Stile: Christie's strategy of wooing key Democrats pays off big

lesson learned: long term winning process
http://www.northjersey.com/columnists/Stile_Christies_strategy_of_wooing_key_Democrats_pays_off_big.html
By CHARLES STILE
COLUMNIST

A day after routing Jon Corzine in 2009, Republican Governor-elect Chris Christie placed a call to the Democratic mayor of Woodbridge, John McCormac, inviting him to join his transition team.

McCormac, a state treasurer under Gov. James E. McGreevey who continues to be a fixture in the state Democratic Party, was happy to sign on.

It proved to be a wise move for McCormac and his town. Three years later, Christie returned the favor, using his political muscle to help approve a 700-megawatt power plant for Woodbridge, a project expected to generate jobs and revenue for decades.

“After elections, it doesn’t matter what party” people are in, McCormac said. “We all have to work together for the benefit of our citizens.”

The “I’ll help you, you help me” alliance with McCormac, made within hours of Christie’s victory four years ago, illustrates an overlooked tactic that propelled his win Tuesday over Democrat Barbara Buono, a longtime state senator from Middlesex County.

Christie’s bold leadership during Superstorm Sandy, the shrewd marketing of his Jersey tough guy persona and several important legislative accomplishments are indeed important factors in the strong support for his reelection. But while the public was seeing all of that, Christie discreetly and methodically courted Democrats with every lever of power at his disposal. By the end, many of those Democrats would supply the manpower, money or simply the photo ops for his campaign.

Long before Buono entered a race that no other Democratic contender wanted to come near, Christie had already won the campaign. While the cameras and the social-media feeds and the political pundits focused on Christie’s forceful personality, his often over-the-top comments and his welcoming embrace of President Obama after Sandy, Christie was planting the seeds for his own reelection, Demo­cratic mayor by Democratic mayor, Democratic boss by Democratic boss, Demo­cratic union leader by Democratic union leader. As the ancient Chinese military tome “The Art of War” noted, “Every battle is won before it is fought.”

Christie won the unofficial support — and admiration — of George Norcross, the South Jersey insurance executive and the state’s most powerful Democrat, by carrying out an overhaul of the state’s higher education system that poured more money into that region. He wooed Democratic-allied construction unions by financing massive transportation projects and backing tax incentives for long-dormant mega-projects in Atlantic City and the Meadowlands. He used his clout to secure approvals for large Port Authority of New York and New Jersey projects in Democratic towns.

By the end of this campaign, Demo­crats not only endorsed Christie, they lavished him with praise, eager to demonstrate their fealty and well aware that the chances of intraparty punishment were nil. Union City Mayor Brian Stack, who is also a state senator, gave Christie a hero’s welcome — and a parade. Essex County Sheriff Armando Fontoura took the unusual step of vigorously defending Christie’s debate performance.

And although Cory Booker formally endorsed Buono, Booker, the state’s most popular Democrat, publicly praised Christie during a Newark supermarket groundbreaking. It was Booker’s first public event after winning the U.S. Senate seat last month. Events with Buono would have to wait.

But Christie’s early, old-school “outreach” worked to divide, conquer and dilute the power of the state’s ruling Democrats. Despite the party’s power on paper — 700,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans and majority control of both houses of the Legislature — Christie’s strategy exploited its divisions and realized its vaunted machinery put power and self-preservation ahead of partisan loyalty.

Christie revived the transactional, political dynamic that vanished during the rocky tenure of Corzine, his predecessor. Legislators and mayors — who care more about obtaining environmental permits and road project funding and financing for community clubhouses — fumed at Corzine’s clumsy deal-making and his CEO-like aloofness.

Christie recognized the post-Corzine hunger among the political class for a governor’s office willing to listen and deal. It made many officials easy prey for Christie’s entreaties.

“Jon Corzine continues to haunt the Democratic Party,” said state Sen. Ray Lesniak, a Union County Democrat.

Christie reopened the governor’s office, but with an implied “you’re either with me or against me” ethos. Those who worked with him — by keeping a low profile, voting for parts of his agenda or even endorsing his reelection — could count on getting their phone calls returned and their needs addressed. Those who criticized risked being locked out.

For some Democrats, it was an easy decision. They saw no advantage in tangling with a governor whose popularity only seemed to soar with every attack on sewerage authority bureaucrats, teacher union leaders and the occasional mayor, like Atlantic City’s Lorenzo Langford, one of the few big-city mayors who openly clashed with Christie.

“Mayors now feel they have a voice in Trenton,” said one Democratic mayor, who declined to be identified for fear of alienating some intraparty allies. “Why did we want to change that?”

Christie forged ties with Democrats for symbolic as well as strategic reasons. He secured the endorsement of Michael Blunt, the African-American mayor of Chesilhurst in Camden County, one of only three small towns that former Gov. Thomas H. Kean did not carry in his 1985 reelection landslide.

Blunt said he was impressed with Christie’s forthright style and the help the town received from the Department of Community Affairs in getting the town’s finances in order. And that help was boosted by a $200,000 special state aid package for economically distressed towns in 2011.

“We received transitional aid when a lot of other towns didn’t receive any,” Blunt said.

Christie won the endorsement of Harrison Mayor Ray McDonough after the governor secured approval from the Port Authority for a $250 million PATH transit hub for the downtown. Harrison was also the beneficiary of a $2 million state aid award in 2012.

Christie also attracted mayors with the promise of access and assistance in the future.

River Edge Mayor Sandy Moscaritolo, who endorsed Christie last month, was part of a group of Democratic mayors Christie invited to Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion in Princeton.

He said “I understand the political position you are in,” Moscaritolo said. “But if you can support me, I would really appreciate it.”

