For Technical people: Do not be a bad manager ... From TechRepublic

More : http://www.techrepublic.com/ 

A tech can earn more money without becoming a manager. If, however, you still want to pursue the management track, please know that leadership is a skill in its own right. You may be a great tech, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be a great manager

Here are some behaviors that I see most often in poor leaders:

#1 You don’t seek feedback, or if you do, it’s for the wrong reason.

I think everyone has had the experience of being asked for feedback, sometimes even in a formal program, and then have all that feedback subsequently ignored. Some managers like to say they welcome feedback just so they can look like the kind of person who, well, welcomes feedback. But, in reality, they have no intention of ever using it.

Don’t do that. Don’t ask for feedback unless you’re prepared to actually implement some of it. It’s a different story if all the feedback you receive sucks out loud and you can’t use it, but at least go in with the best intentions. There’s nothing worse for employee morale than to make them feel like they’re being condescended to.

#2 You never exhibit vulnerability.

You may be that person who knows everything about everything. If so, you should make plans to donate yourself to science, because that’s one heck of a claim.

Maybe you’re not perfect, but maybe you think you need to project that image to gain and retain the respect of your direct reports. Well, that’s just dumb, and here’s why: Your staff knows that you’re not supernatural, which is what you’d have to be to have all the answers all the time. By pretending like you do, you are only portraying yourself as someone who thinks he/she knows everything — in other words, a phony and/or an obnoxiously insecure person.

Also, acting like you know it all is bound to make your staff feel insecure. If you can’t admit to not knowing something, then they know that there will be quite a few times when you’re basically taking them down blind avenues.

Just remember: You hired your staff members for their expertise. Take advantage of that.

#3 You’re unavailable.

I had a boss once who boasted about his open door policy at every opportunity. The only problem was, the door might have been open but he was never in his office. That’s like saying someone can have the keys to your car any time but then hiding the car.

It is true that with a management role, there is a lot of liaising to do with upper management. You should never let that take over your availability for your team. I’m fairly sure upper management doesn’t need every second of your time.

If you’re chronically unavailable then it will be translated by your team that you just don’t care. And why should they care if you don’t?

Some managers get so involved in the day-to-day that they don’t even realize they’re committing one or more of these leadership sins. Make sure you’re not one of them.

  ...Toni Bowers is an award-winning writer and Head Blogs Editor for TechRepublic 

E N M I O P I N I O N: Por: Ricardo Tribín Acosta

Dejando ir

Dejar ir no significa claudicar sino más bien abrirse a nuevas perspectivas. Por ello cuando nos quitamos ciertas “cucarachitas” de la cabeza y permitimos que los pensamientos que nos atormenten salgan de nuestra mente, empezaremos a encontrar libertad y paz en el pensamiento. Esto es posible alcanzarlo cuando finalmente comprendemos que aquellas ideas obsesivas acerca de algo que guardamos en nuestro cerebro solo traen malestar ya que, aunque sepamos que los resultados no serán los que esperamos, creemos equivocadamente que seguir pensando en ello nos traerá la solución.

Dele, dele y dele con la idea, y la solución? Esto pasa hasta en las mejores familias, personas, grupos, etc., pero se particulariza en cada caso, concentrando la situación en la mente de cada cual. Un negocio frustrado, una oportunidad perdida, una relación afectiva finiquitada, en fin tantas cosas sobre las que a veces no poseemos ningún control, pues los resultados ya se han dado y no hay como cambiarlos. Para tales situaciones lo mejor será dejar ir y continuar viviendo en la búsqueda de nuevas y mejores oportunidades.

http://ricardotribin.blogspot.com

Miami, Octubre 7 de 2012

Small Businesses Get the Spotlight in Presidential Debate

The conventional wisdom is that Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama in the first     presidential debate, but there was another winner in terms of attention Wednesday night: America's small businesses. "Small business,"  appeared 27 times in this transcript of the debate and featured prominently in both candidates' opening statements. Obama, who went first, said, "I think it's important...that we change our tax code to make sure that we're helping small businesses."  In his turn, Romney named "champion small business" as the fifth element of a five-part economic plan. The Republican nominee elaborated, "It's small business that creates the jobs in America. And over the last four years small-business people have decided that America may not be the place to open a new business, because new business startups are down to a 30-year low. I know what it takes to get small business growing again, to hire people." Amid their general agreement that small businesses are an important engine of economic growth, the candidates drew clear distinctions between themselves... Continue reading.

Administración y Mercadeo / Management and Marketing

La llamada Administración, arte humano de lograr que las tareas se cumplan con el menor gasto de recursos humanos, materiales y financieros tiene una gran relación con otro elemento de ese complejo mundo de gerenciar, llamado Mercadeo. El Mercadeo, no es sustituto de la Administración, sino es parte importante e indivisible de ella cuando se trata de administrar empresas e insitituciones relacionadas con la selección preferencial del público consumidor. Probablemente el Gerente de una empresa que produce y vende productos tenga ese Mercadeo como una función mucho más prioritaria que el que administra la morgue municipal, por ejemplo. 

