Most of us live our lives by some predefined patterns. We tend to do default things only because we’re taught that’s how it should be. Our parents, our teachers, most of our guides teach us these default things; we’re always told we have to do them. They are never tagged as default things, instead they are tagged as normal things because everybody does them.
Starting from childhood, we’re taught by our parents that we have to go to school; in school we’re told we have to get good grades to get to a good high school; in high school we have to get good grades in order to get to a good college; in college we have to study hard and specialize in some field; we keep hearing that if we’re good enough we might have a chance to get a good job in an important company and for a good salary. We accept these default things as normal things and they become our way of life; we do them without question and then we start our own family, we have our own children and we teach them the same default things.
Ok, so let’s recap. We study hard in school, we get a well-payed job, we go to work and get payed for this. We’re taught that that’s the way the society works so we have to follow the rules. We’re taught to work for money. We’re even taught that the harder we work, the more money we get.

Let’s analyze these default things one by one.

Go to school

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not stating that our children shouldn’t go to school. They should, but it’s important why do they go to school. Most educational systems teach the children a lot of things. Which is good in primary and secondary school. But starting from high school, we should focus on what we need to do next. And when we go to college we should know what we want to do and what we’re good at. I met people who went to college because that’s how it should be. They didn’t even chose the college, their parents did. And they didn’t like what they were doing, but for them it was impossible to drop out and start something else. It’s ok to go to college, as long as you are aware that you can do anything you want. The default path is to go to college, study hard, then get a well payed job and work for others. Start another path. Go to college to meet new people, go to college to learn new things, go to college to find your path. But don’t go to college just because everybody says you should.

Get a job in an important company

Starting from high school most of us dream of a good job, with a well known company. Working in a big company might be very helpful. We can get in touch with new technologies, we can learn faster to interact with people, we can learn how to manage people or projects, we can learn how to interact with customers. Working for a big company might help us learn faster a lot of things. But most people remain in companies even after they stop learning, even after they stop enjoying what they do. Most people stay with their jobs for safety. Leaving a well payed job might be hard and it might be risky. Though, if you stop enjoying your job, if you stop learning and evolving with your job, why stay? Most of us prefer working for a company because it’s safer than starting our own startups. But starting a family business might be a lot better on all aspects. Ok, you might have to allocate a lot more time for doing a startup, but you’ll certainly learn a lot more. You won’t be frustrated with being payed a lot less than what the project you’re working for is worth. You stop complaining about your boss or about the company because you’ll be the boss and the company will be your own company.

Don’t go to work because everybody else goes to work, don’t look for a job in a company because everybody else does it. Get a job if you don’t want to start your own business or if you feel not ready to start your own business. But if you want to start your own business, why wait? Start it right now. It might not work from the beginning, it might be hard, you might fail several times before you succeed, but you’ll learn a lot more than you’ll learn in a regular job. Unless you’re a CEO, right?

I’ve faced the idea of doing a startup. And I kept saying that I have to wait for that genius idea for a great startup. And I kept waiting and I kept waiting. And after a while I realized that a great idea might come after 10 or 100 small ideas. So there’s no point in waiting for that great idea. Try small ideas first, and each of them will be a step toward that great idea

Work hard for money

This is one of the defaults that we all hear every day. Most people say that you can’t have money without working. But there are a lot of people around which work hard and are always in debt. Ask around you what do you have to do for more money and the answer you’ll get is “work harder”. So the harder you work, the more money you’ll have. Actually that’s not entirely true. How come there are a lot of people who make money very easy? Most of them are rich people. And they’ve probably worked hard to get rich. But being rich is not really having a lot of material money, it is in fact a state of mind. All rich people who worked hard to get rich worked hard to believe they’re rich. They worked hard to see themselves rich. They didn’t work hard for the material money. They worked hard to come to believe they’re rich and they worked hard to understand what wealth is all about. The faster we come to understand what wealth is, the faster we’ll get rich. When we get there we’ll understand that working hard for money is just a big lie.

If you can think of other default things, add your comments here.

