“If you don’t understand people, you don’t understand business.” Simon Sinek hits the nail on the head in an important talk at Behance’s recent design conference.
Worth the time and it all starts with Why?
Although business is not usually like war, in that nobody gets shot in meetings, the business world can learn a lot from our military. Let’s take a lesson from General, later President, Dwight David Eisenhower that can help us reduce the number and duration of meetings.
Consider using The Eisenhower Brief as a way of structuring your conversations and (quick) meetings.
The story I’ve heard is that Eisenhower, being an organized military man, required a one page summary during a briefing. The top third contained the problem or hypothesis, the middle third summarized possible courses of action and the bottom third covered the recommendation that the team had assembled. (Full credit to the great Denny Hatch who published this a few years ago and gave me the idea. I can’t find the original article, but you should read his blog here.)
This ingenious document forced the team to:
The enforcement of brevity ensured that the briefers had truly done their homework and hashed things out before coming in to talk with the top guy.
I used this at a very large previous employer and found that it cut about three hours of meetings out of my day. You couldn’t meet with me unless you had the document prepared–and a lot of meetings never actually happened. The use of this forcing mechanism resulted in a lot of problems being solved by the team before having to involve me or the problems weren’t worth spending time figuring out how to describe them.
The meetings also got a lot shorter. With everybody prepared, we could focus on ensuring that the right range of options was considered and that the team didn’t miss any issues. And because they’d done the work, rarely did we have an issue.
The bonus was that I could carry around these one-pagers and have key issues at my fingertips. Great for staving off those “what did we ever do about….” questions from the boss. And if she needed something in hard copy, I’d pull it out of my binder and hand it off. Done.
Takeaway: Think about using a one-page briefing system for your projects. See the attached template.
“Why are you here?” That’s my first interview question. It’s surprising how many people get rattled out of the gate by that question. Yet if you bump into an American in Paris tomorrow and ask the same question, you get a few crisp answers:
I’m here on vacation to see the sights.
I’m here for a business meeting.
I’m here with my husband for a romantic weekend trip.
Those people know exactly what they need to do to be consistent with the “why” statement. Further, when they tell you that, it’s easy for you to help them. See the Eiffel Tower (but go after 2 pm); Use this line on the Metro to get to that office; Eat at this brasserie if you walk along the Seine.
So why is it so hard for interviewees? And do you want to hire somebody who doesn’t have a clear “why?”
By the way, what triggered this was Chandoo (Purna Duggirala) showing up in my RSS feed today. His “why” is simple: “to make you awesome in Excel and charting”. And he is absolutely outstanding in that regard. Check him out for awesome ways to improve your Excel skills!
Bob Lefsetz published an article on Friday that powers this admittedly not very far out prediction.
Streaming–powered by iTunes–becomes the preferred choice of music consumption in the US.
We’ll achieve that by 2013.
Why?
We all have lots of channels and methods of communicating with our customers. Usually, they only have to be consistently on message. There are instances when it helps to have your communication channels completely aligned, not only on message, but tightly integrated from an operational point of view.
That’s when you’re doing outbound calling. Here’s an example of a SiriusXM satellite failure melt-down that happened to me last evening.
I received my second call of the day from an unfamiliar 866 number which did not leave a message earlier. Thinking it was something important, I broke into a family status call to pick it up. Apparently, my SiriusXM subscription for my car expired on July 17th and when SiriusXM tried to bill me, the credit card on file did not authorize the charge because it had been reissued under a different number by the bank.
That was flag #1. Last year, I went on SiriusXM’s self-serve customer portal and explicitly selected the option to receive a paper bill, as I greatly preferred paying they cancel/save price of ~$79 per year instead of the rack rate of $179 per year.
Problem #2. When the telemarketer got me on the phone, he identified himself as being from SiriusXM, indicated that the billing had failed and that he wanted to update my records (look–if you want my new credit card number, just say it) and could he record my call. All in <10 seconds. Wow and no, you can’t record my call.
I let him know I wanted to receive paper bills only and could he fix that. Nope. I needed to tell somebody at SiriusXM that myself. Well, I was. Apparently his CRM system didn’t allow him to do that, the guys that could were in another department (in India) and he’d never heard of email.
Problem #3. He said he’d warm transfer me over to the billing department who could get me a paper bill. “They’ll have my info so I don’t have to repeat myself, right?” “Yes, sir.” You guessed it. I’m dumped into the TOP of the general billing queue and the nice young lady in India had no idea why I was there. Anyway, she puts me on a paper bill, no problem. Then, at my request, she transfers me over to the cancel department.
The cancel guy was actually quite good and a series of reasonable offers. But I wasn’t ready to commit to a half price deal, even for six months. When he asked why, I said “Well, I’ve got this Pandora thing now and maybe I don’t need SiriusXM any more.” BOOM, three months of free service to reconsider.
So what’s going on here at SiriusXM?
These are the two attributes I check for in employment candidates who have been employed at big companies. It seems odd, but in some large corporations there are an entire class of people that seemingly exist simply to forward emails. An engineering manager on one of my teams coined the “email forwarder” phrase to describe them and it’s stuck with me.
