Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

How to reach the Floyd Community Health Center

The Floyd Community Health Center is open five days a week, 8:30 am to 5 pm and can be reached by calling 540-745-9290.

The Center provides affordable comprehensive primary healthcare to the residents of Floyd and Patrick Counties.

Dr. Lorrie French covers Monday, Tuesday and Friday from 8:30 to 5 and from 8:30  to noon on Wednesday. Nurse Practitioner Beth Hubbard is on duty Thursdays from 8:30 to 5.

There is no after hours coverage at present, but they respond the next business day to messages left on their voicemail.

If you need emergency care at any time, you need to call 911.

I am posting this because they are not in the phone book yet and you cannot find them on Google yet. I have mislaid the brochure I got from them and I rely on Google to look up business addresses and phone numbers.

More and more people use search engines to locate businesses. Is your business visible on the Internet?

Adopting new technology in your business - part 2 of a series

You can adopt new technology in an effort to stay ahead of competition or to distinguish yourself from the competition, but the most compelling reason to adopt new technology is because you have a broken business model.

Of course, by the time you realize that your business model is broken, it may be too late to save your business. Therefore, it is important to keep your eye on technology trends that apply to your business and understand what the implications are.

A broken business model occurs when you have not changed your method of operation, but other companies in the market are doing a better job  of meeting your customers needs.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, you may want to skip the rest of this article and find some light reading like this or this.

Newspapers have a broken business model because readers have found the Internet to be a better source of accurate and non-managed news.

Telephone companies have a broken business model because customers have discovered they can get unlimited long-distance calling through their Internet connection.

Established companies have a natural resistance to adopting new technology because this causes them to discard the investments they made in older technology.

When they pay too much attention to "sunk costs" and refuse to see what is happening right now, they can be creating a broken business model for themselves.

If you are the owner of a business, you can find that your business model no longer works because of external changes in the marketplace. You can sit and complain that customers no longer come to your location or you can change your business model to accommodate their changing needs.

Sometimes this is as simple as providing an email address for customers to send orders to you at all hours of the day.

Sometimes it is a matter of providing a website so prospective customers can find out about you. The Thomas Register and other catalogs are being used by fewer companies every year. If you cannot be found using a search engine, you do not exist for many prospective customers.

One point to consider is that technology should be used to enhance the customer experience, not destroy it. Misuse of technology has created the ubiquitous "phone tree from Hell" which keeps you online forever with little hope for human contact.

There are some simple tests for what new technology is right for your business. I will try to cover these in another article.

Consider the benefits of creating an outstanding customer experience...

When you are able to create an outstanding customer experience, your customers return for more of the same and tell their friends about you.

When you adopt this attitude about your products and services, your biggest problem becomes figuring out how to keep on doing it in a way that lets you prosper. It can represent a revolutionary change in your business model and makes life far more enjoyable.

This approach eliminates most of the effort that normally goes into cold calling, upselling, and convincing customers that your pre-packaged solution is right for them.

It encourages you to find out what customer expectations are before you invest a lot of effort and fail to meet them.

To create an outstanding customer experience, your focus must be on the customer and what that customer needs and wants. Once you know his or her expectations, then you can discuss raising of the expectations and what that might entail.

This is a natural and almost effortless process if the customer's expectations are discussed and understood before going on to discuss solutions. It might have profound effects on your life as a business owner.

Most of the transactions that annoy you as a customer involve people who are proposing solutions to problems you don't have or providing solutions you did not ask for. The transactions that customers remember fondly and share with others are the ones where they got more than they expected.

On the other side of the coin, most of the transactions that annoy you as a business person involve doing a lot of work for an unhappy customer. When you exceed customer expectations, everybody wins.

What changes in your business model would it take to provide an outstanding customer experience on a routine basis?

Nepotism again...

A reader asks about the positives and negatives of nepotism in a school setting.

His comment read:

Regarding nepotism and ethics, what about a situation where a teaching staff where the principal has a practice of hiring married couples? Approximately 25% of our staff is comprised of married couples. He is very open about the practice saying it's like a family, but I argue that it could turn into a dysfunctional family. .... What are the positive and negatives of such a practice in a school setting?

I'm not sure I would consider hiring married couples nepotism. I have worked for many companies where several members of a family were employed. Usually, the company did not allow these people to work in the same department or for each other.

I consider nepotism to be the favoring of a relative or a friend over other employees. When family or personal connections interfere with the orderly management of a company, it is a recipe for disaster.

When workers or managers are productive and do the job that people expect of them, nobody cares who they are related to.

When employees or managers are incompetent and are protected because they are friends with or related to someone else in the company, the company has a hidden chain of command and hard working people resent it. Good people will leave as soon as they spot this occurring because it is unfair and unprofessional. Timid employees will remain and moan about their lot.

Are the incompetent people in your company being protected by someone?

Deprogramming a Vista Machine - Part 2

It has been 13 days since I converted my laptop from Vista to Windows XP. The process was more involved than I expected, but for me the end result justified the effort. Your mileage may vary.

In a head to head competition with an identical Compaq Presario laptop running Vista, the converted XP machine is observably faster starting up and is less prone to those annoying blackouts which occur when you ask the Vista system to do something it is not ready to do.

The downside to this adventure is that you have to learn a lot more than you ever cared to know about driver software and the idiosyncrasies of machines that were designed to run Vista and are not really supported by XP.

I no longer relish looking under the hood of my cars or inside the guts of my computers. I have learned the hard way that cutting edge refinements require constant upkeep and are not compatible with standard upgrades.

When you modify a mass-produced system in any significant way, it no longer is part of the mainstream repair and service network. You are on your own, so to speak, and you had better be satisfied with the help of Internet forums.

The bright spot in all of this is that customers are using the Internet to work around problems and the forums are full of useful information on converting Vista machines to XP machines and advice on handling arcane problems involving Conexant High Definition Audio Systems, whatever they are.

