By 
At some point in your sales career, you may find yourself teaming up with other agents or service providers in your area to build business. Or maybe you’re working together on a neighborhood event or website. Or maybe you’re trying to win a listing for a client who spends half his year 2,000 miles away in Maui.
This type of collaboration inevitably leads to some Web conferencing. But don’t let the nature of a Web conferencing platform kill your creativity. Instead, try something new!
Meet Dimdim, an alternative that’s free and also kind of fun as it gives more collaboration opportunities than the usual roster of GoTo Meeting and Webex.
Dimdim allows you to meet with your colleagues or even long-distance clients on a live Web page. You don’t have to download anything or even pay to use it if you have just a small group! (Now that’s a nice perk.) It’s literally click a button and boom! Instant meeting commencement.
Using Dimdim, you can share documents, Web pages, whiteboards, audio, video and even record your meetings for those who couldn’t make it or just for remembering a thought process or decision that was made.
As I mentioned, it is free to use for smaller groups of up to five participants and then starts at $25 per month for unlimited use with more participants. It works on a Mac or a PC. And since there is nothing to install, there’s no excuse for your meeting not to start on time.
What really stands out about this new platform is the collaboration capability and the fact that you don’t have to download anything to use it. For that, it’s worth checking out!
Posts Tagged ‘career’
Cool Apps: A New Way to Web Conference
Thursday Thoughts: Crises and the Practice of Leadership
By “People with passion find a way to get things done and to make things happen, in spite of the obstacles and challenges that get in the way.”
-Steve Jobs
After you spend some time leading a company or team, you inevitably encounter a crisis. How you deal with that crisis as a leader ends up mattering more than the crisis itself.
On June 24, the consumer technology industry’s darling, Apple Inc., found itself wrapped up in a publicity nightmare. Many of the consumers who’d bought the latest iPhone 4 were reporting reception issues, and evidence showed that a defective antennae was causing dropped calls and poor connections when held a certain way.
The issues were more than a big deal partly because of all the fanfare leading up to the iPhone 4 release. When the long-anticipated iPhone 4 was announced in early June, Apple said it was the biggest leap they had taken with the product since the original iPhone shipped three years ago. The company sold more than 3 million iPhone 4s in the first 22 days on the market.
The negative press regarding the defective antennae continued to pile on, causing Apple CEO Steve Jobs to abruptly end his Hawaii vacation to address the issue in a rush press conference.
Apple handled some things inadequately during this calamity, but eventually ended up doing the right thing. Here are five leadership qualities Steve Jobs used to get through this crisis that we can all learn from:
- Strive to educate. In his press conference, Jobs focused more on the larger issues of the smartphones rather than the signal deprivation. He wanted to combine his learning with action and impel the public to seek greater understanding of the product.
- Maintain constant communication. As this whole debacle transpired, Jobs’ main goal was to show that communication is the real work of leadership.
- Become a problem solver. Apple did not choose to simply forget about this issue and not deal with it. Instead, company officials dealt with the situation head on and extended support to their customers.
- Don’t be afraid to show your vulnerability. Jobs began his press conference by admitting the company is not perfect. In doing this and explaining that Apple does have faults, he showed he was strong enough to care.
- An apology is a powerful way to make things better. At one point, Jobs offered a pure apology. His forgiveness does not change the past, but it will enlarge the future.
The clear lesson here is that it is only in the practice of leadership that we influence our world. Rather than view the iPhone 4 problems as a setback, Jobs saw it as a healthy, inevitable part of becoming a successful company.
As American football coach Lou Holtz once said, “Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.”
Steve Jobs exemplified just that. Without his passion and leadership to get through the crisis, the public would not have believed in his ability to resolve the iPhone 4 antennae situation.
As you think about your career and obstacles you face, remember that Steve Jobs believes, “Passion rules! Passion is about our emotional energy and a love for what we do. Without passion it becomes difficult to fight back in the face of obstacles and difficulties.”
The next time you face a crisis, let your passion kick in and guide your leadership decisions.
