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4 Success Habits (Mr. Gray’s speech page 6 paraphrased)

I read this 9 page speech by Mr. Gray as part of Bob Proctor’s bonus materials on a success website. I don’t think the speech is well-written but the truth about achieving success is painfully clear. I am paraphrasing a small part of it, and invite you to email me for the full text.  As an added piece of inspiration, Tony Robbins audio clip about Sylvester Stallone and the making of Rocky is at the bottom.

If you are on a job hunt, or growing a business, I believe Mr. Gray provides great advice…

Reminder to Self:

4 Success Habits – (paraphrased from pg. 6 of Mr. Gray’s speech)

persuading/calling/contacting/working

It’s easier to persuade someone to a particular course of action, than to find someone who already wants to do it. So if you lack contacts interested in what you do, then you have unconsciously formed the habit of limiting your contacts to people who already want what you offer. Contacting people who need what you offer, (regardless of their “wants”) is the path to success; and they may also be a source of referrals.

If you don’t call on people who are able to do what you want, but may be unwilling to listen, then you have unconsciously formed the habit of limiting yourself to calling on people who are willing to listen, but may be unable to do what you want. What’s the worst that can happen, and does that involve my pride and ego?

Successful people form the habit of calling on people determined to help them see why its in their best interest to take action. If you don’t do that when calling on people, then you have unconsciously formed the habit of calling on people when you are in a state of mind, willing to let them convince you of their reasons for not taking action.

Working habits according to Mr. Gray take care of themselves if the other 3 habits are looked after. I think they take work too as I can procrastinate with the best of them. Follow ups and persistence need work. I try and make a mental note of how you feel when you are working hard, and getting things done. I know I feel better.

Speaking of mental notes I find that making a mental note of how you feel the instant after hanging up from a telephone call is very helpful. People respond positively to talking with someone who knows their stuff and believes in what they do, even if they disagree or are not interested.

These are the success habits according to Mr. Gray, and they are driven by long term purpose in life.

To get Mr. Gray’s complete speech please email me. Click on the picture to hear Tony Robbins talk about Sylvester Stallone and Rocky.

Rocky with his dog
Rocky with his dog

Lots of Career Paths in Mobile

Is 2012 the end of the world or just the advent of total dominance of mobile devices in our daily activities?

The revolution is underway but I’m not sure it will fully hit in 2012, maybe a bit later, but for career opportunities, the timing is now!

There is a school of thinking that we tend to overestimate short-term impacts of change, meaning 1 year, and underestimate long-term impacts meaning 10 years plus. If this is the case, after 10 years of broadband mobile at mainstream consumer pricing… your life will change big time. The Internet took 10 years from the mid-90s to shakeout weak businesses and weak business models, as broadband internet access became affordable and deliverable. It takes time, and this is a complex landscape.

According to Silicon.com While until recently the mobile apps market had been dominated by the mobile operator, now there is greater competition between handset companies, operators and application developers who are all wrestling for control of the users’ mobile experience – and their cash. As a result, there’s now fierce competition for domination of the mobile apps space.

1. Money transfer
2. Location-based services
3. Mobile search
4. Mobile browsing
5. Mobile health monitoring
6. Mobile payment
7. Near field communication services
8. Mobile advertising
9. Mobile instant messaging
10. Mobile music

Of particular interest to me, is the convergence of location-based technologies and solutions with all delivery channels inc. mobile. I look forward to some innovative uses of interaction that enhances consumer experiences as we are driving or moving about. Also the issues of privacy and security will continue to challenge the raw potential of location-based mass customization in marketing, content delivery, commerce and communications.

Pour yourself a hot toddy and reflect on…. “What I Can Do For You!” in this new mobile-centric world. Could this be a career path for you?

Do’s and Don’ts for hiring from Fast Company

Here are some Do’s and Don’ts for hiring from Fast Company that are good common sense for small to mid-size growth companies (the kinds of clients we have at zenPeak for the most part).

Of course, picking the right person who will be a peak performer in your company is still an art and a science. Our system includes assessments that use position benchmarks, and examine the EQ competency scores that will lead to peak performance… and… IT WORKS!

Fast Company's The Do's and Don'ts of Hiring
Fast Company's The Do's and Don'ts of Hiring

Location Based Marketing – gonna be big big big (and that means jobs)

Location Based Marketing is not flavor of the month technology. In fact it has been kicking around for years, and still there is a ways to go for the business side to solve the problems ranging from privacy to the profusion of platforms and devices.

Potential Gold Mine for Marketers
Potential Gold Mine for Marketers

The mainstream media inc. Business Week is all over it and you will be hearing more and more about companies making inroads getting traction and even making $.  Watch for companies that are not trying to “organize” the world but are leveraging existing content, user-generated content and offering light open-source solutions – ideal for rapid success.