What is a blog?

A blog (short for web log) is a personal web site where you write stuff on an ongoing basis. It can be used as a personal diary, a collaborative space, a political space, a collection of links or memos to the world. New stuff shows up at the top and your readers can read what’s new and they can comment on your posts.

How can a blog be used?

Blogs are used by all types of people, they are used by journalists, they are used by politicians, they are used by CEOs, they can be used by anyone and there are several platforms out there which offer free blogging services (blogger.com, wordpress.org) or payed blogging services
(typepad.com).

What companies use corporate blogging?

In 10/05/06, 40 (8%) of the Fortune 500 companies were using blogs. Either external or internal, blogs are not new to the corporate world. Some well known companies which use blogging are AMD, Amazon, Cisco, eBay, HP, Intel, Dell, Ford, Motorola, Nike, Oracle, Texas Instruments, Xerox, Verizon, Yahoo, IBM, Microsoft, Macromedia, Google, Disney, GM, Sun, etc.

They use it either externally (for customer support, PR) or internally for communication and collaboration.

What can corporate blogging be used for?

Corporate blogging can be used for Customer support, PR (media relations), Internal management, Recruitment, Knowledge Management. It can be used for communication between different departments, it can be used for communication between management and employees, it can be used for communication between HR and employees, it can be used as technical platform for developing ideas, collaboration, customer support. Many companies use email for customer support. But not all people are good at organizing emails. It might be hard to track down an entire discussion which extends on several emails. With blogging, you can see on a single web page the entire discussion. Several may jump into the discussion and
the solution may be found even faster.

So called risks?

Companies using corporate blogging expose themselves to their employees (when used internally) and to their customers (when used externally). This might be interpreted as a risk because it’s hard to control what an employee writes on the blog. That employee is the administrator of his own blog so he has the power to post anything he wants; he can write about his believes, his frustrations, his accomplishments, anything. So Starting to use corporate blogging might be seen as a risk because a company should start using it only if it’s prepared to handle the transparency brought by it. Otherwise it might become chaotic and hard to control. Though used wisely can improve a lot the collaboration and communication inside a company.

Resources

A very good book on blogs is Jeremy Wright’s Blog Marketing.
Also, you can see a nice article about corporate blogging here.
The Fortune 500 Business Blogging can be found here.

What is lateral thinking?

I’m pretty sure you’ve already heard about lateral thinking. Probably you’ve even read something about this. Lateral thinking means thinking out of the box, looking at problems from unusual angles. It means finding answers to your questions by thinking unconventionally. Because of our educational system, we tend to use some standard connections when looking for answers. Lateral thinking is exactly the opposite. It tries to break the thinking patterns and it tries to break the default bonds. We all tend to think in default patterns, patterns which were formed during our education. Probably that is why we all have similar lives, we all go to school and try to get good grades, then we all do our best to get well payed jobs and become good managers. Our life plans look pretty similar because we’ve been taught to think in some predefined patterns.

How can lateral thinking help me?

When you are facing a problem and you think that no usual method will work, you might find a great solution by using lateral thinking. I was facing this problem while thinking about how can the advertising industry be revived? Even though it makes a lot of money yearly, the ways the ads are spread aren’t very efficient. On the internet, the most used types of ads are banners and text ads. I’d say that video ads are much more efficient and can transmit much more information. But how can you make the readers watch video ads? By using lateral thinking, you might find a few good answers.

Finding solutions using lateral thinking

Let’s think about peer to peer networks. They offer means to download content like music, movies, software, without paying. The conventional thinking is that the ones who download also have to pay. But from a lateral thinking perspective, I’d ask: why? Why shouldn’t I be able to download content without paying? Why shouldn’t or couldn’t someone else pay? Why can’t the money come from some other source, not from the ones that download. It sounds good, but where could these money come from? I give you one hint: advertising .
If you read my article about Advertising industry crossroad you will see that I have suggested a solution for reinvigorating this industry. Why shouldn’t the publishers share the money with the consumers? There are a lot of money spent yearly on advertising industry, how to make this more efficient, how can we make sure that more interested people get to see the ads? You’ll get some hints inside the article. This is another example of lateral thinking.

