Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching

Is Forever a good business strategy?

It is incredible to me that I have paid a different rate for mailing my Christmas cards in each of the past 3 years; 37¢ in 2005, 39¢ in 2006, 41¢ in 2007, and now it will be 42¢ in 2008.

The year I graduated from high school, it cost me 8¢ to mail out the thank you cards for the leis and gifts I had received. That's an increase of 525%

Now, there is the Forever stamp.

[The History of Postage Rates in the U.S.]

WASHINGTON, D.C. — You've heard about it. You've read about it. Now see it for the first time. It's the Postal Service's newest consumer innovation — the Forever stamp. The stamp was previewed today at the National Postal Forum, the premier trade show for advertising, marketing and mailing executives. Featuring the Liberty Bell image and the word "forever," the stamp will be good for mailing one-ounce First-Class letters anytime in the future — regardless of price changes. The Forever stamp goes on sale April 12 at 41 cents. Customers can begin using the stamp when postage changes May 14.

"Who said nothing lasts forever?" remarked Postmaster General and Chief Executive Officer John E. Potter in unveiling the image here at the National Postal Forum. "The Forever stamp is a consumer innovation guaranteed to deliver unprecedented convenience and value to our customers. It's good forever."

Prices change again on May 14th:

Once prices change May 14, the Forever stamp will remain on sale at the 41-cent First-Class one-ounce letter price until the next price change. The Forever stamp will then be available at the new price.

What do you think about banking your money this way with the United States Postal Service? Notice that even if you buy them now, you can't use them until the price goes up on May 14th.

Is Forever a good business strategy?

Does it make sense to you as a customer?

What does this have to do with Talking Story?

When you have adopted the MWA 'Ohana in Business philosophy, you treat everyone associated with your company as business partners. Moves like this outside your company are a terrific way to begin conversations on financial literacy in business within your company. They are current topics and they affect virtually everyone, thus they are great conversation starters.

The more you can help people understand business strategy in general, and as similar or different from your own, the more you will deepen their understanding of — and further learning curiosity with — your own business plan and business model. The more curiosity people have, the more you will stimulate their ideas and their initiative — and let them know you welcome them.

Financial literacy then becomes less intimidating, and conversely, less condescending when it is part of the conversation every time financial news breaks.

So what do you think? Shall we start the conversation here?

Is Forever a good business strategy?

Does it make sense to you as a customer?

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From the Talking Story archives: What does ‘financial literacy’ mean to you?

Some other Let’s Talk Story postings you can choose from!

• Being a “Leader” is what managers do too
• When you have a hard time Choosing, do you know Why?
• Talk Story about Stopping: 5 Reasons to Kill Auto-Pilot
• Talk Story about your Values with Pictures

Why “management” has a bad rep

This is a true story; so true it hurts when you’re a management coach like me.

I stopped at the post office to buy Christmas stamps this morning, asking for eleven of their books of 20 stamps. I bought two different designs, and watched as the woman helping me fanned them out to scan them into her register one by one. Beep...beep...beep... eleven times.

I said to her, “too bad your system won’t allow you to just put in the quantity and scan them once” to which she replied, “oh it will, but we do it this way now because management says we need to show that we spend more time with our customers. We don’t want our hours cut back during the holidays.”

Huh?

She had an expression on her face of being so pleased with herself, not for a moment realizing she was freely admitting to me that her delay tactic was the best thing she could come up with. More service, actual service, was not her first choice, or apparently much of an option she’d thought about at all. Nor was she concerned with the line growing longer behind me. I was dumbfounded and didn’t know what to say.

No wonder the postage rates keep going up... and they are 41 cents; new image not in the budget either?

For a better way check out: Mea Ho‘okipa Live Their Aloha Every Day; a forum with the Ho‘ohana Community on hospitality and service.

From Corporate Life to Self-Employment

Knowing of my long history in corporate life, people will ask me if I’d ever go back to it should I be offered the corporate dream job again. The question will come up when I say that I came very close to having THE corporate dream job more than once in my career. I knew when I was in those situations, and I truly did enjoy them; I had learned a lot being Mz. Corporate Manager.

