Sehrish Irum Creations: 2013

Tuesday 11 June 2013

Sehrish Irum Balance Your Work and Personal Life Like a Pro

The ideal combination of work, family, and social can be difficult to arrive at. Take control of your life with these simple tips

Sehrish Irum

I am always hearing complaints from my high achieving friends about their struggles with balancing their lives. Trying to juggle home, work, friends, achievement, personal downtime, etc. can definitely take its toll and make you feel pulled in all sorts of directions.

It doesn't have to be this way. The very concept of achieving balance is a big part of the problem. The idea of balance means that all of our activities must get equivalent time and attention to be perfect. Life is just not that way and you really don't want it to be. You want to do the things that give you the most gratification and reward and you want to stop doing the things that drain you and make you feel bad. Balancing these will force you to give equal time to all activity regardless of reason. In his book, Built to Last, Jim Collins addresses this problem with his concept of the "Tyranny of the OR" as in I can have this or that.

I prefer to live my life with "The Genius of the AND." I like to figure out how to always have at least some of this and that. My approach is not balance, but integration. I look at each opportunity and then figure out how to integrate it into all the desirable aspects of my life. Below are the guidelines in my process. They require some thought and discipline, but hopefully they'll work for you as well.

1. Decide What Really Matters to You

So many people try to serve the needs of those around them without considering their own minimal needs. Soon they find themselves drained and exhausted. In the big picture, you can give more from being strong and happy then you can from being weak and bitter. Make a list of the activities that give you energy and strength. Make these a priority in your life. It doesn't matter that others may expect you to put money, family, or service high on your importance scale. You have to be true to your own priorities. Once you reach basic contentment you will have more to give and share with those around you. Sure some may consider you selfish, but better to receive their scorn and be happy, than receive their pity and be miserable.

2. Edit, Don't Sacrifice

Often people over indulge in activity that sounds good at first but is truly more than needed. Think before you commit. Your time is limited and you can't do everything. Once you identify the activities of importance, structure them so you are getting just enough to satisfy your needs. Schedule your time to fit the actual number of hours in a week. Take into consideration that you need elective hours and downtime. So if you need six hours of sleep and two hours of down time per day, that means you only have 98 hours per week. Adjust your career path and success choices to fit what is possible in that time frame with your other activities. By taking this proactive approach you won't feel you are giving up activities, because they never were actually an option.

3. Harness Your Creativity

I know some of you read No. 2 and wondered what happens when the numbers don't add up. That is where you have to be creative in your life. Find ways to integrate the social aspects of your life with work and family if those things are important. Combine activity and create new opportunities that will serve multiple needs rather than going with options that were created by others.

4. Take Full Personal Responsibility

There are few hard and fast rules in life. People suffer mostly from self-imposed limits and stigmas even though they are apt to blame it on family, spouses, bosses, etc. Certainly major change can bring pain and hardship, but it can also bring growth and freedom. Design your preferred future and set the plan to achieve it. Then most importantly, make your happiness the priority and take action. You are the only one who can ultimately create satisfaction or dissatisfaction in your life.

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Sehrish Irum The Art of the Expatriate

Sehrish Irum

Probably the most important decision a business owner can make when deciding to set up an office abroad is the selection of who will run it.

Brand protection and location selection are the bones of creating a truly global company, but the heart of such an expansion is the people.

Sehrish Irum

To be a truly global company, the elements that make the brand at home must be appropriately replicated abroad. For OtterBox, we strive to infuse our company culture into the brand and take our customer experience from just a product to a full sensory experience. Given that goal, selecting the right leaders for a new office can make or break the brand.

That being said, we knew we needed to have the right people on the ground. Ones that truly embraced and understood the company culture--people with great Ottertude. We selected a few key internal players who we knew we could trust implicitly and sent them off as expatriates to bring OtterBox to the world.

