5 free online tools that you might actually find useful (you know, for business)

1.     Twitter

Common perception: 

It’s a way to tell people what you just ate for dinner

Newsflash: 

It’s a way to find out what your potential clients need right now

You don’t need to tweet anything yourself. It is unlikely that anyone in the world wants to know your every unedited thought. I wish this message would get through to athletes everywhere, who seem intent on Twitter-assisted career suicide by sharing every response to the boss/coach/owner’s latest statement without any pause for thought.

The key to Twitter is to follow and listen. Follow all of the customers you have and all of the customers you want. They are talking constantly on Twitter. At some point, a 15-year-old marketing consultant told them all they’d be bankrupt in 6 months if they didn’t start tweeting every day. And they listened. The result? Genuinely live information reaching the market faster than any corporate PR announcement or press release ever did. ‘ABC Ltd is pleased to announce Jane Smith as the company’s new head of engineering and construction jobs.’ This kind of information should be gold dust to your sales teams in staying ahead of the game.

2.  YouTube

Common perception:

A total distraction

Newsflash:

It’s the best training resource in the world

Yes, there are dogs in party hats and teenagers kamikaze stunts on skateboards. But there is a lot more besides. YouTube is to training what the Nintendo DS is to parenting. It may be a shortcut, and it can’t replace the real thing – but it’s extremely useful when you’re stretched.

YouTube contains videos from genuine experts on every subject from How to Input a Table of Contents in MS Word, through to explanations of the Liquid Natural Gas industry. Running a business in New Zealand and don’t know enough about doing business in China? How about an interview with the New Zealand Enterprise Commissioner & Consul General in Guangzhou? It’s called ‘Doing business in China.’

PowerPoints are good. Training sessions are great. But unless you’re going to commit resources to the design, production, execution and updating of these materials, you may find YouTube better value for money. Its available 24/7, anywhere in the world and can be immediately accessed. It’s also free.

3.   Trello

Common Perception: 

What’s Trello?

Newsflash:

It’s a life changer

If you haven’t discovered Trello yet, you might be one of a good number of people whose world it could change forever. Are you using MS Outlook to perfectly integrate all your action lists with your calendar and e-mails? No? Nor am I. If you’re one of the 0.1% who have actually mastered the full functionality of Outlook and found a way to make it practical and interactive across your team, congratulations. You may stop reading and go for some frozen yoghurt from that stall you like in the mall. 

For everyone else, there is Trello. Trello is an online system of post-it notes on the wall. Like the post-it notes on your desk and computer, you can move them around, add a new one easily and take down the ones you don’t need. Unlike the post-it notes, you can share them with others across the web, attach notes to other people, organize them into easy lists and protect their security. You can change their color coding, keep them in various different projects, and get updates every time someone adds or subtracts anything. Most importantly it works because it’s like your post-it notes. It’s simple and visual for the non-superheroes amongst us who just don’t want to forget anything.

4.     Skype

Common Perception: 

It’s an instant messenger where my staff can distract each other all day, or avoid picking up the phone for tricky stuff

Newsflash:

It’s free international video conferencing.  

I talk to my team almost every day using this tool. I feel like I’m in the room with them. This is helpful, because with Talascend’s global footprint and our global engineering staffing framework – I’m not often actually in the room with them. This tool has changed the way we operate. Get a $30 web cam, click call and start enjoying the instant benefits of a tool that used to cost high-end big businesses a fortune. And on the weekend, you can call your mom and make her day.

 5.    Join.Me

Common Perception:

GoToMeeting and WebEx are the only solutions

Newsflash:

No they’re not

Join.Me requires no permanent downloads, is available immediately and is completely free. All you need is a phone (or better still Skype) and you can share your screen (and control of your screen) with anyone you like in a secure and simple environment. No planning required, just a link you cut and paste in seconds. Sometimes you just need to see what your colleague is talking about. Join.Me lets you do that.

So there it is – five tools that can make a genuine contribution to your business. Yes, there are down sides to each of them. But one of the best pieces of advice I was given when I wanted to ban a distractive tool from a team I was running was this – you have to manage the people, not throw away the tool. If your systems are blocking any of these tools – I understand why, but I’d urge you to find another means to manage their use that doesn’t involve dispensing with the real benefits of the technology.

