Quote: Chances

“Use the formulae P=40 to 70, in which P stands for the possibility of success and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired. Once the information is in the 40 to 70 range, go with your gut.”
—General Colin Powell, U.S. Army (Retired), Former United States Secretary of State

The Chief Executive, the Leader

In the latter half of the 1990s an issue that would often enter conversation in larger circles was the compensation gap between members of the military and their civilian counterparts. At this time, for instance, anyone that worked with information technology was making next to nothing in the military compared to their counterparts in the civilian world. Those in career fields such as infantry, however, it was rumored, often had problems finding jobs in the private sector outside of police or security: Not a lot of demand for advancing on an enemy and holding ground in the free market. Something that arose from this discussion was the compensation of the Army’s top general: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000 to $150,000 after benefits as opposed to a chief executive officer of a private corporation of equivalent size for, conservatively, $1.5 million.

This was during the same time when my military career was progressing from its earliest phases of learning the ropes of a private to determining that I did, in fact, wish to train to become the general on the cover of the Army magazine that had General Dennis Reimer’s picture on it. I began to develop a mental list of skill sets of leaders of organizations—mostly larger ones, like the Army and major commands that I belonged to—and work on finding application of them in daily life.

· Selecting a team: It is about the people. People are the key in any organization; no matter how much the leader is a superman or superwoman, you need to have people to “do the stuff” of the organization. Things like character and ethics is nearly impossible to teach; when bringing people onto your team ensure that their ideals fall in line with your expectations and the culture of the organization. Skills can be learned, character cannot.

It has been shown, from the smallest start-ups to the largest multi-national corporations, that no product or service is of more value than the people that produce it or the people that receive the service or purchase the good. Employees are everywhere, but good employees are worth their weight in gold. On the same token, while customers are important…any decent demographic analysis ensures sustainability in said demographic: Good and/or loyal customers are worth their weight in platinum.

· The ability to make immediate decisions, often without “perfect” information or not enough of it. Leaders are constantly being called upon to make decisions about the direction of their organization. Sometimes you will be right and others you will be wrong: An imperfect decision (or plan, for that matter) today is better than a perfect one tomorrow: People can always adapt and conquer tasks along the way in regards to the goals of the mission, especially for those mindful of the first tip.

· Develop a skilled team. As leaders rise on the organizational chart they’ll find their role shifting from technical or artisan to mentor and administrator. As a leader of an organizational unit, you understand the requirements for your team, what it must do, what the end result must be. Understanding where you are right now, the dynamics of your team, and the goal where you and your team must reach allows you to develop the skills and talents of those on your team and enhance their dynamics. If you’ve chosen your people well enough this will be much easier and much more fruitful. This can often be the most dynamic, most important, and most rewarding role that a leader undertakes.

· Awareness. Aside from the general awareness of your organization, the people in your charge, and the markets and industry in which you operate, being able to shift your focus between critical matters, strategic opportunities for success, or some other action step is essential in the skill set of the chief executive officer or other organizational leader. This awareness extends, also, to the financial situations such as cash flows and financial reports. Awareness makes a leader and a lack of it is the quickest way to becoming a loser.

· Communication. Each of the stakeholders in your organization—employees, stockholders, creditors, suppliers, and customers—rely on proper communication to ensure peak efficiency of operations. Regular, accurate, and effective communication strategies need to be established by leaders of any organization of any size.

· Handling success, handling failure. If something fails to succeed along the path to your organization’s goals you need to be able to adequately deal with that failure: If that means something as simple as getting back up, dusting yourself off, and continue running or acquiring proper bankruptcy counsel handling this failure is critical. Handling success, though, is also critical. Success changes the entire paradigm of your team: It can cause “growing pains” or change individual perspectives of your team members to change. You must be there to set the culture and the direction for the good times and the bad.

· Back up opinions with facts. Everyone has an opinion about something, but many people are apt to simply regurgitate information without giving it much thoughtful consideration; like the gray matter between their ears is simply a sieve whereas information, whichever quality it is, leaves the same way it arrives. When you hear something, do not believe it unless it either is congruent with your thoughts, beliefs, and ideologies as they stand or you have done adequate research and believe what is said to be true. Most people, see, are content issuing opinions without the requisite facts with which to corroborate or substantiate them: It takes a higher class of intellect to back up that which you say with facts.

