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Growth Management Personal Development

Commercial Cards Modernize the Payments Process and Enhance Supplier Relationships

Our competitive and global business climate requires C-level executives to maintain visibility into spending and constantly look for ways to make every dollar count. A payment strategy that relies on electronic payments is an important first step. As part of that strategy, you can take advantage of commercial card program benefits to drive down costs, forecast cash flow, optimize liquidity opportunities, and enhance valuable supplier relationships.

Consider that 50% of payables are still paper-based1 and each check costs, on average, $30 per item to process and handle.2   Commercial cards can be used not only for purchasing and expenses, but inventory and capital expenditures as well. 

“Progressive leaders looking to improve process efficiencies, cash visibility, and forecasting, recognize that making the relatively simple move toward using commercial cards is the logical solution for payments.”

–Ranjana Clark, Head of Transaction Banking, MUFG Union Bank, N.A.

Download White Paper:

Learn more about transformative ePayables strategies: download the MUFG Commercial Cards white paper here.

About MUFG:
MUFG Union Bank, N.A. is a member of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), one of the world’s leading financial institutions. Learn more about our
Commercial Card program at mufgamericas.com/commercial-cards

Contact a MUFG ePayables specialist at 214-468-7829 or visit mufgamericas.com/commercialcards for more information.

1Electronic Payments Survey, Association of Financial Professionals, 2013.

2 Ibid.

The foregoing article is intended to provide general information about commercial card and is not considered advice from MUFG and MUFG Union Bank, N.A.

© 2016 Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The MUFG logo and name is a service mark of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Inc.

 

Categories
Growth Human Resources Personal Development

The Humor Advantage: Five Keys to Effectively Using Humor That Can Help You Laugh All the Way to the Bank.

Can more funny equal more money? Without question. There truly is a bottom-line advantage to leveraging your humor resources and branding your business with humor. Here are five guiding principles to help you and your business laugh all the way to the bank.

1. First, Do No Wrong

Great advice for doctors or would-be corporate jesters. Make sure the humor you use in your branding laughs with people, not at people. Laugh at yourself, not in a, “I’m a loser” kind of way, but in a way that lets people know you don’t take yourself overly seriously. Stay clear of political, ethnic, gender or sex-based humor. Remember that having permission to use more humor at work is not permission to act like a jerk. It doesn’t give you license to offend or humiliate people, or disparage their character. It’s about being more human, having a bigger heart, and demonstrating greater humility.

The number one fear corporate clients express about using humor at work is that it will invite all manner of obnoxious behaviors eventually leading to lawsuits. Yet, companies such as the Las Vegas based online shoe retailer Zappos, that embrace an enormous amount of fun and humor in their workplace, rarely – if ever – experience anyone crossing the proverbial humor line. Why? Because the style of humor employees use reflects their culture. If you create a respectful workplace culture, as Zappos has done, then the humor will remain respectful.

2. Be Authentic

Humor can break down barriers and build trust, provided the humor used creates and reflects authenticity. As Jerry Seinfeld once said, “The whole object of comedy is to be yourself. The closer to that you get, the funnier you will be.” This applies at a corporate level as well. Customers are savvier than ever and more cynical than ever. They’ll see through half-hearted attempts at humor that seem to be nothing more than manipulative and insincere window dressing. The need for authenticity applies to leaders and employees as well.

The Canadian airline WestJet, modelled after Southwest Airlines, understands the importance of authentic humor. As with Southwest Airlines, flight attendants and pilots at WestJet Airlines are encouraged to bring their personalities to work and to use humor when delivering announcements, but with one large caveat: Be your authentic self. The last thing WestJet wants (or their passengers, for that matter) is a flight attendant pretending to be funny or feeling forced to sing a rap song when they aren’t comfortable doing so. But allowing employees to be their authentic selves and use their own style of humor while delivering great service is what has helped WestJet and Southwest Airlines soar to success.

3. Be Congruent With Your Brand

The humor you use at a corporate level must fit your style. It needs to be congruent with your brand. if you have a classy brand, then your humor, for the most part, should be classy. If you want to be known as an edgy company, then use edgy humor.

Kentucky’s Big Ass Fans, for example, uses a fair amount of edgy humor on its website, which seems appropriate given their name (even though the ass they speak of is a donkey). Their name generates controversy, which Big Ass Fans uses to their advantage by including some of the hate mail they receive on the kudos section of their website. They even have a hilarious video that pokes fun at the entire controversy. It’s edgy humor befitting a company that has embraced an edgy name, but the humor they get away with wouldn’t be appropriate for a more family-friendly or conservative business. Make sure the humor you use contributes to and reflects the brand image you want to project.

4. Be Relevant

The more the humor you use at your workplace is relevant to your business, the more memorable and effective it will be. Humor for the sake of humor can be a fabulous tool, but relevant humor that ties into your unique challenges, issues, products, local attractions, branding, and industry is far more effective.

