Vevo After YouTube, the Biggest Challenges for New Video Platforms

By Dan Goikhman, CEO, Unreel Entertainment

Music video hosting service Vevo has ramped up its efforts to gain independence from Google’s online video titan YouTube. In seven years, Vevo has grown a large following as a licensed partner with YouTube. However, through syndicating the vast majority of its content to YouTube, the music platform has failed to launch its own brand, bound to the limits of the streaming giant.

As Vevo steps out of the shadow of YouTube’s reign, it has rebranded its app and refreshed its logo and senior management team. The video-first music platform wants to be up there with the likes of Spotify or Pandora, and its message to YouTube is clear: We’ve got Bieber and Rihanna, we don’t need you anymore.

Vevo faces a saturated video over-the-top (OTT) market, using the Internet to deliver video content without the need for traditional cable or service operators. This industry is dominated by the household names of streaming, from Netflix to Vimeo, none more powerful than its jilted partner, YouTube. The company is working to differentiate itself and it now must confront the mammoth task of persuading the vast majority of its following to abandon their YouTube viewing habits, providing user satisfaction while also monetizing its content.

As Vevo establishes itself as a true contender in this space, it faces many of the challenges emerging OTT platforms experience. What are the challenges Vevo faces, and is there still hope for new OTT platforms?

Going head-to-head with the gatekeepers of on-demand

A rise in connected devices, including a recent surge of smart TVs, and an increasing mass of digital video content has fueled the growth of OTT, as an alternative to traditional TV consumption through major broadcasters.

Still a nascent competitor on the video OTT scene, Vevo’s new app is up against giants like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, in an industry estimated to reach $63 billion by 2020. Seven in ten people in the U.S. -  roughly 181 million people - consume online video over the Internet, according to eMarketer’s 2015 report. YouTube is the obvious leader in this industry, with an average of 170.7 million monthly viewers that year.

Vevo hasn’t released stats regarding its YouTube versus native app viewership, though of its 400 million active monthly users and 18 billions video views, it’s known that YouTube contributes a huge part. Vevo has historically been the most-viewed YouTube partner, and Vevo accounts for 38% of YouTube’s unique monthly users.

Under leadership from CEO Erik Huggers, the company has a vision to build an OTT brand in its own right, taking a larger share of advertising revenues, rather than handing a big yet publicly undisclosed portion to the Google subsidiary. Centralizing its distribution to one independent platform means Vevo will have autonomy to run a popular platform as it wishes; offering users new tools to engage audiences, and a revenue model with fewer mouths to feed should put Vevo in good stead.

Building a profitable OTT model - the great debate

YouTube has reportedly claimed that 80% of global consumers choose to consume media for free, and 20% are willing to pay for this experience. Digital video ad spend in the U.S. is tipped to hit $9.84 billion this year, growing to $16.69 billion by 2020, according to eMarketer.

NewBay Media also claims that 73% of TV and video professionals will use advertising to monetize content, 59% will use subscriptions, 37% pay-per-view and 34% electronic sales. For example Buzzfeed recently announced the acquisition of startup Scroll, offering niche products such as state-scented candles for the homesick, as it experiments with commerce on the site.

Digiday argues that in the OTT industry, “subscriptions beat ads”. Users want quality content, and high production costs mean that platforms cannot deliver this on advertising profits alone. Vevo is taking a page out of Hulu and Spotify’s playbook -- offering a hybrid model, with a freemium option. On its own - Vevo will take a larger share of ad revenues, and it can begin to lure users to it’s planned premium subscription model. But it’s lost the luxury of scale, and is now working to build its app audiences and generate a following, independent of YouTube.

The future of OTT video will be community-driven

Vevo is pulling out the big guns to define its place in the market; partnering with Warner Music Group to increase its catalog, offering original shows, personalized mobile apps, live production, expert curated playlists, short-form content and more. The MTV of this generation. “Basically we have much more to offer than just a repository of music videos,” Huggers explained to CNBC.

The company has stated its goal: to become a source of information and discovery, lifestyle entertainment for the digital youth. Stepping out on its own, Vevo is seeking to transform itself into a social destination powered by personalized content that is centered around music and video. Truly owning it's distribution means users won’t be limited to selected genres, or lured to uploads outside of Vevo’s channels. Instead, hyper-personalization can enable greater engagement, free of pre-defined buckets.

