Great List of Business Management and Success Quotes

Inspirational quotes are used in motivational speeches, business presentations, and training sessions as a way to drive home the desired  principles.  People remember quotes that resonate with them or are from famous people they respect the opinion of.  

This post is the beginning a few success quotes that will resonate with most business owners and professional people.  Starting with the Will Rogers quote ("Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.") in the image, which applies to anyone with a vision or purpose - whether it is personal or professional.  Mr. Rogers is basically saying if you have an idea to implement or a job to do, get moving on it or someone else will and you will get left behind feeling crushed by your lack of momemtun.  

I want this to be a good list that continues to grow as a great reference for others.  Please feel free to add your own favorite quote to the list by including it as a comment on this post.  

"If you don't drive your business, you will be driven out of business." - B. C. Forbes

"Great companies are built on great products." - Elon Musk

"And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department." - Andrew Carnegie

"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure." - Colin Powell

"First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people." - Leo Rosten 

Ten Tips for Wonderful Webinars

Webinars are a great way to share knowledge or give presentations to multiple audiences at one time.  People from multiple locations can connect at the same time to hear your message without travel requirements or tie zone issues.  Consider webinars as an e-learning option for training and as a marketing tool for sales prospecting.  Below are ten tips to help you have a problem-free webinar.

10 Tips for Wonderful Webinars

1. Select a webinar platform.  If the organization hosting the webinar does not have a webinar/virtual meeting provider, you will need to research ones that might fit your need.  Most platforms offer a free short trial period you may use to host a small webinar to get started.
2. Alleviate technical issues.  Presenters should use a landline connection over WIFI option to prevent possible downtime. For the best voice sound, use a microphone headset rather than the mic inside your computer.  Turn off any pop-up notifications to prevent distractions during presentation.  Also be in a room where there will be no background noises or voices to interfere with the audio.  
3. Have a technical assistant or moderator, if possible.  This allows the presenter to  concentrate on delivering content rand answering questions over clicking on the computer.  Verify with each other when the pre-webinar check-in time together will be , presentation expectations, and any post-webinar activities.
4. Provide a short speaker bio, if you have a moderator who will be introducing the webinar.  This is especially important if there will be several speakers in a panel or webinar series.  It gives the moderator relevant data on presenter to share before introducing the current topic.
5. Keep it short at 30-60 minutes, but no more than two hours.  People get tired of staring at a screen even if the topic is absorbing.  If your message requires more time, consider making it a multi-part series over a few weeks instead of a long session.
6. Promote the webinar.  Webinars target to a specific group should be communicated via email to target audience.  Open webinars may be marketed via email and/or on social media.
7. Have a photo of the presenter to include with bio and show on introductory/closing slides.  This way the audience knows what you look like.  This will allow you to skip having a presenter camera on you when you are speaking.  Presenter cameras are geared for emulating face-to-face meetings, not for presentations where speaker may be glancing down at notes or on-line ressonses.
8. Prepare a slide show for display during the webinar that is interesting and informative.  Keep slide text as concise as possible, use appropriate statistics,  have relevant graphics often, and use animations/transitions to get attention.  In virtual presentations there is no eye-contact so you will need show more slides and spend less talking time per slide than if you awee doing a live presentation.You may want to give the audience the option of downloading a copy of the slid es to follow-along and make notes.
9. Practice your presentation for attention-getting delivery and with your assistant for technical delivery.  With the technical practice session, include testing pauses for: audience to read statistics or graphs, taking polls, giving quizzes, and answering questions.  
10. Consider recording the webinar so that people unable to attend the original virtual session or missed part of a series has the option of watching at a later date.  You may want to limit the amount of time the recording is available to eliminate the possibility of people seeing out-of-date information.

How to Get Topics and Participants for Learn-at-Lunch Events

How do you get topics for learn-at-lunch training sessions?

If you want to start lunch and learns but do not where to start, do an on-line survey (with SurveyMonkey or Social Media Polls) to see what topics people are most interested in to get started.  You can provide 10 topic areas and request those surveyed rank them in order of preference.  You may also want an optional fill-in the-blank field to capture ideas you did not think of for prioritizing in the next survey.  Be sure to provide a “do by” date to encourage timely responses.  The easy decision then is to start with the topic with the highest ranking and move down the list.  This type of survey could be done quarterly or annually to test new topics or determine which ones to repeat.

How do you get people to attend Learn-at-Lunch events?

The obvious answer is to make them worth attending.  How do you do that?  Below are a few ideas to think about for mixing it up and making it worthwhile for your training participants.

