I recently learned about an entrepreneur with a very clever business model: Thorkil Sonne, founder of Danish software testing company Specialisterne.  The 55-person firm's clients include CSC, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Specialisterne claims to be the world's first company focused on leveraging the unique talents of people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).  Sonne started the company in large part to ensure that people with ASD—including his own son—would have employment opportunities.  ASD, the most common form of autism, affects close to 1% of the population, but only 10% of ASD adults obtain any form of employment.

Software testing is a repetitive role which requires high attention to detail, and is an excellent fit for the typical ASD personality. 75% of Specialisterne's testers have Asperger syndrome or a form of ASD.  Sonne estimates that 1% of all the tasks executed in a given large company are suitable for autistic workers.

What I particularly like about this is that Sonne identified a community of talent almost unused by the labor market, and has built a successful firm on that insight.  From the point of view of both profit and of social welfare, he has built a powerful model. He is now expanding internationally.

Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

 

A constant complaint we hear around the office is that emails we receive (and sometimes send) are poorly written or unclear.  According to “How to Write a Perfect Email”, when writing an email that warrants a reply, there are four key components to get a quick and valid response:

 

1. Brevity- Keep it short.

2. Context- How do you know me/where did we meet (Give information that would make a person remember you) and put it in the subject line.

3. Something to Act On- Make the request clear and ask closed ended questions.

4. Set a Deadline- Set a date when you need the information, give one follow-up email and then pick up the phone.

 

My colleague Michelle Reicher observed that the guidelines set in this blog are a good standard to follow, but, "I disagree with the blanket advice to ask closed ended questions. Keep the request and question clear and concise, but allow the responder to give as much information as is necessary to move forward. When one sends an email with questions, the goal is to solicit a response, but it is important to have a complete, comprehensive, and useful response not just a yes/no answer. Yes/No responses answer the immediate question, but do not allow farther explanation that may answer future questions or give farther insight into the matter at hand."

 

In The Cranking Widgets Blog: “How to Construct the Perfect Email Subject Line”, the blogger observes that a good subject line is imperative for a successful email:

“There are 3 simple tips that, if implemented properly, will make your email subject (and, subsequently, your email) much easier to read.

1.      Use Keywords [to identify the purpose of your email.] All email messages fall into one or more of 4 possible categories:

o        Questions (or messages that elicit a response from the reader)

o        Responses (messages that are in response to questions or other inquiring messages)

o        Informational (or FYI - messages that are meant to inform but don’t require a response)

o        Spam (jokes, pictures of your nephew’s baseball game, etc. - as well as actual spam)

2.      Briefly describe the subject - This is best done before you start writing your message. Finding the right balance between vague and overly-specific can be tough. Personally, I think it’s like anything else - you get better at it with time.

3.      For Pete’s sake, never leave the subject blank - This is something I’ve mentioned before, and it bears repeating.”

 

The body of the email will never be read if the context of the subject line does not act as an icebreaker or a contextual reminder. If the subject line merely says, “Hi” then it is synonymous to a cold call, but if the subject line identifies the business or how you know this person it becomes analogous to a warm call or a referral, which are generally more fruitful and productive than an unsolicited call.

Career Acceleration | Personal Productivity | Social Software

I’m looking forward to speaking at the monthly New York Software Industry Association meeting on September 10 in New York. The topic is ‘Secrets of Silicon Alley's Serial Entrepreneurs’. Carter Burden, Laurel Touby and I will be sharing our thoughts. (Personally, I think the key secret is fail fast and often.)

Career Acceleration | Events | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

Jason Alba at JibberJobber added a JibberJobber profile to the Virtual Handshake social software company wiki. Barbara Safani writes,

A successful job search campaign requires exceptional organizational and follow-up skills. Jibber Jobber provides an easy to use interface that takes the drudgery out of the job search process while improving efficiencies and accelerating search activity.

What I like about Jibber Jobber is that it addresses a clear need among job-searchers: managing their job search and all of the people and companies with whom they interact during the course of their job search. The great majority of people I meet have very primitive personal CRM systems--often as primitive as a shoebox of business cards. So there's a large opportunity to provide people with more sophisticated tools. Jibber Jobber's challenge is that it is so narrowly focused on the job search, whereas every professional needs a personal CRM tool (e.g., Act, Microsoft Business Contact Manager, etc. They may find that they successfully penetrate the job-seeker market, then at some point rebrand and target the broader professional market.

Career Acceleration | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Social Software

If you want to avoid the lines, Techcrunch writes how to cobble together an iPhone equivalent for free.

Personal Productivity | Social Software

In our latest FastCompany column, we summarized best practices in managing virtual employees at Evalueserve:

...Daigle observed that the virtual structure eliminates many political issues: "Not only do we not have much of the water cooler, idle time type of communication, and resulting issues -- we don't have time for it. I think there is some truth that the four of us [of the EVS management team] have got by without serious conflicts over 6 full years because we're somewhat forced (by geographic non-proximity) to stay out of one another's way, trusting each other to execute. Despite being geographically dispersed, all four senior managers are actively involved in both sales and operations, in touch via email, instant messaging, and phone daily. However, because we are distant we are forced to act independently and to focus on execution."

Career Acceleration | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

The folks at Landslide have figured out a great marketing strategy: If you view a demo of their "sales workstyle management" system, they'll give you a free copy of The Virtual Handshake--Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online.

Alex Salkever of Inc. wrote in Turning Sales Into Science that Landslide "gives sales staffers what they need, when they need it, to close a deal."  In other words, Landslide provides salespeople more infrastructure, so that they can focus more on selling and less on all of the other activities that distract them from their main job.

Link: Watch a Landslide demo, get a copy of The Virtual Handshake

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research | Social Software

I'm a longtime fan of the design philosophy and work of CreativeGood. Every time I've written a web design spec, I've required the designers to look at that site. Mark Hurst, founder of Creative Good and Good Experience, and host of the Gel conference (Good Experience Live), has just released his new book, Bit Literacy. Although I haven't read it, based on what I've seen of his past writings, it should be very worthwhile. For a sneak preview of his writing style, see his guide to managing the email deluge.

General | Social Software | Personal Productivity

Some useful Guidelines for Using a U.S. Cellphone When Traveling Outside of the U.S.

General | Personal Productivity

If you're having trouble understanding why and how it's become normative for the broadband generation (12-24) to document their entire lives online, I recommend Emily Nussbaum's Say Everything in New York magazine. My favorite section is from Clay Shirky of NYU, who has an amazing gift for metaphor:

Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole.

“Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.”

That’s a cool metaphor, I respond. “I actually don’t think it’s a metaphor,” he says. “I think there may actually be real neurological changes involved.”

General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Social Software

Michael Pollan has a lengthy, excellent article in the NY Times on "Nutritionism": how modern technology can make your food less healthy. I strongly recommend it, particularly for people sensitive to their health and their weight. The bullet points at the end are critical, and will save you a lot of money buying diet books (most of which say exactly the same thing).

General | Personal Productivity

Dion Hinchcliffe reports on "Ten Ways To Take Advantage of Web 2.0".

One of the questions I get asked fairly frequently is how people can leverage Web 2.0 techniques in their applications and infrastructure today. Now that it's getting more well known, more people seem to be actively interested in making immediate, practical use of Web 2.0 ideas.

On a related note, the new meta-search tool Zuula looks very useful. (via Shally)

General | Social Software | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration

"For CEOs and CEOs-to-be, sports may be a more effective training ground than any business school, according to both psychologists and entrepreneur athletes themselves." http://trax.inc.com/k/w/mailman/inc_leading/20070117/athletes

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration

Thanks to some regulatory arbitrage, AllFreeCallswill let you make phone calls to many foreign countries for free.

 Dial 712-858-8094, and at the prompt dial 011, the country code you are calling, and the number you wish to call.

 Easy. Some of the bloggers writing about this call this "free", but that's a bit misleading.

Because AllFreeCalls is taking advantage of certain government subsidies, you as a taxpayer are really paying for this call.

General | Personal Productivity | Social Software

"On the 9th Day of Xmas, Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters revealed to me: Nine Tools for Researching Leads." Whether you are looking for sales or job-hunting purposes, there are a vast number of services you can subscribe to for free that will bring information on worthwhile new companies straight to you. This is a useful list.

General | Personal Productivity | Career Acceleration

I had lunch recently with David Jackson, CEO of SeekingAlpha, and a former neighbor of mine.

I thought that many of our Circle of Experts would benefit from contributing to David's company.

Briefly, www.SeekingAlpha.com is the leading blog source of stock market related commentary by money managers and industry experts and a major provider of financial content to Yahoo! Finance.

Articles published on Seeking Alpha reach over a million readers per month, about 17% of whom are finance professionals.

 Crucially, each article published by Seeking Alpha (including those syndicated on Yahoo Finance) contains a link to the author’s biography or URL of choice, and can therefore be used to publicize your availability for consultations via Circle of Experts.

If you are already writing any sort of analysis, there's no marginal cost or effort to you. Just send SeekingAlpha your work, and they'll do all the editing and production for you.

 You can read about Seeking Alpha at http://seekingalpha.com/about, view a list of sample contributors at http://seekingalpha.com/contributors, and submit an article for publication (Seeking Alpha’s editors will contact you directly after doing so) at http://seekingalpha.com/do/content/submit.php or by emailing Mick(at)SeekingAlpha.com.

(As disclosure, Nitron Advisors does not get any sort of commission or payment from SeekingAlpha if you sign up; we just think that publishing through their channel is valuable to you.)

Career Acceleration | General | Personal Productivity | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research

An interview with Michael Gerber, Author of The E-Myth Revisited:

"If they don’t fail outright, most businesses fail to fully achieve their potential. That’s because the person who owns the business doesn't truly know how to build a company that works without him or her.. which is the key." - Michael Gerber

Michael Gerber is the founder and CEO of E-Myth Worldwide, and best selling author of The E-Myth Revisited, and E-Myth Mastery. He defines E-Myth as:

1: The entrepreneurial myth: the myth that most people who start a small business are entrepreneurs,

2: the fatal assumption that an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does technical work.

Since its publication in 1995, this business classic has sold over one million copies, and is published in 16 languages. Michael observes that most small businesses are started by "technicians", that is, people who are skilled at something and who enjoy doing that thing.

When these technicians strike out on their own, they tend to continue doing the work they are skilled at, and ignore the overarching aspects of business.

 Without clear goals and quantification benchmarks, they soon find themselves overworked, understaffed, and eventually broke. They come to hate the work they do. Rather than owning a business, Gerber writes, "they own a job." Click here for the interview.

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

The creator of BugMeNot.com has launched http://www.retailmenot.com/, which provides coupon codes for retail stores, without the privacy-infringing registration requirements. A very useful tool.

Many online stores allow for a "coupon" or "promotion" code when you order to automatically assign discounts, deals and freebies (kinda like money for nothing). RetailMeNot.com is a place for finding and sharing these coupon codes. So... when you buy online, check here for discounts first (unless you're frikkin crazy).

Via GoodExperience

General | Personal Productivity

From the "brazen careerist", 10 Job-hunt tactics you might not know:

2. Use proactive recommendations. Instead of waiting for a hiring manager to ask for references, have your reference call immediately. This works well if you have a heavy-weight reference, like a well-known CEO or someone who knows the hiring manager. But it also works well if you have little professional experience.

more

General | Personal Productivity | Career Acceleration

From Scott Allen:

There's a great write-up of danah boyd in Financial Times, which labels her the high priestess of internet friendship. I thought they did a great job, with the exception of not respecting her preference of not capitalizing her name. In addition to profiling danah, the article also chronicles the development of Friendster and MySpace, and others, as well as some of danah's insights on social networking sites. For one thing, danah found that while these sites have created a few celebrities of their own,

...apart from a few intense self-promoters, most people, Boyd found, were using the sites to present themselves to a small group of friends and get their recognition and feedback. The sites are an opportunity to define in public who they are. By providing an audience, and the tools to interact with that audience, the social networks are satisfying that need. Boyd calls this behaviour “identity production? and, employing a favourite phrase of hers, says that young people are trying to “write themselves into being?.

The article goes on to talk about social content sharing, business-oriented social software, and sexual predators. The latter has been covered a lot in the news lately, but I agree with danah:

“The fears are so painfully overblown,? said Boyd. “Is there porn on MySpace? Of course. And bullying, sexual teasing and harassment are rampant among teenagers. It is how you learn to make meaning, cultural roles, norms. These kids need to explore their life among strangers. Teach them how to negotiate this new world. They need these public spaces now that other public spaces are closed to them. They need a place that is theirs. We should not always be chasing them and stopping them from growing up.?

There's more on the tension of commercialization, as well as answers to the questions, "What are social networks?" and "Do the sites make money?" Even though it's ostensibly just a profile of danah, all in all this is probably the best article I've seen on the topic of social networking in a mainstream publication.

General | Social Software | Personal Productivity

One of the major themes of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online (see Chapter 16) is the need to preserve ones corporate and personal virtual reputation. I've long thought that there was a need for a business that would be a personal PR agent, which would monitor what's being said about you and destroy any negative information.

That business has been launched: ReputationDefender. What I like about the model is that I think it addresses a real concern that people have (or should have). 10% of Internet searches are for proper names; you are being evaluated every day online. ReputationDefender's main competition will be the same competition that PR firms have: people providing the service in-house instead of using an outside provider.

An interesting question they'll have to address as they scale is verifying the identity of the person using the service. If I say that I want to monitor the activity of my child, who verifies that that person is my child? And this is a great tool for stalking and identity theft (as are ZoomInfo and many other online network services): perhaps I fill out a form indicating that I want to monitor the online activities of a certain individual, who may not be me personally. Verifying that a given credit card ties to the name of the person being investigated is an obvious way to verify identity, but of course large numbers of credit card numbers are stolen every year.

I agree with Pete Cashmorethat it would be preferable to offer a very basic automated tracking service for free to get people into the system - "entering your credit card details is a massive barrier for the casual visitor". After all, people can easily use any search engine/blog reader to view discussion of their name across the net.

More here and here.

Overall, I'm positive on the company's prospects.

General | Personal Productivity | Social Software

America is ready for a new diet fad every year or so. Now that Atkins is done, the Calorie-Restriction Diet could well be next, particularly as the baby-boomers age. For a view of life with that diet, see New York magazine's article.

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

"People who access the Internet for what have become routine functions -- sending emails, writing blogs, and posting photos and information about themselves on social networking sites -- do not realize how much of their personal privacy they put at risk, according to Wharton faculty and legal experts. Nor, they add, have the courts fully addressed the ways in which the Internet can be harnessed for questionable purposes that encroach on privacy. "

Kevin Werbach observes:

...[L]ots of situations that used to be private are now public. It's not a question of privacy but of social norms. Perhaps the answer is just, 'That's too bad.' If someone had snapped a photo of [the Korean girl who didn't clean up after her dog on the subway] robbing a bank and she said, 'You can't take a photo of me,' most of us would say, 'Too bad, you were robbing a bank.' In a perverse way, we're going back to the small town where everyone knows what everyone else is doing by virtue of the global information superhighway. My point is, right or wrong, this is going to happen. Google is not going to go away."

I agree that we may be moving to more of a "small town" environment, where your actions are known to many people, instead of you benefiting from the traditional anonymity of the big city. However, unfortunately so far there's very little evidence that this is resulting in an increase in standards of behavior, which would be my preferred outcome. Unfortunately, for broader societal reasons, we seem to be steadily defining deviancy down. More at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/1567.cfm

General | Social Software | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

From Scott Allen:

This week, Work.com relaunched in the form of a Web 2.0-ish business community. The site consists of how-to guides for running your small business, written by a combination of in-house editors, certified topical experts, and members. While this has admittedly been done before, Work.com has done a great job on the execution: - great domain name - a clean, well-organized design - a highly consistent guide format that includes links to online resources to help you get it done - a team of professional editors, community leaders and experts to make sure content stays current and appropriate and to help members get engaged in the community I'm the community leader for the Sales & Marketing Channel, and there's already a tremendous collection of how-to guides available on the site, including one I wrote on online business networks. Here are some of my other favorites related to online networks, social software, and Web 2.0:

• Small Business Blogs
• Start Podcasting for Your Small Business
• RSS for Small Business
• Marketing Your Small Business with a Blog
• Managing Small Business E-mail
• Managing E-mail Overload

I've committed to several more guides in the next few weeks -- I'll post here as they go up. Also, if you have a particular area of expertise and don't already see it covered (or at least not as well as you think you could), then you can also create a new guide yourself. If you do, be sure to stop by my profile and send me a message so I can have a read and come post comments. Hope to see you at Work.com!

