How yahoo can survive its current woes

How Yahoo Can Survive Its Current Woes

Yahoo was once the be-all, end-all of search engines, and it was really the first big search engine to become a household name. However, Yahoo has come a long way from the days of $118 shares. In fact, thirteen years after it burst onto the internet scene, its CEO has been fired, thousands of employees have lost their jobs, and Yahoo’s shares have dropped. In fact, the site has been so over-shadowed by Google that it has been in major talks with several companies regarding a take-over.

What has caused all of this? There are several reasons. The first is that more competitors have appeared on the scene. Besides Google’s sudden domination of the search engine world, MSN, AOL, and http://Ask.com have all fought Yahoo for users’ attention. What’s more, Google’s emergence seemed to only really detract from Yahoo’s client base-the other three search engines have actually remained steady in recent years.

Yahoo has gotten away from its roots-the search market. That’s what they were originally known for, and it’s what they really do best. Searching the internet was once Yahoo’s entire reason for being, and it’s this purpose that they need to refocus on, especially now that sites like Google are expanding (and possibly repeating the mistakes of Yahoo’s past? Only time will tell on that one).

Yahoo also needs strong, new leadership to help give its employees a new sense of direction and purpose. This leader needs to be able to bring new ideas to the table while at the same time focusing the company. Yahoo is trying to be everywhere, and that strategy simply isn’t working. They’re running Yahoo Music, Yahoo 360, Yahoo Greetings, Yahoo Personals, Flickr, and much more. With the exception of Flickr, all of these sites have been done and have been done better. Yahoo 360, for example, is a social networking site, but it doesn’t enjoy anywhere near the popularity of sites like MySpace of Facebook. Yahoo Personals, likewise, has nowhere near the users that use dating sites like eHarmony.

If Yahoo is truly to survive, these services may need to be dumped. They don’t bring much to Yahoo’s resource pool and are, in fact, financial drains on the company. While Google spread out, too, they’ve actually spent some time revitalizing their search engine capabilities. They’re not spread thin, and they tend to dump anything that doesn’t work out like they expect it to.

Google has also worked on integrating its many services, something Yahoo has not yet done or has done poorly. Yahoo is trying to be known for so many things that it’s no longer really known for anything. They also need to stop spending money on Web 2.0 services. This puts them in direct competition with hundred of other companies, and it’s simply not needed. Yahoo should have two rivals, MSN and Google. They’re fighting a war on so many fronts that it’s hard to count them all.

Overall, if Yahoo wants to survive in the coming years, they need strong leadership that isn’t afraid to cut and run when services start to fail. They have many services that aren’t bringing in nearly as much as they’re costing the company, and these services need to go. Yahoo basically needs to embrace the idea of getting back to their roots. They’re a search engine. If they remember that and refocus themselves on doing what they do best, they can stage a come-back. If they can’t, the future of Yahoo may be grim.

It was just a misunderstanding

It Was Just a Misunderstanding

It was just a misunderstanding… that’s not what I meant…. Have you heard those, or similar statements, recently? If you have, then you are in the midst of a breakdown in communication. The best leaders are excellent communicators, and they encourage a clear, effective exchange of information in their teams. Yet we often experience confusion and misinterpretation at work (and at home). What is going on? Quite simply, we don’t work at stating our ideas explicitly. We take communication for granted, we get lazy, we get careless—and then, bad things happen.

With all the communication tools at our disposal, we are more at risk than ever for miscommunication. Isn’t it great that email has that «receive receipt» function? I think there is a «read receipt» message also. In using these, we are notified that the receiver of the message did, in fact, get the message from us.

Of course, there is no «understand receipt» to insure that the receiver actually «got» what we were trying to say. When we are face-to-face, body language and changes in pace, tone and vocal inflection help us to determine if our message has been understood. In email, we lose these important visual and aural cues, making successful communication much more difficult. Misunderstandings become frequent, and additional emails meant to clarify can make the even situation worse.

At this point, it would be appropriate to visit the classic (and often misquoted) study on communication by Dr. Albert Mehrabian, Professor Emeritus at UCLA. Dr. Mehrabian examined the process by which people decide whether they like one another. The results of his research tell us that how we say something is critically important to others’ understanding of our message. And, as we noted above, this is precisely the factor that is lost in written communication. Therefore, the more we use such quick and easy means of communicating as email and text messaging, the more at risk we are of being misunderstood.

Don’t get me wrong; I love email. It is a very convenient, efficient, and effective method of sending and receiving information—but sometimes, it just isn’t good enough. I also love looking someone in the eye and seeing that they «get it.» Last week, I flew to San Francisco on short notice for this very reason—to make sure my meaning was received and understood clearly. I didn’t want to fly cross-country for a four-hour meeting, but I did anyway, because it was that important.

