A lesson from Bill Gates

Career Lessons from Bill Gates
8:09 AM PDT, June 27, 2008
So Bill Gates is preparing to retire as CEO of Microsoft. Gates and his childhood friend Paul Allen founded Microsoft on April 4, 1975, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to make and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, an early computer that was sold to hobbyists. Gates dropped out of Harvard University in his third year to focus on Microsoft, and the rest, as they say, his history. For a new Forbes article, I was asked to consider lessons that can be learned from Gates’ amazing career, and here are a few I came up with:

Gates had a vision of the future that he genuinely believed in (i.e. the potential of computers) and was prepared to take major personal and professional risks to pursue that vision. He is a man who has never particularly cared what people thought, and so he was able to do things that went against the grain, such as dropping out of Harvard and alienating those who cried antitrust. We can note, looking at Gates, that those who aren’t overly concerned with society’s expectations actually have a better shot of transforming that society for the better.
Even though he was successful at a young age, Gates never sat back and reveled in it. He continually strove for higher levels of achievement. His management style was hands-on so that he could firmly control the direction of Microsoft and its products. He is not a leader who has relied on others to make important decisions on product strategy and other facets of the business, which cuts both ways. On the one hand, he can count himself personally responsible for Microsoft’s many successes, but on the other, he likely suffered a great deal of burnout, which may be part of the reason he’s retiring so early. We should ultimately strive for a working life that allows for some measure of control while leveraging the contributions and talents their of team members.
Gates was not afraid of failure. He was never apposed to without trying various tactics to see what would work for Microsoft – and what wouldn’t. In his speeches and articles, he has been known to tell of the significant investment in time and dollars that went into failed projects like the Omega database and a joint operating system with IBM. But if it weren’t for Omega, we wouldn’t have Microsoft Access, and if it weren’t for the discontinued IBM effort, Windows would not have progressed to its current super-product status. We can learn from Gates that temporary setbacks do not equal total failure but are rather a means to an end.

Whether through a natural ability or one he honed over time, Gates knows himself and what’s meaningful to him. He let Ballmer take over in 2000 so that he could focus on the areas of the business that intrigued him most, and it’s widely recognized how much time and money he devotes to his philanthropic endeavors of global health and education. It’s even said that he’s an excellent father. We should look at Gates as someone who has been successful as a total human being, not just as a businessman. This is, admittedly, a new definition for success, but one that’s becoming increasingly important as the boundaries between the personal and the professional continue to blur.

This is syndicated from Alexandra Levit’s Water Cooler Wisdom.

Which do you prefer?

Inspiration Is More Important Than Intention

This is a powerful statement!

Intention is a toy of the mind;
inspiration is a directive from the Divine.

At some point you’ll surrender and start listening, rather than begging and waiting. Intention is trying to control life based on the limited view of the ego; inspiration is receiving a message from the Divine and then acting on it.

Intention works and brings results; inspiration works and brings miracles.

Which do you prefer?

Excerpts From “Zero Limits” by Dr. Joe Vitale and
Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len

Business Start up

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3755718939216161559&hl=en

What is your Passion?

80% of the workforce say they are not passionate about their careers.

Click on the link to find your passion and join th 20% of fulfilled individuals,

living the life of their dreams!

Time Magazine – Bill Gates speaks

Bill Gates’ New Rules In Business @ the Speed of Thought, Microsoft’s chairman says that only managers who master the digital universe will gain competitive advantage BY BILL GATES

If the 1980s were about quality and the 1990s were about re-engineering, then the 2000s will be about velocity. About how quickly business itself will be transacted. About how information access will alter the lifestyle of consumers and their expectations of business. Quality improvements and business-process improvements will occur far faster. When the increase in velocity is great enough, the very nature of business changes.

To function in the digital age, we have developed a new digital infrastructure. It’s like the human nervous system. Companies need to have that same kind of nervous system–the ability to run smoothly and efficiently, to respond quickly to emergencies and opportunities, to quickly get valuable information to the people in the company who need it, the ability to quickly make decisions and interact with customers.

The successful companies of the next decade will be the ones that use digital tools to reinvent the way they work. To make digital information flow an intrinsic part of your company, here are 12 key steps.