General | Social Software | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

Quietly hidden in [Scott] Adams' groundbreaking work is a financial formula so simple it rivals Einstein's E=mc2. In its original form Adams' formula was apparently so heretical and so explosive that no major house would touch it when he proposed publishing it as a one-page book. After initial rejections, he announced sadly that "if God materialized on earth and wrote the secret of the universe on one page, he wouldn't be able to find a publisher" either. ... Fortunately for America's 95 million investors, Adams' secret nine-point formula was finally revealed in "Dilbert and the Way of the Weasels." Notice its simple brilliance in the exact reproduction of his formula:

1. Make a will

2. Pay off your credit cards

3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support

4. Fund your 401k to the maximum

5. Fund your IRA to the maximum

6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it

7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account

8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement

9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio

MarketWatch via TheBigPicture

General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research

Via Wharton's newsletter:

It's always been assumed that when employees leave their companies to join other ones that all their knowledge and experience leave with them.

 But new research suggests that, at least in the high-tech field, firms can wind up gaining access to the knowledge being generated at their former colleague's new place.

The results of this research are presented in a paper titled, "Learning from Those Who Left: The Reverse Transfer of Knowledge through Mobility Ties," by Wharton management professor Lori Rosenkopf and Wharton doctoral student Rafael A. Corredoira. ... "Contrary to the view that companies lose something when a worker leaves, the study found that they stood to gain.

Specifically, firms that lost an employee to another firm were 8% more likely to cite that firm than other equivalent firms, Rosenkopf says. The reverse flow of knowledge was particularly pronounced when the employee moved to another region. Then the old firm was 22% more likely to cite the new firm."

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/1565.cfm

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

Given we're in a reasonably competitive industry, I'm very interested in tools like http://competitio.us/. The basic idea is that it’s a tool for companies (or investors) to keep track of their competitors' actions and features. I'm not sure it's got enough differentiation to be a sustainable business, but as a customer, I like it. Via Techcrunch

General | Personal Productivity | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research

As a followup on my Vistage presentations, here's "What every CEO needs to know about the array of new tools that foster online collaboration -- and could revolutionize business": Web 2.0 Has Corporate America Spinning

General | Social Software | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

For people who are really sick of losing bags, try flying with a gun. It works for this photographer:

A "weapons" is defined as a rifle, shotgun, pistol, airgun, and STARTER PISTOL. Yes, starter pistols - those little guns that fire blanks at track and swim meets - are considered weapons...and do NOT have to be registered in any state in the United States. I have a starter pistol for all my cases. All I have to do upon check-in is tell the airline ticket agent that I have a weapon to declare...I'm given a little card to sign, the card is put in the case, the case is given to a TSA official who takes my key and locks the case, and gives my key back to me. That's the procedure. The case is extra-tracked...TSA does not want to lose a weapons case. This reduces the chance of the case being lost to virtually zero. It's a great way to travel with camera gear...I've been doing this since Dec 2001 and have had no problems whatsoever.

Via Schneier via BoingBoing

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

I enjoyed speaking at lunch at two Vistage conferences this past week, in New York and Chicago. (As background, Vistage is the world's largest CEO membership organization based on revenue.) You can download my two presentations here: + Chicago Conference: How to Accelerate Your Company with Web 2.0 Technologies New York Conference: Seven Free, Easy Steps to Accelerate Your Business with Web 2.0 Technologies. I have also attached the New York handout below in HTML format. Feedback welcome!

Seven Free, Easy Steps to Accelerate Your Business with Web 2.0 Technologies

Ch = Character

Co = Your firm’s Competence

R = Relevance of the other company

S = Strength

I = Information

N = Number of companies

D = Diversity

Value of Your Corporate Network = D * ∑^N_n=1 (Ch_n * Co_n * R_n * S_n * I_n)

Attribute	Next Step	Cost
1) Character	Review your senior executives' profiles on ZoomInfo.com.	$0
2) Your firm’s Competence	Experiment with BasecampHQ.com for project management.	$0 for one project
3) Relevance of the other firm	Encourage employees to join LinkedIn.com, Xing.com, and other relevant online networks.	$0
4) Strength	Standardize internal phone calls on Skype.com. Encourage employees to use Instant Messaging services. (They're already doing it, most likely.)	$0
5) Information	Sign up on Bloglines.com, Technorati.com, or Topix.net for alerts about you and your competitors' appearances in blogs and news sites. Join CircleofExperts.com to be eligible for paid consulting opportunities.	$0
6) Number of people	Create standard corporate e-mail signature with strong brand reinforcement.	$0
7) Diversity	Use Jigsaw or Spoke.com to identify contact information on prospects.	Jigsaw: $0 w/uploaded contacts. Spoke: $50/mo.

And one more resource:

8) Learn more about Web 2.0

Download The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online at www.TheVirtualHandshake.com

$0

General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Social Software

The courageous actions of passengers on the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11 flew in the face of a long-standing contention in social science circles that people won't put themselves in danger to right a wrong, e.g., the famous Kitty Genovese case.

This fact prompted Monica Worline, a professor of organizational behavior at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, and a colleague to find out what was different about this incident.

The result of their lengthy research is a new paper entitled "Capabilities for Organizing Courage: The Story of United Airlines Flight 93."

It is the first academic study to examine the group behavior dynamics aboard the plane on that fateful morning. The chief finding?

 "People do things in conversations with others that create psychological resources that allow them to act in difficult situations."

http://knowledge.emory.edu/index.cfm?fa=viewArticle&ID=996

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

Users of online dating sites often struggle to find love because the sites themselves make it more difficult than it needs to be. To the rescue: Virtual Dates, an online ice-breaker from Jeana Frost of Boston University, Michael Norton of HBS, and Dan Ariely of MIT. More: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5478.htmlTheir advice about online dating (which also applies to winning business online):

"Remove yourself as much as possible and don't invest your ego in one particular date," Frost offers. "Remember that it's very easy to get carried away and imbue a profile with overly favorable qualities.

 My advice is to try to stay calm and resist being invested in one person until you've actually gotten to know them. Avoid long e-mail correspondences because they tend to heighten expectations.

" "It also takes resilience to go on a lot of dates and spend time actually arranging to meet rather than spending hours a week just searching. The people who go on a lot of dates are the people who find someone. In some sense it's a numbers game."

 New users especially should keep in mind that online dating is not in the end so fundamentally different from regular dating, adds Norton. You try to find people, you try to meet them.

 "It's the people who think it will be quite different from their regular experiences who end up being the most disappointed …. In online dating, the same sorts of people who are online are also out there offline. It can help you sort, but ultimately it takes work, effort, and a little luck."

General | Personal Productivity | Social Software

The event below is targeted at CFOs of mid-size and larger companies (over $50M in revenues). I hope that you can join us.

 CFO Leadership Team First Alumni Gathering September 21, Stamford, CT Guest Speaker: David Teten The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online Join fellow CFOs of mid-size and larger companies, and learn how to accelerate your sales, recruit star employees, enhance your marketing, or just find your next job by using online networks.

David Teten will discuss blogs, social network sites, virtual communities, relationship capital management software, biography analysis software, and other new tools.

 When: September 21, 6:30 to 8:30 PM Cost: $30 including hors'deurves, cash bar

Where: Stamford, CT (location disclosed to confirmed attendees) RSVP: by September 14 to Kevin McEnery, KJMcEnery(at)aol.com, 1-203-348-4435

Who: This event is open only to members of the CFO Leadership Group. Members must have experience as CFO or Divisional CFO in an organization with at least $50M in revenues.

 A few select recruiters specializing in CFO searches will also attend. Our members have experience with companies that include Acclaim Entertainment, Altria, Arc, Associated Press, Atari, Barnes & Noble, Calvin Klein, Dover, Gartner, Georgia Pacific, Gerber Scientific, Groupe Danone, Kodak, Labatt, McCann Relationship Marketing, Nestle, Newsweek, Pepsi, Revlon, Rogers, Scholastic, Sesame Workshop, The Reader’s Digest Association, Time Warner Cable, and World Wrestling Entertainment. Nominations welcome for members.

 Why: To see old and new friends

MORE ON OUR SPEAKER When you finish David Teten’s program, you’ll know how to:

 * create a powerful professional presence online

 * attract business in online networks

 * meet more relevant clients and potential clients

 * start and promote your own blog

 * master the email deluge

 * analyze and value your community of business partners

 * manage your contact database

 * ensure privacy and safety online

 "We hosted one of David Teten’s presentations at the Euromoney 2004 Annual Hedge Fund Start-Up & Business Development  Forum. Out of 40 speakers, David tied for first place for the highest speaker rating." - Diane Higgins, Financial Markets, EuroMoney PLC

BIOGRAPHY David Teten is CEO of Nitron Advisors ( www.NitronAdvisors.com), which provides independent industry experts with consulting opportunities to hedge funds and other institutional investors.

 To participate in paid interviews with Nitron Advisors’ institutional investor clients, at no cost to you, join the Nitron Advisors Circle of Experts ( www.CircleofExperts.com ).

 David is the co-author of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online ( www.TheVirtualHandshake.com ).

David was formerly CEO of an investment bank specializing in Internet domain names. He has worked with the Bear Stearns Technology investment banking group and Mars & Co strategy consulting.

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Social Software

Do you want to break free of Microsoft's grip? Use exclusively web-based apps, most of them free? If you do, try reviewing Ismael Ghalimi's list of 'best-of-breed' web apps, which together provide a reasonable approximation of the Microsoft Office Suite. http://itredux.com/blog/office-20/my-office-20-setup/

General | Social Software | Personal Productivity

A useful service I've been playing with is Google SMS:

Google SMS is a new service that enables you to search for certain kinds of information with Google from a mobile phone or handheld device (such as a Blackberry), and returns your search results as text messages. Get phone book listings, movie showtimes, weather, facts, dictionary definitions, product prices from Froogle, and more.

For example (via Speakernet news): send "Pizza 91320" to the phone number 46645 (GOOGL spelled with the numeric phone keys) and you will receive a text message back with all the pizza joints in that ZIP code. Google SMS

General | Personal Productivity

From Harvard Business School Working Knowledge:

The researchers identified four successful tactics for obtaining stretchwork that were common to both groups:

* Differentiate competence. Anyone hoping to advance must distinguish his or her performance on the job. This is particularly true, however, for contract workers—because they are paid for each short-term job, their employers are likely to subject their work to close, frequent evaluation.

* Acquire referrals. Because high-tech contractors tend to work with a number of clients, brokers, and fellow contractors, they enjoy a broader social network from which to draw referrals than most permanent employees. In the film industry—where most hiring is done based on a production manager's previous experience with an individual—referrals are a vital aspect of getting any job, particularly if it stretches a worker in a new direction.

* Framing and bluffing. "This is one of the most creative attributes for obtaining stretchwork," O'Mahony notes. "People who are good at presenting their prior experience in a way that allows for an easy translation to the desired job can narrow the gap between their past experience and future capabilities." Adopting a hybrid job title to identify oneself—"director-screenwriter," for example—can also help establish authority in more than one area.

* Discounting. Accepting pay below the market rate is a temporary disadvantage some contract workers are willing to accept, if it means gaining the experience and exposure that will lead to a new position. One technical writer put it this way: "I turned down solid offers from three companies, all paying over $100K a year…I would take a job at $55K if they're using a totally new technology so I learn something…It's like playing pool…You hit the green ball with the white ball, and the point is to place the white ball to get the next shot. So I take that job in order to learn skills for my next project."

More...

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

* Get to sleep faster * Tackle problems in your sleep * Take efficient power naps * Take a caffeine nap * Get baby to sleep through the night * Sleep on an airplane * Get up when you really want to * Hold that thought till morning * Relax with Pzizz more...

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There's a product liability lawsuit waiting to happen here:

Studying with diligent friends is fine, says Heidi Lessing, a University of Delaware sophomore. But after a couple of hours, it's time for a break, a little gossip: "I want to talk about somebody walking by in the library." One of those friends, however, is working too hard for dish -- way too hard. Instead of joining in the gossip, "She says, 'Be quiet,' " Lessing says, astonishment still registering in her voice. Her friend's attention is laserlike, totally focused on her texts, even after an evening of study. "We were so bored," Lessing says. But the friend was still "really into it. It's annoying." The reason for the difference: Her pal is fueled with "smart pills" that increase her concentration, focus, wakefulness and short-term memory.

more at A Dose of Genius

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A grammatical blunder may force Rogers Communications Inc. to pay an extra $2.13-million to use utility poles in the Maritimes after the placement of a comma in a contract permitted the deal's cancellation. ... Language buffs take note — Page 7 of the contract states:

The agreement "shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party."

 Rogers' intent in 2002 was to lock into a long-term deal of at least five years. But when regulators with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) parsed the wording, they reached another conclusion.

The validity of the contract and the millions of dollars at stake all came down to one point — the second comma in the sentence.

 Had it not been there, the right to cancel wouldn't have applied to the first five years of the contract and Rogers would be protected from the higher rates it now faces.

“Based on the rules of punctuation," the comma in question “allows for the termination of the [contract] at any time, without cause, upon one-year's written notice," the regulator said.

more Via metafilter

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Thanks to the American Mathematical Society, Dartmouth is giving away the much-praised textbook, Introduction to Probability by Charles M. Grinstead and J. Laurie Snell, as free etext. The website also includes computer programs to go along with the book. Link Via http://www.boingboing.net/2006/07/03/introduction_to_prob.html

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Via Scott Allen:

One of the few e-mail newsletters I read from top to bottom every month is Springwise, which features hot new business ideas from around the world. These may be local/regional businesses that can be duplicated in your area, or just an early player in a new market segment that is still wide open to new entrants.

The current issue features stories on:

Car Prices by Text Message
Car shoppers can check retail and blue book prices via cell phone.

Boutique Wines Online
Advice, discounts and access to boutique wineries not generally available at your local liquor store.

Dinner in the Sky
This one's kind of wacky - you'll just have to see it.

Luxury Convenience Store
In England, it's Harrod's. Imagine a Neiman-Marcus Corner Store in your neighborhood.

Repackaging Barcodes
Graphic designers are turning plain old barcodes into an integral part of the packaging.

Social Money
New tools help people who share bills or who lend and borrow money among friends to keep track of it. The latest issue of Business 2.0 predicts this is a $100 billion industry.

Subscriptions to Springwise are free. If you like it, be sure to check out their sister publication, Trendwatching, which covers new consumer trends.

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

I normally don’t discuss political topics on this blog, but this particularly struck me as an example of one of my favorite themes: the importance of 'peeling the onion'.

At first glance, it's just a picture of smoke from damaged buildings from the conflict in the Mideast. At second glance, it's a fine example of how not to embellish news photos.

Photo at http://imagesocket.com/view/reuters_fakee3e.png (original photo was pulled.) If you can’t figure out what’s wrong, see http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/53640 Via Metafilter Update: Reuters fired the photographer involved.

General | Personal Productivity

The August issue of Scientific American takes a deep look at how experts--chess grandmasters, musicians, physicians--develop their abilities.

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence.

That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time.

It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.

Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car.

 But having reached an acceptable performance--for instance, keeping up with one's golf buddies or passing a driver's exam--most people relax.

 Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement.

In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields.

More... via Boingboing

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The AirPower Wiki chronicles the location of power-outlets in the world's airports. "Those of us who've had three hours to catch up on email and recharge before making another eight-hour flight know what it is to be a voltotropic voyager." via http://www.boingboing.net/2006/07/26/power_outlets_in_air.html via MetaFilter.

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Dennis Kimbro's Prescription for Gaining Greatness in Work and Life

What makes the great, great? It's a question author Dennis Kimbro took 20 years to research, interviewing leaders from diverse backgrounds from Earl Graves of Black Enterprise magazine to Bishop T. D. Jakes. His findings were eventually culled into a book of the same name and recently shared with aspiring corporate and entrepreneurial leaders of the future at the inaugural Black MBA Diverse Leadership conference at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. Among the offerings, Kimbro advised students to be "driven by your vision. Get a big dream and believe in yourself when no one else will."

http://knowledge.emory.edu/index.cfm?fa=viewArticle&ID=979

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

After reading posts about people who have had to beg to be disconnected from AOL, J2, and Sky TV, I saw the following advice:

I've worked for a telecommunications company that I would prefer to go unnamed, and I'd like to offer some tips to anyone trying to disconnect a service they no longer want.

