Twitter 2.0

Twitter Related Sites

Why Tweet? Promote your business, Promote your blog or website, establish a virtual call center, get followers, build network, get ideas, get information, become popular , have fun.

Tweet from your desktop: Use a third party twitter client like twhirl or seesmic to avoid the effort of having to login to the twitter browser each time.

Tweet from your mobile: Press the devices tab under “Settings”, enter your phone number and click the checkbox that allows you to receive tweets on your phone as SMS messages. You’ll then receive a code. Send that code to 40404 in the US, 5566511 in India and your phone will be set up for tweeting.

Definition1: Social media is a publishing revolution.
Definition 2: Perhaps the best definition of social media is content that has been created by its audience. People create content, content creates conversations and conversations create communities.
Twi-facts : The top 10 twitter users had more than 80 followers and were following more than 70 people.
Twistory:It takes a special push to get a social media snowballing to a size big enough for everyone to feel comfortable about climbing on board. For facebook it was its marketing at Harvard and from there to other universities.
For twitter it was the boost it received with its SXSW award.

Kick Starting our Twitter journey:

1. At twitter your username’s not just a user name, it forms a part of your url and will be visible whenever you promote your twitter page. (e.g. twitter.com/billgates, twitter.com/stevejobs etc)
2. One Line Bio- Talk about any project you are currently on or give a more generic bio in terms of [Professional Description 1][professional description 2][personal description]. E.g.wedding photographer; creative artist, who likes to photograph his kids at embarrassing moments.

3. The most powerful way to win followers on twitter is to follow them yourself. Look for all your friends ,colleagues, contacts on Twitter and start following them.
4. Social media is all about personal branding, which means you need to present yourself well, which means have a nice and an apt profile picture.
5. Your sidebar is actually an ad. It functions much like google ad sense.
Background design:
1. Use photoshop or paint.net or gimp
2. Download a free template from box.net /shared/lgw2pz4gso
3. Twitterpatterns.com
4. Grungetextures.com
If you are following my tweets and I reply to someone else you are following, you’ll see that message when you log on to your twitter. But if I reply to someone you’re not following, you can only see that message by looking at my timeline.
5. Websites have users, Facebook has friends and Twitter has followers.
6. Whatever you are doing on the internet , produce content that’s interesting, fun and valuable.
Find experts on a topic related to yours and encourage them to follow you, and you’ll be giving yourself a massive and valuable network.
7. If you want to keep track of what people are saying on twitter about your products or your company, simply search for that keyword and then save the search.
8. Put your twitter name in your signatures.

Tweet your blog: If you are looking to show your posts on any other kind of web site though, an even easier option is to click the “goodies” link at the bottom of twitter’s pages. Choose “widgets” and you’ll be able to select a module to place on your web page.
Two ways to initiate a conversation on twitter:
1. Reply to queries
2. Ask for information
Classic Tweets: This is what I am doing now. E.g. Don’t just say “ I am cooking now”, say “ what you think about it as well or something else”
Opinion Tweets: This is what I am thinking now
Mission Accomplished Tweets: This is what I’ve just done
Entertainment Tweets: “I’m making you laugh now”
Question Tweets: Can you help me do something now?
Picture Tweets: Look at what I’ve been doing
Using Twitter for Product launches and also as a micro helpdesk
Corporate tweets that try to build brands tend to fall into 4 broad categories:
1. Company News
2. Customer Support
3. Feedback
4. Special Offers
One of the most important check points before releasing news about your company is to
take the “Who Cares” test.
***mystarbucksidea
Promoting a blog on twitter- pg 184

The Secret - by Rhonda Byrne

Choice Quotes

Choice Words/Phrases

The Secret

One of the most powerful laws of the universe, the law of attraction, has been extended in this book to a thought level with the understanding that thoughts have frequency and that like attracts like.
If you want to change anything in life, change the channel and change the frequency by changing your thoughts. The law of attraction will give you what you are thinking. The law is unmistakable.