· Handling change. Everything changes; if it hasn’t, it will. Change can be a destructive thing in which there are losers, winners, enablers, and detractors. As a leader you will be expected to see the change through to its inevitable conclusion with your head held high. Things might be good, things might not be as good as you had planned—but people will look to you either way.

· Walk the talk. For one reason or another you are a leader and you have either gained that station because of traits that you have or in spite of them. When you are charged with the professional well-being of employees or adding value to the organization you will constantly be looked at by subordinates, peers, superiors, and anyone looking in from the outside to show integrity, honesty, and other values that you should reflect belonging to your organization’s core belief structure. People will expect you to walk the talk and live true to those things which you say. If you say, for instance, that you have an open door policy and you do not live up to it, people will see that. A story is told of Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott tells of a Wal-Mart employee that needed to speak with Mr. Scott. Calling his residence, though, Mrs. Scott informed the individual that Mr. Scott was out of town on business, and gave the person the information with which to contact the CEO. Although Mr. Scott had been traveling all day he made time to talk on the phone with the gentleman having issues. The quickest way to gain respect is to make promises and keep them; the quickest way to lose it is to not stay true to your word.

· Will the real leader please stand up? The persona of many leaders is one who joins all the right clubs, knows the right people, and attends highly visible community functions. However, this veneer is something that can be peeled off, the real person beneath the persona can be any sort of person; sometimes those highly successful individuals are completely different people: Their persona is someone that you like to know, someone that you like to be around. Their person, on the other hand, is someone that you would normally shy away from in your group of friends.

These are just a slice of the “soft” leadership skills necessary for any successful chief executive officer. By far, the larger base of skills necessary for the role of chief of an organization is something that many people strive for and only a few people achieve.

Sales and Marketing in Everyday Life

Leaders, in my worldview, are those that practice the same ideals and principles in and out of the boardroom. They also practice economies of scope in such a fashion as to gain efficiencies in their daily lives:

“[Economics of scope is] the condition where fewer inputs such as effort and time are needed to produce a greater variety of outputs. Greater business value is achieved by jointly producing different outputs. Producing each output independently fails to leverage commonalities that affect costs. Economies of scope occur when it is less costly to combine two or more products in one production system than to produce them separately.”

To this end, I often find that applying business principles to daily life. Sales and marketing is a great field to derive principles in showing the people in your life the value which you have in the world around you. These principles can supplement your deeds in showing others perceived value.

1. Offer of yourself. Make promises, and be certain to keep them. By offering of yourself, you open yourself up to be offered to, as it is said in The Bible: ““Give, and it shall be given to you. For whatever measure you deal out to others, it will be dealt to you in return.”

2. Seek first to understand. A “Covey Classic,” this principle goes to the emphatic understanding of what you’re being told. Instead of giving someone your autobiography then seeking to bring them to your point of view, try looking at the world from their point of view by thoroughly seeing to their concerns then seeking for your own to be understood. This will help assure that a working communication is developed.

“How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?”
—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

3. Adapt your message. Each person sees the world how they want to see it, through myriad filters and perceptions, in accordance with their worldview. Because of this, you need to be able to speak in terms of the other person’s perceptions, try to see the world through their eyes and adapt what you are saying to how they see the world. Just as a typical basketball player wouldn’t much understand the technical jargon of physics, people will have a tendency of listening with intent to respond rather than listening to absorb if we choose the wrong way to send our message.

“The wise adapt themselves to circumstances, as water moulds itself to the pitcher.”

—Chinese Proverb

4. You are a product providing a service to the world; make yourself great. People look up to others who with traits that they hold in high regard; while the specifics will vary between individuals, there are culturally-held and universally held traits that can be displayed which can influence others to see you as great.

5. Up-sell. One of the times that I was in college I was not your typical college student, just traipsing from class to class, taking tests, and moving on. Instead, I decided to go above and beyond (something forged from my military experience): This became my trademark. Everything that I would do, I would take it one step further, going above and beyond a person’s expectations of me in that situation.

6. Closing. When you’ve gone through the steps and wish to “close the deal” on influencing someone to do something, it is most effective to close in a fashion that matches the situation’s requirements most closely.