How often do you send an email or leave a voice mail when you would be better served by interacting face-to-face? It’s tempting to hide behind email. But vital nuances can easily fall through the cracks. What about your people? I spoke to a friend about this the other day and he said this about his managers, «I tell them to call someone and they send an instant message. They are missing my entire point.»

Misunderstandings cost money. For that reason alone, we must work to eliminate them. Always remember the «understand receipt» function when you are communicating with someone—no matter what method you are using.

How to make change stick

How to Make Change Stick

Well, I’ve talked about ‘mindsets’, and I’ve talked about ‘groupthink’. So what am I saying: that all you need to pay attention to if you want to produce effective change in your team or your organisation is the attitudes, values and beliefs of yourself and the people you work with?

The Balancing Act

Not at all. There are two clear groups of factors to take into account if you want to make the changes stick and produce outstanding results quickly, efficiently and permanently: the ‘internal’, and the ‘external’. And there’s a sensitive balance to strike when you consider which to pay attention to at any given time.

‘Internal’ factors include people’s mindsets, and ‘groupthink’, together with the attitudes, values, perceptions, feelings and beliefs that dictate how people think individually and in groups. Most importantly, these ‘internal’ factors colour how people react to change in the world about them, including the organisation they work in.

‘External’ refers to what the organisation needs to change. These are the concrete, tangible structures, processes and systems that are needed in an organisation of any size to make it work effectively. Examples include organisation structures, salary schemes, IT systems, and business processes.

In my experience, one of two things happens when most leaders think about developing their organisation. The first is that the instinctive reaction is to focus on the ‘external’ factors — after all, these are generally tangible and concrete and capable of development using the skills many leaders have in abundance: planning, directing, implementing and analysing. Making visible efforts at change also demonstrates to their managers that ‘real’ change is happening. So we see over and over again new leaders, filled with the excitement of their new appointment, restructuring their team; or firing somebody and hiring in a person they knew in their previous job; or scrapping a system that has been used more or less effectively for some time, and installing the very latest thing they have read about.

The second thing that happens is that a leader recognises that his or her organisation is adequately equipped for the moment with the ‘external’ factors, and that the focus needs to move to bringing the hearts and minds of the people along with the changes. But they try to work on these ‘internal’ factors using the skills they know to work on the ‘external’ factors: information, analysis and presentation. Or they find the whole area too difficult and fraught with the possibility of disagreement or conflict, and retire quickly and with relief to restructuring and reengineering!

‘Internal’ and ‘external’ factors need to be focused on equally over time. If you as a leader do not attend to both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ factors and manage them with equal rigour, your change efforts will fail. To produce effective change in your organisation — that is, to produce enhanced results through the changes you introduce, requires that you develop your awareness and skill equally in both areas.

However perfect for your organisation’s current and future needs the process you design and install seems to be, if it fails to get buy in, or even alienates people, the change will fail to deliver. Better to ensure that you take the people with you who will make the changes work and deliver their intended results in the long run than to lose the passion, inspiration and commitment in your team and your business!

Tips for Making Change Stick

— Consciously design your projects, announcements and events to emphasise the integration of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ — separating these is common practice and a common reason for the failure of business transformation. For example, include in your Six Sigma workshops, restructuring announcements or SAP training an opportunity for people to express their concerns and fears. Include in your vision and strategy communication to your staff the opportunity for them to play with the ideas and to contribute their own version of how they would like to contribute to the effort. Consider running separate events for key teams to consider the consequences of new initiatives in their own work area.

— Listen. When listening to people’s opinions, concerns and complaints resist the temptation to argue, persuade, reassure and generally provide solutions that come from your mindset and your view of the world. People’s concerns and opinions only turn into resistance if they are not heard and respected. You’ll be surprised at how quickly people’s mindsets can shift.

— Role model what you want others to be and do. As a leader you are the best source of learning and adaptation to change in your organisation.

— Keep your word! Don’t make promises, especially early in the change process, that you’re not sure you can keep. Once trust is gone, it’s very hard indeed to rebuild.

— Repeat the key change messages as often, and in as many ways, as possible. Tell as many people as you can what the key changes are, the intention behind them, and the reasons for them. If they complain they don’t know what’s going on, it’s down to you!

— Recognise, celebrate and market internally any successes, especially early on. Let everyone know about great results and recognise those who made them happen.

How to be a soloist in business yet have the power of many brilliant and great minds

How to be a soloist in business yet have the power of many brilliant and great minds?

The path of an entrepreneur is never easy. Building a business is taxing to the mind, body and soul. Emotionally, the journey is like a roller-coaster ride with its crazy ups and downs. Physically, you have to spend a great deal of time working on your business, sacrificing spare time to exercise or to rejuvenate. And not to mention spending less time with your family and loved ones.

