Tuesday 20 September 2011

How do we create a company people want to work in?

More than 100 studies have now found that the most engaged employees — those who report they're fully invested in their jobs and committed to their employers — are significantly more productive, drive higher customer satisfaction and outperform those who are less engaged.

But only 20 per cent of employees around the world report that they're fully engaged at work.

Which for me is scary as I love what I do for a living - it would be nicer if I was a multi millionaire as well - but I geniunely / usually love what I do.

But for others this is not the case - so what's the solution?

Where is the win-win for employers and employees?

The answer is that great employers must shift the focus from trying to get more out of people, to investing more in them by addressing their four core needs — physical, emotional, mental and spiritual — so they're freed, fueled and inspired to bring the best of themselves to work every day.

It's common sense. Fuel people on a diet that lacks essential nutrients and it's no surprise that they'll end up undernourished, disengaged and unable to perform at their best.

Our first need is enough money to live decently, but even at that, we cannot live by bread alone.

Think for a moment about what would make you feel most excited to get to work in the morning, and most loyal to your employer. The sort of company I have in mind would:

Commit to paying every employee a living wage.

Give all employees a stake in the company's success, in the form of profit sharing, or stock options, or bonuses tied to performance.

Design working environments that are safe, comfortable and appealing to work in. In offices, include a range of physical spaces that allow for privacy, collaboration, and simply hanging out.

Provide healthy, high quality food, at the lowest possible prices, including in vending machines.

Create places for employees to rest and renew during the course of the working day and encourage them to take intermittent breaks.

Ideally, leaders would permit afternoon naps, which fuel higher productivity in the several hours that follow.

Offer a well equipped gym and other facilities that encourage employees to move physically and stay fit. Provide incentives for employees to use the facilities, including during the work day as a source of renewal.

Define clear and specific expectations for what success looks like in any given job. Then, treat employees as adults by giving them as much autonomy as possible to choose when they work, where they do their work, and how best to get it accomplished.

Institute two-way performance reviews, so that employees not only receive regular feedback about how they're doing, in ways that support their growth, but are also given the opportunity to provide feedback to their supervisors, anonymously if they so choose, to avoid recrimination.

Hold leaders and managers accountable for treating all employees with respect and care, all of the time, and encourage them to regularly recognize those they supervise for the positive contributions they make.

Create policies that encourage employees to set aside time to focus without interruption on their most important priorities, including long-term projects and more strategic and creative thinking.

Ideally, give them a designated amount of time to pursue projects they're especially passionate about and which have the potential to add value to the company.

Provide employees with ongoing opportunities and incentives to learn, develop and grow, both in establishing new job-specific hard skills, as well as softer skills that serve them well as individuals, and as managers and leaders.

Stand for something beyond simply increasing profits. Create products or provide services or serve causes that clearly add value in the world, making it possible for employees to derive a sense of meaning from their work, and to feel good about the companies for which they work.

This is what we are trying to do with goAugmented - a leading augmented reality design company based in Manchester. But it's hard to be all the above and a start up at the same time. As Tony Schwartz, who wrote the article and Be Excellent at Anything says:

"In more than a decade of working with Fortune 500 companies, I've yet to come across a company that meets the full range of their people's needs in all the ways I've described above. The one that comes closest is Google. I'm convinced it's a key to their success."

We want to be like Google - which is why we have bright colours ;) Seriously

But other to you how does your company measure up?

What's the impact on your performance?

Which needs would your company have to meet for you to be more fully engaged?

Monday 19 September 2011

Just seen myself in a video - interesting to watch myself on stage.

Didnt really know this was going online - so great to find it - and very proud to be working with Dragon's Den legend Doug Richard.

Sit yourself down - have a cup of tea ready - and enjoy an hours free marketing training courtesy of School for Startups and Great Marketing Works

Just seen myself in a video - interesting to watch myself on stage.

