By Kristie Z. Howard
This article was previously published in Risk and Insurance.

Employers can benefit directly by improving employee health through the introduction of obesity prevention programs. Besides the huge financial stake employers have in reducing the incidence of obesity in its workforce, there is another reason for the importance of obesity programs at the worksite. Despite the recent growth in unemployment rates, the vast majority of Americans–more than 139 million–are employed, and Americans spend the majority of their time at work, more than any other single location or activity.

Then consider how, currently, two-thirds of Americans are considered overweight or obese. The cost effects to employers of such a high obesity rate are staggering. Approximately 9.1 percent of all healthcare costs in the United States are related to obesity and overweight. According to a study published in the journal Health Affairs, medical costs are estimated to be $1,429 higher for obese adults than for normal-weight adults.

In addition to the direct medical costs, employers should also be concerned about the indirect costs of decreased productivity and absenteeism associated with obesity. According to the National Business Group on Health, obesity is associated with 39 million lost workdays per year. A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine showed that obese employees file twice as many workers’ compensation claims and 13 times more lost workdays than their non-obese counterparts.

Because of the unique nature of the obesity problem, unfortunately no silver bullet exists.

What is required is a multidimensional program consisting of both environmental and behavioral interventions. Below are employer strategies that have demonstrated effectiveness in reducing weight among employees and reducing the prevalence of obesity in employee populations.

CREATE A SUPPORTIVE ENVIRONMENT

Do an assessment of your worksite environment as it relates to nutrition and physical activity. Are there environmental changes that could contribute to employees making better health choices?

If you have vending machines, be sure that healthy choices are available. Turn the packages around so that nutritional information is visible, or label the items with red, yellow and green stickers based on their nutritional value. If you have a cafeteria, ask your food provider if they use healthy food preparation practices and ask them to publish nutritional information on their menu. Provide only nutritious food options at company meetings and events.

Similarly, what are the opportunities for physical activity at your workplace? If you have stairs, encourage their use with colorful signs, bright paint and good lighting. If it’s safe and convenient, encourage employees to ride a bike or walk to work. Negotiate discounts for employees for membership at a nearby health club or fitness facility. Sponsor or promote company sports teams or clubs. Consider sponsoring a local fun run or walk.

EDUCATE AND DISPEL MYTHS

Educating employees on the right way to lose weight will exponentially increase their chances of success. According to the latest science, this means that a program should:

– Produce a gradual rate of weight loss of up to two pounds per week (losses may be greater at first due to water loss).

– Guide food choices that not only reduce calories but meet current scientific recommendations for nutritional completeness.

–Create a plan for physical activity that provides a wide range of weight- and health-related benefits.

– Be sustainable.

Employers should use a variety of media to provide healthy messaging, such as company e-mails and intranet. Offer “lunch and learns” as an opportunity to provide tips on grocery shopping, eating on the go, and live cooking or exercise demonstrations. Let employees know about access to community resources.

GIVE EMPLOYEES THE TOOLS

Help build awareness by providing employees with inexpensive pedometers to track their daily steps, or mark off the distances in and around your workplace. With these tracking tools, employees will not only know how far they’ve walked, but they can also estimate the calories they’ve burned and set goals for improvement.

Identify healthy menu options at nearby restaurants, and point employees to reputable Web sites with resources on nutritional information and food tracking, such as www.nutrition.gov and http://www.mypyramid.gov. Some employers place scales throughout the worksite to raise awareness about weight and motivate people to take action.

MOTIVATE WITH TEAM COMPETITIONS AND SUCCESS STORIES

Take advantage of employees’ competitive nature and the support and camaraderie that comes with a team challenge. By engaging teams of employees in physical activity and healthy eating challenges, individuals are motivated to do well and will lose more weight with the backing and encouragement of their co-workers.

Highlighting the successes of others is another great way to motivate and create buzz around your program. Create a “wall of fame” or devote a section of your company newsletter that showcases your company’s healthiest employees.

