5 Ways Leaders Must Build a Family Environment to Achieve Excellence

by Glenn Llopis via @forbes

At a time when organizations are looking for new ways to build high-performance teams, perhaps they should be considering a family approach to business that emphasizes trust and values.  A team work environment where camaraderie means having each other’s back and not judging one another.   A workplace culture that celebrates opportunities, transparency, and  the opinions of all to enrich conversations and diversity of thought.

According to a McKinsey report, one-third of all companies in the S&P 500 index are family-controlled, and many are outperforming their competitors.    A study at Texas A&M further reveals that family-owned businesses beat other firms in revenue and employment growth and have a longer-term view of investment; they’re more stable, and inspire more trust and commitment in their employees.  In fact, the top 10 family-owned businesses – including MARS, Ford, Walmart, Cargill and Koch Industries – collectively generate annual revenues of one trillion dollars.

The success of family-owned businesses runs much deeper during turbulent times.  Because family-owned companies tend to take a much more conservative approach to debt, leverage becomes an advantage.  As noted in the McKinsey report, average family businesses in the U.S. and Western Europe had a debt-to-equity ratio of only 25 percent going into the financial crisis of 2008, compared with 40 percent for non-family firms.

There is clearly something to say about running a business with a family approach.   Not all of them are perfect, but that is not the point. Taking a family approach means establishing a foundation of trust and a cultural promise to unite as one; to perform with purpose and the healthier whole in mind.   In the end, it’s about leadership and the ability to manage the moving parts and sustain momentum.

Here are five ways a leader can build a family environment to achieve excellence in the workplace:

1.     Give Your Team a Sense of Ownership

Too many times, leaders demand that their employees just “do” what they say – and thus don’t give them a sense of belonging to a team.   At a time when employees want to be a part of something meaningful, leaders need to spread the wealth of ownership and with it the responsibility – i.e., apply more accountability to performance.

To build a family environment, make everyone on the team feel as if they are a “board member” in your department.  Establish boundaries, but elevate their sense of purpose. 

2.     Everyone Must Protect One Another

Lead with kindness and intention.   Leadership by fear limits the growth of your employees and the opportunities for achievement.   Treat your employees like family.   Have each other’s back and always help one another improve; talent discovered and used in the right situations can seize opportunities rightly. 

3.     Instill Values to Enable a Trusted Culture

When you can define the standards of performance based on  an understanding of what you, the department and / or the company stands for – it is much easier to establish expectations.   These expectations should be based on a set of core values that everyone can embrace in order to build a trusted culture that is fair with no surprises.   Your team  will operate most efficiently with a clean state of mind knowing that their momentum will not be disrupted with “political road-blocks.” An uninterrupted game plan  means they can focus on results.

4.     Encourage People to Speak-up

Enable people to express their voice and allow their perspectives to be heard.   People shouldn’t feel that they require permission to express their opinions.   The goal is to activate the team, not restrict their participation.   The more people you get involved in the conversation, the more you can benefit from a family environment that embraces differences.    This builds loyalty, grows confidence and solidifies a foundation of trust.    Additionally, the expression of multiple voices allows for the discovery of opportunities previously unseen.

5.     Develop a Succession Plan 

Everyone on the team should be aware of their succession plan.  Be clear in establishing a road-map to get employees excited about the next stage of their careers.  Be transparent with everyone’s plan and allow others to participate in the plan.  With everyone pulling for one another’s success in this family environment, it eliminates traps and cultivates a culture of winning.

Leaders require maturity and trust in themselves to build a family environment.  Those businesses that fail typically are a result of envy, lack of trust and /or  an inability to work together.   Those leaders who can successfully build a family environment in their department will not only achieve more in the short term, but will build a foundation of hard work, determination and perseverance for the long run.

CEOs Don’t Come Pre-Made, Authentic Leadership Has To Be Learned

by Scott Weiss via @techcrunch

“There are a bunch of aggressive, ivy-league-educated, high IQ people working in Bentonville whose careers are going nowhere because they never learned how to connect with other people.” — Lee Scott, (now former) CEO of Walmart, circa 2008

During my short tenure at Cisco, I attended a leadership offsite where Lee Scott was the featured speaker. I certainly knew of Walmart but had never heard of Lee before this meeting. He humbly delivered a powerful hour-long speech on leadership ­­­— without notes or slides, as he paced the stage, hands in pockets. While I’ve heard a lot of leaders speak, I’ve never come away more impressed with how the delivery matched the content.

What struck me the most? That authenticity and humility lead to trust. Trust leads to approachability and open communications. And after listening to Lee for just an hour, he felt familiar and approachable. Honest and fallible. He definitely knew how to be authentic. For others, this may not come so easily.

At the core, coaching authenticity is complicated ­— some might say impossible. Telling someone to be authentic sounds pretty low calorie, especially to a founder plowing through a list of product and operational goals. But it’s important. An approachable and authentic CEO is essential to fostering a high-performance, open communications culture.

About the clearest discussion I’ve seen on authenticity is a paragraph in Jack Welch’s book,Winning:

A person cannot make hard decisions, hold unpopular positions, or stand tall for what he believes unless he knows who he is and feels comfortable in his own skin. I am talking about self-confidence and conviction. These traits make a leader bold and decisive, which is absolutely critical in times where you must act quickly, often without complete information. Just as important, authenticity makes a leader likeable, for lack of a better word. Their realness comes across in the way they communicate and reach people on an emotional level. Their words move them; their message touches something inside. When I was at GE, we would occasionally encounter a very successful executive who just could not be promoted to the next level. In the early days, we would struggle with our reasoning. The person demonstrated the right values and made the numbers, but usually his people did not connect with him. What was wrong? Finally, we figured out that these people always had a certain phoniness about them. They pretended to be something they were not ­­­— more in control, more upbeat, more savvy than they really were. They didn’t sweat. They didn’t cry. They squirmed in their own skin, playing a role of their own inventing. A leader in times of crisis can’t have an iota of fakeness in him. He has to know himself­­ ­— and like himself ­­­— so that he can be straight with the world, energize followers, and lead with the authority born of authenticity.

He absolutely nails it. The passage clearly illuminates the issue, though stops short of giving practical advice. I am often asked by founders and CEOs how to be more approachable or make a personal connection. And of course, while being authentic means something different to everyone — here are a few ways one could start:

Get self-aware. As I mentioned in a previous post (Treating the Dysfunctional CEO), all leaders need feedback. Having an understanding of how others perceive you — through a solid 360-review process — is the crucial first step towards being real. Learn and accept your foibles and faults. Poke fun and work on them out in the open. “I’ll try to keep this short, I know I can be long winded…” etc.

Talk about failures. Nothing helps make a leader more approachable than admitting your struggles, screw-ups and behind-the-scenes thinking on hard calls. If the leader makes this a priority, the whole company will be more open and methodical learning from failure. At IronPort, we used to go through exhaustive post-mortems: customer losses, engineering slips, and misplaced strategies.

Show up to socialize. Have a beer bust on Friday afternoons. Take a team to lunch. Drop in on a late-night networked video game war. (As a newbie, I was slaughtered pretty quickly). Especially if you are naturally an introvert, you must go out of your way to socialize with your team.

Embrace “professional intimacy.” I love this phrase. It describes a leader’s willingness to get personal and talk about life at home or their own career struggles. E.g. “My wife once threw my Blackberry in the toilet… It’s essential to be able to balance home and work before it blows up.”

Nix multi-task listening. It’s one thing to ask someone what they are working on and another to really tune in, give them your full attention and ask follow-up questions. I constantly see bad behavior with executives checking their watch or texts, or looking over a shoulder to see who else is in the room. That’s just phony crap.

Loosen up! This is really about speaking to others as though you really trust them with your thoughts vs. reverting to canned responses or the “company line.” Leaders that can explore the poles of an issue in their own words and off the cuff with employees will gain real trust. This is especially true during all-hands company meetings.

Get good at speaking. As a CEO, if you are a nervous public speaker, you need to practice. Find a coach, do some videotaping and/or try Toastmasters. The goal is to have a marathoner’s heartbeat when speaking to a crowd so as to be natural and comfortable.

Embrace different views. Encourage employees to challenge your decisions and approach. Let everyone know that you are not perfect, you don’t always have the best answer, and sometimes they have better answers.  In some cases, you will get good ideas too. You are obviously the decision maker but embracing different views will improve openness. (Thanks to Yoram at Maxta for this suggestion!)

I leave you with two examples:

Alec Baldwin’s parody of a GE exec on “30 Rock” comes to mind. Yet for all that’s been said, good and bad, about GE…the company does actually have an enduring, high-performing culture for a reason.

And secondly, from what I understand, Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines, is the embodiment of an authentic leader. He would fly around and hold informal meetings with groups of employees that would yield all kinds of new innovations.

It’s leaders like Herb and the execs at GE – whom employees actually trust – that inspire ideas, push back, and foster tremendous loyalty.

Scott Weiss is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. Follow him on his blog or on Twitter. 

What’s All the Fuss About Evernote? Should I Be Using It?

I absolutely love Evernote!  Here is an excellent post from Lifehacker with reasons you too should be using Evernote...

by  Melanie Pinola

Dear Lifehacker,
It seems like everyone is always raving about Evernote, but I don't really understand its appeal. Isn't it just a notes app that other apps do better or simpler? What's makes Evernote so great?

