S&MM SoundOff

Sustainable Intuition?

By Arupa Tesolin (Author of ting!, Speaker, Trainer & Consultant)

Intuition is sustainable, green and a big part of what contributes to innovation in business.  The problem? It's not well enough understood and under-used. But we can make it work for us. My book ting! - A Surprising Way to Listen to Intuition & Do Business Better is launching in North America.  An entire community of Intuition Specialists have gathered together to support the idea of encouraging intuition in business through ting!  (Participate in ting!'s web-launch by Friday Oct. 26th & get an Intuitive Consultation, Coaching and lots of free goodies at http://www.intuita.com/ting.htm)

ting! is a powerful story along the lines of Fish and Who Moved My Cheese that illustrates how a conscious connection with intuition can really change your life for the better. The book offers some key ingredients for a healthy organization. In ting! Tony, is a young sales professional whose world is looking good but feeling a bit sluggish.  He first laughs when his mentor suggests learning more about intuition. But that's just the beginning. What he does next surprises everyone but mostly himself. A ting! is the sound of intuition striking an open mind. Through Tony's journey, readers begin to discover how ting's show up in their own lives. 

Growing intuition skills--and confidence in them--will enhance your ability to be a more powerful communicator, strengthen your relationships and people skills, help you make better and wiser decisions & be more innovative and creative.  The business appeal of ting! is that it shows how to connect the invisible dots between someone who experiences an intuitive insight and creates tangible business result shows a clear-cut business case for intuition that your colleagues, managers, executives & team members will appreciate which legitimizes intuition and its bottom-line significance. The book goes on to list Starter Steps that companies can take to develop intuition skills at work which have a positive impact on performance, productivity diversity and innovation.

The Gallup Organization conservatively estimates the annual economic cost to the American economy from the approximately 22 million American workers who are extremely negative or "actively disengaged" to be between $250 and $300 billion. Have you ever wondered, as I have, what the cost of not being intuitive is?  Think about it.  How many products, communications, services, interfaces would have been more successful if they had been applied with intuition in mind.  How much productivity and time do you think we've lost because our thinking has been too left-brained & linear? If you have been working to implement intuition skills and intuitive design in your workplace or thinking about it I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Blog and Win

Congrats to this week's winners:

Training Day: George

Daily Perk: Ronald

SoundOff: Ron

The contest continues! This week we're featuring the same books as last week. Remember, you can comment on ANY post in the blog to be entered. Good luck!

Breaking Out of the Box

   
REALLY EFFECTIVE MARKETING makes a connection. You can't force it, you can only set things in motion. Then it's up to the whims of your audience to either buy in or turn away. If you do things "like we've always done them", you’re probably going to get the same old results. If you do things the way everyone else does them, you’ll probably get incremental gains at best. I suppose you could spend a lot of money to determine whether blue ink or green ink is more effective at getting people to open your mailer (or read on in your web site), but, come on, that’s merely about squeezing out results, not creating inspired, passionate buyers.
        So I’d like to offer you an alternative, as expressed in the web site for a new book by Miranda July. She could have put together a typical author’s site, with a bio and a picture and testimonials and an excerpt from her book. And that might have sparked interested in some people, but it would have been too easy to dismiss, as well.
        INSTEAD, she took a path that yanks you along on a very entertaining ride, and gives you a much better sense of her writing — no, her vision — than anything she might have put on a standard web site. It’s a tour-de-force, using nothing more than a dry-erase marker and a few kitchen appliances.
        So click on this link (if you didn’t click the one above already) and then ask yourself: “How am I involving my audience?” If you don’t have a good, clear idea — or if it’s something someone else might do — then you’re limiting your results.

[Many thanks to Frank Roche and his excellent KnowHR blog for highlighting Miranda’s site (and for enabling me to, ah, sample the graphic above...). Frank’s insights go far beyond the world of HR, so check him out when you have a moment.]

[You can find more on this and related subjects at The YouBlog — practical ideas on presentations, persuasion, selling, and communications.]

Still Waggin'

Chris Anderson (no, not that guy from accounting), the editor in chief of Wired, has a new book out that may change the way you do business.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More explains one way the Internet revolution has changed business. Although The Da Vinci Code sells more than an Italian-French dictionary, there is still a market for obscure books. Since Web sites like Amazon, unlike physical bookstores, don’t have to give up shelf space for books that rarely sell, they can still profit from offering low-selling dictionaries. There’s some demand for even the most unpopular product. Eventually, Anderson argues, the aggregate sales of fringe products can overtake the biggest blockbuster.

The takeaway for salespeople is flexibility. Although obvious strategies and packages will continue to work, some clients might be looking for something different.  And just the way Amazon doesn't have to give up prime real estate in a store for a dictionary that rarely sells, offering a variety of sales packages has negligible impact on costs, but possibly a great effect on your bottom line.

To learn more about The Long Tail, read this review, or check out the Long Tail Meetup group.

Dale Carnegie: Guru of the Middle East?

I just finished reading Thomas Friedman’s column from February 15 about democracy in the Middle East and the fallout from the recent Hamas victory (“The Weapon of Democracy,” available to NYTimes.com subscribers only).

One focus of the column was what he believed was Hamas’ tough task ahead: managing the West Bank.

While he continued to discuss the politics in the region, there was one particular part of the article that struck me. It wasn’t about the political climate, but the power of the personal development book: “Hisham Abdullah, the West Bank A.F.P. reporter, told me that when he went into Ramallah's main bookstore the other day and asked what was selling, the owner said he'd noticed Hamas people buying Dale Carnegie books on management. ...” Friedman writes.

Apparently when in doubt about management, the new ruling party in Palestine is hitting the books.

Millions of personal business development books are sold every year—Dale Carnegie’s bestseller from 1937 How to Win Friends and Influence People, is ranked 59th in overall sales on Amazon.com.

What is your favorite personal/business development book and why?

Visit S&MM’s Book page: http://www.salesandmarketing.com/smm/resources/books.jsp

Rethinking Goals

If you’re going to be successful, you have to set goals. At least that’s what we’ve always been told. Stephen Shapiro, author of Goal-Free Living, disagrees. After 150 interviews, he determined that the most satisfied and successful people are the least goal-oriented. In "Are Your Goals Holding You Back?" in the current issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, Shapiro explains that successful people and companies are "getting out, playing, and trying lots of new things." He doesn’t advocate aimless living, but rather thinking very broadly, with several possible paths to success.

It seems that goals are still useful—you just have to set them the right way. Take sales, for example. There will always be numbers (aka goals) to meet, but if that is the only focus, bigger long-term opportunities might be overlooked. And what about personal career goals? S&MM interviewed a sales executive who was happy and successful but might well have passed up the job if he'd had narrowly focused goals. We also published a list of steps for setting goals a few years ago, but maybe they need to be re-examined. Maybe the short-term goals are still necessary, but should be more flexible over the long haul. What’s your take on goals? Are they helpful, harmful, or just an optional means to an end? What Shapiro seems to be saying is that goal-setting is not compatible with outside-the-box thinking—but can his approach even apply to the numbers-driven sales profession?