1 INSIST THAT COMMUNICATION FLOW THROUGH E-MAIL
For a large company to be able to maneuver as well as or better than a smaller competitor is a testament to both the energy of the employees and the use of digital systems. Personal initiative and responsibility are enhanced in an environment that fosters discussion. E-mail, a key component of our digital nervous system, does just that. It helps turn middle managers from information filleters into “doers.” There’s no doubt that e-mail flattens the hierarchical structure of an organization. It encourages people to speak up. It encourages managers to listen. That’s why, when customers ask what’s the first thing they can do to get more value out of their information systems and foster collaboration in their companies, I always answer, “E-mail.”

I read all the e-mail that employees send me, and I pass items on to people for action. I find unsolicited mail an incredibly good way to stay aware of the attitudes and issues affecting the many people who work at Microsoft. The old saying “Knowledge is power” sometimes makes people hoard knowledge. They believe that knowledge hoarding makes them indispensable. Power comes not from knowledge kept but from knowledge shared. A company’s values and reward system should reflect that idea.

I like good news as much as the next person, but it also puts me in a skeptical frame of mind. I wonder what bad news I’m not hearing. When somebody sends me an e-mail about an account we’ve won, I always think, “There are a lot of accounts nobody has sent mail about. Does that mean we’ve lost all of those?” A good e-mail system ensures that bad news can travel fast, but your people have to be willing to send you the news. You have to be consistently receptive to bad news, and then you have to act on it. Sometimes I think my most important job as CEO is to listen for bad news. If you don’t act on it, your people will eventually stop bringing bad news to your attention. And that’s the beginning of the end.

2 STUDY SALES DATA ONLINE TO SHARE INSIGHTS EASILY
“Know your numbers” is a fundamental precept of business. You need to gather your business’s data at every step of the way and in every interaction with your customers. With your partners too. Then you need to understand what the data means.

Making data digital from the start can trigger a whole range of positive events. The Coca-Cola Co. is collecting data directly from smart vending machines via cellular phones or infrared signals. A PC-based restocking program at the local bottler office analyzes the data and produces a delivery slip that tells drivers which products and locations need to get stocked the next day.

Taking advantage of digital data at the source can even create new business opportunities. A pilot program in Texas lets customers use a credit or debit card to pay for Coke drinks while fueling at a gas station. Since most people who pay at the pump don’t go into the building, the digital sales system at the pump creates a whole segment of new customers for Coke.

When figures are in electronic form, knowledge workers can study them, annotate them, look at them in any amount of detail or in any view they want and pass them around for collaboration. Going digital changes your business.

3 SHIFT KNOWLEDGE WORKERS INTO HIGH-LEVEL THINKING
A company’s middle managers and line employees, not just its high-level executives, need to see business data. They’re the people who need precise, actionable data because they’re the ones who need to act. They need an immediate, constant flow and rich views of the right information. Companies should spend less time protecting financial data from employees and more time teaching them to analyze and act on it.

At McDonald’s, until recently, sales data had to be manually “touched” several times before making its way to the people who needed it. Today McDonald’s is well on the way to installing a new information system that uses PCs and Web technologies to tally sales at all its restaurants in real time. As soon as you order two Happy Meals, a McDonald’s marketing manager will know. Rather than superficial or anecdotal data, the marketer will have hard, factual data for tracking trends.

What I’m describing here is a new level of information analysis that enables knowledge workers to turn passive data into active information–what M.I.T.’s Michael Dertouzos calls information-as-a-verb.

4 USE DIGITAL TOOLS TO CREATE VIRTUAL TEAMS
A collaborative culture, reinforced by information flow, makes it possible for smart people all over a company to be in touch with each other. When you get a critical mass of high-IQ people working in concert, the energy level shoots way up. Knowledge management is a fancy term for a simple idea. You’re managing data, documents and people’s efforts. Your aim should be to enhance the way people work together, share ideas, sometimes wrangle and build on one another’s ideas–and then act in concert for a common purpose.

Jacques (Jac) Nasser, president and CEO of Ford, sends e-mail to Ford employees worldwide, sharing news–the good and the bad–with everybody. No one screens the e-mail. He talks straight to the employees. He also reads hundreds of responses he gets each month and assigns a member of his team to reply to any that need follow-up.

Getting people motivated to take on responsibility is not a question of organizational structure so much as organizational attitude. Digital tools are the best way to open the door and add flexibility. If the right people can be working on the issues within hours instead of days, a business obtains a huge advantage.

