A Toast Through Time

Tonight I attended the Cape Coral Toastmasters Club. Toastmasters International is a nonprofit educational organization that operates clubs worldwide for the purpose of helping members improve their communication, public speaking and leadership skills.¹

I’ve heard the good benefits of getting involved in this type of organization. Aside from the opportunity to socialize, meet potential business clients and partners, and build my list of contacts, I hope to learn and improve the art of speaking, listening, and thinking.

The members were friendly, receptive, smart, and fun. Though the meeting was professional, the feel around the room was relaxed, positive, and quite immersing. One definitely has to be interested in the art of public speaking to enjoy this type of meeting. There were several guests present tonight, and I think we all had a positive experience.

It was great to meet, chat, and briefly introduce myself to several members. I went in there with a positive attitude and even participated on my very first day! It has been a long time since I’ve been involved in any type of organization in the professional realm. Showing up to tonight’s Toastmasters meeting felt great. I felt like my good old self again.

Just to give you an idea, several years ago I was very involved in the community around me. Back then it was the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s student community. I served in the Senate, was Vice President of the Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers, was a Resident Assistant several terms, wrote for the campus newsletter, and served in other organizations inside and outside of campus.

Since moving to Florida I sort of fell off the map. After a chain of disappointments, I sort of fell into a depression and lost touch of my talents. I even picked up on a little enemy called fear and self-doubt. Yuk!

But it’s all good now. I’m fighting back. This fisherman ain’t finished yet. With God all things are possible! Plus God will not be done with me until his work is accomplished in me. I look forward to joining the next Toastmaster session, and God willing, people can say once again… Look out world, here comes JCruz! as I work in my vocation and share with others the limitless love of God. Make it a wonderful week!

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

1. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toastmasters_International [↩]

The New Business Language of IT and How Using It Can Help Change Your Organization’s Culture

I took the opportunity to check out a few CIO Executive Council Outlook videos the other day and ran across a very interesting “conversation” with Mary Hall Gregg, CIO of Quest Diagnostics. What I found most interesting was how the use of language helped change an IT culture. Today I wanted to share some of this language with you.

The idea is to stop using the old IT language and use the new business language. From what I understand the CIO Executive Council put this together for the beneficial use of all businesses and their IT organizations. Check it out:

I really liked the example of changing the language used to describe internal customers to business partners. Mary Hall Gregg made a great point when she explained the conscious decision her organization made to never use the word customer to refer to colleagues (the people inside the organization) and instead refer to them as as business partners.

Our colleagues — they are our business partners and together we are trying to drive growth for the company, and IT is a tool and a technology to drive growth. Our customers are the people that we serve, so patients are our customers and the patients are first in everything that we do. Physicians are our customers, health plans are our customers, employers are our customers. The people who use our services, who pay the bills — those are our customers. The employees of Quest Diagnostics, they’re either our business partners or, in some cases we refer to them as users, if they are using a service of IT, but we don’t allow anyone in IT to talk about our partners as being customers because it changes the dialogue and it sets a different expectation. If you think you’re my customer, you’re less willing to engage in a dialogue about how we can improve things and work together and collaborate. You just expect that I’m going to deliver a service, and when I don’t get it right, you don’t want to engage in a discussion about how we improve and move forward, so the use of the word partner versus customer I think is very essential for a company and an IT organization, that is about the growth of the company.

Language is important in the corporate culture. Every business and industry defines its culture by their use of language. I have worked for some of the best companies in their industries and each had their own language for industry-specific terms and for general terms, like employees. In my businesses I call employees team members and partners and consider all divisions to be groups, in order to discourage silos and invisible walls and to promote collaboration and a sense of family - an association of people who share common beliefs or activities. I am amazed at how powerful language is.

Kudos to the CIO Executive Council for their fine work on the Outlook series. It was very educational to watch the videos and read the transcripts. I cannot wait to put this information to good use. How about you?

CIOs Making IT/S An Engine for Business Growth

I was reading up on the present role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) in US businesses these days. I gather the role shifted from managing IT, to cutting costs, to driving innovation and development in business. So it seems that the CIO is helping the business save money and increase revenue. The leadership from the Information Technology and Systems (IT/S) departments is now essential in helping businesses grow. Technology is at the forefront of this because we can now accomplish things that were unthinkable even five years ago. With the right skill set and experience the CIO can effectively influence the market direction of a business. Here is a quote from CIO Magazine 2/1/07:

In companies where innovation is a critical part of success, the need for greater IT involvement will give the CIO more knowledge of the innovation process than any other C-level executive. Whether that translates into a strategic voice in the market direction of the company will depend on CIO’s leadership skills, their personal relationships with their CEOs and these CEOs’ own views of strategic value of technology.

