Efficient CEO

What Does It Take To Change The World?

"Don't discount the power of butterfly wings (even paper ones)!"

If the business world can be summed up as "chaos theory" then I am striving to implement the "butterfly effect". Let's address a reality: the business world runs on paper.

For all of our powerful computers, sleek phones, fast internet connections and virtual meetings, not only have we not eliminated the appetite for paper, we've actually increased it. Yes, we need paper, but the world will change... one butterfly, er, page at a time.

There's a reason we still use paper – it's cheap, easy and what we all know. More importantly people don’t change their behavior until they are forced to or until they see a personal benefit. Many people don't even believe it's possible to eliminate the paper used in their businesses. That's where I entered this equation.

When I was flying more than 100,000 miles per year for Arthur Andersen I knew that the costs of paper were directly reflected in the dragging weight of my computer bag. Try walking hundreds of miles through airport terminals and you'll quickly realize that one of the best ways to reduce back pain is to eliminate carrying paper. I developed the habit of using my computer for everything. Any paper I was given was left out of my bag (preferably in a recycle bin).

The metaphor of the butterfly effect is that tiny changes effected by one butterfly could eventually alter the path of a tornado. What started as the simple premise of reducing the weight of my bag led me down the path to enterprise forms automation. Sure, initially my ideas only saved a few sheets of paper, but today my solutions are saving tens of millions of pages of paper per year. Now that’s a lot of butterfly wings.

Tens of millions of pages saved is a great start. Ready for some proof? I recently heard from one of our customers who (unbelievably!) prints a train-load of paper each year and even though the number of forms submitted to them has doubled, their printing volume has remained the same by using automated forms.

Don't discount the power of butterfly wings (even paper ones)! 100% elimination of paper may never happen but there can be change.

Scarcity Thinking For Leaders

"The real problem is the limitation you’ve placed on yourself to make the decision."

This morning I heard a great short presentation on the concept of scarcity thinking. Quickly, scarcity thinking is when you believe there is not enough to go around. The presentation got me thinking about what happens to leaders who think in terms of ‘not enough’. Whether it’s not enough money, opportunity, people, ideas, or other concepts, this way of thinking leads to exactly what you’re thinking of: not enough.

Here are two ways to break this habit:
1. Think In Options
2. Eliminate The Scarcity Mindset

Think In Options

What if every choice you had to make had 43 possible options? When you catch the scarcity thought and immediately consider as many options as you can devise (even the negative or less desirable options) you will begin to see that whatever you consider to be scarce is not the real problem. The real problem is the limitation you’ve placed on yourself to make the decision. Certainly you’re not going to like every option you come up with but thinking about options will create new opportunities and paths to success. For example, if you are out of money and your current job won’t pay you enough, consider getting another job, doing a side project, selling something, eliminating or reducing expenses, borrowing money, etc. Thinking about more options creates abundance in your thinking and naturally removes the scarcity thinking.

Eliminate The Scarcity Mindset

Eliminating scarcity from your mindset altogether is the ideal solution, but of course changing your behavior may be the most difficult to accomplish. One way to eliminate scarcity is to approach problems, tasks, challenges and projects with the mindset that there will be obstacles and scarcity built in by design. Very few people have unlimited amounts of anything, especially time and money. Those who recognize the scarcity to begin with will empower themselves to find solutions when they encounter problems, thereby eliminating the scarcity mindset altogether.

The Importance Of Technology In Your Success

"...and if you’re not keeping up with your technology you may find your employees going elsewhere."

I just finished reading an article about LPL on Financial-Planning.com titled “LPL: ‘We've Arrived’” and was struck by just how important technology has been to aid in their recruitment of advisors and to grow their business. Obviously running a company today requires technology but choosing the right mix of technology can either just facilitate your operations or make you operationally excellent. In LPL’s case, they appear to be operationally excellent (and no, they aren't my customer so I can't say I helped in their success - yet).

Read The Article

The article concludes by profiling the decision Doug Lockwood, a principal with Harbor Lights Financial Group in Manasquan, N.J., made partly based on the stagnation of technology at his current firm. Imagine changing companies simply because the technology their previous firm had wasn’t keeping pace with their needs! Except, that’s exactly what customers do and if you’re not keeping up with your technology you may find your employees going elsewhere. In fact, I recently met a CTO who said he wouldn’t even consider working for another company if they weren’t using VMware for their IT needs.

The article, written by Paul Menchaca (November 1, 2009) is a great view into the world of a best-practices company and I recommend you check it out when you have a few minutes, even if you’re not in the financial industry. Perhaps you’ll see what I mean about the importance of technology to your success.

