Eight Good Behaviors

1. Be a good coach

• Provide specific, constructive feedback, balancing the negative and the positive
• Have regular one-on-ones, presenting solutions to problems tailored to your employees’ specific strengths

2. Empower your team and don’t micromanage

• Balance giving freedom to your employees, while still being available for advice.
• Make “stretch” assignments to help them tackle big problems

3. Express interest in team members’ success and personal well-being

• Get to know your employees as people, with lives outside of work
• Make new members of your team feel welcome and ease their transition

4. Don’t be a sissy: be productive and results-oriented

• Focus on what employees want the team to achieve and how they can help achieve it
• Help the team prioritize work and use seniority to remove roadblocks

5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team

• Communication is two-way; you both listen and share information
• Hold all-hands meetings and be straightforward about the messages and goals of the team. Help the team connect the dots.
• Encourage open dialogue and listen to the issues and concerns of your employees

6. Help your employees with career development

7. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team

• Even in the midst of turmoil, keep the team focused on goals and strategy
• Involve the team in setting and evolving the team’s vision and making progress toward it

8. Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team

• Roll up your sleeves and conduct work side by side with the team, when needed
• Understand the specific challenges of the work

Three Pitfalls of Managers

1. Have trouble making a transition to the team

• Sometimes, fantastic individual contributors are promoted to managers without the necessary skills to lead people.

2. Lack a consistent approach to performance management and career development

• Not proactive, waits for the employee to come to them.

3. Spend too little time managing and communicating

(via)

The American asked the fisherman, “why are you finishing your day so early?”

The Mexican replied “Oh Senor, I have caught enough to feed my family and a little extra to sell for today. It is now time to go for lunch with my family and have a siesta. In the afternoon, I can play with my kids. In the evening, I will go to the cantina, drink a little tequila and play the guitar.”

The business professor was horrified at the fisherman’s lack of motivation to succeed. He answered, “If you stay out at sea until late afternoon, you will easily catch twice as much fish. You can sell the extra, save up the money and in six months, maybe nine, you will be able to buy a bigger and better boat, and hire some crew. Then you’ll be able to buy a second fishing boat and hire another crew.”

He continued, “In another year or two, you will have the capital to buy a second fishing boat and hire another crew. If you follow this business plan, in six or seven years, you will be the proud owner of a large fishing fleet.”

“Just imagine that! Then you can move your head office to Mexico city, or even to L.A. After only three or four years in LA, you float your company on the stockmarket giving yourself, as CEO, aqa generous salary package with substantial share options. In a few more years  listen to this!  you initiate a company share buy-back scheme, which will make you a multi-millionaire! Guaranteed!”

The American got very excited at the prospect himself. He said, “I definitely know these things. I’m a well known professor at the US Business School.”

The Mexican fisherman listened intently at what the animated American had to say. When the professor had finished, the Mexican asked him, “But, Senor Professor, what can a person do after getting millions of dollars?”

Now, the American professor hadn’t thought that far. He was taken aback by the question.

So he quickly figured out an answer “Amigo! With all that dough, you can retire. Yeah! Retire for life! You can buy a little villa with a picturesque fishing village like this one, and purchase a small boat for going fishing in the morning, You can have lunch with your wife every day, and a siesta in the afternoon, with nothing to worry you. In the afternoon, you can spend quality time with your kids, and after dinner in the evening, play guitar with your friends in the cantina, drinking tequila. Yeah, with all the money, my friend, you can retire and take it easy.”

Puzzled with the American’s suggestion, the Mexican fisherman replied, “but, Senor Professor, I do that already!”

——————————

…. I’m just saying!

2010 will be an Excelent year!

I wish you all the best, and may all your dreams come true.

In 2010 I’ll sure be #WorkingOnADream!

I want to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Even if you have nothing, you can get anything. But your attitude & approach should be positive.

I think this is very important to all the entrepreneurs out there.

It is a very useful book for those who are discovering the bennefits of social media and want to grow their business or adventure into new teritory.

For the ones that use social media daily, most of the ideas presented in this book are known, but still, they can help put things into a more clear perspective and bring up new ideas.