Some Democratic donors also helped Christie with their checkbooks. He received $6,300 from lawyers at DeCotiis, FitzPatrick and Cole of Teaneck. Listed among the donors is Al DeCotiis, a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee and a fundraiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Michael DeCotiis, who served as chief counsel to McGreevey.

Buono received nothing from the firm. The DeCotiis family members were unavailable for comment, said William Murray, a spokesman.

Several lobbyists, who declined to be identified, said many traditional donors didn’t want to waste money investing on a long shot like Buono. One veteran lobbyist said he didn’t want to put his career or his clients in “harm’s way” — meaning they didn’t want to risk being cut off by Christie if their names appeared on Buono’s donor lists.

Political veterans say Christie is simply following an “outreach” path hewn by his mentor, Kean, who fostered generally warm relations with urban Democrats in the 1980s. But Christie adapted the approach in his own aggressive style.

While he brought down Democratic Party bosses across the state during his seven-year turn as U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Christie as governor eagerly collaborated with those who still retained their grip on the political machinery.

His relationship with Norcross began with quiet, behind-the-scenes negotiations that evolved into a warm partnership publicly celebrated at news conferences.

Norcross and his allies, particularly Democratic state Senate President Stephen Sweeney, delivered crucial Democratic votes on the key Christie achievements, such as legislation forcing public employees to pay more for health and pension benefits or a law limiting annual property-tax hikes to 2 percent.

Christie also relied on his relationship with Democratic Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo, which some say took root in 2002, when then-U.S. Attorney Christie took the unusual step of writing a letter declaring that DiVincenzo was not a target of a federal grand jury investigation into Essex County government.

When Christie was pushing for stricter rules on arbitration awards for police and fire union contracts, Christie turned DiVincenzo into a de facto lobbyist. During a heated legislative session, DiVincenzo persuaded Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver — who is also DiVincenzo’s underling in her job as an assistant Essex County administrator — to withdraw a weaker version of the bill.

Christie rewarded DiVincenzo with influence and largess — a new senior center in Belleville, $4 million to finance a new technology wing at the Essex County Vocational Center, $7 million in Port Authority aid for a new waterfront park in Newark.

DiVincenzo returned the favor by publicly endorsing Christie’s reelection. Christie praised DiVincenzo as a bold bipartisan leader and refused to distance himself from DiVincenzo after the state Election Law Enforcement Commission charged him with using his campaign account for personal items such as trips to Puerto Rico and gym memberships. His lawyer denies that they were personal expenses.

“The person who controls the budget is the governor,” DiVincenzo said in April, distilling the bottom-line dynamic of their relationship. “When you want to get things done, you go to the governor.”

Christie’s relationship with these two Democratic leaders effectively doomed Buono’s chances. DiVincenzo deployed the Essex campaign machinery for Christie. Norcross, Sweeney and the Democratic allies focused almost entirely on the legislative races. And their vaunted fundraising machine produced only token support for Buono.

Christie’s legendary clashes with teachers and other public employee unions helped make him a hero among Republican audiences, but he also quietly courted trade unions, including those who backed Corzine in the 2009 race.

Only a few months after Christie took office, in mid-2010, a group of labor leaders found themselves at the governor’s mansion in Princeton, listening to the new Republican governor deliver his pitch.

“He said he wants to be our friend,” said Ray Pocino, the powerful leader of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, recalling Christie’s overture. “You know of any legislation that is important to you? You tell me what the reasons are and I’ll do what I can to make it happen.”

Christie’s biggest prize was Pocino’s Laborers Union of 20,000 members. Christie grabbed the endorsement last December — even before the Democrats had settled on a nominee.

Shortly after Christie’s election, Pocino, who serves as a commissioner on both the Turnpike and Port Authority boards, publicly criticized Christie for canceling construction on a long-planned second rail tunnel under the Hudson River in 2011.

But that disappointment was smoothed over by Christie’s decision to spend money dedicated to the project to replenish the state’s Transportation Trust Fund, which finances road and rail projects, and other large-scale projects, such as the raising of the Bayonne Bridge and repairs to the Pulaski Skyway.

“That’s going to create a hell of a lot more jobs,” Pocino said. And Christie’s support for tax incentives to revive the American Dream mall in the Meadowlands and the stalled Revel Casino and Spa in Atlantic City also won labor support.

The Laborers signaled that they intend to invest in Christie’s future — they donated $300,000 to the Republican Governors Association, which Christie is set to lead next year.

Pocino’s members comprise the hard-hat crews on construction sites. For this election, the Laborers and scores of Democrats from city halls to the State House helped pave the road for Christie’s reelection and his future. It is a road paved with the tried-and-true political macadam of horse-trading and alliances of convenience.

10 Warning Signs You're Not Cut Out to Be an Entrepreneur

http://smallbusiness.foxbusiness.com/entrepreneurs/2013/10/31/10-warning-signs-youre-not-cut-out-to-be-entrepreneur/?intcmp=sbcfeatures
By Nicole Fallon



Think you're ready to start a business? Let's say you've got a great idea, a solid business plan and even a decent amount of startup money. If you have these things, you might be able to successfully launch your business. But are you really cut out to be an entrepreneur?

Dan Steenerson, a business speaker, consultant and author, doesn't want anyone to be disillusioned by the allure of being your own boss: Starting a business isn't easy, and it certainly isn't glamorous, he warned would-be entrepreneurs. While there's no formula for the perfect entrepreneur, the commitment and dedication it takes to be a business owner does require a few key personality traits, and they aren't ones that everyone naturally has.

Steenerson identified 10 warning signs that a person isn't meant to start and run a business. If any of these "red flags" apply to you, you might want to reconsider your entrepreneurial goals and stick to your day job.

[Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?]

You can't stand the heat. Before you jump into self-employment, make sure you're very comfortable being uncomfortable. Every day, you'll need to try something new for the first time. You have to be ready to put yourself out there and do things you’ve never done before — all with less financial security.

You have professional ADD. If you get bored and frustrated easily, or you're the type of person who likes to go in a new direction every 60 days, business ownership may not be for you. Being an entrepreneur requires unwavering laser focus to achieve your business goals.

You get stage fright. As a business owner, you are the primary spokesperson for your company. You need to be ready and willing to take center stage and spread the word whenever possible. If you're uncomfortable in the spotlight or you don’t like public speaking, you'd better master these competencies before you launch.

You hate roller coasters. As a business owner, you never know what’s around the corner. It could be a really steep hill or gut-wrenching free fall. There will be countless ups and downs, and you need to be prepared to hang on and enjoy the ride.

You think complexity is cool. Complexity may be cool, but it's hard to create, market and sell. The simplest solutions are the most successful, and as a business owner, you need the ability to distill concepts to their simplest forms so they can be easily communicated.

You can't explain the steps of shoe-tying. Tying a shoe is a complicated. So is running a business. You have to be able to delegate tasks and to direct others, meaning you need the ability to break big ideas into easy, actionable steps for implementation.

You don't believe in marketing. Marketing makes the business world go round. If you don't embrace it, you'll never succeed. You need to be ready to dedicate effort and money to the task of marketing your company, and give it time to work using a variety of mediums. There's no silver bullet.

You're easily winded. Once you get past the adrenaline rush of starting your own business, you'll encounter a portion of the journey called the "middle mile." This is where you face challenge and drudgery. Your feet will hurt and your breathing will be labored. Despite these inconveniences, you must be able to place one foot in front of the other and press on.

You're a problem passer. In business, there are problems that must be decisively resolved by the owner. Sometimes customers and employees will be unhappy with your decisions and that's OK. Successful entrepreneurs never postpone difficult choices.

You're on the quest for quick cash. Profit shouldn't be the reason you are in business. You are in business to solve problems and to serve others. If you find a way to deliver a better solution or service than your competitors, you will make plenty of money, but it doesn't happen overnight.

Flicker on my murky days

Note on Sunday, March 26,2006 7:35:03 AM

Sent by a very considerate friend

Titik Terendah
Oleh : Kafi Kurnia (peka@indo.net.id)

TITIK terendah, atau yang populer disebut "the lowest point", seringkali menjadi posisi yang dihindari banyak orang. Secara strategis tidak akan menguntungkan. Tetapi bukan berarti tidak bisa dimanfaatkan. Paul Arden, penulis buku kontroversial, It's not How
Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to be, menulis bahwa titik terendah seringkali menjadi posisi terbaik untuk beriklan.

Misalnya saja Bali saat ini. Sejak peristiwa bom kedua di Jimbaran, Bali secara perlahan dan pasti terasa semakin sepi. Hampir semua industri pariwisata berteriak karena bisnis menurun secara drastis. Tingkat hunian hotel banyak yang hanya di bawah 20%.

Hal itu saya rasakan ketika mengunjungi Bali, minggu lalu. Ketika tiba di depan hotel, saya disambut secara ramah dan luar biasa. Guest relations hotel malah memberikan pelayanan istimewa. Kamar hotel saya di-"upgrade" ke tingkat yang lebih mewah. Tapi, ketika esoknya membayar biaya kamar, saya kaget bukan main. Harganya cuma Rp 600.000 nett, sudah termasuk pajak dan makan pagi. Murah sekali. Ini harga 50% dari biasanya. Saya kaget bukan main.

Selama di Bali, saya sempat jalan-jalan. Biasanya saya menyewa mobil dan sopir seharga Rp 350.000 untuk 10 jam. Kali ini, karena sepi luar biasa, sang sopir pasrah dan tidak menentukan tarif. Menurut pegawai hotel, tarif mereka turun hingga Rp 250.000. Ketika berjalan-jalan, saya sempat kecewa, beberapa toko favorit saya untuk berbelanja ternyata tutup. Mereka bangkrut karena sepi pengunjung.

Restoran-restoran juga mengalami hal yang sama. Uniknya, karena situasi sepi ini, kualitas pelayanan naik tajam. Hal ini saya rasakan ketika makan di restoran dan berbelanja. Saya mendapat pelayanan khusus. Lebih diperhatikan. Saya merasa tersanjung sekali. Tiba-tiba saya merasakan kenikmatan yang ekstra dan berlebih, tetapi uang yang saya keluarkan justru lebih sedikit. Kesimpulannya, kalau Anda ingin menikmati Bali, inilah saat yang paling
baik. Murah, sepi, tetapi Anda bisa menikmati pelayanan lebih baik.

Sepulang dari Bali, saya kirim e-mail ke teman-teman saya yang doyan pelesir ke Bali, satu di Milan, satu di Amerika, dan satu lagi di Singapura. Berkat cerita saya yang menggiurkan, akhirnya mereka semua langsung ingin berlibur di Bali bulan depan. Peristiwa ini menampar imajinasi saya. Andaikata pemerintah memanfaatkan nasihat Paul Arden, dan mempromosikan Bali di titik terendah ini, maka situasi Bali justru akan cepat pulih. Sayangnya, pemerintah lebih kelihatan kehilangan akal.

Pak Bob Sadino, pemilik pasar swalayan terkenal Kem Chicks, pernah bercerita kepada saya. Katanya, harga cabe di pasar seringkali tidak stabil. Pasar sering mengeluh banyak pasokan, dan harga cabe jatuh. Tidak jarang pasokan menjadi terlampau banyak, dan cabe membusuk. Menurut pengamatan Pak Bob Sadino, hal ini terjadi karena petani gagal
memanfaatkan titik terendah.

