After working for mortgage brokers from Chicago to New York, I recently started a new contract for an entity I had never worked for directly as a loan officer before: a bank.
While in most arenas, being promoted to Euro Mortgage Bankers was a step up for me— lower pricing, faster closings, direct access to underwriting and lenders— in another way, I was unsure. How could I go to loyal clients and Realtors who had known my dedication to my previous mortgage brokerage?
The answer came in a way I couldn’t have expected: working for  the bank meant I could sell loans not just t o my end consumers buying homes, refinancing their property, and not just through Realtors who could recommend me, but also sell our loan products to my competition!
The very mortgage brokers I had competed with for so many years, and many homes, could now purchase directly from me at a discount and I could be rewarded for setting up the relationships! This was a true win, and more than a third of my initial success stories have been in this manner.
To think, I could have continued only direct selling and not even noticed!

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What would you do if you were faced with the challenge of creating new and effective ways to sell homes in a competitive real estate market?

When I was considering ways to double  ClickAnnArbor.com, my small team of Realtors in sales and in size of the workforce, many fleeting ideas seemed solid. What can a small firm offer that bigger competitors can’t?

Change and technology.

Since the mid-1980s, real estate sales firms have been using technology that puts panoramic views of homes online in what is now called a “virtual tour.” Most Realtors provide this as part of a package in home selling services.

My firm, ClickAnnArbor.com, pioneered the use of low-cost, high-quality digital video technology to replace the “computer nerdy” feel of virtual tours with a newsy YouTube video. This innovation allowed us to become the fastest-growing real estate company in the nation’s slowest-selling state!

Today, real estate agents from Maine to California use YouTube for a much more robust view of property.

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Mortgage officers often visited the office with details on new and exciting loan programs to place home buyers or investors into property they wanted very much to get their hands on, whether times were good or bad.

Agents often needed a direct policy on what banks were approved, what types of loans were acceptable, and how we could turn a better profit against the competitors. In each and every case, my ruling was the same, follow the ClickAnnArbor.com mission: To put people in homes. That meant no “interest only,” no 100%+ loan amounts, no “adjustable rates.”

When the housing market began to shake up, our customers suffered losses in property value, but they didn’t have “stinger” loan problems. They kept the homes they loved but they raved about us to all their friends!

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As the world’s largest independent manufacturer of dry grocery organic foods, Eden Foods has risen to greatness because, as they put it, they are providing the cleanest, most nutritious foods and accurate information about them, their uses and benefits. Eden does it “to have good food for ourselves, our children and grandchildren, and to make it available to you and yours,” says Eden President and CEO Michael Potter.

However, at the turn of the millennium, Eden approached me with a bigger problem: how to grow online sales to consumers without threatening to take sales from existing supermarket and distribution customers?

The answer was simple: by crafting a web experience that is more than just food shopping, EdenFoods.com became what even boutique markets can’t: a warehouse of nutrition & recipes, even a history of food Eden offers.

The result? Online sales grew 1000% above the original sales figures, reaching new shoppers who return not only to the website but visit the stores.

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I’m going to draw your attention to Time Machine. This simple innovation is exactly how Apple Computer beat the bigs. It’s how a group of guys and girls from simple beginnings got to become that American fable of building a better mousetrap, founding a company in the “garage” and going on to superstardom and independent wealth.

Time Machine is the story of how something people do regularly with computers became simple, without technology innovation (although that followed) but simply with an analogy.

In the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, backing up files from a personal computer, or network of computers, was an ugly endeavor. Leading vendors offered great leaps forward in storage capacity: Terabytes of information could be saved to tape, disc, or off-site server farms. The problem was, no matter how often you remembered to back up, or automated the process, it was a technical nightmare. Special interfaces were required, and the media you saved to had to be labeled, catalogued and libraried. This sounds like it could be an orderly process, but the devil wasn’t in the details. It was in the one time you needed to restore from backup. This almost never worked.

It wasn’t the users that failed this, or the sysops who were tasked with the backups, or even the companies like Iron Mountain or Western Digital that were providing the highly complex data solutions. It was the system itself. People had to determine which of the last 2 or 3 backups had the version of their files, and often one of those hadn’t run right, so restoring from saved versions just didn’t match up, and could take hours or days in larger organizations.

Apple defeated this problem with an analogy. Instead of making users bend to a complicated catalogue system, they changed the inner workings of their technology to a simple mental understanding. By giving users an in-operating system dial to “travel back in time” to see what files were in a folder, Apple made this easy. It is this same understanding of what users want that forces them to test, test, and test again the methods for user interface in their iPhone, iPod, iPad, and computers. There is plenty of highly technical custom possibility beneath the surface, but for most users, Apple makes it easy on us. If you shake the iPhone when iTunes is open, you get a random playlist. This is something humans understand, without needing to “learn” the interface.

Can we take a step back from our own daily walk and ask, “what do the customers want?”

That’s when we can really break through our own pattern.

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To map an entity to an immediate parent, you can search and arrange source and target group structures side by side on the screen. Simply select an entity with or without its subsidiaries and drop it on the target hierarchy tree.

This upgraded module allows you to store and display multiple parent information having different percentage of ownerships in any given entity, all adding up to 100. Now system limitation shouldn’t be the reason to restricted your business rules to capture single immediate parent with only >50% ownership

Three relationship types that are configured in the base version are legal, business and all. Business hierarchy covers following relationship types.