In essence ,What you think is what you get but there needs to be clarity and positivity in your thoughts. It is important to think and feel about what you want rather than what you do not want for it can lead to very different results. e.g. You get 1 million dollars in a lottery and from then on start thinking about increasing the wealth manifold you would attract more wealth into your life . On the contrary if you start thinking of how to keep the money safe and You begin to think of various possible ways of losing it and how not to lose it.Now, by the law of attraction, you would start attracting events that match your thoughts, which means you might attract events that would steal away your money. Same holds good for competition in life. By the law of attraction, as you compete you will attract many people and circumstances to compete against you in every single aspect of your life, and in the end you will lose.

It is therefore pivotally important to think right. The author recommends Meditation as a means to quiet your mind and revitalize your thoughts. It is important to give up negative thoughts and meditation can be a powerful tool jst for that. Negative thoughts will attract more negativity into your lives and more negative scenarios.
Secret shifters are another tool that the author recommends - things that can suddenly bring positive feelings and positive thoughts to you. It can be a funny incident, it can be your baby’s smile, your top achievements, the person you love etc. Keep a list of these and use them as you realize your moving into a negative zone.
Use the Power of gratitude: Thank for what you’ve already got. Feeling good about what you already have is a positive feeling and will help you attract more positive feelings .

Use the Powerful process of visualization : Visualizations can get you closer to feeling and it is the feeling that really creates the attraction

Moral of the story: Begin to expect great things and as you do, you will create your life in advance.
So your purpose is what you say it is and your mission is the mission you give yourself

Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Fooled by Randomness

For those of us that have come to believe of things that anything can be done and that there’s nothing called randomness will need to re-think. Most of us tend to believe in the correctness of our strategy or the path taken based on the previous success. The key question is, how much of our previous success can vouch for the future. For eg. You have been getting 30% + returns on your portfolio over the last 5 years, is it fine to say that you have beaten the markets and that you know how to make 30%+ for ever. This is where the author begs to differ from the rest of us mortals. How many cases do we see of rags to riches and riches to rags? Is it appropriate for us to shed our caution and say “we have done this before, we know about it”.

Randomness
Lucky fools never think or realize that they have been lucky. They act as if they deserved the money. Lets take the example of Russian roulette, where there’s only one bullet in the gun and the gun is placed point blank to the person and the trigger is pulled. There’s a 1 in 6 probability that the bullet goes and the person loses L(L for life). Let us say a few thousand people try this. You’ll have a large number of survivors based on probability. But this does not nullify the danger in the game. These survivors have survived not because of their strategy or skill. It’s sheer luck.

Rendezvous with Randomness:
In the aftermath of the 1st world war, a few poets got together in cafes and performed this exercise. Each one would write on a piece of paper a pre-determined part of a sentence, not knowing other’s choice. The first would pick an adjective, the second a noun, the third a verb, the fourth an adjective, and the fifth a noun. After the exercise a really poetic sentence came out and that was “ The exquisite cadavers shall drink the new wine”. A totally random exercise.
We can find myriad accounts of traders building success and reputation in seven years and blowing it all up in seven days. Some of these traders estimate such an event to be a ten sigma event, with a probability of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. The market fall need not have been catastrophic but their leverages must have been.

The difference between probability and probability times the payoff: It is very important for one to be aware of the difference. Probability vs. expectation.
Eg. There is a 80% probability that the stock will go up by 2% and 20% probability that it will go down by 10%. Where would you bet? This is a very important diffence that traders need to understand. It is not just the probability, one needs to pay heed to probability times the payoff. Its fine if you lose 1 % 5 times and get 10% once. The latter is still the better.
Sometimes market data becomes a trap: Currencies/stocks that have shown greatest stability are prone to greatest volatility in a rare event. Eg. the peso problem

Our hindsight suffers from short sight- People tend to remember the immediate past and the immediate environments and when they say “it has never happened before’, it is generally applicable to a narrow time frame or environment.
“Why do we consider the worst case that took place in our lives as the worst possible case?”
Rare events are always unexpected, otherwise they would not occur. That’s the author’s speciality. The rare events with a extremely large pay-off.

The black swans are the rare events. No number of white swans can prove that all swans are white whereas on black swan can disprove the theory that all swans are white. It is the example vs. counter example.

