Archive
My Last Day of 2005
2005 In Music
I show you my taste of music in this year. Let’s see if I have some the same as you. ^_^
My Rules :
1 Single must release in 2005, no matter what is album release date.
2 Album must release in 2005. If album release in any country before 2005, it’ll be out.
3 Excluded Re-Issued album, Greatest Hit album and Various Artists album.
4 I pick any one I like no matter how much people like/dislike them and how many copies they was sold.
My Top 30 Best Single Of 2005 :
1 The Importance Of Being Idle – Oasis
2 Speed Of Sound – Coldplay
3 Lyla – Oasis
4 The Ghost Of You – My Chemical Romance
5 Drive – Funeral For A Friend
6 Do You Want To – Franz Ferdinand
7 Two More Years – Bloc Party
8 Home – Michael Buble
9 I’m Feeling You – Santana Ft Michelle Branch And The Wreckers
10 Talk – Coldplay
11 Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own – U2
12 Nine Million Bicycles – Katie Melua
13 O’ Sailor – Fiona Apple
14 I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor – Arctic Monkeys
15 Everyday I Love You Less And Less – Kaiser Chiefs
16 No Goodbyes – The Subways
17 Apply Some Pressure – Maximo Park
18 An Honest Mistake – The Bravery
19 Get Your Way – Jamie Cullum
20 Stronger – TRUSTcompany
21 Smile In Your Sleep – Silverstein
22 Kiss Me Kill Me – Mest
23 Let Me Go – 3 Doors Down
24 Where Are You – Our Lady Peace
25 I Caught Fire (In Your Eyes) – The Used
26 Shiver – Natalie Imbruglia
27 So Here We Are – Bloc Party
28 Soul Meets Body – Death Cab For Cutie
29 Don’t Bother – Shakira
30 History – Funeral For A Friend
My Top 20 Best Album Of 2005 :
1 Don’t Believe The Truth – Oasis
2 X & Y – Coldplay
3 Piece By Piece – Katie Melua
4 Extraordinary Machine – Fiona Apple
5 Hours – Funeral For A Friend
6 Rebel Sweetheart – The Wallflowers
7 Healthy In Paranoid Times – Our Lady Peace
8 The Cosmic Game – Thievery Corporation
9 The Magic Numbers – The Magic Numbers
10 You Could Have It So Much Better – Franz Ferdinand
11 Employment – Kaiser Chiefs
12 Silent Alarm – Bloc Party
13 Back Home – Eric Clapton
14 Oral Fixation 2 – Shakira
15 Bleed Like Me – Garbage
16 Catching Tales – Jamie Cullum
17 Counting Down The Days – Natalie Imbruglia
18 A Certain Trigger – Maximo Park
19 Someone In Control – Trapt
20 Young For Eternity – The Subways
My Top 10 Worst Album Of 2005 :
1 Something To Be – Rob Thomas
2 The Emancipation Of Mimi – Mariah Carey
3 Rebirth – Jennifer Lopez
4 Have a Nice Day – Bon Jovi
5 Dangerous and Moving – t.A.T.u.
6 The Massacre – 50 Cent
7 Never Gone – Backstreet Boys
8 Monkey Business – Black Eyed Peas
9 The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1) – Limp Bizkit
10 Meltdown – Ash
Sexual Life (2005)
Last night, I watched this film. I think I like this. No clear message, Focus on sex (love) and the fact that many people may have not perfect sex lives. It’s not a best movie and not a bad one also. You won’t miss anything if you don’t see this.
SEXUAL LIFE is a contemporary drama about the uses and abuses of sex. The story follows the intersecting lives and loves of eight people. We move from liaison to liaison,eavesdropping on our characters’ most intimate moments and discovering the truth about our sexual lives.
LORNA (Azura Skye), a prostitute in her late teens, tells her roommate/best friend TERRI (Carla Gallo) that she has decided to quit. Her last “trick” is TODD (Tom Everett Scott), a photographer in his twenties who wants to spend one night with a prostitute in order to lose himself in a dissolute fantasy. Todd also has a girlfriend, SARAH (Elizabeth Banks), an executive assistant to an architect, JOSH (James Le Gros). After several dates Sarah and Todd have yet to consummate their relationship and Todd is not sure why.
Finally when they do make love Sarah is ambivalent; she likes and respects Todd but she is not excited by him. It is soon revealed that Sarah is having an affair with her boss Josh; a man she is terribly attracted to but despises as a rake and an egomaniac. To complicate matters we discover that Josh is married to GWEN (Anne Heche) and that he sees no inconsistency between his attraction to Sarah and the love for his wife. Gwen, however, feels Josh is slipping away and correctly assumes that Sarah is the reason. Gwen is afraid to confront Josh and instead she hopes to seduce her old BOYFRIEND (Steven Webber), a successful actor who happens to be in town visiting his sister. By having this affair Gwen hopes to have her revenge on her husband and restore her waning self- esteem. Unfortunately, it turns out her old Boyfriend is now gay, having “come out” shortly after they broke up years ago. Dejected by this news, Gwen soon finds comfort in the arms of DAVID (Eion Bailey), a sympathetic desk clerk at the hotel where she was having lunch. After the liaison, David and Gwen part, never to see or speak to each other again.
Upon returning to his post at the hotel David finds ROSALIE (Kerry Washington) waiting for him. David is in love with Rosalie but unfortunately she is about to get married to JERRY (Dule Hill), the son of a prominent politician. Consequently, David is hoping to break off his relationship with Rosalie but Rosalie is not making it easy for him, and she even wants David to attend her wedding. David refuses to attend the wedding but later he finds Rosalie outside his bedroom window and shortly thereafter the two make passionate love.
Later, Rosalie lies to Jerry that she “uninvited” David. This pleases Jerry as they both want their pending marriage to be about the future and not the past. And besides, Jerry feels enough pressure having to live up to the expectations of his overbearing father without having Rosalie’s “ex- boyfriend” around. The night before the wedding, Jerry and his friends celebrate the end of his bachelor days. At the bachelor party his friends have a surprise for him; they’ve hired a prostitute. As it turns out the prostitute is none other than Lorna, whose planned retirement seems not to have worked out as she had hoped. In the midst of their encounter Jerry breaks away and confesses to Lorna that he doesn’t want to go through with the marriage. Lorna convinces Jerry that he should run away and move on with his life, something she had hoped to do herself in the beginning but didn’t manage to accomplish. Jerry takes her advice and disappears through an open window.
At the end of the film Lorna and Terri decide to sneak into the wedding to see if Jerry goes through with it. It turns that Todd is the photographer at the wedding and he and Lorna recognize each other but the exchange is awkward for both of them. The story ends with Jerry and Rosalie getting married. Lorna is puzzled about why Jerry went through with it but concludes that you never know what the future will bring.
Comments:
Inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, SEXUAL LIFE is a dramatic meditation on sex and love, how we use one to find the other, and how, more often than not, we confuse physical intimacy with emotional honesty. The cast of characters are linked through a series of brutally honest and intimate sexual liaisons. Through this series of sexual encounters the film shines a light on the unending human desire to find a romantic connection with others but how, more often than not, these encounters lead to frustration and misunderstanding. END
Director: Ken Kwapis
The Realness
9 Ways to Use Your Business Plan
It’s not just for financing–your business plan can help you spot future success or failure, attract suppliers and employees, and more.
