Facebook, smacked down again, invites customer input

Facebook always does the right thing by their customers... once their customers have beaten them up for a wrong first step. A year and a half ago they stirred up the wrath of their community by proposing an ad-targeting system leveraging its users' profile data, then backed down.

Now they've done it again. Facebook changed their terms of service, igniting another storm of outrage on blogs, Twitter and, yes, Facebook. They relented, returning to their prior terms of service, and yesterday announced that they will be seeking user input on community questions such as terms of service, and be more transparent, including this statement:

Transparent Process: “Facebook should publicly make available information about its purpose, plans, policies, and operations. Facebook should have a town hall process of notice and comment and a system of voting to encourage input and discourse on amendments to these Principles or to the Rights and Responsibilities.”

It's easy to make fun of Facebook for their public embarrassments, but they do get the message their users are sending. Furthermore, they are pioneers in engaging with their users. There is no template they can follow. Facebook's users, because they give personal and sensitive information to the service, is very sensitive to its use, and the web2.0 nature of Facebook means that its users are comfortable using web2.0 means to communicate. Quiet they are not.

It will be fascinating to see how more traditional companies deal with assertive user bases. As consumers find their voices on line (and efforts like VRM give users powerful tools to manage and communicate with their vendors), we'll be reading more stories like this one. Will other companies learn from Facebook's painful lessons?

Related post:
Zuckerberg learns

Learn from your predecessors--the only way, if you're a CEO or President

Imagine that you have a job that's so exclusive that not only could you not find a book teaching you how to do it, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in your town, or state, who could give you much help.

The job of corporate CEO is like that. So is President of the United States. In each of these positions, learning on the fly seems costly. Is there an alternative?

Yes there is. If only it were used more often.

This question was taken up in two recent articles. In the January Harvard Business Review, Thomas Friel and Robert Duboff discuss "The Last Act of a Great CEO." The last act being an outgoing CEO's sharing knowledge, experience, and perspectives on the job with her successor.

And an opinion piece by Sheryl Gay Stolberg in yesterday's New York Times remarked on the rarity of gatherings like Pres-elect Obama's recent lunch with four other living presidents ("The Very Elite Club that Never Meets").

Friel and Duboff write this about new CEOs learning from their predecessors:

It is difficult to imagine a richer source of information and advice for a new CEO, even on a purely personal level. Being successful as the chief executive of a major enterprise is hardly a straightforward matter; the right combination of style, skill, and focus can vary dramatically depending on the context. One CEO we interviewed put it simply: “You can’t really understand this position until you’re in it.” At the very least, the departing executive has a unique and relevant point of view on the dynamics of the board of directors and the executive team. Often he or she has the most strategic and current understanding of the issues the company faces.

Stolberg's article hits the same theme:

“One thing historians have talked about for years is that there should be a better way for sitting presidents to use the experience of former presidents, and it doesn’t happen enough,” said the presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “The reasons are varied: sometimes personal antagonisms, shyness, the feeling that the former president is too removed from today’s politics to know very much. The result is that there is a reservoir of wisdom and experience that is not relied upon.”

I have an idea that might help. Or, rather, my wife Maura had the idea and she let me borrow it. Companies, and the executive branch, need to create narrative repositories like The Mistake Bank. A repository would be a place for presidents or CEOs to recount events. (Especially mistakes, since we learn very well from mistakes.) and what they learned from them. The repository would be available only to successors. New CEOs and presidents, or experienced ones, could dip into the repository when they had a question or issue they wanted some perspective on.

I've done this, and I know how to set them up, and how to make use of them. CEOs, Pres.-elect Obama, it's time to put this into action. You know where to reach me.

Why company story-listening is democratic

I'm beginning to spend a lot of time listening to stories within companies, and between companies and their customers. Listening to and understanding these stories can help companies adapt to changing markets and competitors, and help their employees work together better.

It's democratic, too. What does that mean? you may be wondering. Traci Fenton, head of WorldBlu and the leader of the corporate-democracy movement, asked me the same question a few months ago. I was trying to explain to her the connection between my work helping companies gather and act on stories and her work promoting the creation of democratic processes and institutions within companies.

To me, it makes all the sense in the world.

To be a participant in a democratic venture, you need to be informed. Lots of information, from different viewpoints, even if it can be contradictory or confusing, is essential to you doing your job, which is to participate in your own governance and direction.

You must also have a voice. Sometimes that voice is a statement at the voting booth. Other times, it is the ability to stand up at the borough council meeting and tell the council they need to approve the school-building project once and for all.