Similarly 20 years of statistical data cannot prove that “ On a single day, markets do not fall by more than 20%”, whereas one instance of a market falling by more than 20% can disprove the earlier made theory. Where we are arriving at is the point that gigabytes and tera bytes of data and statistical analysis cannot prove much while one event can disprove an age-old theory. So the fact that so many of our experts talk about statistical inferences might be proved wrong on one good day.
So, the point here is, historical data has limited value. Don’t be blown away by the historical evidences in life.

Statistical Scams: How many people that you know might have got letters from some company xyz, stating that we are bullish on the market for the next one month and you realize he’s right and this has happened over the past three months and you subscribe.
Lets see how this can be done. Company XYZ sends newsletters to 2000 contacts. For 1000 of them, bullish view on market and the other 1000 bearish. The market turns to be bullish. Great. Next month he selects the 1000 contacts who got it right(bullish ones) and send to 500 of them a bullish view and the 500 a bearish view. This time the market turns to be bearish. Great. 500 of them got it right the second time as well. The third time, he sends bullish to 250 and bearish to 250 of the 500 that got it right last time. This time again, 250 of them get it right. In principle, these 250 people got his advice right all three times and that is a good statistical record. Beware you subscribe to anonymous mailers

Nonlinaerity: Our brain is not quite comfortable with non-linearity. It is tuned to the cause and effect model. It needs connections. This happened because of that or because of this, which needs to happen and when that “that” does not happen, we are confused. Most of the events are non linear in nature. Eg.one may own a security that benefits from benefits from lower market prices, but may not react at all until some critical point. Most people give up before the rewards.

Noise: & Finance Sites:
· Dow is up 1.03 on lower interest rates
· Dollar down 0.12 yen on higher Japanese surplus.
The first one is noise. 1.03 points on dow is like less than 0.1% . This has happened because of lower interest rates!!! The 1 point move on an index close to 11000.??

Gist: Most of us like "Neo" - the hero in matrix would not like to believe that we dont have control over our destiny. Neverthess..let us not ignore the importance to randomness in the events and not getting carried away by our previous/historical success, as if we have found the secret formula for perpetual success .The idea is not to bring in the philosophy of fate, but the understanding of the fact that rare events are not predictable and no amount of the post mortem studies and analysis can make a black swan easily prdictable. We will keep having unexpected and rare events. So..it is important to be aware of this tuth and be prepared and perhaps even take advantage of these, like Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who makes his millions betting on these kind of events. So lets behave like mere mortals allowing ourselves the ability to contradict ourselves. It’s ok, if you thought something today and something changes then your opinion could change. Start everyday on a clean slate, like George Soros. and be prepared for the rare event which might have never occured before, but can occur in the future.

Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres

Choice Words/Phrases

Super crunchers is a book on how we can make a variety of predictions based on number crunching. You’d be surprised to know the power of super crunching. The kind of predictions it can make and the accuracy with which it can make are worth a consideration. You may not be able to predict a stock price and make quick money out of it, but you can definitely use crunching to predict a whole lot of things.

The wine prediction:
Orley challenged the wine quality prediction techniques (swishing and spitting) that had been in place for ages and how was that? Regression? (Wine Quality = 12.145+0.00117 winter rainfall+ 0.0614 average growing season temp – 0.00386). Orley found that low levels of harvest rain and high average summer temperatures produce the greatest wines. In years when the summer is particularly hot, grapes get ripe, which lowers their acidity, while in years when there is below- average rainfall the fruit gets concentrated. So it’s in the hot and dry years that you tend to get the legendary vintages.
The point is – the use of number crunching/statistical analysis to make complex predictions. That’s what “Super Crunchers” is about. Super crunching gets together a combination of size (terabytes- 1000 gigabytes & Petabyte (1000 terabytes)), speed and scale.
Data is power- call it the data empowered businesses. Companies that can leverage this will definitely have an edge over their non data friendly peers. Super crunching leads you to data driven decision taking.

