Connect-IMCAZ

News from our alliance partner, PMI - A symposium

Project Management Institute Phoenix Celebrates 30th Anniversary, Hosts Inaugural “Pearls of
Wisdom in Project Management” Symposium

PHOENIX – Sept. 13, 2007 – The Phoenix Chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI
Phoenix) will celebrate its 30th anniversary by hosting an Inaugural “Pearls of Wisdom in Project
Management” Symposium from 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 8 at the DoubleTree Paradise Valley Resort, 5401 N. Scottsdale Rd.

Chris Cummiskey, director of the Government Information Technology Agency and the Chief
Information Officer for Arizona; and Naomi Karten, author of Managing Expectations and
Communication Gaps and How to Close Them, will serve as the keynote speakers.

The Symposium aims to build greater professionalism in project management as well as provide a
forum for project managers to exchange ideas and best practices and offer a cost-effective
opportunity to continue professional development.

Open to chapter members and non-members alike, Symposium participants can choose from three of 15 separate sessions featuring some of the profession’s top speakers.  Through Sept. 30, the
registration fee for the Symposium is $300 for chapter members and $325 for non-members.  A
special reduced registration fee is available for students.  Fees increase to $350 on Oct. 1.  To
register, or to learn more, please visit http://www.phx-pmi.org.

Need free consulting advice? Free business development advice?

Once again, for members we have a new way for you to get more from your membership (what's next?  personal delivery of a cup '0 joe every morning?  :)

We are starting our Advisory Group, which is an opportunity for those wanting advice and those wanting to give it. 

In a nutshell, we will compile a group of people who are willing to meet 1:1 for one hour at no charge with another (member) consultant who has a specific question.  Then we match people up --  those who have questions with those who are willing to provide it! 

The chapter's only role will be to serve as a "go-between", essentially, for those who are not sure who to approach for advice.  That said, if the member has someone in mind they would like to ask (and is not on our list), we are also happy to ask for you.

The details on this program will come together likely in Sept 07, so if you have ideas or input, please write here.  What are your thoughts on this?  Will you step up to help project manage this for the good of the chapter?

The goal, in concert with our vision, is to create community between our members and provide a supportive & successful environment for all.  And need I mention:  Get Smart, Get Known and Get Business.  (And get a cup 'o joe?)

IMC sponsors the development of Mastermind Groups for their members!

Members,

We are happy to unroll the following concept:  Mastermind Groups.  Detailed info will be posted on the site within the next several days!  Here is the summary for now (which will also be on the site).  We are really interested to get feedback on the idea or any suggestions you may have!  What do you think?  Love it? Hate it?  What questions do you have?  Post a comment!  We plan to form groups in June!

Lisa Koss 

IMC sponsors the development of Mastermind Groups for their members!

Mastermind Groups are a growing business phenomenon used for problem solving, inspiration and motivation. Comprising 5-7 members, the groups are built on member participation and trust to share ideas and resources, support team members in achieving their goals, and aid members in making real progress in their business life.

Mastermind members report benefits ranging from having access to a safe, non judgmental environment, support and encouragement, finding solutions to problems from objective people and developing meaningful relations with others.

IMC is using the best practices available to ensure that IMC members have a comfortable and profitable experience.

Selling Pain Relief

Join IMC-Arizona on March 9, 2007, where Larry Mandelberg will present "Corporate Lifecycles; How and Why Organizations Grow and Die". He will take each participant on a highly interactive journey thru the corporate lifecycle theory, stopping along the way to identify their ideal target client stage. Key issues covered include:

• Identifying functional & dysfunctional organizational behaviors


• Making informed decisions involving change


• Anticipating conflict and reducing friction

The ability of organizations to deal with common problems effectively is the difference between success and failure. Organizations learn to deal with these problems by themselves or they develop abnormal 'diseases' which stymie growth - problems that usually cannot be resolved without external, professional intervention.

The theory of corporate lifecycles analyzes the stages organizations go through as they come into being, grow, age, and eventually die. By defining these stages, the evolutionary process of aging becomes a roadmap map where you can locate any organization and anticipate where it is headed. This 'roadmap format' provides insight into when, why, and how an organization must change. It also helps explain how behaviors that were once healthy can become dysfunctional.

