A while ago I was involved in a small business that made software.  Each year we would have to fork over a massive amount of money in licensing arrangements to Microsoft in order to keep being able to legally make software.   After doing this out of my own pocket for several years I reached a point where it became obvious to me that if I spent in anymore money on making software that wasn’t paying for itself yet, then I would probably have to declare bankruptcy.  I was struck with a dilemma.  Do I continue in business and dig myself into even more debt or do I put my own financial considerations first?  The dilemma was a moral one.

I spent two months seriously thinking about what to do.  I tried everything I could think of to make the product sell more but people just weren’t buying it.  One sleepless night after the other I kept wrestling this through… what do I do?  Eventually as I thought painfully through my options I was left with an ultimatum by my business partner at the time.  Pay up your part of the share or get out.   Considering I was facing personal bankruptcy I chose the latter and not the former.  One of the statements made to me by my partner at the time was, ‘we always be friends but this is about business.’   I think I would have almost preferred bankruptcy though I am very thankful that it didn’t happen.   What I want to think about in this post, through these personal events, is why do we seperate personal values from business?

The split between emotion and greed

When you get right down to the meaning of the statement, ‘it’s not business it’s personal,’ you come to a contradiction in terms.  Business is built on the backbone of personal things.  Initially, it starts with a personal desire.  You then gain support through people who pay for (support) your goods or services.  You are then a success.  Simple isn’t it?  However, notice the most famous examples in recent times in entrepreneurship.  Richard Branson is all heart to the audience and he uses this to great effect.  Car companies are now becoming green and so on.  This is not a mere marketing ploy these things are personal.  I think the majority of business first thinking is flawed because it is simply a neat way to box things into a corner where the emotions of life are cut off.  That, last time I checked, is borderline personality disorder.   I am one of those people who believes that you cannot take your heart out of what you do.

If you split business and emotion you are seriously misguided in your understanding of how human beings operate.  Why?  If you cannot personally connect with people you will not be very popular in the coming ten years.  What differentiates loyalty in this current generations of web nomads is not the desire for personal success and wealth but what makes them feel satisfied.   I was sitting in my office the other day listening to some people bickering (as usual) about their grades.  One of them said that they couldn’t understand what the problem was with their assignment they had met the criteria and done this and that.  Then the conversation turned ugly.  One of them called the lecturer a nasty name and a fellow student another!  I was in my office, admittedly surprised and at somewhat amused by it.    It occured to me however that the calling of the name was an outpouring of emotion. He was hurt by the grade he had received.  I should have walked out of the office and said, ‘it’s not business it’s personal.’  Would he have felt justified by that do you think?  No.  He FELT wronged.

My story

While I felt terribly wronged by what happened to me in business, it is my fault.  Business operates under certain rules, obligations and concepts that are accepted practices.  That said, when the ultimatum was given to me I felt betrayed.  I had spent four years designing the product, marketing it (including once almost scoring a distribution deal), getting free offline media exposure at least three times.   All of which was a terribly hard for me to do because I am not really inclined to attention (moderate introvert on the Myer-Briggs typology).  I went through it though in the hope that my efforts would pay off.  They did, I scored a position in the local paper, Marie-Claire magazine and in various places online.   I spent hours asking people about the design of the product and brainstorming ideas with my partner.  Ultimately though all of that work, effort and planning came to nothing.  Why?  People didn’t want to buy it.

As the months wore on to years I became more and more in debt to this program that people didn’t want to buy.  Sure, I could have done more and I have learned a lot more about marketing since then.   I will say this though, money gets money and attention gets attention.  There is a common, all to misunderstood, idea that all you have to do to have success is think the right way or do this or do that to get in.  Let me warn you as a twice failed business person: don’t believe the hype.  I had more success with Guerrilla Marketing methods than with many of the so-called new ideas in the early part of this century.  Concepts like ‘viral marketing’ really only work for people who have a product people want to talk about.  It only works when you have access to the ’sneezers’ and they are willing to endorse what you have done.  I am sorry but most of what you read online about marketing a business doesn’t apply if you have a product that will never get the level of saturation required.  Read the Guerilla Marketing stuff, it’s a lot more helpful than the crap being dished out by popular marketing myth makers of the day.

