Female guru alert

The members of our list of overlooked female business gurus continue to spread their important ideas:

- Herminia Ibarra of INSEAD has published an article in the January Harvard Business Review ("Women and the Vision Thing") asserting that peers, subordinates & bosses see female leaders as equal to or superior to their male counterparts in every area except one--creating and articulating a strong vision.

- I just got in my hot little hands an advance copy of the new book by Rita Gunther McGrath (& collaborator Ian MacMillan), "Discovery-Driven Growth," which I'm very much looking forward to reading. (I've got to finish "War & Peace" soon!)

As a reminder, the rest of the list includes Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School, Deborah Ancona of MIT, Traci Fenton of WorldBlu and Rosabeth Moss Kanter, also of HBS. Be sure to check out their work.

Best Business Books of the Year 2008

If you don't know what Christmas gift to get for that hard-to-buy-for businessperson, here's your answer. It was a great year for business books. There were five or more additional books that I'd recommend to others. Communicating via story was a theme this year (or perhaps that's what I was looking for!), as you'll see.

1. "Working With Stories," Cynthia Kurtz (free e-book). I read this book three times, cover to cover. A clearly-written, highly practical book that illuminates a new tool for companies to attack intractable problems--gathering, looking at, thinking about, and acting on the stories that customers, stakeholders and employees hold in their minds. (Photo shows my rather beat-up copy!)

2. "A Sense of Urgency," John Kotter. A timely book, full of stories, about the imperative for companies to develop a mindset to "move, and win, now" in order to effect lasting change.

3. "The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking," Roger Martin. Describing great innovators' ability to simultaneously hold and reconcile two conflicting ideas. Notable, among other things, for highlighting success stories outside the US--in Canada, to be precise.

4. "The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up," Norm Brodsky & Bo Burlingham. A great book discussing how successful entrepreneurs share many common attributes--the including the ability to listen to advice and yet, when necessary, to ignore it. Full (full!) of stories.

5. "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies," Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. A prescient guide for companies to understand and utilize social media to reach customers and gain insight into markets.

Related Posts:
Best books of first-half 2008
Best books of 2007

Tags:
reading list, best of, business, 2008

It's time for the "Numerati" to step back

I've been reading the book "Einstein's Mistakes" by Hans Ohanian and though it's been a lot different from my expectations (I was looking for mistake stories and through 150 pages haven't found many) it has proved useful in spurring some thoughts.

One such thought has been the consequences of the growth of science and logical thinking. The first part of "Einstein's Mistakes" describes the roles of Galileo, Newton, Maxwell and others in setting the stage for Einstein's relativity theories. What this brief physics history reinforced to me was the gradual rise to preeminence of logic and mathematics in the processes of human thought--at the expense of philosophy, sociology, anthropology.

Interestingly, even in these legendary clear thinkers there was the all-too-human urge to self-protect and rationalize. Notable was Galileo's effort, according to Ohanian, to fudge the numbers so that his calculations would match what he knew to be correct about the heavens.

Next on my list to read (around "War and Peace") is Stephen Baker's "The Numerati." I find I come to this book with loads of prejudgments. From the press and the jacket copy, the book celebrates the numerization of our thinking. Which I believe is mostly bad news.

This kind of number-worship has brought us financial risk mitigation that paradoxically increased risk, created AAA-rated bonds which were actually of junk status, and any number of other examples of solid financial and numerical logic that under examination simply failed the common-sense test. In other words, a hedge fund that studied human nature might have made a lot of money these last few years.

To me, "The Numerati" is behind the times. We've seen the apotheosis of the logical/mathematical revolution, and it ain't pretty.

It's time to put numbers into their context, and begin to shift more investment to understanding people, how they think, feel and relate to one another. This is where the money will be in the future, and this is what society needs now.

As Dave Snowden writes, "It's not that social computing has created some completely new form of human interaction, what it has done is to enable conversations across barriers and boundaries. We can now be a global tribe (or rather tribes), if we can make the changes that the technology permits."

Tags:
reading list, logic, thinking, social media

Giving myself the "Getting Things Done" treatment

I knew I had to improve my organizing skills early in the summer when I missed two scheduled conference calls in the period of a month. In the moment, I blamed the meeting organizers, who had not attached reminders to the meeting requests, so my Blackberry didn't buzz 15 minutes in advance. After reflection, I realized it wasn't the responsibility of the meeting organizers to account for my time-management peculiarities. I also realized that making a habit of missing conference calls I had committed to attend was bad business.

Around the same time, I listened to a podcast interviewing David Allen, author of Getting Things Done. I liked what he had to say, and a few mouse clicks later I had ordered his book, determined to give myself the GTD treatment.

It wasn't painless, and it took quite a while, but I've been more or less successful at organizing my work and home commitments. I feel like I'm getting more done, and the stress level has decreased because I have all my commitments (work & personal) documented in the same list, and I review that list regularly (though the review could be more regular and more thorough).