The process of writing a business plan helps you take a thorough, careful and comprehensive look at the most important facets of your business, including the contexts in which it operates. Just raising questions can sometimes lead to a solution, or at least ensure that if conditions change you won’t be forced to make decisions hastily. The ongoing "what if this or that happens?" inherent in the planning process keeps you alert. In other words, the planning process itself makes you a far more capable manager than you would be without it. For many, this is a more valuable result than securing funding.
In many ways, writing a business plan is an end in itself. The process will teach you a lot about your business that you are unlikely to learn by any other process. You’ll spot future trouble areas, identify opportunities, and help your organization run smoothly, simply through the act of writing a plan.
1 Evaluating a New Venture
Lisa Angowski Rogak is an entrepreneur who started several newsletters in much the same way. She devised a plan focusing on marketing strategy and cash flow projections to see if she could come up with a way to sell the newsletters while keeping her bills paid. She then prepared a sample issue to be used in a direct mail and publicity campaign. "Planning is the key to the success of your newsletter," says Rogak, whose latest venture is Williams Hill Publishing. "It’s the single most important thing you can do to ensure the success of your newsletter."
That’s the kind of encouragement that helps entrepreneurs persevere, whether they have an existing concern that’s hitting a rough spot or a startup concept that nobody else seems to believe in. Numbers can lie, of course, and nobody can create a spreadsheet that really tells the future. But evaluating financial data is to entrepreneurship what evaluating lab results is to a medical doctor. If your vital signs are good, odds are your future will be as well
But what if the odds don’t look so favorable? What if the first pass through your cash flow projection or income pro formas contains more red than a fire station paint locker? Sure, you can go back and look for an error or an overly pessimistic or conservative assumption. You can even try altering a few of the inevitable numbers that you really have no way of estimating accurately to see where the pressure points are, if nothing else.
But what if you do that, even pushing your alterations past the point of credibility, and your plan still doesn’t make sense? Well, in that case, you’ve probably done yourself the really big favor of finding out something isn’t going to work before you sink your money into it. Nobody knows exactly how often this happens, but it’s safe to say that a lot of businesses are never attempted because the plan convincingly says that they shouldn’t be.
Is that bad? Well, it may feel bad. But think how much worse you would feel if you went ahead with the venture, and things turned out as the plan forecast. Business planning is a powerful tool for evaluating the feasibility of business ventures. Use it.
It would be a shame to keep the benefits of a well-done plan to yourself. And you shouldn’t. You can use your plan to find funding. But a good plan can also help sell your products, services, and your whole company to prospects and suppliers. Furthermore, a plan is a valuable tool for communicating your visions, goals and objectives to other managers and key employees in your firm.
2 Selling with Your Plan
As a rule, your business plan is only likely to be required in the later stages of being selected as a supplier. Let the customer’s process decide when or if you’ll present your plan. As an added benefit, working your way through the early stages of vendor selection will give you a chance to rework your plan, if necessary, to stress the areas you’ve learned are more important to your potential customer.
3 Informing Suppliers and Customers
Increasingly, companies large and small have been trying to trim the number of suppliers and customers they deal with and develop deeper and stronger relationships with the ones they keep. An essential part of this is getting to know more about existing and prospective vendors and clients. So don’t be surprised if one day, when you’re trying to set up a new supplier relationship or pitch a deal to a big company, the person you’re negotiating with asks to see your business plan.
Why do suppliers care about business plans? Suppliers only want to sell to people who can pay, which is one important reason a new supplier is likely to want to see your business plan before taking a big order. Remember, if a supplier is selling to you on credit–letting you take delivery of goods and pay for them later–that supplier is, in effect, your creditor. Suppliers who sell for other than cash on delivery have the same legitimate interest in your business’s strategy and soundness as does a banker.
Say a supplier’s analysis of customer records shows it has a knack for developing long-term profitable relationships with moderate-sized companies that emphasize excellent service, price at a premium level, and provide only the best merchandise. Business plans provide all the information such a company will need to find and clone its best customers. So if a supplier asks to see your plan, be willing to share it. It could be the start of a long and mutually beneficial relationship.
Customers are likely to be concerned about how well your respective strategies fit with theirs. For instance, say your mission statement says that you intend to produce the best-in-the-world example of your product no matter what the cost. Your customer, meanwhile, is a high-volume, low-price reseller of the type of products you make. Even if your offering fits the customer’s need this time, odds are good that the relationship won’t work out over the long haul. If, on the other hand, a look at your business plan reveals that your companies share the same kind of strategies and have similar objectives in type if not scope, it’s an encouraging sign.
4 Managing With Your Plan
The spread of the open-book management theory means a lot more employees are seeing their companies’ business plans than ever before. When employees get the key information managers are using to make decisions, they understand management better and make better decisions themselves, and efficiency and profitability often increase as a result.
Many companies hold annual meetings at which they present and discuss an edited version of their business plan to all employees. Others provide new hires with their business plan-type information as part of their indoctrination in company culture. Both are effective approaches. You can also use bulletin boards or company newsletters to publish smaller sections of your plan, such as your mission statement or some details of financial objectives and how you’re progressing.
One drawback to using a plan to help inform and manage your employees is that many won’t understand it. Some firms provide employees with rudimentary training in matters like how to read a financial report before they hand out the company’s plans. Often this training is done by the CEO and can take considerable time. But don’t be afraid to share details of your business plan with employees. They may turn out to understand it better than you.
5 Monitoring Your Business’s Performance
Using a business plan to monitor your performance has many benefits. If your cash flow is running much shorter than projected at the moment, even though you’re not currently in trouble, that information may help you to spot disaster before it occurs. By comparing plan projections with actual results, you gain a deeper understanding of your business’s pressure points or the components of your operation that have the most effect on results.
* Spotting trouble early. A teenager taking driver’s education is told to look through the rear window of the car in front to try to see the brake lights on the vehicle ahead of that one. The idea is that if the novice driver waits until the car immediately ahead slams on the brakes, it may be too late to stop. Looking forward, past the immediate future, helps traffic move more smoothly and averts countless accidents.
The same principle applies in business planning. You don’t have to be a wizard to get some solid hints about the future beyond tomorrow, especially when it comes to the operations of your own business. You can look at virtually any page of your business plan and find an important concept or number describing some expected future event that, if it turns out to be diverging from reality, may hint at future trouble.
Say your profit margins are shrinking slowly but steadily and seemingly irreversibly. If you can see that within a few months your declining margins will push your break-even point too high to live with, you can take action now to fix the problem. You may need to add a new, higher-margin product; get rid of an old one; or begin marketing to a more profitable clientele. All these moves, and many more you could take, have a good chance of working if your careful comparison of plan projections with actual results warns you of impending danger. Wait until the last minute, and you could be peeling yourself off the windshield.
* Understanding pressure points. Not all tips that come from comparing plans with results have to do with avoiding danger. Some help you identify profit opportunities. Others may show how seemingly minor tweaks can produce outsized improvements in sales or profitability. For example, the plan for a one-person professional service business indicated that rising sales were not, in general, accompanied by rising costs. Fixed items such as office rent and insurance stayed the same, and even semivariable costs such as phone bills went up only slightly. The bulk of any extra business went straight to the bottom line, showing up as profit improvement. But one cost that didn’t seem especially variable went up sharply as business volume climbed. That was the number of transactions.