7. Audience targeting. Although there are supposedly people out there that can do it, why would you want to sell ice to an Eskimo? You end up putting more effort into something to an audience that doesn’t need it. Why would you offer something to someone that doesn’t need it?

“The odds of hitting your target go up dramatically when you aim at it.”
—Mal Pancoast

8. Be persistent about being persistent. Everyone does things that fail, just as we all do things that occasionally work. History has shown over and over again that the victory doesn’t necessarily go to the superiorly skilled or equipped, but rather the most persistent.

“Success is almost totally dependent upon drive and persistence. The extra energy required to make another effort or try another approach is the secret of winning.”
—Denis Waitley

9. You, the Brand. The image which you present to the world is your brand. Everything you put into yourself, your actions, and the world around you is noticed. If you make due on your word, people will add more repute to your brand; just as the opposite is true.

“Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it's not going to get the business.”
—Warren Buffett

Sales, Marketing, and the Exotic Dancer

In my constant search for information around the Internet, I occasionally stumble on something that is as equally profound as it is strange. “10 Sales and Marketing Tips I learned from Strippers” looks at the intricacies of good sales and marketing—two business disciplines that go hand-in-hand—from the eyes of a man that frequents gentlemen’s clubs and, just as frequently, leaves with an empty wallet. He posits that this phenomenon has its core in the greater dynamic of commerce and not merely in the fact that there were scantily-clad or nude women performing for aroused men.

1. Something for nothing. An exotic dancer begins the exchange, the transaction if you will, by flirting with you; doing something to raise your excitement level. This free sample, just like the product demonstrator at Sam’s Club or Wal-Mart, entices you to purchase their good or service. The exotic dancer attains buy-in; your desire to purchase the good increases from a probability to a distinct possibility. If the sample is good enough, your likelihood of patronizing the product or service increases because you perceived utility and outcome are positive.

2. Customer understanding. A good salesperson learns their customers through questions and observations; allowing them to adapt their “sales pitch” and build a better rapport with their customer. The “sales soldiers” in the thickest of sale-and-marketing combat are the used car salespeople of the world: They instantly are working towards building a rapport with you in order to feel out your needs and desires for purchasing a car—that is something that is a bit more than a convenience purchase for most of us.

3. Adapt the sales pitch. The sales pitch is something that can make a potential customer into a paying one. If one sales pitch does not work, then the salesperson will try another one. The right sales pitch is the one that gets the person to reach buy-in; achieved by applying the knowledge of the questions and observations the salesperson translates into likes and dislikes of the person to which he or she is trying to sell.

4. Have a great product or service. Chances are that whatever you are selling can be had somewhere else; in all but a minority of situations there is a substitution product or service—in other words, if what you’re selling doesn’t stand out in some fashion, there is a good chance that the person you’re trying to sell will patronize the product or service from a substitute that offers an advantage to the product or service better than you can. This uniqueness of product or service that you have to offer better than other competitors is called your differential advantage. Certainly, if something is unappealing to you, and the salesperson is unable or unwilling to make it more appealing, then an impasse is often arrived at.

5. Good customer service. Once you are “in the zone” and servicing the customer, it is the duty of the good salesperson to provide good customer service so the patron will offer repeat business opportunities for the salesperson. The more satisfaction, happiness, or euphoria, the better because the stronger emotional attachment will be built into the mind of the person being sold. Good customer service also allows the salesperson an opportunity to up-sell.

6. The up-sell. Standard customer services are where “bread-and-butter” is at—or simply “just making it.” Real profitability relies upon going past the ordinary and into the extraordinary services that you can offer as a salesperson to your client. In the analogy of the exotic dancer, they will sell you the initial lap dance and work towards up-selling you on a trip to the “champagne room” where they have the opportunity to sell you a premium service from her repertoire.

7. Close, close, close. In classic Zig Ziglar fashion, the good salesperson knows how to “close the sale” with different techniques. The analogy of the exotic dancer shows that they like to use the complimentary close (most likely via flirting) and the companion close (by getting your friends to help push you into making the sale).

8. Target the right audience. Salespeople sell things to people who are in need or desire their service. The salesperson is always “pre-qualifying the buyer” by gathering information from those in their environment to find people who are more likely to purchase their goods or services than the average person. Good marketing consists of determining, as detailed and accurately as possible, the traits of your target audience.