While I have no regrets, the quick answer is no.
I’ll never go back.

Today I realize that even THE corporate dream job has a long, long way to go before it can get close to the benefits I now enjoy being self-employed. Here’s why;

1. Working for myself means I work for my own reasons, defining my work completely in terms of what I consider my ho‘ohana to be. Life is too precious to do anything else.

2. I now understand what my ideas can potentially be worth. There is no question that whatever I write, whatever I create and produce is totally my intellectual property. Thus, I’ll always have it as an asset I can market.

3. In my particular situation I have no establishment or office hours; I work where my customer works, or with their brains (i.e. on the phone and virtually works just fine).

4. Because of number 3. I don’t really have the walk-in effect; I get to choose my customers after interviewing and “qualifying” them. I choose to work with people who are coachable yet who are smarter than me in some way (hence I’ll learn from them too), and who I will enjoy working with. To be perfectly blunt, I don’t work with unpleasant people.

5. Now that I’ve had this 4-year taste of it, I’ll never give up the freedom I now have to tweak my work schedule however I need to (and want to). My time belongs to me. The ironic thing is that I work more hours; the exceptionally cool thing is that it no longer feels like work.

6. The incentives are different. You are never as financially literate working for someone else as you are when you are self-employed, and that kind of intellectual currency is increasingly valuable in today’s world.

7. Similar to number 6, being self-employed equates to being self-sufficient. At first you think it’s more risky to work for profit versus paycheck, but you soon find out that counting on a paycheck is the riskiest thing you can do.

8. This one speaks to knowing myself; I thrive on being totally in charge. I got pretty far up the corporate ladder, yet like most “top” executives I ultimately answered to someone; a boss, an owner, a stakeholder. Today I answer to me.

9. I get more done. I have never before had the amount of self-discipline I have today, because I hold myself more accountable than any of my employers ever could. If I slack off, procrastinate, or try to justify anything I only fool myself. Again, today I answer to me.

Self-employment may not be for everyone, but it definitely has become MY only option. It honestly makes me feel smarter.

So why should you care about all of this? Because I’m hoping you’ll think about joining me sooner versus later. To me, smarter and happier people are not my competition; they add the qualities of enthusiasm and optimism to my world.

It’s not that I feel working for an employer is a bad thing. On the contrary, I think you should milk all the knowledge and benefits you can get out of it while you do it. However I do believe that the day will come that you’ll need a “second act” to life’s play because there is this inevitable thing which happens to all of us; it’s called aging. Age creeps up to deal us this cruel card called, not as employable as younger candidates.

UNLESS, you have something to offer that those younger candidates don’t: Intellectual property that buyers can only get from you. Go back to my list and read number 2. again as the single reason. The other ones are the icing on the cake.

For me, Managing with Aloha is my current number 2. Because of number 4. I know that there will be other things like Managing with Aloha in my future.

What is the intellectual property you are working on, banking it for your future?

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Related posts from the archives:

• What does Financial Literacy mean to you?
• An index on entrepreneurship: The Start-up Garden

On the Kūlia i ka nu‘u warpath: the Compensation Enemy

I have a wonderful client who I love working with.

This client has embraced Managing with Aloha with as big a bear hug as anyone can give it. Right now, Kūlia i ka nu‘u could be their middle name, for indeed, it has become a battle cry in their company. They currently joke with me that they are striving to be my poster children for MWA, so much so that when I visited them last week I walked into a room of leaders waiting for me with warpaint striped on their cheeks!

Yet recently I had a telephone conversation with one of them who was very discouraged, explaining to me that,

“It just doesn’t seem right to get people all charged up and excited about all the right things, asking them to Kūlia and strive, reaching higher and higher for excellence, when we just don’t pay them as well as they’d be paid if they left us to go work somewhere else.”

I agree, it’s not right.

The managers in this company are in a tough spot to be in. This is a company in turmoil because they feel they know what to do, they feel they know how to get from good to great, and they love the people they work with, yet they are struggling with retention. Unfilled vacancies are adding to the workload of those who valiantly carry the torch, and even though they know that managing with aloha is the right thing to do, it gets tougher and tougher to rally behind and pull off.