I especially like this space having a strong interest in data-rich target marketing.

Skyhook Wireless
Skyhook Wireless

Check out skyhook wireless You can try out the location-based “loki” system right on their website.

Target Marketing: Are there job opportunities with mobile coupon companies?

In a recent NY Times article , a number of companies in the mobile coupon business were featured.  Although each is using different approaches and technologies, they all are based on the concept that a cellphone is a handy place to get a bargain.

Zavers promotes the business benefits of developing actionable marketing based on the data collected with their solution. This value proposition would apply to any data rich loyalty or couponing program.

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8coupons describes themselves as a fun and easy way to save time, money, and trees by getting the best, up-to-the-minute deals on your phone”

I suspect that there are at least 100 other companies in this space contending to organize the retail or grocery industry, and perhaps collect a small toll along the way.

For job seekers, an opportunity exists to help companies like Zavers in a few ways; with their technology needs in developing their solutions, as a marketing analyst  for their value-added services, and in sales.

Dreier hung out on the clothesline for 20 years

In a weird case of both fraud and impersonation, Marc Dreier’s ponzi scheming ran into the suspicions of some Bay St. types in Toronto, who wisely alerted police. Today, his world of 121 foot yachts, a luxurious Manhattan lifestyle, and his 250 person law firm has reached its final collapse, as he was sent up for 20.

Dreier used investors’ money to subsidize the money-losing firm, to pay off some of the victims of the scam and to buy luxuries for himself, including a 121- foot yacht, vacation homes in the Hamptons on New York’s Long Island and a $39 million contemporary-art collection. The judge said he was surprised that Dreier’s letter showed an “understanding” of his crimes. Letters that victims wrote to the judge depicted Dreier as “arrogant, condescending and cruel” – Bloomberg

If he had taken the zeroriskHR profile, I wonder what his scores would have been on empathy towards others and adherence to rules.

We know that statistically, a good fit to a benchmark score, will contribute to peak performance.

Growth Industry for the next 5 years… Search Engine Marketing

If you are looking for a great career path this is one of the best!

Coming out of this economic collapse, many Internet business processes and business models for small and mid-size business will take shape and REPLACE past efforts – In other words, bye-bye printed Yellow Pages AND bye-bye online Yellow Page type portals.

Proximity marketing (geo-marketing, location-based marketing) is going to be big as new applications using GPS or cellular location technologies empower mobile devices and PCs. This means that an SME operator, even with just one location, can spend her money reaching, engaging and transacting with her target market, without buying a yellow pages ad.

It’s basic stuff, and it will drive the need for more talented people who can create and execute Search Marketing campaigns.

If you are looking for a great career path this is one of the best!

SES Toronto – Are Internet Marketing career opportunities bigger than ever?

SES 2009 Toronto – Search Engine Strategies Conference arrives in town next week.

Thinking about a career in Internet Marketing? Your timing is good!

Wal-Mart beat K-Mart and Sears because they invested in data-rich marketing and merchandising technologies. Companies that think only 10% of marketing budgets should be online are in for a shock to their core! as they play catchup for years to come.

SEM is part of Internet Marketing; a growth industry that is about to explode. This all began with a handful of visionaries like Dr. Ralph Wilson back in the mid-1990s. It has taken 15 years, inc. a few business shakeouts, to bring us to a point of complete transformation.

Social and economic changes usually take at least 10 -15 years, and are often under-estimated in depth of their impact because the growth and retrenchments are only easily recognizable looking back in hindsight, with a “time lapse” perspective. And the future?…

A top “peak performer” career path for the future is VP of Internet Marketing, with the future responsibility of managing 90% of a company’s marketing dollars AND… demand for senior-level marketers will continue to be high. A broad expertise in Internet Marketing web, social networks, and mobile is rare!

If you have been paying attention to the terrible condition of newspapers in North America, you have to ask yourself is this just the economy? and when business picks up, the advertisers and subscribers will return?, or is it a major transformation?

We are inside the transformation, so its hard to see it. Today’s generation has always been plugged in and online. It is no longer cute or charming to be a luddite and announce you don’t use a computer or a mobile device. You will just get shrugs and blank stares.

Digital, interactive, on-demand, high-definition, data-rich media is where its at. Newspapers and newsmagazines are in decline, with just a few destined to survive in some fashion. They are slow, labor-intensive, high-wage, energy gobbling, analog industries with an insatiable desire to cut trees and burn fossil fuels, just to drop printed pages on your doorstep. Much of the information they deliver is stale (sports scores, stock listings) and their strategic knowledge of their readers (preferences and behaviours) is almost nil or dependent on surveys, and is rarely granular, actionable business intelligence.