The Dirty Laundry winery is one of my favorite wineries in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. The name comes from an historic Summerland laundry that reportedly housed a brothel, earning the business the nickname “The Dirty Laundry”. It’s a playful, fun name that invites a lot of humor – and the key to their branding success is that they keep the humor relevant to their name and theme. So the winery’s logo features a red-hot iron with images of women in the steam; their tagline reads: “The Okanagan’s Dirty Little Secret”. Their newsletter is called Laundry Lines, and their welcome sign resembles a giant sheet hanging on a clothesline. The entrance gate posts are giant clothes pegs. The tasting room/gift shop is reminiscent of an old-fashioned bordello (not that I’d know what one looks like) complete with lingerie strewn about the display cases. They sell products such as pink stiletto wine bottle holders. And of course their wine names include such gems as, “A Secret Affair,” “Naughty Chardonnay,” and “A Girl in Every Port.” Even the descriptions of the wine are playfully suggestive.

The more relevant the humor, the more likely it is to reinforce and strengthen your brand, your image, and your products.

5. Embrace a Spirit of Fun

Beryl Health is a call center company that has built a wildly successful business with an employee turnover rate that’s the envy of their competitors. The key to their success has been to focus relentlessly on nurturing a positive and fun culture. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to work in a company where the human resources manager has the alternative job title The Queen of Fun and Laughter? Beryl embraces a fun culture that starts at the very top, with CEO Paul Spiegelman. And yet, Spiegelman admits to being an introvert, and not a particularly funny person. “I’ve come to learn that it’s not about being funny, but about encouraging and creating a culture that embraces a spirit of fun.”

Ultimately, using humor effectively to brand your business is about embracing a spirit of fun rather than trying to be funny. Embracing a spirit of fun suggests a lightness, a willingness to play, and a spirit of inclusiveness.

Michael Kerr is an international business speaker who travels the world researching, writing, and speaking about inspiring workplace cultures and the use of humor in business to drive success. His latest book is called, The Humor Advantage: Why Some Businesses Are Laughing All the Way to the Bank

Categories
Growth Leadership Personal Development

Difficult Doesn’t Have to Be So Difficult: How to Turn Challenging Conversations into Trusting Relationships at Work

By Judith E. Glaser

No one could believe it – Radio Shack let thousands of people go and they did it through email!  Most people dislike delivering bad news in person, and will find any way to avoid it.

Making eye contact with another person who you care about, and with whom you need to deliver a difficult message – probably creates disappoint, upset or hurt – and is one of the most difficult things for human beings to do. So, rather than confronting these challenges, we often take too many alternatives which at the time seem to be less challenging or hurtful but later turn out to cause more pain.

Discussing/Delivering/Moving Through Bad News

Clouding the Issue

Two years ago I was asked to coach a CEO who was one of 6 reporting to a chairman. The difficult message the chairman wanted to give the leaders was that if she didn’t raise the performance of her team she would be asked to leave. Rather than giving that message, the chairman wrote a 6 page report that provided feedback and 98% was about how good the leader was. Embedded in the document were 2-3 lines, which briefly stated that the chairman expected a higher level of performance from the leader. When I asked the leader what this document communicated to her and what she would do as a result, she said she was doing everything right and therefore was on the right track for her bonus.

Failing to be candid with others is one of the largest reasons why people ultimately leave companies. When we think we are doing the right things, we keep doing them. When key messages are embedded into larger messages, they get lost, are “sandwiched in” which means we can easily discount them or deal with them as less important.

Candor is Golden 

People do care about outcomes, but they care more about the processes that produce those outcomes. People want to know where they stand and why. If there is a difficult message they need to hear, employees would prefer to know the truth rather than a watered down or clouded version of it.

Candor supersedes fluff in situations where truth is the medicine needed. Fear of telling a person they have failed, or are about to be fired, or they didn’t make the cut are realities in life. We all know this. Yet we do more harm to an individual by trying to soft pedal our way through a difficult conversation.  When people are candid with us – and do it in a caring way – we are open to building trust with them – it’s as simple as that.

Turning Difficult Conversations into Trusting Relationships at Work

How should a leader address customers; shareholders; the press; employees? Are there different components of the message that should be shared with one group and not another? Who needs what type of information? Most of all, how can you set the context for difficult not to be so difficult. The best strategy is to be specific and clear about what is happening, rather than clouding the message with hyperbole.

  • Unmet Expectations: Most difficult messages come from a very common origin. Unmet expectations. I failed to deliver the results you expected. You failed to deliver the results I expected. It is difficult because it contains embarrassment and disappointment – two things human beings dislike the most. It is a social embarrassment and when this is the core of the context, then people want to deflect the message, minimize it, blame others, avoid it – or any other tactic they can think of.Every difficult message has some dynamics that are unique to the situation. And each group of people may have different messages that are required to share, however there are a few things in common with all. These are all people – and in each case they are important relationships that you want to preserve and sustain even thought the message you need to discuss or deliver is different.
  • If you don’t care about the relationship then you can say anything you want. In this case you can “data dump” or get the situation off your chest and act mindlessly about how you say it. Sometimes this can be venting or letting it all out if the issue is about your relationships with them.
  • Caring: However in most other cases, if your goal is to share something that is considered “difficult” and you want to sustain the relationship, you need to set the context for a sustained relationship up front so the person knows that this may be difficult for both of you… and that you care about them regardless of how difficult the message will be.
  • Candor: In addition you want to be explicit and honest about what you are sharing. Candor communicates respect, and that is what people want most. Not candor that looks like blame, or anger, but candor that looks like the real truth…

Example:  Failure to Deliver Results on Your End
For example, your company failed to make its numbers this quarter and it’s because of a delay in the launch of a product. There will be an impact on stock price, or deliveries, on employee bonuses – so the impact is across the board with employees, shareholders, press and even customers. Identify where the impacts lie, take responsibility for the event, ask people to accept your apology, explain your new strategy for making it better, and asking for their on going support or help in any way that is needed.