ENGAGE AN EXPERT TO DELIVER INDIVIDUALIZED INTERVENTIONS

The most effective weight loss programs involve individual goal-setting and achievement. They make use of exercise and nutrition “prescriptions,” whereby participants complete an evaluation and are then given a structured plan that includes specific recommendations for exercise and nutrition.

These services do not necessarily need to come from an outside vendor, but it should come from an expert. Most employers might not have such expertise internally and would therefore hire a vendor to do this.

USE THOUGHTFULLY DESIGNED INCENTIVES

Reward employees by using a combination of incentives based on both participation and outcomes. Use incentives for participation such as door prizes, raffles or points earned toward a larger prize. If a program involves individual goal-setting, include rewards for achieving program goals in your incentive program.

Most incentive programs use positive rewards, commonly called the “carrot” approach. Some examples of “carrots” include cash payments, gift cards, paid time off or reduced medical premium contributions as rewards for participation in wellness programs or good health behaviors. Reduced medical plan contributions has the greatest motive force, according to a 2008 WebMD online survey of 20,000 wellness program participants

Some examples of the “stick,” or disincentive, approach, include a medical premium surcharge, salary reduction or job sanctions. Companies that want their employees to perceive the wellness program as a positive should utilize “carrots” as much as possible.

If the incentive effect falls short of expectations, consider utilizing “sticks” to achieve the desired effect. The most important point is that employers should use incentives strategically and systematically with their desired outcomes in mind.

The battle against obesity will no doubt continue to intensify, and employers can do their part to help employees take the steps necessary to manage the problem. Employers who take a stand will not only save money for their company but will improve the health and lives of their employees.

Kristie Z. Howard, CEBS, CWPD is a senior consultant, employee benefits and certified wellness program director with Longfellow Benefits, a Boston-based employee benefits consultant and broker.

Patients Teach a Doctor About Life and Death
by Bob Carey, MD
Xlibris (2009)

Several years ago, cardiologist Bob Carey, M.D., decided he wanted his grandchildren to understand how much he had learned over his 56-year career not from his colleagues or from medical school but from his patients and their caregivers. “I wanted to share their kindness and courage,” he explains. “I wanted to write stories about my patients so my 12 grandchildren could learn from them as I had.” His daughter shared what he had written to an author who encouraged Bob to realize a book.

This past year, Dr. Carey’s dream finally came true within the pages of Patients Teach a Doctor About Life and Death: Tales from Fifty-Six Years of Practicing. Published by Xlibris, Patients Teach a Doctor About Life and Death is a compendium of detailed and inspiring personal vignettes culled from Bob’s experiences over half a century. Beginning with his early years at Boston University Medical School’s main teaching hospital (now called Boston Medical Center) in the early 1950s, Bob’s book recounts the story of his treating his very first patient, Gladys: “a tall lady with enlarged lymph nodes in her neck” originally diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. Though ultimately dying from heart disease and kidney failure, Gladys remained Bob’s patient for nearly two decades, teaching Bob that “one can never be absolutely certain of a person’s ultimate prognosis.” This lesson stayed with him throughout his many years of practice.

After the initial introduction, Patients Teach a Doctor About Life and Death is divided into sections that describe his years in medical school, his military service in Okinawa, his years of medical residency as well as private practice, family experiences, time in China and extensive pro-bono work in South America. Each section conveys heartwarming stories from Dr. Carey’s unique point of view. A fellow doctor and friend R.A. Macdonald testifies that Bob’s book is the story of a doctor “who is a product of a largely bygone era… A time when doctors actually listened to their patients.”

An absorbing read, Patients Teach a Doctor About Life and Death has much to say about how relationships work between doctors and patients from a medical standpoint as well as teaching us how curiosity and compassion play into successful outcomes. Proceeds of the book are being donated to a foundation established by Bob to provide scholarships for medical students to work with doctors in poor countries.

Born in Arlington, Massachusetts in 1929, Bob Carey is a graduate of Harvard College and Boston University School of Medicine. In 1954 he married his high school sweetheart, Mary O’Neill, and the two went on to raise five children. In 1960 he joined a practice in Arlington, and later helped found Internist Inc., a group practice, in 1970. This practice joined Lahey Clinic in 1993 until Bob officially retired from medical practice in 1998. Since then, he has been teaching at BU and Harvard Medical School, and volunteering annually for pro bono medical service in Bolivia and Ecuador.