Participants will:

• Understand the changes successful organizations must go through as they grow over time
• Gain knowledge and tools to leverage corporate lifecycles to engage with your ideal prospects
• Use corporate lifecycle insight to educate and engage your current clients

Selling Pain Relief
The University Club
39 E. Monte Vista Road
Phoenix, AZ 8500

7:15 - 7:45 am

Registration, Networking, Breakfast

7:45 - 9:00 am

Main Presentation

9:00 - 10:00 am

Session after the Session

Click here to register

Advise Appreciated

Ok now it is time to ask for some advice from my more experienced colleagues.

I met with a potential client today who absolutely needs to employ my services in order to be successful. The methodologies I advocate (leveraging social media for marketing and PR) are pretty new to the business world. There were two principles. The decision maker appeared to be stuck in the conventional, old-world model. The other 'gets it' but I suspect does not have enough influence to sway the decision-maker.

How do some of you convince a sceptical decision-maker that the revolutionary product or service you offer is not only key, but his only hope of success?

There are many great success stories, some of which I used today. Unfortunately, I don't have enough of my own success stories yet to carry the day solely based upon my own reputation.

Thanks in advance

You should be Monitoring your Reputation

You should be monitoring your reputation and what is being said about you on the internet. Why? because one kid in Iowa with a blog and five readers can kill your reputation, that's why.

In the old days, big companies had news clipping services. Once a week the top executives were presented with a copy of every mention of the company in any newspaper or magazine in the country. Such a service was expensive back then. It costs zero today. When some blogger halfway across the country says something nice about you in his blog you can know about it within minutes. Nothing turns that blogger into a raving fan quicker than a personal email thanking him for his kind words about your company. Conversely, if he said something derogatory you have a chance to reach out to him and make amends before it turns ugly. How can a kid in Iowa with a blog and five readers ruin your company? Because his readers have blogs too and at least one of them probably has a few hundred readers and some of them will post the story on their blogs. And so on until you have a supernova on your hands.

It is easy to create blog and news searches in Google and subscribe to the RSS feeds of the search results. I also recommend setting up searches on Digg because many times something will show up on Digg long before Google if it is hot. Using an RSS reader, you can then check on your subscribed feeds as often or as infrequently as you want.

You should set up searches on:

• Your name.
• Your company name.
• Your website URL.
• The names of all of the public-facing people in your company.
• The names of your products and services.
• The URL of each product/service page on your website.
• All of your trademarks.

Once you have put those in place, then go back and do the same for your major competitors and industry leaders. Add searches for the interesting keywords in your industry and you have a your own personalized giant driftnet stretched across the internet.

Alan Weiss Doesn’t ‘Get’ Blogging

I really enjoyed Alan Weiss’s presentation Friday – Except for his comments about blogging. It’s not the first time I’ve heard those words and they always come from someone who is not a blogger, has never blogged, and does not understand blogging’s potential. I have never heard anyone say, “I’ve been blogging regularly for two years and it’s a complete waste of time.”

Alan spoke of gaining an early reputation as a contrarian and while it occurred to me that perhaps he is doing just that, but from the tone of his voice when he said, “Blogs are worthless” and “Nobody reads them” I think he was being sincere. I guess this means that I’m going to have to assume the mantle of contrarian on this issue.

First, as for Alan’s “Nobody reads them” comment: Not only do CEOs and senior executives read blogs, many are blogging themselves. TheNewPR maintains a list of them. Alan mentioned Marriott and Hewlett Packard as some of his clients. He undoubtedly would be surprised to discover that J Willard Marriott Jr, CEO of Marriott International has a blog. So does Eric Kintz, VP of Global Marketing Strategy and Excellence for Hewlett-Packard.

In fact TheNewPR’s list contains 272 names of people in leadership positions of various organizations who blog. Some of them are:

• Rudi Fischer, CEO, Telekom Austria
• Sab Kanaujia, VP, NBC Digital Media Group
• Richard Charkin, Chief Executive, Macmillan Publishers Ltd
• Simon Waldman, Director of Digital Publishing, Guardian Newspapers
• Scott Anderson, Director of shared content, Tribune Publishing and Interactive
• Marc Babej, President, Reason Inc.
• Randy Baseler, VP of Marketing, Boeing Commercial Airplanes
• Carole Brown, Chair, Chicago Transit Board
• Colin Crawford, VP/Online, International Data Group
• Michael M. Crow, Arizona State University President
• Marc Cuban, HDNET & Dallas Mavericks
• Chad Dickerson, CTO, InfoWorld
• John Dragoon, Chief Marketing Officer, Novell
• Michael Dunn, VP, Hearst Interactive Media
• Jeff Jaffe, CTO, Novell
• Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman, General Motors Corporation
• Lisa Meyers Brown, VP for Marketing, American Cancer Society’s Eastern Division
• Justin Rattner, CTO, Intel
• Greg Papadopoulos, CTO, Sun Microsystems
• Bob Parsons, President, godaddy.com
• Michael Powell, Chairman, Federal Communications Commission
• Michael Pusateri, VP of Engineering, Disney ABC Cable Networks Group
• Joe Wikert, Vice President and Publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Professional/Trade division
• Steve Wilson, Senior Director of Global Web Communications, McDonald’s
• Hu Yoshida, VP and CTO, Hitachi Data Systems