Does this resonate with you? I am sure it does. Most entrepreneurs are facing with these pressing problems and are unable to find a solution to turn this around. You become frustrated, you resort to working harder by putting more hours into your business and the results remain as frustrating as before.

To turn this around, to really starting working on your business and not in it, you have to learn the art of leverage over a business coach and mastermind groups!

Coaching and mastermind groups complement each other extremely well. While a coach serves to provide a mentor-student relationship, a mastermind group provides peer-to-peer support. And this leads to numerous benefits that will give you the edge over your competitors. There are 3 major benefits that you ought to be aware of.

Open-source Creativity

The business world changes as rapidly as the software world. In the open-source coding revolution where the source codes of softwares are openly shared, softwares evolved rapidly. Programmers are able to improve, adapt fix bugs at lightning speed, which adds massive value to the software. Similarly, a mastermind group is like the open-source revolution. By sharing ideas, knowledge and experience within a mastermind group, and leveraging on a coaching as a sounding board, you are able to develop new ideas from your existing core ideas, success will begin to expound exponentially.

Mastermind group levels the playing field.

The business battle field is never equal. You got to be keenly competitive to start and build a thriving business. And this requires you to develop your core expertise but at the same time, develop multiple skills and knowledge databases. Mastermind group empowers you to do so with much more ease. A meeting of minds from a diversified field of expertise adds perspective, depth, experience and knowledge to the person being masterminded. The only requirement is that you have to be receptive, and become a dry and thirsty sponge ready to absorb the input. Leave the analysis to a later time. Do this and you can level the playing field in a much shorter time.

Coaching builds up confidence and competence.

Individual coaching is an example of situational leadership at work. It aims to mentor one-on-one building up the confidence of members by affirming good performance during regular feedbacks; and increase competence by helping the member assess his/her strengths and weaknesses towards career planning and professional development. Depending on the individual’s level of competence and commitment, a leader may exercise more coaching behavior for the less-experienced members. Usually, this happens in the case of new members. The coach does more hand holding at the beginning with the mastermind group members but gradually exercises less clearly defined instructions as the mastermind group builds up confidence and competence.

Bill McCartney once said, ‘All coaching is, is taking a player where he can’t take himself.’ Both coaching and mastermind group serves this purpose and that is to take a business owner to a higher level of thinking and maturity and his business to more profits.

So if you are working alone or planning to do so, why not leverage such that you shorten the learning curve and increase your chances to grasp success earlier?

About the Author

Joel Chue
Expert Author in the topic Mastermind groups

How Can Ordinary People Leverage a Mastermind Group System to Produce Extraordinary Results Over and Over Again?

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Joel Chue @ http://www.mastermind-your-way-to-success.com

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Kaizen blitz for industrial crm

Kaizen Blitz for Industrial Crm

According to manufacturing journalist Thomas R. Cutler in a recent issue of Industrial Focus magazine, «Manufacturers all face a similar challenge: a complex sale that often requires a team selling approach. In every industrial organization one finds internal representatives, outside representatives, managers, technical specialist, distributors, and customer service professionals. Often this team manages several product lines with thousands of specific items and interacts with numerous influencers who affect the sale. During the lengthy sales process the team does their best to manage this complex environment, producing notes, sales call reports, quote logs, memos, faxes, e-mails, and customer service reports, however the information is almost always fragmented. There is rarely one central database of customer information that can be accessed and shared among the people who need it to efficiently do their jobs. As a result, acting less like a team, these people act independently when conducting business and are far less effective. «

According to Larry Caretsky, President of Commence (www.commence.com/mfg), an industrial customer relationship management (CRM) firm, «CEO’s of these companies often share how their new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system provides them all the information they need, but fail to recognize that ERP systems provide information after the sale, not before or during the sales process. ERP systems provide no value for improving the efficiency of how to sell and service customers. This is one reason that forecast reports are always inaccurate.»

Industrial senior executives avoid addressing a customer-centric approach including the misconception that an accounting system provides the information needed; they provide only post sale information. The pre-sales process and information drives the sale.

Manufacturers do not resist funding back-end ERP systems; however the front-end CRM solutions often make a substantial impact on reducing new customer acquisition cost and improving sales efficiency by first addressing data capture, data consolidation, and data sharing.

Commence offers industrial companies complete «Freedom of Choice» to select the solutions and platform that best meets the business requirements of manufacturers and distributors. The comprehensive CRM Industrial application suite is available for use on premise or on-demand as a hosted service. Industrial leaders often build departmental CRM solutions with the award winning Commence Industrial CRM Framework. These choices are why so many industrial companies choose Commence as the solution for managing customer relationships. All Commence Industrial solutions support mobile or wireless connectivity and integration to back-office accounting and ERP systems.