First, a look at Allen's key prescriptions:

1. Collecting all items that need to be looked at in your inbox
2. Emptying the inbox frequently
3. Deciding what to do with an inbox item immediately (acting on it if it can be done in 2 minutes or less, disposing of it if no action required, scheduling action or adding to task list otherwise)--i.e., no returning items to the inbox!
   
4. Filing inbox items where they can be easily retrieved
5. Organizing task lists by context (computer, phone call, errand, on-line, reading, waiting-for)
6. Reviewing your calendar and task lists regularly

There's a lot more, obviously, that you can find in the book, but those are the highlights.

In my experience implementing GTD, here's what I found:

• Collecting all my stuff and processing it took a long time--upwards of two weeks. I had to-do's written on note cards in my bedroom, written on my white board, in notebooks, on existing task lists, and in the inbox already. I had piles of unread books in several places, and articles I wanted to read scattered in my computer directories. At the end, the collection pile measured more than one foot high in my inbox and another three feet or so on the floor beside it.
  
  
• Filing was easier than I thought. Allen recommends one alphabetically-arranged filing cabinet, rather than files organized by some subject (like home, work, finance, etc.). This works for me, although I keep my finance files in a separate accordion file. All the others are in one cabinet.
  
  
• I ended up with a large task list (probably 75-80 items), and it hasn't gone down much if at all. Some people find such a large list intimidating (God, what a lot I have to do!). For me, it was a relief to know that I had everything on paper, and didn't need to carry it in my head--a key benefit that Allen cites for his system.
  
  
• Personal organizer systems don't deal with the Allen approach very well. I tried both the Macintosh iCal system, which didn't allow for even a first-level categorization, and Microsoft Entourage. Entourage allowed two levels of categorization with manageable sorting problems, but couldn't handle three at all... and I wanted three for my list. I was able to work around the problems, but it would be nice to have an automated application that could sync with a mobile device and handle the entire GTD system.
  
  
• Like many people, I don't review the lists enough. I schedule a brief review every day, and a more comprehensive review on Friday. I usually get through the every-day review, but the Friday review is frequently no more substantial than the dailies. I need to work on that.

Like any major change in habits, GTD takes a lot of commitment, time and persistence. For me, at least, it was worth it. I feel more in control of my life and prepared to take on more work than I was a few months ago.

Would anyone out there like to comment on their GTD experiences?

Getting Things Done, productivity, organization

Corporate change #5 - role of consultants in "bringing the outside in"

In earlier segments of this thread, we discussed how "bringing the outside in" is imperative for companies to keep aware and humble enough to avoid complacency and drive their organizations forward successfully. By contrast, companies in which the context inside the company drowns out voices from the outside tend to attribute their successes to their internal competencies, blame their failures on outside entities, and stagnate their way to failure.

I was talking to an old customer earlier in the month about working to help companies learn about the world outside. "Exactly!" he said. "Companies need people like you to come in and help them learn about what customers think."

To a point, yes. Having an outside perspective that is less invested in the company's culture or politics is valuable. But not at the expense of a broad, internal effort to understand and make sense of the outside world.

Referring to the business complexity literature we've touched on a few times in this blog, the world outside is a complex, messy place. It's constantly changing. So old information, and limited sources, are not very useful. To gain the best, most supple understanding of the outside, a company needs lots of eyes and ears, a diverse group gathering and interpreting information, and creating stories about it. Consultants should be among that group, but not the only or the most credible source for outside information.

Management's job is to enable that story-creation, create systems for capturing and making sense of it, and above all to honor and use it to create strategy, spur innovation, and otherwise enable Kotter's "sense of urgency."

That's a job that even McKinsey might hesitate to take on.

Prior posts in this series:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Reading list:
Gary Hamel, "The Future of Management"
John Kotter, "A Sense of Urgency"
Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff, "Groundswell"
Dave Snowden & Mary Boone, "A Leader's Guide to Decisionmaking," Harvard Business Review, November 2007.

Related post:
Complex business problems need diagnosis

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication

Corporate Change #4 - don't leave engaging with the outside to marketing/PR

In the prior post in this series, I talked about galvanizing the will to change through "bringing the outside in"--learning what customers, the press, influencers--really anyone--thinks about the company, its products, its marketplace, industry, etc.

To which a reasonable person might ask: "Isn't that my marketing department's job?" Especially with newer tools like blogs, wikis, Twitter, etc., marketing is taking the lead in engaging with the "groundswell."


While marketing has a significant role to play, they cannot own this function, any more than finance can own any decision that has to do with dollars and cents--it's too big, too comprehensive and too important to be limited to one group. Here are several reasons why:


Marketing is obsessed with brands & messages. Brands and messages are relentlessly positive--who buys a negative message? But learning comes from both positive and negative stories. There are threats as well as opportunities. Marketing is asked to convey messages, not to understand the world in all its messiness and complexity.

