by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
Levy: Let’s talk about web services. Amazon Web Services is dominant in hosting—one observer says that you are the Coke of the field, and there’s no Pepsi. How did an ecommerce site wind up in the position where it’s hosting web powerhouses like Foursquare, NASA, Netflix, and The New York Times? … Young startups all tell me that even if Google offers them free hosting, they still want to use Amazon.
Why do you think that is?
Jeff Bezos: We were determined to build the best services but to price them at a level that customers couldn’t match, even if they were willing to use inferior products. Tech companies always have high margins, except for Amazon. We’re the only tech company with low margins.
Levy: How did you do it?
Jeff Bezos: We really obsess over small defects. That’s what drives up costs. Because the most expensive thing you can do is make a mistake. We can afford to focus on smaller and smaller defects and eliminate them at their root. That reduces cost, because things just work.
—Wired
December 2011
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Team Manager Skills
A Wall Street Journal article identified three personality types that are poison in your workforce:
- Deadbeats: withhold effort,
- Downers: express pessimism, anxiety, insecurity and irritation, &
- Jerks: violate interpersonal norms of respect.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms
Life moves on, whether we act as heroes or cowards.
Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but 
realize it, than to accept life unquestionably. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serve to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind.
Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
–Henry Miller
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, How to Set Goals
The most valuable time management skill is recognizing the important tasks and ignoring the rest. I first observed it early in my consulting career, at Arthur Andersen & Co in New York, after a meeting with my manager and our client, the Vice President of a large energy company. After the client left, my manager and I reviewed the meeting and planned our tasks. I mentioned one of the client’s requests from my notes and asked, “How are we going to do this?” I was shocked by his reply, “Don’t worry about that.”
“What do you mean?” I replied, “He specifically asked us to do that.”
“I know, but trust me, It’ll go away.” He was right. That task was never mentioned again and the client was entirely pleased with our work.
Not taking on everything you could do or want to do is the only way to reserve resources for the key activities.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, How to Set Goals
I apologize for the length of this letter/speech/memo/blog post. If I had more time it would have been shorter.
That keen insight into effective writing has been attributed to many great communicators, from Virgil to Voltaire. Respect for the reader’s time requires the writer to carefully pare all but the most essential aspects of the message. Editing has the added benefit of helping the writer clarify and sharpen his or her own thinking. If you cannot express the essentials briefly and accurately your confusion and uncertainty will distract and annoy the reader. To write fewer words, think more.
Physicist Richard Feynman, for example, admitted to a colleague that he did not have an adequate understanding of Quantum ElectroDynamics, despite the fact that he had won the Nobel Prize for inventing it.
Feynman’s criterium for understanding was to express it in a lecture comprehensible by a college freshman.
Your business plan is the document that most deserves intense thought and editing to make it concise, persuasive, and motivating. Everyone in your business needs to (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Salespeople, Sales Techniques
Dar and I were childhood friends who met at a trampoline school.
One day we climbed a ladder up to a billboard, high above the roof of the school, and dove off, landing on a soft pad below. I climbed to the fifth rung; Dar just kept climbing. Ten years later, he was one of the most daring and successful stuntmen of modern times.
For one of his stunts, Dar had to run full tilt forward, spin around backward, crash through a glass window, fall sixteen stories, and then do a somersault with a half twist, before dropping into an airbag. Any miscalculation or mistake would have cost him his life.
Dar’s stunts included diving off the top of the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles, leaping from a helicopter hovering at three hundred feet to land in an airbag (that looked the size of a postage stamp below), and driving a car off the rim of (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms, Team Manager Skills
For a social discipline, such as management, the assumptions are actually a good deal more important than are the paradigms for a natural science. The paradigm—that is, the prevailing general theory—has no impact on the natural universe. Whether the paradigm states that the sun rotates around the earth, or that, on the contrary, the earth rotates around the sun, has no effect on sun and earth. But a social discipline, such as management, deals with the behavior of people and human institutions. The social universe has no “natural laws” as the physical sciences do. It is thus subject to continuous change. This means that assumptions that were valid yesterday can become invalid and, indeed, totally misleading in no time at all.
Because the generally held assumptions about management no longer apply, it is important that we first make them explicit, and then replace them with assumptions that better fit today’s reality.
That’s where we are today with the discipline of management.
—Peter Drucker
Forbes, 1998
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Stress Management
It Comes Down to This
When you are visited by your personal demons – your fears, anxieties, doubts and wounds – can you sit down and have tea with them?
Can you turn your attention toward the demons and explore what you can learn about yourself?
For many reasons, we often can’t. But the intention to investigate that which is between you and feeling free can sometimes result in new possibilities where none previously existed.
The acronym RAIN can be helpful.
R = Recognize or Realize what is happening
A = Accept or Allow your experience to be what it is
I = Investigate or be Intimate with what is here
N = When we can do the above, you may begin to experience a degree of
Non-attachment, Non-judging and Natural awareness
As I mentioned, sometimes we can’t shift unpleasant sensations, emotions or mental conditions easily or quickly. Over time, with patience, consistency and presence, we begin to feel more confidence that we can be with whatever arises.
—Jonathan Foust
See free, easy Meditation Instructions on this blog.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms
If you are an actor in your own private movie, so is everyone you encounter. You may be the star of your movie but just an extra in theirs.
Try to appreciate some of their drama before you act out yours.
–Tony Mayo
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Leadership Development
Years ago, while I was establishing myself in a new executive coaching practice, I supported my family by working as a part-time, outsourced CFO. Here is a reminiscence of a deep learning I earned during one of those accounting gigs.
I sought help from my own executive coach with the very difficult behavior of a bookkeeper employed by my client. She had called several urgent meetings with the partners and each time threatened to quit, more or less because of me. These meetings were very exasperating as she made charges that were either too vague to dispute or clearly contrary to plain facts. For example, although we repeatedly assured her that she had her job as long as she wanted it she insisted she could not continue to work under such uncertainty and would resign immediately because we were conspiring to take her job away. The partners felt obligated to placate and mollify her because she was the only bookkeeper out of several they had tried who was able to make any progress in getting their bills out to clients.
I said to my executive coach, “I am stressed and bothered because of her unpredictable behavior, of course, but I am mostly bothered by the fact that it bothers me. I am so ‘trained’ and ‘transformed’ I ought to be able to deal with her behavior without becoming stressed, hurt, or angry. I try to remain calm, not react to her outbursts, and keep on working because I need this income. I do what is necessary just to keep getting paid, so why do I lose sleep and spend my non-billable time talking about her with my coach, family, and friends?”
By the way, is this scenario reminding you of anything in your life, right now?
My coach reminded me of the dangers of attachment, of identifying with our property or positions. We confuse preferred outcomes with necessary results. We grasp so avidly to particular bits of property or actions by others that we forget we can still be ourselves without them. We attach money or prestige to ourselves so firmly that we forget that we are not our results or our reputations. What I want is not what I am.
I then remembered the old samurai expression (I suppose all samurai expressions are now old).
The most effective warrior dies before entering the battle.
The bookkeeper was not damaging my body or physically invading my free time. My attachments were the only things making my life difficult. I was attached to looking good in the eyes of my client, I was attached to (more…)
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