The biggest tip is to call well outside of normal business hours -- in my company, customer service was open 24/7, but the retention department closed in the evening.

If you call, say, before bed, or during the middle of the night, you'll just be talking to a regular CS rep who has no incentive whatsoever to keep you as a customer.

It can turn a twenty minute phone call into a two minute phone call.

Second, if you get a rude rep, hang up and call right back. Some reps, especially in commission driven departments like sales and retention, are especially pushy, where as if you call back you might get someone who is right at the end of his shift and just wants to get you off of his phone.

Third, there is one reason for disconnection that will work for almost every service--moving. Tell them you're moving out of the service area, or moving in with someone who already has the same service, and they should be required to cancel everything for you.

Also, it would be helpful to remember that the representatives in retention are paid to retain you as customers--threatening to record the call, asking for their name or ID, or asking for a supervisor will not do anything. All calls are recorded and the representatives have responses they are required to give for every customer question or complaint. The rep who actually gets in trouble will be the one who disconnects you immediately without trying to retain you, not the one who spends twenty minutes using every tactic in the book the company wrote for him.

via BoingBoing

General | Personal Productivity

Eric Shahinian wrote some detailed notes on last night's panel on "Are You Googling Your Privacy Away?" for the New York County Lawyers’ Association / Cyberspace Law Committee.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Mark Grossman, Partner, Dewitt Grossman, P.L. (To stay current with tech law issues, ask Mark Grossman to add you to his mailing newsletter.

 His email is mgrossman (at) dewittgrossman.com. )

 To discuss recent news, let’s look at the new Sprint Family Locator.

Who is concerned? Doubtful.

Many of you probably feel that it’s a sign of relief, that now I will know where my spouse or kid is in an instant.

 But it’s more serious.

Think divorce litigation.

You claimed to be at work, but your phone says you were at the Holiday Inn.

 Curious. I wonder what you could’ve been doing.

Many issues come up as to: is my provider allowed to disclose information if I don’t want them to? Is there any way to stop them? This is only the beginning.

 To add on to the discussion of the actual cost to store this information, we are talking a tremendous amount of space.

This information therefore must be worth it, and it is.

It is worth an incredible amount.

 The EU operates differently than the U.S.

In Spain, this isn’t an issue.

We are in a different culture, people easily spread their information.

Myspace.com is a great example.

75 million users and growing, all of which have given out readily accessible information, that can deduce other information that can say so very much.

There are tons of things to improve in the industry, but we need to focus on one thing in particular, and politics has a great deal to do with it.

 I am a moderate Democrat, and my views reflect that position.

 This is truly a debate on choice.

 Yes, some people prefer to have their information known in order for companies not to waste their time by trying to sell a consumer things that person does not want.

 That is fine. As I will say again, the question is, if you didn’t want your information shared, could you stop it? No.

If the information was lost or stolen, would you want to know? Yes.

Could you? Probably not.

 I recommend Webwasher and Scroogle.org as useful tools to combat the concerns.

 I would love it if the bookstore owner knew what I wanted and would pick out books for me.

 It is the same thing now. But it isn’t one piece of data, they are compiling vast amounts of information.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Harry Valetk, Director, Privacy Online, Entertainment Software Rating Board Everything can be tracked.

This isn’t just web pages here.

 This concerns call records, email records, search queries.

It is all saved, it is never really deleted.

Google doesn’t delete a thing.

They have compiled detailed profiles of every imaginable characteristic.

What has emerged as the controversy over internet cache is truly, how can they sell this to someone? This is private information. But now think back 20 years.

Often times a business’ greatest asset was their mailing list.

Especially for a marketer. It is the crux of their modern marketing business.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Raj Goel, CTO, Brainlink International, Inc. What I find most fascinating, something that most people don’t catch on to, is who would want this information from people, aside from marketers and thief’s? Easy to answer: the government. Surprising how most people never realize they provide the demand for most of this information.

 A good analogy of this industry and discussion is to the automotive industry.

 We are at the equivalent right now of having just got a new Cadillac (picture this 40 years ago), driving 90 mph, and this was years and years before seatbelts and airbags.

What a dangerous situation indeed.

 What is most frightening about Google is not their basic search, it is Gmail. Does anyone have Google? Who got an invitation? It is invitation only.

But wait, look at this, if you provide your cell phone number, they will send you an invitation? Ever realize they could easily just give you an invitation on the website? They want your number.

Google doesn’t want to be a search engine.

 It wants to be the largest database in the world.

They already know more about you than you may know.

Under legislation email must be kept private, under legal documentation, Gmail isn’t an email account, it is a database.

 Notice how the top link in Gmail happens to work very nicely with your tastes.

 Something in your email revealed that. Check the fine print.

So what’s worse than Gmail? Google Desktop.

Yeah it’s great, and efficient. But it gives Google "the keys to your life".

You make yourself so vulnerable to issues.

 Ever realize how you can view deleted emails from a long time ago, or find web pages you may have view briefly? All which has been "deleted" truly was not.

 It is saved for many, many years.

Remember the litigation facing Google, in which they refused to give over user data? Don’t feel safe, it is because it is too valuable to them, not you.

But what is not discussed is the National Security Letter they likely received, forcing them to give over the information, and forcing them not to discuss the situation.

To hit home, I know most people have medical information they don’t want disclosed.

I did work for a healthcare provider, and trust me, your information, minus any psych evaluation, is in at least 5 countries.

General | Personal Productivity | Social Software

ABOUT a year before Adam Richman was to graduate from the Harvard Business School in 1996, he took on an extracurricular project. It was long before the Internet bubble inflated and burst, and well before one of the school's graduates landed in the White House. Mr. Richman wondered: What was the real-world value of a master's in business administration, especially one from the iviest of Ivies? Was it, as widely perceived, an ace in the hole, a get-out-of-jail-free card, a ticket to the good life? more from the NY Times...

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Senior Media Entrepreneurs/ Executives Manhattan Lunch

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

If you are investigating new businesses to grow; have sold your business and are looking for your next move; or perhaps have just exited a senior level executive position; please join us at our lunch for Media Entrepreneurs and Senior Executives Seeking New Business Growth. Participants typically had C-level responsibility for at least a $50M budget in the media industry (broadly defined).

Due to the overwhelming interest in our topic and limited space, we can only accommodate individuals whom the event is addressing directly. We welcome referrals.

Location:
1345 Avenue of the Americas, 49th Floor

(Between 54th and 55th Streets)

Date: Tuesday, June 27, 2006, Noon sharp until 2pm

Cost: complimentary

Your Hosts:
+ David Teten, CEO, Nitron Advisors

+ John Adelman, CIMA and Paul Lewis, CFM, Wittenstein Adelman Group

+ Allan Grafman, President, All Media Ventures; Operating Partner, Mercury Capital (formerly President, Archie Comics Entertainment; CFO, Hallmark Entertainment; Tribune; Cap Cities/ABC)

+ Claire Delong, Accolo

Please RSVP with your one-page text biography to Avi Mally, AMally(at)Nitronadvisors.com , 1-212-682-5874 . Pre-registration is required; we will distribute your one-page biography to all the attendees. Please make sure to include your contact information on your biography, and ideally, your photo. Also, please indicate any dietary preferences (vegetarian, kosher, halal, etc.)

(Our thanks to Jeff Meshel of Mercury Capital for inspiring this event.)

Career Acceleration | Events | General | Personal Productivity

This is a resource site I plan to use. The Athletic-Minded Traveler helps you...

* Find hotels that match your accommodation preferences, personal budget, AND athletic needs * Locate and tour nearby health clubs, lap pools, YMCAs and other athletic-minded facilities * Identify local dining options in all price categories that satisfy both light and hearty eaters * Discover local running/walking routes with marked mileage and printable maps * Find athletic-minded local retailers (e.g., running stores, bike shops, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, Wild Oats, farmers' markets, etc.)

Via Keith Ferrazzi

General | Personal Productivity

Younger siblings, better entrepreneurs?

Which slot in the birth-order sequence makes for the most successful entrepreneurs? Ben Dattner: It's not that cut and dried. There are positives and negatives -- and examples of successful business people -- from all the places in the birth-order spectrum. For instance, first-born entrepreneurs tend to be more extroverted and confident than their younger siblings. In a business where somebody needs to maintain a high PR profile, you could imagine that it might be easier if you're naturally extroverted and confident. Especially if you'll be called on to talk to the media as the public face of your company. First-borns also tend to be more assertive and authoritarian, dominant and inflexible. They're good at executing a plan, following it, and driving others to follow it in a disciplined way. Conformist, task-oriented, disciplined, and concerned with getting things done right -- all these traits are naturally found in first-borns.

more..

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From ForeignMBA.com: http://foreignmba.com/area.php?area=1

General | Personal Productivity | Career Acceleration

Greg Narain has some sound Advice to Fledgling Consultants.

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Tricks to Improve Your Memory 7 ways to recall your PIN number, the location of your wallet, or other key information. More Via Lifehacker.

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My coauthor Scott Allen wrote on The Virtual Handshake blog: I love to read blogs, but increasingly, I find it harder and harder to keep up with all the blogs I'd like to read because there is just so much good stuff out of there. And, of course, it's all mixed up with a lot more stuff ranging from merely mediocre to just plain pointless. Recently, I've particularly become a fan of the "blog carnival" format, a weekly traveling roadshow of the best of the blogosphere on a particular topic. I got overwhelmed trying to keep up with the dozens and dozens of good blogs out there, and just setting up search feeds on keywords wasn't giving me a good variety. Blog carnivals, though, give you a very concise view of some of the best of the blogosphere on various topics. Here are some that you may find particularly relevant:

• Carnival of the Capitalists - 50+ weekly posts about economics, entrepreneurship, personal finance - basically anything having to do with money. I hosted this week's edition. (UPDATE: TheVirtualHandshake.com hosted another edition on May 15).
• Carnival of Marketing - Seven editor-selected posts on all things marketing.
• Carnival of Entrepreneurship - Inspired by both of the above, I started this back in February and it's going great guns. If you have a blog, I'm always looking for submissions and hosts.
• Carnival of Business - Newly launched this week.

To learn more about blog carnivals, including what they are, submitting articles, and a list of all known blog carnivals (here's another), visit BlogCarnival.com. This site is a one-stop resource where you can subscribe to RSS feeds for individual carnivals, submit posts to multiple carnivals, and have some great tools for managing a carnival if you already run one or want to start one.

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The MBAs of the Kellogg-Recanati Executive MBA program have posted summaries of all of their classes at: http://www.kr04.net/ This is a handy reference site---a summary of what you learn in an executive MBA, all on one website.

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Via Marc, I was led to a blog post by David Manaster on recruiter efficiency. He reports that "It would seem that (on average) the optimal workload for a recruiter is between 11 and 20 open positions. " I'd argue that the main reason for this phenomenon is that most recruiters are using only the traditional toolkit: Excel, Word, email, phone, to keep track of their applicants. Nitron couldn't function effectively if we were this inefficient. John Younger, CEO of recruiting process outsourcer Accolo, observed:

I actually find this research to be right in line with our surveys for the typical recruiter today.

 We have found the optimal workload to be between 4 and 18 unique full-time jobs simultaneously.

 At 18 or more, the applicant screening, follow-up and tracking take a severe dive.

The astounding part is that this is the same recruiter workload of 1963! Think about it.

What else in our lives has not budged a bit in productivity in over 40 years! This is the time before e-mail, job boards, the internet and Starbucks.

The core reason is that the recruiter today operates in exactly the same model as the early 1960’s. All we have done is pave the cowpath.

 It gets worse… the hiring manager service and applicant experience have actually diminished with all the technology noise in the middle.

There are new models emerging, but there is an army of people invested in keeping things the same.

According to a staffing.org survey of 2,294 companies, during 2005, the national average Recruiting Efficiency Index was 12.3%. REI is calculated by dividing total recruiting costs, including recruiter salaries & overhead, applicant tracking, advertising fees, etc. and dividing it by total compensation recruited. Accolo reports an REI of under 7% for clients using Accolo's system. Among the drivers for that efficiency: - much higher per-recruiter workload - use of online networks for recruiting (more on that topic)

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

Steve Pavlina's list of 10 Stupid Mistakes Made by the Newly Self-Employed is worth reviewing even for the non-self-employed. Via Marc Cenedella's blog

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Valuable write-up on how some of the most successful people manage their time and their days. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/03/20/8371781/index.htm Via Arash Farin

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A jobless marketing manager recently touted his accomplishments to New York search firm Canny, Bowen. He simultaneously sent the same cover letter and resume to more than 150 other executive recruiters -- and identified every recipient on his e-mail's distribution list. The shotgun approach helped chill the chances of Canny, Bowen proposing him for any vacancy. "We get a half-dozen mass mailings like this every week," reports Gregory Gabel, a managing director. "Two years ago, I never used to get these."

more...

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From the Freakonomics column in the New York Times:

Their work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. .... whatever innate differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person "encodes" the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

more

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Apparently, Gmail’s built-in 'View as HTML' functionality, which allows you to view the content of PDF files (and other types of documents) as if they were classic webpages, works regardless of the files’ usage restrictions (i.e., the functionality doesn't respect Digital Rights Management). More...

Via Boingboing UPDATE: Gmail has terminated this functionality.

General | Personal Productivity

Via Mark Hurst of GoodExperience and GEL:

Part of learning to type means learning how to position the arms and wrists. (See more on "learn to type!" here:) http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/000576.php For years, to cut down on wrist pain, I've rested my forearms on a dictionary and a thesaurus, each 5 cm thick. That elevates my forearms above the mouse and keyboard and reduces stress on my wrists.

Last week I spotted in Yahoo News, "Forearm Support May Cut Computer Injuries" : "An "ergonomic board" that provides forearm support may relieve upper body pain and disorders that can develop from spending extended hours on a computer, a new study suggests.

 The device, a board that attaches to a desk and supports the forearm, lowered the risk of developing shoulder and neck problems by nearly half and significantly reduced neck, shoulder and right arm pain associated with computer work."

My favorite, though, was this quote: "The average cost per board is around $100, said Rempel. The study found that employers would recover these costs within about 10 months of purchasing the boards."

A hundred bucks? Buy a dictionary (from Gel 2006 speaker Erin McKean, please) and a thesaurus for much less than that!

General | Personal Productivity

From Tom Peters: This list of not-always-obvious tips is worth reviewing. http://www.changethis.com/21.01.111ThoughtsOnSelling

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Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee writes in his blog:

I have an article in the spring 2006 issue of Sloan Management Review (SMR) on what I call Enterprise 2.0 -- the emerging use of Web 2.0 technologies like blogs and wikis (both perfect examples of network IT) within the Intranet.

The article describes why I think this is an important and welcome development, the contents of the Enterprise 2.0 ‘toolkit,’ and the experiences to date of an early adopter.

 It also offers some guidelines to business leaders interested in building an Enterprise 2.0 inftrastructure within their companies.

One question not addressed in the article is: Why is Enterprise 2.0 is an appealing reality now? It’s not because of any recent technology breakthrough.

Blogs, wikis, and RSS have been brewing since the 1990s, and folksonomies and AJAX since the early years of this decade.

 Is it just that technologists and entrepreneurs needed a bit of time to absorb all of elements and combine them into useful tools?

That’s certainly part of the story, but focusing only on technology components risks missing the forest for the trees. In particular, it misses three broad and converging trends, all of them concerning the changing relationship between those who offer technologies and those who use them.

The trends are:

 1. Simple, Free Platforms for Self-Expression ....

2. Emergent Structures, Rather than Imposed Ones ....

3. Order from Chaos ....

 the technologists of Web 2.0 are providing a third valuable service -- they’re rolling out tools that help us filter, sort, prioritize, and generally stay on top of the flood of new online content.

 As described in the SMR article, these tools include powerful search, tags (the basis for the folksonomies at del.icio.us and flickr), and automatic RSS signals whenever new content appears. ... I’ll end this post with an anecdote that showed me that these three trends are not yet well understood by many business leaders.

 Last week I was teaching in an executive education program for senior executives - owners and presidents of companies.

I assigned a case I wrote about the internal use of blogs at a bank, and also gave one additional bit of homework: I pointed the participants to blogger and typepad, and told them to start their own blogs and report the blog’s URL to me.

What they reported instead was that they had no intention of completing the assignment.

They told me how busy they were, and how they had no time and no inclination to mess around with blogs (whatever they were).

 Out of two classes of 50-60 participants each, I got fewer than 15 total blog URLs. Trying to turn lemons into lemonade in class, I asked some of the people who actually had sent a URL to describe the experience of starting a blog.

