Saturday, September 30, 2006

Retire and Expire?

A few months back, I was having a discussion with an uncle. He told me, with the most resignation I've seen in my life: "You know, once you get to retirement, apart from golf, there isn't much to do." At the time, I responded something polite and pointed to the sadness of his attitude.

But the event keeps ringing back in my mind as I read and hear stories after stories of people in their prime years who suffer from burn-out due to their work. Or is it the work that's to blame?

Tonight, I hosted a group of employees who came to serve a meal at the homeless shelter that I do fund raising for. My bet is that these people will have something to keep them busy and create some meaning in their life when they retire.

What do you do to create social value in your work?
Creating Value Through a Positive Mental Attitude

Last June, I was doing some research on the relationship between attitude and a positive mental attitude. I firmly believe that having a positive mental attitude is a powerful determinant of a person's altitude in all aspects of life. I had heard that the attitude of an airplane was the orientation of the plane's nose in relation to the horizon.

My simplistic understanding of this concept was as follows: if the aircraft's nose points above the horizon,. the plane has a positive attitude, and is flying upward. If the airplane's nose was pointing below the horizon, the craft had a negative attitude and was flying downward. In my mind, this was an interesting metaphor.

However, I needed to validate whether or not the image I had created in my mind was true to a specialist. So, I asked the people at Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum. All though my interpretation was not too far from the truth, the answer that was given to me by Jill Bagdasarian holds more nuances than I was expecting. Jill's response goes like this:

" Aircraft attitude is used to mean two closely related aspects of the situation of an aircraft in flight.

In the simplest use it is the orientation of an aircraft with respect to the horizon. This is a function of two angles: pitch and roll. The pitch angle specifies the orientation of the aircraft's longitudinal axis. That is, whether the nose is pointing upwards, is level to the horizon, or is pointing downwards. The roll angle specifies whether the aircraft is banked left or right, or whether its wings are parallel to the horizon. The pilot adjusts the controls (the stick or the yoke) to adjust the aircraft attitude in order to keep the aircraft on course or turn or change
altitude.

Aircraft attitude is used to describe the more complex relation of an aircraft to its surroundings, particularly airflow and gravity. This takes into account the settings of other flight controls such as the rudder, engine power, flaps or slats and also airflow. Thus an aircraft can be described as being in a climb attitude or a spin attitude, which implies more than simply nose up or nose down. "


Despite the fact that Jill's answer was richer in nuances than I would have liked, I am thankful that she took the time to send it and I'm glad to give it to you today.

If you do a google on the word attitude, you get 148 million results. Do it on Amazon.com's book section and you get 296,084 results. On Amazon.ca, you get 1,446.

Do you agree that our attitude is important for creating value?

Friday, September 29, 2006

Creating Value All Around Us

Creating value every day can be done within a very limited circle of people around us and a on a larger scale.

Creating value for people around us naturally flows from the habits that we have that create value to ourselfes. By simple choices in our attitude towards others, we can all add value to them.

This occurs both subtly and in more meaningful ways, but it does happen. When we make room for other people in our life. When we make them feel important and become interested in them, we add value to people.

Simple things such as smiling, looking at them in the eyes and listening to them when they speak are all ways by which we can make people feel important. And when they feel important, they have increased in value in their own eyes.

Asking if and how we can help is another very simple way by which we can create value. Learning skills that are aimed at helping others instead of yourself is also a way to create value for others. What's most interesting is these situations is that by doing this, we also create value for ourselves!

That's what companies that systematically engage in employee recognition do: they create value. For their owners and for the individuals working for them. In his very simple, yet profound book Whale Done, seasoned management guru Ken Blanchard presents a very interesting illustration of this principle. Read the book, it's worth it. Really.

In the company you work for, are people systematically recognized for their effort or their performance?
Is Creating Value Important?

A search for the word "value" on blogger gives 9,146,189 results. On Google: 1.1 billions! Not bad. I've now been thinking about creating value for a short while and I'm coming to the realisation that it's kind of the essence of life.

Having children, raising them, starting businesses, earning a living, growing a garden, building a house, etc. Kind of the universal pretext for most human endeavour.

Creating value is pretty much everything we do, isn't it? Any thoughts?

(Boy, I can't wait to have a bit of traffic on this site. Just to feel I'm not alone in this blog thing! I feel like I'm the only person interested in creating value.)