To learn more about Patients Teach a Doctor About Life and Death, click here and then click on the book’s cover. You’ll also learn about other books authored by our emersongroup client thoughtleaders. Just scroll down the page to view our many thoughtleaders’ books!

My Amazon Campaign has been going really well today, pleasantly shocking me! All of you with a book should try this. My book “The Expert’s Edge” is now ranking about 1,832… at 7 AM today it was closer to 680,000 !!!

See my previous blog for details or my home page at Linked In, Twitter or Facebook… only 7 hours left to go! Get your expert’s edge TODAY!

Are you recognized as a go-to authority in your field?

Do prospects seek you out as THE expert to bring in to solve their problems?

Has your business been increasing steadily, despite recessions and tough competition?

If you can’t answer YES to all three questions, get a copy of McGraw-Hill’s “The Expert’s Edge: Become the Go-To Authority People Turn to Every Time” by Ken Lizotte anytime today January 25!

If you purchase “The Expert’s Edge” today, you’ll not only reap the benefits of its “5 pillars of thoughtleading” and how to implement them, but you’ll also gain access to over a dozen valuable professional gifts offered by a formidable array of well-known business experts and thoughtleaders… and at no extra charge!

Why read “The Expert’s Edge”? Favorably reviewed by numerous critics and business leaders, this book will move you toward “thoughtleader” status, separating you from your competitors and making boom-and-bust cycles a thing of the past.

But don’t take our word for it… listen to just a few of the many highly regarded business authors, professionals, consultants and CEOs who have endorsed both the book and Ken’s ideas:

Sean Gallagher, Chief Value Delivery Officer, MarketCulture Strategies
“Want to be the leader in your field? Read this book… You can’t be seen as an expert without it.”

Jan Phillips, author of The Art of Original Thinking: The Making of a Thought Leader
“If you aspire to be a thoughtleader in your field, you won’t find a better guidebook than Ken Lizotte’s ‘The Expert’s Edge.’ It’s a no-frills, cut-to-the-chase manual for mastering the tools of visionary leadership in a fast-paced, ever-changing world.”

Fred W. Green, Chairman of the CEO Club of Boston
“Brilliance is defined as ‘distilling the complex…to the simple,’ which is just what Ken Lizotte has accomplished. Ken’s latest work is a must read for CEOs and all other leaders who want a practical way to separate themselves and their companies from their competitors.”

As for the bonus gifts, you’ll receive tip sheets, articles, videos and much more! But remember, these complimentary gifts are available only if you purchase “The Expert’s Edge” today, Monday January 25, so don’t miss out!

Just forward your electronic receipt to michaela@thoughtleading.com to receive this list of downloadable bonus gifts!

Check out “The Expert’s Edge” NOW

by Stephen E. Lipka, PhD, CMC
Versions of this article were published in imageSource Magazine and CEO Refresher.

“Succeeding” in IT means you’re a partner in the business, you’re respected and sought out, and you’re funded to do work that contributes to business. You can increase your chance of success by understanding your stakeholders. That starts with knowing who your stakeholders are and understanding what motivates them.

Before we begin the tour, let’s be clear why we’re using the term “stakeholder” rather than “customer”. The old IT mindset that knew or cared little about business process, practices, priorities, and issues has brought about a new scrutiny in the language we use when we refer to our internal peers. This reflects the shift in IT towards becoming an integral, collaborative part of the business rather than a necessary but abhorred one. It’s not “users” or “the business,” and “customer” may not truly reflect the collaborative relationship IT should have with peers. Thus, we’re using “stakeholder” to mean any organization that uses IT services, benefits from IT services, or pays for IT services, and that includes internal peers, peer organizations, and external customers.

So let’s take a tour.

