Thanksgiving 2011

This year I am particularly thankful.  It has been a year of challenges for me both personally and professionally.  I am thankful to my family, which despite my best efforts continues to love and support me.  I am blessed to have a wife, three children, two sets of parents, a brother, a sister and a large extended family of in-laws.  There is no one in this world that has your back 100% percent of the time except for your family.  For this I am eternally grateful.   

I am thankful for my health.  I lost a good friend this past year, suffered a severe cycling accident and have not taken my health for granted.  If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything has taken on a whole new meaning to me.

I am thankful for all of my old business contacts that have supported me as both professionals and friends.  I am always amazed by the benefits that are reaped in the business world by treating people well and with respect.  I am grateful to have the types of business relationships that allow me to enjoy my work and provide for my family

Most of all, I am thankful that my life is on an upswing.  The past year has held obstacles that at times seemed almost too daunting to tackle.  With the love and support of my family, friends and colleagues I have had another good year and am optimistic for 2012.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Dan

 “Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. (football) Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence. “

Erma Bombeck

Greatness

“Greatness” is a pretty preposterous title for a blog post isn’t it? In all seriousness, who gets to decide what is or is not greatness? Actually greatness is an elusive word in and of itself. What defines greatness? Is greatness a comparison something or someone? Is there even such a thing as greatness?

I just watched a clip of a 12 year old boy who is being lauded as the greatest classical composer to come along in 200 years. His greatness comes in the form of the gift of music. He just hears it, can write it down and symphonies, piano concertos, and fugues flow from him effortlessly. I am sure that he looks at his work and thinks, “I can do better”. It begs the question, is greatness who you are, what you do, or a result from effort to achieve a goal? I’m not really sure, but I think it might be all three.

I would like to believe that greatness is achieved through effort. I am a classically trained musician and while I am not being hailed as the next Mozart, I do have some talents that allow me to play the music more easily than most. If I had never spent the thousands of hours of practicing, the talent I was given would have never amounted to anything. It was my years of practicing and dedication to my craft that lead me to become the musician I am today. Interestingly enough, in some circles I am considered great, and in other circles, I am considered not so great. Truthfully, neither is right.

In business we are all trying to achieve some sort of greatness. (OK, well maybe not all of us.) We look to achieve what others consider greatness. I think greatness is so fleeting that it needs to be judged from within our own selves. Yes, we all have deadlines and numbers we have to achieve. I am speaking more to how we handle our day. A receptionist and a CEO can both be great at what they do and it would be ridiculous to suggest anything otherwise. How do we bring ourselves to reach and step beyond our comfort zone? Don’t seek the label of greatness from others. Be the best you can be at what you do and seek the greatness inside yourself. Be the great building engineer. Be the great Manager, CEO or salesperson. Be the great store clerk. Define for yourself your own greatness, live up to your own standards.  Don't worry about labels others give you.  Achieve from within.

“I’d like those 20 minutes back please.”

I am probably on hold on a telephone more than most people. In the IT industry, being on hold for support is more than a regular occurrence. What surprises me is how much of a lost opportunity this customer contact time is for most companies. As we all know, hold music was originally composed by military people in order torture their captors. (That’s a joke, please no angry emails) Why anyone would have hold music so terrible that you would irritate someone seeking help from your company. In this day and age of music that you can download, there is no excuse for bad hold music.

One of the fundamentals of running a business should be to capture your customer’s attention and make all aspects of their experience with your company amazing. Don’t overlook the details, embrace them. I am not a big fan of a sales pitch playing on hold music. If someone is holding, they are usually looking for help. My opinion is that if I am looking for help, the help should be taken care of first before I am sold on the next great project. Once you have helped me, I might be interested in what else your company your company has to offer. So, why not put something interesting and or fun on your hold music. With most phone systems, this is a very easy thing to do. Get an iPod and hook it up.


How about for the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day, put on some Irish music. Why not try some “River Dance”, U2, Irish Pub Music….get creative and run with it. During the Grammy Awards, how about some nominated songs. During the Oscars, how about playing some memorable movie music? Change it up! At the very least, interesting hold music will keep your customers from getting annoyed with some boring tape loop. At best, your customers will remember that when they call, the experience of calling your company was a good one.


