Love The Work You're With - Find the Job You Always Wanted Without Leaving the One You Have
by Richard C. Whiteley
Gotta love these self-explanatory titles! Onto my flags...
pg 32 Richard Leider, author, executive coach, and founder of the Inventure Group, interviewed more than 1,000 retirees who had carved out distinguished careers. Says Leider: “I think it was Oliver Wendell Holmes who said, ‘Most of us go to our graves with our music still inside us.’ Many of these people felt that, despite their successes, their music was still inside them… If they could live their lives over again, they would understand what really gave them fulfillment. You might call this the power of purpose: doing something that contributes to life, adding value to life beyond yourself.”
pg 34 It is said that people at work are motivated, in reverse order of importance, by the following three factors: money, great leadership, and having a cause. People are certainly motivated by a paycheck, but great leadership will have an even more rousing effect. Having a cause beats both the paycheck and the leader hands down. People will make extraordinary commitments and sacrifices for what they consider a true cause. At work you have your pay, and your leader-manager, but do you have a cause? This is the vision of your organization and can represent a powerful motivating force for you and your workmates.
pg 77 When Outcomes Get In the Way – On a personal level, a compulsion with results can thwart the desired outcome. A study of world-class athletes revealed that the more they fixated on the outcome, winning, the less likely they were to win. In fact, a single-minded preoccupation with winning an Olympic medal, accompanied by the tremendous pressure this generates, can become a huge psychological barrier to victory. At the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, Tara Lipinski, less preoccupied with the Gold than favoured Michelle Kwan, let if flow. After winning the top prize, she said, “I didn’t think about winning. I didn’t think about beating anyone. I just thought about going out there and having a great time… I felt I knew what the Olympics was about. Pure joy. And I put it into my program.”
This phenomenon was reported by sports psychologist Shane Murphy in a Business Week article entitled “Zen and the Art of Olympic Success.” Wrote Murphy: “Any time you get into that state here you’re thinking about the result instead of what you’re doing, you’re pretty much screwed – to use the scientific term.”
pg 79 If you don’t attach to expectations or outcomes, what do you attach to? Inputs. Life and career coach Joanne Brem, formerly in large-systems sales at the high-tech giant Amdahl, can personal testify to the effectiveness of keeping your focus entirely on inputs – on the things you do to prepare for a result – and off the desired outcome itself. The accolades Brem amassed while at Amdahl were nothing short of startling. … In one year alone, Brem was responsible for more than $30 million in sales. Talk about outcomes. …. “I cared very much about the sale, but my career took off once I got this truth deep in my bones: You have to let it go.” This truth came to Brem after a difficult dry spell that lasted over a year and it immediately sparked four straight years of top sales performance. Says Brem, “Instead of worrying about my quota, I focused on helping my customers. I found that by doing everything in my power to satisfy their needs – and totally trusting that the best outcome would result – ironically also maximized my access to it. It unleashed my highest levels of listening, openness, being in the present, creativity, and spontaneity…and customers sensed it. Because they sensed it – sensed that I was wholly there for them and not just the sale – they trusted me. Once that happened, the orders just took care of themselves.
pg 90 According to studies by psychologists Ed Diener and David Myers, there are four reliable predictors of happiness: self-esteem, optimism, being an extrovert, and a feeling of control. Notice that each of these four happiness factors is rooted in what you do, what you think, and who you are at your core, and not a single one relates to what is done to you, or how others think of you. … Three traits of resilient performers to see how adversity, as well as common daily frustrations, can be used as tools to create the reality you want at work. They are:
- being an optimist
- transforming adversity into advantage
- create a positive life story
pg 104 Become a pleasure seeker. Interesting, isn’t it, that it is the pursuit of happiness that is a right, not happiness itself? The difference? Happiness, as we said earlier, must be a choice. It isn’t a destination, it’s a process. This is born out in the research that proves the happiest people do pursue it. Think about what puts you in a positive frame of mind at work, and pursue it.
pg 137 Mine the mistake. Are there any new insights or unexpected applications that can come out of your mistake? Richard Back nicely sums up this philosophy in his book The Bridge across Forever. He says: “That’s what learning is after all. Not whether we lose the game but how we lose and how we’ve changed because of it. And what we take away from it that we never had to apply to other games. Losing in a curious way is winning.”
pg 141 Few things cause more fear of success than a sense that if you follow your dreams, you will betray the people who love you. – Anne B. Fisher
pg 144 Theodore Roosevelt expressed this idea beautifully in a speech delivered to the University of Paris, Sorbonne, on April 23, 1910:
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
pg 176 A good way to identify who might be a helpful board member is to ask this question: Where am I unsure or struggling in my work life? List the most critical areas where you need support. You have just created potential board “seats”.
pg 211 When the Conference Board examined ratings of leadership capabilities to meet today’s challenges, they discovered that only 8 percent of the respondents rated these abilities as “excellent” while 39 percent rated themselves as “fair” or “poor”. Executive consultant and author Tracy Goss reflected on this leadership gap when she said: “Today’s business leaders are reinventing everything but themselves. Unless executives realize that they must change not just what they do, but who they are, not just their sense of task, but their sense of themselves, they will fail.”
27.4.08
Throwing the Elephant
Throwing the Elephant - Zen and the Art of Managing Up
by Stanley Bing
from the back of the book... In this simple little handbook, Stanley Bing, the master of Machiavellian meanness, offers the nicest possible way to manipulate one's executive elephant to achieve enlightenment - and power.
my flags...
pg 7 Truth #2 Desire is the root of suffering. It is the desire to achieve, to live, to make things tolerable and pleasant, and even better, that creates untold pain in the lives of men and women. Want nothing, and you shall not be disappointed.
pg 25 The inexperienced handler would do well, therefore, to know as much as possible about his elephant before it enters the room. For underneath the great beast beats the heart of a child. Find that heart and you will find the first key you seek.
pg 30 Look. Smell. Be alive to the possibilities. But say nothing. Do nothing. In such nothingness lies all the potentiality you desire. There will be time for action. Now is not that time.
pg 51 Tentative Feeding Schedule (8 feedings throughout the day!)
pg 89 Yes, the one matter about which it is worth educating the elephant, the one thing you inherently know more about, is how other people feel. It is therefore your job, as its handler, to educate the elephant on the subject of Humanity.
by Stanley Bing
from the back of the book... In this simple little handbook, Stanley Bing, the master of Machiavellian meanness, offers the nicest possible way to manipulate one's executive elephant to achieve enlightenment - and power.
my flags...
pg 7 Truth #2 Desire is the root of suffering. It is the desire to achieve, to live, to make things tolerable and pleasant, and even better, that creates untold pain in the lives of men and women. Want nothing, and you shall not be disappointed.
pg 25 The inexperienced handler would do well, therefore, to know as much as possible about his elephant before it enters the room. For underneath the great beast beats the heart of a child. Find that heart and you will find the first key you seek.
pg 30 Look. Smell. Be alive to the possibilities. But say nothing. Do nothing. In such nothingness lies all the potentiality you desire. There will be time for action. Now is not that time.
pg 51 Tentative Feeding Schedule (8 feedings throughout the day!)
pg 89 Yes, the one matter about which it is worth educating the elephant, the one thing you inherently know more about, is how other people feel. It is therefore your job, as its handler, to educate the elephant on the subject of Humanity.
23.4.08
Lovemarks
The Future Beyond Brands
Lovemarks
by Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide, Saatchi & Saatchi (expanded edition)
(I think the title pretty much explains the book! Onto my flags...)
pg 19 Kurt Vonnegut sums it up best: "I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the centre."
When species change, it almost always occurs first at the fringes. Here the population is most sparse and the orthodoxies of the centre are weakest. Here you can flourish isolated from formula and rules, free from the corrosive belief that everything great has already been done.
pg 21 My instinct was to go against the prevailing wisdom. I went to Saatchi & Saatichi people and said, "Here's our Inspirational Dream. We're all going to pull together to stay in the premier league for 24 months. After that, we'll think about making changes, bringing people in and moving people around. I think you can do it, and we're all going to do this thing together." A it turned out, they could. And we did.
In my experience, when you go into most companies what you find is good people and bad management. You can turn that around really quickly by starting with an Inspirational Dream, setting some challenges, and getting everybody focused.
pg 31 One of the realities I faced in business was that I didn't have an MBA. I hadn't been trained in all the rules - so it meant I had to focus on the people: they were the ones who did the real day-to-day business and were close to consumers.
pg 34 The process really only has two steps - so why does everyone find it so hard? It's all because we obsess over the attention part and forget about why we need that attention in the first place: the relationships.
Emotional connections with consumers have to be at the foundation of all our cool marketing moves and innovation tactics. Viral marketing, guerrilla marketing, entertainment marketing, experience marketing - they can all seize attention if they are done right, but once they have it, they have nowhere much to put it. Nothing to build, nothing to add to, nothing to value or care about.
pg 36 Brands can no longer cope with some of the most important challenges we face today as marketers, producers, traders and business people.