• Do not just do lecture and a PowerPoint presentation!  You can make it interactive by adding games, case study review, quizzes, as well as "Q&A."  Make it more interesting by including skits, vendor or customer comments, video clips, demonstrations and music if appropriate.  You might find something funny on YouTube that could drive home your primary point. It should be so interesting that people want to come to the next one!
• Consider capturing all the questions on a flip chart or marker board, if the lunch and learn involves a strategic change.  Then when you get the best answers from management, you can publish it as a FAQ document for all employees to access.  You may also want to record the event so you can share it with more people via the company intranet.
• Find good presenters, people who are knowledgeable and can make their topic interesting!  You do not want a monotone voice reading slides and putting the audience to sleep after they eat.  Instead you want people to go away with more knowledge than they came with.  Presenters can be internal to the organization or motivational speakers from outside the company.
• Make sure you space and equipment works in advance.  Not understanding how to link in remote attendees or on-line data is not only frustrating to them and the speaker, it is distracting to those physically sitting in the room.  If you mess up with technology and spend too much time fixing it, people may not come back to the next event.
• Consider success sharing among teams and projects as potential lunch and learn topics too.  Let your teams shine and share to help others improve and grow.  This should be a learning session, not an idea generating meeting or project completion party – those should be separate individual team events.

Once you have your topics and your schedule planned.  Get the word out!  Start with emails and do not stop there.   Promote it with flyers, bulletin boards, or posters prominently placed around your business facilities.  If your organization has a newsletter or corporate e-calendar make sure your lunch and learns get listed there too.

Five Tips for Planning Learn-at-Lunch Events

Below are five (5) tips to consider when planning a Learn at Lunch training event in your company. Each of the five tips include questions to ask before proceeding with event planning.  

1. Define the best time to hold your sessions.  When do most of your employees break for lunch 11-12, 11:30-12:30, or 12-1?  Choosing a time-frame that most prefer will help you get more people in the seats.
2. Decide how often you want to offer these sessions. Should training events be once a quarter or once a month?  Or do you have an immediate need to disseminate information or want to break it into multiple modules where weekly events over a short time period may be more appropriate?  Choosing a frequency of events will help you arrange for presenters and plan promotions.  If you choose to do weekly events, make them the same day each week so it easier for your employees to plan for.
3. Determine if you want variety of attendees or a targeted group.  Could you provide lunch or would it be better to tell your employees to Bring-Your-Own?  For a targeted learning, people will typically want to attend without extra incentives.  For a varied audience, the extra incentive a free lunch may get more people to show up.
4. Discover a location that will work best.  Depending on the audience size, can you find a room large enough with table space as well as seating?  If you are providing lunch, is there room to set-up an area for people to quickly move through when selecting their meal before the training portion begins?  If you are not providing food and expect a large crowd, can you bring food and drink into an auditorium-type space and do the seats provide a fold-up writing space that may be larger enough for notes and food?
5. Deliver meaningful content.  What topics are people do you plan to present?  Who can you get to present each topic in an interesting or unique way?  This is especially important for reviewing old material where you want people to see it differently and/or not be bored by hearing the same thing again.

Even though lunch and learns are more casual and shorter events than a training workshop, you still need to organize presenters, handouts, facilities, equipment, and food in advance.

*These same five suggestions above will work for non-profit associations who prefer to do lunch meetings instead of dinner events – just replace the word “employees” with “members” when reading the tips.

Writing Resolutions: Two-Part Text

Often a committee, sub-committee, ad-hoc team, or sub-team may need to take their motion up to a higher-level authority (such as a board, officers, management/leadership, treasurer, assigning committee/team, etc.) for approval in order to finance an idea or corporately carry-out an initiative.  To make the approval process easier for that authority, instead of making a vocal motion or presentations during a meeting they will instead provide a written resolution.  A resolution is merely a main motion submitted in writing and it is used when requesting a formal decision from a higher body.  Although it is in writing, they may present the resolution by reading it aloud and then handing the authority’s secretary a copy of the written resolution.  Or they may do a formal presentation and then have 1 or 2 slides at the end that cover the written resolution, in this case they provide the secretary a copy of the presentation to attach to the approving authority’s minutes.

A resolution contains two parts:

1. Preamble (which are the reasons for the resolution and/or potential benefits to the organization)

·         Start each paragraph with “Whereas" capitalized

·         Close each paragraph with a semicolon (;) or comma(,) followed by "and"

·         Avoid the use of (.)  periods

·         Close the last paragraph with "therefore" or "therefore, be it"

2.  Resolution (written in motion form so the approving authority can just amend it as desired and then copy into their minutes).