PR is asked to get positive stories out there, and to counter negative perceptions--not to learn or to inform the company. True dialogue involves listening--even when the conversation is negative or you don't agree with it--and trying to find lessons in that. Perception is reality, and PR tries to change perception--what we're talking about here is, by contrast, understanding reality.


The view of both is too limited. Different parts of the organization have different things to learn from the outside. Operations needs to learn new ways of working. Product management needs to understand how customers actually use products. HR needs to know how the workforce is evolving. Groupthink is also less likely when a diverse group of people is examining the world--with more likelihood that sound actions, and commitment to achieve them, will result.

Comcast's experiment with Twitter-based customer service (see example here of "Groundswell" co-author Charlene Li Tweeting for help and Comcast responding) works because the Comcast guy is trying to solve a customer problem, not deliver a message. If Charlene ends up feeling better about Comcast, it is a side effect, not the intent, of the action. The tech is also in a position to learn deeply about this customer situation and, I'm certain, to disseminate the learning to colleagues.

Imagine this fictional Twitter dialogue if Charlene had to engage with marketing instead of with a real tech (I've reversed it for readability. In real Twitter, the newest message is on top):

charleneli: @comcastmktg My connection keeps going in and out, happens every few months. Comcast Cust service has no idea why. Any way to escalate?

comcastmktg: @charleneli That's hard to believe. Comcast has the highest network reliability in the industry.

charleneli: @comcastmktg Yeah, fine. Can you help me with my question?

comcastmktg @charleneli Of course. One more thing. Did you know we have twice as many HD channels as DirecTV?

charleneli: @comcastmktg What? Who are you? Can you get me to someone who can help me?

comcastmktg @charleneli Right away. Please email help@comcast.com and you'll get a response within 24-48 hours. Have you heard about our community service initiatives?

charleneli: @comcastmktg Aaargh!

Coming next: what is the role of consultants (written by an actual consultant!) in bringing the outside in?

Prior posts in this series:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 5
Reading list:
Gary Hamel, "The Future of Management"
John Kotter, "A Sense of Urgency"
Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff, "Groundswell"

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication, social media

Corporate Change #3 - Bringing the outside in, for real

OK, so you've read my prior two posts on the subject of corporate change, and recognized your need to greatly enhance the information you get from the outside world. Now what?

You'll need to embrace a few basic principles (it won't be easy!):

Enable employees:

1. Reward curiosity and information sharing
   
2. Make time and space for employees to engage with the outside world--wall-to-wall meetings are a no-no
3. Tap existing conduits to the outside (sales force, retail clerks, customer service reps, marketing, investor relations)
   
4. Ensure your information systems and policies don't get in the way

Listen hard:

1. Don't tune out bad news
2. Try to assemble information from many constituencies (customers, competitors, employees)
3. Embrace raw/inarticulate/emotional input
   
4. Honor dissent
   

Create systems and methods to gather and utilize information:

1. Deploy information "commons" where information can be posted, commented on, and passed across and up to aid in decisionmaking
2. Systematically gather information relevant to your business and add it to the commons
   
3. Regularly gather and sensemake commons-generated information
4. Use the information to inform strategy, planning, organization, etc.
   
5. Demonstrate to the employees that the information is used, to encourage ongoing contributions
   

Most companies are not ready for this. Some are. Those that aren't: start getting ready. If you think implementing the above is a lot of work, think how hard it is to navigate out of a crisis--an avoidable crisis, if only you paid attention to and utilized what was going on all around you.

In the next few posts, we'll dig into some specific high-value areas of bringing the outside in.

Prior posts in this series:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 4 Part 5

Reading List:
Gary Hamel, "The Future of Management"
John Kotter, "A Sense of Urgency"

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication

Corporate Change #2 - Why are companies so inwardly focused?

In part 1 of this series, we discussed one key reason companies fail to change even though it's vital: the inability to, using John Kotter's term, "bring the outside in." In other words, companies don't choose to look outside their walls to see what's happening around them, assess the implications, and absorb that into their strategies, products and operations.

Why is this so?

Reason #1 - The Community Effect
A company, as it expands from one person, to ten, to one hundred, to a thousand and beyond, takes on the identity of a community. The employees usually work in an office or plant together. They get information from the same sources--the company newsletter, intranet, staff meetings (more on that later). They spend more time with other employees than with anyone else other than family. A culture develops that inspires curiosity about what's happening inside and reduces it about what's happening outside.

Reason #2 - Leadership Arrogance
I talked to a former client last week and told him about some work I'm doing mining insights from customer-service calls. He told me, "Our CEO thinks he's just like our customers." Since this CEO sees himself as a perfect proxy, there's no reason to dig deeply into customers' feelings.

