Weekend Reading

I am a reader!  I love to read but rarely find the time to be able to dedicate hours to get into a book.  Wasn’t convinced that audio-books were for me but I have spent a chunk of time on the weekend listening to the legend Seth Godin new book Tribes on my iPod.  If you have not “read” a book using audio I would encourage to give it a try.  When Seth is making a point that is particularly relevant for me I like to stop, pause, replay and give it some thought, even make notes on how that applies in my situation.

Tribes (link to paper book) is a great read for any business leader and there are several good points that I will use to write further blog posts about my thoughts on certain topics but some of the highlights are:

• “Be Remarkable” – think about it!  be worthy of remark.  It is easy to become irrelevant and become  a ‘one of’ in your industry.  Don’t be afraid to rock the boat, in fact you have a responsibility to rock the boat.  More to follow in separate post but in the meantime think about it…are you worthy of remark?  Is your Company?
• The Rules of the Game Change Everyday – If you are playing the game by the rules of yesterday it is clear you will not win the game of tomorrow.  YOU MUST CHANGE.  YOU MUST FORCE CHANGE IN YOUR ORGANIZATION. Past success is in no way an indicator of future performance.
• Lead your Tribe – People want and need to be led.  Find the Tribe members in your company, find the Tribe members in your customer base and provide the voice, tools and ability for them to get together and drive the change you need.  EVERYONE in your organization can be/is a leader.  Permission is not required, only initiative and faith.

Whether it is Seth, or Tom Peters, or whoever reading and pushing yourself to think about things differently is critical to driving change and being successful.  What have you read this week?  How did it effect the way you think about your world whether it be politically, professionally, personally.  Continue to grow as a personal….there is no such thing as standing still, you are either moving forward or moving backwards.

Conquering Fear

I Twittered today about potentially starting to use some video-blogging to add a new delivery media and to engage better with my audience. Interested in any thoughts people may have around pro’s and con’s and why they think it is good or bad. I enjoy blogs that have a mix of video and written posts and given that most communication and engagement is done orally I think people tend to engage better when they can see and hear the person delivering the content. The underlying assumption is that the content is good, without that the media is irrelevant. I will try to keep the content as or more interesting and historic posts.

Biggest problem…I’m worried I am going to suck at video-blogging so I am a little afraid of taking this leap. Not doing something because your afraid is weak. Leadership involves making decisions and taking action that is risky and may not work. We do learn from failure and accepting failure is healthy as long as you learn from it and do not make the same mistakes over again so here is the deal…..

I am going to prepare, plan, practice and take the leap. What I need from you is honesty. Tell me what you think, tell me if it sucks, tell me if it rocks. I want to continue to deliver content that is useful to my audience and I want to continue to improve and find better ways to get you better stuff. If video-blogging is neither better for you nor an improvement let me know. Watch for it….it’s coming.

What is your fear? Post your stories here, tell us how you conquered your fear and what the result was. Was it worth it? How has it changed your personal or professional life?

Take the leap…don’t be afraid of failure be afraid of complacency!

How Was Your Day Today?

This is a question most spouses and friends ask each other when they go home at night. How do you normally answer this question? “It was ok” or “same old stuff” are common responses. If this is your response day in and day out I want to encourage you to change that.

Doing the same thing day in and day out is not the right thing for you or for your company. Look at new ways to do things and challenge the “we’ve always done it that way” paradigm. Customers want and demand for us to get better everyday. I am big believer that people and Companies that remain status quo are getting passed and risk becoming irrelevant. Every day you either move forward or backwards because if you aren’t improving your competitors are.

Take a minute each day and look at what you are doing and why you are doing it and how you can do it better to add more value to your customer. Talk to peers over lunch about it. Push yourself, your peers and your boss everyday to get better and try to come home each night with a story, anecdote or example for your family (or your dog) that is not “the same old stuff”.

Push yourself to get better…start tomorrow, don’t wait.

Post stories and examples here, share and encourage each other. YOU can make a difference.

I’ll Take Anger over Apathy

I had the good fortune of having a call with a somewhat angry customer today.  Yes….good fortune.  As I start to reach out to customers in my new role I am hoping to get one of two reactions:

1. I love your software and have received countless benefits and value through it’s implementation and use.
2. Your product is killing me!

If customers are not loving your product and pushing you to make it better or screaming at you because it is not working properly that means they have given up and are apathetic about you and your product.  As long as your customers still have emotion, engage with them and get to Know Your Customer. 

While it is always good to get positive feedback from your customers and delivering value some of the best feedback comes from struggling customers.  These customers can provide you with key actionable inputs and feedback that can help drive further value for happy customers and turn around unhappy ones.

As you meet with more and more customers you start to pick up data points that form trends.  These trends then can then drive product strategy decisions.

