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"Want your employees to buy a new management goal? You have to know how to sell it to them. This doesn't mean selling to your employees; it means selling to your employee culture, which is a whole different proposition. 'Culture' is the most overused yet least understood concept in business. The difference between understanding your employees and understanding your employee culture is the difference between whether your performance goals succeed or fail.
When they form a relationship with a company, employees become a culture. A culture is a separate organism living within your company. It has its own purpose and the power to make or break any management plan – and any manager right along with it. Neither business logic nor management authority nor any compelling competitive urgency will convince an employee culture to adopt a corporate cause as if it were its own. In the killing field between company concept and employee commitment lay many a failed strategic plan."
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"We've been living with the internet now for twenty years and it's not news that we're all connected. Unless a totalitarian government swoops down and takes away our cell phones and our access to social media, that connectivity isn't going anywhere. The question is: How do you and I grab hold of this newfound connectivity to take us to the places we want to go?
At a time when old-fashioned routes to power—the schools you went to, the contacts in your address book, the families you were born into—are not the only ways to get ahead, how do we connect intelligently, e.g. better, faster, more efficiently, and use all of our connections to make our ideas happen? Almost everyone has at least the capacity to link up with people, power, ideas, information and resources, but how do we synthesize it all to produce real change and influence people's lives for the better?
The key is thinking differently about our connections. We need a shift in perception that empowers us to be the drivers of our digital tools and our new resources. This doesn't just mean executives or traditional gatekeepers. This means anyone. This means you."
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"When you experience pressure anxiety—the feeling that you have to produce all the time—your emotional landscape changes for the worse. Small annoyances like picking up your dry-cleaning, for example, begin to interfere with your need to 'produce.' Going to your daughter's play becomes an intrusion. Going on vacation can increase your anxiety, because it takes you away from what you should be doing: achieving results. Important conversations with your spouse may go south because of the subtle pressure of always being 'on.' Worse, your decisions may become distorted by your need to produce. And if your focus shifts solely to winning, at any cost, you may find yourself compromising your ethics.
Pressure anxiety may seem irrational—a mediocre presentation to a client is not akin to physical death—and probably, in and of itself, will not lead to the end of a professional relationship. Similarly, your daughter being turned down from her first choice college will not end her life, although she may feel that way at the time. We often tell ourselves and our kids not to overreact to these kinds of temporary set-backs—to be rational. However, pressure anxiety makes it hard to hold that thought in mind."
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"Today, we are connected in a multitude of ways and tethered to our devices 24x7. We have technology that allows instantaneous online delivery of content, including music, books and video. That same technology allows us to generate our own content and share it with the world. We have interactive social media tools that allow us to connect with communities we didn't even know existed a decade ago. And all of this is available from a mobile device that fits in the palm of your hand. New communication techniques and technologies are emerging at a rapid pace, continuously bombarding us with messages and reminders, with no end in sight.
In a world where it's hard enough to cut through the noise to get the attention of friends and family members, it's even more difficult for businesses and other organizations to reach prospects and customers. Unfortunately, many organizations try to solve this situation by talking louder and LOUDER until they are shouting at us from across a crowded room. They add to the noise, make us tune out, and continue their way down an unsustainable path."
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"What has made customer surprise in such a scarcity? At least three culprits have robbed the glee of service. First, many organizations have been forced to apply austere expense cutting in the face of ever-diminishing profit margins; value-added amazement has gotten pricey. Second, rising customer expectations have elevated what it takes to be judged as enchanting. Customers live in a highly stimulated daily lives. Stores have become sensory theater; TV and the Internet as vibrant as Broadway after dark. To paraphrase an old song, "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Zappos." There is a third reason...one subtler and far more challenging."
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