Someday soon, Alan Weiss will be meeting with a large potential client. The decision-maker will hand Alan one of Hugh MacLeod’s Streetcards. Alan will stare at it blankly and flip it over and over in two hands as a question forms on his face. At that moment Alan will lose the client and not even know it.

Or perhaps between now and then he will ‘get it’ and – as he so often said Friday – he will marvel at how stupid he was just two weeks ago.

IMC-USA's Email Daily Tip Today About Blogging

I subscribe to IMC-USA's email Tip of the Day and I almost always find something valuable to take away. Interestingly, this morning's tip was about blogging. The question posed was:

Is blogging an effective way to get business? If so, how do I go about it?

The reply was not much more that a quote of the Merriam-Webster dictionary and was pretty disappointing. I responded by sending them an email which appears below:

--------------

I begin my mornings by reading your ‘Daily Tips’ email and I almost always find something valuable to take away. Unfortunately, I think your tip this morning regarding blogs does a great disservice to our members. A blog is such an effective tool that I think every consultant should have one. Blogging is a cutting-edge marketing tool that is immediate, personal, and engaging, and is within the financial reach of everyone.

The biggest challenge most consultants face is getting business. In fact, two of the three bullet-points on the IMC-USA website’s Education page are “Get Known” and “Get Business”, both of which are blogging’s strengths. Consultants can benefit from blogging is several ways:

Google Juice

Almost everyone with a problem to solve begins their quest for an answer with a Google search. There is no better way to raise your search engine rankings than a blog containing informative, engaging, and insightful content. Google likes fresh content and each blog post appears to Google as a new page, rasing your ranking. Not only that, other people who find your blog’s content informative will link to it, resulting in more links to you than you could afford to acquire by any other means.

Free exposure

Influential people read the blogosphere. A columnist for the Boston Globe is a regular reader of one of my blogs (and I read her blog too). There is no better way to get noticed by the mainstream press than to blog passionately about topics in your industry.

Direct Access to your Audience

Almost everyone has a story about spending time with a newspaper reporter only to either have the story spiked or appear so completely re-written that your original message disappeared. A blog is a way to bypass the gatekeepers in the media and get your message out to the audience most important to you: your current and potential customers.

Differentiate Yourself

Every consultant has his or her ‘What’ and ‘How’: ‘What you do’ and ‘How you do it’. The ‘What you do’ part is probably not unique. There are most likely several other consultants in your community doing exactly what you do. The important part is the ‘How’. You have probably developed your own unique ‘How’ and have demonstrated its effectiveness repeatedly. A blog is the perfect platform for showcasing your ‘How’ and its effectiveness, and is key to providing your potential clients with the perception of the difference between you and your competitors.

Build Trust

By blogging about your industry and writing about that which you are most knowledgeable, readers will begin to see you as a resource and authority on your topic. They will begin to trust you and your advice.

There is a second type of trust: personal trust. Through your blog, your current and potential clients will begin to see you not as a two-dimensional cardboard cutout but as a three-dimensional figure. They will connect with you and come to trust you enough to feel comfortable doing business with you.

Conversation

A blog is part of a conversation. No aspect of blogging is more important. Our clients are smart and saavy. They participate in various online communities and learn from each other. We can ignore those online conversations, in which case our markets will get smarter faster than we do. Alternatively, we can participate in those online conversations and learn from them, and create an opportunity for the other participants to learn about us.

The other aspect to this conversation is that other experts in your field are already blogging. The blogosphere provides you with the equivalent to an online industry conference where you and your peers can learn from each other and share the latest trends and news.

Improve Your Image

Several years ago, having a website or email address was enough to present the image that you were forward-thinking technically and marketing-saavy. A blog does that for you today. If your competitors are not yet blogging then you are immediately differentiating yourself from the pack. And your blog demonstrates that you are open and honest in your business dealings.