·         Begin with italicized and capitalized words, "Resolved, That"

·         Then word the rest of the resolution in the format of desired decision

Fifteen Common Design Mistakes in Creating Visuals

Since my most popular seminar and  articles are on how to create and deliver presentations, I was intrigued when Payman Taei (Founder of Visme) offered to let me share parts of his video series called "Make Information Beautiful" on my blog.

At the bottom of this post is an 10-minute episode from the series containing great tips to avoid the most common design mistakes by non-designers. The 15 mistakes are indicated below,  However you have to watch the video to get the tips for avoiding these mistakes.

1. Using words instead of visuals
2. Poor readability
3. Mismatching fonts
4. Not choosing the right colors
5. Lack of negative space
6. Place elements arbitrarily
7. Failing to create contrast
8. Not scaling properly
9. Hard-to-read text
10.Inappropriate font combinations
11.Inadequate space between lines
12.Using raster images
13.Striving for complete symmetry
14.Failing to communicate effectively
15.Not being consistent



The additional 4 mistakes mentioned in video are in images and text on Visme blog post
1. Bad kearning
2. Ignoring visual hierarchy rules
3. Copying other's work
4. Forgetting about the medium

Preparing for Presentations by Playing the Part

As a person who has given many presentations and taught others on how to do so, I review books on the subject to see what is new.  Play the Part (on Amazon #ad) by Gina Barnett (that rhymes!) just came out as a two part instructional with activities and worksheets.  The first part of the book covers the signals your body language tells about you in both leadership roles and as a presenter and gives tips to improve.  This book is a great asset for those who want to learn more about body language.  The second part of the book is where she gets more into planning and delivering presentations.  I will focus on the 2^nd part of the book in this post.

Gina introduces a Key Message idea for planning presentations and provides a worksheet with the headings What, How, and Why to create your message.  Under each heading, your answer the following questions:

• What is the situation (concept, problem, idea, or challenge)?
• How can you address it (recommended actions)?
• Why do this (goals, results, or desired outcomes)?

She goes on to discuss ways to grab the audience and get them to tune into the purpose of your presentation using: a catchy title, headlines (for your key messages), and telling stories rather than stating facts.  She says people can better understand and empathize with metaphors and similes than facts and figures.  Although, she seems to agree with me that if numbers are needed to prove a point, they should be in a graph rather than a table or buried in text.

I found it interesting the Gina had a 5P instruction in her book that stands for “Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance.”  I give a 4P approach in my presentation keynotes: Plan, Prepare, Practice, and Perform.  At the end of her book, Gina also dedicates 12 pages to talk about virtual meetings.

You can find her 3-question Key Message template after chapter seven of her communication book Play the Part.  Or you can find a 6-question Presentation Plan format in my meeting management book R.A!R.A! available on Amazon #ad. 

Have a Hook in Your Presentations

The video below contains one presentation tip from book Rule The Room (on Amazon #ad) by Jason Teteak.  The tips is how to make boring topics more interesting by starting with a hook. The best hook is why they want to hear what you are going to say or WIIFM (what's in it for me).

Please note that after 3.5 minutes, the rest of video is a company commercial on their presentation training to gain The Top 8 Business Presentation Skills.  They also provide a discount code for buying the course at end.

Free Business Articles for Organization Newsletters

Looking for free well-written business articles for your organization’s newsletter?  I often get emails from company, association, university, and military representatives asking if they can reprint one of my e-articles in their own newsletter.   I am flattered that they find the information in an article so useful that they want to share it with employees, members, and others.  If you are in charge of a newsletter and looking for something that will strike a chord with your readers, please feel free to check out and use any of the articles on the following topic web pages.  A link to reprint guidelines should be at the top of each page.

·         Communication and Presentations

·         Leadership and Strategy
·         Meeting Management
·         Social Networking and Media
·         Team Building and Project Management
·         Time Management and Organization

Articles that have been published in print magazines will require additional permission from the magazine to reprint any of the text. If you want the right to copy an article in print, you may have to purchase that right from the magazine.  However, you can email out the direct link to a PDF of the article without getting permission.  You can find some of my print articles at http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Shirley_Lee.  These articles are available for reprint - please see guidelines at http://www.ezinearticles.com/terms-of-service.html






4 P’s of Presentations with the “Do or Do Not” Rules of PowerPoint

I recently facilitated a discussion with a group of trainers on the Do’s and Don’ts of PowerPoint presentations.  The purpose of our discussion was to make sure we not only gave better presentations but that we also put more thought into creating appropriate slides.  Therefore the discussion revolved around the 4 P’s of presentations: Plan and Prepare as keys to Creating Presentations, followed by Practice and Perform for Delivering Presentations. 

