Taking Your Business - and Your Employees - From Good to Great

by Early To Rise (10/19/2007)

Issue #2177

  • WEALTHY: Law and order is no longer the exception in many developing countries (Andrew Gordon)
  • HEALTHY: The "easy way out" when it comes to your health (Craig Ballantyne)
  • WISE: Brian Tracy on excellence

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

  • How to set - and maintain - high standards of performance (Michael Masterson)
  • How to defeat a common business killer (Suzanne Richardson)
  • It’s Good to Know… about saving microscopic species
  • Add "irenic" to your vocabulary

== 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!)

… Thirty times more trading going on than the stock market and mostly investment banks doing it. Ummm… Maybe "they" know something you don’t? Click here to learn more…

Where Risk Calls Home

By Andrew M. Gordon

If you think the Wild West has moved to Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and several other emerging countries where the law is uncertain and the sheriff and his posse can’t be trusted, you’re not alone. But things have changed - both in these countries and in the U.S.

  • The law? Recent studies have shown billions of dollars’ worth of suspicious trading taking place in the time leading up to dozens of IPO offerings in the U.S. and European markets.
  • The sheriff? Who has more power than Fed chief Bernanke has over U.S. stocks? Should trillions of dollars (tied up in the stock market) depend so much on one man’s decision to lower rates?
  • The sheriff’s posse? That, of course, would be the government. While governments in developing countries have an unhealthy habit of choosing the winners and losers of the business world, the policies of the U.S. government in energy, anti-terrorism, environment, and housing and mortgages play a huge role in determining the success of companies.

The U.S. financial market is full of risks. And as far as turmoil in the market goes, we’ve outdone 99 percent of other countries. I thought I would never be saying this, but to invest in safer markets, it’s time to look overseas.

[Ed. Note: ETR's Investment Director Andrew Gordon is the author of nearly a dozen books on energy markets, global countertrade practices, and the hot growth sectors of China and Russia. He's 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.]

"You can become an even more excellent person by constantly setting higher and higher standards for yourself and then by doing everything possible to live up to those standards."

Brian Tracy

Taking Your Business - and Your Employees - From Good to Great

By Michael Masterson

If you read almost anything in the mainstream media about management or leadership, you’ll see a lot of advice about making your employees happy.

Listen to their problems and concerns. Create a positive atmosphere. Give them the resources they need and leave them alone. Inspire them. Cheer for them. Be their best friend.

I like it when people who work for me like me, but I try as hard as I can not to encourage it.

It seems to me that the whole point of running a business is to focus your energies and attention on some worthy, profitable goal and get your employees to do the same. If you diffuse that objective by expending time and energy on being likeable, things are likely to go wrong.

A good thing to do in business that will make you almost immediately unpopular is to set high standards.

Most people don’t like high standards, because they create a lot of work - especially the kind of work that nobody likes: the do-it-over-again kind.

Let’s say you are the publisher of a sports magazine. You have to put together 70 pages of editorial every month by a very definite date. To get that accomplished, you create a schedule of a dozen deadlines - giving every writer of every essay ample time to submit his drafts, have them edited, revise them, and then make final submissions.

Now, what do you do if - 24 hours before the final deadline - half of the articles are good but not great? Do you accept what you have as "good enough for now" and send out a memo suggesting ways to make things go better next time? Or do you call everybody in at 4:30 p.m. and tell them that if they want to keep their jobs they have to work till midnight?

And if you are tough enough to take that "unreasonable" stance, what do you say to your top editor who tells you he has an anniversary dinner date that night with his wife?

Setting high standards will make you a somewhat disliked boss/leader. Enforcing high standards will make you positively despised.

Don’t tell me that good management means planning and communicating and creating a system in which crisis intervention is unnecessary. If you believe that kind of thing, you are either a teacher, a consultant, or unemployed.

In the real world, getting from good to great requires extraordinary effort. It demands more time than you want, more energy than you have, and more cooperation than any normal person can be expected to contribute.

That’s if you want high standards. If you are willing to settle for "good," things can be much easier… and you can be much nicer.

Sometimes, when I’m in charge of getting something very difficult done, I say to my viceroys: "We can do this in either of two ways. We can do a half-assed job and have a good time… or we can do a really good job and you probably won’t like me when we’re done."

People usually opt for the really good job - until, that is, they find out I wasn’t kidding.

It’s no fun to redline a manuscript that has been edited six times before. It’s not easy to insist that the wall be repainted yet again. What I feel like doing when I see that someone I like has worked long and hard to produce something that’s just okay is to say to him, "Good work, Joe. You did a really good job."

And you can do that if you like.

But if you ever hope to achieve anything great - if you ever want to create a wonderful product or provide excellent customer service or have a great movie or magazine produced - you are going to have to establish and maintain high standards for your employees. And when you do, you are going to have to live with the fact that some of them won’t like you.

They say that Thomas Edison redid his most-famous experiment something like 6,000 times before he could get the electric light to glow. I can only imagine how unpopular he must have been with the men who worked for him. If paying attention to them and their needs had been a top priority for him, I think it’s fair to say that someone else - sometime later - would have given the world electrical illumination.

[Ed. Note: Get Michael Masterson's insights into becoming successful in your business and personal life, achieving financial independence, and accomplishing all your goals on his brand-new website. You'll find updates on all of Michael's books, news on upcoming ETR events, Michael's blog, and room to send in your comments and questions. Check it out today.]

== Highly Recommended ==

A Quick $2.5 Million From the Biggest Buyer’s Market in 15 Years!

