4 Keys To Google's Success

This is an article reviews on the key success of Google's company, a No.1 company in managing informations for people worldwide. I hope that it can gives us some info on how to succeed :

"I heard David Drummond, Google's General Counsel, speak at Stanford Law School yesterday. Drummond was ostensibly there to talk about some of the legal issues facing Google. He did talk a bit about the difficulty of complying with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in an environment where content owners seek to enforce their rights through Google rather than directly with the infringing sites. He also addressed questions from the audience about the subjective nature of Google's page rankings when it determines that a website has attempted to manipulate page rankings. But Drummond spent the better part of his time talking about what has made Google successful.

Drummond pointed to 4 factors as the key to Google's success:

1. Technology. Along with its innovative approach to page ranking, Google is a purpose-built hardware company, building all its own servers from components it buys directly for their manufacturers. According to Drummond, Google now operates the world's largest distributed computer system. 
2. Business Model Innovation. By perfecting the nature of targeted ads, Google not only has created a highly effective revenue generator, it has produced what it hopes to be a better experience for its users. It is Google's goal to make their targeted ads at least as relevant and useful to users as the search results themselves.
3. Brand. According to Drummond, a European study recently determined Google to be the number one most recognized worldwide brand. Indeed, Google has become a verb ("I can't wait to get home and Google him") which poses real challenges to a company seeking to protect the strength of its mark.
4. Focus On The User Experience. Product decisions at Google are driven by optimizing for the user experience first and for revenue second. The folks at Google firmly believe that the better the user experience, the more easily money will follow.

I believe that all of these are important factors in developing any great technology company. Powerful customer-focused technology with an eye towards making money -- that's pretty much the formula. Even brand, which can be prohibitively expensive to develop ahead of customer traction, will likely follow product leadership. Google's success isn't rocket science, it's just good old fashion company building. Good for them for the discipline. It's an excellent model to follow."

Training Need Analysis

Training Needs Analysis Purpose

A Training Needs Analysis (TNA) is used to assess an organization’s training needs. The root of the TNA is the gap analysis. This is an assessment of the gap between the knowledge, skills and attitudes that the people in the organization currently possess and the knowledge, skills and attitudes that they require to meet the organization’s objectives.

The training needs assessment is best conducted up front, before training solutions are budgeted, designed and delivered. The output of the needs analysis will be a document that specifies why, what, who, when, where and how. More specifically, the document will need to answer these questions:

• why do people need the training?
• what skills need imparting?
• who needs the training?
• when will they need the new skills?
• where may the training be conducted? and
• how may the new skills be imparted?

There are so many ways for conducting a Training Needs Analysis, depending on your situation. One size does not fit all. Is the purpose of the needs assessment to:

• lead in to a design of a specific purpose improvement initiative (e.g., customer complaint reduction)
• enable the design of the organization’s training calendar
• identify training and development needs of individual staff during the performance appraisal cycle
… and so on and so on.

In clarifying the purpose of the TNA, consider the scope of the TNA. Is it to determine training needs:

• at the organization level?
• at the project level for a specific project? or
• at the department level for specific employees?

Your answer to these questions will dictate:

• who will conduct the TNA
• how the TNA will be conducted, and
• what data sources will be used

Training Needs Analysis Method

Below are three scenarios in which you may find yourself wanting to conduct a Training Needs Analysis. This is not an exhaustive treatment, however, it will give you some tips on what to do.

Employee Performance Appraisal

In many organizations, each employee’s manager discusses training and development needs during the final part of the performance appraisal discussion. This method suits where training needs are highly varied amongst individual employees. Typically, the manager constructs an employee Performance Development Plan in collaboration with the employee being appraised. The Plan takes into consideration:

• the organization's strategies and plans
• agreed employee goals and targets
• the employee’s performance results
• the employee’s role description
• feedback from internal/external customers and stakeholders, and
• the employee’s stated career aspirations

The employee’s completed Performance Development Plan should document the area that requires improvement, the actual development activity, resource requirements, expected outcomes and an agreed time frame in which the development outcome will be achieved.

Check out our Training Management Template Pack for a customizable Performance Development Plan and instructions for use.

You may find some commonality amongst individual training and development needs identified in the various performance appraisals. In this case, it may pay the organization to review and classify each of the needs and convert them into appropriate training courses (or other interventions). The next step is to prioritize their importance and aggregate the results so that you end up with a list of courses and participant numbers against each. Then negotiate a delivery schedule that fits in with managers/supervisors and employees whilst keeping an eye on your budget.

