Business Insight Zone

Before I took off for the holidays, I told you Seven things you may not know about me and tapped a few friends to do the same exercise. Here are pointers to three posts in reply:

• Colleen Wainwright, the Communicatrix: Ramping up to the end-of-year lists — Colleen gets extra credit because she listed sixteen things. An overachiever, she is. The most provocative (read: crazy) thing on her list: “I will go to my grave saying Jackie Brown is superior to Pulp Fiction.”
• Russ Somers, Egghead Marketing: Seven Things You May Not Know About Me — I worked in the cubicle next to his for two years and didn’t know some of this stuff about Russ’s career. My favorite part (and an excellent lesson in chutzpah) is this: “I dropped out after my first year of college to play in bands. It was 1979, so the fact that I didn’t play an instrument at the time didn’t slow me down. I bought a bass and was in a band within two weeks.”
• Dan Markovitz, TimeBack Blog: Seven things you may not know about me. — Dan’s got a good sense of humor, but he’s not one for mincing words: “Internet entrepreneurs are, in general, the worst bunch of whiners and time wasters when it comes to productivity issues.”

Thanks to all of these folks for playing along!

~

ADDENDUM, January 5: My Hoover’s colleague Jeff Dorsch responded in the comments on the original post. Thanks, Jeff! (I’m gonna have to ask you about that Cabo Verde trip, since I’ve always wanted to visit there . . .)

~

Photo by Andreas Levers, used under a Creative Commons license.

You didn’t do it all yourself. You never did. Virtually nothing in this world is legitimately a solo endeavor.

Therefore, gratitude is appropriate, even when things don’t seem so great.

Your customers pay your salary. You don’t pay your mortgage or your gas bill or your grocery bill — your customers do. Thank them. Make a habit of it.

Your co-workers cover for you. They inspire you and enable you. (Yes, sometimes they also infuriate you, but them’s the breaks when you’re dealing with humans. By the way, you sometimes infuriate them, too.) Make a habit not just of saying you’re grateful for what they do, but showing it.

Family? Friends? Do I need to go on?

This second day of 2009 is the perfect time to start this habit.

Be brassy about expressing gratitude. Approach or embrace embarrassment, if need be, but make sure you let people know you’re thankful for them and what they do.

(Next up on my to-do list: a dozen thank-yous — by e-mail, in person, on the phone.)

Go tell them.

[Inspiration for this post from Tom Peters.]

~

For more entries in this series, see The Basic Basics — an Omnibus.

~

Thank-you card by Fern R.

Out of curiosity, I looked through this blog’s statistics to find out which posts got the most page views in 2008. Here are the top 10:

1. SXSW session recap: Jason Fried of 37signals.
2. The price of oil in Euros.
3. The work ethic of Will Smith: “deliberate practice” in action. (A high-hitting 2007 post that just kept on chugging in 2008. I returned to Smith’s amazing career again — twice — recently.)
   
4. Deliberate practice in the working world. (Look for my review of Geoff Colvin’s book Talent is Overrated — previewed here — soon; I think the concept of deliberate practice has enormous implications for smartly-run businesses.)
   
5. A coming bubble in alternative energy?
6. Alcatel-Lucent and the right way to do layoffs. (Interesting: I published this one in October 2007, but it drew a string of comments in 2008 . . . when Alcatel-Lucent did yet another round of layoffs. Good ol’ A-L — always reliable for more layoffs.)
7. Ground control to Lincoln: What are you thinking? (I said a lot of congratulatory things about Ford in 2008. This wasn’t one of them.)
8. Gary Vaynerchuk at Grape Vine Market in Austin. (When Gary V. comes to town to talk at my regular wine shop — within half a mile of my house — I show up, take notes, and write it up for the world. It’s just that simple.)
9. A BitTorrent for e-books? (Another 2007 post with legs. Sometimes I inadvertently hit the jackpot with keywords.)
10. The Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE): a first look. (Interesting: this post drew substantially more hits that my review of the book on ROWE.)

Out of further curiosity, I dug up the 2008 posts that drew the most comments and trackbacks. Again, the top 10:

1. The power of naive questions. (Regular readers will know that I return to this powerful concept often.)
   
2. When is it time to kill a project?
3. Gary Vaynerchuk at Grape Vine Market in Austin.
4. Book Review: Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It (A hypothesis: #10 in the list above drew more keyword-hunters wanting to know a little something about ROWE, but this post drew more people who were more deeply interested in the book and its concept, ergo readier to discuss it.)
5. What “Real Advice” Would You Give Your Company? (I liked how commenters took the gloves off for this one.)
6. Time is the resource, but attention is the problem. (Sometimes I write a post and more or less forget about it, but this is one of those with the kernel of an idea in it that I’ve come back to again and again.)
7. The benefits of failure.
8. Putting on the Dunce Cap. (Until I looked over both of them just now, I hadn’t realized how this post and the “Real Advice” post above related to one another.)
9. Being wrong. (My mom told me she laughed out loud at the pictures on this one.)
10. The Social Media Are Not So New. (This is one I’m really proud of, and expect to build on continually throughout 2009.)

Did I, by any chance, write something that was a favorite of yours in 2008? Please stroke my ego tell me in the comments!

~

Photo by Banamine, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Here’s hoping it’s a very good year!

~

Image source.