In this particular case, I have not pulled back from giving them the Kūlia i ka nu‘u message; we have redirected it to solving their issue with a poor compensation structure within the company. It’s a biggie, and it will take all the creativity and determination we can muster.

However that IS what Kūlia i ka nu‘u takes. Striving for excellence demands bucket loads of creativity and determination. In cases like this one, it also demands the bravery (there’s that word again) to simply not accept a wrong: Their compensation structure is very clearly broken.

When you manage with aloha, having a business model with imbalance in what you can afford to pay the people who work for you is not acceptable. Period.

If you cannot make the numbers work, you cannot make the business work in the best possible way, taking it from okay to good, and from good to great.

Managing with Aloha demands business models with aloha.

Take care of your people first and foremost: If you don’t, you cannot expect them to take care of your customers and the health of your business, and still sleep well at night feeling good about it.

“Catch a Rising Star”—yours

This morning, George Ambler, author of The Practice of Leadership (and someone in our Ho‘ohana Community you really should bookmark online) sent me into a management and leadership thinking frenzy with his pointer to an exceptional article written for Fortune magazine — you MUST read it, because I want you to get as fired up as I am right now.

Initially, George baited me with this question of his own:

Are you having powerful leadership experiences?

“Leadership experiences and one of the most important tools for leadership development. Are you consciously seeking out leadership experiences? Leadership experiences, are those that take you out your comfort zone, out of your everyday routine and cause you to embrace some risk. If you honestly evaluate your "leadership career", do you have ten years of leadership experience.......or do you have a one year leadership experience repeated ten times?”

In my opinion, everyone with a calling for great management can be a leader, and that includes you (or you probably wouldn’t be reading Talking Story to begin with).

My company is called Say Leadership Coaching, however my book, and the heart and soul of my business, is called Managing with Aloha. I say I’m a management coach. Why?

I am pretty bullish in my insistence that an emerging leader, that is, the kind of leader I want to see succeed, must understand what great management is.

Even if he or she can’t do it themselves, they have to recognize it so they can hire it, and empower it.

When they lead other managers they must insist upon only great management — they must demand it.

It is my strong, and yes stubborn, unwavering belief that the best leaders have the most management-empathy, and they understand their managers are the glue that holds everything in a business together.

Coaching great managers to be great leaders is easy.

Coaching poor managers to be great leaders is impossible.

Related to this, so insightfully by John Keane here, is that great managers thrive in, and continue to drive human-healthy processes and systems in an organizational culture. This kind of organizational culture is the second thing that the kind of leaders we need today must demand.

And no, demand is not too strong a word. This is too important.

Here is your assignment from this management>then>leadership coach, and if you want to be a great leader today, ignore it at your own peril:

Read George’s highlights here: What’s the State of your Leadership Practice? by George Ambler, author of The Practice of Leadership

Then, high-tail it here for the article George refers to: Catch a Rising Star by Geoffrey Colvin for Fortune via money.cnn.com

Then, let’s talk story. Let me hear from you. This Ho‘ohana Community of ours represents a wealth of knowledge; don’t just hold it in. Make your thoughts known.

For another clue to how critical I think it is we understand the implications of Colvin’s insights, take a look at all the categories below I’ve added this post to. I have also done a post this morning for the Blog Synergy on this subject, for I am hoping to stimulate more ideas on how we as thinking, blog-reading teams of passionate people can work on our practice of leadership, right here, right now.

I’ll be writing more on this for the MWA Jumpstart coaching program later: both George’s post and Colvin’s article deserve serious study.

How I love the work we do!

technorati tags: Alaka‘i, Leadership. for the Talking Story category links, click the ones in this post’s footer.

Learning to like the “B” Word

Oh how well I remember the drill, and how glad I am that I don’t have to do it any more.

Well, I should rephrase that, for I still do it, just not in a mega large company anymore following someone else’s rules.

