We hear all the time people complaining about their lack of power. “I cannot change anything at my job” or “I cannot change my personal relations” or “I cannot improve my business relations”. When you start thinking about some situation, never start with “no” or “cannot”. The “No”, stops your mind from finding solutions. If you want to be able to search for a solution, you should rephrase from “I cannot do this or that” to “How can I do this or that?”

What helps us achieve our goals is determination and perseverance. The determination when following a purpose has to be proportional with the difficulty of achieving that purpose. You have to keep thinking about where you want to get and keep visualizing yourself getting there. If the determination is strong enough than you’ll be able to keep pushing until you get where you want.

I’m sure you know Spencer Johnson’s “Who moved my cheese? ” This great story teaches us how to deal with change. If we know how to deal with change, we will be able to improve all the aspects in our lives, both career or business and personal lives. Let’s divide the discussion into achieving personal goals and achieving business or career goals.

Achieving personal goals

Personal goals might mean buying a house, or buying a car, or loosing weight, or meeting someone. A great question from “Who moved my cheese?” that stuck in my mind was: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Most of us feel fear when dealing with new things or new situations. That’s because NEW brakes our balance. Or so we think. If we succeed in getting over that fear, we’re one step closer to achieving our goal. That fear makes us think like “I cannot afford buying that new house because I don’t have enough money”, “I cannot loose weight or I cannot meet someone because I’m too busy”, and so on. If we remove the fear, if we remove the NO, we will be able to think about our goal like this: “What can I do to buy that house”, “How can I make time to meet someone”. When we think like this, we’re on the right track to finding solutions. So when dealing with something new or when we want to change something in our lives, we should start looking for ways to achieve our goals instead of looking for excuses why we cannot achieve them.

Achieving business or career goals

I have experience in trying to change something in a big company. Big companies have slow processes and are not receptive to change. It doesn’t matter if the change is good or bad for the company, changes are never welcomed in big companies. It might be because there are too many management layers and your idea might be lost along the way; or it might be because there’s already in place something that does not work as it should; it’s pretty hard to make changes in a big company (unless you’re a CEO or you own that company ).

What you need to do is break the change into small steps. Start by changing something at your team level, then show to other teams what that change did for your team and for your project, and so on. Little by little, you’ll be able to do changes, but you’ll have to be patient and only take one small step at a time. And if the change is done little by little, you have a better chance to make a difference into the company. For example, in Romania most of the big companies are multi-national companies. I have written the article about Corporate Blogging for one such company, in order to make them understand what can blogging be used for. They need something to improve the communication between departments, teams, HR and employees, management and employees, so blogging seemed like a good solution. But because blogging is only at it’s beginnings in Romania, pretty few people know what it is and how it can be used. So I had to take little steps and explain one person at a time what it is and how can the company use it. With patience and one-to-one discussions, I managed to make them understand the benefits.

This is just a simple example, the idea is that you’ll be able to do changes in most of the companies, if you take little steps. If it doesn’t work, you should try another approach. Not all companies can be changed, but most of them are receptive to change if the approach is right.

How do I find the power to achieve my goals

You’re goals have to be very important to you. If they aren’t, you won’t achieve them. You should always believe in your goals and always have the confidence that you can achieve them. Never mind what the others say, you should never loose focus. For example if you want to start a startup and you think you have a brilliant idea, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Keep working on your idea, make it materialize and you’ll eventually get where you want.

What makes us so different? Why some of us have great careers, great businesses, great relationships and others have lousy careers, lousy or no businesses and lousy relationships? Why aren’t all the children brilliant? Why aren’t we all top performers? Why aren’t we all very good at something?

There are two important factors which help us become brilliant, top performers, very good at something, great business men: hard work and mindset. Hard work is a very important ingredient for that. And only hard work will take you there. But hard work is not enough. It helps you become very good, but not top performer. I’ve met people who were very good at something but they worked very hard, harder then the rest in order to be the best. And I’ve also met people who were not working hard but were very good at something because they really liked what they did. By combining these two ingredients we get the right recipe.

These two factors can be analyzed separately. Let’s consider the first one: working hard. This is something that most of us can do, if we’re really determined and if we really want to get somewhere, we can work hard and we don’t really depend on anyone else. We just have to set some clear goals, make a clear plan and then stick to it.

On the other hand, it’s not really easy to get in the right mindset. The mindset is an effect of motivation but it’s roots are more complex. I think this depends a lot on our education, it depends on how we were grown and taught starting from childhood.