5 CONVERT EVERY PAPER PROCESS TO A DIGITAL PROCESS
In 1996 I decided to look into the ways that Microsoft, a big advocate of replacing paper with electronic forms, was still using paper. To my surprise, we had printed 350,000 paper copies of sales reports that year. I asked for a copy of every paper form we used. The thick binder that landed on my desk contained hundreds and hundreds of forms.

Paper consumption was only a symptom of a bigger problem, though: administrative processes that were too complicated and time-intensive. Using our intranet to replace paper forms has produced striking results for us. We have reduced the number of paper forms from more than 1,000 to a company-wide total of 60 forms.

Companies talk about rewarding initiative and keeping workers focused on business. When employees see a company eliminate bottlenecks and time-draining routine administrative chores from their workdays, they know the company values their time–and wants them to use it profitably.

6 USE DIGITAL TOOLS TO ELIMINATE SINGLE-TASK JOBS
An acquaintance of mine had an uncle who spent 25 years at an auto plant in Flint, Mich., tacking chrome strips and other finish parts onto automobiles. It was a good job in the years immediately after World War II, but it followed the classic Industrial Age approach: break a process into small, discrete tasks and assign each to one person who does it over and over “the one best way.”

In the new organization, the worker is no longer a cog in the machine but is an intelligent part of the overall process. Having people focus on whole processes allows them to tackle more interesting, challenging work. A one-dimensional job (a task) can be eliminated, automated or rolled into a bigger process.

General Motors launched the Saturn Corp. back in 1985 to create not only a brand-new car from scratch but a brand-new way of building cars and empowering workers. Teams are tight, autonomous units. Each team has a specific function, such as building engines or doors, and each team member is trained to do approximately 30 different jobs in that area, so that people don’t get stale from doing repetitive tasks. Through a Web interface, the worker can retrieve data from a database, automatically load the data into a spreadsheet and pivot through the data to analyze it by part and type of problem.

Give your workers more sophisticated jobs along with better tools, and you’ll discover that your employees will become more responsible and bring more intelligence to their work. One-dimensional, repetitive work is exactly what computers, robots and other machines are best at–and what human workers are poorly suited to and almost uniformly despise. In the digital age, you need to make knowledge workers out of every employee possible.

7 CREATE A DIGITAL FEEDBACK LOOP
Since Michael Hammer and James Champy introduced the concept of reengineering in 1993, companies the world over have been re-examining their business processes. When I read their book, Reengineering the Corporation, three of their ideas really stood out for me. The first is that you need to step back periodically to take a hard look at your processes. Do they solve the right problems? Can they be simplified? The second is that if you cut a job into too many pieces and involve too many people, nobody can see the whole process and the work will bog down. The third, closely related to the second, is that too many hand-offs create too many likely points of failure.

Creating a new process is a major project. You should have a specific definition of success, a specific beginning and end in terms of time and tasks, intermediate milestones and a budget. The best projects are those in which people have the customer scenario clearly in mind. That’s true of process projects too.

Digital technology makes it possible to develop much better processes instead of being stuck with variations on the old paper processes that give you only incremental improvements. You need to be flexible in the face of evolving requirements. You should have a crisp decision process to evaluate change, including a provision for re-evaluating your original project goals.

8 USE DIGITAL SYSTEMS TO ROUTE CUSTOMER COMPLAINTS IMMEDIATELY
Listening to customers means hearing their complaints about current product shortcomings. But getting bad news from customers passed all the way to the product design groups is surprisingly hard to do.

I recommend the following approach:

1. Focus on your most unhappy customers.

2. Use technology to gather rich information on their unhappy experiences with your product and to find out what they want you to put into the product.

3. Use technology to drive the news to the right people in a hurry.

If you do these three things, you’ll turn those draining bad news experiences into an exhilarating process of improving your product or service. Unhappy customers are always a concern. They’re also your greatest opportunity.

Companies that invest early in digital nervous systems to capture, analyze and capitalize on customer input will differentiate themselves from competition. You should examine customer complaints more often than company financials. And your digital systems should help you convert bad news to improved products and services.

9 USE DIGITAL COMMUNICATION TO REDEFINE THE BOUNDARIES
The internet allows a company to focus far more than in the past by changing which employees work within the walls and which work outside in an adjunct, consulting or partnering role.