Reason #3 - Information Flows Top-Down
Leadership serves on outside boards, goes to conferences, talks with consultants. They are tasked with creating strategy, which requires some curiosity and information about the world outside the corporate walls. They process that information into strategy documents, brand images, mission statements, etc., and send it down the line.

Leadership likes orderly information, not the messiness that real engagement with the outside world creates. Most leaders believe that employees don't want that much engagement (in some cases they may be right). Employees realize that the highly-packaged, spun information that they receive is bland and biased. I recently re-encountered a saying familiar from my early working days: "We workers are like mushrooms. Leadership keeps us in the dark and feeds us s--t." I heard that expression countless times till I became a senior leader--interestingly, I never heard it after that.

Combine reasons 1, 2 & 3 and you have an inwardly-focused, uncurious company. Information is either packaged pablum from above, or internal gossip. Conduits to the outside--front-line customer service reps, retail clerks, B2B sales people--are drowned out by the inside talk. Marketing communications staffs engage with the external but are dedicated to sending out messages or countering negative news.

What we've created here is company-as-fortress. Suspicious of the outside, comfortable with colleagues, uncurious. Information is routinized and bleached of content and contrast. Clearly, there's a lot to be done to realize Kotter's prescription to bring the outside in. We'll begin discussing how in the next post.

Other posts in this series:
Part 1 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

Related posts:
A competitive advantage: employees who spend their day talking to people
Time to start listening to front-line employees

Reading List:
Gary Hamel, "The Future of Management"
John Kotter, "A Sense of Urgency"

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication

Best business books of 2008 (so far)

Click here for my end of year 2008 list. Continue reading for the half-year list.

It's been a great year for business books, in my estimation, so rather than hold off till the end of the year, here's a first-half "best of" list for your perusal:




"The Opposable Mind" - Roger Martin. How the greatest business innovators can resolve paradoxes and therefore create new markets.

"Presentation Zen" - Garr Reynolds. Radical rules for creating and delivering powerful business presentations.

"Rain Making" (2nd edition) - Ford Harding. Finally, a book about selling that doesn't shout, but quietly gives commonsense, useful advice on every page.









"Groundswell" - Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. Describes the business impact of social media technologies like blogs, social networks, forums, etc. It would be important just for the subject matter. Delightfully, it's also very well researched, documented, and written.






"Senior Leadership Teams" - Ruth Wageman, Debra Nunes, James Burruss, Richard Hackman. Illuminating a hidden corner of company dysfunction--the leadership team that can't work together--and demonstrating the practices that can overcome it.






"Brain Rules" - John Medina. A delightful, story-filled book that illuminates how the brain works, and how we can change our behaviors to be nicer to our brain and to others'.

Tags:
reading list, best of, business, 2008

"Innovator's Guide to Growth": readable, productive prescriptions for disruptive innovation

I didn't really understand Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" when I read it many years ago. Perhaps like a lot of people employed by large companies, I suffered "innovator's myopia." But after experiencing disruptive products like Skype, Linux and salesforce.com it started to make more sense to me.

Christensen and his followers are still preaching the disruptive innovation gospel, and now, with "The Innovator's Guide to Growth" I am finally getting the picture.

It's the size and shape of a textbook, and works as one. Written by Mark Johnson, Scott Anthony and Joseph Sinfield, along with Motorola's Elizabeth Altman, "The Innovator's Guide" provides a rigorous introduction and a process for nurturing disruptive innovation. It guides a company through identifying opportunities, developing ideas, devising strategies, and deploying them.

There are no magic bullets presented--the core strategy, to find innovations that fundamentally reshape markets, is still difficult for market leaders to follow. Leaders' instincts are to protect market share and "feature up" their products, precisely the wrong approaches to disrupt a market.

One tenet of disruptive innovation is to target "overshot" customers. These customers have grown disenchanted with the continual upgrades of a product and won't pay more for new features. It occured to me that users of Microsoft Windows Vista--a huge product that just isn't exciting anyone (and annoying many)--are just such overshot customers.

The chapter entitled "Mastering Emergent Strategies" was worth the price of the book alone. Referencing the work of Rita Gunther McGrath and alluding to managerial complexity as elaborated by Boone and Snowden in a recent HBR article, it lays out the case for an iterative approach to planning as opposed to an all-out march to a clearly-defined objective.

The authors define three critical steps for iterative planning: (1) identifying areas of uncertainty, (2) performing "smart experiments" and (3) adjusting and reflecting.

The rest of the book is similarly insightful. If you're an innovator, or need to be one, this book should stay on your bookshelf as a valuable reference for many years.

Related posts:
Use your strategy to drive your acquisitions and vice versa
Rita Gunther McGrath

Tags:
innovation, strategy, complexity, reading list

Cradle-to-cradle: desirable but difficult

I had been puzzling about the implications of cradle-to-cradle manufacture before my friend Sara Kaplaniak's op-ed in our local paper yesterday, but reading it helped crystallize my opinion that, while very desirable, cradle-to-cradle requires a significant culture change among those who would be early adopters of the products.