I have been installing new drivers on the XP laptop while I am writing this and the laptop now recognizes some of the hardware that was previously hidden from it.

A few more steps and the laptop now has a fully operational sound system. What a relief!

If I had it to do over again, I would go to my local PC expert and if he had done Vista to XP conversions successfully, I would get him to do the conversion. Proper division of labor, you know. Give the work to the person who does it professionally.

If you are already in the midst of doing this conversion for yourself, here is a link that may help you with audio problems: http://forum.driverpacks.net/viewtopic.php?pid=8558#p8558

Deprogramming a Vista machine - part 1

One of our shiny new Compaq laptop is no longer a Vista machine. The benefits of better graphics and more sophisticated software were frequently offset by disturbing hang-ups and interminable screen blackouts. It also seemed that the machine ran slower as more updates were added. Vista  was a painful reminder of the early Window operating systems that were sold to run on PCs with 128K 256K memories!

With those first version of Windows, the allure of a graphic interface was severely dimmed by the fact that it took forever to boot and longer to execute. Die-hard DOS fans snickered while we pioneers waited and waited for screens to update.

History repeats itself, of course, and so 25 years later I have Vista machines that offer lots of promise but are not really ready to deliver the goods.

It finally got to the point where I spent more time waiting than working

I have work to do and software which runs just fine on Windows XP, so I chose to lobotomize one of our laptops and gave it a new and more stable personality.

I reformatted the hard drive and installed a full installation copy of Windows XP with Service Pack 2. 

The other laptop will be a control subject and will remain a Vista machine. We will watch its performance and see when it starts performing faster than its "deprogrammed" twin. If it takes more than 6 months, it too may become an XP machine.

I was able to make the change from Vista to XP in a day All it took was a little research on the Internet.

Now I am installing all of the special drivers that are needed to get the most out of this new laptop hardware

I am using PC Doc Pro and Driver Genius to make the task as easy as possible.

I'll let you know how I fare.

Aloha to another broken business model

The closing of Aloha Airlines is a tragedy for the nearly 2000 employees involved. They were given less than 48 hours notice that they would be out of work.

Here is the spin from Aloha management:

Airline president and chief executive officer David Banmiller said "..unfair competition has succeeded in driving us out of business, bringing to an end a 61-year-old company with a proud legacy of serving millions of travelers in the true spirit of Aloha."

Hawaiian blogger Rosa Say takes a more realistic view of the situation and I agree with her no-nonsense viewpoint:

"Broken business models, inferior customer service, and management which does little to nothing about both of those things is what causes businesses to fail. Tough competition and rising costs may accelerate your demise, but you can’t blame those two things for everything."

Rosa's personal experience flying Aloha Airlines is a large part of her feelings. She reported that service levels on ‘Aloha’ Airlines were horrible.

Times are tough and there are always competitors who can outspend you, but there is no excuse for providing crappy service and blaming the demise of your company on "unfair competition".

Read Rosa's article Working Beyond Their Means for an excellent presentation of the whole story.

Do not believe in the trap of scarcity

Scarcity is an interesting trap. If somebody makes something "scarce", it can appear more valuable than it actually is. Your attention becomes riveted on the "scarcity" rather than looking for available alternatives.

(This was written a few years ago and it is even more true today. With the current state of the Internet, the barriers to self-publishing or starting a business are significantly reduced.)

When there is the prospect of getting your CD or book published, an artificially created scarcity can keep one fixated on something that is unlikely to happen. There are saner ways to proceed.

Look at the role of scarcity in maintaining control of traditional publishing. There are millions of people who write and only a handful of publishers who have figured out the keys to getting their books in bookstores.

Well, traditional publishers used to be the only real outlets for a writer, but that is no longer the case.  There is no shortage of publishers who can print an excellent quality book and ship it to customers on demand.

With a little work, you can see your work in print and on Amazon.com. You can generate sales without having to rely on traditional publishers or bookstores.

Bookstores are another example of scarcity. There is only so much room and they must stock what their customers will buy. As an unknown, your books will only appear in a bookstore if you or your friends bring books to the store.

If you sell online and offer free shipping, why would anyone need to find your book in a bookstore?

Today there are tens of thousands of writers who write well enough to command a following of readers. The vast majority of them seem to be caught up in the maddening hamster wheel activity of writing, submission, and rejection by companies that have no way of profitably publishing their work.

I've been following the literary efforts of some dear and talented friends for some time and have wanted to whack them gently alongside their heads to get them to wake up and see the possibilities they are ignoring. Some are online, some are not, but they all are transfixed by the traditional dream of being "published".

There are some incredibly persuasive reasons to look outside the resource-limited world of traditional publishing, if your writing is more interesting and thought-provoking than most of the material you read in "mainstream" publications:

1. When you publish your own work, you gain an immense amount of real experience as to what your market is. You also get honest feedback that helps you determine what to do to get more people reading your work.

2. Blogging is the first step in becoming a self-publisher. The feedback you get in your comments and from watching website visitor logs is instant and brutally or refreshingly honest.

You can use this to good advantage in developing a public awareness of your work and a community of people who are interested in seeing that you succeed. They will buy your book and, more importantly, they will tell others about your writing because it is interesting information that they are the first to hear about.

3. There is nothing so psychologically destructive as inviting unnecessary rejection.

Applying for a job when the company cannot pay what you are worth is ludicrous. Submitting manuscripts to companies that are frantically searching for a viable business model is worse.

If a publisher is doing well, it is because it has found a customer base for whatever it is currently publishing. The only works that will interest them are clones of what they are already publishing.

4. THERE IS NO SCARCITY OF OUTLETS FOR YOUR WORK!

Get over the idea that your piece is only valuable if it appears in a traditional magazine, collection or whatever. The only value of appearing in a well-known publication is the immediate visibility. Once it is published, it becomes old news by next month. 

Traditional publishing is a zero-sum game (If someone else gets published, you don't get published). If a known author with a track record of sales has something to release, a traditional publishing house would be crazy to publish something by an unknown instead.

