Name: Nettie
Bio: Nettie Reynolds is a digital strategist and teacher. Nettie works with wonderful individuals and companies from all over the world, helping them create and convey their messages to the online world. She prides herself on her diverse base of clients and her customized and unique approach to each client’s needs. Nettie provides training to kick-start e-outreach for companies and individuals and fine tuning of social media initiatives and presence. Nettie’s clients have seen millions in YouTube views, features on DailyKos, Daily Candy, NYTimes, MSNBC.com, Entreprenuer.com, Pink Magazine, Inc.com, Allbusiness.com, Wall St. Journal, BlogCritics and other leading online sites. Her clients have also been featured in notable business, fiction and non-fiction podcast shows including Total Picture Radio, Mark Amtower Direct, Blog Business World Success, Cranky Middle Manager and others.
Posts by :
- That you can safely ignore team social context, because you ignore this at great peril as in the examples of space accidents.
- That there is no way to measure and manage team social contexts, when our assessments measure team social context by measuring eight behaviors against defined standards.
- That managing team social context is expensive and only affordable by big organizations like NASA. This is not true. Developing individuals by managing team contexts is highly efficient. We offer wholesale assessments to 4-D Network Members (see NASAteambuilding.com) and routinely waive all fees for academia and organizations that cannot afford to pay.
- It analyzes complex team and leadership characteristics into simple, manageable components; and
- It aligns all 4-D processes (assessments, workshops, consulting and coaching) around the fundamental four dimensions.
- Our processes took a contractor’s fee pool from 67% to 96% in a $1B+ contract (HNBT page xix). This change was rapid and profound. Moreover, the contractors’ top management credited us with the change; and
- The STEREO project (HNBT page 54), where the government and contractor team monotonically improved in near lockstep. The project leadership reported high correlation of our social context measurements with both team performance and customer perceptions. Perhaps this is a favorite because it was a dramatic early success for us, when we were not as confident about our effectiveness.
- S = Simple: Is it easy to change from the status quo? Will it be overwhelming?
- N = iNvaluable: Does the seller bring expertise, ideas and insights?
- A = Align: Is the product or service aligned with their key objectives?
- P = Priorities: Is it urgent? Do I need to take action now?
- If they don’t call you back, it doesn’t mean they don’t like you or need you.
- When they disappear into a black hole, it’s likely their priorities just shifted.
- The status quo is your biggest competitor; they’ll stay with it as long as possible.
- They’d prefer to go online to do research than talk to a salesperson.
- It’s important to create a plan that not only includes objectives, goals and success measures but takes into the value that is provided to your target audience. Social media is about creating value not creating messages.
- The corner stone of a successful social media initiative is the trust that is developed between people. Break that trust, just as in any relationship, it is a long road to rebuild.
- Social media can influence customer’s perception of the brand, loyalty and purchase behavior. The challenge is walking the line of a good brand steward, where you are true to the brand promise, and being authentic in the conversations of the social web.
How Does Nasa BuildsTeams?
March 30th, 2012For this issue of Cincom Expert Access, we caught up with Dr. Charles Pellerin, who is also the former Director of Astrophysics NASA and author of “How NASA Builds Teams.” Dr. Pellerin talks about the Hubble Space Telescope, a flawed mirror, what storylines mean and shares his insight on the future of the space program.
Nettie: Can you tell us about your book and how you came to understand how the social issues affect leadership decisions and project failure?
Dr. Pellerin: When the Hubble Failure Review Board named a “leadership failure” as the root cause of the flawed mirror, I became extremely curious about social factors and their effect on teams. How did something we never even discussed trump the work of many of the best technical minds in the world? After I assembled the space mission to fix the telescope, I began to research space failures.
I began my inquiry as a Professor in the University of Colorado’s Business School in 1993, reading the reports and books about space accidents. To my surprise, every failure had a social shortfall as the root cause!
Why focus on space accidents? First, when astronauts (and teachers) die in space accidents, the cost of the investigation is irrelevant. Superficial investigations find the technical mistake and move on. Space-accident investigations run for months with dozens of experts engaged. Second, and obviously, I understand the technical issues and know many of the people these reports reference.
In 1995, I began experimenting with commercial workshops, coaching and assessments to manage team social contexts. Experimentation came naturally, as I have a PhD in experimental physics. Our assessments produce quantitative data that we analyzed every-which-way to see what works and what does not.
In 2003, NASA awarded us a large contract to apply our processes to NASA teams. Dr. Ed Hoffman, Director of NASA’s “Academy for Program/Project and Engineering Leadership” sponsors our NASA work. We now have data from over 1,000 project, engineering and management teams. About two years ago, my colleague, Skip Borst, showed me a graph he just completed that amazed me. Skip had graphed the performance enhancement of the 198 NASA teams with multiple assessments. The lowest 60% of the teams improved performance an average of 5% per 15-minute “Team Development Assessment” cycle! Moreover, on average, every team advanced no matter where they started.
That is what spurred me to write “How NASA Builds Teams.”