Signed,
Just don't get it

Dear Just,
You're not alone. I think the world might be divided into two groups: Those who love Evernote and those who don't (or, at least, don't understand why so many people love Evernote). Evernote is a cross-platform app that serves many purposes—it can be your digital file cabinet, note-taking tool, daily journal, task or project management system, recipe-keeper, and more. Because it has so many uses and different features, Evernote can both appeal to a lot of people and feel like overkill to others. (Our own Adam Pash has written about why he can't get into apps like Evernote because he prefers apps that do just one thing well.)

Although few other Lifehacker editors use the app, many How I Work guests and Lifehacker readers also love (and I meanlove) Evernote. Heck, I use it myself. We asked our Evernote fans why they loved it so much, and here's what they said.

It's a Universal Inbox: Store Anything You Can Imagine in One Place

Evernote integrates with just about everything. It has browser extensions that allow you to save a web page—in its entirety—in one click for future reference. A dedicated Evernote email address lets you forward emails, tweets, or any other type of content to any of your Evernote notebooks. Also, IFTTT (If This Then That) support means you can automatically send content from other services (e.g., Gmail or Google Reader or Pocket) to your Evernote account. If nothing else, you could use Evernote to archive your digital life.

Evernote can thus serve are your "everything" inbox. Thanks to its cross-platform support (desktop apps, web apps, mobile apps) you really can offload all of your reference materials, ideas, to do tasks, or other digital items to Evernote and never worry about where you've collected all those random bits of information. It's one container to store them all. Evernote's search is good enough that you can retrieve all those docs quickly, but it also has great notebook and tagging organization (more on that in a bit) that really make it stand out.

Jay G. says:

I use Evernote for EVERYTHING. I use it for my daily journal. I use it with IFTTT to save all starred items in Google Reader to save interesting articles for future reference. I scan all donation and other important receipts by scanning and emailing. I use it to organize projects with quotes, ideas, snippets from the web, and typed notes. I use it to store all digital manuals and instructions for various electronics around the home. I also use it to save favorite tweets (again with IFTTT). I use it to store teaching notes, discussion ideas, etc. I use it to reference personal documents, contracts, medical documents, etc.

That's just off the top of my head, but these would be the most common uses. I am a Pastor of a church and I find this tool indispensable.

Chris K. writes:

I use Evernote every day. I'm a consultant and often meet with clients to discuss designs. It may be weeks or months in between meetings. Evernote makes it easy to catch right back up where we left off. By synching between my MAC and my Droid I can even get caught up while I'm waiting in the lobby 5 minutes before a meeting. And I can share the notes with my peers.

Basically, you can dump everything in there—from written or typed notes to photo snapshots or videos to voice recordings—and count on retrieving them later either with the reliable search or your own tagging/notebook organization.

It's Digitizes Your Physical Notes and Backs Them Up in The Cloud

Because of its multi-platform support and OCR feature, Evernote also helps people who just want to go paperless. Mike U. says:

I can answer it simply that it helps the unorganized get organized.
Being an Evernote premium subscriber, I use the additional upload capacity to scan receipts, bills and letters, share household notebooks with my spouse, scan our kids artwork and tag it with date/event/grade. Additionally, I use it as a repository for documentation (read:work) in searchable PDF format.
It is totally the one tool I use every day multiple times a day.

There has been numerous times I've been on a call and needed something like insurance information, and it was easily retrieved, because everything goes into Evernote.

Evernote can quickly turn photos and scanned pics into notes—and also decipher the text in those photos. (The Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine is a nice marriage of the analog and digital.)

It's Great for Task/GTD Management

Productivity consultant Daniel Gold says he uses Evernote as a "life management tool":

It allows me to leverage it as a document management tool to incubate all my reference related materials (both scanned papers and electronic) with my action items. With note linking, I can connect the dots between tasks and reference items. Add in saved searches and I can quickly filter through projects and tasks to focus on what must absolutely go right in order for me to be more productive & successful.

Even though Evernote lacks the typical trappings of a to-do list manager (e.g., reminders and checkboxes), it can be a worthy replacement if you set up a system for using it.

Full size

Evernote templates make it easy to turn Evernote into a project/GTD tool, but perhaps the most thorough GTD Evernote system is previously mentioned The Secret Weapon. TSW takes advantage of some of Evernote's unique features: multiple tags selection (e.g., quickly find: ".Active Project," "2-Next," "@Work") and email integration.

Whether you use a structure like The Secret Weapon with Evernote, Evernote could manage your tasks and projects, thanks to the easy email integration, tagging capabilities, and also notebook sharing (for collaborative project management).

It Rocks for Note-Taking, Whether Simple or Detailed

A lot of people also use Evernote as a note-taking tool and for studying or reading. The app has built-in audio capture support and integrates with tools like the LiveScribe digital pen (great for students and constant meeting attendees).

Personally, I find the note-taking to be a bit slow and cumbersome on Evernote. If I want to just quickly jot a note down, it's not the best tool for the job (except for the fact that it's a great universal inbox, as above). I think this sort of dissatisfaction with easy note-taking and syncing is why a lot of Lifehacker editors have resorted to simpler solutions like using plain text files and Dropbox. (I'm defaulting to index cards.)

Still, Lifehacker reader feedback suggests many of you are also using Evernote not just as a digital file cabinet but as a digital notebooks or notepads. Nathan A., a graduate research student in chemistry at the University of York (UK), uses Evernote as an electronic lab notebook:

Each experiment I do has a dedicated note for it, and on the note I note down the COSHH/risk assessment information, safety procedures, procedures and any references I've used. ... After the experiment, I copy up my observations, measurements etc from the lab book into the Note. This is great as it means I can write my reports with full access to my notes, and easily share a copy with my Academic or the rest of the research group.

It might sound a little laborious, but it ensures a contaminant-free 'paper trail' and it makes writing reports up a whole lot easier.

Matthew B. uses it to quickly note milestones in his son's life. And Zef C. uses Evernote to jot down recipe ingredients.

Many readers said they liked Evernote's ability to not only sync across all devices and organize with tags, but preserve the note creation date. And Grad student Andy K. says Evernote comes in handy when you have to compile multiple media formats into one cohesive format. (Also, did we mention it was free for all this multimedia archiving/recording goodness?)

It Works as a Digital Reference System, Great for Research Work or Archiving Material

I use Evernote as a digital file cabinet and also as a place to offload and organize ideas. The web clipping browser extension works really well (although sometimes it makes me wait longer than I want to). Instead of saving just the URL, like Springpad does, Evernote saves the full article and the URL—which is great for reference purposes. With multiple tags selection and the ability to link notes together, Evernote is the ultimate reference system. As frequent Lifehacker contributor Shep McAllister says, it's great for doing research and highlighting how different things are connected.

It Allows for Multiple Special Notebooks

You could put Evernote to any task that involves archiving, journaling, or otherwise recording information.

Adam R. says:

Evernote is perfect for a beer drinking history of the different microbrews I have had. I include pictures of each bottle or glass of beer along with tasting notes for each one.

I also use it for work items I need with me everywhere I go, including IP addresses, network ID's and server names. Easily searchable and hasn't failed me yet.

Others use Evernote to preserve their:

• Meeting notes
• Client/project notes
• Home contractor phone numbers
• Songs (chords, tablature, etc.)
• Technical knowledgebase
• Travel plans
• Motivational quotes
• Usernames and passwords (I might think twice about that)
• Recipes
• Important (e.g., kids' medical) documents
• Bucket list

There are many other ways to record information, but perhaps really none as feature-rich and universally accessible as Evernote. There are tons of plugins for Evernote too, so you can pretty much mold it to your exact needs.

Those are the main reasons/ways all of us are using Evernote. It's not without its flaws (Alexio R. has a love/hate relationship with the app because of its automatic formatting), but it's like the Swiss Army knife of capture tools.

Love,
Lifehacker

Thanks to everyone who chimed in about their Evernote use!

The Best Business Books of 2012

These 12 books have shaped not only the way we work this year, but how we think and the conversations we're having. Authored by luminaries like Nate Silver, Clay Christensen, and Susan Cain, these delightful-to-read tomes offer insight into the power of vulnerability, habit, social media, and more.

1. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain
In Quiet, author Susan Cain argues that introverts are a reservoir of untapped talent--and that progressive managers can create environments in which they thrive.

“Any time people come together in a meeting, we’re not necessarily getting the best ideas," she tells Fast Company, "we’re just getting the ideas of the best talkers.”

Amazon, $15.20.

2. How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth and Karen Dillon
As the author of the disruption-defining Innovator’s Dilemma, Clay Christensen is one of the most esteemed minds in business. In How Will You Measure Your Life?, he and coauthors James Allworth and Karen Dillon investigate what it means to have a fulfilling career, and finds that it is both a focused and open process.

"I believe that we can, in a deliberate way, articulate the kind of people we want to become," he says. "As the rest of life happens to you, you can utilize those things to help you become the kind of person you want to be."

Amazon, $15.98.

3. Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours, by Robert Pozen
Bob Pozen once simultaneously served as president of Fidelity Management, lectured full-time at Harvard Business School, and wrote for the Harvard Business Review--meaning that he’s earned the right to write a book called Extreme Productivity.

"If you want an active schedule," he tells us in an interview about turning career plans into daily actions, "you have to husband your time so you can act on the things that are important."

Amazon, $15.97.

4. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail--but Some Don't, by Nate Silver

Nate Silver has become a bespectacled icon for his prediction prowess--as you might of heard, he called every state of the presidential election (and pulled 20+ percent of the New York Times’ web traffic on election night). But as he observes in The Signal and the Noise, we as a culture have grown forecast obsessed--something all businesses would do well to be aware of.

"We need to stop and admit it: we have a prediction problem," he writes. "We love to predict things--and we aren't very good at it."

Amazon, $16.35.

5. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, by Brené Brown

There's a myth about how entrepreneurs have to be invulnerable. Brené Brown will have none of it.

“If you are alive and in relationship, you do vulnerability,” she tells us. “If you are alive and in relationship and in business, you do it hourly.”

Amazon, $14.72.

6. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg

In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg explores how habits shape our lives--and how savvy businesses can shape them.

Febreeze, for instance, flopped when it launched as an odor killer, because, as Duhigg says, "the people who needed it, who lived with nine cats, had adapted to (it).” After noticing that people look proud after making their beds--a habit to capitalize on--P&G rebranded the spray as a post-cleaning reward, one that now makes $1 billion a year.

Amazon, $15.88

7. Renegades Write the Rules: How the Digital Royalty Use Social Media to Innovate, by Amy Jo Martin

Amy Jo Martin shares her story on how she got the Rock to become a social media machine in Renegades Write the Rules. In our excerpt she argues for why you need to share your life with your followers--whether you're an an action star or an entrepreneur.

"With more than a billion people using these communication channels," she writes, "you can't afford not to have an active role in the conversation."

Amazon, $15.81

8. Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck: What It Takes to Be an Entrepreneur and Build a Great Business, by Anthony K. Tjan, Richard J. Harrington, Tsun-Yan Hsieh

Business takes courage, observe the authors--but don’t confuse courage with fearlessness.

“Guts-driven entrepreneurs aren’t fearless,” they write in our excerpt, “They just know how to cope with, and maybe even thrive in, uncomfortable environments.”

Amazon, $14.75

9. The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World, by Frans Johansson

In every great career, Frans Johansson writes in The Click Moment, there's a time when talent and luck intersect in a fit of business serendipity.

"If you scratch underneath the glossy exterior of success stories, you're actually going to find that behind those things you're going to find an unexpected meeting, a surprising insight, and that's what's behind most success," he tells us. "It follows then that we should court those types of things."

Amazon, $15.85

10. Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, by Frank Partnoy

When making decisions, Frank Partnoy observes in Wait, you need to be able to understand whether you're operating at a Twitter or glacial pace--two contexts that might be happening simultaneously.

"What really good leaders are able to do is inspire the rest of the team by their knowledge of the granular," Partnoy says, "but also be able to step back from the granular and put together the tectonic pieces that need to be placed together."

Amazon, $16.49

11. The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations, by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner

Thirty years of research into leadership yields impressive results--like The Leadership Challenge by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, now in its fifth edition. Culled from decades of asking leaders what they're doing when they're in top form, the authors distill leadership to its essence.

"Leaders accept and act on the paradox of power," they write. "You become more powerful when you give your own power away."

Amazon, $19.38

12. 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era, by Nilofer Merchant

Social media is a game changer, yes, but it's only part of the larger shift of the Social Era, writes Nilofer Merchant. In our excerpt from 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era, Nilofer sketches out the new paradigm's core principles.

What's at the center of the social era? Connections. "If the industrial era was about building things, the social era is about connecting things, people, and ideas," she writes. "Networks of connected people with shared interests and goals create ways that can produce returns for any company that serves their needs."

Amazon, $3.03

One of the Best Ways to Jumpstart Your Company’s Growth

by Chas Klivans 

Most business observers agree that as a company grows it hits speed-bumps at revenue levels of $5 million, $10 million, $20 million, and $50 million. They also generally agree that most Founders, CEOs, or General Managers fail in their well-meaning efforts to take their companies over these hurdles.

The two conventional approaches to solving this speed bump problem are based on a paradigm that inadvertently solves only 50% of the problem. No wonder getting past it is so difficult. Pure business types will argue that this common phenomenon is rooted in weak departments such as R&D, sales, production, purchasing, or financial control. Organization development thought leaders, on the other hand, ascribe it to sub-standard people management originating in B-level executive talent, compensation plans, or culture. These two traditional approaches usually fall short because CEOs leading real world companies need a unified real world business solution focused on both achieving profit and sales plus organizing people to work better together.

Does Your Company Have Some of These Symptoms?

Recently an Owner, Founder, CEO, and President communicated the following about their respective organization:

• At a $20 million distributor of automobile parts, the eight top managers reported directly to the Owner and he alone knew costs, gross margin, and profitability of the company. Management meetings with all the executives were not held.
• In a $10 million regional residential plumbing repair and maintenance business, the six senior managers reported to the Founder, he alone knew the financials, and he was head of the Purchasing Department. This Founder held occasional town hall meetings but when observed he controlled the sessions with a tight fist.
• In a $4.5 million job shop for the military, the CEO did all the customer bids, all the selling, all the purchasing, and regularly drove unfinished parts to outside contractors for deburring and plating in his own car. This CEO called a managers meeting only during a crisis and then was not present, but had his Office Manager run the meeting.
• In a $50 million company the seven top executives reported to the President. He was also the Sales Manager and Chief Financial Officer. Management meetings were held only when sales were down and during them the President was observed tapping into his Blackberry the entire meeting, even though he sat at the head of the table and led each meeting.

The common thread was that all of these top executives reported they were stuck at one of these revenue speed bumps. These leaders said they had tried everything they could think of, they all felt they had hit the wall. However, all of them still acted like start-up CEOs who got involved in virtually every detail of running the company. I know the fear that results in holding onto this start-up mode of single-handedly pushing the business, because I have done it myself. We are all human.

Going Through the Toll-Gate

Most top leaders need to go through a metaphorical “toll-gate” to successfully navigate the $5 million to $50 million speed bumps which every company faces. The Founder, CEO, or General Manager needs the courage to let go of the familiar cherished leadership style he used to get his start-up company off the ground: pushing it forward mostly by himself.

Starting at the first speed bump of $5 million in revenue and more so with each consecutive speed bump, the daily leadership power dynamic must migrate from inside the CEO’s head to inside the heads of each internal leader. The craft of making a small company into a large company is that the leadership style of the Owner or General Manager evolves from solo pushing to the management team collectively pulling the company forward. In addition, this key ingredient boosts the valuation price strategic and financial buyers will pay for a business, because they know the operations can survive without the top leader.

The CEO needs to shift his thinking so he trusts himself to let go of controlling every part of the business and pivots to the role of larger company CEOs, who understand that their daily responsibility is managing the managers and not being a department head. Unless this power dynamic emerges, executives on the senior team will remain undermanaged and the CEO will continue to hold back company growth.

How to Operationalize Making Your Company Larger

The craft of how the CEO transitions from pushing the business forward to the management team pulling the firm forward includes many components. One important tool, described below, is to look at a company’s infrastructure from four different levels.

At the 20,000 foot level invite superior operating women and men who have spines of steel (that is who built sales and profits at a minimum two to three times the size of your company) and big hearts to look over your shoulder and guide you. This is not something to be learned from a book or lecture. Be prepared to take a highly respectful beating as they observe how you run the business. With great love (in a professional business sense) they will correctly tell you where to go with the company and, equally important, where not to go. They will also keep your management team out of denial.

At the 10,000 foot level, conduct a regular quarterly town hall meeting where everybody in the company gets together. This is a very successful practice even in several billion dollar NYSE companies. Place it on the company calendar so employees expect it. At this meeting, show the attendees the company’s financials and key operating metrics, good, bad, and ugly. They already have an instinctual feel for the numbers so harness this knowledge to your advantage. If concerned with confidentiality, have employees sign a confidentiality statement if they didn’t already do so when they received their employee handbook. For the next quarter, determine five items the team will focus on doing, communicate those items in a written memorandum to all employees, and at the end of each quarter grade yourselves on performance.

At the 5,000 foot level the whole leadership team gets together for a weekly managers meeting to review the prior week’s successes and failures and to set priorities for the coming week. If you are looking for what speeds up the sales and profit engine the most in a business, this is it. If leaders need to travel that week, make it mandatory that they participate by phone or Skype. The ones that resist the most need the meeting the most. Try to keep the meeting to one hour. Most firms hold it on Monday morning.

At ground level, the executive team conducts a daily huddle to review the day’s priorities and deal with any fires that need immediate attention. Hold this meeting first thing in the morning and keep it to half an hour. Just holding this meeting will help you do your job as a larger company CEO, because larger company CEOs do not want secrets and surprises. If you are making a lot of changes or have difficult challenges, your people can feel beaten down. In this case, start the meeting with one piece of good news. If someone is a negative Nancy and says, “I can’t think of any good news,” tell them, “No, you’ve got to come up with some good news.”

This has one other advantage. Most companies have a lot to worry about. It is easy to focus on the fact that you or one of your executives is not where you want them to be. At this meeting, take a moment to celebrate small wins in the business so the atmosphere remains more upbeat than it would otherwise be. Many CEOs are so focused on where they need to go that they do not have the fun they need along the way.

Conclusion

By the time your business has reached $4 to 5 million in revenue it is already too large for you to steer it by yourself and for you to be the sole source of innovation. The power dynamic in your leadership style as the Founder, President, or General Manager needs to change for the organization to grow from a small- or medium-size business into a larger company. This secret sauce enables you to scale up to a larger, more complex enterprise with more moving parts, which need to operate in unison in order to achieve greater wealth creation. The more information you share, the more power the team will have to steer the business with you.

