A friend from McGraw Hill forwarded me this post and I thought it was a great way to do marketing. I bet the book is great too. Notice when you watch the video the ability to put hyperlinks embedded in the video. Amazing new way to keep your prospect moving through your funnel. The book that is being presented is written by Aaron Goldman entitled Everything I Know about Marketing I learned from Google.
Customer Experience
August 31st, 2010
Is your customer experience making you money? Costing you money? Do you know? Like a line of falling dominos, daily actions across your organization form a sequence of events that, if aligned correctly, build momentum and culminate in what every business wants-outstanding financial performance. Establishing a target customer experience-your front domino-to drive daily decisions within your organization will determine the fluidity of that chain of events, and the level of profit outcome you achieve. Companies that use a target customer experience as their front domino reap the biggest rewards in profitability, growth and sustainability. Linda Ireland discusses her book about customer experience is a how-to discussion, rich with practical exercises, provides a tested blueprint for defining the target customer experience and translating it into an actionable strategy that will lead to tangible financial reward.
Linda Ireland, friend, strategist, amazing communicator and chief problem solver takes us on a journey of her new book Dominos: How Customer Experience Can Tip Everything in Your Business toward Better Financial Performance
Customer Experience by Author of Domino Linda Ireland from Gary Cohen on Vimeo.
Get outside of yourself and stretch
August 30th, 2010Jeff Prouty a dear friend, brilliant strategist, life and world explorer hosts these amazing strech expeditions around the world. Take a look at the latest adventure helping others.
Words Hurt
August 22nd, 2010
Words Hurt
In working with leaders and listening to their stories about employees as an executive coach, there is a gap that shows up between being concerned about people performance and respectful with people. I know this is a gap that took me a long time to close in co-running my organization. I wanted people to perform and when they didn’t I would become disregarding. I am not proud of those days perhaps you have, or are doing the same today. The problem was the belief system I was operating under was flawed. I believed that being direct, stern and strong would deliver performance results. I could not have been more wrong! Today I help clients see this by shining the light on them as a follower. Let me show you…
Do you get instructions to do anything from your spouse at home? “Well yes you might say.”
When you perform that task do you often get it “right” or is there often correction in how you followed out your task? “Often corrections, I did not even know there is a “wrong” way to make a peanut butter sandwich.”
How do you feel being corrected and knowing that your way would work for you and not for your spouse? “Unengaged, dissatisfied and downtrodden.”
How is that any different than how you may be showing up for your employees?
Words hurt when put in the wrong order with the wrong tone or intent. Think about what your executive coach would ask you, “How do you want to feel everyday coming to work? How do your employees feel? And what can you do to improve it for all of them?” Then act…
News Literacy – Vivian Schiller CEO of NPR
August 17th, 2010This is a recap from Aspen Institute Ideas Fest. Interview with Charlie Firestone and Vivian who is the CEO of NPR. We are faced with a tsunami of information.
Vivian Schiller CEO of NPR at the Aspen Institute 2010 gives insights into the importance of New Literacy. Schiller suggests that a reader today needs to look for three things when trying to understand news literacy.
Independence
Accountability
Verification
It appears that young readers today have one of two opinions on news:
1) nothing is true or
2) anything people send me is true
With so much user generated content it is critical that the readers of today’s media are more informed about how to decode truth verses opinions.
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
It is not about the training Journalists as much as it is about training you as a consumer to understand the information you’re reading. Civics literacy is about how do you find the information you need to be part of a democracy. Civic Knowledge Increases a Person’s Regard for America’s Ideals and Free Institutions according to a recent Civic Literacy Report. Some believe that going to college has the largest impact on our population as it relates to civic literacy. It could not be further from the truth. When college students took a test on civic literacy. On average the student failed the exam.
At the core it is about teaching critical thinking. It is not about doing a google search it is about going deeper and understanding where to go.
At Stoney Brook they are training all students regarding Media Literacy. They started a program for every student and it is been studied and found that critical thinking is elevated and is spreading to other school.
Training in high schools has started one of the schools that has begun such training is Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Md. Below is a video showing how students are learning and teaching new literacy in their school by having journalists go into schools and develop a learning around the subject.
The training focuses on answering the following four questions:
Why does news matter?
Why is the first protection of free speech so vital to American democracy?
How can students know what to believe?
What challenges and opportunities do the internet and digital media create?
Are you, your kids and organization news literate? Do you scan for independence, accountability and verification when presented information. Are you scanning what you read with critical thinking skills or are you just believing what you read and hear? The world has more information to sort through than it has had in all of history with no rules for it’s creation – What is the amount of scrutiny do you need to come to your own opinions and gather agreed upon facts?