- how to cut through the information clutter
- how to connect meaningfully with consumers
- how to create integrated experiences
- how to convince people to commit for life
- how to make the world a better place
Today the stakes have reached a new high. The social fabric is spread more thinly than ever. People are looking for new, emotional connections. They are looking for what they can love. They are insisting on more choice, they have higher expectations, and they need emotional pull to help them make decisions. And, finally, they want more ways to connect with everything in their lives - including brands.
pg 41 Since joining Saatchi & Saatchi, I have given hundreds of presentations around the globe. "Father and Son" is the spot I always play at the end. ... the response never varies. People feel this spot is talking to them personally. The story makes a deep emotional connection.
pg 45 Which brings us right to Emotion Number One. The most fundamental of them all... LOVE.
pg 53 "... but the way I define Love is the selfless promotion of the growth of the other. So to me, if you selflessly promote the growth of your customers and your colleagues, that's true Love. I don't know what more you could do for someone." - Tim Sanders
"Whenever someone asks me to define Love, I usually think for a minute, then I spin around and pin the guy's arm behind his back. Now who's asking the questions?" - Jack Handey, comic
pg 56 When the Love Bug virus hit computers around the world in 2000 I knew I was on the right track. Technocool, hard-edged geeks did the unspeakable: clicked on an unknown attachment. And all because someone said, "I love you." We were onto a profound emotional need.
pg 68 Alan was right onto my ideas about a new state beyond brands. A few weeks later he set up an interview to shake out my thinking and we were off. The results were published as "Trust in the Future" in the September 2000 issue of Fast Company. From the start we were talking tough love. We knew that consumers were cynical, savvy, and selective. They didn't give a stuff about famous brands. They wanted more. I felt the same way. Big-time brand? Big deal! You've got three seconds to impress me. Three seconds to connect with me, to make me fall in Love with your product.
pg 70 I said in the article: "I'm sure that you can charge a premium for brands that people love. And I'm also sure that you can only have one Lovemark in any category." I was sure then, but now I see that I was wrong. Now that we have moved more deeply into Lovemarks we can see that this was way too narrow. The sushi shop on the corner of your block can be a Lovemark to you. Lovemarks can be created by designers, producers, service people, cities, and nations.
The fact is that Lovemarks are created and owned by the people who love them. Where you have a customer in love, you have a Lovemark. Can consumers make Lovemarks out of two products in the same category? As far as I'm concerned, they can do anything they damn well please!
pg 74 But just sitting around waiting for consumers to tell you you're a Lovemark could mean a very long wait. Love is about action. It's about creating a meaningful relationship. It's a constant process of keeping in touch, working with consumers, understanding them, spending time with them. And this is what insightful marketers, empathetic designers, and smart people on the checkout and production line do every day. Now we were ready to create our principles.
Be Passionate. Consumers can smell a fake a mile off. If you're not in Love with your own business, they won't be either.
Involve Customers. They need to be brought into advising on new product development and working up ideas for services. Involve them in everything, but there is no point in just reflecting back what they have already told you. Make your own commitment to change. Be creative.
Celebrate Loyalty. "Will you still love me tomorrow?" Loyalty demands consistency. Change is fine, but both partners must be full participants.
Find, Tell, & Retell Great Stories. Lovemarks are infused with powerful and evocative stories. At their best these grow into mythic tales. They recall the great adventures of the business, its products and their legendary consumers. Storytelling gives luster by opening up new meanings, connections, and feelings.
Accept Responsibility. Lovemarks are, by definition, top of their class for the people who love them. The passion for a Lovemark can be intense. At the far end of the scale people will lay down their lives for a Lovemark. In fact, nations may be some of the most powerful Lovemarks of them all.
pg 76 Constantly testing our ideas against everything that people love, we agreed that Mystery, Sensuality, and Intimacy are made up of the following elements:
Mystery - great stories, past present and future, taps into dreams, myths and icons, inspiration
Sensuality - sound, sight, smell, touch, taste
Intimacy - commitment, empathy, passion
pg 78 We created a test. We decided a brand might be a Lovemark if it matched up to these statements:
- Lovemarks connect companies, their people and their brands
- Lovemarks inspire Loyalty Beyond Reason
- Lovemarks are owned by the people who love them
pg 79 "One way to think about what a Lovemark might be is to consider how a consumer would feel if you took the brand away. What would the person's reaction be? In our business I know if you take away ... she will be angry... So these are measures of an emotional connection and an attachment to the brand that goes beyond reason." - Jim Strengel, Global Marketing Officer, P&G
pg 80 Five things to do tomorrow: Make at least 3 consumer connections a week. The only way to find out what consumers are thinking is to talk to them and listen to what they have to say. They won't say these things to you on visit one - so do repeats.
pg 86 Cecilia Dean understands the elusive charm of Mystery. With her partners Stephen Gan and James Kaliardos, she co-founded in 1991 the extraordinary publication Visionaire. Issuing out of New York three or four times a year, Visionaire is a testament to the power of Mystery. ... I see copies of Visionaire on the tables of Saatchi & Saatchi creatives throughout the world. Why? Because it gives them a heady mix of sophistication and Mystery, inspiring ideas wrapped into a surprising and sensual object.
pg 93 Lovemarks know that the people who love them are passionate, emotional, and often irrational human beings. What they are not are statistics or bullet points in the findings of some nerdy focus group. It's all about listening. Not just keeping your mouth closed between each of your brilliant statements, but really listening.
Tapping into dreams is a powerful way of showing people that we understand their desires and can transform them into delight. The relationship between brands and consumers has been irrevocably changed. The change is a big one. And so are the rewards.
pg 102 Five things to do tomorrow. Ask everyone you work with for a story that reflects what makes your brand special to them. The more diverse the stories, the richer the brand. Ask three friends - people not in the same business - for a story about one of your brands. If they haven't got one, you have work to do.
pg 133 While Intimacy is fundamental to sustaining emotional connections, it is more elusive than Mystery and Sensuality. Why? Because Intimacy has got to be a two-way process. Listening as well as talking. .... Intimacy requires an understanding of what matters to people at a very deep level. And that understanding means that you have to be prepared to reveal yourself as well. Reveal your true feelings. ... Lovemarks are owned by the people who love them. Not by the companies and people who design, produce, market, and distribute them. To act in the knowledge that consumers own Lovemarks calls for radical change. And one of the most radical is opening up to Intimacy. It is only through Intimacy that the barriers of reserve will dissolvee and brands can become Lovemarks.
pg 138 To me commitment is one of the most important and most demanding of the Lovemark attributes. Remember that great definition of the difference between being commited and being involved? In a plate of bacon and eggs, the pig is committed, the chicken is just involved. Long-term commitment - crucial to a Lovemark relationship.
pg 141 I call it "Love in the bank." With Loyalty Beyond Reason, Apple could make mistakes and still be forgiven. This is the reward for a Lovemark. Only Love will get consumers through the bad times when common sense tells them that they should change. Because Apple users loved the product, they were commit ed to it as an idea of themselves. They were Apple people. Loved members of the Apple family.
pg 149 The Love/Respect Axis... low respect + low love = commodities, high love + low respect = fads, high respect + low love = brands, high respect + high love = Lovemarks
pg 156 Shopping is seductive. Erma Bombeck, the voice of the American housewife in the 1960s and 1970s once said: "The chances of going into a store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are about 3 billion to one."
pg 162 My real shopper education started began when I talked my way into a job with Mary Quant. .... We weren't selling makeup at all; we were selling dreams.
pg 174 Five things to do tomorrow. Shake up your ideas. Selling stuff is an ideas business. Spend time in stores you've never ventured into. What are their ideas? What works, what doesn't? Look through the eyes of the shopper. The closer you get to her experience, the richer and smarter your responses.
pg 177 We have to look at people's lives in their entirety, the things they hope for and dream about, the things they fear, the things they love, the things they hate and need and want. What bores them. We need to understand what has meaning and significance for them, not just what they buy and use.
pg 179 I'm looking for research that counts the beats of your heart rather than the fingers of your hand. Research that connects with the inner life of the consumer. Not as statistical constructs. Not as they were. Not as you would like them to be, but as they truly are: living, feeling beings full of fears and desires, hopes and dreams. Kris Kristofferson got it: "A walkin' contradiction/Partly truth and partly fiction."
pg 180 As I got to know some of the women, they'd let me look into their laundry baskets, allow me to check out their cupboards. Some of these people were very poor. Some didn't even have underclothes. The lesson was obvious. While we had been very concerned in our advertising with helping our consumers wash fine fabrics, guess what? Most of them didn't have any! I learned that unless you get to know people and stand beside them as they work, you will find out only what they believe you want to know.
pg 181 At Saatchi & Saatchi we group our research into three approaches. I believe these approaches can transform the way businesses connect with consumers:
1. Climb a mountain
2. Go to the jungle
3. Think like a fish
pg 182 ... Climb a mountain... If you want to look at a tree, stay on the ground. If you want to see the forest, climb a mountain. ... But I also know that when 100,000 people act on their own emotional needs, you had better have some idea of the direction they might turn in. And you probably don't have enough time to knock on each door! ... From this understanding of consumers comes our remarkable evidence that Lovemarks do have huge commercial benefits - in terms of preference, in terms of usage, in terms of future purchase. If you can move your brand into the Lovemark quadrant, it's lifelong relationships, lifetime loyalty, and premium profits.
pg 184 Go to the jungle. ... While focus groups can have a place, they are deeply flawed. They certainly didn't give us rich insights into the Chinese as a people. What they taught us was about the Chinese consumer not as a person...but as a respondent. By bringing them into our environment, asking them our questions, and using our moderator, we were simply gathering information - and we wanted more. Enter Xploring. It's probably the oldest research technique ever used. But despite its effectiveness, most companies seem to have forgotten about it. Ironically, Xploring is far easier to conduct, more affordable, and far more insightful and inspiring than traditional research. Simply put, the Xplorer puts on a pair of comfortable shoes, grabs a backpack, and heads off. There are no one-way viewing mirrors. No projective techniques. Just interaction, observation, and lots of conversation.
pg 188 The Maori of Aotearoa, New Zealand, say: "If you want to catch a fish, first learn to think like a fish." Working with consumers and learning to think and feel as they do is how Lovemarks happen. We have already seen how powerful it can be to go out and join consumers where they life. To participate, not just observe. Another successful idea is to work with consumers to develop insights. I am not talking focus groups here, but interactive sessions where consumers can make a specific difference to design, service, production, distribution.
pg 205 Five things to do tomorrow. Get out of the office. Your Inspirational Consumers won't come to you - and they don't live in the office down the hall. Ask the great questions. Write down a list of six questions that will stimulate your customers into talking to you. Keep the list in your pocket or close at hand wherever you go.
