Be Different or be dead

April 25, 2016

The 6 easy things millennials must do to be successful

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The 6 easy things millennials must do to be successful.

I recently received this tweet:

“@JeanYanglistens: @RoyOsing , Thank you so much for the inspiring career articles!! could you advise the biggest challenges Millennials face in their careers?”

Great question.

Here are my top 6:

▪️Your life expectations may be unrealistic; re-examine them.

You are tagged as narcissistic and feeling you are entitled. “It’s all about you” doesn’t cut it in most organizations. Many are trying to change to get closer to recognizing your lifestyle wants but it won’t happen overnight. Others simply won’t go there.

Either way, for the short term at least, you either have to change your expectations or look to the unconventional niche business stream for a job.

▪️Be clear on the organizations you intend to target.

Identify those who you think have the potential of satisfying your wants and expectations. You don’t have enough cycles to splash and spray your resume over the environment and hope you will land a suitable job. It’s ineffective in any event. Do your research.

Study the leaders. Narrow your options down to 3 or 4 high potential organizations to begin with and expand from there once you have established yourself.

Develop a killer resume.

▪️Work on your answer to the question “Why should I hire you for this job and not one of the five hundred other Millennials who applied?”

The job hunting herd is huge and if you can’t differentiate yourself from others you will be invisible, ignored and unsuccessful.

▪️Fair or unfair, the business world perceives you as being here today; gone tomorrow; changing jobs frequently when the work environment and/or money is no longer acceptable to you.

A resume characterized by a mobile persona raises questions about desirability as it flies in the face of what most organizations want: an employee who is “committed” to what the company stands for and is prepared to stick around for a while.

“Why should I hire you when you have a proven track record of “disloyalty”?” is a question you will have to have a convincing answer to.

▪️If you’re not a marketer you’re at a disadvantage.

There is a good chance that you will exhaust all of your target employers and will have to step out on your own. Fortunately you have the on paper credentials necessary to build a business in the digital and social media world.
What is critical for your survival, however, is to be able to find a niche market opportunity where no one else is playing and where your skills can be applied.

Hone your marketing competencies. Look for small segments where no others play. Talk to people about what they crave. Build capabilities for other millennials to engage with and learn from each other. Create an innovative work environment for others in your tribe.

▪️Don’t look for the perfect job.

Get one and then work on your career. In fact I don’t think your objective should be to land a career; it’s not reasonable given your circumstances. Get a job - learn something - apply what you have learned productively - decide if it is what you want to do forever - take the next step.

Your career will evolve from this process. The truth is you don’t know what your career will be when you start. Too many variables. Go do stuff and see where it takes you.

Think about it.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 4.25.16 at 05:47 am by Roy Osing
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April 18, 2016

What actions does a leader take if they want the organization to change?

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What actions does a leader take if they want the organization to change?

How do you know if the leader you report to wants to try new things?

You can spend months on analysis.

You can create as many scenarios as you can imagine.

You can employ all the tools available to mitigate risk.

But you will never be able to predict the outcome of trying something new. There are simply too many variables in the equation: competitor moves, economic shifts, regulatory changes and technology disruptions are always in play to confound the predictability of any action you plan to take.

You may get close. But you will never get it exactly as you intended.

There is a gigantic chasm between any plan and the results of the plan.

And the only way to bridge the chasm is to act quickly and see the results of your action; execute, learn from the execution, and modify or kill the plan on the run.

This requires a planning process that enables a stream of experimentation; that has the “Why don’t we… and see what happens?” question at its core.

Answer these questions to determine if experimentation is taken seriously in your organization.

▪️What is the conversation generated by leadership. Do they encourage testing new ideas by asking “Why don’t we…”? or do they ask for a detailed business case with yards of analysis that requires months to complete.

▪️How much analysis is performed when considering a new course of action? Is it increasing or decreasing in favour of taking action?

▪️Are annual objectives set for the number of experiments you want to conduct? Is the objective included in the organization’s performance balanced scorecard?

▪️Do experimentation champions get continuous recognition? Does leadership play an active role in the proceedings?

▪️Do your organizational values include a strong innovation focus? If value statements don’t expect a “let’s try it” attitude it won’t happen. And an innovative culture will never flourish.

▪️Are innovation results compared to targets prominently displayed in the workplace for all to see? Priorities must be in the face of all employees to reinforce their importance.

