What I think is that many of us in business are not really in touch with the people. The average person is seeing their “hard earned” wealth and ability to earn a living greatly diminished while the investment bankers are doing just fine. They see bankers not lending while their small business is starving for cash. They see that they can’t find jobs while labor unions strike at Boeing. Big government, big business and selfish unions are not on their list of favorite people these days and neither are people who make it too obvious that they are among the “elite.” Not surprising that a recent poll by Jan Norman over at the Orange County Register lists Politicians and Salespeople as the least trusted professionals.

Here’s what’s different now. First, if the politicians are reading things right, you have one strike against you in the court of public opinion if you have a business that’s doing well and you indulge in conspicuous consumption – I don’t think it matters if you are private, public, for-profit, not-for-profit, large or small, you had best show humility and gratefulness. Blaming others for making things a bit tougher isn’t going to help, and if you try and justify your position (I employ many people, if I do well, they do well. How will I pay their benefits? etc.), you will be seen as a whiner.

The second thing is that today you WILL be transparent whether you like it or not. Many if not most employees and customers are well connected through the internet. Remember the video that went viral about United breaking a customer’s guitar? It cost them big time. It won’t matter to me if you’re large or small, I now have a way to “pay you back” if you are rude, indifferent or give me poor service.

I caught a bit of the news recently and the witnessed spectacle of the executives of BP, Transocean and Halliburton all pointing fingers at each other. No one wanted to take responsibility, because of the legal implications I suppose. But the public will not bother with that, they’ll just see some very wealthy individuals ducking responsibility for a very bad environmental accident. Just like Enron, WorldCom, Wall Street Bankers, individual traders and Krogers, these guys don’t want to own up to the fact that they blew it. What’s worse is, they won’t be able to hide what they did wrong. We no longer control the media, and neither does the traditional big media.

So what does all this mean? To me what it means is that there’s a pretty good chance that the politicians are reading the electorate correctly and are trying to gain points for the upcoming election cycle. If that’s true, business people will not help themselves by also pointing the finger at others. Instead, we should be making sure we are not being casual about customer service, quality of product and service, delivering what we claim, cleaning up our advertising, making sure we are really adding value – all the basic stuff. If you are doing that, then good for you and keep it up, maybe even raise the bar now. If you aren’t really doing things the right way, you might want to think about what it will feel like when (not if) your customers/employees find out.

It doesn’t matter if we are right. It doesn’t matter if the present administration is making things harder for us or not. It doesn’t matter if customers are being “unreasonable.” It only matters that we continue to survive, thrive and continue to do good work. For that we need to own that right now at least big business, and perhaps all business, has fallen out of favor due to the greed, lack of ethics, lack of leadership and being totally tone deaf when it comes to what the electorate is seeing and feeling. Those same negative characteristics are being ascribed to the politicians themselves. Those same negative characteristics may be what makes them right about siding with the electorate “against” business. It doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel fair. But it is the way it is. So the question for businesses of all sizes may well be, “Do you want to be right or effective?”

I’m not one of those who believes that the customer is “ALWAYS RIGHT,” meaning that the customer knows what’s best for YOUR business. I do believe that the customer is always right when it comes to what they want and you had better be listening. You also need to know what’s going on with how they perceive you as a vendor. A valuable vendor communicates with the customer, provides information about innovative solutions to challenges, stands behind their products and services, does what they can to help conserve their customer’s cash and isn’t always looking to make the maximum profit at the expense of the customer.

Before you get the impression that this post is going to be a “business bashing” tirade, I hasten to add that I feel the same way about employees and especially labor unions. Look at the recent discussion created by states cutting back on education expenses and using tenure or FIFO to layoff teachers. Parents and Administrators are now raising significant objections to losing promising young teachers simply because they were last into the workforce. We all know the concern about how to measure effectiveness of our educators, they are tired arguments and I believe them to be mostly discredited. Get over it. There is no compelling reason to keep a person in a particular paid position just because they’ve been there a long time (nor should they be let go because of that reason either). Labor unions would do well to listen to the paying public and figure out how to help the excellent teachers thrive, regardless of age or longevity in the workplace. That would make unions worthwhile.

For the individual employee, learn to find out how you are doing and be ruthless about it. Embrace 360 reviews and if you’re company isn’t doing them, find another way to determine how you’re viewed by supervisors, colleagues, subordinates and customers. Don’t kid yourself on this. Your career depends on it. Are you flexible in assignments (not your values and ethics, but simply learning new things and taking on new assignments)?