Go to your customers and look for the unhappy ones as much or more than your happy ones and drill into there problem and struggles with your product.  Often a turned around customer will be a more engaged, passionate customer than one who was happy to start with

Let me know how it goes for you and make sure you take the angry phone calls before apathy sets in.

Know Thy Customer

Seems like a pretty common sense piece of advice...and it is, BUT DO YOU? In the upcoming months I need to spend time on the road going out and meeting with customers and prospects to ensure I have an accurate perspective on how 'they' see our product. It is very easy to get caught up in the act of navel gazing and convincing yourself everything is alright. It is also easy to carefully and conservatively maneuver through the difficult end of this year and 2009 convincing yourself that sales are down due to the poor economy and you would be right....in part. If your value proposition is compelling and provable aren't troubled economic times the best time to help your customers with their business problems? A few rules for getting to know your customers:

1. Be generous with your customers - make the conversation about them not you. Find out what their biggest pain points are and see if there are ways you can assist them. If their biggest problem is NOT one you can solve, help them anyway. Connect them to a business partner with expertise, or a peer from another company who has successfully fought and won the same battle.
2. Research and prepare - take the time to print out articles on their company and industry and read them ahead of the meeting. Understand the macroeconomics of their industry and vertical to build their trust and confidence that you are a knowledgeable and trusted advisor.
3. Remember your Mother - I remember my mom telling me that I was given two ears and one mouth for a reason and they should be used in that proportion. Remember, you are there to learn! Learn what business problems are occurring at your customer and in his industry. Learn what they like and more importantly DO NOT like about your product. Learn how YOU can help THEM. In order to achieve the goals of the meeting remember to listen twice as much as you talk.
4. Follow Up - Drop your customer a note when you return to the office that follows up on the meeting and thanks them for their time and interest in discussing their problems with you. Follow up with them on the commitments you made at your meeting whether that be a proposal, a contact's phone number you promised them, copies of materials they requested.

This process puts you in a position where once a month or quarter you can call your customer check in and see how they are doing. They may not need your services this trip but if you help them with their business problems whatever they are...your time will come. In the mean time you walk away with valuable information on how your product is used, perceived, the value it is driving and the problems customers are having with it. All in all a pretty worth while trip for both party's.

Let me know how this works for you or if you have a different approach

Changes and Challenges

It has been a long while since I posted to this blog. I have missed the therapeutic effect of thinking through issues, problems, successes and strategies and getting comments on those thoughts from people who follow me and who I follow.

There have been so many things that have gone on in the past few months that could be written on personally, professionally, politically, macro-economically, etc, etc. I will start to work through my thoughts on all of those things in the upcoming days and weeks. I have gone through many difficult and trying times in the past weeks at work and have been presented with the opportunity to lead a group of highly dedicated, focussed and smart people at Ivara Corp as President. We, like many businesses, are going to be entering some very uncertain times in the marketplace and have had to make some very difficult decisions to proactively prepare for this uncertainty. Some of those decisions, which occured over the past week, were the most difficult that I have made in my professional career and I feel deeply for the people that were affected by those changes and will continue to work with them as required to ensure they will land on their feet, which I have no doubt they will.

Looking forward we have a year filled with Change and Challenge but with change comes opportunity. Opportunity for us to refocus on the customer experience, to gather information about why our customers like us and don't like us, to change our product and our offering to meet the ever evolving needs of our customers in the market. It is important that we engage now more than ever with our customers and prospects to stay close and work with them to drive value in their business and grow the Ivara community. While change is a true constant it is not easy. People like the routine and comfort of consistency but the reality is that those who lead change in the marketplace, who allow their community to take them places they otherwise may have resisted, who are open to and embrace change engage their community and drive forward. A truly engaged and passionate group of employees, customers, prospects and stakeholders are unsettled with the status quo. They love what they do, what the company does and because they are engaged they want to make things continuously better than they were.

I love Apple! I love their products and I love their pace. Apple is a company that realizes if it does not constantly antiquate and cannibalize it's own products someone else will. Is the current iPod a great product? Most would argue yes (and sales numbers would support) but in very short order Apple will release a new iPod that will make the current perfectly good product obsolete. Apple does not accept the status quo, they know that the market will continue to change, customers will want new things and that engaging with their community will require them to provide those things (at the expense of their own existing product line) to ensure the community is and continues to be engaged and they remain the leaders of their space.

I will continue to blog here but will also do so at Ivara's blog. I will continue to Twitter personally and will begin to do so at Ivara. One of our great employees Jason Diller has started a Yammer initiative internally which is growing through his care and feeding and is facilitating much needed cross departmental communication. All these tools are just that...tools. Yammer and Twitter and blogs and Facebook are all excellent tools to facilitate community. This will be a year of change for me, this will be a year of change for Ivara and this will be a year where we start to form and engage with our community in new ways. I don't have all the answers and I don't have a silver bullet because their isn't one. I will look to engage through meeting face to face with employees, with customers...both happy ones and especially those less so...with trusted advisors and through social networks. Collectively this group of passionate people will generate the ideas required to drive Ivara forward to success through these turbulent times.