If you were publishing, you would do the same. With limited production capability, you would choose the popular "brand" to sell, not the "unknown" brand.

As a self-publisher, you can publish your work in small quantities as I did, or you can use a POD publisher. Either way, your work will be available for people to buy it and you will do the same promotional actions as if you had published through a main-stream publishing house. There are unlimited outlets for your writing, all you have to do is use them.

There is unbelievable satisfaction in having people say, "I heard about your new book!"

Sometimes they even say, "Where can I get one?"

If you really want people to read your work, please take a hard look at self-publishing. You owe it to yourself to do so. There is no justification for a good piece of writing to remain unpublished. I have also proved to my own satisfaction that self-publishing caused a traditional publisher to license my work after I proved that a market existed for it.

This article applies to almost every form of publishing including music on CDs or MP3 files and artistic works of all kinds. You can reach customers all over the world if you use the Internet wisely.

Growing wiser instead of just growing older

This was written some time ago and I feel that it still applies. Enjoy.

LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE

As we age, we have experiences that range from incredibly good to disastrous. If we survive these experiences, we have a chance to learn from them and go on to further adventures. If we get stuck in these experiences, we merely get older.

I'd like to suggest that charging into the barricades of life with guns blazing and a total determination to succeed is a winning strategy, as long as you keep track of the odds against you. If the odds against you keep rising, you have made a tactical error and need to fall back to a point of safety and regroup.

There is nothing wrong in making a few mistakes. It's making the same mistake over and over that reveals your level of insanity.

You are led into making mistakes when you have insufficient or incorrect information. Learning from mistakes allows for continuous improvement. There are some professions like design engineering and programming which are simply organized methods for learning from earlier mistakes.

If you learn from your experiences instead of repressing them or fixating on them, you will surely achieve a measure of wisdom over time. I think that is a happier course of action than avoiding life or regretting life. You become smarter over time, because your experience has turned into knowledge.

BEING STUCK IN THE PAST

Let's look at the other end of the spectrum, the people who seem to be getting older but not wiser. You will find that their attention is stuck in the past, either on their failures or more surprisingly, their successes.

Too many times, the high school football star, the Homecoming Queen, and those fortunate children who are in the right place to become real celebrities on the stage or screen, are unable to move on and duplicate that success elsewhere.

This can even happen at work. A salesperson can have an incredible season which catapults his or her company into a new operating range. If the company promotes them to a managerial position, they may never again achieve the success they once had. If they cannot change and move on, they remain a perpetual has-been in their own minds although they have as much ability as they ever did.

Let's looks at the more usual case, the disaster which changes your life. If you have really failed hard at something, whether a career, a marriage, or a business of your own, you know how hard it is to pick up the pieces and move on. Death of a loved one falls into the same category. The only thing I can tell you from my own experiences is that all of these are surmountable and you will go on to happier days with renewed love of life if you persevere.

Do not allow yourself to pine over past glories or past defeats.

The beautiful sadness of regret may look good in tragic novels, but it doesn't do much for real life. Appreciate the fact that you are still alive and continue to create your own tomorrows.

Set a goal, any goal, and work toward it using all of the experience you have gained. You will get wiser as you get older and you may enjoy life a lot more.

THE BOTTOM LINE

It is almost impossible to create a future while looking backwards

This was written some time ago and I feel that it still applies. Enjoy.

LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE

As we age, we have experiences that range from incredibly good to disastrous. If we survive these experiences, we have a chance to learn from them and go on to further adventures. If we get stuck in these experiences, we merely get older.

I'd like to suggest that charging into the barricades of life with guns blazing and a total determination to succeed is a winning strategy, as long as you keep track of the odds against you. If the odds against you keep rising, you have made a tactical error and need to fall back to a point of safety and regroup.

There is nothing wrong in making a few mistakes. It's making the same mistake over and over that reveals your level of insanity.

You are led into making mistakes when you have insufficient or incorrect information. Learning from mistakes allows for continuous improvement. There are some professions like design engineering and programming which are simply organized methods for learning from earlier mistakes.

If you learn from your experiences instead of repressing them or fixating on them, you will surely achieve a measure of wisdom over time. I think that is a happier course of action than avoiding life or regretting life. You become smarter over time, because your experience has turned into knowledge.

BEING STUCK IN THE PAST

Let's look at the other end of the spectrum, the people who seem to be getting older but not wiser. You will find that their attention is stuck in the past, either on their failures or more surprisingly, their successes.

Too many times, the high school football star, the Homecoming Queen, and those fortunate children who are in the right place to become real celebrities on the stage or screen, are unable to move on and duplicate that success elsewhere.

This can even happen at work. A salesperson can have an incredible season which catapults his or her company into a new operating range. If the company promotes them to a managerial position, they may never again achieve the success they once had. If they cannot change and move on, they remain a perpetual has-been in their own minds although they have as much ability as they ever did.

Let's looks at the more usual case, the disaster which changes your life. If you have really failed hard at something, whether a career, a marriage, or a business of your own, you know how hard it is to pick up the pieces and move on. Death of a loved one falls into the same category. The only thing I can tell you from my own experiences is that all of these are surmountable and you will go on to happier days with renewed love of life if you persevere.

Do not allow yourself to pine over past glories or past defeats.

The beautiful sadness of regret may look good in tragic novels, but it doesn't do much for real life. Appreciate the fact that you are still alive and continue to create your own tomorrows.

Set a goal, any goal, and work toward it using all of the experience you have gained. You will get wiser as you get older and you may enjoy life a lot more.

THE BOTTOM LINE

It is almost impossible to create a future while looking backwards

A time to mend and fix up...

The cycle of life becomes more apparent as one experiences it over and over again.

There were times in recent years when it seemed easier to discard the old and buy new. That was when our personal economy created plenty of money but consumed our time. It was easier to eat out and buy stuff instead of mending what we had and cooking leftovers. It was not so much conspicuous consumption, as it seemed to be the best use of very scarce time.

