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Volume 10, Issue 3      In This Issue:   Ruthlessly realistic: How CEOs must overcome denial          One Strategy: Aligning Planning and Execution   Sharpening your skills: Managing the economic crisis   How to get people to change   [Meetings] a little less conversation   You've been yelped   How to protect your reputation online   More BlackBerry battery tips: 7 ways to make your Smartphone last longer        Must-Have iPhone Travel Apps        The 3 Facebook settings every user should check now (new)   Every CEO must be a chief listening officer        Harnessing The Power Of The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy   How to be a master public speaker   The shadowy science of sex addiction If you enjoy this newsletter, read more in our Archive and Explore more Topics and Events Ruthlessly realistic: How CEOs must overcome denial Denial, though common, is much more dangerous for your business now than it has been in the past.   One Strategy: Aligning Planning and Execution Explicit and implicit strategies is are not always the same, but to keep your business thriving in changing times, it is important to make them one. Reviewing a spectacular business failure, we often wonder why the CEO didn't see trouble coming. It was so obvious. Why didn't Digital Equipment Corp. CEO Kenneth Olsen see the PC as a threat to minicomputers? Did Coca-Cola's Roberto Goizueta really think New Coke was a good idea? How long did Henry Ford think he could keep selling black-only Model Ts? "Denial has always been a problem," writes Harvard Business School historian Richard S. Tedlow in a new book, Denial: Why Business Leaders Fail to Look Facts in the Face-and What to Do About It. "What is different today is that the cost of denial has become so high. We are living in a less forgiving world than we once did." We asked Tedlow to discuss how denial can cripple a company, and what can be done about it... Read the article     Back to top Sharpening your skills: Managing the economic crisis A series of questions about improving business skills in a crisis and the HBS Working Knowledge articles that answer them: Sharpening Your Skills dives into the HBS Working Knowledge archives to bring together articles on ways to improve your business skills. Questions to be Answered: How do I lead in a crisis? What roles does the Board play? What are the emotional needs of people who lay off fellow employees? What do companies lose when they cut corporate giving?... Read the article     Back to top How to get people to change Positive feelings and feedback go a long way to increasing productivity and employee retention. Authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath discuss their new book on change management. Forget PowerPoint. If you want to influence employee or customer behavior, charts and data typically won't cut it, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the 2007 bestseller Made to Stick and the new Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. In Switch, the Heath brothers explore ways to manage big changes in life and in business. "Change is hard, because we're schizophrenic," says Chip, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. (Dan is a senior fellow at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.) "Part of us may want to change, but part of us has this emotional connection to the way that we've always done things." In researching their new book, the Heaths consulted experts on subjects as diverse as how to diet and how to change society. "Time and again, we found the same principles coming up, whether it was individual change or organizational change or societal change," says Chip. Those principles, he says, involve... Read the article     Back to top [Meetings] A little less conversation Don’t waste time overcommunicating, it cuts productivity and costs money. Keep teams small for more efficiency. Have you ever invited employees to a meeting just so they wouldn't feel left out? If so, you may be an overcommunicator. When was the last time you scheduled a meeting and invited eight people instead of the three people who really needed to be there simply because you didn't want anyone to feel left out? When was the last time you sent a companywide e-mail that said something like, "Hey, attention coffee drinkers: If you finish the pot, make another!" even though there is actually only one person who violates this rule (and she's your co-founder)? When was the last time you... These are symptoms of a common illness: too much communication. Now, we all know that communication is very important, and that many organizational problems are caused by a failure to communicate. Most people try to solve this problem by increasing the amount of communication: cc'ing everybody on an e-mail, having long meetings and inviting the whole staff, and asking for everyone's two cents before implementing a decision. But communications costs add up faster than you think,... Read the article     Back to top You've been yelped A resourceful pair create a dot com company for customer reviews that becomes a source of agony for small companies and entrepreneurs. Yelp, the rambunctious and burgeoning customer-review website, can make or break a small business. It can also drive a business owner slightly insane. On October 30, 2009, Diane Goodman logged on to Yelp.com. Like many business owners in cities across the country, Goodman had lately developed a small obsession with the website, which allows customers to publish critiques of local businesses. She had been visiting her company's Yelp page every day to see what her customers had written about her bookstore. Goodman found reading Yelp reviews to be emotionally wrenching -- but she also couldn't look away... Read the article     Back to top How to protect your reputation online Stay active on social media web sites to keep your reputation where you want it to be. With Google real-time search and sites like Facebook and Twitter continuing to grow, it's more necessary than ever to monitor your online reputation. Here are steps you can take to ensure you're viewed professionally -- and advice