Pareto Plus Petermanaged correctly pareto + peter = unparalleled success (learn more at www.greatkreations.com)

The Three Don’ts of Persuasion

Persuading people to believe in your idea is a critical leadership skill. But too many managers don’t know how. Here are three things to try next time you need to gain consensus or secure a deal:

1. Don’t make the hard sell. Setting out a strong position at the start gives opponents something to fight. It’s better to present your position with reserve, so you can adjust it if needed.
2. Don’t resist compromise. Compromise is not surrender. People want to see that you are flexible enough to respond to their concerns and incorporate their perspectives.
3. Don’t assume it’s a one-shot deal. Persuasion is a process. You’ll rarely arrive at a solution on the first try. Listen, test your position, and then refine it based on the group’s input.

This tip was adapted from Guide to Managing Up and Across available from the HBR Onpoint Collection and provided by the Harvard Business Review.

Co-operatives transform communities. That’s not hype, folks, that’s real. This video, Co-operative business is not business as usual (http://gu.com/p/34g6b) celebrates 2012 as the year of the cooperative. This video from The Guardian shares how co-operative business models offer more to the communities they operate in. Pauline Green, President of the International Co-operative Alliance, talks about the economic benefits and scalability of the co-operative business model.

Good business is not only profitable, it’s fun. I recently ran across a great website that creates art-dolls keeping the environment in mind and the prices reasonable. There’s a lesson here…

Direct from their website, “Snooter-doots™ are whimsical, handcrafted, art-dolls inspired by nature, featuring vegetables, bugs, fish, birds, fantasy creatures, and edibles. We are earth-friendly and sustainable! Snooter-doots are knit by hand from renewable wool and other animal fiber yarns before they are felted.”

I couldn’t believe I found such a great gift! Who could resist the idea that a handcrafted doll was not only unique in appearance and composition, but has it’s own personality (the website says so) and it’s own name and birthday. AND you can adopt one by visiting the Snooter-doot website (http://www.snooter-doots.com). It’s worth visiting this website even if it’s just to read the Snooter-doots story.

They even make a geoduck named Georgie. Cuter than his real-life model for sure.

Today’s Management Tip from the Harvard Business Review is about 3 types of networks you need:

The old adage “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is truer than ever in today’s organizations. But how do you know whom to know? Here are three types of networks it pays to have:

Personal support. Form relationships with people who help you get back on track during a bad day. These may be friends or colleagues with whom you can just be yourself.
Purpose. Include in your network bosses and customers who validate your work, and family members and other stakeholders who remind you that your work has a broader meaning.
Work/life balance. Seek out people who will hold you accountable for activities that improve your physical health, mental engagement, or spiritual well-being.

There are all kinds of cloud spaces for all kinds of collaboration. From meetings to webinars and filesharing to software development, it’s “out there.” We’re all familiar with the leaders in online meetings and webinar software; GoTo, WebEx, Live Meeting, Adobe Connect, and others. Did you know there are less expensive, robust, and reliable options available for less cost?

Our team of curious collaborators checked out a variety of free and fee-based services this month to bring you some affordable and effective solutions that add value to your business processes. Here’s what we found…

yaM:
yaM is an easy-to-use conferencing application that integrates nicely with Google Apps. Scheduling a meeting is as easy as importing your Google contacts. yaM uses your contacts as a participant list and you can add others, too. Our Google calendar shows up on the “Calendar” tab allowing us an easy way to identify open times for a meeting.

Our favorite feature wasn’t ease of use or the clean interface or even the integration with Google apps, but the “All Action Items” tab. All action items from the test meetings we conducted are listed on this tab. Great for anyone who doesn’t take notes during a meeting and forgets what was assigned to them.

Downside? It’s a beta release and we all know what that with beta products we can’t predict the final product or final cost. But in the meantime it’s a winner.

YuuGuu:
According to the product description YuuGuu users can “share screens, hold web conferences and work collaboratively with anyone on the Google Talk IM network all via the Yuuguu application”.

You will need to download the desktop client to initiate meetings. We found this application to be a bit clunky. It wasn’t as easy to navigate as others we tried. As for price we found it to be a bit pricey in comparison to other applications we tried that offered many of the same features.

