Rockstars, Rebels and Rogues

The business environment is moving so quickly today it is often difficult to identify where focus and discipline need to be applied to achieve the organizations vision. Throughout my experience, in my career, speaking to mentors and gaining insight from gurus there are three types of professionals in any organization today – Rockstars, Rebels and Rogues. These archetypes are not necessarily new, but understand that two of the three have both positive and negative characteristics.
If you are not one of these archetypes then you are on the periphery and not realizing your full potential. Let’s start by looking at the apex archetype – Rockstars.

“You have to have a big vision and take very small steps to get there. You have to be humble as you execute but visionary and gigantic in terms of your aspiration. In the Internet industry, it's not about grand innovation, it's about a lot of little innovations: every day, every week, every month, making something a little bit better”.
- Jason Calacanis

Rock stars in music, business and in life are constantly evolving and challenging themselves to realize their full potential. They are the future leaders and visionaries that will help innovate the organization. Their focus is not just on themselves they are focused on developing others as well as themselves. Rockstars tap into experts across and outside their own sphere of influence, or organization, to help fuel new ideas and serve as sources of inspiration.


Their curiosity helps drive different perspectives and understanding of burgeoning technology and how that applies to trends impacting them personally and organizationally. They creative personal narratives of taking in new information and technology to drive personal goals and behaviors. Be and stay tech current or be passed by, no one has time to catch people up on what is driving technology – you have to fight to stay current.


We all know that early in our lives we learn how to be good at school – in the real world, we quickly learned that you have to over deliver on the assignment - You need to blow the freakin’ doors off expectations. It is about volunteering for things to stretch your comfort zone and imagination. Rockstars challenges themselves to perform at a higher level – it is not about the competition it is about them competing against themselves. They know what success is and they are constantly challenging convention.


In this type of environment, most employees don’t raise their hands to offer suggestions or new ideas “out of turn” because they fear they will be branded as troublemakers. Those brave enough to do so anyway are often burned in the process, become dispirited, and/or resort to bad rebel behavior.

Perspectives on Rockstars and Key Qualities
What is it that makes a Rockstar high achiever? Is it luck, looks, intelligence, talent, dedication or bone crushing hard work? All of these things figure into the equation – they all make a difference. But we all know intelligent, talented, hard-working people who do not consider themselves very successful or even happy. And we know people who are not exceptionally bright but seem happy and successful right?

You have the power to change your habits – to acquire new skills and fully use the skills you now have. You can improve your performance, your productivity, and feel the reward in what you accomplish. While some people gravitate to the monetary elements of success there is so much more out there - if the monetary aspect is your only focus then the feeling of accomplishment will slowly dissipate. If you want to maximize your talents and pure potential - get unreasonable with yourself and get out of the comfort zone. The only way to do this is through small steps in learning how to use your talents.

So there must be something else, some secret to success. Actually there are several secrets to achieving your peak performance – being a Rockstar.  The number one secret is attitude:

• Rockstars have indelible positive attitudes. I have always hired for attitude first, agility then aptitude. One of the most important steps you can take toward achieving your greatest potential in life is to learn to monitor your attitude and its impact on your work performance, relationships and everyone around you.
• Elevate their Personal Brand - Bringing their best self to the role every day.
• Willpower - succeed at just about anything they try – is largely determined by their own self-image.
• Mindset - Attitude is critical as it shapes the way you perceive the world and the way the world perceives you. Everyone has a choice each day they wake-up to be a motivator of yourself and others or fall into the victim pit where everything and everyone is against you. The mind plays a serious role in your attitude and outlook on life itself. Many of us have behavior patterns today that were programmed into our brains at a very tender age. The loudest and most influential voice you hear is your own inner voice, your self-critic. It can work for or against you, depending on the messages you allow. It can be optimistic or pessimistic. It can wear you down or cheer you on.

What’s your perspective?
What are other differentiators of high performers or Rockstars – let me know?

Release the Hounds

Why do people limit themselves through anxiety and fear? Too many people limit themselves through fear, through your opinions and actions.  Anxiety in contrast arises purely from our own thoughts, not external reality.  

 

Limitations are both physical and mental, mostly mental – your mindset governs your potential and unfortunately people often relegate themselves to negative thoughts.  These emotions are self-limiting your potential and our mind plays a significant role as negative thoughts keep us from doing what we really want. I am susceptible to negative thoughts, just as everyone is, they are hounds constantly hunting to expose your anxieties or weaknesses at the most inconvenient times.

