Posted on December 3, 2007
Since my last post (Network With Finesse), I have received several emails from you asking some great questions. The key question seems to be: How can I make a valuable contact without being aggressive or proactive? If I can ‘get to’ a very important person, why wouldn’t I seize that opportunity? In other words, if …
Posted on November 29, 2007
If you are not connecting, you are not networking. Networking is not a matter of introducing yourself to someone and then finding out how they can help you succeed. Most of the time, it can be highly interruptive and obnoxious, especially if the person you are ‘networking’ with isn’t in the mood to network. I …
Posted on November 26, 2007
How many times have you had a great meeting, then struggled to find the time later to follow up on your action items from it? I believe that business life is filled with out-of-sight out-of-mind behavior, where meetings end up being ‘happy talk’ with little real execution. In many cases, it is a time management …
Posted on November 20, 2007
A few days ago, I was interviewing Raytheon’s CEO Bill Swanson for my new book. Along the way, he shared a one of his habits with me that blew my mind: He empties his Inbox every day. No email goes unanswered. Moreover, he’s made himself available to most employees that need to voice concern or …
Posted on November 14, 2007
You are who you spend time with. Their outlook rubs off on you and becomes a part of who you are. When Norman Vincent Peale said, “Get rid of all negative people in your life”, in the The Power Of Positive Thinking, this is what he was talking about. Sometimes negative is packaged as ‘constructive’. …
Posted on November 12, 2007
If your business partners don’t know your personal preferences, how can they make you happy? Too often, our partners — be they suppliers, contractors or vendors, don’t have any idea of our preferences for communication, reporting, billing, service, etc. All they have to go on is the contract and its terms, and a few stray …
Posted on November 5, 2007
One of the best experiences you create is through customization. One of the worst ones is created through generalization. When we tailor our information, services and products to someone’s individual situation, we make a real connection. I have learned this recently in both my blogging and speaking life. Often, it is easy to generalize a …
Posted on October 30, 2007
Pine and Gilmore are back. They changed the world, and flipped my mind, with The Experience Economy. They argued, succesfully, that the customer is loyal to an experience and fickle to a high quality service or product. Moreover, they suggested that we aren’t working on the right things at business: staging, using products as platforms …
Posted on October 29, 2007
Many of us have learned “The Secret” for personal life: The Law Of Attraction. However, there is another secret that is powerful in the business world: The Law Of Reciprocity. The law of reciprocity states that people will give back when they’ve been given to. In the context of business, here’s how the law of …
Posted on October 25, 2007
Too often, we prepare for the worst and then good things happen – and we freak out. I’ve seen this in my business life: A company launches, prepares backup plans for the worst case scenario, then their business takes off and they can’t handle the fame, money or credit. They implode on their own arrogance …