AnyMeeting:
This is a free collaboration space that is ad-supported. We spent some time setting up the profile, color scheme, and links to embed in our website. We then launched a meeting that went very well. The video was smooth, audio was clean, and files were easy to upload and share. After this success we launched another meeting and one user asked why there were so many ads.

While we were pleased with the functionality of AnyMeeting and thought the profile section along with the administration end of the software was easy to use and very professional – given that it’s free – we didn’t think to test the user view. Unfortunately, the user sees what the screen AND a list of ads long the right side of the window. When we tested it from a participant’s perspective we decided it was too distracting to use as a professional meeting and webinar tool. In our opinion AnyMeeting would be a top-runner if it allowed for reasonably priced subscriptions that would remove the ads.

Vyew:
Vyew is also ad-supported, but the ads are small and unobtrusive. They are located in the upper right corner of the participant’s window so they are seen, but don’t distract from the focus of the meeting. It also doesn’t take away from your professional look.

More than the minimal ad presence Vyew offers inexpensive, full-featured subscriptions to meet the needs of a single owner business to full-fledged multi-million dollar organizations.

The feature we found most appealing is the “anytime” meeting feature. Even if the presenter is logged out invited guests can stay and continue to collaborate or return at a later time to add to the work. Vyew truly allows you to “meet and share content in real-time or anytime.”

JoinMe:
JoinMe is a lean screen sharing application with full-featured meeting options available. This is a LogMeIn product offering users the ability to share screens and collaborate for free. It looked like a great app for conducting a presentation for up to 250 users quickly and easily. The free version even has an app for iPhone and Android. Upgrade to the Pro version and there are meeting scheduling tools and more.

Unfortunately, JoinMe didn’t work out very well for us. Three eparate attempts to create an account using three independent email addresses failed. Looks like we’ll stick to Skype for teleconferencing and screen-sharing.

Truth be told you’ll have to decide for yourself what best meets your needs, but for our money yaM and Vyew really caught our attention.

Work groups are spread far and wide these days. This has been a growing trend for the last few years and is just about the only way I work anymore. As an independent consultant and a small company I found using online collaboration tools essential to getting things done quickly and effectively without the burden of travel costs. Clients have often asked how I determine which tools to use for collaboration, conferencing, and mobile computing. The three most important aspects of an application or product I plan to work with are ease of use, affordability, and reliability.

Ease of use is an important consideration, especially when evaluating a collaboration platform in which users of varying skill level will be participating. If the features are difficult to find when you need them or another user cannot navigate their way around the work area it’s safe to say the application is not easy to use. It’s a good bet that anything you try will work in Internet Explorer, but you want to ensure the application functions equally well in Firefox, Safari or other popular browser. Ease of use includes the availability of a mobile app for your droid or iPhone. The key to success is understanding that ease of use is proportional to a user’s level of frustration. The lower the frustration level, the easier the tool is to use.

Reliability is critical to successful integration of collaboration tools into your group’s work. If the software has glitches causing it to freeze, requires you to download software in order to function correctly, or any number of inconveniences that interrupt your work flow you may want to consider another solution. If the solution you’re using doesn’t work well or smoothly your client, customer, or team may begin to think you might not be the one for the job.

I recommend the “try before you buy” method of purchasing a solution. I’ve had great success determining reliability of a service during the trial period. Taking software for a test drive is also useful for determining how easy it is to use. For example, an application I used had a nasty habit of immediately starting my webcam when our group wanted to use the voice feature for teleconferencing so I had to unplug my webcam before connecting. Another product I used, and dropped quickly, continually locked up my computer and caused the connection to drop regardless of ISP or computer configuration. These meeting wreckers were things I discovered during the free trial.

Cost should not be the number one reason you choose or eliminate an application or other product although cost is part of the decision and should not be taken lightly. Groupware solutions range in price from free to over $100 per month per user. You want to pay a reasonable amount for a good product you can rely on. My preference is to use open source, web-based tools for collaboration, data storage, and productivity. Open source software is affordable, usually innovative, and for the tech-savvy a great platform for tweaking tools to suit your particular needs.

