I got an email today from the Engineering Alumni Affair and they released Jim’s PowerPoint presentation on 10 Secrets of Success (click the link to download the file) that he used.
I’ve also written the points out for an easy read below:
There is no order
You need to do them all
Different situations require a different skill
Rule 1 - There isn’t any secret - it’s all the little things
Rule 2 - Fail Often. Fail Fast. Fail Cheap.
Rule 3 - Know Yourself. What is your Unique Strength. (He touched about this idea of “Unique Strength throughout answering the questions asked of him. He said find out what you’re good at and get someone else to do the other things. Obviously not for everything though.)
Rule 4 - Manage Your Risk
Inventory buy backs (He said when he started his computer distribution business he would buy from the manufacturer with the condition that he would be able to return the goods if not sold)
Marketing $ (He said if you ever see a Synnex ad you’ll also so an “HP” or “Sony” logo below it which is because they are paying for advertisement)
R & D
Some deals I do not do
Rule 5 - Set a pace you can maintain forever
Business is a marathon
Stephen Covey - sharpen the saw
Rule 6 - Be Frugal
Function vs. Show
I spend my profit
Throw pennies around like manhole covers
Rule 7 - Be Growth Oriented
Growth allows painless efficiency
Growth motivates
Rule 8 - Welcome and Embrace Change
Change is opportunity
Create change
Rule 9 - Nurture a Network
Give freely to people
Keep in touch
Organize it
Be Deliberate
Rule 10 - Be a Time Management Fanatic
Use tricks
Study it
Time is your friend and enemy
Speed/sense of urgency wins
Slow and Steady Wins the Business Race
My Mantr: “Sense of Urgency Wins”
And be sure to check out Jim Estill’s very one blog, which I very much enjoy reading at http://www.jimestill.com
I just came back from a presentation by Jim Estill the CEO of Synnex Canada. He was a graduate of the Systems Design Engineering program at Waterloo in 1980 and became the CEO of Synnex Canada managing $3 billion of annual sales after his computer distribution company was acquired by them.
What I liked most about Jim and his presentation was his causal and down to earth persona. He didn’t try to impress anybody on stage nor did he respond to questions asked by the audience in an arrogant manner.
He started his presentation with a very short PowerPoint presentation on the “10 Secrets of Success”. Being a strong advocate of time management and having created programs and literature on the subject you can tell he hadn’t bothered spending much time on his PowerPoint slides. He simply stated his 10 points on 10 slides (which did contain simple grammatical errors) and allowed the reminder of the time for us to ask questions.
He was moving too fast to write down the 10 points he mentioned but they were all trivial and intuitive. The two most important things from the presentation that I walked away with were:
“Worst thing, first thing”. Meaning that by accomplishing what he least wanted to do during the day first thing in the morning he has tremendously increased his productivity and sense of accomplishment.
Invest time in a speed reading program. He believes that taking a speed reading class has greatly increased his efficiency and productivity. This reminded me of the comment Bill Gates made when asked if he was a superhero which super power would he most want, to which he replied “the abililty to read faster”. Warren Buffet (who reads thousands of annual reports a year agreed with him)
P.S. For University of Waterloo students this event was actually pretty interesting and I encourage you to attend other ones. There was plenty of food, BEER, wine, soft drinks to go around. Plus my friend and many other won a book and some other things. This specific event was sponsored by the Laurel Centre (www.laurelcentre.ca) (Hmm… they use the American spelling of “center” but with a .ca domain :P)
The Hubble Space Telescope is coming to its final stretch of operation and will be replaced with a telescope 10x as powerful placed over a million kilometers from the Earth! My roommate was sharing with me the many developments that are going on in the astronomical world which we aren’t informed about. It’s all really interesting and much of it has alot of important to our future! Anyways, here’s a clip of the new next generation telescope!
Today marked the last day of final exams for me, ending with a bang! It’s sad to see the low quality teaching standards of many university professors and their teaching assistants. I haven’t seen any course with more mistakes in the course notes, mis-numbered assignment questions and general error in teaching material than that for which I wrote an exam for today.
Thinking that many of these students will be the engineers of tomorrow with little clear knowledge of the material they are learning is scary. I can say that a vast majority of my classmates simply don’t learn anything during the school term. They cram and cram before the final exams and if asked anything outside the scope of their assignment questions which they’ve memorized won’t be able to give you an answer.
To say the least I think there should be some quality checks for the courses. Assignment solutions should be legible and the teaching assistants should have a decent understanding of the course material. It’s just disappointing to finish the school term thinking that 4 out of the 5 courses you took were a complete was of time and money.
Another example of poor academic offerings is my distance education psychology course which had no course instruction for the entire length of the course. A mistake was made assigning a professor to the course and students were left with no instructor. No one was held responsible for this and who knows where our money went. Everything I learned was through the course materials which I could’ve done out of interest had I wanted to.
I don’t blame students for dropping out and going on to do what they believe is more important with their lives. A lot of useless time can be spent behind the bureaucracy of the education system. Both that valuable time and money for someone who knows what they want to do in their life can be used much more efficiently outside of the system.
Furthermore I believe the education system conforms people to become dependent on the system for motivation. Students have no metrics for their own lives besides the grades that there professors give them with at the end of the term.
At least another term is over and I can get back to what’s most important to me…sigh…
I just picked up the April 2008 edition of the Report on Business in the Global and Mail and found an interesting article about self-control inside. It is about a MIT post-grad student who created a company called StickK which allows you to use the power of money as a punishment to procrastination. The idea was inspired by his own quest to lose weight where he and a colleague bet half their annual income towards who could lose the most weight.
