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If you are having difficulty seeing this mail or images in it, you can view it in your Web browser. Volume 6, Issue 3      In This Issue:   Oprah: A case study comes alive   A satisfied customer isn’t enough   Three myths of Management   Do I dare say something   Seagate’s Morale-athon   Taking a stand on ethics   Beyond the annual physical   Confessions of an entrepreneur’s wife   How an open door policy ought to work   May loose job offer over salary   Find ten things in common   Beware the stealth interview   Lead generation case study: How multiple touches can lead to profit multiples   The four colors of market planning   The key steps in developing an effective Performance Management Strategy   Bye-Bye Boomers?   Sunbelt cities eclipse major metros in job growth   Is your job making you sick?   Breaking the link of emotional eating   The boss and you   Love in the time of cubicles   Ten diets that work   Ouch! With sex injuries, love really hurts Get ahead with a BlackBerry Solution Sure, you probably see our devices in people's hands all the time. But have you ever seen BlackBerry as a solution for your company before? Or maybe you thought it was only for larger businesses. Truth is, more and more businesses of all sizes are turning to a BlackBerry Solution to quickly gain a competitive advantage. >> Register to learn more Register for a chance to win 1 of 8 BlackBerry devices and find exclusive, limited-time BlackBerry offers! Oprah: A Case Study Comes Alive Writing a business case on the icon of daytime television and chief executive of a major media empire was challenge enough for HBS professor Nancy Koehn and colleagues. Oprah Winfrey's visit to campus to talk with graduating students made it ample reward. I was interested in what it is about Oprah that business leaders can learn from in the twenty-first century.                 —Nancy Koehn The best and brightest executives in the world are common visitors to the MBA classrooms at Harvard Business School, giving students a personal opportunity to talk to the likes of Ann Fudge, Lou Gerstner, Meg Whitman, and Jack Welch. Still, when Professor Nancy Koehn introduced her guest on the last day of class this past spring, "everyone did a double take," Koehn recalls. Oprah Winfrey was in the house.How the icon of daytime television and chief executive of a major media empire came to HBS after three years of effort is a story in itself. And what she told students brought them a unique perspective about leaders and leadership in the twenty-first century. "I think she's a great bellwether for the future of business," Koehn says. "Maybe she and her organization are on a path that a lot of leaders and organizations are going to be on."... Read the article.  Back to top A Satisfied Customer Isn't Enough Deep loyalty turns customers into word-of-mouth promoters—and that's a force you need for growth. An excerpt from the new book, The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth. Listening to the internet Companies are eavesdropping on online discussion forums to find out what their customers really think about them High-quality customer relationships can transform the economics of retailing. It's fine to have customers who like you, but satisfaction isn't going to stoke the growth engine, argues loyalty expert Fred Reichheld. The goal is to turn a customer into a promoter, someone who would answer yes to the "ultimate question": Would you recommend us to a friend? Reichheld's new book, The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth, offers a system called the Net Promoter Score that helps rate customers based on their view of your company. The goal: Cut out "detractor" customers and promote recommenders. In this excerpt, Reichheld outlines the payoffs from developing deep customer relationships and outlines the NPS system. The economic power of high quality relationships. To understand the connection between customer relationships and growth, begin with a simple fact: In business, every decision ultimately involves economic tradeoffs. Every company would want better relationships with customers if these relationships were free. Every CEO would prefer to meet earnings goals with good profits than with bad if there were no cost involved. Indeed, the abuse of customers would end tomorrow if ending it had no effect on companies' financial performance. But of course building high-quality relationships does cost something—often a considerable amount. It requires... Read the article.  Back to top Three Myths of Management In a new book, Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton assail popular yet shaky—maybe even harmful—management practices. Our excerpt starts with a hot trend: benchmarking. Instead of copying what others do, we ought to copy how they think. The logic behind the use of options as managerial incentive is flawed once you consider what behaviors are actually rewarded. The catalogue of poor decision practices is immense, but we focus here on three of the most common and, in our experience, most harmful to companies. Casual benchmarking. There is nothing wrong with learning from others' experience—vicarious learning, as contrasted with direct experience, is an important way for both people and organizations to learn how to navigate a path through the world. After all, it is a lot cheaper and easier to learn from the mistakes, setbacks, and successes of others than to treat every management challenge as something no organization has ever faced before. So benchmarking—using other companies' performance and experience to set standards for your own company—makes a lot of sense. In the end, good or bad performance is defined and measured largely in relation to what others are doing. The problem lies with... Read the article.  