What Really Motivates People to Perform? It's not What you Think...

I was reminded in the past few weeks (please don't ask me to recall where!) about the three motivators that move people to give their best effort.  Because so much of what I deal with day-to-day revolves around inspiring groups of people to work together and achieve great things, these motivators are constantly at play.  Most business owners and managers struggle to get their staff to perform at the highest level (or even a mediocre level), and leveraging motivating factors that really work can be powerful.

Autonomy
Although we're 'herd animals' at heart, people want to do their own thing.  Being micromanaged, forced to constantly answer to someone, or never given a moment's peace are nightmares for your average worker - this especially applies to Americans who are more independent than some other cultures.  Most managers and entrepreneurs are terrified of giving their employees too much autonomy.  While it is true that you have to provide clear boundaries, support, and occasionally intervention, it's been proven repeatedly that people perform better when they accept full ownership of a task and are allowed to make decisions and get the job done in their own unique way.  Autonomy is also a great motivator to access because there are benefits for the organization and management too!  By fostering personal responsibility in your staff you gain more time to focus on upper level tasks and business development without hovering over your team constantly.

Mastery
It really feels good to know that you are EXCELLENT at something - doesn't it?  We all love to feel accomplished and to be recognized for the things we do well.  Expert stature or mastery of a subject are fantastic motivators for your team.  Continuing education, new certifications and other programs can give companies a structured way to leverage mastery in the workplace.  Simple 'thank yous', surprise events and public recognition can also work wonders.  There are several reasons why this motivator is so effective:

1. Higher education typically equals higher pay.
2. Learning new skills keeps employees engaged in their work and prevents apathy.
3. Companies gain employees who are better at their job and who deliver for customers at a higher level.
4. Happy employees who feel that their job is a true specialty make fewer errors and stay longer.

Purpose
Everybody wants to feel that their life is making a difference.  We all would like to think that we are impacting the world and the people in it as we go about our daily business. Managers and corporations can tap into this innate human need for destiny to boost performance.  Be clear about your company's purpose and make conscious efforts to connect your staff with your mission statement.  Encourage volunteerism and community service.  Find ways for your company to engage in corporate philanthropy or holiday giving campaigns.  Make sure that each staff member (even the ones at the bottom) see how their job fits into the grand vision and makes a difference for customers.  All of these things will help your staff be more motivated and creative at work, which will equal higher profits and great innovations.

Lastly, I want to address the 800 pound gorilla in the room... money.  The single motivator that most businesses build into their HR plan is cash.  'Do X and you'll get a raise.'  'Achieve Y and you'll get a bonus.'  'Hit target Z and earn a higher commission rate.'  But it has been proven in studies that money motivators actually make people perform the worst!

Why?  Because money alone as a goal is very cold and shallow.  As much as we all WANT more money, we desire cash to improve our quality of life and feed our soul - not to sit in a vault.  As you consider the three motivators above, notice that each one will translate into more money naturally. 

For example... accepting personal responsibility for your work and getting tasks done independently will encourage you to be meticulous and will free your boss up to focus on the big picture, taking the whole organization forward. Getting better training, more professional designations and higher education will make you more marketable and improve your earning potential.  You will get raises due to merit and knowledge - not tenure or hitting a random goal one time. Feeling emotionally and spiritually connected to your work, and gaining personal satisfaction from your job, will improve performance every time.  All of a sudden you aren't just going to work - you are living your destiny, and that makes you a powerful force.

If you're in a supervisory position and you're tempted to offer people money to reach organizational objectives, I urge you to reconsider.  Find creative ways turn your attention away from money and use the three motivators that really work to take your team to the next level.

What can you do now to Minimize your Tax Bill in April?

Last Ditch Tax Tips for the Year's End!

Most of my clients call at some point in December and ask, "What can we do to reduce our tax liability?" I'm always happy to hear that question, because it means they've made enough during the year to be worried! So what can you do in the last days of December to reduce your tax bill?