9. Persistence, persistence, persistence. No matter how qualified an audience is, rejections will always happen. The good salesperson can either overcome rejections or overcome the fear of them and move on to another qualified buyer. An application of the Law of Large Numbers is that the more people you ask, the likelihood of making a sale is also increased.

10. Branding. When you think of waffles, you probably think of Eggo or Bisquick; when you think of personal media players, you probably think iPod; when you think of purchasing a personal computer, you probably think of Dell or Gateway. The emotional or logical connection that you make between these names, their images, and their place in your categorical view of the world is the essence of branding:

“In marketing, a brand is the symbolic embodiment of all the information connected with a product or service. A brand typically includes a name, logo, and other visual elements such as images or symbols. It also encompasses the set of expectations associated with a product or service which typicaly arise in the minds of people. Such people include employees of the brand owner, people involved with distribution, sale or supply of the product or service, and ultimate [sic] consumers.”

In a future post I will take the above principles and illustrate how we can apply them in everyday life ala authentic assessment.

Quote: Leadership

“Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science says is possible.”
—Oren Harari, author, talking about retired U.S. Army General Colin Powell

What to Do With the Communications Model

With the understanding how the communication model fundamentally works…let’s explore some of the uses of it. Long the field of interrogators and intelligence agents, the art of lie detection is a relatively simple thing with all but the most trained in telling them. Being a leader means getting the right information, at the right time. The “right information” is often the truth; and when you need the truth, you look for patterns in a person’s behavior to determine whether he or she is telling it to you.

1. Are they sweating? Are they fidgeting? Can they make eye contact? Obvious physical, behavioral cues like this offer the most correlative insight that the teller of the lie might be less than truthful at that moment. Changes in posture, distancing themselves from you, becoming belligerent, overly apologetic, pleasant, or defensive—in such that they deviate from a baseline behavior—are all signs of a liar.

2. The devil is in the details. The idiom aside, real events require real details. When you’re being told something that your instincts tell you might be too vague…be wary. If you are uncertain, try asking the potential liar about details. If the details they can or cannot muster can’t pass the reasonable person test, then you’re probably being swindled.

3. An inconvenient attitude. Liars can be the whiners and complainers that are less cooperative than the reasonable person that is telling the truth might be. Liars will also have a tendency to protest and use such ironic phrases as “to be honest.” This sort of thing cracks me up. Unnatural silences and repetition of questions—either by themselves or asking the person they are confronting to do so—are also things to look for. Verbal-vocal cues, however, have a lower correlation with lying than the other behavioral traits.

4. Human lie detection. Lie detectors essentially work by picking out abnormal fluctuations in metrics that can be read of the human body such as pulse rate and pupil dilation because psychologists have found that both increase when a person is lying. They might also experience an increased pitch in voice or pauses in their monologue to come up with details at a moment’s notice, indicating their untruthful nature. Our own personal biases might enter into the equation, too: How many times have you seen people hear what they want to hear; they are not being honest with themselves about what they really want and instead can be lied to more easily. Don’t be one of them. Vocal cues, again, are less likely to in and of themselves be the sign of a liar: Instead they need to be analyzed alongside behavioral cues to make an accurate determination.

5. The world is full of dumb liars. A police interrogation trick, as we’ve all seen in the movies and on television, is to have the perpetrator repeat their story multiple times. In this case you are looking for the person to have inconsistencies. More intelligent individuals can offer stories that keep their consistencies, but the less intelligent liars have trouble doing so. I find this as an interesting quandary: People who are intelligent enough should understand that lying is a situation that might offer short-term gain, rarely offers solid long-term gains while those who are not intelligent enough will look for the easy way out, rationalize excuses on why they tell lies, but have more difficulty keeping up the appearance of propriety when they are not actually practicing it.

Anyone teaching the art of lie detection will offer a couple caveats: All of these behavioral traits work in patterns and we need to have an understanding of the baseline psychology of the individual in which we’re trying to determine this behavior. Lying is a deviation from the norm for all people short of the psychopathic sort, but that’s an entirely different subject completely. Once you’ve determined these two things we need to refine our theories through observation of the individual until we’re ready to make our decision about their truthful nature—or lack of it.

