Rock Star Employees

Many companies and business are going thru massive changes and restructuring to ensure that they survive into the future. This will of course involve identifying and retaining the best talent that is available and moulding them to lead the respective parts of the business. This is no easy task as while there are real talents, there are also massive number of pretenders. Below is an interesting article on The 5 Traits of High-Potential Employees.

Who will be ready to run your company when you can’t be everywhere anymore? Here’s how to pick your next generation of leaders.

1. They know the business. Your high-potential employees are the ones who have true expertise and keep learning. Their knowledge may be technical or it may be institutional, but it’s invaluable for the organization. More important, they understand how their activities, their sector, and their realm of knowledge is related to the company’s goals.

2. Others respect them. Your staff members, not just you, also have to appreciate how much your high-potentials know. It’s not enough that your top people know their stuff. Everyone else has to know they know it.

3. They are ambitious. High-potential employees aren’t just career-minded; they’re ambitious in a focused way. The best way to get a sense of this is to evaluate their commitment to career progression. Look for signs that they long to accumulate new responsibilities, new successes, additional knowledge, and, for better or worse, additional recognition.

4. They work well with others. Though your leaders need to be driven, they also must be able to form partnerships with others besides you. This attitude goes beyond amiability; it’s a pragmatic, tactical skill that allows them to make better, more informed decisions. Lone rangers may be creative and ambitious, but they make lousy leaders.

5. They have guts. Your next generation of leaders must understand that no matter how much research they do, no matter how many cost-benefit analyses they conduct, no matter how many market surveys they complete, they will always be deciding under conditions of uncertainty. The information at hand will always be less than the information you wish you had. Leaders need to have the courage to take risks.

Though you don’t want your next generation of leaders to be clones of you, you do want them to have the traits that drove you to build a growing company. You want them to know their stuff. You want them to have a good reputation on your team. You want them to be driven but able to give and accept help. Finally, you want them to have the courage to make tough decisions, even if there’s a chance they’ll fail. Because that’s how entrepreneurship works.

Source : Inc

Does Job Security Exist?

We hear about how our parents and the older generation stay in jobs for 20-30 years, some even retire in the job they first got when they first got into the job market. Those days are not gone but extremely rare don’t you think? People are consistently on the look out for a better job, better salary to basically progress and do better than they already are.

Now have you wondered why business people work so hard and sacrifices their savings, time and relationships for that promise of success which is not a given even with all the effort. Strange isn’t it? Why do it when you can be employed and earn that stable wage?

Here is one very interesting way to look at the whole thing

Regardless of whether you are self-employed, a traditional employee, or a business owner, you are in business for yourself. The primary distinction is who are your customers? For a typical employee, your “customer” is your boss. He or she is the one who is purchasing your services. However, if you own a business, you have many customers (or bosses).

Accordingly, many entrepreneurs feel it is inherently more risky to have a single boss than having many “bosses.” For example, if you own a thriving business where you can control costs, growth, and marketing, then a whole bunch of customers would have to effectively “fire” you before you were forced out of a “job.” A business owner’s sustenance is no longer determined by single person’s opinion or by shareholders who may not even know his or her name. This is why financial independence is so important to traditional employees: no amount of education or experience can guarantee that even the most talented and faithful workers won’t be unemployed by the end of business tomorrow.

Make sense ha?

It’s probably a good idea to re-evaluate how you look at your job and how you like to position yourself for the future, security is becoming a myth and to survive you need to adapt. Like it’s never to late, it’s never to EARLY to start.

May not make sense but hey, just what i think

Social Media ROI

This is a pretty nice video about how companies have benefited from taking their businesses to social media .Its vital to be part of this wave and to understand your customers before diving into it. It can come out with glowing results or you could seem very corny.

Social Media For Business

Found this presentation extremely insightful and hope its useful for you too!

2009 : 40 Richest Malaysians

As of May 2009, the money men/women from Malaysia are :

Whats interesting to me is Tony Fernandes who sits on the 15th spot and you can sense that he is going to be climbing the list steadily considering how he is diversifying into various businesses besides his baby, Air Asia. Next years list should be a interesting read considering the economic slow down.

Should show who gained and who lost from the turmoil.