Now that we march to the beat of a different drummer, we have time to plan and freedom to choose what we will or will not do. Our income is less than in the frantic years of 60 hour weeks and interminable conference calls, but the freedom to choose more than makes up for the apparent loss of income.

The wonderful thing about mass production and the industry that creates it is the amount of money that flows through the enterprise. If you are in the right spot, you can scoop up enough of it to almost make up for the fact that you are an interchangeable unit in a very large machine. You are a cog in the machinery, but a very well paid one at times.

You ponder the wisdom of your choices every day during your long commutes to and from work...

Once you enter the post corporate world, either through choice or through being laid off, your lifestyle undergoes many changes. You have more time than money and you can still make things go right if you cast off your old wasteful ways.

You can learn to shop more wisely and you will find bargains that you never encountered when you were madly running in place to keep your position and your sanity while living the corporate life.

You also learn to use the wisdom of others who have learned the lessons of surviving on a "less than average" income. You may find to your surprise that you discover some great recipies and some highly satisfying learning experiences that can be enjoyed on your new income level.

You will also come up with innovative ways of improving your situation in life and making a living in a depressed economy. It is all a matter of adjusting your viewpoint and confronting the situation you are facing rather than bemoaning the situation you used to enjoy.

There is always money to be made if you bother to find out what people need and want that you can provide.

As a contractor friend once told me, "We'll always survive. In good times, we build houses. In bad times, we repair them."

This philosophy is applicable to the housing-related field of custom picture framing. I am finding unexpected opportunities in what is generally considered to be a down market.

The economy will recover again and businesses that can survive in a tough economy will be in a better position to move out smartly when business improves. A lot of small business owners are sharpening their skills in these hard times.

It will be most interesting to see how business models evolve during these next few years.

If you use a credit card to buy gas - always get a receipt

We do not live in a perfect world yet, and some of the things we rely on do not always work the way we think they do. I have had enough readers tell me of their adventures with gas pumps that it stirred me to write an article about the things they have discovered.

For example, the gas pumps that you use every week are not as foolproof as ATM terminals. There are a number of ways in which the ongoing transaction can get messed up and can put you at risk.

Your best protection is to make sure that you always get a receipt. If the pump does not print a receipt for you, go inside the store and get one. You may be surprised at what you find.

The pump system may have dropped out of credit card mode and defaulted to a cash sale mode. What that means is that you pumped gas into your tank, but your card has not been charged and you need to see the cashier and pay for it in person.

There are several ways in which a credit card transaction can fail to complete successfully. This is by no means a complete list:

In smaller gas stations in remote areas, a dial-up connection is required to complete the credit card transaction. If that gets interrupted, the card is not charged and you will need to pay the cashier. There may be no message at the pump, but there will probably be no receipt either, so you have been warned.

On some pumps, I am told, picking up the nozzle before the authorization is complete will void the transaction and set up a cash sale.

In some stations, the clerk initiates the authorizing message at the pump, so that customers are not kept waiting for a dial-up connection to go through.

In other stations, the printer is out of paper so no receipt is printed. Do not assume that this is the case. Some readers who have gone in to get a receipt from a cashier report that their card were not charged. Do not let this happen to you.

Driving off without a receipt can create problems for you and for the gas station. In Virginia, this can expose you to threat of arrest and loss of license.

Once you have a receipt, you have confirmation that you paid for your gas.

For a graphic description of what can happen if you fail to get a receipt, read my earlier article.

Simplify Your Life

I wrote this a few years ago for someone who was a little overwhelmed. It still applies today.

• Tell the truth more often.

Then you won’t have to remember what you said to whom.

• Tell the truth as kindly as possible. 

Then you won’t have to say you are sorry so often.

• Curb those impulses to lash out with righteous anger.

Then you won’t have to spend so much time mending relationships.

• If it sounds too good to be true, find out what the exchange is.
Criminality is simply getting something for nothing. If you are not one already, why become a criminal now?

• If life is hard to face, don’t make it more complicated by running away from it .

Find some part of your life you can confront and do something about it.

• If you can’t think of anything else, find an animal to care for.

They will probably not give you any grief about it and you will feel better.

• Find somebody to help, starting with yourself.
If all else fails, take a walk until you feel calmer and rested and look at these again.

This and a lot of other useful tips can be found in my book, Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day which is still available as a free download..

Make Life Easier for Yourself

Find out what people need and want - that you can and are willing to provide.

This is the simplest solution for many of life's challenging problems. All four elements are vital. It applies if you are looking for a new job or relationship, creating a website or a weblog, or starting a business. .

In any of these areas, getting in communication with people to find out what they need and want and deciding what you can and are willing to provide will give you almost everything you need to develop a meaningful relationship going forward.

Doing only one or two is a recipe for wasting vast amounts of time and money and sets you up for a loss. Understand and do every part of this:

Find out what people need and want - that you can and are willing to provide.

Very few people do this, possibly because it means finding out things they do not want to know.

Two typical situations where this applies

1. Let's say you are creating a storefront or a website to promote your business after several years of success through referrals alone. Do you know what people are saying about you that makes other people want to do business with you?

If you understand what is being said about you and why people want to rely on that and do business with you, all you have to decide is how you can provide what is already being promised by others.

Your promotion, store or site design, and your branding should align with the good things that people are already saying about you. It is a matter of meeting the expectation that have already been set up through your successful transactions with others.

2. How about that upcoming job interview? Are you concentrating on making a good impression and smoothly presenting your qualifications?

This can lead to an interview where someone leads off with, "Tell me about yourself" and a half hour later you are still running down the list of marvelous things you have done - most of which do not apply to what they are looking for.

Get in communication with the interviewer, just like he or she is a potential customer. If they ask you about yourself, make it a 20 second pitch like:

"I have xx years of experience including my time in the service. I have developed products, put on major events , and managed call centers.

"What are you looking for in this position?"