Nettie: How do you define social issues, and how did this ultimately impact your work as Director of Astrophysics at NASA for your almost decade-long tenure?
Dr. Pellerin: The technical world has a well-defined and broadly understood vocabulary. I can go anywhere in the world and speak about entropy, critical mass and first derivative and be completely understood. This is not true in the social world. There is no universally accepted terminology for social matters. In fact, teams often comment following our workshops, “Perhaps the most valuable take-away is a common language to talk about social matters.”
As I studied failure reports, I noticed variation in descriptions of the causes. A “leadership failure” caused the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror flaw. “Normalization of deviance,” caused Challenger’s explosion. A flawed “culture” caused Columbia’s disintegration. I chose the term “team social context” because context powerfully drives behaviors, and the terminology has sufficient breadth to include all descriptions.
I used my intuitive understanding of “4-D” when I was leading my Hubble team through the horrible aftermath of the discovery of the flaw and in assembling the space Servicing Mission. My insights were, however, nothing approaching the effectiveness of current “4-D” methodology.
Nettie: Can you briefly tell us about the flawed mirror found after launching the Hubble and how the communications/social issues contributed to this?
Dr. Pellerin: In 1990, in my eighth year as NASA’s Director, Astrophysics, we launched the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. I worried about this mission because of the daunting pointing requirement. The telescope needed to point with the precision of a laser on a 25-cent piece at 200 miles. If we missed this specification by a factor of 10, the telescope would be useless. During on-orbit testing, we found to our dismay that all the difficult systems worked fine, but the mirror had the wrong shape! This rendered the telescope useless for its most important research, cosmology.
NASA appointed me liaison to the Hubble Failure Review Board because the mirror manufacturing was in the late 70’s, and I became Director in 1983. Therefore, they reasoned, I had nothing to do with the flawed mirror. (As you will soon see, that assumption was incorrect.) The Board worked for months trying to figure out what happened. One morning, one of the Board’s optical experts said, “I have an idea. Last night I calculated that an error in spacing the “null corrector by a centimeter would cause the error we are seeing.” This was an unbelievably large mistake for an optics house to make.
The original null corrector was in “bonded storage,” so we pulled out and measured it, confirming the source of the error. I thought, great, I could go back home and do my job again. The Board Chairman, Dr. Lew Allen, had other ideas and persisted in his inquiry. He found that there were numerous instances where the contractor dismissed hints of a problem with “fault tree analysis.” When he inquired as to why NASA never “ran these problems to ground,” he learned that the contractor (Perkin-Elmer) never told NASA of these occurrences. (We settled a lawsuit against the contractor for $25M.) He concluded that NASA failed in leading the program because we created an environment so hostile that the contractor only told us of problems they were sure were real and threatening. Moreover, I was the Hubble program Director. Ouch!
Fortunately, in the turbulent aftermath, neither NASA nor I connected me with the flaw, despite the Board’s finding. I pr
oceeded to assemble the mission that repaired the telescope on orbit, exceeding the original performance specifications by 50%. NASA awarded me a second Outstanding Leadership Medal when the servicing mission succeeded. (It is a wonderful world when you can break something, and then receive a medal for fixing it.)
Nettie: Your book, “How NASA Builds Teams,” describes the concept of “storylines.” Can you talk about how that works with leadership and how what stories we carry with us affect an organization?
Dr. Pellerin: Our most powerful means of influence is what we say, to ourselves (self-talk) and to others. Storylines are things we say that seem like the truth, but are not because they are arguable. Since Storylines are not actual truth, we are free to change them. We teach people to color their storylines as “red” when they distract people from outcomes they want, and “green” when they improve focus on actions that take us to desired outcomes. Here is a “red” storyline: My boss gives me too much work. It is “red” because it is a victim storyline, “It is useless, and there is nothing I can do. The “green” replacement storyline is: “I am responsible for managing my workload. I will communicate with my boss in a way that matches my workload to my capacity.” (We have a communication methodology, “4-D Communication” for this conversation.”)
Storylines can take entire industries to success or ruin. Can you guess which US industry ran this storyline? “Improving quality is too expensive.” They only considered shifting their storyline to “Improving quality is the best way to lower cost,” copying their main competitor, when they lost 65% of market share to a foreign country. It was the auto industry, of course.
Nettie: How did these stories affect the Hubble error? And how do stories contribute to decisions we make on teams and projects?
Dr. Pellerin: The NASA contract managers ran a storyline that “the best way to get performance from our contractors is to beat them up.” This is ill-conceived. People perform complex tasks more efficiently when their contributions are authentically appreciated and they enjoy their work. This kind of storyline caused “the biggest screw-up in the history of science.” When we encounter broken government-contractor interfaces, we initiate the team recovery with authentic appreciation exercises. You can download the PowerPoint slide we use (free) at NASAteambuilding.com.
