Nagesh Belludi

When to Send Customers Gifts

November 20, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Gifts are crucial marketing tools, which can help customers remember you throughout the year, not just during the holidays:

Send a gift after a sale. Saying thank-you does more than complete the sale—it helps build the relationship.
Send gifts after receiving referrals. One of the most rewarding compliments a salesperson can receive is a referral. Send a thank-you soon after getting a referral.
Commemorate anniversaries. Observe the day you signed your first contract with a customer, making it a special date to celebrate each year.
Remember birthdays. Send customers some birthday cheer, not just a card. Be creative and personalize the gift—send tickets to a sports event that the entire family can enjoy, for instance.

Idea for Impact: Business gifts can help solidify sales relationships and earn even more business. Pay attention to the things your customers enjoy and show your appreciation. As long as your gifts don’t seem patently insincere, they’re likely to welcome them.

How to See Opportunities Your Competition Doesn’t

November 19, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Harvard strategy professor Youngme Moon’s Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd (2010) describes how many companies pursue the same opportunities that every other company is chasing and thus miss the same opportunities that everyone else is missing.

In category after category, companies have gotten so locked into a particular cadence of competition that they appear to have lost sight of their mandate—which is to create meaningful grooves of separation from one another. Consequently, the harder they compete, the less differentiated they become … Products are no longer competing against each other; they are collapsing into each other in the minds of anyone who consumes them.

Moon argues that the companies and brands that see a different game win big. Such innovators don’t just try to outcompete their rivals at the margin. Instead, they redefine the competitive landscape by embracing unique ideas in a world crammed with me-too thinking.

European airline Ryanair unleashed a new wave of relentless cost- and price-leadership by charging customers extra for everything beyond a seat itself. If you want to check a bag, you pay extra. If you want an airport agent to check you in and print your boarding pass, you pay extra. If you want food and drink, you pay extra. Later on, Spirit Airlines took the price-obsession further by charging for carry-on bags too. After a rough rollout and customer defiance, paying for carry-on bags has become the new normal.

Idea for Impact: Being different is what makes all the difference. If you do things the same way everyone else in your field does things, why would you expect to do any better? What are you doing to raise your game—not just to stay in place, but to get ahead?

Each Temperament Has Its Own Language

November 18, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

From Dr. Irmgard Schlögl’s The Wisdom of the Zen Masters (1976) (she was later Ven. Myokyo-ni, Rinzai Zen Buddhist nun at the Zen Centre in London):

An elder Zen monk on his pilgrimage put up in a monastery. He came across another monk who was also on the pilgrimage. The two discovered that they had much in common, and decided next morning to continue together.

They came to a river where the ferryboat had just left. The elder took a seat to wait for its return. His new friend continued however, walking over the water.

Halfway across, he turned around and beckoned the elder to follow, “You can do it, too. Just have confidence and tread on.” The elder shook his head and stayed put.

“If you are scared, I’ll help you across. You see I can do it without much trouble.” Yet again, the elder shook his head.

The other reached the other bank of the river. He waited there until the ferry had brought the elder over. “Why did you hang back like that?” he asked.

“And what have you gained by rushing like that?” replied the elder.

“Had I known what you were like, I would not have taken up company with you.”

Wishing him farewell, the elder resumed his pilgrimage on his own.

Temperament clashes exist to some extent in almost all relationships. The language of camaraderie that two people share so effortlessly at some moments can unravel at others.

Sometimes each person believes they are deliberately communicating their needs and values, when indeed little gets through because each is working from different core assumptions and expectations—conveying and interpreting language, gestures, and intent differently, or seeking a different set of signals.

Idea for Impact: Each temperament has its own language.

Each of us has our own expectations of relating in an interpersonal relationship. When there are problems, don’t always attempt to “fix” them or back off and distance yourself. Simply give the other more space to be who they are. Seek to understand.

Let’s Hope She Gets Thrown in the Pokey

November 16, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

The Elizabeth Holmes-Theranos criminal trial hasn’t been without its share of theatrics.