Gathering stories from employees and customers gives them a voice. Sharing them throughout the company provides critical information for employees to act on. Training folks to make sense out of them can root out complacency and provide a platform for action.

If you're a corporate leader who wants your company to be democratic, you better institutionalize the gathering and sharing of stories. From the inside and the outside.

[If you're interested in corporate democracy, you should consider attending WorldBlu Live this month in New York.]

Related Posts:
A Sense of Urgency
Corporate Change Series
Competitive Advantage: Customer-facing Employees

Tags:
narrative, learning, democracy, knowledge

Customer complaints as a source of business insight

We're taking a brief detour from the corporate change series to discuss customer complaints (every businessperson's favorite subject) though in truth it is very much in sync with the "letting the outside in" philosophy we've been discussing in those other posts. The Wall Street Journal's occasional Business Insight section prompted the thoughts with today's article, "Making the Most Of Customer Complaints," by Stefan Michel and David Bowen of the Thunderbird School of Global Management and Robert Johnston of Warwick Business School.

"Making the Most..." focuses on the relationship between the customer, the front-line rep, and service management, and correctly describes how to manage a complaint to minimize damage to customer satisfaction without "giving away the store," and to incent behaviors that will result in customers leaving the interactions feeling good (or at least not badly) about their vendor. It's particularly insightful when describing the conflicts the front-line reps feel when trying to deal with a difficult customer situation:

These workers have the difficult task of dealing with customers who hold them responsible even when the failures in question are completely out of their control. The attitudes of customer-service workers, positive and negative, spill over onto customers.

Yet companies do surprisingly little to support them.

To be successful, these workers need to feel that management is providing the means to deliver successful service recovery on a continuing basis. Alternatively, when employees believe management doesn't support them, they tend to feel they are being unfairly treated and so treat customers unfairly. They display passive, maladaptive behaviors and can even sabotage service.

This alienation is compounded when the workers believe that management is not improving the service-delivery process, which keeps employees in recurring failure situations. Even though complaining customers represent an opportunity to fix problems and improve satisfaction, alienated employees often see them as the enemy.

In addition to the sound advice to repair the processes, provide appropriate guidance to employees and management, and incent customer-delighting behaviors, there's a broader value that I see to studying these interactions.

Customer complaints are a window into the customer's use of the product and perception of the company. Virtually all satisfied customers are silent. Many dissatisfied customers are silent as well--calling customer service is time-consuming and frustrating. The fact that many problems aren't resolved compounds people's feeling that engaging with the company is simply not worth the trouble.

This means that any customer complaint reported to the company is a very important piece of data. Taken together, complaints can illuminate patterns pointing to product over-complexity, poor usability, underservicing, poor expectation-setting. The patterns might tell you that the customer-service approach you are so proud of is not working as well as it should. Or that customers are using a product differently from how you expected them to. The patterns serve as marching orders to product management, marketing and customer service for important value-adding projects.

But... you have to collect and sort through the data. It can't be resigned to the bit bucket because it's unpleasant or tells you things you'd prefer not to hear. I have started to work with clients to learn from customer-service interactions--the raw material, not just the statistics. And, not surprisingly, we are always surprised by what we learn.

Related posts:
Time to start listening to front-line employees

Tags:
narrative, learning, customer relationships, customer service, knowledge

A Mistake-Bank-perfect epigraph

I just unwrapped "Einstein's Mistakes" and this appears before the Preface:

Errors are the portals of discovery.
James Joyce, Ulysses

HBR adds to business failure learning library with "7 Ways to Fail Big"

This article in the September 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review, by Chunka Mui and Paul Carroll, discusses seven corporate worst practices and relates business stories that demonstrate them. The practices are:

1. The Synergy Mirage - companies justify acquisitions by touting synergies that just aren't there, or aren't there in enough volume to make the price worthwhile. (Quaker buys Snapple, Unum and Provident merge.)

2. Faulty Financial Engineering - companies borrowing from the future to make today's revenue look better. Enron, anyone? How about Green Tree Financial?

3. Stubbornly Staying The Course - Kodak, slow to react to digitization of photography, and Pillowtex, which failed to see the trend in outsourcing textile manufacture.

4. Pseudo-Adjacencies - the authors point to Oglebay, a company that thought it could deploy its expertise in shipping limestone to actually quarrying it. Result? Chapter 11.

5. Bets on the Wrong Technology - for example, FedEx ZapMail.

6. Rushing to Consolidate - too often mergers focus on the top-line increases but neglect "increased complexities [that] may lead to diseconomies of scale."

