Remember back to when you showed your parents your report card. Did they ask you first to explain how you got the A in Math? Or did they ask you why you got the C in English? Chances are, it was the latter. But this is the wrong focus. Rather than fixing the weakness (the C in English), it is being reinforced.

Now translate this example to the business world. When employees are reviewed, does the boss expound on their strengths and successes? Usually not. They zero in on the weaknesses and harp about why they can’t conform to the “model” that every employee should follow. 

Traditional management systems encourage mediocrity in everything and excellence in nothing. Look at where employees shine — where they add the most value to the company. Encourage people to be weak in areas in which they are average — because no one can possibly be great at everything — and place the effort on developing their strengths further. If you can’t reassign the part of their job where they are weak, help them improve just enough so that it doesn’t get in the way of their strength. And remember: School is about exposure to everything while business is about success in something.

Source: Stop Worrying about Your Weaknesses

1. Understand that behind every decision lies a hidden agenda. Tap into this unspoken emotional motivation and you will have people saying yes.

2. Identify your audience’s wants, needs and/or values. Deep desires are fundamental to any business decision. The business issue and the hidden agenda are intertwined.

3. Connect yourself to the hidden agenda. You win the pitch when you link your abilities, values and ambition to your audience’s hidden agenda.

4. Deliver like a litigator. Create an exciting tale where your audience attains their deepest desire with good old-fashioned storytelling to convincingly convey your pitch.

Source: Win the Pitch: Tips from Mastercard’s “Priceless” Pitchman

1. Take good photos to show product details.

2. Think how your product descriptions may show up in search-engine results.

3. Change the layout every few weeks or months and see which gives the best results.

4. Set up a merchant account with a bank to link funds from the credit card company or a third-party processor like PayPal.

5. Make online shopping feel like an experience with proper packaging and gift wrap options.

6. Promote your online store heavily with social media.

Source: 6 Tips for Building a Web-Based Store

2001: The Internet has 500 million users.

2002: Mozilla 1.0, which will eventually evolve into Firefox, is released; Internet Explorer has a 95 percent share of the browser market.

2003: MySpace is launched.

2004: Google undergoes IPO via Dutch Auction format and Facebook is launched.

2005: YouTube.com and Google blog search launch.

2006: Twitter is founded as an R&D project.

2007: 1.1 billion people are using the Internet and women now outnumber men online; 120,000 new blogs are created globally every day.

2008: Over 162 million Top Level Domain Names (TLDs) were registered; Google Chrome is launched.

2009: The Internet now has 1.5 billion users and there are over 100 billion live web pages.

2010: Thanks to its streaming video offerings, Netflix stock soars to $180.27 a share.

2011: World IPv6 Day is celebrated, highlighting the depletion of IPv4 addresses..

In 2012 it’s predicted that more than 154 million buyers will be online this year. Plus, 88% of Internet users will browse or research products.

Source: A Look in the Rearview: How the Internet Has Changed Since 2001

1. Download the diagnostic tool at jimcollins.com, and do the exercises with your team.

2. Get the right people in the key seats. Collins observed that building a company is like driving a bus. You need a driver, but you also need the right people in all the key seats.

3. Have a brutal facts meeting once a quarter.  Do not express opinions or strategize, only discuss the brutal facts.

4. Set a 15 to 25-year big, hairy audacious goal (BHAG). It should be concrete enough and ambitious enough to guide your company’s progress for years.

5. Commit to a “20-mile march” that will bring you to your big hairy audacious goal. Companies that perform consistently do much better than those that do spectacularly one year and are feeble the next. The 20-mile march is a metaphor for the milestone that you can reach day-in and day-out.

6. Place at least one really big bet in the next three years. “Fire bullets to calibrate. Fire cannonballs to go big,” says Collins.

7. Practice productive paranoia. Make a plan that will allow you to go for an entire year with no revenues, and still survive.