· Fund–Investment Manager or Advisor relation

· Fund–Sponsor relation

· Fund–Trust relation

· Sub Fund–Umbrella Fund relation

· Bank Branch–Main Bank relation

Please contact Gaurav Malik at gaurav.malik@ebusinessware.com to have a free of charge and no obligation experience of our all new hierarchy module. Visit our blog site for any comments and questions

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When I met with the publishers at the US offices of Oxford University Press in New York City, I remember being awed at their commitment to modern marketing. “We’re funding these efforts over 24 months before the new book comes out so we can create new relationships,” one editor told me.

While my marketing team swung into action with the “modern traditional” methods of outreach; contacting professors to learn how they would use the new book and target institutions that would benefit from social networking about the upcoming publication, creating a complete feedback loop and ready-to-buy market on publish date.

Although the eBook industry is even now in its infancy, Oxford’s Reference & Bibles Division worked with us to create the first-ever website solely for a book, complete with daily excerpts mailed to thousands of buyers.

This landmark event laid the groundwork for the online Oxford English Dictionary, hailed by The New York Times as, “the greatest work in dictionary making ever undertaken.”

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However, visiting the link from the invite on Klout works just fine, while the link to About.Me’s in-dashboard new Klout feature fails. Not from user error, where a mass email was sent with a typographical error in the URL, not from database code in the CRM’s mass email system, but where About.Me apparently sent it to everyone at once. Now, like a fifth-grade rumor that has everyone flushing the toilets at the same instant, ruining the school’s plumbing, or every human being on earth jumping up and down in the same moment to move the planet out of orbit, a very real effect has been achieved: the link can’t respond to all the users at once.

The methods behind cloud computing allow for quick scalability, for immediate response to overwhelming web traffic and processing, but the sad truth is that they can be throttled. By choice, by service level agreement, by paid tier, there are numerous reasons why banks of servers that were built to handle small spikes in traffic but can’t hold up to large jumps in processing…. Often the CPU-sharing agreements allow for a “burst” method where processor power on the server banks aren’t always working, but pulse in large part, then slow down.

The beauty on the example of About.Me’s ask was that within minutes (about 8-10 minutes, in fact) they had remedied the problem and the links were working, the integrated Klout functionality was up and running, and I was amazed. Not by the feature, although it’s delightful. I’m amazed at the digital ability to scale in more processor power when needed, in a way that makes me reminiscent of the machines in Fritz Lang movies or steamboat engineers, twiddling knobs and opening valves for more power when needed, slowing it down when no longer necessary. The Amazon Cloud, Google Apps Cloud, and a variety of private services like Rackspace.com seem to have this handled within limits in a very clear way.

But the technology is still in its infancy.

What is needed is a predictive model, tied in with the CRM systems, so that when an email leaves the “house” containing a link to servers hosted on the same (or a connected) cloud platform, the system can presumptively throttle open more spillways or even veritable floodgates depending on how many recipients are targeted, or, to take it another step further, to integrate with the response mechanisms in those messages, in case a small group of recipients is included in the initial mailing, but the email “goes viral” and includes a high pass-along rate.

A model is needed that can take all of these data points and feedback items into account and can plan to work and react ahead of usage in an overall architecture.

The innovation, of course, will follow.

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Along with the Award Ceremony & celebrations at all locations, in Gurgaon the event proceeded further with two of our torchbearers, Ashudeep Chadha and Mandeep Singh, sharing their experiences with the audience. In fact, Ms Chadha’s brief story on leadership traits was very inspirational.

Eloquence of our host Monica Kumar gave the event an exciting start, with the resilience further carried by Amit Chawla who kept the ambiance engaging with his witty one-liners. The gala went forward with Award and Recognitions, in which we acknowledged the contribution of some of our top performers for the year who raised the Organizational bars to new heights.

We also had our entertainment course in between. Manpreet Kaur sang a spell-binding oldie that earned accolades from all corners of the hall. Then we had a Punjabi skit, called “Kicker-Bicker”, played by Ramdutt, Manav, Himanshu, Manpreet, Brijmohan and Mahendra that made the audience literally jumped off their seats. Finally we had a captivating dance performance by “Abhishek Michael Srivastava Jackson”, as named by our facile host Amit. Abhishek was truly rocking with his fascinating dance moves and unbelievable curls.

Soon after the Award Ceremony, there came the moment we all were eagerly waiting for. The DJ brushed his fingers on the keyboard….and there we go…The atmosphere was simply electrifying with over 150 pair of legs tapping the dance floor on smashing dance numbers. After around two hours of relentless dancing, we went for the dinner party. The dinner comprised of some real finger-licking recipes representing different parts of our diverse country.

Of course, it’s the sentiment behind the gathering that means the most. The company’s renewed united commitment is a boost to the our morale as a great team. For that, we thank all of you.

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Q. How will the manager operate in an environment free of  old hierarchy?

A. Would you believe that you’re going to work permanently with people who work for you but are not your employees? Increasingly, for instance, you outsource when possible.  It is predictable, then, that ten years from now a company will outsource all work that does not have a career ladder up to senior management. To get productivity, you have to outsource activities that have their own senior management. Believe me, the trend toward outsourcing has very little to do with economizing and a great deal to do with quality….

Relations between organizations are changing just as fast as relations between organizations and the people who work for them.  The most visible is “outsourcing,” in which a company, a hospital or a government agency turns over an entire activity to an independent firm that specializes in that kind of work….In another ten or fifteen years, organizations may have outsourced all work that is “support”….This will mean that in many organizations a majority of people working might not be employees of that organization but employees of an outsourcing contractor.

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