Improvement Project

Most, if not all, improvement projects have some employee training associated with them. Examples of improvement projects include planned and structured attempts to reduce the incidence of product defects, increase sales volume and decrease the number of customer complaints. Here, the Training Needs Analysis begins by clarifying the measurable organizational improvement targets and the employee behaviors required to meet these targets. For example, the organization might set a target of a 50 percent reduction in customer complaints by the end of the year. Employee behaviors required to achieve this target might be:

• empathetic listening to customer complaints
• regular follow up of complaint resolution
... and so on.

To get to this point, though, the cause of the underperformance needs to be determined through a series of structured questions. If there is no one else to perform this initial diagnosis, you as the training professional may be called upon to do this job. A performance consulting approach can help you here. With this approach, the person doing the diagnosis first asks managers to identify their problems in concrete terms. Next, possible causes and solutions are discussed and training solutions identified, where appropriate.

To do this successfully, the performance consultant needs to be well-versed in process improvement methods and employee motivation theory and practice. For small projects, you can use a simple employee performance flow chart in working with managers to help identify the cause of performance deficiencies.

Where training is identified as an appropriate solution or as part of the solution, we then recommend that you work through a training needs analysis questionnaire with the appropriate stakeholders. This will give you the information you need to move to the training program design phase.

An effective training needs analysis questionnaire worksheet will cover at least the following areas:

1.  TRAINING NEEDS ANALYSIS CONTEXT Project Sponsor Reason for Request Participant Roles Organizational Objectives Training Program Objectives 2.  TARGET POPULATION No. of Participants Location Department Education/Experience Background Current Job Experience Current Performance vs Expected Performance Language/Cultural Differences Anticipated Attitudes 3.  TASK DESCRIPTION Task Description Frequency Proficiency Performance Criteria Conditions Underpinning Knowledge

The results from these structured interviews are then written up in a formal document, along with the answers to the other questions raised above. Check out our Training Projects Template Packfor an example of a customizable training needs analysis template that you can download today. The results of the TNA are then fed into the next phase of the instructional systems design life cycle; the high-level design of the training program.

Following all of the above is of course more time consuming than getting a simple wish-list from managers and delivering a smorgasbord of training courses. However, by using a structured approach, you will avoid the 80 percent wastage of resources that many companies experience in delivering programs that don’t truly fit their needs.

Constructing a Training Calendar

When constructing an annual training calendar, be wary of simply asking managers what training they want delivered. Assessing training needs this way, you will most probably get a wish list with little connection to the real needs of the organization. When the time comes and they and their workers are pressed for time, you may find it difficult to fill seats. Training is expensive, and there is no better method for wasting your scare training dollars.

Why is this so? We find that many managers are not skilled in identifying which of their problems can be solved by training and which cannot. For a training calendar to be effective, it needs to be tailored for your specific organization’s real needs. Ask your managers what training they need. However, make sure you engage them in constructive dialog about what their real problems are and which of them can realistically be addressed through training. If the performance shortfall is a one-off problem, such as an increasing number of customer complaints, it may be more effective and cost efficient to address the issue on an improvement project basis.

Training calendars are best suited to repeatable and regular demand, such as refresher skills training for infrequently performed technical tasks and for new recruits joining the organization. In these cases, review what training is required on a regular basis and look at what new recruits need to be proficient at soon after they join your organization. Generally speaking, consult with your management team by checking off which of the following areas require inclusion in your training calendar:

• management, leadership and supervision skills
• soft skills, such as communication and conflict resolution
• environment, health and safety
• human resource processes, such as performance management
• business skills, such as strategy, planning and process improvement
• technical line and staff skills such as telephone etiquette and inventory management

In constructing your training calendar, we suggest you also consider looking at one or more of the data sources listed in the next section. Once you have composed your list of courses, assess demand for each course and the required frequency, all the while, keeping an eye on your budget. With a limited budget, we suggest you get your management team to help you assess priorities.

Data Sources

In conducting your training needs analysis, you may have a variety of data sources available to you. Which data sources you use will depend on a number of factors. These factors include:

• the amount of time you have available
• the human resources you have available
• the level of accuracy you require
• the reliability of each data source
• the accessibility of each data source

The data sources that you have available may include:

• interviews/surveys with supervisors/managers
• interviews/surveys with employees
• employee performance appraisal documents
• organization’s strategic planning documents
• organization/department operational plans
• organization/department key performance indicators
• customer complaints
• critical incidents
• product/service quality data

For example, if you are considering providing training in project management to project managers, you may want to interview the prospective participants, the project managers, and their managers on what problems they are facing. It may also pay to review planning and procedural documents to ascertain what project management methodology and tools your organization is using, or is planning on using.