on what to do if you're associated with harmful content. Several months ago when Twitter introduced its lists feature, social media consultant Allen Mireles checked to see which lists included her. "I wanted to see if the lists I was on were a reflection of how I wanted to be viewed on Twitter," she says. She found two surprises: A porn star had included her on a list and another user listed her under "people I've seen naked"—a surprise, she says, because she had never met the person. Mireles responded immediately. First she blocked the porn star on Twitter, which automatically removed her from the list. Then she sent a direct message to the owner of the other list and explained that she uses Twitter for business purposes and didn't think it was appropriate to include her on it. "He very kindly took me off the list and apologized, saying he had been trying to make some of his lists 'more interesting,'" Mireles says. Joe Laratro, president of Tandem Interactive, an online marketing solutions company, experienced a similar situation... Read the article     Back to top More BlackBerry battery tips: 7 ways to make your smartphone last longer Keep backup batteries and chargers besides knowing what your battery power needs are.   Must-have iPhone travel apps Four fun apps for anyone on the go for under $1.00 each!   The 3 Facebook settings every user should check now Don’t give up your privacy rights by allowing Facebook to control your settings, control your own. BlackBerry devices used to be renowned for their impressively long battery lives. But with all the features and functionalities packed into modern RIM smartphones during the past couple of years, some of that battery longevity has vanished. CIO.com's Al Sacco offers up seven advanced tips that he regularly employs to ensure his BlackBerry keeps on ticking...and ticking and ticking. Ever wondered why your BlackBerry seems to get different battery life than your fellow smartphone users' devices? How long your BlackBerry smartphone lasts on a single charge depends on a variety of factors. Your specific device model, size of the battery pack, whether or not your handheld uses 3G networks, if it employs Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth, and whether or not you're using it in a strong coverage area are just a few parts of the equation. So how do you ensure that you're using your BlackBerry battery as effectively as possible? The true key to maximizing your BlackBerry battery-life is... Read the article     Back to top Every CEO must be a chief listening officer Understand your customers and your employees. Harnessing the power of the self-fulfilling prophecy As a leader you can help create a broader vision for your employees and raise them to new levels. If it was good enough for A. G. Lafley, it's good enough for you. When A. G. Lafley stepped down last year as chief executive officer of Procter & Gamble, he received widespread and well-deserved praise from other business leaders and the media. During his eight-year run, Procter & Gamble's top-down, insular culture became far more collaborative and innovative. Revenues at the consumer products company doubled. How did the soft-spoken, modest Lafley make that happen? His superb ability as a strategist and healthy tolerance for risk helped, and so did his belief in the transformative power of marketing and design. Underlying all that, however, was his commitment to one of the most overlooked and undervalued of leadership skills:... Read the article     Back to top How to be a master public speaker Public speaking can be easy, if you use the right tricks. Three easy rules that can make all the difference. She was just shy of her 17th birthday. I was a year younger. It was my first time, but she was like a pro. When she started, my back stiffened and even my knuckles started to sweat. You see, my classmate and I were giving a presentation to our entire school. I was so nervous I had to clamp my hands to the lectern to steady my shaking body. My only saving grace was so that no one heard the guttural sounds of fear groaning out of my mouth, because I was shaking so far from the microphone. Afterward, I was so embarrassed that I set myself a new goal. I would overcome my fear and become a proficient public speaker. I took a course in speaking, trained hard and even spoke in competitions at local Rotary clubs. Now I travel the world from the U.S. to Thailand to Amsterdam doing several dozen paid speaking engagements a year. Public speaking is... Read the article     Back to top The shadowy science of sex addiction Medical research and theories about sex addiction as a disease. Tiger Woods' philandering has talking heads talking about compulsive sex. But research on sex addiction is fuzzy. Nobody really knows for sure--though you can certainly get treated for sex addiction if you think you have it. Last year, X-Files and Californication star David Duchovny checked into rehab for sexual addiction. After a string of women went public with claims they were mistresses of golfer Tiger Woods (the best-paid athlete on the planet and a married man), it took only days for talking heads to speculate that Woods might be an addict and need rehab. The idea of sex as a drug is deeply seductive to journalists and reality TV producers. But the idea of being addicted to sex is actually quite controversial. No such diagnosis is even recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), psychiatry's Bible. The DSM-IV assiduously avoids the word "addiction," preferring to talk about dependence, withdrawal and compulsion. A new condition, called... Read the article     Back to top Forward to a Friend: Do you have a friend that would like to receive ExecWatchsm? Perhaps you know a peer within your organization, or associate at a partner company that would benefit from applying to receive this publication. Inviting a friend to experience the benefits of joining the BusinessWatch Network is easy! Just FW: this newsletter to the person you know who may have an interest and ask them to click here http://www.businesswatchnetwork.com Your friend will be glad you did! 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