pg 224 I believe that the role of business is to make the world a better place for everyone. First, by creating self-esteem through jobs, choices, opportunities, and challenges. And then by focusing our creative minds on innovating for the greater good. .... Anyone who has lived in a poor community knows that the most crippling effect of unemployment is the loss of self-esteem. There is a simple logic at work here. You create self-esteem by creating employment. And so the purpose of business, no matter what any economist tells you, is to create self-esteem.
pg 226 I often ask people whether they'd rather work for a company that is liked, or one that is loved. ONe hundred percent go for LOve. With more of their time spent working, people want that work to mean more to them. THey are searching for identity and they are determined to make a contribution. Great companies respond to this demand by articulating a higher purpose. They inspire people with a call to action that builds identity, focuses on inclusiveness, excites passion, and challenges possibility. And, no doubt, a rock-solid foundation from which it is possilbe to make the world a better place
Even the hard neural sciences are finding evidence through brain scans that cooperating and feeling that we are doing the right thing can really make us feel great. In The New York Times, Natalie Angier summed up Dr. Gregory S. Berns' findings: "The small, brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generoisty over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy."
pg 227 Will the shift towards business taking more responsibility for the world's well-being be easy? No. As with all shifts of power, there are tough issues to be assesed and resolved. Professor Sandra Dawson, Director of the JUdge Institute of Management at Cambridge University in ENgland, highlighted what lies beneath the surface: "THere is a paradox in the sense that if you empower or regenerate, or you enter into a partnership that fundamentally affects the power balance, then it's like a parent and a child. As a parent you enable an independence, which means that a child won't necessarily look at the world the way you do. So if you want to get away from colonial notion of development, then that means you have to take really high risks, because you are enabling things to happen which may not then seem to be exactly what you would have wanted. In other words, you can't empower and secure regenerative actions and at the same time excersize control."
pg 228 THe desire to c ontrol is tough to relinquish, but that is what we must do if we want to start on the journey towards Lovemarks. And let's face it, once you are inspired by the idea of Lovemarks, it becomes impossible to settle for anything less. Tracking Love returns a premium on every conceivable level. As philosopher Daniel Dennet said: "The secret of happiness is to find something more important than you are, and then dedicate your life to it."
.......
From a colleague, a Wharton podcast: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1935
Lovemarks
by Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide, Saatchi & Saatchi (expanded edition)
(I think the title pretty much explains the book! Onto my flags...)
pg 19 Kurt Vonnegut sums it up best: "I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the centre."
When species change, it almost always occurs first at the fringes. Here the population is most sparse and the orthodoxies of the centre are weakest. Here you can flourish isolated from formula and rules, free from the corrosive belief that everything great has already been done.
pg 21 My instinct was to go against the prevailing wisdom. I went to Saatchi & Saatichi people and said, "Here's our Inspirational Dream. We're all going to pull together to stay in the premier league for 24 months. After that, we'll think about making changes, bringing people in and moving people around. I think you can do it, and we're all going to do this thing together." A it turned out, they could. And we did.
In my experience, when you go into most companies what you find is good people and bad management. You can turn that around really quickly by starting with an Inspirational Dream, setting some challenges, and getting everybody focused.
pg 31 One of the realities I faced in business was that I didn't have an MBA. I hadn't been trained in all the rules - so it meant I had to focus on the people: they were the ones who did the real day-to-day business and were close to consumers.
pg 34 The process really only has two steps - so why does everyone find it so hard? It's all because we obsess over the attention part and forget about why we need that attention in the first place: the relationships.
Emotional connections with consumers have to be at the foundation of all our cool marketing moves and innovation tactics. Viral marketing, guerrilla marketing, entertainment marketing, experience marketing - they can all seize attention if they are done right, but once they have it, they have nowhere much to put it. Nothing to build, nothing to add to, nothing to value or care about.
pg 36 Brands can no longer cope with some of the most important challenges we face today as marketers, producers, traders and business people.
- how to cut through the information clutter
- how to connect meaningfully with consumers
- how to create integrated experiences
- how to convince people to commit for life
- how to make the world a better place
Today the stakes have reached a new high. The social fabric is spread more thinly than ever. People are looking for new, emotional connections. They are looking for what they can love. They are insisting on more choice, they have higher expectations, and they need emotional pull to help them make decisions. And, finally, they want more ways to connect with everything in their lives - including brands.
pg 41 Since joining Saatchi & Saatchi, I have given hundreds of presentations around the globe. "Father and Son" is the spot I always play at the end. ... the response never varies. People feel this spot is talking to them personally. The story makes a deep emotional connection.
pg 45 Which brings us right to Emotion Number One. The most fundamental of them all... LOVE.
pg 53 "... but the way I define Love is the selfless promotion of the growth of the other. So to me, if you selflessly promote the growth of your customers and your colleagues, that's true Love. I don't know what more you could do for someone." - Tim Sanders
"Whenever someone asks me to define Love, I usually think for a minute, then I spin around and pin the guy's arm behind his back. Now who's asking the questions?" - Jack Handey, comic
pg 56 When the Love Bug virus hit computers around the world in 2000 I knew I was on the right track. Technocool, hard-edged geeks did the unspeakable: clicked on an unknown attachment. And all because someone said, "I love you." We were onto a profound emotional need.
pg 68 Alan was right onto my ideas about a new state beyond brands. A few weeks later he set up an interview to shake out my thinking and we were off. The results were published as "Trust in the Future" in the September 2000 issue of Fast Company. From the start we were talking tough love. We knew that consumers were cynical, savvy, and selective. They didn't give a stuff about famous brands. They wanted more. I felt the same way. Big-time brand? Big deal! You've got three seconds to impress me. Three seconds to connect with me, to make me fall in Love with your product.
pg 70 I said in the article: "I'm sure that you can charge a premium for brands that people love. And I'm also sure that you can only have one Lovemark in any category." I was sure then, but now I see that I was wrong. Now that we have moved more deeply into Lovemarks we can see that this was way too narrow. The sushi shop on the corner of your block can be a Lovemark to you. Lovemarks can be created by designers, producers, service people, cities, and nations.
The fact is that Lovemarks are created and owned by the people who love them. Where you have a customer in love, you have a Lovemark. Can consumers make Lovemarks out of two products in the same category? As far as I'm concerned, they can do anything they damn well please!
pg 74 But just sitting around waiting for consumers to tell you you're a Lovemark could mean a very long wait. Love is about action. It's about creating a meaningful relationship. It's a constant process of keeping in touch, working with consumers, understanding them, spending time with them. And this is what insightful marketers, empathetic designers, and smart people on the checkout and production line do every day. Now we were ready to create our principles.
Be Passionate. Consumers can smell a fake a mile off. If you're not in Love with your own business, they won't be either.
Involve Customers. They need to be brought into advising on new product development and working up ideas for services. Involve them in everything, but there is no point in just reflecting back what they have already told you. Make your own commitment to change. Be creative.
Celebrate Loyalty. "Will you still love me tomorrow?" Loyalty demands consistency. Change is fine, but both partners must be full participants.
Find, Tell, & Retell Great Stories. Lovemarks are infused with powerful and evocative stories. At their best these grow into mythic tales. They recall the great adventures of the business, its products and their legendary consumers. Storytelling gives luster by opening up new meanings, connections, and feelings.
Accept Responsibility. Lovemarks are, by definition, top of their class for the people who love them. The passion for a Lovemark can be intense. At the far end of the scale people will lay down their lives for a Lovemark. In fact, nations may be some of the most powerful Lovemarks of them all.
pg 76 Constantly testing our ideas against everything that people love, we agreed that Mystery, Sensuality, and Intimacy are made up of the following elements:
Mystery - great stories, past present and future, taps into dreams, myths and icons, inspiration
Sensuality - sound, sight, smell, touch, taste
Intimacy - commitment, empathy, passion
pg 78 We created a test. We decided a brand might be a Lovemark if it matched up to these statements:
- Lovemarks connect companies, their people and their brands
- Lovemarks inspire Loyalty Beyond Reason
- Lovemarks are owned by the people who love them
pg 79 "One way to think about what a Lovemark might be is to consider how a consumer would feel if you took the brand away. What would the person's reaction be? In our business I know if you take away ... she will be angry... So these are measures of an emotional connection and an attachment to the brand that goes beyond reason." - Jim Strengel, Global Marketing Officer, P&G
pg 80 Five things to do tomorrow: Make at least 3 consumer connections a week. The only way to find out what consumers are thinking is to talk to them and listen to what they have to say. They won't say these things to you on visit one - so do repeats.
pg 86 Cecilia Dean understands the elusive charm of Mystery. With her partners Stephen Gan and James Kaliardos, she co-founded in 1991 the extraordinary publication Visionaire. Issuing out of New York three or four times a year, Visionaire is a testament to the power of Mystery. ... I see copies of Visionaire on the tables of Saatchi & Saatchi creatives throughout the world. Why? Because it gives them a heady mix of sophistication and Mystery, inspiring ideas wrapped into a surprising and sensual object.
pg 93 Lovemarks know that the people who love them are passionate, emotional, and often irrational human beings. What they are not are statistics or bullet points in the findings of some nerdy focus group. It's all about listening. Not just keeping your mouth closed between each of your brilliant statements, but really listening.