I am starting to see the general shift in the role of IT/S at the company I work for. I am also beginning to see it in other businesses I research. We are becoming very dependent on technology, not just at home and in our personal lives, but very much so in business. Where there are advantages, there certainly are disadvantages. I wonder if we are looking beyond the bottom line here and seeing the big picture of the impact we are allowing technology to make in our world, our communities, and our families.

Siebel Training Next Week

I am so excited that next week I will be traveling to San Francisco, California for Siebel Application Administration Training. I definitely think this is going to help me be the best Siebel Administrator I can possibly be and provide the best support to our business end-users.

Consequently, this is the first time I travel to the state of California. This week I am going to prepare for this trip and research some landmarks I can check out while I’m there - after class of course. I am so blessed to have my employer pay for the trip and encourage me to grow in the field of IT Information Systems, specifically with the Oracle Siebel customer relationship management application. I am very thankful and hope to make the best of the opportunities presented to me.

2007 Business Restructuring

As of late I am changing the structures of my businesses. It is all part of implementing a new asset protection and tax planning strategy. The idea is to own nothing. Instead of owning it you should control it.

The only reason Americans have to take asset protection seriously is because we live in a litigious society; too many lawsuits! More often than not, some people are out there trying to get what you have worked so hard to earn/build up. On the other hand, the only reason Americans have to take tax planning seriously is because the IRS (whose business is to collect as much revenue for the United States treasury as possible) favors business entities, like corporations, over individuals. In other words the tax code grants more deductions and breaks to businesses rather than people. One reason the government favors this policy is because generally businesses contribute to the growth of the economy. I would personally argue this on the account that if we the people did not spend money, the economy would be in bad shape.

I have not written much about what kind of businesses I am involved with. Let me start by saying it is hard work to start small businesses. I am an entrepreneur and the rewards of successful enterprising far outweigh the risks, hard labor, and challenges I face daily. It is fun too! This year I am involved in starting, managing, and/or operating businesses in asset management, stock trading, real estate, multimedia, business services, and publishing. As soon as websites are available I will post them in this blog. God bless!

Document Review & Restructuring

Ladies and gentlemen it is Friday once again! Over the past two weeks I have been busy at work and in the matters of my business. I am a full-time employee and an entrepreneur. Why both? Until I can manage a system where I can derive all my income from my business, I have to keep a day job to pay the bills. Through the day job I get to broaden my experience and learn many new things. Once in a while I get a good, challenging task at work but those are not as easy to come by unless I look for them specifically. As an entrepreneur, every day is filled with challenging tasks, and the excitement level is mostly high.

My passion is my business so in this blog I will talk about it more than I will talk about my day job. For two weeks I have been busy reviewing business documents and restructuring plans. Over the years I authored many documents filled with ideas and strategies. The problem is that they are all over the place in different forms. Some are written, some are drawn, some are typed up under different file formats. The objective has been to bring all this information under one repository and merge the information to form active business plans.

I hope you have a terrific weekend. God bless.

About Finally Friday: Right before the weekend we review the highlights of my week. Then I share with you my perspective heading into the weekend.

My First Business Account

Ladies and gentlemen, I opened my first business account! It was an exciting experience for me to open my first checking account for my new small business (more on this soon). I enjoyed an excellent customer service experience at the local AmSouth Bank branch here in the beautiful city of Fort Myers. I was treated like a professional and a human being. I was given all the necessary information and all my questions were kindly answered. I give them credit for being the relationship people on the first day. We all know that first impressions are important.

As a bonus for opening a free small business checking account I was given the opportunity to open a free personal checking account. Of course, hardly anything in life is free. As a result, I requested their schedule of fees. Still, choosing to separate my personal and business monies is the first step forward on the road to financial independence. It means business baby!

If you are considering opening a small business checking account, check out AmSouth’s offering. The bank merged with Regions Bank, and hopefully the transition is smooth enough. Thank you AmSouth; here’s to our success!

Quickly Into QuickBooks 2006

Since Friday, I have been doing some learning and research on small business accounting and working with QuickBooks 2006. Before I setup my business through the EasyStep Interview, I’m going to go through the Learning Center and check out their interactive tutorials. I find it so neat that included now are tutorials that help the user become familiar with this expensive accounting software.

I am aware that each year a new version comes out. It is my opinion that the developers would love to have the users “subscribe” each year to the “better, improved” version. However, a company needs to be disciplined enough to say, “No.” I recommend updating every other year or every three years, if need be. It all depends if the developer adds any real new, real useful features; or if they drop support for your current version. Put the money to work for you and buy something else, an asset, not another overvalued expense.

Nevertheless, I do like QuickBooks 2006, especially the new homepage and tutorials. Uncle Sam wants taxes done right and your accounting to be accountable. QuickBooks is the right tool for this and much more.