The On-Purpose Person free book giveaway

Those of you who don’t already own a copy of Kevin W. McCarthy’s book The On-Purpose Person: Mark your calendars, because you’ll be able to get a copy for free April 24-28.

The free edition is a Kindle e-book, and if you don’t own a Kindle device, you can download a free Kindle app for your phone, tablet, Mac or PC.

Free + Free = Good Deal

The On-Purpose Person is a business parable that shows how to take what you already know about yourself and use it to discover your purpose and develop your priorities. Kevin also has print copies available.

Kevin W. McCarthy

In conjunction with the giveaway, Kevin will host a free live webcast:

Power of Your Two-Word Purpose Statement
May 1, 2012, 3-3:30 p.m., EDT

In this interactive online event, Kevin will help you discover your purpose and improve your life. A 20-minute talk will be followed by a Q&A session. Advanced registration is required, so sign up now.

Free + Free + Free = Great Deal!

Kris Den Besten to speak at next Chamber luncheon

Kris Den Besten

Kris Den Besten, president & CEO of Vermeer Southeast and author of the book SHINE, will be our keynote speaker at the Sept. 8 Business-Building Lunch. At our November 2009 lunch, Kris shared how God brought him, his family and his company through some very dark times; now Kris returns to tell the rest of the story!

SHINE is not simply a how-to formula to make you employee of the month or salesperson of the quarter -- although that could happen. Rather, it is a Bible-based, Christ-centered approach for transforming your attitude about work: from that of making a living to that of making an eternal difference.

Join us Sept. 8, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m., in Faith Hall at First Baptist Orlando. The doors open at 11 a.m. if you want to get in some extra chat time. Cost: $25 for chamber members and first-timers, and $40 for nonmembers. Registration deadline is noon on Sept. 6. Register online, or call the office at (407) 814-1124. Table sponsorships are available to members only; a table for eight people is $200. Sponsorships are sold only by phone.

Here's a sample of the wisdom in Den Besten's book:

Credible workers get things done. They do not make excuses but always come through by meeting or exceeding expectations. They are prompt, they meet deadlines, and they can be counted on at all times. They do not take shortcuts or skimp on quality. They do not grumble and complain. Rather, they display an eagerness to model Christ with positive words and actions.

Please join us for what is sure to be an inspiring session.

Preventing Everyday Conflicts

Conflict seems to be everywhere: in our homes, our workplaces, and especially lately, in our government. But it doesn’t have to be a part of your daily life, according to Tim Scudder. His firm helps companies and executives handle workplace conflict.

Dan Tero — iStockphoto

He says conflict anywhere can be an opportunity to resolve long-standing issues and can help us lead more productive lives. It’s not just about resolution. It is also, he says, about learning to have nicer conflicts.

Scudder is CEO of Personal Strengths USA and co-author of Have a Nice Conflict: A Story of Finding Success and Satisfaction in the Most Unlikely Places. “As one set of conflicts is resolved,” he says, “others will take their place, so it’s important to learn how to make conflicts productive and positive, instead of allowing them to distract us from our goals.”

Scudder shares five keys to conflict:

Anticipate. Know who you’re dealing with. Consider how differently others might view the same situation. When people see things differently, there is potential conflict. Keeping that in mind can give you a good shot at steering clear of it.

Prevent. Use deliberate, appropriate behaviors in your relationships. A well-chosen behavior on your part can prevent conflict with another person. But sometimes, you also need to prevent conflict in yourself. That might have more to do with choosing your perceptions than choosing your behaviors.

Identify. There are three basic approaches to conflict: rising to the challenge, cautiously withdrawing, or wanting to keep the peace. When you can identify these approaches in yourself or others, you are empowered to handle the situation more productively.

Manage. This has two components: managing yourself and managing the relationship. Create conditions that empower people to manage themselves out of the emotional state of conflict. It’s also about managing yourself out, which can be as easy as taking time to see things differently.

Resolve. To reach resolution, we must show others a path back to feeling good about themselves. When they do, they are less likely to feel threatened and are free to move toward compromise and resolution.

“Unresolved or poorly managed conflict costs companies in ways they can’t even calculate,” he adds. For example, recent research shows the top reason people leave jobs is poor relationships with supervisors. “Lost institutional memory, low productivity, bad morale, high turnover all cost real dollars.” But well-managed conflict can not only prevent those losses -- it can also promote higher productivity and a stronger bottom line.

