The Agile Scaleup

5 Ways to Go Global; The Soap Queen; Ashiana Housing Video; Dan Pink Interview

"...keeping you great" 

HEADLINES:

Jim, you've done some stupid things before. This is about the dumbest.
	Jim Koch's dad when learning he wanted to start a brewery

The Soap Queen -- talk about owning a word, Anne-Marie Faiola, founder of Bramble Berry Soap Making Supplies, is THE Soap Queen. More below, but first...

Jim Koch's Samuel Adams -- take 3 minutes to read this inspiring Fortune article on Jim Koch who runs the largest craft brewery in the US, Boston Beer ($629 million in 2012). It's a great story of how he started, went public, and has thrived during the Great Recession against the big guys (had to get a cease and desist against Bud) and 2400 small competitors. His bottom line advice:

1. Know the market - must be better or cheaper or go home
2. Don't hire people unless they raise the average - takes selection seriously
3. Learn to fail quickly - they've pulled dozens of beers that didn't sell

5 Ways Smart Companies Go Global -- Pankaj Ghemawat, the youngest ever to be appointed full professor at Harvard Business School (now prof in Barcelona at IESE), outlines five practical keys for going global - applicable to mid-market firms as well as Fortune 500:

1. Chopping Deadwood - pull out of countries that don't make sense
2. Manning the Bridges - pick countries with cultural links - he outlines three questions
3. Fortifying Regions - OK to stay close to home
4. Riding the Big Shift - emerging markets makes up 38% of global GDP, and 79% of growth
5. Cherry picking - avoid "globaloney"

My take - best to follow your existing customers to other countries - that way you have revenue day one in a foreign country. Take three minutes to read his piece in Fortune.

Core Values Video -- Ankur Gupta, head of award-winning Ashiana Housing in India, sent me a link to their latest core values video. Notes Ankur "I really want to thank you for creating such systems that we are able to transfer the core values to many of our employees. One of the employees told me that this is the only company which he has seen practicing its core values, not just talking about them."

8 Ways to Align HR with Core Values -- the system Ankur is talking about, in aligning all your HR systems with your core values, is detailed in this short Growth Guy article - take 3 minutes to review the 8 ways - then share a copy with your head of HR.

Dan Pink Interview -- I meant to point you Tuesday to a 4 minute interview Sean Finter, CEO of Barmetrix did with Dan Pink - it's nicely produced and gives you a quick overview of Dan's thoughts on sales - including why most employees are better at sales than they might think and what the #1 thing all sales people must do in today's sales environment - what Jeff Thule calls Sales 3.0.

The Soap Queen -- seeing my latest LinkedIn Influencer article about the importance of owning a word or two, Anne-Marie sent me this kind note "I must give you credit for the Soap Queen name. You told us to call ourselves the King/Queen/Whatever of our domains and I started calling myself the 'Soap Queen' and now, I'm identified as that term so much that it even made the cover of my new book." Anne-Marie lives the notion that you "are what you publish" (thank you David Meerman Scott) and has a new book coming out in August; a Soap Queen blog; and even Soap Queen TV! Here's a link to all she's doing. She was also kind enough to give a shout out to her Gazelles coach of 7 years, Ron Huntington.

1 Word; #2 Biz Book; Being Decisive in 4 Steps; April 8 Cutoff

"...out-learning the competition" 

HEADLINES:

One of the richest learning experiences today (National Growth Summit Australia) and a killer close - good job. When we first met 4.5 years ago our market cap was 12 million; today it's 170+/ Gazelles has contributed to that.
	Charles Gregory, CEO Silver Chef Limited

Your Success Hinges on One Word -- both your business and career success hinge on one word - something Richard Branson, Donald Trump, and others have nailed -- and my latest LinkedIn Influencer blog post provides the details. Take 2 minutes to scan the post and "follow" me if you would like automatic updates.

#2 Biz Book -- speaking of owning a word, Dan and Chip Heath release their latest book today, debuting as the #2 biz book (hard to beat Sheryl Sandberg's book right now). Brilliantly entitled Decisive, they outline a four-step process for overcoming bad decision making - and humans are notoriously bad given some inherent psychological issues we face including overconfidence and short-term emotional attachment. The four steps they abbreviate as WRAP:

1. Widen your options.
2. Reality-test your assumptions.
3. Attain distance before deciding.
4. Prepare to be wrong.

Worst Decision-makers -- when it comes to forecasting, pundits and experts are the worst - particularly in the realms of investing and politics. Drawing on Daniel Kahneman's brilliant book Thinking, Fast and Slow, this March 22 NY Times Op-Ed piece outlines how a Penn/Berkeley team seems to be besting everyone when it comes to forecasting - a space where it looks like foxes beat hedgehogs (vs. Jim Collins' conclusion when it comes to driving biz strategy). If more accurate forecasting is critical to your business, this article is worth the 3 minutes to read (and study!).

