Wednesday, April 22, 2015

The new world of weed

My new book post on s+b is up:

Welcome to the Marijuana Economy

 
As a child of the 1960s, I can’t resist reviewing Big Weed: An Entrepreneur’s High-Stakes Adventures in the Budding Legal Marijuana Business. But I won’t stoop to snickering references to nickel bags and Cheech and Chong bits that are as passé (and culturally obsolete) as my youth. Instead, I’ll let Hageseth pick up the slack for me.

“I was baked off my ass,” recalls the self-styled “ganjaprenuer” of the time he worked his company’s booth at the 2012 High Times Medical Cannabis Cup in Denver. “Seriously, I’ve never been so high in my entire life. At one point I thought I was hallucinating.”

That’s not something that I ever imagined I’d hear a CEO say (let alone commit to print). But from Hageseth, the founder of Colorado-based Green Man Cannabis, it’s more like smart marketing than a stoner’s sketchy memories. Hageseth is on a brand-building mission that he compares to those of Ben & Jerry’s and Starbucks — two brands that got their start as alternative/counterculture businesses and have since become mainstream icons: “I wanted to win the minds, then the hearts, and finally the wallets of marijuana product and lifestyle consumers and become the most recognized brand of legal marijuana in the world.”

A couple of decades ago, such a business plan would have been written off as, um, a pipe dream. But according to Hageseth, business is booming at Green Man. The company grossed US$300,000 in 2009, the year he started it as a grower of medical marijuana. The business grew nicely, but really took off when the recreational use of marijuana became legal in Colorado in January 2014. Last year, the company grossed $4 million, mainly from two retail outlets in Denver — one of which is across the street from a Whole Foods Market. And after the Green Man Cannabis Ranch & Amphitheater, the first-ever “weedery” (think winery for weed), slated to open in the fall of 2015, has been up and running for a year, Hageseth says annual revenue will jump to $97 million.

Big Weed is an entertaining story of entrepreneurship with all the usual — and some markedly unusual — challenges. Hageseth’s company has the same talent woes as other startups: Green Man almost crashes on takeoff because he hires a master grower via Craigslist (where else?) who can’t quite comprehend the differences between growing marijuana illegally in a basement and growing it legally at scale in a 5,000-square-foot warehouse. Hageseth also has less-familiar problems: No bank wants to do business with a legal marijuana grower for fear of falling afoul of federal banking regulations. Technically, Green Man’s revenue is illegal drug money in the eyes of the feds. “Imagine having to pay huge bills in cash — amounts in the tens of thousands,” Hageseth writes...read the rest here

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Leaders don't always sport a title

How To Find the Hidden Leaders on Your Team
 

By Theodore Kinni
Theodore Kinni has written, ghosted, or edited more than 20 business books. He was book review editor for strategy+business for 7 years.

Everybody recognizes the importance of leadership in the C-suite, but we don’t always give it the
attention it deserves in the trenches—where execution is the name of the game. Nevertheless, there are lots of so-called “hidden leaders” on the front lines, and supervisors and middle managers who know how to find and nurture them can enhance performance in their teams and provide a great boon to their companies.

Who are these hidden leaders? “They are the people who are putting your organization’s strategy into practice, carrying out your quarterly plans, and bringing the value of your organization to life for customers every day,” says Scott Edinger, the founder of Edinger Consulting Group. “They are the employees who make the engine run.”

In Hidden Leader: Discover and Develop Greatness within Your Company (AMACOM, 2015), Edinger, along with co-author Laurie Sain, explains that these often unrecognized and, thus, underutilized employees can set the standards for performance excellence and bring energy to their teams; they serve as trustworthy sounding boards for supervisors and peers alike and are the go-to guys and gals for critical assignments. Edinger generously agreed to answer a few questions to help you harness the power of the hidden leaders on your teams...read the rest here

Thursday, April 16, 2015

How to simplify complex decisions

My new article for Stanford Business:

Conquering Complexity With Simple Rules


A Stanford professor offers a better way to make decisions.

What do burglars, Stanford’s football team, and Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen have in common?
They all use simple rules to help them navigate complex challenges, according to a new book by Stanford professor Kathleen Eisenhardt.

Many burglars follow just one rule that significantly lowers their risk of getting caught — they pass on houses where there are cars in the driveway, says the book, which Eisenhardt co-authored with Donald Sull, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Business. Cardinal football players follow three simple dietary rules: Eat breakfast; stay hydrated; and eat as much as you want of anything that can be picked, plucked, or killed. And Yellen adopted a “mind the gap” rule which uses targets for unemployment and inflation to inform the Fed’s interest rate decisions.

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World is counterintuitive in a time when algorithms and terabytes of data are often cited as prerequisites of decision-making. “How can people manage the complexity of the modern world?” the authors write. “Our answer, grounded in research and real-world results, is that simple rules tame complexity better than complex solutions.” ...read the rest here

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Frontline career development

The Three Conversations that Will Help Your Employees Grow

 

By Theodore Kinni

Theodore Kinni has written, ghosted, or edited more than 20 business books. He was book review editor for strategy+business for 7 years.

There are plenty of plausible excuses for managers who don’t want to be bothered helping employees
enhance their careers. There’s no time. People should “own” their own careers. If I give an inch, they’ll want a mile. Career development is only for so-called high potentials.

The only problem with these excuses, according to employee development experts Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni: “Study after study confirms that best-in-class managers—the ones who consistently develop the most capable, flexible, and engaged teams able to drive exceptional business results—all share one quality: they make career development a priority.” In other words, if you are being called upon to meet ever-expanding expectations or to continuously improve quality or to deliver the next big thing (and who isn’t), you better be thinking about how to help your people help you achieve those goals.

The best way to build career development into your managerial repertoire, write Kaye and Giulioni in their book Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want (Berrett-Koehler, 2012), is by becoming an expert at holding career conversations. These are conversations that “facilitate insights and awareness, explore possibilities and opportunities, and inspire responses that drive employee-owned action” ...read the rest here

Monday, April 13, 2015

Let them hear your body talk

My latest book post on Safari Online:

Why You Need to Work on Your Body-Language Skills

Posted April 7, 2015 by ; filed under Business, communication, influence and persuasion, management, managing yourself.

By Theodore Kinni
Theodore Kinni has written, ghosted, or edited more than 20 business books. He was book review editor for strategy+business for 7 years.

I’m usually oblivious to anything more subtle than a bonk on the head, but even I couldn’t miss the body language in a recent episode of a fair-to-middlin’ TV political drama. In it, an actress playing the U.S. Secretary of State, who is suffering from post-traumatic stress after single-handedly thwarting a coup in Iran, is meeting with an actor playing the President’s chief of staff, who wants her to make a high-stakes appearance on a national TV news program. The chief of staff presses her, asking if she is ready to do the show, and the actress, shaking her head, says, “Absolutely.” He walks away happy.

Clearly, the chief of staff has not read Body Language: It’s What You Don’t Say That Matters (Capstone, 2012) by Robert Phipps. “You’ll typically see this sort of incongruence between words and body language when people are under pressure to do something they don’t really want to do,” explains the UK-based body language expert. “It’s often accompanied by a ‘shoulder shrug,’ which generally indicates one of two things: either ‘indecision’, being caught between a ‘Yes’ and a ‘No;’ or an outright contradiction of the verbal ‘Yes’.” ...read the rest here