Quotable Notable: Oprah Winfrey
Brownie Point: Side-by-Side Walking for a Fresh Perspective
Freshness: The Concept, Rationale, and Importance
6.5 Fresh Steps toward Achieving Freshness
Take Your Pulse: Self-assessment questions measuring your freshness efforts
The Doggie Bag: The Achieving Freshness Takeaways
“My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.”
—OPRAH WINFREY
One of the world’s most famous, powerful, and wealthy women, Oprah Winfrey rose from a dysfunctional, impoverished background to become an entrepreneur who hosted one of the most popular talk shows in history, runs her own cable TV network, publishes a self-titled magazine, operates a satellite radio channel, and is involved in numerous other business and charity ventures. By always trying to achieve something significant with her business and charitable activities, Oprah has built a personal brand that inspires trust, loyalty, and devotion from millions of fans across the globe. On a side note, Oprah originally hails from Kosciusko, Mississippi, down the road from where I grew up, further proof that it’s not where you start in life that matters, but where you end up!
Realizing the power of freshness in college, after graduating I took it into corporate America, where I made the ability to deliver fresh results a cornerstone of my brand. This cornerstone ignited and continues to fuel my personal and professional success. Let me tell you a story about how I helped an organization figure out the problem and offered a fresh, winning solution.
At a certain fast-paced retail chain—I’ll protect its real identity and call it “Chips n Sips”—declining sales were the source of sleepless nights, headaches, and heated arguments among the increasingly frustrated leadership team. The company’s marketing experts finally put their heads together and decided to implement a new cross-selling program that they introduced to all the employees with great fanfare.
The program used colorful, attention-grabbing printed marketing materials. To help cashiers with their new cross-selling task, managers provided a set of bookmark-sized laminated “cheat cards” with several items to suggest.
These cards were placed at all Chips n Sips registers to remind the cashiers what items to cross-sell with each purchase. If a customer bought milk, the cashier was to offer her bread (the laminated cards showed a picture of a milk carton with an arrow pointing to a loaf of bread). If another customer bought beer, the cashier was to suggest chips (same picture format). The cashiers started to follow this procedure but soon became discouraged by the number of rejections they were experiencing.
The bread being cross-sold with the milk was located several feet away from the checkout stand, likewise for the chips being cross-sold with the beer. Customers were reluctant to give up their spots in line to go pick up the suggested items—we all know how more than a few minutes in line are unacceptable to today’s shopper. The handful of customers who decided to get out of line and return with a cross-sold item were greeted by the other customers’ looks of hatred and disgust for holding up the line.
In short, this cross-selling program was a disaster. It held up the lines and de-motivated the cashiers because of non-stop rejections. If the marketers and senior managers had been more in touch with the layout of the stores, the way cashiers operated, and customers’ shopping styles, they would have understood this promotional method was doomed from the get-go. This futile attempt at boosting sales ended up costing Chips n Sips more than $100,000 in marketing and promotional costs.
I knew there had to be a better way to do this, so when Chips n Sips hired me as a consultant to help grow their business and the efficiency and effectiveness of their frontline employees, one of my first contributions to the business was offering a fresh cross-selling process based on a completely different strategy. Before I offered any ideas, I first went to a local Chips n Sips outlet and took note of how registers were set up, where products were located in the store, and what cashiers had to do during the failed cross-selling program.
While this may seem like the commonsense first step, you’d be amazed how few companies actually do any real site-level research before launching new strategies that will impact the experience of their customers and/or frontline employees. Sometimes the fresh approach involves seeing things in a radically different light, and sometimes it involves simply seeing things the way they are!
This fresh insider’s look at the business helped me develop a plan. I began by asking a Chips n Sips store manager to select a special item to promote each day. Every morning, that day’s item was placed in a basket next to the register, and the cashiers simply had to cross-sell the item located at arm’s length on the checkout stand. This way, customers could continue checking out without having to get out of line.
After following this process for three weeks, we began to ask front-line employees to select an item. You can only imagine how fast the items selected by the frontline employees sold. You guessed right; it was easy for them to sell a product that they liked and believed in. The cashiers received 54 percent fewer rejections.
Side-by-side walking, which I like to describe as walking a mile in the shoes of employees to understand what they do, how they do it, and how they experience their jobs, would have helped the Chips n Sips leadership team tremendously. It didn’t take me much time to visit a store and see for myself why the less-than-stellar cross-selling program was self-destructing right before their eyes.