When The Right Decision Is A Tough Decision

"...you can rest assured that you made a decision that enables your company to continue moving forward."

This past September (2009) I was faced with a tough decision, the kind of decision nobody wants to make but the CEO must make: layoffs. To prepare myself for the CEO role I have always told my team that I would make the right decision for the company even if it meant having to let go of people who have become my friends and family at work. Having talked to several other CEO’s and former CEO’s since we restructured, this decision has been reaffirmed by all as the right decision. In fact many of them have said that if only they had been willing to make that choice in their past they wouldn’t have lost their business or their role as CEO.

It is the CEO’s job to make the right decision regardless of how tough it is. That job requires assessing risk and weighing the options that mitigate and/or avoid that risk. If you make an investment that doesn’t pan out, do you keep going at your current spending rate hoping that the investment will pay off in time and risk running out of money altogether? Or do you scale back and lower your costs before you reach that point?

What my company faced, as I’m sure many are facing now, is rising costs, a stagnation in productivity and investments that have not paid off. By projecting forward we saw that if we didn’t make the tough decision soon the entire company and everyone in it would be placed under an unnecessary level of risk of failure. It turns out that this tough decision immediately restored our profitability and ability to make investments that improve our products, services and company as a whole. On a personal level it is sad that people you care for are out of work and must find new jobs. On a business level a company shouldn’t be run on a personal or emotional level without a strong dose of responsibility for the corporate entity.

There is a simple point to all of this: if you don’t make the right decision, regardless of how tough it is, the outcome you fear will arrive by default. If you fail to cut back in time your entire company can go under and instead of laying off only some people you may find yourself laying off everyone (not to mention the other ramifications of going under).

Don’t forget that there is good that comes from the pain of a tough decision. For one, the employees you keep will know that you are a strong leader who is capable of doing what is right and when they believe that their focus becomes more intense and productivity rises. Assuming you make the decision in time, even the employees you let go will appreciate that you looked far enough ahead to give them time to get out with some severance and opportunity to find a job (i.e. don’t wait until December to do lay offs). As for yourself as an efficient CEO, you can rest assured that you made a decision that enables your company to continue moving forward. Our company is now moving more swiftly and with more efficiency, an unexpected effect of having fewer people to manage and perform certain duties.

For those of you who are facing similar tough decisions, trust your instincts and do what is right for your core team, your customers and your company as a whole. Make the tough decision with honor and respect for the trust your team has given you to make these decisions.

Leadership Is A Daily Conversation

"Recognize that you too are going through the changes and may be having the same reactions everyone else is – you are human after all."

My company is going through amazing changes as we grow, evolve our product mix and enhance service delivery. Although our team knew the changes would happen that doesn’t make the changes any less traumatic because you still have to endure the actual changes. Helping people navigate these changes requires vision, constant course corrections and a steely focus on the objective that made you decide to make the changes in the first place. In short, it requires leadership.

How often does your team require your leadership? In every conversation! Being a leader is more than just deciding a direction to go in, which doesn’t always fall solely on the shoulders of the figure-head leader. Leadership means showing belief, confidence and faith in the decision you’ve just made, especially the big ones. After you ask your team to follow your lead, it will help you be a better leader if you have the expectation that every person on your team, including yourself, will question the changes as they are being made.

“Why are we doing this?” “Where is this all leading to?” “Will this really work?”. These are all questions you will hear in varying forms and in some cases multiple times from the same person. Your job is to remind them of where you’re going, why you’re going there and to demonstrate unwavering confidence that the change will work. The way you answer questions, deal with someone else’s insecurity towards the objective and handle outright rejection of the change is the true measurement of your leadership ability. But all of this comes down to the conversation you’re having and how you have it.

The first step to consistent leadership communication is to lead yourself. Recognize that you too are going through the changes and may be having the same reactions everyone else is – you are human after all. In recognizing your own reactions you can remind yourself of why you’re feeling the stress and the benefits you will soon realize. Once you’ve lead yourself you will have a better gauge as to how you can help others address their own reactions.

The second step to consistent leadership communication is to keep your focus on your goal and not allow yourself to become too distracted by the changes everyone else is also enduring. Naturally your team will not be looking forward – they’ll look back to where they were last comfortable and seemingly everywhere else except where you’re taking them. Now remind them of why you chose to make the changes and the benefits they and everyone will realize as a result. Your communication during these moments should be just as crystalline and targeted on the goal as it was when you took those first steps towards the new goal.