Success is a process, one that in my role I will support and foster among a great tribe of people at Ivara and within our community. Our success will be a group success and will come from ideas, thoughts, challenges and changes that I will endeavour to enable but will inevitably come through the community of dedicated employees, customers and prospects who will push us to the change we need.

I look forward to meeting with each of you along the way.

Meet My New Friends

I have recently had the good fortune of having some of my posts selected and my blog linked to some sites that I enjoy and respect.

I have joined the BackBone Magazine blog team. I have been an avid reader of the magazine for quite a while. Backbone magazine was launched in January 2001, at the height of the technology bubble. They continued to publish throughout the tech meltdown and beyond, working as an active participant in the changing business world. Their primary focus has been on how technology enhances business processes, markets, profitability and productivity. Backbone magazine’s aim is to provide business people with a tangible tool to enhance the way they do business in Canada’s New Economy. I plan to contribute as a resource toward this goal for BackBone customers.

As a follower of Guy Kawasaki and his great collection of sites at AllTop I am proud to have been added to the StartUp section of the site with a huge selection of other bloggers who are absolutely top of class. Check them all out here.

At Ivara we have had a great a relationship with Barrett Rose and Lee an Executive recruiting firm that we use for many of our Sales and Services positions. They offer several online resources to their clients and have been kind enough to add my site as a linked resource for their customers, something I don't take lightly.

If I can ever be of assistance to any of my friends and followers please feel free to reach out at any time and please check out the sites and resources of my new friends.

Weekend Thoughts, Reads and the Last Lecture

Some of my Favorites and Musings from the week, hope you enjoy.....

1. On Friday we learned of the passing of Randy Pausch the famed computer science prof and all around great guy from Carnegie Mellon after a battle with Pancreatic Cancer at the young age of 48. His legendary "Last Lecture" is lengthy but always worth the time as the lessons are invaluable.....and very moving.

2. A quote from Michael Jordan (while the souce is questionable, the message is not)

I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occassions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot....and I missed! I have failed over and over and over again in my life and that is precisely why I succeed.

Obviously, it is not important to just fail, it is important to fail and learn from those failures so that you do not make the same mistakes again. You may make new ones but not the same ones. In that vein there is a great Post Mortem on Monitor 110 that we should all read and use as a reminder to be honest with ourselves and analyze our failures so that we may learn from where we have been.

3. Almost every week you could pick numerous of Seth Godin's posts. I am a fan of Chris Anderson and The Long Tail. Seth has a post this week about the Profit in the Tail. If for some reason you have not read The Long Tail....grab it and read it (at least the article) this weekend.

4. Lastly, in support of my Delighting the Customer theme I provide a link to the Six Laws of Customer Experience. Have a read and I hope the theme of focusing on the customer experience is one that you will remember, maybe try some of my suggestions and by doing so you create not just good customer but good advocates, spokespeople and marketers for your growing business.

Keep them Engaged Through Leadership

OK, I think this is the last post in this "Delightful" mini-series so a quick recap is in order.

First I posted about the importance of Delighting your way to Success and how critical it is to improve upon the customer experience every time you deal with them. I gave some recommendations for implementation in your business to improve the customer experience and more closely align everyone at your company with your customer experiences. My Dairy Queen example was a simple illustration of the impact a positive experience has.

I followed up that post with a related one on a new role that we are seeing more of in the market and is that of a "Community Manager", which I am a proponent of and would suggest you consider for your organization. I used AideRSS and Akoha as examples.

Next I followed up with a piece on how critical it is to hire smart AND engaged employees right from the start rather than hiring just for smarts, and gave my thoughts on how to successful hire employees that will delight your customer. This is important for all organizations but especially for young startups. You do not have the luxury of being able to make mistakes against a really tight budget and very few staff. Take your time and get it right.

The last piece will be some simple thoughts on leadership that I think are important to keeping engaged employees in the game and on your team. Hiring the right people is absolutely critical to an engaged workforce but keeping them engaged and growing is all on you. There are so many leadership books out there by people who have forgotten more theory on leadership than I will ever know but here are my simple guidelines that I follow.

