Personality Types and Change Management
Oct 1 2012

Organizational alignment, managing change, and/or getting ready for company growth is not easy.  Companies who spend time addressing organizational health definitely have a competitive advantage.  One way to help assess health is to help management and everyone on the team understand their strengths and weaknesses.  I’ve written on this blog several times about self analysis and assessments from Strengths Finder 2.0 to career inventory tests to reading tons of articles fiction or non-fiction based.

One tool that many companies and business schools use is Myers-Briggs.  I have taken that assessment 3 times and each time I am an ENTJ.  I recently took it again as part of a management team exercise and my T was softer (probably due to the tons of heart related work I’ve done) and my J was stronger (probably because I’ve had to rely more on my planning skills with 2 kids, working full time, consulting part time, and attempting to work on my music).

Below is an infographic on Myers-Briggs Personality Type and Social Media Usage and here are some other interesting articles having to do with how people process decisions and change:

Ten Reasons People Resist Change

7 Social Psychology Studies to Help You Convert Prospects into Paying Customers

Making Choices: How Your Brain Decides

BiG HealthCARE Opportunities Summit
Sep 28 2012

BiGAUSTIN is excited to begin the Small Business @ Work series with our first event, BiG HealthCARE Opportunities Summit on November 1st, 2012. BiG is teaming up with The Seton Healthcare Family to educate and inform women and veterans about the advancements, changes and opportunities within the healthcare industry through panel discussions, breakout sessions, and workshops.

Participants will be able to gather information on HealthCARE and have the opportunity to network and learn about available self-employment as a CAREER within the healthcare community, have ACCESS to healthcare providers, be able to attend economic RECOVERY breakout sessions for personal needs, and learn what every ENTREPRENEUR should know about the new policies, healthcare acts and how these initiatives will affect their day to day business.

The BiG HealthCARE Opportunities Summit’s keynote speaker, author and small business person of the year 2007: Ms. Colleen J. Payne-Nabors, will share her experience and struggle as she built a multi-million dollar business in the mobile cardiac imaging business

For more Information go to: http://bigaustin.org/healthcareopportunitiessummit or email them at info@bigaustin.org

Appreciate Your Employees. It’s Good For Business.
Sep 19 2012

Infographics are the rave right now.  Spell check hasn’t realized that infographic is a new word.  We create infographics for our clients where I work.  We also, in our spare time, create infographics for ourselves.  I happened upon this cool infographic on HR Morning (via a link from Texas CEO magazine) and had to share.  It’s so obvious to me that thanking your employees is good for business, but for some reason 65% of workers don’t receive ANY praise or appreciation.  They must work where Dilbert works.  Appreciating your kids, your friends, or your partners in life is so important.  A few kind and thankful words can go a long way in fostering loyalty, solving misunderstandings, building bridges, and most importantly bringing out the smiles & laughter. 🙂

Great Leaders Read All The Time
Sep 16 2012

They (i.e., Harvard Business Review) say that great leaders read all the time.  That is certainly true of many great leaders (e.g., founder/CEO of WholeFoods) but there are great leaders who probably don’t have the time to read especially with family and work responsibilities, and I think they get some of their information in other ways (i.e., short bursts of knowledge that they have to assimilate over time).  There are tons of not-so-great leaders out there and admittedly they aren’t avid readers.  They have a hard time empathizing with others because they haven’t broadened their knowledge base by relating to other people’s stories from different parts of the world.

When I was working on the series of articles on success, I noticed that most of the leaders I interviewed were very well read and a handful had liberal arts, psychology, or humanities degrees.  You can certainly tell when someone is well read, not just in the latest business trends but also in works of fiction and other great classic literature by the way they interact with people.  I wish I had time to read more novels.  I can’t even seem to make it to my neighborhood mom’s monthly book club!

Here are a couple of interesting but short reads:

The Secret Behind Creativity – discusses ideas on how to be creative

He Loved The Words More Than He Loved The Muse
Sep 9 2012

The movie The Words is unusual for a mainstream movie.  I was surprised it was showing at the biggest theater in our area instead of at the local independent, artsy theater.  I found it thought provoking and intriguing from a “wannabe writer” point-of-view.  I muse on this blog and at one point I had  aspirations to write a book.  Two books actually…one fiction and one based on real people’s stories.  I “finished” 1/16 of both of them.  The attempt at the non-fiction book resulted in the articles on my Success Profiles page.  Life, work, children, self imposed limitations, and personalities got/get in the way of completing them as they do for so many who have lofty writing aspirations.

