Best wishes for a wonderful holiday season. Make sure you spend time with family and friends – and remember that relationships are more important than consumption.
Seth Godin, blogger extraordinaire, has compiled an interesting and FREE PDF download from 70 diverse thinkers in which each person provides ONE WORD to identify an important concept for 2010 … and then writes a single page to describe why they chose that word. From GENEROSITY to DIGNITY to POKER to RIPPLE, there are provocative viewpoints and challenging insights.
I hope it helps to launch a bounteous and rewarding 2010 for you and your family.
The North Bay Business Journal, a publication of the New York Times, is a weekly business newspaper which covers the North Bay area of San Francisco – from the Golden Gate bridge north, including the Wine Country of Sonoma and Napa counties.
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Article published – December 14 2009: The electronic version of the article, as published, may be found here.
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” – Stephen King
“Lary, give this customer a call. We’ve just received an unauthorized return, and I want these shoes sent back. Funny how the green shoes don’t fit and the red ones fit perfectly.”
It wasn’t uncommon for the chairman of company North (remember, “N” for “Nasty”?) to stop by my office with a message like this. His remarks were actually a code: “The red shoes sold well but the green ones the customer bought aren’t selling … so now they’re claiming they don’t fit so they can return them. We’ve had no other such complaints. Tell them we won’t accept them and ship them back.”
I made a note to contact the customer, figuring I’d call them after lunch when I would be more likely to catch them three time zones away. No e-mail back then. Unexpectedly, the chairman returned to my office 20 minutes later to ask, “What did they say?” The first few times this happened I asked, “Who?” … failing to make the connection he expected. While I learned the nuances of merchandising economics with these examples, what I finally realized was that the chairman expected me to drop everything and call them immediately. He wasn’t happy — “What else are you doing?” — and after a few unpleasant encounters, I finally caught on.
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How about that for a double negative … meaning that “Not Not Important” is actually “pretty damn important”. Some of you took English, right?
What do I mean? Many of the followers of Sword Tips know that I’m a big fan of GTD, the “Getting Things Done” framework promoted by David Allen. He wrote recently in Wired magazine about one phenomenon that comes up all the time in my work with CEOs. If like most of us you’re always struggling with priorities, you need to read this. If you’ve got some ideas that have worked for you, share them.
By any other name, it’s the “it’s just not a priority” syndrome! God knows we’ve all got too much to do, and most of us have probably tried the 1-2-3 system of prioritization at one time … soon realizing that everything was becoming a “1″ because it wouldn’t get attention any other way … and then we realized we made everything a “1″ … and then we realized we ended up right back where we started.
There is no avoiding the pain that arrives like a SCUD when something that needs to get done doesn’t get any attention
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As I’ve said here before, I don’t think our elected servants in D.C. know much about creating jobs. Let’s remember that the stimulus program was always “too little, too late” and we harped here that the length of time over which those funds would be deployed was way too long … witness today that jobs officials say more than 50% is still in the pipeline over one year later. So, no surprise it hasn’t help as much as they would have you believe. Robb Mandelbaum writing in the NY Times also agrees that there is very little in President Obama’s most recent speeches flowing from the Jobs Summit last week.
What do you think of the ideas being floated about, the key ones of which are summarized here? Will any of them help your business? Are there other ideas that could work? Fire up those fingers and add your comments here.
For one thing, the Administration continues to talk about incentive programs to spur business lending. While that would also be welcome, it doesn’t get at the root cause of unemployment and jobs growth. I’ve reported here before that lending is NOT the biggest problem in the middle market … it’s demand and revenue growth. Companies are not going to borrow except to meet demand and if demonstrable demand is present, borrowing is usually easier anyway.
One idea is to eliminate the capital gains tax for small business investing.
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The Center for Creative Leadership recently completed a large survey to assess the leadership competencies need for success, both now and in the future.
One of the skills that I highly regard is resourcefulness, the ability to deal skillfully and promptly with unexpected challenges, etc. Interestingly, resourcefulness was the only skill that is in the Top 10 of existing skills. All of the others that are needed for success in the future are NOT skills that leaders have mastered.
This leads to a pretty big Leadership Gap, according to this survey. It might be a good time to take a personal inventory of your leadership skills and make sure you’re doing everything you can to develop the skills that will be needed.
By now, you know that the Sunday NY Times Corner Office series is oft-quoted here to highlight varying aspects of leadership that flow from Adam Bryant’s conversations with notable CEOs and business leaders.
This week he interviewed William Green, Chairman and CEO of Accenture. Read it in its entirety as a refresher on important elements of leadership.
Green reminds us that there is an abundance of talent that we’re not mining …
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Yeah, I know, just what we need … another checklist of the 10 Stupid Things I can’t stop doing ..or the Top 5 things I need to do before I brush my teeth (really, nothing, do that first … please).
Nonetheless, this is a good time of year to consider The 10 Questions You Should Never Stop Asking … mostly because you should never stop asking! This is one way to make sure that the “Makes an ASS out of U and ME” assumptions that are grounding our actions are the right ones … NOW … Next Year … and always.
Ask yourself these questions as you sharpen your focus on 2010.
Usually, when we remember this song, we think of someone “straddling the fence”, trying to be all things to all people, teetering on the edge of indecision and inaction … or someone who always takes the “middle of the road” and commits to nothing.
Gill Corkendale writes in the HBR blog that leaders tend to be either Mr. Inside or Mr. Outside when they really need to focus on being Mr. In-Between, creating an essential “balance” among their varied responsibilities. It’s true that we all drift toward our comfort zone, doing what we enjoy and are good at, often ignoring the more tedious, even painful tasks that remain critical to our success.
She offers a simple checklist to help you evaluate where you are on this continuum.
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Welcome to Exkalibur. I’m Lary Kirchenbauer, President of Exkalibur Advisors, Inc. Please take advantage of our resources to help you build your business ... and let me know what more we can do to serve you.
Read my latest column from the NY Times affiliate, the North Bay Business Journal.
In my former position as a tax partner at KPMG, LLP, I worked closely with Lary on the tax aspects of the plethora of business issues that arise in the life cycle of a start up company. It was unusual to see a senior finance person demonstrate a seasoned business acumen in identifying issues and opportunities, grasping the technical issues, resolving obstacles and implementing change.
Jeffrey Bergmann, V.P. Worldwide Tax, VeriSign, Inc.