#1 Biz Speaker Dan Pink -- right now the undisputed #1 biz speaker on the circuit, Dan Pink keynoted the National Growth Summit in Australia hosted by our partner Karen Beattie, founder of The Growth Faculty. The new material from his latest book To Sell is Human is outstanding. Hard to believe there hasn't been a new book on selling in the top 100 bestselling books for quite some time. Dan is the opening keynote for our upcoming Leadership Summit in Orlando, May 9 - 10 - he's not to be missed.

YPO International Workshops -- I'm leading three 2.5 day "Making the Rockefeller Habits Rock" workshops for YPO in Europe, US, and Asia (India 2014). The US session just opened for registration this week - limited to 15 YPO firms - Oct 24 - 26, Las Vegas.

April 8 Cutoff -- our cut-off date for the $169/night group rate for the Leadership Summit hosted by Fortune is April 8. And the rate is available three days before and three days after if you want to stay a few extra days and soak in the sun or bring the family down. Here's a link to reservation details.

April Rockefeller Habits Workshops -- 4 Jacksonville, 10 Boston, 17 Milwaukee, 17 Vancouver, 17 San Antonio, 23 Houston, 24 Denver, 25 Memphis, 26 Las Vegas.

Google Lessons; 10 Relationship Tips; Smart Thinking; Complimentary Book

"...out-learning the competition" 

HEADLINES: (book fest)

You can't outperform your knowledge.
	Bob Bonwell Carpet Cleaning Megastore

Free Book on Writing a Book -- more below, but first...

Smart Thinking -- University of Texas-Austin Professor Art Markman is a great teacher - and his 52 minute online seminar about Smart Thinking, based on his book by the same title, is about giving your team a knowledge edge over the competition. More below, but second...

Lessons from Google's Leadership Change -- Larry Page, CEO, recently reshuffled the senior team at Google - and it makes sense. The key is keeping the more entrepreneurial members of the team doing innovation - and turning over the more mature product lines to execs that love managing - it's all about the S curve (start-up, growth, maturity) and knowing who is great at which part of the curve and then knowing where a product is on that curve. So I think Page's move is right - to take the guy that created Android, pull him out of running it, and tell him to go create some more!! Study this article if rethinking your own organizational structure.

10 Relationship Tips -- Brad Feld, the famous venture capitalist and co-founder of the TechStar movement, produced an insightful online seminar for us based on his book Do More Faster. Most recently he and his wife Amy have written a book entitled Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur. Here are their top 10 Quick Tips, knowledge useful for any busy executive of a growth firm:

1. Never Schedule High Priority Activities or Deadlines on Fridays: Doing so will likely create a scenario that drifts into Friday night, Saturday, and then Sunday. Always be realistic about the ebb and flow of the work cycle.
2. Don't Bring Up Charged Topics at Bedtime: Your bedroom should be a sanctuary and a safe haven from the demands of the world. Never start a conflict when you and your partner are in bed and dozing off to sleep.
3. Laugh and Laugh Often: We believe you can never hug each other enough, say you love each other too much, or laugh too often.
4. Apologize and Forgive: Practice apologizing when you hurt your partner's feelings. Offer forgiveness when your partner has been careless with your feelings. Know that you will try to be your best self but that you will often fail and will need to hone your apology skills.
5. Have a Life Dinner Once a Month: Make a reservation right now at one of your favorite restaurants. Go out--just the two of you. Buy your significant other a gift. Turn off your cell phones and hand them to the other person. Spend a long slow dinner enjoying each other's company.
6. Set Limits on Technology: You do not need to do just one more e-mail right before bedtime. You really don't. You need to sleep well and restore yourself and reset your brain chemistry during a nice night of rest. Those who need to take breaks from technology are often the least likely to do it.
7. Live Where You Want to Live: Pick the place where you want to live and build your life around it. Our contributors to the book, Mark and Pam Solon, say "We believe it's important for young people embarking on their lives to realize that geography matters in your happiness quotient and that it can even out-weigh the highest-paying job opportunities."
8. Life Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint: Another contributor to the book, Dave Jilk, says "If I could send my younger self a message from the future, it would tell me to treat my career more like a marathon than a sprint."
9. Commit to Each Other's Dreams: "Recognizing that one's partner is pursuing their dream, they are satisfied down to their soul and, in so being satisfied, are that much more alive. That level of aliveness is a gift few partners can ever give, and successful couples recognize this," say Tim Enwall and Hillary Hall.
10. Always Answer His or Her Calls! While it might seem like a small gesture, the cumulative impact of doing so on a regular basis shows your partner they matter to you.

To this last point, I watched an interview with Brad and during the interview his wife called and he took the call! People don't really care when it's your spouse.