This will also set your organization apart from the crowd. Have fun with it. The customers will call up with new music and some will ask why it changed. Pick an obscure holiday. How about Boxing Day (Canada)? Put on some Rocky music just for fun. It certainly lightens the tone of the calls and allows everyone to have a good time with it.


The point is not necessarily to make your hold music a focal point of your company, but take something that most of us would agree is a real downside to contacting a company, and make it into something fun and amazing. Enhance your company image and customer satisfaction and save all of us from the torture known as tape loop hold music.

Timing - In Business as well as Life

As we all know, timing is everything in business. We all remember where we were on 9/11. It was a day we all shared collectively as a community, nation and a world. Timing is something we seek to control as we feel it is somehow controls us.

Back in 2001 I was running a growing business that was hungry for capital. Sales had been going through the roof. We were on the INC 500 list as one of the fastest growing businesses in the US. We had begun the process of working on the refinance of the line of credit with our bank. During this time, we had hired new salespersons. One of our new sales people had brought in an account that was in New York City. The customer had started to use us as their source for Cisco equipment. Within months they started ordering a significant amount of equipment from us. Enough equipment and services had been sold to the client that I suggested to the salesperson that we should go out and cultivate the relationship in NYC.

I began to look at hotels, airfares restaurants etc. We put it in the calendar the last week of August that we would fly to NYC the second week of September in the morning. Like all things when you are a manager, you sometimes feel like one of those carnival acts doing the plate spinning routine. This was no different for me. The company was growing, I was in a constant state of learning, creating and adapting to the new challenges of managing a growing business. The bank financing at the time held the largest set of unknowns for me in business. I have come to understand debt/equity ratios and what the P&L represents to a business, but at the time it was new territory for me. After a phone call with my accountant, he suggested I delay my trip for a week to get the books organized to present to the bank the 3rd week of September. Fate had truly intervened.

Only six months later did I realize how fate had saved me. Our plane was going to arrive Sept 10 in the evening in NYC. We were to stay at the Millennium Hilton Hotel. If you haven’t been to New York, it sits directly across the street from the World Trade Center and sustained massive damage on 9/11 and took almost 2 years to reopen. My client, whose office was three blocks south of the south tower, was completely blocked after the attack and subsequent collapse of the two towers. There is a picture somewhere of the front landing gear of one of the planes in front of their main door. There is a picture somewhere of the front of the hotel being sheared off by the collapse. Even ten years later, it is difficult to comprehend that we were supposed to be there on that terrible day. We had planned on the meeting taking place around 9:30 or so on 9/11.

While nothing in life is for sure, my salesperson and I were spared that day. We were spared not only from actual bodily harm, but spared the trauma of the horrible events as they had unfolded and traumatized millions of New Yorkers that day. On a rare occasion I will talk about my twist of fate for September 11th. The recent programming on television, along with the 9/11 tenth anniversary has brought this vivid and painful memory back to me. I can’t help but think how a simple yes or no decision could have impacted me and everyone around me. At the time, my children were six, four and two years old. In July, My wife and I had just celebrated our 10 year wedding anniversary. There was so much future to be had, so many things to do. It took me a couple of years to even tell my wife about the twist of fate. It still gives me goose bumps to think what could have been.

The truth is that there is only so much you can control in this world. Much of our lives are left purely to fate. This could mean divine intervention to some. This could mean dumb luck to others. I’d like to believe it’s both. Whatever the reason, I was given the past ten years as a gift and hope I made the most of it. It is never lost on me how fortunate I am to have so much in this world. I am grateful for my family, my friends and life as a whole. Don’t ever take your life for granted, the present really is a gift. This September 11th I will stop to remember those whose lives were changed forever, as well as mine.