Red storylines cause decisions that are detrimental to success, and green ones bring success. With a little training, people can “color” their storylines and make choices. I spent my first eight or so years with about 50% of my time consulting for aerospace companies and 50% experimenting with the 4-D System. My consulting clients took the 4-D workshop and I observed them afterward. As I walked through their buildings, I loved hearing people on a telecon ask, “If we ran that storyline, what outcome would we realize?” All saw immediately that the storyline was red and replaced it with a green one. (Do not tell anyone, but this is cognitive psychology, simplified.)
Nettie: What do you think are three common misconceptions about leadership and project management that organizations have?
Dr. Pellerin:
Nettie: Can you describe the 4-D system briefly and how it can be used as a tool to analyze team and individual performance?
Dr. Pellerin: The 4-D System is a Cartesian coordinate system based on the work Carl Jung did in 1905. The 4-D organizing system has two essential functions:
It is at the heart of why our processes are so powerful—repeating the same theme everywhere.
Nettie: What is one of your success stories using the 4-D System described in your book, and what types of organizations have you worked with?
Dr. Pellerin: Actually, I have two favorites:
Nettie: What do you think about the space industry now, as it exists? Are you hopeful for the future in regard to space exploration?
Dr. Pellerin: I have given this a bit of thought, as I was head of NASA strategy for a time. Here is the difficulty. Human flight is the heart and soul of the agency. It is also expensive, costing perhaps 10 to 100 times as much as unmanned programs. NASA has not had adequate funding for human space flight programs since Apollo. At this moment, political turmoil confuses civil space. The Administration wants more NASA funding to go to “commercial” space programs with less NASA oversight. The Congress worries about losing jobs in their districts. While I remain hopeful for the longer run, it is not clear how the near-term will play out. Note: NASA spends 90% of its budget on contracted work.
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The Secret of Teams: What Great Teams Know and Do
January 4th, 2012For this Ask the Expert interview we caught up with Mark Miller, author of the newly released, “The Secret of Teams: What Great Teams Know and Do” and co-author with Ken Blanchard international best-selling book The Secret: What Great Leaders Know and Do. Miller has launched his new leadership community as well – Great Leaders Serve – http://www.greatleadersserve.org . His Twitter is @leadersserve .
In this interview Mark shares his insight on how to develop and nurture high performance teams and what it truly means to be a great leader who serves.
Hi Mark, you started your career at Chick-fil-A almost 35 years ago – what’s the most important thing you’ve learned about leadership during the last three decades?
Mark: I’ve had two big leadership insights thus far in my career… First, Great Leaders Serve. That’s not what conventional wisdom will tell you, but I believe it is true. The second big idea for me is that leadership is fundamentally a choice. As leaders, we don’t get to choose the position we’ll hold within an organization, but we do decide if we’ll lead or not. And, no one else gets to determine how well I will lead – I do. The choices I make on a daily basis define my leadership. That challenges me everyday.
Nettie: I want to come back to the idea that great leaders serve, but first, tell us why you wrote your most recent book, “The Secret of Teams: What Great Teams Know and Do”
About 20 years ago, we started trying to determine what made some teams really exceptional while others remained average or worse. In the book, we’ve attempted to capture the lessons we’ve learned on the journey.
Teams are certainly not a new idea. However, now is the perfect time to set a higher team standard – now is the time to create and harness the power of high-performance teams. The world is more complex than ever. Many leaders are looking for ways to leverage the talents of their team members. Most industries are under tremendous competitive pressure. Leaders are running out of personal capacity and leadership capacity. Men and women working together in a high-performance team setting is the best response we’ve found for these realities.
Nettie: You’ve used the business fable style in this book – why?
Mark: Three reasons: About 10 years ago, Ken Blanchard and I wrote, The Secret, What Great Leaders Know and Do. It was the product of some work we were doing at Chick-fil-A to accelerate leadership development. Because that first book was a business fable, and The Secret of Teams is a sequel, we decided to stay with that style.
Next, the fable allows each of us to see ourselves and our challenges in the story. It is a story based in the real world where all of us try to lead on a daily basis. We can relate to the characters and their story because it’s based on real life scenarios.
Their story is our story.
Finally, the format – around 120 pages, makes the book and its content accessible. We never wanted to create an academic treatment of the team concept. It was not written to impress, rather to assist. The practical side of the fable makes the content feel much more doable, more pragmatic. As a result, people are more likely to try the ideas and enjoy the results of their efforts.
Nettie: Can you talk about what you’ve learned about these high-performing teams?
Mark: In summary, there are three ingredients and one catalyst needed to make any team a high-performance team.
Talent – Great teams begin with the right people – men and women who have a desire to learn, grow, contribute and be part of a successful team.
Skills – The members of high-performance teams possess two types of skills: individual skills and team skills. The individual members must be skilled in their assigned roles and be willing to develop the needed team skills.
Community – This is the element that separates good teams from great ones. High-performance teams foster a deep sense of genuine care and concern for each other. They do life together.
Nettie: What’s the catalyst you referred to?
Mark: Leadership. Teams don’t drift to high-performance. It will require leadership. Someone to say, we are going to become a high-performance team.
Nettie: I want to go back to something you said earlier, “Great Leaders Serve.” What does that mean to you?