Many aspects of The Words were intriguing, from the handsome, young writer (Bradley Cooper) married to a beautiful, dark-skinned, seemingly unemployed woman (Zoe Saldana) to his stealing someone else’s words because his own were insufficient to break the New York publishing barrier.

One line that struck me went something like “He loved the words more than he loved the muse who inspired him to write them.”  My handful of past and present muses (places & people) have triggered words (prose & poetry) that I never knew were inside of me yet found their way often uncontrollably into some of my writing.  I found that  most of those muses, including my children, I love or loved more than the words.  If a place served as a muse, I then loved the words more because they were about the people I loved.

The movie left you hanging because it ends without resolution on what was real and what was fiction.  The older version (Dennis Quaid) of the young, handsome writer has telling flashbacks. However, the observer is left to come up with her own conclusion as to whether the author’s life, the author’s characters, or his stories were real or fiction.  According to the older writer, fiction must never be confused with reality…

Lego Fest Mania – Austin – September 2012
Sep 2 2012

Lego KidsFest was impressive!  We were there pretty much the entire time we could be this morning.  It was at the Austin Convention Center and it was packed full of fun.  Mostly boys signed up for the workshop with the Lego master.  He talked to them about interweaving Lego’s and told him he was the youngest master Lego builder in the company.  He was 29 and had helped build, among many other things, the Lightening McQueen sculpture.  He said it took 1,800 hours to build and weighed about 1 ton.  They had many figures placed around the showroom floor like the Hulk, Batman, Hagrid, Wonder Woman, Superman, Toy Story characters, Ninjago characters, as well as many animals.  Who knew you could make a living building figures out of Lego’s?

The kids could build sections for the mini-nation they were assembling in one section of the showroom floor.  The photo in this post  is of a tower my son built representing the UT tower, and he asked to have it placed it in Texas.  My daughter built another tower and asked to have it placed it in Colorado.  Together the kids built a super tall tower and placed it in California I think.  They said there will be an aerial view of the entire area on their website after the Fest was over.

Lego started a line called Lego friends aimed at girls that had stereotypical pink colors and designs to build houses, patios, landscape gardens, etc.  My daughter and her two friends spent much of their time in that area.  Apparently, Lego’s sales to the girl market went from 10 to 27% after they designed that product line.  Go figure.  Girls like to build, but we still seem to like to build using small purple and pink pieces.  Maybe in 10 to 15 years because Lego created products that girls (or parents of girls) like playing with, we will see more women pursuing career paths in design and construction.  Who knows…

One Giant Leap For Mankind
Aug 26 2012

Neil Armstrong died August 25 in Cincinnati, Ohio.  He was the first man to walk on the moon (Washington Post).  He performed that amazing feat before I was born.  Despite his apparent disdain of publicity, he will always be remembered for his famous words: “One small step for man.  One giant leap for mankind.”  His walking on the moon in 1969 was science fiction come to life.  According to the Washington Post article:

“Although the world remembers him best for walking on the moon, Mr. Armstrong recalled his time on the surface as anticlimactic, “something we looked on as reasonably safe and predictable.” Flying the LM was “by far the most difficult and challenging part” of the mission, he told a group of youngsters in a 2007 e-mail exchange.

The “very high risk” descent was “extremely complex,” he wrote, and guiding the craft gave him a “feeling of elation.”

“Pilots take no particular joy in walking,” he once remarked. “Pilots like flying.””

I wonder who will be the first to successfully land an aircraft and walk on Mars…

Social Marketing Rockstar Tour
Aug 21 2012

Today I attended the Marketo Social Marketing Rockstar Tour event in Austin for my company, Bulldog Solutions.  Marketo sells one of the leading marketing automation platforms that helps companies manage their marketing efforts and evaluate how qualified their leads are before they hit the sales pipeline.  It looks like they still have London and Sydney left on their tour.  It was really well attended…a packed room with 95% women attendees.  I was surprised because pretty much all of the conferences/summits I’ve attended since my career began have had 60 to 95% male attendees, unless it was a women’s conference.  That observation gelled for me the fact that I’m now working for a company that caters to the marketing industry, a field with a high percentage of women in key positions.

