A Word About Disney

I have spent so much time in business and talking to people about business that I have lost the feeling of wonder about what successful companies really do.

Companies that stay in business for decades do wonderful things  and make wonderful products.  I could pick many companies as examples and never have to mention a company that is outside the United States.

Today, I have decided to raise my performance standards. For my standards of performance, I am going to use Disney as my benchmark, because it is the best company at bringing wonder to the people it serves.

The way that the Disney company approaches business is to take a product or service and design it to be the best it can be. Then the company steps back and ask, what can we do now, before we go to market, to make it even better?

Walt Disney, the man, was known to be an exacting task master.  Steven Jobs, who was the largest Disney shareholder, likewise measured performance with a 40-inch yardstick.  They both succeeded in creating products that were excellent to a level of creating a sense of wonder.

Annually Disney, with registration thr0ugh its ESPN division, holds runs.  They bring out all the Disney characters and make every mile magical. They provide details for spectators and of course, ensure that everyone is included. This is the list from the kids events:

“Disney Kids’ Races Age Groups

  • 12 months and under – Diaper Dash for crawlers[“Diaper Dash” is just fun to say!]
  • 1-3 years old – 100m dash
  • 4-6 years old – 200m dash
  • 7-8 years old – 400m dash”

I am have found new inspiration and rediscovered the wonder of what companies do from what Disney has done with this event. None of this would have happened if it weren’t for the fact that the woman in the picture is my daughter, Heather Tran, who slightly less than a year ago was giving birth to my second grandson.
The tutu she is wearing, as you can see from other runners in the background, was worn in the in the spirit of the event.

She ran the half marathon.  For my own sake, let me say that again, maybe in a different way.  She is a new mother of eleven months, and she ran 13.1 miles without stopping!

Thank you, Mrs. Tran, for awakening me to the wonder of American business and perhaps to the wonder of what is possible for me in my own life.  You are an inspiration.

 

Multitasking? Give Me a Break!

The greatest hazard in the multitasking world today is the risk of not getting to the the actual tasks you have set for yourself.

Computers Invite Us to Multitask.

I have always had multiple tools on my desktop.  At one time my desktop was covered with a legal pad, a canister of pens, reference books, a phone book, trade journals, blank file cards, boxes of completed file cards, a hand-written spreadsheet, Roll-a-Dex, a company form for tracking activity, an in-box/out-box, and a phone.

Today, my desktop has a keyboard/mouse, computer screen where I have replaced the physical tools with a word processor, a database, a browser, a mail client, and I still have a phone.  The options of tasks has not been increased.  The browser though does provide the temptation for switch from one task to another and from works task to Internet play.

Obviously, dangerous multitasking is  something like driving a car, or better yet, using a chainsaw while you are trying to do something else.  Impossible multitasking is doing two things in two places at the same time.  For example, juggling six balls is one thing.  Juggling three balls in two places is quite another. Multitasking can be much like juggling three balls in two places.  A person will certainly drop a lot of balls when trying to do two or three or four complex jobs on a computer at the same time.  In the workplace you, just as you may wreck your car by trying to comb your hair, change the settings on your air conditioning, and driving at the same time, you may wreck your business and medical findings suggest that you may wreck your health.

Even before the transition to a computer, I found that prioritizing and staying on task was the important for me.  It was easy to step down the hall for a chat, pull a trade journal out of the in-box, open a reference book just out of curiosity to look up financial information on a company, call someone for social chat, and other things that took me off task.

To stay focused, I have always found it helpful to make  a list of the things I need to get done each day and do those things.  The days for me are less effective when I sit down with an idea of what I need to do and start working as  things come to mind.  I find myself more easily succumbing to distractions when I do not check items off the list as I go through my day.

So multitasking is not a matter of how many balls I am juggling, but staying on task.  If the task is juggling, I focus on juggling.  When I have finished my juggling task, I can start my next task.  When I find that I am flying from one task to another, what I really need is a break.  I clear my mind and return to my list of things to do.  Multitasking?  Give me a break!