Back to top Do I Dare Say Something? Are you afraid to speak up at work? The amount of fear in the modern workplace is just one surprising finding from recent research done by HBS professor Amy Edmondson and her colleague, Professor James Detert from Penn State. Most surprising to us has been the degree to which fear appears to be a feature of modern work life. As every company knows, employees are its greatest resource. It's more than a shame, then, that many workers are either not encouraged or afraid to speak up and communicate ideas at work. Employers are losing valuable knowledge and experience, and their companies are weaker for that loss. In a recent working paper, Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson and Penn State professor James Detert explored the challenges employees face speaking up to internal authorities. Their research focused on behavior in large, multinational corporations, but the lessons learned can apply to smaller enterprises as well... Read the article.  Back to top Seagate's Morale-athon Inside the tech giant's $9,000-a-head team-building blowout in New Zealand. Plenty of companies try to motivate the troops, but few go as far as Seagate Technology (STX ). In February the $9.8 billion maker of computer storage hardware flew 200 staffers to New Zealand for its sixth annual Eco Seagate -- an intense week of team-building topped off by an all-day race in which Seagaters had to kayak, hike, bike, swim, and rappel down a cliff. The tab? $9,000 per person. Correspondent Sarah Max went along for the bonding. It's cocktail hour, and nervous getting-to-know-you chatter floats around the Queenstown chalet, where we've arrived by gondola. Staffers from a dozen countries are talking and gazing out at a stupendous mountain view of The Remarkables. The employees been chosen from 1,200 who tried to get into Eco Seagate. (The company employs a total of 45,000.) There are no age limits: The oldest racer this year is 62. In the first of many embarrassing exercises, four "tribes," each made up of 10 athletically, regionally, and operationally diverse teams, are asked to imitate the sound of the New Zealand birds for which their group has been named: Ruru, Kia, Tui, or Weka. "You're going to think some of this is pretty dumb," CEO Bill Watkins tells the crowd. "Just get involved. Don't be too cool to participate." This event, or social experiment, is Watkins' pet project. He dreamed up Eco Seagate as a way to break down barriers, boost confidence, and, yes, make staffers better team players... Read the article.  Back to top Taking a Stand on Ethics While not normally part of my columnist repertoire, the big ethical questions sometimes need to be tackled. I often hear from working people who run into tough situations on the job. How do I respond to this thing my boss said? How should I navigate this political situation? We help each other. I send words of advice, and very often the letter inspires a column in this space. But these letters don't touch on the biggest problems facing white-collar professionals these days: how to get promoted, how to foil the backstabber in the next cube, and how to neutralize the idea-stealing clown one department away. These are tactical issues. The big one, the issue that vexes corporate people in every industry and function, is this: How do I succeed at my job without turning into that spineless character -- a pod person? Driving home from the office, or sitting in the airport waiting for the red-eye, we wonder: Is this me? Are these meetings I'm holding, these memos I'm writing, are they the things I'm supposed to be doing? Corporate roles can introduce mind-numbing ethical issues. That layoff last month -- did we handle that right? How do I feel about the big bonus I got, in light of the fact that we just outsourced customer support and eliminated 32 jobs in New York? And so on. It's not easy... Read the article.  Back to top Beyond The Annual Physical Well-heeled worriers are signing up for wide-ranging tests. We try a pricey new one. How much do you really want to know about your health? For most of us, the annual physical -- a little blood work, a little poking and probing -- will more than suffice. But for the well-heeled worrier, there are far more detailed and costly options: one- to two-day executive physicals that cost thousands of dollars, $500-and-up full body scans, and now, a $3,400 blood test named the Biophysical250 that screens for 250 possible diseases, at least 150 more than most standard physicals. "Very American," my own admittedly skeptical doctor sighed when I told him I'd tried the latter option for this story. Then came the warning... Read the article.  