How David Beats Goliath or When Underdogs Break The Rules.

Malcolm Gladwell is one of today's most innovative 'connectors' of knowledge. His most recent New Yorker article again proves he is the master.

Gladwell again uses history to reinforce his argument that with the proper planning and doing something different — something that your opposing team (i.e., competition) isn't expecting — even though you are the underdog — You Will Succeed.

Enough of my blather — go read this great article!

The Best Kept Secret In Business.

It boggles the mind. I can't tell you how many times in my career as an adviser and coach to executives that I've heard phrases like:

• "You're a lifesaver Rich — I don't know how I could have done this without you."
• "You're there when I need you."
• "You helped me reach farther than I've ever reached before."

But I'm not here to extol my accolades . . . I just wanted to let you in on a little secret many executives use to climb up the corporate ladder and stay at the top for a very long time:

They all have a Personal Coach.

You would be quite surprised how many of us are out there working in the background, helping our clients jump from one great opportunity to another, celebrate success after success, and have fun doing it. Oh — and along the way making gobs of money.

If you just asked them if they have a coach, you would be surprised by their answer.

So I have a little bit of homework for you to do next week:

Sit down and think of the most successful person that you know. Call them up. Ask if they have a coach.

They probably do.

Want To Knock It Out Of The Park Every Day At Work? Expect Top Performance.

"Not failure, but low aim, is crime." - James Russell Lowell 1. Be conscious of the self fulfilling prophecy: When you expect something to happen (positive or negative), you unconsciously act in a manner which makes it more likely to  occur.

2. Involve your team in setting standards that are achievable, but also require them to stretch their knowledge and skills. Avoid settling for mediocre or sub-par work. Remember that regardless of what you say, it is the performance you''re willing to accept that becomes your true standard.

3. Think of each member of your work group as a high jumper. Celebrate the reaching of new heights - then 'raise the bar' together. But don't forget, as you're raising the bar, so is your competition.

4. Make sure you walk the talk - earn the right to hold others to high standards by meeting them yourself.

To Succeed, Sometimes You Need To Change Your Game.

Watching my son's baseball game last night, I saw the coach do something that I didn't like, but I know he had to do. They were down 2 runs and it was the last inning - they had to somehow stack the deck to even the score. What did the coach do? The sides changed, my son was about to be up at bat, and the coach made the decision to move the batting order around (they are allowed to do that) to favor some of the more heavy hitters. What happened? They tied it up and eventually won the game. Now to your career. Sometimes when faced with an immovable obstacle, one needs to change what they are doing. The more hard-headed one is - the bigger the obstacle will become.

Try something new — either go around the obstacle or don't deal with it at all. Some suggestions:

• Job boards and recruiters are not helping your job search - try networking and connecting with influential people.
• Someone on your team keeps complaining about their work — give them one of your projects to work on — they might shut up.
• Feel stuck in your position — build your potential — read books, go to lectures, take a course. Start a blog! Expand your horizons.
• Continuously at meetings all day — stop attending 1 or 2 of them. See what happens. Leave early/show up late.
• Have an open door policy? Nice guy — no time to do anything else. Limit your exposure to the troops. Close that door.
• Current contact list not delivering that job? Time to make a new contact list — get out there and meet some influential friends. Do you know your mayor? Your representative? You should — they are well connected individuals — call them for an appointment today.
• Boss not listening to you? Try another communication method. If email is getting lost in the shuffle, pick up the phone or even better, stop by his door for a quick 2 minute discussion.
• Resume not getting any response? Time to update it with better keywords, action verbs and most of all - Be Concise! Still not working? Try a resume writer (call me for the best ones).

Bottom line - stop hitting your head against the wall. Changing your game — even a little bit — might make all the difference. You might hit a home run.

4 Ways to Use "Pull" to Increase Your Success

A friend had just received an inscrutable error message. Err = 8008, it read, entirely unhelpfully. What mysterious problem was there this time? He'd set his heart on the fourth season of HBO's hit series Entourage that evening, and now the download was stalled.

By John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison at HBR

Then he realized: What if he Googled the error message? Sure enough, an answer was to be found on the Apple support wiki, and soon he was watching season four on the family laptop.

It's a small example perhaps. But it's symbolic of powerful new abilities individuals have acquired in the world of pull. These play out at three levels. The first enables us to access what we need when we need it — as when we transform previously annoying error messages into vital information. Particularly on the Internet, many of us have already begun to take this first level of pull for granted.