If the marketing managers themselves had taken the time to go out and see how difficult it was for cashiers to cross-sell a product, making a customer wait in line longer and be the recipient of scowls from other customers, they never would have implemented their cross-selling program. Side-by-side walking would have prevented the original difficulties with the cross-selling program because the marketing department would have understood the importance of customer flow and the negative impact constant rejections would have on frontline employee morale.
Side-by-side walking is a perfect example of how freshness lurks everywhere. The person you may be tempted to ignore or dismiss, like the cashier, maintenance person, or customer running into a convenience store to grab a jug of milk on the way home from work, likely holds incredible value and insight. You just have to have your “fresh antennae” on and be attuned enough to the endless fresh possibilities that exist in this wide world of ours to pick up on that value and insight.
Trust me, most of your competitors are too busy focusing on their own narrow interests or trying to follow complex management theories they learned in grad school to ever think of a fresh approach like side-by-side walking. Chips n Sips greatly improved its value proposition to customers and obtained fresh profits and market share by using side-by-side walking. And over the years, the value I have delivered to dozens of companies through side-by-side walking exercises has helped me build my own fresh personal brand, which has allowed me to experience an enormous level of personal and professional success, while staying focused on staying fresh so that I am competitive and poised to capture ever-greater personal success.
Putting the handle “Fresh” before “PASSION” is critically important, because without a fresh approach to your career and your life, all the PASSION in the world will likely not be able to help you achieve your fullest potential. You can’t just land your newly developed brand today, put it on a shelf, and expect it to carry you throughout your professional career while you sit back and reap its rewards.
Anyone who has ever been in love (or even thought they were in love) can attest to this. The initial courtship is passionate, and you can’t see enough of each other. But as you know, time goes on, competition enters, and that once-passionate flame begins to turn into a flicker that eventually burns out. If a relationship is to have any chance of thriving long term, you’ve got to keep it fresh, right?
That same analogy is true for companies. In companies needs change, strategic direction changes, the type of employee they are looking for changes, the skill sets they are looking for changes, economic factors change, and customer needs change (especially important for entrepreneurs and companies in the customer-facing business). You need to stay fresh to be in tip-top competitive shape. Staying fresh provides you with a greater ROI for the employer than that from a potential employee who has just kept pace with the status quo.
The same is true for entrepreneurs; customers want products and services that are fresh and they want the delivery vehicle (the people). In essence, they want world-class products, services, and customer experience.
Do something every day to enhance your brand so that it stays fresh. Would you rather buy fresh bread or old bread? Trust me, employers would rather hire employees who have stayed fresh: ones who have kept up with the times, kept their skills sharpened, developed a set of skills and attributes that will deliver an outstanding ROI, are packaged well, continue to invest in their personal brands, and have maintained a competitive edge. And if you are planning to become an entrepreneur, you will find that customers and clients would much rather deal with a business whose products, services, and capabilities reflect the most current needs of the marketplace.
Okay, so it’s easy for me to sit here at my keyboard and type out advice on the importance of being and staying fresh. I’ve explained to you what freshness is, why it’s so important in today’s educational arena and job market, and even provided you with a real-life example of how freshness works. But now that you know all about freshness, how are you supposed to go out into the world and make it happen?
Fortunately for you, I have distilled the essence of achieving freshness into 6.5 steps that are easy to understand and implement. Don’t misunderstand me when I say “easy” to implement—a lot of effort and passion on your part will be required to make anything happen! But these steps are easy to implement in that with the right dedication and mindset, you can incorporate them into your regular daily life without massively overhauling your existing busy schedule.
Think of it as almost like a diet—you don’t have to radically change your daily life to lose weight. Most diets that require you to radically change your daily life are fad “crash” diets that may offer short-term weight loss but give almost no hope of lasting health and happiness. To achieve lifetime success with weight management, you only need to change your attitude toward eating.
Likewise, to become fresh, you need to change your attitude toward living! Rather than trying to adopt a “quick fix” to obtain pseudo-success that will not last, take the longer-term approach of developing a fresh attitude toward life that will allow you to achieve personal and professional success that permeates your entire existence.
Without further ado, let’s take a walk through each of the 6.5 steps:
An old adage states, “No man is an island.” While this saying (which equally applies to women!) is attributed to medieval English poet John Donne, it has never been truer than it is right now in the early twenty-first century.
