5 Secrets to Making it in Business

Over the past few months, I've been thinking more than ever about what it takes to make it in business.

I come from a long line of entrepreneurs—my father's grandfather was a watchmaker, my grandmother owned a salon and later a yarn shop and a framing business, my father was partner in a chemical company, and my uncles have had their share of boat businesses.

In Rumors of Water, I recall, fondly, my own forays into the agriculture business (a road stand at the end of my grandmother's driveway, where my sister and I would sit in the shade and eat more berries and cherries than we ever sold; needless to say, I have never lived into my Ten Acre Dream).

There is so much to learn from reading about other people's business dreams, and I've been doing that. A few books on my recent shelf are:

Stall Points: Most Companies Stop Growing—Yours Doesn't Have To

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... And Others Don't

Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

The lessons in these books are many, but when I consider the central messages, I come up with these five secrets:

1. sell what you love or believe in. Tony Hsieh of Zappos didn't believe in shoes so much as he believed in Customer Service (though I'm guessing he enjoys a good pair of shoes.) He built Zappos to be, more than anything, an experience in great Customer Service, and it's not surprising that today his interest has begun to shift into the idea of "delivering happiness," a movement of sorts.

Is it possible to sell something you don't love? Maybe. There are always exceptions to every rule. But since these are *my* secrets, we'll have to stick with love. (I was the only person to sell one dismal stuffed animal in a high school fundraising campaign. I didn't believe in stuffed animals, especially those cheap and unattractive ones, and therefore I couldn't market them beyond Mom—sorry Mom, you shouldn't have bought one either... forgive me?).

2. give everything you have to make it work. Across the board, whether we're talking George Cadbury, Eric Ries, Tony Hsieh, or my dad, we can note a terrific dedication that extends to both time and money. It's as if the business is our life itself. We feed it, clothe it, give it our choice moments. If we can't do this, maybe we don't really love or believe in the business. Maybe it's time to eat the cherries, cut our losses, and close up the stand.

3. Stay humble. In Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... And Others Don't, one of the outstanding qualities of the Great companies was a humility in top leaders.

Now this is a tricky one, because we don't necessarily think of a Steve Jobs as being humble. We think *bold.* But humility comes in different flavors. A bold leader might actually be humble when it comes to listening to customers or understanding that a company's, or an industry's, position is never a foregone conclusion.

In Stall Points: Most Companies Stop Growing—Yours Doesn't Have To, one of the prime reasons for downturn was this very issue: neglecting to humbly understand that a position can be wrested from us by a "lesser" company that *is* paying attention to customers, price points, or new technologies.

4. Know who you are, and who you aren't. Also in Stall Points, a major factor pinpointed in downturn was overreaching and diversifying too much. These days, I am watching Amazon with fascination, because it actually seems to be engaged in excessive diversification. (And yes, the bookseller did acquire the shoeseller Zappos). Yet perhaps Amazon is about something other than books. Maybe it is about E-commerce, the way Zappos was about Customer Service. So it will all work out in the end.

For my own part, I recently decided I'm chocolate (not peppermints), tea (not coffee), hot pink or red (not maroon). Around early June, I hope to be able to show you what I mean. In any case, it has helped me focus, to know who I am and who I am not.

5. Make the hard calls, without burning bridges. Not long ago, I heard from a guy whose business was going down the drain. And he was still trying to be all things to all employees, hold on to the past of what the company had been. The result was that he was losing everything. This is such a delicate matter. We need to maintain our compassion and good-dealings, but if something is "failing," we need to be realistic too, and save the ship by necessary means.

For me, this is one of the biggest challenges, as I never want to hurt people. It takes a lot of vision to see beyond the current circumstances, to understand what is ultimately at stake, and to make the necessary hard calls. This is where *loving* the business will ultimately serve us. And if we find we can't love the business that much, we should probably close the stand, after all.


How about you? Have you tried making your way in business? What are your favorite secrets?

Go Ahead, Criticize Me for Creativity

A few days ago I wrote to a friend, someone I actively work with these days, and apologized. I felt like maybe I'd not been agreeable enough lately.

To my great surprise, she wrote back and said I should not apologize. She loves the way we work together—how we freely criticize each other's ideas, to reach toward a common goal outside of ourselves, to be as creative as we can possibly be and find the best solutions.

I felt a great sense of comfort in her words. To think, she believed that our process needn't be all simple and agreeable. What a relief.

But tonight, reading The New Yorker, I discovered I should be more than relieved. I should be really, really pleased to have a relationship like this.

It turns out that the old idea of brainstorming and being agreeable about all ideas that are put on the table is not the best way to produce optimal creativity and quality solutions.

In a study by Charlan Nemeth, at U.C. Berkeley, it was noted, "Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition."

In my world, I'd still like the criticism to be respectful, even playful, but now I can relax and enjoy a good debate, seeing it for the creative possibility it presents.

I might even send this little message to my friend, "Go ahead, criticize me—for our best creativity."


Doll Sculpture by Sara.

Where Do You FInd Words?