7. Roll-ups of Almost Any Kind - As with Loewen Group, a funeral-home aggregator, roll-ups can't withstand downturns and usually provide a short-term revenue bump at the expense of the long term (see #2).

Leaders, you have been warned. Avoid these at all costs!

Related Posts:
NASA learns to avoid its worst practices in safety
Worst practice learning means our favorite business bestsellers are all wrong

Tags:
worst practice, strategy, learning, mistakes, Harvard Business Review

A competitive advantage: employees who "spend most of their day talking to people"

I recall a number of years ago dialing 411 (Information) and asking the operator for a phone number for a store a few miles away in Boston. In a thick Dorchester accent, she corrected the name of the store for me. "I think you mean this one," she said, and she was right.

Old school customer service has been in decline for some time now--pushed out by the costcutting allure of self-service, offshoring, IVRs, etc.

Impersonal customer service works in some cases. Shopping for a known commodity like a book, or CD, for example, or putting a vacation stop on your newspaper delivery. But companies have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, because if it's really important to understand what a customer needs, a trained, empathetic person is the best resource a company can have. These folks, as John Kotter writes in "A Sense of Urgency," help "bring the outside in"--in other words, they provide insight from a vital outside constituency--customers--into the organization.

I've talked before in this blog about how data about customer interactions will be captured and mined for insights about customer perceptions of products, service and the company that provides them. Today, surveys and focus groups attempt to paint this picture. Tomorrow, the real, raw data will be used. Stories from customers, and the stories from the people who serve them directly.

This will provide a new value proposition for customer service. As opposed to a replaceable part hired at the lowest hourly rate possible, front-line staff will be well-paid and well-trained. Their insights will be carefully collected and utilized, and products (and the customers that buy them) will be better off for them.

Shifting customer service to a different location to save $1.00 a call will be unthinkable.

It's possible that Best Buy's Geek Squad is an early prototype of this mindset. In an article in today's New York Times, Matt Richtel depicts a power struggle between computer manufacturers who install application craplets on their PCs, and retailers, who are responding to customers' desire to buy a PC free of craplets. This section was notable:

Mr. Stephens of Geek Squad says he agrees with H. P. that the future is in allowing computer buyers to choose and download what they want. But he said he believed Best Buy, not H. P., was in the best position to help people choose what works for them because, he argued, the in-store technicians are in closest contact with them.

“Geek Squad agents have one thing over Apple and Microsoft engineers. We spend most of the day talking to people,” he said.

Related posts:
Businesses need "A Sense of Urgency"
Time to start listening to front-line employees

Tags:
narrative, learning, customer relationships, customer service, knowledge

The power of "anecdotal evidence"

We have a bike rack on our 12-year-old Isuzu Trooper that fits into the trailer hitch. I mentioned to my wife the other day that perhaps next year we should add a hitch to our 6-year-old Acura MDX, so we can use the bike rack on the MDX after the Trooper gives out.

She laughed. "What if the Acura dies first?" she said.

My wife holds the perception very firmly that the Isuzu is a highly-reliable, trouble-free car, and that the Acura is a fragile thing, constantly in need of expensive maintenance.

Statistics say otherwise. JD Power gives Acura four stars for reliability (out of five), and Izusu only two stars--tied for the worst rating.

But looking beyond statistics, at the stories, the Trooper has a bunch of ardent fans. Some people have had terrible problems and hate the car, yet many others, a larger number, love it. (See this group of epinions posts for an example.)

And the MDX's reliability has some detractors as well (see reviews from Edmunds.com), with many complaints about transmission problems (writer crosses fingers).

What's most amazing is the firmness with which the reviewers--positive and negative--hold their opinions. It demonstrates the "tyranny of the mean," in which a lot is lost by averaging ratings together. A car is an emotion-laden product--expensive, used daily, inconvenience-causing when broken. Opinions then vary dramatically based on personal experience. The stories are arguably more important than the statistics when evaluating this type of product. And product managers, as well, should be especially attuned to the stories customers are telling about their products.

The lesson here is that "anecdotal evidence" should not so easily be dismissed, and that statistics can be useful but, just as when buying a car, you should look under the hood for yourself.

It might help you figure out why your wife thinks the old Izusu kicks the newer Acura's butt.

narrative, product management, learning, Mistake Bank, customer relationships

Time to start listening to front-line employees

I have a colleague who runs a small outsourced contact center in the Pacific Northwest. I told him of my project to find and use stories from call centers to get more useful customer input. He said, "It's a great idea, but nobody listens to the reps."