Back to top Confessions of an Entrepreneur's Wife "A CEO sells everyone. When he asks suppliers for better terms he's also selling them on why they should do it. When he convinces a new hire to join a super-risky venture, he's selling her on the potential the job offers. When he convinces me to stay married to him, he's selling me on the better future we will have together." She was proud to support her husband's dream of building a great business. But five years is a long time to watch someone focus on his company at the expense of everything--everything--else. We were on vacation at the lake when my husband decided to start a company. Our five-year-old, Lily, was napping, so we had some rare adult time to talk about the opportunity Bill was considering. He wanted to leave his job as general manager for an industrial laundry plant to partner with a guy who had invented a drink that was carbonated but also 100 percent juice. It seemed to Bill like the chance of a lifetime, given that he had worked for a number of entrepreneurial companies before, most notably a few beer businesses. And I agreed. As we aged it would only become harder for him to take a big risk like that. We had some money saved and had recently relocated from Boston to Richmond, Virginia--a pretty affordable town. Why not go for it? I knew what we were in for. I had been a business journalist for a dozen years (five of them on staff at Inc.) and had written countless articles and a couple of books about managing start-ups. My husband was a smart M.B.A. with entrepreneurial drive, I told myself, and I would be the supportive wife with exceptional business sense. In five years, he would sell the company to Coke or Pepsi and cash out. Of course you've already guessed it: I was dead wrong on nearly every count. Neither of us could have predicted the company's surprising trajectory. Watching Bill navigate the entrepreneurial life, I see now just how little I really knew about starting and building a business. In the five years since Bill embarked on his great adventure, I've come to realize the only thing I was right about originally is that my husband is, indeed, a smart M.B.A.--and he has more entrepreneurial drive, much more, than either of us knew... Read the article.  Back to top How an Open Door Policy Ought to Work Want to bypass levels of management, strike fear in the hearts of supervisors, and undermine your chain of command? Adopt an open door policy that states any employee can talk with any level manager about any issue at any time. Isn't that the point of an open door policy, you may ask? My answer? Yes and no. In theory, any employee should be able to talk with any level of manager or any other employee about any subject at any time. Philosophically, I believe we are all equal; we just have different jobs. But, open door policies, as commonly interpreted, fail to build the ability of the organization to solve problems close to where the problem occurs... Read the article.  Back to top May Lose Job Offer Over Salary A reader says, "After many interviews, I have inside info - I may be losing a job offer over salary. I have had 6 interviews with 9 people over the past 4 months with a firm. I have several friends working there already. Basically I know that the company wants me. I know that everyone from the top down likes me and thinks I am a perfect match for the position they have in mind. I was originally being considered for several positions while they figured out where I could best be utilized. Now I hear ..." [Read] this discussion in the Forum... Read the article.  Back to top Find Ten Things in Common I've used this successful team building icebreaker for so many years that I don't remember where it originated. This team building icebreaker is fast, easy, and fun. Try out this always successful, laughter-generating, team building icebreaker. It’s a good icebreaker for a meeting because it takes so little time. Take a look at Find Ten Things in Common... Read the article.  Back to top Beware the Stealth Interview Thanks to the time constraints and laziness of both traditional journalists and bloggers, you may be quoted in a story, sometimes at length, without having been interviewed—the victim of a stealth interview. There was a big brouhaha when something similar happened to actor George Clooney recently, but it's really nothing out of the ordinary. Like Clooney, you would definitely be quoted out of context in a stealth interview, because there is no context. The interview never happened. But you're quoted nonetheless, and you did make the statement. You just didn't think you were saying it to a reporter... Read the article.  Back to top Lead-Generation Case Study: How Multiple Touches Can Lead to Profit Multiples It's Friday afternoon. Phil, the top sales rep for a technology company, is catching up on his paperwork. Reluctantly, he picks up a stack of leads awaiting follow up. He rifles through them looking for the hot ones that have budgets and plan to buy within 90 days. He finds none. Among the discards: a prospect indicating an estimated budget of $200,000 to be possibly spent next year. Phil, however, needs to make his numbers this year and decides the decision-making timeframe is too far out. This "lead" goes into the circular file. This is a fictionalized episode of an all-too-frequent occurrence. Salespeople are notoriously poor in following up on qualified leads. In fact, experts say, sales does not follow up on more than 70% of leads. Why?... Read the article.  