Interviews & Essays
Author EssayThe Rosetta Story
What is love in business? Love is a matter of sharing your knowledge, your network of relationships, and your compassion -- or any combination of the three. I have learned this lesson many times in life, and I learned it again last week at the DFW International Airport as I got my shoes shined.
After missing my flight to San Jose, I decided to go for a quick shine. A young lady named Rosetta greeted me at the stand and began to polish my shoes. She asked if I was a businessman, to which I proudly said, "Yes!" She then shared with me her desire to run a business of her own someday. She explained that she was a single parent of three kids, and she wanted to control her destiny as well as their future. She complained that business owners make all the money, and that she had more to offer than just a shine on shoes.
I immediately stopped reading the paper. I related to her aspirations. I looked in her right in the eyes and saw ambition, dignity, and fire. Thinking about the knowledge I could share with her, I suggested she read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends & Influence People. I thought this would give her a good perspective on people and business. I told her about Entrepreneur magazine, and all of the business opportunities in each issue. I also talked to her about her current business -- running the household and running that stand.
"You have your own profit and loss statement, your own staff, and your own mission (to raise your kids). Basically, you're You Inc.!" She understood my point, smiled, and talked to me about how she makes decisions regarding spending money on education versus entertainment, and she talked about the investment value of renting versus owning her home. We agreed that everyone except total recluses conduct business, which means that everyone is a businessperson. The only difference is that the owner of the stand, for example, has a different set of problems -- payroll, taxes, insurance, rent -- than someone like Rosetta. So maybe, just maybe, she should study business first, and take the plunge with eyes wide open. I could tell she was enthused, and I felt great taking a few minutes to talk with her, about her.
The day before I'd left on this trip my publisher sent me 100 promotional flyers for my book to hand out whenever possible. As Rosetta finished my shoes, I had a brainstorm: I'll hire her to pass out some of these flyers to her customers! The flyers had the book cover, my picture, and a description of the book as well as my concept of love in business. So I gave Rosetta a big tip and asked if she'd help pass out these flyers, explaining to her that her stand was a powerful place to market a business book, and that she came in contract with powerful business people.
Rosetta was delighted. "I'll do you better," she said. "I know all the store managers in the airport as well as other shoeshine-stand operators. I'll give them some too. So please, may I have the entire stack?"
An hour later, running to my gate, I passed Rosetta's stand, where I saw her giving a flyer to one of her clients and talking up the book. She looked happier, she looked more fulfilled; her eyes were on fire!
The following week, I was running through DFW once more and noticed one of my flyers taped to a shoeshine stand -- not Rosetta's. When I ducked into a newsstand to get a copy of The Wall Street Journal, the cashier smiled at me and after some fumbling under the counter, produced another copy of the flyer. Actually, it was a copy of a copy -- Rosetta was adding value and spreading the word. Good people were working hard for me -- people whom I've never even met. The cashier wished me luck and told me that she couldn't wait to display and sell the book.
All in all, I've learned that everyone is powerful, everyone has a story to tell, and everyone is a businessperson. By sharing knowledge and compassion with Rosetta, I achieved word-of-mouth marketing in one of the most important nodes of the business world -- an international airport. I learned through books like Seth Godin's Unleashing the Ideavirus that people who travel can be very powerful sneezers, influencers, and gospel spreaders. I received an incredible return on investment for my time, compassion, and payment to Rosetta.
Don't let your next Rosetta slip by. She may be the bright spot in your day -- your No. 1 teammate in the business of life. (Tim Sanders)
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
I.
THE LOVECAT WAY
Not long ago, after I had delivered a speech on the new economy, a woman entering the job market approached me and told me she had career anxiety.
"I'm not worried that I won't land something good," she explained. "I'm afraid that work will be too cold and impersonal. What can I do to guarantee I'll be successful but also happy?"
The answer? The same advice I gave Chris: "Be a lovecat."
At a large sales conference last month, I met two men, one in accounting, the other in management; both of them were afraid. It wasn't that they feared the changes going on around them-they feared being left out of them.