And that's going to slow down, perhaps by a lot, the growth of cradle-to-cradle products.

A brief definition: cradle-to-cradle is a mindset to construct goods from materials that can be completely reused or returned to the earth; i.e., there is no long-term disposal issue. This mindset has been promoted recently by the architect William McDonough.

An example of a cradle-to-cradle product is the Herman Miller's Celle chair, which according to the manufacturer can be disassembled into components that are 99% recyclable.

The most thought-provoking piece I've read on the subject is "The Biosphere Rules" by Gregory Unruh in the February 2008 Harvard Business Review. Unruh writes about how businesses can be transformed by biomimicry--the imitation of nature, a view McDonough also believes in strongly. Unruh's rules for manufacturers are:

1. Use a parsimonious palette
2. Cycle up--virtuously
3. Exploit the power of platforms

#1 implies using a smaller number of materials, in manufacture, and in limiting (eliminating?) the compounding of materials. This is an issue for manufacturers--historically, they've started with a design and located or created materials to fulfill that design. Now they will be starting with a materials list to begin with and say "What can we make from this?"

The benefit is that the simpler materials are more easily reused, recycled or composted. And a fewer number will make the process to collect and sort them more economical.

#2 says in part that items should be made to wear out. (The limitations of #1 may help matters here--the alchemy required to create super-long-lasting materials may lead to unacceptable waste.) This is the most difficult part for me. My whole nature tells me to buy things that are long-lasting in order to consume as little as possible. And that old things have mana and should be retained. (I have three coats I love that are each more than 20 years old.)

Cradle-to-cradle says that things that wear out are OK and, as long as the manufacturers have good processes for collecting and recycling/rehabbing/refurbishing them, it's even desirable.

I may be the only one who will have to have a culture transplant to fall in love with this concept. But if I'm not, cradle-to-cradle may take quite a while to catch on.

Related post:
Fortune Innovation Forum Day 2 (McDonough)

Tags:
manufacturing, environment, technology, sustainability, cradle-to-cradle, recycling, corporate social responsibility

The deep attraction of the locally-produced

While reading a review of Rob Walker's "Buying In," in today's New York Times Book Review, I got to thinking about why I buy a certain type of beer.

The review points out Walker's description of the rebirth of Pabst, which after decades of decline began to grow again, led by young people seeking an unpretentious and less heavily-advertised beer to drink. Picking up on the weak signals, Pabst marketing shrewdly capitalized on the image by embarking on a low-profile campaign focusing on small-scale sponsorships of happenings favored by their market segment.

Yesterday, I took the kids and some friends and went on a tour of the Troegs Brewery across the river in Harrisburg.

I only drink local beers--Troegs, Stoudt's, Lancaster Brewing. And reading the book review made me ponder why this was so. Local beer is fresh, sure. Brewed in small batches. It has more taste than the mass-produced beers. But this didn't explain it all to me. To me, the local aspect is predominant.

Was there a "deep metaphor" at work here? With apologies to the Zaltmans, authors of "Marketing Metaphoria" and coiners of the phrase "deep metaphor," I think so. Something deep in my psyche makes me yearn for Troegs Sunshine Pils and revolt at the thought of Miller Genuine Draft.

Similarly, we get our vegetables much of the year from Spiral Path Farm, a CSA farm located about an hour from here, which we've visited.

At any rate, if this is so, it perhaps explains another phenomenon--when a big national bank buys a local bank, within two years a new local one springs up to take its place. Or does that only happen in my town?

Related Post:
"Marketing Metaphoria": Deep yearnings about the products we buy

Tags:

metaphor, marketing, viral marketing, psychology, reading list

"Marketing Metaphoria"--the deep yearnings behind the products we buy

Father-and-son team Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman, authors of "Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers," assert that beneath our purchasing decisions lie deep, unconscious frames of how the world works. Companies who can understand these frames and connect their products with them can own key positions in their marketplace and build tremendous brand power.

Did you ever wonder why nearly every Budweiser campaign centers around guys drinking together? According to the Zaltmans, it is because they are reinforcing the brand's association to connection, one of the seven heavyweight "deep metaphors" that account for more than 70% of the metaphor usage found in their research. The other "giants" are:

• Balance
• Transformation
• Journey
• Container (keeping things in or out)
  
• Connection
• Resource
• Control
  

An example of deep metaphor usage is the Michelin advertising image of a baby sitting in the tire. The deep metaphor of container is at work here--high-quality, well-designed tires provide a safe cocoon for the occupants of the car. And by extension Michelin owns the safety position with tires. Other brands must find other metaphors to occupy within our brains (say, journey or control).