Your Boss

At the top of every organization is the President/CEO, who is responsible for leading the company in the right direction. Generally, they seek better company-wide performance. But there are several personality attributes that affect their motivation. Let’s look at two:

• Strategic planner vs not: If your CEO believes in strategic planning for the business, you’ve got a free pass to find out what’s important. The critical words here are “believes in.” A true advocate puts strategy and execution plans in place, measures progress against them, keeps them current, and rewards contribution to achievement. For these leaders, achievement of the plan is what matters. For you, the CIO or IT Director, building an IT strategy and plan that supports the organization’s – and executing to it – makes for a happy CEO. On the other hand, if your CEO is a fair weather believer (and that includes those who pay lip service to strategic planning) what matters varies according to the interests of the individual. The extremes are minimizing cost (“IT is just a cost center”) to innovation (“IT should be a disruptive influence that will lead us into the future”). Unfortunately, you’ll have to figure that out on a case-by-case-basis. Worse, you may have to stay tuned as the CEO’s priorities change.

• “Do what I say” vs. “do what I do”: We’ve all worked for leaders who want an unlocked laptop on which they load all kinds of untested software but complain when the machine crashes. A more pragmatic group of leaders will accept what you give them, inquire about technology that interests them, ask you to test it, and suggest making useful technology part of standard issue. The former values personal productivity or cool technology and may also value immediate gratification; the latter values collective productivity.
There are other attributes of CEOs, but these two should give you some guidance on what could matter to them.

Not quite at the top of the organization is the CFO. CFOs focus on money. My experience leads me to conclude there are two kinds of CFOs – those who think of money as something to be retained and those who think of money as a tool to get more money. The former is likely to focus on cost reduction and low bidders. The latter is likely to entertain investments for IT but will also expect an ROI analysis showing positive expectations. I’ve actually discussed this with a few CFOs, and they agreed this is in the CFO’s DNA: CFOs of either kind don’t cross over to the other side. You may succeed in motivating both with cost-cutting ideas, but innovative investments will not likely be readily received by cost-focused CFOs.

So why are these two officers of the company appearing under “Your Boss”? There’s a high likelihood that you, as CEO or IT Director, will report to one of these. (The COO may be a lot like the CEO, but more operational.) This is a hugely different stakeholder, and for this we have evidence. A Forrester report developed from a 2008 survey showed that CIOs who worked for CEO’s were more likely to have projects focused on innovation, while CIOs who work for CFOs were more likely to have projects focused on cost reduction.

Your (Peer) Business Partners Inside the Organization

The senior managers leading sales, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, or service want to maximize the productivity of their organizations with better automation. They are paid to produce, and if your technological support helps them reach that goal, they’ll be pleased. But don’t expect them to be happy about paying for the supporting technology, particularly if they don’t understand how it supports them, how the cost was allocated to them, or why they had no choice.

So how can you succeed as their technology providers? First, learn their business, understand their language, understand the critical factors that lead to their success, and understand how they contribute to the overall business. If you don’t do this, you can’t speak convincingly about how or why technology will help them, and you yourself will be unable to truly understand the relative effectiveness of alternative technology and support choices.

Second, why try to force any IT budget on your business partners? Why not create a steering committee to choose business needs to solve and to allocate funding to solve them? Your business partners will be much more willing to allocate money for value if they drive the governance process.

Your peers will be seeking resources for their own projects, so any attempt to divert resources to IT – directly or indirectly – will be measured against your peers’ standard of “what’s in it for me?” Speak their language. Have them vote on IT direction, guided by their own self-interest or their mutual benefit. It’s unlikely you’ll motivate them by selling or forcing “solutions.”

The Internal User Community

As individuals, users are not literally stakeholders in IT, but taken as a whole, they are indeed. Ask users what about IT is important to them, and chances are the answers will include: “IT has to make my work easier;” “My machine (or the applications I use) can’t break;” and “When something’s broken or I don’t understand it, I need help fast.” As a whole, then, what’s important to the user community is productivity, even though they don’t say that. You can gauge this with user satisfaction surveys, a stand-in for the productivity contribution measurement.