The same is true, perhaps even more important, for those of us who are consultants, mentors and/or self-employed service providers. We had better genuinely have our client’s best interest at heart and demonstrate that so there is no doubt. Find a way to help your customer reach their goals, and one will undoubtedly be saving cash (and it always has been a goal, just exaggerated in this economy). I recently heard on a WSJ podcast that one enterprising HR consultant is teaching her clients how to do what she does so that they can carry the ball in the future. She said, “Why fight the market? The market is to help my clients save money. So I help them learn how to do these things for themselves in the future.” Ecology of information – the hallmark of a good consultant.

The way I see it, we are all in this together. Whether we are small business owners, leaders in large organizations, individual contributors, government employees, union members, in transition, or service providers we had better stop focusing on ourselves and start looking to add value. That isn’t to say we should not be willing to consider our own interests, it just that our interests can’t come first or be foremost.

If the folks at Enron, WorldCom, AIG, Citi Group and all the other dysfunctional organizations had paid attention to their reputation and had goals other than their own enrichment in mind, they would not have become dysfunctional. If we as investors insisted on long term value instead of quarterly stock gains, we would not have pushed the companies into being so short sighted. If the folks in Congress really had the best interests of their constituents at heart instead of their own selfish gains and focus on keeping their jobs, then perhaps their ratings and esteem with the public wouldn’t be lower than whale dung on the ocean floor.

I know, and “if a frog had wings, he wouldn’t keep bumping his butt on the ground.” It seems as though this is all unachievable. Yet, I don’t know of any other way to fix the mess we’re in. I’m convinced that even though it’s a big simplification, “taking care of number 1,” and “wining at all costs” is what got us into this mess. Collectively changing that focus would seem the only way to get out of it. It starts with “the man in the mirror.” Are you willing to change your focus? What is your company doing to “get back to basics” and focus on the customer? Are you looking for ways to change your business model, like the HR Consultant mentioned above?

A trusted colleague recently published a Knol about how we need to strategically rethink our business model to be sure it’s appropriate for the new economic realities. He’s absolutely correct. And, as readers of this blog know, one of my mantras is that we have to totally re-think sales. I’ve been writing about this for some time now, and published my own Knol on the subject back in June of 2009. So, if we need to strategically change our business model, and specifically, change the way we market and sell, then we cannot get by without at least seriously looking into Social Media and what it means to us at work, and for our sales process.

If you want to get an understanding of what all this hoopla is about, you can spend some time with webinars posted on the internet and reading some of the material available such as the book Friends With Benefits or the latest Economist Special Report in the 1/30/2010 issue. This blog post (and follow on posts) should provide the reasons to encourage you to dive in if you haven’t already. For those that have, perhaps you will find some new ideas and resources.

Consider these ideas:

• Your employees all have smart phones, so even if you lock down your networks, they can and will access the social media while at work.
• Your competitors and perhaps disgruntled customers are posting their complaints on-line. Are you reading them?
• I find few people reading any direct mail, catalogs or magazine ads even if they still get printed material.
• I find fewer people reading printed papers, some are subscribing through their e-Readers.
• Most folks I know look up things, services, people, and companies on-line rather than yellow pages.
• Total unique visitors on Facebook in October 2009 was in excess of 430 million.
• Your employees, especially the younger crowd, are all use to collaborating on-line and expect to be able to do so at work for work projects.
• Your competitors are using the Social Networks to build focus groups and to allow “open source design” of products.
• Through Social Networks, your employee may know more about strangers they’ve never met in person than they do about their other employees.
• Privacy will be the big issue rather than should Social Networks be in the workplace.

Okay, so who is on the Social Networking sites? Where are my clients and customers? According to BNet, the demographics break down as follows:

Source: BNet.com

Facebook is by far the largest of the Social Media Networks. But contrary to popular opinion, it isn’t just about personal family and friends trivial discussions. Of course, that does in fact take place, but more and more Facebook is about business. There are so called “Fan Pages” which are more often than not business advertisements in one form or another.

Then we have the most “professional” Social Network in Linked In. It has been around for a very long time and is

Source: BNet.com

now one of the premiere sites for recruiters, head hunters and job seekers.

Many of the retained search and placement firms now openly advise their clients that they use LinkedIn and other social media to find out more about prospective employees. Yet another reason to be very careful what you put in your profiles. Company HR departments are also turning to LinkedIn for job placement. They use other Social Media including Craig’s List, Facebook and MySpace.

MySpace has been seen to be falling behind the other Social Media. Especially competition from Facebook and Twitter have been fierce. Still, they have a respectable

Source: BNet.com

market. This tends to be a younger demographic and focuses on sharing music and photos. Still Facebook has become the second largest photo sharing site on the internet. So MySpace is playing catch up there too.

The newest kid on the block is Twitter. And if you are like me, then you figure it’s just a bunch of teens sending out mundane updates on what they had for lunch, why they hate their math teacher and who’s the “hottest” on campus these days. WRONG!