Mark: The best leaders serve. This is more than a warm thought or a platitude of some sort. While these men and women do have a serving spirit, the best serving leaders also engage in five strategic practices. They…
See the future
Engage and develop others
Reinvent continuously
Value results and relationships.
Embody the values
Nettie: You’ve just launched a new site – http://www.Greatleadersserve.org What will we find there?
Mark: Great Leaders Serve.org is a place to find free resources, ideas, encouragement and a community of like-minded leaders. One resource I’d like to point out specifically – a free team assessment. It’s a downloadable PDF – http://greatleadersserve.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/GLS_secret-of-teams_assessment.pdf.
Take the assessment. Give it to your team; ask them to complete it. Then have a candid conversation about productive next steps.
Nettie: Thanks Mark for the great team insight.
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I Love You More Than My Dog: Five Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad
September 6th, 2011
For this issue of Cincom Expert Access we caught up with Jeanne Bliss, Author “I Love You More Than My Dog: Five Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad,” which is set for paperback release October 2011. The book is available for pre-order on Amazon now – http://tinyurl.com/3ocazjt .
Jeanne Bliss is on Twitter at @jeannebliss and her site is www.customerbliss.com. Jeanne is a customer service pioneer and president of the consulting firm CustomerBliss. Jeanne lectures around the world and is frequently quoted by major media.
TUNE IN on September 4, 2011 at 4:05 EDT to 55KRC.com to listen to Jeanne on Cincom’s Expert Access Radio.
INTERVIEW
Nettie Reynolds (N): What is a beloved company?
Jeanne Bliss (J): Beloved companies thrive in good times and bad. This is because they make decisions through the lens of what is right for their customers and what is right for their employees. They “earn the right” to growth – through managing their business by making decisions in business that are congruent to the types of decisions we want to make in our personal lives. HOW they make decisions drive the growth of their business. Congruence of heart and habit form the backbone of beloved companies. Beloved companies get talked about and grow and have their story told because their actions reveal that they considered the people on the other end of their decisions.
Nettie: Can you talk about Netflix and its customer approach in light of the recent customer pushback on raised rates?
Jeanne: That’s an interesting question because Netflix is a beloved company who has recently had a bit of a slip. How they recover will be important for them and their continued customer devotion. Netflix is a case study in my book “I Love You More than My Dog: Five Decisions that Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad” – where I cited that
“93% of Netflix current subscribers say they “talk up” how great Netflix is to everyone they know.”
Their recent decision to change how their customers were billed left behind a significant group of disappointed customers and affected their subscriber base with an expected impact on revenue and profitability. What Netflix offers is not uncommon in this marketplace. How they honored and treated their customers was very uncommon. They chipped away at that with this most recent decision. They need to earn that respect from customers back to continue to have the same advocacy they have enjoyed in the past.
Nettie: Can you explain what “customer math” is and how it helps track customer gain or loss?
Jeanne: We do what I call “customer math” with every company I work. This is done by creating a rigorous way to track incoming customers by volume and value and then reconcile that number with the lost customers in that same period, comparing incoming and outgoing customer volume and value; doing the “math.” The ‘aha moment’ always comes when the math reveals that company marketing dollars are spent replacing customers lost rather than growing the business with the addition of new customers. In essence, many companies are running in place.
Beloved companies grow because they “earn the right” to an army of story tellers who sell their business for them, effectively reducing their advertising costs, increasing their margins and growing customer advocacy. You assert this is because they make five decisions that drive how they operate – and that their decisions reveal how intently these companies consider the people on the other end of their decisions.
Nettie: You note five decisions in your book that companies must make to be beloved companies, what are those?
Jeanne: Sure.
1. Beloved companies decide to believe – they believe their employees and they believe their customers. In short, they suspend cynicism and trust their customers.
2. Beloved companies decide with clarity of purpose – they take time to be clear about what their unique promise is for their customers’ lives. They use clarity when making decisions to align to this purpose, to this promise.
3. Beloved companies decide to be real – they shed their fancy packaging and break down the barriers between “big company and little customers.” The relationship is between people who share the same values and revel in each other’s foibles, quirks and spirit. Being transparent with customers takes guts.
4. Beloved companies decide to be there – Beloved companies know they must earn the right to their continued relationship with customers. Beloved companies make a commitment to be there when customers need them, on customers’ terms.
5. Beloved companies decide to say sorry – they act with humility when things go wrong and they make it right. Apologizing well and repairing the emotional connection with customers is a hallmark of companies we love.
Nettie: In your book you talk about accidental experiences vs. purposeful or the deliberate delivery of experiences– can you describe that?
Jeanne: We’re delivering defaulted “accidental” experiences to our customers every day because of the silos within our operations. Each does a great job executing on a set of tasks. But those tasks don’t line up. They have different score cards, sometimes competing and different agendas. Companies that are beloved start with the customer and their life first, and then work together across the silos to create and deliver a united experience focused on improving some aspect of their customers’ life. This needs to be a deliberate choice and a different path to how companies create annual plans, reward and recognition and drive accountability. And it has to start with establishing a lens from which every part of the operation makes and manages their decisions. You can connect with customers and the people in your company who serve them. But you need to purposefully decide what direction you want to take your company. And then trust the people in their moment of connection with customers to do the right thing.