53% of millennials expect recommendations on what to watch, and Vevo’s auto-playing videos and personalized artist recommendations cater to this. Similar to Spotify, Vevo fans can create their own playlists and follow profiles, feeding the algorithms with more data, and encouraging community interactions. Senior product manager Jose Gonzalez said these developments aim to make Vevo “personalised, immersive and engaging”.

Vevo’s decision to turn social reflects a larger trend in the OTT industry. Where TV has typically limited users to passive consumption, the connected online audience embraces interaction and conversations. After the premiere of the seventh season of AMC’s ‘Walking Dead’ almost half the audience, that’s some 7.6 million viewers, tuned in to watch the after-show discussion ‘Talking Dead’. On Twitter the hashtags #TWD and #TheWalkingDead made the show the top trending topic, with fans sharing personal reactions to major plot twists. Twitter has also begun to experiment with streaming, providing live footage of NFL games and political debates, using national events to engage audiences of millions on social media at the same moment.

As we're all seeing, the very near future of video is OTT, supported by increasing ad revenues and changing business models. The battle for new startups will be to differentiate in an already crowded market. Vevo has shown through its history that while a strategic partnership can help get you off the ground, autonomy is also an enabler.

As the industry continues to develop, the most successful OTT video enterprises will be those that identify their niche community. Using big data, recommendations and personalization to inspire conversations. The fight of the underdog in the face of reigning giants means startups need to creative, and new digital technologies and social capabilities will help independent content providers to do this.

About the Author

Dan Goikhman is the CEO of Unreel Entertainment, an OTT app provider that creates branded video apps for networks and businesses.

The Single Most Important Question You Can Ask Your Employees

As leaders, we are always looking for the right questions to ask our people. When our employees are faced with a challenge it's tempting to give them advice or to tell them what they need to do, but by doing so you impede their growth and cheat yourself from getting some potentially fresh and powerful ideas. Plus, you don't want to be responsible for every decision that needs to be made. You need to save your energy for more critical decisions.

THE POWER OF ASKING, NOT TELLING
Asking, instead of telling, is one of the hardest behaviors I've had to change as an entrepreneur. Asking the right questions allows your employees to go deeper. It allows them to answer their own questions through a process of self-discovery. It also allows them to take responsibility for what they are accountable for. By working on asking versus telling I've noticed a decline in the number of problems that cross my desk on a daily basis. That simple change alone has had an incredible impact on my business and has allowed me to have more time to focus on the things that matter.

A good leader is constantly engaged in the habit of giving feedback to his people rather than engaging in the de facto method of simply telling, directing, or commanding them. We encourage our employees to be open to feedback because, after all, it's a way we see our blind spots. We encourage them to solicit feedback from their peers, and from their managers so they can be open to the things that others may know about them, but they may not be aware of themselves.

THE MOST POWERFUL QUESTION YOU CAN ASK EMPLOYEES
When was the last time you asked for feedback, and I mean powerful, honest feedback about your performance, work ethic or management style, from your people? Despite the fact that we may think we already know what we need to work on, I guarantee that you still have some blind spots of your own. Remember, even professional sports stars, musicians, and even politicians have coaches. None of us can see all of our weakness. In fact, what we may see as a "strength" others see as a fault. With this in mind I decided to take a leap of faith and started experimenting with my team with what I believe is the single most important and powerful question a leader can ask his or her people, which is:

"What's one thing I could stop doing (or be doing differently) that would make it easier to work with me?"

Ouch. If that doesn't make you cringe try reading it again. It's painful. But it's powerful! We have to be willing to touch the place that hurts in order to discover the areas we need to adjust. So take a deep breath, embrace the idea of being vulnerable, and create a safe space that allows them to answer with honesty. Be careful - if you ask for sincere feedback but you become defensive, angry, or hostile, you will have burned a bridge of trust that will take months or years to rebuild with your employee. In fact, they may never, ever be honest with you again and there may be a time in the future where their feedback could save your company. You asked for it so shut up and take it! Respect the other person for being brave enough to take you up on your question. You're the boss, remember? It's intimidating for them to answer you honestly.

LEAN INTO THE DISCOMFORT
I challenge you to lean into the discomfort and ask this question often. Regardless of your opinion, the feedback you receive will always contain a nugget of truth if not an entire harvest. We all know there are things about ourselves we need to work on. We're not fooling anyone, including ourselves when we pretend there's not. If you're not growing personally you can't expect your employees to grow. Whether you see it or not, they look to you to set the example. Why not take some time to discover more about yourself and how you impact others around you? Ask more than one employee, too. Try asking everyone you work with. If you're not quite up to a face-to-face meeting with potentially painful responses, try email, or use a company that specializes in free, anonymous feedback, like https://www.suggestionox.com/. Get a variety of answers from a variety of people so you can really get down to business and make the proper adjustments. The temporary pain will be well worth it.