Umumnya petani bergairah ikut menanam cabe ketika harganya sedang naik karena pasokan rendah. Malah petani tidak jarang berebut menanam cabe ketika harga cabe sedang berada di titik tertinggi. Akibatnya, ketika mereka rame-rame panen, pasokan cabe berlimpah, dan harga cabe mau tak mau ambruk. Andai kata mereka jeli, justru mereka harus menanam cabe pada saat cabe berada di titik harga terendah. Ketika panen, harga cabe akan berada di titik tinggi karena pasokan kurang.

Teori Pak Bob Sadino ini saya ceritakan kepada sejumlah perternak unggas, minggu lalu, dalam serangkaian seminar marketing yang disponsori Asosiasi Pemasaran Kacang Kedelai dari Amerika. Peternak unggas mengeluhkan hal yang sama bahwa mereka berada pada situasi yang SOS, yaitu titik terendah karena flu burung.

Saya justru memotivasi mereka dengan memanfaatkan studi kasus Bali dan petani cabe. Saya anjurkan mereka menjadi aktivis flu burung, dan memanfaatkan situasi ini untuk mempromosikan perusahaan mereka.

Teori Paul Arden memang ampuh. Titik terendah bukanlah situasi yang ideal. Tetapi titik terendah punya peluang yang unik dimanfaatkan. Yaitu situasi kondusif untuk berpromosi. Dosen komunikasi saya pernah memberikan nasihat unik. Menurut beliau, bayangkan di sebuah ruangan yang penuh sesak dengan orang. Dan semua orang berbicara hiruk-pikuk.
Ruangan akan sangat ribut, dan saat itu proses komunikasi akan sangat sulit karena kita harus bicara keras-keras. Menguras energi dan membuat tenggorokan lecet.

Tapi, sebaliknya, kalau pada titik terendah, ketika semua orang diam. Lalu hanya satu orang berbicara. Mungkin orang itu cukup berbicara pelan saja, tapi semua orang akan mendengar dan menyimak. Semua atensi ditujukan pada pembicara. Komunikasi berjalan lancar.

Jadi, kalau Anda berada di titik terendah, jangan putus asa. Manfaatkan!

TUHAN Memberkati

Scott Adams' Secret of Success: Failure What's the best way to climb to the top? Be a failure.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626104579121813075903866
SCOTT ADAMS


"Dilbert" creator Scott Adams talks to WSJ editor Gary Rosen about how to draw lessons, skills and ideas from your failures—and why following your passion is asking for trouble. Photo: Scott Adams

If you're already as successful as you want to be, both personally and professionally, congratulations! Here's the not-so-good news: All you are likely to get from this article is a semientertaining tale about a guy who failed his way to success. But you might also notice some familiar patterns in my story that will give you confirmation (or confirmation bias) that your own success wasn't entirely luck.

If you're just starting your journey toward success—however you define it—or you're wondering what you've been doing wrong until now, you might find some novel ideas here. Maybe the combination of what you know plus what I think I know will be enough to keep you out of the wood chipper.

Let me start with some tips on what not to do. Beware of advice about successful people and their methods. For starters, no two situations are alike. Your dreams of creating a dry-cleaning empire won't be helped by knowing that Thomas Edison liked to take naps. Secondly, biographers never have access to the internal thoughts of successful people. If a biographer says Henry Ford invented the assembly line to impress women, that's probably a guess.

But the most dangerous case of all is when successful people directly give advice. For example, you often hear them say that you should "follow your passion." That sounds perfectly reasonable the first time you hear it. Passion will presumably give you high energy, high resistance to rejection and high determination. Passionate people are more persuasive, too. Those are all good things, right?

Here's the counterargument: When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion. For example, you don't want to give money to a sports enthusiast who is starting a sports store to pursue his passion for all things sporty. That guy is a bad bet, passion and all. He's in business for the wrong reason.

My boss, who had been a commercial lender for over 30 years, said that the best loan customer is someone who has no passion whatsoever, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on a spreadsheet. Maybe the loan customer wants to start a dry-cleaning store or invest in a fast-food franchise—boring stuff. That's the person you bet on. You want the grinder, not the guy who loves his job.

For most people, it's easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion. I've been involved in several dozen business ventures over the course of my life, and each one made me excited at the start. You might even call it passion.

The ones that didn't work out—and that would be most of them—slowly drained my passion as they failed. The few that worked became more exciting as they succeeded. For example, when I invested in a restaurant with an operating partner, my passion was sky high. And on day one, when there was a line of customers down the block, I was even more passionate. In later years, as the business got pummeled, my passion evolved into frustration and annoyance.

On the other hand, Dilbert started out as just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try. When it started to look as if it might be a success, my passion for cartooning increased because I realized it could be my golden ticket. In hindsight, it looks as if the projects that I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success.

So forget about passion. And while you're at it, forget about goals, too.

Just after college, I took my first airplane trip, destination California, in search of a job. I was seated next to a businessman who was probably in his early 60s. I suppose I looked like an odd duck with my serious demeanor, bad haircut and cheap suit, clearly out of my element. I asked what he did for a living, and he told me he was the CEO of a company that made screws. He offered me some career advice. He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was a continuing process.

This makes perfect sense if you do the math. Chances are that the best job for you won't become available at precisely the time you declare yourself ready. Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for a better deal. The better deal has its own schedule. I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.

This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options.

Throughout my career I've had my antennae up, looking for examples of people who use systems as opposed to goals. In most cases, as far as I can tell, the people who use systems do better. The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways.