Maybe Scudder should visit Washington, D.C.


Tim Scudder is a CPA and president of Personal Strengths Publishing Inc. Since 1995, he has focused on helping clients improve relationships.

For more about resolving conflict, join us at the August luncheon,
where Ken Sande will talk about peacemaking.

Do you have expert advice to share? E-mail Kristen.

Helping people find their purpose

If you heard Kevin McCarthy speak at the chamber luncheon last September, you know his mission is to help others be on-purpose.* Many of us have been through the On-Purpose Leader Experience, a transformative seminar that helps people focus on their purpose, vision, and mission.

Kevin is looking to broaden the On-Purpose reach with a small group study, and has applied for a grant from Intuit, maker of Quicken and Quickbooks software. To get the grant, Kevin's company,  On-Purpose Partners, needs votes:  http://bit.ly/khwhji.

If On-Purpose Partners wins the grant, it will fund completion of the small group materials for his book The On-Purpose Person. This would be a great resource, so I encourage you to support the endeavor.

* If you didn't hear Kevin speak at the chamber, here's a link to a replay.

Listening to Your Customers

By George F. Brown Jr.

Successful business strategies build upon shared successes. When your strategy creates value for your customers, your firm also gains value.

Photo by Carl Dwyer | sxc.hu

One tool critical to such strategies is customer-based insight. Many businesses have some kind of Voice of the Customer program to gather insight from customers. There are three primary goals for such a program:

Gain customer input.

Learn the customer’s perspective on the future business environment and their most pressing needs. This brings insights about product innovation, critical services, trends, and more. These insights can help you get ahead of opportunities and strengthen your value. The key is to keep looking forward, rather than focusing on past performance.

We’ve all had “Duh!” moments—when an insight that should have been obvious was overlooked. One of my Duh! moments (and I admit to many) occurred in a company I was running some time ago, when we faced major challenges keeping up as our customers expanded globally. The Duh! moment came when a colleague asked, “Have we ever asked our customers about their expansion plans?” We started to do so, and the problem never resurfaced.

Effective listening doesn’t stop with direct customers. It’s necessary to listen to all of their customers. Pay attention to the entire customer chain: the path that leads from your customers all the way to the final users of their products. Perspectives vary at each stage, with implications that ripple backwards and forwards. Remarkable insights can be gained simply by asking customers at each stage what they would like to know about the other stages.

Learn what makes a best-in-class supplier.

Identify the metrics customers use to evaluate their suppliers, then develop internal action plans to meet those targets. Blue Canyon Partners identified three clusters where such metrics are concentrated: relationships between suppliers and customers, the suppliers’ ability to meet customers’ expectations, and suppliers’ ability to deliver high-value innovations.

Two things make this a challenge: First, while the three metrics clusters almost always apply, actions to be implemented differ from one customer to the next. Customize your program to gain insights about individual customers. Amalgamated data can yield an outcome that is right on average, but missing the mark with each individual customer.

Second, it takes insights from many people to get an overall picture. A customer’s perspective is shaped by the experiences of many people: designers, engineers, salespeople, and so on. Rarely does any individual know all the details relevant to every dimension of the supplier’s relationship with their company. It takes a lot of listening to understand what matters to a major customer, but that effort is required if a solid portrait is to be developed.

Fix what’s important to the customer.

Too often, this is the only goal addressed by the Voice of the Customer program. It is important, but is third in terms of long-term impact. It requires focusing on what can be improved along all the dimensions of customer interaction. There are three keys to doing this without focusing on the past:

First, topics should only be brought up after discussions about the future environment and the characteristics of best-in-class suppliers have been completed.

Second, distinguish between generic wishes for “better” and situations in which current performance is bad compared to competitors or a meaningful benchmark.

Third, learn whether customers will reward a supplier for improvements in metrics where they say they want “better.”

Select a few targets in which to invest management attention. Narrow the focus to action plans where improvement will provide a payoff. Learn what the customer would do differently if a certain change were made. If the answer is “nothing,” then the change should be reconsidered. On the other hand, if the customer can explain with clarity how the change would leave them better off, then the change has the potential to create value for both firms.