Revisit your 2009 accounting BEFORE the year ends. Most companies don't really examine their books until well into the following year as the tax crunch begins to loom large. It's important as part of your year-end business strategy to have a good understanding of your company's financial situation before the year is over. That way you not only ensure that your books are accurate, you also have the information you need to 'guesstimate' your tax liability and make last minute decisions about spending, giving and deposits.

Examine your inventory. Inventory write-offs can be significant. The drop in market value of any inventory you have on hand can potentially provide your company with deductions. Depending on your accounting methods, you may also want to track any goods that have been damaged or have become obsolete.

Put money into a retirement plan. This is the time of year to make payments into your retirement plan or set up a final contribution before the end of the year to reduce your income. You'll have to check the contribution limits for your type of plan and decide what your budget will allow. 401(k)s, KEOGH plans, Roth IRAs or SEPs are all great places to shelter some funds for future years. As always, you need to discuss the best strategy with your financial planner or accountant.

Defer income into 2010. Any payments your business can receive during the first week of January as opposed to December will cut your tax bill. Every cent deferred until January 2010 will not owe taxes until April 2011. Your specific deferral strategy should be driven by your projected annual profits and legal structure (LLC, partnership, corporation, etc). Depending on your income tax rates in the foreseeable new year, deferral of income can make good sense for many sole proprietors, partnerships, LLC's, and S corporations.

Give a little bit away. Charities are hurting right now, and companies that are doing well can benefit from making last minute donations. Think about donations you may have planned for 2010 and push them back into 2009. Make sure you get a receipt for all tax deductible gifts.

Boost your Expenses. This sounds nutty, but if your cash flow allows you to spend at the end of the year you can save a bundle on your taxes. Purchase items your business will require in the immediate future to maximize deductions for this year. If you can see a need for goods and services in the first quarter of the new year, pay for them now and let those expenses count for 2009. Consider stocking up on paper, printer cartridges and other office items. Order promotional materials like flyers and business cards. Pay your January bills before the new year in areas such as phone services, subscriptions, insurance, rent and utilities. Get repairs made and book 2010 travel early. Buy any new office equipment or furniture you need. (You do have to weigh whether or not it is best to take a write off now or spread out the depreciation over years, but buying fixed assets can be a great tax reduction strategy.)

Every situation is unique, and each business owner has to decide whether or not it makes sense to reduce tax liability in the current year. Sometimes if you are projecting increasing sales it's a better call to just pay your tax bill and not make future tax burdens heavier, but if you are concerned about your tax liability for 2009 these are some great tips that can help you save money!

A Decade of Destruction... How the Internet Ruined Everything

The first decade of the new millennium saw the rise of a supremely disruptive technological force: the Internet.

The past decade is the era in which the Internet ruined everything. Just look at the industries that have been damaged by the rise of the Web: Newspapers. Magazines. Books. TV. Movies. Music. Retailers of almost any kind, from cars to real estate. Telecommunications. Airlines and hotels. Wherever companies relied on advertising to make money, wherever companies were profiting by a lack of transparency or a lack of competition, wherever friction could be polished out of the system, those industries suffered.

Remember all that crazy talk in the early days about how the Internet was going to change everything and usher us into a brave new techno-utopia? Well, to get to that promised land, we first have to endure a period of what economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” as the Internet crashes like a tsunami across entire industries, sweeping away the old and infirm and those who are unwilling or unable to change. That’s where we’ve been these past 10 years, and it’s been ugly.

Let’s start with newspapers. You wouldn’t think that in an information age the biggest victim would be purveyors of information. But there you go. Newspapers are getting wiped out in part because they didn’t realize they were in the information business—they thought their business was about putting ink onto paper and then physically distributing those stacks of paper with fleets of trucks and delivery people. Papers were slow to move to the Web. For a while they just sort of shuffled around, hoping it would go away. Even when they did launch Web sites, many did so reluctantly, almost grudgingly. It’s hard to believe that news companies could miss this shift. These companies are in the business of spotting what’s new, right? Yet they were blind to the biggest change (and the biggest opportunity) to ever hit their own business. Watching newspapers go out of business because of the Internet is like watching dairies going out of business because customers started wanting their milk in paper cartons instead of glass bottles.

