Is Twitter an “ap” in Search of an Application?

It will be interesting to see how Twitter is being used by the business community a year from now. We used it-successfully, I think-at a recent conference that we managed in Chicago. A number of the attendees tweeted their comments and questions and those tweets were used as feedback by the presenters and as fodder for discussion by participants. On the flip side, I made the mistake of following a self-styled “Twitter-guru” for a few weeks. Based on the number of tweets I received from this woman I don’t think she does anything else but eat, sleep and tweet. Thank you “un-follow”! To me the biggest challenge for users will be segregating personal from professional tweets. A number of applications exist to categorize tweets (such as TweetDeckbut) I haven’t seen one yet that easily allows one to easily manage outgoing tweets and separate them by intended audience. I’m interested in your thoughts on where this all goes… (especially from those of you who were made aware of this recent posting via Twitter!)

Persistence

My 17-year-old daughter, Sarah, a junior in high school, started looking for a job in the early spring as soon as she was finished with the ski racing season. Full of optimism, she went to local employers looking for work. I think she expected to be working within a day or so. After several days and no callbacks she wondered if her optimism was well-founded. I reminded her that not only were we in the worst economy of her lifetime, but the worst economy of mine, that she was a teenager with no experience competing for scarce openings and would really need to “work it”. She redoubled her efforts, drawing a wider circle for her search, and going back repeatedly to potential employers. Every day after school for five weeks the same: apply, apply and no jobs. Finally…a week ago..she hit! Twice! The same day! One in retail during the week! One in hospitality on weekends! (Sarah gets excited!)

I’m proud of Sarah’s persistence and am reminded of something that my dad has said to me in the past: “you can learn things from your children once in a while.” Watching a 17 year old kid, with no experience persist and succeed in an endeavor where she didn’t know she could fail is humbling and instructive.

Fear

I’m usually in the office by 5:30 AM. I enjoy being alone during the early part of the day which tends to be my most productive time. That’s when I handle tasks that require my most intense concentration. My trip to the office starts at about 4:45 AM and I even like my commute whose route I change frequently for variety. It gives me time to map out my day and reflect upon our world while it is still peacefully silent.

On a recent morning trip to work I drove by a situation and imagined a scenario that has given me pause since I witnessed it. I drove by a car dropping off what appeared to be a mother and her six or seven year old child in front of a children’s heart clinic. What they were actually going to do there is only known for sure by them and whomever they were seeing but I imagined myself in that role with one of my daughters. I imagined what I would be experiencing if, perhaps, we were there for a heart transplant, heart surgery or some other serious condition. I thought about how fearful I would be for her health and compared it to the things that I currently fear. It made me realize how powerful fear is and also how small are most of my worries.

Peaks and Valleys

I just finished reading Peaks and Valleys, by Spencer Johnson, M.D. Dr. Johnson is also the author of the best seller Who Moved my Cheese? and, like that book, it is a light, but useful parable. One of the main points of the story is to find and use the good hidden in a bad time. That of course, is applicable to the times we find ourselves in now and it is why so many smart companies and entrepreneurs are working hard to prepare themselves for an ascent out of the valley. Dr. Johnson makes the point that when one is “on a peak” and would like to stay there longer one should work carefully to appreciate and manage those good times. This means: be humble and grateful; do more of what got you there; continue to make things better; do more for others, and save resources for upcoming valleys. These are valuable lessons for all of us regardless of where we are in our personal or professional lives.
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Creativity Arising

Times of economic difficulty create hardship for companies and employees. Companies struggle to meet performance goals and employees may become casualties as the downturn forces painful decisions. Positive developments come from these situations as companies are forced to consider how they can do business differently and entrepreneurial former employees begin new businesses, often taking advantage of underserved market niches.

This week I met with several entrepreneurs who are looking at new ways of doing things. The first, a publisher who is facing unprecedented downturns in magazine advertising, is working to retool his business to provide new ways for his advertisers and their customers to interact with his business as the fulcrum. The second is the mayor of a small city who is working on a creative idea that will help his city cut costs without reducing services to his constituents.

Meetings like this are occurring all around the United States. The ideas that are being developed today will form the base that reshapes our economy for years to come as the new concepts become implemented taking some businesses and industries in directions that would not have been envisioned without the impetus of an economic downturn.

Luck, success and success as a result of luck

Garrison Keillor, of Prairie Home Companion fame, a number of years ago wrote the prologue for a National Geographic feature on Denmark. “The Danes are a prompt people”, he wrote, “and if you invite a Danish couple to your house for dinner at 6:00 PM you had better be ready for them to arrive exactly on time.” My ancestors on my father’s side came from Denmark and I learned from him (and my mother) early in my life that if “you aren’t early, you are late.”

This later translated into business philosophies that included: “be early” and its corollaries “the world is run by those who show up” and “we make our own luck”. I believe in all of these and they have been the core of our work at Ewald Consulting.

I am reading Fooled by Randomness, a fascinating exploration of the relationship between luck, success and our sometimes tendency to attribute much of our success to our own brilliance and hard work rather than the fact that sometimes we just are lucky. Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb doesn’t discount the need for intelligence, hard work and other important attributes but he describes what may happen to those who have been “lucky” and built their lives and/organizations around a continued reliance on luck. When the luck runs out or when a “black swan” appears (a significant, unexpected event which can be positive or negative) the organization or individual may be devastated.

I’m not done reading this yet but it has given me a lot to think about especially given the current state of our economy. Clearly, a number of companies and organizations relied on things to continue stably as they had for a number of years. When a tsunami of negative events occurred, many organizations were not prepared. Perhaps, as we come out of the state we are in organizations will return to focusing on the basics that made them great in the first place. For me, I’m going to continue showing up early, participating wherever I can add relevance and focusing on “creating my own luck” rather than hoping it will come from afar.

It’s up to us

This year my attention and the attention of many others, is heightened as our nation deals with an economic crisis where the bottom is as yet unknown. The stock market has crossed into territory where it has not been for 11 years. Fear has its grip on America and so far America seems unable to break out of that grip and move forward. Encouraging quotes I’ve repeated to my friends don’t seem to help. I’ve always found comfort in something Keynes wrote in 1923: “In the long run, we are all dead”.  Economist Paul Krugman agreed but wrote in an October 2008 New York Times piece “in the long run we are all dead but in the short run some of us can’t get buried because of the credit crunch”. What we need now is leadership and hope so that in the long run our economy improves and our world becomes a better place because of American hard work and ingenuity. It’s game time for American businesses, entrepreneurs and associations–let’s play ball and get this country rolling again!

 

David Ewald