ever let distractions--often labeled as new opportunities--take hold.  Weed'em out fast.

5. Identify your top clients and remove the rest of your less-promising clients.

6. Focus all your attention on your top clients. Nurture and protect them; find out what they want more than anything, and if it's in alignment with what you do best, give it to them.  Then, replicate that same service or product for as many of the same types of top client as possible.

7. Watch your company grow to a giant size.  Grow your business to be a giant "pumpkin."

Caution: A say-yes-to-everyone strategy can not be sustained over time, and it actually stunts growth. It spreads you too thin, wasting energy serving clients who would never make you rich; and in serving them is taking precious time away from the clients with whom you enjoy working, and who could make you rich.

Like a geeky, freaky farmer of mammoth pumpkins, you would now focus all of your attention, time, love, support, creativity and energy on the most promising clients in the "patch."

Sources:  Mike Michalowicz: The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field

 John Agno: Ask the Coach

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Leader, Being Fit Matters.

New research suggests that a few extra pounds or a slightly larger waistline affects an executive's perceived leadership ability as well as stamina on the job.

Leadership experts and executive recruiters say that staying trim is now virtually required for anyone on track for the corner office.  "Because the demands of leadership can be quite strenuous, the physical aspects are just as important as everything else," says Sharon McDowell-Larsen, an exercise physiologist who runs an executive-fitness program for the nonprofit Center for Creative Leadership.

Executives with larger waistlines and higher body-mass-index (BMI) readings tend to be perceived as less effective in the workplace, both in performance and interpersonal relationships, according to data compiled by CCL.  BMI, a common measure of body fat, is based on height and weight.

While weight remains a taboo conversation topic in the workplace, it's hard to overlook.  A heavy executive is judged to be less capable because of assumptions about how weight affects health and stamina, says Barry Posner, a leadership professor at Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business.  He says he can't name a single overweight Fortune 500 CEO. "We have stereotypes about fat," he adds, "so when we see a senior executive who's overweight, our initial reaction isn't positive."

A pair of university researchers, using data from 757 executives measured between 2006 and 2010, found that weight may indeed influence perceptions of leaders among subordinates, peers and superiors. The CEOs of today are also more visible than their forebears and must be camera-ready at a moment's notice, composed while courting investors and ready to respond in a company emergency.

In general, the executives in the Center for Creative Leadership study were healthier than the average American. They drank and smoked less and were more likely to exercise regularly. About half were considered overweight or obese, defined as having a BMI of more than 25.  By contrast, more than 60% of Americans fit this description, according to a Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index last year.

The sample's leaner executives, defined as having a BMI under 25, were viewed more favorably by peers, averaging 3.92 for task performance on a five-point scale; heavier leaders averaged 3.85.  Similarly, members of the leaner group rated higher on interpersonal skills.

With greater transparency in business, there's no place to hide. 

Now that everything from retirement perks to personal emails are circulated on the Web, being a CEO can feel like running naked.  In today's wired world, how you treat workers and the planet can quickly come back to haunt you in a blog or I-hate-your-company Web site.  And a new breed of executives has started to talk more about the concerns of "stakeholders" who feel the impact of a business, instead of just shareholders.

A study in the Harvard Business Review found that people tend to choose work partners based on likeability.  Professor Kim S. Cameron at the University of Michigan's Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship also cites studies showing that likeable people--those at the hub of what he calls "positive energy networks"--are four times more potent on the job than those who have influential jobs but are less popular. 

Sources: The Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2013 and BusinessWeek, June 26, 2006

 John Agno: Can't Get Enough Leadership

It Ain't Nobody's Business

Impeccable leadership is critical for any organization to remain adaptable and viable.  However, too much emphasis on a leader at the top lets far too many other people off the hook.

That's because every single person with some stake in an organization must be empowered to lead within his or her domain of responsibility.  This person's leadership role may be fleeting and informal, or it may be official, complete with title and performance targets.  Either way, no one is inconsequential in steering any enterprise to greatness, because greatness is achieved one decision, one action, and one person at a time.

Simply put, that's what Everybody's Business by author Dr. Marta Wilson is about.  This guide book provides leaders with the tools they need to make it everybody's business to know and grow the enterprise.  Also, as part of Dr. Wilson's corporate social responsibility initiative, all first-year proceeds from Everybody's Business will be donated to charities that assist veterans, fight hunger, promote literacy and advance STEM education.

Individuals can be innovators and leaders, no matter their job level or duties.  Everything depends on creating a culture where personal integrity can work in sync with enterprise integrity--the perfectly tuned, dynamic balance of discrete elements and participants--for all your stakeholders.

You need to create leaders and innovators by drawing out every team member's potential--one person at a time.  You may have doubts, or you may believe there is just not sufficient payoff from investing in a cultural transformation in your workplace.  Most likely, however, you have tried to find and keep top-notch staff and failed to do so.  While salary is indeed a key indicator in companies with a stable talent base, so is culture built one person at a time.  The more individuals understand the total system, the more they can contribute beyond the narrow confines of a specific job description.  The more incentives and opportunities to shine they have, the more they will shine.

The question you really want to ask yourself:  Do you know how to identify the lowest-cost changes and strategic adjustments that will create the biggest payoffs for the greatest number of people?

Hint: You can discover this pivotal alternative when you access, expand, unite, and put in motion the total system of individuals who are connected to your enterprise.

Source:  Marta Wilson: Everybody's Business: Engaging Your Total Enterprise to Boost Quality, Speed, Savings and Innovation

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Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

Business should not be a selfish game.  If you want to create wealth for yourself, then aim to create wealth for society as a whole.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is at the core of business: part of making history and contributing to our communities and enriching ourselves.  The goodwill and more passionate relationship generated within the community translates into a far higher demand for our products and services, into more love and loyalty for our brand, and so into major contributions to the bottom line.  This creates a virtuous cycle through which everyone is enriched.

Corporate social responsibility is not a sideline or something that exists simply to make up for being too materialistic and selfish in advancing businesses at the expense of everything else.  CSR is not charity; it is an investment made in order to create value and does not differentiate between commercial and CSR activities.

If you try to create profit in any other way, you may succeed in the short term, but in the end the natural movement of society will crush you and you are bound to lose.  If you try to create wealth by being great to society, you will create the greatest level of profit.

As the Arab Spring swept the Middle East, old ways began to disappear.  Communications technology is breaking down national barriers and undermining rulers, while the youth look to new role models.  Instead of the litany of Arab political failures, they look to business and the arts for inspiration.

Dr. Saad Al Barrak has been a pioneer of this Arab renaissance.  In just seven years (2002-2009), he transformed a moribund ex-state-owned telecom operator, MTC, from its base of 500,000 customers in Kuwait into an international company that reached over 72 million customers across 23 countries in the Middle East and Africa, introducing the world's first boundary-less roaming.

A PASSION FOR ADVENTURE (Bloomsbury USA) shares his story and his distinctive philosophy of leadership and management, insisting that the purpose of business is to create "a wonderful world."

Source:  Saad Al Barrak: Passion for Adventure: Turning Zain into a Telecom Giant

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