Tapping into dreams is a powerful way of showing people that we understand their desires and can transform them into delight. The relationship between brands and consumers has been irrevocably changed. The change is a big one. And so are the rewards.
pg 102 Five things to do tomorrow. Ask everyone you work with for a story that reflects what makes your brand special to them. The more diverse the stories, the richer the brand. Ask three friends - people not in the same business - for a story about one of your brands. If they haven't got one, you have work to do.
pg 133 While Intimacy is fundamental to sustaining emotional connections, it is more elusive than Mystery and Sensuality. Why? Because Intimacy has got to be a two-way process. Listening as well as talking. .... Intimacy requires an understanding of what matters to people at a very deep level. And that understanding means that you have to be prepared to reveal yourself as well. Reveal your true feelings. ... Lovemarks are owned by the people who love them. Not by the companies and people who design, produce, market, and distribute them. To act in the knowledge that consumers own Lovemarks calls for radical change. And one of the most radical is opening up to Intimacy. It is only through Intimacy that the barriers of reserve will dissolvee and brands can become Lovemarks.
pg 138 To me commitment is one of the most important and most demanding of the Lovemark attributes. Remember that great definition of the difference between being commited and being involved? In a plate of bacon and eggs, the pig is committed, the chicken is just involved. Long-term commitment - crucial to a Lovemark relationship.
pg 141 I call it "Love in the bank." With Loyalty Beyond Reason, Apple could make mistakes and still be forgiven. This is the reward for a Lovemark. Only Love will get consumers through the bad times when common sense tells them that they should change. Because Apple users loved the product, they were commit ed to it as an idea of themselves. They were Apple people. Loved members of the Apple family.
pg 149 The Love/Respect Axis... low respect + low love = commodities, high love + low respect = fads, high respect + low love = brands, high respect + high love = Lovemarks
pg 156 Shopping is seductive. Erma Bombeck, the voice of the American housewife in the 1960s and 1970s once said: "The chances of going into a store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are about 3 billion to one."
pg 162 My real shopper education started began when I talked my way into a job with Mary Quant. .... We weren't selling makeup at all; we were selling dreams.
pg 174 Five things to do tomorrow. Shake up your ideas. Selling stuff is an ideas business. Spend time in stores you've never ventured into. What are their ideas? What works, what doesn't? Look through the eyes of the shopper. The closer you get to her experience, the richer and smarter your responses.
pg 177 We have to look at people's lives in their entirety, the things they hope for and dream about, the things they fear, the things they love, the things they hate and need and want. What bores them. We need to understand what has meaning and significance for them, not just what they buy and use.
pg 179 I'm looking for research that counts the beats of your heart rather than the fingers of your hand. Research that connects with the inner life of the consumer. Not as statistical constructs. Not as they were. Not as you would like them to be, but as they truly are: living, feeling beings full of fears and desires, hopes and dreams. Kris Kristofferson got it: "A walkin' contradiction/Partly truth and partly fiction."
pg 180 As I got to know some of the women, they'd let me look into their laundry baskets, allow me to check out their cupboards. Some of these people were very poor. Some didn't even have underclothes. The lesson was obvious. While we had been very concerned in our advertising with helping our consumers wash fine fabrics, guess what? Most of them didn't have any! I learned that unless you get to know people and stand beside them as they work, you will find out only what they believe you want to know.
pg 181 At Saatchi & Saatchi we group our research into three approaches. I believe these approaches can transform the way businesses connect with consumers:
1. Climb a mountain
2. Go to the jungle
3. Think like a fish
pg 182 ... Climb a mountain... If you want to look at a tree, stay on the ground. If you want to see the forest, climb a mountain. ... But I also know that when 100,000 people act on their own emotional needs, you had better have some idea of the direction they might turn in. And you probably don't have enough time to knock on each door! ... From this understanding of consumers comes our remarkable evidence that Lovemarks do have huge commercial benefits - in terms of preference, in terms of usage, in terms of future purchase. If you can move your brand into the Lovemark quadrant, it's lifelong relationships, lifetime loyalty, and premium profits.
pg 184 Go to the jungle. ... While focus groups can have a place, they are deeply flawed. They certainly didn't give us rich insights into the Chinese as a people. What they taught us was about the Chinese consumer not as a person...but as a respondent. By bringing them into our environment, asking them our questions, and using our moderator, we were simply gathering information - and we wanted more. Enter Xploring. It's probably the oldest research technique ever used. But despite its effectiveness, most companies seem to have forgotten about it. Ironically, Xploring is far easier to conduct, more affordable, and far more insightful and inspiring than traditional research. Simply put, the Xplorer puts on a pair of comfortable shoes, grabs a backpack, and heads off. There are no one-way viewing mirrors. No projective techniques. Just interaction, observation, and lots of conversation.
pg 188 The Maori of Aotearoa, New Zealand, say: "If you want to catch a fish, first learn to think like a fish." Working with consumers and learning to think and feel as they do is how Lovemarks happen. We have already seen how powerful it can be to go out and join consumers where they life. To participate, not just observe. Another successful idea is to work with consumers to develop insights. I am not talking focus groups here, but interactive sessions where consumers can make a specific difference to design, service, production, distribution.
pg 205 Five things to do tomorrow. Get out of the office. Your Inspirational Consumers won't come to you - and they don't live in the office down the hall. Ask the great questions. Write down a list of six questions that will stimulate your customers into talking to you. Keep the list in your pocket or close at hand wherever you go.
pg 224 I believe that the role of business is to make the world a better place for everyone. First, by creating self-esteem through jobs, choices, opportunities, and challenges. And then by focusing our creative minds on innovating for the greater good. .... Anyone who has lived in a poor community knows that the most crippling effect of unemployment is the loss of self-esteem. There is a simple logic at work here. You create self-esteem by creating employment. And so the purpose of business, no matter what any economist tells you, is to create self-esteem.
pg 226 I often ask people whether they'd rather work for a company that is liked, or one that is loved. ONe hundred percent go for LOve. With more of their time spent working, people want that work to mean more to them. THey are searching for identity and they are determined to make a contribution. Great companies respond to this demand by articulating a higher purpose. They inspire people with a call to action that builds identity, focuses on inclusiveness, excites passion, and challenges possibility. And, no doubt, a rock-solid foundation from which it is possilbe to make the world a better place
Even the hard neural sciences are finding evidence through brain scans that cooperating and feeling that we are doing the right thing can really make us feel great. In The New York Times, Natalie Angier summed up Dr. Gregory S. Berns' findings: "The small, brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generoisty over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy."
pg 227 Will the shift towards business taking more responsibility for the world's well-being be easy? No. As with all shifts of power, there are tough issues to be assesed and resolved. Professor Sandra Dawson, Director of the JUdge Institute of Management at Cambridge University in ENgland, highlighted what lies beneath the surface: "THere is a paradox in the sense that if you empower or regenerate, or you enter into a partnership that fundamentally affects the power balance, then it's like a parent and a child. As a parent you enable an independence, which means that a child won't necessarily look at the world the way you do. So if you want to get away from colonial notion of development, then that means you have to take really high risks, because you are enabling things to happen which may not then seem to be exactly what you would have wanted. In other words, you can't empower and secure regenerative actions and at the same time excersize control."
pg 228 THe desire to c ontrol is tough to relinquish, but that is what we must do if we want to start on the journey towards Lovemarks. And let's face it, once you are inspired by the idea of Lovemarks, it becomes impossible to settle for anything less. Tracking Love returns a premium on every conceivable level. As philosopher Daniel Dennet said: "The secret of happiness is to find something more important than you are, and then dedicate your life to it."
.......
From a colleague, a Wharton podcast: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1935
19.4.08
How Should You Handle Your Underperformers?
I have a new toy, Google reader, and in trying to consolidate all my email newsletters, I came across this article. I really like this approach, and am keen to try it (not that I'm hopeful for any low performers to cross my path anytime soon!). This excerpt in particular jumped out at me: it's a cross between Bob Prosen's wise words and the 'main things' concept from Monday Morning Leadership. Awesome stuff!
According to Joseph Weintraub, a professor of management at Babson College, performance issues with managers most often “revolve around a common lack of understanding of expectations between managers and their bosses.” One way to diagnose this, he says, is to ask the manager to write down the “three most important things that they get paid to do. Then the manager’s boss would independently do the same exercise for the manager.”
After both have finished the exercise, they would compare results. “In the majority of cases, the lists look dramatically different, with a ‘hit rate’ of about one out of three expectations in common,” Weintraub says. “With this data, the boss and manager can align expectations more clearly to help the manager to focus on doing the ‘right things.’”
How Should You Handle Your Underperformers?
Posted by Paul Michelman on April 17, 2008 10:34 AM
You simply can’t tolerate underperformance. Budgets are too tight, margins are too close, and the need for growth is too overwhelming for even the largest organizations to be carrying any dead weight.
For overburdened executives, often the first instinct is to drop underperforming managers. After all, who has the bandwidth to deal with them? “Underperformers take an inordinate amount of energy to manage,” says Jim Bolton, CEO of Ridge Associates, a communications consulting firm. “You not only have to manage their performance, but, as chronic offenders, they become problems in your performance.”
Look before you leap
Firing and replacing key managers is an arduous and time-consuming task. Not only is the separation process fraught with pain and risk, but according to Michael Watkins, author of The First 90 Days (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), the manager you hire may take six months or more before she produces any value.
Thus many executives don’t confront problem behavior at all, Bolton says, “They find workarounds: they avoid the person, they’re vague in giving feedback, and they often end up with more work to do in trying to compensate for these underperformers. One executive I worked with reorganized his 1,000-person division so he could make an underperformer someone else’s problem,” he says. “But ultimately the choice comes down to fish or cut bait.”
In making that choice, experts say, you owe it to yourself, your organization, and to the manager in question to take at least one shot at diagnosing and addressing the underlying causes of unsatisfactory performance— especially if the employee has shown value in the past. To do so, consider this advice from the experts.
Diagnose and prescribe
Before you can solve the dilemma of an underperforming manager, you need to establish the details of the problem. Begin by carefully evaluating the manager’s results. “What is the manager doing or not doing?” asks John Baldoni, the author of several books on leadership. “Is he making the numbers? If not, why not?” Next, Baldoni says, look at 360- degree results if you have them.
