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Bill Bartmann, CEO of debt collection company CFS2, does things a little differently. Instead of just calling, hounding, and suing debtors to pay what they owe, he calls them "customers" and provides them with free job-search services, such as resume help and interview prep. Perhaps the reason Bartmann runs his company differently is because he himself has never shied away from living life differently . A high school dropout who later put himself through college working at a hog slaughterhouse, he found himself $1 million in debt himself after his first business collapsed. He clawed his way back up by building CFS, the subject of this HBS case study — but then, that too, imploded . Now he's back (again), and doing things differently (again). What follows are edited excerpts of our conversation. What's it like running a debt collection company that's so different from the rest of the industry? It's a little bit like telling everyone that the world...

Did you have a bad day? We do understand that going through a bad day is a really normal thing, but we still need a bit of encouragement from day to day to keep us moving. These famous quotes can light up your day, and hopefully your life because they remind you that the best is just yet to come and the worst things you have come across make you a better man. 1. If you want to change, you have to be willing to be uncomfortable. 2. Enjoy life now. This is not a rehearsal. 3. You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have. 4. Happiness is not the absence of problems, it’s the ability to deal with them.  5. Life is never easy for those who dream. 6. If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one. 7. Failure is simply an opportunity to begin again. 8. Happiness is like a butterfly. The more you chase it, the more it eludes you. But if you turn your attention to other things 9. The only person you should try to ...

Much of what comes out of people's mouths in business these days is sugar-coated, couched, and polished. The messages are manufactured, trying to strike just the right tone. Genuine emotion stands in stark contrast. It's a real person sharing a real feeling. When we hear it, we're riveted — for one because it's rare, but also because it's real. Sometimes it's uncomfortable and a little messy. But that's what makes it powerful. No one is trying to hide anything. We hide emotions in an attempt to stay in control, look strong, and keep things at arm's length. But in reality, doing so diminishes our control and weakens our capacity to lead — because it hamstrings us. We end up not saying what we mean or meaning what we say. We beat around the bush. And that never connects, compels, or communicates powerfully. Yes, being too emotional in business can create problems. It clouds objective analysis, screws up negotiations, and leads to rash decisions...

You've been told that getting the most from your team depends on rewarding and recognizing them collectively. But it's tough to do that, especially when most management systems are so focused on individual performance, undermining the very teamwork you're hoping to encourage. Luckily, you don't have to overhaul your company's evaluation process or pay structure. As a team manager, you can support the right behaviors with things that are in your control. What Experts Say A few decades ago, companies were struggling with how to measure and reward individual performance . But in their quest do so, many overreached, says Michael Mankins, a partner at Bain & Company and coauthor of Decide and Deliver: Five Steps to Breakthrough Performance in Your Organization . "The pendulum has swung too far, and now those measures are getting in the way of forming good teams," he explains. At the same time, compensating people for collaboration can be tricky, s...

Throughout our careers and lives, the big decisions we have to make usually lead back to a single, overriding concern: What really makes me happy? Too often we try to answer these questions without knowing or understanding the real data from our lives. Our self-analysis devolves into speculation or wishful thinking. Over the past month or so, I've been collaborating with Harvard Business Review to develop a quick self-test to determine individual readiness for understanding your own data through the world of auto-analytics . Auto-analytics is a method of using new self-tracking tools to help answer key professional (and personal) questions: How do I boost my productivity? Am I in the right career? How can I improve my work routines by altering my health habits, like sleep and exercise? To get a sense of how auto-analytics can be used enrich our decision making, I recommend three distinct approaches: 1. Quantifying reflection is the practice of spending a few mome...

Are you paying your bills as they come in, and not charging more than you can afford? Excellent. Are you socking away money regularly for retirement, perhaps via a 401(k) plan at work? Good. Have you put a hefty sum of money away as an emergency fund? No? Well, that is a problem -- but it's not an insurmountable one. Take a deep breath and keep reading. Here are a three steps you can take right away to turn that situation around. 1. Understand the concept. First off, let's define our terms. Unless you're independently wealthy, it's smart to have a dedicated emergency fund ready in case disaster strikes. You might lose your job, for example, or experience a costly health crisis. It's easy not to think about these kinds of events, assuming they won't happen to you, but they do happen to some people, and they can wreak financial havoc. (Even a big car repair can throw your finances out of whack if you're not prepared.) How much money are we ta...