Here are some worth-while excerpts from the article:
“A dozen years, ago Florida-based psychologies Roy Baumeister started a series of experiments on self-control. A typical one went like this: Hungry subjects were presented with a bowl of radishes and a plate of freshly baked cookies. Baumesiter instructed some of the subjects to help themselves to as many cookies as they wanted; the rest were told they could only nibble on the radishes. After a while, each subject was given a series of geometric puzzles to solve not knowing, of course, that they were unsolvable.
The point was to measure how long they’d keep at it before giving up. The radish-nibblers, it turned out, caved quicker than the cookie-eaters. In fact, Baumeister’s experiments consistently found that subjects who were forced to exercise self-control were the first to quit when faced with a new challenge. They were also more likely to indulge in something else.”
“…Scientists have recently used fMRI scans to study the brains of people trying to decide between different types of rewards–say, receiving $10 today versus $20 a month from now. What they found is that short-term rewards tend to excite the midbrain dopamine system. In effect, we get high just from contemplating a short-term reward. Longer-term decisions on the other hand, are generally handled by the brain’s more logical prefrontal cortex. In the battle between the two, the dopamine system will nearly always win. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense; Over millions of years, our ancestors learned that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and it served them well. Then again they didn’t have to plan for retirement.”
For my 21st birthday my roommates in California bought me the book “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazi. The book is basically about the importance of networking. Before I got passed the first 20 pages of the book my brother snagged it from me and I haven’t been able to get it back from him since, however to show you how great of a book this is, in just the first 20 pages I was inspired by the following pieces of wisdom:
“Poverty, I realized, wasn’t only a lack of financial resources; it was isolation from the kind of people that could help you make more of yourself.”
“Business is a human enterprise, driven and determined by people.”
“Real networking is about finding ways to make other people successful. It was about working hard to give people more than you get.”
“I’ll sum up the key to success in one word: generosity.”
“He thought of relationships as finite, like a pie that can only be cut into so many pieces. Take a piece away, and there was that much less for him. I knew, however, that relationships are more like muscles - the more you work them the stronger they become.”
“It’s better to give before you receive.”
“Contribute. It’s like Miracle-Gro for networks. Give your time, money and expertise to growing your community of friends.”
“The more specific you are about what you want to do, the easier it becomes to develop a strategy to accomplish it.”
At an information session held by Yahoo! on campus two weeks back I learned that PHP was created by a UW student Rasmus Lerdorf. Considering I use the language alot it was motivating and interesting to find this out. Rasmus is now a Infrastructure Architecture Engineer at Yahoo! and part of the reason they gave us this factoid. Yahoo! does use PHP for the majority of its web scripting.
A friend of mine interested in robotics showed me this video. It’s a very realistic dog-like robot built in partnership with the U.S. Defense budget which makes it even scarier. All we need now is a couple of ballistic missiles on this puppy.
Last week, in another over-capacity filled lecture room, Larry Smith, probably the most sought after professor at the University of Waterloo, gave another high impact lecture on the importance of planning our careers.
Having been a student of Larry’s back in second year and seeking countless hours of business advice from him I knew I would learn a lot from this lecture of his and made an extra effort to attend. Unfortunately, the previous week he had given another lecture on the topic of “How the World Will Try and Stop You and Your Idea” which I was unable to attend. Thankfully however, the video of this lecture was made available to us and you can enjoy it as well http://www.laurelcentre.ca/lectures_larrysmith.html.
Larry’s lecture on career success covered a wide range of topics. He began by telling us how he was tired of hearing from too many alumni about how unhappy they were with their jobs. The problem with these alumni wasn’t that they weren’t getting paid enough or didn’t have interesting work. Their main problem was that they didn’t have a life. They were overworked and while they were mostly paid in the six figures they barely had a chance to start families and enjoy their hard earned money.
What was Larry’s advice to us, the next generation on avoiding this?
It was to go back to using our brains and differentiate our skills from everyone else. The perfect example being himself. As a business consultant he’s paid to think on behalf of CEO’s who didn’t have enough time to do the thinking themselves. When one student asked if an MBA would help, he replied only if it was to advance a specific part of our careers. To get an MBA for the sake of getting an MBA would slightly differentiate us from others but wouldn’t be applicable if there wasn’t a particle problem it would help us solve. He gave the example of an alumni who used the skills he learned in his MBA to penetrate a new market sector for the company he was working for and secure relationships within that sector. He said there was no way the company this alumni was working for would over work him because he had planted himself firmly as the connector in that business relationship.
Another way to differentiate ourselves? Stop using Google. Larry mentioned how Google is not even close to being the best place to find answers. It doesn’t have access to copyright material and it’s what everyone is using. Going back to the basics, such as research publications, newspapers, magazines and books where the valuable, reliable information is held would help us find more innovative solutions to workplace problems. He gave the example of “Factiva” a Dow Jones database of copyrighted information which we pay for through our tuitions yet barely any students use. I personally had never heard of this database until this lecture and found some valuable information searching it afterwards.
Basically, what I gathered from this lecture was that Larry was trying to drive the point which I had come across a few months back on my previous work term in The Economist magazine:
“Far from being simply some missing factor in the growth equation, innovation is now recognized as the single most important ingredient in any modern economy—accounting for more than half of the economic growth in America and Britain. In short, it is innovation—more than the application of capital or labor—that makes the world go round.”
I came across this interesting term “Moral Hazard” that I thought I would share. I think Wikipedia sums it up best:
“Moral hazard is the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act less carefully than it otherwise would, leaving another party to bear some responsibility for the consequences of those actions. For example, an individual with insurance against automobile theft may be less vigilant about locking his car, because the negative consequences of automobile theft are (partially) borne by the insurance company.”
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