Data sources that may show light on where the training needs to focus the most are project performance data and post-implementation reviews. Which sources you will actually use and how much time and effort you expend on each will depend on your particular circumstances. Needless to say, there is no magic formula and you will need to exercise a fair amount of judgment in most cases.

Although there are no hard and fast rules in conducting a Training Needs Analysis, we have outlined above some general guidelines and helpful hints. We can also help you with some practical TNA tools, such as a training needs analysis questionnaire and training needs analysis spreadsheet, in our customizable template packs.

Source/ref: http://www.businessperform.com/workplace-training/training_needs_analysis.html

The power of "ENTREPRENEURIAL skills" in today's business world

Have you ever compared yourself with entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Henry Ford, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs or Larry Page? What entrepreneurial skills do these great entrepreneurs possess that you don't? How did Mark Zuckerberg attain a net worth of $6billion in 2010 while commanding a network of over 100 million users on Facebook? How did Aliko Dangote emerge the richest black man in the world? What secrets or entrepreneurial skills are needed to build a successful from scratch? If the answers to these questions interest you, please read on.

                "I wanted to be an editor or journalist. I wasn't really interested in becoming an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going." – Richard Branson

I hope you know that to be a successful footballer, you must possess the necessary skills of a footballer. The same goes for every other profession including entrepreneurship. In this article, I will be tearing apart, the important entrepreneurial skills that set apart; the great entrepreneurs from others. If building a business is your concern, then you should make the acquisition of these entrepreneurial skills a priority.

                "Skills make you rich, not theories." Rich Dad

Without beating about the bush, below are five important entrepreneurial skills you must develop to build a successful business from scratch.

Five Entrepreneurial Skills You Need, To Build a Successful Business!!

1.            Personal Skills

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and only five Minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you will do things differently." – Warren Buffett

The first skill you must develop as an entrepreneur is your personal skill. Now what do I mean by personal skills? Personal skills are simply those skills that are attached to your personality, more like habits. They are the characters possessed by successful entrepreneurs. For instance; if you are a professional proofreader, then it's important you develop a keen eye for spotting errors.

                "Great men are ordinary men with extra ordinary determination." – Abraham Lincoln

When I talk about developing your personal skill with respect to building a business, I am talking about developing your entrepreneurial mindset. You have to be in the right mindset before ever starting a business. Being in the right mindset entails you have abandoned the get rich quick mentality and above all, you must have integrity.

                “The most important thing in your business relationships is your reputation for honesty. If you can genuinely and sincerely fake honesty, you will be a success. Never doubt it.” – The Mafia Manager

If you carefully study the lives of successful entrepreneurs, you will observe they are courageous, passionate about their entrepreneurial calling and most of all, they think outside the box.

                "Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared, but only men of character are trusted." – Arthur Friedman

                "Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak, courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen." – Winston Churchill

To develop these personal skills, I will recommend you read the 15 Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs and How to develop yours and the 12 Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs. These articles are bound to set your entrepreneurial fire blazing.

2.            Communication skill

                "The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth." – George Jean Natha

The next important entrepreneurial skill you need to develop is communication skill. A famous speaker once said that "the fact that you are talking doesn't mean someone is listening." I don't know who made this statement but I know there is an atom of truth in it.

               

 "Your words have the power to start or quench passion.” – John Mason

To be a successful business owner, you must be a powerful communicator. Look at Bill Gates; whenever he speaks, people listen with rapt attention. Steve Jobs successfully launched the IPod and IPad because he was a powerful communicator. Whenever Warren Buffett gives a directive or recommendation, people act.

                "If the customer says they are not interested, it means you are not interesting." – Jeffrey Citomer

Investors scramble for Buffett's annual letter to his CEOs. Why? They do so because Warren Buffet has taken time to perfect his communication skill. Now how do you develop this communication skill? Warren Buffett; the billionaire investor once confessed in an interview that he took a public speaking course at Dale Carnegie’s academy to improve his communication skill. So to get started, I'll suggest you read How to Improve Your Communication Skill or better still; attend a seminar on public speaking.

                "The more I risk being rejected, the better my chances are of being accepted." – Rich Dad

3.            Negotiation skill

In the course of building a business, you are bound to negotiate deals. You negotiate with customers and suppliers over goods and services offered. You negotiate with bankers over bank loans terms and conditions, just as you negotiate with investors over equity and stakes.

                "If you cannot negotiate, you will end up getting good deals at exorbitant prices or worse still, you will get nothing." – Ajaero Tony Martins

Bill Gates became the richest man in the world in his thirties because he strategically negotiated a deal with IBM in his early 20s. If Bill Gates lacked persuasion skills, his name may not have been imprinted in the sands of time. So if you cannot negotiate, if you lack persuasion skills; building a business may just be a dream to you. Negotiation or persuasion is an art that can be learned, all you have to do is to devote your time to learning it and you will become a master at it.