For Microsoft, outsourcing has been a way to temper the expansion of our work force and reduce management overhead, but it hasn’t stopped the growth of our work force. The Web work style, in which each contributor or company organizes itself optimally, enables us to extend our electronic web of partnerships and–I hope–keeps us from growing big in the wrong areas and becoming ineffective through too much overhead.

As a business manager, you need to take a hard look at your core competencies. Revisit the areas of your company that aren’t directly involved in those competencies, and consider whether Web technologies can enable you to spin off those tasks. Let another company take over the management responsibilities for that work, and use modern communications technology to work closely with the people–now partners instead of employees–doing the work. In the Web work style, employees can push the freedom the Web provides to its limits.

10 TRANSFORM EVERY BUSINESS PROCESS INTO JUST-IN-TIME DELIVERY
M.I.T.’s Nicholas Negroponte describes the difference between physical products and information products in the digital age as the difference between moving atoms around (physical products such as cars and computers) and moving bits around (electronic products such as financial analyses and news broadcasts). Producers of bits can use the Internet to reduce their delivery times to practically zero. Producers of atoms still can’t beam the physical objects through space, but they can use bitspeed–digital coordination of all kinds–to bring reaction time down dramatically.

In some industries, the issue is not so much faster time to market as it is maintaining time to market in the face of astronomically rising complexity. Intel, for instance, has consistently had a 90-day production cycle for its chips, which power most PCs. Intel expects to maintain this 90-day production rate despite the increasing complexity of the microprocessor.

Ultimately the most important “speed” issue for companies is cultural. It’s changing the perceptions within a company about the rapidity with which everybody has to move. Everybody must realize that if you don’t meet customer demand quickly enough, without sacrificing quality, a competitor will.

11 USE DIGITAL DELIVERY TO ELIMINATE THE MIDDLE MAN
In 1995, in The Road Ahead, I used the term friction-free capitalism to describe how the Internet was helping to create Adam Smith’s ideal marketplace, in which buyers and sellers can easily find one another without taking much time or spending much money.

If you’re a middleman, the Internet’s promise of cheaper prices and faster service can “disintermediate” you, eliminate your role of assisting the transaction between the producer and the consumer. If the Internet is about to disintermediate you, one tack is to use the Internet to get back into the action.

That’s what Egghead.com (formerly Egghead), a major retail software chain, did after struggling for several years. Egghead closed all of its physical stores nationwide in 1998 and set up shop exclusively on the Internet. Egghead now offers a number of new online programs that take advantage of the Internet, such as electronic auctions for about 50 different categories of hardware and software and for reconditioned computers. It puts special liquidation prices on systems available on its website and sends out a weekly e-mail “Hot List” with exclusive offers available only to e-mail subscribers.

For the majority of products, which are available through many outlets, consumers will be the greatest beneficiaries. For unique products and services, sellers will find more potential customers and may command higher prices. The more consumers adopt the Web life-style, the closer the economy will move toward Adam Smith’s perfect market in all areas of commerce.

12 USE DIGITAL TOOLS TO HELP CUSTOMERS SOLVE PROBLEMS FOR THEMSELVES
As electronic commerce booms, it’s not just the middlemen who will find creative ways to use the Internet to strengthen their relationships and customers. The merchants who treat e-commerce as more than a digital cash register will do the best.

Dell was one of the first major companies to move to e-commerce. A global computer supplier with more than $18 billion in revenue, Dell began selling its products online in mid-1996. The company’s online business quickly rose from $1 million a week to $1 million a day. Soon it jumped to $3 million a day, then $5 million. It’s now risen to $14 million.

Michael Dell characterizes the business today as “different combinations of face-to-face, ear-to-ear and keyboard-to-keyboard. Each has its place. The Internet doesn’t replace people. It makes them more efficient. By moving routine interactions to the Web and enabling customers to do some things for themselves, we’ve freed up our salespeople to do more meaningful things with customers.”

Smart companies will combine Internet services and personal contact in programs that give their customers the benefits of both kinds of interaction. You want to move pure transactions to the Internet, use online communication for information sharing and routine communication, and reserve face-to-face interaction for the activities that add the most value.

As I said in The Road Ahead, we always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.

