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Three Must-Read Best Practices from Andrew Carnegie

Derek — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:49:10 +0000

Raise your hand if you know about Andrew Carnegie. For those of you who don’t, he was a steel magnate who amassed a fortune during the 1800s that would be worth more than $250 billion in today’s dollars. To put this in perspective, Carnegie would have more money than the top three richest men today, combined.

Carnegie brutally cut through conventions, competitors, and people in his way when he wanted to achieve an objective. For example, during his twenties, he worked for the Pennsylvania railroad and set a stalled train car on fire to prevent further delays on the railroad. Let me repeat that. He set fire to an expensive piece of machinery to prevent delays…

While his coworkers picked their jaws up from the ground, the top executives at the Pennsylvania railroad discovered that Carnegie was right! Destroying the train car was much more efficient than fixing it.

But how ironic is that? The world’s largest corporation (in 1800s) handled one of their biggest problems the wrong way until some punk-kid named Andy changed everything. Now, here is what you can learn from Carnegie’s maverick-like experience:

Discover Your True Objective

After a train crash, railroad executives had one main objective and it was to prevent further delays. Prior to Carnegie, they prevented further delays in a roundabout way — fix the train and move it out of the way. However, Carnegie broke the task down to its core — prevent delays — and skipped everything in between.

Focus on Your Actions (not your explanations)

If Carnegie proposed “burn the train” to the senior management at Pennsylvania railroad, they would have laughed in his face. Why would they want to destroy an expensive piece of machinery? However, when Carnegie did it without permission, the senior management skipped over whether the decision was logical and decided whether it was efficient and in this case, it was very efficient.

Please note, I’m not telling you to burn or destroy anything. I am using Carnegie’s experience as an example.

Destroy Existing Standards (and Create New Ones)

Carnegie loved best practices, but he realized that there was a point where you needed to tear down existing standards and create some new ones. When he burned that first train car, he destroyed an established best-practice of fixing the broken trains. This was a major risk, but it made sense and it became a new best practice. Now, just remember, today’s conventions were yesterday’s innovations, so ensure that you do something today to innovate.

What Do You Think?

Do you know any other Andrew Carnegie stories? Do you think these tactics still apply today? Leave some comments!

Do you know someone who will enjoy this article? Don’t forget to send it to a friend!

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Shelly Palmer: Why You Need to Translate Value Into Wealth

Derek — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 02:27:39 +0000

If you follow me on Twitter, you know I was at SocComm today — Jeff Pulver’s conference on Social Communication. There were many great speakers and I will be posting videos, summaries, and articles over the next few days to share this priceless information with you. So, check back daily.

Shelly Palmer on Value and Wealth

Here is what you’ll learn from his keynote:

Learn what the Jerry Garcia effect is and how it built their empire

Learn the 4 currencies online and how it applies to business

Here are some highlights from Shelly Palmer’s keynote:

Value is simple, but translating it into wealth isn’t. Skype, a ton of value, but no profit. Twitter, a ton of value, but they haven’t made a penny.

There are different currencies online: 1) Attention, 2) Intention, 3) Fame, and 4) Street Cred.

Do something you love, but you need to translate it to wealth.

When you’re inside the walls of a gatekeeper, it isn’t that bad. When you’re outside, it sucks.

Want More Shelly Palmer?

Why don’t you check out his video blog?

Success Factors (Recap)

Derek — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 17:35:59 +0000

Why do some people and businesses become extraordinarily successful? Is it luck? Talent? Just what does it take to go from good to great?

Whether you are an entrepreneur or a CEO, you’ve got ideas on how to be successful, but can you list the concrete factors that separate the titans the peons?

The Success Factors blog series will show you how people and companies achieve success. All you need to do is keep an open mind and go through each Success Factors article.

Success Factors: Improve Your Business

This is the Success Factors basics. If you read these 8 articles, you will learn how to improve your business.

Success Factors: Case Studies

Are you looking for more ways to grow your business? why don’t you take a look at these Success Factors case studies? You will learn what other companies have done to improve their business.

Success Factors: Expert Advice

Here is a quick look at some of the most successful people in both business and life. From musicians to billionaires, there is something here for everyone.

Success Factors: Inspiration

Need some inspiration? Why don’t you take a look at these two success factors articles?

Success Factors: Personal Development

A company is only as successful as the people who work for it. So, why don’t you take a look at these great personal development articles?

Do You Like What You See?