Quote: Defeat

“Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.”
—Ernest Hemmingway, Author

Quote: Listening

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
—Ernest Hemingway

Communications Model

Have you ever walked into a room and talked to someone, only to walk away and not certain if you got your point across? Communication is more than just the words that are said between two people: It is an intricate dance of verbal and non-verbal communication between the sender and receiver in the environment in which it is taking place. Few people understand the true mechanics of communication, even though it is likely the most important thing that we do on a daily basis.

1. In normal circumstances, less than 35 percent of communication is verbal. We’ve all heard this before: What you say is not as important as how you say it. In many languages, what a person says isn’t necessarily what they mean. Take the hundreds of expressions in the English language alone that have an entirely different meaning than that which they say—or idioms.
“Fit as a fiddle,” for instance. Are you referring to a violin-like instrument that is well-tuned, or does it just mean that you’re as healthy as you could possibly be?

2. Vocal communication can comprise more than a third of the meaning of the message. In the movie “Ferris Bueller's Day Off” Ben Stein plays the character of the monotone teacher renowned for his famous “Bueller…Bueller…Bueller” line. Or, take Gary Busey who is known to put too much tone into normal interactions. When I was in the call center business the common catch-phrase was “tone and demeanor:” Anyone that was routinely on the phones knew that tone and demeanor, regardless of what was said, could make or break the call. Voice quality, pitch, and inflection are all factors in proper tone and demeanor.

3. Nonverbal communication is where most of the message lies.

This one makes for a deeper discussion: The importance of non-verbal cues in communication is imperative to communications. First, however, the “basic model for communications:”

Source à Encoding à Message à Medium àDecoding à Receiver

As the source of something you want to get across to another person you craft a message by taking ideas and concepts and fitting it into language that is appropriate for the situation in which you find yourself.

The message then passes through whatever medium—from simple, short sentences to PowerPoint presentations—you choose. The medium also includes your non-verbal and vocal components of this model.

At the receiver’s end, they translate the message you have delivered to them through the medium which you have. The most important things to remember about this end of the communication spectrum, so to speak, is that the receiver receives the message through “noise” that can be found in the environment and the decoding process of the receiver passing it through their “filters” of personal biases.

Keep in mind that any communication exchange is an extremely complex thing: People speak about 75 to 100 words each minute and short-term, sensory memory of the other person can take in about 7 bits of information (give or take 2) before needing to commit it to long-term memory all the while there is the background noise of your situation and the receiver is likely listening with the intent to respond rather than solidly take in the information.

Monkey Mondays: Maryland Woman 'Miserable' After Pet Monkey Seized By State

Wouldn't you be miserable too?

Quote: Plans

"The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan."
-- Karl von Clauswitz, Prussian General

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In preparation for a new weekend feature, I'm hoping that the avid readers of this blog will email their questions on life, love, the pursuit of happiness, or whatever else tickles your fancy. I'm open to, well, pretty much anything.

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The Truth

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
—Marcus Aurelius

Learning and the Authentic Assessment

Imagine yourself with a jeep that has a radiator that needs to be patched before you can get away from a batch of bad guys. All you have in your possession is the standard fare of a jeep and some eggs and water. What do you do? In the 1980s the television show “MacGyver” exposed us to the Richard Dean Anderson character that could, supposedly, use the strangest objects to get out of jams. Not one for guns, MacGyver showed us that the ability to use applied wisdom and a keener intelligence than one’s opponent can be the key to getting out of life or death situations.

In high school most of us took (or are taking) science classes and the like which mixed a combination of traditional lecture and “lab time.” When I took physics in high school, for instance, Mrs. Harriet Howe not only went over the metrics of the solar system with us, she also found a unique way to show us the scale of it by taking us outside with balls of varying sizes and placing each of us with our balls at distances from one another that were proportional to the sizes of the planets and distances between them in our own solar system. Seeing the numbers in a book is something completely aside from seeing the proportional relationships in a real world environment. Of course, this is not a lone example. Surely most (if not all) people reading this must have dissected a frog in their years as a student? Done various experiments with Bunsen burners? Constructed pottery from start to finish in art class?