Newspapers are getting wiped out because the Internet robbed them of their mini-monopolies. For decades they had virtually no competition, and so could charge ridiculous amounts of money for things like tiny classified ads. This, we are told by people who are wringing their hands over the demise of newspapers, was somehow a good thing. Good or no, it’s gone, thanks to Craigslist, which came along and provided the same service at no charge. Whoops.

TV is in the same boat. For decades we had three big broadcast networks. They weren’t exactly a monopoly, but close enough; with so little choice, the networks could aggregate huge audiences and charge outrageous fees for advertising time. Along came cable, which brought in dozens of competitors. This hurt a little bit, but when the Internet arrived, the dam burst. Suddenly the number of “channels” soared as high as you can count. There is no limit. It’s infinite. That sudden surplus has drained ad money from TV networks, which is why TV is now jammed with low-cost junk—reality shows, cable “news” that owes more to Jerry Springer than to Walter Cronkite, Jay Leno on five nights a week in prime time—taking the place of scripted shows, which cost more to make. Basically, TV is on a race to the bottom, cutting costs to stay ahead of the destruction. This may be a short-term fix, but simply putting out a worse product is probably not the way to survive.

The music business has suffered even more. First there was Napster, distributing music at no cost. Apple’s iTunes Store offered a path to survival, but it forced the music companies to cede control of their industry to Steve Jobs. As for music retailers—remember them? Yes, children, there used to be actual stores that you could walk into and buy music, on CDs and even on vinyl record. You don’t see many of those about anymore.

As for the film industry, Apple now offers movie studios the same Faustian bargain it made with music companies: “You just focus on making movies, and let us take care of digital distribution.” But the movie guys remain wary, and at the very least would rather deal with many different digital distributors and not let any single distributor get too powerful. The studios realize that the digital revolution is disrupting their business. The best they can hope to do is slow down the disruption.

But it’s not just stodgy old-fashioned companies that have been hurt by the rise of the Internet, even tech companies suffered damage. Before the Internet came along, Microsoft ruled the computer industry. Tiny software companies lived in Microsoft’s shadow, and they knew that if their business struck gold, Microsoft would offer them an unpleasant choice: either sell your company to us for a pittance, or we’ll create software that mimics your product and put you out of business. Microsoft bullied rivals and business partners alike, until the latter squealed to the U.S. Department of Justice, which brought an antitrust case against the software giant, resulting in a judgment against Microsoft in 2002.

These days nobody fears Microsoft. The company has become a stumbling, bumbling joke. That’s not because of the government, however. What really tripped up Microsoft was the Internet. Microsoft’s business model was based around waiting for others to innovate, then making cheap knockoffs of what others were selling. Microsoft copied Apple to make Windows. They copied Lotus and WordPerfect to make Excel and Word, then bundled those apps into a low-cost suite called Office. They copied Netscape Navigator to make Internet Explorer, and then gave it away free, tied to Windows, and killed Netscape. But then the copycat model stopped working. Why? For one thing, Microsoft got slower, while everyone else got faster. The new Web-based companies, like Yahoo and Google, needed little money to get started and could scale up quickly. Google figured out keyword-search advertising and got so big so fast that Microsoft could not drag it back. Apple rolled out the iPod and then the iTunes store, and by the time Microsoft realized that selling music online was a big market, it was too late—Apple had it sewn up. The same is true of Amazon with the online retail market, and the Kindle, and its cloud-computing services.

Now Microsoft finds itself racing to catch those companies, even as it invests resources and energy into defending its money-making products like Windows and Office. It’s a case study that could have sprung from the pages of Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma. Microsoft is too big to get swept away. But it’s too wedded to the old world to make it across into the new one. It is quickly becoming irrelevant—maybe not as much as the average newspaper, but close enough.