If this is not done, you will drive your management team crazy because the leadership style that worked well for you as a smaller company CEO now hurts your ability to function as a larger company CEO.

Ask yourself this question, “Are you pushing, when your management team needs to be pulling?”

A Great Leader's Year-end Checklist

 by Les McKeown via @inc

The year is almost over. Great leaders know how to tie up loose ends and make sure their employees are happy and ready to move forward.

Salespeople live and die by the annual review. Auditors have built an entire industry around it. For the next month, print and television media will pour out gallons of coverage of the past year in review...

And yet, as leaders we often move from one year to the next with little or no time spent reviewing the year just past from a purely leadership perspective. To help counter that, here's my five-point year-end leadership checklist:
 

 1. Manage the narrative. Every business, division, department, project, group or team ends the year with an often unspoken (but widely accepted) narrative:

-"We blew it."

-"We nailed it."

-"Our customer service team let us down."

-"The first three quarters sucked but the fourth wasn't too bad."

Your mileage will vary. As the leader, it's your job to understand what narrative has taken hold in your team, and to manage it accordingly. 

This isn't the same as PR or spin. Managing the narrative isn't about manipulating what people think, it's about knowing what has taken root in your team's perception and helping the team members understand its importance.

So--as this year closes, what narrative has your group or team subliminally adopted? How accurate is it? Do you need to amplify or clarify any of it? Does it need to be discussed as a group? What lessons can you all learn from the narrative?
 

2. Straighten the angels. Next week, we'll put up the Christmas tree in our house, and as always, the final thing we'll do is to straighten the angel at the top.

Whether you've had your best year ever or the worst year imaginable, some--probably all--of your top performers will have been bent out of shape getting you through it. 

Some of them will have developed less than helpful traits - of arrogance perhaps, or gruffness, or maybe just thoughtlessness. Some will be harboring grudges, or feeling hurt or confused. Others may have been blindsided by events and are finishing the year off their game. One or two may simply be exhausted.

They're your angels. You're their leader. You need to go straighten them out.
 

3. Cull. In the course of any year there's a whole bunch of individual and group dynamics which lose efficacy, and which only you can untether. Practices that have become outdated; policies that no longer work; routines, rituals and habits that now just get in the way; meetings that have lost their purpose.

Ask for nominations of less-than-useful activities from your team, but make the final decision yourself - and make everyone's life simpler by culling those that truly yield no ongoing benefit.  
 

4. Restock. During the year you and your team will undoubtedly have used up one or more of the staples of healthy group interaction: energy, perhaps, or enthusiasm. Maybe as a team you've lost a sense of fun, or maybe you've run short on objectivity or perspective.

Take a moment and think about it. Again, take soundings from your colleagues. One way or another, you don't want to start the new year with one or more of those staples missing from your team's pantry. 

When you've identified which is missing, or has run down to dangerously low levels, think through how to restock in the next 30 days--can you theme the holiday retreat, or your end of year address accordingly? Do you need to give your folks some mentoring, or coaching, or training; or just a rest, or a new perspective?
 

5. Center yourself. Finally, what about you? How have you changed as a leader this year? 

Draw a line down the center of a page, and list on one column your defining characteristics at the start of the year, and on the other, your defining characteristics at the end of the year. How do the two lists differ, if at all?
Ask someone who knows you well to repeat the exercise, from their perspective of you. How similar is their list to yours? 

As you look at the two lists, which characteristic of yours most helped your group or team this year? Which characteristic caused the most trouble? (When you've decided, ask your team if they agree--you may be surprised by how differently they view which characteristics are your strong points and which are weaknesses.)  

Next year, how can you do more of the first characteristic, and less of the second?

The 20-Minute Exercise To Eradicate Negative Thinking

BY KAIHAN KRIPPENDORFF via@fastcompany

Belief is contagious. It wins supporters. It’s self-fulfilling. Here's how to get there when nagging, negative thoughts are holding you back.

After a flurry of emails in response to my blog post on passion, I reached a disheartening realization: Passion is useless if you don’t already believe.

You see, what we can achieve is limited by what we believe. Henry Ford knew this: “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you are right.”

So here I was, passionately committed to become the world-class business guru, best-selling author, the speaker who fills stadiums. And yet there was voice telling me, “You can’t do it. Keep trying, trying is fun, but in the end you will fail.”

You’ve probably heard that voice as well.

I’m making progress--my book sales are accelerating, my keynote audiences are growing, and I’m sharing the stage with people like Jack Welch and Robin Sharma--but in the back of my mind the voice pulls the reins: “You can’t do it.”

Great “outthinkers” seem to overcome this voice. Their belief matches their passion. Napoleon believed he was the greatest general of his time and so he was. Steve Jobs believed his people could achieve the impossible, so they did. Richard Branson believed he could win against British Airways, and so he won, even though every airline that tried over the prior three decades failed.

Belief is contagious. It wins supporters. It’s self-fulfilling. As Harvard professor Rosebeth Moss Kanter shows in her book Confidence, the belief you can win creates momentum which improves your chances of winning.

So what do you do when you don’t believe?

Over the past four weeks, I’ve studied books and articles, interviewed entrepreneurs and experts, then assembled it all for you in a simple framework with which you can systematically attack whatever belief is holding you down. Give me 20 minutes. This works.

Fundamentals

1. Beliefs aren’t real. They are mental maps, abstractions of reality, that help us predict a complex world. My son believes good batteries must be cold because I keep ours in the freezer. He believes Santa Claus rides a sleigh.

2. Four anchors form our beliefs (For more, read Why We Believe What We Believe by Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman). 

• Evidence: Something happens (e.g., gifts appear one morning and my mom says they are from Santa Claus)
• Logic: It makes sense, more specifically, it is consistent with our other beliefs (e.g., gifts can’t just appear out of nowhere, my mom and dad were asleep...it must have been Santa)
• Emotion: Strong emotional associations (a 3-year-old’s joy at getting a new choo choo) embed beliefs more indelibly
• Social consensus: We believe more deeply if others believe too (e.g., Maria and Nico and Sofia all say Santa brought them gifts too)

3. We reject what doesn’t fit. Once a belief is formed, we explain away any inconsistent evidence. I saw a documentary in which a young child said to his friends, “Santa came to my house and ate a little bit of a cookie, then he went to Jack’s house and ate a little bit and drank some milk, then to Maria’s and ate some and then...So if he went to ALL of our houses in one night, it must mean--” You are sure he is about to realize Santa can’t be real, but instead he animates excitedly, “Santa must have been really hungry!”

4. Humans need consistency between beliefs, actions, and words. In Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini calls this “The Rule of Consistency." This is how beliefs hold us down or lift us up. If you believe you can’t, you start acting and speaking like someone who can’t, so you actually can’t. Interestingly, the relationship also works in reverse: Change your action or words and you can change your beliefs.

The Model

Over a 12-hour flight home from Paraguay, I assembled these principles into a model we can use to deconstruct and replace any belief that holds us down. It is simpler than it looks.

Imagine a hot air balloon being held down by four anchors. The balloon represents the belief holding you down and actions and words this belief influences.

The four anchors represent evidence, logic, emotion, and social consensus. To release the balloon you must replace the offending belief. Do this in five steps:

Step 1: Identify the belief.
Find a belief that is holding you down. Tip: Write down beliefs until you find one that hurts. In my case, “You don’t really have what it takes to be world-class author/speaker/thinker.”

Step 2: Identify the anchors.

• What evidence/events anchor the belief? (my books aren’t on the NYT best-seller list)
• What emotions anchor your belief? (I feel comfort because in not really trying, I know I can’t fail)
• Who around you reinforces this belief (social consensus)? (well-intentioned people who congratulate me on already having achieved the dream)
• What logic locks in this belief; what “dependent beliefs” fit? (wanting to fill a stadium is self-centered, thinking I can offer what people don’t already know is conceited)

Step 3: Pick a new belief.
What alternative belief would be consistent with someone who really achieves your dream? (I am destined to be a best-selling business thinker and speaker.)

Step 4: Release the anchors. 

• Evidence: what alternative evidence supports this new belief? (people pay me lots of money to speak, I’m sharing the stage with some of the biggest business gurus)
• Emotions: what does it feel like to really live this new belief and fulfill your dream? (passion, purpose, having made an impact)
• Social consensus: who can you surround yourself with to support the new belief? (other business gurus and authors)
• Beliefs: how can you replace the “dependent beliefs” identified above? (this is not conceited because it’s about serving others; the best business gurus do it to serve others, not for their ego)

Step 5: Set your course.
Write down five specific things you will do (action) and say (words) that force you to live your new belief.

Completing this process took me 20 minutes and has put me fully in the game, committed and knowing I can win. Would that be worth your time?

Click here for a more detailed workbook. I will also invite you to a free webinar outlining this framework and add you to my newsletter. If you don’t find my newsletter valuable you can unsubscribe with one click.

10 Leadership Practices to Stop Today

by Paul Spiegelman via @inc

If you want to be the best in your industry, you have to get rid of your outdated management style.

You might not feel it day-to-day, but business management is in a major transition.  The old days of command-and-control leadership are fading in favor of what might be better termed a trust-and-track method, in which people are not just told what to do, but why they are doing it.  More formally, we're moving from what was called "transactional" leadership to "transformative" leadership. And there's no turning back.