I have no idea why these types of job exist in company, but if you find yourself in one of them, get out–quick. That’s because developers, engineers and doers can smell BS and suit monkeys a mile away and will do everything to go around and avoid email forwarders and eventually make you and your job irrelevant.
Meeting-goers are that category of employee who run from place to place all day long and sit in meetings. (And most of them suck, with or without them.) As one of my wise leaders once said:
The more meetings you show up at, the less important you are. It means you have lots of time to kill.
Be important. Don’t just forward emails and go to meetings. Ship something. Face the market.
I love being sold. I can even suspend disbelief in the interest of hearing just why I need a $44K CUV instead of a $15K subcompact that will do the job, arguably, just as well.
What I can’t stand is the voicemail left today by a lazy salesperson. “Maybe we can help you by… Maybe we can help by….” all the way through a laundry list of what this consulting company can do for me, which might have ended with their ability to ensure our lawn was weed-free. I’ll never know because I deleted the email 20 seconds in.
Figure out what problem (singular) I might have (and why) and explain to me why you absolutely, positively can take that pain away today. I might not have that problem today, but I’ll sure as heck remember that solution when I do have that problem.
Or ramble and let me delete your email or voicemail. The choice is yours, as is the time you waste.
It’s still budget season across corporate America and we’re getting to crunch time. In the first pass of the budget, you invariably include all your wishes for the coming year. What new initiatives you’d like to take, why, and what kind of revenue and/or cost savings they’ll generate.
The first pass is usually somewhat unconstrained, or constrained in a very limited way. The objective is to get you thinking about what you could do if you didn’t have to worry too much about the money and resources needed to accomplish those tasks. And that’s the right way to do the first pass at budgeting. You don’t want to shortcut creativity and encourage lateral thinking which, by definition, requires no constraints.
The second pass is where the trouble starts.
Once the finance guys roll up the first draft, the problems begin. The CapEx requests are 3X what the company can tolerate. There’s an insane new headcount request (this is guaranteed to be a problem, and is bigger the less-seasoned and mature the management team is), the product roadmap is literally unachievable due to space/time continuum issues. And so forth.
So finance steps in, under the guidance of executive management and begins imposing constraints. And that’s where the biblical levels of wailing and gnashing of teeth begins. And the never/always justification for the crying starts:
“The finance/accounting/CFO/planning guys never give me enough CapEx to achieve my objectives.” “This company always favors that other department and not mine.” “I’ll never recruit good talent without frozen superduper macchiato tofu machines at every workstation.”
Babies cry when constraints are applied. Leaders shrug and carry on.
What do babies do when constraints hit them in the face? They cry, they pout, they hit. If old enough to verbalize, they try to negotiate. “But Joe’s finance guy lets me buy my own servers outside the shared/secure corporate infrastructure, so I should be able to run my department on Lotus notes instead…” (Don’t laugh, I’ve heard something very similar to this multiple times.)
Leaders understand that constraints are good. Fewer resources and tighter definitions of what we need to accomplish simplify the problem and clarify the possible courses of action. They make you say “no” to more things. They give you a solid north star to follow.
And the best things have usually been built with very constrained resources. Consider the ingenuity applied to get Apollo 13 home using only the stuff they had on the LEM and CM and whatever thinking could be applied by the men on the ground and on the ship.
When constraints are applied, I go home early
When pass 2 of the budget starts, I always get home first. Why? I accept the fact that constraints are part of life and budgeting process and don’t waste my time with the political arguing and horse-trading to get resources. I treat the coming fiscal year challenges as a linear programming problem with a series of constraints. Once the full extent of the constraints are known, it’s relatively easy to figure out what my team can and can’t do.
The team appreciates the fact that we don’t hold out false hope of getting a different set of constraints or a reality that might be more suitable to us but is, in fact, a fantasy. Plus, they get to go home and recharge and refresh instead of cranking out extra PowerPoint slides.
Seth Godin covers this well here, as well.
Takeaway: Consider the constraints placed on you during the budgeting process as a gift. Lead and don’t be a baby. Go home early and get some rest so you can win.
When you’re in trouble, the world does not form an opinion about your character based on what you say. Rather, judgement is based on the length of the line and the stature of those in line who defend you.
Like the long line defending the Murdochs. Oh, wait.
Small and startup businesses have it tough. You have to be chief cook and bottle-washer, CEO,CFO, CMO, CTO, CPO, CSO and much more, usually without (much) help. Oh, and how do you stay in touch with your customers in this increasingly-social world?
I just finished reading what I think is a great book for those small and growing businesses. It’s Marsha Collier‘s The Ultimate Online Customer Service Guide: How to Connect with your Customers to Sell More!
Don’t think of as a “customer service” book. You’ll not learn anything about AHT, call routing, ticketing systems or capacity planning. Rather you’ll learn everything you need to know about “..connect with your customers…” Really. The book is positively an encyclopedia of hints and tips for the small and growing business. If you’re a small business or one that doesn’t want to remain small, you’ll get at least 3-5 ideas in your first read that you can use right now that will help you grow.
Recommended.
markpilip
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