Thursday, September 28, 2006

The Power of Nice

Opportunities for creating value are everywhere. People creating value and helping us do so are all over. Go check this book out: The Power of Nice. Try the NiceQ Test and see how you score!

If you read it, let me know what you think.
Why is Value Creation Important?

As I made my initial steps in the blog world, I began by refering to Michael Porter's model of value creation in the enterprise. As this was a humble begining, I added a few elements, some more general, others more specific. As I was walking back home after serving the meal to some of Montreal's homeless people, I was wondering why is it that people create businesses or charitable organisations?

Obviously, there are as many reasons for starting a business as there are entrepreneurs, but to make our life easier, let's say that it's to make a living, or get rich. In the case of a charitable organisations, most of the time it is to help your fellow man or woman of child. Or to save the environment.

But this did not satisfy me much. So I tried to get 30,000 miles in space to gain a broared perspective. Bear with me for a moment.

Since nature, when left unatended, has a "natural" tendency to return to chaos, value creation is the result of the human struggle to fight chaos and create order. Don't you love this kind of deep thinking?!

For example, take a trail into the woods. Leave it unatended for 20 years. Don't even hike it. Chances are that the trail will have disappeared, unless it has been adopted by deers. You may say that this not a good example as walking the trail is only a means to get somewhere. OK. But why do you want to get to this "somewhere"? Go visit a neighbour? OK. Why? Trade your onions for a chicken? Created value. Just say hello? Created value. Not always commercial, but still value!

All human interactions are based on the search for and exchange of value. When value is created for both parties, the relationship might last longer. If the relationship is win-loose, the relationship might not last very long. Makes sense, no?

Now let's take Dell's (or any other corporasion's) customer service. If the customer service ends-up creating a win-loose value exchange, in the end, everybody looses, even Dell's shareholders, in the end.

Coming back to the "human fight against chaos". An individual seeking to create value for another (or for the entire planet for that matter), whether through the creation of a business, making a donation to a charitable organisation or getting involved with GreenPeace to help stop deforestation in Northern Québec, this individual is creating value as a consequence of his or her fight against chaos. Allthough the fight against chaos is not the primary motivating factor, of course.

Am I making any sense here? Any thoughts?

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Creating Value by Giving

I had a special experience tonight. I work for Montreal's largest homeless shelter. Each night, we serve dinner for our city's destitute and after the 15th of the month, we open our dining hall to every hungry person who comes to us. Why after the 15th of the month? Well, these people receive their social welfare cheques the first of the month, and for most of them, the money has ran out in about two weeks. So we allow them to come for a hot meal.

Tonight was the first time that I had the opportunity to serve a dinner. It's a pretty well oiled operation as we served three seatings of around 100 people. Sometimes we serve up to seven seatings! Each seating takes roughly 20-30 minutes, everything included: preparing the tables, allowing the people in, serving them a hot plate, desert and coffee, cleaning-up and preparing the tables forthe next group.

I was part of a group of generous Montrealers who do this every month. These people create value for our city's destitutes by paying for and serving dinners each month.

Do you have examples of generous activities that you could share?

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

How a mis-informed service agent can kill your company – or another way for diminishing value, fast!

I purchased a Dell desk-top computer a few months ago. Good little machine. Affordable. Delivered on time. And to this day, quite reliable.

Now, in Canada, Dell has a deal with Sympatico, one of the country’s largest Internet providers, and owned by Bell Canada. This deal offers three months of free high-speed Internet access upon purchase of a Dell computer. I took the deal.

One night, I ran into a problem and called Sympatico’s customer service. Upon hearing the description of my situation, the agent asked which brand of computer I was using. When he heard that I was using a Dell PC, he simply told me to put the “thing” back in the box and return it to the manufacturer immediately! I was stunned.

Obviously, I kept the computer, but couldn't help wonder what had gone through this fellow's mind. He was either having a bad day and was retaliating to his boss or the company, or he had simply been poorly briefed by the marketing people who put the Dell deal together.

Maybe I'm exagerating by saying that this fellow was "killing the company", but he sure was causing damage to his employer.

This is going to sound like a question which will trigger millions of comments (hopefully!), but I'm taking the chance: Have you ever had a bad customer service experience?