The bottom line is that there is no better way for a consultant to showcase his or her talents and boost exposure than a blog.

Speed-Reading Our Blog

Want to make it easy to keep up with Connect-IMC-AZ.org (or any blog for that matter)? Use the blog's RSS Feed.

Every blog is published is two formats. One is the familiar HTML that you see here in your web browser. The second format, called RSS, strips out all the graphics, styling, and formatting and delivers pure text. The interesting part is that MSIE 7 (Microsoft Internet Explorer version 7) knows about RSS, and it will tell you if there are any new posts on this blog since the last time you visited and how many.

It gets better. MSIE 7 (as well as most other RSS Feed Readers) can aggregate the feeds from multiple blogs onto a single page. The beauty of this is that at a glance you can see if there are any new posts here (as well as new posts on any other blogs you read), and you can also see the first few sentences of each new post. The result is that you can quickly keep up with what's going on here.

In a recent post on my own blog I called it a Bicycle for Your Blog.

Here's how to use RSS in MSIE 7:

1. Look on MSIE's toolbar over on the right and locate the small orange square icon shown here. Click on it.


2. Connect-IMCAZ.org's RSS feed will be displayed. Near the top of the page there is a yellow box with Connect-IMCAZ and the words 'You are viewing a feed that contains frequently updated content...'.
   
3. Just below that paragraph is Subscribe to this fed link. Click on it. A pop-up dialog box will apppear. Leave the 'Name' and 'Create In' fields as is and click on Subscribe. There. That's all there is to it.

To check and read a Feed:

1. Locate the Favorites Center icon (the gold star) on the tooobar. Click on it.
2. Click on the Feeds tab near the top of the Favorites list.


3. Mouse over Connect-IMCAZ and the tool tip will show you how many posts have been added to this blog since the last time you looked.


4. Click on Connect-IMCAZ and the new blog posts will be displayed.

Want to Have New Blog Posts Delivered to Your Inbox Instead?

Look for the 'Subscribe via Email' box in our blog's sidebar and enter your email address into the field.

Choose to be Optimistic

Dave

Thanks for inviting me to be a guest-author for the IMCAZ blog. I'd like to share a recent article I sent to friends and clients regarding the value of being optimistic. Since consultants can easily find themselves on an emotional roller coaster, this little article may help my friends and colleagues in this wonderful profession. Enjoy!

Choose to be Optimistic
When people ask me what I do for a living, I say, "I help individuals and organizations improve performance and productivity." Their response is often, "So, are you a motivational speaker?" That response always causes me to bristle because one, I'm not a motivational speaker and two, helping people and organizations improve performance involves much more than just giving a pep talk.

I have to be careful though because motivation is an important factor in performance improvement. Someone once said "I don't believe in motivation, it doesn't last." Well, neither does bathing, Bucco, that's why we do it every day.

Rather than talk about motivation, I'd like you to give some thought this week to the value of being optimistic. We live in a very negative world and, in order to get past the constant barrage of negativity, optimism can be a very useful tool for improving or maintaining a high level of performance and productivity.

Studies by the American Psychological Association show that there are some real advantages to being optimistic, whether you're in sales, managing a business or raising children. As a matter of fact, studies show that our (general) outlook on life came from the way our parents looked at life. That's a good reason to be real careful what we say and how we respond to life's difficulties around our kids.

Here are four reasons why it pays to be optimistic:

1. Being optimistic enables us to better handle and/or receive negative information when it has the potential to be useful. We can learn a lot from failure - if we approach it with the right attitude.

2. Optimists tend to realize that not every problem can be solved. As a result, they're better able to recognize the problems they can't solve and stop devoting time and effort to a loosing cause.

3.Optimists tend to have better coping skills than pessimists. They try multiple solutions to problems, ask others for help and recognize what's not in their control.

4. Optimists tend to behave in ways that provide them with more information. Ever hear "there's more than one way to skin a cat?" That's an optimistic approach.

So, on a scale of 1 to 10 were do you stand in terms of being optimistic or pessimistic? How do you handle negative situations? How do you approach a problem? Do you face a difficult issue head on and look for multiple solutions, or do you give up and walk away if the first solution didn't work?

Here's the good news, being optimistic or being pessimistic is a choice. You can choose to see the glass half full or half empty. And, you can choose to not react to life's difficulties the same way mom and dad did. Unless of course mom and dad were the most optimistic people you ever met.

Now, that's motivating!

Les Taylor
www.achievement-solutions.com