I’d also urge you to make sure your perception of every available tool is accurate. You could be missing some major opportunities to streamline the way you work, whether it’s just your own workload you’re balancing, or if you’re managing a team, a region or an entire business. 



Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering jobs, staffing and marketing in the technical sector.

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Beware the tipping point when an honest mistake becomes a dishonest cover up

Businesses can be a lot like soap operas in one important respect – a secret never stays secret forever. It’s only ever waiting in the background today to become tomorrow’s main plot line.

One of the most common forms of secrecy in the modern workplace is the concealing of mistakes – it is this small and unnecessary crime that results in more dismissals than any other kind of misconduct. People make mistakes; it’s a natural part of being human. Immediate acknowledgement, combined with ideas for fixing the problem, will always be the best course. 

Everyone makes mistakes; people respect colleagues who admit to it and get to work on making it right. Whatever the situation, we are usually presented with a fork in the road, where the obvious need to face the music conflicts with the immediate ability to suppress the problem.

There is a crucial tipping point when honesty becomes dishonesty.

In this instant, if you choose the wrong path, your integrity flies out the window along with most of your chances of walking back your mistake. There’s always a point where you get to make a call on what you’re going to do:  either pull over, admit you've got a flat tire and ask for help; or keep driving, hoping nobody notices and guaranteeing reduced performance and damage to the car. You won’t be able to drive forever, but every yard you drive is foolishness, and you’re undermining your credibility every minute. 

Long ago, at another company in the UK, a colleague of mine chose the wrong path. In a moment of carelessness, an otherwise capable and valued employee, failed to inform his customer about an additional cost for which they would be liable under the terms of the contract they were signing. He missed it; He just got the math wrong on a busy day - something to do with the overheads on raw materials. Later on, when the customer good naturedly refused to pay the cost, assuming it was an invoicing mistake, my colleague agreed and just assumed on a multi-billion dollar project that the mistake would be lost. The contract  was immediately rendered unprofitable. In a moment of foolishness, my colleague buried the mistake. He was trusted, He owned all contact with the customer – who remained happy with arrangements, ignorant of the whole problem which they assumed to be an error made in good faith on the first invoice. He was able to hide the mistake for weeks.  Nobody noticed until further down the line that the arrangement was actually burning money.

At that point, the right questions were asked and the details emerged. Angry exchanges, apologies and packed boxes followed. And why? Because He didn't walk into the Project Director’s office five minutes after realizing the mistake, face the embarrassing truth, and get the support he needed to fix the problem – which in this instance would almost certainly have been a frank conversation between his boss and the customer, a compromise, and a reduced - but still profitable - margin.  No big deal. All will be forgiven within a week, maybe there’ll be some closer oversight next time.

We write frequently about how seemingly trivial events can dramatically affect your career.  These stories include careless texting mistakes that corrupt vital data security, career moves that seem to happen by accident, and here, the little white lie of omission.

The last few years have provided no end of evidence to support the notion that fessing up now will save a lot more trouble later. It is true on a corporate level; it’s true on a personal level. The tangled web begins with a very simple individual decision, taken at the tipping point where incompetence becomes malice. It ends with a global financial crisis, a Ponzi scheme, the collapse of a great career, or more likely – just the loss of a job.

Disgraced Olympic sprinter Marion Jones was shown a small vile of liquid and asked if she had ever seen it before. This was her tipping point. The truth would have been painful, but a lot less painful than the eventual prison term, which resulted entirely from her lie to federal investigators in answer to that very specific question. The truth – as she must have known then in her heart of hearts, was coming out all the same.

Ironically, it is Lance Armstrong who appears to have made a far more sensible decision. Perhaps, having seen the writing on the wall, he chose a path that will leave whatever he has done in the realm of athletics, where Marion Jones must surely wish she had left hers. The criminal investigation into Armstrong remains closed.

Ultimately, the question that fascinates a great many people when it comes to the cyclist is simply this: How could he possibly have thought that those hidden things would remain hidden? If the conspiracy touches as many people as the USADA’s 200 page report claims, it’s incredible to believe that anyone involved in the alleged activities could possibly have thought they would remain secret.  

