Author: Graham Bunting

This arrived in my email last week and I thought it was too good not to share. I don’t know who originally created it, but thank you, whoever you are!

1. Quit arguing with people about the same old foolishness! Respect their position and keep it moving!

2. Quit telling people your secrets when you know they are not going to keep them! And if you keep telling them, then quit getting mad when they tell your secrets!

3. Quit trying to pull people on your journey who don’t want to travel with you. Either they believe in you and value you….or they don’t!

4. Quit complaining about things you can’t and won’t change!

5. Quit gossiping about other people! Minding our own business should be a full time job!

6. Quit blaming each other for things that in the big picture aren’t going to matter three weeks from now! Talk solutions…and then implement them!

7. Quit eating things you know are not good for you! If you can’t quit…eat smaller portions!

8. Quit buying things when we know we can’t afford them! If you don’t have self control, then quit going to the stores! Quit charging things, especially when you don’t NEED them!

9. Quit staying in unhealthy relationships! It is not okay for people to verbally or physically abuse you! So quit lying to yourself! It is not okay to stay in the marriage for the children! Ask them and they will tell you that they really would prefer to see you happy and that the misery you and your spouse/partner are living with is affecting them!

10. Quit letting family members rope you into the drama! Start telling them you don’t want to hear it! Quit spreading the drama! Quit calling other relatives and telling them about your cousin, uncle or aunt! Go back to #5 minding your own business should be enough to keep you busy!

11. Quit trying to change people! IT DOESN’T WORK! Quit wasting time & energy getting angry at people when you know that they are just being the miserable and jealous people that they are!

12. Quit the job you hate! Start pursuing your passion. Find the job that fuels your passion BEFORE you quit!

13. Quit volunteering for things that you aren’t getting any personal fulfilment from anymore! Quit volunteering for things and then failing to follow through with your commitment!

14. Quit listening to the naysayers! Quit watching the depressing news if you are going to live in the doom and gloom of it all!

15. Quit making excuses about why you are where you are or why you can’t do what you want to do!

16. Quit waiting on others to give you the answers…and start finding the answers for yourself! If what you are doing isn’t working for you…then quit it!

17. Quit deliberating and start making your dreams a reality!- Quit being afraid and START LIVING YOUR LIFE! CREATE THE LIFE YOU WANT! If you want something different than what you have had in the past…you must quit doing what you have done before and DO something different! JUST QUIT IT …… and START DOING something to create the experience you want!

As social media grows in popularity – sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed etc, are all growing exponentially. Why is this?
Well there could be many reasons, and there are many experts sharing their views on it. I simply see this as the more adventurous and networking oriented people doing just that – networking first off with their friends and colleagues, to share news and keep in touch (for me Facebook started with my son taking time out to travel and share his experiences there. I registered to follow him and stay in touch daily) and then once engaged realising that there are bigger opportunities with this medium.
My first networking experience was actually Linkedin a few years ago – I was invited to connect with someone and joined and put together a brief profile (have it all updated now I know better), more recently I have really embraced social networking and have multiple presence on line including Ecademy. I joined just over 18 months ago and have (through some assistance) managed to gain some great contacts. One piece of advice I took was to decide what I wanted from networking and how I was to approach it. The advice was to be an OPEN RANDOM and SUPPORTIVE networker rather than CLOSED SELECTIVE and CONTROLLING. The former promotes a completely open approach to networking along with a high degree of randomness (as the name suggests). Some folk choose to only network with people that they have already met and know – I prefer to connect randomly and then learn more about them, how I can assist them, and the overwhelming evidence I have seen suggests that this is the most productive long term.
In the final analysis everything in life is like a wheelbarrow – it will do nothing unless you pick it up and push it.

