Comments

Tom

I would love to see you come back to work this time and do what you use to do so well - hang with genuine change leaders. We are blessed with so many examples of excellent change leaders who currently ply their talents from boardrooms to hot dog stands.

The change leaders I respect today - people who will become legends for the next generation - are as good as any we have seen in the past.

First we can all learn so much about change leadership from Lee Scott (CEO of Wal Mart). He is both a front liner and a CEO. He spends heaps of his time with his troops in their stores - he knows products and prices inside out but more importantly he knows the Wal Mart customer experience from the ground up. He is currently leading Wal Mart's approx 2 million associates (staff) on a transformation to deliver sustainable retailing (energy and greenhouse gas reduction initiatives for his company and its customers) AND most importantly towards a new health care scheme for all his associates.

Jeff Bezos is a new frontier leader who is still building Amazon into a digital age company that has no peer. He continues to impress us all with his initiatives - most impressively his EC2 cloud computing model now provides a compelling storage and computing power service to other businesses (small and large). Jeff has also released the kindle (an electronic book) - it could be the breakthrough for readers that the iPod was for music lovers. Jeff is leading us all into a world of efficient and effective machine to machine systems, processes, organisations, and businesses - this will change the ways we do things and this will increasingly allow each of us to be more and more relevant and remarkable at what we do best. Jeff is also about to pioneer space travel for us all. In sum, Jeff is a change agent who builds new ventures and then tinkers with them until they are the best of their breed.

John Doerr is a Silicon Valley based venture capitalist - he has become a legend in his field. He is perhaps most famous for his involvement with Dr Eric Schmidt in securing a financial platform for Google. John is a change agent who possess the great foresight and insight needed to convince people with capital to back risk-taking ventures. He is dedicated to two areas at present. Finding ways to prevent the world being ravaged by what he sees as an inevitable pandemic. Finding ways to foster green technologies that reduce our green house gas emissions and thus our carbon footprints AND kicking our bad habits that have made us all addicted to oil.

Trust you are enjoying your semi retirement Tom.

Richard.

Posted by Richard Lipscombe at February 9, 2008 5:28 PM

Thank you so much for this wonderful list of thought provoking ideas. We need expansive minds, compassionate hearts, solution-focused, proactive, conscious and aware people in the world now more than ever.

Joseph

Joseph Bernard, Ph.D.
www.ExploreLifeBlog.com

Posted by Joseph Bernard at February 11, 2008 1:04 PM

Excellent two-part list! I know I will succeed if I ‘DO’ at least 50% of what’s on it and therefore I WILL DO. Thanks Tom.

Posted by Sriram at February 15, 2008 11:40 PM

Maybe I misunderstood the reason for this 100 tips, but if salespeople can just get to back to the basics and follow-up 100% of the sales leads marketing creates, within 3 months sales will increase. On the Sales Lead Management Association site there are many articles about this. From my own recent book,

“100% follow-up Rule: Corporations that have a 100% inquiry follow-up policy will sell more that those that don’t.”

James Obermayer, Managing Sales Leads: Turning Cold Prospects Into Hot Customers, (Mason, Ohio, Textere an imprint of Thomson/South-Western, 2007), and Racom Books, Page 15

So simple, it is difficult to believe.

Posted by James Obermayer at February 18, 2008 12:34 AM

I appreciate current contributions. I’d like to think that the nearly impossible is in you way (while you’re emphatically self-driven for accomplishments) with determined aggressive towards the ends (objectives, goals) to be met. Churchill offers a great deal of examples of how an extraordinary leader works out.

Many lessons to be drawn out from him, without a doubt. Churchill reminds, as many others, that (scientific) knowledge is power. Napoleon, incidentally, says that a high-school (lyceum) graduate, must study science and English (lingua franca).

So, the “soft knowledge” (values) plus the “hard knowledge” (science, technology) must converge into the leader (true statesman). Being updated in values and science and technology in century 21 –to be en route to being 99% success compliant- requires, as well, of an open mind (extremely self-critical) that is well prepared (Pasteur).

Posted by Andres Agostini at February 29, 2008 4:19 PM