Ray Soifer, a top-rated banking analyst based in Arizona, has an explanation for the crisis gripping the stock market: Blame Harvard! Soifer has long studied the proportion of Harvard MBAs who pursue careers in finance; when more than 3 in 10 head for Wall Street, it’s time for investors to sell, he says. The implication: Harvard MBAs, in aggregate, subtract value. Alas, his study comes out once a year, so it’s no use to short-term investors. But we’d love to know what Soifer would find if he studied the correlation of Harvard MBAs heading to the Valley with venture-capital returns. The results would be edifying — especially for investors in Facebook, whose Harvard dropout CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is currently guided by COO Sheryl Sandberg, Harvard Business School ‘95

If this is true it is a hard hit to the the ability of MBA’s to actually create value in the marketplace.

What do you think?

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I Work With Successful Business Owners Who Hate Their Job

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Seems every week, everyday someone I read in my Google Reader is telling me how to make money from blogging. This will not be another post telling you “how to make money from your blog”.

1. Be Careful Whose Advice You Follow, Including Mine

I have great respect for  Steve Pavlina, Michael Martine, and Chris Brogan. They are prolific bloggers and are making money directly or indirectly from their blog(s). These are people you can trust. The one thing that is significant about these three people is that it took them years to become an “overnight” sensations.

2. Overnight Sensations Are Anything But Overnight

Steve Pavlina started his blog October 1st, 2004 and grew his daily income from $4.12/day to $1,000/day as of October 29, 2006. Not sure why he has not updated these amounts in the last two years but the point is it took Steve 2 years of hard work to get to that point.

Michael Martine has been online for about a decade I think. I have known Michael a little more than a year. Hes is a hard working blogging consultant who spent years perfecting his approach to blog design and blogging. Now he is busy developing a learning environment to teach others how to make their blog serve their business marketing and sales objectives.

Chris Brogan has been blogging at ChrisBrogan.com since March 2004. I took a look back over his archives and it appears that Chris started to become widely read as the length of his posts increased. The number of comments on his posts really only started to become consistent in July 2006. Engaging and building a community takes time.

3. Traits of Success: Consistency, Learning, and Time

What each of these fine people have in common are four traits:

1. Write frequently and passionately.
2. Have the ability to observe, learn and evolve.
3. They wrote consistently and allowed time to build momentum.
4. Narrow focus.

None of these four traits are easy. There is no magic pill or silver bullet. The good news is we each have these inherent character traits. We just need to learn how to harness them within ourselves and then get down to work.

There it is. That four letter, dirty little four letter word, work.

4. Work is NOT a Four Letter Word

We are impatient and too often unrealistic in our expectations. Between the media and the thousands of Internet “get rich quick” courses, newsletters, and hard sell tactics made by overzealous marketers we should have become jaded and guarded.

Instead we are often suckers for a good come back or success story. We say stupid things like “I’d rather be lucky than smart.” or enroll into the latest seminar, webinar, or learning program that is able to scratch our wounded egos. When what we need to do is put our heads down and work.

The truth is I do not want to work hard. I want it easy and I want it now. You are no different. We keep ourselves busy listening to the latest guru, expert, or read the latest book. Therein lies the trap and the lie. We are so busy listening to others that there is no time to sit, think, and listen to ourselves.

5. Listen to Your Own Voice

As a business coach, I often tell people that “You can have anything you want. First, you need to know what you want.” Before we start to chase an idea, spend money on another book or course we need to stop and make sure we know ourselves. Take the time to know what we want, why we want it, and make sure we have the stamina and passion to stick it out for the long term.

Otherwise we can easily get caught in the endless loop of constant and never ending personal development without ever learning the most important business skill. Knowledge of our market and ourselves.

6. Know Yourself AND Your Market

Perhaps this is a good time to meet your greatest benefactor and advocate - yourself. To the degree that you grow personally and professionally so goes your business. You cannot escape, fire, or avoid yourself forever. Either you learn, change, and evolve or your business and your blog will die.

Target marketing is no longer valid. I have been teaching my clients to target “customer needs” for over a decade. Let me tell you, when my clients get in trouble with their marketing is when they loose touch with the market.

Understanding your customers’ needs, wants, emotions, and perceptions is not a magic spell you can whip out to solve your marketing woes. It will help your to design your business and product(s) and help you help the customer to connect the dots between their need and your product or service.

Remember, needs, wants, emotions, and perceptions are the lens you use to focus building a business, service or product that they will absolutely love. To accomplish that you will need to become a “master of the details”.

