Fred Factor
Mark Sanborn

How passion in your work and life can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. "The Fred Factor is a powerful, poignant parable of success. It's about going the extra mile and always doing more than is expected. It is revolutionary, yet simple. It is life changing.

www.fredfactor.com

  • When your life is at low tide, when your professional commitment is wavering and you just want to get the job done and go home at the end of day, what can you do? Here's what I do: I think about the guy who used to deliver my mail. Because if Fred the postman could bring extraordinary creativity and commitment to putting mail in a box, I can do as much or more to reinvent my work and rejuvenate my efforts. He is proof that there are no insignificant or ordinary jobs when they're performed by significant or extraordinary people. that's what I call the Fred Factor.

    　

    The Fred Principle

  • Principle 1: Everyone make a difference. A mediocre employer can hinder exceptional performance, choose to ignore it, and not adequately recognize or encourage it. Or excellent employer can train employee to achieve exceptional performance and then reward it. Ultimately, though, only the employee can choose to do his or her job in an extraodinary way, regardless of the circumstances. 

  • Nobody can prevent you from choosing to be exceptional. you can be as happy as you choose to be.

  • People give work dignity. There are no unimportant jobs, just people who feel unimportant doing their jobs.

  • While positions never determines performance, ultimately performance determines position in life.

  • Ultimately, the more valuable you are to others, the more value you create in your work or your interactions with others, the more value will eventually flow toward you.

  • Principle 2: Success is built on relationships. Indifferent people deliver impersonal service. Service becomes personalized when a relationship exists between the provider and the customer.

  • Relationship building is the most important objective because the quality of the relationship determines the quality of the product or service.

  • Principle 3: You must continually create value for other. and it doesn't cost a penny. The most important job skill of the twenty-first century: the ability to create value for customers without spending more money to do it. The trick is to replace money with imagination, to substitute creativity for capital.

  • Focus your attention from being employed to being "employable". Being employable means have a skill set that makes you desirable to any employer regardless of industry.

  • The faster you try to solve a problem with more, the less likely it will be the best solution. with enough money anyone can buy his or her way out of a problem. the challenge is to outthink rather to outspend the competition.

  • Principle 4: you can reinvent yourself regularly. no matter what job you hold, what industry you work in, or where you live, every morning you wake up with a clean slate. you can make your business, as well as your life, anything you choose it to be.

    　

    Becoming a Fred

  • One thing seems common to all human beings: a passion for significance. I've never met anyone who wanted to be insignificant. Everyone wants to counts, to know that what he or she does each day isn't simply a means of making a living, but a living of making meaning

    Mark Sanborn   Mark Sanborn is known internationally as "the high content speaker who motivates." He presents 90-100 programs every year on leadership, team building, customer service and mastering change. Mark's client list includes Exxon, BMW Financial, New York Life, Costco, ServiceMaster, and HP. His other books, Team built: making team work, Sanborn on success.

    Sanborn & Associates, Inc. is an idea lab dedicated to developing leaders in business and in life. www.marksanborn.com

  • You can convert your job into one you love, not by doing a different job, but by doing the one you have differently.

  • Most people think they get ahead in life by learning something new. I believe you can also get ahead by going back to the basics of success. There are lots of ways to define true success, but I believe that having the most fun doing your best work is at the top of the list.

  • Do the right thing for the right reason. If you go about doing the right thing, knowing that the doing is its own reward, you'll be fulfilled whether or not you get recognition from others.

  • Your possibilities are endless. Why do people love to hear the story of Fred, because it reminds them not only of what is possible but of their own personal potential as well.

    Three difference-making strategies

    Strategy1: Identify when you will make a difference. You are making a difference because, like most of the Fred I've encountered, you want to and you can.

    Strategy2: Target the people to whom you will make a difference. Customer, go beyond the marketplace and into every area of human relationships. Family, one the sadder things in life is to know someone love us but to rarely experience it. you can transform ordinary family interactions and events into extraordinary moments.