You know you have built an excellent digital nervous system when information flows through your organization as quickly and naturally as thought in a human being and when you can use technology to marshal and coordinate teams of people as quickly as you can focus an individual on an issue. It’s business at the speed of thought.END

From Business @ The Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System, by Bill Gates. (C) 1999 by William H. Gates, III. Published March 1999 by Warner Books, USA.

IMAGE CREDITS | PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY JACQUES BARBEY

Happy Mother’s Day – Humor

 I didn’t write this,

but,

I wanted to share it with you.

As a redneck once said, “I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.”

‘A little Mother’s Day Humor’

or maybe some solid advice!

1. My mom taught me TO APPRECIATE A JOB WELL

DONE.” If you’re going to kill each other, do it outside. I just

finished cleaning.

2. My mom taught me RELIGION. You better pray that will

come out of the carpet.”

3. My mom taught me about TIME TRAVEL. If you don’t

straighten up, I’m going to knock you into the middle of next

week.”

4. My mom taught me LOGIC.” Because I said so, that’s why.”

5. My mom taught me MORE LOGIC. If you fall out of that

swing and break your neck, you’re not going to the store with

me.”

6. My mom taught me FORESIGHT. “Make sure you wear clean

underwear, in case you’re in an accident.”

7. My mom taught me IRONY.” Keep crying and I’ll give you

something to cry about.”

8. My mom taught me about the science of OSMOSIS. “Shut

your mouth and eat your supper.”

9. My mom taught me about CONTORTIONISM.

“Will you look at that dirt on the back of your neck!”

10. My mom taught me about STAMINA.

You’ll sit there until all that spinach is gone.”

11. My mom taught me about WEATHER. “This room of yours

looks as if a tornado went through it.”

12. My mom taught me about HYPOCRISY. “If I told you once,

I’ve told you a million times. Don’t exaggerate!”

13. My mom taught me the CIRCLE OF LIFE. “I brought you

into this world, and I can take you out.”

14. My mom taught me about BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION.

“Stop acting like your father.”

15. My mom taught me about ENERGY SAVING.” Turn out the

lights, “We don’t have stock in the electric company.”

16. My mom taught me about ANTICIPATION.”Just wait until

your father gets home.”

17. My mom taught me about RECEIVING. “You are going to

get it when you get home!”

18. My mom taught me MEDICAL SCIENCE.” If you don’t stop

crossing your eyes, they are going to freeze that way.”

19. My mom taught me ESP.” Put your sweater on; don’t you

think I know when you are cold?”

20. My mom taught me HUMOR.” When that lawn mower cuts

off your toes, don’t come running to me.”

21. My mom taught me HOW TO BECOME AND ADULT.” If

you don’t eat your vegetables, you’ll never grow up.”

22. My mom taught me GENETICS.” You’re just like your

father.”

23. My mom taught me about my ROOTS.” Shut that door

behind you. Do you think you were born in a barn?”

24. My mom taught me WISDOM. “When you get to be my age,

you’ll understand.”

25. And my favorite: My mom taught me about JUSTICE.” One

day you’ll have kids of your own, and I hope they turn out just

like you.”

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY

I found inspiration

This is a gem.

I found this video to be exceptionally inspirational !

 Thanks to SaiF for bringing this video to my attention.

This video is taken from one of Farrah Grey’s motivational speaking events. It may take some time to load,

 but is worth every second of the wait.

Let me know what you think,

Bill

www.gathergreatness.com

www.asksaiful.com

Don’t Wait Until You’re Great

I wise man once said:

“You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going.”    [Mike Litman]

 

“Ignore the rules. There are no rules. There are no regulations. You get out and you do what you need to do because you believe in what you’re doing.”

John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten), punk rock musician 

Don’t Wait Until You’re Great

By David Cross

David Howell Evans is not known for being a technically accomplished guitarist – although few people really care. He developed a trademark sound that contributed to the success of the band in which he plays – a band that has sold over 170 million albums worldwide. Rolling Stone magazine proclaimed him #24 on their list of The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

The Edge – as Evans is better known – is the guitarist for U2, one of the greatest rock bands ever. Did he wait until he was a virtuoso on the guitar before joining U2? Nope.

The Clash – a pioneer of punk music – didn’t care a lick about being “great” either. When they started, only two of the band’s four members could even play an instrument. Despite that, The Clash produced one of the top-selling albums of all time (“London Calling“) and wound up as #30 on Rolling Stone’s list of The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. And they went on to kick-start thousands of other bands… including U2.