During the event, they focused quite a bit on the metrics related to measuring success when using social media to drive leads into your pipeline.  My accounting background made me wonder why measurement has not been a key focus until recently and my creative side said “Wow, this is really a perfect opportunity blend for my operations/numeric skills and my interest in the B2B/relationship selling experience.”  Even better was the fact that their company/logo color is purple, which is my favorite color, so I was happy to get a bunch of purple SWAG (sun glasses, speakers, cookies, water bags, etc.).

Is It Really That Easy To Raise Money?
Aug 19 2012

The success companies and artists have seen on Kickstarter make it seem easier to raise money than ever before.  According to the article Kickstarter projects generate millions of dollars, a notable group of people have raised substantially more money than they intended.  According to the article:

Pebble Technology wanted to raise $100,000 to make 1,000 wristwatches that can be programmed with different clock faces, and they ended up with $10.3 million.  The founder of Pebble is 25 years old.

Designer Casey Hopkins asked for $75,000 to make a luxury iPhone dock out of solid aluminum. He got $1.4 million. That was in February 2012 and his project was the first to surpass $1 million.

Artist Rich Burlew asked for $57,750 to put his comic books back in print, and ended up with $1.3 million.

Ouya asked for $950,000 to create a game console and hit $8.6 million in pledges.

Apparently 10% of the films in this year’s SXSW film festival were funded by kickstarter!  That’s incredible!

It seems easy, but there is a finder’s fee: Kickstarter takes 5 percent and Amazon.com Inc. takes another 3 to 5 percent for processing the payments. Recipients are also typically taxed on the funds.

It’s interesting to note that most, if not all, of the people who exceeded their fundraising goals already had a reputation for delivering good products as well as a loyal following.  It would be much harder for someone to come out of nowhere and achieve the same results.

It will be interesting to see how long this trend lasts and if lawsuits will arise if people who contribute their money aren’t satisfied with what they get.  How does one get a refund?

Interesting Links And Random Thoughts – August 2012
Aug 12 2012

Until I figure out a strategy for this blog, which may continue to be known for it’s non sequitur personality like it’s owner, here are a few interesting reads and observations:

The 11 Ways That Consumers Are Hopeless at Math – The Atlantic

It’s Alright To Cry – gapingvoid cube grenade

Where does trust come from?  – Seth Godin.  “Hint: it never comes from the good times and from the easy projects. We trust people because they showed up when it wasn’t convenient…”

“I don’t even know what I’m afraid of” – Seth Godin.

I wonder if there is such a thing as brown/tan-gray/silver color blindness.  If so, I think I have it.

I’m so proud of my son for asking people to donate to mycharity:water, bringing clean drinking water to those without, instead of giving him birthday gifts.  He exceeded his original goal by $160 so far for a total of $360!  He never once complained or mentioned that he didn’t get any presents and was happy he could serve so many people & families.

Close friends and even co-workers can often know you and accept you better than your own family, who may only be able to see you in the box that you desperately and continuously tried to break out of most of your life but you let them keep putting you back in there until you couldn’t anymore.

Demand Creation Online Course By SiriusDecisions
Aug 4 2012

Following is a post called Demand Creation 101 that I wrote for the blog at my company, Bulldog Solutions:

The following was authored by Aruni S. Gunasegaram, Account Director. Aruni joined Bulldog in June 2012 with a background in technology entrepreneurship, B2B sales, consulting, and operations.

I had the opportunity to take an online course created by SiriusDecisions called “Foundations for Best Practices in Demand Creation.” I have overseen the marketing function in the past but needed and wanted a refresher in the terminology used by the thought leaders, SiriusDecisions, in the demand creation area. I was glad that Bulldog Solutions invested in my skill refresh.

The online course was a very useful primer on the elements of Demand Generation (Wikipedia – the focus of targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in a company’s products and/or services. Commonly used in business to business, business to government, or longer business to consumer sales cycles, demand generation involves multiple areas of marketing and is really the marriage of marketing programs coupled with a structured sales process.). The course was simple to navigate, interspersed with videos, quizzes and even included worksheets that you can use internally to assess your own companies strengths and weaknesses in the area of demand generation. If you pass the final exam (which I did) you can claim certification on that topic which will hopefully benefit me and Bulldog Solutions going forward.