When I was told cough up or get out I could see this was a business decision.   The line it’s not personal it’s business was thrown at me and since then I have reflected on the dichotomy it causes in people.  It’s like when people try to strip the emotion out of religious debates.  You just don’t get it.  Faith and personal beliefs are felt.  It’s like saying to a leper, ‘Hey put aside your leprosy and look at it objectively.’ Tell me how to remove my emotions.  Tell me how not to fell the sting of failure.   Business is personal.  In my situation though there really wasn’t much that could be done.  I had borrowed to capacity and I had to leave.  There was no choice for me.  I could have sought venture capital but I had lost faith in the product and in my partner.   Especially when I had seeded in a great deal of my own money to begin with.

The problem with creating silly paradigms

To say it’s not personal it’s business, means that you have no heart.   I am the first to admit business decisions are often the hardest to make and they do involve people.  But there is a false paradigm that comes with business that I want to address in this post.  You can’t separate your heart from what you do.  If you do have that ability then you must be a borderline sociopath.  I am not talking about receiving constructive criticism because that only improves what you do.  There is no better way to test your ideas than to show them to your enemy.  The devil’s advocate is a strong ally in business.  I am saying that business decisions often involved choosing money over people matters.  Business is often portrayed as being all about the dollar at the expense of people.  What then is social entrepreneurship?   Money and wealth are good things.    Disaster couldn’t be avoided in my situation because it was too late for me.  I had to make a choice.  I didn’t want to get divorced so I picked what I picked and I am content with that decision.   In the time since leaving the business I have reflected on that, the choice of words, and realised that this is a big problem.  We really need to bring some heart back to business.  The two are not mutually exclusive.  They are just “not talking” at the moment!

When we create ideas to believe in our subconscious mind supports us 100% of the way but our heart (or inward person) will give us tell tale signs that we have made the wrong choice.   An idea the world and especially the university system believe in is the separation of emotion and mind.  This is a huge mistake.  We have educated the mind but altogether pushed aside the role emotions play in such things.  What a tragic mistake.  By doing this we have taken the heart and soul out of business in favour of decisions that are in essence evil.  We have let greed dominate our thinking instead of making responsible moral choices.   If you ever get the chance to see a movie called the Parable of the Sadhu you really should watch it.  It explains the story of a man who was trekking through the Himalayas with a colleague.  Along his path he met a Sadhu from the local village.  She had wondered onto the mountain become dehydrated and lost.   The mountaineer made the choice to leave the Sadhu with another group and move forward to the summit.  After returning to America the events troubled him and made him think he made the wrong choice in choosing his own objectives over the need presented to him as the Sadhu.   What I learned from watching it was that people often say they would do the right thing but often make the business choice first.

The road forward

It’s very easy to sit here in my little rental listening to the wind blowing through the besser brick structure of my run down house and say these things.  I mean why do I really care?  I care because I see, day after day, shallow people who have plans for success coming into my courses and leaving again.   Things aren’t getting better. I have been stepped on, stabbed in the back and for what?  For a few thousand dollars?  I mean c’mon.  The road forward is for us who desire to be leaders in the entrepreneurial sphere to begin to bring back discussions on ethics and the role of values in business decisions.  Especially in the technical sector where all we do is get larger, wider and less coherent.   In particular, we need to make a place for emotions and understand the role they play in decision making.  You can’t turn them off.  You can’t say, ‘well I will put these aside for now.’  Again, if you can do that they you are sociopath and you need treatment.   The road forward in business is to learn from our past ethics stuff ups and begin to make better decisions that are informed about emotions and their role in the workplace.   Even the stuff I had to read for my research on emotional engagement is about making people becoming emotionally hooked into their work so they will become more productive!  That’s brainwashing!

