Lou Holtz’s 3 rules of life:

“Everybody needs four things in life: Something to do, someone to love, someone to believe in and something to hope for.”

I wish I had said that, but it was my very close friend Lou Holtz. I recently invited Lou to speak to a professional group I am mentoring and he was his usual outstanding self. It’s no wonder that the Washington Speakers Bureau calls Lou one of the best speakers in the world.

I’ve heard Lou speak a hundred times, and he still amazes me with his practical, down-to-earth, plain and simple advice.

For example, we have all kinds of rules and laws. We’ve got federal laws, state laws, corporate laws, bylaws … you name it. Holtz simplifies things by following three simple rules.

Rule #1 - Do right. “Just do the right thing,” Lou says. “We’ve all done dumb things and wish we hadn’t done them, but you can’t go through life with an albatross around your neck saying, ‘I made a mistake.’ Say you’re sorry, make amends and move on.”

He added: “I think it’s wrong to be bitter. We all have a reason to be bitter. We’ve all had injustices done to us by society, by a spouse, by a friend, but you can’t go through life being bitter. We’re always blaming someone else. Wherever we are it’s because of the choices we make.”

Rule #2 - Do everything to the best of your ability with the time allotted. Lou says: “Not everybody will be an All-American. Not everybody will be first team. Not everybody will be great. But everybody can do the best they can with the time allotted.”

Rule #3 - Show people you care. I have seen this rule in action many times. Lou is constantly asking people, “How can I help you? How can I assist you?” And he means it. He has a deep-down burning desire to help people.

Lou Holtz says he can get by with only three rules because the people you meet have three basic questions.

The first question: Can I trust you?

“Without trust, there is no relationship,” Lou said. “Without trust, you don’t have a chance. People have to trust you. They have to trust your product. The only way you can ever get trust is if both sides do the right thing.”

The second question: Are you committed to excellence?

Lou explained that “When you call on a customer, you send a message that you are committed to certain standards. How much do you know about your company and what opportunities your company offers to satisfy people’s needs? The only way that can ever be answered is if you do everything to the best of your ability.”

The third question: Do you care about me?

Holtz said: “Do you care about me and what happens if your product doesn’t do what it’s intended to do? Caring about people is not making their life easy. Caring about people is not being their friend. Caring about people is enabling them to be successful.”

A few years ago I was asked to help raise money for a Lou Holtz statue at Notre Dame. On the pedestal, his players had chosen three words - Trust, Commitment, Love. Those words represent Lou’s core values.

If people follow these three simple rules, their self-confidence grows. They don’t worry when the phone rings. They have no doubt about what they are doing. They lift everyone up in their organization. These three rules help hold organizations together.

Holtz then finished with this exercise. He asked us to pick two people. Pick someone you love, admire and respect. Then take someone you’ve got a problem with. Ask these three questions about both people. Just a simple yes or no.

“I guarantee you, the person you admire and respect, you said yes to all three questions,” Holtz said. “The person you’ve got a problem with, you pinpointed a problem. Either you can’t trust them, they aren’t committed, or they don’t care.”

When you have a problem with someone who falls into these three categories you have to decide if you can change it or live with it. If you can’t do either, your only other choice - and probably the right choice - is to divorce yourself from the problem or the individual.

I never said it was easy.

There is a natural progression among what is considered reactive, proactive, and predictive tactics in technology. In many ways the maturity level of your IT organization and the tools you leverage corresponds to the progression. No matter where your organization lies in terms of maturity, the end goal is the same: to effectively manage an increasingly complex IT infrastructure. To accomplish this objective, IT organizations must be able to predict and solve problems before they affect the customer.

A reactive approach entails addressing an IT problem or incident after it has already occurred. Clearly, this approach poses the most risk of prolonged business service disruptions, as the identification and resolution of each incident are only initiated after a service disruption is reported. This risk alone has justified the fact that most IT organizations take gradual, if not immediate, action to adopt a more refined approach.