Keep the focus on what they need and want and are willing to pay for and you will have a most enjoyable interview and it will be amazingly stress-free. Your responses will be more on target when they tell you the qualifications they are actually looking for.

You will also be able to spot situations where they have not really defined what they need and want. Let's say they are looking for an events manager and they have never put on events, or a sales manager and they have never had one before.

Your questions are critical to establishing a good working relationship, because you really need to understand what their expectations are and be clear what yours are also.

Whether you are looking for a job waiting on tables or managing a store or a group, your questions can make the difference between a great job or a painful ordeal.

One of the unexpected benefits is that you will discover situations that are not right for you before the interviewer does and can end off gracefully with no hard feelings. Your parting line may be, "That's an interesting position, but it doesn't make the best use of my skills."

The bottom line

Any time spent finding out what people need and want from you and are willing to pay for is well worth the effort. Please note, this is not a sales pitch. This is a "survey" and it cannot be a list of canned questions. A simple conversation over coffee at the right time and place can do wonders.

Try it and see. It will make things easier to an amazing degree.

Silver bullet fables - part 3 - competence

Perhaps you think that competence is the silver bullet to career success. After all, it is competence that enables  you to hold your position when all about you are running in circles and panicking.

Wrong again. Competence is a vital necessity for success in any endeavor, but it is not a silver bullet or a lifetime ticket to the fast lane.

Your "competency certificate" in any field needs to be renewed on a yearly basis or even more often.  It's not that you lose your hard-won skills, it just that the playing field changes and your skills can become less relevant overnight.

Programmers see this as a life-long challenge. Advertising executives are finding this out every day as their years of media experience gives them no purchase on the realities of internet advertising. Internet marketing requires entire new skill sets which are continually changing. Old time marketing executives are having to scramble to retain clients because their competencies do not necessarily apply to the Internet.

Corporate presidents find that they are now being challenged by individual customers in ways they never imagined. A single dissatisfied customer with a weblog can derail the most intensely funded promotional campaign in a heartbeat.  While corporate management is saying, "who is this crackpot?", the customer is spreading a tale of customer woe faster than the PR flacks can respond.

One of the most notable examples of this process is the newspaper and mass media businesses. Reporters and TV anchor people still are experts at "shaping the news" so that it conveys the publishers message to a waiting populace. They had years of success foisting off opinion and editorial comment as news until that damned Internet came along.

Now the mightiest news anchors and reporters are up against an army of pajama-clad bloggers who fact-check them mercilessly. Using Google and other Internet tools, it took only hours for bloggers to expose the fact that the CNN presidential debate questioners were Democratic Party operatives instead of "independent voters" as advertised.

When media experts parade opinion as news and bloggers reply with facts mixed with strong opinions, it gives the reading public background material that they never had before. The net result is that mass media is being forced to change and become more accurate or go out of business. Bloggers are also being forced to become more accurate and more professional as more people start reading them and challenging their assumptions.

When every citizen has access to the Internet, they essentially become additional news outlets as well as promoters of various causes.

The competency requirements are changing even in small businesses. In small businesses like custom jewelry making or woodworking, it was once sufficient to be a skilled craftsperson who could create a unique piece at a reasonable price. Today there are craftsmen in other countries who can create unique work at lower prices. Survival now requires better marketing skills and collaboration with other craftspeople so that each craftsperson can focus on what they do best and the final result incorporates work from several people.   

Almost all of the technical competencies I acquired in college were useless when i graduated in 1959. I had to upgrade my competencies on the job and that was the beginning of a lifelong immersion in the rapidly changing field that eventually became the computer industry and the Internet.

I have had to retrain myself in some major area every year just to stay abreast of current requirements. Any area that I take my attention off for very long is an area where I am no longer competent. Since I do not have unlimited time and resources, I have to pick my battles and my studies carefully.

Post corporate life requires a different set of skills. To become competent as a self-employed entrepreneur/craftsman is a never-ending task. Fortunately, it is one that I enjoy.

Have you updated your competencies lately? If you are feeling uncertain about your future, this might be a good place to start.

Thanks to the Canadian Museum of Nature for the image of the extinct dinosaur.

Silver bullet fables - part 2 - persistence

Another silver bullet approach to managing your life or career is to persist, no matter what, until you succeed.

It sounds so, simple, and so reasonable, that it is no wonder that so many sincerely motivated people follow this path to eventual meltdown or worse.

Let me give you some examples to illustrate the folly of using persistence as a silver bullet for dealing with life and its challenges. Persistence as a silver bullet solution is like continuing to drive down the road long after you have lost your sense of direction.

It's like saying to yourself, "If I just keep on driving, I will eventually arrive where I want to be."

Some real life examples include:

Persisting on a career course without noticing that your spouse and children have started creating a life elsewhere without you.

Continuing to share your expertise in some area and failing to notice that your listener's eyes are glazing over.

Continuing to push some product or service on a potential customer without fully understanding their objections to doing business with you.

Continuing to work a full schedule even though you are sick and your judgment is impaired.

I have done all of these, of course, and have survived to go on to better things in the end, but the lesson to be learned is that there is no silver bullet which can be used to resolve all situations. Persistence is vital, but must be tempered with observation and course corrections where necessary.

I caused a fire yesterday that burned a half acre of underbrush next to my new home because I was ignoring the fact that I was not really healthy and in possession of my full faculties.  If it had not been for some helpful neighbors and two volunteer fire departments, I would not be writing this post today.

I have been under the weather with a very heavy cold and I have kept on working and producing as though I was healthy. My respiratory distress and the coughing was a constant distraction and my effective IQ was probably around 45.

So when I went to empty a bin full of "cold" ashes, I did not take the usual precautions and put them safely in a steel ash barrel, because it was already full. I took the ashes, which had been sitting on the hearth for several hours after Gretchen had cleaned the stove, and poured the pile of ashes at the edge of our cleared yard. I stowed everything neatly away and went back to work.