To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That's literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose 10 pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.

If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize that you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or to set new goals and re-enter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.

I have a friend who is a gifted salesman. He could have sold anything, from houses to toasters. The field he chose (which I won't reveal because he wouldn't appreciate the sudden flood of competition) allows him to sell a service that almost always auto-renews. In other words, he can sell his service once and enjoy ongoing commissions until the customer dies or goes out of business. His biggest problem in life is that he keeps trading his boat for a larger one, and that's a lot of work.

Observers call him lucky. What I see is a man who accurately identified his skill set and chose a system that vastly increased his odds of getting "lucky." In fact, his system is so solid that it could withstand quite a bit of bad luck without buckling. How much passion does this fellow have for his chosen field? Answer: zero. What he has is a spectacular system, and that beats passion every time.

As for my own system, when I graduated from college, I outlined my entrepreneurial plan. The idea was to create something that had value and—this next part is the key—I wanted the product to be something that was easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities. I didn't want to sell my time, at least not directly, because that model has an upward limit. And I didn't want to build my own automobile factory, for example, because cars are not easy to reproduce. I wanted to create, invent, write, or otherwise concoct something widely desired that would be easy to reproduce.

My system of creating something the public wants and reproducing it in large quantities nearly guaranteed a string of failures. By design, all of my efforts were long shots. Had I been goal-oriented instead of system-oriented, I imagine I would have given up after the first several failures. It would have felt like banging my head against a brick wall.

But being systems-oriented, I felt myself growing more capable every day, no matter the fate of the project that I happened to be working on. And every day during those years I woke up with the same thought, literally, as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and slapped the alarm clock off.

Today's the day.

If you drill down on any success story, you always discover that luck was a huge part of it. You can't control luck, but you can move from a game with bad odds to one with better odds. You can make it easier for luck to find you. The most useful thing you can do is stay in the game. If your current get-rich project fails, take what you learned and try something else. Keep repeating until something lucky happens. The universe has plenty of luck to go around; you just need to keep your hand raised until it's your turn. It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.

I'm an optimist by nature, or perhaps by upbringing—it's hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins—but whatever the cause, I've long seen failure as a tool, not an outcome. I believe that viewing the world in that way can be useful for you too.

Nietzsche famously said, "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger." It sounds clever, but it's a loser philosophy. I don't want my failures to simply make me stronger, which I interpret as making me better able to survive future challenges. (To be fair to Nietzsche, he probably meant the word "stronger" to include anything that makes you more capable. I'd ask him to clarify, but ironically he ran out of things that didn't kill him.)

Becoming stronger is obviously a good thing, but it's only barely optimistic. I do want my failures to make me stronger, of course, but I also want to become smarter, more talented, better networked, healthier and more energized. If I find a cow turd on my front steps, I'm not satisfied knowing that I'll be mentally prepared to find some future cow turd. I want to shovel that turd onto my garden and hope the cow returns every week so I never have to buy fertilizer again. Failure is a resource that can be managed.

Before launching Dilbert, and after, I failed at a long series of day jobs and entrepreneurial adventures. Here are just a few of the worst ones. I include them because successful people generally gloss over their most aromatic failures, and it leaves the impression that they have some magic you don't.

When you're done reading this list, you won't have that delusion about me, and that's the point. Success is entirely accessible, even if you happen to be a huge screw-up 95% of the time.

My failures:

Velcro Rosin Bag Invention: In the 1970s, tennis players sometimes used rosin bags to keep their racket hands less sweaty. In college, I built a prototype of a rosin bag that attached to a Velcro strip on tennis shorts so it would always be available when needed. My lawyer told me it wasn't patentworthy because it was simply a combination of two existing products. I approached some sporting-goods companies and got nothing but form-letter rejections. I dropped the idea.

But in the process I learned a valuable lesson: Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas. From that point on, I concentrated on ideas that I could execute. I was already failing toward success, but I didn't yet know it.

Gopher Offer: During my banking career, in my late 20s, I caught the attention of a senior vice president at the bank. Apparently my b.s. skills in meetings were impressive. He offered me a job as his gopher/assistant with the vague assurance that I would meet important executives during the normal course of my work, which would make it easy for him to strap a rocket to my backside—as the saying roughly went—and launch me up the corporate ladder.

On the downside, the challenge would be to survive his less-than-polite management style and do his bidding for a few years. I declined his offer because I was already managing a small group of people, so becoming a gopher seemed like a step backward. I believe the senior vice president's exact characterization of my decision was "[expletive] STUPID!!!" He hired one of my co-workers for the job instead, and in a few years that fellow became one of the youngest vice presidents in the bank's history.

I worked for Crocker National Bank in San Francisco for about eight years, starting at the very bottom and working my way up to lower management. During the course of my banking career, and in line with my strategy of learning as much as I could about the ways of business, I gained an extraordinarily good overview of banking, finance, technology, contracts, management and a dozen other useful skills. I wouldn't have done it any differently.

Webvan: In the dot-com era, a startup called Webvan promised to revolutionize grocery delivery. You could order grocery-store items over the Internet, and one of Webvan's trucks would load your order at the company's modern distribution hub and set out to service all the customers in your area.

I figured Webvan would do for groceries what Amazon had done for books. It was a rare opportunity to get in on the ground floor. I bought a bunch of Webvan stock and felt good about myself. When the stock plunged, I bought some more. I repeated that process several times, each time licking my lips as I acquired ever-larger blocks of the stock at prices I knew to be a steal.

When the company announced that it had achieved positive cash flow at one of its several hubs, I knew that I was onto something. If it worked in one hub, the model was proved, and it would surely work at others. I bought more stock. Now I owned approximately, well, a boatload.