Then, as I wrote about last week, a bank that is renowned as a great place to work told me that an idea to have tellers share via internal blogs customer interactions they found interesting was a non-starter: "We just put into place a policy to limit the access our employees have to the internet."

Well, it's time to start listening to the reps. It's time to let tellers blog about what they experience.

We generally accept that having happy employees at the front lines can help revenues, because happy employees convey good feelings to the customers they meet, making those customers feel better about who they're buying from, etc.

But it's now clear that in addition to courtesy and helpfulness, front-line employees also know more about what customers want, what they like and don't like, how they feel about the company, than anyone else. Because "the reps" hear it, every day, direct and unfiltered.

Back in the day, the only way an executive could access this insight would be to visit stores and talk to employees and customers him/herself. This still happens. But with cheap, ubiquitous data-sharing technology like blogs, RSS, wikis, social sites, etc., there's nothing standing in the way of systematically gathering and immersing oneself in detailed, rich information about customer interactions--even if you're the CEO.

And don't you think getting the chance to communicate, and being listened to, might increase the job satisfation of the front-liners?

An executive at a large US insurer told me that at their quarterly management meetings they listen to selected recordings of customer calls. "It's always a shock when you hear what customers say directly. We're so far removed from the customer."

Precisely.

Related post:
Enterprise use of 2.0 collides with restrictive access policies

Tags:
narrative, social media, blogging, learning, customer relationships, customer service, knowledge, knowledge management

Pilots learning by studying mistakes

Dave Stein took a break from writing about his core subject, building sales effectiveness, to discuss how pilots study the circumstances around crashes to learn what situations to be careful of. This kind of learning from mistakes can save one's life.

Dave is an experienced pilot. I don't think I knew that before reading the post. I like when people inject their personal passions into their blogs. I don't mean navel-gazing, but unveiling parts of their life experience that aren't visible in their professional profiles.

learning, mistakes, aviation

Zuckerberg learns

I didn't like much of what I read about Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Seemed like a bratty kid, ego on overdrive. The questions about perhaps appropriating the idea from Harvard classmates cast a shadow to me.

But I am impressed with what I'm reading about him now. Today in The New York Times, Brad Stone profiles some new Facebook integration tools, and in the article some quotes from Zuckerberg that are out of step with his old persona, to say the least.

Like this:

“We paid a lot of attention to making sure that people have complete control over what is in their feed,” he said. “We learned from last time.”

And this:

“As happy as I am with the growth of the ecosystem, there are a lot of mistakes we made,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “I think we can all agree that we don’t want an ecosystem full of applications that are just trying to spread themselves.”

To that end, Facebook announced a series of new incentives for developers to write what it characterized as “meaningful” tools for the service. It said it would pick certain applications that meet a set of Facebook principles to be part of a new “Great Apps” program.

Others are recognizing Facebook's progress:

Blake Commagere, the developer who created zombie and vampire games for a variety of social networks, said Facebook was simply learning as it goes, like everyone else in an unprecedented Web experiment.

“It’s been a learning process for developers and for Facebook,” he said. “They are breaking new ground, but these guys are sharp. They are going to continue to improve it.”

So, it's a much humbler and seemingly wiser Zuckerberg. That can only bode well for the future of the platform and the company.

Tags:
entrepreneurism, learning, mistakes, New York Times

"Once Upon a Nation" teaches history through storytelling

My family went to Philadelphia for the US Independence Day weekend. Among other activities, we visited thirteen storytelling benches arrayed around the historic district. At these locations, storytellers told us tales about Revolutionary War-era figures and other notable people and events from Philadelphia's history, including:

• The first bank robbery in the US
• A Philadelphia witch trial
• The invention of bubble gum
• The escape of one of President George Washington's house slaves
  
• The hiking and camping adventures of a young boy who became a renowned artist and horticulturist.

Of all the cool things we did that weekend--visiting the Liberty Bell and touring Independence Hall (where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were debated), eating at a tavern where Jefferson ate--the stories were the most memorable part of the trip. Our five-year-old insisted that visiting all the benches was our highest priority for the weekend.

We attended several events featuring performers playing characters from the period--Ben Franklin, a Patriot soldier, a young aristocrat. You could hardly walk down the street without running into a printer, militia officer or milkmaid--in character always.

At night, we recounted the stories we'd heard that day. As we toured, we looked for references to story characters in the historic buildings.