As a way of showing how understanding deep metaphors can help companies create innovative products, the authors describe how the hearing-aid company Oticon redefined its product category. Oticon interviewed hearing-aid wearers about why they frequently didn't wear their devices. They learned that typical hearing aids were gawky-looking and prominent, thereby stoking users' deep fears of being broken, ugly containers. The company then created a new product that was smaller and sleeker, resembling a high-tech cellphone device more than an old-fashioned hearing aid, and combined it with an advertising campaign reinforcing the "escape" metaphor.

The authors urge readers to use this type of "workable wondering" to reimagine their innovation approaches, not just to find new ways to package or promote the same old products. I agree. When marketers use psychology to understand customers deeply, and respond to those unspoken needs, they're doing a service. (If they're just trying to get into my brain to sell me more peanut butter, well, that's just creepy.)

"Marketing Metaphoria" is a fascinating, fresh look at understanding how humans react to products beyond their functional attributes--a topic as old as advertising itself. But in connecting itself with the entire innovation process, it's more than just a book about communication.

A video interview with co-author Gerald Zaltman, where he elaborates on deep metaphors and how they can be discovered, can be found here.

Tags:
metaphor, marketing, market research, psychology, reading list

"Brain Rules" rules

I'm happy to use my sons' favorite expression to headline today's post. If something is really, really good, it "rules." I guess kids wish for monarchy (or feel as if they live under one). For example:

"Spongebob rules."
"Indiana Jones rules."
"Swim team rules."

And, similarly, John Medina's "Brain Rules" rules. (And I'm not the first to say so.) It performs an amazing trick--besides being informative and insightful...it's also a delight to read.

The book sets out twelve rules about how our brains work (#1: Exercise boosts brain power; #8: Stressed brains don't learn the same way), cites study after study to back up the rules, and demonstrates how our current lifestyles often aren't particularly good for our brains. Mixed in is advice for students, parents, presenters, executives, drivers--everybody--about how to act more in support of your brain rather than in opposition to its needs.

I gravitated to the section about attention (#4: We don't pay attention to boring things), especially his description of the 10-minute rule for his university lectures:

I decided that every lecture I'd ever give would come in discrete modules. Since the 10-minute rule had been known for many years, I decided the modules would last only 10 minutes. Each segment would cover a single core concept--always large, always general, always filled with "gist," and always explainable in one minute. Each class was 50 minutes, so I could easily burn through five large concepts in a single period. I would use the other 9 minutes in the segment to provide a detailed descrtiption of that single general concept. The trick was to ensure that each detail could be easily traced back to the general concept with minimum intellectual effort. I regularly took time out from content to explain the relationship betwen the detail and the core concept in clear and explicit terms. (p.89)

The book is full of stories, blessedly, and also demonstrates Medina's innate grasp of rule #4 by creating suspense in passage after passage, for example:

To explain how timing issues figure into memory formation, I want to stop for a moment and tell you about how I met my wife. (p.133)

How could anyone close the book there? Devices like these (used seamlessly and delivered in a deadpan voice) propel you through the book, so that at times it feels like you're reading a thriller, not a book about neurology.

Enough said. Great book. Read it. Do something nice for your brain.

Related posts:
The first great business book of 2008
A must-read for people who present

Tags:
storytelling, learning, neurology, presentation, reading list

Michael Dell on generating sales leads

I found this great Michael Dell story in "Lessons Learned: Starting a Business." In case you thought his success with Dell Computers was a complete accident, read this:

The first job I got when I could actually drive...was with the Houston Post newspaper. My job was to call people on the telephone and convince them to buy the newspaper. The first partial month I worked there, I figured out that when people wanted to buy the newspaper, either they were moving into a new house or an apartment, or they had just gotten married.

The way to find people who'd just gotten married was to go to the county courthouse. They have the applications for marriage licenses, which are a matter of public record in the state of Texas. And there is a place on the application form where you could request the license be sent. So that turned out to be a really good place to find people to whom I could send an offer to get the newspaper.

The other thing I found was that you could actually get lists of people who had applied for and received mortgages. And that was another great list of people. My first full month at the paper, I was the top salesperson of newspapers, and I had a great time. This was a summer job. I started hiring my friends and sending them out to all the surrounding counties to collect all these lists of people who had applied for marriage licenses and just had a blast. I was sixteen years old. I saved my money and bought a BMW.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpted from Lessons Learned: Straight Talk from the World’s Top Business Leaders--Starting a Business. Copyright (c) 2008 Fifty Lessons Limited; All Rights Reserved.

For more information about the "Lessons Learned" series, including a showcase of 50 Lessons video stories, please follow this link.

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narrative, career, sales, resourcefulness, lead generation, reading list

"Three-Story Laurie" and remembering to repeat

I'm having fun reading "Brain Rules" by John Medina. It's interesting, funny and--unexpectedly--not the least bit dry. I'll write more about it in the next few days. But for now, one of the rules, #6 (Long-Term Memory: Remember to Repeat) made me recall someone named Three-Story Laurie.