The Internet has changed pretty much every aspect of our lives over the past decade. Is that for the better or the worse? Depends on who you ask.

 
Daniel Lyons is technology editor for NEWSWEEK. He blogs at Techtonic Shifts.

10 Ways a Start-Up Can Use Social Media to Market Itself

Hubspot Blog on November 9th, 2009
By Edward Boches

“How can a start-up with a few employees and a tiny marketing budget get its name out there?”

The question appeared perfect for a panel that included blogger and Twitter star Chris Brogan, Hubspot’s CEO and Inbound Marketing author Brian Halligan, and this blogger, who has worked on the launch of numerous companies and brands including Lotus, Monster.com, and Lending Tree, not to mention another dozen that never made it.

Interestingly, while we all agreed in principal with what a company should do — embrace social media, take advantage of the platforms available, connect with influencers, and allow the community to play a role — we disagreed somewhat on how much time it might take and who should do it.

Chris suggested that you could achieve a version of what he’s done – build a following, mobilize a community, turn content into business (my interpretation) — in a couple of hours a day. I contended it would take a lot more time than that if you planned on generating quality content. Brian argued that anyone could easily start a blog, post something daily, learn to be Google friendly, and let search take care of the rest.

We each answered quickly and moved on to another question. But if we’d had more time, this is what I believe we may have collectively suggested that a start-up do to market itself:

1.    Craft a brand position rooted in a customer benefit.

An awful lot of young companies do a good job of describing a product’s features rather than synthesizing them into a single benefit. A simple handle, either expressing what a brand stands for or declaring its point of difference, will serve you well in everything from appearing in search results to being remembered.

2.    Take your message and content to your consumer. Engineer your presence.
You may want a website where you fill orders, capture data, or simply demonstrate your product, but you shouldn’t assume your customer will instantly come to you. Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and YouTube are
all basically free tools. You need to go where your consumer lives online. If your customers, prospects, and influencers are there, you should be there: listening, engaging, sharing, and helping them.

3.    Find inventive ways to create or gather content.
For starters, make your website into a blog. Fresh content, the ability to post comments, and pages that get linked to will add to your online visibility. No doubt it’s challenging and time consuming to generate enough content to populate your network and blog, but there are smart ways to go about it.

First, whatever you’re doing, write about it. Report on your progress. Second, come up with a daily question you’d want someone to ask and respond to it in a blog post or video. Third, save time by collecting content from others. Place your product or service, even in beta form, in front of people willing to blog, make videos, and tell stories about it. Aggregate this content to your blog or video channel. Fourth, conduct polls or ask questions about a related topic and turn these results into future posts as well as “news” you can release to both bloggers and press.

4.    Get on Twitter and use it actively.
It takes time to build a large Twitter following, but it’s a quick way to connect with industry influencers, bloggers, and press that might matter to you.

No matter what you sell, someone on Twitter is having a conversation about it. It’s your chance to listen, respond, and engage with potential enthusiasts. More importantly, on Twitter there’s a willingness to help each other that you just won’t find anywhere else. Perhaps it’s because re-tweeting information is virtually effortless, or that people practically vie to share new finds, or that users feel a sense of obligation to those who follow and promote them, but for whatever reason, you’re likely to find people who are willing to help promote your brand on Twitter, presuming you learn Twitter protocols and give more than you take.

5.    Connect your customers and prospects to each other.
One of the best things you can do as a young company is to foster word-of-mouth conversations among your earliest customers. Whether you do it on Facebook or on your own site, it’s important to invite your customers to talk to each other and share ideas. Allow them to guide one another on how they use your product or service. Not only will you have the opportunity to learn what people like and don’t like about your product, you may end up with a bunch of people you can ask to help you.

6.    Develop relationships with the right bloggers.
Every start-up in the world wants that article in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.  But the fact is, the right bloggers might be more influential for a number of reasons. They have loyal readers. Their references or links to your site will drive up your search results.  And these days, it’s more likely that ideas will bubble up from the blogosphere to the mainstream press than vice versa.