“What are peers, bosses, and employees saying about the manager?” You should also do your own 360, asking key stakeholders and peers about the manager’s performance.
In addition, Baldoni suggests asking the manager to provide his view on why his performance is sub par. “The reasons could vary from lack of support from you (the boss); inadequate resources in people, budget, and time”; to myriad other factors. “The manager may also be facing problems outside the office with spouse, children, or parent care.” Then consider talent/skill fit: “Ask yourself if this manager is in the right position,” Baldoni says. “Does he have the right talent to do the job as well as the skills to perform? Talent you cannot
coach; skills you can develop.”
According to Joseph Weintraub, a professor of management at Babson College, performance issues with managers most often “revolve around a common lack of understanding of expectations between managers and their bosses.” One way to diagnose this, he says, is to ask the manager to write down the “three most important things that they get paid to do. Then the manager’s boss would independently do the same exercise for the manager.”
After both have finished the exercise, they would compare results. “In the majority of cases, the lists look dramatically different, with a ‘hit rate’ of about one out of three expectations in common,” Weintraub says. “With this data, the boss and manager can align expectations more clearly to help the manager to focus on doing the ‘right things.’”
Give solutions reasonable time to take
Bolton cautions executives to maintain realistic expectations for a turnaround in performance. “It takes six weeks or longer for people to change behavioral patterns,” he says. If you give a manager an appropriate amount of time and he is still not meeting the expectations you clearly laid out, Bolton says, “you’ll have to decide if their continued performance is worth the price your business pays for the status quo.”
This article appeared in the March 2004 issue of Harvard Management Update.
http://conversationstarter.hbsp.com/2008/04/will_you_help_or_heave_your_un.html
According to Joseph Weintraub, a professor of management at Babson College, performance issues with managers most often “revolve around a common lack of understanding of expectations between managers and their bosses.” One way to diagnose this, he says, is to ask the manager to write down the “three most important things that they get paid to do. Then the manager’s boss would independently do the same exercise for the manager.”
After both have finished the exercise, they would compare results. “In the majority of cases, the lists look dramatically different, with a ‘hit rate’ of about one out of three expectations in common,” Weintraub says. “With this data, the boss and manager can align expectations more clearly to help the manager to focus on doing the ‘right things.’”
How Should You Handle Your Underperformers?
Posted by Paul Michelman on April 17, 2008 10:34 AM
You simply can’t tolerate underperformance. Budgets are too tight, margins are too close, and the need for growth is too overwhelming for even the largest organizations to be carrying any dead weight.
For overburdened executives, often the first instinct is to drop underperforming managers. After all, who has the bandwidth to deal with them? “Underperformers take an inordinate amount of energy to manage,” says Jim Bolton, CEO of Ridge Associates, a communications consulting firm. “You not only have to manage their performance, but, as chronic offenders, they become problems in your performance.”
Look before you leap
Firing and replacing key managers is an arduous and time-consuming task. Not only is the separation process fraught with pain and risk, but according to Michael Watkins, author of The First 90 Days (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), the manager you hire may take six months or more before she produces any value.
Thus many executives don’t confront problem behavior at all, Bolton says, “They find workarounds: they avoid the person, they’re vague in giving feedback, and they often end up with more work to do in trying to compensate for these underperformers. One executive I worked with reorganized his 1,000-person division so he could make an underperformer someone else’s problem,” he says. “But ultimately the choice comes down to fish or cut bait.”
In making that choice, experts say, you owe it to yourself, your organization, and to the manager in question to take at least one shot at diagnosing and addressing the underlying causes of unsatisfactory performance— especially if the employee has shown value in the past. To do so, consider this advice from the experts.
Diagnose and prescribe
Before you can solve the dilemma of an underperforming manager, you need to establish the details of the problem. Begin by carefully evaluating the manager’s results. “What is the manager doing or not doing?” asks John Baldoni, the author of several books on leadership. “Is he making the numbers? If not, why not?” Next, Baldoni says, look at 360- degree results if you have them.
“What are peers, bosses, and employees saying about the manager?” You should also do your own 360, asking key stakeholders and peers about the manager’s performance.
In addition, Baldoni suggests asking the manager to provide his view on why his performance is sub par. “The reasons could vary from lack of support from you (the boss); inadequate resources in people, budget, and time”; to myriad other factors. “The manager may also be facing problems outside the office with spouse, children, or parent care.” Then consider talent/skill fit: “Ask yourself if this manager is in the right position,” Baldoni says. “Does he have the right talent to do the job as well as the skills to perform? Talent you cannot
coach; skills you can develop.”
According to Joseph Weintraub, a professor of management at Babson College, performance issues with managers most often “revolve around a common lack of understanding of expectations between managers and their bosses.” One way to diagnose this, he says, is to ask the manager to write down the “three most important things that they get paid to do. Then the manager’s boss would independently do the same exercise for the manager.”
After both have finished the exercise, they would compare results. “In the majority of cases, the lists look dramatically different, with a ‘hit rate’ of about one out of three expectations in common,” Weintraub says. “With this data, the boss and manager can align expectations more clearly to help the manager to focus on doing the ‘right things.’”
Give solutions reasonable time to take
Bolton cautions executives to maintain realistic expectations for a turnaround in performance. “It takes six weeks or longer for people to change behavioral patterns,” he says. If you give a manager an appropriate amount of time and he is still not meeting the expectations you clearly laid out, Bolton says, “you’ll have to decide if their continued performance is worth the price your business pays for the status quo.”
This article appeared in the March 2004 issue of Harvard Management Update.
http://conversationstarter.hbsp.com/2008/04/will_you_help_or_heave_your_un.html
12.4.08
The Cluetrain Manifesto
The End of Business as Usual
by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searis, David Weinberger
from the intro.... A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies. .... Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.
If you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get... we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings - and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.
To read the 95 Theses: http://www.cluetrain.com/ (you can also read the entire book for free)
my flags...
pg 2 ... The wicked witch won't really push you into the oven, honey, but watch out for AK-47s at recess. Amazingly, we learn to live with it. Human beings are incredibly resilient. We know it's all temporary, that we can't freeze the good times or hold back the bad. We roll with the punches, regroup, rebuild, pick up the pieces, take another shot. We come to understand that life is just like that. And this seemingly simple understanding is the see of a profound wisdom.
It is also the source of a deep hunger that pervades modern life - a longing for something entirely different from the reality reinforced by everyday experience. We long for more connection between what we do for a living and what we genuinely care about, for work that's more than clock-watching drudgery. We long for release from anonymity, to be seen as who we feel ourselves to be rather than as the sum of abstract metrics and parameters. We long to be part of a world that makes sense rather than accept the accidental alienation imposed by market forces too large to grasp, to even contemplate.
And this longing is not mere wistful nostalgia, not just some unreconstructed adolescent dream. It is living evidence of heart, of what makes us most human.
But companies don't like us human. They leverage our longing for their own ends. If we feel inadequate, there's a product that will fill the the hole, a bit of fetishistic magic that will make us complete. Perhaps a new car would do the trick. Maybe a trip to the Caribbean or that new CD or a nice shiny set of Ginsu steak knives. Anything, everything, just to get more stuff. Our role is to consume.
pg 16 While collaboration has been paid much lip service within corporations, few have attempted it beyond their own boundaries. Ironically, companies that remain "secure" within those boundaries will be cut off from the global marketplace with which they must engage in order to survive and prosper.
pg 17 Instead, the future business of businesses that have a future will be about subtle differences, not wholesale conformity; about diversity, not homogeneity; about breaking rules, not enforcing them; about pushing the envelope, not punching the clock; about invitation, not protection; about doing it first, not doing it "right"; about making it better, not making it perfect; about telling the truth, not spinning bigger lies; about turning people on, not "packaging" them; and perhaps above all, about building convivial communities and knowledge ecologies, not leveraging demographic sectors.
pg 23 The long history of distrust between workers and management didn't start with the likes of Karl Marx or the AFL-CIO. It's based more on fallout from the ideas of people like Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford, ideas like "scientific management" and Theory X. Underlying these questionable principles that have done so much to shape the assumptions of business-as-usual is the premise that workers are lazy, unwilling, even stupid. Today, this premise translates into the near-certainty that employees are pilfering company time, collecting a paycheck while hanging out on the web all day. They probably are. But that's a symptom, not a cause.
pg 23 And unless your industry is very "mature" - which really means ready for the bone yard - your market isn't wearing pinstripe suits anymore, either. ... was anybody ever this straight or this stupid? Are they now? If not, what does this say about current approaches to online marketing? In many cases, your workers are your market. Come out of the bunker once in a while, see what they're up to - it could be your future.
pg 35 Dig deeper. Down to the sites that never entertained the hope of Buck One. They owe nobody anything. Not advertisers, not VC producers, not you. Put your ear to those tracks and listen to what's coming like a freight train. What you'll hear is the sound of passion unhinged, people who have had it up to here with white-bread culture, hooking up to form the biggest goddam garage band the world has ever seen. ... What are these underbelly sites about? What's a rock concert about? How about creation, exploring a visceral and shared collective memory we've been brainwashed into believing never existed?
pg 37 So the bottom line is: you can play int he Internet headspace as well as anyone. There are just three conditions: 1) you have to let your people play for you, since there's really nobody else at home; 2) you have to play, not something more serious and goal orientated; and 3) related to the previous, you have to have at least some tenuous notion of what "headspace" might mean. It's not in the dictionary. But you can ask around. Get the general hang of the thing. If you figure it out, we'll think you're cool and consume mass quantities of all your wonderful products. See how easy life can be when you loosen up a little?
pg 44 ... I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I will use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. His ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time. - John Jay Chapman, Commencement address to the graduating class Hobart College, 1900
pg 49 Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, discusses bricolage as the opportunism of those who work with their hands, creating stuff out of whatever is lying about. The Web is group bricolage. Individuals build it without working from a master plan. They take pieces of that work - stealing gifs, formats, links - and create new pages. This makes the Web unpredictable, creative, and always the result of human hands.