Understand How to Address Fears, Concerns, and Worries:

  • Triggering:    ‘Feared Implications’

Very often just the thought of having a difficult conversation causes anxiety and fear. Our minds quickly create a movie of what might happen, and our minds are quick to imagine the worst. I call this ‘feared implications.’ Feared implications are the worst-case scenarios, and when our minds imagine the worst, the neurochemistry of fear takes over. The clinical name for this is Amygdala Hijack, named after the part of the brain, which is the seat of fear.

  • Priming:
    Do have the conversation in person     whenever you can. When you talk with someone face-to-face, it primes the way for an honest and caring exchange and it does make a difference. People experience a great level of trust and openness when they see someone face-to-face and see the look in their eyes of caring and concern for their well being.
  • Refocusing & Redirecting:
    Do focus on outcomes     and especially those that may be good or better for the person down the road. A person receiving bad news will be focusing on the loss and you want them to focus on how to use this situation to grow and to gain something better than what they had before. Redirect and refocus them on how to use this situation as an opportunity for change and growth.
  • Reframing:
    Do focus on development and growth not punishment and blame.     Most people feel shame and embarrassment when something goes wrong. When you reframe a discussion from ‘criticism’ to ‘development’ it shifts the person from thinking, “I was bad” to “here are new ways to be successful.” This creates a new energetic shift in their brain from the fear state to being open to learn something new. The Heart-Prefrontal Cortex will start working together and become in sync to create a healthy state of mind – open to learn.
  • Co-creating:
    Fear closes down conversations. When the boss is afraid to talk, it amplifies the fear and feared implications. Instead, be open to discussing the impact and implications of the news. People will always say after the fact, that when a leader was open to discussion, it makes them feel that the difficult news was palatable. They feel if the process of exchange is fair and open, with candor, respect and caring, then they can accept the news. Also, if there is dialogue they may come up with other ways of handling the situation that had not been revealed before.

Judith E. Glaser is CEO of Benchmark Communications, Chairman of the Creating WE Institute, Organizational Anthropologist, and consultant to Fortune 500 Companies and author of four best- selling business books, including Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results (Bibliomotion). Visit www.conversationalintelligence.com; www.creatingwe.com; email jeglaser@creatingwe.com or call 212-307-4386.

Categories
Growth Personal Development

Are you ready for the 21st Century Enterprise?

–By Matt Preschern, CMO – HCL Technologies

Think of a national bank. Can you name its main competitors? If you simply listed rival banks, think harder. It has to fend off threats from Paypal, Square, SoFi and several lean start-ups that could jeopardize its business model with a cool, user-friendly app. And that’s not all. Threat looms from Apple, Amazon and Google, who are changing customer expectations dramatically with their digital and mobile payment services. Similar seismic shifts are playing out in virtually every business, from car manufacturers to airlines to healthcare companies. New digital rivals, epitomized by Uber and Airbnb, are derailing revenue and cost structures across industries. Not every industry is equally impacted by this disruption, but everyone is seriously concerned. Talk to any business leader across the world, and you will see these disruptive digital lean start-ups are a hot button issue. And they sparked some of the most invigorating discussions, while I was at the C-Suite Network Conference in Boston earlier this week. 

Millennials in the driving seat

Let’s step back a little and try to understand the forces shaping this massive wave of disruption. Millennials, the first generation of digital and social natives, are at the forefront of the action. Probably influenced by their always-on, multi-tasking, multi-device lifestyles, the digital-savvy cohort wants instant and personalized experiences. And they don’t shy away from sharing their brand preferences via digital and social channels. This generation is expected to spend $200 billion annually by next year and a whopping $10 trillion in their lifetime. That could motivate several companies to completely change how they interact, engage and address queries from customers.

Disrupt or get disrupted

This is a huge shift. How should you respond, if you are facing this volatility? Here is the mantra: Disrupt yourself and transform into a 21st Century Enterprise (21 CE) or get disrupted. Embracing digital, mobile, cloud and analytics is part of the picture, but there is more. To remodel into a 21 CE, your company needs to transition to a customer-centric and outcome-based model and adopt an agile and lean structure to continually adapt to a dynamic market. These multi-pronged transformations are not easy for large well-established companies with thousands of employees and assets worth billions of dollars. They need to completely overhaul their customer experience, operational processes and business models. Take outcome-based model, for instance. Companies that sell products will instead offer subscription-based services around their products. Their revenue won’t depend on the number of units shipped but on delivering solutions that directly produce quantifiable results. In the new business landscape, the transaction doesn’t end at the checkout or after a social media review of their experience.

Uber-proof your company

In an era where the relationship with your customers, employees and ecosystem is continually evolving, it’s important to lay focus on ‘how’ to make yourself uber-proof. Let’s take some time to look at few important changes one needs to embrace in adopting the 21 CE company culture and model:

 1.       Balance new power structures: Digitalization and other tech initiatives need a lean and agile structure that could break down silos and short-circuit lengthy corporate processes. This could rejig several departments and power structures.  

2.       Focus on experience: It’s not enough to give customers the product they want and when they want. Brands need a strong emotional connect that sets them apart in customer’s minds and hearts.