Ordinarily this would be a given and not necessarily a matter of grave concern. A large enterprise could absorb these costs, but for this single professional, however, added paperwork came at a very high cost–her own time. As a part of checking her plan against results, she noticed this unexpected increase in transactions and calculated that she spent around an hour on paperwork for each transaction no matter how large or small. She realized that one of the most important pressure points in her business was related to the size of a transaction. By refusing small engagements and seeking clients who could offer big jobs, she would reduce the amount of time spent on otherwise unproductive paperwork and increase the time she could spend completing client requirements.
Ultimately, she was able to trim what had been 100 annual transactions down to 75, while increasing the amount of her dollar revenue. The result was a free 25 hours to spend working on more business or just vacationing. If you can see and relieve a pressure point like that, you can really keep your business from boiling over.
There are few things to equal the sensation of filling in all the numbers on a cash flow projection, hitting the recalculate button, and scrolling to the bottom of your spreadsheet to see what the future holds. If the news is good and you see a steady string of positive cash balances across the bottom row, you know that, assuming your data is good and your assumptions reasonable, your business has a good chance of making it.
6 Do the Numbers Add Up?
Many businesses fail because of events that are impossible to foresee. If you’d begun a car dealership specializing in yacht-sized gas guzzlers right before the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s, you would be in the same position as a driver heading at 100 miles per hour into a brick wall–through no fault of your own. The same might go for a software startup that comes out with a new program just before Microsoft unveils a top-secret, long-term development effort to create something that does the same job for a lot less money.
It’s probably not a bad idea, as part of your business planning process, to try to include some information in your business plan about the activities or intentions of the potential embargos and Microsofts. If nothing else, crafting a scenario in which the unthinkably awful occurs may help you to deal with it if it does. But some things are just wild cards and can’t be predicted. For these you just have to trust the luck of the draw.
So what numbers have to add up? Certainly you have to be selling your products and services at a profit that will let you sustain the business long term. You’ll also have to have a financial structure, including payables and receivables systems and financing, that will keep you from running out of cash even once. If you have investors who want to sell the company someday, you may need a plan with a big number in the field for shareholders’ equity on the projected balance sheet.
When you’re asking yourself whether the numbers add up, keep the needs of your business and your business partners, if you have any, in mind. Even if it looks like it’ll take an air strike to keep your business from getting started, you don’t want to do it if the numbers say that long-term it’s headed nowhere.
7 Attracting Good People
It takes money to make money, sure, but it also takes people to make a company, that is, unless you’re a one-person company. Sometimes even then a plan can be an important part of your effort to attract the best partners, employees, suppliers and customers to you.
* Prospective partners. Partners are like any other investors, and it would be a rare one who would come on board without some kind of plan. Partners want to know your basic business concept, the market and your strategy for attacking it; who else is on your team; what your financial performance, strengths and needs are; and what’s in it for them. Luckily, these are exactly the same questions a business plan is designed to address, so you’re likely to please even a demanding prospective partner by simply showing him or her a well-prepared plan. The one difference is a plan probably won’t contain the details of a partnership agreement. And you’ll need one of these to spell out the conditions of your partnership, no matter how well you and your prospective partner know, understand and trust one another.
* Prospective employees. Although employees may not be making cash contributions to your business, they’re making an investment of something equally important–their own irreplaceable time. The kinds of employees you probably want are careful, thorough, good at assessing problems and risks, and unwilling to leap into hazardous waters. As it happens, these are just the kind of people who are going to want to see a written plan of your business before they come on board.
Now, it’s not going to be necessary, if you’re running a restaurant, to show your full business plan to every waitperson or assistant dishwasher who fills out a job application. It’s the most desirable employees–the talented technologists, the well-connected salespeople, the inspired creative types, and the grizzled, seen-it-all managers–who are most likely to feel they can and should demand to see details of your plan before they cast their lot with you.
So even if you don’t show your plan to more than a few prospective employees, when you need it, you may really need it bad. Make sure you’re ready when a promising but inquisitive job candidate shows up at your doorstep. Another thing, as we’ve pointed out, not all businesses have plans. So by having one, you’ll be making yourself a more desirable employer.
8 Plan for the Possibility of Failure
There’s no point in planning for failure, but there is a point in writing a business plan that’s willing to admit the possibility of failure. It’s only natural to create a plan that will describe a roaring success, but you have to be careful not to present an overly optimistic view, especially of such elements as sales, costs and profit margins.
It’s tempting to noodle around with the numbers until you come up with the desired result. And if you only make small changes here and there, it may seem all right. What difference does it make? Say you increase your projected market share by 1 percent here, reduce expected costs by 2 percent there, and lower your estimate of required startup capital by a few percentage points as well.
A number of similarly small changes, in sum, can make a big difference in the bottom line of your plan and turn what otherwise looks like a loser into a projected winner. But don’t be seduced. You may be asking for investments from friends and family you care about as well as putting your own life savings into the enterprise. Arm’s-length investors’ feelings may not be so important, but if you mislead them in your plan, you may open yourself up to accusation of misrepresentation.
Looking at things in your plan through rose-colored glasses may even doom your business to failure if it causes you to seek insufficient startup capital, underprice your product or service or expect unrealistically rapid growth. Temper your enthusiasm. If your plan indicates that the business idea isn’t sound, by all means look for errors. But don’t make the mistake of skewing your plan to fit an idea that isn’t sound.
9 Update Your Plan
Writing a business plan is one of those skills that improves with practice. The first one or two times you create one, you may feel a little unsure of yourself and even less certain that what you’re doing has value.
If you go on to start several ventures during your career, you’ll naturally write several business plans, and each one will be better than the last. It’s likely as well that with better planning skills will come improved business skills, boosting the odds that each successive company you start will do better than the one before.
But there’s no reason that only serial entrepreneurs should get the benefit of regular business planning sessions. If you start just one company or even if you never start a company at all, you can and should be constantly honing your business planning skills by updating and rewriting your business plan.
Updating a plan is normally easier than starting from scratch. Instead of trying to figure out what your basic business concept is, you only have to decide whether it’s changing. Instead of wondering where you’ll find the current market research you need, you just have to go back to the original source for updated figures. You’ll usually be able to reuse the financial formulas, spreadsheets, management biographies and other more or less evergreen contents of your plan.
It’s important, however, that a plan update not be a mechanical task, limited to plugging in the most recent sales figures. Take the time to challenge some of the core assumptions of your prior plan to see if they still hold up. Have profit margins been higher than you expected? Then start planning how to make the most of any extra cash you generate. Is your new retail store unit not performing as well as others or you expected? Then now’s the time to figure out why. Has competition for your new product arisen sooner than you guessed? Take a look at other products with an eye to seeing if they are also more vulnerable than you think.
In large corporations with strict planning routines requiring annual, semiannual and quarterly plans and plan updates, managers spend at least part of their time working on or thinking about a new plan or plan update. All that information flowing up to senior managers in the form of plans helps keep the brass informed. It helps those in the trenches, too. It’s a fact that everybody is judged by past performance. And the best way to ensure that a year from now you’ll be looking back on your performance with satisfaction and pride is to plan now and often.
Here are eight reasons to think about updating your plan. If one applies to you, it’s time for an update.
1. A new financial period is about to begin. You may update your plan annually, quarterly or even monthly if your industry is fast changing.
2. You need financing, or additional financing. Lenders and other financiers need an updated plan to make financing decisions.
3. Significant markets change. Shifting client tastes, consolidation trends among customers and altered regulatory climates can trigger a need for plan updates.