The difference between success and failure is the slight difference between practicing good habits and bad habits. If your conversations lack confidence and faith then your team will doubt their own abilities to reach the goal. Choose to lead in your daily conversations and your team will leverage your strength, confidence and faith to carry themselves forward to success.

Empower Your Team To Do Their Best Work

"Am I hiring him to do what I say or to let him do what he says?"

My role as President at Efficient Technology Inc is to empower my team to do their best work. While in college I often heard people say “hire people who are smarter than yourself”. Since I was getting straight A’s I initially didn’t understand what they meant by ‘smarter’ than me. As an entrepreneur, it was easy to get caught up in the notion that I already have the best ideas. Truthfully, that was just my immature thinking for that age. What the advice-givers really meant was to hire people who are smarter in their respective roles and areas of expertise. In addition, I have learned to not just hire those people but to let them do what they’re great at doing.

We just hired a VP of Sales and Marketing. He’s an outstanding person with excellent experience and philosophies. His ideas are sound and, frankly, better than the ideas we have been using for the past five years. So here’s the question I have to ask myself: Am I hiring him to do what I say or to let him do what he says? Since I believe in empowering my team to do their best work, the answer is obviously to let him do what he believes is best based on his expertise.

How can you empower your team to do their best work? I have a few simple rules to ensure I can actually extend power to my team.

1. I believe in my team. There is no better gift you can give someone than to believe in their abilities by telling and showing them your belief.


2. I believe that empowerment works. What you believe forms your reality, so if you don’t believe empowering someone will work, then it won’t.


3. I set expectations and measure results. My goal is to get someone’s best work from them therefore I set that expectation and look for the results.


4. I show trust by leaving my team alone. Empowerment is the opposite of micromanagement – trust that the work will be done and you’ll be surprised at not only how well it gets done, but how effective the person becomes.

Giving a new team member full authority and leeway to perform is not necessarily easy nor given without measures of trust and rapport, but wow is it effective. Not only is our new VP already outperforming what I can do in the realm of his expertise, but the synergy the entire company gains from his excitement, focus and the exercising of his strengths is beyond expectation.

How Do You Build Confidence?

"Confidence is knowledge of yourself."

Here's my definition of confidence, which leads to how you can build your confidence: "Confidence is knowledge of yourself". When you have done something well a hundred times you have built knowledge in your ability and therefore you won't think twice about doing it again. This lack of contemplating how to perform a skill is because you know your ability and are confident. Building confidence, then, is to have knowledge of doing something well.

Building confidence can be done in a number of ways. The traditional way is to try, fail, try, learn, try, succeed... in other words, keep trying until you perfect it. Most confidence is built by doing something repetitiously. Another way is to borrow confidence from the future. Try this exercise to see what I mean.

1. Choose something you're not confident in doing today (e.g. public speaking, a new sport, etc)

2. Project ahead in your mind to a future point in time when you've mastered this task (e.g. a month, a year, etc)

3. In your projection think about the knowledge you'd have about that skill and try to sense the confidence you'll feel in the future when performing it.

4. Now borrow that future sense of confidence and approach learning this new skill with the knowledge of having mastered the skill in the future.

If you practice this projection technique you'll find that you can borrow some or all of your future confidence and accelerate your growth and mastery of your new skill today. Of course there is no substitute for actual practice but a little extra confidence will greatly boost your acquisition of confidence and knowledge of yourself.

The Fine Line Between Confidence And Arrogance Is Humility

"A confident person doesn't tell you that they're confident."

This is going to be a tricky article to write because the last thing I want to do is come across as arrogant, or as though I know everything. How do I show you my confidence without being arrogant? Or better yet, what is confidence and how is it not arrogance?

Dictionary.com defines arrogance as "offensive display of superiority or self-importance; overbearing pride". Confidence on the other hand is "belief in oneself and one's powers or abilities; self-confidence". Some mistake arrogance for confidence and vice versa so if you want to be sure that you're always confident and not arrogant, be humble. Therefore the fine line between confidence and arrogance is humility, "the quality or condition of being humble; modest opinion or estimate of one's own importance, rank".

I like to define confidence in terms of behavior and my friends have often heard me say that "a confident person doesn't tell you that they're confident". The confident person simply does what they’re confident at doing and demonstrates their abilities without exerting their pride upon you through claims or exaggerations. It's those who lack confidence that feel compelled to tell you how great they are or how well they can perform.

