Unit of One Anniversary Handbook

Your career is only as healthy as your learning curve. If you're not developing new skills in your current job, then you're jeopardizing your long-term employability.

To keep moving forward, embrace two personal disciplines. First, regularly benchmark your skills against the standards of excellence in your field. Technical people understand how quickly what they learn in the classroom gets obsoleted by developments in the real world. What goes for engineers and software developers goes for everyone. Find people who are leaders in your field and stay abreast of what they know and how they work. And keep your eye on young people, a great source of unexpected insights.

Second, develop a personal learning plan. If you're serious about benchmarking, you'll discover gaps in your skill set. The only way to close those gaps is to set goals for learning. Maybe it's, "I will start a course in C++ programming by the end of this month." Or, "I'm going to learn how to use PowerPoint so I can create my own slides." Smart goals are specific, measurable, and achievable.

Finally, never turn down a request for an informational interview. It's amazing what you can learn from people who want to learn from you.

James Moore
Chairman, GeoPartners Research, Inc.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
jim@geopartners.com

Reflect on the network of people you rely on to make yourself a more effective person. There are at least four dimensions of leadership and growth for which you need support. "Kitchen cabinet" members help you formulate hunches into ideas, and keep you honest. "Analytics" test and develop your ideas into fact-based, well-reasoned plans. "Agents" take action on your behalf. And "confidants" help you make tough choices.

Are you well staffed in each dimension? Do you need to recruit a few choice people into your inner circle? Who might make a real difference to your leadership effectiveness? Now schedule lunch with that person right away!

Ways to Make Change

Marian Salzman,
Director, Department of the Future
TBWA Chiat/Day
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
marians104@aol.com

The biggest change in business today has nothing to do with reengineering or reorganizing. The biggest change is the consumer. Chalk it up to Vietnam, the fall of communism, ethnic cleansing, scandals in politics, sports, and the professions. The consumer is more anxious and cynical than ever before. Consumers worry about their country, their schools, their jobs. They don't know where to find the answers to big questions -- How should I raise my child? -- or to small questions -- Which brand of soup should I buy?

This, it turns out, is both a challenge and opportunity for marketers. Companies are bombing consumers with information. Here are three ideas to help you drop smart bombs.

First, brands matter: People are looking for something to hold onto, not just generic products they can buy. A sense of tradition matters: Even as they embrace new technologies, consumers have grown nostalgic for the innocence and pretechnological simplicity of their childhoods. Systems thinking matters: Consumers want to limit their impact on the environment and at the same limit its impact on them. Ultimately, communicating about the future is about creating a vision of a time and place where things may be better, or at least "reinvented."

Jim Taylor
Senior Vice President, Global Marketing
Gateway 2000
North Sioux City, South Dakota
taylojim@gw2k.com

A friend of mine recently took her 86-year-old mother on her first airplane trip. During the flight, the pilot invited her to see the cockpit. My friend's mother leaned over and asked, "Darlin', what's a cockpit?"

This moment brought joy to everyone on that plane who heard it. And it's a precious example of my hardheaded advice: If you want to change your company, change how it relates to customers. Specifically, understand that the aesthetic experience people have with products and services are just as important as conventional measures of quality and performance.

Customers believe that companies are corrupt, unresponsive, and unavailable -- even if they make reasonably good products. That's a reality that few executives are willing to admit. You need to build a communications pipeline that surfaces good and bad stories from customers so that every day, how people talk about the company on the inside is informed by what people are saying on the outside. And every executive needs to talk to a few customers (of the most ordinary kind) every day to understand how they're feeling and what they're thinking.

When we launch a new product, we identify a collection of early adopters and christen them "pioneers." We talk to them. We find out what's working and not working.