The following questions were presented as part of the discussion of the plan step:
•         Who will be there?
•         What will appeal to this audience?
•         What supporting visual aids are needed?
•         How much presentation time
•         Where is presentation?
•         When is presentation?

During the discussion on prepare step, the Rules of 6 for creating the best text and graphic slides were presented.  A bad example was presented for the group to pick-apart what made the slide a hindrance to learning rather than a good visual aid.  Use of other visual aids such as flip charts, handouts, note-taking, and activities were also discussed as alternatives or additions to slides to increase learning.  Technical tips for using PowerPoint and Word to create and deliver training and presentations were also shared. 

A 3-phase practice model was offered for making sure the skills of the presentation delivery would be excellent.

1. Out loud to self
2. With someone observing
3. In presentation setting

The discussion on how to better perform was kicked off with an exercise on what your body language and gestures can communicate during a presentation.  In other words, are tones of voice, facial expressions, or movements confirming what you are saying in the presentation or are they distracting or worse delivering a different message?  Also discussed were a few things to remember regarding Podium Use by Presenters.

Death by Powerpoint – Is this your Presentation?

I do a keynote called Perfecting Presentaitons with the 4 P’s which is on creating and delivering business presentations.. During the 2nd P of the keynote, I share an exercise with th group on the right and wrong way to create PowerPoint slides. They learn a lot by trying to find everything wrong with my slides before we discuss the right way to prepare a show.

Watch the very amusing video titled “Life After Deatch by PowerP:oint” (under 10 minutes) below by Don McMillan and ask yourself “Do my slides look like that? Do I talk that fast?” In the video, he shares many of the same tips I do but in a much funnier way. The basic information I share in my keynote and that you will also glean from the video on slide shows are these key points:

• Do not type every word of your speech, summarize in slides
• Do not use too many font types or sizes – find 1 style that your audience can read easily
• Do define your acronyms or technical terms
• Do not overuse animations and images
• Do not put too many bullets on the same slide (for more see Rule of 6)
• Do use graphs and charts but only if they explain data better than a table.

Presentations - Bad and the oh so Ugly

I gave a recent example of a good presentation in my last post. Here are a few not to emulate.

The Bad...
A Walking Disaster Fired Himself on National TV. Michael Brown, the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, fired himself on national television shortly after hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans. Brown didn't realize it at the time, but that is exactly what he did when he went on CNN and told host Paula Zahn that he had no idea that there were thousands of hurricane refugees huddled in the New Orleans convention center.

There was only one problem with Brown's insufficient intelligence report — he was the only person in the world who didn't know that thousands were holed up in the convention center because they had been broadcast on TV continuously on all the news channels for more than 24 hours. Once Brown made this startling admission, it was only a matter of time before the Bush Administration would have to fire him. Brown instantly became a symbol for anyone and everyone who was less than satisfied with how the Federal government responded to the crisis.

OK, those were CEO presentations on national TV or massive auditoriums filled with press, customers and employees. But today, many of us speak at professional groups where we introduce program guest speakers or give announcements. And what about the much more common conference room setting that most of us frequent?

As the coach/presenter for Present-to-Win as part of Boot Camps for Business, I often see the sweaty palms, anxious voice, and shaky hands that go with presentation anxiety. Just telling what we do can send us into orbit. We can choose the wrong words, stumble, say things we often regret and just look foolish. One of the key elements we stress in our Boot Camps is that presentation opportunities can arise anywhere. And you want to be successful when they do pop up. Watch Sarah transform in her "before and after” video. Look at the differences. They are amazing and this is exactly the kind of end product we focus on in our Boot Camps.

The Ugly...Know your audience — avoid being a "killer." At a recent business gathering, we were asked to briefly introduce ourselves to the group so they would know something about our work. The first participant began to share not his bio but his entire investment business strategy. As he began, his anxiety about presenting hit and his voice shot up an octave. His hands shook. He did not pause or listen. He talked and talked about stuff most of us didn't care about. His “killer question” was unleashed to convert all of us to customers. Here it is. “How many of you are planning to die this year?”

Well, maybe that once worked at a Rotary meeting, but it fell very flat with this group. “This would be a good year to do it” was a response across the room, which brought down the house. Our broker quickly closed down his marketing materials. It hurt to be in the same room with him.

What could he have done differently to present more effectively?

