Emma Lo Russo – Page 7 – Emma Lo Russo

September 24, 2011September 24, 2011

Choosing the right mentor

I was recently asked what someone should look for in a good mentor.

The first thing to do is to recognize the value in engaging a good mentor or coach to help you hold yourself accountable for developing yourself and taking your career to the next level.

The value of seeking a career mentor is in how they can help you bring clarity to your career goals over the near, medium and long term, to help you prioritize your next steps towards your goals, how to strategize and evaluate options in light of your goals and values, and to help you stay accountable to the path you wish to take. Through formalizing this relationship with someone, it provides a regular, safe and confidential sounding board to bounce your fears, aspirations and future challenges.

Finding the right mentor is based on how inspirational they are to you, how experienced, how insightful and how good they are in facilitating the right discussions. High Emotional Intelligence would rate as the key characteristic of a great mentor and just as you would look for a great employee, you want in a great mentor someone who has demonstrated that they are smart, talented, have a history of delivering great results and have built many great relationships and people through their leadership and association.

In a busy working world, it is too easy to rationalize to ourselves what we do and why we do it. Much harder to rationalize to someone else. Particularly if they are asking you the right questions and you are looking inside yourself to provide the right answers.

Both you and they will know when you are making excuses or seeing things through a narrow field of vision.

If you want to take your personal life or career to the next level, it may be time to engage a mentor. The benefits of having someone else push, question, strategize with you through mentoring can only lead to greater success.

June 28, 2011March 29, 2017

Tips for leading successful negotiations

Often in business or when supporting coaching clients, I am asked to prepare or help someone to lead a successful negotiation. Here I share my key tips for leading successful individual negotiations:

Prepare in advance – understand the principles of bracketing. Plan for, and clearly know your high point, your low point and your mid point. Your midpoint should be what you are happy to be paid, your low point is your walk away, and anything upside of your midpoint you should be delighted. Think about your strategy in how you could move your first asking point greater then where it would otherwise be to help raise the midpoint.
Try to avoid putting your price down first – no matter what. Look to get the person you are negotiating with to state their position, their thinking, their decision-making criteria. You can look to set the agenda and ideal outcomes based on principles before a number or the details of the introduction gets introduced.
Keep your cards close to you and actively listen to the other party to help you determine your approach and negotiation tactics. To get the other person to state his or her position first assuming the status quo is fine with you and there is no pressure on you to make a move, be bold enough to say to the other side, “You approached me. The way things are, satisfies me. If you want to do this, you’ll have to make a proposal to me.”
Hold to your position for as long as you can – see how far they will come to your point first without you budging or without you budging far. Communicate all the time that you are prepared and ready to make the deal and find something that works for everyone.
Understand all the influencers and decision makers – you must know and work with the person authorized to make the deal. Talk to the key decision maker. Spend time in researching, listening and understanding their drivers and frame of reference.
Discussions should always begin with a clear understanding of the win-win-win. How do they win, how do you win, how do you win together? Much research has been done to support the approach of winning for everyone is a much better outcome and brings greater results (financial & emotional) then if you have win by screwing down the other party. Negotiation is based on the foundations of inspiration and persuasion. How can you make the other party see your point of view or vision for the future?
Negotiation is not always about money – negotiation can be based on a number of factors. Think creatively and really understand your own drivers. For instance, in salary negotiations you may be looking at any one of the following elements: Base Salary, Added Benefits, Profit Share & other short &/or long term incentives, Working environment & flexibility in hours, Additional holiday periods, Job enrichment & satisfaction based on doing more of what you love.
Avoid being the first to double bracket or to negotiate against yourself (you would be surprised at how many people do this – make an offer, then jump in with another based on the other person’s non-response). Hold and wait until the other person makes their offer known. Hold too on your final position and get them to talk about what they are thinking and what you can do to help them. Reinforce their and the combined win in the win-win-win situation. Identify any potential barriers to bringing closure to the negotiations. Think about how you can remove them or how else they could be viewed and change your tactics accordingly.
There may be variables in a negotiation, understand what they are and be clear (first be clear to yourself) as to what is important to you – eg timing, breakdown, flexibility etc
Consider the power of using time as a variable – what needs to be done by when and how flexible can you or the negotiating party be around that (and what is the value to you around that variability). Gain a sense of urgency – if the other party is keen to bring closure to the negotiations you may in fact be able to use that urgency to your advantage by moving slowly and looking like you don’t care how long it takes. However look to ensure the principles of having something that works for everyone remains a priority.
Never negotiate when you are feeling emotional. Try to keep a level head at all times. If you need a break, request time to think about the offer until you can think straight again. Talk out loud to someone else if you need some help in unraveling your emotions and to help reform the confidence and rationale in your approach and position.
Remember to celebrate the final result of your negotiations. It is important to ensure all parties feel good about the deal that was done.
Once concluded, spend some time reflecting – could you have done things differently for next time? Any lessons learned?
Finally, never let the other party know you were prepared to accept less or pay more in the negotiations. They will feel bad, and you will lose any goodwill created by the win-win-win principle.