It was one of my favorite nicknames ever, because while it sounded like it might have referred to an apartment building, Three-Story Laurie referred to her tendency to repeat the same few stories again and again. She showed up at various gatherings of my college friends over the years, and always had a collection of three new stories that she'd tell and retell over the course of the weekend. By repeating the stories, she made sure she remembered them. In doing so, Laurie was employing this advice from "Brain Rules":

...The relationship between repetition and memory is clear. Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information if you want to retrieve it later. Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information more elaborately if you want the retrieval to be of higher quality. Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information more elaborately, and in fixed, spaced intervals, if you want the retrieval to be the most vivid it can be. (p. 133)

This idea of remembering via repetition has a lot of uses. I've found, when recording stories for the Mistake Bank, that a second or third retelling is better, tighter and richer than the first.

And, oftentimes, I write in this space about something I've read, in order to understand it and remember it better.

Sort of like now.

memory, narrative, learning, reading list

"Senior Leadership Teams" is essential reading for executives

I recently related a story for the Mistake Bank about my experience as a senior leader with a medium-sized IT company. It involved a particularly difficult senior team meeting and my nasty reaction to a colleague's questioning a decision I'd made regarding a member of my team.

I recalled the story because I was reading "Senior Leadership Teams" by Ruth Wageman, Debra Nunes, James Burruss and Richard Hackman, which discusses that peculiar species--the team of leaders. One of the themes of the book is that senior leaders, left to their own devices, will prioritize their individual work and give little to the team. Another is that senior leaders rise to prominence based on their talents to achieve results with teams that work at their direction, meaning their teamwork skills are rusty at best. A third is that CEOs don't take many of the basic actions required to form a cohesive and productive team--things like explicitly choosing team members, setting explicit standards and norms for behavior, or providing adequate information for teams to act effectively.

My senior team experience bears this out. I focused on my team and my results, and preferred to leave my colleagues to clean up their own sandboxes. And when a colleague got too involved in "my" area, I didn't take kindly to it. I didn't know what the senior team was for, nor what was expected of me and how I should behave. In retrospect, I didn't behave well some of the time--even if I felt I was doing what was best for the company.

Perhaps you see why a book is needed to instruct people in this area. And, thankfully, "Senior Leadership Teams" is an excellent effort. The authors, affiliated with the Hay Group and with Harvard University, studied more than 100 senior teams and tried to understand why many performed poorly, while others--a smaller number--worked well. They found six conditions--three "essentials" and three "enablers"--that excellent teams had in common:

The essentials:

1. A real team
2. The right people
3. A compelling direction

The enablers:

1. A solid structure
2. A supportive context
3. Team coaching
   

The six conditions might sound simple, but the book is filled with insight as to why these simple things are hard to do, and what's necessary to make them real. As an example of the commonsense yet counterintuitive advice throughout "Senior Leadership Teams," read this section regarding selecting the right people to be on the team:

An executive suite is not a schoolyard. Just because someone wants to play on your team, has always been on the team, or was considered the heavy hitter of a past team does not mean that you are obligated to have him on your team. What's more, just because you have been chosen to lead an established team does not mean you must keep all the players when you take it over. (p.79)

There is wisdom like the above all over the book--on reward systems, team purpose & objectives, and prioritization. And interesting stories of real CEOs and how they made their teams effective.

One minor complaint--the book is addressed to a CEO, and as such gives lots of advice about selecting, coaching and enabling the team, and less advice about being an effective member of the team. Perhaps this is a topic the authors can explore in a future book.

But this is no reason to avoid "Senior Leadership Teams," no matter what your role. If you are an executive, or want to be an executive, read this book--before your next senior team meeting.

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Tags:
management, leadership, teamwork, reading list

Champy's "Outsmart"--less than meets the eye

We talked some about business gurus last week, and while the name Jim Champy wasn't on the WSJ list, he would have been in the past. So when I was sent his new book, "Outsmart," I put down the other books I was reading to take this one up.

The good news was, at 165 pages with ample white space, it didn't take long to read. The bad news was that it fell far below my expectations. "Outsmart" is the business-literature equivalent of those new paper-like mint strips you lay on your tongue. The ideas dissolve in an instant.

Why? The book lacks the rigor of other recent books in the strategy literature, "The Opposable Mind" and "Big Think Strategy." It fails to paint the far-reaching vision of "The Future of Management." It is a collection of inspiring stories, and that has value. After reading it, however, I had difficulty taking away any lesson other than to be an extraordinary success, you had to be an extraordinary person with a strong vision and have excellent timing--not a very useful blueprint for most leaders.

At the end of each chapter is a summary of learnings. In "Compete By Doing Everything Yourself," Champy offers this lesson:

Control what matters. Doing everything yourself speaks to a very human impulse. When Cappello [the CEO of S.A. Robotics, the company that competed by doing everything itself] talked to me about his need to control his company's processes, I immediately understood that he was really talking about his distaste for losing control, especially for the kind of product he makes.