This is not at all an easy process. Many rules and regulations apply specific to the country or region that the office is located. My suggestion is to get expert advice on how to properly expat someone--it will cost a bit, but save a lot of headaches in the long run.

Process aside, selecting the right person to take the brand, vision, culture, etc. overseas is one of the hardest choices to make as a business owner and CEO. The responsibility is enormous and trust is the No. 1 consideration.

For those familiar with E-Myth (if you're not, I recommend that you do so), the person or people that take on this job would be a blend of entrepreneur and manager. To get the best of both worlds, I recommend tapping two people--an operations rock star and a sales prodigy.

Once these trusted company insiders have established the bare bones of the new office, it's time to start filling it. Selecting talent from within the market is crucial, but even more important than the skill sets and connections is the culture fit.

When possible, we bring new candidates abroad to our U.S. headquarters in Fort Collins, Colorado, for training. This allows them to absorb the culture, learn from their American counterparts and feel like a part of the family. That's not always feasible, so the expat leaders serve as cultural cross-pollinators.

The workplace culture in offices around the world will never be mirror images of the home office due to overall cultural differences. Trying to force it will have the opposite result. A focus on core values, which should transcend typical cultural boundaries, will act as a bridge. The literal translations for things like accountability, passion, and integrity will be varied, but the essence of those traits is universal.

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Sehrish Irum Design Your Business Like a Product

Sehrish Irum

Some companies have product design down to a science. These engineering-minded entrepreneurs can apply these same skills to scaling their business.

Sehrish Irum

New product development is often seen as the life-blood of any company, and rightly so. If you aren't innovating, you're stagnating. Interestingly, developing your business is not that much different than developing your product.

OtterBox recently launched its new Armor Series case for the iPhone--a case that guards against water, drops, dust, and crush. That's a lot of protection, and the case required a lot of engineering from a very talented team. It also gave me a chance to be more involved in design than I had been for a few years.

After focusing so much of my time on designing a business structure, it was nice to get back to the design table alongside the engineering team. I was struck by how many parallels there are between the two very different but very important processes. The challenges and opportunities found in product design are really not much different than the ones you will encounter creating the structure for your business:

Innovate, Innovate, Innovate

As markets shift, so do the needs and wants of customers. In mobile technology, the landscape is changing rapidly so innovative new products are a must. In the same way, your business requires innovations in process on a regular basis. As your company grows, it demands the next 'big thing.'

Design and Test

With a product like the Armor Series, there are many separate but interconnected elements. During design, when one element was tweaked, another was often impacted. Newton's Law is alive and well--every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Rather than change many elements at once, it is best to change one and then test to ensure everything else is still working. The same is true in business processes. An update to one process might have an unintended impact on another one. That doesn't mean you should be paralyzed due to fear of change. Rather, be ready to accept that a great new system or process that fixes one issue might, in turn, cause one in a different area of the business.

These are "pre-launch" considerations. Planning is so critical to success, but so is speed. The trick is balancing the two. I'll detail the "post-launch" similarities between product development and business development in the next column.

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Sehrish Irum One Thing I Wish I Knew Before Going Global

OtterBox's CEO talks about a lesson he learned the hard way after expanding his business overseas.

Sehrish Irum

Ideally, the first steps to becoming a global brand start well before product or people are in-market. But protecting innovations across the globe is tricky and expensive, so it often does not become priority until it's too late.

OtterBox is all about protection--that's what we do. When it came to going global, however, we weren't as diligent in protecting our brand as we were in protecting mobile technology. We are well covered today, but that is because of a lot of hard work, long hours, and not insignificant expense.

If I knew then what I know now, I would have invested earlier in filing for trademarks and patents in all regions we operated. With different rules, regulations, and processes in nearly every country, the complexity and expense of protecting intellectual property globally can be paralyzing to a young, growth-stage company, but the potential harm is much more costly.