A proactive approach involves setting pre-defined boundaries for key performance measurements, and commencing a specified course of action each time these thresholds are crossed. For example, if a disk’s utilization exceeds a predefined percentage of the total capacity available, an alert is raised before service delivery is impacted. Static thresholds, as utilized in a proactive IT management model, are typically set arbitrarily through a time-consuming manual process. Measurements of even a single threshold can vary widely over time as the environment changes and your infrastructure evolves. Adjusting the thresholds regularly is tedious and time consuming. The approach is much less effective than the predictive model.

Predictive intelligence, as its name implies, does far more. By some accounts, the predictive approach can cost 4X less than either of the previous approaches. Through understanding and determining what is normal baseline or abnormal based on usage patterns, predictive intelligence technology lowers the level of event “noise” and often eliminates duplicate and excessive alerts that account for as much as 80% of total alerts. Similar to “accidental” calls to 911, duplicate alerts consume valuable personnel resources that are better utilized by attending to more critical issues.

GOAL of IT360 Predictive Intelligence Technology:To minimize service disruption of mission critical applications through collection, correlation and analysis of data to identify, isolate, and resolve threats in advance

We started talking about how to get through such a tough period.  How does one remain mentally strong when things are collapsing?  There are two principles that are important to keep in mind this is great advice for entrepreneurs and leaders to remember when everything is not going your way:

1)      You can control everything, and that’s ok.  Do not try to take on issues, problems, etc. that are beyond your control. You can’t change the economy, credit rules, or what a client is going to do.  Don’t worry about it.  Learn how to work with the situation at hand.  Sounds like common sense, right?  Take an inventory of the things you are worried about right now.  Which of them are within your control, and which are not?

2)      Positive mental attitude.   Again, a no brainer right?  So simple.  Yet how many times have you started your day, or a meeting, or some interaction with the thought in your head that “this will not go well, today is not going to be a good day, what if I am not smart enough, lack the will, etc.”  Defeat starts between your ears and nowhere else.   Get in the habit of starting and ending your day with a positive thought.  Continue those positive thoughts throughout the day.  A magical thing will happen, I guarantee it.  Call me if that one simple exercise does not change your life.

As we finished our lunch, I could tell that discussion of those two simple principles had made an impression.  I have shared that advice many times now with struggling business leaders.  In these economic times I am sure that this discussion will continue.   You can change the outcome.

Number one:  Answer your phone.  By that I mean be responsive.  How many times do you leave a message that is not promptly returned?  What does that say to the client/customer/stakeholder?  Customers want to connect, by various methods for sure (twitter, text, Facebook, mobile phone, email, etc.)  Those connections are extremely valuable.  Do not miss a chance to connect with a customer or prospect.

Number two: Provide the best service or product possible.  If you can’t make a commitment to quality, you are probably in the wrong business.

Number three:  Demonstrate flexibility.  There is no one-size-fits-all.  As consumers, clients, customers, we want two things: 1) some control over the buying process and 2) to know that the vendor, partner, conglomerate is listening to us and cares about our wants and needs.

These are three simple habits that will make your business successful.  How often do we see them not in use?  How well does your business grade on these simple practices?

Want to make really smart decisions for your company? It's simple as looking into the future and assessing the data--a service that a few young companies dealing in "predictive analytics" are selling

Business swims in a sea of data. No matter what line of work you’re in--publishing, healthcare, retail, food service, drug-dealing--your business operates in a vast, swirling matrix of information. How many people are interested in your product? When do they show most interest? How much of your product should you produce? Where, when, and how should you sell it?

Data crunching giants like IBM and SAP have long mined and analyzed data for businesses, offering predictions about what actions will help their bottom line--“predictive analytics,” to use the industry buzzword. But the cost of such services has typically been so high--a price tag in the millions, if consulting services are added, is not altogether unheard of--as to limit their use to major corporations. Now, for the first time, a few smaller players are promising small and medium-sized businesses that they, too, can use predictive analytics to better forecast what actions will yield a greater profit.