"How do I drill into this World Wide Web thing?" one of them asked. "I don't know what to work on because this isn't my skill set. Am I still relevant? Is there anything I have to offer that can add value?"
The other man said, "I don't think I can compete with these kids ţying out of schools loaded with their new-economy knowledge and jargon. Everyone else seems to be jumping into new roles, but I think the world is limiting me with all its rules and biases."
"That's not how the world is run," I replied. "It's run via intangibles -- knowledge, networks, and compassion."
It never seems to change. No matter how and where I meet these people, and no matter what their age or experience level, I have found one common truth: Men and women across the country are trying desperately to understand how to maintain their value as professionals in the face of rapidly changing times.
Until recently, bizpeople could survive for years without advice, without connection skills, perhaps even without new ideas. But now that the bizworld is moving at a velocity once unheard of, many of us can't keep up. We've made some bad decisions, we've received some bad advice, we didn't get connected to the right opportunities, we're feeling left behind or left out.
Technology has revolutionized our landscape. Before the information revolution, business changed gradually and business models became antiquated even more slowly. The value progression evolved over decades and double decades. You could go to college, get an M.B.A. and work for forty years, and your pure on-the-job knowledge stayed relevant. Relationships were for the most part geo-bound, and only a handful of people comprised your entire business network.
That was yesterday. Forget about today, because tomorrow is upon us. And to succeed in tomorrow's workplace, you need a killer application. (What's a killer app? There's no standard deŢnition, but basically it's an excellent new idea that either supersedes an existing idea or establishes a new category in its Ţeld. It soon becomes so popular that it devastates the original business model.)
What is that application? Simply put: Love is the killer app. Those of us who use love as a point of differentiation in business will separate ourselves from our competitors just as world-class distance runners
separate themselves from the rest of the pack trailing behind them.
This isn't just a feel-good message that I sense audiences want to hear. I believe that the most important new trend in business is the downfall of the barracudas, sharks, and piranhas, and the ascendancy of nice, smart people-because they are what I call lovecats. They will succeed for all the reasons you will discover in this book.
But first, what do I mean by love?
The best general definition I have ever read is in the noted philosopher and writer Milton Mayeroff's 1972 book On Caring: "Love is the selfess promotion of the growth of the other." When you are able to help others grow to become the best people they can be, you are being loving -- and you, too, grow.
Mayeroff actually used the word caring more often than the word love, although love is interchangeable with such terms as caring, charity, and compassion. But because "Show me the love" has such a ring to it in a business context, love is the word I prefer to use.
Mayero°, however, talked mostly about love in our personal lives. We need a different definition for love in our professional lives.
When we start a job, whether as recent graduate or CEO, we take on a contract to create more value than the dollar amount we are paid. If we don't add value to our employer, we are value losses; we are value vampires. My definition of added-value: The value with you inside a situation is greater than the value without you.
In your personal life, you can make decisions based on personal needs. If you wish to remain friendly with a toxic person, you have every right to do so. But business is not personal. Love in the bizworld is not some sacrificial process where we must all love one another come what may. There is no free love in the new economy. Every member of your team depends on each and every other member to contribute. You can't afford to take on people who will sink your value boat. So the definition of love must be modified to guarantee that it means not only you, but all the people who populate your bizworld, are value-added for that bizworld.
Here, then, is my definition of love business: the act of intelligently and sensibly sharing your intangibles with your bizpartners.
What are our intangibles? They are our knowledge, our network, and our compassion. These are the keys to true bizlove.
Who are our bizpartners? Potentially, they are each and every person in our work life, whether our bosses or bankers, our clients or competitors, the money guys with the cash to burn, the writers who spin it up so the stocks can churn.
In the following three chapters we will discuss each of the three intangibles in detail, but here they are in short form:
By knowledge, I mean everything you have learned and everything you continue to learn. Knowledge represents all you have picked up while doing your job, and all you have taught yourself by reading every moment you can Ţnd the time. It means every piece of relevant data and information you can accumulate. You can Ţnd knowledge almost anywhere-through observation, experience, or conversation. But by far the easiest, most efficient way to obtain knowledge is through books.