La extraordinaria importancia del Mercadeo en una empresa para asegurar su éxito en la preferencia del público en el mercado, determina que le concedamos un espacio especial en el blog como herramienta fundamental de las llamadas pequeñas empresas. Comenzamos ese acercamiento al tema reproduciendo lo que hacen los expertos y lo iremos introduciendo en los próximos números

That human art known as Administration is  focused in a main task:  goals must be achieved    with the least amount of resources and the lowest cost. It has an all-important relationship with another element of managing: Marketing. Marketing is not a substitute of Administration, but is an inherent element of it when you are dealing with public preferences of consumers. Probably a Manager of a manufacturing and distribution company will have to deal with marketing as a much more important function that the one managing the city morgue. 

This growing importance of Marketing in most businesses to achieve success has made us to open an special place in our blog, to let small businesses know what experts in Marketing are doing or saying.  Next releases will include these elements from them

Customer Service: From Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Because the Customer Is NOT Always Right!

Restaurant-goers can Yelp (YELP) about high prices and bad service; homeowners can carp about shoddy contractors on Angie’s List (ANGI); ripped-off customers can tattle to the Better Business Bureau.

Now small business owners have a place to share opinions of their own: BadConsumers.com. The site’s tagline: “Because the customer is NOT always right!”

“Everything’s geared for the consumers and their protection. What about us?” asks Peter Robideau, 48, the site’s founder and owner of TeleTechie, a Malverne (N.Y.) technology support company that employs eight and brings in about $1 million annually. Robideau, a database programmer who started the company in 2004, has long traded gripes with fellow entrepreneurs about customers who haggle on prices after agreeing to them, stop payment on valid invoices, or don’t ever pay.

He had for some time wanted to find a way for small business owners to share the bad customer lists that many of them keep internally. “I have 7,000 customers on Long Island, and most of them are great,” Robideau says. “But there are a handful out there who are repeat offenders, and they only do it to small businesses because they know you don’t have a room full of lawyers to sue them. They make you wonder why you’re in business in the first place.” Most problem customers are not reneging on payments because they’re poor, he says: “It’s not that they can’t afford to pay you. They’re like rich kleptomaniacs.”

Robideau built the BadConsumers database and had a friend design the front end; he’s invested about $5,000 in the project. The site, which went live in early September, is offering free six-month memberships to business owners nationwide who submit valid tax ID numbers. Robideau says almost 500 people have become members and figures he’ll eventually charge around $100 for annual memberships. He envisions the site as protection for entrepreneurs: the electronic equivalent of the bounced checks that retailers post at cash registers.

Bad debt is a pervasive problem for small businesses, and it’s maddeningly difficult to solve. In a Citibank (C)survey of 750 small business owners released in September, 30 percent identified slow or delinquent receivables and bankruptcies as their greatest cash-flow management challenge. Nearly one-quarter blamed late or nonpayments for sudden cash crunches during the past year and said making a collection call was “the most uncomfortable business finance challenge,” second only to reducing staff.

Credit bureaus sell reports that can identify consumer credit risks, but many small businesses cannot afford them or do not consider them worthwhile for jobs that run a few hundred dollars, says Gene Fairbrother, president of MBA Consulting in Dallas. Companies cannot write off bad debt unless it’s for something they’ve actually spent money on, such as labor or materials, he says.

So the contractor who told Robideau that a customer paid $14,500 of an agreed-upon $15,000 bathroom remodel, “because Oprah said never to pay a contractor the full amount,” is out of luck—and his anticipated profit margin—unless he goes through the time-consuming, costly process of taking her to small claims court or putting a lien on her property.

Consumer protection groups aren’t enthusiastic about Robideau’s site. “A bad customers list is a bad idea,” says BBB spokeswoman Katherine Hutt, who called it “a public shaming device” in an e-mail. “We get that some customers are hard to deal with. We handle about a million complaints a year, and we see plenty of cases where the customer is unreasonable in their demands.” Still, she says, a site like BadConsumers could backfire on its members with negative publicity, especially through social media.

Encino (Calif.)-based attorney Stephen Dem, who specializes in debt-collection issues, worries that people who learn they are being bad-mouthed on Robideau’s site will take him to court. “I find great liability in that; it’s a very risky thing,” he says.

Robideau says his attorneys have assured him that speech on his site is protected, just as the complaints about business owners and their employees are protected on online review sites. Complaints will not be visible to nonmembers. Robideau has privacy and posting guidelines that prohibit profanity and racial slurs, and he says every post will be moderated.