8. Get a high return on your next luck event. Great and mediocre companies encounter the same amount of luck, good and bad. Capitalize on your good luck and turn your bad-luck events into a big part of what makes your company great.

9. Make a to-do list as well as a corresponding “stop-doing” list where for each item on your to-do list, you have an item that you will stop doing.

10. Commit to a set of core values that you will want to build your enterprise on, without changing them, for 100 years.

Source: Jim Collins: Good to Great in 10 Steps

Public clouds are owned and operated by a cloud service provider, and are open to any company that wants to subscribe. They are particularly well-suited to small companies with limited IT expertise and small IT budgets.

Private clouds are built and managed on a company’s own network by their internal IT staff. They are much more expensive than public clouds and take longer to implement. They do offer more privacy, greater control over data, and tighter security.

Hybrid clouds combine aspects of public and private clouds. They give small companies tighter security than a public cloud, but offer more flexibility at lower costs than a pure private cloud.

Source: What Type of Cloud is Right for your Small Company?

1. Make your subject line something that will prompt the recipient to open and follow through.

2. Word the problem/solution the way you think the decision maker would reason. 

3. Relate your email to the decision maker’s business values.  

4. Anticipate problems and objections and build your case accordingly.

5. Clinch the deal by asking for the decision to be made.

Source: Email Tips: 5 Ways to Get Action

Researchers have identified the predictable stages of creative thinking.

1. Saturation: Once the challenge has been defined, it is time for self-absorption of what is known about the challenge to date.

2. Incubation: This stage of creativity involves mulling over information, often unconsciously. Intense exercise is one of the best ways to access new ideas and solutions.

3. Illumination: When you give your left hemisphere a rest, you’re bound to have those “Ah-ha” moments, the third stage of creativity.  

4. Verification: In this final stage of creativity, the left hemisphere again takes over to challenge and test the breakthrough you’ve had.

Source: How to Think Creatively

1) Use multiple availability zones, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). Each zone runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure. If a disaster occurs, the impact to your business is significantly reduced.

2) Place workloads in multiple regions for extra security and protection.

3) Use more than one cloud provider, making sure that they don’t share the same data center resources.

4) Specify in service-level agreements (SLAs) the availability percentage as well as penalties in the case of a disruption.

5) Assess if your business is cloud appropriate. If your data and computing resources are critical, put steps in place to protect their availability.

Source: 5 Tips for Surviving a Cloud Outage

It’s been about a month now since Facebook rolled out its Timeline Layout for business pages. Are you using it to your business’ best advantage?

The cover photo can now be 851×351 pixels but cannot contain contact information, prices, or Like and Share features.

The About section has more prominence on the page and should be beefed up if you haven’t already done so.

Application boxes add interactivity to your page by letting visitors access apps you’ve installed. Four boxes are shown on the page, but the first one is always Photos. Visitors can click on the right down arrow to see additional boxes.

A new way to highlight a custom page, a sweepstakes, or a special offer is possible with the Pinning option. Select a post, hover over the top right, click the pencil icon, and select Pin to Top.

To include a link to your custom tab application, click the pencil icon to edit, and select Link to this Tab. The link appears in a dialog box, and you can copy and paste it into your Wall post. Wall posts can be made to appear full width by hovering over the top-right corner of the post and clicking the star icon.

Fans can now send a private message to your business via the Message button. The Activity Log lets you moderate, edit, highlight, and delete user posts on your page.

The new Milestone feature lets you add important business events to the timeline.

For Admins, there are five page management sections: Notifications, Messages, New Likes, Insights, and Page Tips. Notifications informs you when a visitor interacts with your page. Messages lets you manage user posts, and Page Tips rotates through a variety of help topics. New Likes shows recent likes to your page. Insights let you optimize your Page posts. You can see your weekly total reach, how many visitors are talking about your page, even how viral your page has become.

For more information, see How to Prepare Your Facebook Business Page for Timeline.