Advertising

What is Advertising? What does Advertising focus on? What is it’s purpose? We all know the answers to these questions. Shortly put, advertising means letting the consumers (people) know of new products, services or even new companies. Every day we are fed different audio, video, pictures, banners, text or other types of adds on several information channels. What I want to talk about in this article is the efficiency of these information channels (from the advertising necessities point of view) and some simple ways to make them more efficient.

Existing types of advertising

The most known types of information channels, used also as advertising channels, are: radio, television, magazines/news papers and internet. Let’s say a few words about each one of these.
Radio ads are mostly listened to while driving. They are not the most efficient type of advertising, but they get the message to a lot of people. When we play radio ads, we have to make sure that the target people are the same or a big part of people driving cars.
Television ads are probably the most expensive type of ads. Even if the consumer likes it or not, an interesting movie or a tensioned sports game is interrupted for advertising. We’ve come to accept this and it’s almost natural now.
All types of magazines and news papers use 50% or their space (probably even more) for advertising. They are pretty much targeted ads because you’ll rarely see a dog food ad inside a business magazine.
Nowdays the internet is already a very efficient advertising channel. It has started displaying ads by using banners and pictures and links. Now the best way to advertise on the internet is by context ads, which are basically text ads which provide links to different sites with products and services.

All these type of channels have a very important characteristic: no matter the channel, when an ad is broadcasted / played / displayed / clicked, the channel owner will charge the ad owner. So all the money from the ad go into the channel owner’s pockets.

Problems with the existing type of advertising

Existing types of advertising get ignored by a lot of people each day. Some of us change the TV channel when the movie is interrupted for ads, some of us do not read or even look at ads inside printed magazines, and probably a lot of us have developed a sense in reading web pages without even seeing the ads (I know I have). How do we make people pay attention to our ads, how can we increase the efficiency and return of investment of ads campaigns? What can we do in order to make more people pay attention to our ads?

Solutions

Let’s think about Text Ads. They are probably the youngest type of ads. They tend to change a lot but something remains the same: who cashes the money. It’s always the one that displays the ads. These text ads haven’t embraced the Web 2.0 concept (I used this “Web 2.0″ tag because it’s so used these days that we all know what it means). They haven’t adapted to the “empowering people”, “collaboration” or “social networking” concepts. They have given power to the publishers, so they’ve made a few steps ahead, but they do not bring anything new to the readers, to the users.

The money on ads get to the channel owners without doubt. But you, as a channel owner, how can you make more people pay attention to the ads that you broadcast or publish? It simple: Start sharing the money with the users. Start giving money to your consumers. You don’t have to give your own money, you just have to take less than before and give to your users or viewers a part of the money that you’ve charged for broadcasting or publishing the ads. Is this a crazy idea? I’m sure it sounds like a crazy idea right now, but I don’t think it will sound like a crazy idea in a couple of years. Sharing the money with your users gives you the guarantee that they will start watching the ads. It gives you the guarantee that the users will start noticing the ads. The problem that you need to figure out is how to do that. How can you share with your users the money from advertising? How can you be sure that there’s no fraud? How can you attract people and also ad owners?

If you understand my suggestion and then figure out a solution, you’ll have your idea for a golden startup.

Even though this article is mainly addressed to managers, all feedback is welcomed

People tend to change their jobs every one or two years. It’s hard for companies to invest time and money into someone who’ll leave in one year. They tend to avoid people who are not stable, they tend to avoid hiring people who change their jobs a lot. A better approach might be figuring out how to find and hire the best people, and then how to make them stay. How can companies keep their employees for more than one year? You might be thinking: give people more money, they’ll stay if they have bigger salaries. A bigger salary motivates an employee for a couple of months, and then they’ll want more. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be paid accordingly. If they don’t get a good salary from the beginning they won’t start working for a company, so the salary is very important. But there are other factors too and if the managers use them wisely, they will be able to keep the best people. It’s the manager’s job to create the right environment for their team members and the shortest recipe is this: when people feel they can be themselves inside a company, when they feel stimulated and appreciated inside a company, when they feel they are part of a team, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll stick around for a while. By analyzing this even further, we will find three directions we need to focus on: Personal development, Career development and Environment.

