A Note From The President

Avil Beckford, President

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about living a fulfilled life, and discovering and rediscovering my passions. I have been asking myself if I really enjoy what I do for a living, and if I didn't get paid for it, would I still do it. Am I the person that I was meant to be? To help me find the answers that I seek, I often consult books because I enjoy reading.

So what have I been reading? The Angel Inside, the book I reviewed this month, is one of the books I read. Others include The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz, The New Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwelll Maltz and the Twelve Pillars by Jim Rohn and Chris Widener.

Have you taken the time to ask yourself the tough questions? Are you living a fulfilled life? Does what give you joy, aligned with what you do for a living? Are you the person that you were meant to be?

Book Review

Review of The Angel Inside: Michelangelo, Il Gigante, and Creating a life of Power and Beauty by Chris Widener

The Angel Inside is a fun, yet thoughtful book that you can read in about an hour. This book is in the form of a fable, which makes it very easy to read. While reading The Angel Inside, I was processing the information presented and looking at ways to relate it to my life. The book is about finding that person of power and beauty, which is within every one of us.

The book starts off with a very disillusioned 30-year old Tom Cook, who travels from the US to Europe to find himself - to look for a new direction for his life. Back in the US, Tom was living an unfulfilled life. He was working in a job which he hated, trying to make his father proud of him. He was desperately trying to please his father.

The day before his return to the US, he is sitting on a bench in Florence feeling forlorned because he hasn't found what he was searching for. A stranger, who looks to be in his seventies, and much later revealed as Mr. Bounarroti, enters his life and changes it forever. This stranger parachutes into Tom's life and uses sculpting and Michelangelo's David - Il Gigante to teach him lessons in life and help him to find his way.

The stranger takes Tom to the Galleria dell' Accademia to view Michelangelo's sculpture of David. Tom learns the following life lessons:

1. Find the angel inside you
2. Follow your own passion
3. Be confident in your strength
4. Pay attention to details, you'll discover beauty
5. Your hands can create what your mind conceives
6. Plan and prepare
7. Every accomplishment starts with one swift action
8. Embrace the stages of chipping, sculpting, sanding and polishing
9. Be content because success sometimes takes years
10. No one starts with the Sistine Chapel (Small successes lead to greater successes

Chris Widener uses sculpting as a metaphor for life in his fable. To expand on lesson eight, first, you have to chip away or get rid of what doesn't work in your life. Second you have to sculpt or mold your life the way you want it to be. Third, adversity and negative circumstances often sand away the rough spots in our lives, which strengthen us and allow us to grow. And fourth, polishing allows our power and beauty to shine through.

The stranger instructs Tom and tells him "The tools of a sculptor are few, but the tools for sculpting a life are many. We are a product of the things that we allow to shape and influence our lives. Everything that we interact with will shape and mold whom we become. This includes both what we choose to involve ourselves with as well as what we choose to not involve ourselves with… Our business associates and our friends are people who we can choose at will. We should choose these people wisely for what they will help us become."

Five Great Ideas

1. People often have so much invested in what they are currently doing that they cannot start to live and fulfill their dreams
2. Fear often prevents us from taking the first step
3. Books give us the ability to converse with the author
4. Have a network of people around us who act as a springboard to a better life
5. Most people cannot create or accomplish great work that's lasting until they have gone through the process of growing and learning from their experience
   

I recommend The Angel Inside.

February's Book List

The Angel Inside: Michelangelo, Il Gigante, and Creating a life of Power and Beauty by Chris Widener

Survey Results

According to Liberum Research, a consulting company that tracks and assesses management change at more than 4,500 publicly traded companies in North America:

• There were 291 CEO changes and 19 CMO changes during January 2006 at publicly traded North American companies.
• By comparison, Liberum reported 172 CEO changes and five CMO changes in January 2005.
• Changes include resignations, terminations, departures for other reasons, new hires and internal moves
• Most of the changes were in Drugs/Biotech, Business Services, Banking, and Media
  
  

Source: (Kate Maddox, "C-suite sees flurry of changes," BtoB The Magazine for Marketing Strategists, February 13, 2006, http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=27062)

How Did They Do That?

Jacoline Loewen, Partner, Loewen & Partners Corporate Services Inc. http://www.loewenpartners.com

Challenge: One of my biggest challenges is trying to manage different types of personalities. Managing different personalities when they are your clients' is very different from managing different personalities within your company where you're trying to get people to do things.

I had a very bright employee who didn't like to have anything planned or anything put on paper. I valued her, she is very hardworking and she is very self-directed and gets her projects done. So, the matter was how to get her to buy into the changes that were taking place in the organization. We were going through a lot of changes. She had to change. We went through a period of hyper-growth, which meant that we had to move offices, and our clients were suddenly a lot more sophisticated - our clients were a lot bigger. We knew that we had to become a lot more streamlined in what we do because we couldn't all be in the same office and just be overhearing each other's conversation.

Her and a group of employees had resisted putting strategy on paper, or even discussing strategy because it was seen to be too management "consultantish" and not practical.

Solution: I decided to have Monday morning meetings, which was done grudgingly. I got her to be in charge of the Monday meetings and asked her, on Fridays to collect from everyone what their three priorities would be for the upcoming week. It was a very small step, but it was quite something to get everyone to tell you what their priorities for the following week would be. At first, she wasn't very excited, but after a couple of weeks she found out that she could ask the CEO and the Chairman of the company for their three priorities, and she would quite gleefully announce at the Monday morning meeting that she didn't have the Chairman's priority for that week, but hers was in, and everyone else's were in. Essentially she was given championship - she was given power. Once she started to run the agenda for the meetings, she saw the rationale for planning a week ahead and she could see how valuable the process was because everyone started to realize that the CEO's priorities was very different from theirs. They started to wonder what should my priorities be.

People also started to dialogue to determine what the team was trying to achieve. A simple tool opened up dialogue about the 6- month, 1- year, and 5-year plan. The employees then requested a strategy meeting once a month. And now we have lunch brought in and we sit down with a strategy document, which they now read, which before they didn't. And, now we discuss whatever they want to discuss and they all bring in articles. It helps us to loosen up. It also helped us move to a more structured approach to business.

Lessons Learned

1. It's easy for me to think on a 9-lane highway. I think across a broad range and I think long-term. I had to bring it down to a very simple level to start getting the strategic thinking into the company. I had to start with the first brick in the foundation and learn to be satisfied because normally I want the whole house built right away
2. I had to also learn to take that first brick and hand it over to the most disgruntled person to give her power, and in fact she was someone that I would have fired and now she is one of the most valuable person in the company
3. Being simple is very powerful
   

What Can Ambeck Do For You:

Ambeck Enterprise provides diverse business research and analysis services to senior executives, through the relevant distillation of diverse facts and data.

Information To Support Your Needs

The president of the Canadian headquarters of a multinational organization who was asked to present at a conference, required an urgent briefing on the topic of succession planning. Ambeck Enterprise:

• Conducted research on succession planning using a variety of sources (both commercial and free)
• Interviewed experts in the field to get the latest information
• Decided which information would have the greatest impact at the conference
• Developed a document with trends, statistics and models

Results

Using Ambeck’s final document, the president was able to deliver a presentation with impact and credibility.

Formula For Success

Jacoline Loewen, Loewen & Partners Corporate Services Inc.

You have to have a sense of humour and grit. Grit is the ability to keep going. When you run your own business you have to keep putting one step in front of the other, and do all the small bits of your business model, and then surprisingly, you really do win the large contracts. It's quite astonishing.

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