The quest for productivity has another side, however. Users and small organizational units have the urge to build little applications in Excel or Access, or to use cheap or free consumer technologies for business purposes. Some studies show that users are increasingly taking over technology projects. Speed of deployment matters to them; corporate red tape doesn’t. Few users are motivated by corporate security and data integrity concerns. If this is the case in your organization, you can satisfy by institutionalizing this approach: Provide architects, project management training, and guidance on compliance matters.

Finally, on a personal level, many younger users care about collaboration, social networking, blogging, and related technologies. Satisfy these individuals by enabling such technologies for use within the company and the outside world. (See below.)

Your Company’s End Customers
To what extent are the company’s customers your customers? Answer that question by listing all the customer touch-points.
Are you providing direct service, like an ISP (think AOL) or a hosted application service like Salesforce.com? If so, your company’s customers are your customers. They’re motivated by the value proposition they bought.

Do you operate a web-enabled sales or service channel, like hotels.com? What likely matters to customers is that – without calling customer support – they can transact business quickly and easily, at any time, for anything they might want to do (e.g., make, change, cancel, or check a reservation).

More broadly speaking, if you operate the company website – whether or not the site provides sales or service – your services reflect on the company. Consumers (not yet customers) may want information about products and services. And customers and prospective customers may want to engage your company or may want to talk about experience they’ve had with your company. Social networking and blogging are important methods of engagement for the youngest consumers.

Finally, do you operate a telecenter for customer sales and service, as, for example, an insurance company might do? The company’s end-customers are not your customers, but how you perform reflects on the company. IT cannot likely make these customers happy, but it can sure make them unhappy. Consider: “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know why your policy was canceled. The system is down. Can you call back on Monday?” Or consider my bank’s website, which insists that I cannot transfer “1200” but I can transfer “1200.00”.

Your Channel Partners (Distributors and Resellers)

What’s different when your company sells through distributors? Quite a bit. Distributors want sales support, including access to information and sales support literature or websites, and they want service support from readily accessible and knowledgeable staff. While your peers in sales and service will have to provide the skilled staff and the materials, your telecenter and web support services will have to be up to the task. Depending on your business model, you may also have to support end-customers, potentially with service desks branded to match your distributor.

Most critical for a sustainable relationship, however, distributors will need access to your systems, easy integration, and top-notch systems support.

Your service attitude in understanding their business motivation, distinct from that of your own company, will matter. Do a bad job of it all, and – unlike your internal peers – your distributor can walk away.

Franchisees

Unlike distributors and resellers who have their own brand and identity, franchisees want to act like they’re your company and look like they’re your company. Most important, franchisees want your company to redirect leads to them – like the Ford website offering to find a dealer near you, or the Coldwell Banker website that routes you to a local office when you find a listing that interests you.

For some franchise businesses, the value proposition to franchisees may include template websites that allow franchisees to populate with their information, listings, services, service staff, etc. and present it as their own. In addition, an intranet may be an important means by which franchisees can interact among themselves or communicate with the company.

All of the above is no more complex than any other kind of technology-based service you’d provide any external customer. Satisfaction with your services, however, will be motivated by how well you support their ability to do business. Unlike distributors, who may be able to walk away, franchisees are typically bound by contract to represent the brand for some period of time. However, franchisees may have very similar needs and can speak with a common voice, which can help you define services. The common voice can also prove formidable if you fail to provide useful, high quality service.

Conclusion

Stakeholders are motivated by their own interests. Understanding the business and personal objectives of each individual stakeholder will help you understand how to serve them. Hopefully, this article has shed some light on the needs and motivations of stakeholders you may encounter in your role as an IT leader and will help you and your IT organization succeed in its mission.

About The Author

Stephen Lipka is a Principal of Avatar Strategic Partners, where he guides clients to higher profits through better use of information technology. His career spans 34 years in management, consulting, and product development. Steve is a Certified Management Consultant (CMC), a designation held by only 1% of US management consultants. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at SUNY Stony Brook. Reach Steve at slipka@Consult-Avatar.com.

Are you recognized as the go-to authority in your field?