4. New or stronger competitors are looking to your customers for their growth.
5. Your firm develops or is about to develop a new product, technology, service or skill. If your business has changed a lot since you wrote your plan, it’s time for an update.
6. You have had a change in management. New managers should get fresh information.
7. Your company has crossed a threshold, such as moving out of your home office, reaching $1 million in sales or employing 100 people.
8. Your old plan doesn’t seem to reflect reality anymore. Maybe you did a poor job last time; maybe things have just changed faster than you expected. But if your plan seems irrelevant, redo it.
By David H. Bangs Jr., September 27, 2005
5 Common Sales Mistakes
The things you do–and don’t do–could keep you from closing sales. Watch out for these 5 common mistakes, and learn how to avoid them.
Everyone makes mistakes. Usually, these mistakes can be easily rectified by small changes in work habits, time management and–most important of all–attitude. The biggest mistake people make when selling is lack of enthusiasm. Customers are drawn to passionate people–if you’re not passionate about what you’re selling, even the best skills will go to waste.
Luckily, there’s always room for improvement. Though we all make mistakes, we have the potential for improvement every day. Here are five common sales mistakes to watch out for:
1. Not making enough calls: Selling is a numbers game. A great attitude certainly opens up opportunities, but you also have to call as many people as possible. It’s simple math–the more people you call, the higher the number of positive responses you’ll get. A higher activity level increases your ability to connect with customers.
2. Not connecting with the right decision-makers: You won’t close sales by calling on people who are not qualified to make the deal. If a prospect has no authority to make a decision, you have to ask tough questions like, "Is there anybody besides yourself who is involved in this decision that I should speak with?" Don’t be afraid to call from the top down; the big guns just might take your call and direct you to the person who handles your type of product or service.
3. Not listening: Salespeople make this mistake many times–they’re so busy thinking about what they’re going to say next, they forget to listen to what the prospect is telling them. In my November column, I talked about asking smart questions. It’s not only asking questions that counts–it’s also getting prospects to expand on their answers and learning from what they say. Don’t get so excited about what you’re selling that you talk too much and stop listening.
4. Time mismanagement: Not closing enough deals is a time-management issue. It’s important to keep your goals in sight, to be able to see the big picture, and to know where you are in every customer’s sales cycle. It helps to have a visual reminder in front of you, perhaps a goal board or a diagram showing you what you need to do every day and how much time should be allotted to each activity. This will help you know when you should be closing. It’s better to ask for the order early than not to ask at all.
5. Not recovering quickly enough: Everyone experiences rejections and setbacks. Deals that have been in the works for months or even years fall through. A sale that seems like a sure thing turns out to be dead in the water. If you take this rejection personally, it will diminish your enthusiasm and hinder you from moving on to the next sale. The most successful salespeople are able to shake off their disappointment and keep right on going. The reason most salespeople let rejection get to them goes back to mistake No. 1: They don’t have enough activity to fall back on or other prospects to call. It’s not failing or falling that’s the problem–it’s the inability to get back up again. The secret to dealing with setbacks is finding the positive after a negative encounter. Let that "No" motivate you to figure out a different approach so you’ll get a "Yes."
By Barry Farber, December 2005
It’s Who You Know
If you really know how to work your connections, a successful startup is less than 6 degrees away.
The saying goes that every person on earth is separated from every other person by only six degrees. That means your friend’s brother’s nephew’s wife could know Michael Dell, Donald Trump or Martha Stewart. You could conceivably be only a few networking steps away from someone who could help you get your business off the ground–be it an industry contact, a top lawyer or a state government official. You’ve heard all about the importance of networking, but what about harvesting your own network to uncover someone who just might be able to get you in touch with a stellar business contact? That’s six-degree networking.
Even if you don’t think you know someone who can help, you’d be surprised. What about an old schoolmate you send holiday cards to? Who might she know? Or could your softball teammate have a brother in the same industry in which you hope to hang your shingle?
Perhaps the biggest benefit of using the "six degrees of separation" method is that you have an "in" with this new person. Since your friend of a friend is opening the door, you’re not exactly a stranger. "The whole key to six degrees is you’re coming with a reference; you’re not cold calling," says Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time and CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, a marketing and sales consulting and training firm in Los Angeles. "You’re coming with a warm lead, so to speak."
A Friend of a Friend
A warm lead is exactly how Paul Taylor found someone who could help him get his specialty clothing business off the ground. Taylor, 36, had been working as an arborist and found that his work clothing wasn’t as practical for tending trees as he would’ve liked. He wanted to combine the durability of a canvas work pant with the agility and great fit of a rock-climbing pant–so in 1997, he launched Arborwear LLC from his parents’ Cleveland-area home.
Like any entrepreneur excited about a new idea, Taylor was talking about the venture one day with a friend who was also an arborist. This friend happened to have a friend whose sister worked in a New York City fashion enterprise. Taylor called that friend of a friend, who then introduced Taylor to his fashion-industry sister. "I called her, and I ran the whole idea by her. She didn’t know anything about chain saws or tree work or arborists, but she said, ‘The key to it is that you have a niche, and that’s really the only place you can ever hope to get started,’" recalls Taylor. "I wound up going to New York City and meeting [this contact]. She loaned me a cell phone and gave me this list of people to see about fabric."
Taylor’s fashion-industry contact was so helpful and encouraging, in fact, that he credits her with helping him launch his business. "She gave me confidence that this was a good idea–and she gave me a push in the right direction," he says.
Sincerity is the key to making the six-degree method of networking work for you, according to experts. If you go to people thinking only about what’s in it for you, you’ll turn off a lot of potential contacts. "As you approach these individuals, be sure you’ve clearly defined what you can do for them," says Ferrazzi. "Generosity is the [key] to your success with relationships. Defining what currency you have–what you can do for others-is crucial."
If you can bring something to the table, do it. If you can’t, as was the case with Taylor and the fashion-industry contact, display complete humility, and be genuine in your communication with contacts. Says Taylor, "The thing that helped me most was that I never lied, [though] I always tried to sound like I knew what I was talking about. I really found that people bent over backward to help me."
To get started, plumb your expertise, and look for things to offer. Taylor, for instance, was able to barter his tree-removal services with a lawyer he met through another friend–he got legal services to help set up his business, and the lawyer got a problem tree removed from his property. Cultivating contacts has paid off for Taylor, whose $1.5-million business now sells its Arborwear line of specialty climbing and outdoor-work clothing online. The company’s line of pants, shirts, T-shirts, belts and hats is also sold through retailers such as REI nationwide.
Coincidental Meeting
The seeds of your six-degree network can grow in the most unlikely places. You might sit next to someone on an airplane, or be chatting with someone as you wait for an elevator, when business kismet strikes–so be sure to bring your game face with you wherever you go. "Every interaction with anybody counts because it reflects on your brand," says Alaina G. Levine, president of Quantum Success Solutions, a Tucson, Arizona, company that provides expertise on topics such as PR, personal branding and marketing.
Kaz Kihara always had his business idea in the back of his head. While working for a CPA firm in the late 1990s, he was attending night school and started chatting with one of his classmates. The two struck up a friendly rapport, and Kihara learned his classmate was the chief information officer for an $80-million company in the medical services industry. In 1999, when Kihara decided to start Premier Data Technology Inc., a Torrance, California, provider of IT services to small and midsize companies, this high-level executive hooked him up with a former colleague–who became one of Kihara’s first and largest clients.