Source: BNet.com

Twitter has become a huge marketing tool for sharing information that is useful. Sure, there are still the personal updates from time-to-time, but the folks I follow (and those who follow me) seem more interested in sharing information. This Blog will be “Tweeted,” shared on Facebook and Linked in when it posts. All automatically.

Which brings me to another couple of points. For those of us who have limited time only and do not want to get sucked into that “black hole,” there are tools that let us time-shift our work. I usually take a few hours out of my weekend to work on the Social Media and Blog stuff, schedule it for the following week, and then go about my business during the normal work week. I may throw in ten or fifteen minutes early in the morning to “Tweet” some interesting article that an e-mail pointed out. But for the most part, I do this kind of creative work on the weekends or evenings after the normal workday ends.

Another point is that for those of us who are selling services or whose products are not sold over the internet, we often make the mistake of saying, “Yeah, but did it generate any business.” I think the answer needs to be perhaps it did, but really what I’m doing on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and my Blog is branding, not advertising. I think this is a very key point. By openly posting information, sharing knowledge with peers and generally giving back to the community, we are becoming known and building credibility. And remember, these days, “sell” is a four letter word. Nobody wants to be sold anything. So adjust your attitude, intention and messages to be one of openly sharing rather than pitching.

More on tools and how we can manage this brave new world in the next installment.

Where to start and what can business leaders learn? I will speak only for myself. I too have come to be disgusted with politicians who glibly declare what it is that the “American taxpayer wants.” Really? Each side knows? And it’s different? There’s only one citizen consensus? And I have become equally disenchanted with public company boards who have approved huge bonuses and executives who have demanded them. Having said all that, I’m left with the mystery of what has gotten us in this pickle – certainly these guys aren’t stupid. And in the information age, you, they and I are certainly not without access to the information to make better informed choices.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book What the Dog Saw, points out one of the ironies in this information age. We have too much information and people hide things right in front of us. It will get worse, not better. For example, Gladwell points out that all the information about how shaky Enron was before its collapse, was available to the public. In fact, students at Cornell University studied Enron as a business school exercise. They analyzed the public financial information: “The student’s recommendation was on the first page, in boldfaced type: Sell.” Keep in mind that this report was published (and is still available) in May of 1998 long before the disaster hit. Here is one tidbit from the students’ recommendation:

In addition, our analysis has found that Enron takes more marginal risk than its competitors, in part to set up a high fixed cost platform for anticipated new markets internationally and in electricity, without a corresponding return to balance the risk. This is risky. Time will tell if it’s prudent.

Emphasis is mine. What’s the point? Well, the information the students gathered was in the public domain. They did not “Watergate” the Enron offices. What about the rest of us? In hind sight, it is almost as if the executives at Enron simply said, hey, let’s do what we’re supposed to do and report our special entities, make all the appropriate disclosures in foot notes and see if anybody notices. Few did. Disaster struck.

As a member of the board of a public company, or advisory board member to a private company or an employee, or a citizen voter we need to do a better job at educating ourselves about the issues at hand. Certainly we can’t do the same difficult, tedious and time consuming job the Cornell students did for every company issue or referendum, but we can help ourselves by learning more about how our modified capitalistic system works in general, keep up with scientific advance affecting our lives, and bother to see another’s point of view.

It has become obvious that we cannot trust the politicians to do the right things (no matter which party). It should be said they do the same thing many of us are doing; voting for things they don’t really understand and/or extorting advantages for themselves and constituents at the expense of the larger good, and/or purposefully creating huge obfuscating bills. “Let’s just put it all out there,” they say, “nobody will bother to read it or understand it beyond the paragraph that gives them what they want.”

So the bottom line is that the average American citizen, frightened about his/her prospects since more than 10% of their fellow employees are out of work, believes they can trust almost no-one. Not their religious leaders, not their political leaders, not their business leaders and not even those involved in educating the next generations. It seems as if everyone is out for themselves regardless of the effect their actions might have on the rest of society or their companies.

It’s time for us to take the blinders off. First we must live our own lives with integrity. Then we must not assume that it’s only the other executive or senator or representative that is corrupt – it could be our own executive, senator or representative that is corrupt. We have to hold ourselves and others accountable if we are to get back to doing business based on trust. As I’ve said before, trust is knowing that you have my best interest at heart, not just your own. We have to do this hard work to make our democracy thrive. We have to educate ourselves on the issues and not fall for the glib, sound bites that bombard us every day. The information is there. We need to get it and think for ourselves rather than simply listen to our usual news source or special interest group. We have to go out of our way to understand opposing points of view.