Overcoming people's past perceptions of you isn't easy. When I launched my consulting business seven years ago, I was astonished to find — years later — that acquaintances and even friends hadn't kept up with my career transition. They'd ask about my past work in politics or nonprofit advocacy, oblivious to the changes that had been consuming my life. It wasn't their fault, however. These days, we all have thousands of Facebook friends or LinkedIn connections; it's just not realistic to keep up with everyone's latest developments. But the fact that they weren't aware of my new business meant I was losing out on referrals and potential clients. I realized I had to ensure they took notice. Of course, you can't just prop someone's eyelids open, A Clockwork Orange -style, and force them to read your white papers or watch your webinars. So how do you get other people to realize, and remember, what you're doing now — and grasp what you...

You are stressed — by your deadlines, your responsibilities, your ever-increasing workload, and your life in general. If you are like me, you even stress about how much stress you're feeling — worrying that it is interfering with your performance and possibly taking years off of your life. This might sound a little crazy, but what if it's the very fact that we assume stress is bad that's actually making it so bad for us? And what if there were another way to think about stress — a way that might actually make it a force for good in our lives? Well there is, according to new research from Yale's Alia Crum and Peter Salovey, and Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage. Let's take a step back, and begin with a different question: What is stress? Generally speaking, it's the experience — or anticipation — of difficulty or adversity. We humans, along with other animals, have an instinctive physical response to stressors. It includes activati...

I came across this article which I think is really relevant to any business that has accumulated stockpiles of data about clients, and its operations. What to do with this and how it can be put to good use to identify opportunities. Below are the key points of the interview  Big data and analytics actually have been receiving attention for a few years, but the reason is changing. A few years ago, I thought the question was “ We have all this data. Surely there’s something we can do with it.” Now the question is “I see my competitors exploiting this and I feel I’m getting behind.” And in fact, the people who say this are right.   I get asked, “Who’s big data for?” And my answer is it’s for just about everybody. There are going to be data-based companies: Amazon, Google, Bloomberg. They’re great companies, and they have a lot of opportunity. But just because you’re not going to be a data company doesn’t mean you can’t exploit data analytics...

“I don’t know what we’d do without him!” That’s what an executive in a Fortune 100 company recently told us about a brilliant project leader. We’ve heard the same sentiment expressed about many highly skilled specialists during the hundred-plus interviews we’ve conducted as part of our research into knowledge use and sharing. In organizations large and small, including NASA, the U.S. Forest Service, SAP, and Raytheon, managers spoke of their dependence on colleagues who have “deep smarts”—business-critical expertise, built up through years of experience, which helps them make wise, swift decisions about both strategy and tactics. These mavens may be top salespeople, technical wizards, risk managers, or operations troubleshooters, but they are all the “go-to” people for a given type of knowledge in their organizations. Because deep smarts are mostly in experts’ heads—and sometimes people don’t even recognize that they possess them—they aren’t all that e...

We all tend to trust what we can see. If someone is always in the office early and leaves late, you'd probably assume he is a dedicated, hard-working employee. But he might actually be the least productive of his co-workers. And that's why numerous experts have advised that companies should avoid management by observation, and instead focus on the actual work itself. But many companies have clung to cultures of "face time," in which staffers who log the longest hours are assumed to be the best employees. I, myself, have been guilty of that bias. Though as telecommuting becomes more widespread and the workplace becomes increasingly virtual, management by observation simply doesn't work anymore. Supervisors can't concern themselves with the "where" and "when" of work. Instead, they now have to concentrate on the "what" and "how." A number of researchers we talked to have observed that the virtual wor...

Listen to the language that any leader, consultant, or HR professional uses, and you'll hear them expound at length about how "we" need to change "them." That says it all: the fact is, no one likes to be changed, even if the change is ultimately beneficial. In his recent HBR blog post , Ron Ashkenas argues that the reason most change management initiatives fail is due to stunted managerial capability to implement change. He points out — correctly, I believe — that in many organizations the responsibility for change initiatives has come to rest with HR, and not with the line supervisors and managers. However, I believe that there's a deeper, more fundamental problem with the way we frame the whole notion of change management. In fact, I propose that we dispense with the concept of "change management" entirely. History shows that's a recipe guaranteed to foment fear, resistance, and — ultimately — failure . Many factors underlie that...

Why don't more project managers sound an alarm when they're going to blow past their deadlines? Because most of them have no earthly idea when they'll finish the job. They don't even think it's possible to know. Too many variables. Too much that's out of their control. That's the dirty little secret of project management. As the lead developer on one big software project put it: "Everybody knows the schedule is a joke, and we pay no attention to it. It will be done when it's done." It's funny, though. Big, successful companies that manage huge projects like highways and dams and office parks have to deal with many more variables than a software development team. Yet they usually know how far along they are at any given time, and they keep their customers in the loop. That's how they get to be big, successful companies. Granted, they have fancy project management software to help them stay on top of the sc...