 

Changing your perspectives and your mindset influences your attitude and outlook.  Self-limiting, negative behaviors to avoid in your pursuit of shaping your ethos are the following:

1. Stop Using Hope as a Strategy – There is no substitute for action, hope and wishful thinking cannot be mistaken for action.  Start to start, do something that drives outcomes by looking at the entire process to achieve the objective or goal. People need to detach from fantasies that may relieve them momentarily in a guise of action, but there is no basis for achieving the desired outcome set forth. I have written before that massive goals require massive action, I cannot take credit for that phrase, but it has resonated with many of the people I speak with.  It’s critical to take bold action toward your visions, in order to create success.  This can only be accomplished if you are grounded in reality – breaking down these large goals into digestible chunks.  Spend each morning to contemplate your short-term and long-term goals identify one action you can immediately take today to realize those goals.
2. No Free Rides – Seeking for easy answers and entitlements is a negative mindset high performing professionals avoid.  They know how to keep negativity out of their mindset, they figure out how to get the help they need without entitlements.  There is a reciprocity that exists in any relationship – these people do not expect something for nothing.  They have an objective approach to anything or anyone they come into contact with - they treat others impartially and fairly and know they expect the same.
3. Stop the Victim Mentality – People view the world in limitations and barriers versus an opportunistic outlook on life and new ways to solve problems.  This type of thinking is can be summarized simply that the world is not fair and why is this happening to me. Being a victim lends itself well to the concept that everyone that is happening to you is outside your control and everyone else’s fault. High performers look at the world with eyes wide open and understand the challenges associated with what is going on with their goals and objectives.  High performers fail fast and learn from the mistakes. Personal accountability comes into play where you must anticipate variables and be quick to address having a plan.

 

Release yourself from hell hounds of anxiety - While we can’t always control how we feel, we do have the power to choose how we think and act.

 

What are other sources that “limit personal potential”?

Battle Cry - Charge

“Charge” – Creating your own battle cry to discover your personal potential.

The One Thing is a repetitive concept in my vocabulary – “holding yourself accountable”. How will you activate or action your purpose on a daily basis? Finding your own battle cry to charge yourself up activating your goals and purpose.  How can this be accomplished with conflicting priorities in your own life – discover your personal potential.

 

Understanding what your purpose is in life is a journey of self-discovery that encompasses both personal and professional goals. The concept has been the topic of movies, articles and a myriad of other media platforms. While many people relate the concept of One Thing to the City Slicker movie of the 1990s, it is more than finding your purpose. 

 

People instinctively know what matters most. The objective is to get out of your comfort zone and stretch. Ask for help in your journey from family, friends and colleagues.   Planning does not require a great deal of time, just the discipline of holding yourself accountable for your own success or failure.  I have used the phrase start-to-start as a catalyst to get moving.  

 

Think about this, if you have a goal short-term or long-term what is the ONE THING you can do today to advance that goal forward?

 

Start in the morning, the weekend prior and plan out your actions – be consistent in your planning time.  Quiet your mind from all of the racing thoughts that percolate throughout your life.  This time is truly for you and seeing yourself for what you have the potential to become.  This is not the time for anxiety to come knocking at your door, where second-guessing sends you streaming for your old comfort zones. People who doubt themselves, lack trust in their own intuition find themselves far from where they want to be. 

 

Many people often confuse a big checklist or to-do list as a plan of attack (well actually it is part of it), but it starts with your mindset. I’m not concerned with avoiding distraction every minute of every day.  Your focus does not mean perfection, perfection is elusive – search for excellence and the discipline to drive your actions on a daily basis.

 

 

Baby Powder

George Bernard Shaw said that “People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it”.

There are some wake up calls that people have throughout life – and it is a signal to take accountability for action be it mental, physical or spiritual.  It is not about being ultra-organized and over-committed to a task list – but rather it is truly about holding yourself accountable for your own goals.  If you are not on that path take out some baby powder douse some on your hand and smack yourself into reality.  The baby powder is meant for effect since the talc will cause a prolonged sting on the skin.  The reference can also be compared to an infantile view of your own personal potential and perceived limitations.

 

We have all experienced ruts, now is the time to get out and hold yourself accountable. If you can’t get anything done, you need to confront these seven harsh truths that reveal why you procrastinate.

 

Shiny Objects -  Toys and technology interrupt you constantly. People like to complain about how “distracted” they are, and most of them aren’t willing to accept that they are responsible for that reality.