Keeping his six-degree network of contacts in mind at all times, Kihara regularly calls his contacts socially–not always with a specific business goal in mind, but to keep those lines of communication open. "While I’m driving in my car, I call my clients, friends, ex-employees, just to see how everything’s going," says Kihara, 35.
And just like the experts suggest, he approaches contacts with ways of helping their businesses. Says Kihara, "I try not to do it too aggressively–I usually try to know the person or help that person in their business or personally. How can I help them so that they might want to help me out?"
There’s one definite no-no of the six-degree system: Don’t be too pushy or aggressive when pursuing your leads. And don’t rush a connection too quickly, says Steve Harper, author of The Ripple Effect: Maximizing the Power of Relationships for Your Life and Business. "If person A can get you aligned with person B, but you don’t have enough rapport built up with person A, you have a tendency to really burn a bridge," he says. "You [can] make people feel used and seedy in the process [by] leapfrogging them. It’s really important to let everybody know that they’re individually important in the process–and give the proper credit to person A for opening that door of opportunity." You can do that by following up with a thank you, he notes.
Ever appreciative of his business relationships, Kihara’s company grew to a second location in Las Vegas in May thanks to six-degree networking. He is currently establishing and building relationships in Asia with hopes of bringing his services to the Japanese market, which will likely push sales past the 2005 projections of more than $2.4 million.
Proactive Network
Consider the biblical adage "seek, and ye shall find" when it comes to six-degree networking. As Ferrazzi notes, you have to be proactive when employing this approach during startup. First, you must decide exactly what type of startup help you need: Are you looking for someone to help finance your business? A mentor to teach you about your industry? A source of great employees? "Once you identify what you want to achieve, you can specifically target the individuals you need to associate with to achieve [your] goals," says Ferrazzi. "Some are going to be prospective clients, community leaders, influencers, etc."
That kind of preparation is precisely what helped Cindy Page build her Blockhead Bath line of bath and body products. When she launched her company in 2002, she needed help determining her company name in addition to general information about the bath and body industry. A former assistant buyer for Filene’s, Page knew a vendor who referred her to a friend who worked in marketing for a large bath and body manufacturer–and she was able to glean a lot of industry knowledge from that contact. "When I talked to that person, I really made sure I had a goal in mind and the kinds of questions I wanted to ask [all prepared]," says Page, 35. "I made sure I did my homework."
Do your homework, and don’t be afraid to ask politely for what you need. But, Ferrazzi cautions: "You’ve got to make sure the intimacy you have with them is commensurate with the request." There’s a fine line between being proactive and being aggressive, but experts agree that many people are willing to help if you approach them in a positive, "what can I do for you" kind of way.
It’s really just being brave enough to open your mouth about your business. Says Page, "I tapped into every friend, every trusted colleague, every business associate." A friend of a former co-worker, for instance, was organizing a Ronald McDonald House fund-raising event; thanks to that connection, the organizer tapped Blockhead Bath to donate to the silent auction-a social coup and a brand boost. Page was also invited to participate in a sales event at an arts fair in Chicago when a friend of hers, who went to college with the person who ran the fair, put in a good word. The real-life implication of such relationships is clear: Page has seen her company’s 2005 sales approach $500,000, and her company currently sells its products online at www.blockheadbath.com and at the Amazon.com Beauty store. Says Page, "People like to do business with people they know, and they like to help people they know-or kind of know."
Six Degrees of Success
It would seem that using your six-degree network of contacts is not only smart for business, it’s essential. "It’s amazing to think that we are connected to every other person on the planet by only six steps, which means there are unlimited business opportunities out there," says Levine.
And if you’ve learned anything, it’s that this isn’t just an easy, one-time gig. It’s important to keep your six-degree network thriving as you grow your business. "It’s a never-ending process. It isn’t just going to events and collecting business cards–it’s about finding people you can build something with and cultivate a relationship [with]," says Harper. "It’s a lot of hard work to build that trust and rapport, but you’ll be rewarded handsomely because you’re willing to put the time and effort into it." Cultivating your six-degree network is a deliberate and valuable act, so tend to it as you would a garden, and watch the business opportunities grow.
6 Ways to Start 6-degree Networking Right Now
Ready to build and cultivate your own connections? These six action steps will help you get your six-degree network up and running:
* 1. Make a list of the 250 people most important to you. Keith Ferrazzi, CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, a marketing and sales consulting and training firm in Los Angeles, suggests you consider business leaders, community leaders, friends and family–basically anyone who can help you and to whom you might have something to offer. Start cultivating those relationships.
* 2. Become a master at relationships. It’s not just about picking up the phone; it’s about creating long-term connections and developing a real rapport. Ferrazzi says to remember things like your contacts’ birthdays and favorite hobbies.
* 3. Join business and social groups. Start attending meetings, luncheons, mixers, whatever–anything that will build your contact list. "As you grow [your] business, your circle–your network- should grow as well," says Zoe Alexander, networking expert and founder of Divas Who Dine LLC, a women’s business networking group in New York City.
* 4. Assess your attributes. Clearly define what you can bring to the table for all your new contacts. The more you bring to the party, the more willing people will be to help you, Alexander points out.
* 5. Engage in conversations. No matter where you are, start talking with your seatmate or line buddy. Ask questions about their business or industry and talk a bit about yours, Levine suggests. You’ll get ideas, inspiration and, if you’re lucky, a really good six-degree contact.
* 6. Bone up on current events. "Leaders are readers," says Steve Harper, author of The Ripple Effect: Maximizing the Power of Relationships for Your Life and Business. To be relevant to your desired contacts, you’ve got to stay abreast of news, happenings and the like. Doing so will also give you good conversation-starters for any networking situation.
By Nichole L. Torres, December 2005
Top 10 Business Plan Mistakes
When it comes to creating a business plan that attracts investors, these tips will help you get it right the first time.
Every business should have a business plan. Unfortunately, despite the fact that many of the underlying businesses are viable, the vast majority of plans are hardly worth the paper they’re printed on. Most "bad" business plans share one or more of the following problems:
1. The plan is poorly written. Spelling, punctuation, grammar and style are all important when it comes to getting your business plan down on paper. Although investors don’t expect to be investing in a company run by English majors, they are looking for clues about the underlying business and its leaders when they’re perusing a plan. When they see one with spelling, punctuation and grammar errors, they immediately wonder what else is wrong with the business. But since there’s no shortage of people looking for capital, they don’t wonder for long–they just move on to the next plan.
Before you show your plan to a single investor or banker, go through every line of the plan with a fine-tooth comb. Run your spell check–which should catch spelling and punctuation errors, and have someone you know with strong "English teacher" skills review it for grammar problems.
Style is subtler, but it’s equally important. Different entrepreneurs write in different styles. If your style is "confident," "crisp," "clean," "authoritative" or "formal," you’ll rarely have problems. If, however, your style is "arrogant," "sloppy," "folksy," "turgid" or "smarmy," you may turn off potential investors, although it’s a fact that different styles appeal to different investors. No matter what style you choose for your business plan, be sure it’s consistent throughout the plan, and that it fits your intended audience and your business. For instance, I once met a conservative Midwest banker who funded an Indian-Japanese fusion restaurant partly because the plan was–like the restaurant concept–upbeat, trendy and unconventional.
