I spoke on Friday at the Business Awards dinner at Schoolcraft College. I never had heard about the college until they invited me to speak at this dinner. It is a two year college of 24,000 students outside of Detroit. The students I met came from a diverse background of experience and ages.

When I was there, I learned about their new academic forgiveness program which I thought really allowed students to Bounce! If a student is returning after 10 years between the last time they went to school, they can exclude one semester or 12 credit hours from their go forward grade point average (GPA). This is a great way to allow returning students you want another chance at academic succss to be able to bounce- and be given another chance at success. I think this is truly innovative. Are other schools doing this?

As always, I asked Schoolcraft how they bounce:

I spoke today to 500 people in Chicago at Speed Coaching event sponsored by Open of American Express and SCORE. This event works alot like speed dating. You learn alot quickly! There are business coaches that help the business owners on different topics from finance to marketing throughout the day. The best part is that the event and the future resources are all free courtesy of the non-profit SCORE.

The lunchtime crowd that I spoke to was very spirited. It is not very often that I have the pleasure to present in Chicago since I travel so much. This felt like coming home. I saw so many people that have heard me speak before and I enjoyed reconnecting with them. Of course I asked them, How Do You Bounce?

As humans, we all seek meaning. Some of us seek “the truth”. Alot of business authors claim their teachings are “the truth’ or “the way”. I agree with Buddha when he said, “Don’t accept the claim of truth of different sages and teachers including mine. You have to test the validity of the truth yourself as gold is tested in a furnace.”

Similarly in business, we seek a truth in our search for “The 5 Steps to Success”- we look for the 5 magically steps we find in some book or speech that will tell us the way to financial success. Forget about it! It does not exist in my book or any other business book. The best we all can do is listen to what others say and then use our own skills and our own hard work to forge our truth, our way.

There is no substitute…unfortunately.

For the employees of Bear Stearns, news of the company’s demise is as bad as it can get.  Of the more than 14,000 people on the payroll, most expect to be laid off soon, with no prospects for other jobs.  In addition to the unemployment issue that they face, many employees took huge hits to their investment portfolios due to the plummeting of the company’s stock value.  So, with jobs that are about to disappear and savings that have evaporated, what should they do now in order to survive, especially in these precarious financial times? In fact, the financial and emotional uncertainty of being unemployed is a scenario which countless people have faced as companies continue to merge and reduce costs. We need to Bounce!

We need to remember that our careers are not linear.  Things occur unexpectedly and bad times happen. Life long employment is dead. We all face major shifts in careers and financial health, through this crisis. It is fine to grieve disappointments, even wallow for a bit in the grief for a day or two, if you need to, but eventually, we have to bounce and make another decision to get us to a new place.  Only by taking action, to we have the opportunity to get on a new path.
 

It is not uncommon that there is an innovation by a religious leader before I speak at a Chamber of Commerce Luncheon. Today, in Wheaton, I spoke at their monthly meeting where I was touched when Reverend Allen from The Second Baptist Church stood up and asked in the prayer before the meal, “Lord, please give us Bounce! During these times of recession ,we all need a little Bounce!“-Amen!

With over 5,000 articles written today on the web about Mr. Spitzer’s rapid fall from as the power the governor of New York, the media frenzy isdeafening. But I believe that his recent troubles should not dictate the end to his public life. We need to remember that most of our careers are not linear. We all screw up sometimes and bad things happen. It is fine to grieve failures, even wallow in it for awhile, but Spitzer did the wise thing- he made the decision to quickly resign so he could move on with his life and career. His articulation that he will continue on as a public servant in some way is what the bounce process is all about. He now can get on a new path so he can seek another success opportunity in his life.

What do you think?