Nettie: You also talk about companies earning the right for customers to tell their story, what does that mean?
Jeanne: A lot of companies want to “get” the rave. My take is that they’ve got that backwards. Companies need to earn the right to have customers tell their story. The five decisions in this book help companies achieve the accolades that beloved companies receive on Twitter, Yelp, and across the internet.
Social media is being misunderstood a bit now, as organizations are thinking that these platforms are another great place to “push” advertising campaigns, banner ads, etc. There is value in that – but that is not what I mean here.
The companies that are beloved look to social media as a powerful litmus test. Are customers, without prodding unabashedly singing your praises to others, encouraging them to experience your products, services and who you are as people? Are your employees? These companies also look to social media forums as a powerfully transparent way to have a two way dialogue with customers and employees not available to them before. They are always “listening” by knowing when their company comes up, and they are responding, to both good comments and the challenging ones – in the light of day. This honest, open communication endears them even more – especially when they take action to resolve issue s- and then go back on those sites and communicate it!
Nettie: Why is it vital to stay fresh and fearless as a company to have customers that want to return to you?
Jeanne: Companies that are loved are real; they have a human quality to them. Their packing slip doesn’t feel manufactured, it has a tone. This doesn’t have to be over the top – but it goes back to being deliberate.
The beloved companies know that even in the communications that go out to customers, they have to think through how it all knits together – and is what’s written on all this paper and emails messaging that honors customers – the people on the other end.
Beyond communication, being fresh is about knowing customers and their lives. You need to know their life to serve their life….which sounds like a cute tag line. But this is an operational mantra not a bumper sticker.
Staying close to customers means you know how to build your order fulfillment center and processes from the way customers need to receive things from you. It means knowing when to change your product mix. It means recognizing that your field force isn’t getting value from the old fashioned “milk run” approach to going out to check inventory, and that you may need to transform those “sales reps” into “partners” who help your customers grow their business (and yours).
That’s what makes you beloved – when you make your decisions by knowing your customers lives – and aren’t afraid to stay fresh and make changes as it’s warranted.
Nettie: What are the most surprising things you found in looking at the companies who successfully became “beloved companies” and how they moved to that place?
Jeanne: What has become the most interesting about this journey and talking to these companies and capturing what they do – is that they keep it pretty simple. The decision making lens is about “is this right for customers,” “is this right for employees?” They decide to grow by focusing. Customer love is a reward for what some consider irrational business behavior. These companies make their decisions by always moving in the direction of their customers and employees. This consistency creates a power that eliminates the oversight and need for manuals and rules and regulations that companies yearn for.
By having leaders who are so connected and in alignment about what they will and will not do and being in lock-step in how they make and model decisions, they give the rest of the organization permission to act in the same manner. And that becomes their growth engine – consistency – reliability – doing the right thing.
Simple to say, hard to do.
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Bridging the Gender Communications Gap
June 20th, 2011
This is an interview with best-selling author and keynote speaker Connie Glaser. Connie is one of the country’s leading experts on gender communication and women in leadership . Exploring communication differences between men and women, Connie offers corporate seminars on effective communications and overcoming barriers to leadership.
Q (Nettie Hartsock) : What is the main difference between the way men and women talk?
A (Connie Glaser): Men tend to use conversation as a means to assert their opinion and negotiate — and maintain status. Conversation is a medium for giving advice, directions and information. They tend to use short sentences and be very direct. For men, conversation is often perceived as a game of one-upmanship … shoot, score, win. Women tend to use language to communicate feelings, as well as convey information.
Q: You state in your book that women tend to use more qualifiers in their speech, i.e., “I might be wrong about this, but …” or “I think.” Explain the problems with this type of talk in the workplace.
A: In the female culture, women often try to avoid coming across as too direct or boastful. Consequently, they tend to use qualifiers that play down their authority or status. Men will take these qualifiers literally and if a woman says, “This may be a stupid question, but …,” they’ll assume a stupid question is coming right up.
Q: How can women get out of the habit of apologizing excessively?
A: When women say, “I’m sorry,” they’re often told, “Don’t apologize; it’s not your fault.” But typically, they’re not apologizing for having done something wrong, but rather feeling sorry that something happened.Typically, they’re not apologizing for having done something wrong, but rather feeling sorry that something happened. By all means, apologize if you’ve done something wrong. But women need to monitor themselves for constant apologies, as men perceive it as a sign of lacking confidence and competence.
Q: Another point you make in the book is that men can’t take a hint. What are the potential problems with this trait?
A: As womens’ language tends to be more indirect, a woman might say, “It’s really hot in here,” which translates into “Turn down the thermostat.” Women tend to be more intuitive and typically understand the intent of the statement. Men tend to be more literal, and less likely to read between the lines. They probably think she’s complaining about the room temperature.
Q: How can women learn to be better self-promoters?