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/26663591?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0&amp;color=ffffff" width="940" height="529" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen allowFullScreen></iframe>

Thursday 15 September 2011

What we can learn from Salesforce's scruffy looking leader :)


Read this today - and made me think about our own leader in the advertising revolution i.e. me. We need a leader for augmented reality to become a house hold moment!
I think we can all learn a lot from Benioff, and not just from his business model and technology. Here are a few lessons we can all learn in terms of vision and leadership:
1. Be inclusive. At Dreamforce, I think I heard the term “you” (spoken to the audience) at least a hundred times. “You created the social enterprise.” “You told us you need mobility.” Every presentation involved customer case studies. Salesforce even featured a video from KLM, the airline, that wasn’t related to Salesforce.com at all, but just illustrated a creative use of social media. Benioff clearly wants Salesforce.com to be a community, not just a company. And a community is much harder to stop.

2. Be confrontational. Benioff is not afraid to pick a fight. In fact, he seems to enjoy it. You can’t listen to him give a presentation without hearing a swipe atOracle and a jab at Bill Gates. He wants to create a narrative about the Salesforce.com community being a revolution against the old guard. Indeed, he even referred to the Arab Spring and a revolution happening in corporate America, in which old guard CEOs, who don’t get the social enterprise, are falling like Qaddafi. He’s calling out his own customers. Many of us in the CEO role are afraid to be provocative. We want to make friends and avoid enemies. And this is good. But playing nice to a fault doesn’t make headlines. And, more important, it doesn’t inspire people—whether they are employees or customers.

3. Be evolving. The term pivot has become almost cliché in the startup world. But while changing directions is impressive and imperative, it’s relatively easy for five people in a garage and much harder forbig enterprises. Although Salesforce isn’t Hewlett-Packard yet, it’s not easy to get 5,000 employees to do a 180. Salesforce.com had a good thing going, crushing Siebel with software-as-a-service for CRM (customer relation management). But Benioff saw the arrival of cloud computing, and software-as-a-service was suddenly a thing of the past. Then, just as cloud computing became hot, he perceived the next trend in social media, and shifted his focus to redefining the “social enterprise.” Each time he pivots, he makes the previous phase (for instance, cloud computing) seem obvious and de facto, further cementing his company’s position. And none of his competitors can keep up.

4. Be imitating. For all the flak Benioff gives Microsoft for copying innovations from Apple and others, he’s absolutely willing to imitate where appropriate. Check out Chatter. Benioff openly admits that it’s designed to look like a Facebook inside Salesforce.com. He realized that people understood Facebook, and that enterprises needed a corporate equivalent. He didn’t try to reinvent the wheel and devise a user interface to be more “enterprise-friendly” than Facebook. He almost literally copied the look and feel we all know, down to the latest Chatter Now instant messaging feature, which is a doppelganger of Facebook Chat. The UI may not be innovative, but for corporate users who’ve gone blind after years of looking at 1980s-designed SAP user interfaces, Facebook at work is refreshing and exciting.

5. Be infectious. If you’ve ever been to an IT conference, you realize that if there is a hell it probably includes the typical IT trade show. Bored customers race past booths seeking out free T-shirts, watered down drinks, and scantily clad booth babes. If customers do stop at your booth, they are most likely just eyeing your giveaways, your staff, or both. Yet my company exhibited at Dreamforce this year and we were mobbed. And, no, it wasn’t because our cheesy giveaways were any better than our neighbor’s. Every booth was mobbed. Customers actually wanted to talk and learn. They were excited. In many ways, Salesforce.com has done the unthinkable and made customers feel that they aren’t fighting with vendors, that they and vendors are shoulder-to-shoulder together on the right side of history in an epic battle.
What I first saw as cheesy in Benioff, I now respect as genuine passion. He really believes there is a revolution. Or at least that’s what it feels like. And then you start believing it too.

Wednesday 7 September 2011

"Few of our own failures are fatal," economist and Financial Times columnist writes in his new book:

 
Which I loved so much I will copy the whole article down here to remember. 
 
According to Adapt, "success comes through rapidly fixing our mistakes rather than getting things right first time." To prove his point, Harford cites compelling examples innovation by trial-and-error from visionaries as varied as choreographer Twyla Tharp and US Forces Commander David Petraeus.