How to Decide if Your Startup Should Be a Non-Profit

What are some of the main differences when founding a nonprofit vs for-profit startup? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Answer by Jessica Jackley, Co-Founder of Kiva and Entrepreneur, on Quora.

If choosing a mission is like deciding on a destination, then choosing the right organizational structure -- whether a non-profit, a for-profit, a social business, or any other structure -- is akin to picking the best vehicle to move forward.

Many entrepreneurs can get bogged down in the assumptions they have about how a particular type of organizational structure should operate, what its culture must be like, what its goals have to be, etc. They jump to conclusions that are not necessarily true about those structures. For example, just because you want to create positive change in the world does not mean you need a non-profit to do so. Similarly, I believe that making a healthy profit from a great idea that helps improve people's lives does not necessarily make you a greedy robber baron.

I admit that I have gotten sucked into this kind of limited thinking in the past. For years I believed for-profit businesses were just vehicles for selfishness: that a business was an every-man-for-himself, greed-driven, money-focused beast. I believed the business world was an exclusive club for people who cared solely about hoarding cash and who had somehow convinced the world to give it to them. If businesses were for-profits focused exclusively on making money, and the organizations that were focused on helping people were non-profits...well, that was all I needed to know. I concluded, business was bad, nonprofits were good. And I wanted to be on the side of the good guys.

Of course, the majority of social sector organizations do great work - work that serves, fixes, helps. But businesses can do a lot of good in the world, too. And unfortunately, and much harder to admit, I've also seen non-profit organizations that, in my opinion, hurt more than they help in the long run. So, incorporating as a particular structure doesn't guarantee that your work will live up to the ideals of that structure -- or that you have to live down to any of the negative stereotypes either.

This goes for all of the other new structures cropping up as well. I couldn't be more excited about the recent progress made toward the creation of yet another structure for, in the words of Delaware Governor Jack Markell, "...a new type of corporation that is hard wired to compete to be the best in America at being the best for America." The Governor was referencing the July 17, 2013 passage of public benefit corporation legislation in his state, which enables businesses not only to pursue high returns for their investors, but to design their decisions and strategy around prioritizing social impact as well. Delaware is the most popular state for incorporation for U.S. businesses, so benefit corporation (b-corp) legislation was a monumental addition to their laws. B-corps must "operate in a responsible and sustainable manner," they must identify what kind of public benefit they want to pursue, and they must maximize stockholder value as well as balancing the interests of anyone "materially affected by the corporation's conduct." It's a tall order, and one that I believe will blend the best of all worlds.

When Kiva was in its early planning stages, we were initially agnostic on whether we should organize as a nonprofit or a for-profit entity, or some sort of hybrid organization. We saw advantages to both ends of the spectrum, but ultimately decided to organize as a non-profit 501(c)3 because, among other things, this seemed to be a vitally important factor for our target audiences: lenders, microfinance institutions, borrowers, and funders. When we really couldn't move along any further without getting outside funding, our most promising and significant funders only wanted to donate money to our vision if they could do so under the umbrella of a non-profit organization. We heard from would-be lenders, too, that their desire to contribute to our network of budding entrepreneurs in developing countries would hinge on the knowledge that they knew no one was getting rich off of their 0% loan. We couldn't move forward without the support of these people, so their opinions mattered. As Kiva has progressed, the goodwill and level of trust gained as a nonprofit have made a real difference in cost savings as well, as the organization has benefited greatly from donated services and corporate partnerships that wouldn't have been as easy to garner as a for-profit.

So what structure is best? It depends. It depends on what you want to get done. And how you want to go about doing it. And whether or not ownership is important to you. And how much control you want to have. And where you want to get your funding, and from whom, and in what form. And who you want on your team, and what you'll need to attract and retain them. And dozens of other factors.

An organization's structure is simply a vehicle to get you to where you need to go. Where you take that vehicle and how you use it is primarily up to you. What matters most is starting with a clearly defined mission, then finding an organizational structure that will best facilitate that mission.

This question originally appeared on Quora. - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

More questions:

• Charities: What are some things companies need to consider when doing social impact planning?
• Parenting: What is it like to be a mother of twins?
• Foreign Exchange Market: How does Kiva deal with the risk of foreign exchange?

Can Radical Transparency Fix Global Supply Chains And Slow Climate Change?