A Lesson in Cool: What Miles Davis Taught Us About Success

Derek — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 02:14:18 +0000

Do you want to learn how to make your company successful? Here is Matt Rodela’s contribution to the Success Factors blog series.

Photo Courtesy of Peter

Miles Davis is a legend. Rising from the relative obscurity of the suburbs of Illinois he grew quickly to become one of the most influential, and controversial, musicians. With over 100 recordings, Miles was a monster musician. No denying that he was a virtuoso on his instrument, but even more impressive is that he was able to take this remarkable playing and parlay it into a nearly 50 year career. During his career Davis developed new sounds and styles of music, like cool jazz, hard bop, jazz-funk, and fusion, all of which made possible much of the music heard today (R&B, Soul, Smooth Jazz).

There is a lot that this genius of hip can teach us about being successful. Here’s a rundown of how the techniques Davis used to stay ahead of the curve are ones that you can apply to help you jump all of today’s hurdles with a liberal dose of cool.

Reinvention

What Miles Did: Miles Davis was able to stay relevant and on top of his genre by dramatically changing his style and approach every few years. He was never satisfied with where he was at any given moment. He pushed the envelope with a creative fearlessness that often saw him jumping from group to group and leaving one record label to sign on with another. The fact that Davis was able to stay fresh is what helped him define music on his own terms and change the musical landscape for decades to come.

How You Can Do It Too: Reinvention works well in business, as well as all other facets of life. As soon as you become comfortable with where you are now, you loose your competitive edge. Always look for new ways to push the envelope and strive to be in a different place now than you were a few years ago. If you’re in danger of falling off of people’s radar, change your game and make a comeback. Miles Davis understood this and proves that there are really only two choices in life: progress and grow or stay where you are and fade away.

Less is more

What Miles Did: Much of Miles’ signature sound came from the spaces in between the notes he played. Davis was known for leaving huge gaps in between the musical phrases he would play during solos. This came during a time when most other jazz musicians were trying to cram as many notes as possible into as short a time as possible. What this technique did was give each note he played more weight, value, and impact. It also set him apart from the other entertainers of his time.

How You Can Do It Too: The ideas of simplicity and space are a key factors to living a successful life. Cutting out distractions and focusing on what’s important will give your ideas and actions room to breath. By focusing and simplifying, at a time when everyone else is overworked and overstressed, you’re giving yourself a critical competitive advantage.

Trend Setting

What Miles Did: Davis started his career by imitating and following his mentors in jazz and bebop. Soon, however, he realized that he could only get so far by following in others’ footsteps and started blazing his own trail. Introducing the world to hard bop, modal jazz, and fusion, Miles Davis made a name for himself and set trends in popular music that lasted decades.

How You Can Do It Too: To be a trend setter means being bold and taking risks. Take the time to learn from those who have been successful before you and then don’t be afraid to travel off the beaten path to forge your own legacy. Miles shows us the best way to accomplish this is to be confident in your abilities and true to yourself.

Collaboration and Mentoring

What Miles Did: Arguably Davis’ most important contribution to the jazz community was his ability to bring talented musicians together and push them to do incredible things. From his early works with Charlie Parker and John Coltrane to his later recordings with the likes of Herbie Hancock and John Scofield, Miles Davis made sure to surround himself with impressive musicians. In fact, there’s hardly a musician that came of age between the 50’s and 90’s that Miles Davis did not influence in some way. The musicians that were lucky enough to be picked to join him came away with a new understanding of music and often carried the Miles Davis sound with them throughout their career. Even artists like Jimi Hendrix and James Brown site Miles as a direct influence on their music.

How You Can Do It Too: Success is never achieved alone. Even someone as individualistic as Miles Davis understood this. To be great, you need to have the ability to choose and work with great people. Once you have great people working for you, make sure you instill within them the traits that you’ve learned over the years. That way, you’ll create a small army of people who will share your vision and spread your legacy. That is how Miles Davis made a name for himself, and how you can too.

You don’t have to be a musical virtuoso to make your own mark on the world. Instead, by applying some of the tricks used by the king of cool, you can rise to the top, separate yourself from the competition, and make a name for yourself.

You can follow my attempts to start a small part-time computer consulting business and turn it into a full time success on my blog, Your Friendly Neighborhood Computer Guy. I’m also trying to make my own mark on the musical world. Keep up with me as I begin recording my first full-length CD at MattRodela.com and twitter.com/mattrodela.