From an advertiser’s point of view, the content isn’t really important but rather the ROI of Marketing. Can Internet Marketing deliver ROI? Yes, and Search Engine Marketing is a key component.

So now we come full circle back to the prospects for a career in Internet Marketing. Yes, your career prospects and your timing are both excellent!

Earn Customer Trust with Employees who can be Trusted!

There are a number of steps a company can take to build a trust relationship with customers.

According to Deborah Nixon of Trust Learning Solutions. In the Financial Post article of May 26 2009, she lists a few;

  1. survey customers
  2. survey employees
  3. examine strategies and programs against survey results
  4. align communications with trust messaging
  5. recheck changes made in 6 months

According to Nixon, “Employees who doubt the integrity or ability of their organization to cope with challenges will deliver poor customer service”

I don’t fully agree with this statement, although there are certainly lots of problems resulting from companies operating low trust corporate working environments.

A worker may hate their job and their boss and think the company is slimy, but may still do their work. EQ assessments, and over 40 years of studies, show that an individual’s empathy and organizational loyalty, and other emotional intelligence internal and external competencies, will impact the degree to which they follow the rules and do their job, regardless of the level of trust around them.

Testing is a critical component in a high-trust organization that wants to be trusted. Companies must invest real resources to take this path. In addition to Nixon’s excellent advice about surveys etc.,  companies need to recruit and retain people who have been assessed, and will likely be suited to their roles. This is the way to peak performance in an organization.

Peak Performers will love the new Scotiabank Executive Compensation scheme!

Peak Performers will love the new Scotiabank Executive Compensation scheme!

According to the Financial Post of May 20 2009, under the new compensation plan, investment bankers at ScotiaCapital will win in the long run if all stakeholders, including the bank and its shareholders, also win in the long run.

The Financial Post outlines the details, and asserts that there may be a rush for the exits if other Bay St. firm don’t head down the same path as ScotiaCapital.

While the world’s big financial institutions cope with stress tests (the Federal Reserve Stress Test guide is here) zenPeak has another thought…

Why not test staff for how they respond to stress with a comprehensive Emotional Intelligence profile from zenPeak?

It’s a proven methodology to discover the EQ and get some awareness on how someone will perform in their job. Take a look at the core competencies that bring peak performance on Bay St.!

Think Positive! How Bank of America began – 1 man with guts.

Think Positive!

We are well down a slippery slope of  panic solutions that are just throwing taxpayer money at what appears to be ways to instill confidence, loosen inter-bank credit etc. Nothing seems to be working as fast as needed, and it appears that everyone is running for the hills.  Obama is only human and in spite of the best of intentions has a formidable task just to fill his cabinet posts.

Today,  Bank of America hit new lows – down over 90% in a year! I was in a waiting room a few years ago at Bank of Montreal and was reading about the history of VISA. What I took away from my quick read was that Bank of America (originally Bank of Italy) operated by Amadeo Giannini, emerged as a San Francisco institution when the owner recovered the bank’s hard assets out of the earthquake damaged building in a vegetable push cart, and then went down to Fisherman’s Wharf and set up a table in the open air, and began extending credit and resuming operations to help the city recover from the earthquake. The Company later went on to be a founder of the Visa card (BankAmericard).

Wouldn’t it be a shame if BAC is nationalized by the US Government as suggested by Sen. Chris Dodd – Bloomberg

Somewhere out there is another Amadeo Giannini, a man who can be trusted to get things moving without the government bailout, maybe running a small regional bank that in 25 years could be the world’s largest!

One alleged Fraudster returns to the US, the other goes missing!

With his cowboy boots stuffed with cash, platinum, a fake passport in his own alias name and swiss bearer notes, the dimwit alleged mortgage ponzi schemer Christopher Warren took a cab from Toronto airport to the US border.  Huffington Post reported that as Warren was on his whirlwind adventure, he showed flight crews a stash of gold.

I’m not sure these were the boots Warren was wearing (they are gorgeous huh?) when he got busted at the border, but  “Court documents alleged they defrauded investors and mortgage companies of $100 million since 2006. The fraudulent deals involved 500 homes and condominiums in California, Florida, Nevada, Illinois, Colorado and Arizona”   ——-

News today that Venezuela seized Stanford Bank , reminded me that Allen Stanford is missing after allegedly scheming 8 Billion out of  50,000 customers. Huffington Post reports that Stanford’s damage could match the Madoff ponzi scandal, and lists the “most shocking” allegations…

  1. Stanford posted identical returns two years in a row, in 1995 and 1996, indicating the fraud has been going on for at least 13 years.
  2. Stanford and CFO James Davis have “wholly failed” to cooperate with the SEC investigation.
  3. There was no army of analysts combing through Stanford’s multi-billion-dollar portfolio. Rather, the only research conducted on companies in which he was investing came from Stanford himself, and CFO James Davis.
  4. Stanford told at least one client that the SEC was freezing CDs, a blatant impossibility.
  5. Stanford lost money from the Madoff ponzi scheme, “despite the bank’s public assurances to the contrary.” One analyst puts the loss at $400,000.
  6. Despite repeated calls from the SEC to Stanford’s Antigua-based accounting firm, the accountants never answered their phones.
  7. And as if the SEC couldn’t put it any clearer, Stanford’s public statements about its investments “are false.”