The world is packed with thousands of successful people who leapt right in. People who became great because they were willing to take a risk.

Still, I often hear of people who say the reason they have not started their business is that they’re not good enough. They feel they need to wait to acquire more information, deeper knowledge, or more specific skills.

The simple fact is that you can get much better at doing almost anything by doing that thing. Another important thing to note is that you never really know – until you get out there and do it – whether or not you’re good.

Until you actually start your business, it’s all theory. You don’t know how well your idea will succeed until you put it into practice. But the last thing you want to do is wait around until you’re sure. For one thing, you run the risk that your idea will become obsolete. By waiting, you allow the quick and the brave to one-up you in the marketplace. Plus, no matter how long you tinker or research, you STILL won’t know if your idea is good until you put it out there.

Start marketing your widget today, and you’ll know in a few weeks or months whether it’s a big success or a stinker. Keep planning for decades, and you could find out it’s a flop… after having wasted too many years of your life banking on its success. Michael Masterson calls this approach “accelerated failure.” Pick up his best-selling book Ready, Fire, Aim and learn more about it.

This advice holds true for practically any business I can think of. Internet marketing is no different.

We’ve been urging you to get a little Internet side business started for some time in ETR. If you’ve been waiting to do it, here are four things you can do immediately to jump right in:

1. Launch a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ad Campaign

Google, Yahoo, and other major search engines allow you to display your ads by bidding on keywords relevant to your business. When someone clicks on one of your ads, you pay a pre-set fee of a few cents. You can set a daily budget of a few dollars so you can ease into PPC advertising and perfect your technique before upping your budget.

Agora Inc. brought in hundreds of thousands of new customers last year alone through effective PPC campaigns.

Learn more about setting up a PPC account by reading Patrick Coffey ’s article, “Mastering Google AdWords in 3 Easy Steps.”

2. Start Collecting E-Mail Addresses

A huge factor in the success of many online businesses is e-mail marketing. Establishing regular, relevant, and timely contact with your customers and prospects is a proven way to generate more sales and to turn prospects into customers. Offering a free report, useful advice, or information that you deliver by e-mail will help you do it.

For more details about collecting names online, take a look at Patrick’s article “How to Build Your E-Mail Subscriber List Quickly and Easily.”

3. Start an E-Mail Newsletter

Start to regularly send out useful information to the people on your e-mail list. Don’t know what to write? Not to worry. Write about what you know. If you have a music store, send out tips and advice for playing or caring for instruments. Garden store? Timely, seasonal, local advice on what to plant and when and how to tend a garden. Try to remember some of the meetings or phone calls you’ve had with your customers and recount them. Voila! You’ve started an e-mail newsletter. Spice up the articles with some relevant product or service information – and don’t be afraid to ask for an order!

For more about how to create an e-newsletter, read my article “The 3 Basics You Need to Start an E-Mail Newsletter.”

4. Start a Blog

One thing that takes longer to master with an online business is search engine marketing. That is, creating content and copy that is both attractive to search engines and readable by humans (your customers and prospects). With a blog, you can quickly amass a plethora of information that will attract search engines… and customers. As with an e-newsletter, just write about what you know and offer advice and tips that will be useful to your readers.

Starting something new is both exciting and scary. But sometimes the fear of getting started can stop you right in your tracks. If you don’t start, you can’t fail. But then again, you cannot succeed either. There is no better time than right now to get up there, plug in your guitar (or laptop!) and start strumming away. Do not wait until you are great. Start small. Start now.

[Ed. Note: David Cross is Senior Internet Consultant to Agora Inc. in Baltimore. People from all over the country have already experienced the power of managing their destinies through motivation, determination, and goal setting. Discover the secrets that have made them successful.