A few weeks later, Webvan went out of business. Investing in Webvan wasn't the dumbest thing I've ever done, but it's a contender. The loss wasn't enough to change my lifestyle. But boy, did it sting psychologically. In my partial defense, I knew it was a gamble, not an investment per se.

What I learned from that experience is that there is no such thing as useful information that comes from a company's management. Now I diversify and let the lying get smoothed out by all the other variables in my investments.

These failures are just a sampling. I'm delighted to admit that I've failed at more challenges than anyone I know.

As for you, I'd like to think that reading this will set you on the path of your own magnificent screw-ups and cavernous disappointments. You're welcome! And if I forgot to mention it earlier, that's exactly where you want to be: steeped to your eyebrows in failure.

It's a good place to be because failure is where success likes to hide in plain sight. Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.

Mr. Adams is the creator of Dilbert. Adapted from his book "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big," to be published by Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), on Oct. 22.

10 Steps to Executive-Level Confidence

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/10/15/10-steps-to-executive-level-confidence/?mod=trending_now_1

By Becky Blalock

Making the move from middle management to the executive suite requires a healthy dose of confidence. Executives have to make critical, wide-reaching decisions, often with limited information and time—then persuade others to execute those decisions. Self-assurance is a must.

Yet gaining confidence can be a struggle. The “Impostor Syndrome” is real:  researchers at Georgia State University found that 33% of the high-achieving adults they interviewed did not feel they deserved their success. The Imposter Syndrome meant that sufferers opted out of important career opportunities, to their financial and personal detriment.

Women in particular struggle with confidence. They often are less adept at moving forward after setbacks, reading temporary failures as permanent deficiencies, and they often have smaller professional social safety nets than men.

The good news is that confidence can be learned, like any career skill. Here are 10 steps that can have you operating from a place of power:

1) When in doubt, act. It’s the difference between running and stagnant water. When you’re stagnant, doubt and insecurities breed like mosquitoes. Dale Carnegie wrote that “inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage.” Fear of failure can paralyze us, as we almost always overestimate the consequences. Build your confidence instead by taking action, often.

2) Do something outside your comfort zone each day. If we don’t stretch our comfort zones, they shrink. Constantly challenge and improve yourself, and you’ll become comfortable doing new things—and you will establish your identity (both to yourself and others) as someone who takes risks. Each new thing you try adds to your knowledge and skill base, and provides you with a foundation of competence. This is the bedrock of any successful career.

3) Put the focus on others. Choose to be conscious of others instead of self-conscious. Ask people questions. Turn conversations into a game where you try to find a connection with the other person. Give compliments generously, and volunteer to help others when you can. Looking for the best in others will help you see it in yourself.

4) Cultivate mentors. Their advice and connections are invaluable, plus you will make better decisions about opportunities thanks to their objective assessments of the pros and cons. And you will be much more willing to take risks knowing you have supporters who will help you get back up on your feet if you fail.

5) Keep self-talk positive. It’s hard to feel confident if someone puts you down all the time. It’s impossible if that naysayer is you. Watch how you talk to yourself. Is it how you would talk to a friend? If not, then make a change.

6) Eliminate negative people from your network. You absolutely need to invite and be receptive to constructive criticism if you want to grow as a professional and as an individual. But recognize that some people will never be happy with you or with life, and it is a waste of time to try to convince them of your worth.  What’s more, their sour outlook on life is contagious. Learn to identify these people quickly, and move on.

7) Take care of your health. Make time for exercise, and get enough rest. Your body must be physically ready to take on challenges.

8) Do your homework. Keep up-to-date on the news in your industry, and know your company and department inside and out. If you have a challenging task ahead, prepare and practice in your mind. Nothing builds confidence like knowledge and preparation.

9) Watch your body language. Your posture and overall appearance affect both your mental state and how others perceive (and thus respond) to you. If you want to be a leader, you have to dress and act the part. Stand and sit up straight, make eye contact, and remember to smile. Wear the professional clothing of your industry. Eliminate the telltale signs of nervousness: excessive twitching, closed-off posturing (crossed arms and legs, hunched shoulders), and shallow breathing.

10) Practice gratitude daily. In a recent study of how successful people spend the first hour of each day, the No. 1 response was investing time in thinking about the things for which they are most grateful. Starting your day by saying “thank you” for the good in your life makes it more likely that you will approach the day’s challenges with the proper perspective.

Like public speaking or leadership, confidence is a professional skill that can be improved. According to Dr. Peter Buckley of Georgia Regents University, “As you add experiences, you’re more likely to gain confidence. And with confidence, you will embrace new experiences.” Start growing your confidence today.

MANIFESTO: Mengintegrasikan Servis dan Sales

http://the-marketeers.com/archives/mengintegrasikan-servis-dan-sales.html#.Ul3CiNLry-l
 Sigit Kurniawan



Saat ini, banyak perusahaan yang menarik biaya tambahan untuk layanan servis yang sebelumnya digratiskan. Misalnya, dulu, bila kita membeli piano Yamaha ada tambahan kursus piano gratis. Namun, sekarang, kalau mau kursus, orang harus merogoh koceknya lagi. Tapi, kursus tetap laku karena kualitasnya lebih baik dibanding saat digratiskan.

Banyak servis yang dulu digratiskan lalu berbayar tapi tetap ramai peminat. Misalnya, meskipun banyak lounge eksekutif sekarang berbayar, tapi tetap dipenuhi oleh pelanggan. Hal ini membuktikan bahwa servis pun bisa dijual apabila dikelola dengan baik. Pertanyaan sederhananya, kalau bisa dijual untuk pelanggan, kenapa harus digratiskan? Tentu dengan catatan, pelanggan bakal menerima layanan yang lebih dibanding dengan saat digratiskan.