7. It’s All in the Details

The problem I have with many self-help and online learning programs is that many of them give you the big picture and then leave you to figure out the details. I think it is irresponsible and it’s time we held those businesses and entrepreneurs accountable and call it for what it is, lies. Damn lies.

It is just to easy to zap out a brief summary or an overview about how to blog and make money. Then promote and market it as the “seven secrets to online success” or some other meaningless, stupid title.

Giving us a summary without the details is like flying on an airplane at 30,000 feet and never ever landing - the view is great but you can’t see much. Sure you can say you flew over Chicago. Unless you land and spend some time in Chicago, you will not have any significant details about the city to share with your friends.

The same is true reading blog posts that tell you how to make money blogging. Unless the post is part of a series that gets into the nitty-gritty details, run and keep your wallet in your pocket.

When it comes to blogging or anything in life or business the details matter!

8. Experience is a Process

Give yourself the best chance at succeeding. Take time to learn your lessons, pay your dues, and apply what you learned. Action, feedback, correction.

It is a simple formula that has the potential to help you make a big difference in your success.

1. Action: be prone to always be getting into action. Be practical.
2. Feedback: pay attention to what is going on around you. If your actions fail to produce as expected. Dig into it to learn what needs to change.
3. Correction: now that you are aware of the feedback, improve. Make corrections, adjust course, and get back into action.

Above all. Be authentic, be yourself.

This is how I see the world of blogging and business. What say you?

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This is a video in progress, feedback welcomed and appreciated.

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What do you think? What perception would that create?

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I am always amazed at the commitment Olympic athletes make. They have phenomenal character. They lay it all on the line for one event that will determine if they are the best in the world and if they will get the gold medal.

We Get What we Expect: The Canadian Challenge

One of the greatest challenges for the Canadian Olympic Team was that they were expected to just show well, do their personal best. Interview after interview revealed a complacency and acceptance that a personal best was good enough.

Is it just me or were you struck by the fact that no one was talking about going for the gold medal?

Christopher Robin said to Pooh, “You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” Here is the rub, unless you believe that you are brave, strong, and smart knowing doesn’t really help.

Thank goodness there were some men that expected [read: believed they would] to win the gold medal!

One Goal: Olympic Gold

The Canadian Men’s Eight Rowing Team had a different perspective than most of the other Canadian athletes.

I saw an interview where one of them said, “We have just one goal, to win the Olympic Gold Medal, that’s it”.

Simple, no ambiguity one vision. They would be satisfied with nothing else, win the gold medal.

By the way, they won gold!

Look at those faces, these guys are going to be smiling for a long time! That’s the kind of smile I want to have on my face at the end of each day.

Being the Best in the World

I started wondering how my life would be different if I had the tenacity to commit to compete at a world class level, to be the best in the world?

What would happen if you made a decision to shoot for being recognized as the best in the world? How would it affect my attitude, standards, and approach to personal and professional development?

There is a fine, albeit significant, between my personal best and being the best in the world. It is separated by being totally obsessed and committed to constant and never ending improvement.

I have spent the last three years testing, preparing, and refining an idea - and process that allows CEO’s to operate the business at a distance - by Remote Control. It is a story I have not yet told and yet represents the best of what I have to offer business owners.

It is possible for an entrepreneur to keep a business and yet reduce or eliminate his/her need to actually work in the business. I have proven that it can be done with my clients.

Performance is Personal

I have been thinking about my own performance and have taken a number of steps to become the best in the world.

1. I have hired a coach who is the best at what they do.
2. I have invested in the hardware, software, and tools to help me train and grow.
3. I learn from every “best” attempt and then figure out what needs to change to improve.
4. I have a vision for being the best at helping entrepreneurs enjoy the freedom they’ve always dreamed.
5. I am completely re-engineering my business and developing a road map to guide me in coaching my clients along their path to become the best in the world.

Have you ever considered how your life would change or what you might achieve by becoming the best in the world at what you do? Look at the attitude of Michael Jordan:

“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.” - Michael Jordan via StartUp

Becoming great is a worthy pursuit. Being the best in the world is well, the best.

I have an opening for a new coaching client who has the burning desire to become the best at what they do. Someone who is looking for a coach who wants a win as much as you do. If that’s you, call me at 1-866-281-8281 I would love to meet you.

P.S. I am working on Manifesto that tells the story of the work I have done coaching business owners to become a Remote Control CEO.

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“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.” - Henry Ford

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