Are you positive and looking on the bright side every day?

Is optimism a part of your company culture?

Do you have a good sense of humor during the day?

If you do, then you are an optimistic leader like many Silicon Valley companies. You are an adventurous, fun leader. You know how to take an element of risk to have a FUN Management company.

You recharge yourself everyday with positive thoughts. You surround yourself with like-minded people. You take action. You are moving and full of energy.

Sometimes you get stuck in the mud. You accept it as part of the excitement and you figure out a way to get out and move on. You have outside mentors that can help you with new ideas when you get stuck. You are always optimistic about the future of the company because you trust your employees and know they will do the right thing.

You know how to visualize your great future and how to bring your company to the best level. You do visualize at least five times a day your great goals.

In parts one and two of Optimism Begins With the Leader, I shared with you about how leadership can help a company thrive even after hardships. In today's post I want to share with you some more leadership success stories.

Would you like your company to be voted “The Best Company to Work For?”

That honor has been given to the company, QUICKEN LOANS, for three years in a row by COMPUTERWORLD magazine.

Quicken loans, the nation’s largest online retail mortgage loan lender, based in Michigan, has 5,000 employees. The company hires 300 employees PER MONTH for their growing company!

The leaders in the company encourage their employees to be open-minded. Chief Information Officer, Frank Laura, knows that optimism leads to creativity and new ideas.

Team members love working for the company because they have the ability to take ownership in projects and work collaboratively with others from across the company. They love the fact that they can take responsibility for their projects.

CIO Laura tells us that the 360 teams in the technology group know all facets of the business.He says…

"We challenge them to dig deep, looking for things that can be improved upon, from the client's perspective. I think they derive a lot of satisfaction in building solutions internally, and in knowing what they do makes a difference to the company and our clients."

Chairman and Founder, Dan Gilbert, says… “Quicken Loans has created an entrepreneurial spirit that encourages and rewards creativity and innovation.”

The leaders recognize great ideas. It doesn’t matter whether it came from the CIO or the newest person on the team, they run with it. They are obsessed with finding a better way.

The company's culture provides the greatest sense of job satisfaction.

In my past three threads, I have shared some great leadership success stories about two companies, Quicken Loans and Odwalla.

Today let's discuss what we can learn from the stories of Odwalla and Quicken.

It pays to be optimistic. Don’t give into the negative when a crisis happens. Stay optimistic. Keep your mind open to new possibilities. Share your ideas with your employees. Ask for their suggestions.

An optimistic leader keeps communication open. He/she encourages everyone to brainstorm and share his or her ideas.

Top companies reward their employees for a job well done. Employees like to be empowered and get recognition as a team player for their achievements. They like to feel the sense of fulfillment and know that their leaders are aware of the contribution they have given to the company.

Young talented students looking for their first job in America want to work for dynamic Silicon Valley companies because they say they are FUN companies to work for. They tend to avoid companies that have the old traditional management style. Soon I believe that many Korean companies will have the same issues.

A year ago I interviewed some of the employees at Google. Google is a terrific model for FUN Management.

Here are ten comments that Google employees shared with me as to why they LOVE to work for Google.

1. “I get up in the morning looking forward to coming to work.”

2. “I came out of early retirement so I could work for Google.”

3. “I haven’t yet met anyone at Google who is complaining or bitter.”

4. “I am interviewing for FUN people to come to this team.”

5. “The founders, Larry and Sergei, created a work environment that was fun.”

In my last post I shared with you why FUN Management can be the best thing for your company's success.

Today I want to share how you can bring FUN back into your workplace and launch you to becoming a global leader.

Because your employees have a passion for their work, they will care about their customers; they will do their best. Your salespeople will not only sell your product, they will also do their best to maintain the reputation of your company. Your employees will keep your customers happy even after they sell their product. They will do follow-up calls, improve products and in general take initiative to keep your customers satisfied.

F.U.N. Management is also the only way you can communicate globally. If you learn F.U.N. Management it will prepare you to become a F.U.N. Management Global Leader. You will have a better understanding of how to develop good working relationships on a global level that will result in improved productivity and increased profits. Some other benefits that result from F.U.N. Management are:

1) People will begin to have confidence and believe that they can do well. You will have better communication with your people, and mistakes within the company will disappear or greatly reduce.

2) You will find it much easier to recruit the kind of people you want to have working for you if your company has a reputation for being a fun place to work at.

3) You will also find it easier to keep your employees. They like coming to work – why should they look for a better job elsewhere?

4) You will have a great relationship with society around you and it will be easier to do business.

Positive thinking is a great attitude to have and a healthy one.

I know some people who roll their eyes and scoff whenever anyone mentions positive thinking. They think optimism is childish and see cynicism as a mark of sophistication. You may think that way yourself, or, at the very least, I’m sure you know someone who does.

Well, that attitude could kill you! Studies have found that positive thinkers actually live longer than pessimists. Positive thinking can help with stress management. They are finding many healthy reasons to be a positive thinker.

Positive thinking is also a proven ingredient to professional success. In a University of Pennsylvania study, Dr. Martin Seligman in 1998 wrote an article entitled Learned Optimism and he found that insurance agents with a positive outlook sold 37 percent more insurance in the first two years than those with a negative outlook, and the pessimists were twice as likely to quit in the first year as were the optimists.

So, are you convinced yet?

The power of a positive attitude has been with me since I was a child thanks to my mom. She instilled in me at an early age that the power of a positive attitude would be an important attribute for me to have.

I got a chance to use that power of a positive attitude a year ago when I took a trip to the bookstore and a book caught my eye. As I leafed through the pages, I glanced at the publisher: Wiley. I had never heard the name before, but my book coach Joan told me that the company was a well-respected name in publishing. Since I now knew that the books they published were in my area of interest, I decided to use some positive thinking and send a book proposal to Wiley.

The next day, I flew to Dallas to speak at an American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) conference. I was busy practicing my speech when my co-speaker asked me to pick up something at her booth. I was running late, so I hurried through the booths, barely looking as I rushed passed. However, one sign caught my eye: Wiley. Intrigued at the sudden emergence of the name in my life, I decided to stop and chat with the booth attendants. Though there were a lot of people clustered around the booth, the attendants were polite and helpful. When I mentioned that I was thinking of publishing with them, they cheerfully directed me to the right person within the company, also standing at the booth.

Unique leaders have success bred in them. What does success mean to you? Do you give up when someone says NO to your idea? Is failure an option for you? I learned that unique leaders create their own success when I worked on a new idea to create a comic book.

For the past two years I have created and produced a multicultural education resources comic book for my cultural diversity training. First, people were excited that I decided to do this, but then they asked me, “How will you do it?” “How will you market it?” “Who is your reader?”

I knew that a multicultural education resources comic book would be a good cultural diversity training tool for my group because it is easy to understand and a fun way to learn a new concept.

The world is shrinking because of the Internet and media news, but peoples’ minds are still focused on their own country’s culture. A multicultural education resources comic book is a simple, way to communicate and help people learn and understand cultural diversity differences.

Even though I didn’t know how to do it, I knew I would get it done. I was passionate about the concept of multicultural diversity training through a comic book, and I was excited about learning a new field—comic book publishing.

First I created a storybook draft with actual experiences I had coming to America. My first business meeting where I had to speak English, then dining etiquette where I got invited to a dinner party, business card exchange manner, and what to wear to a business meeting.