This story is cross-posted on Ecosystem Marketplace.

Kevin Rabinovitch stands straight and speaks in clear, clipped tones - more like a naval officer than a corporate quant - as, on the screen behind him, a daunting mass of threads and whorls illustrates the global flows of Brazilian soybeans from thousands of individual municipalities across Brazil, through specific exporters and importers, to countries around the world.

"We buy a lot of soy from Brazil," he says. "But we also buy things that eat soy in Brazil before we buy them," he continues, referring to the chickens and cows that end up in pet food manufactured by food giant Mars Inc, where he's Global Director of Sustainability.

Known for its ubiquitous Mars and Milky Way candy bars, privately-held Mars, Inc also makes Whiskas cat food, Wrigley's chewing gum, and dozens of other products that require tens of thousands of tons of cattle, soy, and palm oil - all of which are packaged in products derived from pulp & paper.

These are the "big four" commodities responsible for most of the world's deforestation, and they achieved that status because thousands of companies buy them from hundreds of thousands of farmers around the world, and many of those farmers chop forests to make way for plantations.

But a relative handful of companies have been acting more like environmental groups than for-profit entities, largely because unsustainable agriculture means unsustainable business. Mars, for example, recently teamed up with Danone to launch the Livelihoods Funds, which invest in sustainable small-scale farms around the world, and it's one of 56  companies to endorse the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF), which aims, among other things, to purge deforestation "from the production of agricultural commodities such as palm oil, soy, paper, and beef products by no later than 2020."

Even before endorsing the NYDF, Mars had established concrete goals for improving the way it gathers raw materials, and it set tight deadlines for achieving them. Now it's reporting solid progress on two of them: the Forest Trends Supply Change project shows Mars reporting it is 91% of the way towards achieving its palm oil goal and 89% of the way towards achieving its packaging goal.

But the company hasn't yet publicly reported progress on its soy or cattle pledges, both of which have 2017 due dates, and Rabinovitch says the task is proving more difficult than he and most corporate sustainability directors imagined.

"Privately amongst ourselves - and even publicly in forums - there's a lot of head-scratching that goes on," he says. "We know we want to end deforestation, but it's not obvious how we're going to do it, and it's critically important to have the data community step up and say, 'Here are tools that can help you.'"

That massive blob on the wall behind him could be one of those tools (see "How it Works", below).

Further Coverage on Bionic Planet

Scroll down to continue reading, or hear more on the latest episode of of Bionic Planet, which is available on iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, and elsewhere. The latest episode features extended interviews with the team that developed Trase, as well as a walk-through of the platform.

Trasing the Globe

It's called "Trase", which stands for "TRAnsparence for Sustainable Economies", and was developed jointly over the past two years by the Global Canopy Programme (GCP), the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), and the European Forest Institute (EFI).

It's designed to help companies and watchdogs track the impact that the purchases in one part of the world are having on the ground in other parts, and it works by tracking soybeans from every Brazilian municipality that produces them - more than 2,000 in total - through brokers, exporters, and importers, and then providing an overlay to compare the supply chain with environmental conditions in the municipality of origin.

"Traders tell us that they need to be able to filter the threats and opportunities quickly to be able to prioritize those places - and the other actors associated with those places - where they need to be acting first, and with the highest priority," says Toby Gardner, an SEI Research Fellow who demonstrated the portal at year-end climate talks in Marrakesh, Morocco.

The demonstration came just days before Climate Focus presented an assessment report consolidating data from 12 transparency initiatives, including Supply Change and GCP's Forest 500, as well as interviews with corporate sustainability officers, finding a disturbing lack of transparency around progress among NYDF companies.

Tedious Research; Simple Interface

Trase lets users view both a supply-chain map and a geographical map, and the data driving it was cobbled together over two years using bills of lading, customs declarations, and other documents generated in the harvesting and transport of soybeans. Many were purchased from trade intelligence companies.

"Tellingly, this is data that already existed, but it was not tapped by the sustainability community," says Gardner. "We were looked upon with bemused astonishment when we approached trade intelligence companies to use these, and I wonder how many other useful sources are out there just waiting to be tapped."

They plan to expand the portal to include other Latin American countries, then to facilities that crush soybeans into meal and oil, as well to feedlots that turn soybeans into chickens and beef, and finally to the other big four commodities. Internally, they assign confidence ratings to many of the "threads" in the supply-chain map, which is constantly being improved through site-specific research.