Business owners certainly have a long way to go, especially in more established companies where old practices die hard.  But you can see increasing evidence that by creating a company with a clear purpose and values, you'll find your employees connect themselves to something bigger, and that increases productivity.  In other words, a culture of engagement leads to greater customer loyalty, and better financial success.

Here's my list of "old school" practices you ought to chuck, and "new school" practices to champion instead:

1. Out: Micro-management, or the need to control every aspect of your company. In: Empowerment, the ability to give your people some rope--even rope to make mistakes without blame.

2. Out: Management by walking around the office; it is no longer enough to be visible. In: Leadership by watching and listening, engaging in conversation, implementing the ideas presented to you, and distributing the results.

3. Out: Pretending you know everything. You don't have all the answers, so why try to make people think you do?  In: Knowing your leadership team members and trusting them. Choose great people who have the right skills and fit the culture.  And get out of the way.

4. Out: No mistakes, or a "no tolerance policy" some still think works. In: Learning from mistakes, or being the first to admit an error.

5. Out: The balance sheet drives the business, and informs all other decisions. In: People drive the business, boosting customer loyalty, and profit.

6. Out: Job competency is sufficient. Do the job asked, and you'll survive. In: Recruit "A" players who will go the extra mile. They're out there.

7. Out: Invest in technology to increase productivity. In: Invest in people.

8. Out: Demand change; be very specific about what you want and when. In: Nurture change; your people can come up with the best ideas and you can give them credit for it.

9. Out: Fried food in the cafeteria. In: Wellness in the workplace.

10. Out: Incentives; pay employees more money and they'll do more. In: Rewards; being valued matters more than money.

So ask yourself which of these out-of-date practices you're still using. There's no time like now to try something new.

3 Best Ways to Say 'No'

Struggling with productivity and time management? Try these simple guidelines to improve your focus simply by saying "no."

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Sometimes it feels like there's just way much to do and too little time.

You may believe that, but it's not necessarily true. Perhaps you're just spreading yourself too thin, and that can change.

There are many helpful productivity and time management tips, but I believe the most powerful one is the art of saying no.

That's no to yourself, no to employees, no to friends, and yes, even no (sometimes) to clients. Reflect upon the times that you regret saying yes to something that took you away from your primary focus. How much time and stress would it have saved you if you had uttered one little word?

But how do you say no to your own mother when she calls to chat in the middle of the day? Or to the client who expects you to go beyond the scope of a project without paying for the extra work? What about all of those cool ideas that enter your mind; how do you say no to yourself and remain focused on what's most important?

Here's a hint: You can say no without uttering the word. Here are three simple guidelines that might just make your life easier.

1. Don't respond immediately.

When you are asked to do something that brings isn't a part of your primary focus, simply tell the person that you will get back to them. Take a little time to assess the pros and cons of saying yes. Reflect upon your goals and review how saying yes will affect them.

Even if it's a simple request, it may put you behind schedule. Is it worth it? You have a right to say no, and once you begin to see the results, this little word will roll off your tongue with greater ease.

2. Consider creative solutions.

Sometimes we say yes because we just want to be nice. Saying no does not mean that you aren't a nice person; it simply means that you have priorities and boundaries. When someone comes to you with a request that you would like to fulfill, but would put a crimp in your schedule, think about giving them a partial yes--or offer another solution.

A few weeks ago I was asked to speak to a group on very short notice. I really wanted to do it to help them out, but I knew the cost. Following my own advice, I offered to get back to the meeting planner by the end of the day. I decided that I simply couldn't take the time out of my schedule right now, so I called a peer and asked her permission to pass her name along as a potential speaker. Then I called the meeting planner with this wonderful solution and a commitment to speak to her group in January instead.  No doesn't necessarily mean never.

3. Keep it simple: Never over-explain or apologize profusely.

You do not have to apologize for doing what's right for you and your business. If you are kind in your response and offer a few very simple words of explanation, most people will respect you for it. Take a moment to put yourself in the other person's position and choose the words that seem most appropriate for their personality type. If they are direct, be brief and direct; if they are emotional, use a more compassionate tone.

Remember that long explanations and apologies may backfire, causing the other party to push harder and you to question your decision. Don't complicate the situation, just kindly say no with a brief explanation (one sentence) or creative solution attached.

Just for fun keep a list of your progress. If you say no to picking up the phone when your friend (or even your mother) calls during your work day, jot down how much time you saved and call them back during a time when you can both enjoy the conversation. Resist the hasty yes and keep track of your time savings for a week or two. Soon you will be delivering a powerful no with ease!

Marla Tabaka is a small-business advisor who helps entrepreneurs around the globe grow their businesses well into the millions. She speaks widely on combining strategic and creative thinking for optimum success and happiness. @MarlaTabaka

9 Daily Habits That Will Make You Happier

by Geoffrey James via @inc

 These minor changes in your daily routine will make a major difference in your life and career.

Happiness is the only true measure of personal success. Making other people happy is the highest expression of success, but it's almost impossible to make others happy if you're not happy yourself.

With that in mind, here are nine small changes that you can make to your daily routine that, if you're like most people, will immediately increase the amount of happiness in your life:

1. Start each day with expectation.

If there's any big truth about life, it's that it usually lives up to (or down to) your expectations. Therefore, when you rise from bed, make your first thought: "something wonderful is going to happen today." Guess what? You're probably right.

2. Take time to plan and prioritize.

The most common source of stress is the perception that you've got too much work to do.  Rather than obsess about it, pick one thing that, if you get it done today, will move you closer to your highest goal and purpose in life. Then do that first.

3. Give a gift to everyone you meet.

I'm not talking about a formal, wrapped-up present. Your gift can be your smile, a word of thanks or encouragement, a gesture of politeness, even a friendly nod. And never pass beggars without leaving them something. Peace of mind is worth the spare change.

4. Deflect partisan conversations.

Arguments about politics and religion never have a "right" answer but they definitely get people all riled up over things they can't control. When such topics surface, bow out by saying something like: "Thinking about that stuff makes my head hurt."

5. Assume people have good intentions.

Since you can't read minds, you don't really know the "why" behind the "what" that people do. Imputing evil motives to other people's weird behaviors adds extra misery to life, while assuming good intentions leaves you open to reconciliation.

6. Eat high quality food slowly.

Sometimes we can't avoid scarfing something quick to keep us up and running. Even so, at least once a day try to eat something really delicious, like a small chunk of fine cheese or an imported chocolate. Focus on it; taste it; savor it.

7. Let go of your results.

The big enemy of happiness is worry, which comes from focusing on events that are outside your control. Once you've taken action, there's usually nothing more you can do. Focus on the job at hand rather than some weird fantasy of what might happen.

8. Turn off "background" TV.

Many households leave their TVs on as "background noise" while they're doing other things. The entire point of broadcast TV is to make you dissatisfied with your life so that you'll buy more stuff. Why subliminally program yourself to be a mindless consumer?

9. End each day with gratitude.

Just before you go to bed, write down at least one wonderful thing that happened. It might be something as small as a making a child laugh or something as huge as a million dollar deal. Whatever it is, be grateful for that day because it will never come again.

Are You Blocking The Way?

by Vineet Nayar via CEO.com

On your ascent to the Corner Office, you’ve probably encountered an abundance of leadership theories. Which one do you subscribe to? Do you lead from the front? Are you in the back? Or do you walk shoulder to shoulder with your team?  For my part, I just get out of the way.

No kidding. I truly believe that the role of the CEO is overstated in business.  Just like a head coach in the NFL or a Major League Baseball manager, we often get too much of the credit when our team succeeds, when it’s actually the players on the field who need to get all the praise.

Let’s face facts. It is too simplistic to attribute outstanding performance to a leader. Just because you are the CEO, it does not mean that you have all of the answers. Nor does it mean that you are making all of the decisions.

Some of you might already subscribe to a participative style of management and arrive at solutions in collaboration with your leadership team. But that is not what I am referring to.

Think about it. In today’s market environment, who is really most important to your customers? Who lives in the value zone? Who is innovating to find new solutions to overcome the new challenges facing our customers? It is the employee at the customer interface. The CEO is too far removed.

So the business of a leader is really to enable employees in the value zones of the company; encourage them to actively seek and initiate new ways to create value for customers; and enthuse them to take on the responsibility for change. Then, most importantly, step aside as they get to work.

And I am not the only one who subscribes to this view. There are many forward-thinking leaders who take this approach as the new gospel truth. Brad Smith, President and CEO of Intuit, for example, concurred in a  recent interview, to Forbes, “Regardless of whether you are leading a large enterprise or a small team, you need to remove barriers to innovation and get out of the way.” A similar view was shared by Joanna Pineda, CEO, Founder & Chief Troublemaker at the Matrix Group, who  wrote in her blog recently, “The more I got to thinking, the more I realized that sometimes, CEOs should set goals and parameters and then get the heck out of the way.”

And why not? After all, it is the employees who have been at the core of every game-changing idea around us. Look around. Whether it is the iPhone, the tablet, digital cameras or any other recent technology innovation, employees — perhaps those tucked away in the research and development labs — are the ones who have built them. They have carved the shape of the products that defined the past and present. Without a doubt they are the ones who are going to build our great companies in the future.

No matter how much senior management might resist shedding the spotlight, the winds of change are swirling and hierarchical pyramids are getting destroyed everywhere we look. Social media has built a new world run on collaborative power and popular revolutions are leading political and social transformation.