2. The plan presentation is sloppy. Once your writing’s perfect, the presentation has to match. Nothing peeves investors more than inconsistent margins, missing page numbers, charts without labels or with incorrect units, tables without headings, technical terminology without definitions or a missing table of contents. Have someone else proofread your plan before you show it to an investor, banker or venture capitalist. Remember that while you’ll undoubtedly spend months working on your plan, most investors won’t give it more than 10 minutes before they make an initial decision about it. So if they start paging through your plan and can’t find the section on "Management," they may decide to move on to the next, more organized plan in the stack.
3. The plan is incomplete. Every business has customers, products and services, operations, marketing and sales, a management team, and competitors. At an absolute minimum, your plan must cover all these areas. A complete plan should also include a discussion of the industry, particularly industry trends, such as if the market is growing or shrinking. Finally, your plan should include detailed financial projections–monthly cash flow and income statements, as well as annual balance sheets–going out at least three years.
4. The plan is too vague. A business plan is not a novel, a poem or a cryptogram. If a reasonably intelligent person with a high school education can’t understand your plan, then you need to rewrite it. If you’re trying to keep the information vague because your business involves highly confidential material, processes or technologies, then show people your executive summary first (which should never contain any proprietary information). Then, if they’re interested in learning more about the business, have them sign noncompete and nondisclosure agreements before showing them the entire plan. [Be forewarned, however: Many venture capitalists and investors will not sign these agreements since they want to minimize their legal fees and have no interest in competing with you in any case.]
5. The plan is too detailed. Do not get bogged down in technical details! This is especially common with technology-based startups. Keep the technical details to a minimum in the main plan–if you want to include them, do so elsewhere, say, in an appendix. One way to do this is to break your plan into three parts: a two- to three-page executive summary, a 10- to 20-page business plan and an appendix that includes as many pages as needed to make it clear that you know what you’re doing. This way, anyone reading the plan can get the amount of detail he or she wants.
6. The plan makes unfounded or unrealistic assumptions. By their very nature, business plans are full of assumptions. The most important assumption, of course, is that your business will succeed! The best business plans highlight critical assumptions and provide some sort of rationalization for them. The worst business plans bury assumptions throughout the plan so no one can tell where the assumptions end and the facts begin. Market size, acceptable pricing, customer purchasing behavior, time to commercialization–these all involve assumptions. Wherever possible, make sure you check your assumptions against benchmarks from the same industry, a similar industry or some other acceptable standard. Tie your assumptions to facts.
A simple example of this would be the real estate section of your plan. Every company eventually needs some sort of real estate, whether it’s office space, industrial space or retail space. You should research the locations and costs for real estate in your area, and make a careful estimate of how much space you’ll actually need before presenting your plan to any investors or lenders.
7. The plan includes inadequate research. Just as it’s important to tie your assumptions to facts, it’s equally important to make sure your facts are, well, facts. Learn everything you can about your business and your industry–customer purchasing habits, motivations and fears; competitor positioning, size and market share; and overall market trends. You don’t want to get bogged down by the facts, but you should have some numbers, charts and statistics to back up any assumptions or projections you make. Well-prepared investors will check your numbers against industry data or third party studies–if your numbers don’t jibe with their numbers, your plan probably won’t get funded.
8. You claim there’s no risk involved in your new venture. Any sensible investor understands there’s really no such thing as a "no risk" business. There are always risks. You must understand them before presenting your plan to investors or lenders. Since a business plan is more of a marketing tool than anything else, I’d recommend minimizing the discussion of risks in your plan. If you do mention any risks, be sure to emphasize how you’ll minimize or mitigate them. And be well prepared for questions about risks in later discussions with investors.
9. You claim you have no competition. It’s absolutely amazing how many potential business owners include this statement in their business plans: "We have no competition."
If that’s what you think, you couldn’t be further from the truth. Every successful business has competitors, both direct and indirect. You should plan for stiff competition from the beginning. If you can’t find any direct competitors today, try to imagine how the marketplace might look once you’re successful. Identify ways you can compete, and accentuate your competitive advantages in the business plan.
10. The business plan is really no plan at all. A good business plan presents an overview of the business–now, in the short term, and in the long term. However, it doesn’t just describe what the business looks like at each of those stages; it also describes how you’ll get from one stage to the next. In other words, the plan provides a "roadmap" for the business, a roadmap that should be as specific as possible. It should contain definite milestones–major targets that have real meaning for your business. For instance, reasonable milestones might be "signing the 100th client" or "producing 10,000 units of product." The business plan should also outline all the major steps you need to complete to reach each milestone.
Smoothing Out the Rough Spots
Once you know what mistakes not to make, there are still a few steps you need to take to make your business plan "bulletproof." Be sure you . . .
* Think it through. You might have a great idea, but have you carefully mapped out all the steps you’ll need to take to make the business a reality? Think about building your management team, hiring salespeople, setting up operations, getting your first customer, protecting yourself from lawsuits, outmaneuvering your competition, and so on. Think about cash flow and what measures you can take to minimize your expenses and maximize your revenue.
* Do your research. Investigate everything you can about your proposed business before you start writing your business plan–and long before you start the business. You’ll also need to continue your research while you write the business plan, since inevitably, things will change as you uncover critical information. And while you’re researching, be sure to consult multiple sources since many times the experts will disagree.
* Research your potential customers and competitors. Is your product or service something people really want or need, or is it just "cool"? Study your market. Is it growing or shrinking? Could some sort of disruptive technology or regulatory change alter the market in fundamental ways? Why do you think people will buy your product or service? If you don’t have any customers or clients yet, you’ll need to convince investors that you have something people really want or need, and more important, that they’ll buy it at the price you expect.
* Get feedback. Obtain as much feedback as you can from trusted friends, colleagues, nonprofit organizations, and potential investors or lenders. You’ll quickly find that almost everyone thinks they’re an expert and they all could do a better job than you. This may be annoying, but it’s just part of the feedback process. You’ll know when you’re done when you’ve heard the same questions and criticisms again and again and have a good answer to almost everything anyone can throw at you.
* Hire professional help. Find a professional you trust to help guide you through the entire process, fill in knowledge gaps (for instance, if you know marketing but not finance, you should hire a finance expert), provide additional, unbiased feedback, and package your plan in an attractive, professional format.
Writing a business plan is hard work–many people spend a year or more writing their plan. In the early, drafting stages, business plan software can be very helpful. But the hard part is developing a coherent picture of the business that makes sense, is appealing to others and provides a reasonable road map for the future. Your products, services, business model, customers, marketing and sales plan, internal operations, management team and financial projections must all tie together seamlessly. If they don’t, you may not ever get your business off the ground.
By Andrew Clarke, November 28, 2005
Determine Your Leadership Style
As an entrepreneur, you are the leader of your company. And to become a great leader, you’ll have to look within yourself. Start by examining the different types of leadership styles.
An important point of this introduction to leadership styles is that effective leaders can be true to their own nature and not have to assume radically different personae when in a leadership position. A person’s mannerisms and personality typically don’t have to change when assuming a leadership role. This doesn’t mean that great leaders don’t make some changes in their leadership presence and style, especially when changes are needed. These changes occur primarily after self-study, evaluation sessions with superiors or subordinates, or on-the-job experience. Develop your own leadership style, therefore, based upon your own set of beliefs and personality traits, as well as what you learn from studying leadership.