3.       Be consistent across touch points: A 21 CE organization needs to go beyond digital and provide their customers the same, consistent experience across channels, from web to social media to physical stores.

 4.       Personalize Interactions: It’s crucial to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. This requires advanced digital marketing tools and predictive analytics models that collect information, extract meaningful insights and then convert them into real-time and tangible business actions and outcomes in line with shifting market trends.

 5.       Reorient and Reskill: To survive and thrive in this environment, everyone in the team must ‘up their game”. This new age environment demands us to reskill for all key characteristics of 21 Century Enterprise across aspects of  economics, human experience, design, unified ecosystem and the 21st century buyer journey.

So, it’s a tough re-alignment. But make no mistake. It’s not optional. Since 2000, 52% of the Fortune 500 companies have merged, been acquired, gone bankrupt, or fallen off the list as competition intensified and business models got disrupted, according to Constellation Research.  So, don’t be afraid to break things in order to make them better. There’s no other way to keep pace with today’s fast-changing world.

Categories
Growth Human Resources Personal Development

Executive Briefings: Intersection of Leadership and Social Media

By Thomas White for Huffington Post

In my work, I meet business leaders from all over the world who have advice, stories and personal tips to provide. I sit down with these leaders to give them the opportunity to provide current business advice and give a glimpse to their personal stories as a business leader.

I recently sat down with Rob Harles, Head of Social Business & Collaboration at Accenture Interactive. Rob joined Accenture from Bloomberg LP in New York where he was Global Head of Social Media responsible for developing and managing Bloomberg’s social media strategy and initiatives worldwide.

As a leader in social media for a long time, both at Bloomberg and now Accenture, what changes do you see in what expectations customers have of companies?

Customers have higher expectations than they’ve ever had. Social has acted as a catalyst for people to express their views, support, lack of support for brands, and what they expect brands to do, to live up to their promise. Only ten to fifteen years ago you wouldn’t have been able to do that. Brands were lucky enough to be able to tell you what they stood for and hope you believed it. Now you have to prove it, and social is acting as that catalyst.

We call it the ultra-transparency situation, and it affects how companies engage with customers. How would you describe this phenomena?

The phenomenon with social is really about people wanting to feel that they matter, and they want to be able to express that. It’s been around since the dawn of time, when we were just a nation of shopkeepers. As we grew and had to come to terms with the challenges of scaling businesses, we got more and more distant from our customers. The result was that we had to do standalone market research at a set point in time just to see where people’s needs or demands were going or how they felt about us. Now that’s changed. It’s 24/7. They’re telling you exactly what they need. They’re telling you exactly how they feel. Sometimes they’re telling you the extremes of that because there is less of a filter.

What do you see in the next five years? How is social media going to change as a medium, and how is it going to change the way we do business?

The advantage of real-time information is that we are addressing people’s issues faster. We are being more responsive. Organizations and brands are using the insights that come out of social to improve themselves, and that’s a good thing. But with that always comes challenges. This is where organizations go off the rails. At Accenture Digital, what we’re seeing is that companies are almost too ready to take data and do something with it and not really think about the implications. Also, it comes with the challenge of where do you draw the demarcation line in terms of privacy? How do you think about protecting the rights of your employees or the rights of your customers? There isn’t a day that goes by when there isn’t a headline about something like this. It’s creating great opportunities on the one hand, but it’s also creating a lot of challenges in terms of sensitivity and the law. Eventually we find our path. Eventually we figure out the right way to do something and sometimes we only do that by making mistakes. Sometimes the consequences of those mistakes are actually quite precious, but it still makes us better.

Let’s shift gears. As a leader, what are the traits that you most admire in other leaders?

Everybody is different. That’s the thing that I’ve recognized, and good leaders recognize that. We’re a little bit more open than we’ve ever been and don’t self-edit as much. Great leaders are ones who have a vision and are willing to be tenacious enough to drive that forward. An example would be if you say you want to have an innovative culture. It’s another thing to actually create an innovate culture. Great leaders are ones who are a little more flexible than they’ve ever been, but have great vision and can really motivate people to bring more than what they’re just asked to do. It’s like a puppy dog scenario. I love it when people come to me and they have an idea, it might not be a perfect idea, but it’s a start. They’re thinking. The worst situation is where you stifle that.

Along your way to becoming the leader that you are today, who has inspired you, and what about them inspired you?

I have to pay homage to some of the great thinkers and entrepreneurs that we’ve had in just the last few decades. Whether it’s Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, or Steve Wozniak and many more. In so many ways they represent the unique American spirit of trying to do something that no one has done before. It’s high risk. I admire the people who are the unsung heroes who have tried something and it hasn’t worked. Most entrepreneurs, if they’re really honest, will tell you, “So much of our success is built not just on hard work or creativity.” But their little secret is luck and being able to see it and take advantage of it and run with it. Not everyone has that luck, but they have all the other things. Sometimes those unsung heroes drive us forward through the missed opportunities and the failures just as much as those who we venerate. I like to see people, generally, who try things and are okay with failing and picking themselves up, learning from it, and moving to the next thing.

 

Categories
Growth Leadership Personal Development

Theory of Creativity

 

By: Yitzchok Saftlas

Safety first might be the best advice if you’re behind the wheel of a car, but if you want to test drive a creative marketing or advertising concept, you’ve got to take it for a spin.