Let’s take a peep into our day to day impacts of the data crunching:
1) iTunes lists the top downloaded songs
2) Delicious lists the most popular internet bookmarks
3) Netflix can recommend different movies to different people
4) eHarmony recommends people that are very similar to you
5) Google pre-picking the web pages based on your previous browsing habits etc
6) CapitalOne’s proactive call center and algorithms enables them to answer some of your questions even before you ask them. When their customer calls them for cancelling the account, they are re-directed either to a cancelling system/person or to retention specialist based on the client profitability and myriad other factors.
7) Visa with a little mining of my credit card charges can make a guess of whether I’l divorce in the next five years

Generating Data:
One can generate random data using ( =rand()) function in MS Excel. The random data thus generated can be used to gather insights
Randomized testing can be done with any policy that can be applied to some people and leave the rest. It cannot be applied to things such as a space shuttle launch or the federal rates determination etc., where we cannot randomly pick some people and assign them high interest rates, keeping the interest rates low for the rest. However there are dozens of other business/government situations to which randomized testing can be applied and make better predictions based on the randomized trial results.Should Google buy Youtube? This kind of question too cannot be readily answered by Super crunching. Super crunching requires analysis of the results of repeated decisions.
Evidence based Medicine: Misdiagnosis accounts for about 1/3rd of all medical error.
Marketing crunchers predict what products you will want to buy. Randomized studies predict how you’ll respond to a prescription drug.
Why are humans bad at making predictions? The human mind tends to suffer from a number of cognitive failings and biases that distort our ability to predict accurately e.g. people give too much weight to unusual events that seem salient( such as murders over more common and more dangerous deaths) etc.
So how about both? Traditional experts make better decisions when supplemented with results from a statistical prediction. In several studies, the most accurate way to exploit traditional experience is to merely add the expert evaluation as an additional factor in the statistical algorithm.
Fine then, what’s left for us to do? Hypothesize. What is left for us and for our intuition is to determine the variables that need to be used in the statistical analysis. The hunches of humans are still crucial in deciding on what to test and what not to test. Humans also play a vital role in collecting the right data for the analysis. Intuition can be treated as a pre-cursor to super crunching.
Epagogix has a neural network to try to predict a movie’s receipts based primarily on the characteristics of the script.
Understand numbers, understand standard deviation, get smart, speak more than yes or no….understand that Supercrunching is a complement to intuition. At the end of the day, the aim is to be able to make better choices in life—intuition or otherwise.

SD: There’s a 95% probability that a normal variable will lie within two standard deviations from the mean.
e.g. For every 100 people who work in the IT sector, an average of 40 people suffer from high cholesterol, with a SD of 10, meaning to say that, 20-60 people suffer from high cholesterol in 95%of the cases(different lots of 100 people).

Tipping Point- by Malcolm Gladwell

Choice Words/Phrases

Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses. They are like epidemics. This is the concept of the tipping point.
The three characteristics of an epidemic:
1. Contagiousness
2. Little changes causing dramatic effects
3. Change happens not gradually, but suddenly
Supporting stats:
In 1992, there were 2154 murders in NYC and 626,182 serious crimes, with the epicentre at Brownsville and East NY. But then, it tipped and it tipped suddenly at some point. Within five years, murders had dropped 64.3 % to 770 and total crimes by about 50% to 355,893.
Now, why is it that some ideas or behaviors or products start epidemics and others don’t???
The three agents of change according to Gladwell
1. Law of the Few
2. Stickiness Factor
3. Power of Context
Most of us know the 80/20 rule. This becomes even more extreme for epidemics. Something like 90/10 or maybe higher.


Law of the Few: Social epidemics of most kinds require some special rare people with rare skillsets to trigger off. This is the law of the few. The few that trigger a social epidemic.
There are three kinds of these rare people : The connectors ( These are the people that connect us to the world. They can just introduce any two people, they know a lot of them. They could just intro you to your prospective boss etc), The mavens ( Data banks. These are the people that know too much about the products in the market. They are walking reviews or databases. They can with authority suggest you products) and the Salesmen( The likable convincing friendly neighbour, rational, coherent and one that can convince you to go for something)

Stickiness Factor:
This refers to the stickiness of the message. Stickiness is about how sticky it is, how long it can stick in people’s mind, how much of the mindspace can it occupy and how long. The message’s stickiness can be enhanced in a variety of ways ( Repetition, Innovation, Catchy, Humor, Sentiment, Attention span etc). An advertiser better understands this. For the message to spread like an epidemic, it needs the stickiness.