But what if we don't have an error message to enter into a search engine? As the big shift takes hold, and the world becomes ever less predictable, many times we're no longer certain what to look for or what questions to ask. That's where a second level of pull becomes more useful: the ability to attract people and resources you didn't previously know existed. Some percentage of these, once you encounter them, turn out to be relevant and valuable — just what you were looking for. This level of pull works through serendipity rather than search. Social networks are prime spots for serendipity to play out as we unexpectedly encounter friends of friends or even total strangers that ultimately prove to be helpful.

The first two levels of pull — the ability to access and attract — are ultimately static. They assume that the people and resources we need already exist and that the challenge is to find or discover them. Yet each of us may need to further develop our own personal and professional skills before we can even recognize how best to access and attract what we need and want. Said differently, we need to master a third level of pull — the ability to pull from within ourselves the insight and performance needed to achieve our potential and help other people do the same.

What follows are four broad ways each of us can use these three levels of pull to increase our personal success:

1. Make your passion your profession. Do you love what you do? In today's economy just having a job is cause enough to be thankful. But the pace of change keeps none of us safe: a more uncertain world requires working harder to keep our professional skills competitive. Since most of us put intense effort only into those things that provide us meaning and emotional engagement, we must make our passions our professions or the world will pass us by.

2. Expand — and engage — the edges of your social network. You're probably on Facebook, LinkedIn, or some other social network by now. But how adventurous are you there? Serendipity works best when we extend the edges of our social networks. People on these edges represent "weak ties" connecting us to new insight, experiences, and capabilities that provoke us to improve our own game. Over time, these edge connections become part of our core network, transforming that core in deep yet unexpected ways.

3. Participate in spikes. As we begin to pursue our passions, something remarkable starts to happen. While a few of us will choose to remain in, or even migrate to, remote geographic areas because of our passion for certain physical locations, many more of us will be drawn to emerging spikes of complementary talent in densely settled geographic areas. Social networks in virtual space will amplify the forces of pull being generated in spikes as our passions motivate us to seek out people who can help us get better faster. 4. Maximize return on attention. Hearing these recommendations, some readers will ask how any of us will have enough time to expand our networks and explore talent spikes. Aren't we time-constrained already? Yet by adopting new tools and services we can all improve our "return on attention" — the value we get in return for the time spent looking for what we want and need. Search tools help improve this value immensely. But serendipity tools may prove even more helpful as they connect us to people and resources we don't yet know exist.

What about you? Would you accept a "friend" request on a social network from someone you'd never met? In what ways have you noticed serendipity at work in your own life and career? Have you found ways to shape serendipity to increase the quantity and quality of unexpected encounters?

To Be A Great Executive — Be Flexible.

"In life, change is inevitable. In business, change is vital." - Warren G. Bennis

Encourage others to break tradition, when appropriate, in order to find better ways of doing things. Remember: If you continue doing what you've always done, you'll continue to get the same results.

Understand and appreciate that others may not do things exactly as you would do them. Be open-minded . . . you might discover their way is even better.

Remove Stop Signs to Progress by avoiding statements such as "We've tried that before" or "That's not the way we do that here."

Don't cast all decisions in cement. Be willing to modify them as changing circumstances or data dictate.

Global Crisis Forces Corporations To Look Beyond Quarterly Earnings.

With the US economy in turmoil, Wal-Mart, the nation’s leading retailer boasting more than 144 million customers per week, is taking on a new leadership role. In a country where about one person in three is considered obese and 47 million people are without healthcare, the company is taking a unique stand in educating both its consumers and suppliers. by Rahilla Zafar at Insead

Five years ago, it would have been unheard of for the company’s top executives to be talking about reducing the firm’s carbon footprint, cutting transportation costs, reducing excess packaging, creating more transparent supply chains and starting initiatives to provide credit to millions of low income Americans who normally would not have access to any.

More and more companies are finding that their efforts to reduce their carbon emissions and become more environmentally friendly have led to increased profits.

At the 2008 Net Impact North American conference held this month at Wharton Business School, Matt Kistler, Senior Vice President of Sustainability at Wal-Mart, spoke about his company’s role in shifting consumer culture.

The story began 10 years ago, while Kistler was managing coffee sales at Kraft Foods. A group of Yale University students had begun requesting that their campus food service serve only 'socially-conscious' coffee.

Kistler admits that his intention at the time was to add a product to the portfolio that consumers wanted and not necessarily do something for the planet but in the process of doing that, he discovered much more.