They all shrugged and said it was no big deal, took about five minutes total, didn’t require any skills, etc. I then asked why I would give busy executives such a silly, trivial assignment.

 In both classes one smart student piped up to say "To show us exactly how trivial it was." At that point, class discussion became interesting.

via Ross Mayfield What Prof. McAfee is describing *inside* the enterprise is exactly the same sort of phenomenon that we see salespeople, recruiters and other using both inside and outside the enterprise, and explore in The Virtual Handshake. Another person now writing on this area: Paul Gillen. (Via Centrality Journal )

General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Social Software

I hope that some of our readers will join me at TiECON East, June 15-17, in Boston, MA. With over 1,200 expected attendees, TiECON East plans to become the largest Global Innovation conference on the East Coast.

 The sponsoring organization is TiE, whose members receive roughly 5% of the venture capital investment in the United States.

Speakers include: -

 Howard Anderson, Founder Battery Ventures and The Yankee Group - Nikesh Arora, VP & GM Europe, Google - Clayton M. Christensen, Professor, Harvard Business School, Author, The Innovator's Dilemma - Rajat Gupta, Senior Partner Worldwide, McKinsey & Co. - Ray Kurzweil, Author & Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence - Venkat Ramaswamy, Ross School of Business at University of Michigan - Paul Sagan, CEO, Akamai - Mohanbir Sawhney, Professor, Kellogg School of Management - Howard H. Stevenson, Professor, Harvard Business School - Hatim Tyabji, Executive Chairman, Bytemobile Inc.

 I'll be participating in two panels, one on innovation in social software and online networks, and one on innovation in investment research.

The keynote speaker is Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations (although I somehow doubt he will be talking about innovation, given that's not the UN's strength.) With prices starting at $269 for TiE Members and $100 for student members, the conference isn't expensive. For more information or to register, contact the TiE-Boston office at (781) 272-3875 or visit www.tieconeast.com .

Career Acceleration | Events | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Private Equity Investing | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research | Social Software

Katharine Hansen discusses how to maximize your internet job searches: http://www.quintcareers.com/maximizing_net_job_search.html

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

One of the questions Scott Allen and I are frequently asked, and that comes up as a recurring topic of debate, is, "Which online tool is best for me to meet and sell to the right people?" In our latest Fast Company column, Of Hammers, Wrenches, and Screwdrivers, we take a side-by-side look at online networking communities, blogging, and LinkedIn, and compare and contrast them based upon the Seven Keys framework we introduced in The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online. While the boundaries between the application of these tools is somewhat fuzzy and they tend to cross over each other, this is a handy, concise overview of the predominant models and how they relate to each other and to your activities. Professor Constance Porter wrote more on this topic at Centrality Journal. See Blogs, Social Networking Sites or Virtual Communities: Alternative Paths to Building Relational Equity with Customers (Part 2)

General | Social Software | Personal Productivity

Do your clients and colleagues constantly say your email went into their spam filter? So much that you're worried your domain might be blacklisted? There's a quick, easy way to check. Go to http://www.completewhois.com/rbl_search.htm and enter your mail server address. For example, mine is 207.174.139.198 (you can get this from your ISP if you're unsure). After you press GO, the tool will query ALL the 25 major RBLs (real time blacklists). Once you confirm you aren't on any of them, you will feel much better. Better yet, you'll know it's actually the receivers of your email who aren't training their spam-blocking software correctly, and you can ask them to add you to their "safe senders" list.

via Laura Stack, via Speakernetnews

General | Social Software | Personal Productivity

"Don't work too hard," wrote a colleague in an e-mail today. Was she sincere or sarcastic? I think I know (sarcastic), but I'm probably wrong. According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I've only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.

More at Wired News

General | Social Software | Personal Productivity

(From "Remember Every Name Every Time" by Benjamin Levy.)

In the book, Levy describes two methods for remembering names.

First, the verbally-oriented, "basic" technique:   FACE. FOCUS on the name. ASK again. COMMENT to them and yourself about the name. EMPLOY the name in conversation.

 Second, the visual, "advanced" NAME system. It's "advanced" because it doesn't depend on you working the person's name into conversation, and it does take a lot of practice.

But Levy remembers hundreds and hundreds of names using the four steps below. NAME stands for... NOMINATE - Survey the face, then choose a feature, any feature! [Ex. Bob's nose.] ARTICULATE - Describe the feature to yourself so you know it.

 [Ex. Bob's nose...it's large in proportion to his face, and the nostrils are very prominent.]

MORPH - Names don't mean much, so transform them into nouns! [Ex. "Bob" becomes..."bobsled!" Visualize the famous Jamaican bobsled team.] ENTWINE - so that... NOMINATED feature + MORPH = a lasting memory [Ex. Dozens of bobsleds shooting out of his nose!] Via Keith Ferrazzi's newsletter

Career Acceleration | General | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

I recently was fortunate to participate in a panel discussion on “The Great Sales and Marketing Debate: The Cagey Sales Veterans Debate the Young Up-and-Comers”, sponsored by the New York Software Industry Association, March 13, 2006, held at JP Morgan Chase.

 Allen Reynolds and Jesse Mandell all took some notes, which we have merged in the summary below. Master of Ceremonies, Bruce Bernstein, welcomed and introduced the two questioners and four debaters.

 Questioners: Sherri Sklar and Ruth P. Stevens Sherri Sklar, President, Sherri Sklar Strategies, LLC Sherri Sklar has built a star track record in helping organizations obtain exceptional results.

 Over the last 20 years, she has enabled organizations to make dramatic turnarounds, helping under-performing divisions achieve significant growth in the most difficult of marketplace conditions.

 Ms. Sklar has helped organizations in marketing strategy and execution, sales strategy, sales execution and performance, business development strategy, channel management, and communication skills training.

 A frequent presenter at seminars and conferences, Ms. Sklar practices and teaches 'peak performance delivery', a proprietary technique Ms. Sklar employs to help clients achieve optimal results.

Ms. Sklar is President of her own consulting company, Sherri Sklar Strategies, LLC., (SSS). SSS is a sales, marketing and business development consulting firm that delivers measurable results from assessment, proven strategies, and excellence in execution.

 Ms. Sklar received her MBA from Harvard Business School and her BA from Newcomb College at Tulane University.

Ruth P. Stevens Ruth P. Stevens' expertise in customer acquisition and retention derives from a decade and a half of hands-on marketing for both large enterprises and start-up companies.

Just prior to beginning her consulting practice, she served as chief marketing officer at an Internet company in New York City.

Before that, she had broad responsibilities for direct marketing at three corporate giants-- IBM, Ziff-Davis and Time Warner. At IBM, she served as director of direct marketing, North America, for the IBM hardware, software and services brands, leading a team of 140 direct marketing professionals.

 She then moved to the IBM Software Group, where she directed global direct marketing. At Ziff-Davis, she served as vice president of marketing for the electronic publishing division, and later helped launch Ziff's Consumer Media Group as its vice president of marketing.

At Time Warner, she worked in marketing, new business development and general management for the Book-of-the-Month Club and Time-Life Books.

 Ruth has been a regular columnist for DMNews and is a frequent contributor to a variety of marketing publications.

She teaches marketing to graduate students at Columbia Business School and NYU's Stern School of Business. Ruth serves on the boards of the Direct Marketing Idea Exchange in New York City and the Direct Marketing Club of New York.

She is past chair of the Business-to-Business Council of the Direct Marketing Association and holds a BA from Hamilton College and an MBA from Columbia University.

Debaters: Alan Kaufman, Ed Martino, Larry Cohen, and David Teten

Team Old School: Alan Kaufman and Ed Martino Alan Kaufman

Alan Kaufman is a 38 year veteran of the Computer/Software/IT Industry. He was a founding member of the management team of Cheyenne Software, Inc., where as executive vice president of sales, he grew the business from $1 million in fiscal 1990 to over $200 million in 1997 to propel Cheyenne into the 13th largest software company in the industry.

 He has served as an officer in the Navy and holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University.

 He serves on the Board of Directors of NetIQ, a leader in server and security management, and is a Trustee of Outward Bound USA.

Alan also serves on the Board of Directors of NYSIA and is its founding president.

Ed Martino, Director of Industry Business Solutions, Sprint Nextel Ed Martino is currently the Director of Industry Business Solutions for the new Sprint Nextel Company.

 He has worldwide responsibility for the market penetration, solution development and overall growth in industry sectors for Financial, Insurance, Media and Professional Services, a $2b business area.

Prior to this role, Ed was the Director, Northeast Corporate Sales for Nextel Communications.

Other roles have included the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales reporting to the President for two companies both in the global systems integration business.

Ed also served in various global management positions for the IBM Company for eighteen years.

Ed is a member of several boards including the NY Software Industry Association where he is the Vice Chairman.

 Team New School: Larry Cohen and David Teten Larry Cohen, EVP, Heartbeat Software

 Larry Cohen is one of the most creative and inventive minds in the software business. He has that rare ability to listen to a business problem, quickly isolate the key issue, and translate that insight into a practical software solution.

 From his early days in the industry, Mr. Cohen has demonstrated a remarkable instinct for identifying a new technology solution and putting it to work quickly.

Shortly after graduating from UC Berkeley, he pioneered the use of Webcasting in the healthcare industry. Soon after, he received an NIH grant to conceive the first online adherence programs ever developed.

 Larry was a driving force behind the first enterprise-class, web-based software products for Marketing Content Management (MCM) in the financial services industry.

 He devised a highly innovative technology and methodology for performing online competitive intelligence. And lately, he's been fashioning a new form of CRM that integrates data-mining and web services.

 Throughout his career, Larry has closely advised some of the world's most prestigious organizations, including Amgen, Novartis, GSK, Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Intel.

David Teten, CEO, Nitron Advisors

David Teten is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Nitron Advisors, an independent research firm which provides hedge funds, venture capitalists, and other institutional investors with access to a network of frontline industry experts.

 He is also coauthor of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, the first business guide to how to use blogs, social network sites, and other online networks to accelerate your sales.

He blogs on the Circle of Experts Brain Food Blog and at TheVirtualHandshake blog.

 David formerly worked with Bear Stearns' Investment Banking division as a member of their technology/defense mergers and acquisitions team, and was a strategy consultant with Mars & Co.

 He holds a Harvard MBA and a Yale BA. NOTES ON THE EVENT: Larry Cohen, EVP, Heartbeat Software David and I see 5 main differences between the 'old school' and the 'new school' of sales and marketing:

 1. The new school sells highly focused products.

The new school goes after underserved, highly niche markets (and submarkets) that do not have much competition or many me-too products.

 For example, Heartbeat Software does not sell CRM to pharmaceutical sales organizations. We sell a highly specialized CRM product to Medical Affairs Departments and their Medical Science Liaisons.

 Due to our specificity, we are able to work with the majority of pharmaceutical companies and offer them incredibly specific learning from their competitors.

We aim to penetrate the majority of these markets (and have done so in pharmaceuticals). Similarly, Nitron Advisors focuses specifically on introducing their clients, hedge funds, VC funds, and law firms, to industry experts---and more specifically experts in transition.

The new school understands that we need to do a few things very well and that companies buy software because their competitors have bought software - period. One client told me that if no one has bought the software they would never buy it.

 If everyone has it -- what's the point? But if a few key competitors have purchased, they will quickly jump on board. Non-vertical specific back-up software, data storage, or cell phones are not specific enough to attract the new school.

 2. The new school does not waste valuable marketing dollars on soft, non-focused, and unproven channels.

The new school uses on-line and off-line tools that have a proven, measurable ROI by creating a direct, track able, one-to-one relationship with our customers.

Among the major mechanisms for this: + highly targeted old school cold calling with a new school spin; selling a proven piece of software to a sub-market that is not being called on; + e-mail marketing to very specific titles and organizations where we have market share, with tracking provided by software provider; + Pay per Click search engine advertising (Google, etc.) + Pay per Call search engine advertising (Ingenio, etc.) (Teten's editorial note: Eloqua offers some useful marketing ROI tools.)

3. The new school focuses on smarts & network, not necessarily experience.

 Sales methodologies are interesting.They are also boring and notoriously difficult to get to stick or to actually change behavior.

The new school understands that growing a stellar sales team is about hiring smart, energetic people who are great at sales.

 What makes a good salesperson?

The new school knows that it is one thing: A person that keenly understands the part of themselves that other people relate to and who can leverage that part to get people to buy. We hire those people. No matter what experience, sales training, or existing client relationships they have. Google famously put a billboard up on the road from San Francisco to San Jose that had a complex mathematical problem on it. If you solved it, you gained access to a recruiting website. The new school knows that smarts goes a tremendously long way.

4. The new schools taps online networks, not only face-to-face networks.

 Consider that 84% of U.S. Internet users have used the Internet to contact or get information from an online group—more than have used the Internet to read news, search for health information, or even to buy something.

More and more of us are using online networks, such as blogs, social network sites, virtual communities, and other "social software" as a daily part of our business life.

 All the major Internet players, including Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL Time Warner, eBay, and Google, are already offering social software tools and planning more in the near future.

 Bill Gates, John Kerry, and other celebrities are among the over 2 million people currently registered on LinkedIn, a popular business networking site. Nitron Advisors uses these technologies both to target customers and to recruit new industry experts on our clients' behalf.

 5. The new school sells based on product quality, not just on who plays better golf.

Many salespeople spend a tremendous amount of time and energy playing golf and drinking beers with customers. They believe that a personal “I like him" relationship is key to closing the sale.

 In the new world, that relationship is helpful, maybe even a prerequisite, but it doesn't close the sale.

Neil Rackham, founder of sales consultancy Huthwaite, conducted a study of whether salespeople who built good relationships would really make more sales:

"We found that sellers who dealt successfully with small retail outlets in rural areas seemed to rely heavily on personal factors in their selling. . . . For example, the seller might ask, “How’s Ann enjoying her riding lessons?" . . . In rural areas, where the size of the sale was small, successful sellers used more of these personal references than did sellers who were less successful." "But it was a different story in the large urban stores, where the average sale was more than 5 times the size. We found no relationship between success and reference to personal issues[emphasis added]." … "I’ve heard many other professional buyers complain about salespeople who try to open calls by cultivating areas of personal interest. The last thing a busy buyer wants is to tell the tenth seller of the day all about his last game of golf. . . . Many buyers become suspicious of people who begin by raising areas of personal interest."

Source: Neil Rackham, Spin Selling (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1988), 140.)

Alan Kaufman After Cheyenne sold, I retired.

 Soon after, I was approached by the VP of sales for NetIQ Corporation and asked where I found my stellar employees. The answer was that I trained them.

Training is incredibly important. Every new situation I went into was different. I never took a cookie cutter approach to anything.

 A good sales/marketer carries a quiver full of arrows and can use each one for any new situation that arises.

Sherri Sklar, President, Sherri Sklar Strategies, LLC As my first question, can you sell a complex software solution without meeting the client face to face?

 Ed Martino, Director of Industry Business Solutions, Sprint Nextel Yes, you can, but I wouldn’t advise it. If it’s complex, it needs lots of service.

The biggest cost is in the service side and your goal is to build a bridge to the customer and use them as a referral to build business.

 David Teten Yes you can. Salesforce.com does it all the time.

That said, the more complex the product and particularly the after-sales support, the more helpful meeting in person can be.

To sell virtually, you first need credibility (your potential clients and competitors look you up online and evaluate the validity of your service) and second, effective relationship management.

Ed Martino I disagree with David. Most of Salesforce's sales are to corporate customers and their success depends on the time that they spend with their customers.

 David Teten But it is impossible for a company to meet with all their smaller customers.

 Alan Kaufman You must identify how complex a sale is and whether you need to go out there to meet face to face.

 Ruth P. Stevens To be competitive in getting the product to market, how should the marketing be structured? What is the best marketing approach?

Larry Cohen At Heartbeat, customers pay for product development. Marketing should focus on specific departments in like companies.

When we call someone who works in hedge fund marketing, and say we have a product designed just for him, we get a good response rate. It's not spam if the person is interested in buying what you sell.

 Alan Kaufman Good marketing programs include people who are interested in talking to analysts to see how the customers are buying. I don’t believe in print advertising, especially if you are working with a small budget.

 Bruce Bernstein How should you go after your target market? How do you enable the sales to happen? How do you structure the sales team?

Ed Martino It all depends on the size of companies. It always takes lots of research and phone calls, and knowledge of the competition.