"If a company declares that they have a production farm in a given municipality, that's something we can take into account," says Clément Suavet, who lead development of the platform. "As we gain more information, we can add certainty incrementally, and we would like to make this available on the site as well."

Yin and Yang

The platform is designed to blend with others that show different parts of the supply-chain puzzle. Trase, for example, ends at the port of import, which means it doesn't yet show end retailers and manufacturers. Supply Change, on the other hand, begins with end retailers and manufacturers, as well as brokers.

"Each of our platforms are tackling different parts of the puzzle, and there are many others coming at it from other angles as well - from supply chains transparency and data collection tools such as CDP Forests Program to the sustainable commodity certification agencies such as RTRS and RSPO," says Stephen Donofrio, Supply Change's Senior Advisor. "As Supply Change relies solely on self-reported commitment declarations and progress updates, then in a sense, Trase compliments this in that it could provide a ground-truthing, or spot check, against what companies are saying in their own documentation."

Rabinovitch says that, as more entities shine more transparency on supply chains, good companies will be more willing to show their cards, leading to virtuous cycle of more and more disclosure.

"The default mindset of corporate entities is, 'If I share data, something bad could happen; someone could figure out something about my business,'" he says. "But as soon as a number is out there, a customer or supplier says, 'I'm assuming that number applies to you, because Trase says it's the deforestation number of companies in your country,' so good actors now have a motivation to say, 'Whoa, hang on. Disaggregate us from that lot. These are our numbers,'"

Thomas Sembres works with the UN REDD Facility and EFI. He contributed to the platform's development and sees such tools providing support to cash-strapped regulators, and cites the European Union's long development of the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative, which is designed to identify sustainable sources of timber coming into the EU.

"If this type of platform had existed when we were negotiating FLEGT, we would have been able to identify much more sharply the key actors from the private sector, as well as the key jurisdictions that have a stake in the trade between countries, and incentivize progress along the way," he says, adding that good actors are already becoming dramatically more transparent.

"We're seeing transparency becoming a competitive advantage," he says. "We've struggled for so many years to try to convince the private sector to release more data on supply chains, but we've never had a complete picture."

And that complete picture is critical, because transparency can be a double-edged sword, according to Rosa Maria Vidal, Executive Director of the Governors' Climate and Forests Fund.

Use and Abuse: To Flee or to Fix?

Vidal says she's a big believer in transparency, but she cautions that it can backfire if disclosure scares companies away from problematic municipalities instead of encouraging them to engage productively.

"We're working to build new partnerships across 35 subnational jurisdictions responsible for 30% of the world's deforestation," she says. "These are jurisdictions that have promised to reduce deforestation 80% by 2020 by bringing benefits to communities, but they haven't seen any finance yet."

If the emerging transparency efforts shine a light on companies that are sourcing material from high-deforestation areas, she says, they should encourage those companies to actively improve conditions rather than pull up and move elsewhere.

"If we don't facilitate this dialogue - if we just say, 'It's a risky jurisdiction' - it will mean more deforestation because of fewer jobs and opportunity," she says - and Gardner agrees.

"It's unrealistic for all companies to just pick up and move to where there are no problems, and if they tried, no one would ever meet their commitments," he says. "But companies often don't even know their impacts, and this makes it possible for them to know where they need to invest."

How it Works

The address is www.trase.earth, and the portal offers introductory tutorials at the bottom of the page.  Or you can click on "explore the tool" and see where your mouse takes you:

The first layer shows all known soybean flows from Brazilian municipalities, through trading companies and exporters in Brazil to importers working in other countries.

You can color code to highlight supply chains by various criteria - in this case, the type of biome from which the soybeans come:

The Amazon may be Brazil's most famous biome, but the country has six of them, and some are more fragile than the forest.

Or you can filter it to one or several countries - in this case, China:

China is the leading importer of soybeans.

Filter to one trader - Bunge - and you get this:

Bunge is the largest soybean trader operating in Brazil.

You can then reduce it to one importer - Guangxi - and you get this:

Now you can trace all the flows through Bunge and Guangxi into China.

Finally, you can expand the municipality bar to see where Bunge gets the beans that it sells to Guangxi. In this case, hundreds of strings appeared, but we highlighted just four. The municipalities you select will show up on the map, and you can begin layering in factors like deforestation rates, reported rates of forced labor, and water scarcity.

Bunge buys from hundreds of municipalities in Brazil, but here we have highlighted four of them. Note their appearance on the map. You can also layer in various risk factors, such as rate of deforestation or reported cases of slave labor.