Theories of Leadership
There are scores of leadership theories, models and studies available for you to examine, if you choose. Although developed primarily in the 20th century by scholars, leadership ideas have existed at least since A.D. 100. Thanks to these great men and women, the curious have been able to analyze leaders on the basis of personality, situations, interaction with others, psychology, politics, humanism and perception, to name a few factors. In addition to the theories, there are countless leadership surveys, tests and aptitude indicators that are available to determine a leader’s style and interests.
What can you do when faced with this complexity of leadership information? Most leaders don’t study the many theories of leadership in detail. Some general knowledge is helpful, however, to know what the relevant major issues are so that you can use that knowledge in your specific situation. These issues will be explained in this article. Then you can choose to study in more detail those areas that are of most interest to you.
Leadership Orientations
To help prepare you for your leadership role, we’ll briefly examine five leadership orientations. Since every leader has a distinct style made up of combinations of these orientations, it’s impossible to accurately predict your style without a thorough analysis. As with most leaders, you’ll tend to use different styles when faced with different situations. Each orientation presents two extremes between which leaders have to determine the right balance for themselves, based upon their personality and specific leadership challenges. For example, there are effective leaders who have high orientation scores in both relationship and task; others score high in relationship and low in task. By understanding the following five leadership orientations, you’ll be better able to understand the framework within which most leaders operate.
* Democracy or autocracy
* Participation or direction
* Relationship or task
* Consideration or initiation
* Action or inaction
Democracy or Autocracy Orientation
These two orientations are the first classification because they encompass attributes of the other four orientations. It makes sense that leaders tend to lean naturally toward one or the other because followers will do either one of two things. They will do what they’re asked to do, thus requiring the supervision of a teaching and facilitating type of democratic leader, or they’ll do what they’re made to do, which requires a more punishing and coercing autocrat.
There’s no conclusive proof as to which type of orientation is more effective at getting bottom-line results. One may be more effective in different organizations or situations than the other. A person’s style of leadership, however, does affect employee job satisfaction, although the effects vary among employees. A higher degree of satisfaction in an organization will encourage loyalty, teamwork and sharing of the leader’s goals; each of these can lead to higher levels of personal and organizational productivity.
Democratic leaders focus on their followers because they feel the welfare of their team is of great importance. They tend to be easily approachable, relationship-oriented and considerate of others’ feelings. They prefer to lead their teammates by collaboration and empowerment. They’re convinced that tasks will be better accomplished if they consider their subordinates’ needs. These teammates tend to have high job satisfaction.
Autocrats primarily are concerned with tasks for which they’re responsible. They believe the key is to focus less on subordinates and their needs and more on the work-related issues. In doing so, they use their position to prescribe solutions and direct others to comply. This type of leader usually has more subordinates with low levels of job satisfaction than does the democratic leader.
Participation or Direction Orientation
Leadership can also be analyzed in terms of how much contribution the leader obtains from subordinates before solving a problem or making a decision. As previously discussed, most leaders are situational and they use both styles on different occasions.
A popular leadership trend since the 1980s has been to encourage employee participation in problem solving and decision making. By obtaining and considering the suggestions of subordinates, a leader has access to more data, experience and opinions.
Participation can occur when the leader either delegates total responsibility for tasks or allows subordinates to participate in problem-solving and decision-making processes. A more restrictive form of participation is used when a leader discusses the task with subordinates but ultimately makes the decision as to what will be done. By using a participative style of leadership, a leader doesn’t relinquish the responsibility to get the job done, but gives subordinates the authority to help arrive at the right decision to get the job done correctly. Participation is particularly effective in less structured or rapidly changing work environments.
Leaders who have a direction orientation decide what needs to be done and communicate this to subordinates. They may or may not explain why they chose a course of action and they may use persuasion techniques to bolster their directives. These leaders autocratically assume that, since they know the right answer, seeking input from subordinates is unnecessary. They may rationalize the use of a directive style by citing organizational problems, such as low employee educational levels and competence, even though this may not be applicable. The degree to which a leader may be directive depends upon a number of factors.
For example, leaders tend to be more directive when there’s high uncertainty in the situation, little time is available, a short-term increase in productivity is needed, or they exercise a high degree of positional or organizational power. Directive leadership tends to be used more than participative leadership in slow-changing situations or where less employee input is needed.
Relationship or Task Orientation
The best leaders concern themselves both with people relationships and the tasks for which they are responsible because tasks usually are accomplished more effectively when human factors are considered. The degree of integration of task and relationship varies considerably with each leader; the exact mix partly depends upon task urgency, subordinates’ work performance and ability, organizational climate, and the leader’s natural inclination toward one orientation or the other.
Leaders who set relationships as a priority recognize the synergistic effects of attending to the human side of work. This doesn’t mean they’re less concerned with accomplishing tasks but that they know the best way to achieve high-quality success is to make sure they consider subordinates’ and team members’ needs. They do this by maintaining warm, close and friendly relationships with their followers and co-workers and by openly trusting and supporting them.
A complete task orientation means that a leader has foremost in mind the job that must get done. Without seeking input from subordinates, the leaders structure the work, define the goals, allocate resources, and focus on achieving production quotas or delivery of services. People are of concern, but only because they’re necessary to get the work done. This leader uses an inflexible, no-nonsense approach with subordinates.
Consideration or Initiation Orientation
Considerate leaders do what any considerate person would do, but in the context of leadership. Since they concern themselves with subordinates’ interests and well-being, they’re sensitive toward their feelings, needs and goals. Before making decisions, they seek suggestions from subordinates and consider what effects these decisions will have on the team. By openly praising and privately correcting subordinates, they establish a working environment in which people trust, respect and follow them.
Initiation refers to a leader’s ability to start activities and organize work. Strong initiators prefer not to let the group completely structure its work or make all of the on-the-job decisions. They prefer not only to determine what must be done but also who does it and how it is to be done. Consequently, they focus on tasks: most of their daily initiatives occur simply to facilitate achievement of work-related goals. Since there can be overlap in these two orientations, a leader could be both highly considerate and initiating and still be effective.
Action or Inaction Orientation
Action-oriented leaders involve themselves with fulfilling work responsibilities. They take charge of these responsibilities by using the leadership and management principles discussed in Leadership Made Easy and by realizing that subordinates perform better when their leaders are aware of work-related issues, interested in seeing goals achieved, and actively monitoring performance.
Active leaders establish and communicate their subordinates’ authority, responsibilities and work parameters. Having this knowledge of what is expected of them and the encouragement to perform well, employees will gain the autonomy that most of them crave. There are distinctions between action and inaction. By asking a subordinate to complete a task, for example, the leader is actively delegating an assignment, not avoiding taking action.
Leaders who are inactive are much less engaged in their work than active leaders. On a spectrum of reasons for such inactivity, you will find leaders who consciously shirk their responsibilities and those who do not realize they’re less active than they need to be. Inactive leaders tend to react to a daily work challenge after someone tells them about it, whereas the active leader proactively seeks out impending obstacles. In addition to the risk that inactive leaders pose to their organization’s ability to achieve goals, the leaders themselves risk being perceived as irrelevant or ineffective by their subordinates.
Personality, Psychology and Leadership
The previous discussion of leadership orientations shows you there’s much room for leaders who have various combinations of leadership styles. Most leaders take a situational approach and use different styles under different conditions, depending upon the urgency and nature of the task, experience and expectations of subordinates, and the degree of trust and rapport in the work relationship.