Take, for instance, web publishing. Web publishers have traditionally been content with “real-time analytics”--that is, information about how readers are interacting with their sitenow. But as vast stores of this data accumulate, there’s no reason why publishers can’t demand to know more. They should be able not only to observe the present, but to make guesses about the future.

Example: an editor who thinks a story is strong, and showcases it prominently; the article subsequently gets higher traffic. “It looks like the decision you took was correct,” says Mortensen. “But that’s just a self-fulfilling prophecy," he says--of coursepromoted stories fare better. “What you don’t know is, was there another piece of content that could have done better?” Would a more substantial article have spurred deeper engagement with your site, prompting a reader to dig deeper into your archive? Visual Revenue makes predictions about how it thinks your content will fare and what sort of return on investment you’ll get out of it, down to the dollar and cent. VR’s own services start at about $1,000 per month, though price varies based on volume.

Web publishing is one thing, but isn’t the messy world outside the Internet too complex to forecast the future? No,  cross-industry, in finance, retail, manufacturing, a lot of web 2.0, healthcare, government...” In every sector, companies find that they have “tremendous amounts of data, tremendous value locked in the data, and are currently unable to get it out, either because of complexity or cost.” For years,  companies were mostly happy just to be accumulating data for reports, charts, and graphs, which were used to create accountability. But increasingly, companies want more out of their data.  But now that so much data is in hand, "people want to optimize for the future, to forecast more accurately.

Services aren’t exactly cheap, running some 40 grand a year. But competitors--folks like IBM, SAP, and Oracle--often charge up to five times as much. (Some companies offer a range of prices, depending on what services are contracted; while some clients might spend thousands of dollars per year, others could spend "millions.")

The cost-benefit equation certainly looks increasingly favorable. "With the affordability we bring to the table, it’s not just big financial institutions with 20 billion dollars in annual sales who are able to take advantage, the SMBs of the world are now able to have that same kind of competitive advantage that the big titans have."

By the same token, the big titans of predictive analytics itself--the IBMs and the SAPs of the world--may have to watch their back for the up-and-coming Pentahos and Visual Revenues. Were they able to predict that?

 That is why WayPoint, a leading provider of PredictiveIT, actually spells out its services in our 25 Point IT Services Checklist.  Yes, and that includes 24 x 7 x 365 Monitoring and Alerts:

 24 x 7 x 365 Monitoring and Alerts: Servers and Services, Operating Systems, Networks, Computer Room

Security & Managed Services:

Web Servers
Mail Servers
File Servers
Database Servers
Other Servers
Disk Usage
Memory Usage
CPU Usage
Customer Applications
Other
Local Network Equipment
Internet Access and Uptime
Interoffice/WAN Access and Uptime
Environment, including Temperature & Humidity
Power
Physical Security
Firewall Audit
Antivirus Software Current and Running
Intrusion Detection/Prevention Audit
Wireless/Access Point Audit
Verify Backup Process is Reporting Success
Servers Operating Systems Patched & Updated
Desktop/Laptop Operating System Patched & Updated
Network Equipment Patched & Updated
Backup Key Config Files, i.e. Firewall Config
 And all this is done for a monthly fee well below what you would pay for doing it in-house.

1)      Build the sense of “community” – connect the resources that make this area such a desirable place to live, work play       

2)      Attract investment from outside – Other states, other countries, there is a real opportunity here, let’s get the word out

3)      Develop public-private partnerships – that make sense and give us a competitive advantage (or at least equal footing)

These activities will be developed in the days and weeks to come.  Will you be part of this effort?  What do you think?

2)      Staying true to your word

3)      Offering assistance (unsolicited)

Think about those three things this holiday season and on into your 2011 business year.  What impression will you leave behind?