In most contexts arrogance is not a favorable attribute or quality in a person. There can be, however, a time and reason to use arrogance as a tool. The best example of this is Mohammed Ali. Before each fight he would boast to everyone how he was the greatest fighter of all time, the greatest fighter in the whole world even. And then he'd take his gloves to the ring and prove it. He regularly used arrogance as a tool to boost his and everyone else's confidence in himself (while intimidating some opponents). In certain cases it may be appropriate to use a little bit of arrogance to help you push through to a level of confidence. But remember to add humility back into your approach if you want to be confident and not simply arrogant.

The ABC's of Sales: Always Be Confident

"Always be confident and your sales will take care of themselves."

I have never liked being 'sold' anything. The pressure of the other person's need to get your money, to win your deal, is a sure-fire way to dissolve the good will that is initially extended in business. What's worse is I don't ever want to be perceived as 'selling' anything. Yet my company, and I'm sure your company, has an incredible set of solutions to offer the world and that requires sales. So where is the balance between offering and promoting vs. selling and negotiating? For my team it's in the simple letters of ABC.

We changed the rules for what ABC stands for in sales. Have you heard that ABC stands for "Always Be Closing"? The concept is that your conversations, your actions, your intent is to always be focused on how to 'close' a deal. And of course that philosophy works and has worked for many sales people. The problem with that philosophy is that if you are always focused on closing a deal, then you may become too focused on filling your personal needs and you may fail to listen and attend to the customer's needs. I have personally seen too many sales people fall into this trap and alienate customers, relationship managers, partners and even their own team.

ABC in my company stands for "Always Be Confident". Classic sales training books and classes teach that "you" are the product people buy not necessarily the goods and services you're promoting. We all prefer to buy from someone we like and believe in and that person is usually the most confident in who they are, what they do and what their products do. By focusing your personal development and growth on becoming your most confident self you’ll find that:

1. You're not really selling -- you're promoting and informing.
2. You're not grabbing someone's attention -- you're attracting it.
3. You're not closing deals -- you're winning friends and customers.

I have often told people that the fine line between confidence and arrogance is humility. Have you noticed that the annoying, high-pressure sales person tends to be arrogant? Therefore the fine line between being perceived as a sales-type person vs. someone your customers want to do business with is your confidence. Always be confident and your sales will take care of themselves.

Why Servant Leadership Is Ideal For The Millenial Generation

"...which means they'll quit their job if you don't treat them right."

Over the past few weeks I've been learning a lot more about the Millennial Generation (Gen-Y). This is the generation after Generation X, and they seem to be quite the opposite. Where the Gen X group is highly independent, even off-standish, the millennial group is all about social interaction and keeping their options open. They bond through virtual and real interactions with each other on a much greater level than most of the generation before them (just think Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc).

At a recent USC Networking Day event Morley Winograd told us the Millennials are a clever group. They tend to be confident, even self-centered, and possess a great drive for achievement. In a work environment, decisions require consensus and they want to be recognized for their abilities. They also know that they can get that recognition in other places, which means they'll quit their job if you don't treat them right. So how do you lead such a group?

If your form of leadership is to dictate and hold people accountable to their job description, you may find that the Millennials don’t want to work for you. They prefer an open structure in order to come and go as they please, work the hours that they want to work, socialize with their friends, peers and colleagues, and keep running their busy personal lives while they're on the job. This may sound like a cushy job to most of us but to the Millennials their job and their personal lives are the same thing.

Given that I practice servant leadership, I'm a bit biased as to why this form of leadership is ideal for the millennial group (not to mention that it has been working for the past four years). While plenty of forms of leadership exist, most leaders demonstrate hard and fast rules for how things must be done. The main premise of servant leadership is to empower others to do their best work, which is exactly what this new generation wants. Here's the trick: when you empower somebody to do their best work that means letting them do their job in the most effective manner for them.

With the Millennials that are on my team I have found that by giving them a lot of freedom I get a lot of results. It truly doesn't matter to me what time of day they work as long as the work gets done. Instead of demanding a 9 to 5 work schedule and only getting the minimum number of hours out of my team, they typically work harder out of their own free will and ambition. If I were to use any other form of leadership and dictate how they work I wouldn’t be tapping into their true potential.

Another reason servant leadership is a strong fit for the millennial group is because they prefer to make decisions by consensus. As a leader you always have the ability and right to make final decisions. As a servant leader, you empower your team to make the decision with your guidance and oversight. If your team is made up of Millennials then you'll be giving them exactly what they want while leveraging their strong sense of social responsibility. Your only challenge then is to make sure their decisions are sound and match your vision.

Do you have Millennials on your team? Let me know how you are working with them, to realize your entire company’s full potential.