Has your business been increasing steadily, despite recessions and tough competition?

If you can’t answer YES to all three questions, get a copy of McGraw-Hill’s The Expert’s Edge: Become the Go-To Authority People Turn to Every Time by Ken Lizotte ON A VERY SPECIAL DAY!

If you purchase The Expert’s Edge on January 25, 2010, you’ll not only reap the benefits of its “5 pillars of thoughtleading” and how to implement them, but you’ll also gain access to over a dozen valuable professional gifts offered by a formidable array of well-known business experts and thoughtleaders… and at no extra charge!

Why read The Expert’s Edge? Favorably reviewed by numerous critics and business leaders, this book will move you toward “thoughtleader” status, separating you from your competitors and making boom-and-bust cycles a thing of the past.

But don’t take our word for it… listen to just a few of the many highly regarded business authors, professionals, consultants and CEOs who have endorsed both the book and Ken’s ideas:

Sean Gallagher, Chief Value Delivery Officer, MarketCulture Strategies
“Want to be the leader in your field? Read this book… You can’t be seen as an expert without it.”

Jan Phillips, author of The Art of Original Thinking: The Making of a Thought Leader
“If you aspire to be a thoughtleader in your field, you won’t find a better guidebook than Ken Lizotte’s The Expert’s Edge. It’s a no-frills, cut-to-the-chase manual for mastering the tools of visionary leadership in a fast-paced, ever-changing world.”

Fred W. Green, Chairman of the CEO Club of Boston
“Brilliance is defined as ‘distilling the complex…to the simple,’ which is just what Ken Lizotte has accomplished. Ken’s latest work is a must read for CEOs and all other leaders who want a practical way to separate themselves and their companies from their competitors.”

As for the bonus gifts, you’ll receive tip sheets, articles, videos and much more! But remember, these complimentary gifts are available only if you purchase The Expert’s Edge on Monday, January 25, so don’t miss out! Just forward your electronic receipt to michaela@thoughtleading.com to receive this list of downloadable bonus gifts!

To check out The Expert’s Edge, click here.

Then take your business to new heights!

Book publisher success can now be found in alternative business models such as subscription services along the lines of the old Book-of-the-Month Club and specialty books that buck the tide of current economics such as books priced in the $200 or more range (PER book!)…

by Elena Petricone

Summary:
Typically consisting of a PowerPoint presentation with synchronized audio, slidecasts don’t consume much time or energy, yet can be an appealing alternative if you’re intimidated or overwhelmed by the prospect of creating a video or other daunting technological creation.

Full text:
A slidecast, to use the wiki definition, is an “audio podcast combined with a slideshow or diorama presentation.” Typically consisting of a PowerPoint presentation with synchronized audio, slidecasts don’t consume much time or energy, yet can be an appealing alternative if you’re intimidated or overwhelmed by the prospect of creating a video or other daunting technological creation. Though a slidecast on your website probably won’t attract huge numbers of new clients, adding one that’s informative and illustrative of your expertise can be an effective boost to your already existing or developing Internet presence, offering you an edge over your competition.

Sifting through Internet jargon of course can leave you feeling muddled. Podcasting, vcasting, webcasting and slidecasting for example, all have some conceptual overlap. But slidecasting simply means, as the term suggests, a presentation that incorporates a slideshow. This makes slidecasts well-suited for instruction. A slidecast might be a prerecorded webinar, a conversation, a how-to guide and anything in between. Consequently, decisions about the length, tone and content of your slidecast are entirely up to you. Though video can be integrated into the presentation, a slidecast is usually composed of synchronized audio and still slides.

Why Slidecast?

As mentioned above, creating slidecasts will not make or break your business yet they can represent excellent tools for maintaining good client relations. By openly sharing your knowledge, you’ll establish yourself as an expert of experts with advice to spare. Slidecasts assure clients, prospects and interested viewers alike that your dedication to educating others is central to your business value.

