The Loyalty Conundrum

by Early To Rise (09/7/2007)

Issue #2141

  • WEALTHY: A $10 million pistol? (Andrew Gordon)
  • HEALTHY: Say goodbye to body boredom (Jon Benson)
  • WISE: Hans Selye on leadership

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

  • How to keep your loyalties from coming between you and success (Michael Masterson)
  • An intimidating online tool your users probably won’t use (Bob Bly)
  • It’s Good to Know… about caring for Alzheimer’s patients
  • Add "solipsism" to your vocabulary

== Highly Recommended ==

Turn the Tables on Microsoft, AOL, & Time Warner!

Oh no! Yet another mandatory upgrade from Microsoft. On top of that, they say you probably need a new computer too. Then there’s your Internet provider hiking rates and fees again. Meanwhile, more time flushed down the drain surfing the web for endless hours.

There’s got to be a better way.

Shhhh… There is…

Let me take you on a trip to T.O.S.O.T.I.

- Patrick Coffey

Dry Powder Carries Big Bang, Part 1

By Andrew M. Gordon

Big buyout and hedge funds have some $550 to $600 billion to invest in companies. Wall Street calls this unspent cash "dry powder," and just the sight of it makes investors giddy.

They try to figure out where Wall Street is aiming its dry powder, and rush to invest in those companies before a shot is fired. For example, if a fund has loaded its gun with $10 million worth of dry powder and aims it at 10 different companies, observant investors could rush in and invest $10 million in each of those 10 companies. The market has just added $100 million to its coffers from a $10 million pistol.

$600 billion is only 3.4 percent of the stock market’s total capitalization. But by aiming its guns at several companies before firing a shot, Wall Street’s effect on the market is many times greater than that. That’s a big reason why the market has been hitting new highs. And it’s also a big reason why the market panics when it looks like these funds might not be able to borrow (and invest) as much money as they want.

You should at least know whether the companies in your portfolio are going up on the strength of growing profits or due to the funds’ taking aim. Once you know, you should show much greater loyalty to those fundamentally strong companies (think companies with good cash flow and sound management) that are much less affected by an overall market drop and much more likely to recover when the market does.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you how to stay on top of the market’s schizoid behavior.

[Ed. Note: ETR's Investment Director Andrew Gordon is the author of about a dozen books on energy markets, global countertrade practices, and the hot growth sectors of China and Russia. He is the editor of INCOME, a monthly financial advisory service that uncovers income-generating stocks that promise safety (first and foremost), along with much-higher-than-average profit potential.]

 "Leaders are leaders only as long as they have the respect and loyalty of their followers."

Hans Selye

The Loyalty Conundrum

By Michael Masterson

Here’s a question I’ve wrestled with for years: When it comes to success, is loyalty a good quality or a bad one?

Should you be loyal to those who have been there for you? If so, for how long? Always? Even after they can’t help you anymore? Even if it might hurt you?

If you care about the people who support you, you are going to face these questions in your career.

I remember reading a story about Oscar De La Hoya, one of the greatest boxers ever. Among other achievements, De La Hoya held championship belts in four weight classes. From all the reports I’ve ever read about him, De La Hoya seems like the ultimate nice guy. Devoted to his mother, who died before he won his 1992 Olympic gold medal, the 34-year-old says he "feels her" looking after him - by a touch on the arm, the neck, the face.

But when it comes to business, he’s all business.

Not so with Shelly Finkel, the guy who trained, managed, and supported De La Hoya during his amateur career.

Finkel not only treated De La Hoya like a son but paid as much as $100,000 for his mother’s medical bills. De La Hoya had promised Finkel he would sign with him when he went pro - but when the time came, he signed with someone else. The "someone" was Robert Mittleman and Steve Nelson, both of whom Oscar jettisoned after only 16 months.

Next was Mike Hernandez, who was De La Hoya’s business manager for six years - during which time De La Hoya and his family went from a net worth of less than $20,000 to millions. Hernandez was fired in 1999.

When De La Hoya fired Gill Clancy, the celebrated trainer, he said, "I loved him being around - great attitude, great motivator. But I look at everything as a business. If they’re not doing anything for you, why have them along?"

Is this what it takes to come out on top? Can you make a decision like that and still be a nice person?

There are many who say there is a difference between what we do in our personal lives and what we do in business. They claim it’s ethical to be somewhat ruthless in business so long as you are honest and loyal and kind to your friends and family.

These people have an interesting moral perspective. Some might call it solipsistic. Be good to yourself first, they say. Because if you are not good to yourself, you can’t be good to others. After you have taken good care of yourself, then pay attention to your immediate family. If you don’t give your spouse and children more of your time, attention, courtesy, and love than you give to anyone else, you don’t have your priorities straight. At the next level, outside of your immediate family, are friends - and then, outside of friends, are colleagues.

