You need a personal assistant

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Your to do list is dragging you down. Why do tasks that do not inherently enhance the quality of your life when you could pay someone $10 and hour to do them? I learned this when my boss and I had our new computers set up at our homes. I stayed at home all day waiting for the technical person to arrive and then worked the weekend to catch up. My boss had his assistant wait at home and he got more done than I did without even having to work the weekend. Day after day I watched my boss get twice as much done as I did until I hired my own personal assistant — and after that, I looked at the tasks of daily life in a different light.

We each have big goals in our life and all big goals take time: Growing a successful career, being a good spouse, and climbing Mt. McKinley. None of these grand goals requires you to pick up the dry cleaning yourself.

Each time you do a mindless task yourself you make a statement about the value of your time. If you had an extra hour with your kids, would it be worth $10? If you had an extra hour at the office could you increase the value of your output to make up for the $10 (think: raise down the line). If you're spending a significant part of your day doing tasks that are not integral to your life goals, then you're wasting your time.

Your first thought should always be, “Do I need to do this myself?” How does a CEO create value that's bigger than herself? She has other people doing the work so she can think about big picture issues. (And in fact, you are probably a person doing this CEOs work. More incentive for you to act like the CEO of your life and pass off the slough.) If you want to create something big you need to hire people to help you.

So why doesn't everyone have a personal assistant that they hired from the local university? Heck, a fourteen year old could do half the tasks on most lists. (In fact, the first university student I hired used to sub-contract my tasks to his fraternity brothers, which I accepted as evidence of how little training it took to do my tasks.)

Some people overestimate the difficulty of tasks and underestimate the frustration impact. They say, “Training the person would take longer than doing it myself.” HEL-LO!?!?! Did anyone train you to call the insurance company to complain about a bill? No. It's trial and error. So your assistant can learn himself. Even five calls would only cost you less than $10. But if you did the five calls to the insurance company yourself you'd be angry and frustrated for the next two hours.

Some people overestimate the importance of a task. They say, “The person would never do it how I want.” But so what? You're not giving the core of your life to the assistant. You're not saying, for example, “Can you climb Mt. McKinely for me?” You're asking for something like food shopping. So let's say the assistant buys the wrong bread and forgets pasta. Is having the right food in the house integral to your life goals? The answer is probably No. You can eat pancakes instead of pasta. It's a small price to pay to have enough time to meet your life goals.

A time optimist does not use an assistant because she says, “It'll take me more time to ask the assistant to do the task than to do the task myself.” This person misunderstands time. Buying movie tickets, for example takes ten minutes on the phone, but it takes only one minute to ask an assistant to do it. If you make the choice to spend the 10 minutes doing it yourself seven times a day, you've wasted an hour of your time.

If you are currently employed don't tell me you don't have enough money. Think of yourself as a small business, and follow the basic rules of running a business: You have to reinvest profits (your salary) back into the business (your career) if you want to see growth (your promotion). No matter how much you earn, as long as you can cover basic life necessities (food, clothes, housing — not sailing lessons) a portion of your profits should go back into your business.

Learning to use an assistant effectively is not easy — it takes practice. But using an assistant now, for your personal tasks, your will train yourself to effectively leverage the personal assistant you get from your employer when you get promotion after promotion from being so intently focused on your goals.

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What I learned from communication coaching

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My cousin had a karaoke party. I had to go because he’s my cousin, but I refused to sing because this would have pained the audience even more than it would have pained me. A woman at the party, however, impressed me by engaging the crowd even though she had no apparent singing talent. It turned out that this woman, Lindy, is a Sanford Meisner-trained actress who works for a consulting firm, teaching executives how to strengthen business relationships by using acting techniques. The course costs $275 an hour. I signed up.

At our first session, Lindy explained the premise: Acting and leading are both about establishing a relationship with an audience and making them believe in you. My first assignment was to memorize a short speech — “Ain’t I a Woman,” by Sojourner Truth. I loved the speech, but I hated having to memorize it, and I dreaded having to recite it in front of Lindy. Then I remembered what Lindy’s boss said at the beginning of the course: This program is best suited to high-level executives with enough self-confidence to explore leadership techniques that might feel silly at first. I wanted to fit into this self-confident high-level executive category, so I forced myself to show up for the second meeting.