My youngest daughter is always the champion. When she sees a new idea and loves it, she takes off at top speed.

I showed her the WordBowl, 2011, and she was enchanted. She started gathering woven bowls from around the house. Bowls that came from Kenya. Starting cutting slips of paper and plying me for words.

"Sparkly," that's a good word, isn't it, Mommy?"

"That's a great word."

"Is this how you spell threaten? T h r e a t e n."

"Wow, you spelled that right!"

"I know how to spell a lot of things, Mommy. Don't you know?"

And she fills her bowl. And she writes a poem about playing ball with the moon. And I laugh when the ball goes bop-bop-bop, and I get emotional when the moon and she must part. She's found her words, and she's filled me.

Should We Force People to Write?

I admit in Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing, that I never made my daughters write (they are home-educated, and I do it how I want).

In our education experience together, we've done a lot of other things that I believe turned my girls into writers, but mandatory writing was not one of them.

I am thinking about this today especially, after reading a quote at this wonderful place:

But what if the reading problem isn’t as simple as forcing students to read and write more (which we should also do)?

Really? Should we force students to write? Here's a poem from Sara, age 14, which she handed me today. She made up her own form for it. This, from a girl who has never been forced to write...


The Pirates and the Sun

Once upon a long ago time
When lemon trees fell in love with lime,
And all the fairy tales were true (if only in your mind)
A pirate sailed the seven seas to find the treasure.

The treasure sat on the rim of the sun,
At the edge of the sea, number 101,
At the edge of the night, just before it’s done,
And there sat the treasure, the only one.

The pirate’s flag was big and black,
It billowed and whipped and sometimes lay slack,
It was made of (don’t tell) a regular sack,
But it was the flag of a pirate.

The pirate smiled and twirled his moustache,
He grinned and rubbed his hands at the sight of the stash,
And one gold tooth in his mouth did flash,
And every pirate got gold, from the first to the last.

Now the pirates sailed back, for a year and a day,
And they met an old monk, who taught them how to pray,
And they had many adventures, don’t ever say
They weren’t the greatest pirates who lived.

Yes they sailed away, and now they came home,
With a bag of gold, and a horse from Rome,
And a parrot, a stick, and a wrinkled old gnome,
A drum and a harp and a broken trombone.

But the world had changed when they sailed to the sun,
To the last ever sea (number 101)
And the pirates’ fleet was sunken and gone,
And the world was round in the minds of everyone.

So the pirates took one look at the cities of the day,
From London to New York to the coast of Malay,
To the skyscrapers high and the waters grey,
And they turned right around, and went back where they came.

And now they do sail, past the coasts one by one,
Forever looking for the treasure, the only one,
And the edge of the sea right next the sun,
And the time they left behind long ago.

For what use is gold if your world is gone?
What use is a ship when it’s old and down-run?
What use is a crew of pirates who come
To the deck always looking for the thing which they long?


If we shouldn't force students to write (and I believe we shouldn't), what is the key to getting them to a place of excellence in reading and writing? Well, perhaps to answer to that question, you'll need to read the book. ;-) But I'd also love to hear your ideas right here today.

What if You Have a Genius?

"And what if the genius is yours for one exquisite moment of your life," says Elizabeth Gilbert, "and then you pass it along?"

(I feel this way about the writing I've done. I feel like if I never accomplish anything major again, then the process of passing it along to those I teach and mentor is something beautiful and just as exquisite in its way.)

Choosing (or Not) to Play the Game

This year, as some of you know, my older daughter is in a distance-learning program. It's been a struggle in many ways. But the biggest difficulty has been my girl's impatience with a system that sometimes "doesn't get it."

By this she means, the balance of inside and out has sometimes not been well-understood or successfully addressed. Being home-educated her whole life, this is a shocking experience. The rhythm of our lives has always been to cultivate what's inside the girls with appropriate outside helps. The balance has been (mostly) simple to achieve.

There are days when I almost despair over how simple it *has not been* in this new situation, though the distance-school has tried to (mostly) be accommodating.

The other night I told my girl that this is how it is in life. She'll encounter people and systems who "get it" and those who don't. And she will have to choose whether to play their game or assert her own game. I told her stories of times I've played the game and times I determined I could not. I want her to know she has a choice.

5 Ways to Increase Your Klout Score Exponentially

In the span of about a week, I increased my Klout score by 13 points. To put this in perspective, I should mention that this happened during the fallout period, when a lot of people's Klout scores dropped.

It also happened over the *exact days* I revamped my Twitter strategy. So this post is going to share my Twitter secrets, which are based, quite simply, on love.

(For those of you who know and love me, let me assure you I haven't gone Klout crazy. My workplace is exploring it, and so I began exploring it. The only danger I see so far is that I might become a Klout-score-checking addict :)

Klout, in my opinion, could otherwise be called a "love quotient." It tracks who you love, what you love, how much you love, who loves you and how much they're willing to share the love.