For now, TRACE includes 320,000 unique pathways, and that will increase exponentially as the portal grows to include other countries and commodities.

Emotional Intelligence: The Key Trait to Reducing Stress and Improving Your Quality of Life

By Arash Asli

Compared to a high IQ, emotional intelligence (EQ) has a higher impact on personal success, leadership abilities and quality of life. IQ is a genetic trait, while EQ is something you can train yourself to gain.

As someone who has always had a very busy life and high-intensity career, I find that working on my EQ is one of the best ways to cope with stress. My goal is to share what I've learned in the hopes that you, too, can improve your quality of life and cope with stress and anxiety, no matter what these feelings are stemming from. 

Training Your EQ

Emotions have the ability to override our objective mind. They can influence how we run our personal lives, manage our business and deal with loved ones, co-workers, customers, employees, etc. Irrational thinking like this is an obstacle that can only hold you back from success and lead to bad relationships, stress, anxiety and even depression. 

But training your EQ helps put you back in charge. For example, as a hobbyist photographer, I carry different lenses best suited for the shot I'm trying to capture. In the same way, having an increased EQ helps you choose the right view for dealing with unexpected obstacles and challenges that life may throw your way. You gain the ability to switch "lenses" based on certain circumstances, so you can look at the world with an appropriate perspective for each situation, avoiding emotional baggage that can prevent you from achieving your goals.

To improve your EQ, you should first understand its two psychological components: self-awareness and social awareness.

Self-Awareness

Gaining self-awareness is the first step to achieving a higher EQ. In his book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey emphasizes that self-awareness empowers us to choose our own destiny and live based on our goals, not simply by default.

To be self-aware, get to know yourself deeply. Understand your needs, feelings, habits and drives. Figure out the "what" and "why" behind your emotions and identify their root cause. For example, try asking yourself, "What just made me feel good or bad? Why do I feel this way?" Look inside of yourself and train yourself to acknowledge feelings as they occur. Then, take control of your objective mind by learning which "lens" works best to reflect on the situation. The key is to be completely present and recognize why and how you got there. Then, it's about learning to neutralize. 

Social Awareness

The second component of EQ is social awareness. This is similar to self-awareness, but rather than looking inwards, you're looking outwards -- recognizing the feelings and emotions of people you're communicating with.

Consider how successful executives and politicians control outcomes. Typically, it's a high EQ that helps them influence people through their words, motions, expressions and tone of voice.

Look behind the curtains and recognize the emotional cues causing one to behave a certain way. Objectively know what they are experiencing and why. An uncomfortable incident with a friend, partner or stranger can easily occupy your emotions and thoughts, but if you look deeply, you'll find that it's mostly your own self-judgment driving your emotions. In reality, people's behavior is based on self-needs seen from their own perspective, and depending on the nature of your relationship, only a very small part of their thoughts cares about the perspective of another. If you come to terms with this realization, then your expectation from others will change accordingly, as their lens won't reflect your view point. In addition, the scope of your self-judgment is larger.

To be socially aware, switch your lens to objectively look at a situation from another person's perspective and try to understand their behavior. Harnessing and managing their emotions will allow you to better communicate, manage conflicts, inspire and be an influence.

Becoming Present

We set goals to reach ambitions in life, but when life gets in the way of achieving those goals, we get stressed and emotions take over. So is it the goal or life that we are really after?

People who lack the ability to be proactive tend to be more reactive. They consider themselves "victims" of certain situations and lack the ability to change their reaction.

Time is the most sacred, expensive resource by any means. Days, months and years can pass by, but we often won't take the time to be present, as our focus is on the destination or what's ahead of us tomorrow. If we treat life like the journey it actually is, then it's about enjoying the experience and learning from our choices. We must not treat life as an obstacle, but learn to be the captain of our own ship -- in other words, our mind!

Training your EQ helps manage your emotions in healthy ways. It enables you to control impulsive feelings and behaviors, manage your expectations of others, and adapt to changing circumstances to stay on the path towards your goals.

As the saying goes, what's urgent is seldom important, and what's important is seldom urgent. What's urgent is to focus on the important aspects of life and enjoy the journey.

Arash Asli is founder and CEO of Yocale.com, an online booking platform for small businesses. 