Erase the Tape and Start Over

I have been reading many articles about Steve Jobs and his departure from Apple. What seems to transcend all of the articles is praise for Steve Jobs behavior, which during his career at Apple, was considered unorthodox and at times, considered absolutely mad. I guess Apple might be the definition of unorthodox in some circles. With mainstream competitors like Microsoft, IBM and HP, Apple’s competitors would create a product. Through a perpetual state of upgrades and improvements Apple would evolve their products to their final state. While this is proven business process for tech production, Apple always had a better way.

Steve Jobs, as described in all of the articles I have been reading lately, was never afraid to take an eraser to a project and wipe it out completely. At face value, it sounds like madness. Why not work on what you have and make it better. You can work on many things in this world, especially in the field of technology and improve them. In fact it is encouraged in our field to keep engineering a solution until it’s right. I am not here to dispute the wisdom of working through a project and improving it till we are happy with its results. To the contrary, refinement is what has to be done to get to the completion of a project. Steve Jobs genius is in his ability not to be in love with anything while it is in process or even after its completion. More importantly, Jobs courage to take something and throw it out and start over, whether it was finished or not, was his true genius.

As many of you know, I am a part time musician. While I only have a minor in music, there is always a part of me that functions like a musician. Musician’s and others involved in the fine arts know the wisdom of throwing out something bad and starting over. Most of you know the biggest selling album of all time is currently, “Thriller”, by Michael Jackson. Did you know the second biggest selling album is The Eagles “Their Greatest Hits” (1971-1975). The Eagles’ attention to detail in their recordings is staggering. All of their arrangements, vocals, playing and lyrics seem to just flow when you hear them. I have heard multiple interviews with the group’s members, engineers and managers. Don Henley and Glenn Frye would spend a week meticulously working on a track till it was completely finished, they would listen to the song they recorded and if there was anything they didn’t like about the final version of the song, they would hit the erase button. This ultimately led to huge turmoil within the band and eventually lead to its breakup. However, it served the Eagles’ music well. Their songs are insanely great. If you don’t believe me, download a copy of “Lying Eyes” and tell me that the attention to detail isn't spectacular. The only way to achieve this kind of greatness is a willingness to hit the erase button. If it isn’t insanely great, why bother!

Remember as you are downloading “Lying Eyes” to your iPhone, iPad or iMac how brilliant these marvels of technology work and how brilliantly intuitive they are. While a computer company and a 70s rock band may seem totally unrelated, their creative process was identical. Have the courage to hit the erase button, be brilliant!!!

Recommendations

I know this blog is supposed to be about “Real Networking”. There is nothing more real than making a connections with someone which is what this blog is about. Although most of my posts revolve around technology, the underlying theme is using technology to make connections.


Some of you may know that I am currently looking for a new job. In this economy and lack of bank financing available after 20 years of running my own shop I find myself in the ranks of job seekers. It has been a challenging, but interesting journey. One thing I have had to do professionally, which I haven’t had to do in almost two decades was ask for recommendations.

While the prospect of closing a two million dollar project may seem intimidating to some, this is the world which I have lived very comfortably for a long time. However, my initial anxiety over asking for recommendations snuck up on me. Ironically, with the advent of social networking, it is now much easier professionally to ask for someone’s recommendation than it has ever been previously. This, however, does not take away from the anxiety of asking for someone’s approval of work you have done.

In business, I believe that I have the reputation of being tenacious….that is code for sometimes I behave like a pit bull when trying to get a deal done. When you are the president of a company, you have an extreme amount of latitude to do almost whatever you see fit at any time. Herein was my conflict. While I have been a very tough businessman, now I have to ask for recommendations from people who I have worked with, and in some cases been a tough negotiator.

I used LinkedIn to ask for the recommendations and have been very surprised, and quite frankly, humbled by the people who have written the recommendations for me. It’s like the old adage, “you never get your first kiss unless you ask for it”. It is a wonderful feeling to get a recommendation, and in todays electronic age it is easier than ever to ask.

Often times we get hung up on what we do wrong, but never think about all the things that we do that are right. Ask for that recommendation, you’ll find it very rewarding.

Texting in Company

I saw this on a friends web site. Praying for more human interaction. This is precisely what I like. Making a distinction between using technology to connect or using it to disconnect.

Texting in Company - Prayer Blog - Prayables