I interviewed Harford over email to dig deeper into the counter-intuitive lessons ofAdapt. What follows is a series of key takeaways on the psychology of failure and adaptation, combining insights from our conversation and the book itself.

The Wrong Way To React To Failure
When it comes to failing, our egos are our own worst enemies. As soon as things start going wrong, our defense mechanisms kick in, tempting us to do what we can to save face. Yet, these very normal reactions -- denial, chasing your losses, and hedonic editing -- wreak havoc on our ability to adapt.

Denial. "It seems to be the hardest thing in the world to admit we've made a mistake and try to put it right. It requires you to challenge a status quo of your own making."

Chasing your losses. We're so anxious not to "draw a line under a decision we regret" that we end up causing still more damage while trying to erase it. For example, poker players who've just lost some money are primed to make riskier bets than they'd normally take, in a hasty attempt to win the lost money back and "erase" the mistake.

Hedonic editing. When we engage in "hedonic editing," we try to convince ourselves that the mistake doesn't matter, bundling our losses with our gains or finding some way to reinterpret our failures as successes.
 
We're so anxious not to "draw a line under a decision we regret" that we end up causing still more damage while trying to erase it.
 
 
The Recipe for Successful Adaptation
At the crux of Adapt lies this conviction: In a complex world, we must use an adaptive, experimental approach to succeed. Harford argues, "the more complex and elusive our problems are, the more effective trial and error becomes." We can't begin to predict whether our "great idea" will actually sink or swim once it's out there. 

Harford outlines three principles for failing productively: You have to cast a wide net, "practice failing" in a safe space, and be primed to let go of your idea if you've missed the mark.

Try new things. "Expose yourself to lots of different ideas and try lots of different approaches, on the grounds that failure is common."

Experiment where failure is survivable. "Look for experimental approaches where there's lots to learn - projects with small downsides but bigger upsides. Too often we take on projects where the cost of failure is prohibitive, and just hope for the best."

Recognize when you haven't succeeded. "The third principle is the easiest to state and the hardest to stick to: know when you've failed."
 
The more complex and elusive our problems are, the more effective trial and error becomes.
 
 
How To Recognize Failure
This is the hard part. We've been trained that "persistence pays off," so it feels wrong to cut our losses and label an idea a failure. But if you're truly self-aware and listening closely after a "release" of your idea, you can't go wrong. Being able to recognize a failure just means that you'll be able to re-cast it into something more likely to succeed.

Gather feedback. "Above all, feedback is essential for determining which experiments have succeeded and which have failed. Get advice, not just from one person, but from several." Some professions have build-in feedback: reviews if you're in the arts, sales and analytics if you release a web product, comments if you're a blogger. If the feedback is harsh, be objective, "take the venom out," and dig out the real advice.

Remove emotions from the equation. "It's important to be dispassionate: forget whether you're ahead or behind, and try to look at the likely costs and benefits of continuing from when you are." 

Don't get too attached to your plan. "There's nothing wrong with a plan, but remember Von Moltke's famous dictum that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The danger is a plan that seduces us into thinking failure is impossible and adaptation is unnecessary - a kind of ‘Titanic' plan, unsinkable (until it hits the iceberg)."
 
Being able to recognize a failure just means that you'll be able to re-cast it into something more likely to succeed.
 
 
Creating Safe Spaces to Fail
Twyla Tharp says, "The best failures are the private ones you commit in the confines of your own room, with no strangers watching." She rises as 5:30 AM and videotapes herself freestyling for 3 hours each morning, happy if she extracts just 30 seconds of usable material from the whole tape. This is a great example of a "safe space to fail." But many of us don't have this luxury of time or freedom. So how do we create this space?

Practice disciplined pluralism. Markets work by this process, encouraging the exploration of many new ideas as well as the ruthless weeding out of the ones that fall short. "Pluralism works because life is not worth living without new experiences." Try a lot of things, and commit only to what's working.

