No Barriers

Last week I attended the sales kick-off meeting in Orlando of a customer of ours where I had the great pleasure of listening to keynote speaker, round the world solo yachtsman, Neal Petersen. While there are several hundred people who have also achieved this feat what sets Neal apart is that he grew up a person of color in Apartheid South Africa, in abject poverty and suffered from severe hip disabilities in his early childhood.

Rad eCommerce Experience

I always like to use this blog to highlight a positive experience that demonstrates particular sales and service excellence, so today I would like to talk about Blackhole Boards. But first some context: recently my 6 yr old son took up skateboarding and shows some real aptitude for it. His first board has been put through the wringer and it is time (already!) for a new one.

Eating Our Own Dog Food and Loving It!

Working in Silicon Valley in the 90s meant being subjected constantly to a barrage of hip, dot-com buzzwords and phrases of which “eating our own dog food” was prominent. There were many others of course which gave rise to a game that was played at meetings called “buzzword bingo” where you could tick-off buzzwords used during that meeting for your own entertainment. Of course conference calls lent themselves perfectly to this activity (apparently, not that I’d know – although I will admit in our office there was once a pool on how many times the word “conceptually” would be used by Marketing during a call and the final score exceed the highest bet by some margin! – of course I am sure they had their own pool on the buzzwords we used too.)

Impacting the Recovery

It has been a very busy time of late due to my being given a unique opportunity to run not one but two companies simultaneously. In addition to my role at Huthwaite, I am now also running Omega Performance, a sister company in the Informa family of Performance Improvement businesses.

Let's Be Honest: Excellence Takes Hard Work

Following on from my post on the Short Cut Culture some of you have emailed me to ask about whether I believe there is a broader context to this and indeed I do. We have begun to celebrate and tolerate mediocrity in all its forms as a way of avoiding standards that take hard work to attain and to hide behind it as some kind of great equalizer. Either way it has made the quest for excellence the path of increasing resistance.

The Shortcut Culture

I have just returned from a short vacation in Los Angeles and while I was there it struck me how what I call the "Shortcut Culture" has pervaded the home of the entertainment industry. Once upon a time young hopefuls would get off the Greyhound in LA, find a job busing tables, save their tips to pay for acting lessons and endlessly trudge from one audition to another driven by the belief that their hard work and commitment just might make them a star.

E.I. is O.K.

If there is one thing that most frequent business travelers fear is that dreaded delay on the tarmac especially when the actual flight is a short commuter one. Well this evening it happened at Dulles Airport in DC, we boarded the CJR 700 commuter plane, seating for about 60 people, on time only to be informed that thunder storms in Charlotte had shut the airport there. And so we began that open-ended wait for us to get the go-ahead or head back to the gate. In the end we spent 2.5 hours sitting on the hot tarmac (it was still in the 80s outside) in the small confined space of the full CJR 700 an experience that had the potential to be an extremely uncomfortable and frustrating one.

Insight & Foresight

I recently launched a series of conversations with business leaders from across multiple verticals called "The Business Insights Series" and as I reviewed the first five interviews I tried to see if there are some consistent themes emerging. What I found is that although there is great diversity in terms of business focus, there is great consistency when it comes to outlooks and observations.

Some of the key insights provided by these business leades include:

Are you ready to cross the Delaware?

As we head into the Independence Day celebrations it is worth noting how in the winter of 1776 it seemed highly unlikely there would ever be any independence to celebrate. George Washington and his continental army had suffered defeat after defeat and had been forced to retreat through New Jersey into Pennsylvania. Morale was low, desertion high and the prospects for reenlistment remote. But rather than succumb to what seemed the inevitable, Washington decided that winning a victory, any victory and soon was critical to turning things around. To this end he carefully re-examined his options and found a target in the wintering Hessians at Trenton. If he could rally the continental army and get them to Trenton he was confident that surprise and superior numbers would carry the day. So he set off on that famous crossing of the Delaware and the rest as they say is history.

Who Dares Wins...

I arrived for a meeting in Toronto which is gearing up for the G20 Summit later this week and when I got to my hotel I was surprised to find the lobby thronging with people and a noise level that would rival most sporting events. No I hadn't come upon the Anti-Globalization crowd getting ready for whatever it is they will be protesting against this time, rather to my surprise it was the "G20 Young Entrepreneurs" who have a side meeting at the summit. If their enthusiasm and high spirits are any indication of their entrepreneurial talents then it is likely I maneuvered my way through some future innovators who will join the likes of Google and Facebook in the pantheon of the truly disruptive.