It is time to actively channel the power of these winds by building windmills, rather than walls. It is time indeed for CEOs to move away from legacy management systems to decouple power and position. If we can just broaden the leadership franchise, we are sure to find new ways to transform business by letting the real people, making a real difference, come to the forefront.

There is an African proverb that goes something like this: A blade of grass does not grow faster if you pull it.  I think this is profound wisdom for CEOs today as they look to lead more effectively in the “New Normal.”

Vineet Nayar is Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of HCL Technologies Ltd. (HCLT), a $4.3 billion global information technology services company and author of the highly acclaimed management book “Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down” (Harvard Business Press, June 2010). He is also an acknowledged management visionary and a radical thinker who architected the company’s „Employees First, Customers Second‟ (EFCS) strategy, which transformed HCL’s business, through its inverted organizational structure which has helped create transparency and accountability within the organization and encourage a value-driven culture since its conception in 2005.

CEO Confidence Index

Vistage and the Wall St. Journal team up for a survey measuring the sentiment of U.S. small-business CEOs and owners about the economy. Respondents are limited to businesses with annual revenues of $1 million to $20 million. The findings are analyzed by Dr. Richard Curtin, University of Michigan. Read more about the survey, or read about the October results.
 

Green Eggs and Ham: Overcoming Objections in Sales

One of my Vistage group members had a copy of Green Eggs and Ham in his office.  When I asked him how it got there he told me, It is the best sales book ever written!".  I reread it and, he is right!  It is an amazing story of persistence, overcoming objections and closing the sale.  I liked this blog post to illustrate some of the practical points of the book!

by Carmen Hudson
Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Suess is a classic tale of the struggling salesman. Poor Sam-I-Am isn't even trying to get his prospect to buy his product yet: he's just trying to get the man to take a sample! Sam-I-Am overcomes no less than 73 objections before he makes his "sale".

There is step by step process that you can use to overcome objections, and like any sales "script", if you can brand these into your memory and make them yours, you'll be able to deliver them smoothly and avoid making it sound canned or corny. While our friend Sam-I-Am does not follow the outline exactly, he does go pretty closely.

First, Make Sure You Understand the Objection.

Sometimes the objection is not the objection. For example, a prospect might say, "I have to think about it. I never buy anything like this without thinking about it first."

This could be true. But it often isn't. Sometimes this is just a smoke screen for whatever is really bothering the prospect. Restating and clarifying the objection can help you zero in on what the prospect's actual problem is.

A good way to do this is to say, "I can certainly respect that, Mr. Jones. I myself like to make sure I am carefully considering every angle before I spend any of my hard earned money. Can I ask you a question?"

Usually, the prospect will consent to being asked a question. A question is not threatening, and it reassures the other person that you are interested in what they are thinking and feeling at this juncture. So when they assent, you ask the key question.

The Key Question: "Is the need to think about this decision the only thing keeping us from doing business today?"

If the prospect says, "Yes," move on to the next step. If the prospect says, "No," he will often follow it up with the real objection, perhaps, "I just am not sure I have the money for it right now." Once you're working with the real objection, you can proceed to trying to overcome it.

Clarify their Desires.

If you are like most salespeople, you likely have a variety of options to offer any customers, even if those options are just as simple as the "red one" or the "blue one." Sam-I-Am, for example, offered "here," or "there", as well as "in a box" and "with a fox." Asking about options refocuses the prospect's mind on ownership, on seeing your product or service as his. So once you have isolated the objection, you might be able to move on to something like this:

"I can definitely appreciate that Mr. Jones. Nobody wants to spend their money on something they're not going to need or like. But just so I can clarify for any conversations we might have in the future, did you like the red one, or the blue one, better?"

"I definitely liked the red one better," Mr. Jones might say.

Overcome the Objection.

"The red one is an excellent choice," you might say, "And I see how well it will compliment what you're already doing. You did mention to me that you were really wanting to have a nice couch that would compliment your existing decorating scheme, I can see how the red one would be the choice for you. But you said you were concerned about the price?"

Again, you're making sure you're dealing with the real objection.

"Yes," Mr. Jones might say. "$999 is a little more than I'd hoped to pay."

How you overcome the objection might well depend on what you have to offer. Does your product or service offer savings in the long run? Do you have a slightly different option that offers a lot of what the prospect is looking for at a cheaper price? Do you have negotiating room to lower the price or give deals and specials? Your own sales manager or company will likely have their own industry-specific tips to deal with the specific objections.

Sometimes, however, the prospect will switch objections on you again, and you'll have to go back to the beginning. Just make sure you switch up your wording, or you'll start to sound like the happy bobble headed psychobabble robot, understanding and appreciating everything the prospect ever said.

Thank you, Thank you, Sam-I-Am!

You are doing your prospects a favor by overcoming their objections in the right way. By continuing to ask enough questions to learn what your prospects real concerns are, you will be able to dramatically raise your close rate as well as be assured that you've created the relationship that brings customers back to you, rather than risking a case of "Buyer's Remorse" and cancellation down the line. After all, when Sam-I-Am finally made his sale, he created a customer for life.

The Real Truth About Sales Tests

Our Vistage speaker this week is on sales and marketing, unquestionably the lifeblood of any business.  This post by Greta Schulz hits home a key aspect of success.

How do you know if that sales candidate you or your sales manager fell in love with is really the superstar you hope they are?  Before you pin your hopes on your managers’ ability to screen, recruit, interview and hire…you should know how pre-employment testing can raise your success rate in hiring new salespeople.

The keys to pre-employment testing is to make sure you’re testing for the right things.

Example:  Do you want to hire salespeople who knowhow to sell?  Or do you want to hire people who willsell?  Understanding the difference can make or break your career as an executive.  The right test will give you an accurate, honest assessment about your candidate and list them into the following four categories:

# 1. Can Sell and Will Sell:  Know what to do and consistently execute in selling situations.  Hire and train these and you’ll never need to worry about hitting budget.

#2. Can Sell but Won’t Sell: This is the most dangerous person to have on your team.  They know what do in selling situations but don’t consistently execute.  We keep giving them more time because “they’re just so good”. If you’ve got these on your team, find out quick if they’re fixable.  If not, replace them.

#3. Cannot Sell But Will Sell: This person is the one that may pleasantly surprises you.  They don’t look or act like they could sell their way out of a paper bag, but they sell anyway.  Hire these, provide the right type of on-going training and you can guarantee superstar performance.

#4.  Cannot and Won’t Sell: Hopefully you don’t have any of these.   They’re easiest to spot and you should deal with them quickly and decisively.

What’s the right type of test?  There are so many sales pre-employment tests which fall into four types.  Here are the characteristics and limitations of each.

Personality Tests:  Determines personality type and stability.  Cannot accurately predict whether or not people can or will sell.  It also brings up old beliefs that an outgoing personality, a real “people person” will be a good salesperson. After doing this for years, that is not a predictor of strong sale ability at all.

Benchmark Tests: These are an analysis of your “best salesperson(s) and taking the “characteristics of this person to try to hire in their image. In my opinion it is the combination of each person that makes them successful or not and to try to mirror that is setting up for failure.

Sales Aptitude Tests:  Assess what people know about selling.  They won’t necessarily tell you whether or not someone will execute is a selling situation.  There’s a huge gap between knowing and doing.

Internal beliefs Test:  Measures strengths and hidden weaknesses that more accurately predicts whether or not someone will sell.   Measures guts, goals, selling system effectiveness, willingness to prospect, and their willingness to do whatever it takes even if it’s uncomfortable.

If you want to know how someone will fit in your company’s culture or how to manage them, use a behavioral test.  If you want to predict future sales performance, use an Internal belief test.

When combined with a strong recruiting process, you can virtually eliminate bad sales force hires.  Hold your managers accountable for their hiring mistakes. Sales training should come only when you have hired the right people.

Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton knew how to hold his managers accountable for their hiring recommendations.  When his executives hired a candidate, Walton asked each to write a page outlining the candidate’s strengths and why they were hiring the candidate.  In the event that employee ever needed to be fired, Walton required the manager to write a page explaining why.  Then the manager had to travel to see Walton to personally explain the differences in the two memos.  After one of these sessions, few managers repeated a hiring mistake.

There is nothing more important than hiring the right people. It should be an ongoing process. When you have a good strong group, then and only then should you spend time and money on training. You need the right ingredients to make a great meal even if the recipe is good, right!

Email me if you would like a sample; greta@schulzbusiness.com. And ask!

Stop Caring How Many Hours Your Employees Work

by Ilya Pozin

Bring your company into the 21st century, where work is about goals accomplished, not hours clocked. Your employees will thank you.

The traditional 9-to-5 workweek is just that: traditional, a vestige of a different era when the number of hours an employee clocked on a production line was an easy way to measure productivity. The nature of work has changed, but too many businesses still automatically adopt a rigid schedule without considering its effects on employee productivity and happiness. 

Enforcing strict working hours erodes employer-employee trust. Telling them whenthey must complete their work is a fast way to make them feel less autonomous. And nothing kills productivity faster than an atmosphere in which employees feel forced to work. They should want to complete their work--for the good of the company and because they like what they do, not because they feel obligated or forced. 

The fact is, giving employees full freedom to come in and leave when they want may increase their output and productivity. 