Rethinking Values in the Workplace

by Rod Collins, Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors

In a recent global survey of more than 1,700 chief executive officers, researchers at IBM found that the CEOs identified empowering employees through values as an essential driver of high performance. When we think of values, what usually comes to mind are virtues, such as integrity, honesty, fairness, and trust. These virtues are the attributes that are generally reflected in well-meaning corporate mission statements. Unfortunately, in far too many instances, these values are more "talk" than "walk." Despite management's best intentions, corporate mission statements rarely become corporate behavior templates. Why, if values are so important to performance, do so many organizations have trouble walking the talk? Perhaps it's because managers are focused on the wrong values.

Virtues are like blooming flowers. They are the most visible and the most defining part of a plant. But flowers are also the plant's most vulnerable part. Without solid roots, fertile soil, and plentiful water, flowers quickly shrivel and die. So it is with business organizations. Wherever we find organizations that are blossoms of virtuous values, we are likely to discover the fertile soil of a collaborative culture rooted in a subtle set of structural values.

Value Choices

An effective business organization is the intersection of three workable models: a business model, an operating model, and a management model. In defining these models, managers generally need to make a series of structural value choices among five sets of paradoxical values:

Serendipity vs. Planning

Self-Organized vs. Centrally Organized

Emergent vs. Directed

Simple Rules vs. Detail Coordination

Transparency vs. Control

In approaching these choices, the best option is usually a balance between the two paradoxical values rather than a selection of one value and the dismissal of the other. To understand how these choices work, let's borrow an analogy from the field of psychology.

The late psychologist Erik Erikson developed a model of human development that postulated that every person moves through a progression of eight psychosocial stages to reach her full development. The developmental task of each of these stages is the resolution of the tension between two paradoxical psychosocial values. So, for example, in the first stage-- Basic Trust vs. Basic Mistrust--an individual needs to choose between these two values in approaching and dealing with other people. In the healthy personality, this is not an "either/or" choice but rather a "both/ and" balance. While it may appear at first blush that trust is a virtue and the obvious choice in this paradoxical pair, keep in mind that a person who is always trusting is often regarded as a "Pollyanna." Similarly, one who is always mistrusting is considered to be paranoid. The healthy person develops a sense of both trust and mistrust, but not necessarily in equal parts. In striking a balance between the two values, the psychologically fit person has a clear preference for trust over mistrust. In other words, while she usually leads with trust, she is savvy enough to know when to mistrust.

The dynamics of this analogy apply to organizational development. As businesses move from the entrepreneurial stage to growth and then to maturity as large established companies, their leaders need to make a series of structural value choices. In resolving these paradoxical value choices, they need to strike a preferential balance of one value over the other.

Value Preferences

Since their inception well over a century ago, corporations have clearly preferred the values shown on the right in the above list to those on the left. Over time, these preferences have become so solidified that many, if not most, traditional organizations today find themselves in a position where they value only the items on the right to the exclusion of those on the left. This explains why the longstanding tasks of management have been defined as planning, organizing, directing, coordinating, and controlling. It also explains why in the typical top-down hierarchical organization, there are hardly any simple rules and little self-organization and transparency, and why serendipity and emergence are foreign concepts. This also explains why so many companies have difficulty in walking the talk when it comes to virtuous values. It's hard to be trusting when the dysfunctional dynamics of bureaucratic silos foster intense internal competition in a zero-sum game for resources and control.

Now, a new breed of business leaders who are making very different value choices are providing increasing evidence that the blossoms of virtuous values are possible only when nurtured in the soil of the structural values shown on the left. Richard Sheridan, the cofounder and CEO at Menlo Innovations, is a trailblazer who's built an extraordinary workplace by emphasizing the values on the left.

A New Way of Working

In his best-selling book, Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love, Sheridan shares his experience of creating a very different type of organization. Menlo is a software company located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. When you walk into the Menlo office, the first thing you will notice is that there are no offices. Everyone sits at long tables arrayed in a large open room where people work in pairs--two people sitting together at one computer, working on the same task at the same time. These pairs are rotated on a weekly basis so that over time everyone has a chance to work with each other. Pairing, rotating, and working in an open environment provide ample opportunities for Menlonians, as they like to call themselves, to leverage the power of serendipity to delight their customers. According to Sheridan, "a culture that embraces and honors its people with a changeable space encourages serendipity. This may be the single greatest value of wide-open space."

Menlonians are heavily involved in organizing their work. A core discipline at Menlo is that every project is captured in a sequence of story cards produced by the people who will actually do the work. Once a week, all the workers come together as a group in a weekly ritual where the different teams do time estimates for the various story cards. Because the people closest to the work are defining the parameters, these estimates are more reliable than arbitrary dues dates assigned by harried managers. The story cards and the time estimates are posted on a common Work Authorization Board so teams who finish projects more quickly than expected can support other teams with work in progress.