Brilliant children and average children

All children are smart. There’s no stupid or average children. What makes the difference between a smart child and an average one is self confidence. We all believe in our own powers and potential when we’re little. Remember childhood, there was nothing impossible back in those days. We knew that we could change the world.
But as we grow up, we start loosing our self confidence. We start loosing the thought that we can do anything we want. We stop believing in our potential. Our parents are very important at teaching us self confidence; and also at loosing it. They should teach us that we can do anything we want, they should make us believe that there’s nothing impossible. Children should be taught to focus on the positive aspects of any situation (hey, a bad grade is not the end of the world) and also they should be encouraged to focus on doing what they like. Children should be helped finding their own path and having the right support will make them have faith in their own potential. Believing in your self is the right mindset for getting wherever we want and we should help our children gain (or not loose) self-confidence as they grow up.

Being good or being bad at something

When you like what you do and if you are sure that you can do it, there’s a good chance you can be really good at that; and also there’s a good chance that you’ll get where you want. Liking what you do is the right mindset for doing it right.

If you don’t like what you do, if you don’t feel motivated enough, it’s most probable that you’ll never have the right mindset and you’ll never be good at that. Change is the hardest thing to handle. Most of us continue to do jobs and tasks we don’t like just because we’re used to it. But instead of continuing being bad at something, why not start doing something we like and something we’re good at. Enjoying what you do creates the right mindset for being very good at that.

Successful businessmen

Not all of us can be business men. Some of us enjoy having a job, we enjoy having a fixed schedule, we enjoy focusing only on something like technical stuff and not worrying about sales, marketing, branding, business meetings and so on. If you like what you do and are good at that then nothing should stop you. But if you have a job and you wish having you own business, stop asking your self if you’re able or not to do it. And stop worrying about failure.

All successful business men have had at least as many failures as successes. What made them successful is their determination to succeed. It’s their mindset and their belief that nothing stands between them and their success. All we have to do is transform our failures in useful experiences and learn from them and apply what we learn. If we follow this simple guideline, we’ll succeed eventually: we might succeed from the first attempt, we might succeed from the 10th attempt or from the 100th attempt. But if we keep trying we’ll get where we want.

When having the right mindset we take every failure as a lesson and then we move on.

Earlier today, I was in a restaurant and I was reading an article in Business Week about the first Starbucks opening in Romania. The article was telling about the great experience that Starbucks is trying to offer to their customers. The idea behind the business is simple: selling coffee. How did people come to love so much the Starbucks coffee? What differentiates Starbucks from other coffee shops? What makes people get in line in order to get a coffee from them? What makes them so special? In the same context, what makes people choose Google for search over other services? Or what makes them choose iPods over other mp3 players, Amazon over other on-line book stores, Coca-Cola over other drinks, and so on. All of them use pretty simple business ideas: coffee, search, music, books, drinks. Though, something makes them different.

Starting a new business

When thinking about starting a new business we tend to think we need a great idea for that. We are most certain that if we have a great idea the business will succeed. And we keep searching and searching for that great idea. Sometimes we might find it, but most of the time we won’t. It took me a while to realize that waiting for that brilliant idea will not get me anywhere. Most of the successful businesses use simple ideas and focus on improving the experience of the consumers. Starbucks focuses on offering a unique experience, Google focuses on offering the best and most relevant search results, Apple focuses on design and experience with all of their products (I’m writing from my iMac so I had to say something about Apple ), and so on. They’ve all started from simple ideas and focused on creating a unique environment around their products. It took a while for these companies to influence our lives and experiences, but they did it eventually.

On the other hand, there are also companies which started their businesses from brilliant ideas: Microsoft (operating system), IBM (personal computers), and so on. And they are successful businesses. What these companies have in common is that they came up with something new, with something a lot different that what was available at the time. They offered a different and better experience in personal computing, OSes and they had a lot of impact on how people work right from the beginning.

So there are two roads you can take for your startup: great ideas or great experiences.

If you have a brilliant idea, you can start develop your business around that idea. You’ll know if your idea is brilliant or not by the reaction of the ones around you. If you tell them your idea and they love it, there’s a good chance that the idea has a lot of potential.

If you don’t have that brilliant idea but you still want your startup, you can start from a simple idea and then focus on offering a great and unique experience to your customers. And always do something that you’d use. If you don’t like the services you offer, you customers will also dislike your services.

What should I choose for my startup?

I don’t think one choice is better than the other. I’d rather say they are both good. It’s just that one is more accessible than the other. It’s easier to start from a simple idea and make the best of it, than waiting for a brilliant idea. And it’s always better starting your business and developing it than not doing anything.