4.            Leadership skill

                "In business, leadership skill is not an option. It's a necessity." – Rich Dad

Business is all about your relationship with people. It entails uniting people with different backgrounds, beliefs and skills to a common cause. It entails forging people with different skills and ideologies into a business team.

                "Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people." – John D. Rockefeller

I have never seen a great business without a great leader at the helm of affairs. Building a successful business therefore requires you become an excellent business leader. Take a look at Bill Gates, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Aliko Dangote, Steve Jobs and so many others. These men are great leaders in their respective businesses.

                "Business is not just doing deals; business is having great products, doing great engineering and providing tremendous service to customers. Finally, business is a cobweb of human relationship." – Henry Ross Perot

Successful entrepreneurs were not born business leaders; they were made. They became business great leaders because they desired it; they humbled themselves and learned the art and science of leadership. Today, they are leaders in their game with a huge number of followers.

                "Everyone has an invisible sign hanging from their neck saying, 'make me feel important.' Never forget this message when working with people." – Mary Kay Ash

It’s within you reach to become a good corporate leader or but you must first develop the first three entrepreneurial skills listed above which are: personal skill, communication skill and negotiation skill.

This is necessary because these three skills are vital components of effective corporate leaders.

                "The ability to deal with people is as purchasable as a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other thing under the sun." – John D. Rockefeller

5.            Sales skill

                "If you cannot sell, you will be sold." – Ajaero Tony Martins

This is perhaps, the most important entrepreneurial skill of all. I decided to list it last so that I can explain its details in full. The reason I regard this as the most important is because I have never seen a business that doesn't sell one thing or the other. If you are not selling tangible items, then you are probably selling intangible items such as services.

                "A man's success in business today turns upon his power of getting people to believe he has something they want." – Gerland Stanley

I regard sales skill as the most important because life is all about selling. To get a good job, you must sell yourself to your employers. Even before you get married, you must sell yourself to your spouse, convincing him/her that you are the best partner. Success in business is also all about selling; you must first sell yourself to your investors, next to your suppliers, your business team and employees and then to your customers.

                "The best way to turn a woman's head is to tell her she has a beautiful profile." – Sacha Guitry

Many people shy away from selling because they are afraid of rejection. Bill Gates sold himself to IBM before he became a billionaire. Steve Jobs personally sold his products such as the IPad in the media. Thomas Edison and Ray Kroc started as salesmen; I am also in the business of selling. The moment I stop selling; I will cease to be an entrepreneur. So my last note to you today is this "start selling something."

                "The ability to sell is the number one skill in business. If you cannot sell, don't bother thinking about becoming a business owner." – Rich Dad

In conclusion, I want you to go over the five entrepreneurial skills again and decide which one is missing in your life. As a last note, I leave you with this quote;

                "Skills make you rich, not theories." – Rich Dad

What makes a successful "ENTREPRENEUR"?

More answers by Brad Sugars

 

That's a pretty open-ended question, but there are some general principles I can outline for you. First, you need a good vision for what you ultimately want your business to be, and that requires a certain amount of specificity and detail.

It's important to ask yourself these questions:

How big do you want your business to be, in terms of team, revenues and profits?
Does the industry or category you are entering support that vision?
Are you truly passionate and committed to your vision? Are you willing to do whatever it takes to achieve it?

Next, you need a product or service that people want to buy, and those people need to have the resources to actually buy it. Finally, you need to know the numbers for your venture.

How long will it take you to break-even?
How long before you start generating positive cash flow? Profit?
Do you have a systemized way to generate qualified leads?
How do you plan to get repeat business?
Do you know the pitfalls of discounting?
What's the "value" of added-value?
Are you willing to learn and be coached by people who actually know what they are doing in business, versus what you think you know about business?

Remember, more businesses fail from a lack of knowledge than a lack of capital. You can always make up for a lack of money with a good strategy, creative cashflow plans or good relationships with your vendors, suppliers and customers. But you can't make up for the lack of knowing how to make those things work to your advantage.

So be open to new ideas, work with a mentor or a coach and make sure the market is both willing and able to buy what you are selling. From there, it's just a matter of working toward your vision and your goals -- and having some fun along the way.

 

Brad Sugars is the founder of ActionCOACH, the world's number one business coaching firm. As a world-renowned entrepreneur, author and Business Coach, he has helped more than a million clients around the world find business and personal success. Sugars has owned and operated more than two dozen companies including his main company, ActionCOACH, which has nearly 1,000 offices in 26 countries.

 

Resources: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ask/answer22199.html