Powerful Branding (and free book) -- Brad has cranked out 6 books with 2 more due this summer. If you want to build authority, credibility, and expertise in your market and generate more business, publishing your own book is one of the best, if not the best, ways to do it...and it is easier that you think. My friend Adam Witty has authored a new book entitled The Book Itch: Is There a Book in You? This book will quickly answer that question. Adam is giving away copies of the book to the first 250 insight readers that request them. Visit http://www.thebookitch.com/gazelles. Once they're gone they're gone, so request your free book now.

Smart Thinking -- Leading a team to achieve great things isn't always easy. In this Smart Thinking online seminar, Dr. Art Markman tells how to help your team outthink your competition and achieve your most important goals by building a workplace culture built around the application of cutting edge knowledge to get things done. In his online seminar you will learn:

• How to help your team identify critical gaps in their knowledge
• The best way to create working conditions that help your team excel
• Strategies for removing common workplace distractions
• How to foster the openness to try new ideas and collaboration
• The best way to spot the hidden connections among team members

Dr. Markman is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin and director of the Program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations. As always, money back guarantee.

All You Can Eat -- BTW, if you would like all your employees to have unlimited access to our 30+ online seminars, we have a flat fee of $5000/year. So if you have 50 employees, this works out to $100/year to access the top biz thinkers in the world and their knowledge - a built-in online corporate university for you - and we've done the hard work to pick the authors and topics that matter. Get all your employees in a rhythm of watching one per month and see their competence and confidence grow. Email Daniel Marcos if interested.

"You Can't Outperform Your Knowledge" -- I still marvel at the simplicity and power of this statement Bob so nonchalantly included in a note to me. Thinking it must have been spoken by some biz guru, I searched the internet and found nothing (OK, another cleaning company used it). I think we've found our new mantra - and the precise rationale for investing two days and attending our upcoming Leadership Summit in Orlando May 9 - 10. See you there.

#1 Book; Bossy Girls; God's Architect; Four Things Men Need to Do; Grand Rapids March 20

"...keeping you great" 

HEADLINES:
 

As men get more successful, they are better liked by men and women; as women get more successful, they are less liked by men and women.
	Sheryl Sandberg, COO Facebook

#1 Book This Week -- a book for both men and women, Sheryl Sandberg's book entitled Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead soared to #1 this week of all books. Here's a link to a quick interview of Sandberg by Fortune magazine where she highlights the likeability gap I quoted above. As COO of Facebook, she is probably the most powerful and influential woman biz leader in the world. Take 3 minutes to read and watch her interview where she also outlines 4 main messages for men in helping women (outlined below at the end).

Bossy Girls -- and this 11 minute interview of Sheryl Sandberg, on the highly-acclaimed news program 60 Minutes, is something I'm having my 9 year old daughter watch tonight with the rest of the family. I particularly love her observation that when a girl is called bossy, it's because she's a leader!! Sandberg points to all kinds of credible research on why women get held back resulting in a loss to themselves, our companies, and the world.

Top School Leadership -- one of the top women biz gurus and former VP of Oracle University, Liz Wiseman (author of Multipliers), has a new book out next Tuesday entitled The Multiplier Effect: Tapping the Genius Inside Our Schools. I've already gifted a book to the headmaster of our children's school. Co-authored with two educators, the book takes a deep dive with more than 100 of education's best leaders and explores the five disciplines that distinguish Multipliers from Diminishers and how these leaders attract and develop talent, as well as harness new ideas and energy to drive educational innovation.

Read the foreword by Clayton Christensen (Innovator's Dilemma guru) here: Get access to Chapter 1 of the book here:

Accidental Diminisher Quiz -- Is it possible that, despite good intentions, you've been accidentally diminishing the people on your team (like me over all these years - why Liz's first book was so painful for me to read)? Take this 5-minute quiz to find out.

Why The Multiplier Effect is an important Idea for both Business and Education

1. We face what might be the challenge of this decade: To rethink and revitalize education at a time when the life we are preparing students for is changing as fast as our budgets are shrinking. We need leaders who can mobilize all the energy and intelligence in their schools. And, we need to do this across all our schools.
2. In the current economic realities, we can't afford schools that operate on a fraction of the intelligence inside them.
3. Our businesses need an education system that delivers new graduates who enter the workforce with critical thinking skills and able to lead in a new era where a leaders job is to access and unleash the talent and intelligence of others.
4. The Multiplier Effect has a suite of extremely practical tools for any leader (in business or education) who want to begin practicing Multiplier Leadership. The ten, one-page "Multiplier Learning Experiments" and the "Accidental Diminisher Workarounds" are alone worth the price of this book.