Each of us negotiates many things and many times in daily life and in business. By considering these simple strategies, you should obtain an outcome you are happy with.

For leading more complex negotiations, there are many resources available. One book that I recommend reading is “Negotiation Genius – how to overcome obstacles and achieve brilliant results at the bargaining table and beyond” by Deepak Malhotra & Max H. Bazerman, Harvard Business School 2007

What have you found works for you? Do you recommend any strategies or resources that have helped you? What tips would you offer others who want to lead successful negotiations?

March 17, 2011March 29, 2017

Growth in a connected world

Emma will be the key-note speaker at next week’s business conference “Growth in a connected world” where she will explore in greater detail the forces of change impacting your business, customer relationships and infrastructure.

Understand, Grow and Lead by embracing these changes.

Read Emma’s related post on Driving your own upturn

DETAILS OF CONFERENCE:

GROWTH IN A CONNECTED WORLD

Date: Wednesday 23 March 2011

Time: 7.30am for an 8.00am start

Location: Sydney Masonic Centre, Corner of Goulburn and Castlereagh Streets.

NB: Ample parking available close by.

RSVP:

Call (02) 9261 5111 / (02) 9248 0162

Who Should Attend:

Business Owners, CEO’s, CFO’s, CIO’s and Senior Managers.

Event hosted by:

Green and Gold People to People & Ontrack Systems (AUS) Pty Ltd.

Supported by SAP and NETFIRA.

SAP Business One, is an affordable integrated business management solution for Small and mid-size businesses, turns your existing business assets into thriving resources.

NETFIRA is a B2B supply chain software solution for small and medium businesses, allowing them to buy and sell online without a need for the website or EDI.

March 17, 2011March 29, 2017

Driving your own upturn

There is no more normal. No back to normal. No creation of normal. There is only readiness and the acceptance that certainty in business has been removed.

What is required is a nimbleness and a feeling of empowerment to quickly synthesize and work out the emerging opportunities and the dangers that can be found in the ever-changing markets, changing technology, and changing pressures that surround us.

An organization’s readiness to make decisions, to take risks, to learn along the way, to adjust, becomes the new standard. An organizational culture that supports, encourages, embraces and celebrates new information and innovation. One that equates change with opportunity and an exciting future.

Competition has never been greater. Competition for talent, competition for resources, competition for your customers, competition to be heard and valued by the people who matter to you – your customers.

Choosing to compete on price is no win for anyone – you lose profits and someone, somewhere is likely to do it cheaper, followed by someone else offering it cheaper again.

Competing on first to market is also time-limited. Someone will follow and offer the same, maybe more, maybe better and certainly followed by a number of others.

Competing with the product and services you serve today will not serve you tomorrow. They will be substituted by new, better, sexier and more personalized or smarter versions or something that supersedes them entirely.

To remain relevant and of interest to your customers, you can compete on one thing only – your ability to consistently evolve and differentiate and to create the best possible customer experience.

