The State of the Union address was on last night. I’ll be honest I, typically look forward to the event. There is pomp and circumstance, high drama, and the occasional surprise. To cap it off you get to have a speaker from the opposite party offer a rebuttal. Without fail the night can be informative and completely ridiculous in a single span of time. However it does offer a snapshot of both our ideals and fears.

As I thought after about the address, I thought I should take stock of my own Union. Am I living up to my potential, am I taking ownership over my life?

I’ll be honest, my assessment wasn’t that positive. I tend to take a dim view of my own accomplishments in life and try to downplay them. But the event was cathartic as well. When given a chance how often do we truly evaluate ourselves?

The company we work for can hold a lot of our identity. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but we spend a lot of our day at work and it dominates our time. Is that Union strong? What about your family relationships? Friends?

You may be asking, why the sobering talk? Quite simply it’s important to remove the blinders from time to time and truly look at life unfiltered. Take the time to look at your strengths and weaknesses and look for opportunities for growth. I can assure you everyone will be better for it.

One thing I learned this week is to set the example.

It sounds minor, but I tend to come in a few minutes late to work sometimes. Typically it’s because I’m grabbing a coffee or with my girls for a few minutes.

Today, my manager spoke to me about it and said he doesn’t care that I am late, but he needs me to set an example for some of the junior folks on the team.

It went from what could have been a discussion on a trivial matter to a coaching opportunity. And you know what, he was right!

And the Union is that much stronger for it.

What makes your union strong?

Image credit: ewe neon

The heart of a champion is measured not by their victories but by how they come back from defeat.

I may not have mentioned it before, but I am a University of Georgia grad and proud to be a Bulldawg!

My beloved college football team went into double overtime and defeated Oklahoma in this year’s Rose Bowl. That win propelled them to compete in the National Championship next week against Alabama. This is the first time in 38 years since UGA has competed for the title and I’m excited to see how they do.

Why do I bring this up you may ask? Well, for one thing, I am taking every chance I get to celebrate the great season my team is having. The second reason is that the current news is absolutely depressing and tends to drag me down.

One goal for the new year is to surround myself with positive people and mindsets. The news doesn’t fit into that.

I previously brought up failure and how it can transform or destroy someone. As mentioned, I attended UGA  and graduated with a degree in Economics. One of the required courses was Finance 300, all business majors had to have it and it wasn’t the easiest of courses. I enrolled and about midway through I realized I was going to fail the class. Not even close to a C, a solid F.

I had a choice to make then and there. Stop attending and sleep in ( it was and 8am class) or continue on with zero stress, absorb and study and then retake it in the summer. I chose the latter and was very happy about it.

My professor saw that I continued attending and partaking in the class and I built a relationship with him. As a student it was great, I felt like I was auditing the class and was not worried about grades. When the summer rolled around I was able to master the course and finished with a B+.

I actually still look back at that time with fondness, even years later.

So much of our life can be full of regret, why not embrace the failure and learn from it?

I did and am sure you can as well.

Image credit: Josh Hallett

I attended a tech talk recently that was put on by the Tampa Bay Tech Garage here in Tampa, FL. Like most mid sized cities we have some thriving tech companies as well as startups.

The tech garage is an incubator that provides mentoring, work spaces and community to those that are growing their businesses. One way they facilitate this is by hosting talks with well established owners who can speak to their trials and successes, all in an effort to grow the tech community in our area.

Side note: if your reading this and you’re cold then consider the Tampa/St Petersburg area, it’s warm, full of sun and has a thriving community.

The discussion I attended centered on how failure is inevitable, but creates innovation and break-throughs if approached in the right way.

Our speaker was Chad Nuss, CEO of Inside Out, a sales innovation lab that teaches, tests and optimizes sales teams across the country. He had been the owner of several startups with successful exits and is just a great guy to be around. In his different roles he has also experienced epic failures that he had to learn from.

The topic was relevant in a lot of ways.

In tech we tend to say that revenue covers a multitude of sins. The evidence is there when you look at the Ubers or [insert any other money-losing company] of the moment.