Yes, Holmes’s massive fraud is obvious. She entranced (read WSJ reporter John Carreyrou’s excellent chronicle, Bad Blood (2018; my summary)) journalists, investors, politicians, and business partners into believing her fantasy science. She may even be responsible for negligent homicide if people died because of her company’s fake test results.

Then again, these sorts of cases generally hang on subtle distinctions between hyperbole and outright dishonesty and whether such deceit was deliberate.

Holmes’s lawyers will argue that she was merely an ambitious entrepreneur who failed to realize her vision but wasn’t a fraudster. Her lawyers will make a case that she is not to be blamed because people took her puffery and exaggeration as factually accurate. At what point do her wishfulness and enthusiasm go from optimism to intentional fraud? That’ll be the critical question.

At any rate, the Theranos verdict is unlikely to deter others from the swagger, self-assurance, hustle, and the “fake it till you make it” ethos that is so endemic to start-up culture. Investors will never cease looking at people and ideas rather than the viability of their work.

Idea for Impact: Don’t be so swayed by story-telling that has a way of making people less objectively observant. Assemble the facts, and ask yourself what truth the facts bear out. Never let yourself be sidetracked by what you wish to believe.

Don’t Be Deceived by Others’ Success

November 15, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Imitating successful competitors is a leading pathway to business innovation. Benchmarking can offer meaningful insights into comparative performance and help discover learnings for improvement. However, adopting others’ best practices can be surprisingly misleading and ineffective.

Four perception biases that come with benchmarking other companies can fail to make yours any better.

Many companies luck into success.

As I’ve noted before, you can’t reproduce others’ luck. Successful companies tend to significantly overvalue the effect of their leaders’ deliberate decisions on their performance and understate the role of chance—being at the right time, at the right place, with the right people. Alas, what worked in their circumstances may not work in yours.

The set-up-to-fail syndrome.

Benchmarking can be remarkably misleading when you make oversimplified comparisons to superstars who may not represent your situation. You could sink your business if you blindly copy celebrity leaders’playbooks in the wrong context, product, strategy, or market.

Companies that benchmark Apple and Steve Jobs and sidestep market research often disappoint themselves when their product launches fail. The leaders of these companies neither have Jobs’s brilliant intuition nor his extraordinarily talented creative team to build what customers want but didn’t know they wanted yet.

In the same way, companies that imitate the 20-70-10 “rank and yank” processes from Jack Welch’s playbook often fail to realize that several factors contributed to their success at General Electric. Welch had a robust organizational culture that insisted on regular and candid employee feedback and robust personnel processes for recognizing and developing the best talent within the company.

Corporate culture is a tricky business.

Your company’s culture—the prevailing way your people feel, think, behave, and relate to one another—cannot be changed easily. One industrial company aborted trying to imitate Google’s culture. This company couldn’t get its managers and employees to be more autonomous and innovative because the company’s and the industry’s ingrained culture did not lend itself to experimentation, risk-taking, and the celebration of fast failure.

Benchmarks look backward, not forwards.

In a competitive, ever so fast-changing world, what has succeeded in the past ten years may not necessarily do so in the next 10. The management guru Tom Peters once warned, “Benchmarking is stupid! Because we pick the current industry leader, and then we launch a five-year program, the goal of which is to be as good as whoever was best five years ago, five years from now.”

A strong focus on “quick wins” can turn out long-term losers.

Benchmarking can make short-term gains but have adverse long-term effects that may not manifest until many years later. By imitating an industry leader, a capital goods company decided to boost efficiency by outsourcing design to its suppliers. Years later, it discovered the debilitating effects of the loss of vital technical knowledge.

Idea for Impact: Best practices only add value when applied in the proper context

Applying best practices in the wrong context is a sure-fire way to hold your company back.

Pay attention to all ideas, mull them over, test what makes sense, adopt what works, and discard what doesn’t.

Sure, help yourself to great ideas wherever you can get them, but be mindful of the context. Try to understand how the top performers’ circumstances and culture may be causing their success. Think through the long-term consequences of any decision you take or any practice you adopt.

