I’d love to say that I was chilling out at Whistler and I came up with this brilliant idea to let you promote your blog here, but I cannot take credit.

I learned about this idea from a great friend Gini Dietrich of The Fight Against Destructive Spin.

Turns out she learned about it a couple of weeks ago, from Toronto HAPPO champion, Danny Brown, invited his blog readers to pimp their blogs in the comments of his blog. You should go check it out – An Invite to Pimp Your Blog

So, you can do the same here. Let’s see what kinds of blogs you have and let’s see if we can find you some new readers.

Please include the following:

1. The blog’s name and link

2. A one sentence description about why someone should read your blog.

3. Your full name

4. Your Twitter handle (if you have one)

As an alternative, if you don’t have a blog, give us one blog post you’d like me to write about in the comments.

Go ahead! Promote your blog here…

The best potential employees aren’t looking for a job because they’ve already got one. That’s why you have to poach them.

In close to thirty years of my professional life, I’ve only had two job interviews. The rest of the time I was poached by one company while working for another.

There are lots of reasons why finding the right people is hard, but if you want your business to be exceptional, your staff must be exceptional people. It takes work but it’s worth the investment of time.

I had to remind someone of this while on a multi-city speaking engagement. At a talk in Sydney, Australia, a member of the audience commented, “What you don’t realize is we have a really tight economy in Sydney right now, and there are just no employees out there. We have the lowest unemployment in forty years.” I replied that I felt her pain—in Vancouver, we were at the lowest in fifty years! But honestly, I asked, what difference does it make? Even in tight job markets the great employees still exist, they’re just working somewhere else.

Poach them!  Show them why working for you is WAY better!

Bill Gates had a great idea with getting a computer on every desktop, but he fell short with that goal.  Every company should have two to three monitors on every desktop! 

Think about how many seconds each hour that you wait for windows or a browser to open and close.  Add all of that open and close time together and you waste minutes each day.  Those wasted minutes would be completely obliterated by having multiple screens open at the same time.  And additional monitors don’t cost very much anymore – only around $150. The time saved and additional productivity gains well off-set that small investment.

Use your additional monitors by having your web browser open on one at all times, and keep Google as your homepage (you likely use it more than anything else).  I keep Twitter as my homepage and I have a little Google Search bar in Firefox so I get the best of both worlds.  On your second monitor, keep your email open, but keep it open in draft mode.  I also set up my mail client to only sync and find new mail manually.  I don’t want it reloading new messages as they arrive.  I find that it makes it easier to only check a couple times a day when I don’t see new messages arriving.  On my laptop (the third monitor) I’d be using whatever application I’m working on (which happens to be Word, since I’m typing this right now).  Also, in using a Mac, I’ve set up ‘Spaces’ so I can have nine application windows open and very quickly shift between them.

Do whatever it takes to shave off ANY downtime so that you can perform even better.

Many extremely successful entrepreneurs are even clinically diagnosed Manic Depressive or Bi-Polar (Bi-Polar Disorder is nicknamed, “The CEO Disease”).

Francis Ford Coppola has it.  So does Ted Turner. Jim Clark, cofounder of Netscape, was described in Business Week by Netscape’s other cofounder, Jim Barksdale, as someone “who has his mania only partly under control.  He’s a perpetual motion machine with a short attention span, forever hurtling at unsafe speeds. When his forward motion is impeded, Clark becomes irritable and bored.  In his search for the stimulation of the ‘new, new thing,’ he quickly loses interest in the companies and ideas he starts and tosses them into the laps of his bewildered employees.”

Bill Gross, CEO of Idealab, was written up by a Fortune editor who apologized and said, “I believed him because I was dazzled by him. He had an infectious boyish enthusiasm that was charming and irresistible. He spoke so rapidly—jumping from topic to topic as if he were hyper-linking.  It was hard to keep up with him.  He had so much energy he seemed constantly on the verge of jumping out of his skin. He bubbled over with optimism.”

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been described as “hypomanic” and “unable to think outside the box – because he doesn’t even see the box.  He’s also been described as quick to fly off the handle emotionally.