Successful people also have epic failures, but if they are generating revenue it shouldn’t matter.

This is the wrong approach! It leads to us brushing off failure, burying our head in the sand and not learning. It is one reason you see companies have spectacular rises and sudden falls.

There is a better way.

Examining a failure in your life can be humbling, but also rewarding. You can learn from it, approach it differently next time, or achieve a breakthrough.

As I look at my own life I can count the many ways I have failed and repeated that same mistake again. I actually do not mind failing but I hate repeating that.

How often have you achieved a breakthrough or innovation after a failure?

What did you learn and how did you make it better?

As we go forward we shouldn’t fear failure, we should embrace it and grow.

Happy failing!

Flickr image credit: Jason Tester Guerrilla Futures

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

In the course of my work with startups I’ve found there are three main reasons for serious screwups.

1. Founder ego
2. Speed (cramming 20 hours of work into 12 hours day after day almost guarantees a few (or more) blunders)
3. Tight budget (leads to cutting corners)

It was number 3 that tripped up Ben Landers, president and CEO of Blue Corona Inc.

Landers made a minor change in a form job offer letter, but didn’t have it reviewed by their lawyer.

“I took a boilerplate job offer letter and updated it—I thought—for Blue Corona,” (…) He considered running the letter by an attorney, but at the time it didn’t seem worth the expense for the struggling startup. “We had no money back then. Zero. We were losing money in fact,” recalls Landers, who launched the Gaithersburg, Md.-headquartered startup in 2007.

It’s hard when your company is running on fumes, let alone negative fumes, not to see legal advice as a luxury and take a pass.

But it proved a very costly mistake.

Changing the language of the job offer letter relating to commissions amounted to the addition of one bullet point, he notes. In the end, Blue Corona paid its former employee between $10,000 and $12,000, probably 10 to 15 times what it would have cost to have an attorney update the job offer letter, estimates Landers.

Funding, and money in general, have gotten tighter, so it’s tempting to skip checking with a lawyer, accountant or other service pro.

But it’s smarter to count Landers as your avatar and what happened to him as a lesson learned and a bullet dodged.

Image credit: HikingArtist

I do brand outreach for my long-term associate NTR Lab, which includes working with Yana (always a pleasure) on its blog. Today’s post originally appeared there on January 28.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and investor Bill Gurley, among many others, believe that 2016 is the year that many unicorns will morph into unicorpses as valuations tumble amidst tightening money.

So does that make 2016 a bad year to start your company? No, in fact, just the opposite.

According to Jason Calacanis, angel investor and founder of Inside.com “Great companies are like great captains; they make take advantage of smooth sailing times like now, but are not afraid of rough seas that eventually show up.”

Jeff Grabow, EY Americas venture capital leader says, “If you talk to venture capitalists, they’ll all tell you the best time to start a company is in a downturn.”

And Mike Abbott, general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, made a great point when he said, “We’ll stop seeing particular folks starting a company for the sake of starting a company, because they see it as this romantic endeavor.”

But it was CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal who said it best, “While it’s ‘fun’ in a schadenfreud’y way to claim some absurd number of unicorns will falter in 2016, it misses out on the fact that 2016’s climate may force many of these unicorns to become RABBITs.”

Rabbit? Who wants to be a rabbit? You should. Being a rabbit is much like Andrew Wilkinson’s horse that we mentioned last week.

Image credit CB Insights via Business Insider

 The biggest difference going forward means that your valuation will be based on real revenue as opposed to funding rounds — more like Apple / less like Uber.

You’ll learn to do more with less and will stretch not only your dollars, but also your pennies. And your team will learn along with you.

For those of you who haven’t experienced a tighter economy or worked through a real downturn the actual experience can be off-putting, if not downright frightening.

Click for a cornucopia of ideas and resources to do more with less.

Image credit CB Insights via Business Insider

Back in January I provided a link to The Mix (Management Information Exchange) and recommended that you register and read hacks of interest to you.