Draw 3 circles:

1. What business am I in?

2. What are the customers' needs?

3. What does the company have to offer?

The little space where the circles overlap is what you develop and present to the CIO.

Larry Cohen Small software companies are unable to pay to talk to analysts, so they must talk to businesses in the area for the problem they are going to solve.

Refer to previous success that you’ve had at one or two other companies.

 Ed Martino I agree that if you don’t have a large enough budget, don’t talk to analysts.

Talk to smaller CIOs from a niche group and then work your way up to the top.

Larry Cohen I agree with Ed. We use that business model at Heartbeat Software. Ruth P. Stevens The marketing department must provide good leads for sales force. How would you suggest that you develop these leads?

 Alan Kaufman Having an inside telesales group that goes through incoming leads and cold calling is good. You also need to develop a good computerized process that is repeatable. Leads from the Internet need to be shown to the inside sales group as well.

 David Teten We get to the big dogs through networks. Each member of our sales team (and of our whole company) has a personal network that we can tap. In addition, no surprise, we use online networks. We post intelligent comments on someone’s blog to make an entrée, and get into a target's network in that manner. Microsoft has approximately 1,200 bloggers out of 55,000 employees.

 There is no excuse to cold call Microsoft; just contact a blogger in your target area, and use their blog as a conversation starter.

Ruth P. Stevens What incentives do you use for the sales team to follow up?

David Teten Pay people a good commission. Develop a sense of ownership. Give options.

 Larry Cohen We have company wide minimums. If it’s a top 25 pharmaceutical company we go in person and talk to them David Teten In order to get leads, people should be thinking about how to talk to their particular network. This method is much easier than getting leads from a database company.

Bruce Bernstein The old school is emphasizing structure and the new school is going with leads. We hate the people who contact people for business by my boarding school alumni directory.

 What do you think about David’s method?

Ed Martino If you have a niche, then you don’t need to worry about making the phone call. If you’ve got value and you’ve done the research, then the other person may actually appreciate the call.

 Bruce Bernstein It might also be a generational thing. The youngsters don’t mind getting the networking call.

David Teten The issue is how to get the most targeted individual. Email used to be an effective means, but today, email is broken. You can’t reach people easily via email due to spam filters and overuse of the email medium. If you can find the name of person in your sweet spot, call them. Even the shallowest referral is better than an cold call.

Sherri Sklar What are the most important things that someone in marketing can do to create a buzz for their firm and their product?

 David Teten Get to opinion leaders. Get to bloggers. They are very powerful way to spread word of mouth. That's a large reason why companies like Foldera have attracted over 1 million downloads---great coverage in influencer blogs like Techcrunch and Om Malik.

 Lead events. Be a speaker and put yourself in a leadership position. You will reach far more people speaking at a conference, than you will handing out business cards before one. Reach 100 people, not 5.

 Ed Martino Blogs sound good. We want to look into them. Press releases are also good. Sometimes a trade show is a good idea, if you can find ways to bring customers too it. You will create a buzz just from saying that you are going to be at the show. Target is the key word.

 Marketing to promote your product in a targeted way is very important.

Larry Cohen For selling to institutional investors, I lean more toward conferences on asset management trends, rather than trade shows, since marketing and business people will be speaking at them.

Pay for your sales people to attend, and shake hands and create relationships. It's cheaper to send 5 salespeople than to get one corporate sponsorship.

Alan Kaufman The trade shows that you choose to attend must have your customers there. I like to allow our customer a chance to demo our products. If possible, get a small booth so people can at least see your company logo.

 Ed Martino It’s all about ROI. It can make the difference between a million in sales and 60-70 billion in sales. ROI is key. You must be selective and you must leverage the money that you put out to get a return.

Sherri Sklar How do you grow a stellar sales team? Do you simple hire energetic, smart people, or is there much more?

Ed Martino I am big on balance. People with fire in the belly are important, but what you really need is diversity because it enables different groups and people to bring in their abilities to the sales force.

You want young people who are energetic and idealistic to bring in pep, and older people who can bring in learned skills to pass on. You also need people from the industry for which you are selling.

The younger people will give you a lot of overtime. Motivation, however, is key.

 People need to feel empowerment and ownership.

 Larry Cohen We are a $10m company.

Each person needs to meet their quota. We do, however, go after a wide range of people. The key is to find people who know what about themselves makes them successful. We interview a ton of people, but after they are hired, 99 percent of them stay.

 Ruth P. Stevens As sales managers, how do you optimize profits to your firm when the sales team is always trying to give away a deal?

Alan Kaufman I think it is sloppy to sell on price. You can always cut a deal if you have to. If they cut a deal too much, the loss should come out of the salespersons percentage.

 Larry Cohen We need to train people to stay by their product.

David Teten Another idea is to pay your sales team a commission on margin instead of based on revenue.

This margin info should be shared with your team, but it often isn’t. We show all our new employees our full business plan on their first day of work, because we want them to understand the big picture.

 Ed Martino In smaller companies, I would drop price to get marketing traction. If the customer will eventually become a testimonial, then it’s good. You need to take risk. Larger businesses need to have focus. They need to pick customers. At the end of the day, you want sustainability.

 In smaller companies, salespeople don’t see the sales price, and that’s why they try to give it away for lower.

 Sherri Sklar If someone says that he is interested in your software if you can prove to them that it is buy worthy, do you fly someone out? How do you approach the relationship?

 Larry Cohen Because products are focused, we phone and then fly to meet with them. I’ve learned that we are more likely to make the sale if we stick to the price, because if we slide, then they may question the value of the product more and more.

 Alan Kaufman In today’s world, regions are a lot larger so you have to be careful about support. How would you support your product in South Africa?

 This scenario requires discipline in the sales force. They should know not to go after crazy leads. If it’s a one-time, you might want to walk away, but if it's American Airlines in Texas, you have a lot of chances to make other sales.

Sherri Sklar What technologies can you use if you don’t know what the return will be, you don’t want to lose it the sale, but you also don’t want to send expensive resources out?

David Teten Use all the media: IM, email, webconferencing, phone, in-person meetings. This allows for a steady progression of relationship closeness.

 Professor Caroline Haythornthwaite has done some very interesting research in this area showing that the more media channels you use, the higher the trust levels that develop between two parties.

QUESTIONS FROM AUDIENCE: Scott Lichtman How do you feel about PowerPoint and its role in sales pitches?

David Teten People buy from people, not from paper. The more talking I do, the less selling I do. Communicate value and use a slide show for support. You want the attention focused on the company and the project, not the PC.

 Ed Martino I am seeing that the PowerPoint is here to stay. Today, it is more animated and you are trying to stay way from stale slides. There is more animation and stuff over the net. Webinars etc. are a great way to get your story in front of a lot of people.

David Teten Humans are wired to be interactive. PowerPoints are passive, and your potential customers will learn less and buy less when they are passive. You need to keep them active if you want to keep them interested.

Bruce Bernstein What method was used before PowerPoint?

Alan Kaufman We used flip charts and then foils. I love listening to good speakers. A major problem today is that people don’t speak to the audience. Also, never read from your charts.

If you read to your audience, you will lose them. Using a wipe-board works for developing an idea in front of a crowd. Using a PowerPoint can be a disservice.

Audience Member In your experience, what best motivates a sales force?

Ed Martino Incentives work if they are fun. Recognition of achievement is also important. Build a plan at the beginning of each year. Each person should know what the accelerator and multiplier is.

If they blow the doors off, they will know what the cap is.

 Alan Kaufman Salesmen have fragile egos, and when they are in a losing streak, it gets to them. Give recognition to the people who perform the best. This has the incredible effect of reinforcing their positive performance.

 Audience member The three most important things for generating leads are current clients, (stealing from) competition, and referrals.

Larry Cohen I find that if they have a rolodex, it may be all that they have to offer. That’s why we don’t go with them. At some point the rolodex runs out.

Alan Kaufman There is nothing wrong with a portfolio, especially when you are trying to capture a vertical.

Larry Cohen We put out our own PR, and when we come out with a new product, we send out targeted emails.

 Bruce Bernstein Earlier in evening, David Teten mentioned that email was broken. Ed Martino said that there is no place for instant messaging in corporate America. Please expand.

Ed Martino Instant messaging is internal. Email should only be used because everything needs to be logged. Instant messaging isn’t on the radar screen, and it can’t be logged or archived.

David Teten As the young grow up, instant messaging will become an increasingly important medium. There are plenty of companies which sell archiveable IM and email solutions. IM is being used regularly across corporate boundaries—we use it with our clients.

 Bruce Bernstein Are there fundamental differences in advertising that that came out during this discussion?

David Teten

 1) There is a movement in spending from advertising in mass media to PR. We are so deluged with advertising that it has lost efficacy. However, people do read the actual content in the magazine around which the advertising is wrapped. A good PR firm can get you in there as content. We get sales leads every few weeks from a Businessweek article about us from last year.

2) Secondarily, there also exists a movement to advertising where you can calculate an ROI. We're moving from pay per click, to pay per action or pay per call. Compare that with throwing a million dollars at the Superbowl and seeing what happens.

Ed Martino I have to disagree because my company (Sprint) sponsored the Superbowl! It depends on the industry. If you are in a big industry you have to make a statement, so you have to go with pro golf, the Super bowl etc. If you do not advertise with it, people ask why you aren’t in it. Such mass advertising is important.

Alan Kaufman No one can afford TV. PR means hiring an agency. It’s best if you can get someone to develop relationships with the editors of blogs.

You have to stay on top of people who can influence the influencers

CLOSING STATEMENTS: Ed Martino There is more in common between the old school and the new school, because it is an evolution from one to the other.

Sales and marketing is fun and the interrelationship and interdependence between that and finance is important. Ethics is also very important. Ethics is everything.

You need to have respect for your customers and your competition. We need to be ethical about how we do our business.

David Teten We're in the advice/education business. Ironically, there is a lot of advice out there in the world, but most people don’t absorb it and don’t follow it.

They listen but don't learn. I encourage people to internalize the ideas that we've discussed here. I hope that people learned something that they can take home and incorporate into their sales and marketing strategies.

And as last words: A.B.C.---Always Be Closing.

Career Acceleration | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

(reprinted by permission)

Converting Gatekeepers into Greeters

By Debra Feldman, the JobWhiz

Correct technique and good manners turn interactions with corporate gatekeepers from frustrating to fruitful. Gatekeepers are not meanies; they are their boss’s designated agents charged with limiting unnecessary, potentially wasteful interruptions and unexpected interference that may negatively impact the boss’s workflow or productivity. Any unsolicited, meaning uninvited inquiry requires screening.

If you don’t know the boss, then you have to show the gatekeeper it is okay to give you an appointment, schedule a meeting, provide an email address, switch you to voice mail, etc.

 The gatekeeper uses criteria developed to evaluate requests. If you pass the test, you are referred to the boss. If not, you are turned away.

 The value proposition you initially present to the gatekeeper has to satisfy predetermined needs or be intriguing enough to captivate her attention allowing you the opportunity to elaborate on your interest and justify your request as an exception.

 Here are 6 ways you can increase your personal odds that gatekeepers will grant you access. Start with the premise that the gatekeeper is not an enemy but, like yourself, is a professional trying her best to fulfill her assignment, keep the boss happy and get her reward for a job well done.

1. Offer a low risk, high reward situation. Do your homework. Plan your presentation so it is clear, compelling and engaging. Pique the gatekeeper’s curiosity. Be ready to address the gatekeeper by name, to inquire if she has a few moments for your call and how her day has been. Listen. Do not charge forward just because you didn’t get voice mail. If she hesitates, sounds busy or is juggling other lines, offer to call back, even before you leave your name. Do ask if there is a more convenient time to call back.

2. Convince the gatekeeper that there is no reason not to offer you an appointment. The gatekeeper is balancing two competing choices: granting too much access to the wrong applicants and being too stringent thereby excluding individuals that the boss would want to meet. Her job depends on how well she interprets the screening criteria. If the gatekeeper believes it would be more detrimental to keep you out than to let you in, you have won!

3. The more interaction you have, the more invested the gatekeeper becomes in a relationship that contributes to a desire to help you and be a part of your success. Speak respectfully, be polite. Make small talk. Ingratiate yourself and it is more likely that your proposal will sound attractive. Be likable and you’ll get more atttention and be able to more clearly communicate your value, engage in a dialogue and have the chance to explain more about your business.

4. Follow the gatekeeper’s instructions, cooperate and be pleasant. Not only do you have to have a high quality concept, but your personality has to be a fit. If she asks you to email a request, do it and send it out within 24 hours or less before you are forgotten. Don’t be argumentative. Smile as you speak—it will come through in your voice. Your demeanor tells her that you are not going to cause trouble. If your are not cooperative ( ie. difficult to manage,) she may conclude that you are not worthy of the boss’s time and sabotage your request. Be patient and helpful. This gatekeeper may be your new boss’s administrator or even your own right hand someday!

5. Gatekeepers can become your personal liaison warming up the boss on your behalf and facilitating the impossible.If you can win the gatekeeper’s support, she can become your ally advocating for you, squeezing an appointment for you into a booked calendar, talking you up to the boss, giving you hints to help your meeting be more positive. If your encounter with the gatekeeper is negative, reconsider your goal. If the boss condones unprofessional behavior, do you really want to move forward with this?

6. Timing is critical. If you don’t succeed, try, try, again. Make your own luck. Don’t be discouraged if your first approach isn’t wholeheartedly embraced. Re-group and after an appropriate interval, attempt another connection revising your presentation, enhancing your value proposition and using better timing. Persistence and creativity pays off. Follow up is key to making progress.

©Debra Feldman, 2006, DebraFeldman(at)JobWhiz.com

Debra Feldman is the JobWhiz™, a nationally-recognized expert who designs and personally implements swift, strategic, and customized senior level executive job search campaigns, banishing barriers that prevent immediate success. Learn more about her groundbreaking techniques that compress job searches from months into weeks . Contact Debra now at www.JobWhiz.com to expedite your executive ascent!

Career Acceleration | General | Personal Productivity

The Office Chart That Really Counts Mapping informal relationships at a company is revealing -- and useful:

Two years ago, Ken Loughridge, an information technology manager living in Cheshire, England, uprooted his family and moved to the other side of the world.

His company, engineering and environmental consulting firm MWH Global, was reorganizing its various information technology offices into a single global division, establishing its main service center on New Zealand's more cost-effective shores and promoting Loughridge to manage the company's worldwide network, system, and desktop needs.

 "By and large, the staff I'd adopted were strangers," he says. To help adjust to his new surroundings, Loughridge took a map with him.

A map of his organization, that is. A few months before, MWH had surveyed its IT employees, asking them which colleagues they consulted most frequently, who they turned to for expertise, and who either boosted or drained their energy levels.

Their answers were analyzed in a software program and then plotted as a web of interconnecting nodes and lines representing people and relationships.

Looking a little like an airline's hub-and-spoke route maps, the web offered Loughridge a map -- a corporate X-ray, in a sense -- to how work really got done among his charges.

It helped him visualize the invisible, informal connections between people that are missing on a traditional organizational chart.

more

Career Acceleration | General | Personal Productivity | Social Software

We finally did it: we have made our new book, The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, available for free download.

Of course, we encourage you to buy the bound book at your local bookstore. It's much easier to read that way (and actually cheaper than printing out the whole thing on your printer).

Just as online dating has revolutionized the way singles connect, similar technologies are revolutionizing the way that businesspeople close deals.

 We wrote The Virtual Handshake to show you how to sign new customers, meet new business partners, recruit star employees, or even find a new job, all by using online networks.

 More technically, it's the first mass-market guide to "social software": blogs, social network sites, virtual communities, relationship capital management software, contact management software, and so on.

This was not an easy decision; we had a lot of discussions between ourselves and with our publisher, the American Management Association, about this. We were very hesitant to give away 2.5 years of hard work at no cost.

The top five reasons we're doing this are:

 1) We've gotten rave reviews for the book, but it's very hard to get people to notice a new book.

The Virtual Handshake has received extremely strong reviews in BusinessWeek, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, countless bloggers, and many other leading publications. It has also been excerpted in CNN.com and FastCompany.com. I just received a great review from Ron Lichty, in the Software Development Forum News:

"It’s not often that you read a book in an area where you have interest and passion and discover authors who both deepen and broaden your thinking. It’s equally rare to find a book that, despite being published, as books are, months after they’re written and more months after they were researched, that nonetheless introduces technologies and applications and services that seem as fresh as if they were posted to a web site yesterday. The Virtual Handshake was that for me."

We invested far more effort than we probably should have in writing a rigorous book that met our standards, with dozens of case studies, 300 sources, and extensive peer review.