What the question is leading to is that great customer service of good communication between departments can create value in a significant way, making customer experience richer, more positive.

Monday, September 25, 2006

Thank God, I only Lost My Job!

If you ask the question, chances are that most of us remember where we were on that dreadful morning of September 11, 2001. That year, I was working as a product manager for Canada's largest Web portal. Back then, Web advertising revenues were not at the same level as they are now. The business model was fine, it just needed a little bit more time to kick-in the profits.

So, on September 8, 2001, my boss called me into his office to announce me that I, along with a few dozen other employees, was no longer employed in their company. Now, the world changing events that occured the following days had the impact of freezing the job market for the next four months.

At the time, my wife and I had two young children and she was a stay-at-home mom. I ended-up finding work six months after being fired, but this period of time had many effects on me. I remember one event in particular with strong emotions.

Around January, I came across a former co-worker. We were not close friends, but knew eachother well enough to carry a conversation that made some sense. When I asked how he was doing, he told me that one year earlier, his nine years old son had been hit by an automobile. He also told me that his son, who was a beautiful and bright child, was now undergoing rehabilitation, and learning to eat by himself.

From this day forward, I never complained again for such events. I lost my job two more times over the following four years, and we had a third child during that period. Every time my attitude was getting lower, I reminded myself of my friend and kept saying to myself: “Thank God, I only lost my job!”

This works for me. Whenever we feel our attitude going down, we must always remember that some one is always having it worse that us.

If you ever had a similar key learning moment happen to you, feel free to share it!

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Creating Value Begins With the Way We Think

This will sound like I'm stating the obvious, but bear with me here. Thinking is the way us humans can add the most value in any thing that we do. Thinking allows you to understand where you are in life and ponder on where you want to go. Thinking will allow you to develop and adjust the plan to get there. Thinking is the way we get ourselves out of tricky situations.

“If we want to get out of our current situation, we will need to think differently that the way we thought when we got ourselves in this situation.” – Albert Einstein

One of the best books I've had the chance to read recently about thinking is John Maxwell's "Thinking for a Change".

Another book which has had a profound impact on the way I think is "The Power of Impossible Thinking", by Wind and Crook.

I invite you to get these books and give me your comments, or let me know which books you've read that helped you with your thinking.
Ah! The Weather…

The weather is among the things that we have no control over. You got up this morning and had plans to go hiking, or some fun activity that you like to do either alone or with people that you love. Oh no! It’s raining. Now, what are you going to do?

First, you should look at your options: you can stay home and relax, read a good book, go get a movie. You can also go hiking any way, which will be a totally new way to experience this great activity.

“Have the serenity to accept the things which I cannot change, the courage to change the stings that I can change and the wisdom to know the difference between the two.”

More often that we think, we have the freedom to choose between positive or negative. That freedom is the space of freedom between a stimulus and the response that we choose to adopt. And this is one of the things that separate humans from animals!

Deciding to have a positive mental attitude no mater what is the most important decision we can ever make. By making this decision and reviving it every morning, we enter a world we all have access to, but that too few of us are willing to walk in. Because it increases our hope for the future, this simple decision enables us to develop discipline and mental toughness, which lead to perseverance.

Yes, I know, it's the old half-full-half-empty-glass thing, but when we want to create value, it's pretty much where we have to begin.

If anyone has found a better way, feel free to post your comments!

Saturday, September 23, 2006

What is Your Context?

As I mentioned in a previous posting, there are two sides to the analysis part of strategic planning: internal and external. In the internal analysis, you want to understand what are your strengths and your weaknesses. This is particularly important because if you want to provide decent performance while reducing your stress, you want to seek opportunities that allow you to play in your area of strength.

In a recent job that I had, I was heading a humanitarian services organisation which had lost $1.1 millions the previous year on a $2.7 millions budget. My mandate was to bring this organisation in the black again. The organisation was in such a dire situation that the best person to lead it should have been someone with an accounting background. So, for one year, with my strengths in marketing, I struggled to make the thing work.

This experience taught me the importance of operating in your area of strength as opposed to your area of weakness. You can see when an employee is in his or her area of weakness: they will have a tendency to procrastinate and their work will be either/or late or of poor quality.

Threats and Opportunities

When looking to gain a better understanding of your context, you want to take them separately and take the time to understand what forces in the environment could cause you to fail (threats) and what this same environment offers you in terms of possibilities.