Four Things Men Can Do - back to Sandberg's book, below is the short list she outlines in her short interview and elaborates in the book - and she tells a couple relevant stories in the interview that highlight what she means:

1. Help women sit at the table; help women reach opportunities
2. Push back on the success and likeability gap
3. Have the honest conversation about sponsorship and mentorship
4. Help women navigate through the child rearing years

And I like how she describes her brother's handling of the pregnancy question in the interview

God's Architect - Antoni Gaudi -- BTW, check out the short piece 60 Minutes produced on Gaudi's famous SagradaFamilia - another reason I love Barcelona. It aired during the same episode as Sandberg's interview.

Grand Rapids, MI -- first one-day workshop of the spring season - March 20. This is our 15th year of offering workshops - going strong because the tools/methodologies work. Below is list of full spring schedule - book a refresher course.

Buffett Wisdom; Daily Huddle Video; World-Class Team; IfByPhone Service

"...keeping you great" 

HEADLINES:

Berkshire's yearend employment totaled a record 288,462, up 17,604 from last year. Our headquarters crew, however, remained unchanged at 24. No sense going crazy.
	Warren Buffett, March 1 Letter to Shareholders

Daily Huddle Video -- Craig Zoberis, President, Fusion OEM, sent me this video of their Daily Huddle, more below including a calling system helpful for daily huddles, but first...

Warren Buffett's Letter -- his annual letter to shareholders is out and Australian-based SmartCompany's online newsletter (I'm here for our Growth Summit in Sydney) has the best summary - "10 Nuggets of Wisdom." Take 3 minutes to read through the list, including why he's buying up local newspapers; and here's a link to the full letter - always worth 10 minutes to scan through for great investment, economic, and business insights.

Heinz's Purchase -- some think Buffett overpaid for Heinz. However, Buffett notes, "More than 50 years ago, Charlie told me that it was far better to buy a wonderful business at a fair price than to buy a fair business at a wonderful price." Plus Buffett always negotiates plenty of cheap warrants as part of the deal that end up making him a lot of money down the road.

Horowitz on World-Class Teams -- "As CEO, you know that you cannot build a world-class company unless you maintain a world-class team. But how do you know if an executive is world-class? Beyond that, if she was world-class when you hired her, will she stay world-class? If she doesn't, will she become world-class again?" These are the opening questions of Ben Horowitz' latest blog entitled "Staying Great." This is one worth taking 3 minutes to read.

#1 Way Execs Fail -- Horowitz laments that CEOs have very little opportunity to develop their immediate team - they must come 99% ready to perform (not so for middle management, they must be developed). He goes on to note, "when the company doubles in size, (you have) a new job. This means that doing things that made you successful in your old job will not necessarily translate to success in the new job. In fact, the No. 1 way that executives fail is by continuing to do their old job rather than moving on to their new job...and failing to keep up with the changes in the business."

You Must Remove Them -- and the toughest situation is where an executive has helped grow the company 10x but is not able to run the new behemoth they created. Concludes Horowitz "your loyalty must go to your employees -- the people who report to your executives. Your engineers, marketing people, sales people, finance and HR people who are doing the work. You owe them a world-class management team. That's the priority."

Automated Daily Huddles -- Alan Rudy, President, MedBridge Home Medical, has 10 locations across the US and needs to have daily operational huddle calls in various groupings. Before deploying a new automated calling system called IfbyPhone, the normal challenges of someone being 4 minutes late would waste a dozen people's time (almost an hour of productivity).

IfByPhone -- Instead, at an appointed time each day, IfbyPhone calls everyone. No more remembering dial-in numbers or access codes. Alan has both his cell phone and desk phone programmed in and if away from both phones, he can simply call from another phone and punch in his cell phone number to be connected. Notes Rudy "Time and again I might have a conference call at 11:05am, look at my clock at 11:01am and think 'I have time to answer one more email' only to mentally wake up at 11:09am. Or I'm running through an airport and simply forget to call in."

Save Money with Attorneys -- Rudy also uses the service for ad hoc conference calls, especially with attorneys who bill by the minute. One avoided 10 minute delay on a conference call with an attorney and his 3 associates can pay for the service for a month!

CAVEAT -- Not 100% Reliable -- concludes Rudy, "About once a month, it does not launch a call. Not sure why. Cool thing is, my assistant can go on line and launch it again right then. It is all set up on line. And it is virtually impossible to ever talk to anyone at the ifbyphone company. One irritating item is calls can only happen at 5 minute increments, so we can't have a huddle at 11:07, for example, only at 11:05 or 11:10am. I have not found another service to provide this outbound call, but would love to hear of another. We have about 7 standing huddles every day (range 5-14 people) throughout the company that use this service (the others happen just in a single location, so they are standup huddles and no need for a call), along with ad hoc conference calls. Our cost is about $250/month. Well worth it."