Back to top The Four Colors of Market Planning Allow me to introduce you to what was, for over 100 years, the Four Color Conjecture-that is, until the mid '70s, when mathematicians Appel and Haken made it the first major mathematical concept to be proved by a computer—turning it into the Four Color Theorem. From Wikipedia: "The Four Color Theorem states that given any plane separated into regions, such as a political map of the counties of a state, the regions may be colored using no more than four colors in such a way that no two adjacent regions receive the same color." To create a complete marketing plan, one that drives near and longer term marketing action, I need only four colors as well. Those colors are created through a set of analyses that we perform: 1. Customer analysis 2. Competitive analysis 3. Whole Product analysis 4. Forces analysis Now, I mention this because I'm working these days on a series of Marketing Plan Templates for the folks here at MarketingProfs. (You can see the first one here). As with all templates, the value lies primarily in providing—imposing—a structure on the process, to facilitate thinking and cut some organizational corners. There is also a structure I impose on the preparation for planning: the research and analysis and assumption-bashing that we go through before we think that we have enough knowledge to make good decisions. And that structure revolves around the Four Color Theorem... Read the article.  Back to top The 10 Key Steps In Developing An Effective Performance Management Strategy In a recent issue of The Economist, the magazine points out that "Over the next few years companies may well come to reassess the value of their HR operations and decide that workforce planning and performance management have become sources of competitive advantage... ." Some would say that's already the case. For instance, the United Kingdom's Northumberland Fire and Rescue Authority was praised on January 19, 2006, by government authorities for "making progress in achieving its objectives through its proactive approach to community safety, supported by improvements in its performance management framework to monitor core outcomes." Officials went on to say that the Authority has driven down deaths and injuries from fire to the lowest level in history. To offer more evidence that an investment in performance management pays dividends, consider this... Read the article.  Back to top Bye-Bye Boomers? More Women Choosing Not to Work A recent report indicates that a growing number of college educated women are opting out of the workforce. It’s now a matter of time. The baby boomer generation—comprised of nearly 83 million people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and getting ever-longer in the tooth—will soon begin filtering out of the workforce. The threat that has long been on the horizon is now knocking at the door: Boomers will be leaving behind the jobs—including many C-level posts—they’ve held for years, taking with them the wealth of experience and knowledge they have accrued.Charged with filling those positions, companies will draw on a pool of workers that, at least in terms of numbers, doesn’t seem capable of replenishing the ranks. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a labor force of 162 million in 2012, and anticipates the economy will require 165 million jobs. Those figures—accounting for factors such as outsourcing and the hiring of newly arriving immigrants—don’t necessarily equal a shortage of 3 million workers, but do pose questions for many U.S. companies. On the whole, “employers simply can’t afford to see this generation retire en masse,” says Roselyn Feinsod, principal at Towers Perrin HR Services in Stamford, Conn., without witnessing significant effects on productivity, the ability to serve customers and, ultimately, the bottom line. The good news for business is that... Read the article.  Back to top Sunbelt Cities Eclipse Major Metros in Job Growth Sunbelt cities such as Las Vegas, Orlando and Phoenix will see the most metropolitan job growth in the United States this year, according to a new study by economic and financial forecasting company Global Insight Inc., headquartered in Boston. The study, released by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the official nonpartisan organization of cities with populations of 30,000 or more, predicted that the economic output or GMP -- gross metro product -- of American cities will decrease slightly, rising 3.3 percent in 2006, compared to 3.7 percent in 2005. At the same time, the study indicated an unbalanced future for the country's 361 metropolitan areas... Read the article.  Back to top Is Your Job Making You Sick? "College students may want to reconsider their majors based on these results," joked Dr. Gerba. "TV producers, consultants, and lawyers ranked on the low end of the germ spectrum." In the number one spot were teachers, a finding that didn't surprise Dr. Gerba's researchers. "This is clearly one test on which teachers would not like to receive such 'high marks'," added Dr. Gerba. "But then again, when your officemates are children, it is no surprise that classroom surfaces are off the germ charts." The study, which was funded by The Clorox Co., found that the phones, desks and keyboards regularly used by teachers, accountants and bankers harbored nearly two to twenty times more bacteria per square inch than other professions. Phones ranked as the home for office germs, followed by desks, keyboards and computer mice. In a change since the researchers first began tracking "Germs in the Workplace" in 2002, bacteria presence on office surfaces overall appears to have... Read the article.  