John Luif

For a fun conversation gather your team and include people from marketing, sales and any other area of your company and pose these two questions:

1. Why is the measure of success important?
2. What is the measure of success?

You will get some great responses ranging from “The first question is just stupid” to some very enlightening answers.  Let everyone voice their opinions then put in a few ground rules.

• The measurement has to be something the individual can directly effect.
• The measurement has to be something that can be measured regularly.

After putting forth these guidelines the responses from people should begin to change a bit.  Instead of hearing measurements like revenue you will start hearing measurements like sales deals closed this week or new clients for the week.

The purpose of the conversation should be clear by the end.  Each individual will leave having a better understanding and appreciation for each role in the company.  Another beneficial side effect of this conversation is each person will find ways to help others achieve their goals (even if they do it with knowing it).

I ran into an interesting issue yesterday, usb devices were not showing up in my VM.  I decided to disable the Windows Firewall and it started working.  Next I  brought up TCPView and saw that tcp ports 49515 and 49516 were being used by VMWare Workstation.  In the Windows Firewall Exceptions I added the ports and the VMWare Workstation program and everything works with the firewall turned back on.  Problem solved!