I bombed. I couldn’t remember the speech. Lindy told me to think less about the speech and more about connecting with her, my audience. Finally, when I looked at her the way I look at my husband when I need him to pick up the dry cleaning, she was satisfied.

I may have gotten the look down, but my delivery was still off. Lindy instructed me to reengage her whenever I sensed I was losing her. So I started over. She stopped me immediately. “You can’t just start over,” she said. “Leaders stick with their audience and fight to get them back.” “How do I do that?” I asked. “Take a risk,” she said. In acting, one might ad-lib; in business, one can ask a rhetorical question. So I did, and then started talking right away. She pointed out that a good leader is comfortable with a long pause, which shows trust that the audience is thinking. Speaking too fast doesn’t allow the audience to absorb or interpret, killing any chance of making a connection.

My biggest problem, according to Lindy, was wanting to appear like a cool and hip leader and not paying attention to my audience. I made it about me instead of about them. “Pretend you’re an evangelist preacher,” she said, because preachers excel at engaging listeners. I continued to give my speech, adding after every few sentences, “Can I get an ‘Amen’?” I felt more and more pathetic as Lindy sat in stony silence, ignoring my bleating pleas. Then I realized that if I didn’t care about what I was saying, no one else would. You really have to want an “Amen” to get one, and finally I did.

After this breakthrough, the sessions became easier. The principles of theater and management are the same: A director and a manager both have to lead in ways that allow for and encourage a person’s best, most creative self. Managing is about performing, which takes practice, energy, and concentration. The basics are these: Believe your material. Know your audience. Engage them, so they are invested in what you have to say. And for those of you who are not yet managers, acting like a manager is the first step toward becoming one.

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Don’t hold a meeting without an agenda

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A meeting is a like a party. If you don't plan it carefully you’ll look incompetent and end up embarrassed. Forethought is necessary. You wouldn't invite three ex-boyfriends to a game of Twister with your mom, and you wouldn't plan a costume party without letting people know the theme in advance. While you might not have ex-boyfriends or a good costume, most offices always have individuals who love to undermine leaders in meetings.

Having no agenda is the first sign your meeting will be a time-suck. . Most people who skip writing an agenda have no idea what they want to accomplish during their meeting. They don’t know this, though.

They begin the meeting thinking they know the goal — for example, to get a project back on track. But they’re wrong. The real goal is to bring team members together to create a plan to get the project moving. Without an agenda, someone else will create the plan during the meeting, and you’ll end up seeming weak and helpless.

Most people know they should always have a meeting agenda, but for unfathomable reasons, they assume their meetings are the exception to this rule. Even if you think your meeting is an exception, write an agenda. There is no downside for you in doing this. Every meeting gives you an opportunity to demonstrate that you’re a visionary. But if you aren’t in charge of what happens during the sit-down, how can you ensure that you’ll look good?

Other people don't write agendas because their meetings are routine and predictable. Everyone who attends could write the agenda themselves. In this case, why have the meeting? Then you’re knowingly scheduling a time-suck. You’ve probably worked for a company where managers hold Monday-morning meetings to hear their staffers say what they did the previous week. A competent manager would ask for a weekly report, then distribute a weekly summary instead. Think daily listserv vs. digest. A digest would alleviate another boring meeting, or it would open up the Monday meeting for more substantive issues.

Still not convinced that your weekly meeting is useless? Perhaps you think an agenda-less meeting where everyone reports their progress will make a certain slacker in your group get the point. Forget it: Do your job and handle the slacker on your own instead of making your staff suffer through a meeting.

The downside of preparing agendas is they may get attacked. This happens when attendees get the agenda at the start of the meeting. The meeting can then degenerate into group-level agenda attacks, which then can degenerate into group-level personal attacks and a sidetracked meeting. Nip this in the bud by emailing the agenda in a note to participants a day in advance (don’t send your agenda as an attachment because no one will read it). By giving attendees a chance to review the agenda, attackees will likely approach you individually, and you’ll have time to make revisions. (Here's a tip for procrastinators: Write your agenda before you call your meeting. This way you'll know whether in fact you need the meeting before you schedule it.)

