management

Can't afford to hire locally

A friend who runs a top niche job board recently asked me this:

In the past, we’ve only hired local sales people but we’re looking at the possibility of hiring remote reps. I know it’s hard to find employees in South Florida and I was wondering if you have any staff that works remotely and if so is there anything you can tell me that would help us?

My answer -- you can't afford not to. We tried for years to grow our sales team by hiring locally. We would hire-train-fire and then repeat. But all the while, I was watching Don Firth (friend and fellow Florida job board entrepreneur) grow his sales team three and four times as fast by hiring virtually from around the country.

The Greatest Wealth Is Health

The greatest wealth is health.  ~Virgil

This is a difficult topic for me to write about.  I’ve been dogged by health problems since my second daughter was born four and a half years ago.  But for a number of reasons I’ve said little about my struggles to the LatPro team.

• Leading is not complaining.  First and foremost, leading a team is about helping others.  It’s about removing obstacles and creating a positive and efficient environment.  Leading is not complaining, it’s listening.  So, if you are a leader, you don’t dwell on your own speedbumps, whether your roof has a leak or you are physically ill.  Complaining sucks energy from others.  So you keep your problems at home and do your best to energize your team.
• Sympathy is depressing.  When you stub your toe, a little sympathy is nice.  If you have a chronic illness, you want to forget about it.  It feels good when others understand your limitations and offer assistance but conduct business as usual.
• Staying focused.  Building a company is like climbing a mountain.  The pinnacle of the mountain exerts a strong pull on you like a powerful magnet.  You can’t see the pinnacle when you start climbing or even when you are halfway to the top, but you know it’s there and you feel the pull.  The higher up you get, the more exotic the scenery and the more exciting the climb.  Your mind and body become tuned entirely to reaching the top.  That’s how I feel about our team and the company.  We’re climbing a mountain and we’re going to the top detours and all.  

Three Ways to Make Your Strategy Stick

If you read Guy Kawasaki, Jim Collins, Pat Lencioni, Verne Harnish and other  top gurus, you may develop truly world class mission statements, values, brand promise, and strategy.   But  if you don't communicate them well, they won't take you nearly so far.  Here's how to make sure you communicate these things well.  

From the co-authors of ¨Made to Stick¨, brothers Chip Heath and Dan Heath comes their
manifesto, ¨Talking Strategy: Three Straightforward Ways to Make Your Strategy Stick¨.

Inspirational movies for business leaders

I especially enjoy sports and coaching movies because they often provide a great metaphor for business life. Here's a list of the ones I've enjoyed:

The Heart of the Game

Hire The Growth Minded, Not The Talented

There's a great post today on Guy Kawasaki's blog about the mind-set of successful people - whether you are hiring, managing a team or raising kids, this is an important principle.  Search for people who love to learn and grow.  Praise effort not talent.  It's one of the core concepts of Brad Smart's TopGrading interview system which is the best recruiting how-to I've seen.

That's Management!

Jack Welch has a great column in Business Week about the balance between managing for short and long term results. The question was "Since there is such a bias in the markets for short-term results, how can you prepare for the long term?"

The answer: "In a word, that's management!"

He uses examples from a couple of key areas to show that this balancing act between short and long term results is what good management is all about.

10 Name Types for Your Business

Here's an interesting outline of the ten most common name types with pros and cons for Tech companies:

This post illustrates ten name categories that account for all the names in the TechCrunch company/product index. Though most of the TechCrunch names are “Web 2.0″ names, there’s nothing particularly Web 2.0 about the categories. They all represent linguistic naming strategies that can be used for companies or products of any kind.

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Positioning Your Internet Business, Part III

This is a continuation of my review of the book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout.  Here are more passages I found meaningful.

You need vision.
You must have vision. There’s no sense building a position based on a technology that’s too narrow. Or a product that’s becoming obsolete. Or a name that’s defective.

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4th Quarter Update

Today, we’re halfway through the fourth quarter and really beyond that point considering all the holidays to come. The good news is that our implementation of Verne Harnish’s Rockefeller Habits is a rousing success.

We haven’t been this focused and energized in a long time -- in fact, this feels like an entirely new level of performance that we’ve never experienced before. Just a few weeks ago MANY of our key goals felt out of reach… now only a few remain.  We're in the ZONE!