A central concept in leadership study is that to better understand the behaviors of leaders and subordinates, it’s useful to understand the psychological nature of the people involved. One popular and extensively used resource is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. After individuals respond to questions based upon how they usually would feel or act in different situations, this survey classifies them into one of 16 types, based on four continua: extraversion-introversion, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling and judging-perceiving.
These types will provide insight into a test-taker’s work preferences and decision-making patterns. A leader can use this as a tool to gain insight into his or her subordinates or team members; it can be a useful way to increase understanding.
Although such resources will give you a quick profile of yourself or your subordinates, it’s important to be careful when using them and never completely rely upon them. They should be used only in conjunction with skill development tools and other resources. There are several reasons for this.
First, though many companies use the tests, experts disagree considerably as to their reliability. Unfortunately, there’s no magic formula for what test is best. It’s up to you to examine those that are available and make the best choice for you and your organization. Second, these resources are sometimes misunderstood. People often make major style changes based upon the results of one survey, without realizing the extent to which those results were due to bad testing conditions or the person’s mood at the time of the survey. Third, some people are skeptical of tests or resentful of being arbitrarily typecast. You can avoid this reaction if you take the time to explain the process and results to them.
Qualities of a Leader
As scholars have studied leaders over the years, they have attempted numerous times to identify leadership qualities. There are certain recurring qualities that seem to surface in the best leaders. To give you an idea of what makes a great leader, here are some of the best qualities.
* Adaptable
* Ambitious
* Caring
* Confident
* Convincing
* Courageous
* Creative
* Curious
* Decisive
* Discerning
* Empathetic
* Ethical
* Fair
* Honest
* Innovative
* Persistent
* Responsible
* Self-directing
While these sample qualities provide great insight into leadership behavior and help you understand why some leaders are more effective than others, it’s difficult to conclude the degree to which these 18 qualities help people become great leaders; therefore, it is important to understand three points about leadership qualities. First, there is no complete list of leadership qualities.
If you attempted to list every possible quality of a leader using published studies since the early 1900s, you would have hundreds of qualities. Second, very few, if any, leaders have all the qualities on any given list. It isn’t necessary nor is it possible for a successful leader to completely fit a leadership mold that someone suggests is best for him or her or for his or her organization. Leaders, like their subordinates and team members, are individuals who are alike and different in many respects and can be successful without radically altering their inherent qualities. Third, a person can possess many leadership qualities and still not be a leader.
By Randall D. Ponder, September 27, 2005
15 Ways Other People Can Promote Your Biz
Put your networking circle to work for you with these guaranteed ways to generate new business.
Has anyone ever said to you, "If there’s anything I can do to help you with your business, let me know"? Did you respond, "Thank you. Now that you mention it, there are a few things I need"? Or did you say, "Well, thanks, I’ll let you know"?
If you’re like most of us, you aren’t prepared to accept help at the moment it’s offered. You let opportunity slip by because you haven’t given enough thought to the kinds of help you need. You haven’t made the connection between specific items or services you need and the people who can supply them. But when help is offered, it’s to your advantage to be prepared and to respond by stating a specific need.
Systematic referral marketing requires that you determine, as precisely as possible, the types of help you want and need. There are many ways your sources can help you promote yourself and your business and generate leads and referrals; we’ve chosen to discuss fifteen of them. Some are simple, cheap and quick; others are complex, costly and time-consuming.
1. Display your literature and products. Your sources can exhibit your marketing materials and products in their offices or homes. If these items are displayed well, such as on a counter or a bulletin board, visitors will ask questions about them or read the information. Some may take your promotional materials and display them in other places, increasing your visibility.
2. Distribute information. Your sources can help you distribute your marketing information and materials. For example, they can include a flyer in their mailings or hand out flyers at meetings they attend. A dry cleaner attaches a coupon from the hair salon next door to each plastic bag he uses to cover his customers’ clothing; a grocery store includes other businesses’ marketing literature in or on its grocery bags or on the back of the printed receipt.
3. Make an announcement. When attending meetings or speaking to groups, your sources can increase your visibility by announcing an event you are involved in or a sale your business is conducting, or by setting up exhibits of your products or services. They can also invite you to make an announcement yourself.
4. Invite you to attend events. Workshops and seminars are opportunities to increase your skills, knowledge, visibility and contacts. Members of personal or business groups that you don’t belong to can invite you to their events and programs. This gives you an opportunity to meet prospective sources and clients.
5. Endorse your products and services. By telling others what they’ve gained from using your products or services or by endorsing you in presentations or informal conversations, your network sources can encourage others to use your products or services. If they sing your praises on audiotape or videotape, so much the better.
6. Nominate you for recognition and awards. Business professionals and community members often are recognized for outstanding service to their profession or community. If you’ve donated time or materials to a worthy cause, your sources can nominate you for service awards. You increase your visibility both by serving and by receiving the award in a public expression of thanks. Your sources can pass the word of your recognition by word of mouth or in writing. They can even create an award, such as Vendor of the Month, to honor your achievement.
7. Provide you with leads. A source can help you by passing along information she hears about someone who needs the kind of product or service you provide. Following through on such leads–for example, a rumor about a new company moving into the area or a news item about the troubles another business is having–could result in new business.
8. Provide you with referrals. The kind of support you’d most like to get from your sources is, of course, referrals–names and contact information for specific individuals who need your products and services. Sources can also help by giving prospects your name and number. As the number of referrals you receive increases, so does your potential for increasing the percentage of your business generated through referrals.
9. Make initial contact with prospects and sources. Rather than just giving you the telephone number and address of an important prospect, a network member can phone or meet the prospect first and tell him about you. When you make contact with the prospect, he will be expecting to hear from you and will know something about you.
10. Introduce you to prospects. Your source can help you build new relationships faster by introducing you in person. She can provide you with key information about the prospect. She can also tell the prospect a few things about you, your business, how the two of you met, some of the things you and the prospect have in common, and the value of your products and services.
11. Arrange a meeting on your behalf. When one of your sources tells you about a person you should meet, someone you consider a key contact, she can help you immensely by coordinating a meeting. Ideally, she will not only call the contact and set a specific date, time and location for the meeting, but she will also attend the meeting with you.
12. Follow up with referrals they have given you. Your sources can contact prospects they referred to you to see how things went after your first meeting, answer their questions or concerns, and reassure them that you can be trusted. They can also give you valuable feedback about yourself and your products or service, information that you might not have been able to get on your own.
13. Publish information for you. Network members may be able to get information about you and your business printed in publications they subscribe to and in which they have some input or influence. For example, a source who belongs to an association that publishes a newsletter might help you get an article published or persuade the editor to run a story about you.
14. Serve as a sponsor. Some of your sources may be willing to fund or sponsor a program or event you are hosting. They might let you use a meeting room, lend you equipment, authorize you to use their organization’s name, or donate money or other resources.
15. Sell your products and services. Of all the kinds of support that a source can offer, the one that has the greatest immediate impact on your bottom line is selling your product or service for you. Your network member could persuade a prospect to write a check for your product, then have you mail or deliver the product to your new customer. If you do so swiftly and cordially, you may gain a new lifelong customer.
Suppose a customer you know well tells you a friend of his wants to buy your product. How should you respond? By telling him to have his friend contact you? By asking for information about the friend? The correct answer is neither. While your interest is still hot, let your friend, the customer, take your product and sell it to his friend, the prospect (if he plans to see his friend in the near future, of course).
By Ivan Misner, May 23, 2005
NOZ 