A few months ago, one of Dave Lindahl’s students from California took a jaunt to Texarkana. There he found his first real estate deal ever: a 192-unit apartment building in foreclosure with a mortgage of $4.3 million.

He didn’t have to pay nearly that much to buy it, though. Instead, he worked a "short sale" and acquired the property for just $2.3 million… a savings of two million dollars off the top! Better still, he bought it with no money down.

But the story doesn’t end there. After putting $400,000 of improvements into the property, he re-sold it for $5.2 million! That’s a quick profit of $2.5 million–without using a cent of his own cash!

Dave’s methods are that powerful, and anyone can use them - even in today’s market. Click here for more on how you can learn his secrets for building truly passive income from the biggest buyer’s market in 15 years, absolutely free.

ETR Insider Report: Your Biggest Enemy

By Suzanne Richardson

When you have your own business, you need to be invested in what you’re doing. That means putting your heart and soul into your marketing, your copywriting… and your product. But, as Michael Masterson and marketing expert Rich Schefren pointed out at last week’s Info Marketing Bootcamp, you need to be careful not to fall in love with it.

You may have a fantastic idea for a blockbuster product. You know that it will change the lives of people all over the world. But don’t get stuck on it, or your business could perish. In fact, Michael told Bootcamp attendees, "Your biggest enemy is falling in love with your product."

"If it’s not a winner in the beginning, it’s not going to be a winner ever," added Rich.

Instead of putting everything you have into the product, put everything you have into seeing whether it will sell. "Just keep changing things up," Michael said. "Don’t be arrogant enough to think that you know what people want. We’re not in the ‘look at me’ business. We’re in business because we want to make products that people like. Try different products. If you make them small and inexpensive, if you experiment a lot, you’ll eventually find something that works."

This is one version of a theme that ran throughout the entire Bootcamp: Test, test, test. Don’t put all your hopes and dreams on one product. Test different products until you find a rainmaker.

[Ed. Note: ETR has created a brand-new Info Marketing program that gives you an all-inclusive, A-to-Z blueprint for starting your own powerhouse Internet business - from learning how to pick a product and set up a website to discovering copywriting secrets from the masters, techniques to help you create an e-mail list, the best ways to market your product, and more. Sign up for our hotlist and you'll be one of the first to hear the details of this exciting new program.]

Pill Poppers Give Up on Magic Pills

By Craig Ballantyne

Everyone wants a magical pill for weight loss. It’s so much easier than getting off the couch. Unfortunately, the "easy way out" doesn’t work. Fortunately, you don’t need a pill to reach the weight you want.

Canadian researchers took a look at two of the most common weight-loss drugs, Orlistat and Sibutramine, to see how consistently patients used the pills over a two-year period. More than 20,000 patients took part in this study.

Similar studies had reported minimal weight loss but plenty of adverse effects from these drugs (which makes you wonder why doctors still prescribe them). It’s no surprise, then, that less than 10 percent of the patients in the Canadian study continued with them for one year, and only two percent were still using them at the end of the two years.

For one reason (ineffectiveness) or another (adverse effects), most of the patients stopped taking the diet pills.

Compare this to a lifestyle change of eating whole, natural foods, and exercising with short but intense workout sessions. When my clients finally try this lifestyle (a plan they can follow for the rest of their lives), we find that most keep it up.

Taking pills is not a way of life. Eating for energy and exercising to feel good and improve your fitness is the best method for improving your health and changing your body.

Instead of a donut for breakfast, eat an apple and some almonds. Replace soda with green tea or water. Get up 10 minutes earlier and start a progressively more intense exercise program. And take a few minutes each night to strengthen your body with bodyweight exercises in the comfort of your own home. I guarantee that it will be easier for you to stick with that program than trying to lose weight with pills.

[Ed. Note: Fitness expert Craig Ballantyne is the creator of the Turbulence Training for Fat Loss system. If you want a free online source of information, motivation, and social support to help you improve your health, lose weight, and get fit, sign up for ETR's free natural health e-letter.]

It’s Good to Know: Saving Microscopic Species

Efforts to save such endangered species as the giant panda, whales, and marine turtles get most of the press. So you’ll probably be surprised to find out that creatures that are almost invisible to the naked eye are getting similar help from scientists.

The Smithsonian’s National Zoo is host to 12,000 microscopic Elkhorn coral larvae from the waters off Puerto Rico. Scientists will breed and nurture this threatened species in specially designed tanks. If all goes according to plan, the larvae will be returned to their native territory to rebuild damaged coral reefs.

(Source: Science Daily)

== Highly Recommended ==

Give Yourself a Nice Pay Raise - And A Three Day Weekend, Every Weekend

By the end of this week, you can give yourself a pay raise. How does an extra $20/hr sound… and schedule a few days vacation while you’re at it!

After a month or two, how about another raise… to $2,000 a week.

It’s happening everywhere. Ordinary people — including folks who never finished school — starting their own businesses… and making side incomes in the neighborhood of $40,000… $60,000… even $100,000 or more a year.

They’re living the American Dream. Now it’s time for you to start living it too. Click here to continue…

- Charlie Byrne

Word to the Wise: Irenic

Something that’s "irenic" (eye-REN-ik) - from the Greek for "peace" - tends to promote peace.

Example (as used in the London Times): "[Rev. John Taylor] was always irenic by temperament and desire, and his sensitivity to others enabled him to bring together and work with people of very diverse views."

[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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