Inspirational Quotations #919

November 14, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi

In love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.
—Robert Ranke Graves (British Writer)

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
—Robert M. Pirsig (American Writer)

The forces of things, the beings of the Universe, interpenetrate, divide and unite themselves according to eternal laws. But the laws of Nature are, to speak after the manner of men, Thoughts of God, in which all lives, that is to say, He is.
—Heinrich Zschokke (Swiss Writer, Reformer)

If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.
—Sheryl Sandberg (American Executive, Author)

Organization can never be a substitute for initiative and for judgment.
—Louis Brandeis (American Jurist)

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!
—Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones) (American Labor Activist)

A belief which does not spring from a conviction in the emotions is no belief at all.
—Evelyn Scott (American Novelist)

We keep going back, stronger, not weaker, because we will not allow rejection to beat us down. It will only strengthen our resolve. To be successful there is no other way.
—Earl G. Graves Sr. (American Entrepreneur, Publisher)

It will always be a battle a day between those who want maximum change and those who want to maintain the status quo.
—Gerry Adams (Northern Irish Politician)

Desire nothing for yourself, which you do not desire for others.
—Baruch Spinoza (Dutch Philosopher)

One small cat changes coming home to an empty house to coming home.
—Pam Brown (Australian Poet)

The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a man’s determination.
—Tommy Lasorda (American Baseball Player, Coach)

Our great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are.
—Alexander Hamilton (American Statesman)

Great control of every motion and placement is a kind of self-care. It’s self-love in the best sense. I make a contract with the dancers (not literally, of course) to keep them alive and well and progressive—doing level best to see that they’re not injured. Dancing is not normal, that only a strong, knowledgeable body can protect against damage.
—Bella Lewitzky (American Choreographer)

It’s the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.
—Claude M. Bristol (American Self-Help Author)

You Can’t Believe Those Scientific Studies You Read About in the Papers

November 11, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Look at the filler articles in the well-being section of your preferred newspaper, and you’ll often luck into health advice with nuance-free mentions of all sorts of scientific studies.

One week, drinking coffee is good for you. Next week it’s harmful. Ditto video games. Swearing makes you look intelligent, but hold your flipping horses … the next day, swearing makes you seem verbally challenged to explain your annoyances respectfully.

Gutter press revelations isn’t only less-than-scientific, but it actually defeats the objectives of science.

In June 2014, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published an allegedly peer-reviewed paper titled “Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes.” The study deduced that hurricanes with feminine names generate more casualties supposedly because tacit sexism makes communities take the storms with a feminine name less seriously. The work was discredited as soon as its methods were dissected. Nevertheless, the dubious paper had made its way into media channels across the country because of the believability implied by the influential National Academy of Sciences.

Positive results that make a sensational headline tend to get published readily—especially if they speak to the audiences’ worldviews. In truth, many of these studies are low-quality studies where the variables are latent, and the effects aren’t directly observable and quantifiable, especially in the social sciences. Sadly, with the push to produce ever more papers in academia, peer review doesn’t necessarily corroborate the quality of research nearly so much as it enforces a discipline’s norms.

Idea for Impact: Let’s be skeptical readers. Let’s be better readers.

Let’s subject every claim to the common-sense test: is the claim possible, plausible, probable, and likely? Everything possible isn’t plausible, everything plausible isn’t probable, and everything probable isn’t likely.

Being skeptical does not mean doubting the validity of everything, nor does it mean being cynical. Instead, to be skeptical is to judge the validity of a claim based on objective evidence and understand the assertions’ nuances. Yes, even extraordinary claims can be valid, but the more extraordinary a claim, the more remarkable the evidence to be mobilized.

While we’re on the subject, have you heard about research that found that you could make unsuspecting people believe in anything by merely asserting that it’s been “shown by research?” Now then, the former’s the only research worth believing. Very much so, yes, even without evidence!

Lessons from Airline Entrepreneur David Neeleman: Staff Your Weaknesses

November 8, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Airline serial entrepreneur David Neeleman has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD.) School was torture. He couldn’t focus, and he procrastinated constantly.