The only way three people can keep a secret, says the Chinese proverb, is if two of them are dead.  When the time comes for you to face that fork in the road, plan on a full disclosure approach. Take responsibility; start moving past it there and then.

The chances are you’ll be disclosing everything in the end anyway, but from a very different position.

Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering jobs, staffing and marketing in the technical sector.

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Your career is an accident. Don't make a plan, get a helmet.

We are driving our careers. That’s what we are told. We are sitting behind the wheel, looking at the road ahead, changing gear when we want to, making decisions about how fast we want to go and ultimately which direction we take. Mirror. Signal. Maneuver.

It’s a comforting metaphor. It’s a pity it’s bull.

So often, the mistake we make as professionals is to look back on our career path and see a logical progression. It’s easy to do this when you look back on things in retrospect. It’s easy to believe that this led to that, which led to the other and so on.

But this is all post hoc ergo procter hoc. Seeing a thing as the result of something else, simply because one followed the other.

Let’s call me John Q. I was working as an assistant manager at Circuit City from 2005-2007. I was made the manager in 2007 and held the position for two years before moving to join Best Buy as the regional sales manager. Obviously I’ve done well for myself; my career shows a clear progression. A consistent, linear progression from junior to senior, from low wage to middle management.

Well done me.

I’m leaving some things out of the story though, things that have been edited out of my career history. These were random catalytic events that shaped the whole thing. Because they’re not on my resume, they’re not part of the accepted narrative of my career – but they change everything.

Firstly, I became assistant manager at Circuit City almost against my will. I was young and ideological. I’d only taken the gig so I could get the rent paid while I was trying to get a job in music. I reluctantly accepted the extra responsibility for an extra five bucks an hour. It wasn’t a career decision. Nor was it a career decision a couple of years later, when the manager I worked for suffered a heart attack and retired early, effectively disappearing in a puff of smoke on a Tuesday morning leaving me to take over. I took the job and I did it well, I expected to retain the management job for a few more years. But then, as we all know only too well, Circuit City went to the wall. Suddenly facing the prospect of redundancy, I was forced to put myself out there again, talk to a recruitment company and put my resume online. The result was a great offer from rival Best Buy, to effectively take the level above the one I was working in. I wound up with 20% more money and some stock. It turned out to be a great thing for me. ‘Turned out.’

Now my sensible linear career progression looks like what it really was – a series of random and uncontrollable events that bounced me around with no care for my plans.

Because the truth is that there is no such thing as career management. There is no such thing as ‘planning your career.’ From the time you first walked into the career councilor’s office at school and were told you should be a chef because you admitted to being slightly hungry, through to this morning when you surfed the internet for jobs for ten minutes because one of your colleagues annoyed you. Your vague intent to push your career in the right direction combined with your occasional decision to act when you were unhappy or undervalued, do not constitute a career plan.

Your list of companies you would most like to work for and your sense of what job title you probably ought to have, and in what time frame, are worth nothing to you.

We spend too much time trying to shape our careers and not enough time trying to create the rounded professional identity that will increase our chances of making progress when the inevitable random catalyst presents itself.

Instead of sucking up to your boss, make an effort to be respected by everyone around you. When her kayaking vacation down the Nile ends in tragedy, it will be your peers and reports who are asked what they think of you as a manager, not her.

Instead of surfing for jobs and blasting out your resume, build a strong relationship with a good recruiter. They can be your eyes and ears while you focus on your job.

Instead of chasing the money, chase responsibility. The more you take on, the more qualified you become for more advanced jobs and ultimately more money. Especially if nobody sees the vacancy coming.

You can’t know what will happen, and you can’t control when or where fate will strike. But you can create a solid foundation that will see you right no matter what happens.

Strategy is not about predicting the future, it’s about having a sensible framework around you so that you can respond to anything. Experiences, references, training, qualifications – there’s a reason these things tend to be headings on the resume – it’s because they’re things you actually need. Take these things off the resume, and think of them as real things that you arm yourself with to create a promotable, hirable human being, it won’t be long before you’re adding another level of advancement – whatever it is you want.

Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering jobs, staffing and marketing in the technical sector.