This week I want to dedicate my blog to a couple of members of the Love Your Business Community who have been directly effected by the fires in Victoria.
To Bernie and Karen and everyone at the BACS team, and Hellen and the DCA team, our thoughts and love are with you.
Here are the messages from Debbie at BACS and Jane at DCA, including how you can help directly.
I caught up with Fabrice last night. Fabrice is a good friend of mine who works for Accenture - a large consulting company where I worked a lifetime ago.
A little while back I told him a bit about what we are up to with Love Your Business, and gave him a new business card. On the back of the card (as well as on our website and email signature) it says the more we love, the more we thrive.
Last night Fabrice told me something very cool.
A couple of links crossed my desk this week (thanks Grace!) that are a bit of fun ... But also marketing genius. A brilliant way of building an email database. If you have a couple of minutes, check them out.
I had my most unusual business coaching session for the year last night, with Francis and Cecilia from the village of Veifa'a in Papua New Guinea.
My brother Jon and his wife Fiona lived in Veifa'a for a couple of years as part of a volunteers abroad program (there are now numerous babies and toddlers named Jon and Fiona in the village). They become good friends with Francis and Cecilia, and were adopted into their respective clans. And now they have brought them out to Australia for a holiday.
They plan to take back a laptop and an old printer / scanner / copier to start a letter writing and photocopying business in their village. Jon asked me to give them a pro bono business coaching session. And I have to say, doing business in a PNG village has its advantages!
Every business - including yours - is in the business of having people feel better ... whether you know it or not.
The primary motivation and the key consequence of everything we do is how we feel. Every action we take is to move away from pain or towards pleasure. Everything we do is in order to feel better. Sigmund Freud called this the Pleasure Principle: he said it motivates all human activity.
Why is this important in your business?
In yesterday’s newspaper, The Age, there was a story of how Virgin Atlantic sacked 13 of its cabin staff after they criticised the airline and some of its passengers on the social networking website, Facebook.
The official reason given was that the staff’s behaviour was "totally inappropriate" and "brought the company into disrepute".
Grace started a couple of weeks ago as our new office manager / PA - a role we call our chief nurturing officer. She's doing great ... but there's a serious issue. She's got a better chair than me.
It's newer, bigger, more comfortable ... and it looks better. And I'm the CEO. Surely that's not right. After all, I work more hours, I spend more time sitting down, and did I mention I'm the CEO?
Here is a story from my brother Ben:
The other day was running a training session in Sydney. This guy turned up late, and was basically a royal pain in the arse - think a high school student up the back who knows the teacher can't give him a detention. Continually interrupting, yawning loudly, wrapping his knuckles on the desk. After about 40 minutes I said to him that he's making it impossible to run the session and if he has any issues about the software that he needs to discuss we'll have a chat about it after the session. He really cracked it at that point, and said I was being paranoid etc.
Sat, Oct 16th, @2:00pm - 06:00PM - |
Sat, Oct 23rd, @9:30am - 05:00PM - |
Love Your Business is a wonderful opportunity to step out of your business, de-construct its elements and choose to re-design it in a very powerful and dynamic paradigm.
