5 ways to show authority — without yelling

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Here is an excerpt from an article written by Amy Levin-Epstein for CBS MoneyWatch, the CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the website’s newsletters, please click here.

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(MoneyWatch) Here’s a sure way to undermine your authority as a manager or competence as an employee: Lose your temper. The ability to get your perspective heard without yelling is imperative to success in the office. Here are five ways to be emphatic while retaining your composure.

[Here are the first two of the five.]

•  Make it impersonal. If you’re disappointed and upset about a situation, focus on the situation, not the person involved. “Human compassion and situation analysis will always serve you much better than yelling or being overly emotional,” says Lisa Quast, founder of Career Woman. A parent might make criticism personal by saying they are disappointed in their child, but at work keep it about the business — not the person — at hand.

•  Change your tone. Even though you’re not yelling, you should use a noticeably tougher tone than you would generally use. “The point of view or criticism needs to be discussed not only in a logical and rational manner, but also in a steady tone of voice that helps demonstrate the seriousness of your comments,” Quast says. A calm, yet urgent, tone will help you communicate your message more effectively than a panicked or angry one.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Amy Levin-Epstein is a freelance writer who has been published in dozens of magazines (including Glamour, Self and Redbook), websites (including AOLHealth.com, Babble.com and Details.com) and newspapers (including The New York Post and the Boston Globe). To read more of her writing, visit AmyLevinEpstein.com. Follow her on Twitter at @MWOnTheJob.

To check out Amy’s other articles, please click here.

Revenue Disruption: A book review by Bob Morris

Revenue Disruption: Game-Changing Sales and Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth
Phil Fernandez
John Wiley & Sons (2012)

How and why Revenue Performance Management (RPM) can help achieve sustainable growth and profitability

The title of this book probably attracted your attention (and thus served its purpose) but you’d be well-advised to ignore it. The subtitle offers a better indication of why Phil Fernandez wrote the book: To identify and explain a number of game-changing sales and marketing strategies to accelerate what I would have characterized as “profitable” growth, given the fact that ego-driven growth, growth at any cost, has ruined countless companies. Fernandez’s specific focus is on buyer-centric initiatives that take into full account the real-world dynamics of today’s purchase decision process.

Long ago, I concluded that, because sales and marketing are so different in terms of their nature and function, they should be viewed – and conducted – separately. Each requires a quite different mindset. All that remains true, except….

Except that, as I have realized in recent years, the shift of power has shifted from the seller to the buyer. That shift requires that sales and marketing be viewed – and conducted – as separate but [begin italics] interdependent [end italics] areas of operation whose strategies and tactics must be coordinated with meticulous care. Fernandez apparently agrees. As he observes, “Far from operating as solo hunters, salespeople today must instead be hyper-connected. They need to link up with fellow sales professionals, as well as to their colleagues from marketing, research, customer support, and technology. Most importantly, they need access to the same information sources and online social networks that their prospects are almost certainly using.”

These are several of the passages that caught my eye:

o  “Core Marketing Strategies Take Shape (Pages 13-14)
o  “Encouraging Collaborative Communication” (42-44)
o  “Driving Growth by Changing the Marketing and Sales Dynamic” (62-64)
o  Actions from sales playbook to help marketing professionals become as closely tied to revenue (88-90)
o  “Revenue Cycles n Depth” (108-112)
o  “Building Engagement and Developing Relationships with Lead Nurturing” (127-131)
o  Steps to creating a high-performance revenue team (142-143)
o  “Go with the Flow: Measuring the Revenue Cycle” (154-157)
o  Benefits of Revenue Performance Management (RPM) platforms for change (166-170)
o  “RPM as a CEO Imperative” (182-183)
o  Various perspectives on the role of a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), Pages 200-201

I appreciate Fernandez’s provision of mini-profiles of what he characterizes as “Revenue Revolutionaries” whose game-changing sales and marketing strategies have helped to accelerate sustainable revenue growth. I also admire his skillful use of a “Key Points” section that concludes each of the 27 brief but remarkably substantial chapters. They facilitate, indeed expedite frequent review of key points.

One of Phil Fernandez’s most important themes in this book is the need for constant and continuous evaluation of one’s sales and marketing strategies, to be sure, but also a willingness to make major changes in one’s strategic thinking and, if necessary, modification and even replacement of the strategies themselves. To paraphrase Joseph Schumpeter, “creative destruction” and “creative disruption” are synonymous.

The global company’s challenge

Here is a brief excerpt from another terrific article featured online by The McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company, in which Martin Dewhurst, Jonathan Harris, and Suzanne Heywood explain why, as the economic spotlight shifts to developing markets, global companies need new ways to manage their strategies, people, costs, and risks. To read the complete article, check out other resources, obtain information about the firm, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

Source: Organization Practice

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Managing global organizations has been a business challenge for centuries. But the nature of the task is changing with the accelerating shift of economic activity from Europe and North America to markets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. McKinsey Global Institute research suggests that 400 midsize emerging-market cities, many unfamiliar in the West, will generate nearly 40 percent of global growth over the next 15 years. The International Monetary Fund confirms that the ten fastest-growing economies during the years ahead will all be in emerging markets. Against this backdrop, continuing advances in information and communications technology have made possible new forms of international coordination within global companies and potential new ways for them to flourish in these fast-growing markets.

There are individual success stories. IBM expects to earn 30 percent of its revenues in emerging markets by 2015, up from 17 percent in 2009. At Unilever, emerging markets make up 56 percent of the business already. And Aditya Birla Group, a multinational conglomerate based in India, now has operations in 40 countries and earns more than half its revenue outside India.

But, overall, global organizations are struggling to adapt. A year ago, we uncovered a “globalization penalty”: high-performing global companies consistently scored lower than more locally focused ones on several dimensions of organizational health. [Note: Please see Martin Dewhurst, Jonathan Harris, and Suzanne Heywood's "Understanding your ‘globalization penalty,” mckinseyquarterly.com, July 2011.]  For example, the former were less effective at establishing a shared vision, encouraging innovation, executing “on the ground,” and building relationships with governments and business partners. Equally arresting was evidence from colleagues in McKinsey’s strategy practice showing that global companies headquartered in emerging markets have been growing faster than counterparts headquartered in developed ones, even when both are operating on “neutral turf”: emerging markets where neither is based (see “Parsing the growth advantage of emerging-market companies”).

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Martin Dewhurst is a director in McKinsey’s London office, where Suzanne Heywood is a principal; Jon Harris is a director in the New York office.

The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Kate Aquila and Roni Katz to the development of this article.