Category Archives: English
How To Be Memorable in Business
The formula to success? Being memorable. Throughout our lives we constantly encounter people from many walks of life. Often though, we only remember a select few of those folks. 
Why are some more memorable than others? Why were they more interesting and seemingly more distinguished from the countless others you spoke with that day? The answer is relatively simple: they planted the seeds in your mind that made them take root in your memory. That is some powerful stuff, because if you too can make people remember you – you, by default, will stand out. And it’s the stand outs who garner all the business.
1. Better Is Not Better. Different Is Better. It is hard to be better. Even when you are, no one really cares. If you are a little faster (your deliver proposals 30 minutes earlier), a little more polished (you wear the modern skinny tie, when your competition still wears last years wide tie), a little more professional (you send a thank you note after visiting a prospects office) – you’re clearly better, but it will go unnoticed.
It’s the extremes that get noticed. If you are going to compete on being better, you need to be way better or way faster or way more professional. That’s not hard, that is way hard. To be way better, takes tremendous effort and expenditures that you may not be ready to take on.
But there is another way. Instead of being way better, trying being different. It is usually significantly easier to do. If your industry is stuffy, be the casual guy. If your industry is casual, be the unwavering professional. The goal is to stand out from the status quo. If you want to be memorable, different beats better, by a long shot. View the rest of this posting
NBC Paid $1.2 Billion to Broadcast the London Olympics. Where Does That Money Go?
NBC paid the International Olympic Committee a record $1.18 billion for the U.S. broadcast rights to the 2012 London Games and $4.38 billion for the four Olympics from 2014-2020. What does the IOC do with all that cash?
According to the IOC’s Olympic Marketing Fact File:
The IOC distributes over 90% of Olympic marketing revenue to organizations throughout the Olympic Movement, in order to support the staging of the Olympic Games and to promote the worldwide development of sport. The IOC retains under 10% of Olympic marketing revenue for the operational and administrative costs of governing the Olympic Movement.
Broadcast rights—particularly U.S. broadcast rights—are the main source of the IOC’s Olympic marketing revenues, which also include money from top-tier sponsorships, ticketing and licensing. From 2005-2008, broadcast rights provided the IOC with $2.57 billion—nearly half of its total revenues—and roughly 60% of that total came from NBC. In large part thanks to the escalating cost of broadcast rights, IOC President Jacques Rogge announced last week that the IOC’s reserves have grown from $105M to $558M since 2001. View the rest of this posting
When It’s the Time for Plan B
Two months after launching Brand Thunder, Patrick Murphy sensed that sales were sluggish because he was charging too high a fee for his sole product, a 
customized Web browser.
So he temporarily slashed the price by more than 75% and gave the product new, income-generating features, including ads and a search tool, by forming partnerships with other businesses.
The original fee “was a leap for something that wasn’t proven,” says Mr. Murphy, who started the Dublin, Ohio, company in 2007 in anticipation of a pink slip from a large Internet company. “We had to be nimble enough to make that change or this business would not be here today. It was live or die.”
Start-ups don’t always evolve according to plan. Some end up targeting the wrong market, while others get sidelined by unforeseen competitors. To avoid failure, experts say it’s critical for owners to quickly identify what’s obstructing them and come up with a solution that sticks. View the rest of this posting
It’s not the type of advice you would usually expect from the head of an elite university. In an open letter to his son published last November, Pier Luigi Celli, director general of Rome’s LUISS University, wrote, “This country, your country, is no longer a place where it’s possible to stay with pride … That’s why, with my heart suffering more than ever, my advice is that you, having finished your studies, take the road abroad. Choose to go where they still value loyalty, respect and the recognition of merit and results.”Why So Many People Can’t Make Decisions
Some people meet, fall in love and get married right away. Others can spend hours in the sock aisle at the department store, weighing the pros and cons of buying a pair of wool argyles instead of cotton striped.