Back to top Breaking the Link of Emotional Eating There’s no doubt that obesity is a global epidemic and a health priority. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that obesity contributed to roughly 400,000 deaths in 2004 (a 33 percent jump from 1990) and contributes as much as $93 million to the nation’s yearly medical bill. While the causes of obesity are varied and often unclear, one link is certain: Overeating leads to obesity. And, emotions often lead to overeating. In fact, experts estimate that 75% of overeating is caused by feelings and using food to cope with emotions. “Emotional eating acts as a way of using food, usually comfort food, to cope with emotional ups and downs. We eat when we’re lonely, sad, bored, angry, grieving, frustrated, afraid -- believing that that it will fix whatever's wrong,” says Marie Apke, Senior Vice President of Bensinger DuPont & Association, a leading provider of employee assistance programs. "However, because the roots of emotional eating are not physical, we should address the situation from a behavioral and psychological perspective -- not from focusing on dieting and portion control."... Read the article.  Back to top The Boss And You Write this down: Your boss isn't your best friend, a babysitter or an ogre. If you're lucky, your boss is competent, a mentor interested in your advancement and confident in your abilities. A good boss depends on you. The reward for good work is challenging assignments in the future. In return, make your boss look good to The Grand Pooh-Bahs who inhabit the executive suite and the corner offices. If nothing else, boosting your boss will advance your career. (See: "I Pledge Allegiance To My Company.")"The relationship with your boss is a partnership," says Jane Boucher, author of How To Love The Job You Hate: Job Satisfaction for the 21st Century. "It takes effort to built the relationship and nurture it. You have to communicate well, avoid confrontations and resolve differences in a positive way." That sounds simple enough, but many employees get bogged down in small details and lose sight of what's important... Read the article.  Back to top Love In The Time Of Cubicles Whenever companies have me help their people build stronger relationships for professional success and personal joy, I always share one powerful point that's quite prominent in my book Never Eat Alone: Business relationships are personal relationships. I know this from experience. Some of the best personal friends I've ever had have also been my bosses, colleagues, employees, clients and suppliers. Also, two significant others I had were people I worked with. And according to recent studies, there's a good chance you could say the same... Read the article.  Back to top Ten Diets That Work There are two eternal truths about diets: One, if properly followed they will result in weight loss; and two, most people will cheat. Only an iron will, an in-house nutritionist or numbed taste buds can guarantee a successful diet. But this isn't just a question of discipline. It's also boredom, timing and preconditioning. For example, an athlete accustomed to consuming large amounts of food will find it hard to reduce his or her caloric intake when no longer in training. Even if the foods are tasty--the Atkins diet actually encourages people to eat bacon and butter--people will hunger for the forbidden. The reason is that many diets are too restrictive and are not designed to be sustained over time. For example, go to a spa, drink lots of water, go for hikes, do yoga, eat 1,000 calories a day and lose weight. Within a short time of coming home, though, the weight that had been lost, like the prodigal son, has now returned... Read the article.  Back to top Ouch! With sex injuries, love really hurts The British erotic retail chain Ann Summers recently released a poll asking people if they had ever been injured during sex. One in three said they hurt themselves somewhat routinely, though the injuries were about what you might expect: rug burns (to, ahem, the knees), muscle pulls, a conk on the noggin from, say, banging into the headboard. But at Sexploration we hear stories, sometimes from emergency room doctors in bars. By the third martini, the stories often begin with, "You wouldn’t believe what I saw last night…" And so I decided to call around to emergency rooms and ask sober ER docs about the things they see, and, more importantly, what advice they might have based on their experiences, not only how to avoid the damage, but how to handle the delicate task of seeking help once the damage is done... Read the article.  Back to top Forward to a Friend: Do you have a friend that would like to receive MgmtWatchsm? 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! DISCLAIMER: MgmtWatchsm and the BusinessWatch Networksm are service marks of DMS. 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