Counter Offers: The Stress of Trying to Leave a Company

Counter Offers: The Stress of Trying to Leave a Company

There is some interesting history on this article.  The first day that I posted it, I copied it from a database template, and pasted the article into this website.  The content of that template somehow brought down the entire the website.  I could still see the back-end of the website but site visitors could only see a blank page.

When I published the article from the template, the article went out in feeds on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Feedburner, The title was “People are stranger than horses.”

I restored the website, rewrote the article in a text file, and published then it.  However, with an article titled “People are stranger than horses” already published, my rewrite seemed to need a new title that reflected the earlier article.

I was really having a challenge with this article.  I was experiencing a bit of stress in getting a very simple article published.

The relationship between the title and counter offers is that people may exhibit very strange behavior under the stress of making a job change, just as my website surprised me in crashing the way it did and was causing me a bit of stress.

People who accept counter-offers often find tried that they have gone running back to the problems they had been trying to leave behind.  Having made two job changes myself, I have experienced firsthand the pressure that a job change can cause.

IF PEOPLE ARE STRANGER THAN HORSES
What brought up the subject of people and horses and now computers pertains to experiences I have had as recruiter.  I have read that three of the most stressful things in life are the birth of your children, buying a house, and making a career move.  I can think of other things perhaps equally stressful, and births, marriages, and career moves for some people are not stressful at all.  They are part of the miracles of living.

In a letter of congratulations that I send to applicants who have recently signed a letter for an offer of employment, I tell them that the purpose of my letter is to help them prepare emotionally as well as understand what to expect in terms of a counter-offer.

A company prefers to lose people based on the company’s timing.  This concept is easy enough to understand if you follow sports.  Some of the more mediocre players are very valuable in the middle of the season.  They are trained and they know the playbook.  When the season ends, the mediocre players with no contracts for future work see their value drop to zero.

A counter-offer is simply a negotiation process.  The employer tries to convince an employee to stay with anything from an increase in pay or responsibility or convenience or nothing but praise.  The employee can engage in the negotiation or just sit there and listen with a deaf ear.

One of the toughest people I have ever known served as an Army ranger in Vietnam.  He and I worked at the same company for over three years.  He was a father of four and felt that he needed to make more money.  He sought and landed a job that gave him a pay increase.

When he resigned, he went through a counter-offer process with some people who were skillful sales people and could be skillfully intimidating.  The former ranger felt that the people who were making the counter-offer had betrayed him earlier in his career at the same company.  He sat with the people making the counter-offer for over an hour.  He politely listened to what the management team had to say and asked questions for more details.  He dragged out the process like a prizefighter drawing out a fight just to punish another boxer.  Finally, one of the managers making the counter-offer said, “So you have decided to stay with our company?”

This Army ranger stood up and said, “Yes, I have, but I need to make more money for the sake of my family.  He took out a pen, pulled a piece of paper from across the desk of the manager directly in front of him, and wrote down a number.  Then he turned the paper for the manager to see and pushed it back across the desk.  The number was twice his current salary.  He looked at each of the two people he viewed as Judases and then said, “Call me when you can move my salary to match that number.”  He then walked out.  No one called him.

As it turns out, this post has taken a different direction from the one that brought down my website.  I was certainly not going to copy and paste it from the same deadly document I have used before.  Since I noticed that the post was already out there on the Internet before I had finished it, I felt compelled to complete rewriting the post tonight.

However, tonight I could not focus on the strangeness of horses and computers relative to people.  This post discusses different life experiences from those in the deadly post.  Yet I plan to tell those other stories, soon I hope.  The experiences in that story were experiences that today are valuable to me.  On this night, I am just wondering about that Army ranger, who must be nearing retirement now.  I liked the guy.  He was a friend, but other people were put off by the guy, and put off when I tell how he handled that counter-offer.  They see him as arrogant.  I don’t know.  Maybe he was arrogant.  To me, he was a war survivor, a tough person in business, a friend, and a person who was not bewildered in the flow of life changes.