7.    Start Crowdsourcing.
There is no shortage of services – companies like crowdSpring (design) or Tongal (video) — to help you source affordable content from designers, videographers, writers, and others. But there’s an even better reason to crowdsource. You allow your customers to participate in the creation of your brand. If you want a great example, take a look at how HBO seeded True Blood. Instead of advertising, HBO shipped samples of synthetic blood to popular videographers and bloggers, who, of course, couldn’t resist making videos or posting pieces about the mysterious liquid. You may not have anything as cool as fake blood, but you can still learn to think this way.

8.    Read Brian Halligan’s Inbound Marketing Book.
Even if you have a product with enough mainstream appeal to justify paid advertising, consumers today spend more time searching than watching. You want to be found. Inbound Marketing covers all of the basics you’ll need to know to make your content Google friendly.

9.    Give stuff away for free.
Take a look at what HubSpot does: free tools (Twitter Grader and Website Grader); free webinars (How to use SEO, Blogging for Business); free eBooks (Facebook for Business, Getting Found Online). If you sell food, give away recipes. If you’ve invented a sleep monitor, offer free tips on better sleeping. Free content generates awareness, builds loyalty, creates newsworthy topics, and spreads word-of-mouth. Remember, in this day and age, what a brand does is far more important than what a brand says.

10. Make the time, build in the role, or hire the right partner.
As folks like Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk have proven, you can do all this yourself if you have the right time, energy and commitment. If you can’t muster that, give this role to one of your first hires. If you’re less than comfortable identifying that person within your own company, (hint: it’s not an intern or a kid right out of school; Digital Natives may know all the technology, but they often lack the strategic chops and the ability to create truly compelling content) retain the services of a public relations agency with real experience in social influence. Make sure that if you go this route, you ask for case studies as evidence that the PR team assigned to your business actually practices what it preaches.
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When I started in this business, launching a brand was costly. You needed a significant marketing budget that covered an oversized booth at a trade show, a direct sales force or a Super Bowl commercial, and a good hunk of your money went into advertising and promotion. Now you might be able to get away with a laptop, an Internet connection, and some well-focused social media.

Attention... Do you Go After it at All Costs?

A few hundred thank-yous to Mike McLaughlin, Editor of Management Consulting News, for this reality check on garnering attention for the wrong reasons and generally misbehaving.  For more visit www.managementconsultingnews.com.

It's clear that the "attention economy" in the US has run amok when adults hatch a plot to market themselves by making us believe their son was trapped in a runaway weather balloon. The parents of the media-dubbed "Balloon Boy" got the attention they craved, but it may land them in jail.

They're not the only ones willing to sacrifice good sense for notoriety. Scroll through blogs and twitter feeds and you'll find attention seekers there too. They're easy to spot. Usually, they're saying something outrageous just to be in the spotlight.

What I find puzzling, though, are the people (some of them consultants), who seek attention by tearing down others. When responding to a blog or twitter message, it seems that some people feel they can abandon the basic rules of civility they would observe toward anyone they met in person.

And some obviously relish the buzz that Internet fights can generate. It's a shame that so many of these arguments devolve into childish name-calling and other insults. When I see these exchanges, I'm sure the consultants involved have lost touch with three realities of our business.

First, problem solvers are collaborators, not aggressors. Who wants to hire a person who goes on the attack over every disagreement?

Second, every word you put out into the market is there for clients to see. If you throw a hissy fit on your blog because someone didn't like what you said, a client may rightly wonder how you'd react if the issue was truly important.

Third, clients expect consultants to respect them and their teams. If you're willing to unleash a public tirade against a total stranger, what might you do once you land in their office?

When I first started in consulting, a mentor offered a guiding principle about behavior toward others, especially in tense situations: "When you're upset, the most emotionally satisfying response to an argument is usually the worst possible one." This simple point seems more relevant now than ever.