Even after writing a strong agenda, some meeting leaders feel their sit-downs will be unsuccessful. The solution isn’t ordering food for participants. If you need food to have a successful meeting, cancel the meeting. Otherwise, food will make your meeting last longer than necessary — again, a time-suck. . There's nothing like the inevitable crash from a a mass sugar high — just when you need to develop the big plan.

Still not writing that agenda? Let’s return to the party theme: The best part of a party is the after-party when you discuss everyone who attended and what they wore and said. In fact, I never feel a party has really happened until I've done a debriefing. The same is true for meetings. People will debrief and dis each other behind their backs after the meeting — nothing you can do about that. But you can ensure they're only dissing you for what you wore and not what you said by maintaining control with an agenda.

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Advice for starting your own business

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Feeling stuck? Uninspired? As though your New Year's resolutions have no spark? Maybe it's time to start your own business. It’s likely you intuitively know if you're actually an entrepreneur stuffed in a corporate cubicle. The entrepreneurship bug isn’t something that hits in middle age. It’s something that's inside you from day one — a part of who you are. So don't be stifled by your age or lack of experience. Just make sure you have the right personality for success and the right attitude toward failure.

Get a good idea
Starting a business is very high-risk. Most entrepreneurs fail. So minimize your risk by honestly evaluating if your concept is valid and marketable. Remember, just because you like your idea doesn't mean there’s a market full of buyers for it, so do your research. Tip: your mom’s opinion doesn’t count because she’s biased, so find a small business mentor and ask her.

Assess your personality
You also need the right personality to run your own business. You must like people and people must like you — so you can get them to do what you want. You need to be able to make fast, confident decisions, and you need to be organized so that you can give clear direction to others. If your product launch flops, you are the one who has to tell everyone why the company is still on the road to success. If you can’t rally the troops, you need a business partner.

You also need boundless energy. When you own the company, you set the pace and the standards. Remember the day at the office last month when you were upset and tired from worrying about your personal life the night before, so you surfed the Internet all day? Relaxing, wasn’t it? You can’t do this when you own the company. Most small business owners work 80-hour weeks and wish they needed less sleep.

I have these traits. And I started a business. I raised funds and hired employees, and, surprise, the company was successful and I eventually cashed out. But I paid a high price. I worked almost every waking minute. When cash flow was poor, I worried not only about my own paycheck, but about the paychecks of my employees. When cash flow was good, deal flow was heavy and my workload doubled even though I was already maxed out. While I was negotiating the sale of my shares, my hair started falling out. I didn't know this happened to women, but apparently it does, usually from intense stress.
Fortunately, most small business owners are optimistic. And I am, too. I bought some Nioxin to make my hair grow back. And once I regained my former full mane, I started another business.

It failed. And I lost a lot of the money I made from the first business. There were many reasons for the failure: Bad timing, bad economy, and maybe, in hindsight, bad idea. If you think you have the personality to succeed as a small business owner, make sure you have the right approach to failure as well.

Minimize risk to your checkbook and your career
I invested only the money I could afford to lose. I had no kids and no mortgage. I lost my loot from my first company, but I didn't lose my shirt: I kept enough to live on for a while longer.” Think of starting a business as gambling: When you go to Vegas, never bet your plane fare home. Once my company closed, I enlisted a resume-writing service to help me frame my business flop as a career hop to the next level of management.

Fail quickly and move on
Most business leaders fail once or twice before hitting it big. Think of failure as a necessary career step and move through it quickly and assuredly — recognize when things are going poorly, fail fast, learn, and get another idea.

To those of you with the right personality, I say bring it on! You will be pleased that you turned tough economic times into an opportunity for fulfillment. And even if you fail, remember that statistics indicate you are most likely to succeed when you are doing something you love.

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How to fire a relative

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Learning to be a good manager requires that you perform a wide range of tasks from delegating, to coaching, to planning. When none of these go well, you need to perform the final task: Firing. Letting someone go is very difficult for most people – our instinct is to want to help people, or at least not harm them. But how you fire someone says as much about the firer as it does about the free.

In fact, the current job market encourages perfect hiring. Jobs are so scarce right now that a reasonable manager should be able to find a very good match for her needs. But first you have to fire the bad matches. My most difficult lesson in this arena happened when I had to fire a relative.