pg 50 Rick may believe he's good at multitasking, but I don't believe it. Humans can't multitask - we can't pay attention to two things simultaneously. You can multitask? Fine. Then read a book and write one at the same time. No, multitasking is really just rapid attention-switching. And that'd be a useful skill, except it takes us a second or two to engage in the new situation we've graced with our focus. So, the sum total of attention is actually decreased as we multitask. Slicing your attention, in other words, is less like slicing potatoes than like slicing plums: you always lose some of the juice.
pg 59 The Saturn mechanic was speaking for his company in a new way: honestly, openly, probably without his boss's explicit sanction. He gave away secrets, took a risk, was humanized - and he greatly served the interests of Saturn. He and others like him are changing the way Saturn supports its customers. And Saturn corporate might not even know it's happening. This puts a completely different spin on "talk is cheap". The mechanic's e-mail didn't cost Saturn a nickel. He wrote it on his own time. Companies need to harness this sort of caring and let its viral enthusiasm be communicated in employee's own voices. Pay a little, get a lot. Talk is cheap.
pg 65 Hart Scientific, Inc. posted a convenient comparison of conversational writing versus traditional writing on their Website. They have two versions of the Y2K compliance page. You can tell them apart:
Noncompliance issues could arise if Hart Scientific manufactured products are combined with other manufacturer's products. Hart cannot test all possible system configurations in which Hart manufactured products could be incorporated. Our products currently test as being compliant and will continue to operate correctly after January 1, 2000. However, customers must test integrated systems to see if components work with Hart Scientific manufactured products. Hart makes no representation or warranty concerning non-Hart manufactured products.
And...
If you're using our equipment with someone else's gear, who the hell knows what's going to happen. We sure don't, so how can we promise you something specific, or even vague for that matter? We can't, so we won't. However, we love our customers and like always we'll do whatever is reasonable to solve whatever problems come up, if there are any.
We seem to know, intuitively, when something spoken, written, or recorded is sincere and honest - when it comes from another person's heart, rather than being a synthesis of corporatespeak filtered by myriad iterations of editing, trimming, and targeting. There's an inherent pomposity in much of what passes for corporate communication today. Missing are the voice, humor, and simple sense of worth and honesty that characterize person-to-person conversation.
pg 67 There is no longer a single source for "The Truth". You can no longer download the corporate PR campaign as reality and go from there. You are now hearing many voices, many "truths", and will have to pick and choose and integrate. A company's fear is that a lone voice with an axe to grind will make up a "truth" as plausible as anything the Marketing department has come up with, but harmful to the company, and it'll be adopted as the "truth" irrespective of the facts.
The reality is that when malicious propaganda happens (and it will happen), the truth will out. That is the glorious thing about the markets of opinion; no opinion remains unchallenged. This is the real fear many corporations have of the markets of opinion, that their white propaganda - they are the Galahads of the industry, pure and good and perfect - will also not survive the challenges of the market of opinions. They're right, they won't. Cope. The corporations will be revealed to be made up of fallible human beings. Just like us. - Brian Hurt, email to cluetrain.com
pg 68 A critical aspect of success with large numbers of customers lies in listening to them. It's not enough for employees to talk to customers. There must be a way for the fruits of employee conversations to trickle back into an organization's plans. When Sun started to address the problem of providing technical support to the Java developer community, we made a glaring error. We assumed our answers to technical questions were more valuable than answers from sources outside our group, than answers from our customers.
pg 96 Everyone who knows how to point and click can gather tracks from their favourite musicians and assemble their own albums. Production and distribution are so cheap and easy that the market can do it for itself. That leaves the recording industry with almost nothing but the role of marketing, a task they generally haven't grasped very well when it comes to the Web because they're too busy trying to squelch what they rightly see as a threat to their hegemony. Recording companies thought they were originators but instead found they were intermediaries. And the most efficient markets tend to have the fewest intermediaries.
pg 97 It doesn't take a genius to see that what the MP3 is doing to the music business, the widespread availability of reading matter on the web will do to the publishing industry. It's already happening. And it will take off like wildfire the moment truly readable, portable computer displays enter the mainstream. (Amanda's note: fastforward to 2008 and Amazon's Kindle).
pg 106 So what's a business to do? People aren't going to simply repeat messages. You can't shut them up - at least not for long - and you can't make them mouth words they don't believe any more than you could get your teenaged children, your spouse, your friends, or anyone to. Save your discipline for the few renegades who, through malice or ignorance, spill beans that need to be kept in the can. Expend your efforts instead on building a company that stands for something worthwhile, so that you can't wait to unleash every single one of your voices into the wilds of the new global conversation.
pg 114 What's happening to the market is precisely what should - and will - happen to marketing. Marketing needs to become a craft. Recall that craftworkers listen to the material they're forming, shaping the pot to the feel of the clay, designing the house to fit with and even reveal the landscape. The stuff of marketing is the market itself. Marketing can't become a craft until it can hear the new - the old - sound of its markets. By listening, marketing will re-learn how to talk.
pg 123 To have a conversation, you have to be comfortable being human - acknowledging you don't have all the answers, being eager to learn from someone else and to build new ideas together. You can only have a conversation if you're not afraid to be wrong. Otherwise, you're not conversing, you're just declaiming, speechifying, or reading what's on the PowerPoints. To converse, you have to be willing to be wrong in front of another person. Conversations occur only between equals. The time your boss's boss asked you at a meeting about your project's deadline was not a conversation. The time you sat with your boss's boss for an hour in the Polynesian-themed bar while on a business trip and you really talked, got past the corporate bullshit, told each other the truth about the dangers ahead, and ended up talking about your kids - maybe that was a conversation.
pg 132 There's a dark side to self-reliance. It can encourage a type of arrogant cynicism that reacts to anything that the business tries to do for you with: "I can do it better than than that." In this view of the world, there's what I can do with my own two hands and then there's red tape. To the Web cult of self-reliance, the business is not only an obstacle, it's them, the other.
Yet if we know that routing a customer comment through the standard structures of the Fort will result in a content-free form letter being sent out six weeks later, we will sit down and bang out an email immediately that actually addresses the customer's concern. Self-reliance breeds disengagement with the business but more direct engagement with the real work of business.
We are seeing, then, a realignment of loyalties, from resting comfortably in the assumed paternalism of Fort Business to an aggressive devotion to making life better for customers. The business isn't a machine anymore, it's a resource I alone and we together can use to make a customer happy.
pg 134 A couple weeks after arriving, he called me into his office to bond with me and also, not incidentally, to find out when the next wave of marketing materials would be ready. I said I didn't know. Why not? he demanded. I replied that I had a really well-motivated team of professionals who were moving heaven and earth to get it all done; it would be done at the earliest possible moment.
He looked at me in amazement. And gave up on me.
Now, I will admit that as COO, he needed to have some sense of the timing of events. For example, he might have needed to know when the materials would be ready because of an upcoming sales meeting. And in such a case I would have told him what I thought would be ready. And if he wanted it sooner, I would have warned him that some of it would be of poor quality. But, in fact, there was no upcoming event. He managed by holding people to deadlines. I managed by holding people to people.
pg 135 ... If not living by deadlines is unrealistic, it's just as unrealistic to think that a motivated group of people, working hard, will get things done by a particular moment just because you set that moment as the endpoint. .... Instead, let's leave open the possibility that deadlines are frequently a weapon used by managers who assume that workers are basically slackers. In fact, hyperlinked teams - ruled by the laws of connection - are motivated by a genuine desire to turn out a product or help a customer. They will work as hard as they can to do right by their customers and their coworkers. They know better than anyone, in many instances, when the work can realistically be finished. Managing them simply means asking them.
pg 140 What's gone wrong here is time. Because we are so geared towards heroic presentations, we keep our work under wraps until we go public with it (that is, publish it) at the big meeting. Until that moment, no one is allowed to look at it without our permission. It is secret. But the Web is changing this...
So, you'll be given an assignment, and, just as before, you'll retire to your cubicle, but only for about half an hour. You'll write up some initial ideas, post them to the intranet, this feels like saving them to a shared folder - and you'll send out mail to the poeple you think can help you with this. (Here's how much attention you'll pay to where these people are located in the org chart: zero.) Your email will say, and I quote:
Old Man Withers wants me to solve the Parchesi problem in Tahiti. By next month! Yikes! So, I posted a couple of ideas at https://rsmythe.megacocorp.com/parchesi. I also put in some links to Donkeyballs' (oops, I mean Donerby's) bogus report from last year, the one that didn't see the crisis coming. You can always count on Donkeyballs. ;) There are also some links to a couple of sites I found when I did a search at the usual-suspect search sites. Let me know what you think. And remember, the doc I posted is just a bunch of BS. Kick it around, and let's get this thing going...
pg 142 Of course, majority vote isn't the only way to make decisions. There's consensus, compromises, negotiations of every stripe, even counting eeny meeny. Yet for all this richness, in business we default to autocratic rulings. It seems a shame.
So, two outcomes are likely as the work of business increasingly moves online. First, we'll see more ways of deciding because we're seeing more ways of associating. Second, an important part of every project will be how you are going to decide. (Amanda's note: this speaks to Ram Charan's messages about the importance of decision making as leaders, as well as Crucial Conversations' info on decision making in dialogue).
pg 151 We live in stories. We breathe stories. Most of our best conversatons are about stories. Stories are a big step sidewise and up from information. ... So, stories are not a lot like information. But they are they way we understand. How to apply this to your workaday world? You already have. When you are telling someone how you won this account or lost that one, when you are explaining why the competitor's trade-show booth was a disaster, or when you are telling a financial analyst how the market got to be as wacky as it is, you're already telling stories. You can't help it. You're human. Stories are how we make sense of things. Anything else is just information.
pg 152 Seven Ways to Tell Stories
1. Ban the opening joke. Begin your next PowerPoint presentation by saying, "Let me tell you a story..." and then recount what made the market the way it is, what got your company to come up with such an incredible product, and what obstacles particular customers faced and overcame by using your product.