You can’t plan your way to progress.

The yard sticks move forward only by people doing stuff; by turning brave ideas into crude deeds constantly.

Stand-out leaders encourage this activity by asking “Why don’t we…” often and passionately.

Cheers,
Roy

Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 4.18.16 at 05:36 am by Roy Osing
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April 11, 2016

Why career success depends on being awesome or not

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Why career success depends on being awesome or not.

And awesomeness depends on how many people around you are in the same career category as you.

What category are you in? Engineer? Author? Content Marketer? Accountant Executive Recruiter? Advertising Manager? Consultant? Personal Trainer? These are all common ways to describe the box you play around in.

How big is the category you’re in? There are literally hundreds and hundreds of individuals in each of the professional categories above.

Successful careers are determined not only by your performance, but also by the number of other people who share your category.

The larger the population in your category, the more intense competition you face; the more difficult it is to be awesome and the tougher it is to rise to the top.

It’s extremely difficult to get noticed in the crowd and attract the attention you need to progress in your career.

The secret is to redefine your category so that you are the ONLY in it.

Reduce the crowd you’re in to you and only you.

This means getting really granular in terms of what defines you as opposed to anyone else.

So, you’re NOT an accountant! You may carry the accountant tag, but in terms of positioning yourself for personal growth opportunities, you are an accountant with certain attributes that make you unique.

And as such, you cannot be compared with other accountants; you are in an accountant category by yourself.

So how might you go about defining you, the accountant of 1?

Here are 5 questions to ponder.

▪️What added education do you have (that is useful to the organization) that traditional accountants typically don’t have?

▪️What skills and experience have you amassed that would surprise people coming from a “numbers person”?

▪️What unique business ideas do you have that make you MORE than an accountant?

▪️Are you a numbers or finance person who can add strategic value to the organization ?

▪️Do you have a gift for relating to others which might be an unusual trait of someone who fulfils this introspective role?

Consider the standard definition of your job as the foundation on which to build a structure which applies only to you.

Your basic role is but the entry level to a successful career. You need it to play the career game but it guarantees nothing unless you add to it dimensions of uniqueness that others value.

There is no formula for this work, no equation that yields your category of 1.

It requires introspective examination in combination with an accurate assessment of what the marketplace needs.

Get going.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 4.11.16 at 04:03 am by Roy Osing
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April 4, 2016

6 simple ways to make sure your startup doesn’t fail

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6 simple ways to make sure your startup doesn’t fail.

Got an idea you think can make you lots of money? Good. Chalk one up to you for coming up an innovative thought.

But the real challenge you have is to figure out how to monetize it. If you can’t get people to buy it, your idea is wasted.

Here are 6 steps to take to increase the chances of your start-up succeeding.

▪️Define, in precise terms, how your new business idea is different than your competition.

Ultimate success will be determined by staking a unique claim in the market. If your idea is the same as, or similar to something already out there, it will be invisible and will be ignored. It won’t attract attention and no one will buy.

▪️Identify the potential customers for your idea.

Winning is all about targeting your idea to very specific groups of people and giving them a reason to buy from you. It’s not about flogging your idea to the masses and hoping it will stick to some of them. If you can’t define your potential customers, STOP.

▪️Recruit people who have a strong marketing and customer service background.

Ultimately, the success of your idea will depend on go-to-market effectiveness. Better have people on board who have experience in serving customers and providing value-based solutions to people. Technology and finance expertise are needed as well, but in a supportive role. People responsible for customers must be your anchor.

▪️Test your idea with potential customers.

It’s not about how excited you and your friends are about your idea,  it’s about what your potential customers think. Get them in a room and present your idea. Ask them to evaluate it. Does your idea excite them?Let them play with it. Do they think it satisfies what they crave they have?
Do they think it’s different than other products out there? Would they buy it? At what price? Would they likely tell their fiends about it?

▪️Define the unique value created by your new product or service.

Flogging product features is not a sustainable approach. Discover how you are satisfying a want or desire that your potential customers have. This will form the basis of your marketing efforts and your pitch to potential investors.

▪️Avoid thinking that technology will sell itself.

People don’t buy technology, they buy the benefits technology creates for them. Happiness. Joy. Pleasure. A solution to a problem.

The odds are stacked against a start-up surviving; these 6 steps will help to thwart the grim reaper.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 4.4.16 at 03:41 am by Roy Osing
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