Here are four reasons why you should drop set working hours: 

1. It diminishes productivity.

When employees are forced to be at work within specific time parameters, their success is tied to when they come in and leave the office--not what goals have been met. Just because an employee is present doesn’t mean he's actually being productive. Let's face it: Simply filling the requirement of sitting in a chair for eight (or more) hours is not exactly motivating.

2. It doesn't foster trust.

Employees should have full autonomy to meet their goals however they want--put the onus on them to determine the best process. That way, they’re more likely to own their work and be passionate about being the best they can be. 

3. It's distracting.

Do most employees' projects and tasks consistently fit within a rigid, 9-to-5 schedule? Probably not. So why do you want them thinking about how many hours they clock instead of meeting their goals? Employees can and should determine how long they must be at the office to get something done. After all, during a big project you don't want someone walking out the door when the clock strikes 5 simply because she's met her time quota for the day. 

4. It's bad for teamwork.

Working in a team can make a huge difference when it comes to productivity. But when individual team members are bound by set hours, you exacerbate potential issues over who's pulling their weight. Let your employees focus on meeting team goals and collaborating to make it happen--whether that means they all work together in the office during the same hours or whether they work in chunks of time here and there. They know how to get their work done.

Getting rid of employee hours can require a culture change in your company, but you’ll reap the benefits of increased flexibility and autonomy. Keeping employees happy and productive starts with you showing them trust--and enforcing hours shows exactly the opposite.

How (not) to get a raise

Be Happier: 10 Things to Stop Doing Right Now

Sometimes the route to happiness depends more on what you don't do.

 

Flickr Creative 

Happiness--in your business life and your personal life--is often a matter of subtraction, not addition.

Consider, for example, what happens when you stop doing the following 10 things:

1. Blaming.

People make mistakes. Employees don't meet your expectations. Vendors don't deliver on time.

So you blame them for your problems.

But you're also to blame. Maybe you didn't provide enough training. Maybe you didn't build in enough of a buffer. Maybe you asked too much, too soon.

Taking responsibility when things go wrong instead of blaming others isn't masochistic, it's empowering--because then you focus on doing things better or smarter next time.

And when you get better or smarter, you also get happier.

2. Impressing.

No one likes you for your clothes, your car, your possessions, your title, or your accomplishments. Those are all "things." People may like your things--but that doesn't mean they like you.

Sure, superficially they might seem to, but superficial is also insubstantial, and a relationship that is not based on substance is not a real relationship.

Genuine relationships make you happier, and you'll only form genuine relationships when you stop trying to impress and start trying to just be yourself.

3. Clinging.

When you're afraid or insecure, you hold on tightly to what you know, even if what you know isn't particularly good for you.

An absence of fear or insecurity isn't happiness: It's just an absence of fear or insecurity.

Holding on to what you think you need won't make you happier; letting go so you can reach for and try to earn what you want will.

Even if you don't succeed in earning what you want, the act of trying alone will make you feel better about yourself.

4. Interrupting.

Interrupting isn't just rude. When you interrupt someone, what you're really saying is, "I'm not listening to you so I can understand what you're saying; I'm listening to you so I can decide what I want to say."

Want people to like you? Listen to what they say. Focus on what they say. Ask questions to make sure you understand what they say.

They'll love you for it--and you'll love how that makes you feel.

5. Whining.

Your words have power, especially over you. Whining about your problems makes you feel worse, not better.

If something is wrong, don't waste time complaining. Put that effort into making the situation better. Unless you want to whine about it forever, eventually you'll have to do that. So why waste time? Fix it now.

Don't talk about what's wrong. Talk about how you'll make things better, even if that conversation is only with yourself.

And do the same with your friends or colleagues. Don't just be the shoulder they cry on.

Friends don't let friends whine--friends help friends make their lives better.

6. Controlling.

Yeah, you're the boss. Yeah, you're the titan of industry. Yeah, you're the small tail that wags a huge dog.

Still, the only thing you really control is you. If you find yourself trying hard to control other people, you've decided that you, your goals, your dreams, or even just your opinions are more important than theirs.

Plus, control is short term at best, because it often requires force, or fear, or authority, or some form of pressure--none of those let you feel good about yourself.

Find people who want to go where you're going. They'll work harder, have more fun, and create better business and personal relationships.

And all of you will be happier.

7. Criticizing.

Yeah, you're more educated. Yeah, you're more experienced. Yeah, you've been around more blocks and climbed more mountains and slayed more dragons.

That doesn't make you smarter, or better, or more insightful.

That just makes you you: unique, matchless, one of a kind, but in the end, just you.

Just like everyone else--including your employees.

Everyone is different: not better, not worse, just different. Appreciate the differences instead of the shortcomings and you'll see people--and yourself--in a better light.

8. Preaching.

Criticizing has a brother. His name is Preaching. They share the same father: Judging.

The higher you rise and the more you accomplish, the more likely you are to think you know everything--and to tell people everything you think you know.

When you speak with more finality than foundation, people may hear you but they don't listen. Few things are sadder and leave you feeling less happy.

9. Dwelling.

The past is valuable. Learn from your mistakes. Learn from the mistakes of others.

Then let it go.

Easier said than done? It depends on your focus. When something bad happens to you, see that as a chance to learn something you didn't know. When another person makes a mistake, see that as an opportunity to be kind, forgiving, and understanding.

The past is just training; it doesn't define you. Think about what went wrong, but only in terms of how you will make sure that, next time, you and the people around you will know how to make sure it goes right.

10. Fearing.

We're all afraid: of what might or might not happen, of what we can't change, or what we won't be able to do, or how other people might perceive us.

So it's easier to hesitate, to wait for the right moment, to decide we need to think a little longer or do some more research or explore a few more alternatives.

Meanwhile days, weeks, months, and even years pass us by.

And so do our dreams.

Don't let your fears hold you back. Whatever you've been planning, whatever you've imagined, whatever you've dreamed of, get started on it today.

If you want to start a business, take the first step. If you want to change careers, take the first step. If you want to expand or enter a new market or offer new products or services, take the first step.

Put your fears aside and get started. Do something. Do anything.

Otherwise, today is gone. Once tomorrow comes, today is lost forever.

Today is the most precious asset you own--and is the one thing you should truly fear wasting.

Want Success? Love to Sell

by Geoffrey James

Adopt the one characteristic that unites all highly successful people: they love to sell.

 

Getty

The most successful entrepreneurs and businesspeople share a single, essential characteristic: they're good at selling. No idea, expertise, product or service ever became successful without somebody selling it to investors, peers, employees and customers.

I can, and have, published hundreds of posts explaining how to improve your ability to sell, but up until now, I've held back a secret. It's a secret so powerful and so essential that it will seem painfully obvious when I reveal it in this post.

The Big Secret of Success

The secret is this: the way to become a great salesperson (and therefore successful in whatever you do) is to enjoy selling.

Take Steve Jobs. By all accounts, Jobs was often miserable and frustrated when working with other people and creating new products. But on the stage, selling those new products to the waiting world... the joy in his face was marvelous to behold.

I've seen the same phenomenon in many industries. The CEOs who are the most successful are those who get a bigger kick from meeting with customers than from handling day-to-day operations.

The secret certainly holds true in sales and marketing. I can tell within seconds of meeting a salesperson or a marketer whether or not they love their job. And, not surprisingly, I've watched the ones who do love selling make the most money.

If you truly want to be successful at whatever you do, you should now be asking yourself: "How can I learn to really love part of my job that involves selling what I have to offer?" If that's what you want to know, read on.

How to Love Selling

In my experience, people who truly love selling see themselves in service to a higher purpose. For CEOs like Steve Jobs, that higher purpose is "changing the world," which was the tone of every sales pitch Jobs ever gave.

That idea--"change the world--is deeper than it seems at first glance. The reason successful people want to "change the world" is that they want to make it a better place, where people are happier, safer and where there's less pain and suffering.

However, it's impossible to change the world if nobody knows or understand what you're selling. Selling, in other words, is the vehicle through which you change the world.  Without selling, every idea falls on dry and barren ground.

Selling, therefore, is nothing more nor less than a way to be of service to others and that's where the enjoyment comes in. When you're selling, you're creating a better world for yourself and for others. How can you not enjoy that?

This concept runs contrary to the popular notion of the slick salesperson who cares only about making the deal. Nevertheless, it's the way that truly successful people feel when they're selling something they believe in.

The Bliss of Selling

This true nature of selling and how to enjoy it was recently made clear to me when I reconnected with an old friend, a guy whom I consider to be among the most successful people I've ever met.

His name is David Rotman, and when I originally met him, he was a "mover and shaker" in Hollywood, the executive producer of the classic fantasy movie Dragonheartand co-producer of the action film Cliffhanger, among other projects.

Make no mistake about it, producing movies is a sales job par excellence, which involves getting multiple people to buy into your vision of what's possible and then keeping them motivated to make that vision a reality.

Since then David has enjoyed success in other areas, like writing and selling screenplays, and promoting special events like the Agape Lovefest. He recent left Hollywood to help out at his family business, one of the largest furniture stores in the world: the famous Rotmans in Worcester, MA.

Talking to David is like taking a bath in positive energy. When he talks about selling (in all the many forms that he's been successful at it), he uses the word "BLISS" which he defines as an acronym: "Beaming Love In Sacred Service."

Right now, David is applying that concept to selling furniture while he learns the business from the bottom up, but I believe that the concept of BLISS has been the core of the many successes that he's had in his life.