You need to implement a model that supports sustainable and continuous innovation. To build an organization that supports innovation that supports the improvement of your customer’s lives in a way that is valued and meaningful to them.

And critically, an organization that allows your people to be free to innovate, to think, to create, to build, to serve, to deliver growth.

Who is going to be the hero? The leader of change? The leader of innovation? The leader of your success and future? The leader of growth and upturn?

The answer is You. Yes, You.

You need to create the space in your organization to shine. You need to create space to allow your team to shine and enough to allow all your people to shine.

You need to get every non-differentiating system and innovation-roadblock, innovation-killer and time-wasting activity out of the way so you can spend time on:

Finding ways to introduce new products and services to existing customers.
Identifying new customer segments to target new, innovative, personalized and relevant offers.
Capitalizing on opportunities in emerging markets and enhancing your performance in existing markets.
Delighting your customer through their unique experience dealing with you

If you are not already finding this time, thinking or operating this way, then your time is already limited. Either you will be replaced by others who are, or your organization’s ability to compete will be time-limited.

Tic toc tic toc.

Time is ticking. Time for change. Time to do things differently. To think differently.

If you want growth and are under pressure to deliver numbers, then take ownership within your organization to drive your own upturn and success.

February 27, 2011March 29, 2017

Working for pressure or pleasure?

Socrates said “The Life which is unexamined is not worth living”. Just as you empty your piggy bank to count the coins to determine how much value you have created, it is a good thing to tip your life upside down and shake it around to allow you to view it from a few more angles and evaluate the sum of your life value.

However unlike the coins that have a predetermined value, the value we place on all the individual and collective “life” experiences can be viewed very differently and uniquely by each person. The most important evaluation is the one you place on it. How do you measure the value of your total life experiences against all aspects of your life: Family, Professional, Health, Financial, Spiritual, Social, Intimacy and Community?

The sum of where you are today, and how you got here, is not measured by time and does not predetermine the course of the total life balance and value. What got you here, might not get you to where you would like to end up. Time is not measured in minutes, hours and days in a life value, but rather by what you do with your time.

Which comes to the question, what are we working to generate? Are we working with clear purpose? Towards something that will give us a great sense of peace, happiness and satisfaction? Have we truly evaluated the value we are looking to generate? The legacy we would like to leave? And importantly, how to get there?

Many executives and people I know talk of the “treadmill” they are on. Even more so at the start of a calendar year when there seems to be a lot more “getting started” meetings, new activities, education and sporting schedules to be slotted in. People feel just as they are getting into the swing of things, planning for the new financial year begins, and before you know it you are working hard to deliver a number of things with hard deadlines and pressure to deliver on multiple goals, commitments and resolutions.

Since I often feel the weight of the number of balls I choose to juggle, I recently asked myself this question “am I working for pressure or pleasure”? This shifted things for me. Although I set out (in a pretty determined way) to work for pleasure both personally and professionally, doing what I love, with people I love, for people I love; I can get hooked on the pressure and use that to drive outcomes. Before I know it I realize I am working to the rhythm of pressure, and forget that I want to work for pleasure. My experience tells me I can achieve far more and enjoy it far more along the way, when I work for pleasure.

There is no right or wrong answers or evaluations when examining your own life. The key is to evaluate it regularly and to make it meaningful to you. To consciously maximize the value you are looking to generate. To gain pleasure in what you do so that you can achieve more of what it is you want to do.

If you see your life as a piggy bank made up of multiple experiences, against each aspect of your life, with each holding a personalized value, how are you going against the total value you are looking to generate? What will you change?

February 10, 2011March 29, 2017

Socializing your organization…

Social Media is not just for the geeks, techos and the under 30’s. No manager can ignore the increasing power and influence of the social web. People are connecting, sharing, listening, influencing, growing the relevance of their networks every day.

It is easy to see that as technology advances at such rapid rates, the rules of marketing, customer and employee engagement have changed and must continue to change.

Most managers accept you can’t ignore the social web. The question really becomes for each of us: “How can I add value to my organization in determining where and how the social web can be leveraged to deliver solid bottom line outcomes?”

