20 years ago
20 years ago I was in a hotel room in Malaga. I had just given a training course to one of my dealers. I was a product specialist for Philips and travelled every other week around Spain to visit our distributors. I was young and each time I visited a new city, I tried to stay for the weekend and do some tourism.
That day I was tired. It had bee a long day. I was at my room, having a club sandwich and watching television. Hotels had satellite TV and I didnt, so I always tried to watch some german tv to learn the language.
I remember I was lying on the bed, with my sandwhich an a beer and I started seeing all those images about crowds of happy people jumping over the Berlin wall, all those hundreds of people celebrating in the streets, all the smiles, the happiness. I went through all the TV channels and all of them were giving the same news. The Berlin wall was history.
I got so excited about living that historic moment. What was I doing in a hotel room ? I decided to go out and celebrate…and luckily the first bar I walked into it was full of germans with great smiles celebrating, jumping, singing, hugging each other. I joined the party and stay with them for several hours!
20 years later some voices say things should have been done better. There are still invisible walls. German economy has suffered the reunification and not everybody is happy about it.
But, you know what? Liberty is a right, a human right. 20 years ago liberty won and that is what we have to celebrate and hope that the rest of the walls in the planet one day will also be overtaken by masses of happy people with smile and hugs.
Ken Blanchard interesting words
I just came back from a conference by Ken Blanchard about “Leadership in tough economic times”. It was quite interesting. I wrote down some sentences that I want to share. Ken Blanchard is a leader in management and leadership and author fof the best seller “The one minute manager”.
So these are the sentences I wrote down:
If you want to lead in tough economical times, you have to make sure you do three things:
1) Be the bearer of HOPE
” If you change what you think, you change your behaviour”
” The key to happiness is that you perceive you are happy”
“The only reason bad newsis news is because not a lot of bad news happen”
2) Share with your people as if they were your business partners.
“You need your people”
“None of us is as smart as all of us”
“Building a community of trust stats with respect”
3) Lead with servant leadership
“Profit is the applause you get for taking care of your customers and creating a motivating environment for your people”
“Customers dont know your values, goals, strategies, mission…they only know how they are treated”
“The problem with rat races is that even if you win you are still a rat”.
Let’s have fun
Last week I wrote about how an emotion can change an opinion. The simple vision of a guy wearing a clown nose made me go from a negative to a positive opinion. Today I saw this video posted in Facebook and I though about all the people that used those stairs. They probably stopped thinking in whatever was in their mind and experimented the pleasre of fun. That for sure made them go home with a big fat smile!.
The power of an emotion to change an opinion
All of us who are in marketing and PR we must never forget that our target is people. We may draft an excellent PR plan to communicate the benefits of a product and the result is that someone will buy the product. We may work on reputation management of a firm, and the result is that someone will trust that firm and invest in it. We may work on a press conference and the result is that the editor will get the message, write about our client, and someone will buy the product or service. People. We work for people. And people are emotions. Sometimes we forget that.
Today I was walking to the office and was waiting for a light to turn green and saw that an abandoned building nearby had been “occupied” and very loud music was being played. My mind immediately started producing negative thoughts about this: neighbourhood is going to get dirty, this may attract burglars, this people always generate conflict , etc.. Suddenly, while I was crossing the street still looking at the house, a young guy went out the balcony, with a clown nose and a trumpet and started playing, dancing and wawing and the people passing by. He made me smile. And I smiled for a long time. And just with that smile all my negative feelings went away, and thought – “young people who still believe in something and live accordingly. Wow”.
Was it the music? Was it the red clown nose? Was it his eyes looking at mine? I don’t know, but it touched my emotions and modified my thoughts.
So let’s think about this when we write our marketing and communication plans. People.
PS. Needless to say, being ethical is a must.
Dell to buy Perot Systems for $3.9 billion
From: www.eleconomista.es
Nice to see things are moving in the industry!
By Franklin Paul and Gabriel Madway
NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – DELL (DELL.NQ
| 16,010 | -4,07% |
-0,68 |
Dell Inc plans to buy Perot Systems Corp for about $3.9 billion, paying a steep 67.5 percent premium to expand its technology services business and compete with Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM.
Perot Systems, a computer services provider founded in 1988 by former U.S. presidential candidate Ross Perot, would be the largest ever acquisition by Dell and comes after extended speculation about its M&A strategy.
Dell, which lags far behind HP and IBM in the services arena, is looking to buy a company with a strong focus on serving healthcare and federal government customers. It expects the deal to add to earnings in fiscal 2012, but some analysts thought the price tag may have been too high.
Dell said it would pay $30 per share for Perot Systems. Its Friday’s closing price was $17.91 on the New York Stock Exchange.
J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz said the price is 1.4 times Perot Systems’ sales, compared to HP’s purchase of EDS for 0.6 times sales last year. That would make the acquisition a little expensive, although it was good for Dell to lessen its dependence on personal computers, he said.
“We do see the building block as being compelling, but the purchase price seems relatively rich,” Moskowitz wrote in a research note.
Perot shares jumped 65 percent to close at $29.56 while Dell shares fell 4.1 percent to $16.01.
The deal comes as large technology companies expand into higher margin IT services to secure stable and recurring revenues as computer hardware becomes cheaper.
