Can Akdeniz's Blog, page 86

Why cool leaders are more successful

by Can Akdeniz, the author of Cool Boss: Why are cool leaders more successful and 11 Qualities of Today’s Greatest Leaders

Regardless of what industry you may work in, one underlying fact has begun to demand a shift in leadership and management styles. That fact is quite simple: The world has changed. The modern marketplace is a drastically different place than it was in past decades and generations, and that undeniable evolution of how business is done, and what elements lead to ultimate success means that leaders must evolve as well to remain relevant, influential, and successful. There are a wide range of leadership styles that may have been used in the past, but in today’s fast-paced and dynamic business world, one style has consistently churned out innovation and industry-leading products; that style of leadership is simply being “cool”.

The qualities of a cool leader mean that they are flexible and forward-thinking, and are relatively unrestricted by the outdated modes of leadership that no longer function in the world today. They focus on employees, enabling them to think freely rather than controlling their every movement through micromanagement and mindless tasks. They are open and transparent about future projects, company direction, and workforce expectations. As individuals, cool leaders achieve a minor (or major) celebrity status in popular culture, because they are more than just a figurehead for a successful company, they are an active and essential element in the business model, and they almost always lead by example, due to their passionate and tireless dedication to their vision.

Some of the biggest names in modern business like Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Sergey Brin, and many others have taken different routes to achieve their cool leadership style, and their resulting success speaks volumes about the need for the fundamental evolution in business theory.

Leaders are admirable, both within their company and without, recognizing that their contributions to consumers must be balanced with an awareness of society’s needs. Furthermore, the direction of their product development and company vision should take a lot more into account than simple profit margins. They must act as role models for their workforce, other aspiring leaders, and the general public, because a close association has developed between consumer choice and the personality of a company, which is so closely based on the leadership and persona of the person in charge.

The coolest leaders are daring, and aren’t afraid of failure. They recognize that without taking risks, the game will never change, and the world can’t move forward. They instill a culture of innovation, out of the box thinking, and independent projects for their employees to stretch their mental muscles and creativity, while also being able to redirect focus and inspire collaborative efforts when one idea begins to stand out from the pack. A cool modern leader knows when to step forward and take charge, and also when to allow the invaluable assets of his workforce lead the way into new territories of creativity and innovation.

There are many other qualities that define the new style of business leadership; some are more relevant than others depending on which industry you belong to, but all of them can, in some ways, shape you into being a captain of modern industry and bringing your ideas to prominence within the global marketplace. The entire theory of modern leadership is outlined in my new book, “Cool Boss: Why are cool leaders more successful and 11 Qualities of Today’s Greatest Leaders”. It is a comprehensive explanation of what new techniques and ideas are coming to dominate today’s generation of business theory, and also gives real-world examples of the world’s most influential and successful leaders who have integrated many of these qualities into their industry leading practices.

“Cool Boss” is the perfect roadmap to your future as a cool leader, or it can be a guidebook for starting the process of evolution in your established business to make it functional and successful in today’s changing world.

New Leadership Book: Cool Boss – Master 11 Qualities of Today’s Greatest Leaders

>> Order today Cool Boss on Amazon

Is your company struggling to remain relevant, innovative, and cool in the eyes of modern consumers? Do you feel like you’re falling behind as a business leader? Or are you just starting out and want to begin on the fast track to success by using the most effective modern techniques? Do you want to achieve the same level of success as some of the most influential, respected, and recognizable business moguls in the world?

If your answer is yes to even one of those questions, then “Cool Boss” may be exactly what you need.

We have all seen the titans of modern business blazing trails into new areas of thought, altering cultural identity through innovative products, and selflessly giving back to the world in a wide variety of ways. On top of that, they look cool doing it, which is a growing trend in modern business theory that is paying off in a big way for. The qualities that define the careers and mentality of the cool, new generation of business leaders are specifically designed to fit within the modern world, leaving the obsolete and antiquated modes of leadership behind.

Have you ever wondered why Richard Branson is considered a visionary, despite numerous failures and a reputation for taking dangerous risks? What did Steve Jobs do that made him, and the Apple Corporation, the trendsetting giants of a massive industry? How did Mark Zuckerberg change the fundamental process of social interaction with the creation of Facebook? The book also includes practical advice and success stories from other leaders like James Dyson, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Bill Gates and others who have led the way into the new generation of cool leadership.

“Cool Boss” will provide you with the tools and techniques you need to evolve your business strategy and leadership style for the modern global marketplace. It contains in-depth explorations of real world examples and case studies from some of the coolest business figures of today that continue to change the world with their unique, industry-dominating styles of leadership. This book will be your comprehensive guide to becoming a cool leader, just like them.