Finding "a safe space to fail is a state of mind." Assuming that you don't operate a nuclear power plant for a living, you can probably infuse a bit more freedom and flexibility into your workday. Give yourself permission to test out a few off-the-wall ideas mixed in with the by-the-book ideas.

Imitate the college experience. "College is an amazing safe space to fail. We are experimenting with new friends, a new city, new hobbies and new ideas - and we'll often mess up academically and socially as a result. But we know that as long as we don't screw up too dramatically, we'll finish college, graduate, and move on - that mix of risk and safety is intoxicating. Yet somehow as we grow older we lose it."
 
The above is soooo right as we here at goAugmented are finding out as we experiment with mobile Augmented reality applications - not all of them are right. In fact, most are wrong - but after reading this we can see why :)

Monday 5 September 2011

Interesting to to be in it - the Smarta 100

An Analysis of the winners. Which is interesting - as we are one of them @goaugmented (www.goaugmented.com) - the augmented reality company I help.



This year’s Smarta 100 provides a fascinating snapshot of UK small business today: a cross-section of ingenious new ideas, individuals seeking self-employment after redundancy, the innovators of the cloud and crowd and the fast-growth big businesses of tomorrow.
From the weird and wonderful world of non-spill potties, pillows for long-distance lovers and non-tooth pulling toffee, to market changers like crowd-powered wine dealer Naked Wines, parcel innovator MyParcelDelivery.com and fast-growing retailer WedgeWelly, innovation and entrepreneurship are alive and well in Britain.
Many of this year’s winners have triumphed through adversity. Take Camille Johnson, who set up Pink Ribbon Lingerie after her mother’s experiences struggling to find attractive mastectomy lingerie. Or Mark Buschhaus and Stephen Barnes, who used their £20,000 redundancy pay-off from Woolworths to set up toy retailer Toy Barnhaus, now turning over £1.4million from three stores.
Proving the crucial role small businesses have to play in the future recovery of the UK economy, Smarta 100 revenues total over £65,000,000 with an average turnover of £692,000. They’re contributing more to the nation’s coffers than they’re borrowing too, with over half (51%) entirely self-funded.
One in five has taken private investment; seven used a bank loan to start-up. Five sought funding from friends and family, two were invested in by larger companies, one was entirely crowd-funded and two won investment on TV’s Dragons’ Den.
On average, they are three years and two months old. They employ a total of 740 people, with 9% employing a staff of more than 20. Smarta 100 businesses tend to be running lean operations however, with a growing shift to virtual teams and networks of freelancers – 79% employ fewer than 10 people and 68% fewer than five.
The Smarta 100 also tells us about the people behind Britain’s brightest small businesses. This year’s winners are 55% male, 45% female, aged between 18 and 52 with an average of 33. In case you were wondering, 25% of them are either a Virgo or Libra zodiac sign – with only two Sagittarians!
Which I find really interesting. As a Piscean. And due to this article coming out today:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/children_shealth/8741380/Month-a-baby-is-born-suggests-what-career-they-will-have.html All about when you are born and what you are more likely to do statiscally.
Nice. Anyhoo - great news for us at goAugmented - augmented reality mobile specialists in Manchester.

Sunday 4 September 2011

Just recieved this - and made me think - especially as reviving my love of NLP today.

While global financials freefall and everyone else panics, you have a huge asset which can produce growth rates that will leave most stock traders green with envy, if you manage it right.

That asset is your mindset. Your IP [Intellectual Property] and how you master your emotions are your strategic advantage and part of the key that will secure you during this economic turmoil. Unlike shares and investing, there's no downside risk. Everything positive that you feed your mind with you can NEVER Lose - and the upside normally ranges from a 100% to 10,000% return on your investment, regardless of the economy. Get that in a bank?!

So the first priority is to protect any assets you have. In this economy it doesn't mean insuring them or paying them down, it means something entirely, controversially different.