Whether it is texts, the number of to-dos on a list somewhere or the number of emails you need to respond to – you need to take prioritize based on your goals at work or life in general.  No time make time through prioritization and communication. If you feel overwhelmed, you need to deal with the fact that it is your fault – stings a little I know, I have been guilty of that and I know many of friends, family and co-workers face the challenge daily. 

I knew a person a long time ago who had Sunday Night Syndrome, freaking out about what she needed to do during that week. After some level of venting she moved from complaint to commitment in less than thirty minutes. With that story it is a great idea to get quiet with yourself, no cell-phones or television, and pre-game your day or week – what do I need to do in order to achieve my goals this week.  Take stock in yourself by holding a high level focus session at a set time every week and every day if possible.

 

Feats of Strength - You consume your headspace with things you have no control over.  You create more stress in your life by falling down this slippery slope.  The self-inflicted anxiety it causes will only lead to regret and more energy spent on things you have zero control over.  If you do have some modicum of control over the situation – do something, don’t complain do something – anything.

 

Camaraderie versus Focus - Everyone needs friends, co-workers and family to feel valued and part of a something larger than themselves. While it’s great to have camaraderie, you can’t expect to achieve anything worth talking about if you spend all of your time with other people. Highly productive people know they must spend the occasional day or night working alone if they want to achieve their goals.  Stop avoiding what needs to get done and plan your day with and without other people.

 

Another distraction Multi-tasking - Focus is a skill that is in short supply especially today where alerts are common place, emails are rampant and now smart-watches will steal even more mindshare from the day, if you let it. Everyone is so obsessed with doing more things that they never stop to consider the fact that it might be more productive to do fewer things more effectively. One question I had for my son, just this week, how efficient is it to stop writing your essay every five minutes to answer a text that isn’t urgent? How successful do you think you will be if you’re so accustomed to distraction, that you don’t even know what concentration feels like? During your weekly focus session with yourself try to define what concentration feels like.

 

Random Acts of Mental Sabotage - Other random excuses why you cannot get anything done - your problems were caused by other people.  While some aspects of this could be true based on work and your personal capacity to accomplish new tasks and asks, you need to employ your daily and weekly prioritization and communicate.  If you get upset when another person gets ahead instead of you, then I am not sure if any of this post will help or even a larger container of baby powder.  Look — even if you deserved the position, how productive is it to gossip about another person and how does that impact your personal brand or ethos?  Look for different ways of making other people successful every day and you will be investing in your own personal potential.

 

Accountability and action are inextricably linked whether you like it or not.  I believe venting in certain situations has a purpose, but just really wastes a great deal of energy – your personal energy.  Hold yourself accountable, by keeping focus on the actions below and a proverbial container of baby powder at the ready.

 

• Get Quiet - Take stock in yourself by holding a high level focus session at a set time every week and every day if possible.
• Wasting Energy and Feats of Strength - If you do have some modicum of control over the situation – do something, don’t complain do something – anything.
• Get out of Your Comfort Zone - Stop avoiding what needs to get done and plan your day with and without other people.
• Stop Multi-tasking – Define and experience what concentration feels like
• Don’t Sabotage Yourself - Look for different ways of making other people successful every day and you will be investing in your own personal potential.

 

If anyone has other ideas to stay focused and hold yourself accountable, I would welcome your contribution.

 

Call the Ball - Career aspirations start with being authentic

Managing your career is based on a combination of aspiration, inspiration and attitude.  You are charged with manifesting your own destiny.  All our lives are products of the many small decisions we make. How you spend a minute can dictate how you spend an hour and eventually how you spend your hours determines whether you will reach your goals. An opportunity lost is lost forever and ultimately, self-control lets you relax because it removes stress and enables you to conserve willpower for the important challenges.

 

More and more people are looking for their purpose in the world and in the workplace looking for validation as a sign of life. People want to be heard, but more importantly they want to know that their contributions are being noticed and not taken for granted.  Not for the sake of attention, but more so because they want to know that their skill sets are still relevant and useful and that they are making a difference to advance the organizations they serve.   With training and professional development budget cut-backs in recent years, people have had to start investing in themselves as concerns grow about where their capabilities best fit in their organizations and what their futures hold.

 

At the same time, leaders are trying to make their people feel more secure in order to maintain consistency, conscious that if too much disruption leaks out into the workplace, there is risk of losing high-performers which is challenging to replace from the impact of time, lost intellectual capital and cost. In this ever changing “war on talent”, landscape, leaders need to think differently about how to keep their teams on track. 