Personal development

Being able to do what we like

Imagine you were hired by a new company. What would motivate you the most? Being assigned on a project that you like or being assigned on something you don’t? Many companies believe that once you’ve signed a contract with them, your productivity and efficiency will be the same on any project inside the company. The reality is that people will be more productive when working on tasks that they enjoy than when working on tasks they don’t enjoy. It is very important for people to like what they’re doing. If they love their work and if they love what they’re doing, they will be very productive and very efficient. A manager has to know his team and what each member likes and what they’re good at. Then it’s the manager’s job to align this with the project needs as much as possible. Doing some changes from the management level, might result in having a better team with the same people.

Receiving company’s support when working on personal projects

Allowing team members to work on personal projects might have an awesome effect. Better yet, the employees should be encouraged to work on personal projects. The company might come to implement a new service or product starting from an employee’s personal project. Most of Google’s services were first developed as personal projects by their employees. Google allows their employees to work 20% of their time on personal projects; they’ve proven that this method is working so why not adopt this in other companies too.

Feeling important

Trust the employees. Give power to the employees. Give them tasks but also give them responsibilities. Let them innovate, let them come up with new ideas; analyze their ideas and give them feedback. It shouldn’t matter who came up with a brilliant idea and that person should be rewarded and encouraged to investigate even further. Employees need to be told that they are allowed to improve the products, the process, all the important things inside the company. And not just tell them they can make changes, support them in making changes.

Remove communication barriers

It doesn’t matter if we are engineers or managers or technical leaders. We can all be right or wrong. The days when only the managers were right are long gone (if they ever existed ). Don’t be afraid to admit your mistakes. If you are a manager and you’ll admit you were wrong in taking some decision, you won’t appear weak in front of your team. Instead you’ll get more appreciation from your team. They will feel closer to you. Stop acting like you’re somewhere far away from your team and start being in the middle of the team.

Also, communication inside a company is crucial. You need a platform for internal communication between employees and management, between different teams, between different centers. Companies tend to use newsletters in order to inform employees on new topics. But they are not very efficient because employees cannot give feedback to that. A more efficient communication framework is a corporate blogging platform. This will ease the communication between departments, the communication between managers and employees, the communication between HR and employees. This platform offers you means of communication with your customers too. It’s proven its efficiency so many times with big companies like Sun, Microsoft, GM, and so on, so it should work for your company also.

Feeling that we are part of a team

It’s very important to feel like you’re part of the team. Creating bonds between the team members has a great impact on both individual efficiency and also on team efficiency. If you had to choose between two teams: one where the team members consult each other on technical matters and always make decisions together, and another where team members never talk to each other and decisions are made by the manager, which one would you choose? I would choose the one where the team members are not only coworkers but also friends. There are many factors which glue teams together. A great power in this has the manager by talking to the team and always collaborating with them and assigning them tasks in which the team members have to work with each other. Also, there are team members which glue teams together. Some of them do not have good technical skills or good leadership skills and at first sight you might think “what does this guy do in my team”. At a closer look you might notice that that member glues the team and he or she is at least as important as the other members. It is very important for a manager to identify the role of each team member and figure out how can that team member help in gluing the team.

Transparency and clarity

Tell your employees everything they need to know. Don’t make any suppositions. Don’t lie, be straightforward. People are smart enough to understand what’s going on.

There is a tendency in some companies to try and keep the employees in a foggy state of mind. For example if an employee comes and ask “was there any decision made on this?” or “did you find a solution to that?”, some managers will say “oh, we’re still under discussion”, or “we haven’t made any decision yet”. It is ok as long as it takes a couple of weeks or one month, but if it takes more than that the employees will loose their trust in the manager. Instead of trying to avoid the truth, it’s better to give straight answers and real answers. Straight answers make employees appreciate you as a manager and they will come to you every time they want to know something because they know you’re honest with them. They will start trust you.