Falling so far away from the central core, business associates should not expect to be treated very well. There are simply too many priorities that come before them. In Oscar De La Hoya’s case, there was … well, Oscar De La Hoya.

I’ve talked about this before. I wrote about it in my newest book, Ready, Fire, Aim. The moral world falls into two camps: Those who have this egocentric philosophy of ethics and those who follow the Christian idea of "what you do to the least of my brethren."

Most Christians, of course, are not Christ-like in this regard. And neither are Jews or Muslims. There’s an inverse relationship between how often a person mentions his religion and how quickly he sins - so long as nobody’s looking.

This take-care-of-yourself-first morality isn’t restricted to religionists. Politicians couldn’t be politicians if they didn’t practice it. Likewise with government bureaucrats, best-selling authors, Hollywood stars, and professional athletes.

Loyalty, their actions suggest, is a sentimental attachment that winners cannot afford. If you want to rise to the top, you have to surround yourself with the best people. Someone who was good at getting you from point A to point B might not be able to take you to point C. If he can’t, replace him with someone who can.

That is what Oscar De La Hoya did. And he’s a four-time champion. At least that’s how some people see him. I see him as a four-time chump.

There is never, ever a good reason to be disloyal to someone who has been loyal to you. Turning your back on someone who has had your back for so many years marks you as a person who has no character. It is a selfish and ultimately stupid way of achieving success.

When you mistreat a longtime supporter, like De La Hoya did, you show the world how shallow and fickle you are. Smart people will see your action for what it is - spinelessness - and avoid doing business with you. You also create, in the person you spurned, a formidable enemy - someone who will spend the rest of his life doing whatever he can to undermine your success. If you make it a habit to treat people this way, you will populate your business world with malefactors and doom your career to an unhappy ending.

Loyalty is a two-way street. Develop a reputation for "using" people, and you will find yourself used when you least expect it. Your employees, feeling insecure and unappreciated, will be motivated only by money and will jump ship the second they get a better offer. Your vendors, also feeling insecure and unappreciated, will think nothing of charging you more and doing less for you - and making sure you don’t find out about it.

Ultimately, loyalty (like honesty and integrity) is a characteristic people will judge you by. In the long run, your life gets better and easier when there are more people pushing for you than against you.

So what do you do when you are faced with an opportunity to better yourself at the expense of someone who has been loyal to you?

You pass it by, that’s what you do.

Sometimes you can find a second way. Oscar De La Hoya has made a lot of money. He could have easily afforded to keep Finkel on in some capacity - focusing on some specific thing he did very well and paying him well and giving him a respectable title. He could have done that if Finkel agreed to it. If not, he was morally bound to stick by the guy who stuck by him.

Of course, De La Hoya is not alone in this. Mike Tyson did exactly the same thing. But in Tyson’s case, his decision to hook up with Don King spelled the end of his career. He got what he deserved. De La Hoya has his just desserts coming.

You can reduce the likelihood of facing this kind of choice in your career by surrounding yourself with people who are not just good but good enough to grow bigger as you do.

When partnering or hiring key employees ask yourself, "What is his potential? What will he be contributing when the business is five times larger?" If the person is good but not that good, feel free to hire him - but don’t become his partner and don’t make any long-term promises. Treat him as well as he treats you, and you’ll both be good for each other.

The second-most-important thing you must do is provide your key people with the information, technology, and direction they need to be excellent. It is so easy, and so common in growing businesses, to neglect this part of the relationship. Time passes and the business grows, but the excellent person you started with hasn’t been given what he needs to keep up. You get frustrated and blame it on him, when it’s your fault.

You must also be honest with them every step of the way. If you believed they were excellent when you hired them but soon found out otherwise, don’t keep them in limbo by letting them do the lesser jobs and doing the more important stuff yourself. Observe them carefully, come to a reliable judgment, and then let them know. Much better and easier for them to be redeployed or even fired after a few months than after a few years.

Finally, recognize that loyalty doesn’t mean you must do what others think you should do for them. Just because someone expects to be your business manager doesn’t mean you should agree to it.

When you hire or partner with someone, he should understand that your commitment is to a particular vision. If you can inspire him to commit to that vision too - and not to you personally - it will be much easier for him to do the right thing when the time comes.

Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Don’t suggest benefits you can’t provide. Hire and partner with excellent people, teach them, listen to them, and get them to commit not to you but your vision.

If you do that, you won’t have to face the choice Oscar De La Hoya faced. And you won’t have to hurt someone who has been good to you and spend the rest of your life feeling bad about it.

[Ed. Note: This fall, Michael Masterson and a group of the world's leading Internet marketing experts will be revealing proven techniques for shooting your online sales through the roof, creating over a dozen sources of new revenue, and tripling or even quadrupling your profits within the next 9 to 12 months. Sign up now for ETR's fast-approaching 2007 Info-Marketing Bootcamp - Making a Fast Fortune on the "Other Side" of the Internet.

