Six Steps To Getting Ahead in Your Career Bayt's guide to vaulting up the career ladder.

http://www.bayt.com/en/career-article-78/

Six Steps To Getting Ahead in Your Career

Bayt's guide to vaulting up the career ladder.

1. Find a Mentor

A good mentor is that special someone who will take the trouble to see things from your point of view, take your side and guide you in the right direction. The best professional mentors are people with experience in your own industry who can give sound professional advice, help you brainstorm and solve problems, put matters in perspective and sometimes open doors for you. Mentors however need not be from your own industry. An old college professor, an entrepreneur friend of the family, a family banker with a good overall business sense or even someone in a completely unrelated field whose integrity, judgement and intuition you trust, can all serve as allies and sounding boards as you progress up the career ladder. Try to find that someone you can learn from and who can help you through the uncertain patches in your job and overall career.

2. Effective Time Management

Effective time management boils down to setting specific goals and meeting them. Plan ahead both in macro terms and micro terms. Set deadlines for projects and then break the projects up into individual milestones with separate deadlines which you can tick off as you accomplish them. Delegate along the way. Dina in graphics, for example, may be better equipped to draw those Excel charts and make them visually appealing than you, so allocate that particular microtask to her. Make your deadlines reasonable and aim to over deliver rather than over promise. It is always better to have some slack time at the end of a project to check for detail and presentation rather than have to rush the next item on your agenda.

You will find that this kind of planning is so attractive that it will spill over into your personal life. Little Johnny's life will be so much fuller when you see how many activities you can schedule for him on paper and when you can allocate that half hour between your lunch break and that meeting to paying him a surprise ice cream visit at school. You will also find yourself scheduling more 'fun' and 'relaxing' activities for yourself when you take control of your time by planning ahead.

3. Manage Your Boss

Bosses have lives, career roadblocks, deadlines and worries of their own and a smart employee will learn how to ingratiate themselves to their boss amidst all the noise and create an ongoing professional dialogue that achieves both parties' objectives. Proactivity is the key to a successful employee/ employer relationship. Take control of your career and communicate your goals, aspirations, ideas and concerns to your boss on an ongoing basis rather than hoping he will make plans that suit you and notice all the work you get done. Effective communication in the right tone at the right time is a very important component of this relationship as is full transparency, making it easier for your boss to see and appreciate your work and efforts and promote you.

4. Negotiate for What You're Worth

There's nothing like feeling underpaid and undervalued to put a damper on your career aspirations and stifle your motivation and productivity. Take control of the situation and try to negotiate a compensation package that is more in line with what you feel you're worth. Refer to articles on negotiations in the Career Center of the Middle East's #1 job site Bayt.com if you are new to the field of negotiations.

Remember, there are specific rules to successful negotiation. First of all, make sure what you are about to negotiate for is realistic. Arm yourself with some knowledge of what your peers in the industry and in the company are making and a sound judgement regarding how much you feel your boss really values you.

Secondly, target a win-win scenario. Aim to show your job how much better off he will be having a better paid employee who will then exert more effort, take more initiative and live up to the yet untapped potential everyone knows she has. The message essentially is "employee is unhappy, unhappy employee is unmotivated, employee sees no fairness in situation, let's make company more profitable and boss look much better by paying employee to be more motivated and produce more and better work."

Thirdly, make sure the tone is right and that you are flexible so you can win in a number of different scenarios. Listen carefully to your boss's point of view and anticipate his concerns. Be prepared to offer different means for him to meet your justified aspirations. For instance, if after a respectful and well argued dialogue, your boss is unable to meet your demands for a cash raise, ask for a guaranteed bonus, or a raise 3 or 6 months down the road providing you meet specific milestones, or non-cash compensation hikes such as medical insurance, children's schooling or stock options. It may be that you will be happy just with a new title which will more adequately reflect your position and responsibilities. Plan several ways you can proceed towards the compensation package you find satisfactory and aim to leave the meeting having advanced in one of these directions.

5.Delegate

This is not about passing the buck. It's about freeing yourself to do what you do best and achieving maximum efficiency all around. It's not entirely optimal for a consultant with a PHD in Stochastic to spend 3 hours perfecting the pastel shades on his powerpoint presentation when he could have used that time to execute strategy for another client. Effective delegation can spread the workload amongst people so that each is challenged in their own domain and so that others can learn new skills and improve old ones. The whole outfit benefits when everyone is doing what they do best.

6. Take Ownership

Whether it's that filing cabinet you're responsible for keeping in chronological order and safe from natural disasters and epidemics, or a team of 6 bankers that you are in charge of, taking ownership of your work is the first step toward personal and professional satisfaction. If you think of yourself as 'owning' your little domain - sometimes as part of a team - you will take special pride in your output and results. That feeling of 'ownership' will boost your creativity as you look for new ways to indulge and improve your professional terrain and the attitude will almost always communicate itself to your boss and peers. Think of every professional task, no matter how small, as a project worthy of your signature and make sure the quality of the work you produce lives up to your name!