I will eventually come back to the aspect of personal attitude, but I feel it’s particularly important to point out that some times, some people see an opportunity where another will feel that there is a threat. This is normal as two persons are the same and have the same strengths.

The Trip Analogy

I like to use the analogy or a trip when discussing strategic planning. Your current position is your current position (!), meaning where you are, in which condition (tired, etc.). Your strengths and weaknesses could be the amount of money or time you have to undertake the trip, the vehicle that you have, etc.

Your goal (here is another epiphany) is your destination. That’s why in goal setting, you want to make them as specific as possible (more on goal setting in a future posting). And your plan is the road, the vehicle, the time required to travel.

I invite you to write me your comments if you have other analogies that you use for strategic planning.
Who Are You?

The number of books aimed at helping individuals to better understand themselves cannot be counted, and any attempt to present to you even an overview of this literature would be both futile and not credible one single bit.

Our occidental education system has evolved to an entity whose most important purpose is to train workers for employers: businesses and other organisations aimed at maintaining or increasing our level of life. This system is usually quite performing. As a proof, there is a direct correlation between a given country’s economic indicators, such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the level of education of its population.

In fact, all though the education system is supposed to add value to individuals throughout the process, it often fails to help individuals to know basic, yet essential information about them. What I mean by this is that if you ask one hundred individuals to name five of their strengths, you might not be able to encounter ten who can do this. The same might be true about knowing one’s weaknesses.

The sad thing about this occurs when an individual enters the work force or begins making a living for themselves as an entrepreneur. Since neither the education system not the work environment seem to favour individuals to tap on their strengths, its purpose of creating value is not entirely achieve. So, when evaluation time comes for an employee, he or she is told by their superior that they have to develop certain skills that they most frequently do not posses.

In the work environment, many individuals operate too frequently in areas of weaknesses, which forces them to perform below their capacity, thus making their organisation create less value that they potentially could.

What's worse, as most employees receive little positive reinforcement for their achievements, they keep wondering what is wrong with them. As you seek to develop new habits for creating value in your life and in other people’s lives, it is very important to know what your strengths are. Also, you need to seek activities that allow you to operate in your areas of strengths.

Take time management for example. Some individuals are very well organized and use their time very efficiently, while others do not posses that strength. In their evaluation, the people whose strength is not time management will be encouraged to take training to improve on this skill. No matter how much training they go through in time management, it is unlikely that this will never become one of their strengths. At best, they will become average at this particular skill.

It’s as if a parent fails to recognize one of their children’s fundamental personality traits. How they are wired. If a child is introverted and has an interest for processes and tasks, you cannot expect this child to behave or react to the same to certain situations as another child who is extroverted and has a bias towards people.

One of the best methods to get to know what your strengths are has been developed by Marcus Buckingham and Marcus O. Clifton. It is very well presented in their book “Now, Discover your Strengths”. That's actually where I took the time management example from.

With the StrengthFinder tool that they have developed, you can identify what your five dominant strengths are, and from this, understand better how you can maximize your own value and that of the people around you.

According to Buckingham and Clifton, you can have a hint of your strengths by paying attention to those things in your life that way you spontaneously react in a given situation. Also, a yearning to do certain things may reveal the presence of your particular talents. So does the speed at which you learn certain things and the satisfaction that you derive from some activities.

Can you identify and clearly express five of your strengths right now?

Friday, September 22, 2006

Understand Where You Start From

Most strategy development is fundamentally fairly simple. Whether you develop a strategy for a multi-national company or for going to buy something at the corner store, you will follow more or less the same basic steps.

First, you must begin by getting as clear an understanding of your current situation. This will involve what is referred to as an “internal analysis” and an “external” assessment. An outcome of this step often takes the form of a S.W.O.T. analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunity and Threats). From this, you will identify a problem that must be solved.


Second, you need to get some sort of an idea of the destination that you want or must reach. This is where you establish vision, mission, goals and objectives, for long, medium and short term.

Third, you will develop a strategy and a plan of action.

And finally, you will establish a certain evaluation mechanism, which will allow you to know if you are achieving your goals at different milestones.