Pemikiran di atas berbeda dengan pemikiran dahulu yang memposisikan servis sebagai pelengkap produk. Sebab itu, lumrah bila ada servis gratis, seperti gratis biaya kirim, gratis makan pagi, dan sebagainya.

Ada pandangan yang mengatakan "ada uang, ada barang." Pandangan ini seolah mau mengatakan kalau Anda mau mendapatkan hal yang lebih dan berkualitas, Anda harus membayarnya lebih dulu. Di sisi lain, ada pandangan juga yang mengatakan yang gratis biasanya kurang berkualitas. Gratis sama saja dengan terlambat antar, gratis sering dilekatkan dengan penanganan yang asal-asalan, dan sebagainya. Sementara, orang lebih memilih mengeluarkan uang lebih untuk mendapatkan servis yang memuaskan.

Servis merupakan ajang cross selling dan up selling yang bisa memberi keuntungan. Bila kualitas servisnya asal-asalnya, bagaimana orang servis bisa menjualnya? Padahal, kalau orang servis itu sadar, ketidakpuasan pelanggan terhadap customer service bisa memengaruhi pemasukan pendapatan perusahaan tempat mereka bekerja. Sebab itu, penting sekali melatih orang-orang servis sebagai tenaga penjualan untuk belajar service excellence.

Untuk mengintegrasikan servis dan sales, ada beberapa hal yang patut di simak. Dulu, servis dianggap sebagai cost center. Sekarang, servis bisa diperlakukan sebagai profit center. Westin Hotel, misalnya, menjual bantal dan kasurnya kepada pelanggannya. Peminatnya banyak karena bantal dan kasur hotel tersebut terkenal dengan keempukannya. Lalu, beberapa toko buku sekarang menyediakan servis lebih kepada pengunjung toko dengan lounge atau kafe. Sekarang, banyak lounge dan kafe toko buku dikelola secara independen sehingga bisa mendatangkan profit yang lebih besar lagi.

How to Design a Bundled Payment Around Value

HBR Blog Network

http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/10/how-to-design-a-bundled-payment-around-value/

by Mary Witkowski, Larry Higgins, Jon Warner, Michael Sherman, and Robert S. Kaplan

The traditional fee-for-service reimbursement model is widely acknowledged to be a major driver of escalating health care costs. Because it rewards the volume of treatments, not the medical outcomes produced, it offers no way for the industry to reward its best providers and for patients to seek them out. It also penalizes cost reduction since eliminating unnecessary procedures leads to lower reimbursements.

For this reason, many health care practitioners and policymakers advocate a new bundled-payments model that reimburses providers with a fixed fee for delivering all the services required to deliver a complete cycle of patient care for a specific clinical condition. Bundled payments (BP) have the potential to reward providers that deliver more value to their patients — better outcomes at lower costs.

In practice, however, bundled payments have struggled to gain traction. One reason is many bundled-payment contracts use artificially short time horizons, not a complete cycle of care, which cause the contract to be similar to a traditional fee-for-service model. Another reason is these new contracts are negotiated at the payer-administrator level in a zero-sum cost-shifting process. Insurers strive to lower the prices they pay while the hospital’s contract administrators attempt to preserve top-line revenues. Physicians, left on the sideline while these new contracts are being forged, are further distanced from the new payment model because they often lack experience in measuring patient outcomes and have little confidence in their costs.

To understand how to address these concerns, an academic team from Harvard Business School brought together a group of orthopedic surgeons from the Boston Shoulder Institute and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, a Boston-based insurer, to create a new BP model focused on patient value. While the final price for the contract has yet to be negotiated, we believe that the structure and development process used to create this bundle can inform other providers and insurers about how to create bundled-payment contracts that benefit all the stakeholders: providers, insurers, and, most importantly, patients.

The Motives of the Pilot’s Members

The Harvard researchers believed that their expertise in value-based health care delivery could help the physicians and the insurer construct a superior BP contract in which the insurer paid a lower price, providers preserved their financial margins, and patients enjoyed superior outcomes. Rather than a zero-sum negotiation, such a new contract would be a win-win for insurers, providers, and patients.

The surgeons (all physicians from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital) participated because they wanted a reimbursement model that rewarded providers for delivering better medical outcomes for their patients at a lower cost. They were already measuring their patient outcomes and were in the process of introducing a costing approach that would enable them to participate in a new payments model.

Harvard Pilgrim agreed to join the effort because it recognized that traditional payment models were unlikely to help control rising health care costs. With regulators increasingly prone to challenge rate increases and employers unwilling to accept premium increases, the insurer felt that a BP model, co-created with clinicians, represented an attractive path for offering lower prices to its customers while preserving their access to the best providers.

The team has been meeting every two weeks over the past four months to design a BP model for a pilot project. The key elements of the project are the following:

Defining the Bundle

The working team selected damage to rotator-cuff tendons as the clinical condition to be bundled. Rotator-cuff repair (RCR) is a high-volume procedure with a definable cycle of care for which there is substantial variability in outcomes across physicians. Therefore, the team believed that RCR surgery offered an opportunity to improve outcomes and standardize treatment around best processes.

The team members wanted to define a cycle of care that corresponded to the medical condition of the patient. They selected a care cycle that starts with the initial pre-op appointment and concludes one year after the day of surgery. They agreed that this period would allow short-term surgical complications to emerge and be addressed within the bundle and that the recovery time would be sufficient to meaningfully measure patient outcomes.