When my dad remarried, the first time we met our stepsiblings was at the wedding while we all waited to walk down the aisle. We exchanged names and marched. Only afterward, at the reception, did I realize that we had a lot in common. In fact, my new stepsister, Dana, was exceptionally clever and charismatic. She was leaving her job as an editor at a top New York publisher to seek work that would pay more. Since she had risen to the upper ranks of her prior company, I considered her a smart, detail-oriented person. And the fact that she wanted to make more money meant she was ambitious. So I offered her a job in marketing at my company.

My plan was a disaster. She was so detail-oriented that she could not see the big picture. Her perfectionism may have been appropriate for editing, but she wasn’t producing the volume that the position demanded. She would never accomplish enough to make an impact on the company. I changed Dana's job a few times to try to bring out her strengths, but she could never quite fill the role. Finally, the team approached me en masse and said that no one wanted to work with Dana.

I wasn’t surprised. Repeatedly, I had said things like, “You’re only as good as your team” and “Make your teammates look good because being surrounded by high performers makes you look good.” Also, I talked a lot about Microsoft and McKinsey having zero tolerance for B players. During performance reviews, Microsoft employees are ranked on a curve, and the lowest performers get the boot. McKinsey only keeps the top performers from its stable of entry-level analysts, and dismisses the rest.

I decided that if I wanted to be part of something as highly competent as these companies, I needed to get rid of incompetence on my own team. So I called my dad and said, “I have to fire Dana.” He said I shouldn’t have hired her in the first place — he knew it would never work.

Firing a B player is difficult, especially if you’re a good manager. You’ll likely respond to the person’s shortcomings by thinking that you failed to manage her or him properly, so you’ll try a few new approaches. When that doesn’t work, you’ll likely ask yourself, “What could I possibly have been thinking when I hired this person?” Only after you admit that you made a mistake will you be able to issue the pink slip. And even then, it’s difficult. You don’t have the same righteous indignation that you would if the person had stolen or harassed someone at work; instead, he or she simply wasn’t a star performer.

As I reluctantly prepared to fire Dana, I asked another person to join us, because the only thing worse than firing a family member would be getting sued for it. But she didn’t kick and scream. And she didn't even pick a fight at our first Thanksgiving together (though my brother joked at dinner that he wouldn’t work for me unless I gave him a contract with a good severance package).

If you plan to succeed in corporate America, you must be able to get rid of employees who don’t move or shake, even if they’re your relatives. Their work reflects poorly on you, and it doesn't help them, either, to be somewhere they don't shine. Dana may not have had vision as a software marketer, but she saw that, in the big picture, my firing her was the right thing — for both of us.

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Couples therapy can help your career

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Couples therapy: My husband is slumped at the edge of the sofa, sulking. I sit in the center cushion, upright and animated, ranting about why he needs to get rid of his bike.

The therapist tells me to be quiet, but in a couples-therapist way: “Let’s give him a chance to talk about the bike.” He says he needs to keep the bike in the kitchen, where it will stay until he formulates a daily riding schedule.

I listen. But not really. Mostly I plan my arguments about why what he is saying is irrelevant and why I am right: The plan is too detailed, he’ll never finish the plan, and because we live in a New York City shoebox, the bike is a waste of space.

We go through this routine for every topic: He cannot figure out every single detail, so he cannot plan; I have no patience for details, and I always have a plan. When we decided to have a child, he wanted to overcome every hurdle first — from finding an apartment with a playroom to setting up a college fund. I told him we had to move forward, hurdles and all. At every session he ends up very quiet in the corner of the sofa, and we accomplish nothing.

Our therapist tried a lot of tactics to get us to communicate. I took notice when she observed that the problems I have in talking to my husband are probably the same types of problems I have in talking to people at work. This made sense to me immediately because I always say that I love my husband but would never want to work with someone like him.

He’s a slow, methodical thinker, and I generally do not have patience for them at work. But the therapist points out that I chose such a person for a husband. “You must have had a reason,” she says. And it’s true. In my heart of hearts, I know that a slow, methodical thinker is the perfect counterpoint for me. At home, my husband is the one who takes the time to find out that our first-choice apartment has rats, and our second-choice apartment — which we live in now — has a secret cubbyhole for keeping cookies warm. In my work, the detailed thinker is the perfectionist who compensates for my disinterest in details.