A: From kindergarten on, girls are taught that if they do a good job, they’ll be recognized for their work and be promoted accordingly. Unfortunately, success in the business world doesn’t work this way. The right people need to know about your accomplishments if you want get ahead. Women need to seek visibility for themselves — volunteer to make a presentation, write a press release about recent accomplishments, network with company influencers, and let key people know about your successes.
Q: How can men learn to curb interrupting when others speak?
A: The language patterns of men and women are strikingly different. Women subscribe to the “fairness” doctrine (“I speak, then [it's] your turn.”) Men subscribe to the “if you’ve got something to say, say it now” theory. Men can benefit by curbing their verbal enthusiasm and hearing a woman out. Women need to stand their ground and finish what they’re saying without allowing themselves to be interrupted.
Q: When, if ever, does profanity work in the workplace?
A: In certain industries I’ve consulted with, profanity, unfortunately, seems to be the norm. On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, for instance. I was told by one female surgical resident of a large hospital that she was advised that she needed to use more profanity to demonstrate her authority and credibility! As a rule, I advise checking profanity at the front door. It can make others feel uncomfortable and violates workplace protocol.
Beaten Down, Vulnerable, Out of Control–Are We in a Psychological Recession?
June 1st, 2011For this issue of Cincom Expert Access we talked to Dr. Judith Bardwick, a highly regarded speaker, consultant, researcher, and writer on psychological aspects of people at work. She is the author of “The Psychological Recession.” For more than two decades, Dr. Bardwick has combined cutting-edge psychological research with practical business applications to optimize organizational performance, change organizational views and values, and help managers achieve financial and personal success. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, BellSouth, and National Steel are among her many clients.
Dr. Bardwick is the author of one of the top 25 bestselling business books of the last decade, Danger in the Comfort Zone (AMACOM Books; 1995). Her other books include The Plateauing Trap, In Praise of Good Business, and Psychology of Women. In addition, she has published scores of journal articles, papers, and book chapters on an array of topics.
Nettie: Your eBook, “The Psychological Recession” – http://tinyurl.com/494af8q - is garnering some real visibility and has strong synergy with what is going on in the nation’s workplaces – what do you think is the main message of the book?
Dr. Bardwick: Since the early 1980s, about half of the employees in the world’s developed economies and as many as 2/3s in the U.S. are frightened by their loss of job security in a world-wide economy and depressed about their future. Despite the great financial cost that follows the end of employee commitment, governments and employers have thus far ignored the need to replace these profound feelings of alienation with optimism. Optimism, commitment, greater confidence about the future, and a Let’s Go! Spirit will result when individual employees are once again treated as significant resources.
Nettie: You note that optimism is the key to taking risks, growing the economy and sparking innovation – can you talk about that briefly and how organizations need to empower optimism so that the psychological recession can have less impact?
Dr. Bardwick: Optimism is the result of success and success is the key to developing confidence, resilience, and appropriate risk-taking in individual employees and their organizations. To counter pessimism stretch goals need to be achievable and their accomplishment visibly celebrated, recognized and rewarded. In other words, all progress toward a better future needs to be front and center at every level with everyone aware that hitting goals sets the stage for even greater achievement.
At the same time commitments need to be made to employees that communicate in terms of what happens – and not just in words – that the organization respects, trusts and needs their valuable employees. Examples include Conditional Commitment which is a policy which says as long as we need your skills and can afford to pay you, you have a job with us. I’d also like to see some version of a “G.I. Bill” for the retraining of displaced employees. And customizing rewards and working conditions for employees goes a long way toward rebuilding the high energy of commitment.
Organizations, in which employees are committed to the organization and invested in its mission, return an average of 30% higher profits than comparable organizations in which commitment levels are low. Acting to reinforce the value of employees is, therefore, self-serving to the organization.
Nettie: You define today’s Psychological Recession as “a prolonged terror of uncertainty combined with an absence of trustworthy leadership” – what are the 2 fundamental reasons for the malaise today?
Dr. Bardwick: Jobs, jobs, jobs is the major preoccupation of the public. With an unemployment rate stuck at roughly 9 percent, with the majority of unemployed people out of work for more than half a year, feeling frightened and vulnerable are psychologically appropriate emotions. Virtually everyone knows people who have been laid off and whose later employment is far below that of the job they lost. At the same time, aside from an extension of unemployment insurance, most governments and corporations have done little to encourage job growth.
Government in most states and especially at the federal level, have ignored the public’s priority for job creation. Adversarial politics is seen as outweighing the public good. Congress is currently viewed with contempt. It is no accident that the undecided voter bloc is now larger than those of the two major parties. Disgust seems to be distributed even-handedly.
Nettie: Why is trust in leadership so important in organizations and what can leaders do to build trust even during this downtime?
Dr. Bardwick: Trust is the most critical element in every kind of relationship; where trust flourishes so do organizations and personal relationships. Where, on the other hand, there is mistrust, the suspicion of paranoia prevails and it’s every person for themselves. Then, coercion replaces motivation in getting things done.