All of the above are a product of Once Upon a Nation, a group charged with creating a "living history" of Philadelphia. And they've succeeded. The stagings and stories intertwined beautifully with the historic sites to create an fun, immersive, reiterated experience that "Brain Rules" author John Medina would approve of completely.

A real testament to the power of stories at work.

[P.S., The storytelling benches are open all summer till 4:30pm.]

Related post:
"Brain Rules" rules

Tags:
storytelling, history, narrative, travel

How to treat prospects who visit you

From The Mistake Bank:

When prospects from Hong Kong visited us in the US, we did our normal thing and thought everything went fine. Soon thereafter we had all but lost the deal. Then we visited them, and learned another model for entertaining visitors.


Find more videos like this on The Mistake Bank


Tags:
Mistake Bank, narrative, learning, errors, failure, mistakes, sales, video, hospitality

Don't try to fail, just try

It's been worrying me a bit, with all my emphasis on learning from mistakes and removing the stigma from making mistakes, that I might be encouraging people to try to make mistakes.

Although making a deliberate mistake can be a very useful exercise and lead a company to discover insights it couldn't find out otherwise, it shouldn't be the focus of your approach.

The point is to try to succeed lots of different ways, make small bets, try "safe-fail" experiments. Follow those that appear to lead somewhere. Ditch the remainder quickly.

More and more people are thinking this way. My evidence? Today's Wall Street Journal Business Insight section, which talks about experimentation and learning from failure throughout. One example is "In Search of Growth Leaders," by Sean Carr, Jeanne Liedtka and others which asserts that managers who can foster growth have different mindsets than those who can't. [A nice graphic in the article compares people who see life as a journey of learning--i.e., potential growth leaders--to those who see it as a test--similar to the work of Carol Dweck referenced by Amy Edmondson in HBR, and discussed in a recent Mistake Bank post.]

There's also "Oops! Accidents lead to more innovations. So how do you create more accidents?" by Robert Austin, Lee Devin and Erin Sullivan--which says to "explore lots of approaches" and "make accidents cheaper" which is safe-fail by other words.

And "Follow the Leaders," by Craig Pearce, which encourages allowing team leadership to shift from member to member based on the needs of a particular part of a project, echoing ideas from the recent HBR article on management lessons from multiplayer online games.

If you do make a mistake, don't throw it away. Learn from it, and put it in the Mistake Bank. The public one, or one of your own.

Related posts:
Multiplayer games demonstrate a new model for leadership
Amy Edmondson in July/Aug HBR
To progress in complex environments, experiment
Make some mistakes, and profit from it

Tags:

Mistake Bank, experimentation, learning, errors, failure, mistakes, innovation, leadership, Wall Street Journal

Female guru alert: Amy Edmondson in July/Aug HBR

Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School appeared on our recent list of Overlooked Female Business Gurus, and she has also published an article in the July/August Harvard Business Review. Titled "The Competitive Imperative of Learning," it's a blockbuster that will cement her position on the guru list for some time to come.

Edmondson persuasively argues that a focus on efficiency in most companies chokes off resources for innovation and learning and creates an environment of harried, fearful employees rushing from task to task. Sound familiar?

In such an environment, given that the business, market and competitive playing field are changing continuously, the certainty is that the company will lack the learning, vision and insight to adapt itself to new realities. In essence, it will become a highly-efficient producer of last year's products and services. The market will have moved on.

Edmondson's work complements that of Dave Snowden and Mary Boone on the Cynefin Framework. Snowden & Boone describe simple and complex business contexts and the challenges these different contexts pose to managerial decisionmaking. In simple contexts, best practices and efficiency are the tools for success. But in complex contexts, learning, experimentation and adaptation are key.

As Edmondson points out, "the influx of knowledge in most fields makes it easy to fall behind." In other words, the space where competitiveness is created today is the complex space.

Three key inhibitors to learning environments are time, safety and review. Efficiency-based companies don't allow time to think and reflect--the emphasis is on processing and dispatching tasks quickly. (Gary Hamel discussed this issue nicely in "The Future of Management.")

And few companies provide the psychological safety required in a learning environment. Learning requires failure, failure is stigmatized, therefore people try to avoid it. Or if it's unavoidable, it is covered up or played down.

I can tell you based on my work to date on The Mistake Bank that psychological safety is a big issue. I have had numerous dialogues with colleagues, members, mentors, etc., which have involved the ramifications if someone were to discover the mistake the person has contributed to The Mistake Bank.

[My position on that matter is this: people who admit mistakes are more valuable to companies, customers and colleagues than those who don't--because we all know that everyone makes mistakes. No exceptions.]