Our explicit role models were academics who write for the popular audience (e.g., Bob Cialdini, Deborah Tannen, Robert Putnam, Howard Gardner). Readers appreciate that; the problem is getting readers to be aware of the book, in a world that publishes 600,000 new books every year. Providing a complimentary ebook is a way to increase trial of the book.

2) Frankly, we make very little money on each book.

We earn in the range of 5%-20% of the publisher's sale price (depending on various factors in the nature of each book sale), and 15% of that goes to the agent, and then Scott takes a chunk of course! In many cases, you as the affiliate marketer earn more on the sale of a book than we will, since you can earn up to 10% of the retail price as an affiliate, with no other parties involved. This is evidence that in the book value chain, the marketer adds more value than the content creator.

If the book becomes a bestseller, we'll make real money on it. But in the unlikely instance that it does not become a bestseller (grin), then the real value of writing a book is the marketing of my company, Nitron Advisors and our Circle of Experts; of Scott's consulting/speaking services; my speaking appearances; and anything else we choose to market. There are also a lot of other ancillary benefits to writing a book, which I won't discuss here. But to achieve any of these marketing benefits, we just need to get the book in peoples' hands.

3) Distributing an ebook is particularly appropriate given the subject of our book.

Long term, we think that every professional businessperson would benefit by learning from our system. In the short term, the obvious sweet spot of our market are highly computer-literate people who are heavy Internet users. Those are exactly the sort of people who are likely to be highly receptive to a free ebook marketing campaign.

 4) Providing free downloads has worked very well for Cluetrain Manifesto, Naked Conversations, Seth Godin, and Cory Doctorow, all of which were significant influences on our book, and all of whom we'd be happy to emulate.

 5) Insatiable curiosity.

It's an experiment. If it works, we can recommend it to others. To our knowledge, most of the authors who have tried free ebooks were self-published. AMACOM Books (the American Management Association) is experimenting just as we are. So, download it now, tell a friend, post a link to http://thevirtualhandshake.com/free-book-download.htm on your blog, etc. Once you've read it, we'd greatly appreciate a review on your blog, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, company newsletter, or any other appropriate venue. And of course, we always value your feedback. Enjoy!

Career Acceleration | General | Personal Productivity | Social Software

I am happy to report that we are relaunching the Nitron Advisors Circle of Experts Brain Food blog from a new home on the Web, http://www.CircleOfExperts.com/blog . Please tell your friends! From that link, you can subscribe with your favorite blog reader (Bloglines, Newsgator, etc.) or get every posting via email.

If you would like to change your subscription, unsubscribe, or make other changes, just visit http://lists.circleofexperts.com/mailman/listinfo/brain-food .

We will continue to write on Brain Food about career acceleration, business acceleration, consulting opportunities for industry experts, investment research, and online networks. We always welcome suggestions from people with good content.
We have several sister blogs and mailing lists we recommend:
http://www.nitronadvisors.com/mailing-list.html – two mailing lists for businesspeople interested in independent consulting assignments and new full-time jobs

http://www.circleofexperts.com/nyc : worthwhile business conferences, panels, and other events in the New York area

http://www.TheVirtualHandshake.com : how to sign new clients, raise capital, or even find your dream job with blogs, social network sites, and other online networks. You can also download there a complimentary copy of my new book, The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online.
To make sure that this email gets through to you, please add brain-food-blog-do-not-reply@circleofexperts.com to your address book or trusted sender list.Thanks for reading, and if you like this blog, please tell your friends!

General | Social Software | Events | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration | Private Equity Investing | Public Markets Investing | Securities Research

Two people—one a nattily dressed young white man, the other a middle-aged black woman who is slightly overweight—apply for a job with your organization. They seem equally qualified, but the hiring manager has an inexplicable and slightly negative reaction to the woman. “I just can’t put my finger on it," he tells you, “but I don’t think she’ll be a good fit." You agree, admitting you just have a feeling the male applicant would be a better performer.

more: SHRM: How to Detect Hidden Bias

Personal Productivity | Career Acceleration

Guy Kawasaki devotes a lot more time than I seem to have handy to write thoughtful, well-organized pieces, like his list of tips for The Effective Emailer.

Social Software | Personal Productivity

an offer from my coauthor Scott Allen: Next Wednesday, February 8, from 1:00-2:30 Pacific (4:00-5:30 EST), I'll be doing a no-cost teleseminar with Steven Van Yoder, author of Get Slightly Famous (review), on how to use blogs, social network sites, and online communities to increase your exposure and position yourself as a thought leader in your field. Some of the topics we'll cover include:

• 12 steps to use online network sites and blogs to become a virtual guru
• An overview of several important online network sites and how to choose the best ones for your business
• Demystifying the world of blogs and social network sites, even for the "technically challenged"
• How to select and engage effectively in online network sites
• How to create your own group within a social network site
• How to position yourself as a Slightly Famous expert online

The teleseminar is free, but seats are limited, so you will need to register in advance.

Social Software | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

The Rotman business school is offering a complimentary book compiling the best articles from their magazine , in a book called A New Way to Think: The Best of Rotman Magazine". (yes, i like stuff that doesn't cost anything...)

Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

I think that one of the most obvious applications of the wiki model is in the legal space, and no surprise, it's been launched: wiki-law.org .

I think that this site has the potential to significantly change the practice of law.

 My motivation and likelihood to contribute to this site is far higher than it is to contribute to Wikipedia.

 Like many businesspeople, I already have a library of template contracts; why not share them? (And I'm not even a lawyer.)

For TheVirtualHandshake.com, I held an email interview with Pangea3's Vice President of Litigation & Research, Dan Savitt, about the site. (Dan is a recovering litigator.)

Teten: What other online legal resources do you consider comparable or competitors to wiki-law.org?

Savitt: FindLaw is a common and widely used resource for a broad array of areas.

But it isn't always well-maintained, with broken links and such and it isn't always intuitively organized.

My favorite free legal service, albeit not entirely open source, is the Legal Information Institute’s site (run by Cornell Law School).

I know that LII is developing an open source legal encyclopedia but is extending invitations to only its members.

Law.com is a good resource for legal news.

Teten: When A hires B to do legal work for him, who owns the text of the resulting contract? Does A have unlimited rights to post that text on a wiki, share it with friends, etc.?

Savitt: I'm not sure but the terms of the engagement would likely govern, with the default being that the client has unlimited rights to do what he wishes with the work so long as the attorney did not reserve rights in it.

Generally speaking, the attorney would not retain any property rights in the legal content of the document-- because the law isn't copyrightable -- although the attorney could retain a property interest in the format of the contract if the form is unique and the attorney takes steps to protect his interest by imprinting the form with a copyright notice and a reservation of rights.

For example, Blumberg is the dominant publisher of legal forms.

Its forms are copyrighted.

And Blumberg has 10 different forms of subpoenas for 10 different situations.

 Now, Blumberg cannot copyright subpoenas in general.

Anyone can produce one, and Blumberg has no right to claim that it has a property right in all subpoenas because it contains the same language as its subpoenas.

 But it can have a copyright in the look of its subpoenas because it originated the look of its subpoena and the look was unique and not already in the public domain.

Another example is the cases that you pull down from Westlaw or Lexis. You will note that those cases have copyrights too -- but the copyrights are limited to the headnotes and Westlaw's or Lexis's added content, like page cites or other editorial additions.

Then there is the issue of intent/fair use, etc.

 If you go onto thesmokinggun.com or findlaw, you will find many examples of copyrighted materials, contracts, subpoenas, etc. But these sites aren't violating copyrights, because the documents were introduced into the public domain; the senders had no expectation that the documents would be kept private; the documents are not unique or may not have copyrightable materials; and the posting party put the docs online for newsworthy purposes/ for the public benefit.

But as the Supreme Court's decision in MGM v. Grokster last summer emphasized, a poster may be held liable for copyright infringement if it posts copyrighted material on-line with the intent to encourage users to infringe the copyrights even if the main thrust of the site is for lawful purposes. "We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties."

So if you are served with a subpoena on a Blumberg form, and you then post that form on-line with intent that people should use/copy the form for their own subpoenas (or otherwise know that people will use it for infringing purposes), then the poster may be liable for copyright infringement even if there is a substantial non-infringing use of the product/website.

Teten: In many cases, there is no formal term of engagement between a client and counsel. Client just says, please help me analyze/draft X, and the counsel does that. If there's no formal documentation of ownership between the two parties, what should we assume are the ownership rights in a given contract?

Savitt: First off, New York -- where I’m admitted -- requires attorneys to enter into a formal written engagement agreements with their clients before beginning any legal work, so your question deals with a situation that isn’t or at least shouldn’t occur as often as you suggest.

 It’s just good practice, moreover, for an attorney to have an agreement in place that clearly defines the terms of the engagement, including who owns the resulting product.

Nevertheless, if, as you suggest, there is no agreement or the engagement letter is silent on who owns the resulting work product then, as I mentioned before, I would guess that once the attorney delivered the product to the client, the client then has full ownership rights in the product -- be it a contract, complaint, letter or memo -- and can do whatever he pleased with it so long as his use is lawful.

There are at least a couple of caveats: such as, (i) the creation and delivery of a legal document by an attorney generally does not destroy any pre-existing third party property rights that are incorporated in the delivered product (like my Blumberg example) and (ii) that hypothetically the governing State’s law could suggest otherwise.

That being said, I’ve never heard of a case where an attorney demanded that a client return all copies of a contract or memo he drafted because the client’s use purported violated a common law property rights.

(The issue of a retaining lien is different and goes simply to enforcing the bargain between the attorney and client.)

Teten: Assuming wiki-law is successful, which is a reasonable assumption given the astonishing popularity of wikipedia.com, how will it impact the legal profession? In particular, how will it impact the "bread-and-butter" legal work that makes up a high percentage of the typical law firm's revenues?

Savitt: I don't see very much of a financial impact.

 If anything, it will detract business from other form providers.

That's because the beauty of law is that it is broad enough to cover new situations, and new situations rise up every new day.

What is good for A yesterday may not be what B needs tomorrow, even though B believes that his situation is no different than A's.

How do you ultimately know that A's form is good? It gets tested; modified and improved; and tailored. Ultimately, forms are only as good as the persons who use them.

Teten: Which is exactly the point of the wiki!

Savitt: True, but there is more to the law than cases, statutes and contracts.

In the end, those are only tools.

How to use those tools effectively to carry out your legal and business concerns? Well that’s the rub.

And it’s awfully close to falling under the scope of practice of law statutes, which are typically so broad that they can capture whatever conduct the state regulators want them to.

Just ask the folks at We the People and look at wiki-law.org’s own disclaimers.

We the People is one of several businesses that specializes in selling self-help legal "document preparation" service to non-lawyers using paraprofessionals.

(I remember seeing in a couple of unauthorized practice of law regulatory actions that they have offered reference attorneys, who offer suggestions but do not create an attorney-client relationship with the consumers -- to their customers as well.)

Their target audience is small businesses and consumers who can't afford to or don't want to pay an attorney for what they perceive as relatively simple legal tasks.

In essence, the site says use this great resource – but caveat emptor and don’t blame me if the information is wrong.

Ultimately, the reader has to decide for himself if he can rely on the information he finds on wiki-law.org. Is it is dependable? Is it complete? Is it up to date? How is someone supposed to know the answer except through professional expertise, intuition or blind faith? Lawyers know that the law doesn’t always work intuitively.

 I’m not suggesting that only lawyers can make that determination but odds are they will, as a group, be much better prepared than non-lawyers.

Wiki-law could be very useful in educating non-lawyers about the law, but it cannot teach the ability to think critically about an issue that is beaten into every attorney beginning with his first year in law school.

 Where I do see a tremendous opportunity is for attorneys to take advantage of the resource.

 I know that there are already dozens of web-based communities where practitioners of similar ilk compare notes and exchange ideas.

 In other words, the value I see in the site is as a legal resource, whose value will rise or fall depending on the reliability of the contributors, their content, and the strength of the site's editorial guidelines.

It may even work itself into legal opinions once it gains acceptance.

 I could see wiki-law as the ultimate living legal constitution that aggregates legal discussion, commentary and knowledge.

The possibilities are really interesting. But all it takes is one wrong answer and the resource’s credibility could be mortally wounded – causing attorneys and their clients to stay away.

Ultimately, the key will be in the content providers and their editorial good senses.

 Dan continued…. Interestingly, our interview highlights one of my concerns about of wiki-law in that my answers reflect only my elementary largely uneducated understanding of copyright law as clouded by my experience and understanding of property law in general – "Savitt on Copyright", if you will.

But I am not an expert on copyright law and I haven't reviewed any of the caselaw and secondary sources that are required to give a proper understanding of some of the issues (despite that I included a quote from a recent Supreme Court opinion that I happen to have on my laptop last night.)

 In other words, I learned long ago as a junior associate that you wouldn't want to buy this version of Savitt on Copyright.

 So, I just want to clarify that that my response is more speculation than legal knowledge That being said, I am sure that lawyers logging into wiki-law could annotate and properly give my responses the critical eye it needs and provide a more thorough response.

 But that leads to the issue of specific legal advice and independently rendering it to the public (something which we can't do here at Pangea3).

Would the site allow people to pose legal questions and then have anyone -- lawyers or laymen -- to offer advice tailored to those suggestions? Teten: I don’t think that's their current model, but that's a logical service to offer. Ingenio.com and similar sites already offer this sort of access.

 Savitt: The State Bar regulators wouldn't be too happy about that and might see wiki-law or its users as aiding and abetting the unauthorized practice of law, which regulators consider just as bad as engaging in the activity itself. And then there is the issue of liability for a wrong answer -- could the responder/poster be held liable for malpractice or under an unauthorized practice of law? Why not? A court could find that the disclaimer was boilerplate and not want to enforce it.

Then again, the (stated) purpose of unauthorized practice of law statutes/prohibitions is consumer protection -- and not job protection.

 Regulators who see it as their duty to protect the public from charlatans posing as legal experts may ultimately see that the public would be adequately protected.

30 years ago, paralegals in a law office were a rarity, and now they are an integral part of any decent sized functioning law office taking on tasks that don't require the lawyer's full legal acumen. 15 years ago, contract attorneys doing document reviews were a rarity.

But now even the bankruptcy courts, with their strict fee sharing prohibitions, recognize that they are also an integral part of controlling costs in any decent sized litigation.

 And in the past few years, the ABA has promulgated amendments to its Model Rules to provide safe harbors for working with foreign attorneys and those amendments have been adopted in one form or the other by many States.

One additional thought, as legal costs have skyrocketed, and there seems to be no corresponding increase in the caliber of legal services to match the increases, the public, both businesses and consumers, are looking for more value: consistent high-quality service, reasonable price, and efficiency from their legal service providers.

And they are expanding their sources for that value, which in part is driving Pangea3's business (although we don't independently provide legal services to the public): litigation consultants, legal technology providers, paraprofessional legal document preparation service providers and other alternative legal service providers. Wiki-law may fit in there but if and when wiki-law turns from a resource into a provider, well, then my paternal unauthorized practice of law concerns get tripped again.

 In the end, intriguing legal issues.

I'm having flashbacks to the bar exam as I type this.

 Regardless, the site -- like Pangea3 -- is a natural progression in how law continues to advance and adapt to the world around it, albeit kicking and screaming.

Thanks for the dialogue. Teten: Thank you! The legal industry, like the medical industry, has traditionally been marked (or marred) by a notable resistance to take full advantage of technology.

 I look forward to wiki-law, Pangea3, and other attacks on the traditional model upending the traditional apple cart.

Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Social Software

One of the major themes of our book is that email is dead. It's good to see that BusinessWeek is now picking up on the same meme: E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago:

e-mail has hit a wall, creating an impenetrable scale of conversations people don't need to be a part of and shipping around mounds of information they can't possibly digest. What was intended as a point-to-point communication tool has been stretched into a broadcast medium. …. Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. … [from comments: The 50% use of wikis is from a Gartner report from last November: "Predicts 2005: Support Improves for Knowledge Workers," document ID G00123809. The web site is gartner.com and enter the document id number: G00123809. ] At Dresdner, Rangaswami says that among the earliest and most aggressive adopters, e-mail volume on related projects is down 75%; meeting times have been whacked in half.

Social Software | Personal Productivity

(book summary written by Scott Lichtman): I recently borrowed a copy of The Six Sigma Way, a book by Pande, Neuman and Cavanagh (consultants to GE, Allied Signal and other corporations). While the book and concept have been around several years, the steps it recommends for services firms are fresh and valuable today.