As the Gallup Organization has noted, people join organizations but leave their bosses. Bosses who are perceived as unfair, Machiavellian and not transparent are seen as not trustworthy and therefore are not trusted. Trust, simply put, is based on “What you see is all there is.” When that is not the case, mistrust precludes a relationship with and a commitment to the boss. As the boss is perceived as a representative of the organization, people will view the organization itself with suspicion and have one foot out the door.
Unfortunately, many people with no EQ are promoted into management positions where the job is to motivate and involve employees. Most people who are oblivious to human dynamics are inept in their role as managers although they may well be outstanding professionals. Low EQ managers should be replaced with insightful high EQ leaders and perform as highly valuable professionals.
Nettie: You say, “The only way to get significant job growth in the US is for Americans to out-innovate and out-perform their worldwide competition” – can you talk about how that works with consumers and how the job engine is performing as well?
Dr. Bardwick: The United States has a long history of creating major, significant innovations that create consumer demands because of their superiority. We have a major advantage in creating innovations because our culture tends to praise original views. In contrast, most other cultures discourage what I call Creative Confrontation which involves forthright opinions out on the table in pursuit of better ideas.
In cultures where there is only one right answer mastery is accomplished by memorizing what has become widely accepted and rejecting other points of view.
While consumers have come to expect competition based on price, effective innovations compete on usefulness. A good example is the Apple Corporation whose products are highly innovative and routinely create industries and markets.
International competition in the U.S. began in the late 1970s and became a major factor. Our corporations started out fat and complacent since there had never been serious international competitors before. Over the past 30 years our companies have continuously improved quality and productivity – but, to date, that’s largely been at the expense of employees who ceased being a critical resource and became a cost…to be cut.
Nettie: What are three ways today that every single person can reduce their own psychological recession?
Dr. Bardwick: The Psychological Recession is a state of generalized anxiety. That means the problems are not specific but are instead vague, like a dense fog that prohibits seeing anything clearly. The very vagueness of anxiety is the reason it is so difficult to get rid of. But that is the necessary task: the vague question of “What is going to happen to me?” needs to be replaced with the specifics of fear. In this instance the fear might well be, “I might lose my job.”
As soon as issues become specific they are amenable to being solved. No one can answer the question of what is going to happen…but they can come up with ideas of what to do in case one’s job is lost. For example, you might use the social networks to achieve greater visibility; you might move to an area where your skills are valued; you might return to school to upgrade your skills…the list of possibilities of what you can do is long.
In addition to the specific actions taken to increase the probability of returning to work, setting out an agenda of actions to be taken gives people a feeling of again being in control. That, in itself, is immensely positive, creating a sense of energy and purpose and diminishing the sense of a psychological recession.
Nettie: What are you most hopeful about in terms of how we will come out of this crisis?
Dr. Bardwick:There’s an old saying that it has to get worse before it gets better. Since many people will always prefer the status-quo, when it comes to creating big changes a crisis can be your best friend. A crisis can force awareness of a need to do things differently which may lead to changes in behavior, to taking action.
Generally speaking, the public is now ready for change and that is what their voting patterns tell us. Now we also need effective leadership that will diminish the politics-driven divide and enable Americans to join together in focusing on achieving what our nation most needs at this time: a growth in jobs, a decline in the deficit, and fiscally responsible pensions and social welfare programs.
We can and we must recapture the ebullience of “Go for it! “ Because that foretells a positive future.
Artistry Unleashed –
January 31st, 2011
For this Expert Access interview, we caught up with author and professor, Dr. Hilary Austen, whose new book, Artistry Unleashed (http://www.artistryunleashed.com/), is being heralded by leading thinkers in the Silicon Valley and beyond.
Dr. Hilary Austen is an adjunct professor and member of the Dean’s Advisory Board of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Co-founder of the Catalyst Consulting Team in Santa Cruz, California, she has worked with such clients as Monitor Group, Oracle Corporation, Stanford University’s Intelligent Systems Lab, Shell Oil, Proctor & Gamble, Lockheed Martin and Merck Pharmaceutical. Dr. Austen also co-founded the Brain Integration Center in San Diego, which offers programs in personal development, art, communication and learning based on brain research.
1) What inspired you to write this book? Can you briefly talk about your background?
I started out as an artist who went to design school—Rhode Island School of Design—but ended up an organizational consultant. While trying to help organizations solve what I call enigmatic problems—how to develop leaders, build strategies or work cross-functionally—I found surprising inspiration in my art-school education. Enigmatic problems are not single-answer problems, but instead open-ended. Unlike most of the rest of us, artists love open-ended problems and are educated to solve them, at least in their particular medium. From this starting point, I studied with artistic people across disciplines—from cooking, to photography and horsemanship—to look for a pattern. Happily I found one, though in the deeper patterns of thinking rather than in execution.
2) Artistry Unleashed has been endorsed by leading thinkers including Sir Ken Robinson and Polly Labarre. How is this business book different than others that are currently out there?
