Random Things

Brands get the consumers they deserve. Treat consumers like morons and they act like morons. They don't really pay attention. They use their DVRs with a vengeance, and rip through what we have to offer them. When asked, they will say advertising is something crafted by idiots for idiots. When asked, they will say they can't really remember that Claritin spot. And this can't surprise us, because after all the ad shut them out. It created a cultural artifact so obvious and annoying that no one will waste a second on it.

But if we give the consumer a little credit, they reward us. They watch the ad. They dwell on the ad. They relate to the ad. And they relate to the brand. Give the consumer a little credit and that credit rebounds to the brand.

Jim Collins (author of Good to Great) and Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence) have long advised companies what to do. But both suggest that the secret to high performance for individuals is deciding what not to do.

For instance, if you're reading this column at your desk, somewhere within an arm's length is your "to-do" list. Many of us can't imagine daily life without it. A to-do list focuses our attention and delivers a delicious dose of dopamine to our brains each time we cross off an item.

Peters has nothing against to-do lists, but he says that they're insufficient – that we should also create "to-don't" lists. He recommends that we specify and enumerate what holds us back – the actions, behaviours and obligations that sap our energy, distract our attention and therefore ought to be avoided.

"Get rid of all the clutter that undermines your sense of focus," Peters has advised. Your to-don't list can help you illuminate what belongs on your to-do list. As Peters puts it: "What you decide not to do is probably more important than what you decide to do."

Meanwhile, Collins has reached a similar conclusion. Years ago, when he was a graduate student, a professor told Collins that he wasn't leading a disciplined life, but merely a busy one.

She asked him how he would change his behaviour if he learned one day that he had just inherited $20 million but that he had only 10 more years to live. In that situation, she asked him, what would you stop doing? Thus was born Collins's counterpart to Peters's innovation. He calls it a "stop-doing list" – and he compiles it once a year.

"A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally important, what is not," Collins wrote in 2003. "It is the discipline to discard what does not fit – to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort – that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company or, most important of all, a life."

The key insight of both Peters and Collins is that we spend too much time on addition and not nearly enough on subtraction. Yet it's only by taking away what doesn't matter that allows us to reveal what does matter.

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So I urge you to give the Peters or Collins method a try – and make a list of your own. Lists have a peculiar resonance in our lives – a power to shape our behaviour in ways that other language forms often cannot match.

After all, God didn't offer Moses a few paragraphs of prose on Mount Sinai. Instead, he presented his commandments as a list. And, as it happens, eight out of 10 of them tell us what not to do.

The barriers to obtaining power aren’t so much competitors or external circumstances, but ourselves. If you really want power, you need to be willing to make the tradeoffs required and then get out of your own way. Some of the most important reasons people don’t seek power are:

• The effort required. I don’t know of any powerful people who don’t work a lot. Esserman sleeps little and so does Rudy Crew, the former school superintendent in New York and Miami-Dade County who was named the best school superintendent in the U.S. in the spring of 2008. CEOs travel constantly and are always “onstage,” working and thinking. Great results require enormous energy and effort. Some people think they want power, but aren’t willing to devote the time. As marketing guru Keith Ferrazzi told my class, “you have to work really, really hard. Maybe you’ll get lucky, but don’t count on it.” Studies of genius in every field ranging from art to science to athletics show that while individual talent matters, it is practice and coaching - effort — that is the key to success. Why would attaining power be any different?

• The time spent on strategic relationships. Most people, naturally enough, want to spend their time with friends, family, and close work associates. The problem is that people who are closest to you are also more likely to be close to each other and to have the same information and contacts as you do. In other words, they can provide you mostly redundant information and contacts. That’s why network research consistently shows the importance of weak ties — people whom you don’t know particularly well but who enable you to access different information and social networks.

• Loss of privacy. People in power are under intense and constant public scrutiny. As former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd learned, in positions of great power, there is no such thing as a private dinner. Not only will people be watching your every move, and feeling free to comment on job-irrelevant things like the car you drive and whom you hang out with, when you have power, any mistake you do make won’t be as readily forgiven. Higher power means your actions have higher stakes, and higher consequences means less latitude. This constant scrutiny is stressful, and some people would rather have more privacy and autonomy.