Six Sigma refers to a statistical principle of reducing defects in any process (invoice entry, web page development, iPod manufacturing) to less then 3.4 per million.

More generally, it's a method for prioritizing the greatest value-generating processes in a business and reducing 'defects' by orders of magnitude - time and again.

 Defects can refer to data errors, physical flaws, or anything that a customer considers less than perfectly executed.

Usually, businesspeople associate Six Sigma with the manufacturing line, but it's equally valuable for services firms.

In fact, it's extremely valuable for knowledge-based firms because have spent relatively little time analyzing and perfecting their processes.

Some would claim this is because of intangibles in the creative process, but I suggest there's also a reluctance by higher-paid knowledge workers being to be subjected to "quality control." Let's look at a few service activities where process measurement applies.

 1) Accurately qualifying prospects. E.g., at what percentage of first sales meetings will the prospect say "yes, this is a service that's relevant to me"? Do you know what's an optimal return-on-meetings (or RFIs, for that matter) for your business model?

2) Up-to-date information on a web page. How many of your web pages at any given time have out-of-date information or broken links?

3) Clarity of marketing materials. How many of your marketing materials would prospects say they "understand fully".

4) Timeliness of investment research.

Did a research piece your team produced get to the relevant investors within a day? An hour? How long a delay is acceptable to your customers?

5) Finishing projects according to original schedule and budget.

The Six Sigma "cure" isn't rocket science but almost all firms that have used it succesfully emphasize the following steps in the following order:

 1) Identify your core customer-facing and profit-generating processes within and across functions. Also identify your key profit-generating customers.

 2) Have customer define the performance levels for acceptable and exceptional delivery.

 3) Measure current performance.

 4) Prioritize, analyze then implement improvemnets.

 5) Integrate Six Sigma into daily activities through ongoing metrics, "Voice of the Customer" input mechanisms, etc. Firms tends to fail at this process when they skip a step, such as systematically interviewing customers or "back of the envelope" guessing current performance.

 Firms also tend to underestimate the benefits of long-term adherence to the program and top management support; these foundations lead to both incremental improvements and breakthrough changes in how one does business, resulting in profit improvements of 10% to 30% or more over several years.

Quality control has taken hold in mass-produced services, such as call center response times.

 Now it's time to look at your knowledge-work business and find the benefits of systematic process improvement.

Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

Men's Health features a list of 14 body-hacks: ways to manipulate your body into doing things you didn't think it could do.

12. Make your heart stand still! Trying to quell first-date jitters? Blow on your thumb. The vagus nerve, which governs heart rate, can be controlled through breathing, says Ben Abo, an emergency medical- services specialist at the University of Pittsburgh. It'll get your heart rate back to normal.

Link via Digg via BoingBoing

Personal Productivity

This is the draft operating Manual for "Junto 2.0", a MasterMind group based in the New York tri-state area.

To learn what a Mastermind group is and how it works, continue reading… Junto 2.0 DRAFT MasterMind Group Operating Manual by David Teten and Kaushal B. Majmudar Outline of Manual

 I. Introduction

 II. Objectives

 III. Benefits

 IV. How Does It Work?

 V. Requirements for Entry

 VI. Process for Joining

 VII. Meeting Rules

 VIII. Suggested Meeting Structure (Subject to Modification)

 IX. Sample Meeting Topics

 X. How to Exit

 XI. Appendix 1: Ben Franklin's Junto Society

 XII. Appendix 2: Thoughts on cooperation from George Lucas

 XIII. About the Authors I. Introduction This is the draft operating Manual for "Junto 2.0", a MasterMind group based in the New York tri-state area.

David Teten and Kaushal B. Majmudar have been working together to create this new group.

Jo Condrill's definition of a Mastermind group: "A master-mind group consists of [a small team of] people who work together in absolute harmony to achieve diverse goals.

 While these people work in harmony, they may be very different from each other.

 The common element is that each draws something from the others, and each contributes freely to the group.

 It is the focusing of each mind on a common issue that triggers thoughts not readily available to one mind.

 Those in the group draw upon their unique experiences and specialized knowledge to help each other.

 When many minds concentrate on a single point, the activity generates a power over and above the sum total of each of the individual minds.

It is as though an invisible force joins the group and provides additional insight.

Personally, I have used the master-mind concept with amazing results -- first to advance my career and later to lead a group of volunteers to achieve remarkable results, ranking number one in a worldwide organization, Toastmasters International.

" (source) Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, is widely credited with popularizing the concept.

For more background, see also this summary from the "NYC Junto": http://www.nycjunto.com/whatisjunto.htm .

Our motivations in creating this group: primarily, to accelerate our success and personal efficacy in achieving our goals.

Anthony Robbins once remarked that only about 5% of his audiences actually acts to implement and benefit from any of his teachings on how to achieve personal and professional success.

 Many books on success emphasize the value of creating a mastermind group (perhaps using some variant of the term). We decided to actually implement the idea that so many experts recommend.

 We were also motivated by some bloggers who also are active in Mastermind groups, including the prolific Steve Rubel.

We are posting this manual on the Web in an attempt to gather constructive feedback and share the results of our brainstorming and collaboration with other likeminded individuals elsewhere in the world.

Everything herein is a work in process, and is thereby subject to discussion and modification as we receive feedback and as other members of the group provide input or suggestions.

 II. Objectives

 A. "Create access to advice, counsel, and personal cooperation of a group of people who are willing to lend each other wholehearted aid in a spirit of perfect harmony" (source: Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill)

B. Share best practices and resources

C. Work on self-awareness and self-improvement

D. Create synergies and new possibilities: “No two minds ever come together without, thereby, creating a third invisible intangible force which may be likened to a third mind" (source)

III. Benefits

 A. Accelerate your personal and professional progress

 B. An instant and valuable support community of peers and friends

 C. Give back to your peers and to society

IV. How Does It Work?

 A. Monthly meeting to be held for 2 to 2.5 hours, typically over lunch or dinner

 B. Absolute maximum of 10 members

 C. Rotate facilitation -- each month has a new leader/note-taker for accountability

 D. Occasional special training and learning sessions (possibly with invited speakers)

 E. Group will meet in a mutually convenient place (can alternate geographically if to makes sense to do so)

 F. Diversity of group is important. Strongly prefer representatives from diversity of occupations: entrepreneur, investment banker/asset manager, policy, legal, media, operating executive at large company, physician, politician, academic. We also strongly prefer diversity across race, religion, etc.

 G. Use confidential Yahoo! Group for online communication

 H. Democratic Process: everything about the group is subject to scrutiny, discussion and modification by vote of majority of members in the group.

V. Requirements for Entry

 A. Nominated by existing member.

 B. Within driving or commuting distance of group meeting locations (in our case in the New York Tri-state area).

 C. Has a compatible current level of career and professional achievements and aspirations.

 Some evidence of being a significant  achiever in chosen field. Potential to be at the top of their chosen profession or business.

 D. Thoughtful and analytical.

 E. Has the desire and inspiration to make this year, decade, and life extraordinary. Has an "internal locus of control": knows  he/she  is ultimately responsible for his/her own success. Ready to let their desire to be passionate about their life and work overcome their fear of change.

 F. Is an active listener. Responds well to, and acts on, feedback. Open-minded.

 G. Wants to win based on values; has a greater purpose.

 Cares about and wants to give back to their community and society

 H. Realizes that cooperation is far more powerful than competition, i.e., people who are committed to helping others succeed.

 Has an abundance mentality.

Understands and cares about what drives his/her partners' businesses.

 I. Ideally, not working in the same industry as any current member, and with a significantly different personal background than every other current member.

J. Enthusiastic about participating with intent to actively participate in the group and attend meetings in person (commits to provide advanced notice to other members in case absence is unavoidable in a given instance)

VI. Process for Joining

A. Nominated by existing member of the group

B. Submit resume and statement of personal goals (1, 5, and 20 years)

C. Interview and approval by all existing group members

VII. Meeting Rules

A. Better to give than to receive (but the law of reciprocity works – give that which you would like to get)

B. Try to emphasize solutions, encouragement and pointing out possibilities vs. focusing on problems, criticism, and pointing out hurdles

C. Share time, ideas, and best practices, but don’t dominate

D. Listen actively and intently with a desire to understand. “Seek first to understand, then to be understood."

(Source: Steven  Covey)

E. Maintain confidentiality.

 No one outside the group (not even life partners/spouses) should have access to any information about what is discussed by other members of the group, particularly the personal information of individual members.

 It is OK to share best practices and ideas that you have learned with others.

F. No putting down, arguing with, or directly contradicting other speakers. All discussions should be conducted "without fondness for dispute or desire of victory."

 "All expressions of positiveness of opinion or direct contradiction are prohibited."(Source: Ben Franklin).

G. Mutual respect and supportive environment to be maintained at all times

VIII. Suggested Meeting Structure (Subject to Modification)

A. Brief (one to three minutes) check-in by each member.

Start with the best/most positive thing to happen since last meeting.

B. Book report by one member - distribute 1-2 page summary of book and lead discussion (15 to 20 minutes)

C. Person I admire report by one member – distribute 1-2 page summary of person’s life and what can be learned from him/her (15 to 20 minutes)

D. Update and ask.

 Each person must state a goal they will have accomplished by the next month's meeting and review how they did on last month’s goal.

Members can also share issues/problems they are currently grappling with and ask for help/suggestions from the group to unlock strategies, resources, etc. that might be helpful in overcoming these obstacles.

 (5 minutes each) E. Free discussion time – discuss one question or topic of the day (e.g. see questions below) (30 to 40 minutes)

F. Distribute notes/highlights from the meeting to those (rare members) not in attendance, but who are committed members of this group

IX. Sample Meeting Topics

A. What is the function by which we should measure our life's actions? Proposed formula: Maximize: (Power * Money * Health * Spiritual Growth * Community Impact * Family Strength * Friend Strength) / Age, subject to constraints of: ethics, law, and resources

B. Accountability Sessions (potentially a recurring topic): Each person to ask and answer the following questions: What are my most cherished goals for this coming decade, year, and month? What concrete steps have I taken to realize these goals? What are the steps that I should take, but have not yet done so to advance in the direction of my goals? Why have I not taken these steps and when do I commit to start? - group participants to ask and HONESTLY answer these questions once in a while in front of the entire group to encourage each of them to realize and take corrective action, but in a more self empowering and positive way than if it were to come in the form of critique from others.

 C. Play the Game, a success technology developed by Sarano Kelley. D. Learning about Thinking Sessions/Thinking Partners (See book: Time to Think by Nancy Klein).

X. How to Exit

A. Member no longer wants to be a part of the group (voluntary exit).

B. Member fails to attend 2 meetings in a row without advance notice AND good cause.

C. Consistent failure to participate in or contribute to the group, as noted by one or more current members.

D. If there is a consensus among more than 66% of the members that you should not remain in the group for any reason.

XI. Appendix 1: Ben Franklin's Junto Society Source: Ben Franklin's biography, by Walter Isaacson “Ben Franklin was the consummate networker.

He liked to mix his civic life with his social one, and he merrily leveraged both to further his business life.

This approach was displayed when he formed a club of young workingmen in the fall of 1727, shortly after his return to Philadelphia that was commonly called the Leather Apron Club and officially dubbed The Junto.

Franklin’s small club was composed of enterprising tradesmen and artisans, rather than the social elite who had their own fancier gentlemen’s clubs.

 At first the members went to a local tavern for their Friday evening meetings, but soon they were able to rent a house of their own.

There they discussed issues of the day, debated philosophical topics, devised schemes for self-improvement, and formed a network for the furtherance of their own careers.

Franklin’s Junto initially had 12 young members.

Besides being amiable club mates, the Junto members often proved helpful to one another personally and professionally.

The tone Franklin set for Junto meetings was earnest.

 Initiates were required to stand, lay their hand on their breast and answer properly four questions:

1.) Do you have disrespect for any current member?

2.) Do you love mankind in general regardless of religion or profession? (Editor: add race, for the modern context)

3.) Do you feel people should ever be punished because of their opinions?

4.) Do you love and pursue truth for its own sake? The pursuit of topics through soft Socratic inquiry became the preferred style of Junto meetings. Discussions were to be conducted ‘without fondness for dispute or desire of victory.’

All expressions of positiveness of opinion or direct contradiction were prohibited under small pecuniary penalties.

 Though the youngest member, Franklin was by dint of his intellectual charisma and conversational charm not only its founder but  driving force.

The topics discussed ranged from the scientific to the metaphysical.

 E.g. Did importing indentured servants make America more prosperous? What is wisdom? In addition to such topics of debate, In Franklin's original Junto, the members used as a guide a series of 24 questions, such as:

1. Have you met with anything in the author you last read, remarkable or suitable to be communicated to the Junto, particularly in history, morality, poetry, physic, travels, mechanic arts, or other parts of knowledge?

2. What new story have you lately heard agreeable for telling in conversation?

3. Hath any citizen in your knowledge failed in his business lately, and what have you heard of the cause?

4. Have you lately heard of any citizen's thriving well, and by what means?

5. Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate?

6. Do you know of any fellow citizen who has lately done a worthy action deserving praise and imitation?

7. What unhappy effects of intemperance have you lately heard; of imprudence, of passion, or of any other folly or vice? What happy effects of temperance, of prudence, of moderation, or of any other virtue?

8. Do you think of anything at present in which the Junto may be serviceable to mankind?

9. Have you any weighty affairs in hand in which you think the advice of the Junto may be of service? In what manner can the Junto, or any of them, assist of in any of your honorable designs?

10. What is the most interesting or unusual thing you have read, seen, or heard about in the last month? What is the most potentially dangerous or harmful? The most beneficial? The most significant for the people here today?

11. What can we learn from world events today? Has there been any notable failure or success, financial, political, or otherwise, from which we can gain insight and understanding?

12. Can a man or woman arrive at perfection in this life? What is the proper balance between idealism and pragmatism in our existence? (Franklin's own question)

13. How can we judge the goodness of art, music, drama or literature?

14. Is science compatible with religion? What is the appropriate role of religion in our lives, if any?

15. What is the most important political issue facing this country in the next five years?

16. Have you lately observed any defect in the laws of your country of which it would be proper to move the legislature for an amendment?

17. Has anybody attacked your reputation lately and what can the Junto do toward securing it?

18. Is there any man whose friendship you want and which the Junto or any of them can procure for you?

19. Whom do you respect most? Why?

20. In what manner can the Junto or any of them assist you in any of your honorable designs?" Franklin was in turn influenced by Daniel Dafoe’s essay “Friendly Societies" and John Locke’s “Rules of a Society which Met Once A Week for the Improvement of Useful Knowledge"

 XII. Appendix 2: Thoughts on cooperation from George Lucas

 Source: interview at Academy of Achievement at www.achievement.org, in response to the following question: "You mentioned the words "communal" and "connecting."

Your generation of the top film makers all seem to be friends.

 How did you band together in a field that is so competitive?" George Lucas: “I think that's the advantage that my generation has. When we were in film school and we were starting in the film business, the door was absolutely locked.

 There was a very, very high wall, and nobody got in. All of us beggars and scroungers down at the front gate decided that if we didn't band together, we wouldn't survive.

 If one could make it, that one would help all the others make it.

 And we would continue to help each other.

 So we banded together.

 That's how the cavemen figured it out.

 Any society starts that way.

 Any society begins by realizing that together, by helping each other, you can survive better than if you fight each other and  compete with each other.

 Farming cultures started this way, and the first hunting cultures started this way.

 Everything started in city-states.

 We have a tendency to lose it when we forget that, as a group, we are stronger than we are as individuals.

 We start to think we want everything for ourselves and we don't want to help anybody else.

 We want to succeed, but we don't want anybody else to succeed, because we want to be the winner.

 Once you get that mentality -- which is unfortunately the way a lot of the society operates -- you lose.

You can't possibly win that way.

 Part of the reason my friends and I became successful is that we were always helping each other.

 If I got a job, I would help somebody else get a job.

 If somebody got more successful than me, it was partly my success.

 My success wasn't based on how I could push down everyone around me.

 My success was based on how much I could push everybody up.

 And eventually their success was the same way.

 And in the process they pushed me up, and I pushed them up, and we kept doing that, and we still do that.

 Even though we all have, in essence, competing companies, if my friends succeed, then everybody succeeds.

 So that's the key to it, to have everybody succeed, not to gloat over somebody else's failure.

 We continue to do that, and we do it with younger filmmakers.