Power of Context
What really matter is the little things. Small things can bring in a different context. E.g. there’s a theory that predicts the behavior among humans based on their order of birth. The older sibling happens to be domineering and conservative, while the younger ones creative and rebellious. The context changes if, these kids are away from home. The older siblings are no more likely to be conservative or domineering while the younger ones no longer rebellious or creative.
Another interesting example is the “broken window theory”. If a town has a broken window which is unattended to, there sets in a sense that no one cares and no one dares or that no one is in charge). This will result in more broken windows, which in turn will return the anarchy to roads etc sending a signal that anything goes. This in due time will build up to more serious crime in the town.

The rule of 150: Another big-league concept is the group concept and how groups can trigger an epidemic. Groups influence us in big ways. We try to remain in the groups and our behavior is governed by the rules of the group. The Rule of 150 which is seemingly an optimum group size that can achieve sublime results in spreading epidemics. So next time you want to spread a social epidemic, forget not to have a close group with a size of about 150. If you conside the neo-cortex ratio(don’t ask me what) in humans, its about 147.8 approx 150 which indicates the max people with whom we can have a genuinely good social relationship.

The rule of 150 can be extended to office team size or your social group size. A group of size larger than 150 can be too large for close ties among its members.

So dear readers, beware the small Big things in life, a small push at the right point can tip off any big thing.

Executive Warfare - by David D'Alessandro

As you go higher up, the competition intensifies and to reach “the top” is gonna be truly tough. You may have multiple bosses to please, you have to manage some intricate network of relationships, people always judge you and its not always fair. You may be rising happily within an Organization for two decades and on a not so fine a day, you are backstabbed and ousted. Everything is possible.
At this point it is also not enough to be smart, hard-working and result oriented, because your competition would also possess these attributes. So it’s something like “What got you here, won’t get you there”. There’s a fundamental change in the game. You need to know when to take a shot at your rivals and when to react gracefully and importantly how to handle the many new influences on your trajectory.

Attitude, Risk and Luck:
Three things you’d need for this combat – The right attitude, a willingness to take calculated risks, and dumb luck.
Lets get to the Attitude part- Be the boss within. Feel like one, think like one. How do you do it?
1. Study, study and study. Study to the extent that you get a new dimension or perspective to the discussion. Ask questions about that dimension and you suddenly become the most valuable person in the room.
Eg. “ David once learned that his company was planning to invest in a joint venture with the Colombian govt. During the meeting, he asked “what happens to our investment if the guerillas destabilize the government or a civil war breaks out?”
A crucial perspective but ignored till then. The CEO was suddenly looking onto David for answers and he became the most valuable person in the room.
2. Keep your personal life, personal and do not embarrass yourself in public (avoid having a martini at a company event)
3. Get in a sense of humor.

Risk: Higher management is all about handling risks intelligently and in a calculated manner. Here, Risk is the name of the game.
“Every project in the world has a father or mother who decided to take the risk. AND Organizational memory is very sharp on this point as to who took that risk”
At the same time, the key is taking the risk in a calculated manner. It’s very dangerous not to be able to see the downside of something. You must know and see a project that you may want to kill. It’s like the stop-loss concept of the equity markets. Know when to exit and be bold about it.
Luck: After doing all the right things, one still needs the luck to get what you want. There will be times, when Luck is not by your side. So what can one do about it? There’s no real solution for this but the author believes that you can make your luck (at least partly).
In this context the author gives some tips to improve your luck.
If you are passed over for a promotion, think about trying a new instrument, like getting assigned to task forces across disciplines. Get exposure to different disciplines. Contribute in new ways. And to close this case for luck one very important closing point- Its critical to be at the right place. You stay too long at a place too rich in your skills, and you are giving a tough time for your luck to make you lucky. Whatever you may do, you stand a great chance of being neglected. So move on from such a place and find the right one.