Think of your brain as a kind of piggy bank. Smart people fill it up with all they learn until they possess a formidable wealth of knowledge. Then there are those who sit around all day and never put anything in their bank; all they accumulate is a large butt. You see these people every day, on planes, trains, and in lounges, staring off into space, downing cocktails, heading off to business meetings ill-prepared. Like kids who don't know how to put pennies in their banks, these adults don't know how to accumulate knowledge.
When I give a speech, I often tell my audience that if they feel I have anything valuable to say, they should consider this: My knowledge isn't inherent. I wasn't born with an IQ of 200. I haven't started a colossal business. I am not a rocket scientist. Six years ago my career path wasn't any more remarkable than anyone else's. Then I went on a reading tear. And the more I read, the more I went into business meetings and won people's hearts -- and their business, too.
So what I say to my audiences is: Don't let a guy like me get a step up on you. Maybe you've been in business for twenty-five years. Maybe you have stuff on your résumé I would die for. Yet you're stopping in the race to let me catch up. And it's all because I keep reading.
I can't tell you how often people ask me after a speech, "Could you give me your book list? I should have been doing this for the last thirty years."
Says Harry Beckwith in The Invisible Touch: "Instead of thinking about value-added, think about knowledge-added. What knowledge can you add to your service, or communicate about your service, that will make you more attractive to . . . business partners and customers?"
By network, I mean your entire web of relationships. In the twenty-first century, our success will be based on the people we know. Everyone in our address book is a potential partner for every person we meet. Everyone can fit somewhere in our ever-expanding business universe.
Relationships are the nodes in our individual network that constitute the promise of our bizlife and serve as a predictor of our success. Some of the brightest new-economy luminaries, such as Kevin Kelly (New Rules for the New Economy), or Larry Downes and Chunka Mui (Unleashing the Killer App), argue that companies, organizations, and individuals comprise, and are most highly valued for, their web of relationships. If you organize and leverage your relationships as a network, you will generate long-lasting value (and peace of mind) beyond your stock options, mutual funds, and bank accounts. You will also create a value proposition for new contacts, which in turn drives membership in that network-the prime law of business ecosystems, known as the Law of Network Effects. Value explodes with membership, and the value explosion sucks in more members, compounding the result. These famous wise words put it more succinctly: Them that's got, gets.
But not all of us know to go out and get. Try out this metaphor: When we are born, we receive a fishing net. Throughout our lives we troll for contacts-while in school, at work, or through professional organizations and clubs. If we are fishing well, we accumulate a network of people who support us, who appreciate our value, who lead us to new opportunities. But not all of us use our net wisely. While some of us fill our nets with prizewinning fish, others let their nets languish and fall to the bottom of the ocean, stuffed only with the deadweight of old tires.
Those of us who end up with the best-stocked net have a most valuable commodity. When we are fully and totally networked, we are powerful. Alone, even with all the wisdom in the world, we are powerless: castaways adrift in an impersonal ocean. Without a network, knowledge is nearly useless. Knowledge is your power source or your battery, but relationship is your nerve center, your processor. You get value from your knowledge, but it becomes real when you share it with your network.
I believe that Silicon Valley's greatest innovation is not the invention of wowie-zowie hardware and software, but the social organization of its companies and, most important, the networked architecture of the region itself-the complex web of former jobs, intimate colleagues, information leakage from one Ţrm to the next, rapid company life cycles, and the agile e-mail culture.
Once, scarcity created value. Today abundance can create value. In the old days, when we traded tangibles such as gold, the less gold that was available, the higher its value. Supply-and-demand ruled. Now the opposite can be true. Abundance creates power. If you have a great idea for running a business, and it is adapted throughout your industry, your idea is more, not less, valuable. Value today derives from an idea that everyone has accepted, and then competition sets in to perfect the execution of that idea.
The more people in your network, the more powerful the network.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2002 by Tim Sanders
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