Connecting the social web to organizational value:

Building your brand is largely based on how your brand is perceived by your customers. You don’t own your brand – your customers do! Your customers are already choosing to watch, connect, discuss and engage with your brand. Aden Young of DigitalBuzz noted in his December post “that 67% of people on Twitter follow a brand (that they will purchase), in comparison to only 51% on Facebook. Yet on Facebook 40% of all people follow a brand in comparison to Twitter’s 25%.”

Easy to conclude that the social web should not be seen as an add-on channel, but rather an extension of your business, providing customer information and the means to engage that should integrate into every aspect of your business.

Opportunities include:

WHAT QUESTIONS CAN AND SHOULD YOU BE ASKING?

Here are just some of the questions you can be asking your organization.

Customer Journey – how is this being captured and managed from possible interest>engagement>purchase>repeat purchase>advocate>evangelist> influencers?
Social CRM – how and where does (& can) the social media insights fit into the broader marketing and customer engagement, sales and support strategy? Your communications strategy? How is this being integrated and implemented in real-time?
Lead generation strategy – where and what is involved in leveraging the triggers provided within the social web in relation to your known customers and your ideal customer target markets?
Employee Power – How does your digital strategy allow for you to grow, harness and leverage your employees? Your partners? Your franchisees? What is their role in this? How can they be involved in utilizing social media? What guidance and more importantly, permission and encouragement do you need to provide?
E-Commerce – Thinking beyond “bricks and mortar” and your current go-to-market model, where and when will your e-commerce platform sit within this? Where and how do you drive traffic to and from this site?
Retailing – How can you grow your online brand and customer engagement to drive traffic into store?
Business Information – How are you overlaying the insights gained from the social web as it relates to your customers,markets and ideal new customers and markets?
Measuring – How do you measure all the above? Once you embark on a digital strategy that includes leveraging the social web, how can you be sure you are being successful? What measures, insights and returns can you gain? How real-time is this?

These are just a few questions to start the ball rolling. What else do you think should be added to this list?

How can you (the non-geek/non-social web expert) get involved in harnessing the social web and add even more value to your organization?

January 9, 2011March 29, 2017

When One Business Just Isn’t Enough: How to run a portfolio Business

Emma was recently interviewed by Suzi Dafnis of Australian Businesswomen’s Network. Here she introduces Emma to her network as:

“For many of us, running one business is more than enough. My guest today runs two businesses. Emma Lo Russo is an experienced innovator, organisation leader and marketer. She has brought together her experience gained from leadership positions across a broad spectrum of industries to two businesses.

Digivizer, a business that delivers the digital footprint of the people you know (i.e. your clients) and the people you should know. Digivizer looks at who you should connect to through social media and Validity Coaching, a collective of experienced executive coaches.

Emma joins me to talk about the pros and cons of running a portfolio business, that is, a collection of businesses. We look at:

Does running two businesses impact the effectiveness of one or more of the business?
How can a split focus help you get better business results?
What are the challenges of running more than one business, and how do you overcome them?

Enjoy this interview with Emma Lo Russo.”

http://www.abn.org.au/site/article/Video-When-One-Business-Just-Isnt-Enough-How-to-run-a-portfolio-business-Emma-Lo-Russo-interview

October 27, 2010March 29, 2017

How do people experience you?

I recently made the decision to switch from PC to Mac for my business platform.

Everything about the experience – from walking into the store; interacting with the technology; enjoying the broader synergies with our iPhones and iPads; the ease in which I am able to connect and share content with my family and business colleagues; the stories, sharing and understanding offered by the broader Apple community – has lead me to think about the importance “experience” plays in our decision making.

Every single part of my exposure, interactions, associations – my collective experience with Apple – is always positive, enjoyable and exceeded my expectations.

The relationship between our experiences and our feelings are key drivers to the decisions we make.

Just like a product or company brand’s true value is in the eye of the consumer and how it is perceived in the market place, our personal brand is really valued by the experiences people have with you and the perceptions they then form.