Bosses: Make sure that you understand your boss’ goal (immediate goal and beyond that). It also helps to identify with your boss’ risk appetite. If he’s for safe play, then in all respect he’s gonna reward safe players over you. And assure your boss that you are loyal to him and discreet. It’s important to be the most trusted person in the boss’s stable. At the same time, you can tell him your needs and assure him your loyalty as long as he gives you the push you need. It’s ok to say “I’ll help you reach your own goals, but you have to do something for me, which is to push me along”.
Be the most trusted person but let him not get too dependable on you that will let him not leave you anywhere to explore.
Get into the right meetings: It is necessary for you to attend the right meetings. Whoever the powers are in your org. getting exposure to them is important.
In these meetings, if you’re able to answer questions that your boss may not know answers to- you have made yourself visible and your boss wouldn’t mind taking the credit for hiring a real smart person, like you.
Some other tips about your survival and your journey to the centre of the boardroom.
Tip 1: Don’t just hitch yourself with just one person. He may have a very short life span. Hitch yourself with as many people as you can.
Tip 2: Pay attention to the meetings you attend and try to understand the dynamics between your boss and the CEO/CXO. If from the body language you find some indifference or tension, it’s a signal that you are perhaps not under the best boss.

PEERS:
Beware the consigliore (some really trusted people of your bosses and have unfettered access to your bosses). They can do a lot of harm behind your back. There are ways to tackle them. 1) Identify the possible consigliore and feed them with wrong and different information. So, depending on the info. That reaches your boss, you know the actual culprit. You may then further tackle this by constantly proving the info. Provided by the consigliore to be wrong. At the same time, once you know whom the consigliore is, you may deal with him in such a way that he passes on good inputs about you and that can really work for your advantage.
You will have enemies and they will be underhanded. What you really have to defend against are the water cooler campaigns (rumors about you). The really shrewd enemies will try to weave a theme using a series of stories about you.
You will have to tackle this wisely. If the rumor is a lie, calmly make the facts known. Also expose as little of your personal life as possible. Keep people who will not hesitate to give you candid feedback.
RIVALS:
The people above you are watching how you behave with your rivals. The top management wants to know how you tackle your rivals. It’s important to be an incremental player. Build your reputation steadily and dimensionally.
It’s good to know you rival’s weaknesses and it’s better when you show the world how you do not have the same weakness and how you can handle such situations better. In this book, David mentions of a case where the employee was an alcoholic and his rival decided to fire him whereas David gave the employee a helping hand and even sent him to a rehabilitation center at company’s expense, because the employee was a valued asset to the company, nevertheless keeping his bosses apprised of the case on a regular basis. This differentiation gives you the edge over your rival.
Ask your Rivals, pointed questions in meetings. They can disconcert your rival and will help you understand his weaknesses. “With one sharp, pertinent question you can raise the bar for your rival, open up a new line of inquiry that he will now have to face persistently’”
Organizational etiquette can be foolish at times; you should risk breaking it once in a while.
Appreciate your rival in front of the management if he has done a brilliant job.
If you have to shoot your rival, kill him- don’t leave him wounded and if you lose to your rival, leave the place or department or whatever. It’s not easy to work under your rivals.

The Team You build: I will not delve into this. I shall rather give it in a few points the gist of this chapter
a) Pick your own team
b) Be deliberate about bringing in outsiders
c) Hire people who are unlike yourself
d) Don’t be a bigot
e) Avoid hiring people who are mirthless
f) Beware of Yes- men
g) When it comes to Layoffs, some flexibility is only right.