About an hour later, I noticed that the woods were on fire and called the fire department. At that same moment, two neighbors drove up and jumped out to help me contain the fire as best we could.

It took another hour and a dozen fire fighters to put out the fire which I had caused by my neglect of my usual safety precautions. In retrospect, I can see that I had set myself up for it by continuing to work and carry on without recognizing that I was judgment-impaired because of my health.

Like driving and drinking or while using a cell phone, managing a business or your life while physically under the weather is putting yourself at risk.

Persistence, tempered with cautious observation, is probably a safer course to follow.

If any of my comments have struck a chord in your life, you might want to see what is actually going on before you follow any of my examples.

I plan on a reduced schedule with frequent side-checks from Gretchen before I return to the normal full-tilt assault on life.

Silver Bullet Fables - part 1 - targets

There is this wonderfully persistent idea that keeping your eye on a target and doing whatever it takes to attain that target will give you the best chance of achieving success. Your managers and even your parents may have pushed this approach ahead of doing things in a way that you can be proud of. Achieving the target was all that mattered.

This is the silver bullet approach to managing your life or career and it has an amazing weakness. When you commit to doing everything necessary to achieving a goal or target, you can set yourself up to be despised instead of being admired.

Why? Because the goal can become more important than how it is achieved! Others will only remember that you did not get results honestly.

So much attention is put in achieving goals in business and in schools that cheating or falsification of results is deemed less important than missing the goal.

When a student is not able to learn fast enough to keep up in school, the pressure to show success and to graduate often becomes more than the person can resist and she or he cheats.

When a group in a company finds that a product is not ready to ship and this will cost them bonus money or even cost them jobs, the temptation is to falsify test results, ship the product anyway and leave the problems for others to fix.

Targets are not achieved by accident. They are the result of focused effort and persistence. When the targets become mere statistics instead of real achievements, this opens the door to all kinds of corporate and individual insanity.

Some of you who have been in sales have experienced such extreme pressure to close sales by a certain date that you did whatever was necessary to close the deal. I have watched several companies go under after enough of these unprofitable deals were closed.

I worked for one sales manager who didn't care how many people we upset on the phone as long as we met our quota of orders. The bad word of mouth reports spread so fast that it permanently affected sales.

This focus on a target to the exclusion of the methods used to achieve it results in the discrediting of otherwise good ideas.  The target could be saving the earth or endangered species, but criminal acts or blatant hypocrisy can discredit the entire idea.

Global warming pundits jetting off to Bali for high visibility meetings do more environmental damage than the populations they pretend to be saving.

Candidates for office may justify covering up crimes in order to be elected and "serve" the people. They also rewrite history in an effort to erase earlier viewpoints they now say they never held.

Even retail establishments can place such emphasis on making goals that employees will lie in order to deflect criticism from customers. Try telling the employees at Michaels that their bathrooms are out of paper and see what happens.

Achieving a target in a way that you can be proud of lets you end cycle and move on to other targets. Cheating your way to achieving a target leaves open issues that will always come back to haunt you, even if you go on to achieve nobler things.

If your working life is not what you want it to be, you might see if you are being driven to make targets, "no matter what it takes!"

Thanks to the Applications Team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for their version of this classic illustration.

Boosting personal productivity with the right tools and enough storage - part 1

Productivity is my number one concern even though I am well out of corporate life, because there is never enough time to get everything done that I need to do.

Obtaining the right tools takes more than money. You need to find a tool that will actually save you enough time to justify its purchase.

In order to make that judgment, you might want to do the task using cheaper alternatives until you can clearly evaluate the value of purchasing the "right tool" for you.

For example, last year I justified buying an electric log splitter on the basis of safety and 7X production over manual log splitting. I split logs manually until I clearly saw the need for more firewood in less time with less risk to life and limb.

This year, I finally justified a lawn tractor and dump cart for moving firewood and garden supplies around my property. I had put it off for two years based on the cost involved and I was amazed that my productivity and my willingness to do onerous chores went sky-high.

Moving unwieldy pieces of construction debris, concrete blocks, or bags of topsoil is no longer a chore to put off until better weather. The tractor and dump cart make short work of such chores. They inspire me to improve my landscaping efforts and to put in order where none existed before.

A side benefit in having the right tools for difficult jobs is that I have no difficulty in enlisting help from volunteers. Family and neighbors enjoy doing cool stuff with the right tools!

This year I also invested in a computerized mat cutter for my framing business. It took an enjoyable, but painstaking task of hand cutting mats and changed it to a more profitable activity with many additional options for creative expression. I can create mats of considerable complexity in less time than I could cut a simple mat before.

I love tools that work well, but it is a matter of balancing the Gee-Whiz factor of something new and shiny against the inexorable need to make tools pay for themselves. Some dandy new tools, especially software, have such a steep learning curve that you will spend more time learning to use the tool than you will save with it.

We have five computers in our household at last count and every one of them is the lowest cost solution for a particular set of problems. Hardware is so inexpensive these days, usually about $500/unit that it almost makes sense to add another system to the network rather than upgrade to a high-end system.

Access and usability, not ownership, is the key as far as I am concerned. Renting instead of buying may work out best in your case, but there are other options such as co-ownership or borrowing with an agreed rental and repair agreement.

The bottom line is that if you are not getting all of your tasks and chores done, are there tools which will boost your productivity enough to offset the cost of these tools? If that is not possible, have you looked at resetting your expectations?

Once you have the tools you need to get things done quickly, you will run into the other big barrier to production which is lack of space. That is deserving of a separate article and will be published as Part 2.

Gone in Nine Minutes - the future of moving is here

Moving containers take a great deal of stress out of moving and they offer the potential for saving money at the same time. PODS stands for Portable On Demand Storage.

In a recent example of a PODS move from Charlotte, NC to Floyd, VA, this PODS container was delivered by truck and was placed in the townhouse driveway in less than ten minutes.