As we move from being children and being able to acquire knowledge through lecture, to becoming adults and thus becoming more experiential, kinesthetic learners we see the value of the way certain things were taught to us when we were younger. As adults, we wouldn’t imagine learning many things without taking a hands-on approach: From learning new languages to learning to work on the Internet, adults are, by their very nature, hands-on learners.

Why is this?

In educational theory there are contrasting types of learning, or “assessment:” Traditional and authentic. Traditional assessment works such that an isolated skill or retained fact is assessed through testing to evaluate a skill or capability that has been learned. Examples of this are readily available in our experiences: Needing to go through rote memorization of technical specifications or some such so you can recall them at a later date. Real world situations rarely call for this kind of knowledge, however. More often than not our activities call upon multiple disciplines and are a collection of knowledge, skills, and abilities. Relevant, real-world situations are the essence of what authentic assessment is.

I’ll admit: I’m a geek. I may not look the part, but for some reason I have been one to take the seemingly mundane details and remember them for later recollection. In many cases, ever since I was a child I was able to soak up material like a sponge and, despite an improper mental state, recall these details for a situation that called for them. I’ve often been asked why it is I have committed to memory such details of subjects that are often on distant ends of any spectrum. From my youngest years, I’ve ascertained, I determined that various types of knowledge would have relevance someday. Perhaps the situations in my life that I was facing at those times didn’t call for the active use of such things as Planck’s Constant (h=6.626 x 10 -34 joule seconds) or how to conjugate verbs in German, but I always told myself and lived by the notion that “knowledge is power,” and later “there is no knowledge which is not power.” Knowledge became a tool from which to develop skills, both allowing me to derive a sense of self-worth, confidence, and personal power from.

When people inquire about the relevance of the mundane details, I often find a voice in the back of my head telling me to tell the person that I am currently engrossed in conversation with to seek relevance in everything: You never know when it might come in handy.

Maybe you, too, will someday find yourself in the situation that MacGyver found himself in above. First you would need to dump some water in the radiator, jump start the Jeep. This would cause the water to heat up. A few minutes later, you would dump in the egg whites which the water cooks. Once cooked, the egg whites naturally plug the holes in the radiator making the Jeep temporarily usable.

Lightening Crashes

''My wife said the sky was blue, but the lightning bolt was the most horrible sound she had heard in her life,'' said Clemente Vazquez-Bello, owner of the home where Canales and two workers had come to do landscaping.’

You ever get that idea that God (the god or higher-power, omnipotent being of your choice) just has it in for some people?

Quote: Damned if You Do...

“Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt

Self-Managed Behavior

"Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is."
- Isaac Asimov

Growth is a constant process; one for which we don’t often have someone directing us. Throughout most of our lives we are forced to take accountability for our behaviors and that growth. Techniques in self-managed growth, from a psychological perspective, can go far in helping us achieve our desired behaviors. Everything in our lives is about the choices that we make. Behaviors are simply the manifestation of those choices. Our behaviors comprise the makeup of our lives and, therefore, we live the life that our behaviors make for us.

1. Choose a target behavior. You must first know that which you desire to change.

2. Recording a baseline. With what frequency do you currently exhibit the behavior which you have or do you have undesired responses each day?

3. Set realistic goals. Set gradual, realistic goals to help you achieve your desired results. The best way to do this is to set daily and weekly goals.

4. Select reinforcing activities. Reward yourself for meeting you daily goals and reward yourself for meeting your weekly goals. Select something that you like and that will keep you motivated!

5. Record your progress. Keep accurate records of the behaviors that you are actually exhibiting and how that matches with your intended goals.

6. Reward successes. Follow through with your reward activities based on your following through with your goals.

7. Adjust your plan. As you learn more about yourself don’t be afraid to adjust your plan to better meet your needs or the needs of your environment.

Keep up the process and continually work at becoming the person that you want to become. Even though this will take some effort, over time your baseline behaviors will change and you will be able to achieve the success that you want!

Unusual Perception

When I first moved to wonderful and beautiful Grand Junction, CO, I chose an occupational route which would not put me in charge of a small army of fast food workers: Though I will do those things which are required of me to keep a paycheck coming in, food on my table, and a roof over my head, I knew that there was something better out there for me. Not that the path which my resultant choice was better, but it didn’t require me to smell like fried foods at the end of the day. I took a job in the wireless industry as a receivables management agent in a call center. It was high-stress with high-turnover, but it was technical in nature and I figured that it was something that would tide me over until the next better thing came along.