I never thought about it but Boomers (like me) don’t bounce as well as Gen Yers (like my children). Maybe it comes from being part of the video generation. Gen Y Labs puts it this way:

Gen Yers are better at “bouncing” from failure than any other generation doing business.  They don’t perceive risk as a “do-or-die” phenomenon. Risk is more like a scenario to Gen Yers. They dive in and try something. If they fail, they shake it off and try again, just like they learned to do in their scenario-based video games.  Boomers see failure as a very personal experience and often need to re-invent themselves before stepping back into the playing arena.  Gen Yers see a re-start button and go for the game another time, knowing that the course of play needs to be altered.

What Gen Y Labs says it true. For many Boomers failure is too personal. We can learn from the Gen Yers who have a much easy time pressing the restart button….of bouncing. Maybe I need to go home and play more video games.

I have seen people using there cell phones and PDAs in the strangest places. I have seen them used at the urinals in rest rooms, on bicycles, treadmills, etc, etc, etc. We do this because we are so programmed to multitask that we can’t “waste a minute” by just doing one thing at a time.

But now a new low. At the local salon where I get my haircut, they wash your hair first. As I was waiting, there was another gentleman getting his hair washed while at the same time holding his PDA high in front of him so he could read his email while getting his hair washed. At one point during this scene, he yelled out to the woman washing his hair. “Stop! I can’t see my Backberry, you keep getting water in my eyes.” Ugh!

This needs to stop. As I say in my new book, Bounce! we need to strive for minimal achievement by focusing on one thing at a time. The myth of multitasking is just that- a myth. Our brain can really only do one thing at a time. In multitasking, we just switch quickly. Studies show that this multitasking decreases our productivity overall by 50%. If we can strive for minimal achievement- that is, focus on one thing at a time, we will actually increase our power and results.

And besides, let’s just relax for a minute and enjoy getting our haircut. Email can wait 20 minutes.

I didn’t know what it was or that I needed one until I didn’t have one. Isn’t that the way our consumer culture work?

I kept on seeing these nifty little icons next to other web site urls in the Internet Explorer browser bar….a company logo, fancy letters, designs etc. Even though they are only 1/4 inch tall, they do look cool. I learned they were called favicons (Favorite and Icon combined). So now for my web site, my favicon is an orange rubber band ball. Check it out at www.barrymoltz.com.

I have found that documentaries are a great way to learn. I wish I would have know about Donald Crowhurst when I was writing Bounce!

In the documentary, Deep Water, Crowhurst, the owner of a less than successful manufacturing business for electrical components. He enters the first Golden Globe competition in 1968 to sail from London single handedly around the world against 8 other competitors. His boat was financed by an English entrepreneur, Stanley Best who used Crowhurst’s only asset, is house as collateral. According to the terms of his agreement, if Crowhurst failed to complete the voyage or quit early in the competition, his family would be homeless and bankrupt.

Although his boat was not ready, Crowhurst launches it by the contest’s October 31st deadline. Only two weeks into his journey (of almost an expected year), his boat begins to leak. If he gives up now, he loses everything. If he goes on to the treacherous Southern Ocean, his boat will sink. Crowhurst struggles to decides what to do.

Crowhurst decides on a third option (WARNING: MOVIE SPOILER ALERT).

He decides that he will lie about where he is. Forty years ago, without the GPS of today, he describes the progress he is making by radio and keeps a fake log book. He continues to fake is location through a series of intermittant broadcasts showing incredible progress and speed. Meanwhile, he is waiting for the other competitors to come around the world and then he will fall in behind him on their way back to London. His plan fails when all the other competitors (except one) sink on their journey and he is expected to be in England with the fastest time. Unable to sail into a hero’s welcome because of his lies, he abandons his boat and drowns himself.

There are so many themes here that I discuss all the time. Why could he not come back from his failure? Why did he see the only alternative as suicide? Was there too much pressure where we bet everything on this one trip? Do we crave that fame and fortune too much and will do anything to achieve it? Do we live in the kind of society that we live in where a man has no choice?

What would you have done? Turn around? Given up? Gone on to certain death?