George F. Brown Jr., along with Atlee Valentine Pope, is the co-author of CoDestiny: Overcome Your Growth Challenges by Helping Your Customers Overcome Theirs, published by Greenleaf Book Group Press. Brown is also CEO and co-founder of Blue Canyon Partners Inc., a strategy consulting firm.

Do you have expert advice to share? E-mail Kristen.

When to pay bonuses despite posting a loss

One of the many great things in Kris DenBesten's book SHINE is the account of how he surprised his employees one year by giving bonuses even though the company had posted a loss.

I thought of that this week because of two very different news stories. First, my colleague Adam O'Daniel at the Charlotte Business Journal reported that Bank of America's board awarded its CEO, Brian Moynihan, a $9 million stock bonus, even though the bank posted a $3.2 billion loss for 2010.


Then, Bloomberg reported that Lockheed Martin's CEO, Robert J. Stevens, asked the board to keep his pay where it's been for three years. The company won't award raises to any executives at the level of vice president and above, because although it did have a profit last year, the profit margin was too narrow.

Lockheed Martin's bonus policy "accounts for individual performance and the performance of the company, or business unit."

Lockheed Martin's policy makes sense. I, too, work for a company where bonuses are not issued unless financial goals are met. And BofA? What a crock. How do you award a bonus when there's a loss? If there's no profit, there can be no bonuses.

Then I remembered SHINE.

Mind you, there's a big difference between DenBesten's company and Bank of America, and it doesn't only have to do with how many digits follow the dollar sign.

BofA paid its executive bonuses because, as we have seen so often lately, that's just what banks customarily do. In the world of high finance, you don't withhold an executive's raise or bonus. It's part of that culture. Defense contractors and newspapers have a different culture.

And so, I think, do equipment companies.

When DenBesten handed out those bonuses, he was acting on his own principle of serving others. It's exactly the kind of radical step of faith we're called to take, especially when times are tough.

Hiking up recovery mountain

If your business, like so many others, is still hurting, you may wonder what the economists are thinking when they talk about our economy being in recovery.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession ran from December 2007 to June 2009. If we've been in recovery for a year and a half, why does it still feel like a "recession" to so many?

It's important to understand what economists mean when they speak of "recession." If you graph them, periods of growth, or expansion, are rising lines leading to peaks. Periods of contraction, or recession, are descending lines that lead to troughs.

The GDP, one of the main factors in measuring economic growth, has been rising since June 2009. Though that growth was sometimes small, the numbers were positive, as opposed to the negative numbers seen during the recession.

So why does recovery seem so crummy?

Photo by Christophe Libert
stock.xchng

Imagine you're climbing a mountain. When you reach the peak, you stand in the bright sunshine and can  see for miles.

Then you fall. You roll down that steep slope for a year and a half. You land in a valley. Bruised, but not broken, you stand up. That mountain behind you now blocks the sun. You're in shadow.

You can't go back the way you came. Ahead of you is another mountain -- maybe not as tall as the one you fell from. It has a shallower slope. You begin climbing. Slowly, surely, you ascend. You leave the valley floor behind. But the next peak is still far away, and you are still in shadow.

In The Great Reset, Richard Florida compares the 2007-2009 recession to earlier ones. "Recovery from both the Long Depression of the 1870s and the Great Depression of the 1930s -- the First and Second Resets -- took the better part of two or three decades."

He says forecasting where we'll be once the present crisis is history would be like predicting "the full flower of postwar suburbanization from the vantage point of Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration day in 1932."

Florida goes on to identify the forces "that will almost certainly power a real Great Reset and a more sustainable new way of life." I have yet to finish this book, but I suspect Florida's observations will be instructive for all of us as we climb through this long recovery.

And as we go, let's remember that we have a mighty counselor who climbs with us out of the valley. "The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned." — Isaiah 9:2

To reach younger consumers, think globally

I had to go to Germany to get the right watchband. What strikes me as odd is not that I paid twenty euros for a watchband, but that I could only find one store that had the size, color, and material I wanted. That the store was in Germany was almost -- but not entirely -- irrelevant. There was the price of shipping and the exchange rate to think about.

Other than that, once I found a website with a product that met my admittedly picky specifications, I placed my order, logged into PayPal, and sent my funds off to Uhrenbandversand in Oranienburg. In a little over a week, I received my package by luftpost.

