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aspire career CEO Leadership Lesson productive rewarding sleep

Sleep Less

Sleep less.
Yes, you heard me right! Sleep Less.
This is one of the best investments you can make to make your life more productive and rewarding. Most people do not need more than 6 hours to maintain an excellent state of health. Try getting up one hour earlier for 21 days and it will develop into a powerful habit. Remember, it is the quality not the quantity of sleep that is important. And just imagine having an extra 30 hours a month to spend on the things that are important to you.

A story: I was about 8 years old and it was an excruciating pain to get up in the morning to attend my class. My dad once took me aside and showed me a newspaper article about Indira Gandhi, who was then India’s Prime Minister. I vividly remember the article talking about her canvassing for elections and her hectic schedule. I used to admire her as a leader. My dad then asked me if I knew how many hours of sleep she had. He went on to add that she required three hours of sleep a day. I have not checked the veracity of that statement to date – but can vouch that that statement changed my life. I seldom sleep for more than 6 hours and this was instrumental in me doing more with my own life.

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action aspire career CEO goals Leadership Lesson mission success

Mission Statement

You must have a mission statement in life. Everyone must have one. Imagine a company, an organization or an institution without one.
This is simply a set of guiding principles which clearly state where you are going and where you want to be at the end of your life.

A mission statement embodies your values. It is your personal lighthouse keeping you steadily on the course of your dreams. Over a period of one month, set a few hours aside to write down five or ten principles which will govern your life and which will keep you focused at all times.

Examples might be to consistently serve others, to be a considerate citizen, to become highly wealthy or to serve as a powerful leader. Whatever the mission statement of your life, refine it and review it regularly. Then when something adverse happens or someone tries to pull you off course, you quickly and precisely return to your chosen path with the full knowledge that you are moving in the direction that you have selected.
Related Suggested Reading: Goals by Brian Tracy (Link to Amazon.com)

Personal Example: Many years back in 1996, I attended a seminar where the speaker quoted this example.
[Paraphrased] Mission Statement is like a flight path. As most of you would realise the flight path looks like a smooth curve. In reality however, this is just a guiding line. A whopping 90% of the time the pilot is trying to get the plane aligned to the flight path -must be before the auto-pilot days- thanks to the tail winds, head winds, side winds. He constantly adjusts his direction subtly but surely to stick to the path.
Imagine pilot flying out a plane JFK – Heathrow without a plan. Your life is similar. You need a mission and a plan. You may not always get it, but you would be the first to know if you have missed it and make course corrections.

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Leadership Lesson Uncategorised

Understanding Fiscal Stimulus

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Understanding Fiscal Stimulus

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aspire career CEO Leadership Lesson Uncategorised

# Selling [Blurb] Be proud of the world’s oldest profession

Oldest profession – did you hear that?

(Repost from an earlier post in 2010)

Yes, the world’s oldest profession is selling. While your guess is as good as mine as to how the adage about “the oldest profession” being prostitution, a little more thought and you will realize that even prostitutes had to settle on the (sale) bargain, making the solicitation as it were (prospecting, qualification), before surrendering to the act (order fulfilment).

Well, the intention is not to get into those details but, more importantly, to say why selling is an excellent profession for those seeking excellence. Selling is a profitable career. This is the one career where you are rewarded for your abilities and not normalized to the bottom-most performer on the ladder.

Think about it –

You have the enviable pride that you help solve your prospectus’s problem. You are assuaging their pain or removing it for them.

  1. A good salesman’s employment is guaranteed in boom and even more during bust times.
  2. And yes, your company may have the best product. Unless it is sold, and profitably at that – there is no way your company will make money to pay for those salaries or even manufacture that product.
  3. To sell possibly is the most rewarding decision in your life. It gives you unlimited potential for your personal and financial growth.

Happy Selling!

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aspire career CEO Leadership Lesson Uncategorised

Business is Social: Implementing Social Media Strategy in Business (Part 2 of 2)

In my earlier post of Business is Social:…, I shared the size of the market was and the lovable demographics social media presents. In this second and final part, I will share with you the basic steps of getting there.
Before I proceed I want to share with you a personal sorry that occurred a few days ago.

I was disappointed at mediocre internet banking infrastructure of the two banks #hdfcbank, #icicibank and the unhelpful call center of #jetairways. The numerous attempts to the call center that either put me on hold for a good 20+ minutes or were unable to understand the requests yielded no results. As their customer that lives abroad, such waits and both frustrating and costly. I did what was the next step. Vent my frustration on a tweet.

In less than 12 hours, I had ‘messages’ from two of the firms #icicibank #jetairways requesting for more details. In less than 24 hours of me providing my contact details, the representatives called me and promised to fix the issue. One bank #hdfcbank, just chose to be unheard and non-present on twitter. Needless to say thy just lost my $10K investment that I was planning to do to their competitor.


