Making Things Happen!

Recently some of my ideas have been pub­lished in a vari­ety of locales. One being Aus­tralia and the other was in the newslet­ter of Scott Insur­ance. Check them out here:

Cat­fights and fire­walks: the risk-taker’s guide to success

Per­for­mance News

I don’t really know when the “Dog Days” of sum­mer offi­cially start but here in TN it feels like they are upon us. I really want to clean my garage but don’t rel­ish the feel­ing of work­ing inside an oven that is set on 325°.

The fact is there is always an excuse not to do things. Such as:

• Every­one is on vacation
• It’s hot
• The econ­omy is down
• The oil spill
• Etc.

Even if it seems like there isn’t as much going on this time of year (I know that’s not true for a lot of us) these “down” times can be used to get oth­er­wise post­poned projects done. Use this time for:

• Set­ting new strategy
• Invest­ing in self development
• Find­ing and begin­ning new ways of improv­ing your business
• Orga­ni­za­tion areas of your busi­ness that get neglected dur­ing the “high season”
• Invest­ing in new strategic relationships

Take action now. The habit of avoid­ance will not go away when things get busy. The excuses just change.

After vis­it­ing some com­pa­nies with cool cul­ture I decided to write an arti­cle on the sub­ject. Cash­ing in on Cul­ture is an arti­cle about why com­pa­nies should make cul­ture a pri­or­ity and how to improve it. Here is a list of com­pa­nies with great (cool) company culture:

• Zap­pos
• The Lampo Group
• Emma
• Method
• Apple

What com­pany do you know of that has great cul­ture? Does yours? What needs to change?

This morn­ing I left the house early to get fuel for a road trip. Within a few yards of the mail box I noticed a tur­tle and a rab­bit on the road (really, I did). The cot­ton tailed bunny quickly hopped out of the way while the lit­tle snap­ping tur­tle pic­tured above inched towards the side of the road. I had to swerve to miss him. But what if I hadn’t?

I know the hare gets a bad rap for not pac­ing him­self while the wise ol’ tor­toise plods along to win in the end. But here’s the thing, when a 5000 pound SUV is bear­ing down on you who do you want to be? I’m vot­ing to be a bunny.

Change, com­pe­ti­tion, eco­nomic chaos, reg­u­la­tions and more are bear­ing down on busi­nesses every day. These are all 5000 pounds of threat to be responded to. How do busi­nesses choose the way of the wab­bit (sorry, I couldn’t resist)? Through agility. But how do these attrib­utes man­i­fest them­selves? Here are a few indi­ca­tors of an agile business.

Process ori­ented
Cus­tomer focused
Exter­nally aware
Cul­tur­ally pro­gres­sive
Orga­ni­za­tion­aly flexible

None of these come for free or are easy to fos­ter but when change is loom­ing you’ll be glad you invested the time and effort to become agile.

I’ve been rid­ing in air­planes a good bit lately and have noticed a big dif­fer­ence in flight atten­dant atti­tudes. When we flew to CA the atten­dants smiled, laughed and even joked with us. One of them went so far as to call my son Justin Bieber over the inter­com. The way the atten­dants acted made the trip a lot more fun. Guess which air­line that was? Yep, Southwest.

Today I flew with another air­line. I made a funny (trust me, I’m funny) com­ment about the heat to the flight atten­dant. Her response was about as enthu­si­as­tic as one of those stone heads on Easter island. The rest of the flight was the same way. She was bor­ing, the flight was bor­ing. We all sweated through the bore­dom. Guess what air­line? Yep, Delta.

Two ques­tions came to mind.

1. How hard is it to smile?
2. What are these two com­pa­nies doing with their employ­ees to get them to act so differently?

Do you have a job where you work face to face with cus­tomers? If you do, try to smile at them and act like a human. Maybe even laugh at their jokes.

Do you run an out­fit that has peo­ple that inter­act with cus­tomers? If so, fig­ure out how to treat your employ­ees so they like serv­ing your customers.

I’ve never seen a com­pany that had grumpy work­ers AND happy cus­tomers. Need an exam­ple? Go to the post office Fri­day at lunch time and count the smiles.