Alaska is one of (if not THE) most beautiful places on the planet but it can deliver weather that is absolutely brutal.  One musher describes the race as “buying front row tickets to the freezing over of hell.”  Ambient temperatures of -40 to -50 degrees, winds of 80 to100 mph, wolves and moose to contend with, huge mountains to cross, razor sharp ice and deep snow to plow through, much of the race run at night or in blizzards with little or no visibility, hardly any sleep for weeks and a bunch of dogs who would rather be fighting or having sex!  Does that sound like a fun thing to do on your next vacation?

In 1975 a guy named Norm Vaughan entered this race. He was 70 years old!  He didn’t make it to Nome that year or the year after when he took a wrong turn, which is very easy to do, and was lost for 4 days in the Alaska Range.  Race officials and friends tried to talk him out of re-entering the race but he refused and in 1978 he finally made it to Nome.

Over the next 11 years he ran the race 8 more times and achieved his fourth and last official finish in 1990 at age 85!  It took him 21 days, 10 hours and 26 minutes, the winner that year was a tough lady named Susan Butcher who did it in 11 days, 1 hour.  What’s amazing is that in order to attend to his dogs’ paws with ointment and booties (an essential part of the process) he had to literally drag himself along the ice and snow on his belly because he had bad knees.  He attempted to run it again in 1992 at age 87 but scratched …. hello!

Here’s another story.

Tom Dempsey was born in Milwaukee in1947 with only half a right foot and a stub of a right arm.  Despite his disability, as a young boy he had a burning desire to play (American) football at the highest level.  Given his affliction, any reasonable assessment of his prospects would be that he has little to no chance of playing even a friendly neighborhood pick-up game let alone participating in the professional league

But failure was never an option for him.  He was so firm in his resolve to play competitive football that his parents had a special artificial wooden foot made for him.  He practiced kicking the football with his wooden foot hour after hour, day after day.  Eventually he succeeded in playing for 5 NFL franchises as a kicker and to this day he holds the record for the longest kick in NFL history: a 63 yard field goal that won the game for the New Orleans Saints against the Detroit Lions (19-17) in the last 2 seconds of the game before a crowd of 66,910 people.

I’m sharing these stories with you because they’re good examples of determination, resolve and perseverance.  You might not have in mind setting off on a dog sled to Nome or spending your time in the backyard kicking a football but you might like to recall these stories the next time you’re confronted by a challenge that seems too hard or contemplating a goal that is too lofty.  As Napoleon Hill once said “what your mind can conceive and believe you can achieve.”  Knowing what your ultimate goal is and doing whatever it takes to achieve it is the key to success–it’s that simple

Which wolf are you feeding?

In today’s busy world it is so easy to be drawn into negative thoughts, to complain, to blame circumstances, to become angry and impatient.  And the more we allow this to define our behavior, the worse it seems to get and the less content we are.  In other words, what we give most mental attention to seems to be what actually becomes our reality–a self fulfilling prophecy so to speak.  Now, it is said that 90% of what we do each day is driven by habit.  A habit is simply “learned behavior” so if you can learn a habit you can unlearn it i.e. replace it with a better habit or as the Cherokee might say, feed the good wolf.

My point here is that if you are not enjoying a great life then you are most likely feeding the wrong wolf.  You need to change your habits by consciously eliminating those that you know are not useful to you and adopting those that you know are useful.  I’m told that a habit (of any sort) can be broken withing 3 to 6 weeks but you have to work at it.  Having been a very heavy smoker, I know exactly what this means but I also know that it gets easier over time.  If a smoking habit can be changed so can any behavioral habit!  You can, in other words, dramatically change your life simply by consciously looking at your behavior and taking a decision (i.e. thinking about then acting upon) to adopt a different thinking habit.

I’m in the process of reviewing questionnaires from people who will be attending a Boot Camp in London and a fairly typical response to a question I ask on “your key frustrations” is something like: “lack of original thinking from the team and the speed with which they deliver.”  I have heard this a thousand times and I can say with confidence that as long as you believe (i.e. think about) your team members lack the ability for original thought and/or are inherently slow, that will continue to be the prevailing outcome.