Executive Coaching Tip: Are emploees people or objects?
August 16th, 2010
People are our best assets!
One of the most over-used lines in business is, “our people are our best assets.” It is catchy and embraces a point of view. People are as important–no, make that more important–than other less touchy-feely assets (unless you’re in the plush toy business).
It also slides you mentally into a single category. This inducement may not work out as well as the writer of this quote intended.
When you put multiple ideas or things under a single category you will have a tendency to create larger blind spots for you as a leader. You may explore fewer options and treat those items in a single asset class the same and if you did that you would be ignoring all you have learned about motivating people. People are complex, individual, multidimensional and can not be seen simply as an asset to the business. How are you doing at opening up your view to see your human asset as people?
Hitler on Leadership
August 16th, 2010
Hitler on Leadership
To day I was at a Bar Mitzvah and the Rabbi held up a Torah explaining it was from a community in Eastern Europe. The community of Jews that survived the holocaust fled the community and scattered around the world. The Torah was captured by the Nazis to be held as a symbol to be put in a museum to demonstrate what Hitler Accomplished and to keep the population under fear of his rule. Today the synagogue holds it up at a symbol of the survival of both the religion and the defeat of the evil monster.
Your Place in the World of Things
August 14th, 2010I was speaking with a dear friend this morning and we were discussing how important it is to recycle. Not from a pedestrian view although that is important too. We all need to think through the system of where stuff comes from in our economy and where it ends up. Often times where it ends up does not seem to matter that much to us, because it may be on another continent. What is equally amazing is that is where much of the stuff is made too (so if their is pollution or a stretch in ethics of how something is made we might be able to turn a blind eye)! If you are in the business of making or selling things. Think through the cycle and how you can play in both the selling and disposing of stuff to make it easier for your customer. Think of it as an opportunity and even profitable to be conscious of your place in the world of things.
A couple places to check out the idea of recycling of stuff:
Asset Recovery Corporation will take your computer equipment and get it to be reused or disposed of in a planet healthy way. Read about what Starbucks is doing to recycle their coffee grounds, paper cups and other waste by product. Milton Freedman was wrong! It is not all about profit maximization when the spaceship “earth” that you live on is decaying from unrealized costs that are the by-product of our consumerism, namely pollution. What is one thing your organization could do in you’re place in the world of things?
Trust: Consistently Delivering Results
August 14th, 2010
Seven C's of Trust
Leadership books, blogs, and journals constantly stress the importance of trust. If you’re not trustworthy, they say, why would anyone follow you? While trustworthiness is certainly very important as a leader, it’s also very important that YOU trust your co-workers.
Exceptional leaders use questions 70 to 80 percent of the time to increase alignment, engagement, and accountability among their co-workers. The value of question-based leadership is greatly compromised, though, if leaders don’t trust their coworkers. If there’s no trust, then every answer the leader receives will be clouded with suspicion or judgment. Co-workers are quick to pick up on this distrust and the quality and honesty of their answers may very well dip downward. The leader’s questions will ring hollow in their ears.
This post begins a 7-part series on Trust, each one focusing on one of the 7 C’s: Capability, Commitment, Capacity, Connection, Commonality, Character, and Consistency. Today’s focus is Consistency.
Consistency is demonstrated by a strong track record of predictable (and largely successful) actions. Such consistency allows others to have a firm sense of you, such that they can predict your decisions and behavior. The more consistent and reliable you are, the more others are apt to trust you and your work.
This post is about trusting co-workers, so let’s focus on them. If a co-worker is inconsistent in delivering on his promises and responsibilities, how likely are you going to believe his answers? Not very, right? In some ways, that’s the least of your concerns.
When you accept inconsistency, you risk spreading a virus of mediocrity within your organization. You will begin to ask less because of low trust, and you’ll begin to work around those you see as inconsistent, which will create an off-balance work environment for those who deliver consistently. As a result, YOU will become inconsistent as a leader.
When faced with inconsistency, you must act to change that outcome with training or removal. Or risk infection.
How are you affecting the culture of consistency within your organization? Are you driving for that expectation? If not, how might that be undermining your leadership?
Other Blog posts that may interest you:
Building Trust in Your Organization
90% of Employees Feel Betrayal Frequently
Trust Begins With You! What is Your Trust Score?
5 Questions to Ask to Build Trust
Leadership Style Assessment – What leadership style are you?