Throughout training we learned of many a wireless wonder; after a few weeks of classroom training and a few weeks in what was called Academy Bay— that place where new call center agents take their first calls under the supervision of mentors, themselves seasoned call center staff. Soon thereafter we were assigned to floor teams and started our careers as agents. The thing that we each learned was that customers would likely call us if they were past due on their wireless phone accounts—if they called in for customer service and were past due, the voice recognition phone system would direct them to our department. People who don’t pay their bills (and some that do) have a particular behavior pattern, I quickly learned. A generality it might be, but many an experience it was nonetheless: They can be rude, angry, frustrated, mean, panicky, oblivious, and act quite, quite stupidly. I decided quickly that I wanted into a position that was less “on the floor” and more in a support-style role. My vision became to be promoted. And, in my typical style, do so in a distinguished manner.

In the first two weeks of being on JoNi’s “Team 4,” I achieved the second-highest collections in the call center at $176,000. The person that beat me (by only $4,000) for the top spot was a veteran of about 5 years. The next month I hit number one. I had learned the systems like no other and, in my spare time between calls (something that tends to happen on night shifts) I would memorize the details of policies, procedures, and the best practices of my job role. My time on a call averaged about 3 minutes: I was a one-stop shop for the customers that had better things to do than to stay on a phone after being on hold for (often) several minutes or hours and have them on their way to live the rest of their lives.

Yes, my vision was coming to fruition. Soon I was selected to be part of a team of 5 to travel to another call center and “red hat” for them—assist agents in training for their new posts by offering advice and assistance for them as they need it while they were on the phones. This call center was training some 300 agents to go from the old second generation “TDMA” software systems to the newer third generation “GSM” software. While I wasn’t as much of a whiz on the second generation stuff as some of the old timers, I had come to know the Siebel software that drove the GSM phone systems better than most others. Yes, my vision was coming to fruition.

Around this time I had applied for the Resolutions Support Desk, or the Resolutions Department as it was more formally called, “RSD” or “Rez” was the team of individuals that had distinguished themselves as the best of the best call center agents and been promoted to work in an environment where they would advice other call center representatives on procedural, policy, and technical issues and, as necessary, take an escalated call from a customer. Have you ever called someplace and asked for their supervisor? If you called this company, spoke with the receivables management department, and asked for a supervisor there was about a 1 in 100 chance (by my estimation) that you could talk to me.

Yes, my vision saw me through to being a standard floor agent in a call center to becoming a member of the elite, the special forces of the wireless industry.

Vision: Unusual competence in discernment or perception; something that is or has been seen; a person or thing of extraordinary beauty; or to picture in one’s mind.

The first thing to know about vision is that it is derived from the leader: Vision must be leader-initiated. Vision is a key part in shaping an individual. Without vision, we would not have goals. Without vision, we would not be in positions to strategize our ways from point to point, to end up where we would rather be in life and to become the person that we want to become.

While your vision might be humble and it might be grand, it is always shaped by your paradigm in that your principles, standards, ethics, and morals will guide the vision from start to finish. Your ideal goal is representative of your goals, your ideals, and builds on your past and present. Your vision, in short, moves you forward.

Imagine clearly where you want to be and, given healthy doses of action, you can make your vision come to fruition.

With Self-Discipline Most Anything Is Possible

He’s been called “The American Lion;” a man that stands apart from others in his era as being someone who transformed himself and the time in which he lived. In the late 17^TH century he saw the need to modernize the American Navy. While mourning his first wife he learned to rope and ride in the badlands of what is now North Dakota. During the Spanish-American War he dropped everything and went out west to recruit a ragtag group of cavalrymen from myriad walks of life to fight in Cuba under General Leonard Wood, becoming nothing short of a war hero. This man who had started as a frail boy with physical ailments grew to be some of the finest stock this country has offered. Becoming President of the United States at 43 years old, Theodore Roosevelt is in the elite club of Presidents to win the Nobel Prize.