Here’s a note from a CEO’s blog:

“Today is Wednesday, and I haven’t been able to accomplish anything so far this week. It’s not that I don’t have plenty to do – I just can’t shake this depression long enough to do it. Last week I was a whirlwind – this week I’m a slug. My insomnia has been bad the past week or so, and it’s only when my body can’t go on any longer that I sleep. This lack of sleep makes my mind sluggish too…and it takes a great deal of time and effort to accomplish even the simplest of tasks. Intellectually I know what needs to be done…but emotionally I just don’t have what it takes to get a move on….

I’m trying to take things one day at a time, but it’s so hard to keep from thinking of what the future holds in store for me.  I’m sad that I didn’t do more to keep in touch with friends I have known for years. I guess I could attempt to re-connect with some of these folks, but the embarrassment of my current situation is just too much right now…. sigh.

Something needs to change pretty soon or I’m afraid I won’t be able to crawl out from under my rock and I’ll end up in a home, or worse. This is not a good day at all. Perhaps tomorrow will be better. “

It’s not about what’s in your head, it’s about what’s in your gut.

How will you use what you’re feeling to help you become really successful??

I hope you are seeking the answer.  This is one of the many areas I mentor the CEOs I do in our bi-weekly coaching sessions too.

When writing this post I was sitting in a quiet room with a fireplace up at a Whistler, BC lodge.  No people, music, phones or email.  Just me sitting beside a window watching the snow fall = perfect environment for me to focus and get some real quality work done.

Find an environment to focus and productivity improves.  So will the quality of your work.

Strict Focus Days are helpful. Slowing down every month or quarter long enough to sit quietly and obsess about the future helps fuel more thoughtful decisions about the present and future of your business.

During these times, it’s good to think about the following:

• Where in your business could you be focusing more?
• Who could you be building better relationships with?
• Who are your biggest clients?  How could you get more business from them?
• Are you taking time to really focus without the trappings of day to day life distracting you (laptop, email, phone)? If not, I strongly urge you to think about taking a Focus Day (or a few) to disconnect from the rest of the world and be alone with yourself and your thoughts.

I’ve looked at my companies metrics or KPIs every week.  Back in my College Pro Painters days, we called it the “Weekly RAG” (Results At A Glance) and it was critical to the goal-setting and planning we did weekly to drive the business.  If you’re not looking at a dashboard for your business weekly already, how’s that working for you?

To assist me in keeping teams and individuals focused, I’ve had one-on-one meetings each week with all my direct-reports.  And I’ve ensured that they had these same one-on-one meetings with those who reported to them.  At College Pro Painters, we called it GS&R: Goal Setting and Review. This simple meeting rhythm provided a ton of focus for all of us.

Fortune magazine asked me once, “How do you motivate your employees?”  I said, “I don’t.”  I continued, “I refuse to try to motivate people. What I want to do is try to take people who are already motivated and inspire them to do the stuff they know they have to do, and give them the systems and tools to create change. Then be there to support them.”

Help align and keep people focused who are already motivated.  That’s a recipe for growth.

Open spaces create transparent and energized work environments.

This leads to the development and transmission of office culture across people, departments, and finally, the entire organization.

Years ago, at 1-800-GOT-JUNK? we had all our employees on two wide open floors in an office. There were no walls.

Then we moved into a downtown office tower and had to use the 14^th floor of the building for the better part of a year while our real office space was constructed.

For the first time ever people had private offices, and it was interesting to see what happened.  For the first week or so, people loved having their own space.  They felt more focused, appeared to get more done and had the quiet they needed to think.  Then, after a week, the chatter started. People said, “I miss everyone,” and, “Where is Greg? I haven’t seen him in ages,” or, “Is so-and-so sick today?” It went on and on.  After about three weeks, it was unanimous: private offices killed the buzz and employees wanted their open workspace back.

Everyone knows you’re hiding out in your private office playing on FaceBook, Twitter or surfing porn.  So go join the rest of your team – open up your entire office space.  When I mentor CEOs I push them all to get rid of private offices.  Including their own.

Creating a Painted Picture in order to reverse engineer your success is something that made intuitive sense to me.

I’ve since learned that it’s far from intuitive for everyone else.

Most people don’t think about the steps that are needed for personal or business success, and those that do can become easily frustrated with the planning process.