Playing it safe is the absolute worst thing you can do, says Linda Kaplan Thaler, who was inducted last year into the Advertising Hall of Fame. Linda is the former chairman of Publicis, an advertising group whose blue-chip client roster includes: P&G, Nestle, Merck and Pfizer, and is the creative genius behind many world-famous advertising campaigns, such as the “I don’t Wanna Grow Up, I’m a Toys R Us Kid,” and “Kodak Moments.”

Perhaps one of her biggest success stories – one she shared with my listeners on a recent edition of Mind Your Business on 77WABC – was the campaign she devised for AFLAC, an acronym for American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus.

Few Americans had ever heard of AFLAC before Linda won their account in 1999, even though AFLAC was a Fortune 500 company, providing financial protection to more than 50 million people worldwide.

AFLAC’s advertising had been a flop and company awareness was hovering at a barely perceptible 3%. The company was intent on staying the course with their emotional commercials to try to worry people into running out and buying insurance to cover the unexpected. Linda knew that to win AFLAC’s advertising account, and turn them into a household name, she was the one who had to do the unexpected.

With negotiations at an impasse, Linda asked AFLAC’s CEO Dan Amos for a private meeting, and asked him one simple question: What keeps you awake at night? Amos replied that he loses sleep over the fact that even his relatives don’t know the name of the company.

Linda went back to her office, and the drawing board. At a brainstorming session, her creative director, Eric David quipped that AFLAC rhymed with quack and conjured up visions of ducks. 

“I said: That’s it! That’s how we’re going to make America remember this name!”

Her copywriters composed a brilliant script, with two 40-year old men munching sandwiches on a park bench, where one asks the other to define supplemental insurance. A duck from the nearby pond waddles out of the water and quacks a one word answer: AFLAC. 

Initially, Dan wasn’t impressed, but Linda was so sure that she shelled $35,000 out of her company’s coffers to test the message. That was bundle for her young company at the time, but the ad soon broke the bank. In two years, consumer awareness rose from 3% to 96% and today, the duck even graces the AFLAC logo at company headquarters.

Linda is never deterred by initial resistance. “The best ideas are the bad ideas that you turned upside down,” she says. Linda has three tips to help overcome that natural and understandable resistance:

1. Go for a Soft Approach

“I call it the Yes sandwich,” Linda says. “It’s much easier to get what you want that way. So when the client says, ‘that’s ridiculous,’ I say, you’re right, it’s a little insane but let’s just push back for a minute and see why this particular insanity makes some rational sense. Then go back to pushing for it.”

2. Let the Client Take Credit

President Harry Truman once said you can accomplish anything in your lifetime as long as you’re willing to not take credit for any of it. “If I throw out an idea, and the client says, that’s outrageous, I’ll say, what do you think will make it better? When they give me their idea, I’ll say: great idea, why didn’t I think of that!”

3. Don’t be afraid to fail

James Dyson, the inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner, developed 5,126 prototypes over 15 years until he found one that worked, eventually amassing a net worth of $5 billion. He once said he got so much more innovation out of each failure along the way. “So we tell clients: If an ad doesn’t go viral, no one will see it, so you never have to worry that it will be seen as a failure.”

If you too hope to make the Advertising Hall of Fame one day, get the client thinking: “That’s nuts. That’s crazy. And then, yes, that could be brilliant!

Bottom Line Action Step: Share a great idea with a client and let them make it even better.

Yitzchok Saftlas is the founder and president of Bottom Line Marketing Group, a premier marketing agency helping hundreds of corporate, political and non-profit clients build their brands since 1992. Yitzchok’s new book: “So, What’s The Bottom Line” contains timeless advice for marketers, seasoned executives, and entrepreneurs. His weekly business radio show, “Mind Your Business” is aired on 77WABC radio every Sunday night. Yitzchok can be reached at ys@BottomLineMG.com

 

Categories
Growth Leadership Personal Development

The New Golden Rules

By: Billee Howard

Today innovation is predicated on the notion of providing never before seen ideas and offerings based on the fundamentals of trust and sharing. In our world today, the idea is that if we come together, we can build a better world predicated on better equality in all things. In today’s WEconomy, by pooling our resources together to build not just new products, but new ideas based off of trust and reputation, we are able to create mass access to once unattainable standards of privilege or luxury.

The world now understands more than ever before that together we rise, and together we fall. As the Lehman collapse and cascading world destruction showed us, we may all be separate, but we are also all connected in ways never before imagined. As such, the old ways of doing things no longer work. We cannot build upon hidden mistakes and hope for a better tomorrow.

New world orders call for new rules of business. Here is the road map that I have developed to help you navigate our newly created and largely uncharted business landscape and retain the best of the old, while innovating the new.

Create a “wespoke” approach to innovation.

Businesses today that provide products and services that are defined more by emotion and experience than function or status are thriving. In the past, people were wooed by the shiny and new. Today they are gravitating toward the elite and engaging.

Brands that understand this fundamental paradigm shift and seek to innovate not just things but ideas are the brands that will emerge as the entrepreneurial giants of tomorrow.   Brands now not only need to focus on creating a product or service, but creating an experience for their customer that is immersive, engaging, and collaborative.