Simply put, without a well-established and maintained network, you will not go far in this world. You could be the most brilliant and talented person in your field, but if you lack a network of peers/colleagues/supporters/believers in the brand who can vouch for you and put you in touch with the right people, all that brilliance and talent will go unnoticed. Due to immense market pressures and the rapid speed of modern business, today’s employers do not have time to waste searching for job candidates, evaluating them from scratch, and then hiring and training one they hope will turn out to be successful.
A large number of employers are now more willing to hire people they know, either directly or through someone, who can demonstrate they will succeed with a minimum of training or development. They will ask someone who knows you and is in your network what your track record is like, whether you make things happen, and whether you can get results. You want to empower your network members with the ability to respond with a resounding, “He/she is the person that can make it happen and he/she has a track record of results to prove it.”
So how do you go about establishing a network? Start with the people you know. As an aspiring or current member of the professional world, hopefully you have already taken some basic network-building steps, but don’t be complacent. Continue to join professional associations and volunteer for causes you believe in. Look for the “movers and shakers” and invite them into your network. Identify people who are where you want to be and are what you want to become and soak up their knowledge like a sponge. Identify the leading brand expert in your field of expertise (you will know them because everyone goes to them for advice and to make things happen). Seek out people who can help alleviate the areas where you have the greatest opportunities for improvement (aka your “weak spots”).
Attend as many professional conferences and trade shows as you can, and meet as many people as possible while you’re there. Within your company, serve on internal committees and focus groups, especially ones that will bring you in close contact with employees from other departments with whom you otherwise might have little interaction. Also keep in mind that a network is a living, breathing organism. It needs regular nourishment or it will die (remember, you have to keep it fresh). Refresh your network on a regular basis. Call that old college buddy you haven’t seen in a while and find out what he or she is up to. A powerful phrase from the mouth of a high-performing employee to his or her boss is “Oh, he/she would be a great employee, we went to the same college and are friends.” The phrase is equally important when it’s uttered to a customer that you want to do business with as an entrepreneur.
Make a point of speaking out at the next meeting of your professional organization, or take a leadership role in your civic group’s next fund-raiser. Demonstrate to the people in your network that you genuinely value their time and friendship and watch how much more productive your network becomes. Get connected and/or stay connected with your alumni association, and be active in as many groups and events as possible.
And one final note on networking in the twenty-first century—your network is no longer constrained by physical boundaries. Thanks to the unifying power of the Internet, you can build a virtual network that spans the globe. Professional networking sites such as LinkedIn and Spoke.com, alumni- and personal history–oriented sites such as MyLife.com, and even social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter allow you to establish a profile and build valuable relationships with people you may never even “meet” in the physical sense! There are also numerous other sites dedicated to professions, hobbies, charities, and interests that can instantly put you in touch with like-minded peers around the world.
If you maintain any type of personal social networking profile, website, or blog, please keep in mind that it needs to reflect the type of image you want to present to prospective employers and business contacts, not the type of image you want to present to your college pals! Compromising photos are out, as are blog entries describing your alcohol intake during last weekend’s big party. As a good rule of thumb—if you’d be embarrassed for your parents or kids to see it, keep it off the Internet!
While some people like to attribute the success of others as “luck,” this is really just jealousy talking. True success never occurs through simple luck. Even in the case where someone assumes control of a successful family business or inherits a large sum of money, if that person doesn’t have what it takes to succeed, they will fail. Many a family business or fortune has been quickly squandered when an unqualified heir inherited the reins!
Likewise, a “lucky break” will be of no help to a person who is unwilling or unable to recognize the opportunity, seize it, and then capitalize on it to achieve success. Showbiz legend has it that the great leading man Burt Lancaster got his first big Broadway role because a casting director mistook him for another actor. Even if this is true, do you think Lancaster could have parlayed that role into a towering stage and film career if he had been a dud in front of the audience and camera?
Now that you’re ready to recognize that success is never an accident, identify three of the most successful people in your area of branded expertise. Think big. Don’t restrict yourself to the three most successful people who you know, or who live in your region. If you want to be a success in real estate and you live in Omaha, Nebraska, you won’t do much better than making Donald Trump one of your three role models.
You have identified three major success stories in your area of branded expertise. Now it’s time to do a little homework. We live in the “Information Age,” an age where the whole notion of privacy has changed and personal details of almost anyone’s life can be found. We’ll save the debate about the overall ethics and implications of this situation for another time. Right now, we will use it to our advantage.