The book covers a wide array of topics and subjects, including…

The difference between enabling and controlling
How to lead by example and be an active participant
Increasing accessibility and communication with employees
Building unique connections between departments and projects
Treating employees as people, not assets
Staying humble and aware of the impact your leadership has on the world
Being seen as a global leader and an agent of positive change
Properly choosing when to risk and when to stay safe
Pushing forward entire industries and societies through innovation
How to inspire, motivate, and lead from the center
The reasons why the hierarchical structure of the past is broken
Improving your reputation as a cool leader
Efficient restructuring of company vision and function
How the old approach to business can still be damaging
Increasing passion through enabling and energizing your workforce
Balancing strong leadership and selfless humility
Understanding the future, and the perpetual nature of change
The best way to leave a legacy for the world.

About Author

Can Akdeniz is an author, lecturer and business advisors.  He is the owner of cbebusiness.com

Can’s ultimate goal is to inspire others to innovate and improve their businesses to best fit in with the times as they continue to change. He approaches business as a complete entity, so his advice applies to a wide array of relevant topics, including business evolution, leadership theory, employee satisfaction, infrastructure, technological applications in business, and corporate function.

Order today Cool Boss on Amazon>>

The consequences of technology-driven change

by Can Akdeniz, Author of MBA 2.0

There has never been a time in the history of humankind during which the nature of life and work has changed so rapidly as in the past 50 or so years. The driver of that change, more than anything else has been and will continue to be technology. The monolithic structure of corporate America, emerging after the Second World War, could never have arisen without revolutions in mass communication and statistical data analysis.

Now, we are poised at the brink of changes just as drastic, if not more so. Again, these changes are driven by technology, and again they will change the way we all live and work. In large part they already have. The era of instant communication has implications both grave and exciting for modern business. The cutting edge of the internet era has already carved huge grooves in the once smooth edifice of the corporate world, and all signs point to it continuing to do so. What will emerge from this dynamic sculpting process is uncertain, but it pays to stay abreast of these changes so you can be part of the resultant statue and not end up in the debris pile.

The Rise of Analytics

Everything we do on the internet is being recorded and aggregated by someone somewhere. Before the rise of Google and other analytics companies, it was anybody’s guess what this information might be used for. But targeted advertising is only the beginning. In the future, businesses will depend increasingly on telematics in making strategic decisions once based on intuition or abstract theory. Those who do not keep up will be left in the dust.

The future of business will be in the strategic implementation of analytics to improve decision-making, manage risk, and assess new business opportunities. Learning about and investing in analytics behooves any smart business owner who hopes to survive the coming changes.

The Productivity Problem

Employees increasingly feel entitled to spend vast swaths of work time idly surfing the internet or g-chatting friends. While this may seem like a simple disciplinary or motivational issue, it goes deeper than that. With the constant lure of smartphones and multiple social networking sites, the workplace has become irrevocably porous, with the outside world seeping in no matter which sites you block or what your policies are.

A smart employer will find ways to work with this trend rather than against it. This might take brute force techniques like paying only for piecework or more stringent hiring practices. But it could also mean more innovative solutions, like gamifying the workplace through psychologically appealing reward systems, allowing more work from home, as well as relying more heavily on outsourced or freelance work.

Working on the Cloud

Much touted for many years without tangible results, cloud computing is becoming a concrete reality. If taken advantage of, the cost-reducing potential of moving large-scale business processes to the cloud is utterly staggering. Time and money once lost to storage, backup and recovery, software integration and access issues are fast becoming obviated. Startups will be vastly easier to launch and innovation will bloom as a result. More than an advantage, doing business on the cloud will quickly become a competitive necessity.

Advertising Hypertargeting

Advertising is one area in which the changes happening will be so vast as to seem almost scary. A crop of innovative advertising startups are developing techniques and technologies to find and subdivide demographics to practically sub-molecular levels of specificity. To properly take advantage of this new wealth and breadth of customer data, business owners will have to become more niche-oriented, with more varied and data-informed product lines. It will take a lot of very individualized advertising to maintain and grow loyalty as more companies offer more finely grained services. Keeping this cost-effective and managing the strategic shifts it requires will be very challenging.

These are just a few of the ways that businesses will have to adapt to coming changes spurred by new technology. To stay competitive will increasingly require a near-prophetic ability to monitor and predict shifts as and before they happen. Just remember to stay on top of your game and keep up to date and you’ll be able to ride the new paradigm as it slides into place.