So what have I learned from my failure?  Lots of things.  Two major things… how to market something successfully and how not to.  More than that I have learned that business is good and I love it but it has no heart at the moment.  I blame myself for failing in business and I do not point the finger at my partner.  He did what he had to do.  I have overcome my feelings of hurt and betrayal which really were uncalled for.   I have learned this: it’s not ‘business’ it’s ‘personal’.  The heart and the mind cannot be separated to suit what we think business should be.   Every time I read it’s not personal, it’s business.  I think of how shallow people like that are.  How selfish they are and how they really don’t know how human beings work.  These are just images we have floating around in our heads.  Who said business had to be tough? Donald Trump? That’s just the way HE chooses to do it.   You may think, ‘well he gets results.’  So what?  Where’s the heart?  I know people who have spent their lives putting on the ‘tough guy’ image and they are alone, miserable and indifferent.  Is that what you think success is?  Just having money?  You are much poorer than you realise if you think that.

In closing I would like to say that I consider myself as an entrepreneur.  Even though I am employed as a academic I am still at heart and will always be an entrepreneur.  I just so happen to be one who leans to the right side of the brain.  I am emotional you might say.  That said, I am not a basket case neither am I suicidal.  I recognise the place and needs people have and choose to put them first where I can, instead of chasing the almighty dollar.  I just wish I could find people who were like me so they world could become a better place.

Technorati Tags: small business, business, heart, subconscious mind

I was in the car driving home from work when I suddenly realised something. Big actions often come from deep seated unconscious feelings that we really don’t understand. Think about the decision to have children, was it a rational choice or something that you felt you had to do. What about the choice to follow a career in the field you are in? Was there something about that kind of job that just spoke to you? A lot of the time the choices we make, especially those from the heart, cause us to take huge actions.

There is a thing called post-hoc rationalisation which I lectured on the other day that says we often take actions and later justify them by making sense of what happened because we don’t really know why we did what we did. Take me for instance. I am attracted to things that are new. No, not shiny things… new things. I like to create stuff and make it. In my job I don’t get much of a chance to do that at present so I have been a bit tired. But, when I am working through something new and ideas are flowing I feel like I have had a fire set under my backside. It’s truly wonderful. Why is that? It’s because deep down that’s me and when I see that in the world it’s me coming out.

As small step we need to begin to pay attention to what we do and trace it back to what we think and then some kind of underlying feeling or emotion.  These deep things we ignore are us.  I have once heard it put this way you are not what you think about you are the bit behind the thoughts.  I think in business we need to pay more attention to these things and take them more seriously.  I think this is an interesting topic and I will be posting more about this in the next few days.   Thanks for reading.

Technorati Tags: unconscious, feelings, decision, actions

The other day my sister in law told us that she found a tree right down the end of her yard that she didn’t even know she had. When she investigated further she noticed something was growing on it … hello Macadamia nuts! When she told me that story I thought how often in life do we not know that we have something valuable and how much we overlook who we really are. Do you know that you may have something valuable that can be shared with others? What stops us from seeing that value we have?

I believe that the answer is not a simple one but a great percentage of people I have met cannot see their value because they believe lies about themselves. The last time you made a mistake did you slam your fist into the table and scream obscenities at yourself. If you did, did you know that you are making yourself believe that you are worth the abuse? You are saying to yourself, ‘Gee I am totally stupid and worthless aren’t I? I guess that I couldn’t run an automated pig farm?’ Think about what you say during a day and make a thought diary.

How do you do this? Well its simple really find a notebook and write down what you think you are every time you say it. There’s a key. We often don’t realise that we are telling ourselves what our real value is everyday of our life when we say it. A principle that most people overlook is this: whether you know it or don’t what you think you are comes from a deep well of underlying ideas that grow inside you. How do you they grow? They grow because we feed them by recognising the value they have by speaking to it.