“I got thrust into working with different NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and people like Paul Rice, the founder of Transfair USA, enlightened me,” says Kistler.

In 2004, after joining Wal-Mart, he raised the question if the company should be thinking about sustainability in packaging. His insights led to company executives deciding to hold the retail giant’s first ever meeting on sustainability.

“Our goal is to take care of the customer and such initiatives help people both save money and live better,” he says.

It was not long ago that the green movement was perceived as being an alternative lifestyle rather than something mainstream. Now, many Americans are beginning to recognise that what they thought to be the norms of everyday life are unsustainable.

Kistler says that at Wal-Mart, it was not just about the company making changes like working on supply chains for responsible sourcing and using more fuel-efficient vehicles, it was also about ensuring that their two million employees understand that there are ways to live better.

“We started a personal sustainability project to get associates engaged. It is a voluntary program first launched in the United States which has prompted thousands of pounds of weight loss, more employees biking to work and the company saving hundreds of thousands of kilowatts in energy,” says Kistler.

The change also brought to the attention of employees things they normally would not have given a second thought about. For example, one employee noticed that a vending machine had an unnecessary light bulb in it. After suggesting to management that the bulb was wasting energy, the company removed the bulbs from all stores nationwide, saving the company one million dollars a year.

Kistler says the company can go further in guiding customers in what they should buy, but the question remains: how far can it go?

“The chairman of Patagonia, an organic clothing retailer, says we should work with suppliers to change some of our product ingredients. For example, high fructose corn syrup is part of the ingredients of some of the products we sell. Wal-Mart could ask these companies to shift to cane sugar, which many believe to be a healthier alternative,” says Kistler, who admits the company is not quite there yet to make such a push.

However Wal-Mart has worked with suppliers to eliminate red and green lighting on devices such as televisions.

“It is staggering the number of power plants that would be erased from the grid from just a small decision like that. Thinking like that is simple and our company plays a unique role in making those changes happen,” he explains.

The biggest roadblock for companies is making many of these changes in the current economic situation.

“We are willing to pay more for products coming from companies who show that their price increase is related to making investments to become more fuel efficient and taking better care of their workers. But do not bring us higher costs that are not justifiable,” says Kistler.

“We are going to make some mistakes. This is a new area, there are no books written telling us what to do. It is okay to take a prudent risk as long as the mistakes are not long lasting,” he adds.

For John Brock, CEO of Coca-Cola Enterprises, sustainability has taken centre stage at the company.

“When Wal-Mart, our largest customer, says we are going to have a sustainability conference and want all CEOs to come, we show up. The commitment of companies such as Wal-Mart and (UK retailer) Tesco has been remarkable; institutionally this is no longer niche, it is mainstream” says Brock.

Brock adds that the game has changed tremendously.

“We are working with NGOs as partners, when five years ago none of us would have been caught in the same room together. We are all committed to the same end result. There are some disagreements over how we get there, but sustainability has become the core of everything we do.”

One of the company’s long-term goals is to sell a litre of beverage without a single drop of water going to waste. Today, it takes 1.77 litres of water to make one litre of Coca-Cola. When government officials in Georgia, where the company is headquartered in the US, asked the beverages firm to reduce water usage by 10 per cent, the company was able to cut it by 30 per cent.

But in the current economic downturn, many believe that while consumers are becoming increasingly aware, they are not willing to pay more for change.

“Americans are keenly interested, but will not sacrifice formula and an increase in price. It is our responsibility to figure out how to deliver,” says Brock.

Many believe much will now depend on the leadership provided by the new administration.

According to Paul Herman, founder of HIP Investor, a San Francisco-based company which advises investors and corporations on how to be more sustainable and profitable, the United States could be the world’s leader in producing the technology for alternative energy.

“That is something possible in one presidential term. Today for solar energy, it is a competition between China, the United States and Germany. If there was a government incentive to invest in it, large corporations like General Electric would. China has invested 586 billion dollars into its infrastructure, which will likely include investments in clean energy,” says Herman.

The best role for the United States government would be to set the efficiency metrics and rewards for outcome, but not prescribe what process or technologies companies should use, Herman says.

“For example, when the government subsidised the price of ethanol, it put pressure on corn prices. A better approach would be when the government set fuel efficiency standards, which they have not updated,” explains Herman, who believes the top companies in the US could be doing much more.