How to Make it Real

Here's how to create, foster and expand the love of selling that will, in turn, help achieve success:

1. Have a Mental Touchstone

Decide why you do what you do and how it helps people and then use that deeper understanding as a way to keep yourself on track. In David's case, it's the concept of BLISS. Whenever he's dealing with people, he internally reviews his motivations and actions to make certain that they're coming from that core idea.

2. Focus on Real People

Rather than abstract "markets" or "customer bases," think about real people who you're really helping. David, for instance, takes photographs of himself with other people he meets, famous and not famous alike. One wall of his office in Hollywood was covered with these photos, a constant reminder of the emotional connections that he'd made.

3. Learn the Craft of Selling

It's easier to love doing something if you're good at it, so the time and energy that you put into learning how to sell, is time and energy that will help you love selling. The idea is to create a self-reinforcing system where your ability and your love for the craft proceed in lockstep and apace.

4. Consider Connecting with David

David is creating a network of people who believe that business in general and selling in particular is meant to be a blissful experience. If you're interested, consider connecting with him via his LinkedIn profile.

How to run your business in Evernote

I have become hooked on Evernote thanks to my friend Tim.  Now I use it in both my business and personal life, on every device, everyday.  Here is a useful article to help get you started. 

Christopher Null

Evernote isn’t a revolution. Like most of the technology products we tend to use regularly in our daily lives, Evernote is an evolution, a collection of good ideas that rollsinto a single program the functionality of a half-dozen apps you would otherwise use separately.

Evernote was designed for individuals, but businesses have been adopting it in increasing numbers, finding unique ways to put it to use. Evernote itself has taken notice of this, and later this year it will be launching Evernote for Business, which could elevate Evernote’s business utility even further.

Meanwhile, if you’re new to Evernote, or are just dipping your toes into it, here’s how to put the little app that could to its best use.

Evernote's desktop app syncs with its mobile and browser counterparts.

Get started with Evernote

Evernote is a hybrid system of offline and cloud-based features. You’ll need to create an account when you first download Evernote; you can then install the software just about anywhere. In fact, the more places you install it, the more useful it becomes. Evernote is available for the Mac and Windows and all mobile platforms, so no matter how multi-platform you are when you work, there’s nothing keeping you from running Evernote on every device.

Evernote’s core functionality is in storing your notes and keeping them organized and synchronized, in real time, among all your devices. It pays to understand a bit about Evernote’s terminology, which isn’t always intuitive, before you start filling the app up with content.

In Evernote terms, every page you create is its own Note. Notes are most useful when organized into various Notebooks, essentially a folder full of notes. Setting up notebooks tends to be easier on a computer than in a mobile app, so it’s a good idea to configure your notebooks ahead of time on a PC, even if you leave them empty to start. A group of notebooks is a Stack. Just drag one notebook to another to automatically create a stack. (Right-click to rename it.)

For example, if you used Evernote to keep an archive of payroll, each paycheck would be a note, each employee would be a notebook, and various classes of employees (full-time, part-time, contractor) might be a stack.

Add tags by clicking the appropriate box above the note itself.

Add content

When you create a note, you can give it multiple Tags, by clicking the “Click to add tag” button in Windows or the Info button (an i in a circle) in the mobile app. Tags are especially useful when you’re embedding nontext content, since everything in Evernote is searchable. They’re most useful when you have common but more general terms that you might want to search across all of your notebooks: “2012 taxes,” “personal,” or “urgent,” for example. Adding content from within the mobile app may be less intuitive than it should be to new users. To create a note on the go, navigate to the notebook you want to work in, then click the oversized plus-sign (+) button at the bottom of the screen.

Speaking of adding content, one of Evernote’s major features is that you can add all types of content to the archive, not just text. The program supports PDFs, images, audio recordings, sketches (with the Skitch plug-in), webpages (with the Web Clipperbrowser plug-in), and more. Evernote has a rich plug-in ecosystem, which you can explore on the Evernote homepage if you want to delve even further into special types of content.

Share content

Finally, we come to Evernote's marquee feature: Sharing. Everything you create in Evernote is automatically shared with your various installations of the software unless you specify otherwise when creating a notebook. (Note that you can't change this behavior later.) By default Evernote synchronizes all installations of the software every 30 minutes;  or, you can press F9 to initiate a manual sync.

You can also share content with other Evernote users. The easiest way to do this is to right-click a notebook and select Share Notebook. You’ll be prompted to enter email addresses or to create a public link to the notebook that is accessible via the Web. After accepting the invitation, the recipient will find the shared notebook under the Shared tab on the left-hand navigation pane in Evernote. Note: To share notebooks with full read/write access, the owner of the notebook must be a Premium user ($5 a month), which comes with additional features like extra content and the ability to make text within PDFs searchable. Otherwise, notebooks are shared as read-only.

Now that you’ve got a handle on the basics, it’s time to put your new Evernote skills to better use. Here are some ways that small business owners are elevating Evernote beyond the obvious.

Upgrade your note-taking

At its core Evernote is a juiced-up note-taking system, but you can get more out of it if you make use of the software’s multimedia capabilities. Joey Price, CEO of Jumpstart:HR, says, “I record the audio of client meetings while jotting down notes in real time. We manage a lot of different clients, and sometimes taking notes in shorthand isn't enough. Being able to replay the audio back once I've left helps me re-immerse in my thought process and generate new ideas to help our clients.”

Archive essential emails

Storing email permanently in a webmail folder or within Outlook is usually fine, but it means you have to have access to your inbox in order to read it. Evernote gives you a couple of options for upgrading the way email is archived. First, Outlook users can use the “Add to Evernote 4” button that appears in the toolbar to send the full text of an email to Evernote as a note at the touch of a button.

Not an Outlook user? Use the “email to Evernote” capability to send any message directly to Evernote. When you create your account, Evernote assigns you a custom email address to use. Just forward notes or received messages to this address, and they’ll automatically be converted into notes behind the scenes.

Forget about that receipts shoebox. Evernote digitizes and filters receipts with OCR.

Keep tabs on inventory

Evernote may not be robust enough to replace your inventory-management software, but it’s an excellent tool for keeping tabs on the various items you sell, along with basic pricing information. If your business involves a smaller number of SKUs, you can even use Evernote as a way to showcase your wares from any device. Just add a photo, details, and prices, and Evernote turns into a handy mobile portfolio that you can update anytime.

Collaborate on projects

Building an agenda for a meeting either with staff or with clients is usually a tedious, email-based affair. But share a notebook from within Evernote, and the process becomes much more collaborative. Agendas can be built and refined on the fly right up until the meeting begins. Brainstorming sessions can take place asynchronously, and each participant can add notes whenever the mood strikes them instead of being limited to a single brainstorming session. Got a big event to plan? Evernote can keep a dozen subcontractors on the same page.

Integrate with Getting Things Done

Evernote is a natural tool for the productivity obsessed, and while you can probably figure out how to add it into a Getting Things Done workflow, one Web programmer has done the heavy lifting for you, thanks to this 15-minute configuration guide. It's definitely worth a look if you’re a GTD freak.

One Evernote user captures all check pay stubs sent to employees for an easy archive.

Track expenses, pay employees, and prep for taxes

No, Evernote can’t cut a check, but it can keep tabs on who got paid what. Justin Lugbill of Lugbill Designs uses Evernote to replace the shoebox full of receipts. You can scan or take a snapshot of each receipt, and then save it to Evernote. Says Lugbill, “Every receipt that I get, whether it’s paper or an email confirmation, I forward to my Evernote account.” Different expense categories each get their own notebook, and employees have their pay stubs archived and organized in separate notebooks, so Lugbill can easily look up any given check. The end result looks more like a bookkeeper’s chart of accounts than a to-do list. 

Archive analog notes for posterity

The conference rooms of the world are covered with whiteboard notes that are promptly erased by the evening cleaning crew, just as many a hotel bar is littered with note-covered cocktail napkins that are swept away into the trash. No one wants to have to be the guy who copies this information down into digital form, and with Evernote you don’t have to. Jesse Waites of PNTHR.com says he snaps photos of anything drawn or hand-written outside the office and drops the picture into Evernote. As noted earlier, Evernote can convert handwriting in PDFs into plain text for you. It even scans images for text and saves that text separately.

Stash software keys

What do you do with all those software keys you get for registering purchased and downloaded software? If you’re ultra-organized, you might save them in a file that you store on your computer… which you have to hope you remember to back up or print out before you wipe your hard drive (at which point you may actually want to use them again). Simple solution: Forward all registration-code emails to Evernote and drop them all into a notebook, and you’ll never lose them again.

Store business cards in Evernote. OCR turns text into usable, searchable data.

Remember a name

Business cards have a nasty tendency to end up in stacks (or the trash), which makes them virtually useless to both the giver and the receiver. Evernote makes for a great repository for contact information. Just snap a picture of the card, and let Evernote’s OCR go to work. Add notes and tags to remind you why exactly this person was important. Alternatively, you can use Evernote Hello, which, while it isn’t specifically designed with business cards in mind, does let you use Evernote as a sort of souped-up contact manager.

Spy on competitors

David Handmaker of Next Day Flyers says Evernote makes competitive analysis on the Web easy. “I’m also a huge fan of Skitch [the Evernote add-on that lets you edit and annotate screenshots and images]. I, along with many of my team members, use it frequently to take screenshots of our website or our competitor’s sites, and we mark it up to highlight important information. The functionality and ease of use is fantastic. Plus it saves our company money, as now we don’t have to buy as many Photoshop licenses for the team.”