Be a Redemptive Leader

In order for an organization to harness the power of redemptive disruption, there must be a top down push of the characteristics required to be successfully disruptive. This means that companies need leaders who are driven to disrupt at every stage in the supply chain.  Not only what you make, but how it is made, where it is made, and how your customer’s are serviced are all open for reinvention today. 

Today’s most effective disruptive leadership stems as much from belief as it does from bravado. Faith is one of the most powerful tools in a CEO’s arsenal today. Possessing unshakable faith, inspiring that quality of belief in others. And transforming that passion into believable hope is among the most critical strategic imperatives of leadership today.

In the HouseOfWe people don’t just buy things because they are shiny and new. Today, people buy things from the people and companies they believe in. And leaders and companies that inspire this type of following are built from a foundation of trust and faith both inside and out.

Embrace Failure as the New Success

Historically, failure has been a no-no. something to deny. Something to run from, or hide at all costs. Wall Street never rewarded failure. In fact it punished it with battered earnings reports and falling stock prices. Today, in the post-apocalyptic 2008 world, measured and strategic failure is the bedrock of tomorrow’s success.

The majority of the causes of the 2008 financial contagion stemmed from denial and an inability to admit failure. Today, businesses must openly acknowledge what works and what doesn’t, and have the bravado to completely destroy the failing pieces in order to achieve forward prosperity.   Similarly, companies can no longer afford to rest on their laurels when they are feeling successful.  With the ever-accelerating pace of change, what defines success today may very well not define what it is tomorrow.

Good judgment comes from experience. And experience comes from bad judgment — from failures. The key question is how you respond, whether you learn from failure and rebound or not. And always remember that there is nothing more sexy and appealing than a good old comeback story.

Create an organizational culture that rewards the courage and ability to do things differently.

Be sure to reward mavericks in your company for shunning conformity.  Innovation is vital for the growth, success, and wealth of firms. Yet the source of innovation is not so much investment in R&D, but the retention of talented people, who may appear at times as difficult mavericks that old school brands would have weeded out and discarded.

Keep pace with the speed of change

Recognize that change is occurring at an unprecedented velocity, and that your competitors today, will most certainly, without question, not be your competitors tomorrow.

Today, disruption is often only thought of as taking place inside of start-ups and through lone wolf entrepreneurs. That couldn’t be further from the truth. In the HouseOfWe, whether we are big or small, we all must embrace an appetite to do things differently.  Today size doesn’t matter. Heft is no longer a badge of honor. And legacy does not preclude us from need to disrupt and innovate our way through the rushing current of rapid change. 

In fact, agility is among the world’s most valued currencies today, next to creativity. And as a result, small today is often thought of as the new big. It is for this reason that successful companies are combining the best of the past with the best of the future to conceive a better tomorrow. They have the foresight to recognize that one’s competitors today will most certainly not be their competitors tomorrow, and are making the necessary changes required to envelop disruption and innovation into their legacy organizations in ways that poise them for growth both today and tomorrow.

Embrace change as a core business competency

In today’s marketplace, a company’s greatest asset, and only constant, is change. The ability to be able to force yourself into a place of discomfort no matter how comfortable you have become is the little known factor that is driving much success today. This counter intuitive idea is hard for many to embrace, but those who do manage to find not just short term but long-term success.

Tell consumers what they want before they know they want it.

One of the most critical idioms driving disruptive innovation today is the Steve Job’s mantra of telling consumers what they want before they even know they want it and then creating a scenario where they cannot live with out it.  It was that guiding platform that enabled Jobs to not only transform how we listen to music with the advent of the IPod, but how we as a society ultimately would be able to consume media as a whole. 

It was this one simple idea that allowed Job’s to build Apple into not just the world’s greatest technology company, but also the world’s most innovative consumer lifestyle brand ever built.

Reject limits.

One of the most critical components of success in today’s market is to approach disruption and innovation with an aspirational mindset that is so bold that it knows no limits. The winners in today’s environment are no longer just taking existing things and tinkering with them to make them better. We are no longer wowed by a new product upgrade. We want something new entirely.

Samsung, for example, introduced a 3D TV in 2011 only to be replaced a year later with the first ever Smart TV. 365 days after one invention debuted, seeing a picture in three dimensions was no longer as relevant as having a TV that could think and react as fast as one’s phone.

The reason that Samsung has rapidly become one of the world’s largest technology companies, surpassing giants like Microsoft and HP, is because the company’s innovation and imagination knows no bounds. In fact an entire town in Seoul Korea, named Samsung Town is basically dedicated to imagining the world’s next great technologies and bringing them to life.

In order to disrupt effectively there must be no limits on what you can kill or what you can create. You must be as willing to put yourself out of business, as you are to imagine a plethora of new ones.

Create a Culture of Courage.

Succeeding in the today’s transformed marketplace means finding the courage to not only create, but also to conquer- -to dig down deep to access the pioneering spirit required to truly disrupt. And it’s about being brave enough to imagine so boldly that you might sound silly or outlandish, even to yourself.

The ideas that will shape our new world will be those that challenge traditional conventions and fly in the face of everything we knew or thought we knew to be true. So don’t be afraid to have big ideas, crazy ideas that raise eyebrows, engender fear, or invite ridicule.

Leadership Pocket Mantras 2016

1. To survive in a post-apocalyptic world, technology can no longer be a panacea or the end solution to every challenge.

2.  Speed, size, and power fueled by technology won’t take the place of human interaction, or collective human endeavors.