How to Set and Achieve Business Goals

Derek — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 04:05:06 +0000

Do you want to know what makes a business successful? It’s not profit, reputation, or impact. It’s not marketing or finance. It’s not whether you’re sitting in a Herman Miller chair or on a park bench. It is when you set business goals and achieve them.

Without business goals, you will never know “What’s Important Now?” You can work on anything you want and never hold your business accountable. If you don’t set business goals, success will remain intangible and impossible to find. After all, how can you reach for what you can’t see?

So how do you set business goals and achieve them?

One or Two Goals, Max

We have enough going on with just “living” our lives. We have to shower, eat, work, clean, and the list goes on and on. You need to set one or two goals, max, because you won’t have time for anything else. You need to put all of your eggs in one basket and devote your time to fortifying that basket. You’re a business person and your time is limited. You simply won’t have time for more than one or two goals.

Command Your Ship

The leadership expert John C. Maxwell said, “A Pessimist complains about the wind. An optimist expects it to change. A leader adjusts the sails.” And that my friends, is how you create a business goal. You need to look at something you control and aim to control it. Don’t focus on the weather, focus on what you can do to change the weather.

Two Versions Of Your Goal

You need to have two versions of your goals. You need to have one goal that you think you can achieve and then one goal that is much higher than the first. You never know what you might accomplish and you don’t want to sell yourself short by setting your goals too low.

Make Your Goals Public

When I started this “Success Factors” series I committed to one article per day. Let me tell you, it’s hard. It’s real hard to find one unique article per day to write about. Yet, here I am, staying up all hours of the night and losing sleep to make sure I get one article up per day. My goal is public and I don’t want to fail.

Do Something Today

I just launched Prevential.com and I kept asking myself, “What can I do right now to grow my audience?” So I started a blog series. Instead of trying to optimize my website for search engines, I focused on what I did best and started writing immediately.

Forget Effort. Manage Activity

It doesn’t matter how hard you work. What matters is how much you do while you work hard. So, if you’re trying to sell shower doors, you should contact 500 people instead of 400 people. Don’t work on improving your conversion ratio because that could take a lifetime of practice. Instead, focus on what you control and that’s how many people you talk to.

Now, how about you join the conversation?

How to Learn From Your Competition

Derek — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:02:54 +0000

Prevential offers Success Factors to help rewire your business and personal life for success. Please check back for new “Success Factors” articles daily in Jan. 2009.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur or aspiring athlete, you will benefit from studying your competition.

Don’t believe me? Let me show you two examples.

For the first, lets take a look at one of the worlds best basketball players.

Kobe Bryant studies videos of his opponents on a portable 10″ DVD player. He combs through each video to find advantages which could help him guard his opposition in basketball games. Oh, and did I mention that he does this before every game?

The second example is about the world’s most impressive retail tycoon.

Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, would regularly visit his competitor’s stores. He started doing this as a aspiring business man and continued to do it when his stores were in first place. He believed in learning from everything and he thought his competitors could teach him the most.

But now you must be wondering, “How Can I Learn From My Competition?” In the remaining part of this article I will go over the best ways to study your competition for maximum growth potential. So, lets get started.

Who Are Your Competitors?

You need to find your competition to learn from them. It could be a teammate, a rival business, or it could be yourself, but the bottom line is that there is someone or something out there that you need to compete with. But how do you find them? Who is considered competition and why?

People and businesses compete for limited resources. We compete for sales, customer’s time, or that one promotion, or that one corner office. In short, your competition is anyone who prevents you from getting more of what you want.

You can easily define your competition by looking at your goals. If you want that promotion, your competition is anyone who may receive that promotion over you. If you create video games, your competition is all video game companies or more broadly, any company that demands a person’s “extra” time.

But what if you can’t find your competitors?

You need to define your business and goals on a broad landscape. It will help you spot potential attackers and growth opportunities. For example, if you specialize in 7″ screws, you would not want to compete in the 7″ screw market. You would want to compete in the “we help you build or hang things on the wall” market. If you specialize in iPhone games, you need to compete with “we help you waste time on your phone at work” market.

Okay, but how many competitors should you track?

The magic number is all of them. Unfortunately, who has the time for that? So, if you are a small business or corporate executive, I would focus on 3 competitors. If you don’t have 3, redefine your business and goals so you have 3. If you have more than 3, redefine your business and goals so you have 3.