• Fragile egos. People like to feel good about themselves, and one thing that people do to maintain their self-esteem is to engage in self-handicapping. Specifically, if you don’t try — or try too hard — any setback or failure won’t have the same implication for your actual abilities. In the power domain, people sometimes “opt out” of the competition, choosing to believe they are above “playing the game.” That way they don’t have to confront the inevitable setbacks.

The simple reality, even for a high-flyer like Google, is that the best engineers, marketers and project managers truly do have a world of opportunity — and it's unrealistic to think that you can persuade them to stay forever. Nobody expects lifetime employment, on either side of the table. But great people can keep working with you, long after they've stopped working for you. Back at the height of the first Internet boom, we published an article in Fast Company called "Hire Today, Gone Tomorrow." The lessons it offered more than a decade ago are perfectly relevant to what Google and other companies are going through today.

"Forget lifetime employment," the piece argued. "The new goal is lifetime affiliation. Forget such terms as 'ex-employees' and 'former colleagues.' The new term of choice is 'alumni.' Forget all your old ideas about who works for you and how. The day someone walks out the door doesn't mark the end of your relationship with that person. It marks the start of a new stage in that relationship."

Management consulting firms have understood this principle for ages, which is why they're so good at maintaining "alumni" networks. Your former employees (sorry, alumni) can be a powerful source of future business.

It's also possible, literally on the day that people leave, to begin preparing for the day they might return. Just as talented contributors can't be expected to stay forever, there's no reason to expect they will be gone forever. The smart folks at Gensler, the celebrated design firm, have a high-profile program to celebrate the organization's "boomerangs" — valued contributors who have left and then come back, and get an actual boomerang to signify their status.

"All Gensler Boomerangs enjoy a very special relationship with each other and with the firm," reads the letter than accompanies the boomerang. "They're our prodigals returned, the old dogs who teach all the tricks to the new pups, the elite corps that we rely on and are delighted to welcome back. This boomerang is a token of our thanks — a frivolous reminder of the serious value we place on our association."

The most disruptive, unforeseen, and just plain awesome breakthroughs, that reimagine, reinvent, and reconceive a product, a company, a market, an industry, or perhaps even an entire economy rarely come from the single-minded pursuit of the busier and busier busywork of "business." Rather, in the outperformers that I've spent time with and studied, breakthroughs demand (loosely) systematic, structured periods for reflection — to ruminate on, synthesize, and integrate fragments of questions, answers, and thoughts about what's not good enough, what's just plain awful, and how it could be made radically better.

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The catch is that most companies don't know how to reflect. They've been finely engineered, instead, to do. So here's how to craft your own reflection items.

Why. On the odd occasion most boardrooms reflect, reflection often starts with "how." But that's the lowest order question. The biggie, the more productive, provocative question to start with, is: why are we here — really? Here's an example of a "why" reflection item: "Are we really just here to sell more sugar water? Or is there a bigger, more resonant, and fundamentally worthier goal we could — and should — be pursuing, like ensuring no human being goes thirsty?"

What. From why, move to "what." What are the competencies that let you achieve, attain, accomplish your "why"? Does your current "what" support your desired "why" — or not? For example, if you're just here to sell sugar-water, then "innovating" slightly new flavors of soda every few months, and finding novel markets to "sell" it in (read: competencies in product innovation and mass marketing) is probably good enough. But if you have the impertinence to exist for bigger reasons, then you're probably going to upgrade your "what" to support it. Like, for example, if you're here to ensure no human being goes thirsty, then mere humdrum "innovation" of flavors isn't good enough — you're going to have to rethink "what", and redefine a new set of breakthrough competencies (perhaps in radically efficient water cycling).

Which. After "what", ask "which." Which products, services, partners, and assets underpin the most productive, efficient, effective ways for you to bring your competencies to life — and which don't? Does your "which" ignite your "what"? If you're here to "innovate" sugar water, then thinking in terms of orthodox buyers and suppliers might do the trick. But if your "what" is bigger, like slaking the world's thirst, then you're probably going to have to upgrade your "which", too — to, for example, include impoverished, thirsty people, and water-poor communities as vital partners in a micro water (re)distribution grid.