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.

Successful businesses and new companies have a lot of key elements contributing to their success. One of them, and a really important one too, is MANAGEMENT. Many businesses started to change the way they are managing people, or they started with a “workers as people” type of management from the beginning. Workers are valued as individuals, they are given more power and more trust; also, the decisions are not taken somewhere at the top and communicated to the workers, instead they are taken together with the workers; managers talk to their people and take decisions based on their feedback. We started to understand that two or more heads are better than one. It was about time, right?
There are many types of management, but if we think about how these types of management see people, we can divide them into two categories. Let’s dive a little bit into these two and see how they influence our company and our company’s success. For the sake of example I will talk about management in a software company, but the examples and observations apply to other types too.

“Engineers as Resources” type of management

Many companies, mostly older companies, use the type of management where they treat engineers as simple resources. No one is irreplaceable or even important and management treats them like faceless people, with no individuality. They don’t care what an engineer does as long as it works fine, to them he’s a simple, replaceable resource. It’s not important if that engineer likes what he’s doing, it’s not important if he’s motivated to do that, it’s not important if he’s better at something else, it’s not even important if he’s looking for another job. All that’s important is for the project to be finished on time and on budget.
Some of these companies try to say that they believe in collaboration, trust, talent, but these are empty words. How can you believe in and pay for talent when you don’t value each individual?
This type of managers also tend to lie to their people. They tend to tell and repeat unclear things and keep their people into an uncertainness. They think that it’s better to lie than to tell the truth because people are not smart enough to understand certain things. Like for example “if this project is not delivered on time and as requested we’ll all be fired”. Instead of transmitting this message, managers say “it’s very important to deliver this on time because … or …”. I think transmitting the truth does more than enough and it motivates people enough to do their job right. If telling the truth doesn’t do the job, than no other lie would.

Problems caused by the “Engineers as Resources” type of management

People working in these types of companies don’t enjoy their work. They don’t enjoy what they’re doing. They don’t feel motivated and they don’t contribute to innovation. They simply execute their tasks and wait for the day to be over. The management team is responsible for creating the right environment. It’s your job to start care about your people, it’s your job to start knowing what they like, what they’re good at, what stimulates them and where they want to go, where they want to evolve.

“Engineers as People” type of management

This type of management cares about the people. They care about each and every engineer. They care about what stimulates his imagination, they care about what motivates him most, they care about his plans or even help him plan his future. This type of managers don’t lie to their people, they are straight forward and honest to their people. Even more, they make decisions based on the team’s feedback and give engineers the opportunity to work on what they want. Let’s take Google for example. Engineers at Google have 20% of their time allocated to work on whatever they want. This means that they can work on anything they want, they can work on new products, they can work on new services, they can work on whatever they wanted to do but probably didn’t have time to do it. From this were born most of the Google’s services. They believe in empowering people. They believe in letting the engineer evolve in whichever direction they want. That’s why they’re so successful. There are many other examples. I’ve read an article a while ago about managers at BMW talking to people on the assembly line, about workers submitting new ideas and being listened by the managers.

Problems solved by the “Engineers as People” type of management

The biggest problem into a company is motivating people. Making them more efficient. Well, here’s the recipe. Let people work on what they want. Listen to them. Give them the possibility to be creative. Involve them when making decisions. Show them that their opinion is important (and I mean really show it, not just tell it). Give power to your team and they will surprise you. Also, allow them to change the environment. Don’t just put them into cubicles with no individuality. How can an engineer feel creative into his own cubicle when all the cubicles look the same. Better yet, stop using cubicles . Start creating the right environment and you will get the productivity that you’ve waited for so long.

Adaptability Century

What type of management to use in the adaptability century? We thought that the 21st century is the speed century, but actually it’s the Adaptability and Speed century. Deliver quickly and with real features. For this you need innovation, you need you’re people’s full capacity, their full intelligence and their full imagination. Start stimulating that. Make people work at their full capacity and make them enjoy it and you’ll be able to achieve anything.

Do YOU need to change anything?

Think about your company, and then think about this: do people at your company wait for 5 PM to go home? Do they start looking their watches every 5 minutes starting from 4 PM or even earlier? Then you need to change something and you need to start right now. Don’t invest lots of money on consulting some specialized companies, instead start asking your people what they want. Ask them how to improve their life and their experiences at work. It might be hard at the beginning but it will pay off in the end.

Why Motivation?