Providing free insight into your field may seem counterintuitive, but don’t fear copycats or those who might “steal” all your great ideas. As Ken Lizotte, author of The Expert’s Edge: Become the Go-To Authority People Turn to Every Time (McGraw-Hill) points out: “There will always be people who will never be your customer and who will be content to take your information and walk away. But there will always be readers and listeners too who don’t want to do it for themselves, and they will be eager to become your clients.” Slidecasts are a resource then to which your clients and prospects have 24/7 access. Yet even sustainable, easily obtained advice does not necessarily mean that everyone will have the motivation or desire to proceed without you.

Slidecast Content

Before dashing off to create a brand-new slidecast, consider work you’ve already done. Have you previously made a PowerPoint presentation in preparation for a speaking engagement, fundraising pitch, or webinar? Do you happen to have any audio recordings of yourself sitting around? Have you created a PowerPoint for use at sales calls? Recycling and incorporating past efforts is a smart way to save time. But don’t worry too if you’re starting totally fresh: assembling a new slidecast is still within your reach.

While composing and structuring your slidecast, you may want to ask yourself some questions to inspire topics or delve deeper within them. Determine your value propositions by answering the following:

How do you currently improve your clients’ situations?
What do you do very, very well?
What do you do better than any of your competitors?
Is there something that makes your business unique compared to others in your field?
Why are your clients more than happy to pay you?
What problems do you solve?
What problems do you see coming?

Remember that a slidecast is a terrific opportunity to take precise, bullet-point information and accompany it with your voice. This is not to say that you drop every formality once you begin audio recording but do consider the slidecast an opportunity to go beyond the text on your website. You may feel as though everyone knows how your industry operates simply because you function in it every day but clients and other slidecast viewers will typically not be so well-informed about you and therefore appreciate the extra time you take sharing your expertise with them.

Whether you are new to slidecasting or you are coming to slidecasting fully prepared and experienced with a PowerPoint and audio, I strongly encourage taking a look at other slidecasts before creating your own. SlideShare.net, a free sharing site that does not require any downloading, hosts a plethora of slidecasts in a variety of topics for you to sample. Take some time to explore this site and learn what makes an excellent slidecast and what makes a dud. Being able to articulate why a slidecast is engaging or boring can be enormously useful. Actively watching and listening will enable you to apply effective techniques to your own slidecasts and thus prevent disastrous mistakes. Though slidecasting is not a terribly difficult form of social media to master, you should nonetheless prepare yourself fully so as to maximize your slidecasting potential.

How should you actually make your recording? You may want to write a script to follow that accompanies your PowerPoint presentation. Or you may prefer to record “off the cuff.” Use your best judgment and determine what method will bring out your best effort and your most effective performance. This component of slidecasting should be done in whatever way feels most comfortable to you. And tempting though it might be, don’t self-plug to exhaustion! No one enjoys a dioramic advertisement. The issue is expert content pure and simple, designed to enhance your value to your target market. Keep shameless promotion “bombs” out of the picture.

Would you like more technical help with setting up your first slidecast? There are many websites out there eager to accept your money in exchange for tools to improve your slidecast. You could take advantage of these. Yet if you are a slidecasting novice, or unsure whether or not slidecasting is a good fit for your business, you probably don’t want endure any major costs just yet. Fortunately you don’t have to. Many free, high-quality programs exist to help with every aspect of slidecast construction. Most can be found with a quick search engine investigation. For the actual assembly and synchronization of the slidecast, for example, SlideShare is very easy to use, offering tools to bridge your slidecasts to Facebook, LinkedIn, Wordpress, YouTube, and more. Plus, the White House uses it!

Post-Slidecast Creation Actions

Once you’ve created your slidecast, use it strategically. Above all, make sure your masterpiece doesn’t just sit on your user profile or lay hidden away on your website. Ken Lizotte reminds us in his book that many professionals who produce or achieve something positive often next forget to let even the people who are the most invested in them know about it! Utilize your email list and announce to your clients and business contacts that you are using this new tool. Give them a link so they can view and experience your new slidecast. You may find that some of your contacts are using slidecasts as well and so will be especially interested in viewing yours as well as possibly cross posting presentations on their own blogs or websites.