But knowing something doesn’t mean I’m willing to change. Just like when I claim to be listening to my husband, I seem as though I’m listening to people during work but in reality, I’m more interested in my own ideas than those of the person talking. I talk over and past them. I am dismissive and unresponsive. “How do you keep people from strangling you?” my husband asks, when he’s particularly annoyed and probably considering strangling me himself.

So back to the bike. I tell myself that if I’m patient, he’ll come up with a great plan that will make keeping the bike in the apartment a good idea. That if I can just learn to control myself in the context of the bike, the therapist, and the annoyed husband, then I will do much better in my career. It is clear to me that I deal with my husband in the same way as I deal with people at work. And my career will be stronger if I can become a stronger marriage partner, because the communication skills are the same.

So every time I get frustrated in couples therapy, or I think that it’s a waste of money, I remind myself that communication skills know no boundaries. I can tell myself that I’m a good communicator at work, but the best feedback I can get is at home. If you want to know what your weak points are at work, ask your significant other — that person knows.

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4 ways to make more time

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Success in the workplace depends on being a good time manager, because it doesn't matter how good you are at your job if you never have time to do it. Here are the four most important steps you can take to end that feeling that you “can't get everything done”.

Prioritize ruthlessly
Most people who are too busy to get everything done are not really too busy: they are procrastinators. Everyone has time to do the most important thing on their to-do list each day. Most people have time to do the top five things. Problems arise when people do the number eight thing first because it's easy.

Instead of doing the easy things, do the things that will have the most impact. Many days, for me, that means doing one very difficult thing that has the potential for big, long-term reward. The problem is that this one thing probably has a lot at stake; if it goes poorly, then no long-term reward. So I get nervous about doing it. The number-eight task has little impact, so doing it poorly doesn't scare me as much.

In the worst case, this sort of prioritization goes on all day. If you choose to do the easy things first then at the end of the day, when there's no time, you make yourself crazy trying to get the top of your to-do list done. Whereas if number eight is not done, you can go home anyway.

Stop doing research
One of the biggest black holes on a to-do list is research. “I need to read this book before I start writing,” or “I need to have three more numbers before I start the project.” In most cases, you can start without all the research.

My friend Mary just fired someone who procrastinated so much she was frozen at her desk. This person's job was to write client work proposals, but in each case, she would say she needed more information in order to write the proposal. Mary would tell her to make up assumptions for the information she didn't know, and fix it later. But this employee could not do it; she was so scared to get started on the proposals that she could always think of another number she needed from the client.

Sort immediately
Another form of procrastination is pile-making. To read a piece of paper briefly and then put it in a pile to be read again is to double your work. In most cases, though, a pile maker does not want to make a decision about that piece of paper until it is an emergency. If you forced yourself to deal with every piece of paper as soon as you touch it, you will find that you deal with papers in 50% less time.

Barnes & Noble is so convinced of this theory that the company has made touch-it-once company policy. When Barnes & Noble opens a new store, hundreds of workers unpack boxes of books. Some books are easy to shelve and some are difficult. Rather than shelving the easy ones right away and making a pile of difficult ones, employees touch a book only once: you cannot put it down until you know where it goes.

Call a spade a spade
This morning I sat down at my computer to write a column. But first I checked email. (I have four accounts. I checked them all.) Then I rechecked because I thought I should have received a more interesting batch of mail the first time around.

Then I told myself I could surf for just a little. I came a cross a study from the University of Carleton that said cyber-slacking is the new form of procrastination, and it's killing peoples' productivity. I saw myself in that study.

So I took my computer to a local cafe where I cannot connect to the Internet. The Internet is useful, yes, but in most cases, it’s a way to take a break from doing the hard stuff.

It seems that most of time management is being honest with yourself: At each moment, ask if you’re doing the most important thing or the easiest thing. The more honest you are with yourself, the more time you’ll find in your day.

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The best way to break rules

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The current business climate encourages rule breakers. Not the kind at Enron — those are law breakers. Rule breakers break with convention. Sallie Krawcheck, for example, was a top stock analyst in the 90s. She could have gone to a big investment firm where the heavy-hitters gave stock advice that, in hindsight, seems to have been garbage. Instead, she stayed at a boutique research company, which she made famous for quality. Last year Krawcheck took an enormous career leap to become the CEO of Smith Barney precisely because she had broken with convention years earlier.