The procedures and resources in the bundle would include pre-op appointment and testing, use of the operating room and facility services on day of surgery, surgeon, anesthesiologist and support staff, clinic visits, in-hospital drug and laboratory tests, and post-surgical physical therapy.

Two issues had to be addressed. First, although the bundle is tied to achieving measurable outcomes during the year, no business organization in any industry will wait that long for payment. Harvard Pilgrim agreed, therefore, to pay most of the bundled price 30 to 60 days after the surgical event; the remainder would be held back until the guaranteed outcome could be assessed at the 365-day mark.

The second issue was Harvard Pilgrim’s existing IT system, which had been designed to support the fee-for-service model. The insurer agreed to bypass the system and use manual procedures in the pilot study to track and bill patients and pay providers.

Selecting the Patient Population

The team’s goal was to be as inclusive as possible in specifying the patient population while incorporating the appropriate risk adjustments. The team identified a core group that would capture at least 80% of the potential RCR population. It also created risk-adjusted tranches to include patients who, based on medical evidence, had a higher intrinsic risk of failure due to medical comorbidities, age, body-mass index, and other factors and adjusted expected outcomes and a pricing differential for patients in each tranche.

Specifying Outcomes and Guarantees

The surgeons reviewed the clinical literature and their own research to select, with the insurer, the outcomes that matter most to patients. These included a mix of objectively measurable outcomes, such as rotator-cuff strength and the rates of complications that occur during operations, and subjective patient-reported outcomes such as pain, the ability to perform activities of daily living, and satisfaction with their outcomes.

The bundle incorporated the metrics in two ways. First, payments would be made to physicians and the hospital only if patients achieved specified minimal performance in each area. Second, if outcomes exceeded a more ambitious performance level, the insurer would make incremental bonus payments.

Such outcome-based guarantees and incentives are rare in traditional top-down bundled-payment contracts created without the input of frontline physicians. These contracts typically involve compliance with certain procedures (such as timely administration of pre-operative antibiotics) that may be easy to agree on and implement but may be peripheral to the ultimate patient outcome. The Boston Shoulder Institute surgeons and Harvard Pilgrim agreed that their set of metrics could provide patients better experiences and could be used to attract more patients to high-value providers.

To enhance transparency, the insurer intended to clearly communicate to patients, ahead of time, a price for the complete treatment cycle and the outcomes that could be expected. The physicians agreed to provide outcomes data to the insurer throughout the care cycle.

Ensuring Patient Engagement

Everyone recognized that the engagement of both patients and external professionals involved in the RCR cycle of care was critical for the project’s success. Toward that end, the Boston Shoulder Institute agreed to identify downstream physical therapists and to train, certify, and compensate them. The physicians also planned to conduct extensive patient pre-op education on narcotics, discharge, and physical therapy as well as provide 24-hour turnaround for all telephone calls, same-day office visits for urgent care, and a phone call from the physician’s office on the first day after surgery.

Harvard Pilgrim agreed to design new, innovative plans whose features included waiving such liabilities as co-payments if a member chose a high-value RCR provider for the surgery. The insurer expected to publicize the BP pilots through media and employer channels to attempt to drive increased volume to these high-value providers.

Estimating Costs

The Boston Shoulder Institute wanted to enter the negotiation with an in-depth understanding of all its costs over a typical RCR-care cycle, something that it could not learn from its existing costing systems. The Harvard Business School team helped the institute’s physicians and staff apply time-driven activity-based costing to measure the costs across the full cycle of care. They began by taking a careful inventory of resource needs and usage for each process in the cycle.

The figure “Initial Surgical Consultation” shows the detailed map for the first process. At each step in this process, the team identified the personnel and equipment required and measured the time consumed by each resource in performing that process step.

The team then accessed data from hospital and physician departmental budgets, the human resources system, and the equipment and facilities databases to estimate the “capacity cost rate,” the cost per minute of each person and piece of equipment used in the care cycle. It also calculated the cost of space used by each resource or clinical and administrative process. The team combined the time and cost estimates to obtain the total cost for surgical treatment of rotator-cuff tears.

Setting the Price

Going into the price negotiation, the Boston Shoulder Institute’s aim is to achieve better patient outcomes and thereby earn a margin over the actual costs incurred. This will come in several ways: the bonus payments for consistently producing superior outcomes; more business driven to them by the insurer because of the better outcomes; and, with a higher volume of patients, more cost-efficient processes. Harvard Pilgrim’s objective is to achieve a bundled price that represents a discount from its fee-for-service payments to facilities, clinicians, and therapists for the RCR care cycle (along, of course, with the superior outcomes). Looking down the road, it believes that if it can extend the new BP model to other conditions, it will be able to reduce its premiums and differentiate itself by offering superior, guaranteed outcomes.

Boston Shoulder Institute physicians and Harvard Pilgrim are now waiting for senior management at Partners HealthCare, the parent of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital,  to review the proposed bundle and to negotiate the price for a trial period. The trial would allow the physicians, hospitals, and therapists to learn how to work together under the new arrangement and set the foundation for a long-term contractual relationship.

***

Throughout the project, the Harvard researchers have kept the discussions focused on the prize: aligning provider and insurer incentives to deliver more patient value. The interactions have given the providers confidence that the costs assigned to the clinical treatments were accurate and have assured the insurer that the provider’s costs will be be based on clinical best practices and high capacity utilization. Over time, as more provider organizations agree to outcome-based bundles, Harvard Pilgrim believes an informed market will introduce competitive pressures to sustain a fair sharing of value between providers and insurers.

All participants have been impressed by the collaborative ethos of the working group. Conversations are open and frank. Rather than a traditional negotiation about who bears which costs, the face-to-face interactions have built trust that is enabling the insurer and physicians to arrive at a win-win value-based solution.