“Of the S&P 100, a third are reporting sustainability data and actively integrating that within their management systems. Only ten of the 100 are actively educating Wall Street and just a few are having proactive conversations with shareholders on this topic,” says Herman.

Cross-sector discussions also remain limited and it is yet to be seen if a government push will be enough to bridge the divide, or if it will take another crisis to get companies to shift from self-interest towards a common interest.

The Secret of 'The New Marketing' by Seth Godin.

This, in two words, is the secret of the new marketing. Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you...

Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they'll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.

If they don't love it, you need a new product. Start over.

Your idea spreads. Your business grows. Not as fast as you want, but faster than you could ever imagine.

This approach changes the posture and timing of everything you do.

You can no longer market to the anonymous masses. They're not anonymous and they're not masses. You can only market to people who are willing participants. Like this group of ten.

The timing means that the idea of a 'launch' and press releases and the big unveiling is nuts. Instead, plan on the gradual build that turns into a tidal wave. Organize for it and spend money appropriately. The fact is, the curve of money spent (big hump, then it tails off) is precisely backwards to what you actually need.

Three years from now, this advice will be so common as to be boring. Today, it's almost certainly the opposite of what you're doing.

Catch Seth at his blog.

No Time? Focus on the Important.

Busy people have two options when they decide how their workdays will go: they can choose to be reactive to urgent demands on their time, or proactive about focusing on what they decide is important. The only way to actually get things done is to mitigate the urgent to work on the important. Let's differentiate between what I call urgent and important.

Urgent tasks include things like that frantic email that needs a response RIGHT NOW; a sudden request that seems like it'll only take two minutes but often ends up taking an hour; a report you've got to write up before a meeting. More often than not "the urgent" is putting out fires, or busywork, or tasks that you'd rather do first because they're less intimidating than your current project list.

Urgent tasks are usually short-term and we're drawn to them because they keep us busy and make us feel needed. (If we're busy people, we must be important people.)

But dealing with a constant stream of urgent tasks leaves you wrung out at the end of the day, wondering where all the time went, staring at the undone actual work you've got to complete.

On the flip side, important work moves you and your business towards your goals. The important stuff doesn't give us that same shot of adrenaline that the urgent requests do. It can involve thinking out long-term goals, being honest about where you are and want to be, and just doing plain hard work that feels boring and tedious. On a personal level, important stuff may include making time to get to the gym every day. On a business level, important stuff may be devising your yearly plan, breaking it down into quarterly and monthly deliverables, and evaluating your current performance against last year's plan. (Doesn't the mere thought of going to the gym and deciding on this year's goals make you want to check your email? Still, that's the work that will help you meet your goals.)

If your workplace encourages that frantic vibe of headless-chicken running and constant urgency, it can feel impossible to focus on what's important versus what's urgent. Still, an awareness of the difference and a few simple techniques can help.

Choose three important tasks to complete each day. Write them down on a slip of paper and keep it visible on your desk. When you have a moment, instead of checking your email, look at the slip, and work on an item. Keep the list to just three, and see how many you can complete.

Turn off your email client. Shut down Outlook, turn off new email notifications on your BlackBerry, do whatever you have to do to muffle the interruption of email. When you decide to work on one of your important tasks, give yourself an hour at least of uninterrupted time to complete it. If the web is too much of a temptation, disconnect your computer from the Internet for that hour.

Set up a weekly 20-minute meeting with yourself. Put it on your calendar, and don't book over it — treat it with the same respect you'd treat a meeting with your boss. If you don't have an office door or you work in an open area that's constantly busy, book a conference room for your meeting. Go there to be alone. Bring your project list, to-do list, and calendar, and spend the time reviewing what you finished that past week, and what you want to get done the following week. This is a great time to choose your daily three important tasks. Productivity author David Allen refers to this as the "weekly review," and it's one of the most effective ways to be mindful about how you're spending your time.

by Gina Trapani at HBR.

Grow Your Business Tweet by Tweet.

Entrepreneurs are finding the fast-rising microblogging site to be a useful tool for reaching out to customers. By Jeremy Quittner at Newsweek

Here's what happened when Chris Savage, the chief executive of Wistia.com, searched for the phrase "private video sharing" on Twitter, a social networking site. One post he found read, "A teacher requested a private 'video sharing' Web site so that specialists can observe student behavior—can anyone refer one?"

That got Savage's attention. He e-mailed back: "Still looking for a private video sharing site?"

Minutes later came the reply: "YES! It's the first request for one—thought I'd hit up my tweets before [I] go digging."

