Tina Gleisner

Cultural Shifts Affecting Our Lives

Each of us tends to focus on the 2 or 3 most important things affecting our lives, be they personal or professional in nature. It helps to step back from your day-to-day activities, to see the big picture and one I find very challenging is the changing nature of the people around me.

Be they friends, employees or customers ... their social character is different from mine. When you're with these people every day, you can learn the difference more easily than when you're running a small business with short, intermittent interactions with 10s to 100s of people each month.

Pepperdine's (where I got my MBA) newsletter had 2 fascinating articles which I've included excepts from with links to full text. The world is changing, and I hope we're up to making personal changes to keep up.

• The Trybaby Syndrome by Charles D. Kerns, PhD

Trybabies focus on tasks and actions they can do well, but that have little or no relation to their success within an organization. This article identifies the Trybaby Syndrome as a performance challenge and introduces a "Performance Influence - Importance Matrix" to help managers identify the differences between so-called Trybabies, Spinners, Pass-Timers, and Corperformers.

• The Leaders We Need: And What Makes Us Follow by Michael Maccoby ... a book review

... the industrial age was rooted in a domestic model of the traditional family with a father as principal breadwinner and authority figure. This model privileged disciplined, bureaucratic leaders who set clear goals. Business was structured hierarchically with a well-defined pecking order where everybody took orders from the person above and gave them to the one below. The highest value was stability. That model faded in the 1970s.  

The 1980s privileged "The Gamesman," a politically savvy leader who treated work as a game to win. Corporations downsized and people worked "at will." The social character was team-based with short-term objectives and a focus on transferable skills.

Maccoby calls the new millennial interactives. Raised on twitch-and-click video games, their relationships are fluid and diverse. They are optimists raised to regard parents as "friends" with whom they align laterally as with siblings, creating an affectionate bond tempered by a freedom to critique. They want to collaborate with their leaders for the "common good" and are happy doing so in a virtual sphere.

 

Women's Networking in NH - How Many Groups?

Here I sit trying to sort out 2 women's groups in NH that I'm not very familiar with, and honestly it's a struggle understanding them all. The good news is, we've got so many choices ... and they're all becoming much more active in helping their members showcase their businesses. The challenge though, is sorting out which ones to join (in addition to your professional and local business groups like the chamber) and even then, you still need to decide which meetings to attend.

I decided to start the list of groups, at least those I'm aware of. PLEASE everyone, help me complete the list with any groups you know and I've missed.

• 4 Walls 1 Roof, Bedford - 1st Thur, breakfast
• 4 Walls 1 Roof, Portsmouth - 3rd Wed, dinner
• Business & Professional Women (BPW), Nashua - 3rd Thur, lunch
  
  • Have heard there are BPW groups in Londonderry and Haverill, MA
• eWomen Network, Portsmouth - 3rd Thur, dinner
• New England Women's Network, Manchester area - 3rd Thur lunch (Pam Oliwa) 
• New Girls Network (Sherrill StGermain)
• Seacoast Women's Network (SWN), Portsmouth - 3rd Tues, dinner
• Southern NH Women's Business Network, various evenings & locations (Manchester area)
• Women's Business Center (WBC), based in Portsmouth, multiple meetings across southern NH
• Women Inspiring Women, maybe 2nd Thu, dinner
• Women's Rural Entrepreneurial Network (WREN), multiple meetings across northern NH

Would love to hear from everyone about the following:

• Would you like to create a shared Women in NH calendar where we could put all of our events to help with scheduling?
• Should we consider opening up our various business showcase events to members of other women's groups, as we're all trying to support women owned businesses?
• What other ideas do you have for collaborating across multiple womens groups in NH?

Everyone can simply add their comments below, and that way we can all participate in the conversation. Thanks everyone

Getting Heard Among the 100,000s Marketing Merssages

Just had to share these numbers with you ... as they're huge, scary and representative of the challenge every small business owner faces each day. Thanks to Lani and Allen Volvod for sharing on their blog.

The average person today is exposed to:

• 3,500 marketing messages a day!
• 24,000 messages A WEEK!
• 1.7 million a year and climbing!!
• Barnes and Noble bookstores have over 130,000 titles to choose from.
• Grocery stores have over 30,000 choices vying for your attention.
• Walgreens has a measly 15,000 choices and they’re doing okay.

Everyone is competing for ATTENTION. But check so it's important to remember that people buy from:

• Those they know, like and trust
• They don't buy because of clever slogans or graphics
• They don't buy because you say you’re the best
• They don’t buy because you have a truly great product

They buy because you have the answer to making them richer, happier, or better looking. They buy from you, because YOU are the SOLUTION to a problem they want fixed!