So, what will you do to make sure that we create an environment of trust and integrity? You are no doubt adding to the information we all see, so will you pass along to others; only one point of view without checking validity? Will you not even try to understand an opposing idea or different point of view? Or will you go out of your way to be hear and consider another person’s position? If your view doesn’t “carry the day,” will you sulk or be passive aggressive or will you accept the majority rule (or executive team decisions) and move things forward? In the end, we get the corporate culture and the democracy we deserve. It’s up to us.

On the employee side, they feel that it’s quite alright for them to give two weeks notice if they get a better offer elsewhere, but at the same time seem to think that as long as they want to stay, they should be able to do so. If the employer lets them go (for whatever reason), they feel that somehow it is unfair. Of course, this is not true of all employees nor do all business owners despair over employees not acting as if the company is their own. However, there does seem to be anecdotal data to back up my perceptions.

This situation first came to my attention many years ago as I worked in the semiconductor industry. We had facilities in Silicon Valley (Sunnyvale and San Jose). I often heard managers complaining that employees were more than willing to leave for a slight raise and join another company. It seemed to be easy to do in the valley and it seemed to be true; and it made me wonder. So I started asking some questions of the engineers, marketers and sales people who left our company and those still with us. The picture became a bit clearer. It seems that there was a lot of loyalty – but the loyalty was to a particular product line or architecture rather than a company. So if I considered myself a Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) kind of guy, I would go where all the exciting things were happening in that field. Likewise if I considered myself a Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) person. If I was skilled and excited about one architecture and the company began to emphasize the other, I eventually left to find another employer in line with my talents and passions. This kind of “loyalty to a concept” was even more prevalent in the software and internet companies.

So managers needed to change the context in which they interpreted the content of their experience with respect to “loyal employees.” If an engineer or sales person believed in a certain product or architecture and we began to de-emphasize that particular product, then we could expect to see folks leave for greener pastures. On the other hand, if we kept pushing the envelope and introduced new products and improvements to existing products, then our employees were “loyal” and mostly content.

Discovering this different view of loyalty led to some insights that served some divisions very well. As long as they were able to stay at the leading edge of product development, they kept the best employees. They found that salary and other monetary rewards were not the biggest motivators. They had to be competitive, but by and large, it was an exciting environment in product development that the employees appreciated and which kept them happy and inspired.

So as we work our way out of this recession and employees begin feeling as though employment changes are possible, how will you hold on to your key players? Do you know what your employees are loyal to? Since they don’t own the company, it likely isn’t the company itself that inspires them. They may be grateful for the company and the employment it provides, but what are they really passionate about?

I think there are many reasons why we’re moving away from the old “product/feature” or “needs/benefits” selling for all except the most commodity types of products. The internet is replacing salespeople and telemarketers in many of these cases. I believe we are and will be spending most of our time in “consultative/relationship” selling and migrating even more to “trust based” selling for our key customers and clients. A few of the reasons for this reframing of the sales process seems to be (a) less consumerism (for common commodities) thus a more sophisticated level of sales is left, (b) on-line purchasing is minimizing interaction with salespeople for commodity purchases and research, ( c) the economy is limiting what people and companies are spending so each purchase made is scrutinized and (d) social networking is training us to give value in our relationships – without expectation of quid-pro-quo.

This last reason is what I’m thinking most about these days. In face-to-face networking, whether you’re in transition or in search of business clients, you are likely finding that you MUST first provide value to those you meet rather than “ask for the order.” This concept, not an new one, hit the Wall Street Journal This Morning podcast recently, and it is sure good to have some validation in what I’ve been proposing to those I mentor and coach in the business community. The point is that from Social Networking sites where the protocol is to deliver value and NOT sell or self-promote, to the WSJ advocating the same generous approach to networking for your career we are being taught that unless someone has our best interest at heart, we should avoid “doing business” with them. How do we know if someone “has our best interest at heart?” Clearly, it is that they are focused on us and how they can help us rather than being focused on themselves and asking us to help them or buy from them. Think about this for a minute. If I am focused on telling you about wonderful me or focused on getting you to place the order with me, then how can I possibly have your best interest at heart? This concept is put succinctly in the saying “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

I am beginning to think that one of the more powerful catalysts for changing how we interact with each other (in person or remotely through the media) is being shaped by the etiquette we are taught in our Social Networking interactions. In their excellent book on Social Media Marketing, Friends with Benefits, Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo make it clear that marketers and those blogging or posting on others’ blogs or interacting with bloggers have to add value before they have the right to request assistance with their marketing program. What comes through clear (at least in my mind) is that “selling” is taboo in almost all cases.

So what are you seeing as the major reason for the move to trust based selling? Do you agree there is a general and pronounced aversion to the “old” selling models? How do you feel when someone posts a “solicitation” in a comment on your blog? How do you feel when you are constantly “sold” on a blog? Does this translate to how you interact with colleagues and professionals in your business life?