2. Make sure the forms you use to "collect knowledge" have big empty boxes in them so the story can be told.
3. Every meeting with a potential partner, every exciting sales meeting, every important encounter with customers can best be told as a story. Do so.
4. Turn your next white paper into a narrative.
5. Collect the stories of your business and publish them on an intranet site.
6. Reward the tellers of good stories. They're the people everyone's listening to anyway.
7. Rewrite your mission statement as a corporate story. In fact, wouldn't a narrative version of an annual report help the company more than the usual hearty prose and canned snaps of happy employees?
pg 171 The Web got built by people who chose to build it. The lesson is: don't wait for somone to show you how. Learn from your spontaneous mistakes, not from safe prescriptions and cautiously analyzed procedures. Don't try to keep people from going wrong by repeating the mantra of how to get it right.
pg 177 Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes. - Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish journalist, 1991
pg 181 And next time you wonder what you're allowed to day at work, online, downtown at the public libary, just say whatever the hell you feel like saying. Anyone asks you, tell 'em it's OK. Tell 'em you read about it in a book. Put that in your demonic paradox and smoke it.
pg 182 Fact is, we don't care about business - per se, per diem, au gratin. Given half a chance , we'd burn the whole constellation of obsolete business concepts to the waterline. Cost of sales and bottom lines and profit margins - if you're a company, that's your problem. But if you think of yourself as a company, you've got much bigger worries. We strongly suggest that you repeat the following mantra as often as possible until you feel better: "I am not a company. I am a human being."
pg 183 Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning , a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, whre play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the busines of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not perishing form the earth forever. Yeah. Imagine that.
by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searis, David Weinberger
from the intro.... A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies. .... Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.
If you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get... we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings - and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.
To read the 95 Theses: http://www.cluetrain.com/ (you can also read the entire book for free)
my flags...
pg 2 ... The wicked witch won't really push you into the oven, honey, but watch out for AK-47s at recess. Amazingly, we learn to live with it. Human beings are incredibly resilient. We know it's all temporary, that we can't freeze the good times or hold back the bad. We roll with the punches, regroup, rebuild, pick up the pieces, take another shot. We come to understand that life is just like that. And this seemingly simple understanding is the see of a profound wisdom.
It is also the source of a deep hunger that pervades modern life - a longing for something entirely different from the reality reinforced by everyday experience. We long for more connection between what we do for a living and what we genuinely care about, for work that's more than clock-watching drudgery. We long for release from anonymity, to be seen as who we feel ourselves to be rather than as the sum of abstract metrics and parameters. We long to be part of a world that makes sense rather than accept the accidental alienation imposed by market forces too large to grasp, to even contemplate.
And this longing is not mere wistful nostalgia, not just some unreconstructed adolescent dream. It is living evidence of heart, of what makes us most human.
But companies don't like us human. They leverage our longing for their own ends. If we feel inadequate, there's a product that will fill the the hole, a bit of fetishistic magic that will make us complete. Perhaps a new car would do the trick. Maybe a trip to the Caribbean or that new CD or a nice shiny set of Ginsu steak knives. Anything, everything, just to get more stuff. Our role is to consume.
pg 16 While collaboration has been paid much lip service within corporations, few have attempted it beyond their own boundaries. Ironically, companies that remain "secure" within those boundaries will be cut off from the global marketplace with which they must engage in order to survive and prosper.
pg 17 Instead, the future business of businesses that have a future will be about subtle differences, not wholesale conformity; about diversity, not homogeneity; about breaking rules, not enforcing them; about pushing the envelope, not punching the clock; about invitation, not protection; about doing it first, not doing it "right"; about making it better, not making it perfect; about telling the truth, not spinning bigger lies; about turning people on, not "packaging" them; and perhaps above all, about building convivial communities and knowledge ecologies, not leveraging demographic sectors.
pg 23 The long history of distrust between workers and management didn't start with the likes of Karl Marx or the AFL-CIO. It's based more on fallout from the ideas of people like Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford, ideas like "scientific management" and Theory X. Underlying these questionable principles that have done so much to shape the assumptions of business-as-usual is the premise that workers are lazy, unwilling, even stupid. Today, this premise translates into the near-certainty that employees are pilfering company time, collecting a paycheck while hanging out on the web all day. They probably are. But that's a symptom, not a cause.
pg 23 And unless your industry is very "mature" - which really means ready for the bone yard - your market isn't wearing pinstripe suits anymore, either. ... was anybody ever this straight or this stupid? Are they now? If not, what does this say about current approaches to online marketing? In many cases, your workers are your market. Come out of the bunker once in a while, see what they're up to - it could be your future.
pg 35 Dig deeper. Down to the sites that never entertained the hope of Buck One. They owe nobody anything. Not advertisers, not VC producers, not you. Put your ear to those tracks and listen to what's coming like a freight train. What you'll hear is the sound of passion unhinged, people who have had it up to here with white-bread culture, hooking up to form the biggest goddam garage band the world has ever seen. ... What are these underbelly sites about? What's a rock concert about? How about creation, exploring a visceral and shared collective memory we've been brainwashed into believing never existed?
pg 37 So the bottom line is: you can play int he Internet headspace as well as anyone. There are just three conditions: 1) you have to let your people play for you, since there's really nobody else at home; 2) you have to play, not something more serious and goal orientated; and 3) related to the previous, you have to have at least some tenuous notion of what "headspace" might mean. It's not in the dictionary. But you can ask around. Get the general hang of the thing. If you figure it out, we'll think you're cool and consume mass quantities of all your wonderful products. See how easy life can be when you loosen up a little?
pg 44 ... I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I will use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. His ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time. - John Jay Chapman, Commencement address to the graduating class Hobart College, 1900
pg 49 Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, discusses bricolage as the opportunism of those who work with their hands, creating stuff out of whatever is lying about. The Web is group bricolage. Individuals build it without working from a master plan. They take pieces of that work - stealing gifs, formats, links - and create new pages. This makes the Web unpredictable, creative, and always the result of human hands.
pg 50 Rick may believe he's good at multitasking, but I don't believe it. Humans can't multitask - we can't pay attention to two things simultaneously. You can multitask? Fine. Then read a book and write one at the same time. No, multitasking is really just rapid attention-switching. And that'd be a useful skill, except it takes us a second or two to engage in the new situation we've graced with our focus. So, the sum total of attention is actually decreased as we multitask. Slicing your attention, in other words, is less like slicing potatoes than like slicing plums: you always lose some of the juice.
pg 59 The Saturn mechanic was speaking for his company in a new way: honestly, openly, probably without his boss's explicit sanction. He gave away secrets, took a risk, was humanized - and he greatly served the interests of Saturn. He and others like him are changing the way Saturn supports its customers. And Saturn corporate might not even know it's happening. This puts a completely different spin on "talk is cheap". The mechanic's e-mail didn't cost Saturn a nickel. He wrote it on his own time. Companies need to harness this sort of caring and let its viral enthusiasm be communicated in employee's own voices. Pay a little, get a lot. Talk is cheap.
pg 65 Hart Scientific, Inc. posted a convenient comparison of conversational writing versus traditional writing on their Website. They have two versions of the Y2K compliance page. You can tell them apart:
Noncompliance issues could arise if Hart Scientific manufactured products are combined with other manufacturer's products. Hart cannot test all possible system configurations in which Hart manufactured products could be incorporated. Our products currently test as being compliant and will continue to operate correctly after January 1, 2000. However, customers must test integrated systems to see if components work with Hart Scientific manufactured products. Hart makes no representation or warranty concerning non-Hart manufactured products.
And...
If you're using our equipment with someone else's gear, who the hell knows what's going to happen. We sure don't, so how can we promise you something specific, or even vague for that matter? We can't, so we won't. However, we love our customers and like always we'll do whatever is reasonable to solve whatever problems come up, if there are any.
We seem to know, intuitively, when something spoken, written, or recorded is sincere and honest - when it comes from another person's heart, rather than being a synthesis of corporatespeak filtered by myriad iterations of editing, trimming, and targeting. There's an inherent pomposity in much of what passes for corporate communication today. Missing are the voice, humor, and simple sense of worth and honesty that characterize person-to-person conversation.
pg 67 There is no longer a single source for "The Truth". You can no longer download the corporate PR campaign as reality and go from there. You are now hearing many voices, many "truths", and will have to pick and choose and integrate. A company's fear is that a lone voice with an axe to grind will make up a "truth" as plausible as anything the Marketing department has come up with, but harmful to the company, and it'll be adopted as the "truth" irrespective of the facts.