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If that's what to reflect on, here are a few tips for how to reflect better.

Primarify. When many companies reflect, they choose to use third-, fourth-, or fifth-hand data. "Hey, Billy Bob — what do you think of this XYZ survey about ABC, commissioned by 123, for 789?" But nth-hand data is, by definition, an off-the shelf commodity — hence, it's often empty of deeper insight. Better reflection is built on primary data — preferably, face-to-face interaction. So get busy talking to your customers, investors, buyers, suppliers.

Qualify. Garbage in, garbage out: reflection isn't just about numbers. It's about why the numbers happen in the first place, and what the numbers really mean to humans. So to reflect best, you need a rich matrix of "qualitative data" that your questions and answers can germinate in. What does that mean? Just people's perspectives about human experiences.

Simplify. The jargon that's so beloved of boardrooms and beancounters is kryptonite to reflection. The best reflection isn't simplistic — but it is simple, cast in concepts that have meaning outside the boardroom, because it's those concepts that indicate that what you're reflecting has breakthrough potential. "Cross-functionalizing the marketing mix to drive incremental revenue generation opportunities" isn't reflection (and heaven knows few breakthroughs ever lie down that path). Conversely, "we will reduce the number of thirsty people in the world" is a reflective statement — simple, resonant, meaningful.

That's not to say you'll instantly solve every big problem just by reflecting. But you might get a tiny bit closer. And it's those small steps that count.

A research paper shows that people’s compliance with a request can be substantially increased if the requester first gets them to agree with a series of statements unrelated to the request, but selected to induce agreement (mere agreement effect).

...Across five studies, we show that induced mere agreement subtly causes respondents to view the presenter of the statements as similar to themselves, which in turn increases compliance with a request from that same person. We support the similarity explanation by showing that the effect of agreement on compliance is suppressed when agreement is induced to indicate dissimilarity with the interviewer, when the request is made by some other person, and when the artificially high level of agreement is made salient.

Interestingly

We propose that the mere agreement technique can be highly effective because (1) initial agreement and subsequent compliance do not need to be related for the effect to occur, and (2) the initial agreement can be easily induced by statements virtually anyone would agree with.

Why?

we show that this mere agreement effect is due to an increased feeling of similarity with the requester after initial agreement with him/her. This increased similarity leads to increased compliance with any request.

Money is always welcome and notoriety can be nice. Most research academics will cheerfully accept funding and fame. However, the surest way to gain access to the world's brightest students and most brilliant professors is to bring problems that simultaneously goad their curiosity and tap their expertise from unexpected angles. World-class researchers always have their own agendas. They don't need another one from you. But they almost always will make time for smart, passionate people with problems that can make their work more valuable and accessible.

That's why you see cutting-edge molecular gastronomy innovators like Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adria enjoy fruitful and meaty collaborations with top-tier research institutions. They're not just technically brilliant and successful in their own right; they bring novel challenges and unusual constraints that invite creative academic participation. Money isn't irrelevant but it's neither the real or most compelling reason for partnership. You've picked the wrong problem if it's your budget that gets your erstwhile collaborators hot-to-trot. You know you've picked a winner when the academics ask if it would be OK if someone could do a doctoral dissertation based on some slice of the problem you've posed.

This kind of innovation collaboration is fundamentally different from the contract research and development so many Fortune 1000 firms seem to desire from research universities. Crudely put, there's no shortage of cash-strapped companies hoping to "outsource" some of their harder science and engineering problems to a chemistry or metallurgy or biology department because they hope it would be cheaper than doing them in-house. That's a recipe for mutual frustration, not productive partnership.

The provocative problem sets we're talking about aren't investigator-driven but investigator-seductive. That is, researchers go into them confident that they can be solved but not quite sure how. They're betting, and it's a good bet, that they'll learn something interesting and important along the way. Just as important, their students will learn something interesting and important. In the meantime, your problem gets solved and you likely gain insight into a suite of analytic techniques and technologies that can empower your next generation innovations.

via blogs.hbr.org

Psychologists have spent years trying to discover the answer to the question: "What makes innovators different?" In one of the most thorough examinations of the subject, Harvard researchers spent six years and interviewed 3,000 executives to find out. According to the Harvard research, the No.1 skill that separates innovators from noncreative professionals is "associating"—the ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields. The three-year Harvard research project confirms what Jobs told a reporter 15 years earlier: "Creativity is just connecting things."