Ok, I know your first question: why another blog on personal development? I know a lot of great blogs or websites focusing on personal development. My favorite ones are www.stevepavlina.com, www.paulgraham.com, www.jamesray.com and others. I read regularly blogs about personal development and the main topics are: making money, loosing weight, starting your own startup, and I agree these are very important topics. Though I’m pretty sure we all stop at some point and ask ourselves: am I capable to start my own business? am I capable to improve my relationships? am I capable to become a manager into the company I work for? am I capable to change anything? am I capable to make the next step? or even worse: I cannot start a business, I will never be a manager because I don’t have the skills, I will always have lousy relationships, I will never be capable of doing this or doing that.

What is Motivation?

I see all day people complaining about how hard their life is, how they don’t make enough money, how they are caught inside a bad relationship, how they are stuck into a lousy job. What’s very interesting to me is that when you say: “Life is hard and nothing comes from thin air” everyone will agree. But if you say: “Life is easy and you can have everything you want”, people will start laughing.
Starting from childhood, we’ve been told that our life has already been decided, that we’re very small and we don’t have any power, that there’s something called Destiny and we have no control over it. So when we see a successful person we say “that’s a lucky person, and that s/he’s been destined to be successful”. Or we simply say “s/he’s got lucky”.
The only difference between that person and the ones still waiting is MINDSET. That person has found the MOTIVATION for what s/he’s doing. That person has started to write her/his own destiny.

The difference between those that do and those that talk about doing is MOTIVATION. Motivation is the engine that drives all the great things in our lives and without motivation nothing spectacular will ever happen.
Probably a rushed answer will be: money is the motivation for all this. Well…actually it’s not. Money is only a vehicle to whatever it is that we want. The motivation is different than that and it’s personal and might be different for each one of us.

How do I find the Motivation?

Allan Pease has made an interesting list about our primal motivations. Your motivation might be: Financial independence, Having your own business, More income, Traveling, Having more spare time, Personal development, Helping others, Meeting new people, Retirement, and so on. Your primal motivation might be on this list, or it might be something else. In order to find it, think about what drives you, what would you like to achieve if you didn’t have any constraints? do you want money? or do you want freedom? do you want to travel? do you want to sail? do you want to run your own business? do you want to be a manager? do you want to be a great technical person? do you want to have financial independence? What do you want? When you find the right answer you will know what is your primal motivation.

How do I use the Motivation?

There are two discussions here: motivating yourself for achieving a personal goal and motivating the ones around you for achieving a common goal.

Motivation is our engine, it’s our fuel and it’s our direction. If motivation is strong enough, the engine will not stop, the fuel will not finish and the direction will not change until we get where we want. It’s easy to understand this, and most people start on this path. But if and when they fail, most of them start thinking: “I knew I couldn’t do this”, “I knew there’s no reason to try”, “I knew I would fail”. Do you see the mindset here? This is a closed mindset, it’s the mindset that separates greatness from mediocrity. It’s the mindset that separates success from failure. Let’s take businesses for example. Do you think there are any successful businessmen who didn’t fail at some point? The number of failures is probably equal or even bigger than the number of successes. Though, how did these successful businessmen succeed? How could they, if they failed? Well, they never stopped. Their mindset was: “I will keep doing this until I succeed. I will never stop until I reach my goals”. And they didn’t. And sooner or later they achieved their goals. The MOTIVATION was strong enough, so the MINDSET was the right one.

If we expand that, we can think about motivating people around us. Let’s say I’m a manager in a successful company and I have a team working on a project. What’s my role as a manager? Do I have to keep pushing people around, keep stressing people with the deadlines, do I have to ask them day by day what are they doing? I think not. All these are effects not cause, they are effects of people not being motivated enough. Project management is all about creating the right cause, motivating people, it’s about creating the right environment, and if we create the cause of motivated people, the effect will be great deliveries and respected deadlines. I will come back on this subject in a later article, I just wanted to stress out the role of motivation inside teams.

That’s all for now on motivation. I will focus on motivation most of the time but I will also write about New types of businesses, New types of management, New types of startups.

What’s next?

My next articles will be:

Find the power to achieve your goals or WHY do people keep saying “I don’t have the power to change anything (at my job, in my business relations, in my personal relations)”.

Advertising Industry Crossroad - why not sharing the money with the consumers? After all, they are the ones clicking on the links or watching the adds, right? Share with them and you’ll achieve the main goal of advertising: people will stop ignoring the adds (text, video, pictures).

New type of management in the Adaptability Century

Motivation inside your company - creating the right environment for a productivity boost

Why some people excel and others don’t - mindset, believe in your own potential

All these articles and what comes after them, will focus on motivation and mindset. So stay tuned!