The reality is that when malicious propaganda happens (and it will happen), the truth will out. That is the glorious thing about the markets of opinion; no opinion remains unchallenged. This is the real fear many corporations have of the markets of opinion, that their white propaganda - they are the Galahads of the industry, pure and good and perfect - will also not survive the challenges of the market of opinions. They're right, they won't. Cope. The corporations will be revealed to be made up of fallible human beings. Just like us. - Brian Hurt, email to cluetrain.com
pg 68 A critical aspect of success with large numbers of customers lies in listening to them. It's not enough for employees to talk to customers. There must be a way for the fruits of employee conversations to trickle back into an organization's plans. When Sun started to address the problem of providing technical support to the Java developer community, we made a glaring error. We assumed our answers to technical questions were more valuable than answers from sources outside our group, than answers from our customers.
pg 96 Everyone who knows how to point and click can gather tracks from their favourite musicians and assemble their own albums. Production and distribution are so cheap and easy that the market can do it for itself. That leaves the recording industry with almost nothing but the role of marketing, a task they generally haven't grasped very well when it comes to the Web because they're too busy trying to squelch what they rightly see as a threat to their hegemony. Recording companies thought they were originators but instead found they were intermediaries. And the most efficient markets tend to have the fewest intermediaries.
pg 97 It doesn't take a genius to see that what the MP3 is doing to the music business, the widespread availability of reading matter on the web will do to the publishing industry. It's already happening. And it will take off like wildfire the moment truly readable, portable computer displays enter the mainstream. (Amanda's note: fastforward to 2008 and Amazon's Kindle).
pg 106 So what's a business to do? People aren't going to simply repeat messages. You can't shut them up - at least not for long - and you can't make them mouth words they don't believe any more than you could get your teenaged children, your spouse, your friends, or anyone to. Save your discipline for the few renegades who, through malice or ignorance, spill beans that need to be kept in the can. Expend your efforts instead on building a company that stands for something worthwhile, so that you can't wait to unleash every single one of your voices into the wilds of the new global conversation.
pg 114 What's happening to the market is precisely what should - and will - happen to marketing. Marketing needs to become a craft. Recall that craftworkers listen to the material they're forming, shaping the pot to the feel of the clay, designing the house to fit with and even reveal the landscape. The stuff of marketing is the market itself. Marketing can't become a craft until it can hear the new - the old - sound of its markets. By listening, marketing will re-learn how to talk.
pg 123 To have a conversation, you have to be comfortable being human - acknowledging you don't have all the answers, being eager to learn from someone else and to build new ideas together. You can only have a conversation if you're not afraid to be wrong. Otherwise, you're not conversing, you're just declaiming, speechifying, or reading what's on the PowerPoints. To converse, you have to be willing to be wrong in front of another person. Conversations occur only between equals. The time your boss's boss asked you at a meeting about your project's deadline was not a conversation. The time you sat with your boss's boss for an hour in the Polynesian-themed bar while on a business trip and you really talked, got past the corporate bullshit, told each other the truth about the dangers ahead, and ended up talking about your kids - maybe that was a conversation.
pg 132 There's a dark side to self-reliance. It can encourage a type of arrogant cynicism that reacts to anything that the business tries to do for you with: "I can do it better than than that." In this view of the world, there's what I can do with my own two hands and then there's red tape. To the Web cult of self-reliance, the business is not only an obstacle, it's them, the other.
Yet if we know that routing a customer comment through the standard structures of the Fort will result in a content-free form letter being sent out six weeks later, we will sit down and bang out an email immediately that actually addresses the customer's concern. Self-reliance breeds disengagement with the business but more direct engagement with the real work of business.
We are seeing, then, a realignment of loyalties, from resting comfortably in the assumed paternalism of Fort Business to an aggressive devotion to making life better for customers. The business isn't a machine anymore, it's a resource I alone and we together can use to make a customer happy.
pg 134 A couple weeks after arriving, he called me into his office to bond with me and also, not incidentally, to find out when the next wave of marketing materials would be ready. I said I didn't know. Why not? he demanded. I replied that I had a really well-motivated team of professionals who were moving heaven and earth to get it all done; it would be done at the earliest possible moment.
He looked at me in amazement. And gave up on me.
Now, I will admit that as COO, he needed to have some sense of the timing of events. For example, he might have needed to know when the materials would be ready because of an upcoming sales meeting. And in such a case I would have told him what I thought would be ready. And if he wanted it sooner, I would have warned him that some of it would be of poor quality. But, in fact, there was no upcoming event. He managed by holding people to deadlines. I managed by holding people to people.
pg 135 ... If not living by deadlines is unrealistic, it's just as unrealistic to think that a motivated group of people, working hard, will get things done by a particular moment just because you set that moment as the endpoint. .... Instead, let's leave open the possibility that deadlines are frequently a weapon used by managers who assume that workers are basically slackers. In fact, hyperlinked teams - ruled by the laws of connection - are motivated by a genuine desire to turn out a product or help a customer. They will work as hard as they can to do right by their customers and their coworkers. They know better than anyone, in many instances, when the work can realistically be finished. Managing them simply means asking them.
pg 140 What's gone wrong here is time. Because we are so geared towards heroic presentations, we keep our work under wraps until we go public with it (that is, publish it) at the big meeting. Until that moment, no one is allowed to look at it without our permission. It is secret. But the Web is changing this...
So, you'll be given an assignment, and, just as before, you'll retire to your cubicle, but only for about half an hour. You'll write up some initial ideas, post them to the intranet, this feels like saving them to a shared folder - and you'll send out mail to the poeple you think can help you with this. (Here's how much attention you'll pay to where these people are located in the org chart: zero.) Your email will say, and I quote:
Old Man Withers wants me to solve the Parchesi problem in Tahiti. By next month! Yikes! So, I posted a couple of ideas at https://rsmythe.megacocorp.com/parchesi. I also put in some links to Donkeyballs' (oops, I mean Donerby's) bogus report from last year, the one that didn't see the crisis coming. You can always count on Donkeyballs. ;) There are also some links to a couple of sites I found when I did a search at the usual-suspect search sites. Let me know what you think. And remember, the doc I posted is just a bunch of BS. Kick it around, and let's get this thing going...
pg 142 Of course, majority vote isn't the only way to make decisions. There's consensus, compromises, negotiations of every stripe, even counting eeny meeny. Yet for all this richness, in business we default to autocratic rulings. It seems a shame.
So, two outcomes are likely as the work of business increasingly moves online. First, we'll see more ways of deciding because we're seeing more ways of associating. Second, an important part of every project will be how you are going to decide. (Amanda's note: this speaks to Ram Charan's messages about the importance of decision making as leaders, as well as Crucial Conversations' info on decision making in dialogue).
pg 151 We live in stories. We breathe stories. Most of our best conversatons are about stories. Stories are a big step sidewise and up from information. ... So, stories are not a lot like information. But they are they way we understand. How to apply this to your workaday world? You already have. When you are telling someone how you won this account or lost that one, when you are explaining why the competitor's trade-show booth was a disaster, or when you are telling a financial analyst how the market got to be as wacky as it is, you're already telling stories. You can't help it. You're human. Stories are how we make sense of things. Anything else is just information.
pg 152 Seven Ways to Tell Stories
1. Ban the opening joke. Begin your next PowerPoint presentation by saying, "Let me tell you a story..." and then recount what made the market the way it is, what got your company to come up with such an incredible product, and what obstacles particular customers faced and overcame by using your product.
2. Make sure the forms you use to "collect knowledge" have big empty boxes in them so the story can be told.
3. Every meeting with a potential partner, every exciting sales meeting, every important encounter with customers can best be told as a story. Do so.
4. Turn your next white paper into a narrative.
5. Collect the stories of your business and publish them on an intranet site.
6. Reward the tellers of good stories. They're the people everyone's listening to anyway.
7. Rewrite your mission statement as a corporate story. In fact, wouldn't a narrative version of an annual report help the company more than the usual hearty prose and canned snaps of happy employees?
pg 171 The Web got built by people who chose to build it. The lesson is: don't wait for somone to show you how. Learn from your spontaneous mistakes, not from safe prescriptions and cautiously analyzed procedures. Don't try to keep people from going wrong by repeating the mantra of how to get it right.
pg 177 Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes. - Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish journalist, 1991
pg 181 And next time you wonder what you're allowed to day at work, online, downtown at the public libary, just say whatever the hell you feel like saying. Anyone asks you, tell 'em it's OK. Tell 'em you read about it in a book. Put that in your demonic paradox and smoke it.
pg 182 Fact is, we don't care about business - per se, per diem, au gratin. Given half a chance , we'd burn the whole constellation of obsolete business concepts to the waterline. Cost of sales and bottom lines and profit margins - if you're a company, that's your problem. But if you think of yourself as a company, you've got much bigger worries. We strongly suggest that you repeat the following mantra as often as possible until you feel better: "I am not a company. I am a human being."
pg 183 Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning , a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, whre play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the busines of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not perishing form the earth forever. Yeah. Imagine that.
9.4.08
Suggested Readings
This from an employee development resource. There are some great titles on here I haven't ready yet...
Money Ball - Lewis, Michael
Wikinomics - Tapscott, Don and Williams, Anthony
Blown to Bits - Evans, Philip and Wurster, Thomas S
Monday Morning Leadership - Cottrell, David
Kiss Theory Goodbye - Prosen, Bob
The World is Flat - Friedman, Thomas L
Blue Ocean Strategy - Kim, W Chan and Mauborgne, Renee
The Tipping Point - Gladwell, Malcolm
Boom Bust & Echo - Food, David K and Stockman, Daniel
Blink - Gladwell, Malcolm
Emotional Intelligence at Work - Weisinger, Hendrie
Walk awhile in my shoes - Harvey, Eric and Ventura, Steve
Money Ball - Lewis, Michael
Wikinomics - Tapscott, Don and Williams, Anthony
Blown to Bits - Evans, Philip and Wurster, Thomas S
Monday Morning Leadership - Cottrell, David
Kiss Theory Goodbye - Prosen, Bob
The World is Flat - Friedman, Thomas L
Blue Ocean Strategy - Kim, W Chan and Mauborgne, Renee
The Tipping Point - Gladwell, Malcolm
Boom Bust & Echo - Food, David K and Stockman, Daniel
Blink - Gladwell, Malcolm
Emotional Intelligence at Work - Weisinger, Hendrie
Walk awhile in my shoes - Harvey, Eric and Ventura, Steve
2.4.08
Recruiting Blogs
I was sent this link by a few kind folks at work. The site has a heavy American contingent, but likely still some valuable intelligence within it's pages that can still be applied to the Canadian recruitment market. Check out the groups...
http://www.recruitingblogs.com/
http://www.recruitingblogs.com/
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