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Darwin wrote that it wasn’t necessarily the strongest who survive, but the most adaptable- this is as true today from my perspective in business as it was for Darwin when he originally wrote it.
It has never been particularly easy to find new customers who want your product or service. The process of finding and meeting new customers is in itself not difficult. Most companies using a traditional mix of marketing including cold calling and telesales. These traditional methods are growing less effective as it is so easy for people to find the products or service they require through a 5 minute search on the internet, or more readily through an established relationship.
Creating a loyal following through exploiting the web and creating a valuable relationship is the smart way to build a future pipeline. When these “followers” have a need for your services, you will be on hand, trust and value already established, to solve their problem. But you already knew this- right? So what stopped you doing something about it? Time, resource, etc etc. There is plenty of evidence to show that this is a sensible approach, so perhaps it’s time you took steps. Http://unhub.com/grahambunting

I wonder why it often seems that sales and marketing work in separate silos, and measure a disparate set of metrics (which appear to be aligned at surface level) – never before has it been more important for these two departments to align and (really) work together – it is not practical for each to work to an exclusive success measure. There is only one measure of success – profitable growth.

Yet despite what seems an obvious statement, there is still conflict rather than coordination at all levels and much finger pointing for the general lack of sales results. Sales claiming that there are not enough good quality sales leads arriving at their desks and marketing claiming that there are loads of leads and sales are unable to sell them. If this carries on unchecked then it’s clear that the disharmony will drive down business rather than develop it.

The answer should lie in alignment – aims, metrics, pay etc. Why would you have two such critical departments of the business working at any lesser level of congruence I wonder?

I have been watching the situation with Nortel with interest since they went bankrupt and wondering where the value sits for various suitors. I confess to a degree of surprise that the only news I have read about is Telecoms vendors showing interest. Why not Cisco or Microsoft for example? Is there not an opportunity to make an aggressive land grab and perhaps make significant inroads into the Telecoms market place where Avaya and other traditional voice vendors are currently dominant.
So back to the initial comment- where is the value when there is so much apparent duplication. I can’t however argue that $475million isn’t pretty good value for a significant global player like Nortel.

I am philosophically thinking about my life as a journey and how all of the various experiences are shaping me into who I am today, and what I will be tomorrow. Very rarely do we get the time and opportunity to do this naval gazing, and yet I have been fortunate in getting the chance. By the way, I think the phrase “it’s not what happens to us, but how we respond to it that matters” is a great example of the fact that we often have very little influence over “things” that happen to us in life, BUT, we absolutely can choose how we respond to them!

Back to my opening comment – through the opportunity of redundancy, I took the chance to review and evaluate my life’s journey, and think about “ME PLC” in many different ways – what I stand for and what’s important to me etc. This part of my journey has been both very important and enlightening in that I have learnt much more about me. In so doing, I have built value into my future work opportunities: Grafting onto my sales/leadership/team expertise, with 2 qualifications from INLPTA – a Coaching diploma and a Leadership diploma rich in Neuro Linguistic Programming language.

I also learnt that whilst I do have a strong independent streak, I also enjoy a working environment that enable rich people interaction and that enables me to take my experience and share with other people though mentoring and coaching and general interaction.

I am thinking much more now about the journey and hope that people reading this will take this as a catalyst for them to take more control.

Telecoms – everyone’s an expert

I have worked in telecoms most of my working life and I have seen much change on one hand and yet paradoxically very little on the other.

Telecom to most people appears to mean telephony – I.e. a device for speech for use at home, in the office or whilst mobile, and from this perspective, apart from changes in phone set designs and disparate approaches from vendors on the layouts and labelling conventions (some use simple text whilst others use icons that I can’t for the life of me work out – so what hope is there for the uninitiated) there has been very little change. Even the newer entrants from the data World have taken a fairly conventional approach, which is probably understandable.

There is much change talked about more at the large enterprise end of the commercial market place, and this is at an infrastructure (plumbing) level. IP or Internet Protocol to give it its full name is a different approach to transmission of the voice signals that for most of us means very little. After all, who made a fuss over marketing the fact that the “old world” was TDM or Time Division Multiplexing? So what! Does it really matter? Perhaps not, but then again perhaps it does – the answer lies in the “what does it mean to my business if I change/don’t change”. The impact could be very little; however, it could deliver significant additional capability for your organisation and cost savings too – especially if you can share traffic on inter-office links, and use other low cost network carriers for some traffic. There is no simple answer to the conundrum, it just needs careful consideration from your perspective for your business, and weighing up the pros and cons – because there could well be some, for example, if your data infrastructure is already creaking at the seams, it could well require an investment to update before adding voice as well. A lot of this will depend on your organisations approach to return on investment and how you measure the benefits etc. Just get some independent advice before jumping in.