Knowing your value starts with understanding where you draw your values from. The first thing you need to know is what am I worth? This is not a financial question that you answer by opening up your wallet and taking a look at how much cash you have. Your sense of self-worth does not come from the things you own because if it does you are much emptier than you know. True self-worth comes by recognising that you are not worthless that you have some value. Knowing your value means knowing that you are valuable. How can you really know this?

You know who you are not by what you do but by who you are. Some people attach their identity to what they do. Some people attach their identity to their social standing and the clubs they join. The bottom line is: those things are poor substitutes for the sad truth that people are missing something that they really need. A sense that they don’t need anything to prove their own worth. All they need is to know that they are accepted.

As a Christian you have this right. Service and the things you do make no difference and the influential friends that you hold dear to you are all there to make you feel better about something that you lack. Inside you there is a belief system that says: I need something to make me feel adequate. I need money to feel as if I am somebody… I need a lot of friends because if I need people around me to keep me up or whatever it might be.

For me, a key problem was always trying to prove myself to others to make myself feel like they liked me. I would do extraordinary things to try and get people to like me. I would buy them things, do extra work for them and whatever came to mind to try and make these people think that I had value. What I didn’t realise was that I was trying to buy friends by making them like me. I could make people like me and I could do things that would make me look superior but on the inside I was empty and hollow because I knew (as I imagine you do if you are reading this) that I was totally empty. Sure I had people around me to feel sorry for me or boost me up which helped but the real problem was I thought I didn’t have any value. I needed these people in my life to give me value. The truth is your value comes from something much deeper than that. As a Christian your value comes from God.

In the world’s way of doing things we con ourselves into believing that we are worth something by playing games. We play all kinds of games. At work we climb over people because we think we need to have that next level to feel successful or we talk down to people who are not as ‘affluent’ as us because we think they are inferior. Why would we do that? We do it because we have a deep down need to feel like we have value. The problem is: you already have value.

The bible tells us that Jesus Christ lives with us (2 Cor 6:16) and that he has accepted us (Eph 1:3). If we believe that this is true then what else really matters? Jesus also said that the cares of this world choke the fruitfulness of God’s word in our lives (Mark 4:17-19). It would be easy for me to say, ‘brush them aside and focus on Jesus.’ However, this is easier said than done.

Beginning to recognise your value

Knowing your value starts when you realise this: God loves me unconditionally. Allow the thought that he loves you without any reason to settle in you. Think about it by running the thought through your mind everyday. Whenever you are tempted to think or say something terrible do this: point to yourself and say I am totally accepted by God. So what if people don’t like you… a bunch of people don’t like me. But I am not able to be rejected. You can reject the way I look, what I might say but you cannot reject me because I am not able to be rejected. If at heart I am accepted in Jesus Christ this means I can never be unaccepted. If I am totally settled in that knowledge and people reject me for whatever reason all I need to know is that he loves and accepts me totally.

This kind of knowledge does not come overnight like so many false promises of modern teachings tell us. You grow into this kind of knowledge. But it begins with you making the right decision right now by saying, “I am worth something… God accepts me and loves me unconditionally.” Add your spiritual faculties to this: begin believing it in your heart. Find an imaginative way to attach pleasure to the thought.

After a while you will begin to notice three things:

1. You are constantly devaluing yourself
2. The thoughts of love coming from you are true real feelings coming from God
3. There is nothing else that matters once you know that he accepts you

Now, I am not telling you that instantly you will feel better. Shy away from instant solutions. If they do work it’s only for a little while then you have to go back and put something else in its place. Find a scripture from the bible on what God thinks about you and say it every morning and every night when you go to bed. Think about it on a daily basis. Now I have not perfected this but from doing this I have stopped so many negative beliefs from arising up in my soul. I hope that you do practice what I have said here today by at least attempting to:

1. Recognising how you value yourself
2. Replacing that with a Godly way of seeing yourself

By doing this consistently and thinking about how God thinks about you, you will begin to see yourself as he does. You will see yourself as loved and accepted, totally forgiven and washed in the blood of Jesus Christ. If you don’t see yourself as God does, then you are probably seeing yourself as others do or worse as the enemy does. Grace teaches us that we are accepted, that we are not condemned that we are loved. Start today. Start right now: you are accepted, you are loved. Remember this: if you don’t attach value to you then nobody else will.