For a more in-depth treatment of the challenges and opportunities posed by technology, as well as many other topics relating to modern business administration, consider picking up my book MBA 2.0: Handbook for Modern Business. In MBA 2.0, I’ve cut out the filler clogging most traditional business literature. In its place I offer a lean, results-oriented primer geared to turn you into the kind of innovator who will thrive in the emerging economy. Using real life strategies drawn from the experiences of today’s successful entrepreneurs, MBA 2.0 is designed to help you tack with the winds of change and harness the power of the hyper-connected global marketplace. Whatever your business goals, MBA 2.0 will help you get there.

Why creativity is your most important asset

Everybody knows who the Wright Brothers are, right? Of course, everybody has at least heard of the inventors of the first working airplane. They were two simple bicycle shop owners with an idea and the means to make it happen, and now they are enshrined forever in history as “The Inventors of the Airplane.”

Wilbur and Orville Wright started with a printing press in 1889, both of them being confident entrepreneurs. That press ran and evolved over the years until they got rid of that and opened up their bicycle shop in 1892, and after that time they became more and more interested in flight. They wondered why nobody had come to think of the proper way to make a flying machine before. Through study and observation of birds, they determined that it was all in the subtle movements of the wings, what ailerons do today. So they set out to make a machine that would make those movements. They worked on their plans for years, crafting a new prototype glider between each attempt, but finally they were able to do it. They made the world’s first airplane. Now, while that’s a pretty impressive feat, but here’s an interesting thought — if the Wright Brothers had built their airplane today, then nobody would know them.

That is not to say, of course, that they weren’t smart men. They were brilliant in their time and would be in this time, no doubt. Not only were they brilliant, they were also hard working. Three times over three years they built gliders, persisting in the pursuit of that one goal with an admirable determination.

There are two important aspects to any enterprise — coming up with the idea and making that idea happen. In everything we create there is the generation of an idea and the work put in to make that thing a realization. This is true of the Wrights over a century ago and of us today. The difference being — and this is a key difference — is that today we have thousands and thousands of different kinds of machines to help us work on our ideas.

When we use a machine to make our ideas come to life it cuts down on the creation time by a wide margin, leaving us humans with more free time and nothing to do. Workers that were once skilled labour, and well paid for it, are replaced by computers which are far more efficient than they are. So with all this free time comes more potential for the creative side of the enterprise. There is more potential for ideas, and so more ideas are generated.

To get back to those two parts mentioned above — coming up with the idea and making it happen — this means that it’s less necessary for a person to need skilled training. And why should they? It is far more efficient to let a machine do your work for you. Jobs and businesses are easy to do now.

If that is the case, then we have to wonder how we are supposed to stay competitive when it comes to work. What is it that we base our merit on when our skills are matched by machines? How do we get our business to succeed when everybody can work just as fast? The answer lies in creativity. The ability to come up with ideas is more important than ever in today’s society.

The reason the Wright Brothers wouldn’t be famous today is because today the way to succeed is to be more creative, rather than work harder and faster. At the time of the Wrights’ first flight there had already been countless attempts at flying for centuries before. We have had the idea of flight in our heads for a long, long time — long before the efficiency of computers and mechanical tools. As long as mankind has seen birds soaring majestically across the sky we became jealous and wanted to try it ourselves. However, if people had started dreaming of flight nowadays, then the Wright Brothers would give up their place in the history books for whoever it was who was quick enough to think of the idea first. Most likely somebody like Leonardo da Vinci, or maybe Icarus.

This focus on creativity has led to a high demand for it when it comes to realizing a business enterprise. The skill set required for success is no longer words per minute or bookkeeping, but the ability to think creatively and outside the box. We live in a period marked with the underlying idea of “hypercreativity.” What matters more and more is a person’s ability to come up with ideas, not their ability to put that idea into action.

Hypercreativity means that the world is increasing the rate at which we come up with ideas. Your creative skills are your most important asset in this day and age, and the only way you can keep up is by coming up with enough ideas to stay competitive. The minute a company fails is the minute that the people in charge stop coming up with new ideas. This odd new blend of industry and creativity puts the creative types first, and the market has shifted to accommodate them as best as it can.

If there is demand for it, then the creative path is the best choice. It builds on itself, too. When you adopt a more creative outlook it becomes easier and easier to come up with ideas, leading to even more ideas being thought of. So maybe the Wrights would not have made the first airplane today, but maybe they would have had the time and inclination to come up with the next step in the evolution of flight technology, or perhaps space travel! We need to leave the work to the machines and concentrate on the creative aspects of our endeavours.

by Can Akdeniz, Author of MBA 2.0: Handbook for Modern Business