1. Give direction - in the absence of being given direction by a leader employees will make up their own direction. This is hugely problematic because if you have 10 employees who are all engaged and acting in the best interests of the company but are pulling in different directions it will make the very difficult journey from point A to point B way harder than it already is. For small companies, you don't want to get meetinged (is that a word?) to death and a meeting schedule is a completely separate post so to start I would recommend the following. For 15 minutes at the start or end of every day huddle with your team. I posted some details earlier on the agenda.
2. Open, focused and frequent communication - understanding the big picture and the strategic path the company is on is critical. Every chance you get reiterate the "elevator pitch" with your employees. Explain why you are doing what you are doing organizationally and strategically and how they fit in to that. What is their role in achieving this success and how can they impact total company success. Again, in a small organization it is much easier to see how you fit in and what your contribution means. Just make sure everyone knows the strategy and what success is so they are engaged as part of the solution.
3. Lead by Example - BE FULLY ENGAGED! Engaged employees WANT to be inspired and look to you to be the rock through all the ups and downs you will face. Constantly reinforce your words in point #1 and #2 above with your actions. Your behaviour shows people what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour for others...when you don't think anyone is watching...they are. Don't give them reason through your actions to become disengaged.
4. Measure Success and Reward Proper Behaviour - make sure any and all measurements or metrics you put in place for the business are aligned with the strategy you are implementing and base all rewards around those. Rewards do not need to be purely financial especially for highly engaged people. These employees want the company to win and want to be part of it. Non-monetary rewards like GH3 nights out and pool and beer nights on the company to acknowledge great work are great motivators and team builders at the same time. I am a big believer in that which is measured is improved. Put the right measures and rewards in place and they will drive behaviour and engagement that is consistent with the strategy and keep everyone in synch rowing the same direction.

By Hiring Delightful Employee's and Keeping them Engaged you will Have Delighted Customers!

There are so many things in business that are uncontrollable that have a material impact on your businesses success or failure. Who you hire and how you motivate them as the leader and how they interact with your customers are all controllable. Nail the stuff you can nail and this is one area that everyone can control....get at it.

Hiring Engaged Employees

My last few posts have presented my thoughts on the critical need to delight your customers at all times and have discussed some of the how's around that from the perspective of the types of roles you will require and some recommendations around the types of action plans you can implement. There is one major requirement for the execution of the plan and the consistent delivery of a WOW customer experience and that is PEOPLE.

It is imperative that the people building your product, the people hiring, the people interacting with customers, the people in your company are passionate about what they do and are portraying the message and delivering the experience you want. In early days for a startup this isn't so hard because all of these people = 1 person = you!

In all companies hiring right is a key success factor but as a startup and/or small company it can be the difference between success and failure. I know I am oversimplifying and there is tons of literature out there for more complex processes and systems and formulas and measures but this is what it breaks down to:

1. Hire Engaged People
2. Keep Them Engaged

If you Hire correctly, keeping engaged people engaged is not nearly as difficult getting unengaged people to engage. You have 500 things to do each day as an entrepreneur/founder/CEO and keeping your employees up during good times and bad is an absolutely critical aspect of your job but don't make that harder on yourself than you have to with less than ideal hiring decisions.

For every role there are key components or competencies of the job that they need to be able to perform and perform at the head of the class but to me this is really just table stakes. Once you have some one who technically can do the job you need done here are some key things to look for:

• Attitude - Attitude is everything. How are they emotionally in the interview, are they engaging, upbeat, smiling, eager, excited....regardless of the role you should walk away feeling energized not drained
• Passion - Listen for knowledge and passion for what you do. They won't know everything about everything that your company does but if they are not jazzed about the space and what you are doing from a macro perspective it will make my next point even harder for them to pass and that is......
• StartUp experience - this is not a must for me but it something I have to feel very comfortable that the person understands especially depending on how I feel about the prior point. There are long days, all nighters, low lows and high highs and you have to be comfortable that this person has a "very healthy appetite for work" lets say
• Spidey Sense - Call this your gut. You get a feel for someone during the interview. How will they fit with your team, would you feel comfortable if they were in front of your customer? your investor?

My last recommendation here is to have at least two interviews with someone before you make any offer. The first in a more formal, typical interview setting and don't limit yourself to an hour (schedule them in the early evening say 5:30). If things do go well you will want more time to explore and the time will fly. If they pass the first interview the second interview should be in a more informal setting and should involve more members of your team. If you normally go for a pool night, darts, GH3, whatever...invite them.

None of these are rocket science but they are 4 simple points I have written on my white board at the office as I go through the hiring process. Write them down somewhere so you have them and just take a look at the points before and after you conduct your next interview. I actually have a ranking and weighting for each of the four but that is just the finance guy in me needing to bring EVERYTHING back to numbers so I won't bore you with that.

Interested in your comments on your best and worst hires and what happened....hope these help!

Some other great posts on this topic:

Tech Capital Partners - discusses the value of Employee Engagement

DangleTech

Dharmesh at OnStartups - talks about his hiring thoughts for startups