So it is a book worth reading / listening to.

I will point out the key points of each chapter.

Chapter 1. Word of mouth goes world of mouth

• Despite niche fragmentation caused by the internet, people still desire an understanding of what the majority is doing. Social media is that mechanism.
• Spending time on social media makes you more productive. Social media is the mechanism that allows users to avoid information indigestion.
• Business models need to shift. Simply digitizing old business models doesn’t work. Business need to fully transform to properly address the impact and demands of social media.
• Traditional magazines and newspaper are struggling for online survivor because some of the most qualified people to write a story are qualified bloggers who write for the sheer joy of it.
• In the future we will no longer look for the news. Rather the news will find us or we will create it. That future is now.
• A key aspect of social media is the ability of millions to tag items just like you would label a Manila folder. This helps catalog the information on the web and makes it easier for all users.
• Not all great viral marketing ideas  need to originate in the marketing department. It is prudent to team up with already successful programs.

Chapter 2. Social media = preventive behavior. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube.

• Businesses and people are willing to have open diaries within social media as a way to stay connected.
• What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube.
• Individuals and companies are starting to leave their lives as if their mothers or board of directors are watching their every move because they probably are.
• Social media connects parents to their kids like never before.
• Social media enables frustrated customers to immediately post their frustrations.
• Negative comments and posts are easier for companies to find with social media. Hence those companies have more time to focus on the solution rather than spending time finding the problem.
• Effective companies and people relish critical feedback via social media.
• Poor companies spend time attempting to obfuscate or manipulate negative comments within social media.  Good companies spend time addressing and resolving customer complains.

Chapter 3. Social media = braggadocian behavior. It’s all about Me, Me, ME!

• Social media allows individuals to take real time inventory of their lives and helps answer the age old question: What am I doing with my life.
• Reality TV has been replaced by reality social media. It’s all about my friends and my own reality.
• Social media is the new inbox. Younger generations finds email antiquated and passe.
• Generations Y and Z interpersonal communication skills have been retarded by reliance on social media tools that aren’t face to face or verbal.
• Generations Y and Z have a desire to contribute to the greater world around them and leverage social media for social and charitable causes.
• Consumers want to take ownership of your brand and brag about your product. Let them!

Chapter 4. Obama’s success driven by social media.

• Open two way conversations are much more effective than unilateral communications to your audience for politics and businesses.
• By engaging voters, social media has had a positive impact on voter turnout.
• The adoption of online in the future could save a lot of money in lost productivity.
• We are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence in terms of being able to predict and control influence outbreaks.
• Fortune 500 companies should learn from Obama’s faith in social media and allowance of the public to take ownership of his brand and grow it to unexpected levels of success.
• Just like businesses, politicians and governments need to keep up with the advancements in social media. Otherwise they will be left behind.

Chapter 5. I care more about what my neighbour thinks than what Google thinks.

• Consumers are looking to peers for recommendations on products, services, health issues and more via social media.
• Social media helps eliminate different people performing the same tasks.
• The old adage that you can have only two of these: cheep, quick or quality doesn’t hold true with social media.
• Successful companies in social media will function more like entertainment companies, publishers or party planners, rather than as traditional advertisers.
• With the increasing popularity of eBooks there will be new digital placement opportunities for brands. Similar to product placement in movies.
• The most successful social media and mobile applications are those that allow users to brag, compete, or look cool by passing it on.
• The main threat to Google in the search war is not another search engine but the rise of search queries in social media.

Chapter 6. Death of social schizophrenia

• The transparency and speed of information exchange within social media mediates casual schizophrenic behavior.  Having a work personality and having a party personality will soon become extinct.
• Being well rounded as a company or individual is less beneficial. It’s more productive to play to your core strength. This differentiates you from the competition.
• Companies that produce great products and services, rather than companies that simply rely on great messaging will be winners in a socialnomics world.
• Marketers jobs have changed from creating and pushing to one that requires listening, engaging and reacting to potential and current customer needs.

Chapter 7. Winners and losers in a 140 character world.