One of the ways Menlo builds the value of emergence into its structure is through the innovative practice of High-Tech Anthropology®. HTA's, as they are called, engage with clients in their native environments to better understand the full scope of needs behind the client's software requests. Their job is to listen, observe, and most importantly, to discover unrecognized needs, unusual uses of their products, or new opportunities for creating value. Their learnings are converted into stories that may inform future projects or enable new innovative lanes of value creation.

Unlike their traditional counterparts, the project managers at Menlo don't tightly coordinate the details of day-to-day work. That's left to those who actually do the work. Menlonian managers are facilitators whose primary job is to be the custodians of the simple rules behind Menlo's extraordinary success. The company's prime rule is that nothing gets done on a client project unless it's written on a 5½-by-8½ index "story" card. Another rule is that each story card must be estimated by the people who do the work. As noted above, these are the two rules that enable Menlo's practice of self-organization. A third rule is that story cards are not placed on the Work Authorization Board unless specifically authorized by the client. And finally, project managers are responsible for assigning the specific Menlo pairs for each of the authorized tasks. These later rules assure that there is no ambiguity around assigned work.

Transparency is the underlying context for everything that happens in Menlo. The wide-open office and worker involvement in defining work parameters, along with the unusual practice of the employees being responsible for interviewing, hiring, and onboarding all new hires contribute a sense of belonging and ownership rarely found in the workplace.

Changing how we manage is not easy, given the pervasive presence of hierarchical management and its preference for centralized command and control by an elite few. While this traditional management may have worked well in slower more stabile times, emphasizing the values on the right could be a formula for failure in a rapidly changing world. Sheridan's successful experiment in giving preference to the values on the left provides a practical example of how and what to do to build an organization that's able to keep pace with a rapidly changing world, while at the same time creating a workplace where people love to come to work.

Rod Collins (@collinsrod) is the Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and the author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books). He writes for this column on the first Thursday of each month.

Startup Idea for SMB Channels in India

If you are trying to sell B-to-B software to Indian SMBs, you know that it's a very big market, and by and large, inaccessible.

There are hardly any mature channels through which to cater to this audience of customers profitably.

There are a couple of companies that have successfully scaled their businesses by selling to Indian SMBs: Greytip (payroll SaaS) and Knowlarity (virtual telephony). To learn more about these two companies, I've interviewed Girish Rowjee of Greytip and Ambarish Gupta of Knowlarity.

VC after VC will tell you that they don't invest in India facing B-to-B SaaS ventures because the channels are not developed to scale fast-growth businesses. Sasha Mirchandani (Kae Capital) and Sandeep Singhal (Nexus Venture) discussed these issues with me recently.

So, what is to be done to unlock this market and make it accessible to SaaS vendors? And to flip the point of view, why should millions of SMBs in India not get the benefit of software? After all, software is eating the world, delivering incredible productivity gains all across the board!

Well, I see opportunity here for a different class of startups: not just the SaaS vendors, but the value added resellers who could build for themselves nice businesses by working with a portfolio of SaaS vendors to bring their technologies to specific regional SMB clusters. Whether it is CRM, HR, ERP, or any other type of software that can help these SMBs, there is clearly an opportunity for VARs to advise, select, implement, and train.

Each VAR should focus on a specific region, and a specific size of SMB and deeply understand the needs of that class of SMBs. This includes understanding the cost structures, the opportunities for delivering ROI with the introduction of software, training needs to fully deliver the benefits thereof. Effectively, for these SMBs, the VARs would be operating as business transformation consultants.

Some numbers:

There will be different segments of SMBs with different budget levels for buying technology. Some will be able to afford $500/month, some $1000/month, some $1500/month and some $2000/month.

Assuming a 40% commission structure, a VAR focused on the $500/month budget segment will need to service ~400 customers to get to $1M. The $1000/month segments will need ~200. The $1500/month segment will need ~150. The $2000/month segment will need ~100.

India has over 50 million SMBs. Only 40% of these are currently using technology in any meaningful way. Even that is 20 million SMBs. So the numbers I am talking about (100-400) are relatively small and quite doable.

In fact, if we can systematically stimulate 100,000 VARs to focus on developing their practices, and build systems and methods to manage 100-400 SMBs effectively, it would be an enormous value creation opportunity for India's technology future.

And, each of these VARs would become good solid livelihood generating million dollar businesses.

Photo credit: Andrés Nieto Porras/Flickr.com.