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I recently had the pleasure of buying a can of Dr. Pepper from a local man in a shopping centre. Considering we don’t have Dr. Pepper here in Brisbane the price was considerably more expensive that you might think… but I didn’t mind paying it. Why? Every time I go into the store the man greets me with a smile and always has something great to say. You can just tell he absolutely loves what he does. How can I tell that he does? Because his heart is in what he is doing.

The opposite of what I am saying

Yesterday I bought my very first table at a local furniture store. The man who runs the store was sitting in a recliner with his eyes closed and didn’t even acknowledge us as we walked in the store. Probably didn’t help that I said, ‘Wow, they are dead on a Saturday,’ as we walked in. Whoops! The table we had picked out of the catalogue was ordered and the man hardly moved. Now I am not one to makejudgments on the spot but I would say he was not happy with his job and his heart was somewhere else.

Where is your heart?

My heart is in creative, idea generating things. I like to make new things out of old combinations and build things. Now, I don’t know which end of the hammer to pick up but in my heart this is how I am.  The point of this post to ask … is your heart in what you do?  Check yourself.  Ask yourself… do I want to do this for the right reasons or the wrong reasons?  Look at the mirror and ask yourself what’s the deal?

How do you know your heart is not in it

When you go to work do you feel the ‘ugh’ feeling?  What do I mean?  A while ago a colleague of mine walked up to the office he was in and he had recently quit.  I said to him, ‘Why?’.  He said to me, ‘Every time I walked up the stairs to come to my office I would get depressed.’  I instantly saw his point.

Now I have to caution you here.  Sometimes you have to build something else in order to move forward before you make the shift.  But, don’t lie to yourself.  Tell the truth.  If you know you aren’t putting your heart into it… find out what you should be and go for it.  That however is another story for another post.

Technorati Tags: Dr. Pepper, Brisbane, heart, judgments, truth

I am moving house at the moment and we finally got to see the place we are moving into today in full detail.  I have NEVER in my life moved into a house that was so filthy.  Normally, I wouldn’t blog about this kind of thing but I mean MY GOD!  The windows were dirty, the walls had black scuff marks on them, the oven was unclean and so I could go on.  Have you ever had this problem?  Here are four reasons why shouldn’t do the same thing.

Remember the Golden Rule? 

Do unto others?  Why not think of the poor sucker who is going to move in after you.  How about them?  Now we have to clean the house just to make it habitable.  Why not buck current trends and scare somebody by doing something helpful.  I sure wish the person that came before me in my new house had done me this way… now that I have all this CLEANING to do!

A sense of personal respect

To me somebody who leaves a rental property in that kind of state (unless physically or mentally incapacitated) is saying, ‘you know what I couldn’t give a royal damn about whoever is coming after me.’  I see this kind of thinking on the road all the time.  Why do people compete for a space on the freeway?  Don’t you know that one day you will be DEAD and then where will you be rushing too?  Take you time and be courteous.   People who have no personal respect treat others the way they have been treated themselves.   Without recognising it we become the very thing we desire not to become by virtue of the fact that we are displaying the very behaviour we find so abhorrent in others.   So have some personal respect and do something you admire so others can likewise admire you.  Starting thinking about how you effect people’s lives and especially what you can do to make a positive difference… even if they never see you doing it!

All I have really said in this post is that you should display the behaviour that you yourself think you deserved to be treated with.  Now, this is a note to remind us in the world of business not to think that we must not have a different mindset when we rub shoulders with our colleagues.   Who you are on the field is who you are in life.  Don’t give me that, ‘yeah but this is business,’ poppycock … that means you choose to be an arrogant so and so who shelves his morals when convenient.  Don’t do this!  Be different by really being kind and caring about those you know.  Why not frighten the hell of them by doing something out of the blue for someone you hate?  I am telling you this a really liberating way to live.

