Thanksgiving In June

As a glass-is-half-full guy conjuring up a topic for June, I resolved to avoid any reference to hardship. It's been way overdone. I am jumping off the hardship bandwagon. And I invite you to join me.

Retailers historically have Christmas in July sales. With those events just around the corner, I hereby invite you to join our Thanksgiving in June celebration. Since all of us will always be smarter than one of us, I solicit your help in building a list of powerful positives.

To get us started, here's some things I'm thankful for...

• The big banks are primed to pay back their bailout money. Capitalism is making a comeback.
  
• The swine flu was just another over hyped media event. It did serve to temporarily juice up the hand sanitizer market.
  
• Jay Cutler
• WiFi
  
• Summertime or at least the absence of winter. Remember half full.
  
• Apple's I-products. We always want more for our children.
  
• Cellular service improvements. It's like that army of Verizon folks has raised the bar for all.
  
• Using Web 2.0 and user generated content to work smarter.
  

Now it's your turn. Please click on the Post a comment link (below) to add whatever is currently filling your glass. Thanks to all of our contributors!

Who Moved My Customers?

Revisiting: Who Moved My Cheese?

Most of us are familiar with Dr. Spencer Johnson's 1998 parable Who Moved My Cheese? The book was written to provide career guidance to people in changing work scenarios. Today, those lessons apply as much or more to business leaders as to their past and present employees.

Remembering Typewriter Repairmen

I'm dating myself again by recalling the painful times when we needed to call in IBM's service technicians to repair our Selectric® and Executive typewriters. Those urgent service calls were expensive and all too frequent for our aging workhorse equipment. Speaking of workhorses, typewriter repair men are now outnumbered by blacksmiths. Fortunately for IBM, they have they've historically been able to find new cheese in new places. Both IBM and I have gone beyond typewriters. I'm composing this on my Lenovo ThinkPad. The Big Blue nameplate is conspicuous by its absence as they cashed out and exited the commodity PC market.

IBM is one of only 71 remaining companies from the original Fortune 500 of 1955. Of those 71, most are in different businesses now. This means that 429 corporate giants have vanished from the list. The pace of change change continues to accelerate. How are businesses responding to the challenges of rapid change?

The Responders

Playing with a pat hand is no longer an option. To aid in your thinking, I share this assortment of cheese seeking approaches that I've seen. These businesses have either found new ways to utilize their core competencies or developed new competencies to serve emerging or changing marketplaces demands.

• A manufacturer that previously produced ink for the printing industry has developed new specialty toners for laser and ink jet printers.

• An architectural firm is pursuing more small residential restoration and remodeling projects to ride out the new building lull.

• The owner of a predominantly General Motors auto mall responded by acquiring three foreign car franchises.

• One Chrysler dealer dropped the franchise to sell and service more affordable used cars that their customers are holding on to.

• A mechanical engineering firm whose phones suddenly stopped ringing hired us help them to implement a proactive sales process that has rebuilt their client base.

• A residential remodeling service company is working with us to develop a marketing campaign that targets institutional and association projects with funded budgets.

Reinvention and Innovation: What's in it for you?

If a giant like IBM can evolve, why can't you? Is it time for your organization to discover new opportunities? Perhaps we can gain some insight from The Great One.

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. - Wayne Gretzky

If your organization is struggling to figure out where your puck is going to be, my advise is to do so quickly. We continue to learn that he who hesitates is lost as...

Its not the big that eat the small. Its the fast that eat the slow.

What New Opportunities Are Outside of Your Box?

So is it time for you do a better job of thinking outside the box? Innovation author Adam Hartung makes a semantic distinction on this concept. Adam advises instead to first step outside of your box. Then think. But its not that easy. Look no further than the 86% of the original Fortune 500 that have fallen off the list. Maintaining the status quo didn't work for them.

A Word from Our Sponsor

If day-to-day minutia of running a leaner organization or a lack of creative juices is preventing you from thinking strategically, help is available. It has been said that attempting to do strategic thinking on your own is like a dentist who attempts to drill his own tooth. Or perhaps its like the self-representing attorney who has a fool for a client. From our outside the box perspective and experience in over 30 different industries, we have a proven ability to help clients extract and discover valuable new ideas and opportunities. You're invited to contact me directly. Helping clients to discover new cheese is our bread and butter.

You're encouraged to share some of your examples of other positive business changes or transformations that have resulted in more effective pursuit of cheese. Please use the comment option.

A Lesson in Higher Level Communication from an 800 Pound Gorilla

This is a marketing topic. I was, as first reluctant to put it here in a leadership blog. We can likely agree that influencing skills are important part of effective leadership. And for those of us who want to improve at getting people (like prospective customers) to do what we want them to do, I share this discovery.