If you manufacture a complex, customized product, the need for control is clear. If you are providing a more commoditized product or service, however, outsourcing part of your work might be a legitimate option or, in some cases, a competitive necessity.

In other words, you can succeed by doing everything yourself, or by having others do work for you. It depends.

And in another chapter he writes, "I'm a strong believer that a company must be a low-cost producer to compete." Really? Is S.A. Robotics, which builds everything internally, a low-cost provider?

To me, these are indications of a book without a center. Compared to "The Opposable Mind" or "Big Think Strategy," "Outsmart" is lightweight. There's no science behind the theories other than a Darwinian metaphor in Chapter 1. The explanations are anecdotal (most times, a single anecdote). And no unifying theme.

"The Opposable Mind" described founders or CEOs who could reconcile contradictory ideas and thereby create new markets. Each example (and there were many) reinforced that idea. So did the cognitive research cited. "Big Think Strategy" supplemented its case studies with a strategic method.

By contrast, "Outsmart" is a brief, easy to read, set of success stories, that together don't add up to an important book, sad to say.

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innovation, strategy, reading list

A "new midlife crisis" story from the Williams-Sonoma Chairman

[This story is from Howard Lester, Chairman of Williams-Sonoma, the large home-goods retailer.]

...I realized that to that point in my working career, I had kind of done the things that were necessary. I was trying to make a living and just do the best I could and make money, but I was never really happy. I wasn't excited about getting out of bed in the morning and going to work, so I gave a lot of thought to what it was that I wanted to do, and I knew it was something different.

One of the main conclusions that I reached was that it was important for me at that point in my life--as I mentioned, I was in my early forties--to do something; you know, this is not a dress rehearsal. And I wanted to do things that I loved doing. Why go through life doing things that you don't love doing? And I felt that if I was doing something I loved, I'd have a better chance at being good at it than doing something I didn't love, because it wouldn't be work, it would be a joy.

So I went on a little journey of looking at a lot of businesses, some of them pretty weird. And one day I came across this little company called Williams-Sonoma, which was struggling. It was a little $4 million company with four stores and a small catalog, located in San Francisco. One thing led to another, and I was able to purchase the business in the summer of 1978.

We've been very fortunate. We've grown a business that we're quite proud of, and I can tell you that since acquiring Williams-Sonoma, I don't think there has been a day or a morning when I wasn't excited about getting up and going to work.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpted from Lessons Learned: Straight Talk from the World’s Top Business Leaders--Starting a Business. Copyright (c) 2008 Fifty Lessons Limited; All Rights Reserved.

For more information about the "Lessons Learned" series, including a showcase of 50 Lessons video stories, please follow this link.

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narrative, career, midlife crisis, reading list

An almost mistake story about hiring

From The Mistake Bank.

[This story is from Mike Southon, Chairman of Beermat, an online resource for entrepreneurs, and founder of Instruction Set Ltd., a UK computer-services firm sold to Cap Gemini in 1989.]

I remember one story when Instruction Set got to about twenty-five people, and I was running sales. I hadn't really done sales before. I thought, "I'd better hire a grown-up." So I went to a recruitment agency and these CVs arrived--people with fantastic credentials. There was this one particular gentleman, and his motto was "Give me the bullets, and I'll fire them," because he said he'd doubled revenue everywhere he'd been. So I thought he was a good guy. He came in, extended a big handshake, made eye contact, and said, "Yes, give me the bullets; I'll fire them. Michael, I'll double your revenue. That's what I do."

So I asked him to meet everybody. His body language with different people was fun. With all the ladies, he was staring at the cleavage. With other directors, it was the big handshake and "Give me the bullets; I'll fire them." I thought that must be what salesmen are like. Then I took him to lunch, and the waitress made some error--I can't remember what it was--and he tore off a strip of her in front of me, to show how tough he was. I thought, "What an idiot."

I went back to the office and thought, that's what you have to do; you hire people like that. And I decided that no, I was not hiring him; the man's an idiot. People were knocking on my door, asking what I thought of the guy. And I said, "Sorry, I should hire him because he's brilliant and he'd double our revenue, but I didn't like him, so I'm not hiring him." They said, "Thank God for that. We all thought he was an idiot as well."

So instincts were right. I sent him an email saying that I was really sorry, that we were a bit strange at the Instruction Set, that we didn't behave like normal companies, and that he'd probably be brilliant elsewhere, but here he wouldn't be perfect, but best of luck. I got a week of abusive emails from him.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpted from Lessons Learned: Straight Talk from the World’s Top Business Leaders--Starting a Business. Copyright (c) 2008 Fifty Lessons Limited; All Rights Reserved.

For more information about the "Lessons Learned" series, including a showcase of 50 Lessons video stories, please follow this link.

narrative, hiring, recruiting, interviewing, sales, reading list, Mistake Bank