Monthly Archives: March 2015

Inc.com Column: Why Jeff Bezos, Tony Hsieh, and Al Gore Told Me to Stop Networking

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5 Awesome Ways to Win or Lose the Most Valuable Relationships

The worst thing about networking books is the advice often feels so manipulative, mercenary and self-serving. The world’s best entrepreneurs routinely tell me that a better way to think about growing your business is to “seek to build a community — to make better choices in the people with whom you partner — that’s the only way to have greater long-term impact on the world,” Jeff Bezos told me as we tromped through the snow at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It’s time to shift to a longer view of relationships, rather than seeing everyone in the room as this quarter’s target for business development.

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(Read article on Inc.com)

Traditional networking leans too heavily on creating short-term contacts intended to meet your momentary needs and ambitions. Long-term success is not just about quick wins; it’s about going deep to find the people who matter most and to learn what’s happening out there in the market that is likely just out of your field of vision. Consider theses five ways to shift your thinking in favor of a bigger, longer-term Return on Relationships:

1. Don’t confuse transactions with relationships! says Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos and DowntownProject.com. What if you knew when you first met someone that they would be a long-term colleague and resource? Would it shift the way you approach that conversation? People can smell superficiality. “Go deep to find out why you’re better off working together,” Hsieh said.

2. Don’t ask for anything until you’ve added value, Al Gore mused as we stood in line on the way into a TED session. I asked him about how he felt about networking. He shook his head, then shrugged: “The only way to earn reciprocity from anyone else is for you to show generosity first.”

3. Don’t make this about you. “An appreciative listener is always stimulating,”Agatha Christie once famously quipped about how much people are moved by the rare person who can shut up long enough to hear and understand what others are saying. If you’ve ever wondered about how to interest people in talking with you, then embrace a critically important piece of advice: No matter how cliché this may seem, it’s absolutely true that the best way to be interesting is to be interested. Abraham Maslow’s historic “Hierarchy of Needs” research ranked “being understood” as one of humanity’s most desperately treasured desires.

4. Don’t go after the biggest network. Strive for quality in your network, not quantity. Networking can be overwhelming and often pointless if you simply try to amass a large number of people. Instead, select fewer, deeper, more interesting folks. Invest in your Most Valuable People, or MVPs, as they’re called in Admired: 21 Ways to Double Your Value. In a national survey of Gallup’s Most Admired People and Fortune’s Most Admired Companies, it was clear that most people “don’t know what is valued by the few people who are the most important to their success.” It’s a simple matter of reciprocity to know what others value before expecting them to value you!

Make a list of the people who are essential to your future and find out what they love. Are you spending the time necessary to understand what they value? Could you be devoting more attention to this relationship? Is there someone new you would like to add, but haven’t put time into that connection yet? When you focus on being more valuable to your network of MVPs, the natural result is more value flows back to you.

5. Don’t just go along for the ride with any network. Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang suggests that you find out what your MVPs care about and help take a leadership role in the community organizations that are most important to them. For example, most nonprofit groups are “hungry for help,” he said. “No one will ever turn down your offer for genuine support for a worthy cause.” You’re always welcome as a volunteer to manage or do work for free. If you commit to a sincere effort, you will be invited to lead something valuable to them, or to join the board for an event or for the group — and in so doing you will have the opportunity to deepen or expand your visibility and community.

Let’s hope you’re next!

(Read more…)

 

Inc.com Column: How to Make Sure You’re on Larry Page’s 2015 Wish List

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Here are four ways to become an irresistible acquisition target for the search giant…

When we received an offer from Google to buy our company, you can imagine the excitement. Like most startups, an exhausted crew of unshaven entrepreneurs had been throwing themselves at the task 24/7 and the tiny firm was growing by leaps and bounds. It’s obviously huge validation to have your firm acquired by Google or other innovator, but it’s not as rare as you might think. They’ve been buying more than 50 companies per year–we were just one week’s purchase! (Read article on Inc.com)

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Why do Facebook, Yahoo and other notables continue to buy companies at a blistering pace, and how can you make yourself irresistible for their next offer?

Solve these four problems first:

1.  Can You Pass The Toothbrush Test? Google CEO Larry Page is legendary for saying he won’t buy your company unless the product or service is something people need and use throughout the day–the toothbrush test. But it’s not only that. The service has to be something people ‘want’ as much as they need, so for more than a dozen years Page has insisted that startup teams demonstrate first-hand experience with solving customers’ most compelling problems. Before Google tapped YouTube to come aboard, founder Chad Hurley would often lament “the great pain of uploading video and the great joy that came from seeing your stuff instantly online,” he mused. “At that time, there was no easy way for the mass of consumers to do this. The solution was born from our own frustration!” Back then only a few visionaries (like Google) could see just how enormous that business would become. I sat next to Larry Page in the audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos after the Google/YouTube deal had closed. On stage there were a bunch of tech prognosticators showing off for the cameras, expressing dismay at Google paying more than a billion for YouTube (back when that was rare). Page turned to me with a smirk: “I think we’re going to do okay on YouTube,” the Google cofounder chuckled. “Don’t worry about us,” he started to whisper. “No one seems to realize yet just how necessary it will be for people to broadcast themselves every day!” (Broadcast Yourself was one the original YouTube slogan.) I told Larry Page that even the stock market was smarter than the critics in the snowy Swiss Alps that day, as Google’s stock price had leapt almost $2 billion after the deal was announced.

2.  It’s The Ugly Stepchild Not The Sexy Stuff That Wins Long-Term. While some successful businesses capture the public’s imagination and dominate the media’s attention at the beginning, those companies often become the rare, few victors in fiercely competitive markets. More often it’s better to solve a problem that may be less glamorous, but still necessary to a market niche. At the turn of the century, “bandwidth was limited, so it would take forever to upload even YouTube videos, and playback was haltingly slow,” Hurley observed. YouTube was an ugly stepchild in the sexy media industry, but it would soon become a necessity.

3.  The Dirty Little Secret About Innovation. Innovation requires experimentation, but what’s the most likely result from most bold new tests? Failure! Do big company managers enjoy high-profile flops with their bonus and reputation on the line? Nobody does, with one notable exception: startups that lack the scale, experience, customers and resources–they don’t have the obvious competitive advantages of their bigger competitors–so they have no other choice but to take disruptive action and embrace daring risks to solve problems, please customers and win market share. For all the lip service given to innovation and entrepreneurship, almost no well-established leaders do it in a serious way because they have to deliver quarterly earnings and are burdened by regulatory complexities and peer pressure at their own companies. There isn’t much incentive to innovate if you’ll be fired for doing it!

4.  If You Can’t Beat Them, Buy Them. For many risk-adverse firms, the solution is to hunt for startups whose businesses are have done the pesky R&D for them. Why not buy a company that has already slogged through the humiliating setbacks and taken the research and development risks and demonstrated successful traction? Google is a master at this kind of talent search. As Darwinian economic forces cull the vast majority of the herd of entrepreneurs in any emerging industry, the visionary buyers have the opportunity swoop in to acquire and integrate the most promising, road-tested survivors.

As an executive coach and angel investor, I often lay half-awake at night with dreams about getting that exciting call from an acquirer. I’m grateful to have been a part of more of dozen happy exits–along with dozens of happy entrances by visionary managers at big companies. Each time I’m amazed to see how great leaders embrace risk so that the company and their customers win over and over again.

Let’s hope you’re next!