 There's no way of getting through any kind of endeavor without help from friends. And trying to be the number one person,  ultimately, is a losing proposition.

 You need peers, you need people who are at the same level you are.

 You never know in life when you're going to need help, and you never know who you're going to need it from.

 One of the basic motifs in fairy tales is that you find the poor and unfortunate along the side of the road, and when they beg for help, if you give it to them, you end up succeeding.

 If you don't give it to them, you end up being turned into a frog or something.

 It's a concept that's been around for thousands of years.

 It is even more necessary today, when people are more into their own aggrandizement than they are in helping other people.

 I don't think there's anyone who's become successful who doesn't understand how important it is to be part of a larger community, to help other people in larger communities, to give back to the community."

XIII. About the Authors David Teten is CEO of Nitron Advisors, an independent research firm that provides institutional investors with access to frontline industry experts.

 He is coauthor of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, the first mass market book on online networks and social software.

 He runs TheVirtualHandshake.com resource site, co-writes a column for FastCompany.com, and writes a personal blog, Brain Food. David holds a Harvard MBA and a Yale BA. Kaushal Majmudar, JD, CFA – Kaushal is President and Portfolio Manager of The Ridgewood Group, a value oriented money management firm based in Short Hills, NJ, that runs managed accounts and hedge fund investments for individuals and institutions.

Kaushal was previously an investment banker at Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers.

He is co-author of “Create the Business Breakthrough You Want: Secrets and Strategies from the World’s Greatest Mentors" and is working on his second book.

Kaushal holds a JD with honors from Harvard Law School and a BS from Columbia University.

Career Acceleration | Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity

The Find-a-Human database is a public collection of touch-tone recipes that get you through big companies' voice-jail systems and through to a live operator. Add your own! Find-A-Human -- IVR Cheat Sheet Via BoingBoing

Personal Productivity

JD Roth wrote a good summary of about a dozen books on personal finance: The Richest Man in Babylon, Your Money or Your Life, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Think and Grow Rich, Wealth Without Risk, Creating Wealth, etc. "These books have embarrassingly bad titles, seemingly designed to appeal to the get-rich-quick crowd": foldedspace.org: Get Rich Slowly!. Via Marshall Brain

Personal Productivity | Career Acceleration

10+ practical ways to use your phonecam, from 43 Folders

Personal Productivity

Clive Thompson writes in the NY Times on Meet the Life Hackers. One of the key sentences:

"On the bigger monitor screen [the size of a big-screen TV], people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly."

Personal Productivity

Jon Udell shares: How to request a library book...via Amazon. Via Merlin Mann:

I still can’t get over how cool this is. Jon Udell’s little wizard lets you generate a bookmarklet for requesting a library book—based on the Amazon page you’re currently viewing. It’s clearly a flawless lifehack. You just need to know your library’s URL and which system your own city uses (which Jon makes simple by providing preview links to see which style your system seems to follow). San Francisco folks, use “http://sflib1.sfpl.org/" and leave the default system of “Innovative" selected.

Personal Productivity

The reliably worth-reading Merlin Mann crafts some more useful tips on Writing sensible email messages. His points also apply well to blog posts. EOM ("End of Message").

Personal Productivity

FastCompany has just published an excerpt of our book on the ten basic steps necessary to take full advantage of online networks. The excerpt is called Leveraging Your Links. Years ago, when I interned for Procter & Gamble, we were told to never write a memo longer than one page. This excerpt is our book written on one page.

Social Software | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

From Katrina Resources - a Very Unofficial List, via BoingBoing: "Don't have an SMS-ready cellphone yourself? You can e-mail from a computer to an SMS-capable phone.

Here's E-mail to SMS addressing for major carriers:"

 # 1+AreaCode+MobileNumber@mobile.mycingular.com Cingular

 # AreaCode+MobileNumber@mmode.com former AT&T users on Cingular

 # AreaCode+MobileNumber@page.nextel.com Nextel

 # AreaCode+MobileNumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com SprintPCS (US)

 # AreaCode+MobileNumber@tmomail.net T-Mobile (US)

 # AreaCode+MobileNumber@vtext.com Verizon (incl. AirTouch)

 # AreaCode+MobileNumber@vmobl.com Virgin Mobile (US customers only)

 # AreaCode+MobileNumber@teleflip.com

 For all US cellphones with SMS (see Caveats below) For example, to SMS someone on T-Mobile with a phone number of 202-456-1212 send an email to 2024561212@tmomail.net More...

Personal Productivity | Social Software

I saw a very insightful post from Konstantin Guericke, CoFounder of LinkedIn on MyLinkedInPowerForum. He writes (reposted by permission): ________________________________________________________________________

Message: 1 Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 22:09:35 -0700 From: "Konstantin"

Subject: The power is in the network you already have Virtually all professionals nod enthusiastically that "relationships matter," but only a small group heeds the advice below.

They start networking when they have a need. But that's a really bad time to do it.

One of the core networking principles has been that you need to network proactively, meaning meeting lots of new people and build relationships, so you have people you can fall back on you need a job, an expert, an investor or a business partner.

 And you have to network with lots of people because you just don't know what kind of relationship you may need. And many networking sites try to encourage this old way by being a sort of virtual networking event where you can get to know lots of people.

LinkedIn turns this on its head by focusing on relationship management and giving members access to the people you need through the people you know.

The people in your personal networks are contacts on demand. As long as you have strong relationships with, say, 100 people, you have on-demand access to hundreds of thousands of people-far more than you could ever meet through networking.

So, what this means is that LinkedIn obviates the need to network in the traditional sense.

Unless you are a young professional just getting started on your career, you already have a network just from working-this is a network based on co-workers, bosses, clients, business partners, investors, etc. And this network is strong because these people know the good work you have done and are capable of doing.

 In the past, this network was often insufficient because it was just 30 or 100 or 300 people, depending on the type of profession and length of your career.

The person you needed would often not be among this group. But through LinkedIn, you have access to an on-demand network, so once you have brought the group of people who know you and your work onto LinkedIn (and these days, many are already on, so it's much easier than two years ago), you can just relax and know that you can reach the people you need when you need them-without having to get to know them all "just in case."

This is a fairly radical notion that transcends most existing networking philosophy. And it allows you to focus on working, rather than networking.

 One the network of people who know your work is built, when you need someone, search and you will find.

 Ask for an introduction, and you will get in touch along as your connection provides a strong introduction and you have a win-win proposition.

 As you help your connections reach the people they want to meet, you strengthen your bonds with both parties you are introducing.

 The best way to expand your list of connections is simply to continue to do work and do it well.

Your connections list will grow, and each connection will be an avenue to thousands of new contacts that are accessible on-demand, when you need them. -Konstantin Konstantin Guericke VP Marketing and Co-Founder, LinkedIn Professional Profile

This is very consistent with some of the themes in our book. I think that spending endless hours chatting at cocktail parties or chatting in online communities is a waste of time from a professional point of view. It's defensible as recreation, but not for business development. Whatever your job is, do your job well, and success will flow from that. What counts is not the number of people who know you, but the number of people who know you, trust you, and will pay you to do what you do.

Career Acceleration | General | Personal Productivity | Social Software

Daniel Akst has a fascinating piece on how much, and how, Looks do matter. The best observation:

Although looks in mating still matter much more to men than to women, the importance of appearance appears to be rising on both sides of the gender divide.

In a fascinating cross-generational study of mating preferences, every 10 years different groups of men and women were asked to rank 18 characteristics they might want enhanced in a mate.

 The importance of good looks rose “dramatically" for both men and women from 1939 to 1989, the period of the study, according to David M. Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas.

 On a scale of 1 to 3, the importance men gave to good looks rose from 1.50 to 2.11. But for women, the importance of good looks in men rose from 0.94 to 1.67.

In other words, women in 1989 considered a man’s looks even more important than men considered women’s looks 50 years earlier.

Since the 1930s, Buss writes, “physical appearance has gone up in importance for men and women about equally, corresponding with the rise in television, fashion magazines, advertising, and other media depictions of attractive models."

Personal Productivity

From TheDamnBlog.com:

Ever wonder how to hack an elevator to own it for your trip and not be stopped on any other floors? "The designers of some elevators include a hidden feature that is very handy if you're in a hurry or it's a busy time in the building (like check-out time in a hotel). While some elevators require a key, others can be put into "Express" mode by pressing the "Door Close" and "Floor" buttons at the same time. This sweeps the car to the floor of your choice and avoids stops at any other floor. This seems to work on Most elevators that I have tried! Most elevators have the option for this to work, but on some of them the option is turned off by whoever runs them. This is a rather fun hack, so the next time you are on an elevator, give it a try, you have nothing to lose, And this concludes Hacking Elevators 101!

Although I suggest acting on this hack would be very inconsiderate to the people on the intervening floors.

Personal Productivity

I recently had the chance to play with the latest versions of several software packages which I use heavily: Act! by Best Software; eGrabber by eGrabber Inc.; and Cardscan from Cardscan, Inc. Disclosure: these companies were kind enough to send me sample copies of their latest models. ACT! 2005 for Windows is a comprehensive tool for managing your key business and personal relationships.

I have been using various versions of the program since 1996. As with previous versions, you have a great deal of power to slice and dice your data in countless ways.

 You can customize many different components of the program to make it work exactly the way you want.

The new version includes some very useful features that previously I had to create kludges to simulate.

 For example, you now have one-click access to all of your open opportunities (i.e., sales leads).

The bad news: the program is slow, even on my fast Dell with 1 gigabyte of memory.

 It does not include certain functionality which I think of as mandatory: e.g., the ability to do a Boolean search of which groups a person is a member of.

Although in general I think Act is a very useful program, I urge you to test it on your machine with a large contact database and see if it runs fast enough to be useable in your environment.

 eGrabber is an extremely handy program which converts free text (an email signature; a profile on someone’s web page) into an entry in your favorite contact manager.

 This makes it much easier to keep clean records of your sales leads and the other people with whom you need to talk.

 It’s an inexpensive tool and well worth installing.

My one complaint: it does not properly process foreign addresses.

If you provide it with an address in France, even if you explicitly write “Paris, France" at the end of the entry, eGrabber will not properly enter into your contact manager the fact that you are looking at a French address.

Cardscan 7.0 is a significant upgrade to Cardscan 6.0 .

It is a small handheld business card reader plus a software program.

The handheld scanner is not notably different than the preceding version, but the software program is a major step forward.

With the prior edition, my assistant or I had to make manual changes in about 80% of the entries that came from this program.

Cardscan would make errors by running letters together, not understanding that an email address was an email address, and so on.

With the new version, we only have to edit about 5% of the entries that come in.

My only complaint: with a two line address (e.g., "#3 West 35th St., 7th Floor") Cardscan imports that data as one line with a line break.

However, Act! works better if that data were converted into two different lines in the Address1 and Address2 fields respectively.

 I could not find a way to configure Cardscan to handle this common situation more smoothly.

Anyone who frequently meets new people would benefit by purchasing these useful tools.

Personal Productivity | Social Software

I admit it, Dave Barry is one of the funniest writers I've ever read. For a great summary of some of the tricks of his trade, see How to Write Like Dave Barry.

Personal Productivity

From Target Marketing Magazine (7/1/05):

"Tricks of the Trade", By Regina Brady Are your e-mail recipients only seeing half of your subject line? Is your e-newsletter being flagged as spam? Here's a handy guide to some of my favorite online sites and utilities that should help you in your e-mail and online marketing efforts. And, the good news is they're all free.

Although Ms. Brady is writing for an audience of people who send thousands of emails at a time, almost all of her points are relevant to those of us who send out twenty emails in a day---if you want to make sure that your message gets through. More...:

Social Software | Personal Productivity

Wharton student David Moradi has written up a summary of Keith Ferrazzi's book, Never Eat Alone: and other secrets to success, one relationship at a time. You can download his notes here: Reader's notes from NeverEatAlone.

Personal Productivity | Career Acceleration

You might like Meet-O-Matic,. a very simple, easy-to-use, no log-in required, automated meeting scheduler. It's an excellent example of how a single-use device (e.g., a digital camera) can trump a multi-use device with lots of bells and whistles (e.g., a cameraphone).

Personal Productivity

Using search engines such as Google, "search engine hackers" can easily find exploitable targets and sensitive data. This article outlines some of the techniques used by hackers and discusses how to prevent your site from becoming a victim of this form of information leakage. More...

Via Automatt

Social Software | Personal Productivity

More on the ever-popular topic of how to clean up your online image: Loosing Google's Lock on the Past - New York Times.

Social Software | Personal Productivity

Invaluable advice: 11 steps to a better brain. I'm just waiting to hear that Modafinil is becoming standard issue at all the major investment banks.

Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management

Thomas Weber of the Wall Street Journal writes today about Backpack, a joint web-based to-do list. He also mentions several personal productivity blogs, along the same lines as Brain Food, and many of them inspired in part by Getting Things Done. These are worth checking out: - Lifehacker - 43 Folders - To-Done!

Personal Productivity

Are you interested in s-e-x? Would you say that publicly?

There are at least a few Silicon Valley executives who readily admit this in their profiles on social network site Tribe.net, or demonstrate it by the tribes of which they are members.

While some people are comfortable with a seamless blend of their business and personal lives, most people have some kind of boundaries between these aspects of their lives, a sort of faceted identity, as danah boyd calls it.

 In our latest FastCompany.com column, Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, we take a look at three dominant categories of networks: social networks, knowledge networks, and business networks.

 While these rarely exist in isolation, any given community tends to have one dominant mode. Recognizing and respecting the dominant mode within a given group will make the group more receptive to your participation, and ultimately make you more effective in your interaction with the group. Read more...

Leadership and Management | Personal Productivity | Social Software

From the New York Times, in an article on why and how active people burn so many calories than the inactive:

At meetings, [Dr. Levine] stands instead of sitting. Talking on the telephone, he paces around. In his office he has a treadmill in place of a desk. ... "My computer is stationed over the treadmill," he said. "I work at 0.7 miles an hour." A stand-up desk might seem simpler, but he prefers the treadmill. ... "Walking at work, first of all it's addictive," he said. "It's terribly good fun. I actually feel happier, particularly in the afternoon. You might think you come home exhausted, but you don't. You come home energized." For him, the treadmill has eliminated the afternoon slump, when a lot of people feel sleepy and crave candy bars or caffeine.

Personal Productivity

Venture capitalist Christian Mayaud, like me a follower of the Getting Things Done philosophy, posts his dream system for high-volume email management, , using technologies available today.

Social Software | Personal Productivity

The NY Times profiles legendary entertainment lawyer Bert Fields: Telling Hollywood It's Out of Order. Fields has never lost a case. My favorite part:

Even with the 35-minute commute from Malibu to his office in Century City, Mr. Fields says he still bills more hours than any of the 100 lawyers at his firm, Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman Machtinger & Kinsella, and he still returns home daily to Malibu to make lunch. A key to his efficiency is that he doesn't "do lunch," he said, nor dinner, drinks or breakfasts with clients. "I made a deal with myself many years ago that I would never socialize to get business," he said. "And I never have. Lawyers should get business because people think they're good lawyers."

Mr. Fields is truly a salesman after my own heart. Keith Ferrazzi/Tahl Raz in their book, "Never Eat Alone", emphasize the importance of getting business in large part because people like you and you are charming. Charm helps, charm counts, but Character and Competence trump mere charm every time.

General | Personal Productivity | Leadership and Management | Career Acceleration

From Mobile Pipeline, via Arieanna Foley:

Basically, the new phishing model will start with a log-in page for a public WiFi network. What you'd expect at any hotspot, really. ... Without realizing it, the user will enter personal information to the logon page, whereupon the hacker will proceed to put 45 or so viruses onto the computer. The attack is specifically targetted at business people - it will typically take place at a tradeshow, airport or conference. What can you do? Use a firewall. Use only those websites that have SSL security (watch for the logo and click on it). Try to use a VPN (virtual private network). Don't stay connected to the wireless network if you don't need to be.

Social Software | Personal Productivity

Danyel Fisher of Microsoft writes:

So you've got a spreadsheet with hierarchical data. Something like this, say, which shows how different divisions of XYZ corp are doing at sprocket, widget, and screw sales:

Unfortunately, it's kind of hard to read this. How much overhead is in Sprockets but not in one of the subdivisions? Where are the trouble spots?

This is, of course, where data visualization comes in.

This draws regions' size as the number of employees, and the color linked to profit or loss.

And now, you can just click one button in Excel to get it. More For an example of a map of the stock market with this approach, see SmartMoney's MarketMap.