Another common mistake that managers make is the supposition that people will come ask if something is not clear. The will not, or most of them won’t. So in order to avoid this situation is better to always tell the team what’s going on and that they are always welcomed to come and ask you questions. Let me give you a little example: let’s say you are using some grade ladder in order to differentiate experienced employees from fresh outs. Let’s say this ladder has 3 levels: beginner, experienced and senior. Probably you are using some salary ranges for each level. These ranges might be public inside the company or they might be private. There is no point in keeping them secret because this will keep the employees in an uncertain state of mind, they cannot know where to evolve, they cannot make plans on their career, so they will probably go to another company where they can plan their future. I’m not stating that you should hang printed papers with the salary ranges on every wall. They can be communicated by mouth, but tell your team from the beginning that they can come and ask, don’t make suppositions like “if they want to know they’ll ask”, because most of them will not. One of the manager’s job is to always keep the team informed and this applies both to project aspects and also to company aspects, politics, decisions and everything that affects the employees.

Aligning the company’s objectives with the personal objectives

You cannot just align some words like “great talent” and “innovation” and expect the employees to start believe in them or even understand them. They all have to be aligned by the manager to the employee’s personal goals. So this is a task that will imply different strategies with each team member. The manager will have to work on aligning one or more of the company’s goals to each team member, depending on what he or she likes to do. If one of your team members is very interested in innovation, work on stressing out the company’s goals that are closer to innovation. If another team member likes process, work on stressing out the company’s goals that are closer to process. If another one is interested in some specific technical aspect, focus on stressing on one or two of the company’s objectives that are closer to that. Do no try to make each member of your team believe in all the company objectives because that’d be pretty hard. Instead try to find what does each member focus on for personal developing or career development, and try aligning that direction with the company’s objectives.

Career development

Being able to plan our career

It is very important for each one of us to be able to plan our career. It is important to be able to plan how to evolve, it’s important to know the direction in which we want to go. One question that is very used in job interviews is “Where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years?” The answer gives an insight on how can both the employee and the company evolve together. This shouldn’t be only a question, this should be the starting point for a manager with a new employee. This should be the first factor for the manager in planning how to grow an employee.

Evolving inside a company means both money and career. So if I want to make a plan inside the company I work for, I should be able to make assumptions on these two: how much can I be paid in 5 years and what can I be in 5 years.

If an employee does not know how to evolve inside a company probably they will start looking for another job, and they won’t stop looking until they find a job where they can make plans.

Having the right environment

Creating the right environment

Many companies use cubicles because it’s space efficient and it’s easy to prepare the office prior to bringing the employees in. Using cubicles is not very efficient because the environment can become noisy and the efficiency of your team will suffer. Though if you do not have a choice in this, allow the employees to make some changes to their own cubicles. Someone cannot be creative if his or her desk looks exactly the same as all the others. In order to be creative and efficient, we need an environment in which we feel good and safe. We need an environment we like, one that’s specific to our personality.

Feeling no pressure

Some managers have the tendency to stress the team more than necessary. Especially when a deadline is close. It’s good to remind the team that they need to finish by a certain date, but there’s no point in telling them that several times a day. Checking up the status every hour will not do any good to the efficiency, instead it will diminish it. When starting to work on something it takes around 15 minutes to get in the right state of mind, so if the manager comes to check-up on the status every hour, the employee will use only 45 minutes from each hour, and only 3 quarters from each day. Add to this emails coming every 10 minutes, phone calls coming every 20 minutes and other types of interruptions and you’ll see that no one is really efficient more than 50% of the day. And 50% is a pretty optimistic figure.

Conclusion

It is very important to have a motivated team. There are very expensive ways to motivate teams and there are cheaper ways to motivate a team. Some of them are hard to implement and adapt to your team, others are easy to implement and do not need much effort. Whichever methods you choose, it’s better than not doing anything.