Depending on whom you have identified and what field you’re in, researching what they do to stay fresh could be as simple as a visit to an online search engine or informational site, a visit to a bookseller site, a trip to your local library or bookstore, or it may involve a little more leg-work. To stay with the Donald Trump example, he has never been shy about trumpeting the secrets to his success for the world to hear (for a price, of course!). Trump has written numerous books about his business philosophies and strategies, and there has been at least one major biography written about him, as well. You will also find detailed biographical data and commentary on his life and career using any major search engine such as Google or informational site such as Wikipedia; although, online data always deserves an extra bit of skepticism before it is accepted as fact! Fields such as medicine and sales also contain numerous celebrity success stories that can be easily researched. Also keep in mind that even many famous and successful people are willing to put details of their lives out on the Web on social networking or personal blogging sites for everyone to see.
Naturally, if you want to enter show business or professional sports, there is no shortage of famous success stories to choose from. Keep in mind the odds against you are incredibly long and that most of the success stories you will read are of the “tell-all” variety and will likely offer as many examples of what not to do as what to do!
But what if your chosen field is less flashy? What if you seek success in something more “under the radar,” such as developing industrial solvents? Not to worry. First, if you’re not already reading the trade publications that cover your field of interest, start reading them. No matter how obscure your chosen career is there are at least one or two magazines dedicated to it. If you have identified top performers in your field, there will probably be information about them in those publications, even if you have to do a little digging through back issues. Also look through printed and online professional guides, such as “Who’s Who” type publications, for biographical information about successful people in your field.
And don’t be shy about using your network! Maybe a contact you haven’t spoken to in a while went to the same alma mater as or worked alongside one of your targeted success stories. What a perfect excuse to call them up and reconnect!
So you’ve identified three successful people and researched how they stay fresh. All that information does you little good on its own. You need to do a little “modeling,” which is one of the biggest secrets of successful people. Why develop a success strategy from scratch when you can crib ideas from someone who has already done it before you? The great ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle unabashedly used ideas from his teacher Socrates, and successful people have been following in the footsteps of mentors and role models ever since.
Continuing with the Donald Trump example, according to his book Trump: The Art of the Deal (New York: Random House, 1987), he rises most mornings by six a.m. and spends an hour reading newspapers. He arrives to work by nine a.m. and during the course of a working day that runs till about six-thirty p.m., makes 50 to 100 phone calls and has at least a dozen meetings, most of which last no longer than fifteen minutes. He rarely stops for lunch and will often continue making phone calls from home until midnight and all through the weekend. Trump finds all of this activity enjoyable.
If you are planning how you will start your career as a real estate developer, you could easily work five of these steps into your daily routine. Rise at six a.m.? Check. Spend an hour reading newspapers? Check. Arrive to work by nine? Check (come on, you should be doing this step already!). Make 50 to 100 phone calls per day? Check. Skip lunch? Check. And even if your personal schedule wouldn’t allow you to make calls from home until midnight or through the weekend, you could certainly still enjoy your work as a real estate developer. Implementing these steps couldn’t possibly make you less successful, and I’d be amazed if they didn’t make you more successful over the long haul!
RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication,” and if you don’t already know what it is you need to learn, pronto! RSS is a Web feed protocol that allows content such as news updates and blog entries to be continually streamed directly to your computer or mobile device. You obtain RSS content through reader software that can be downloaded free from a variety of online sources (as with any free download, do your homework and only select software from a verified, safe provider!). A wide variety of RSS links are available for you to stream via your reader. Most major news sites offer RSS syndication, as well as blog sites, chat rooms, etc. By signing up for RSS feeds from sources relevant to your area of branded expertise, you can easily stay on top of all the latest developments and happenings without having to constantly go to the trouble of performing a manual Web search. In addition, sites including Google and Twitter allow you to sign up for email alerts, so that links to notable postings regarding a specific topic automatically arrive in your email inbox on a daily or weekly basis.
Becoming and staying fresh is easier than ever, thanks to the continually expanding array of personal electronic devices that allow you to stay plugged in to your network and the world around you. In previous steps, I have touched on the fresh potential of the Internet in general and of RSS feeds in particular, but have not delved into the myriad supporting technologies that allow you to fully harness this potential, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For more details on some of the latest and greatest technologies that are out there waiting to support your fresh efforts, see the “Fresh Technologies” section in this chapter!