I remember vaguely a business statistics course where the teacher demonstrated to us how we can calculate the cost of pure and perfect information. Today, I could not remember any of the intricate calculations presented by the professor. However, I remember understanding a very important fact brought about by this demonstration: in most business contexts as in life, pure and perfect information does not exist. And if it does, it comes at a cost so high that its actual worth is pointless.

Many people often fall in a paradigm called analysis paralysis, in which they spend so much time analysing a particular situation or opportunity that by the time they are through their evaluation, is they ever do, the opportunity has lost its value. They have missed the boat.

I particularly appreciate the strategic planning model used in business because it is simple and efficient.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Creating Value - Brief Intro

Creating value or adding value. What does this mean exactly? These are terms that we hear or read about all the time. Like most of you, during most of my adult life, I heard about added value, either through various readings or through the media. And I was first introduced to the theoretical notion of “added value” during my graduate studies in marketing.

Then, as I occupied various positions as a marketing specialist and after this as a fund raiser, I was able to observe and ponder on how, in every day life, value is created. More interestingly, over the course of my professional career, I have worked for several organisations and have been able to observe how value is destroyed by actions undertaken either strategically by the leaders and managers of the corporation or by day-to-day behaviour of individuals working for these companies.

Following is a very brief, non-in-depth history of the academic origins of the concept. In 1985, Dr. Michael porter, a brilliant Harvard Business School professor introduced a model that allowed managers and business strategists to understand how value is added within corporations.[1] Rest assured, the aim of this text is not to go into a deep analysis on the model proposed by Dr. Porter. Most brilliant people have the ability to take the complex and make it simple. And that’s exactly what Dr. Porter did. (By the way, this is a form of creating value!)

Dr. Porter's work is used mostly by scholars and business strategists and when it was first published, he presented a whole new way of understanding what a firm does to create value. By breaking the company into the different “activities” that a product or a service goes through in any business, Dr. Porter describes how value is added. This is how companies build their competitive advantage.

And this is just how far I will be going about Dr. Porter’s brilliant work. Also, I'm not going to refer to the economical meaning of “added value”. What I want to do is present it so that you can create value in your own life. And once value has been added into your life, you might find it worthwhile to create some into the lives of other and into the organisations that you are a part of.

I will also bring your attention to some observations made through my experience as a parent, which I believe is the single most important task any individual can be given. Rearing children to become responsible adults has been so far one of the single most challenging, yet rewarding endeavour I have ever undertaken. Those of you who have not had the chance or having children can tranfer these notions into your personal relationships or even work life.

Creating value implies choosing the right attitude towards yourself and other people. The right attitude will lead you to say the right words. The right adjectives, if adjectives at all. For example, there are several levels between the following sentences:

- This is Bill.
- This is my friend Bill.
- This is my good friend Bill.
- This is my great friend Bill.
- This is Bill, my best friend.
- This is Bill, my best friend in the whole world.
- This is Bill, the God father of our oldest daughter.
- Etc.

By reading them, you develop a clearer and clearer sense of my appreciation of Bill as well as the type of relationship that we have.

From the foundational positive mental attitude, adding value also demands that we choose the right actions. To fulfill your own destiny and to help others reach their own objectives.
In an attempt to understand how individual attitude and behaviour affects the fait of theses individuals and the organisations they are part of, I have made several observations. I want to share these with you in this blog.

We will begin by offering you a framework used by business strategists to assess situations, establish objectives, develop strategies and evaluate whether or not your strategies have produced the expected results. From there, we will spend some time helping you understand the importance of knowing the direction you are going to and the results you are choosing to achieve.

Other texts will focus on the ways by which we can add value: first how we can create value to ourselves, as without first feeling secure in your own value, we cannot move to the next level and add value to individuals around us and organisations that we are part of. This last section is particularly dear to me as it is the very reason why I decided to start this blog.

I now invite you to look around you. The house you live in, the chair you are sitting in right now, the automobile that you drive or the bus that you take to commute to and from work. Remember the words from Peter Gabriel's "Mercy Street" song:

"All of the buildings, all of the cars were once just a dream in somebody's head."

I hope that reading this blog helps you to understand a few of the things that I came to understand myself. Being totally new to blogging, I understand that comments are whar make blogging what blogging is.

Actually, I bagan blogging upon the recommendation of a dear friend. His name is Harry Wakefield and his blog is www.mocoloco.com . It's worth a visit!

[1] PORTER, Michael, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, 1985