The people you have to Motivate:
Respect their years of experience. Mere resentment will set in if you pretend to understand in a few weeks what they have spent half a lifetime learning.
When in doubt, simplify the issues, stay out of the details, and make sure your experts know that you will hold them accountable for the outcome.
Encourage your people to bring bad news to you individually so that they are not ashamed in public or not bring in the news at the right time for fear of ridicule.
Remove the blood clots mercilessly. Blood clots are the people who try to hinder your initiatives, rebel against your decisions, cut you out of the decision-making etc
As you move higher up. You will need to keep your door ajar (keeping em’ completely open will invite too many ppl unnecessarily and a lot of time waste). You cannot afford to listen to your employees pouring their heart out but at the same time, it’s not good to have an idea of their personal lives (whether or not they have kids and if so, how many etc)
“Loyalty is about gratitude, not Patriotism.” You build loyalty by helping each member of your team, individually, get where they want to go”
eg: You really need the services of an employee for 2 more years, but he’s now leaving the org. It really helps for you to know that all he really sought is an 80-foot boat and move to Florida in his retirement.
Yu can then say “ Look, I’l ensure you get your 80-foot bat. I’l bonus you, option you, or enhance your pension, whatever it takes for you to get your boat. But I’l need two years of your services” It’s a hard to resist deal. Isn’t it?
Many such examples as these. Another very important thing is to stand by your employees during difficult times. E.g. Flying down to pay your respects to someone dear to your employee or rending a helping hand for their family medical problems etc build a long lasting loyalty which does not happen over a cup of beer or cocktail.
Outsiders with Influence:
· Clients like babies need attention
· If an important client is at a meting in your building, drop in.
· Share your official and personal contact numbers
· Consigliore to them – advise them, listen to them, stand by them( never discuss your internal organizational issues though)
· Solve their problems, not just business problems but also their personal problems.. Do not however make it embarrassing by sending birthday greetings or lavish gifts etc.
· “Let your bosses know straight out that if they don’t promote you at some point, you will walk and much of the gold will walk with you”.
· Tread carefully with the extended family
· Try and be a part of the same club or share the same hair dresser etc. this kind of info. is very crucial
Culture:
Remain culturally sensitive and try and build a culture of openness, not a culture of fear.
The New Bosses- The Journalists:
Talk to your reporters regularly; do not however give interviews unprepared
Don’t soliloquize in interviews. Give short answers that cannot b taken out of context
“If you are getting really good press, some reporters will be contrarians just to stand out from the crowd. Pay heed to them and explain them, if possible meet them personally.
Be available to a reporter both when you have a positive story and a negative story.
Leave your plush office and visit their sparse govt. offices just to introduce yourself.
Show composure when aggressively questioned

Whale Done

Whale done is about improving your relationships at work, and at home following the training methodology imparted to killer whales. We all know how life-threatening a whale can be. Yet there is a group of whale trainers who play with whales and make them perform breathtaking feats on a daily basis. Ken Blanchard( the author) takes cues from the whale trainers and depicts in this book as to how these techniques can be used to better human relationships.
Lets navigate and absorb the essence of this killer shark training techniques.
Two lovers at a dining table – enraptured in each other’s company, lost in each other’s eyes and ignorant of what’s happening around. – Undivided attention is whats present in this case. As relationships mature, most of us get into ‘Gotcha’ mode. The gotcha mode according to Ken is about catching people doing things wrong. This is the root cause of deterioration in relatioships. The final demise of a relationship begins when you do something right but you are still yelled at for not doing it right enough. You had to ask me...You should have done it earlier blah blah blah..So how do we avoid this Gotcha thing and move ahead? – Whale Done techniques.
I shall in the next few pages walk you through these techniques:

T1: Accentuate the Positive
T2: Redirect the energy when mistakes occur

What do these thing mean? T1 essentially is the opposite of Gotcha mode- the Whale Done mode. T1 is about focussing on the things done right( however small or even if it is slightly irrelevant to the task at hand).
How do we do T1?
a. Wake up and say something positive when everything is going well
b. Praise progress (don’t wait for the end result)
c. Praise immediately
d. Be specific about what they did right or almost right
e. Share your positive feelings about what they did
f. Encourage them to keep up the good work
g. Never assume you know what motivates a person (It is avoidable to motivate people with money and animals with food). There are very many other things to motivate people/ animals with. Eg. One thing animals like is a rub on their stomach or a pat on their head or a long ride in a car.
T2: is avoiding the gotcha. In case mistakes occur, redirect the energy and build trust.
How do we T2?
a. Describe the error or problem as soon as possible , clearly and without blame
b. Show its negative impact
c. If appropriate take the blame for not making the task clear
d. Go over the task and ensure that it is clearly understood
e. Express your continuing trust and confidence in the person.
You’ve gotta read the book, for some examples on using Whale Done!!!!

Whale Done, everybody.