Bloomberg reports that Michael Zarich, a senior investment officer with Antigua- based Stanford International Bank, in a sworn deposition, described how “Stanford told investors the program had positive returns for periods in which clients actually lost money. The firm claimed a return of 18.04 percent in 2000 when actual investors lost as much as 7.5 percent, according to the complaint. In 2008 client pitch books, Stanford presented hypothetical data under the heading “Historical Performance” alongside the audited 2005 through 2008 figures, the complaint said.”

- Frank Abrams is the founder of  zenPeak Inc.,  helping companies find and retain peak performers.

Broker bails out on his position of trust

Marc Schrenker was picked up by police in a KOA campground today.  His alleged scheme to fake his death by calling in a distress message, and then parachuting to freedom out of his airplane didn’t work. He is alive to deal with some of the mess his life has become.

Apparently, he was involved in stealing commissions, but at this stage, maybe the kindest thing to do, until the facts emerge, is to say his life was unraveling. His wife had recently filed for divorce, and his father had just passed away.

Someone accustomed to $1,000 suits, private planes, fancy cars and club memberships, can often have a hard time when it all comes “crashing down”. Victims of the Madoff scandal have killed themselves out of despair.

How a person deals with these challenges and choices in the workplace is best understood with EQ testing and assessment, based on the science of axiology.

Luckily, Schrenker wasn’t hurt when he parachuted out, and no one on the ground was nearby when his plane landed in a swamp.

If a person, like Mr. Schrenker is alleged to be, had been EQ tested and assessed using the zerorisk system, prior to being hired, I believe they would have been identified as a poor fit for a position of trust, with a potential for theft and embezzlement.

- Frank Abrams is the founder of zenPeak Inc. , helping companies find and retain peak performers for high-trust and high-integrity positions.

Here’s why today is the best time to join the Financial Services business!

Today is the best time to join the Financial Services business!

  1. Clients are unhappy. If you call a prospective client with a simple and safe investment such as a deposit, they will listen and give you an appointment, because their current financial adviser has either stopped calling, or is explaining why portfolio values are down. They might switch, but 2 years ago, it would have been impossible to compare yourself against their broker’s success with the client portfolio.
  2. The advice you give today , and the products you recommend today, are more likely to make clients $ tomorrow. The most successful brokers, planners and advisers don’t try and pick winners, they follow a system and rely on others to make those tough decisions. Fact is whoever is selecting and packaging product for you today has a better chance of being right, as the tide of the market rises.  The investments that focus on the stock market, which is currently low after a 50% correction, will likely do well in coming years.
  3. Where you work is important! Who you know, historical performance, projections no longer carry much weight with clients. What counts is knowing you are personally service-oriented, that you can be trusted, and that the company you work for has survived the credit crunch and is getting stronger, (not just barely surviving or still losing money)
  4. The potential market is huge! Most people have trouble saving money. They carry credit card balances at very high interest rates, and they have the wrong kind of life insurance. Ignore the tv commercials about wealth management; the vast majority of clients need basic help to solve these problems.
  5. Hard work and honesty is respected today. Today, financial success is measured in lowering your risk and credit exposure, eliminating debt, understanding exactly what you are investing in, saving carefully for your future, and having independence. If you are ready to work hard and be straight with people… Today is the best time to join the Financial Services business!

- Frank Abrams is the founder of zenPeak Inc. , helping companies find and retain peak performers for high-trust and high-integrity positions.

Scum Dog Millionaire – now he’s stuck in the outsource outhouse

Satyam founder, Ramalinga Raju has admitted to being a liar and a cheat. His company name, Satyam means “truth”

Lying in public
Lying in public

He has admitted to falsifying the financial records of SATYAM a leading Indian publicly traded company.  Ramalinga Raju, is not a slumdog millionaire but a man who took his family’s agricultural roots, and grew them into a successful conglomerate, most notably as a computer services offshore outsourcing powerhouse. Now Raju and his company are in the outsource outhouse. Ramalinga Raju was an Indian hero and has delivered The Mea Culpa – “what I did and why” to the Board of Directors.

- Frank Abrams is the founder of the zenPeak Inc. , helping companies find and retain peak performers.