A day later, all of the furniture from the two-bedroom townhouse was loaded into the container by trained professionals in three two hours and the homeowner locked the container. There was no messing around with inventory lists and box counts. The owner's stuff goes in the container and it is locked up, period.

The next day the fully loaded PODS container was picked up and removed by one driver. Here is the slide show of the PODS container being picked up and removed in nine minutes. Turn on the captions feature on Flickr to get the full effect.

Compare this to the extreme circus of traditional moving company activities. In a traditional move, a huge van pulls up and blocks the street for several hours while a crew of people cram your possessions around or on top of somebody else's household furnishings.

The driver is making an inventory list and giving directions while workers carry boxes, lamps, and furniture on to the truck. Near the end of this activity, workers are creating and sealing boxes for all the odd things that are left over, like your golf clubs and the weed whacker and the left over skate boards. (All in same box - marked with a cryptic number)

When you are given the box count, it is a miracle if the count means anything to you and you hope that it is complete. You sign the inventory anyway and hope for the best.

When a moving truck arrives at your new home, it is a different truck and your household possessions have been rearranged and crammed in around somebody else's possessions. You can tell because they loaded your furniture into the side of truck "A" and they are taking your furniture out of the top rear of truck "B".

Your furniture has been piled high on top of other people's furniture and they have to hand your furniture down piece by piece in 108 degree weather. They are passing your heavy living room furniture down ten feet while hanging off the back of a van with no lift gate and no ladders.

Images of unloading a Mexican bus come to mind while this is going on. The only difference is there are no crates of chickens.

Four hours later when the dust clears, you find that some of your possessions are missing  and you start negotiating with the driver to get the situation handled.

Container moving offers a great deal of flexibility and it does not hold you hostage while movers madly scramble to unload a truck and get your furniture placed in inclement weather. If your new home is not ready, you can store the containers until you are ready to unload them. If they get delivered and the weather turns inclement, you leave the containers sealed until you are ready to unload them

I have written about SmartMove which neighbor Tom King and I have used successfully. Their smaller containers offer a little more flexibility in tight situations and steep driveways, but the delivery and pickup of five containers took an hour versus the 9 minute pickup I witnessed with this recent POD move made yesterday.

See the images on Flickr to get the full significance of what this new container moving system can do. From the arrival of the truck and its driver, to the departure of the truck, driver and POD container, it took only 9 minutes from start to finish!

That's hardly enough time to drink a cup of coffee! Compare this to your last move...

Finding people who need and appreciate pearls

I have been incredibly fortunate to have discovered custom framing, an occupation that lets me create wow products for extremely appreciative audiences.

I get to work with customers and help them choose a framing system that complements and enhances their cherished works of art. The end result is far more meaningful than I ever expected. The final product is esthetically pleasing and emotionally satisfying for all concerned.

We all take a win on the final result.

The dynamics of this process are unlike any client relationship I have encountered before. I find it to be personally challenging as it calls upon every bit of design skill that I have learned. It is also mutually enjoyable for both the client and myself because each custom framing job involves working out an optimum solution to a complex problem with hundreds of alternative choices.

Occasionally a client will give me a work of art and ask me to frame it using my own judgment, but I prefer working with them so they can experience the creative thrill that comes from discovering the exact effects they are trying to achieve.

Combining colors and textures of mats and matching them to one of hundreds of moulding choices produces continuing surprises. When customers see what is available, they almost never adopt a cookie cutter approach of saying, "I'll take a white mat in a black frame."

Instead, we go at the challenge by finding a mat combination that brings out what they want in a work of art. Then we find a moulding that encloses the whole in a way that creates a sense of balance and completeness.

But, it doesn't end there! This is an iterative activity as most design processes are. We will reach a combination that pleases, then one of us will pick up another mat or moulding and say, "What if..." and we are off on a new path of discovery.

The process invariably ends when we all say, "Wow! Look at that!". This happens when the combination of art and framing elements coalesce into a harmonious whole that produces an emotional effect.

In essence, I act as a facilitator and make it possible for clients to achieve as much creative freedom as they desire.

This works whether the art is created by a professional or by a child. When it all comes together, we experience an emotional surge. We have created something together and the experience  becomes a bright spot in our memory.

As in all things, making it happen requires skills that I have been acquiring for many years. I am really happy to be in this place and time with so many people who love and appreciate art and are willing to preserve it.

This is work that I truly enjoy and I work with clients for whom I have a great deal of affinity.
It is for me the best of all possible career choices at this point in my life.

I am here because I finally learned the lessons I discussed in my previous article.

Throwing pearls before swine - a good way to drive yourself crazy

I have been talking to a number of people recently who made the unfortunate decision to work for dunderheads and are now beginning to realize that this is a losing game.

Having done this myself more than a couple of times, I have great empathy for them.

The problem stems from the fact that some of these employers don't appear to be dunderheads when they interview you for the job in the first place. They may be relatively intelligent in many areas and may even have advanced degrees. They often can carry on a social conversation and may even have a broad range of subjects that they can discuss easily.

The hiring manager with anger management issues is relatively easy to spot and you will do well to end the interview if there is any suspicion that your interviewer is crazier than you are.

Are you still with me here? Your job interview is the place where YOU find out whether you want to work for this organization.

Essentially, the people who really drive you crazy when you work for them are the apparently sane and intelligent executives who have no real clue what you are doing for them and how difficult it is to deliver the product or service you are being paid for.

What happens is that you fail to set expectations for what you are delivering.

Now, some of you will argue that you spelled everything out and even put it down in writing to confirm what you would do and how you would do it.

Sorry! I've been there and done that too, but it's not enough!

Some hiring managers are just glib. They will say yes to every condition you set as a requirement for working there and when you show up for work, there will be no office, or you have to supply your own computer until they get around to ordering one, etc. Or, they hire you for a management slot, but they want you to cover the phones.