    Stragegy3: Be the difference. we must make time in our schedules to determine how we can change our ordinary actions into extraordinary ones.

  • Success is built on relationships. you add values to people when you value them.

    The seven Bs of relationship building

    1. Be real. always do your best at being yourself. let these actions come our of who you really are, what you truly believe in, and the things you are committed to.

    2. Be interested (not just interesting). Interesting people attract attention, but interested people attract appreciation.

    3. Be a better listener. People are flattered when you make an effort to get to know them and seek information on how to serve them better.

    4. Be empathic. The need to be understood is one of the highest human needs, but to often people who know us either don't care or don't make the effort to understand how we really feel.

    5. Be honest. Say what your will do and do what you say

    6. Be helpful

    7. Be prompt.

  • Transactional interactions focus primarily on results, sometimes even at the cost of relationships

  • Relational interactions emphasize the importance of how people are treated in the process of achieving results.

  • Misinformation. If you don't know the answer to a question, say so. while nobody likes bad news, there is something worse. Good news that isn't exactly true.

  • Grow yourself, grow your value. the best way to grow your value is to grow yourself. the more you grow as a person, the more you will have share with others. Learning more skills does not mean adding more values, use that skill for others will add values.

  • Having a goal to become more Fred-like in your work won't motivate you; having a compelling reason- a passion or purpose--to become more Fred-like is what will stir your motivation.

  • I.Q. (Implementation Quotient). how many good ideas die for lack of action and follow through on your part. Increase your I.Q. Watch and learn. then adapt and apply.

  • The ripple effect. we need to be conscious not only of the primary effects of the things we do but of the secondary consequences, which are a ripple effect that touches far more people than those in our immediate presence.

  • Freds find satisfaction in their passion for significance. They distinguish themselves not by the result they have achieved, but by how they have affected and touched others.

    　

    Developing other Freds

  • Customers don't have relationships with organizations. they form relationships with individuals. passionate employees constantly show their commitment to customers. they do this by demonstrating their passion about what they do.

  • Fredcaducation. Find, Reward, Educate, Demonstrate. this is a way to develop Freds.

  • Find. there is something that is much more scarce, something finer by far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability. -Elbert Hubbard-

  • Discovering talent is often nothing more than uncovering it. when you trust your people with time, time most valuable asset, to reveal their talents, you will see just how many Freds there are in your organization.

  • Reward. No man can become rich without himself enriching others. -Andrew Carnegie-

  • We get the behavior we hope for, beg for, or demand. we get the behavior we reward. It is a matter of rewarding the right behavior and using the right rewards.

  • When you don't see much meaning in what you do, you won't bring much value to what you do.

  • Educate. Your interests focus your awareness. as you become increasingly interested in developing the art of the extraordinary in yourself and others, you will notice more and more examples. Be an example. nothing inspires people more than an example directly experienced or indirectly learned from a real-life incident.

  • You teach what you know, but you reproduce who you are.

  • Demonstrate. You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips -Oliver Goldsmith-

    1. Inspire, but don't intimidate. your example should be down-to-earth and doable.

    2. Involve. bring your people in doing something Fred-like.

    3. Initiate. Don't wait for the right moment. it will never come. don't wait for the perfect opportunity. Just take an opportunity and make it as perfect as you can.

    4. Improvise. Take what life gives you. you might become a positive example not because of your situation, but in spite of it.

    　

    For the love of Fred

  • We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. -Aristotle-

  • Why do you do what you do? Fred is one of those people who is very purposeful about how he lives his life. He understands himself and what motivates him. do good and you will feel good. the best never rest. Treat customers and others as friends. The impact you have on others is the reward. Fear nothing except to waste the moment.

  • At the day of judgment we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done. -Thomas A Kempis-

  • Whom do we most remember? we remember those who lived to serve others. we are most impressed and affected not by what people gain but by what they give. not by what they conquer but by what they contribute.

  • What makes any act extraordinary is doing it with heart. What makes any life extraordinary is living it with love. That's the secret of the Fred Factor.