Pollster John Zogby places me and my contemporaries in an age cohort he calls “Nikes,” because our motto, he says, is “just do it.” This is the group also known as “Generation X,” that hard-to-pin-down bunch that followed the baby boomers. After us comes what Zogby calls the “First Globals,” those born 1979–90. Even more than I, with my euro-spending ways, First Globals see a world without borders.

Understanding First Globals is necessary for marketing to them, and in his book The Way We’ll Be, Zogby details their worldview. Regarding the Kyoto accords, the International Criminal Court and the role of the United Nations, he says, their position is “sharply at odds with the generations just ahead of them.”

To get them to listen to whatever you’re selling, you have to get down to where they are. You have to make yourself equally a citizen of planet Earth, and you need to recognize that, for them, embracing diversity isn’t a matter of political correctness but a habit of mind.

The Way We’ll Be is packed with demographic information not only about different generations but about different mindsets. Zogby describes the major movements in our culture: living with limits, embracing diversity, looking inward, and demanding authenticity. This book is an excellent resource for understanding these movements, which will be key to reaching whatever demographic is your target market.

To reach First Globals, Zogby says you must stretch your borders. Though their worldview may differ from yours, you can successfully reach them by “opening doors, not closing them.”

If you stretch the borders of your business far enough, you might even make customers of First Globals in Germany.

Discerning God's will — the executive summary

We often struggle with decisions, wondering whether what we are preparing to do is God’s will or our own. Making Godly Decisions by Os Hillman is the most concise teaching I have found on the subject.

Hillman’s advice is focused on four main areas:

• Hearing the voice of God
• Decision-making methods
• Confirmation processes
• Timing for implementation

This book is scripturally based and includes real-life anecdotes to illustrate the principles given. Each chapter includes questions for reflection, journaling, or group discussion. It is available as a paperback or as an e-book.

Making Godly Decisions is full of common sense, but also full of Biblical sense, which is sometimes uncommon. For example, Hillman says “the final determining factor on whether we should do something is whether God has directed us to do it, not whether it makes sense.”

I appreciate the conciseness of this book. I have heard of publishers that will not accept very brief books. Presumably they are not worth the effort to print. Nonsense. In just 80 pages, Hillman sums up the subject very well, leaving me feeling, for the first time in -- well, ever -- that I get it. Any more would have been fluff. Don’t we already have too much fluff to deal with?

In reading this book, the most important lesson you learn may be, as was the case for me, that you already know more about godly decision-making that you realize.

Every manager should read this book

How Full is Your Bucket? by Tom Rath and Donald O. Clifton, is based on the simple metaphor of a bucket and a dipper. Each of us has a bucket that is continually filled or drained by our interactions with other people. Positive encounters fill us up, and negative encounters drain us.

Among the authors' key points:

• The Number One reason people leave their jobs is they don't feel appreciated.
• Praise must be meaningful and specific.
• Recognition is most appreciated and effective when it is individualized, specific, and deserved.
• We are at our best when our buckets are full, and at our worst when they are empty.
• Every interaction is an opportunity to fill someone's bucket — or drain it.
• When we fill other people's buckets, we simultaneously fill our own.

Like parents who focus on the F's on a report card rather than the A's, many managers focus on critiquing weaknesses rather than developing strengths.

Mind you, it's not possible to simply offer groundless praise. As the authors note, "positivity must be grounded in reality." They cite the pointlessness of "Employee of the Month" programs, because inevitably — in the interests of "fairness" — every employee gets one. I've also seen workplaces where the award just moves about between a select few high performers, which may be more honest but doesn't do anything to lift up the mid-level performers.

Every worker has room for improvement. But consider a method used by many writers' groups, including the one I belong to. It's called the "sandwich method," though being a bookish person, I prefer to think of it as bookends.

Start with a genuine compliment, then give constructive feedback on what needs fixing, then end with more praise for strong points. Employees, like students, and writers, need to build on their strengths in addition to improving their weaknesses.

Individualization is important, because while one worker may appreciate a plaque to hang on the wall, another might prefer some extra time off to spend with family. To aid in this, the book includes a "Bucket Filling Interview," which can help managers learn about what really motivates each employee.

How Full is Your Bucket? will not only help managers encourage employees, it will help anyone see where they've been missing opportunities to fill other people's buckets.