Years ago I recall watching television; there were a series of commercials discussing virtues that people should have and selling them on the “why.” One featured a judge that said that discipline is the everyday price we pay in place of paying the price of regret. We bathe each day instead of regretting being ridiculed by those around us for smelling and/or looking like we have just woken up; we exercise and eat right so that we won’t become overweight and will feel better; we respect others so that they will, in turn, respect us; we follow the law because we would regret being punished for not obeying it (or, a person is just of virtuous character and believes that the rule of law is there for a reason). Discipline is not just important, it is essential for the leader to practice.

Imagine that you are a member of a military unit in a leadership role: Be that as an officer or a non-commissioned officer. With subordinate troops in your charge, in the face of imminent danger do you confide in your troops your fears, thus validating their own and possibly fomenting more, or do you practice proper discipline and do your duty as their leader and an officer of the public and the commander-in-chief that you serve? The answer is obvious in the context of discipline.

In today’s “instant gratification” society the practice of self-discipline is instead often traded for impulsive behaviors that, instead of leading to success, lead to feeling good now. Proper self-discipline can be what separates a slob from a person that looks and plays the part of the successful individual.

“The one quality which sets one man apart from another—the key which lifts one to every aspiration while others are caught up in the mire of mediocrity—is not talent, formal education, nor intellectual brightness—it is self-discipline…With self-discipline, all things are possible. Without it, even the simplest goal can seem like the impossible dream.”

I couldn’t have articulated it better myself.

Leaders in History: Subutai

Born in Mongolia in 1176 in the Uriangqai tribe, Subutai was the primary military strategist of the great Ghengis Kahn. Not necessarily a man of common knowledge in western society, Subutai has the distinction of conquering the most territory throughout history directing more than 20 campaigns where he would routinely coordinate campaigns up to 500 kilometers apart including the conquering of Poland and Hungary within 2 days of one another. In addition, Subutai was the highest-ranking non-relation to the Khan having begun service to him at the age of 17.

Those who succeed do those things that others do not, such as the leaders that have harnessed their abilities and conquered their circumstances in times past. We look to these leaders to gather insight into those things which we can do differently to find success or further it. Subutai was a man that changed the paradigm of his trade by virtue of his merit and wit.

A story I recall reading about General Subutai once was regarding his siege of a European city. Surrounding the city he faced the decision whether to lay siege to it or to take a more passive approach. Inconspicuously he ordered a column from a rear entrance to the city to be vacated leaving an ample opportunity for any occupants of the city to flee from the city. Uncertain of the situation a small number of troops traversed through the vacated column and escaped the supposed forthcoming slaughter. After the escape of the first few troops, the remainder of the city was vacated through the opening—only to be slaughtered. Instead of using aggressive means to take their goal, Subutai found a method which reduced friendly casualties while the effect of total war was felt on the enemy.

Regardless of the style he used to achieve victory at that siege, Subutai was known for his aptitude and proclivity for using siege equipment and engineers on the battlefield. When most countries outside of China were using siege equipment and engineers for just that—laying sieges to cities—Subutai’s insight into the alternate uses for such combat assets made him become the first individual to use tactical artillery on the battlefield. During the Battle of Mohi Mongolian forces faced the wrath of Hungarian crossbowmen through fierce resistance and a battle that conflicted high levels of Mongolian casualties at a battle for a bridge. Needing to adapt his forces competencies and assets to conquer the situation—and the Hungarians—Subutai ordered stone-throwing catapults to thrust boulders at the banks of crossbowmen, quickly dispatching the threat that they posed to Mongol forces. Moreover, while the crossbowmen defended the bridge they had been ordered to secure with all their might, Subutai ordered an emergency bridge be built so that his forces could outflank his enemies.

Subutai was responsible for conquering the various jurisdictions of Russia and further ventured into Eastern Europe and easily bested many of the military forces there. He sent spies further into Europe and partook in limited military engagements leading to his ambition of taking on the entire Holy Roman Empire in 1241. Unfortunately, by this time, news had made it to the front of the death of the third son of Ghengis Khan, Ogotai. Mongol forces returned to their homeland and Subutai never returned to Europe by the time of his death at 72 years old in 1248. Had he done so, however, the face of western civilization might have changed dramatically.

Valuing wisdom and the application of it to circumstances, Subutai elegantly balanced grace with brute force by gracefully maneuvering his enemies into circumstances where brute force would completely wipe them out: He was a wise leader who controlled circumstances instead of allowing circumstances to control him.