The 6 basic elements that the course revolves around are: Demand Type, Relative Targeting, Lead Taxonomy, Buying Cycle, Portfolio Marketing, and the Demand Waterfall. It was a very informative primer with the only thing I would have liked to see more of was real life case studies of companies who used the methodology and what specific successes they achieved.

I’ve been able to use and share the concepts internally so that I can help my team and my clients better understand the Demand Creation lifecycle. I’m looking forward to taking my next online training course on a different B2B Pipeline topic with them soon. Thanks SiriusDecisions!

What The Heck Is Strategy?
Jul 31 2012

I think about strategy often.  It may not be apparent from my random, non-strategic blog posts, but I think about it in corporate and sometimes personal terms.  Most of my roles since grad school have required strategic thinking.  It’s an art and a science and sometimes I find that I make decisions without having full detailed analysis to support them and the result is good and sometimes I do tons of analysis and they don’t turn out the way I’d hoped.  The best is where I’m able to get a lot of good black & white data and combine it with observation of the situation along with referencing my past experiences.  I believe strategy is a lot about pattern recognition.  The best way to recognize patterns is from living life and facing many challenges.  The next best way is to do a ton of reading and case analysis.  The ideal is to have experience in both.

We are working on some strategic initiatives at work (yes, I have a new job and it’s awesome) and my boss sent me a link to How strategists lead, by Cynthia Montgomery (Harvard professor), in the McKinsey Quarterly.  You have to register to get access, but it’s well worth it. Key takeaways for me from the article are: “The only way a company will deliver on its promises, in short, is if its strategists can think like operators.” And “It is the leader—the strategist as meaning maker—who must make the vital choices that determine a company’s very identity…”

I’ll be blogging more about my new role in the near future.

What If Life Were Like A Woody Allen Movie?
Jul 29 2012

To Rome With Love is a typical Woody Allen movie with unusual scenes and unexpected turns of events.  His movies are usually intellectual and strangely disturbing and/or alluring.   In his movies (unlike in real life), people seem to shrug their shoulders if they can’t make sense of what’s happening and move on without an intense amount of guilt for lying, cheating, or stealing.  They don’t stay angry even if they were hurt or betrayed by someone else, well most times they don’t know they have been betrayed.  Midnight in Paris was similar in style and yearning.  He attracts a star studded cast and makes them act in his trademark style.

Woody is often noted as being “ahead of his time.”  If we can laugh at our human foibles like we do at the characters in his movies, then I do hope he’s reached his time and we have the opportunity to sing in public as well as we do in the shower. 🙂

Around The Corner…
Jul 14 2012

Why is it when we are stressed or depressed we usually can’t envision peace and happiness around the corner, but when we are happy and things seem to be going well, we are more likely to anticipate bad things around that corner?  Not everyone thinks like that but most people are not as enlightened as Buddha professed to be and events, people, pets, and words affect us.  We doubt ourselves and our future.  The ironic thing is that if something really bad does happen it’s usually not anticipated.  So we get ourselves worked up over things that usually don’t happen because we can never really prepare for the really horrible stuff.

I saw this photo of a little Indian boy rowing in a metal bowl (not sure where I got it now since I saved it months ago) and it evoked several thoughts/emotions in me as a mother:  “That could be my son.  What a brave little boy!  Does he know where he’s going?  Where are his parents?  Was there a big flood or is this his usual morning routine? Will he be ok? Who is waiting for him on the other side.  I hope someone hugs him.  I hope someone gives him some food.”  Who knows what he’s thinking, but he apparently found a big flat oar like stick, got in this metal bowl, and decided to row to a better place.

Happy Birthday America – 2012
Jul 4 2012

What a great country!  What great opportunities await.  What questions have you asked?  What questions have you not asked?  What help have you sought?  What help have you given? How often have you expressed your gratitude?  How many times have you forgiven yourself and others and reinvented yourself?  Americans, what are you waiting for?

Happy Independence Day – July 4, 2012.