Trademark protections should be filed as soon as possible. Apple suffered from a trademark loophole with the iPad recently. Earlier this year, the company shelled out $60 million to settle a dispute with Shenzhen Proview Technology over who owned the iPad name. Apparently, Apple thought it had purchased the rights through a U.K.–based subsidiary of Proview, but Proview argued the sale was not authorized. This example illustrates just how choppy the waters of global brand protection can get.

In retrospect, OtterBox could have been more proactive in registering our trademarks outside of the United States. Trademark and patent protections should be set up in any country in which a product is being sold and manufactured. There is some relief, though; a single process for trademark registration in Europe will cover you in about 25 countries (Norway and Switzerland, for some reason, do not participate in this program).

The latter is especially true for China, where the boom in manufacturing significantly outpaced regulations to protect intellectual property, resulting in a booming counterfeit and infringement industry. If you haven't already, file for protections in China. Given that it is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, you'll probably be there in some fashion at some point in the future.

Another area that doesn't fall into IP but is related to brand protection is domain names. It is relatively inexpensive and easy to secure domain names for your brand--otterbox.ie, for example. It's so simple to do that some people have made a business out of grabbing domains and selling them to brands.

Filing for trademarks and patents is only a part of the battle; enforcement is an entirely different story. However, the process of making your company as strong globally as it is at home starts with what you most want to maintain and protect--the brand.

Sehrish Irum Balance Your Work and Personal Life Like a Pro

Sehrish Irum

The ideal combination of work, family, and social can be difficult to arrive at. Take control of your life with these simple tips.

Sehrish Irum

1. Decide What Really Matters to You

2. Edit, Don't Sacrifice

3. Harness Your Creativity

4. Take Full Personal Responsibility

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Sehrish Irum 3 Tips for a Healthy Hiring Process

Hiring people who are not the right fit for your company is akin to catching a cold. Here's how to limit the extent of the illness to the rest of the company.

Increasing revenue at a progressively rapid rate is not easy, but hiring the right staff to keep pace is even more difficult. The biggest issue we faced as a fast-growing company in 2012 was finding the right people to evolve with us.

OtterBox was No. 75 on the 2012 Inc. Hire Power ranking, which honors the private companies that have added the most jobs during the past few years. Because the past three years were generally difficult in terms of national job creation, there are a lot of really good people out there who are looking for new career opportunities. But just because they are good does not mean they are right for your company.

Hiring at a growing, changing organization is a big deal, and it can be a bit scary. It's sort of like flying. You get onto an airplane with a bunch of strangers who all have the same destination. The problem is that some of them will have colds. Hiring the wrong person is like spreading a cold within the organization--it can make others sick as well. Hiring mistakes must be corrected quickly for the health of the company.

Some of the "wrong" people are more like cancer than colds. They get ingrained and are around for a while, and you are totally taken by surprise by the time the illness is exposed. Though not necessarily contagious, these are much harder to treat and recover from.

If a company has a solid culture, "wrong" employees will not last long. They will be miserable in a setting that is not conducive to who they are, but some will stick around longer than necessary--content to collect a paycheck. The key is having a system in place to deal with the issue quickly:

Watch for Patterns and Trends

Identifying a "cold" or "cancer" is usually the most difficult part of getting your organizational composition healthy. A pattern of behavior or trend in work production issues is a good indicator.

Warnings

I prefer a three-strike system. This gives employees an opportunity to grow and improve and leaders a chance to coach. Some "wrong" employees are actually salvageable if they have the right attitude.

Courageous Leadership

It comes down to the courage of managers to identify and deal with issues. Without a leader who not only has a good grasp on the composition of his or her team but also the gumption to identify and deal with problems, a poor hire can hide out for a long time to the detriment of all other employees.

Having someone at a company who truly doesn't belong is a failure of the company--we didn't hire right and/or we didn't develop right. These issues are nearly unavoidable when you're more than doubling employment every year, but a system for identifying and remedying organizational illnesses will limit the damage.

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