Other situations are more subtle. During the interview they say that they want you to set up a marketing department, or a customer service division, something you have a great deal of experience doing, but they have never had a marketing department or a customer service division, so THEY HAVE NO CLUE WHAT THEY ARE ASKING FOR.

They may even offer you a handsome salary, but you miss the clues and fail to ask what their marketing or customer service budget is. What you find out, all too soon, is that they expect you to make this function happen by yourself.

After enough of these episodes, your job interviews become quite different. You spend 70% of the interview asking questions instead of answering them. Your interviews are shorter and more successful. They become conversations between peers. You may still get blindsided by a management team whose social skills cover up their lack of ethics, but your recovery time will be mercifully short and you will probably exit stage left in the first few months.

Whether you work for an employer or a client, give them everything you've got, but make sure they understand what you are doing for them.

If you maintain that viewpoint, you will be ready to address the first signs of discontent with a positive attitude and probing questions that should uncover the issues that are causing your client/new boss to show unhappiness with your work.

You are often hired to change things, but the powers that be often don't like what that entails. After awhile, you learn to cover that topic gracefully in your interview.

If you do everything possible to set expectations properly and things don't work out, learn from the experience and move on.

If you are competent, there is work for you. Your task is to find work you enjoy doing and people you enjoy working for. That is actually a goal worth pursuing. If you produce pearls, find those who need and appreciate pearls.

Good luck!

Are you a commodity?

Being a commodity is safe, or so it seems at first. You have your MBA or your high school diploma and you go out and get a job that pays you appropriately.

You shovel fries or you write reports and you keep your head down and keep your thoughts to yourself and all goes well. The only downside is that you are not in control of your life and you never will be.

You do have a title, of course, but you are essentially a hired pair of hands with a speaking part that is narrowly defined.

Try making up your own lines and you will find yourself elsewhere. Try changing your daily routines and you will find yourself on the street.

Being a commodity is great if you are a scarce commodity and dismal if you are no longer in demand. Large companies are good at hiring commodities because they can easily use a checklist to see if you are qualified. There is no judgment call required to hire you.

If you want to survive in today's working world or if you are working for yourself, you need to understand what is unique about your abilities and promote that to potential customers, clients and employers. That way, you stay in control of your career. If you offer a unique benefit or service, that lessens the possibility of your client or employer of finding an alternative solution elsewhere.

So, what is the alternative? You can take responsibility for your life and your future and create your own individual microbrand, or as Hugh MacLeod calls it, a global microbrand.

Hugh MacLeod is a well-known example of a marketing guy who who has been making up his own rules and is creating quite a stir in the world. Have you heard about The Blue Monster, about Stormhoek wines? Hugh created both of those campaigns using his weblog as a point of departure.

If you are really tired of being a commodity, you might want to read my earlier post: To Be or Not Be a Commodity - that is your choice

Playing a better game of life - part 6 - finale

This is not the end - This is where you take over and change the game to one of your liking.

Warning: This is not a warm, fuzzy conclusion with softly swelling inspirational music. It is more like a klaxon signaling another round of hostile activity.

It's time to move from the theoretical contemplation of life as a game to getting on with it and applying what you know.

Life is all about survival and doing things that lead to increased survival for self, family and the greater community in which we live.

Most of us understand this fairly well because we have done things which have actually threatened our survival at some time. If we survived, we tend to look for ways to improve survival, not risk it needlessly.

Some people lead such protected lives that the idea of "survival" is somehow repugnant, something that only happens in a third-world society. They have so little knowledge of the real world that they can scarcely imagine bad things happening to them.

This can be seen in those whose good fortune comes from wealthy parents who protect them from the realities of life. Even as adults, these people are "protected" by their parents influence or wealth against the results of their own mistakes.

We live in a rapidly changing world and parents/protectors find less and less stability in their own lives these days.

Whether it is a natural disaster, tsunami, hurricane or just the end of a bad financial quarter, more and more people are finding that their personal survival depends on a certain minimum level of preparedness and not on what "Daddy" can pull off for them.

We who have experienced financial disasters or who have lived from paycheck to paycheck know that it doesn't take much to go from living well to finding oneself in dire straits.

When I see men almost my age busing tables in Paneras, it gives me pause and I redouble my efforts to make a go of my business enterprises.

I see many well-kept older men and women working the checkout stations in food chains and retail establishments. These are often people who held good-paying jobs and expected to retire comfortably until their company off-loaded them in an effort to stay afloat in an increasingly competitive world. These people have refashioned their lives and have adapted to the realities of 21st century employment instability.

Most of the people I see working the craft shows are former business professionals who have become artisans and artists. They were able to be more selective in their occupations because they prepared themselves for self-employment.

There are others who used their corporate time well and gave themselves a running start when they became self-employed. They became consultants or small suppliers to industry and they prosper because they identified a niche and prepared well enough to deliver a service that is needed and wanted.

I am bringing this series to a close because the game goes through repetitive cycles and we are coming to the end of another financial year. Some of you are at risk and you need to prepare yourself as best as you can, not necessarily by working harder.

If you are finding that your new boss is being unduly critical of you these last few weeks, it may be because she is planning to get rid of you in an effort to save her own job. If the company has not been doing well, this second or fourth quarter is when efforts are made to lighten the ship in hopes that it will weather the storm to come.

Your work output is rarely a consideration when it comes to deciding who goes and who stays. In far too many cases, the people who are kept are those who are in tight with management.

You know who you are, and if you are reading this you are probably not one of the insiders. Instead, you have been trying to get your job done in the midst of too many meetings and too much micro-management by the clueless.

Do not slacken your efforts to get your job done, but network as never before because this is a time when you need friends who have friends who are hiring.

There is always someone who is hiring.

Your job is to find the one who is right for you.

If this person doesn't seem to be available, hire yourself and get on with your own business. It's all part of finding a game that you can win at. You may find yourself playing the best game of your life when you are self-employed.

Give it your best and you will find that there are brighter days ahead.

Good luck.

(This was first published on September 8, 2005 and it still applies.)