All great business people have had to break some rules on their path to huge success. But be careful: people who break all the rules all the time are not innovators or a breath of fresh air, they are sociopaths. Rules create order and process, and no company can operate in a state of anarchy. The key to breaking rules is to know which rules to break.

Break rules that matter.
You always take a risk when you do things differently, so make sure there's big payoff. Does your company have a dress code? Adhere to it. No one ever made corporate history by wearing torn jeans on casual Friday. If you follow most of the rules, then when you break a rule people will be more willing to let you go with it.

Weigh the risks.
There are a lot of rules that deserve to be ignored, but sometimes breaking rules is more trouble than it's worth. As a marketing executive in a software firm, I was required to have engineering signoff on every word on the front of the box. The process became an opportunity for code-heads to make illiterate proofreading comments. But I still got signoff every time, because while breaking that rule would save me a day in the box production schedule, it would cost me weeks of assuaging engineers' egos.

Know the reason for the rule before you break it.
The best example of this is the renegade barrista at Starbucks (if she has not been fired yet). She keeps changing the composition of standardized drinks. Lattes have a little less milk, Frappuchinos have a little more foam. I overheard her declaring that she gives customers what they want even though they don't know to ask for it. This would be a great idea in another company, but the charm of Starbucks is that wherever you go — Seattle or Milan — the drinks are consistent.

Break rules so that you can be more effective.
Andy Grove broke rules of convention by pioneering the idea of management by walking around. He didn't necessarily set out to break a rule, he just wanted to manage in a way that felt comfortable to him, and walking around talking to people suited him well.

Break rules that other people would be scared to break.
In 2000, when everyone was still running on Internet adrenaline, stock analyst Jon Joseph announced that the chip sector was in for a big fall. At the time, he received so many death threats that his company hired a bodyguard for him. Recently he was rewarded for going against the grain by receiving a top post at Smith Barney.

Good rule breakers spent part of their life as good rule followers. Jeff Bezos is renown for bucking the conventional wisdom that CEOs shouldn't micromanage. He does, and it works well for him. But before he was a rule breaker he spent the beginning of his career in consulting and finance positions where he followed the rules for entry-level employees and did what he was told to do.

If you think you've got a situation where you should definitely break a rule, remember that good rule breakers are good salespeople. You can't just break a rule and think it'll stick. You have to explain to people why your way is better. Get people behind your new way of doing things so that your new direction can have the large impact you hope for. Break a rule and people will gossip; lead down a new path and people will follow.

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Public Speaking 101

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Each month my husband selects a concert for us to go to. I used to pick, but I would select music I knew, like Beethoven or Mozart, and my husband, the over-educated music student, would scoff at my pedestrian tastes. Now I am at his mercy, and I endure the type of music that requires a specially tuned piano, or a specially trained ear.

So I was thrilled to hear we were going to a Bach concert. Finally, a composer I had heard of. What I didn't realize was that it was a lecture. I grumbled, “Who goes to a Bach lecture without getting course credit?”

I brought a magazine to the lecture, but after five minutes, I put the magazine away. The guy who gave the lecture, Robert Kapilow, was amazing. I learned as much about public speaking that night as I did about Bach. Here are some things Kapilow did that we should all do when we speak:

Know your audience
He said, “I will use Bach as a basis for introducing the fugal procedure.” (This meant nothing to me.) He said, “How many people have listened to the Art of the Fugue.” (Everyone raised their hand.) He said, “How many people have studied it?” (My husband a couple of others raised their hands.) Kapilow pitched himself toward the majority. (Thank god.)

Pick a good support team
The Brentano quartet played. For those of you who have never heard of them, they are very good. Not your standard quartet. Surely playing a lecture is a more maddening gig than playing a wedding, and tickets were cheap so the musicians couldn't be getting paid a lot. Kapilow must have worked hard to get these musicians to play, but it was worth his effort — everything he described was more interesting with the Brentano Quartet as exhibit A

Perfect your body movement
Even though the topic was dry, Kapilaw moved around the stage like it was a Las Vegas show. When he described the “radiant glorious major version” he reached his arms out. When he said, “Then we go back in minor and it's dark” his arms tucked up close to his side. He made arcane music look exciting through his gestures, and his excitement was catching.