3. The shiny and new will no longer beat the trusted and true. A return to the values of old and the pride we once took in artistry and craftsmanship will return, but married with the automation and speed of the present.

4. A fearless approach to failure is a must. Failure should not be avoided, or even just accepted, it should be sought out. The only way true innovation can happen is having the courage to do just one simple thing: try, try and try again.

Billee Howard is Founder + Chief Engagement Officer of Brandthropologie, a cutting edge communications consulting firm specializing in helping organizations and individuals to produce innovative, creative and passionate dialogues with target communities, consumers and employees, while blazing a trail toward new models of artful, responsible, and sustainable business success. Billee is a veteran communications executive in brand development, trend forecasting, strategic media relations, and C-suite executive positioning. She has a book dedicated to the study of the sharing economy called WeCommerce due out in Fall 2015 as well as a blog entitled the #HouseofWe dedicated to curating the trends driving our economy forward. You can read more about “WE-Commerce: How to Create, Collaborate, and Succeed in the Sharing Economy” right here!

Categories
Growth Personal Development

Selecting the right depositary bank and collateral agent/trustee for your infrastructure project

Project financing has changed over the years to include a more multi-faceted structure. In the past the purpose of the financing may have been to simply build a facility however, today, it is not uncommon for a single project to be divided into multiple phases or be composed of multiple facilities in order to meet the long range goals of the project. The financing for this type of structure may include multiple loan types with different parameters, include additional time frames for equity contributions or other types of cash infusions or include conditional lenders such as a swap counterparty or a letter of credit provider. This level of complexity requires that your chosen Depositary Bank and Collateral Agent understand how these phases affect the cash flow and assignment of collateral to the Secured Parties.

MAKING YOUR CHOICE

When it comes to choosing a Depositary Bank and Collateral Agent that will successfully administer your project finance transaction, look for institutions that understand the structure of your deal and its corresponding responsibilities based on the project agreement and any ancillary agreements to which they are signatories.

There are many challenges to any large project/transaction—knowing what to look for, and hiring the Depositary Bank and Collateral Agent that are right for your project can be instrumental to its success.

Click here to learn more

Categories
Growth Personal Development

C-Suite TV Talks Enacting Change, Empowerment, Sales Coaching, Customer Service and the Importance of ‘WE’ Commerce

April/May Programming for Best Seller TV Features Authors Ilja Grzeskowitz, Meridith Elliott Powell, Jason Forrest, Donna Cutting, and Billee Howard

NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwired – May 11, 2016) – Best Seller TV, one of the top online business shows on C-Suite TV, has announced their upcoming episodes for April and May. Best Seller TV will feature in-depth interviews with a number of leading business authors: Ilja Grzeskowitz, author of Think It. Do It. Change It.: How to Dream Big, Act Bold and Get the Results You Want, Meridith Elliott Powell, author of Own It: Redefining Responsibility – Stories of Power, Freedom & Purpose, Jason Forrest, author of Leadership Sales Coaching: Transforming from Manager to Coach, Donna Cutting, author of 501 Ways to Roll Out the Red Carpet For Your Customer: Easy to Implement Ideas to Inspire Loyalty, Get New Customers and Make Lasting Impressions and Billie Howard, author of WE-Commerce: How to Create, Collaborate and Succeed in the Sharing Economy.

Ilja Grzeskowitz, or “change expert #1” as he’s known by German media, talks about his new book, Think It. Do It. Change It.: How to Dream Big, Act Bold and Get the Results You Want, which details the step-by-step process he uses with clients to make change happen. Grzeskowitz says in order to make change happen, one must not just think differently, but act differently, too. He also highlights the six steps to fully execute the change you want — dream, vision, direction, goal, action plan and execution. A firm believer in ‘firing’ the negative people in your life and allowing the fear of change to become your best friend, Grzeskowitz feels dealing with change will be the most important skill everyone will need to master in the upcoming years. He urges his readers to remember the following when thinking of change, “You will become the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Become an agent of change.

In her book, Own It: Redefining Responsibility – Stories of Power, Freedom & Purpose, Meridith Elliott Powell talks about the need for both leaders and employees to take responsibility — not only in their work life, but in their personal life as well. She decided to write the book after discovering how powerful and empowering taking ownership of your own life and career can be. Powell feels that, “If people could learn how to take responsibility and the skill of it, they can do or accomplish anything they wanted” and when both leaders and employees take responsibility, she states, you have “a serious recipe for success.”

Jason Forrest, author of Leadership Sales Coaching: Transforming from Manager to Coach, compares sales professionals to athletes in the sense that they want to be coached like an athlete, rather than managed like an employee. He also highlights the difference of being a manager and a coach, stating that a manager makes peoples’ lives easier, while coaches make people better. Forrest is also a big believer in unleashing profits through people. The book is field-tested to reduce turnovers and increase sales, and it’s aimed at “corporate gladiators” interested in becoming coaches rather than managers.