Savage: "Cool. You may want to check out Wistia.com. Full disclosure, I'm the CEO; -)"

While this exchange may seem a bit cryptic, Savage is one of a growing number of business owners to whom it makes an awful lot of sense. Savage frequently trolls Twitter looking for sales leads for his five-person, $1 million company, which makes software that facilitates video sharing through a private network. Although Savage has been using Twitter for only a year, it's already helped him find 12 new clients for his Lexington (Mass.) company. "This is a no-cost way of marketing," he says. Because Twitter provides a public forum, each post becomes a form of promotion as other users follow Savage's posts. "You are building a reputation; people can go back and look at your Web site and the quality of your content, and you are becoming part of the community," Savage says. Other business owners are using Twitter for market research and to keep an eye on customer service issues. BREVITY'S BRAWN Twitter distinguishes itself from MySpace (NWS) and Facebook by relying less on picture-laden profiles and more on posts of fewer than 140 characters, referred to as "tweets" or "microblogs." Twitter's simplicity is paired with a powerful search function that allows users to mine others' updates in real time for useful nuggets. "Twitter lets you stay on top of what is happening within your client base," says Chip Lambert, owner of Network2Networth, a business development consultancy in Phoenix. "You can look at conversations and reposition yourself, your products, and your services in a way that appeals to the market you are reaching out to."

An estimated 5 million people use Twitter, according to Cambridge-based Forrester Research. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says businesses "that are not quite big enough to make an impact on the Web, or to spend resources there," have been some of the earliest users of the site. He says some San Francisco-based coffee shops and bakeries have sent tweets to tell their customers about specials or products they may be out of that day. One Los Angeles taco truck uses Twitter to tell customers where it will be that day. "Businesses use this as a hybrid between marketing and customer service," says Stone. "They use the Twitter Search to track mentions of their products and services and as a way to begin a conversation."

Like any online forum, Twitter may not be for everyone. Its immediacy and conversational nature make it a boon to those whose products and services may take a bit more explaining or back-and-forth. And it can be a time suck. "One of the major drawbacks is that [Twitter] is very addictive," says Savage, who has 800 followers and in turn follows just as many. He uses a popular add-on called Tweet Deck, which lets members organize messages by category.

GETTING STARTED Joining Twitter is easy and free. You create a user name and password, then log onto the site. (You can also sign up to have tweets delivered to your mobile phone.) Once inside, there's a big box at the top labeled "What are you doing?" While you could start by typing something as mundane as "I am drinking my coffee and checking out Twitter," you'll see tabs on the right that say "following," "followers," and "updates," enabling you to follow others whose posts you find interesting. Once you've been posting for a while, people follow you too. A certain viral element takes over, and soon you may wind up in the middle of a Twitter community with common interests.

You'll also find thousands of irrelevant posts. "It is easy to get lost and sidetracked," says Lambert, who suggests entrepreneurs think strategically about how they might use Twitter. A mortgage broker, for example, could follow discussions people are having about new tax credits, learn what advice they're getting and which sites they're linking to, and then compose a suitable message to address them.

The viral component of Twitter has helped Andra Watkins, founder of Positus, a consulting firm based in Charleston, S.C. She joined Twitter about six months ago, and at first found it a bit daunting. "I did not grow up using these tools and it has taken me time to develop the voice and approach," she says. Still, she has built a following of 600 Twitterers—friends, colleagues, bloggers, and potential customers. She in turn follows about 600 other people, including a group from her home state of South Carolina—85% of whom she figures could help bring in business. She also follows influential bloggers and those with large Twitter followings, in hopes of establishing a dialogue with them, and keeps tabs on her competitors. Watkins sometimes sends out tweets that have nothing to do with her business, such as a few complaining about exercise. "It makes me more approachable," Watkins says. In the past six months, she's found 10 new paying clients through Twitter.

Other business owners, like Michael Coffey, chief executive of BlueCotton in Bowling Green, Ky., are using Twitter to enhance customer service. The 25-employee, $4 million company lets customers design their own shirts online. For the past two months, two of Coffey's factory workers have used iPhones to snap pictures of completed shirts, and then to send photo tweets to customers right before shipping. "Customers have some anxiety when they purchase shirts online," Coffey says. The tweets help alleviate those concerns—and have won new customers who spot the designs on Twitter. "Having people follow BlueCotton is a feather in our cap," Coffey says. "It helps create real fans of the company."