Creating your first slidecast of course will probably be the most difficult. The obstacles you encounter on your first try may determine how adventurous you are next time around. Don’t be afraid to experiment with length or video segments or other aspects. And though all forms of social media are manageable, slidecasting can be a great “gateway medium” for teaching you how to meet ad master other technological challenges.

One last point: slidecasts will probably not win you fame and fortune. The substance of your business will always outrank the latest social medium. But slidecasts do offer you the opportunity to connect with new clients, old clients, prospects, new and old colleagues and curious viewers alike. By providing such inventive free resources, you’ll gain higher credibility and recognition as the go-to expert in your industry and field.
____________________________
Elena Petricone is emersongroup’s Deputy Imaginative Officer. Contact her at elena@thoughtleading.com

How I Took My Life Back After Thirty Years

By Michael Finch
BookSurge Publishing 2009

For thirty-one years Michael Finch gave his total allegiance, energy, devotion, dreams, time and love to Guru Maharaji (the Lord of the Universe, Prem Rawat). He also gave the Guru and his organizations two inheritances, a house, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. As Maharaji’s former chauffeur Michael was close to him personally; he lived as a renunciate in Maharaji’s ashrams, and was later authorized and empowered to reveal the Guru’s secret teachings (the “Knowledge”).

Michael explains that his new book “Without the Guru: How I Took My Life Back After Thirty Years” is a story of “how I came to live, think, feel, behave, and love, without ‘the Guru’, meaning both Maharaji, as the actual guru in my own life; and in a more general sense of learning to face myself and the world without any intermediary or negotiator, of any kind, in between.”

Michael’s background brings a particularly moving voice to the chronicle of his life from “beatnik and hippy roots of the mid-1960s,” and the later struggle to reclaim his life once it had become complexly intertwined with Maharaji. “Without the Guru” is not only a narrative about extricating oneself from a cult. Michael’s prose is self-reflective, honest, and eloquently describes the overlapping experiences of devotion, spirituality, and being human. In one passage Michael examines what Maharaji meant to him and others within a crowd:

“Actually, not loved us so much as he loved me, each of us locked in our own private fantasy that he was really noticing us individually, or we were aching for such notice. We identified the outer guru we saw out there with the inner guru we knew existed in here, so the figure on stage we were yearning for was also our own inner essence. And the consequence of such identification was to give ourselves away, to wrench our self from its true home here and place it at a distance over there on that stage.”

Michael’s book is about “a process of discovery,” of how he learned to feel, love and act without Maharaji: “It is a story of being confined within a rigid belief system, realizing it, and discovering how to break out from it.”

This ability to recognize the guru dynamic and be able to side-step it, is not just relevant to Eastern gurus such as Michael writes about, but especially to both business and life decisions in our modern western world.

To be mesmerized by the supposed expertise and charisma of a guru-figure, whether religious or business, can lead to dependency, unclear thinking, reliance on flawed beliefs, and bad decisions.

Just how bad such decisions can be was revealed by the tragedy in October 2009 involving a sweat lodge run by another guru (this one Oprah-approved) James Ray in Sedona, AZ. This sweat lodge was completely unlike ceremonial Native American sweat lodges and violated elementary safety guidelines. Sixty-four people were crammed into a space deliberated created to be physically challenging, and the guru-figure James Ray repeatedly affirmed that they needed to go “beyond themselves” and remain in the lodge, to surrender to something more than themselves. The result was three deaths and nineteen serious cases of collapse.

The interesting thing about this incident is that no one was physically prevented from leaving the lodge. It appears that people stayed against all reason, in spite of severe physical distress, because of the pressure from the guru-figure to surrender and “transcend themselves.”

It is easy to say “Well, I would have left in a situation like that” — and perhaps you would have. But then it is hard to appreciate how insidious, seductive and powerful the guru dynamic can be. By examining the dynamic in such detail, Michael does us all a favor by showing us an “up close and very personal” view of human relations, in the business environment and in life in general, that it is important we enter well prepared and alert to its dangers.

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