As a customer, I was delighted that a 140 character tweet could achieve what a 20min international phone call or a 300 word email could not. Harnessing its power, let’s get serious.
Unfortunately, most companies are still treating social media like just another teenage fancy. When in fact, it’s so much more.

 

Where can Social Media help?

  1. customer service, building loyalty
  2. public relations, networking, thought-leadership
  3. and yes, may be customer acquisition, too.

And because I’d hate to see it all not add up, I’ll add this tiny bit of advice. Do not assume that social media is the answer to every problem

  • If your product sucks, social media won’t fix it.
  • However, if your customer service sucks, social media can help.
  • If your repeat business sucks, social media can help.
  • If your company’s word of mouth sucks, social media can help.

So, here’s what you need to do:

Define your company’s social media strategy.

Hope is not strategy

Stop thinking “campaigns”. Start thinking “conversations.

Your customers are queuing there. Your resistance to social media is futile. Millions of people are creating content for the social web. Your competitors are already there. Your customers have been there for a long time.
If your business isn’t putting itself out there, you are putting yourself out of business?

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aspire career CEO Leadership Lesson Uncategorised

Business is Social: Making a case for Social Media Strategy in Business (Part 1 of 2)

 
In my consulting assignments and workshop on social media, participants ask me the same question again and again. The top three questions are –

    • “Why do we as a business need to be there?”
    • “Facebook is for friends and Twitter is there for celebrities, not for real businesses”.
    • “We are a professional organization, not some startup”

In this two part series, I will share how social media can change the business dynamics and help you get closer to your prospects and customers. In part 2 of this series I will share my own personal example with an airline and a bank on how they leveraged social media to solve customer problems.

Well are businesses really social?

A few years ago when Avinash Kaushik, an Analytics Evangelist of Google quipped “social media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it. Nobody knows how. When it’s finally done there is surprise it’s not better”, it seemed like just that.
Now 3 years later 36 months wiser, Wikipedia defines thus – “Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable communication techniques. Social media is the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue”,
Why should I care, you may ask?
Well, I can give you not one but six trends that possibly can change your perspective.

  1. Because 3 out of 4 Americans use social technology.
  2. Because 2/3 of the global internet population visit social networks.
  3. Because visiting social sites is now the 4th most popular online activity
  4. Because time spent on social networks is growing at 3x the overall internet rate, accounting for
  5. Because social media is democratizing communications. Big time.
  6. Because social media is like word of mouth on steroids.

Because, social media is a force to be reckoned with! If facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd most populated in the world, just after China and India.

If all this is great stuff, how does it affect my business, my customers or my prospects? I will cover these in my next issue, and I leave you with this thought –

  • 93% of social media users believe that a company should have a presence in social media.
  • 93% of these users want a dialogue, not a monologue on social media and believe that companies should not treat social media as yet another channel for broadcasting bulls*t.

Well now that I set the grounding on the basics of Social Media, I will take up in my next issue on how businesses can leverage social media in my next issue.

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aspire career CEO Leadership Lesson

Free Education–The Khan Way!

Aspire to …. do something different that touch a million lives!

While browsing through the net looking for stuff to help my children learn about concepts better than they do in school, I happened on the Khan Academy

In an era where everyone looks at monetizing their offerings, here is a special person who has provided a whole bunch of stuff meant for children – free. 

This is the kind of work required for us in India to touch the Million plus children who never go beyond rote reading and many many others who drop out of school.  

Thinking out of the box!

I am sure there are many many more such sites- and I will keep sharing while I stumble upon more of them in the coming days.  Stay tuned.

 

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Free Download of three things, to help you plan your 2011

  1. FREE Download of an exclusive Goal Sheet template – Goal Sheet_aspire2be.pdf;
  2.  Free Download of the 2011 aspire2be Monthly Blossoms Calendar
  3.  Free Download of the 2011 aspire2be  Yearly Morning Orchids Calendar
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    action aspire dream Leadership Lesson

    Aspire 2 Be: A preamble!

    Aspire 2 Be: A preamble!
    Why did we choose this topic?
    All of us aspire to be someone or do something. During our lifetime we either we surrender our aspirations or get annoyed that we are reaching nowhere. Life gets frustrating and we end up blaming the world, the surroundings, and the people.
    Aspire2Be is designed to give you back control of your life and career – I repeat – help YOU take control of YOUR life and career.
    There are zillion self-help books and that will sure continue to sell. They all fairly good fix-it solutions and they too may work. The authors here will share their thoughts and experiences of over dozens of years of experience in their professional careers – to help you dream, ponder and act – in a way and method that you will be best suited to you.

    Aspiration –
    You either have it or you don’t. If you want to do something or become something life.Just do these three things – dream-ponder-act – The success is yours for keeps.