Be conscious of audience limitations
By the fourth fugue, he said, “Listen for the bing-bing or the down-up. If you're a really good listener you can listen for all four things, and we'll discuss after this lecture if that is humanly possible.”

Then, at one point he decided we needed a confidence boost. He said, “Stretofugue is very similar to Row, row, row your boat.”

By the end of the lecture I loved Bach. I even loved the stretofugue. And really, what is the job of a public speaker but to get you to love his topic? Many people give themselves permission to be sub-par speakers because of an unwilling audience, or an untenable topic. But Kapilow proves to me that anyone can captivate an audience if they have the right skills.

For those of you who have an opportunity to speak to a group, remember to aim as high as Kapilow. For those of you who want an opportunity to see Kapilow in action, look for his “What Makes it Great” series.

Next up: Bach managing the brand of Bach. Did you know that the subject of Bach's last fugue are the notes B, A, C, H?

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Lessons learned from SARS

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Good decision-makers are good information-gatherers, but in the end, they trust their gut.

When a few people were infected with SARS from skinning frogs alive or working among chicken carcasses, China might have contained the problem. Instead, China made a very bad decision to cover up the disease.

In hindsight, it's easy to say which problems are insane to try to cover up, and SARS turned out to be one of them. But don't be so smug that you cannot learn from China's mistake. After all, each of us struggles regularly with the choice to either ignore a problem or fix it.

In the face of a big problem, coming clean is usually the easiest thing to do. Covering up often requires a lie, and then another lie, and then, before you know it, you are talking about an alternate reality that even you cannot keep track of.

But day after day we have to decide if a problem is really big or just a minor blemish in an imperfect world. For example, software publishers always launch software with technical problems. Microsoft would have no products if they insisted on shipping problem-free software. The issue for a product manager is to decide if she's launching her product with problems so big that they will undermine sales.

In these instances, you must gather as much information as possible in a reasonable amount of time. But know that in the end, you will have to go with your gut.

The World Health Organization would have told China to quarantine. But China chose not to involve the WHO until it was too late. Microsoft engineers surely declared the company's server software too rife with security flaws to bring to market. But the product managers went with the product anyway, and frankly, Microsoft has made a mint off this server software. When weighing risk, Microsoft and China both, in the end, have to go with their instinct. But Microsoft does a more honest job of gathering facts to inform its decision.

For your own decision-making process, remember that people who feel powerful do not hide from the information that is available. When you take a calculated risk in the face of a significant problem, act like you are a powerful person — Gather as much information as possible and then trust your instinct.

Brian Arbetter, an employment lawyer at Baker & McKenzie, reports that clients started calling him as soon as the US media started reporting on SARS. This is because Arbetter's clients are big and rich (after all, Baker & McKenzie is expensive) and they feel powerful. Arbetter's clients feel like they have the ability to solve any problem that they can understand, so they call their lawyer to gather information.

Companies that dealt with SARS quickly and decisively are models for your own decision-making. Arbetter says many companies asked employees just back from Asia to stay home from work for ten days. At least one international company held a board meeting without members who live in Asia.

People who worry that a problem will crush them are more likely to hide from a problem and hope it goes away. So even if you don't really feel powerful, act like you do, and power might just come to you. Face problems head on. If you can't afford Arbetter, call a friend. Get advice, and then take action.

One more decision-making lesson from SARS: Be careful when you act selfishly. Sure, business is a game, and everyone is competing for market share. But you can't compete if no one shows up to play; we are all dependent on each other. Microsoft, for example, made a lot of money on server software, but Microsoft caused worldwide wrath when email exchange was brought to near halt due to lack of security on Micosoft's part. Both this example and the rapid spread of SARS remind us that we depend on each other to act ethically — to keep the interests of the community in mind.

That's a lot to balance when making a decision. Now you know why most of us start off our decision-making careers as copy machine technicians: Should the page be darker or lighter? Is it faster to hand-feed or automate? Think of these annoying entry-level questions are a warm-up for the SARS moment in your career. And then vow to make it a moment when you use your power to support community interests.

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