Thursday Thoughts: Manute Bol: A Giant Among Men
At 7 feet, 7 inches tall, the late Manute Bol was too big a man to be a professional basketball player. Though he stood well above the tallest players, Bol was more like a giant who lived his life fighting for those who were less fortunate than him.
Bol (Oct. 16, 1962 – June 19, 2010), a Sudanese-born basketball player and activist, was the son of a Dinka tribal chief who named him Manute, which means “special blessing.” Bol came from a family of extraordinarily tall men and women: “My mother was 6 feet 10, my father 6 feet 8 and my sister 6 feet 8,” he said. “And my great-grandfather was even taller – 7 feet 10.”
During Bol’s years on the professional basketball court, he had the sport’s most imposing defensive presence, which gave him a singular purpose: blocking shots. To this day, he holds the top record for career blocks per 48 minutes (8.6).
But for those of us who remember his days as a Golden State Warrior, we recall the most unlikely three-point shooter in NBA history. “He was so competitive,” his coach, Don Nelson said. “He thought he could score, but of course he couldn’t. To get him to do what I needed, I told him when there was five seconds left on the shot clock, and if we didn’t have a good shot, we would get the ball to him. And he actually made some.”
His role on the court became a metaphor for his life’s work. Just as he played defense for the opportunity to make those crazy three-point shots, he played basketball just so he could earn money for Sudan. Bol gave an estimated $3.5 million during this 10-year NBA career to help support Sudan.
He established the Ring True Foundation to raise funds for refugees and often took part in unusual or unexpected events just for the publicity. He once boxed with former football player William “The Refrigerator” Perry (and won in the third round) just to get the phone number of his foundation on Fox TV. In 2002, he made a single-game appearance with the Indianapolis Ice of the Central Hockey League, and he also once suited up as a horse jockey.
He would suffer any indignity if it raised money for the Sudanese.
“He lived in fairly severe pain for his last five years; still, he was driven to leave a meaningful legacy for the next generation of young Sudanese in the South,” said former National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, who often traveled with Bol.
He touched statesmen and athletes alike. “Once you were his friend, you were always his friend. That’s just how he was,” Rick Mahorn, a teammate on the Philadelphia 76ers said. “Every moment with him was just fun, but he was a soldier, proud of who he was, trying to help everybody around him.”
This “giant among men” will long be remembered – not for the NBA records he leaves behind, but for the people he helped along the way.
Would you want your child to go into real estate?
By Kind of an interesting question, isn’t it?
It reminds me of that Willie Nelson song, “Mothers, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys…”
So what is it? Do you or don’t you want your kids to follow your foot paths into real estate?
First, let’s look at the choices. Your child could be a realtor, a mortgage broker, a bank lending officer , an appraiser, or a title or escrow officer.
The first thing is that yes, it can be a very lucrative field. This is especially true for realtors and mortgage brokers.
It’s not unusual, at least in a good year, for a realtor or mortgage loan officer to make $100,000-200,000 in a year.
The obvious downside is volatility. I know one person who was an account executive for the sub-prime mortgage arm of Lehman Brothers. She was making about $300,000 a year during the good times, but she’s now working as a bookkeeper at a plumbing supply company.
If your kids do go into real estate, teach them early to set aside money during the good times to help them ride out the bad times.
Along with the lack of predictability of income, there is one huge positive: It’s the ability to help people. This is especially true for realtors who work so hard to help people find their piece of the American Dream.
Being a realtor was once considered almost a hobby. The cliché was that bored housewives did it to have something to do. I don’t know if that was really the case, but today’s Realtor is highly trained and extremely professional.
A final benefit to being a realtor or being in the mortgage business is that these careers present all sorts of interesting investment opportunities. If your son or daughter goes into these or related fields, they will learn about good buildings for sale way before an ad shows up in the Sunday paper.
So along with the potential for good compensation, there is the chance to make good money through smart investing.
All in all, would I want my kids to go into real estate?
The answer is, quite simply, yes. And I’d be proud of them for doing so.
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