Finally, Edmondson emphasizes the need for disciplined reflection and review. By evaluating, discussing and communicating the results of new ways of doing things, companies achieve the payoff of experimentation. My experience is that most companies don't like to look back.

There's a lot more to the article than I've discussed here. Read it when you have some time to think and reflect! (Better yet, talk about it with a colleague.)

Related posts:
Great innovation requires great teams
Leaders need to manage complexity
Toyota excels by revealing hidden problems
Stop studying the problem and just try something!
On Gary Hamel's "The Future of Management"
For consultants, adopting the "Google 20%" is vital

Tags:
complexity, decisionmaking, teamwork, collaboration, innovation, learning, Harvard Business Review

Mini-podcast: Listrak's Ross Kramer on not investing in sales and marketing

An audio story from The Mistake Bank.

When Ross Kramer started his first technology business, he focused on the technical side to the exclusion of sales and marketing. In retrospect, that was a mistake.

You can download the story here.

Biography:
Ross Kramer started his first company, a web hosting firm named Vertex Internet, in his Penn State dorm room in 1997. He quickly noticed the struggles his customers were having in communicating with their customers efficiently and effectively, so he started Listrak to help with their email marketing needs. Under Ross’ direction, both companies have grown into technologically-advanced companies that are leaders in their industries.

Listrak services clients such as Daimler Chrysler, Motorola, L’Oreal and the Islands of the Bahamas from its Lititz, PA headquarters. Listrak is a two-time winner of the Central Penn Business Journal’s Top Fifty Fastest Growing Companies and the 2005 Growth Company of the Year by the Technology Council of Central PA.

Tags:
learning, Mistake Bank, sales, marketing, technology, podcast, investment

Roughnecks learn to learn from mistakes

"Unmasking Manly Men" in the July-August Harvard Business Review Forethought section had a grabby title and a thesis puncturing a resilient stereotype: one of the roughest, most macho, most dangerous industries in the world--offshore oil drilling--has developed a new work culture where workers support each other, where they are open and candid with their feelings, and...my favorite topic...where they admit mistakes and seek to learn from them.

The piece, written by professors Robin Ely of Harvard Business School and Debra Meyerson of Stanford University states that the culture change was led from above, primarily as a way to improve safety and reduce accidents. And that worked--on-the-job accidents declined 84% over a fifteen-year period. Efficiency and productivity improved as well.

This culture of candor had at least on beneficial side effect--the company developed a new assessment of leadership potential based on ability to listen and learn rather than excellence as a roughneck. [A lesson to the many many professions out there that still select new leaders based on skill in the old job vs. capability for the new one.]

I'm learning that developing a culture of destigmatizing mistakes, discussing them and learning from them makes the whole organization a lot more human, caring and fun. Oh, yeah, innovative, too.

learning, mistakes, culture, Harvard Business Review

"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

"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

The Mistake Bank manifesto

I've been reading the new book "Senior Leadership Teams: How to Make Them Great," by Ruth Wageman, Debra Nunes, James Burruss and Richard Hackman. Very close to the end of the book I found a passage that is a better explanation of what's behind the Mistake Bank than anything I could write myself. While it's focused on senior leaders, I think the ideas work for anyone who has a job or owns a business. [I'll do a full review of the book next week. Sneak preview: it's very good.]

To learn continuously... requires that senior leaders move beyond well-practiced leadership habits and well-learned personal models of what makes for a great leadership team. What's needed is active experimentation with new and unfamiliar leadership strategies, and whenever there is experimentation expect that there will also be failure.. More often than not, trying out a new grip or swing in golf or tennis results in worsened performance for a while. But these experiments also generate learnings that cannot be had otherwise. The same is true for experimentation with leadership strategies and skills.

In fact, error and failure always provide more opportunities for learning than do success and achievement, because failures generate data that you can mine for insight into how you might improve your assumptions or your mental model of team leadership. Indeed, the bigger the failure, the greater the learning opportunity. To learn from failure requires that you ask questions that arouse anxiety (for example, about the validity of your deeply-held assumptions or about personal flaws in your diagnosis or execution abilities). Learning from failure also requires that you gather data that can help answer those questions and then adapt your mental models and your behavior. These activities are not natural or comfortable acts, and they are especially unnatural for successful people who have limited experience in learning how to learn from error and failure. (p. 204)

Copyright 2008 Harvard Business Press

Mistake Bank, experimentation, learning, errors, failure, habits, mental models, organizational behavior