Strength in a tough economy depends on having a Rhino thick skin, staying focused and completely ignoring the mass media. We urge you to make this a priority in these uncertain times. Here are 6 highly effective ways to do it:
  1. Don't get sucked into the negativity. It isn't the reality, it is only a perception and something to sell papers and brainwash society. You can disprove any mass theory in 10 seconds flat - it's not real and it only serves to cannibalise your wealth.
  2. Invest more. Now. Your friends and 'social advisers' will think you're nuts. Pull money out of every asset you have, even if that asset has reduced, use other people's money and pile it into undervalued asset classes such as property and stocks, and be greedy while others are fearful [You know the quote, right?]
  3. Build Your Brand. Now is the time to shout when everyone else is hiding. Leverage the lack of competition and get known. Turn your education in yourself into cash. Stand up and be counted. Lead. Educate, inspire and give others belief while no one else has the brass.(you can do this with great marketing sic which is why I am building a workshop called BrandMe)
  4. Invest in your education. You need resilience and toughness in these times, but you also need strategies too. Most people stop spending and therefore actually go backwards. When you invest and learn, you have double the edge on your competition. The best companies actually increase their marketing in a downturn while everyone else cuts spend. You are a heavyweight.
  5. Market & Advertise. Newspaper rate cards are dirt cheap. Less leaflets are getting sent out and publications will drop their pants for you. [pants= rates :-)] Increase your advertising spend and take a greater lion's share of the customers you'd never normally see.
  6. Raise non standard, non bank finance. Banging your head against the brick bank wall, begging for money will get you nowhere in this economy. Find private investors, JV partners and more liquid commercial facilities. Get fast money with no application process and no arrangement fees. 
Most of these things people stop in a recession, and pray for survival until 'things get better'.

Don't pray this one out. Get out there and grab your best chance for 15 years.

Interesting isn't - of course, they are selling something - but perhaps something I might be going to.

Who knows - strange days cause for strange behaviours :)

Thursday 1 September 2011

Read a great article on what it takes to be a leader - from the ground up.

Hmmm perhaps this is why things are stalling - time for some personal development.

Read a great article on what it takes to be a leader - from the ground up. 

I need to work on from 7 to 10 :)- What about you?

  1. Be your authentic self. Don’t try to be someone that you are not. Other people quickly see through this façade, and lose respect. Find the good in difficult situations or personalities. Work on improving the real you, rather than building a better façade.
  2. You have to like yourself first. Don’t expect others to like you if you have a bad self-image. Practice positive self-talk using genuine accomplishments to pave the way for authentic productivity and success. Absorb the new approach and make it real.
  3. Perception is reality. How you perceive others is your reality about them, and the same is true for them of you. It is far easier to make a good first impression than to change a bad one. Likability is leaving people with positive perceptions.
  4. Exude energy in all your actions. What you give off is what you get back, and your own output can energize other people or deflate them. Channel your authentic energy to be genuine and likable, even when faced with difficulties and challenges.
  5. Curiosity never killed a conversation. Showing genuine curiosity about a person’s job, life, interests, opinions, or needs is the best way to start a conversation, keep it going, and make you likable. Check for matching needs for help rather than demanding help.
  6. Practice listening to understand. If you want others to understand and like you, you have to understand them by truly listening to what they are communicating. Don’t forget that good listening is done with you eyes and other body language, as well as your ears.
  7. Show people how you are like them. Look for common interests and backgrounds, shared experiences and beliefs, to find similarities that can help you build connections with other people. People like people who are like them.
  8. Create positive mood memories for other people. People are more apt to remember how you made them feel than what you said. It’s hard to be likeable when you intimidate people, practice insensitivity, or otherwise make them feel uncomfortable.
  9. Stay in touch and remember connections. Showing genuine curiosity about a person’s job, life, interests, opinions, or needs is the best way to start a conversation, keep it going, and make you likable. Stay in someone’s mind to make them comfortable.
  10. Give something without expecting a return. There are countless ways to give freely to others, including making introductions, sharing resources, doing favors, and giving advice. What goes around comes around.
  11. Have patience, don’t expect benefits from every contact. Likeable people don’t demand value from every interaction. Stay open to the possibility that results may take time, and come in ways not obvious today.