Fortune Magazine: Secrets of Greatness. October 2006

 *** Valuable Information ***

[This is the 2'nd and last Post ]

*What it takes to be great*:

Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work

By Geoffrey Colvin, senior editor-at-large October 19 2006: 3:14 PM EDT

(Fortune Magazine) — What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway (Charts) Chairman Warren Buffett the world’s premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was “wired at birth to allocate capital.” It’s a one-in-a-million thing. You’ve got it – or you don’t. Well, folks, it’s not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful. Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets.  The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant – talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great. Scientific experts are producing remarkably consistent findings across a wide array of fields. Understand that talent doesn’t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It’s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, “The evidence we have surveyed … does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts.” To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness. The irresistible question – the “fundamental challenge” for researchers in this field, says the most prominent of them, professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University – is, Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields. Scientists worldwide have conducted scores of studies since the 1993 publication of a landmark paper by Ericsson and two colleagues, many focusing on sports, music and chess, in which performance is relatively easy to measure and plot over time. But plenty of additional studies have also examined other fields, including business.

 No substitute for hard work The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice. Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule. What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He’d had nine years of intensive study. And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, “The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average.” In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years’ experience before hitting their zenith. So greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What’s missing? 

 Practice makes perfect The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition. For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day – that’s deliberate practice. Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, “Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends.” Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It’s the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

The skeptics Not all researchers are totally onboard with the myth-of-talent hypothesis, though their objections go to its edges rather than its center. For one thing, there are the intangibles. Two athletes might work equally hard, but what explains the ability of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to perform at a higher level in the last two minutes of a game? Researchers also note, for example, child prodigies who could speak, read or play music at an unusually early age. But on investigation those cases generally include highly involved parents. And many prodigies do not go on to greatness in their early field, while great performers include many who showed no special early aptitude. Certainly some important traits are partly inherited, such as physical size and particular measures of intelligence, but those influence what a person doesn’t do more than what he does; a five-footer will never be an NFL lineman, and a seven-footer will never be an Olympic gymnast. Even those restrictions are less severe than you’d expect: Ericsson notes, “Some international chess masters have IQs in the 90s.” The more research that’s done, the more solid the deliberate-practice model becomes. 

 Real-world examples All this scholarly research is simply evidence for what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century’s greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, “If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don’t practice for three days, the world knows it.” He was certainly a demon practicer, but the same quote has been attributed to world-class musicians like Ignace Paderewski and Luciano Pavarotti. Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he’d have been cut from his high school team.) In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice – passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow – practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up. Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age – 18 months – and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that’s what it took to get even better.

The business side The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements – you can practice them all. Still, they aren’t the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information – can you practice those things too? You can, though not in the way you would practice a Chopin etude. Instead, it’s all about how you do what you’re already doing – you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it. Report writing involves finding information, analyzing it and presenting it – each an improvable skill. Chairing a board meeting requires understanding the company’s strategy in the deepest way, forming a coherent view of coming market changes and setting a tone for the discussion. Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill.

 Adopting a new mindset Armed with that mindset, people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. They want more information on what they’re doing and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren’t just doing the job, you’re explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense. Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it’s the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset. Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business. Yet most people don’t seek it; they just wait for it, half hoping it won’t come. Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-development chief Steve Kerr says, “it’s as if you’re bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don’t know how successful you are, two things happen: One, you don’t get any better, and two, you stop caring.” In some companies, like General Electric, frequent feedback is part of the culture. If you aren’t lucky enough to get that, seek it out.

 Be the ball

Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call “mental models of your business” – pictures of how the elements fit together and influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your performance will grow. Andy Grove could keep a model of a whole world-changing technology industry in his head and adapt Intel (Charts) as needed. Bill Gates, Microsoft’s (Charts) founder, had the same knack: He could see at the dawn of the PC that his goal of a computer on every desk was realistic and would create an unimaginably large market. John D. Rockefeller, too, saw ahead when the world-changing new industry was oil. Napoleon was perhaps the greatest ever. He could not only hold all the elements of a vast battle in his mind but, more important, could also respond quickly when they shifted in unexpected ways. That’s a lot to focus on for the benefits of deliberate practice – and worthless without one more requirement: Do it regularly, not sporadically.

Why?

For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done. That’s the way it must be. If great performance were easy, it wouldn’t be rare. Which leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. While experts understand an enormous amount about the behavior that produces great performance, they understand very little about where that behavior comes from. The authors of one study conclude, “We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice.” Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, “Some people are much more motivated than others, and that’s the existential question I cannot answer – why.” The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they would coast to fame and riches if they found their talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life’s inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren’t gifted and give up. Maybe we can’t expect most people to achieve greatness. It’s just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn’t reserved for a preordained few.

 It is available to you and to everyone.

 From the October 30, 2006 issue

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