Welcome to the Davies-Black Business Blast

What’s good about the dawn of a new year is that it gives us an incentive to discard the bad habits of the previous year and to begin afresh. While many of us will make resolutions to improve habits related to health, weight, and exercise, we challenge you to make a resolution regarding your career or a problem area in the workplace. To help ensure that your resolutions don’t derail within a few weeks, this issue will provide you with some strategies and tools to make the most of resources you already have—you and your employees! If you have thoughts and story ideas you'd like to share, please contact us at db_newsletter@cpp.com.

—The Davies-Black Publishing Team

Q&A with Nancy Ahlrichs

Nancy S. Ahlrichs, SPHR, is a noted author and national expert on talent management. In her new book, Igniting Gen B and Gen V, Ahlrichs details ways that companies can tap into the innovation and creativity of their longtime employees, develop an organization-wide competency in employee engagement, and change the direction of their bottom line.

Why do you think that Boomers and Veterans are being overlooked as sources for innovation?
There is a myth that only “up-and-comers” innovate—not true! We have had a youth-oriented culture since before the end of WWII. As teenagers and twenty-somethings, Boomers said, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” Later, they adopted Bob Dylan’s song “Forever Young” as the anthem for themselves while paradoxically discriminating against their own peers once they hit forty.

How can organizations ignite their Gen B and Gen V employees?
First, realize that every system is perfectly designed to deliver the results it gets. What is it about your organization’s systems that hold back those past the up-and-comer stage? Which is rewarded: longevity or innovation? You get what you reward. Is training only for new hires—so long-term employees fall progressively behind? Are projects and project leadership just for Gen Xers and Gen Yers? Are long-term employees asked for their ideas? Considered for promotions? Uncover the barriers to innovation and watch Boomers and Veterans get creative!

Should more than one mechanism be applied simultaneously?
Absolutely! Organizations are systems. We need whole system change in order to get the most from our long-term employees.

Why should organizations try to delay retirements today?
We simply do not have enough employees of any age today, much less enough Gen Xers waiting in the wings to replace tomorrow’s Boomer and Veteran retirees. To fill the gaps, we have off-shored entire companies, set up third-party employers so we can access the knowledge of our own retired employees without jeopardizing their retirement payments, filled in with H-1B visa hires though only 65,000 are available, and even outsourced services, design work, and manufacturing overseas. The need for skilled employees will become critical by 2008, when the shortage of potential will top 10 million individuals.

What important roles can retirees play in organizations today?
With the proper background, retirees can play every role, from interim CEOs or CFOs to project leaders or members to vacation fill-ins for call centers. It is a matter of matching the skills needed and the hours available. Retirees want every work configuration imaginable: full time, part time, seasonal, project, on-site or telecommuter, and so on. With today’s better health and longevity, Boomers and Veterans expect to be productive well past age 65.

Find Your “Big Idea”

You are your most important asset. In a sense, you are your only asset. And your ability to maximize the asset that is you is the single most important ingredient in your success.

That’s why self-branding is so valuable. For people, branding is about achieving greater success, as represented by money, fame, self-esteem, or whatever measure is important to you.

But I am also talking about becoming who you were meant to be, which means that success includes becoming who you truly are. The trick to effective self-branding is to devise a strategy that works in achieving professional and life goals but also is true to you—that brings more of you into the equation.

Branding for people is about finding your Big Idea—your unique selling proposition (USP). You want to represent something special—a belief system you stand for that sets you apart from others. This could be made up of your point of view, your vision, your style, even your mystique—the X Factor that makes you special and relevant.

Branding for people is also about “packaging” the brand that is you and using branding strategies and principles from the commercial world to enhance your identity and communicate your USP. It also means developing a personal marketing plan for reaching your goals, tactics to get from A to B (and through all the other letters of the alphabet, depending on your goals). And it means engaging your target audience without seeming self-promotional and obnoxious.

In her book U R a Brand!, brand strategist Catherine Kaputa unlocks the hidden rules
for creating a one-of-a-kind self-brand. For a longer excerpt of this award-winning book,
Look Inside! >>

New Spring Catalog

At Davies-Black Publishing we carefully select our books to reflect the latest thinking and practice on the human understanding and development side of management and organizational practice. The secret of our books’ success is their ability to meet your needs and help you be successful. View our new spring catalog and learn about our exciting range of quality books by expert authors. Download the catalog. >>

Optimizing Luck

Charged with running science operations for NASA, Thomas Meylan and Terry Teays played an integral part in one of the most successful and longest-running international astronomy satellite projects in history. Meylan and Teays say that one of the biggest-payoff skills transferred from their work at NASA to business consulting was experimentation; it works just as well in leadership and management as it does in science.

As you make your New Year’s resolutions, experiment in the workplace and pledge to become a luck-optimizing leader by incorporating these actions and procedures in your behavior:

• Foster connections to the world. Develop an extensive network that connects you to the important people in your external business environment (market leaders, policymakers, customers, suppliers, and other large-scale influencers).
• Observe continuously. Always be aware of the conditions in your business environment.
• Work hard. Reflect on your observations and identify the right things on which to expend your efforts.
• Think critically. Carefully test the information you gather from your business environment, assessing it for clues leading to success.
• Stay in it together with the working teams. Build an effective network of relationships with the various working groups that actually perform the services and create the products that generate the revenue and keep the customers (in-house and external) happy.

For more ways to develop luck-optimizing competencies across the entire workforce, check out Optimizing Luck: What the Passion to Succeed in Space Can Teach Business Leaders on Earth.

Author Events & Conferences

• Davies-Black Author Events – Ongoing
• BookExpo America – May 29-June 1
• ASTD International Conference & Exposition – June 1-4
• SHRM Annual Conference & Exposition – June 22-25
• Academy of Management Annual Meeting – August 8-13
• Frankfurt Book Fair – October 15-19

Let us know if you're going to be at any of these events — we'd love to meet you there.
E-mail us at db_newsletter@cpp.com.

Davies-Black and its colophon and FIRO-B are registered trademarks of CPP, Inc. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, MBTI, Myers-Briggs, and Introduction to Type are trademarks or registered trademarks of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Trust in the United States and other countries.

Davies-Black^® Publishing, A Division of CPP, Inc.
1055 Joaquin Road, 2nd Floor | Mountain View, CA 94043
Tel: (650) 969-8901 | Toll free: (800) 624-1765 | Fax: (650) 623-9271
www.daviesblack.com