There are numerous conferencing and presentation tools available; Citrx’ GoTo Meeting, WebEx, RealTalk, Zoho Meeting are just a few. Even skype allows for desktop sharing during a conversation. None of these however allow for true, real-time collaboration the way Google Wave or SAP’s new offering, StreamWork does. Though now discontinued, Google Wave was promoted as a hosted conversation. In many ways Wave is email raised to a higher plane. SAP StreamWork is a true collaboration space that provides multiple users with real-time, simultaneous access to the data.

SAP is known for their enterprise solutions, but StreamWork is an easy to use, reliable, and pleasantly affordable, spelled free, collaboration platform for smaller companies. It has a series of modules you can move around your screen. Any of the group participants can drag and drop agenda items. You can link dedicated folders from a Box.net account thereby utilizing less storage space on the SAP servers (and saving costs, too). Using integrated planning and evaluation tools makes StreamWork a valuable tool for project teams. If anyone from the group is unable to attend a meeting they can log into StreamWork at another time and quickly catch up. This robust, easy to use, and clean web-based application works just as well for a company my size as for large multi-nationals.

Additional web-based applications I include in my collaboration toolkit are Skype for general international communication, DimDim for webinars and presentations, RTM for simple task management, Box.net for document storage and sharing, Zoho Project, Google Apps, and Second Life. There are more, but these are the mainstay of my “corporate” infrastructure and all of them save time and money thereby increasing effectiveness, efficiency, and ultimately profitability.

We all have them. Post-it notes pasted everywhere or maybe it’s a pocketful of random notes on paper scraps, receipts, and napkins. Each and every one of them filled with important numbers, reminders, to-do items, sketches of the new office layout; all of them very important. Then we empty our pockets or gather the post-its only to discover we can’t remember who’s number that was, or we missed the due date for that to-do item.

It’s exhausting to manage all those bits of data and to add insult to injury none of them have a relationship to any other bit of data. It becomes daunting when we factor in our inability to manage paper documents and reports. The lack of good information organization has a dramatic impact on our personal and professional effectiveness. Did you know that over 70% of office trash is paper. The Boston Globe reported that 15% of all paper documents handled in the workplace is lost and 30% of our time is spent trying to find it. We lose over six weeks a year searching for lost paper.Our organizational methods for electronic data aren’t any better.

There are many systems and tools available to help organize and manage our paper and electronic data. I’ve tried more of them than I care to admit often spending hundreds to be disappointed in them. I don’t recommend trial and error, but I do emphasize careful consideration of potential new tools. Here are some thoughts on two great tools that when used together create a stress reducing double-header; David Allen’s Getting Things Done system and The PersonalBrain. This isn’t a campaign to sell either the GTD products or The PersonalBrain Software. Frankly, both can be used for personal data management and organizational effectiveness without costing anything.

GTD is not new, but if you’re unfamiliar with it be sure to check out David Allen’s GTD website and blog. The site offers free downloads of useful articles.If you use Outlook for your email and calendar consider the GTD add-in for Outlook. There is a wealth of GTD information available with a simple web search. The PersonalBrain is less prominent in the data management conversation.

The developers of the PersonalBrain call it “the ultimate digital memory.” This is an easy to use, dynamic mind-mapping software application that is non-linear and non-hierarchical. It applies visualization to your information, creating a digital map similar to paper-based mind maps you may be familiar with, but is so much more powerful. It allows you to create a network of information that is organized in a way that reflects the way you think so finding data is easier and the relationships between things is clear. Your ideas are no longer forced into a single folder or copied multiple times for various projects. Combined with basic GTD concepts Personal Brain becomes a powerful brainstorming, project management, and data storage system.

Still like carrying around paper? Seems I see more and more people carrying little leather-bound notebooks. These items are varied, attractive, and can be purchased just about anywhere. I think they’re a bit expensive so, I use a pocketmod for daily note taking. You can get your own fold-up notebook at PocketMod.com. This website is set up for you to design and then print a pdf of a single-sheet, paper pocket notebook. Design it, print it, use it. I suggest designing it with GTD in mind. At the end of the day put it in your Brain. Now that’s managing data effectively.