After following the first six steps to freshness, it’s time to take the additional “half step” of making sure that everything about you communicates and exudes freshness. Like it or not, image and appearance are extremely important, and unless you look and act the role of fresh, you can follow the first six steps to the hilt and they will get you nowhere.
To help radiate freshness to the world around you, use a simple acronym I refer to as MISS—mindset, image, skills, and substance. Mindset means having a mentality that focuses on freshness. When you get up in the morning, are you thinking about what you can do to be as fresh as possible in the upcoming day? Are you keeping your mind sharp and focused throughout your daily activities, even the dull, routine ones? Are you constantly engaging yourself with colleagues, bosses, friends, and strangers?
Image means projecting an aura of freshness to everyone you encounter. Are your clothes neat, clean, and in line with the latest fashion? Do you perform all the necessary daily personal hygiene and grooming steps? Is your smile wide, gaze steady, handshake firm? Do you carry an ample supply of eye-catching business cards and a quality leather attaché case to your internships and job interviews, and do you use fine personalized letterhead for all your correspondence?
Skills means having the goods to back up your fresh mindset and image. Are you constantly taking advantage of educational and professional development opportunities to stay on the cutting edge of your field? Do you volunteer for extra assignments that will keep your existing capabilities sharp and teach you new ones? Do you use personal time to perform research into all the latest trends and developments that affect your career?
Substance means having the character to make an investment in you truly worthwhile. The world has enough “empty suits” already! Do you only give your word when you are 100 percent committed and then follow it through at all costs? Do you always tell the truth, even when it hurts? Do you always maintain high ethics and personal honesty, eschewing the fast, cheap buck for hard-earned profits that will stay with you?
Follow the principles of MISS and you will surely hit your fresh target! After you have done all the groundwork, don’t stumble on the execution!
Now that you know all about what fresh really means and what it takes to achieve and maintain freshness in your daily professional and personal life, let’s take your pulse and measure the health of your freshness efforts. Answer each question using the following scale of one to five hearts. Then add up the total and see how “heart-healthy” your level of fresh really is!
6.5 My resume is current, up-to-date, and competitive.
Now that you’ve taken the test, let’s analyze your score:
You have been given the 6.5 steps to achieving and maintaining freshness. Once you have followed them, it is time to take the extra step that will allow you to truly complete your quest for freshness. This step ingrains the need to constantly stay fresh into your everyday life on a permanent basis.
Remember, Fresh PASSION is not a quick fix, but a methodology for changing your approach to life so that you can achieve your maximum potential as a professional and as a human being. Use the chart that follows to track your continuing progress toward achieving and maintaining true freshness.
If you can’t say it succinctly, you can’t say it at all. With these words of wisdom and all you have just learned in mind, write yourself a text message that sums up your strategy to keep your brand fresh in the space that follows. Write it like you would an actual text message—something you can read in 10 seconds or less. Poor spelling and smiley faces are strictly optional!
Staying fresh is really all about staying current. In the Information Age, staying current is easier said than done. Fortunately, there are numerous technologies available that can help you stay on top of constantly changing job markets, professional skills, and social networks. The iPod you use for listening to music can also be used for listening to podcasts—digital broadcasts of information specifically designed to be accessed via iPod. Podcasts are a great way to obtain valuable news and information “on the go”!
And of course, any on-the-go person knows about the endless variety of smartphones and tablet/portable computers that allow you to surf the Internet; send and receive emails and text messages; send and receive phone calls; store information; take photos; record video; and perform a whole host of other tasks anywhere you happen to be. I won’t review the extensive list of mobile devices on the market, but be aware that technology companies are constantly releasing newer gadgets with more capabilities at lower prices. Research before you buy.
One interesting phenomenon that is gaining traction is the free or reduced-charge Internet-based phone call. A number of online services allow you to download software that enables you to place phone calls throughout North America and across the globe, for free or minimal costs. Skype is one of the best-known providers of free Web-based conference calls, and many other service providers offer low-cost or free phone calls using Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. As with mobile devices, perform careful research before selecting or downloading any Internet telephone software.
Finally, maintaining a virtual network is easier with Web conferencing tools. This software allows users to collaborate, meet, present demonstrations, conduct training, and perform other group activities, all without leaving their computer. Web conferencing can bring far-flung members of a network together in real time in a way that closely mimics actual face-to-face interaction. Once again, research all your options before making any decisions.
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