1. Think First. Here was a group of new people and the key is to choose exactly one message he would like to share. Upon reflection, he probably groaned a bit about going on and on. We sure did.
2. Time Flies so get a watch. In an introduction held in a Board Room, using your time wisely says a lot about you. Two minutes tops. More than that and you are giving an unwanted keynote.
3. Collateral Damage. Always remember, Less is More. Handing out folders of sales collateral to people you just met doesn't work. Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe adopted the motto "Less is more” and we all learned a lot from his design restraint. Now we need to learn it in presentations as well. Very, very few of us are convinced to take a sales or business action based on a brochure.
4. Re-Fresh. Avoiding any hackneyed phrases is insurance that your presentation feels current. Stale bread doesn't sell.

Presentations - Good, Bad and Ugly

School bells will start ringing soon and probably not a moment too soon for parents, but they also ring for all of us whose jobs include communicating with others. Public speaking, staff meetings and sometime the Board Room full of suits are all on our radar. Many of us have presentations outside our comfort zones and that's why our Present-To-Win skills training have become so critical. No better place to start on presentation skills than with all the trouble that the folks at Apple have had with those pesky new iPhone 4 phones.

The Good...
The world seemed to have caught the Steve Jobs press conference as it quickly shot to the top of twitter et al. Here was a CEO coming on stage to “defend” his product and his company. The worst possible position. Did Jobs crawl out on the stage and beg forgiveness. Hardly.

FastCompany Magazine took a hard look at what happened when the company finally responded to the near-universal criticism of its latest gadget's antenna problems. On stage, Steve Jobs didn't offer a solution to the iPhone's reception issues (outside of a free bumper), and he never once offered an apology (even refusing during the QandA to apologize to investors). FastCompany went on, “instead, Jobs delivered a crystal-clear presentation that reminded the world--even the pissed-off fan boys who created this backlash--why Apple is Apple. Because Apple is known for, if nothing else, having rabid, rabid evangelistic fans who believe in the company and their products.” The key word here is “believe”.

Almost as important as “what” Steve said was “how” he said it and thus effective presentation skills become our theme as we look at how we communicate some of the most critical information of our careers.

Forget bullet points—it's all about the message, Jobs only uses succinct phrases, and even his slide with the most words contained just fewer than 30 --and that was the summary of his whole presentation. "No bullet points," insists author and social media scientist Dan Zarrella. "Basically you want to have one-thought per slide." "His slide design is image, and then text, which is not only short and quotable, but even if it's taken out of the context of his presentation, it still makes sense," notes Zarrella. Apple has certainly perfected its slide design.

If there was one theme for Jobs's entire presentation, it was, “We love our users (customers).” In four different slides, it was the message with a subhead identifying other themes.

What can we learn from this? That is the way one of the master presenters in the business world today handles a crisis that in many other hands would be a four-alarm fire. Steve just reminded everyone that Apple knew who brought them to the dance and they weren't leaving. Great job but now, but for something completely different from another CEO with a different ending – see my next post on bad presentations with a few tips on making them better.

Do presentations eat up meeting time by including too many slides?

During my presentations on meeting management, I usually recommend telling any presenters when invited to a meeting exactly how long they have to present and how much time should be allowed for questions. Then I go one step further and also suggest limiting the number of PowerPoint slides the presenter may bring in relation to the talk time. My recommendation is 2-3 minutes per slide for technical talks and up to 5 minutes per slide on non- technical subjects. Why impose presentation limits? This greatly reduces the chance that the presenter will read from the slides and that the audience may suffer from information overload.

Can limiting the number of slides by time really can be done? YES! I recently spoke to a technical group, who preferred their presenters show PowerPoint slides during their talk and provide copies as handouts. I typically do not use slides unless I am leading a training class. Since I always strive to meet my audience needs, for this presentation I prepared six slides (with 3 to 17 words on each slide, which is less than the Rule of 6) to show plus one slide that would only be in the handout. The extra handout slide was a resource page that provided the audience with contact information for me, how to find the book the presentation was based on, and where they could go to get more information on the topic. After the presentation, many members of the audience told me or the meeting coordinator how much they appreciated the presentation. Most said they would use much of what they learned during the presentation. Not one person complained that I did not provide enough slides!

Another meeting presentation tip I share is to ask the presenter to arrive 5-10 minutes before their scheduled presentation time and plan to stay that long after their presentation time. The early arrival insures they are ready to present if the meeting is ahead of schedule. It is better that the one presenter allows more of their time than that the entire group has to spend time waiting for them to show up. The presenter planning to stay late means they do not have to leave for another appointment before their presentation time, just in case the meeting is running a little late, or there are more questions than anticipated. If the subject is controversial or highly technical, then the presenter may want to provide a supplemental handout after the talk or wrap-up with information on how the audience can get more details like a website or toll-free phone number.

Use these ideas in your meetings and presentation to save time. Please share others ways with our readers on how you save time in meetings when someone is asked to give an informal or formal presentation by adding comments.