So, here's the Lovers Guide to Increasing Your Klout Score thru Twitter

1. Ask yourself, what do I really love? Then tweet about it. Do this for two reasons. One, it will enable you to be more focused (an important part of a good Twitter strategy). And, two, it will enable you to sustain your Twitter activity for the long haul. Nothing works better than a strategy that fits with your lifestyle and interests.

2. Claim your love. My workplace has done this, with some success, by using the hashtag #goodwork. My Twitter poetry group has done it with the hashtag #tsptry. It's a way to get seen amidst the noise, and to invite others into your circle.

Some people have an uber-branding strategy around the use of unique hashtags. #Amwriting, an "award-winning hashtag," developed by Johanna Harness, is one of the most creative I've seen yet.

3. Get emotional about your love. There's a reason advertisers track your emotions. Take advantage of it, and make sure your tweets use emotive words or concepts that will generate an emotional response in your followers. This isn't about exploiting your tweeps; it's about becoming a better writer.

4. Ask for love. @Claireburge impresses me with her questions. On any given day on Twitter (or elsewhere), you will find her asking for advice and direction from those in the know. This is not only a terrific connecting strategy, it is also a humble strategy, because it seeks to learn.

5. Make love connections. Do you know people who would just love to know each other? Introduce them. Go ahead and tweet @doallas I think you would love @knittingthewind—just beautiful! Increasing connections naturally and lovingly is part of a healthy networking strategy.

Try these 5 Twitter Love-Life tips, and let me know if they increase your Klout score. I'd be curious to know.


And now, a love request.

I'm looking for love in the following places, and would really appreciate any direction you could give me, towards excellent bloggers and tweeters and Tumblrs who beautifully explore:

tea, French, bread, writing

I'm also claiming my love in these same categories. If you want to follow along on any given day, or become part of a more focused conversation, you can join me under these hashtags...

LLfrench
LLtea
LLbread
LLwriting

(If nothing comes up under a particular hashtag, that means I haven't been tweeting about it lately. Hashtags don't bring up results if you take a rest for a few days. And I *always* take a rest on weekends. Which, btw, will lower a Klout score. But I love my rest, and you can't put a score on that.)

Why Are You Tweeting During Your Performance Review?

You know, it's all about Klout.

And maybe your next raise.

Steve Jobs Comes to Lunch with Creativity

Over lunch the other day, I was talking to a friend of mine. He's working on his PhD in the area of user experiences, mostly technology.

His opinion of what Steve Jobs did best? Take stuff that already existed and find ways to put it together. This fascinated me; after all, we think of Jobs as the one who "created" some of these technologies. My friend said it wasn't like that. Instead, Jobs often saw possibilities in disparate pre-existing technologies and put them together to create beautiful user experiences.

This reminds me of today's chapter in Mindfulness, which focuses on creativity. Creativity doesn't necessarily create out-of-nothing. It simply does a quarter-turn and says, "Ah, look at it this way."

If this sounds easy, it may not be. My friend laughed as he put his iPhone on the table and said, "Isn't it beautiful? And even when other companies had it sitting in front of them, they still couldn't create a decent knock-off. That's genius, don't you think?"

I often wonder how well we are cultivating this kind of genius in the way we teach our young people, giving them, as Langer notes, too few choices in how they interact with materials and information; I know that my own daughter is chaffing against her distance-learning program this year, because it prescribes more than she's used to (we're working on that... maybe later this week I'll share her next assignment, which she took *more* than a quarter-turn with).

How much are we willing to do the quarter turns? How much does creativity matter to us? It might mean a "bad grade" or some commercial failures along the way. Will we risk it?

Being Mindful of Twitter Power

There are always two (or more) ways to frame something, reminds Ellen Langer. Remembering that is part of being mindful.

I've heard people frame Twitter as a mindless pursuit. But... may I suggest a different perspective?

Last year I wrote a post called 10 Reasons to Write (Or Not) a Book About Writing. Someone I didn't know, called @fictwriter, tweeted the post. Not long after, Jane Friedman, who was working for Writer's Digest at the time, clicked through the tweet link and left this comment on the post...

Found your post through Twitter (@ficwriter). I work at Writer's Digest, and understand the dilemma! But if you decide you want to do it, we'd love to see your proposal.

Jane's words stuck with me, even though I categorically decided I would *not* write a book about writing. In fact, I was too tired to think about writing anything at all, having already put myself to the task of book-writing several times.

Still, when I went to a picnic this June and got my title handed to me, I remembered Jane's words. It made me think the project was not just fun but also viable.

So again I turned to Twitter. One Saturday morning I asked my friends, "If I was, say, writing a book on writing, what would you want included?"

Their answers helped me shape the book. A lot.

Today the power of Twitter has come full circle to Jane. Remembering her comment so long ago, I mentioned that I had actually done the book, largely thanks to her comment. As a result, she read the book, and today I am tweeting her post, which excerpts the book that Twitter brought to life.

Twitter a mindless pursuit? Not for me. :)

___

Care to join us at The High Calling for a bookclub discussion of Mindfulness, by Ellen Langer?