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Infinite Promotes New Member To Management Team And Plans To Expand Again In The First Quarter Of 2012

http://www.free-press-release.com/news-infinite-promotes-new-member-to-management-team-and-plans-to-expand-again-in-the-first-quarter-of-2012-1324153135.html

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Park Ridge, Illinois, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) December 17, 2011 -- Infinite, a sales and marketing firm located in Park Ridge, Il., plans to open another location in the early spring of 2012. The company has recently promoted new executive leadership and will be taking on a third client in the beginning of the year.

Infinite is a sales and marketing firm located in Park Ridge, IL. The company specializes in client acquisition and retention. National service providers hire Infinite to represent their brand name to manage a regional market-share. Infinite’s biggest client is the nation’s leading provider of electricity and natural gas products.

Within the first month, the team at Infinite acquired over 100 new accounts for the client. Within four months, Infinite doubled in size and began acquiring over 300 new accounts per month, more than doubling their performance.

Having seen such success in the first few months of business, Infinite began attracting the attention of other clients in the same industry. In October, Infinite signed a contract with a new client in the energy industry. Like its first client, the new addition is an independent energy provider that offers electricity and natural gas services to homes and businesses nationwide.

In November 2011, Infinite promoted Sarena Mennen to Assistant Management, becoming the third member of Infinite’s management team. Like all executives at Infinite, Sarena began with the company at the entry level. She worked through the company, receiving on the job management training, and took advantage of the no seniority culture within the company.

“I am excited to see her hard work pay off. Sarena has proved she deserves to be a part of the management team here and I am excited to see her continue to grow within the company,” explains an executive at Infinite.

This new promotion has paved the way for expansion allowing the team to take on new clients and has equipped the company with the leadership needed to expand to multiple markets. Infinite plans to expand with its third client in the first quarter of 2012 and grow to four locations within the next 24 months.

A New Look At Failure - Crash and Learn: Finding Value in Business Failure

http://allbusiness.sfgate.com/business-failure-lessons/15534702-1.html

Crash and Learn: Finding Value in Business Failure

Nothing succeeds like success.
It's true, says no less a source than Harvard Business School. An extensive study of entrepreneurs by the school a few years back found that "entrepreneurs with a track record of success are much more likely to succeed than those who have previously failed."
Put another way, most people don't learn from their mistakes -- they just keep making more mistakes.
But not everybody. There are certainly many entrepreneurs who fail once -- or two or more times -- and succeed the next time around. What makes the difference is their willingness to face up to their failure, study it, and take lessons from the experience. In other words, they learn.

An Expensive Lesson

Dan Hobin was the classic dotcom flameout. In 1999, he was 30 years old and his digital-publishing startup, SmashCast, had just raised $7 million in venture capital. SmashCast had prime office space in downtown San Francisco, new employees filled the cubicles, and the company threw lavish parties at the drop of a baseball cap.

"We raised the money before we even had a business plan," Hobin says. "It was like taking a little kid and pumping him full of steroids."

Two and half years later, SmashCast was out of juice. The money was spent, and Hobin had to shut his company down. It was a very expensive lesson, but an effective one.

In 2005, when Hobin launched his next company, he took a different approach. He didn't solicit outside capital. He wanted his new startup, G5 Search Marketing, to be completely bootstrapped.

"This time, I was going to do it the old-fashioned way," he says. "We were going to grow slowly, watch every penny, and do whatever it took to be cash-flow positive."

So far, he's stuck to the plan. Hobin's search engine optimization and marketing company has more than $10 million in annual revenue and is growing fast. It has 56 employees and 100 percent revenue growth over the past four years, and last August it secured $15 million in its first round of institutional venture capital.

Better still, it's almost entirely debt-free.

"I learned a lot when the bubble burst," Hobin says. "I learned that you build a much healthier company when you bootstrap because you can't afford to do things you shouldn't do; you can't afford to make mistakes."

The Missing Link: Experience

Another dotcom entrepreneur who crashed and learned is Reid Hoffman. Like Hobin, he watched his startup flop, studied his mistakes, and came back stronger the next time around. Quite a bit stronger, actually: Hoffman built LinkedIn, the most popular social network for professionals, with more than 90 million registered users and a valuation upwards of $2 billion.

Hoffman's dotcom dud was a networking site called Socialnet. It started in 1997 and was acquired four years later at a fire-sale price; Hoffman walked away with just $40,000. After a stint at PayPal, Hoffman founded LinkedIn. Part of the reason the company is now the immense success that it is, Hoffman says, is the lesson he took from Socialnet. What was that lesson? Be a good learner -- and surround yourself with the same.

"I thought you should hire the exact skill set for every position," he says. "But in reality what you want is people who can learn fast."

And the same principle applies to a company: Like a good entrepreneur, it must be able to adapt and improve as it goes. "I learned you should never be embarrassed by your 1.0 product release," says Hoffman. "Too many entrepreneurs want to release the perfect product and get all those oohs and aahs, but that's a big mistake. It's better to get out there and move quickly and make improvements on the fly."