It involves that 800 pound retailing gorilla, Wal-Mart. Their advertising tag line has progressed over the years. As consumers of their advertising, let's reminisce.

Always the low price. Always.

Then they altered (perhaps backpedaled) their promise to Always Low Prices.

Last fall, Wal-Mart updated their slogan to Save Money. Live Better.

Why change after 19 years. Is this an improvement? If so, why?

I believe so. Here's why...

• The slogan is in keeping with the values of founder Sam Walton who was known to proclaim: "We save people money so they can live better".
  
• It provides a sense of purpose for Wal-Mart associates. This is why they do what they do.
• Remember studying Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs? This slogan serves to address higher order human needs and thereby connects with prospective customers in low, middle and high income demographics.
• The answer to the question: Why is it important to save money? is no longer left to the imagination. It goes beyond stating a rational feature. It describes a benefit and on a higher emotional level.
• Which would you prefer: Getting a low price or living better?

So there it is. With four simple words, Wal-Mart is doing a better job of attracting both customers and motivating their associates. Its the kind of efficiency we've come to expect from The Waltons.

My Tea Leaves

Back in the days when I managed a manufacturing facility I had recruiting responsibilities. I was a semi-frequent interviewer and never gained proficiency. I talked too much and asked too little. And I admit that we, like most organizations, hired for skills and knowledge. Then fired and promoted on the basis of attitudes and habits. We'd lose someone and start the process all over again.

I've been working with an internet enabled talent assessment system for about two years now. And the insight that we can gain about what, how and why someone will do a job is uncanny. I am blown away by how I can describe a person whom I have never met to someone who has and be so on target. It's a lot of fun for me as I feel like The Amazing Kreskin.

So now it is becoming both fun and profitable as I have been using a job benchmarking and assessment to understand job fit like never before and use that understanding to make informed and less biased hiring and promotion decisions. And we all know how costly these people related mistakes can be.

If you're curious, I'll make it easy for you. I own the domain executivetalentassessments.com and I will continue to add content to this site. I also have written my most recent monthly briefing on how this insight has led to some performance breakthroughs for executive coaching clients. It's titled When the Going Gets Tough. Enjoy!

Speaker Contrasts

In September, I had the pleasure of hearing two national renowned speakers.

• Marshall Goldsmith, a prominent executive coach to Fortune 100 CEOs. Sponsored by the Lake Forest Grad School.
  
• Doug Hall, a former P & G product development guy who went on to fame and entrepreneurial success by creating a fast track product development and ideation company, the Eureka Mansion.

Both presentations were rewarding. I was able to meet and converse with both. After the fact, I can sight one significant difference in approach. Marshall Goldsmith is all about sharing and helping. To paraphrase, he said that it's impossible for you to steal anything from me. That's because I give it all away. So by definition, it can't be stolen.

In fact, he has a resource site http://marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com where he walks the talk.

In contrast, Mr. Hall's sponsors (I'll protect the guilty) promised before and after the presentation to share his PowerPoint upon request. It's been three weeks and somehow they haven't gotten around to fulfilling this promise to me or three other attendees I know. The sponsor had a different agenda.

A great example of a abundance thinking vs. scarcity thinking.

In the words of Keith Ferrazzi, former CEO and author of the networking book Never Eat Alone: "Power today comes from sharing information. Not withholding it."

In the interest of enhancing the power of Mr. Goldsmith, a new hero of mine, I have ordered this and hereby plug his latest book: What Got You Here Won't Get You There.

It's a challenge for me to take the high road and not expose that promise breaking sponsor. They offered to pay me for referrals. But how do you refer an organization that doesn't doesn't deliver on their initial promise?

I have to stay "on-purpose" with this post: To promote building your power through abundance thinking.

The Launch

The good people at Google have made the blog set-up process quick and painless. I am in the process of exploring the advantages of blogging vs. publishing articles via e-mail subscriber marketing. So any comments on that topic will be welcomed.

And so here we have it, post number one.

At this point, I have scores of brief executive briefing articles that I have written and published on our Vista Development corporate site. More specificly, they are indexed and cataloged on our Working SMART archive page. I am considering gradually migrating them to the blog with some added comments about how they were inspired as most came from listening and analyzing the challenges of our clients or prospects. And since I'm plugging my sites, I should add that we also have a micro-site, ChicagoExecutiveCoaching.com that focuses on the coaching side of the practice. I am a self proclaimed link monger in constant pursuit of inbound links for SEO purposes.