Really the golden rule could be put this way, ‘Do unto others what you think you deserve (or would like) done to you.  I think Jesus got this right!  Now, if you will excuse me I have packing and cleaning to do.

Technorati Tags: problem?, being kind

At the core of the human beings lie a heart. Now I am not talking about the blobby looking red thing that pumps blood round your veins… I am talking about you. The real you. Did you know that every business has a heart to it? If you are more inclined to the intuitive you will notice there are certain places you go to that have more heart than others. The people have a smile on their face and are just happy to be there.

In my local bank there is a lady who works on a teller who consistently gives the best service of anyone in the whole bank. When I go in their she always has something positive to say and in my mind she creates value beyond measurable bank dollars. Why is that? It’s because she lifts the spirit of the workplace through her positive approach. Ever been to McDonalds and the person serving you gave off a certain level of heart? After you got your burger you felt like you weren’t even valued as a person? They are conveying a heart that says ‘I don’t like you and I don’t want to be here’. That underlying heart is what this article is about. What’s the heart condition of your business?

Knowing the heart of your business

What is it that you do that makes you better than your competitors? What makes them keep coming back? Recently a course I was teaching got a new convenor who is dedicated. When she lectures she believes every word and consequently students have taken to this person like a duck to water. Why? They recognise the heart in what she is doing? Do you know the heart pulse of your business or workplace? If so what’s it like? Ask yourself… how do I feel when colleagues talk to me? Do I feel good? What is the core feeling you have after you have spent one hour at work?

Does your business have heart trouble?

Here is a check list of things I have noticed that mean your business has a heart problem.

1. You have a lot of complaints

Customers just don’t seem to like you do they? No matter what you do you just keep hearing negative feedback. This could due to a defective product or service but the chances are you simply are putting a heart that’s sick out there and that leads to me next point

2. What do your people think and how do they act?

One of the key things you can do to test the heart of a business is to see how people in the business treat each other. What are the words like? What is the body language like? Chances are there might be slumped shoulders… people taking longer lunch breaks and a genuine lack of heart. One of the best ’strategies’ Virgin has used is to only hire people who want to work in a close knit team environment. They find people who want to work for them because they want a place with heart. Being a business Virgin uses this to their advantage by creating an atmosphere to work. Subsequently people who work them usually work longer hours, put in more effort and make the business what it is today. The heart is the underlying conditions that cause us to speak, think, and act the way to do. This does not stop happening in business because we are professionals. The heart is central to all human affairs and you cannot separate it from what you do.

3. Where are the artery cloggers?

A scoffer is someone who resorts to negative criticisms instead of constructive activities. Unfortunately, if your business is filled with people like this it’s because that’s the atmosphere you have allowed to foster. The only way to deal with this is to systemically change it by removing people who act this way. If you are serious about creating a business with heart find out where the artery cloggers are and remove them. The last thing a business needs is to be filled with negative people who choke up the flow of your life blood.

4. Is your workplace overly competitive?

I do not believe it’s fruitful for a business to allow it’s employees to be overly competitive towards each other. This kind of problem allows the growth of personal ambition which in turn creates people who are willing to step over their colleagues to get ahead. It’s a good thing to have people that work well but it’s quite another to have people who work well with each other. A business is like a body. Each part of the body serves and works with the other parts in order to make it function as a whole. If the body turns on itself what will happen? Organisational suicide that’s what!

As I write this I am listening to song by James Taylor called ‘Copperline’ from Eric Clapton’s guitar festival. I am struck by the man’s passion as he sings about something that clearly means something to him. The heart is coming out in the music. Today why not do a ‘heart test’ on your business by carefully looking at the words and actions that are flowing in your business. It will help to discern what the heart of your business really is like. When you know that you can carefully build the right kind of heart over time and create the platform for lasting success.

Technorati Tags: heart., intuitive, spirit, business, negative feedback, passion, success