 

They must become more intuitive, diverting from the traditional ways of leading that have become too predictable and uninspiring. Many leaders are out of touch and disconnected from their employees, focusing solely on their own personal agendas.  

 

Where it becomes most apparent, are when leaders try to use a “one-size-fits-all” approach to earn trust, build loyalty and inspire team and individual performance. Leaders must understand that in today’s new workplace, there does not exist a single formula to inspire employees to perform better.   Rather, it’s about how to maximize all the components in order to create hundreds of formulas that provide long-term value, continuity and impact, but are most importantly authentic.    Organizations have a responsibility, but so do the people who comprise  the organization.  The mutually beneficially relationship between employer and employee has gone by the wayside like work life balance.  These are semantics and you need to be authentic and true to yourself, leading your own career, in order to realize your full potential in any organization.

     

 

Inside Out - The haze of commoditization

Inside Out - Breaking through the Haze of Commoditization

The business of professional services is to take away problems and or capture benefits.  At the center of professional services is that they work to prepare clients for the future, identify new opportunities, anticipating adversities controlling what can be controlled.

 

The main objective of any professional service marketing organization is to establish a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship with their clients.  This is where experience based marketing and positioning comes into play.  The level of interactions through a number of different endpoints and platforms need to be consistent in order to break through the haze of commoditization.

 

Firms Need Differentiated Strategies for Their Brand to Stand Out - One of the biggest challenges for professional service firms is category parity. Surprisingly many firms lack differentiation not because of their brand necessarily, but because they all have virtually the same business and operating model, the same strategies, and the same mission. The root of the problem with professional services is not brand differentiation but business differentiation.

 

Success of professional services is based equally on the quality of the client relationship and on the quality of the solution to a performance, regulatory or legal issue. But most of all the challenge lies in the fact that advice is often intangible. While it may appear as self-serving, the role of marketing plays a significant role in the context of standing out. Professional services are intangible by the nature of services, so they must excel at branding, marketing and such other processes as business development and knowledge management.

 

Successfully branded organizations base their brand on a core positioning that is uniquely own-able and represents a distinct attribute or capability. This clear definition is supported and reinforced by everything the firm does – requiring all professionals and staff to live the brand every day. This internal dimension of branding is critical to product, services and professional services is becoming top of mind with many organizations.

 

Operationalizing the brand, may appear to be a lofty management consulting term, but think about the implications.  What does it mean to operationalize the brand, to live the brand? It involves the alignment of the brand and its values, long-term strategy, human resources, operations, internal communications, and more, to ensure the right behavior is in place. Obviously branding cannot solve every business performance issue and cannot be applied in all situations, but the transformation of the brand must start from Inside Out.

Buckle Up - Breaking through Legacy Perceptions

Evolving Legacy Perceptions & Future Expectations of the Professional Services Marketing

The contemporary CMO and marketer can no longer be just a brand ambassador and storyteller; they must also have a deep understanding of marketing technology.  There are several market and psychological shifts occurring in professional services and I would dare to say that globally were are evolving towards a services based economy:

 

Creative Storytelling – Too many brands, specifically professional services brands continue to fail at persuasively placing what they have to offer inside the lives of the people and operations of people within organizations they are trying to reach. A lot of that seems to come down to a simple gap in the alignment of priorities: while marketing teams contemplate data and speak energetically about really understanding their buyers as individuals, those interests are not reflected as clearly as they should be in what they end up saying.

 

So while organizations focus on what they are doing and think about that quantitatively and in terms of deliverables (because that is how they are judged internally), clients focus on how the brand or experience makes them feel and which of the many brand options available to them feels most like them (because that’s how they make their decisions). The role of the CMO is evolving at a rapid rate and equally for marketing professionals – the shift in digital, emotional space of your brand, developing conversations and experiences.

 

Integrated Experience - We can debate functions but in a hyper-connected digital world, everything that a business does — the entire “experience that it delivers” from internal employees to suppliers and customers — is now the scope of marketing. How are we as marketers shaping the conversation and our positioning in the marketplace? 

Technology is saturating the discipline—Marketing has more software intertwined in its mission today than any other profession.  Many CMOs have larger technology budgets than CIOs due to managing every interaction the brand has with customers. Using these capabilities requires new approaches to brand management and marketing strategy — as well as new competencies across the Marketing organization.

Branding is not linear anymore — it is not just what you say to your clients, but what your clients are saying to each other about your brand. Most importantly we must ensure brand strategies must be authentic with the audience whether it is transactional, strategic or ethereal.

When are we going to start to demand the professionalization of the Marketing discipline?