People under-perform for one of two reasons: indifference or incompetence.  If it is the latter get rid of them.  If it’s the former, you need to ask yourself why is that person indifferent?  I’ll bet you’ll find the answer in the area of communication and since what you think about (that person and his/her ability) determines what you talk about I suspect you’re allowing yourself to be drawn into negative thoughts about that person.  This will result in you being unwilling to stretch that person through delegation, a reluctance to invest in training and a failure to help that person see the “big” picture (your vision) for your business and how s/he fits in with that.

When I meet with the Principals of firms that are doing extraordinarily well financially, the defining characteristic that separates them from those that are not doing anywhere near as well is in the way they talk about their people, their clients, their vision for the future of their firm and their passion for what they are doing both personally and professionally.  These firms are drawing their team members from exactly the same labor pool,  they service the same type of clients, offer the same type of services, use the same technology as other firms and yet they are getting superior results.

It is not, therefore, a question of what resources you have to work with it’s how you work with these resources and the “how” comes back to what you think about.  If you think the same thoughts as “winners” and if you believe you will experience the same outcomes as they do you will be a winner, it’s really that simple; it’s called modeling excellence.  This is something that Kerry King will be talking about at our Annual Conference in Brisbane next week.

I’ll leave you with this thought from Jack Canfield, author of the best selling Chicken Soup series of books.

Do you realize that your life at this very moment is the result of everything that you have ever thought, done, believed, or felt up until now? You can start right now to consciously and delibrately attract whatever you desire in the lifetime.  Through the Law of Attraction, you can attract people, resources, money,ideas, strategies and circumstances–literally everything you need to create the future of your dreams.”

Something to think about?  I’d welcome your thoughts!

Research done by Fred Reichheld and his team at Bain & Company indicates that high profit performing companies have two characteristics in common:

1. A high percentage of repeat business from customers that’s reflected by a high Net Promoter Score
2. Low levels of team member turnover.

It is interesting that these two characteristics literally define Southwest Airlines, a company which has a very high NPS and (perhaps because) a very high degree of team member engagement and therefore retention.

In an industry where most companies struggle to make a profit in any year, Southwest has been profitable for 35 consecutive years and has produced the highest return to shareholders of any company in the S&P 500. In 2002 Money Magazine noted that $10,000 invested in 1972 to worth $10.2 million by 2002, that’s an average compound growth rate of 25.97% per year. This is remarkable and especially so for a business in such a highly competitive industry where differentiation is difficult at the best of times and where each firm’s strategy is so transparent.

Herb Kelleher, the charismatic founder and until June 2001, its President & CEO, realized very early in the game that the key to the company’s success was its ability to attract, retain, develop and motivate its team members. No other airline holds a candle to Southwest.  Many have tried to copy its operating business model but none of them have been able to emulate their people system.

On a recent flight I noticed an article in their in-flight magazine called Spirit which talked about the process they use to bring on board new hires. Southwest has experienced an employee turnover rate of less than 5% for most of its life—that’s simply unheard of in most businesses especially these days. But the people at Southwest consider even this number to be too high for a business in which people are the key to its profitability—do any other businesses you know of have a similar reliance on its people?

The article talks about their OnBoarding process for integrating new hires into the company.
They have events such as “LUV @ First Bite New Hire Luncheons” and their “Sponsor a New Hire” program that includes amongst other things their annual Duck Derby.

The key to their success to hire for attitude and train for skills and let’s not forget, they LUV to have fun and include their customers in it. But believe me they are serious about business which explains why they’re hugely profitable and have consistently led the airline industry with the lowest ratio of complaints per passengers boarded.

If you’re interested, you can view a scanned image of the article.  It would make a great catalyst for you to talk to your team and/or your clients about initiatives you could put in place to address the talent war that you’re engaged in.

And if you’d like to let your team members self-assess their own level of engagement you can download The Engagement Quiz.  This would be a great tool to get some dialog going in your firm about what needs to be done to enhance productivity through improving the level of engagement.  Kabachnick’s book is well worth reading.