It’s a much more meaningful process when you do it with your own money, and because you actually want to. I’ve gotten to be somewhat of a rebel over the years, and I like to do it by my own no rules approach, always stretching, always searching, always experimenting, always testing in a way that the metrics of it get to be more fun, more meaningful.

What am I talking about? The “B” word. Click over to my article on www.Lifehack.org today and find out … betcha anything you say, “oh, that B word.” 

Here’s a hint before you click … look at what category I put this post in. Todd is the one that got me started on this back on Monday.

What does ‘financial literacy’ mean to you?

In our talk story Friday, Tom Ehrenfeld mentioned how something really bothers him:

“…the creation of a new class of people who are in permanent debt. Between the relaxation of standards for credit card companies (which now charge usurious rates and an ever-escalating array of fees and penalties), the changes in bankruptcy laws, and the conversion of the debt counseling field from one of small local charitable agencies to virtual storefronts for for-profit hucksters, it’s bad. There are already alarming discrepancies in this country in the allocation of wealth, and the credit epidemic is eviscerating what’s left of the middle class. Obviously I believe in free markets and in enterprise, but not to the extent to which we’re producing debt peons.”

Well Tom is certainly not alone in his concern. This morning, I saw this headline in our Honolulu Advertiser, pulled from the Associated Press:

Experts see crisis in growing U.S. Debt
By journalist Robert Tanner

You owe $145,000. And the bill is rising every day.

That’s how much it would cost every American man, woman and child to pay the tab for the long-term promises the U.S. government has made to creditors, retirees, veterans and the poor.

And it’s not even taking into account credit card bills, mortgages — all the debt we’ve racked up personally. Savings? The average American puts away barely $1 of every $100 earned.

Our profligate ways at home are mirrored in Washington and in the global marketplace, where as a society we spend $1.9 billion more a day on imported clothes and cars and gadgets than the entire rest of the world spends on its goods and services.

Will your kids be able to deal with their money?

These articles were very distressing to me in my morning newspaper reads:

Star Bulletin: Education Dilemma.
PBN: Economic literacy: students know as little as their parents.

“Does money hold its value well in times of inflation? No, but 36 percent of Hawaii students answered “yes,” and 22 percent said they didn’t know, according to a survey by the University of Hawaii Department of Economics.

As reported to the attendees of the 2004 Hawaii Economic and Financial Literacy Conference in Waikiki yesterday:

521 students (at 19 public high schools from all seven school districts across Hawaii) were given 20 multiple-choice financial questions. The average student got 11 of the 20 questions right. The group score was 54 percent.”

Yikes!

A few years ago I picked up Robert Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad Poor Dad at an airport newsstand, and it made a huge impact on me. Kiyosaki is not a fan of the financial education given—or not given—in our schools. Reading his book, I thought about the two teenagers I had at home, and I vowed that I would begin their financial education myself.

We started with simple things: I got them each their own checking account with a cash card to use while shopping, and opened savings accounts in which any future cash gifts would go. I made the first modest deposit in each account: I would double it when they each finished reading Rich Dad Poor Dad for themselves. (Not sure how bribery rates in good parenting, but in this case it did the trick.) That Christmas, one of their gifts was their own brokerage account in the USAA First Start Program: through-out the year we’d make small monthly deposits to UTMA Mutual Funds on their behalf. We’d match their own voluntary contributions. Quarterly we’d talk about their statements, and in teaching them I had to get more intelligent about it myself.

This past year, we took a huge step with my daughter’s financial education: she went through the entire real estate purchase process with me for an O‘ahu condominium, looking up her own credit history we thankfully had established those years prior, evaluating the mortgage options we had available, and earning the right to put her name alongside mine on the deed. She has a monthly budget designed to pay herself (her equity) first, as she juggles college with a job and her living expenses.

I’m sharing my story with you to encourage you: the best and easiest way to prepare your kids is to let them in on your life. Create a family budget and explain it, stick to it and evaluate it on a regular basis. Refinancing? Starting a Christmas savings plan? Planning a 401k rollover when you change jobs? Talk about these things at the dinner table.

Don’t wait for the schools to do the job you can do best.