Going forward, he hopes to offer a third-party arbitration process that will help members resolve their conflicts. For now, he’s providing a place for entrepreneurs to commiserate. “It’s about time,” he says.

Klein is a Los Angeles-based writer who covers entrepreneurship and small-business issues.

From Bloomberg BusinessWeek - China: Stay or Go? -

 

Global Economics

China: For Many Expats, It's Not Worth It

Stay or go? That question has erupted in a public way among China’s large population of expatriate businessmen, entrepreneurs, journalists, and academics, who the public security bureau says number 220,000.

The debate started with an essay, “You’ll Never Be Chinese: It Is Time to Leave the Country I Loved,” by former magazine publisher Mark Kitto, a British 16-year resident of China. After his English-language magazine was seized by the government, Kitto retreated to Moganshan mountain outside Shanghai, where he and his Chinese wife have run a restaurant and guesthouse business for the last seven years. “Don’t you think,” asked Kitto in the August edition of Britain’s Prospect, “with all the growth and infrastructure, the material wealth, let alone saving the world like some kind of financial whiz James Bond, that China would be a happier and healthier country? I don’t think it is.” A second piece, titled “Why I’m Leaving China,” published July 25 by American tech writer and filmmaker Charlie Custer on his popular ChinaGeeks blog, made many of the same points.

The articles, widely e-mailed among expatriates, are being discussed on English and Chinese websites. “If you haven’t read Mark Kitto’s article on why he’s leaving China, do so now,” wrote Richard Burger, who has lived in Beijing for nearly four years, on his popular blog The Peking Duck, on Aug. 14. “There is talk of the U.S. ‘falling off a financial cliff,’ but right now I think China is closer to the edge of that cliff, and that it’s also a steeper cliff than ours.” The Chinese have reacted, too. In response to Custer’s piece, one outraged Chinese wrote on July 30: “Well, at first remember this, nobody forced you to come to China, [neither] your parents nor your God. Secondly, don’t try to change China when you are not a citizen of China. Thirdly and last, don’t spit on others when you leave. Thank you, have a nice flight, and please don’t come back!”

Custer, who with his wife left Beijing in late July for Maine, says, “I didn’t expect this to produce the emotional responses it seems to have. That’s in part because it is difficult to write an article like that without sounding critical of those who stay.” He had explained his decision by pointing to China’s problems with air pollution and food safety—and how they could affect his future children.

On the opposite side of the debate are those who basically say: Get over it. That was the message of “Foreigners in China Must Learn the Rules of the Road,” by Shaun Rein, the American founder of a market research firm based in Shanghai, who has lived in China for 12 years. “When crafting strategies, businesses need to do what the market demands and what the Party allows specifically for foreigners,” wrote Rein in a Sept. 14 essay on Businessweek.com (where he is a regular contributor). “Know your limitations and do not expect to operate with the same opportunities as Chinese. It is not an even playing field and never will be,” he wrote. “Don’t try to make it one, or you will end up banging your head against walls as Kitto did.” He called Kitto’s decision to go into media, a tightly controlled industry, a mistake. In retrospect, Kitto agrees.

It’s no secret that China has badly polluted air in its major cities. News reports highlight incidents of poisoned milk, adulterated pork, and even exploding watermelons. The rigid educational system is a turnoff for foreigners with families, while international schools charge tuitions that would bankrupt most.

The growing expat angst also reflects China’s often oppressive political system, and doubts about whether the ruling party can reform itself without social instability. “One day they are going to run out of money, and run out of soldiers and police” to deal with growing unrest, says Kitto in a call from Moganshan. (He’s leaving next year.) “China is always proud of everything being big. When the problem comes, it will be a big one, too.”

Disillusionment is a natural response to the diminishing opportunities of a slowing economy. “Up until 2006 you could come to China and get funded for something you wrote on the back of an envelope, myself included,” says Anne Stevenson-Yang, the American co-founder of J Capital Research, a Beijing-based equities analysis firm. After 21 years in China she has sold her house in Beijing and is looking to buy in New York City, in case things in China deteriorate rapidly.

Even many Chinese are growing uneasy. Members of China’s elite, including government officials, are seeking foreign residency for themselves or at least for their families, according to numerous reports in China’s state-owned media. The Chinese derisively call a functionary who secretly sends his next of kin abroad, sometimes with illegally obtained cash, a luo guan, or “naked official.” “China is a country run by a bureaucratic elite that doesn’t want your participation or views,” says Stevenson-Yang. “When you have the perception that things are getting better, you can accept that. When you don’t, you might as well leave.”

The bottom line: Foreigners in China are weary of the state dictating many business decisions. Education, food safety, and pollution are concerns as well.

With Bruce Einhorn

Roberts is Bloomberg Businessweek's Asia News Editor and China bureau chief.

5 Ways to Kickstart Complete Marketing Success

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