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Are you a card collector?

The first time I heard the expression “be a card collector,” I was not certain what the person meant. Collecting cards to follow sports figures or to trade in games had always been my idea of card collecting.

What I learned from a master at networking was that collecting business cards was part of the process of building a database and from there a professional network.  I also learned from this person that asking for a business card was a way of showing an interest in another person and their business. It was a way of saying that the time you spent with them was worth your time.

I was at the Food Marketing Institute trade show a few years back. The line of people waiting for cabs could be 100 yards long.  Just catching a cab could take an hour.

A woman I had met at the show asked if she could join me in line and share a cab.  She and I were going the same direction.

I was standing in line alone between two groups.  I was happy to have the company.

She was a former Procter & Gamble division manager who was at the show networking in an effort to get a new job.  She was going the same direction as I was and asked if she could hop in line and split the fare.

She explained during the ride that she had made a huge mistake over her career.  She had not built a network.  For over a decade, she had believed that she would never work for another company and that building relationships outside of Procter & Gamble was a form of disloyalty. She made it a point to distance herself from people at other manufacturers, people who had left Procter & Gamble, and especially from corporate recruiters.

On the day that she and I shared the cab ride, she had left Procter and Gamble, gone to another company, and had left that second company.  She was now unemployed and had few contacts who could help her.

She said that there was a certain irony in her sharing a ride with me, a corporate recruiter she would have avoided ten years earlier.

She said that being at that trade show and talking with the few people she did know, she realized that she had cut herself off from opportunities that were available to many of her peers who had done a better job of staying in touch with business associates throughout the industry.  She was very talented and yet did not have a workable network.  She had never collected cards.

Today there are many ways to collect cards.  At trade shows, people pick up cards from vendors and competitors.  On the Internet, it is fairly easy to build a network by joining professional groups that are ostensibly designed to provide helpful information.  Around the office there are people you can always get to know better.

The person who told me to be a card collector many years earlier was a master at what bright Internet people (LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Facebook)today have turned into huge enterprises: that is, the enterprises of helping people collect cards.

Jay Wren, Success!

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Interview Tips: the Chemistry of the Job Interview

For some hiring managers, the chemistry of the job interview influences hiring decisions as skills.  Hiring decisions have so much to do with chemistry that personal chemistry might be the biggest element in the interview process.  Think about it.  The interviewer has read your resume.  This person must have some reason to believe that you are qualified for the job.

I have heard more than one hiring manager say that they have made their decision within the first five minutes.  They spend the rest of the time reconfirming their decision.

Therefore, from there, the interviewer is interviewing you to learn five things:

    1. Confirm the details from your resume
    2. Determine whether you can successfully apply your skills to the job you are seeking
    3. Get an understanding of your interest in the job and whether the job is a fit for you
    4. Evaluate your reliability and your potential
    5. Decide if your personal chemistry will mix with the culture or personal chemistry of the company.

If you spend an hour interviewing for a job that matches your skills and qualifications, the factor that determines whether you get the job is whether you have the chemistry to fit into the company as well as other candidates.

Therefore, put effort into putting your best foot forward and making a great first impression.  Show an interest in the interviewer and in the hiring company.  Use open gestures.  Sit up straight and comfortably.  Smile.  Show the interviewer you have prepared for the interview by talking about the things that interest you about the company.  Have a meaning list of questions and ask them as the interview progresses.

When you meet the interviewer, you should smile.  Give them a firm handshake.  Listen to what the interviewer is discussing.  Listen to what the interviewer is asking you to discuss, and just be honest.  Your smile, your interest, and your chemistry will increase your chances of getting the job.

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