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Giving Away Your Secret Ideas

Meeting 4In the Caribbean, we maintain a distinct fear of being ripped off, especially when it comes to someone else “stealing” our ideas. In this article for the Sunday Gleaner, I argue that it’s better to give away ideas in order to generate leads, than it is to keep them to oneself. Giving them away allows for new ones to arise, which keep the flow going, and actually improves the quality of the ideas.

One remarkable difference between doing business in the United States and here in Jamaica is many of us are obsessed with holding on to ideas. As professionals, we keep innovations close to our chest, for fear that ‘s’maddy might tief dem’.

I hear this complaint from people who should know better. The conversation often goes like this:

‘My sales are down. This recession is killing me. The usual techniques aren’t working – cold calls, advertising, discounts.’

‘What about putting your best ideas together in an opinion piece to the business editor of The Gleaner?’

‘An mek s’maddy tief dem? Yuh mad?’

Then, out comes a story of the long hours he or she spent on a proposal, which a client turned down right before taking the ideas and using them anyway – for free.

I suggest a bold counterstrategy. Give up the fear of being ripped off, and forget about holding on to your ideas. They aren’t yours to begin with, and the more you hold on to them, the fewer you’ll generate. Stop playing defence, and instead go on creative offence by burying your listening audience with new ideas.

Over the past eight years, I have produced hundreds of articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, white papers, presentations, online training, and books while trying to share my very best ideas in this column. More than 95 per cent of these individual pieces were produced for free.

My recently launched book, for example, was available for free for five days. More than 3,000 people around the world received the book, making it No. 1 on the list of free books in its category.

When people ask me if I’m crazy to give away so much, here’s what I wish I could explain: The ideas aren’t mine (or yours).

Where do ideas come from? I’m a bit of an intuition junkie, and I listen keenly for new insights – as soon as they pop up, I capture them. They have fuelled my business for 20 years and are the reasons I can produce new content freely today. I have a long backlog of fresh topics.

But, this wasn’t always the case. Before moving back to Jamaica, my business partner complained that I never contributed to the company newsletter. It was true: I never did. To me, writing was a nasty chore. She had a gift honed by a Harvard education, and I did not.

On the eve of my return, however, I began to write a blog about the move, and found that I couldn’t stop. It was the beginning. But the impetus didn’t come from me.

So where does inspiration come from? My short answer is that they don’t come from me anymore than air or water do.

Instead, like the earth’s elements, they come through me. Trying to hold on to them is a mistake. Giving them away actually allows more of them to come. Like most other things that truly matter, they come from God, the ultimate source.

All I have to do is never block the channel.

TURNING IDEAS INTO SALES

We are in the most desperate of economic times. I have had more sleepless nights in the past 12 months than in the past 10 years of my life, all related to the future of business here in Jamaica.

One thing I long for, like many business owners, is help. Preferably free.

Your clients also need help, especially in these times. Preferably free.

How can you deliver the ideas that God has loaned you in a way that builds your business revenues?

1. Start with your prospective clients’ problems. In your head or on paper, brainstorm the difficulties they have and the gaps that exist in their information. Look carefully at the decisions they can’t make because they don’t have a process.

If you hang out with these questions long enough, your experience will bring you to some of the answers.

2. Pick a single problem, preferably the biggest one, and find a free, popular channel for your message, such as a blog, YouTube or Facebook.

3. Get enough feedback to make your content interesting and as attractive as possible.

4. Before it’s absolutely perfect, stop working on it, send it out and start working on the next edition.

5. When you gain a bit of a following from your clients and prospects, start asking for their email addresses in return for continued and guaranteed early access. Take the prospects and qualify them; then, convert them into clients.

The process I have outlined here is simple, but as you probably know, the difficulty doesn’t lie in the technology. It’s in having the right overall mindset. Work on that, and the rest is easy.

Here’s the link to the article: Try This Revolutionary Sales Technique – Give Away Your Secret Ideas.

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How to Recruit Super Employees

The following article wasn’t published in today’s Jamaica Gleaner as I expected, but here it is in full.

How to Recruit Super Employees

In a recent column, I gave some advice to employees who are asked to do the job of one or more people in addition to their own. Demands for this kind of surplus productivity cause headaches for employees, but they signal a greater problem for companies when they see no willingness to improve, or even worse, when some workers see the request as unfair: a clear sign that something important was missing when they were selected.

Given the high cost and effort of replacing low-performers this problem can be deadly.

It’s a real challenge for Jamaican companies. Many local firms are not competitive compared with their foreign counterparts, which can sometimes do the same work with fewer people at a lower total cost.

The first gambit some Jamaican firms take avoids the human resource issue. They blame high prices on the usual suspects: devaluation, security, the recession. These excuses last for a while – until competitors’ aggressive improvements catch up and overwhelm them. By delaying employee productivity improvements they are eventually forced to close.

The ultimate solution doesn’t involve lobbying, politicking or complaining that the government isn’t doing enough. The global forces of business improvement are much bigger than any of these, and they are ultimately inescapable. Also, history has shown that Jamaicans will do anything to pay the price we believe is fair – including importing products in suitcases. We take high prices personally, and we don’t use fancy words like “price-gouging” – we simply say “dem too t’ief.”

The fact is, providers of products and services need to find ways to drive employee costs down — and productivity up, not just sometimes. Always. That means they have to find ways to ask workers to do more with less. Not just once, but every single day.

A great place to start is in the way new employees are selected from a pool of candidates. When it’s done well, this process is one way to separate the rare, self-motivated employee from his/her peers.

Going Beyond Interviews

The days of hiring based on an interview alone are quickly passing. Research shows that it’s simply too easy to be swayed by externals: nice diction without dropped (or misplaced) “h’s,” a lighter shade of brown skin and attendance at the right schools. Add to that a recognizable family name: these things used to be enough to create the comfort needed for a job offer.

However, today, the recession is producing job candidates who are willing to work harder than ever before, and employers would be foolish to continue using gut instinct to make important hiring decisions. A few admit this openly, and they have adopted a best practice that has been around for some time: “assessment centres.” But the phrase is misleading – it’s not a physical location. The phrase refers to a process.

The Solution: An Assessment Centre

This complicated phrase is built around a simple principle: the best way to evaluate someone’s aptitude is to evaluate his or her ability to do select tasks. For example, a mini assessment centre to hire a gardener would test candidates’ ability to cut the lawn, trim hedges and create a new bed for your tomatoes. The candidates would know that they are each being tested and compared against others, and the best performer would win the job. To conduct this simple assessment centre, you would have a clear set of criteria to use as a guide.

However, in practice, most businesses don’t use this method: it’s just easier and quicker to use gut instinct than it is to set up assessment centres. The fact is that they aren’t easy to craft.

Setting them up requires an in-depth knowledge of the essential parts of the job. In many workplaces, standard job descriptions are of little help, if they exist at all. Expertise hasn’t been captured, and when an employee departs, their knowledge of how to perform the role leaves along with them. It makes the task of determining the core elements of the job an uphill struggle.

It also requires some skill: translating the tasks required by the job into “assessment tests” takes creativity. I have seen everything e.g. video role plays, written tests, computer games and mini-projects. Together, they have a surprising quality, revealing spontaneous and breathtaking performances: both good and bad.

When centres are run properly, they effectively separate candidates from each other, and it becomes much easier to hire employees who are willing to do the job of two or more people, while playing the never-ending game of getting better all the time. Then, the candidates who are hired are the ones around whom a powerful future can be built.072