Correction: In the 9/7/07 issue of Early to Rise, we misspelled the surname of the person quoted before Michael Masterson's article. It was Hans Selye, not Seliye.]

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3 Ways to Make Your Workouts and Diet More Exciting

By Jon Benson

A recent U.S. poll revealed a truth that most of us already know: Boredom kills a workout routine. Boredom is also commonly cited as the number one reason people go off a diet.

If you want to build the healthy body you deserve, you simply must make your workouts and nutrition plan fun, engaging, and full of immediate rewards. So here are three techniques you can use to make sure you stick to your plan:

1. Build in daily dietary rewards.

Make these rewards small on most days, and fairly large one or two days per week. For example, treat yourself to a piece of dark chocolate after a workout or eat half a muffin or bagel every Sunday morning. Eating healthfully doesn’t mean completely denying yourself when it comes to foods you love. And adding tasty little rewards to the healthy meals you eat can make any diet easier to sustain.

2. Record your workouts in a journal, and try to best your previous efforts each time.

Make it a game. See if you can get one more rep, one more set, a bit more weight, or go a bit faster. Small steps taken daily will add up to massive progress over time, and giving yourself a challenge each day will stave off monotony.

3. Include a "fun" exercise/diet day every week.

Make that day unique. Go rollerblading with your kids instead of doing a treadmill workout. Consider kayaking instead of the elliptical. Anything qualifies. Follow this with a "fun" meal of your choice. Indulge, but don’t overeat.

Remember: Balance and creativity are the keys to a fitness lifestyle that is anything but boring. You can do it!

[Ed. Note: Jon Benson, a lifecoach and nutrition counselor who specializes in helping individuals discover a life-altering mind/body connection, is a contributing writer for ETR's new natural health e-letter. His work in the field of post-40 fitness and mental empowerment has helped countless thousands. Learn how you can do the same at www.fitover40.com or www.mpowerfitness.com.]

Quick Blogging Tip: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of RSS

 By Bob Bly

Should you use Real Simple Syndication (RSS) to distribute your blog content and attract more readers?

In case you don’t know, RSS is a method of notifying users when the content of a website is updated. For instance, a person could subscribe to an RSS feed that automatically lets them know that their favorite blog has a new posting. To access the RSS feed, they need to download an "aggregator," a type of software that checks for new content at specified intervals. (Google Reader is one of the few RSS feed services that doesn’t require downloading any software.)

Blogging enthusiasts claim that RSS is bringing blogging to the masses. But according to an article in Fuel newsletter, very few people subscribe to RSS feeds.

Reason: Despite its name, Real Simple Syndication isn’t all that simple.

Proof: 98 out of 100 people find RSS so intimidating and confusing, they don’t use it.

Before jettisoning RSS completely from your blog, consider that it does have some good points. Aside from notifying individual users when you’ve updated an article or blog entry, RSS gives you a way to syndicate your website content to other online publications that use RSS feeds as part of their own content. This can help get your name and ideas out to Internet users who aren’t already reading your blog, and can result in more traffic to your site and more customers.

[Ed. Note: Master copywriter and best-selling author Bob Bly is the editor of ETR's ETR's Direct Marketing Masters Edition. a program to help you start your own successful direct-mail business. Sign up for Bob's free monthly e-zine, The Direct Response Letter, and get more than $100 in free bonuses.]

It’s Good to Know: Caring for Alzheimer’s Patients

A recent study has found that simple training can ease the burden of those caring for relatives with Alzheimer’s disease and, as a result, keep the patients out of expensive nursing homes for up to a year and a half longer. The researchers, from New York University’s School of Medicine, tracked 406 caregivers (some for up to 17 years) who had training in coping skills, weekly social worker visits, and phone access to a counselor. These caregivers experienced less depression and fewer health problems than a control group.

(Source: Associated Press)

== Highly Recommended ==

You Already Know Fortunes Are Made from Trading. The Question Is: WHAT Are "They" Trading Most? (And It’s Not Shares or Commodities!)

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Word to the Wise: Solipsism

"Solipsism" (SOL-ip-siz-um) - from the Latin for "self" + "alone" - is the philosophical theory that the self is the only reality, the only thing that can be known and verified.

Example (as I used it today): "[People who] claim it’s ethical to be somewhat ruthless in business so long as you are honest and loyal and kind to your friends and family … have an interesting moral perspective. Some might call it solipsistic. Be good to yourself first, they say. Because if you are not good to yourself, you can’t be good to others."

[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker ... build your self-confidence and intellect ... increase your attractiveness to others ... just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR's new Words to the Wise CD Library.]

Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2007

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