You may think 3 is too much or 3 is too little, but it is a very manageable number for a single person. On average, you should spend at least 3 hours per competitor per month and 9 hours isn’t too demanding for one person. If you have the resources and time, you should expand your competitor tracking, but if you don’t, 3 is a great start.

What Are Your Competitors Doing?

Here is where we take some insight from people like Sam Walton and Kobe Bryant. You need to find out what your competitors are doing and why. If you can’t find out why, make sure you know what they are doing so you can use it to improve your business.

When the Holidays started coming around I noticed my local Barnes and Nobles did a few changes. I’m not competing with them, but what they did was interesting. They created a huge table of board games and placed it near the customer service desk. Additionally, they moved their “clearance” items from the back-end of the store to near the customer service desk. I found myself asking, “Why did they do it?”

Well, when the holidays come around many people spend impulsively. A parent comes into a book store to buy their daughter the new Harry Potter book and asks customer service where to find it. While waiting for help, she spots 50% off signs and “great games for children.” Now she leaves with the hottest new game Blokus, some cheap 50% index learning cards, and the latest Harry Potter book.

So, make sure you make note of what your competitors are doing. There is a reason for it and it may help you improve your business.

But how do you do it? How do you find out what your competitors are up to?

Are you ready for the answer? it is going to be very complicated. Get dressed, leave your house, and go look at what they are doing. Look at the products they are selling, Look at their light fixtures, look at their signage, look at their event promotions. Just use your eyes and you will find out what they are up to.

What Are People Saying About Your Competitors?

Why does it matter what people are saying about your competitors? Are there opportunities hiding in conversation?

If you’re reading a blog, I doubt I have to tell you this, but yes there is. There are tons of opportunities.

When you look at what people are saying about your competition, you can find one of two things: 1) a thread of discontent or 2) a success story. Lets talk about both of them.

A Success Story: When you look at what your competitors are doing, you need to use your judgment to decide whether or not it is positive or negative. When you have a testimonial, you have proof. If you see on Yelp that the local diner received a ton of praise for their simple 15 item menu, you may think about cutting 50 items off of your 100 item menu.

A Thread of Discontent: If you see people complaining about the pizza place’s customer service, you can position yourself as “the pizza place with the best customer service.” If you see people complaining about a lack of information on a competitors blog, you can provide a ton of information on your blog.

But how can you discover what people are saying about your competitors?

Ask them: Many people love to give their opinion. So, you might as well use it to your advantage.
Twitter: By now I’m sure you’re familiar with how much Twitter has grown. You should use Twitter Search to scope out your competitors and market regularly.
Yelp: If you are a small business, you know about Yelp. You probably dealt with some bad reviews before or good reviews, but you should look at your competition’s bad reviews as well.
Google Blog Search: Blogging is the source of conversation. You can search brand names, peoples names, or anything you want and you will find someone talking about it. Don’t let this free information go to waste. So, use Google Blog Search.

What Are The Experts Saying About Your Competitors?

If you regularly read Prevential.com, you know how cynical I am about proclaimed “experts.” However, they do have a ton of insight into your competition and your market. So, you should read what the experts are saying.

To start, you want to follow your industry news. You want to see what the independent trade journals and dedicated media outlets are saying. If they’re talking about some new great Point of Sale system or Content Management System, you should probably check it out. If they are talking about a new innovative product, you may want to consider adding something similar.

Why You Should Talk to Your Competitors

Many businessmen and executives hate their competition. They view them as villains who are trying to rob their bank accounts. However, this kind of hostility is not beneficial and will hurt your business.

When you view your competitor as a villain, you assume you are the savior. You think everything you do is right and everything they do is wrong. This kind of mindset will prevent you from doing the right things at the right time. You may not be able to keep an open mind when you see them doing something different because you will assume it is wrong.

Instead, you should talk with your competition regularly. They can be a huge help.

You don’t have to give away your secrets, but you should share certain best practices. This type of stuff will promote good will and respectable competition. You wouldn’t want a hostile competitor throwing a rock through your window or hacking your website right?

Additionally, if small businesses or executives communicate, they may fair much better against larger competitors with thousands of employees. I remember when I started an entertainment blog, the way I grew it was by talking with other entertainment blogs of similar size. We worked together and we eventually caught up to the huge entertainment blogs.

The Bottom Line

So you know what people are saying, you know what your competitors are doing, and you talk to your competitors regularly, but what do you do to differentiate? How can you make sure you and your company beats your competition?

Want to know How To Differentiate From Your Competition?