In 1998, when I was first exposed to visualization at an Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) meeting.  I started to think of this whole process as ‘leaning out into the future,’ which many people find helpful when they’re trying to understand this process. Eight years later, I heard another Vancouver entrepreneur, David Chalk, describe visualization as ‘leaning out into the future,’ too. Obviously, it made sense to people to think about the process this way.

A few of the other entrepreneurs from my EO Forum Group also got excited about this process and began to use visualization and the reverse engineering it in our own ways.

Once you’ve leaned out into the future and created your Painted Picture, reverse engineer to make it happen. A good example of how this works is the custom home construction process. In this specific scenario, the finished product—the home—is the equivalent of our Painted Picture.  But before creating it, home builders meet with clients and ask them to describe all kinds of areas of the home they want built or renovated. They get photos from clients and draft sketches based on these photos and other materials. After a few discussions to determine precisely what the clients want, the desired home begins to take shape visually. The plans, the builder and architect then draw up show a clear, painted picture of what the home should look like.

Using the plans as a guide, construction workers, electricians, plumbers and other team members build the client’s dream home, or ‘reverse engineer’ it. Custom home construction is the perfect example of reverse engineering in action: by starting with what the home should look like, all of the players on the team, from construction workers to the folks putting the paint on the walls, know exactly what they’re supposed to do. Everyone’s role is clear and the desired outcome is, too. It should work the same way in your organization and it can—but only if you use a Painted Picture as a guide.

An organization’s Painted Picture should serve the same purpose for you and your employees as the plans for a custom home: it should show you the way forward in reaching your ultimate objectives for your organization.

Don’t forget: Draft your Painted Picture with care, attention, and detail. This way, everyone on your team understands his or her role.

It’s not as much about setting the goals as it is about getting the damn stuff done.

Too many people write lists.  Lists are great.  I use them too.  However getting stuff done isn’t just about lists and setting goals.  That’s only the starting point.

REALLY getting stuff done is about deciding exactly when you’re going to do it and putting that task right into your calendar at a specific time based point.

a) What are you going to do

b) When are you going to do it

Try that for a week… Prove me wrong.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

This slide is at Google’s Zurich office.

Nothing kills creativity like boring photos on the walls or using super-traditional board and conference rooms when you’re running a new and exciting business venture. Boring rooms, mean boring employees, mean customers go elsewhere.

Go a little crazy and use the physical space as a blank canvas to elevate the mood of the team. For example, at 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, one of our boardrooms was called the Blue Sky Room.  We had a huge wall with a blue sky and clouds.

ReThink Marketing in Vancouver has a Lego room, a drum set, globes hanging from the ceiling, a ping pong ball board room table and Astro turf for carpet.

Don’t be confined to some old school vision of the workplace. You’re not an old school company.  Plus you’ll get Free Publicity from building an awesome company culture.

I just realized how lucky I am. 

Over the past twenty years I’ve worked REALLY hard to build awesome companies, build great teams, and build the trust of entrepreneurs around the world.

I was just getting ready to upload this photo and realized that these six companies are ones I’m humbled to have built the trust of.

Five of these great brands have paid $2,500 each to put their logo on my laptop for 2010.

The companies are: Outsourcing Things Done, Maverick Business Adventures, Grasshopper.com, Media Temple, and Hire Better.  I got so lucky to find such awesome ones.  And in the process I turned down many others (some who just didn’t get in early enough, and others who weren’t just the perfect fit yet).  Anyway – thanks to all of them.

Yes they are paying me – but you all know me – I wouldn’t rave about them if I didn’t love them.  And if anything changed – I’d be the first to give them there money back and take the sticker off too.

I’m lucky to have such great brands supporting me that you’d be smart to check out too.

Lastly, yes there are 6 stickers here.  I gave one free spot away to the non-profit that I support.  I contacted the CEO of Kiva.org and asked him if he’d like to be on my laptop with the other brands.  He loved the idea and said yes.  I then told him I’d give them the spot for free because their mission was so similar to mine.  They are all about helping entrepreneurs grow too.

This year, I’ll be speaking in front of tens of thousands of entrepreneurs.  They’ll all see these six logos.  And trust me, I’ll be raving about them all year too.