If I hadn’t done so it’s doubtful I would have heard about Ricardo Semler and Semco Group.

Since the mid-80s when Semler arrived on the scene, that has meant an ever-evolving experiment in upending the organizational status quo: no organizational chart, no fixed offices or working hours, no fixed CEO, no HR department, no five-year plan (or two- or one-year-plan), no job descriptions or permanent positions, no approvals necessary—and an endless array of clever practices and initiatives to increase individual autonomy and agency, participation at every level, trust, and informality.

The result? Market success—Semco is private but Semler reports average annual revenue growth at 40% and profitability. (…)

“We constantly talk about passion—serving customers passionately, filling in forms passionately—but what if we created the conditions for people to feel exhilaration, to get involved to the point they shout ‘yes!’ and give each other high fives because they did it their way and it worked?”

Would your people thrive in a going concern that functions more like a startup than most startups?

If yes, why? If not, why not?

Knowing why it would/does work is useful because you can share the knowledge and lessons learned with others.

If you don’t believe similar actions, tweaked for your organization, would work you need to ask why not.

You can ask your peers or, better yet your people, but first ask the mirror.

You may need to look no farther.

Flickr image credit: Cea

There are many ways to consider leadership’s future and I often focus on schools and education (not the same thing) and kids—who are the leaders, actual and positional, tomorrow.

But there is another view of leadership’s future worth considering and that is of leadership as an industry, as opposed to an action or description.

Make no mistake, leadership, directly and indirectly, is definitely an industry.

Consider the standard definition of ‘industry’: A category used to describe a company’s primary business activity, usually determined by the largest source of a company’s revenues.

From individual coaches to major consultants and every size in-between, thousands of people earn their daily bread and pay their mortgages with money made through their activities in the leadership industry. Even those who aren’t paid in money are earning something, whether it’s enhanced reputation, a way to spread their opinions/beliefs, an ego boost or something still more esoteric.

I’m not saying that this is a bad thing or a good thing, but it is a thing worth noting.

In a previous post I warned of the need to digest and tweak expert information as opposed to swallowing it whole and this is even more important when it comes to leadership, considering the vast volume of it and the media’s constant focus and insistence that it is leadership that separates the winners and losers.

Even if you subscribe to that idea you need to develop a definition that is relevant to your world and stands the test of time, not some offered up by the industry.

Leadership terms are casually thrown around, applied by some to any and every action that a person does, may do or should do and by others only to the actions/words of those in positional leadership roles.

Perhaps these two points are worth accepting, although I’m sure many will disagree with me,

1. Leadership is an industry in which people, directly or indirectly, earn their living.
2. Leadership information comes in a multiplicity of forms and the quality varies widely.

Accepting these two ideas results in one conclusion: like investing information, leadership information should be digested, internalized and tweaked for your individual needs at both that point in your life and in your future.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist/4582034468/

It’s been awhile since I posted one of my rules and this seems like a good time to give you another.

At first look it may seem to be targeted to a teen or twenty-something audience, but I don’t think so.

I think it’s applicable to anyone breathing.

It’s what you learn
after
you know it all
that counts!

Image credit: Mark Brannan on flickr

Failure isn’t really failure unless nothing is learned.

Learning from it means that you need to look at it differently.

Few individuals or companies enjoy dwelling on what they consider failures; most pick themselves up and move forward; the strongest dissect what went wrong.

They take the time to decompose the thoughts and actions that didn’t work and document them in a ‘lessons learned’ report.

Good so far.

But what happens to the report? Is it neatly filed with the project information or under another heading?

Investing effort in lessons learned reports only to file them makes it more likely that the errors will be repeated again in the future.

And that is frequently the case.

Instead, if the goal is to learn, then learn to LAUD IT.

Look at what went wrong, not what worked;

Analyze what was done;

Understand why it was done;

Determine how to fix/improve both thoughts and actions.

IT refers to using technology to share the information, making it easily available to everyone and searchable.

Try it. LAUD IT.

Image credit: Biology Big Brother on flickr