“I felt like I should be out doing things, moving things along, but here I was, stuck studying statistics, which I knew had no application to my life,” Neeleman once said. “I knew I had to have an education, but at the first opportunity to start a business, I just blew out of college.”

Despite his own struggles, Neeleman went on to build a stellar business career in the airline industry. He started Morris Air, WestJet, JetBlue Airways, Azul Brazilian Airlines, and Breeze Airways. He’s even led the revival of TAP Air Portugal.

Through it all, Neeleman made the best of his strengths—original thinking, high energy, and the ability to draw the best out in people.

Far from lamenting his ADHD, David Neeleman celebrated it

Early on, Neeleman realized that he must manage his ADHD carefully. Throughout his career, he got help with his weaknesses.

People with ADHD tend to possess rare talents and gifts. They can be extraordinarily creative and original. They display ingenuity, and they encourage that trait in others. They can improvise well under pressure.

However, ADHD confers disadvantages too. People with ADHD are likely to be incredibly forgetful, disorganized, impulsive, and hyperactive. They drag their feet and miss deadlines. Their performance can be inconsistent. They can drift away mentally unless, oddly enough, they’re under stress or handling multiple inputs.

Sadly, modern society (including parents, schools, workplaces, and career counselors) tends to linger upon the negative symptoms and encourages people with ADHD to learn to cope with them. Strengths are more likely to go unnoticed.

Idea for Impact: Don’t let your weaknesses stop you from reaching your life goals.

In your work-life and outside, seek environments that allow you to bring more of your strengths to play. But don’t ignore your weaknesses (or the downsides of your strengths.)

Staff your weaknesses. Identify two or three key job activities that you don’t do well. Determine how you can delegate those responsibilities to others or seek help. This way, your weaknesses don’t become the Achilles heel that can hamper the strengths that make you effective.

Inspirational Quotations #918

November 7, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi

If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury; but if you injure him, you will always remember.
—Kahlil Gibran (Lebanese-born American Philosopher)

He who foresees calamities suffers them twice over.
—Beilby Porteus (Bishop of London)

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
—Jean Cocteau (French Poet, Artist)

Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.
—Laozi (Chinese Philosopher)

The best plan is to profit by the folly of others.
—Pliny the Elder (Roman Scholar)

In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
—Erich Fromm (German Social Philosopher)

As a means to success, determination has this advantage over talent—that it does not have to be recognized by others.
—Robert Brault

One original thought is worth a thousand mindless quotings.
—Diogenes Laertius (Greek Biographer)

In politics, people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.
—Cecil Parkinson (British Politician)

It’s hard enough to write a good drama, it’s much harder to write a good comedy, and it’s hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.
—Jack Lemmon (American Actor)

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.
—E. M. Forster (English Novelist)

It is no proof of a man’s understanding to be able to confirm whatever he pleases; but to be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false; this is the mark and character of intelligence.
—Emanuel Swedenborg (Swedish Mystic, Theologian, Scientist)

The worst men often give the best advice.
—Philip James Bailey (English Poet)

Success and failure are greatly overrated. But failure gives you a whole lot more to talk about.
—Hildegard Knef (German Actress, Singer)

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (American Head of State)

Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.
—Saul Alinsky (Community Organizer)

Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave.
—Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux (Scottish Jurist, Politician)

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Nagesh Belludi

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Idea for Impact: Each temperament has its own language.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Many companies luck into success.

The set-up-to-fail syndrome.

Corporate culture is a tricky business.

Benchmarks look backward, not forwards.

A strong focus on “quick wins” can turn out long-term losers.

Idea for Impact: Best practices only add value when applied in the proper context

Wondering what to read next?

Gutter press revelations isn’t only less-than-scientific, but it actually defeats the objectives of science.

Idea for Impact: Let’s be skeptical readers. Let’s be better readers.

Wondering what to read next?

Far from lamenting his ADHD, David Neeleman celebrated it

Idea for Impact: Don’t let your weaknesses stop you from reaching your life goals.

Wondering what to read next?