Seeing the world as black and white, in which choices seem clear, or shades of gray can affect people’s path in life, from jobs and relationships to which political candidate they vote for, researchers say. People who often have conflicting feelings about situations—the shades-of-gray thinkers—have more of what psychologists call ambivalence, while those who tend toward unequivocal views have less ambivalence.
High ambivalence may be useful in some situations, and low ambivalence in others, researchers say. And although people don’t fall neatly into one camp or the other, in general, individuals who tend toward ambivalence do so fairly consistently across different areas of their lives.
For decades psychologists largely ignored ambivalence because they didn’t think it was meaningful. The way researchers studied attitudes—by asking participants where they fell on a scale ranging from positive to negative—also made it difficult to tease apart who held conflicting opinions from those who were neutral, according to Mark Zanna, a University of Waterloo professor who studies ambivalence. (Similarly, psychologists long believed it wasn’t necessary to examine men and women separately when studying the way people think.)
Different Strokes
PEOPLE WHO SEE THE WORLD AS BLACK AND WHITE TEND TO…
- Speak their mind or make quick decisions.
- Be more predictable in making decisions (e.g., who they vote for).
- Be less anxious about making wrong choices.
- Have relationship conflicts that are less drawn out.
- Be less likely to consider others’ points of view.
PEOPLE WHO SEE THE WORLD IN SHADES OF GRAY TEND TO….
- Procrastinate or avoid making decisions if possible.
- Feel more regret after making decisions.
- Be thoughtful about making the right choice.
- Stay longer in unhappy relationships.
- Appreciate multiple points of view. View the rest of this posting
10 Mistakes That Start-Up Entrepreneurs Make
When it comes to starting a successful business, there’s no surefire playbook that contains the winning game plan.
On the other hand, there are about as many mistakes to be made as there are entrepreneurs to make them.
Recently, after a work-out at the gym with my trainer—an attractive young woman who’s also a dancer/actor—she told me about a web series that she’s producing and starring in together with a few friends. While the series has gained a large following online, she and her friends have not yet incorporated their venture, drafted an operating agreement, trademarked the show’s name or done any of the other things that businesses typically do to protect their intellectual property and divvy up the owners’ share of the company. While none of this may be a problem now, I told her, just wait until the show hits it big and everybody hires a lawyer.
Here, in my experience, are the top 10 mistakes that entrepreneurs make when starting a company:
1. Going it alone. It’s difficult to build a scalable business if you’re the only person involved. True, a solo public relations, web design or consulting firm may require little capital to start, and the price of hiring even one administrative assistant, sales representative or entry-level employee can eat up a big chunk of your profits. The solution: Make sure there’s enough margin in your pricing to enable you to bring in other people. Clients generally don’t mind outsourcing as long as they can still get face time with you, the skilled professional who’s managing the project.
2. Asking too many people for advice. It’s always good to get input from experts, especially experienced entrepreneurs who’ve built and sold successful companies in your industry. But getting too many people’s opinions can delay your decision so long that your company never gets out of the starting gate. The answer: Assemble a solid advisory board that you can tap on a regular basis but run the day-to-day yourself. Says Elyissia Wassung, chief executive of 2 Chicks With Chocolate Inc., a Matawan, N.J., chocolate company, “Pull in your [advisory] team for bi-weekly or, at the very least, monthly conference calls. You’ll wish you did it sooner!”
3. Spending too much time on product development, not enough on sales. While it’s hard to build a great company without a great product, entrepreneurs who spend too much time tinkering may lose customers to a competitor with a stronger sales organization. “I call [this misstep] the ‘Field of Dreams’ of entrepreneurship. If you build it, they will buy it,” says Sanjyot Dunung, CEO of Atma Global, Inc., a New York software publisher, who has made this mistake in her own business. “If you don’t keep one eye firmly focused on sales, you’ll likely run out of money and energy before you can successfully get your product to market.” View the rest of this posting