This notion of making creative associations through seeking out new experiences is worth exploring more closely, as it plays a significant role in the way Steve Jobs has generated one innovative product after another, and another, and another. Jobs is a classic iconoclast, one who aggressively seeks out, attacks, and overthrows conventional ideas. And iconoclasts, especially the successful ones, have an "affinity for new experiences," according to esteemed Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns.

 

Exposure to novel people and places

Steve Jobs doesn't see things differently from the rest of us. Jobs perceives things differently. Vision is not the same as perception; perception separates the innovator from the imitator. Vision is the process by which photons of light hit the photoreceptive cells of the eye's retina and get transmitted as neural impulses to different parts of the brain. Perception, as Berns points out, "is the much more complex process by which the brain interprets these signals." Dozens of individuals saw the graphical user interface at the Xerox PARC facility in Palo Alto, but it was Jobs who [in 1979] perceived it differently. He had an epiphany, a massive jolt of creativity.

The key to "thinking differently" is to perceive things differently through the lenses of a trailblazer. And to see things through these lenses, you must force your brain to make connections it otherwise would have missed. When Steve Jobs studied calligraphy, it was such a novel experience that it ignited his creativity. When Jobs spent time meditating in an apple orchard, he experienced something new and it led to some creative insights. When Jobs visited India in the 1970s, he experienced something radically different from his life in a California suburb. And when Jobs hired musicians, artists, poets, and historians [to build the Macintosh], he was exposing himself to new experiences and novel ways of looking at a problem. Some of Jobs's most creative insights are the direct result of novel experiences either in physical locations or among the people with whom he chose to associate.

Does Steve Jobs see things differently? Yes. Is this skill unique to Jobs? No. You can learn to be more creative as long as you keep in mind that your brain will fight you every step of the way. By pursuing new experiences and thinking differently about common problems, you are asking your brain to expend energy when its natural role is to conserve as much as energy as possible. It's not easy, but by forcing yourself out of your comfort zone—physically and mentally—you will kick-start the firing of synapses, improving the odds of generating new ideas that have the potential of transforming your business and your life.

Sustainability has come to hold two meanings for social enterprises. The first refers, as usual, to the soundness of our organizations' financial footing. The people who pay for a social venture's services are not always the same as those who use them. From a practical standpoint, this doubles our organizations' workload as we pursue the work to provide our products or services plus the work to secure the funding for those products and services. More recently, revenue-generating models have become the ideal;
everyone is searching for a way to survive without perpetual philanthropic infusions.

There are organizations that price their products for their (generally poor) clients and generate funds like any other manufacturer of goods, only with the added plus of making a difference through what they sell. Other organizations look for offshoots of their social work that can be monetized and marketed. The tension between mission and financial urgency can be acute. We must be vigilant about not over-charging the very people we are trying to help, or spending so much time generating a saleable product that the social impact for our clients declines.

The second definition of sustainability refers to the durability of that social benefit. It's wonderful to work in a community and improve lives, but what happens once we've moved on to the next site? Can our clients maintain what we've started or will our constant presence and intervention be required? This issue feeds back into our development of models that scale. We may have to add entirely new programs to our original simple offering to ensure that our efforts have lasting benefits.

The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition posits that there are five stages people go through:

1. Novice
--wants to be given a manual, told what to do, with no decisions possible

2. Advanced beginner
--needs a bit of freedom, but is unable to quickly describe a hierarchy of which parts are more important than others

3. Competent
--wants the ability to make plans, create routines and choose among activities

4. Proficient
--the more freedom you offer, the more you expect, the more you'll get

5. Expert
--writes the manual, doesn't follow it. 

For me this is a quick & easy reference to benchmark my expectations for the people I work with. It's important to recognize that some people are experts and treating them like novices will be counter-productive and unmotivational. You get the best results by giving them the freedom to surprise you. Of course the flip side is also true and if you give a junior person too much freedom you'll probably end up with a mess on your hands