Leadership Defined...

I have been really lucky to be involved recently in a new business environment, aka a new career at a company out West in Cali. More to come on that front soon, but in the meantime I experienced an amazing feeling recently and it has changed who I am.

I forgot how important leadership is to an organization and how much it shapes the company. I forgot the impact the leaders of a company have on the overall company growth and success. I forgot that leadership is what makes companies successful.  Leaders are influential in the organization and to me influencer equals leader.

I have been struggling with trying to understand why certain companies were successful and why others were not, it is because of leadership. I have been trying to better understand the impact the CEO or other C-level people have on the success of a company, and I now realize it is leadership. Great leaders are worth their weight in gold. Great leaders will payoff 1000x what you pay them. Great leaders will make the difference regardless of the environment or business situation.

I have had an awaking to something I knew already in my heart and in my head. It is like I have come out of a cloud of confusion and have seen the light. I have gotten religion, it is called the awaking of leadership.

The people I am involved with today are the types of leaders who define the ability to lead. They are the types of people that look out for each individual contributor and respect them for who they are and what they can bring. These people I have joined recently have been tremendously successful in business, and it is not because of luck or timing, it is because of pure leadership. If you think I am speaking to you, I am.

Trust me, when you experience this environment you will know what I am talking about. I understand your confusion. I understand where you are. I understand why this might not make sense to you. But it will, one day.

How start-ups succeed…

This is a question that I have had for years. I actually take it on step farther and wonder how some companies succeed and some fail. There are plenty of reasons a start-up will fail, from lack of funding, poor fiscal management, leadership, politics, lack of vision, crappy technology, etc… You could write a book, or many books, on why start-ups fail.

But what I am interested in is why some start-ups succeed. I realize there is a lot of luck involved and there is a lot of hard work, great technology, etc… But I think one of the main reasons a start-up succeeds (all other things equal) is because of the founder and their ability to drive the company to their vision.

Start-ups are not like most other businesses; the vision is a liquid thing and is constantly shifting with the market. Many times the start-up is actually inventing a market and requires the ability to see the vision and then the tactical abilities to translate this to reality. The leader, founder, CEO or whatever you want to call him/her, is the main point of success. In order for a start-up to consider success, it is critical that this one leader plays the key role in moving things forward, making decisions, and translating the vision into reality.

I have been in a few start-ups and people complain that the businesses are run in a hub and spoke model. Many groups having to interact and move forward based on interactions with the founder or visionary. People look at this model and say ‘it is not scaleable’ or ‘we need to rely on others’, and all of these statements are true. But the most important point is missed when someone makes these statements. The most important point is that the start-up is a moving and evolving being and the people that are a part of the start-up have been brought in to execute on a vision. These are not the visionaries; if they were they would be starting their own businesses. These are the people/teams that are here to build and formalize the business.

The only way to make this work is to have the founder/visionary in the hub and have that person driving the organization through the spokes. It has to happen this way because the key to success for any start-up is the ability to build out the vision in a rapid manner that does not require a lot of frivolous debate. Without the hub in the middle, the start-up is almost doomed to failure, the people running the business will not be able to translate the vision into a plan and move quickly.

Don’t look at this as a hub and spoke, look at it as a star in a galaxy and all the planets are taking their energy from the star in the middle. The galaxy is expanding and growing and the middle star is powering the universe.

Now, at some point in the company life stage it will become important to move away form the hub and spoke model and allow for scaling of the business. This will happen over time and will be something that occurs naturally. It is not something you can force and for that matter forcing it can cause even more problems.

So, if you are in a start-up, embrace the hub and spoke model. Encourage it to move quickly and allow for rapid deployment to the market. Leverage the asset of the visionary in the middle, it is what will help to ensure your success.

I am now at a new start-up called Dynamic Signal, and we are building a scalable platform for word of mouth and conversational marketing.   One of the reasons I decided to co-found this company was the two other executives at the company are two of the most competent leaders and visionaries I have ever worked with.   I realize every time I do a new start-up it is a risk, but each time we do it the risks seem to be as big, but not as difficult to overcome.   I am not sure at some point if the risks become so familiar that you lose your edge, but I don't see that coming anytime soon.  

How to WIN a Negotiation... Every Single Time!

Alright, I can't guarantee this one, but I can pass to you a tip that Eric Sink took the time to write out in his blog. Though his theory is truly common sense, it is 100% accurate and on target.

Now, in a B2B or enterprise sales environment, you can see the companies that do well are the ones that use time and planning to their advantage. The companies that fail are those that don’t put themselves in a situation where they can not close the deal.

Time is one of the few resources that is actually very abundant in today’s business world, it is really a question of how well it is managed. The greatest leaders are the ones that utilize time (i.e. planning, resources, capital, etc...) in the best ways possible.

The answer in how to win a negotiation every time? It all ends up being Time. And with time you always have the ability to walk away from the deal...

You can read more on this at Eric's post, but I think he is right on with this one. I have had many personal and business experiences that support his theory 100%.