Donna Cutting’s book, 501 Ways to Roll Out the Red Carpet For Your Customer: Easy to Implement Ideas to Inspire Loyalty, Get New Customers and Make Lasting Impressions, tackles the world of customer service and rolling out the red carpet for all customers. Cutting states that employees need to be armed with all the proper tools in order to provide excellent customer service. When employees don’t have all the tools, there’s a disconnect with the service they ought to provide, but don’t. She says there are four main things to think about:

1. Consistency – Every customer receiving the same level of service from every team member at every opportunity, every single time
2. Technical piece – Involves asking the question, ‘Am I delivering the product or service I’m promising?’
3. How do you deliver – How are employees delivering customer service? Are they making the customer feel like they’re important?
4. ‘Wow’ factor – The unexpected moment of surprise and delight that makes people want to talk about you in a positive way

Billee Howard’s book, WE-Commerce: How to Create, Collaborate and Succeed in the Sharing Economy, highlights a world in which culture and commerce collide in ways that are considered unprecedented and an economy driven by entrepreneurialism and creativity. Howard talks about how the sharing economy ushered a variety of micro-economies that enable people to come together and experience luxuries they’ve never experienced before. She makes the argument that millennials, and Gen Z behind them, aren’t interested in owning possessions, but in sharing, borrowing, and using technology to come together and help make the world a better place.

All episodes of Best Seller TV will air throughout the month on C-Suite TV and are hosted by TV personality Taryn Winter Brill.

Best-selling author, speaker, and former Fortune 100 CMO Jeffrey Hayzlett created C-Suite TV to give top-tier business authors a forum for sharing thought-provoking insights, in-depth business analysis, and their compelling personal narratives.

“We have a great lineup for April and May! I am a big believer in empowering those around me so I think our viewers will enjoy these interviews that talk about making necessary changes and the empowerment that comes with enacting a positive change — personally and professionally,” Hayzlett said.

For more information on TV episodes, visit www.csuitetv.com and for more information about the authors featured in Best Seller TV episodes, visit www.c-suitebookclub.com.

Categories
Personal Development Sales

Executive Briefings: The Model of R.E.A.L. Leadership

By Thomas White for Huffington Post

In my work, I meet business leaders from all over the world who have advice, stories and personal tips to provide. I sit down with these leaders to give them the opportunity to provide current business advice and give a glimpse to their personal stories as a business leader.

This week I interviewed Joe Hart, President and CEO of Dale Carnegie Training, an organization whose founder pioneered the human performance movement over 100 years ago and has continued to succeed and grow worldwide, through constant research and innovation building on its founding principles. Dale Carnegie Training has more than 3,000 trainers and consultants, operating in 300 offices in over 90 countries impacting organizations, teams and individuals. Dale Carnegie Training’s client list includes more than 400 of the Fortune Global 500, tens of thousands of small to mid-sized organizations and over 8 million individuals across the globe.

Dale Carnegie does a lot of research in regard to leadership. What are the traits that make up a great leader?

Dale Carnegie Training initially conducted research on this subject in 2015 in the United States and Brazil. We were so intrigued with what we had found that we expanded the research to 13 additional countries. Some of the key questions we found included: what are the types of traits that really motivate someone to want to give their best and what are the things that demotivate people. From this research we have characterized these to ‘R.E.A.L.’ or reliable, empathetic, aspirational and learning.


What makes a leader Reliable?

It refers to someone who is internally reliable. Internal reliability is someone being authentic. As people, we have great intuition, and we can tell when somebody is being consistent with who they are. They are internally reliable. But with external reliability people want to sense a level of integrity. Does the leader do things that they say they are going to do or do they say one thing and then do another?

Of the four traits, this one is absolutely foundational for the other three. It doesn’t matter if you’re empathetic, aspirational, or you’re an active leader, if do not have reliability, you do not have the core trust that you are building with people. If you do not have this trust with the people you work with or who you interact with then the other traits just will not matter.

What does it mean to be Empathetic as a leader?

Being empathetic means to really want to reach out and to be others-focused. It means to demonstrate a desire to listen, to care, to recognize the importance that other people have and to really give them the respect of hearing what it is that they have to say. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.” So, an empathetic person is trying to learn, trying to listen and trying to demonstrate caring for the people around them.

There’s been a transformation of how leadership has been viewed over the decades. In the past, one might expect a leader to have all the answers, to show strong leadership qualities. Today, especially when you look at the millennial generation, people want to contribute to find out the answers. They want to have meaning in their work. They want to know the work they’re doing is valuable and that they are valued as a person. Someone who comes in and simply says, “Here’s what we’re going to do and you’re going to do it,” that is an immediate dis-engager for high percentages of people.”

What does a leader need to do to be someone who is Aspirational for the people that they are working with?

Leaders tend to focus on the bottom line. The finances are important and critical to the success of any business. However, to focus on those exclusively without a broader picture is not necessarily enough to connect with a lot of people. If a leader understands that people really want to have meaning in what they do, then simply hitting financial targets may not be enough. A leader not only needs to be focused on the details but also on why we are doing this at all and why what we are doing is important.

The financial parts and having targets are all important, but at the same time, to have something broader and something we can connect to that makes us feel like, “Yes, I’m really a part of something bigger and important, and I can go home and feel really good about that.”

How critical is it for a leader to also be a Learner?
It is very critical. Being a learner connects with empathetic in the sense that the learner says “I don’t have all of the answers”. The learner recognizes that mistakes are going to happen and they learn from that. They don’t necessarily like it but, they will embrace it and they won’t hesitate if they’ve made a mistake, to admit it, to address it and to move on. It’s about taking action. It’s about making mistakes. It’s about experience and judgement.

Follow Thomas White on Twitter: @ProfoundlySmple