• No person or company is perfect so you are best to admit your faults and the public will respect you for it.
• Advertising historically has been wrapped around the content. It now needs to be integrated with the content to take advantage of viral opportunities.
• Companies should leverage the Tom Sawyer approach. Let fanatics contribute to your product, show, or service.
• Your customers fans of today are the potential competition of tomorrow.
• Listen first, sell second.
• It’s better to live a social media making mistakes than living a social media live doing nothing.
• Don’t forget that SEO and social media go hand in hand.

Chapter 8. Next seps for companies and the glass house generation.

• Don’t build your own field of nightmares by building or replicating a social network for your company. If you build it, they most likely will not come. You are better connecting to the best in class social media tools that exist.
• Social media is helping to drive the transformation of mobile devices being the dominant internet access point instead of computers.
• The information exchanged in social media in relation to job searching and recruiting has rendered it unrecognizable from the information exchanged 10 years ago.
• Just as marketing will become more referral based, job seeking and recruiting will be more referral based than ever before.
• The younger generation’s interpersonal communication skills are starting to suffer as a result of over dependence on non verbal and non face to face interactions.
• Search engine results and the traditional internet advertising model are antiquated. Social media will push both of these to revolutionize. Otherwise they will see a dramatic decrease in market share.
• The overall achievement of individuals and companies will be largely dependent on their social media success.

End summary: It’s all about the economy stupid! No, it’s all about a people economy driven, stupid!

And I will leave you with a video that I hope will convince you (once again) that socialnomics is the new way of doing business.

Yes, listen and not read, because I prefer to listen to a book. It’s more convenient. It’s easier to listen than read while I’m in traffic, or when I have short periods of free time. Also, I can listen at twice the normal speed, that can save quite some time.

It’s a very interesting concept that can help you a lot. The internet is very much about creating blue oceans. Opening new markets that did not exist before. It’s a book that I reccomand to all young entrepreneurs.

The blue ocean strategy focuses on 6 key principles:

Principle 1: Reconstruct market boundaries.
Principle 2: Focus on the big picture, not the numbers.
Principle 3: Reach beyond existing demand.
Principle 4: Get the strategic sequence right.
Principle 5: Overcome key organizational hurdles.
Principle 6: Build execution into strategy.

I wanted to tell you more about this book but I have discovered some great summaries and presentation of it, so I will let this video and presentation do the talking for me:

Blue Ocean Strategy Summary

And if all this have convinced you that is a book worth reading, you can find it here, or read it from google books.

1. Set the theme with a single headline
   • Make your theme clear and consistent
   • Create a headline that sets the direction for your presentation
2. Provide the outline
   • Open and close each section with a clear transition
   • The point is: Make it easy for your listeners to follow your story
3. Demonstrate Enthusiasm
   • Wow your audience
   • If you’re not passionate about your company, product or service, we’re not going to be!
4. Sell an Experience
   • Analogies help connect the dots for your audience
   • Make numbers meaningful
5. Make it visual
   • Paint a simple picture that doesn’t overwhelm
   • Inspiring presentations are short on bullet points and big on visuals
6. Threat your presentation like a show
   • Identify your memorable moment and build up to it
   • Spend time to rehearse.
   • And one more thing: Give your audience an added bonus to walk away with

It was the first Agile event in Romania and I consider it a great success.

I helped promoting the event through www.Lucrez.in/IT and I was also a speaker, talking about an Agile Startup (but more on this in an other post).

I was glad to see that from the first edition, the conference had great speakers:

Jurgen Appelo – The CIO of a Dutch IT company, a manager that I look up to, a great speaker and soon author.

Corey Haines – The Software Journeyman, a very nice guy whom I appreciate a lot as a programmer but most because he stopped working at corporations and started traveling and programming with others, teaching them not to write crappy code.

I also spent more time talking with two great professionals Lucian Parvu – PM @ Luxoft Romania and Razvan Gliga – IT Architect @ IBM Romania.

It was very good to see how uberVU used Agile in a talk given by Mihnea Giurgea and Mircea Pasoi.

The discussions were great, the audience was larger than I expected and I learned a lot of the importance of Agile development.

Kudos to Maria Diaconu for putting up such a great event.