Bouncing Back

Rudyard Kipling wrote that one key to success in life is the ability to "meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same." In other words, success and failure matter less than the way you react to them.

Author Barry Moltz has written much the same thing, particularly in his book Bounce! Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success. He calls failure "just part of the roller coaster, part of the cycle of business. You'll have successes and failures -- get what you can from both."
In fact, if you're an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, failure is considered a badge of courage. It gives investors an opportunity to probe what you learned from the experience and see how you deal with adversity, says Cynthia Padnos, founding managing director of venture capital firm Illuminate Ventures. "We don't believe you have to have failed in order to succeed, but we have a culture here that believes failure is not a barrier to success. There's a big difference between a project that tried and failed and an individual who's a failure," she says.
What's most important when faced with failure, according to Moltz, is resilience. He makes the comparison to baseball. If you're an entrepreneur, you need to keep going to the plate. The more often you step up, the more hits you'll have. And that, perhaps, is the best lesson any business owner can learn from failure: Past performance is not indicative of future results.
"Don't take failure personally," Moltz says. "Don't let yourself believe it's because of some inherent fault. You can learn from failure but you can't always learn from failure, so often the best thing is just to let go and move on. If you can do that, it gives you another chance at success."

Great Article On Leadership From Deborah Shane

http://www.careerealism.com/12-principles-champions/

12 Principles of Champions

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By CAREEREALISM-Approved Expert, Deborah Shane
Coming from a mentoring, teaching and training background for 20 plus years has helped me to understand how certain qualities make champions!
There are 12 common qualities I believe underlie “peak performers” or champions in any field,  industry, business, or just personally!
I love to study champions. We mostly identify with sports people and teams: Lance Armstrong, Pete Sampras, New York Yankees, Detroit Red Wings, New England Patriots, University of Florida, Babe Ruth. But, let’s not forget about other champions who champion causes: Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy, Rosa Parks and tireless other “silent heroes” that change people’s lives daily by what they do under the radar.
What is a champion?

By definition, a Remarkable Person – somebody who exemplifies excellence or achievement; Defender – somebody who defends, supports, or promotes a person or cause because they are
“passionate” about it.

It can be anyone, it can be you.

Character is an attitude…
“Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves , some turn up their noses and some don’t turn up at all.” (Sam Ewing)

The process it takes to become a champion includes solid fundamentals, a dedication to discipline, a willingness to practice, a lot of heart, a little luck and perseverance. All great teams and athletes commit to this process and because they are “in it” daily, they succeed and win. This same process is how anyone can become a champion, or champion a cause.

Here are 12 principles that can make you or anyone a champion. Are you ready?

1. Personal and Professional Integrity
2. Industry and Product Knowledge
3. Sincerity of Motive and Intent
4. Enthusiasm for Life
5. Passion for what you do and who you are
6. A dedication to Excellence
7. Commitment to Discipline
8. The  Perseverance to keep growing and learning
9. Willingness to embrace new ideas
10. Openness to Change
11. A healthy and active Sense of Humor
12. Awesome Attitude


Opportunities to stand out, make a difference and truly impact people, the community and world you live and work in is boundless.

Become a champion and champion something today, NOW. Small things can make a BIG difference.
They add up over time.
Are you ready to champion your life and business and become the champion you are destined to be?

Silobreaker Recognizes Infinite For Taking On A New Client This Month

Silobreaker Recognizes Infinite For Taking On A New Client This Month

http://www.silobreaker.com/infinite-grows-with-new-client-and-plans-for-expansion-5_2265036311259775152

Infinite Takes On New Client This Month And Plans Expansion For 2012

http://www.free-press-release.com/news-infinite-expands-this-month-and-plans-for-more-growth-on-the-way-1322790949.html

December 1, 2011 -- Infinite is a sales and marketing firm located in Park Ridge. The company has just expanded with a new client. Infinite has plans to continue growing, double in size a second time, and open a new location within the next 6 months.

Infinite, located in the suburbs of Chicago, focuses on client acquisition and retention. The company is hired by national corporations to gain new customers and manage current accounts through one on one personalized customer interactions. The company’s first client is the leading supplier of electricity and natural gas products in the country.

Within the first month, Infinite had acquired over 100 new accounts for the client. Over the next few months, Infinite doubled in size and increased their work to over 300 new accounts per month, more than doubling their performance.

With this success, Infinite was attracting attention from new clients. In October, Infinite signed a contract with a new client in the energy industry. Like its first client, the new addition is an independent energy provider that offers electricity and natural gas services to homes and businesses nationwide.

“We are all excited about this year’s growth. We have such a hard working team. It is great to see individuals taking on this new responsibility and advancing in their careers. The new managers we promoted during this growth have worked from the ground up and truly earned their positions. We are all proud of them,” explains an executive at Infinite.

This month, Infinite is officially opening its new division. They expect similar success with acquiring and retaining accounts as they have seen with their previous client.

Infinite expects to continue this momentum well into 2012. Over the next six months, Infinite plans to open another location and sign with a third client.