Very Important Concept for Businesses

This is part of a talk that Jeffrey Hazlett gave at the annual ANA conference.  I saw him speak at the IAB annual event and he gave the same talk.   This is a part of the speech he gave where he talks about his experience as CMO at Kodak.

This concept for all business people is critical, especially for a business that has to innovate but has a lot of red-tape running the show.

Customer Attrition Stats

I ran across this interesting article on Customer Attrition and I thought I would pass it along. As I think about customers, this was a jarring bit of information, hope it might be of interest.

Why Customers Leave Their suppliers in Business Relationships

1% of the time they die.

3% of the time they move away.

5% of the time they are simply lured into new relationships with competitive suppliers for no other reason than the persistence and persuasiveness of their sales reps.

9% of the time, they leave for better pricing or terms.

14% of the time, they leave due to product dissatisfaction.

68% of the time, they leave because they sense indifference from their suppliers.

Source, UPSIDE DOWN MARKETING by George Walther.

The Top 15 Reasons to Use Twitter...

I have been using Twitter for about a year and over the 12 months I have learned a few ways to get the most out of the service. There is obviously a huge social aspect to the Twitter community, and this is probably one of the driving forces for the highly engaged user base. But I have found many other reasons and value propositions within this tool and service and I thought I would share a few…

1. Breaking News – if you follow the right people or services you can receive breaking news almost instantaneously on your phone or blackberry.

2. Breaking News within a specific vertical – by using the right keywords you can find out information about specific industries as the new breaks. For example if you put in the tracking on keywords such as ‘Dow Jones’ for financial or ‘CDC’ for health you can be alerted to news in these categories.

3. Keep in Touch – you can follow your friends, neighbors, or co-workers and always have a sense of what they are thinking or doing.. This is helpful when you are busy and traveling and want to just keep in touch with people.

4. Keep track of travel – by tracking the right people you can always get a sense of where someone is if they are on the road a lot. This is very helpful with clients or people you might work with. You can always have a sense of where they are.

5. Rapid Response to Questions – you can send out questions on anything under the sun and many times can get a very quick response on your question.

6. Efficient Communication – you can provide your Twitter name to people that need to reach you or need to know where you are to ensure they can always keep on top of things.

7. What People are Saying About You – you can track your name or company and get a sense of what people are saying or thinking. You can also respond quickly to any misinformation that might start to leak out.

8. Competitive Intelligence – by tracking the names of your competitors you can get a good sense of what they are up to or planning.

9. Buzz or Rapid Trends – you can get a sense of what trends are moving at almost an instantaneous pace. When you see a lot of posts about a specific topic you can get a sense of how important that news is going to be.

10. Track you Investments/Stocks – keep on top of any news, information, leaks, rumors around stocks you own or are watching.

11. Keep up to Date with your Clients – Always have information or news on your clients so you can react quickly to anything that comes up.

12. Betting/Fantasy Sports – keeping on top of the vegas lines and any news out of the different teams you are betting is important.

13. Job Hunting – you can get a good amount of information about a company or their needs by tracking the news or employees of the company.

14. Emergency Preparation/Watch – watching for certain keywords can help you in making sure you are aware of any potential emergencies.

15. Tracking Local – by watching the local cities around where you live you can keep on top of things that are going on in your area. This also applies to Amber alerts or other local issues that might come up.

Top 5 things I would like to see Twitter provide:

1. Closed Communities – the ability to create a group that people can join or be dropped into where they receive instant alerts/twitters

2. White label solution – for corporate brands the ability to white label the Twitter solution could be interesting. One example that would be fun is American Idol group or NFL group.

3. Corporate Accounts – the ability to list the different companies or services that can be tracked in a much better directory or user experience.

4. RSS Integration – the ability to tie together blog postings with twitters so you can be alerted when a new article is posted and the headline within the same interface.

5. More advanced tracking logic – the ability to provide more advanced logical statements in tracking keywords, such as track ‘google’ if twitter is employee of Google and posting includes any of the keywords ‘layoff’,’investment’,’merger’

And a few stretch ideas…

1. Tracking Local – somehow the ability to post the location of people based on their last twitter (if they enable it). i.e. I post from my SMS and am in NY now it could carry this information with on the posting.

2. Breaking In – somehow the ability to break into twitter users based on certain types of messages. This would be opt-in, but if I needed to get a message to a group of people I could pay to have the message broadcast to them.

3. Embedded Content – the ability to send a twitter message and embed content that is enclosed within the message. This could make it easier for content to be presented to the users based on the different devices they are using.

4. Voting on Twitters – some form of social voting on twitter postings that could allow people to use the voting to weigh information.

5. Security Twitter – okay this is a real stretch, but the government uses twitter to communicate any important information to different groups. Also, users can use twitter to alert authorities to suspect situations or problems.

Okay, that is enough for now, but these are just a few things that seem to be of value in using Twitter. They have a long way to reach critical mass, but I do think there will be some really unique and exciting services that will come out of this team.