Today, there is much talk about the importance in investing in personal branding. Spending time to understand and shape what we represent as individuals, how we represent our core values and articulate our unique selling proposition.

Asking people to stop and think of how they may be viewed and the disparity to how they wish to be viewed, can certainly grow self-awareness and can influence behaviours.

How people view, interact, associate, and do business with you, are all opportunities for people to “experience” you. The experience they have with you is far more important in determining their evaluations of you and the decisions they make that concern you, than anything else.

Considering how meaningful, enjoyable, interactive, and valuable the experience people have of you is as important in the social web as it is in our personal dealings.

When you consider the ease in which we can connect, associate, interact and share on the social web, do you consider what experience people are having of and with you? Is it consistent with the experience they would have with you and you would hope to deliver in person?

It certainly makes an interesting point for reflection:- what experience are people having when they see, read, or exchange something with you? Or in more simple terms: – How do people experience you online as well as in person?

September 23, 2010March 29, 2017

Be the change you want to see in the world…

I love this quote by Mahatma Gandhi. And I try to live by this mantra.

Having lead an ASX-listed technology company as President & COO for 5 years, and after working 20 years in leadership positions for a range of corporates and agencies( working full time whilst raising my 3 kids), I took the big scary decision to step out last year and take a more entrepreneurial/self-starting career change.

After taking some time out to contemplate what next (travelling around Australia in a Winnebago with kids and husband), I decided to take my future into my own hands and do a number of things:

1) Stay focussed on doing what I love and feel passionate about “helping people and businesses grow”, and to

2) Find a new and different way to leverage my experience by playing to my strengths and passions

I now focus my time on sharing my experience and developing people through coaching, leadership development, workshops, speaking, writing and am now working to help businesses grow through harnessing the power and value of the web.

What drives me is my excitement about the increasing ubiquity of the web, faster processing and download power, interconnectivty and mobility through an ever-increasing range of electronic products and platforms, and how this has opened up the global market.

The model introduced by Apple with the ipod and itunes was a real paradigm changer for all businesses. Now all companies are looking at how to take advantage of technology and how they can connect, interact, create lock-ins with their customers through more personalised, targeted products, services and support – all delivered through the web.

The web is undeniably becoming more social. Right now, people are meeting, finding, sharing, and connecting with one another through the social web – leaving behind digital footprints that are as unique as they are. As an example, a recent Nielsen study found that 75% of global consumers who go online access Social Networks and Blogs, and that there was a 66% increase in time spent on Social Networks/Blogs compared to last year.

Australia’s social media audience is estimated at 9.9 million and 40% of online Australians are now interacting with companies via social networking sites, reinforcing notions that Australians are open to engaging with brands and companies online. And this type of penetration is typical of western countries and increasing at a rapid rate in the developing countries.

It is through this changing world and the increasing take up of what has become the social web that I co-founded DIGIVIZER together with my (very smart) partner Clinton Larson to help businesses bring sense to the billions of connections and conversations that are happening on the web each day. To help them find what matters to them and to help them use it in ways that they can extract value and a return to their bottom line.

And so I now introduce DIGIVIZER to you…

DIGIVIZER delivers to businesses the digital footprints of people you know and people you would like to know, providing insights into who and what people are saying and about things that matter to you. All presented in meaningful, people-centric, easy-to-understand and easy-to-access sets of data.

When integrated with your customer relationship, sales and marketing platforms and programs, DIGIVIZER gives you a new edge to enable more powerful personalization and targeting through all customer interactions – significantly increasing the return on your marketing and sales investment.

We are in the early stages of growing, balancing client requirements with the development of the base platform. It is exciting, it is challenging, and it is unlocking some powerful results.

I truly believe this Social CRM is the future for businesses and as a very wise person said, that the personalization of our experience on the web will no doubt be viewed as the characterizing aspect of the current phase in the evolution of the web and the way we will do business.

And so, the journey continues. And it all starts with making the changes you want to see in the world – starting with yourself and your world, then looking beyond.

Exciting times for us all ahead!