This book reveals why you must—and how to simultaneously—sustain two competing organizational forces: efficiency and exploration. When organizations choose one approach at the expense of the other, it explains why many fail. Individuals face this dilemma as well. Expertise and mastery are often developed at the expense of creativity and originality, or, again, vice versa. Great performance demands both. But this integration is elusive and demands a set of capabilities previously overlooked.
3) Your book highlights how surprise, ambiguity and change are often associated with fear; but in reality, they are essential to creativity and great performance. Can you talk about that further and give us a couple of examples in regard to this in business?
The features you’re highlighting are characteristic of enigmatic problems, and as such, pervade organizations. And, even though they are common, few of us seek them. Few of us walk out the door in the morning and say, “Wow, I can’t wait to deal with more ambiguity today.” Or, “I am looking for changes that will disrupt what I have planned for my day.” Or simply, “Surprise me.” But, without these events, we would lead predictable, repetitious and unremarkable lives. Pick up any account of a great business success, and it will be a tale of uncertainty, ups and downs, some would say foolishness in the face of resistance and good advice and the exploiting of unexpected innovations, epiphanies and events. These books reveal stories of luck, brilliant moments and persistence, a steady hand and a cool head in the face of surprise. There is a difference between being surprised and being startled. Being startled you are awash in fear; being surprised you have seen what others have missed. In this apprehension is the seed of a great business.
4) Artistry Unleashed describes the differences between qualities and quantities. Can you briefly detail the differences and the importance of understanding those differences?
First, quantities can be measured with an instrument; no human involvement is required. Qualities are perceived and felt; human involvement is essential. Second, shifting between quantities and qualities changes the kinds of questions you can ask and answer. What you think is beautiful is a qualitative question; how much you weigh is a quantitative one. When you value a company, the quantitative measure rests on net profit and share value, while a qualitative evaluation rests on criteria like sustainability, contribution and customer and employee satisfaction. While these criteria are often translated into numeric terms, they elude measure by even the most sophisticated metrics. Finally, using qualities effectively can vault us to a level of personal performance that numbers just can’t. A computational model, however, complete and detailed, can’t teach us to swing a golf club, lead a company or love our family. These are unavoidably qualitative challenges.
5) Why do we need to be able to go beyond crunching quantitative data to produce single-point answers?
At best, even the most accurate and extensive data can only give us a partial picture of the status quo. In the face of the future’s uncertainties, it is tempting to grab onto this partial picture, but creativity, innovation and problem solutions come from the ability to imagine and to see the world beyond what is known, and so, what the numbers can reveal.
6) Can you describe the Knowledge System model and how people can use it to develop artistry no matter what their field?
Artistry is not mechanistic, but neither is it mysterious. The Knowledge System captures the patterns of knowledge development and thinking that are essential to artistry in any discipline, but have remained hidden. Myths about artistry, and unfortunately often artists themselves, have buried artistry under a pile of mumbo jumbo. Artistry is a talent; artistry waits on a muse; artistry is magical. All of these ideas are false distractions. Instead, artistry is an emergent capability that comes from the systematic development of three distinct but interrelated types of knowledge that together make a knowledge system tick: Directional knowledge, Conceptual knowledge and Experiential Knowledge. Fortunately, this knowledge system works the same way in any discipline, so students of artistry can use it to design the right kind of learning. Learning, by the way, that is virtually nonexistent in traditional schooling.
7) You define the Seven Hallmarks of Artistry in Chapter 9. Can you describe three of those hallmarks and how people can apply those in practice?
The first hallmark is the ability to pursue ends and means interdependently. This idea runs counter to popular notions of problem-solving, goal-setting and linear-causality (i.e., we should set clear and measurable goals and proceed to them directly!). Because artistic capabilities are applied to enigmatic and open-ended problems, ends can’t be predetermined, and the means—the way forward—are always unclear. Being flexibly purposive frees us from prepackaged living and means that our actions and solutions can reflect what we care about and be relevant to immediate situations. The fifth hallmark is the ability to remain unfazed by failure and unfixed by fame. The impacts of success and failure can be equally debilitating to budding artists in any discipline. We all know how devastating failure can be, but artistry depends on the skillful harvest of failure’s fruit … knowledge. While failure can be difficult, success can be crippling. Nothing stalls artistry faster than falling in love with what you create. This almost irresistible gravity can pull you backwards to repeat and repeat the same solution. No matter how good it might be, repetition anchors you to obsolescence. Reframing both success and failure ensures progress. The sixth hallmark of artistry is highly developed cognitive emotions. What is a cognitive emotion? It might sound like a contradiction of terms. Cognition refers to thinking and emotion to feelings. How can they coexist? Cognitive emotions include curiosity, fascination, focus and surprise—states of mind where thinking and feeling work together. This is critical to artistry because it means that you can use feel—the experience of qualities—to guide action. Being detached and solely analytic separates us from qualities, as can intense feelings like fear, anger or even hope and joy. In the moment of action, cognitive emotions allow us to stay present with qualities and reasoning, so we can be effective during even our most stressful moments.
8) Why is passion so important in terms of embracing artistry?
Pursuing artistry is tough. It takes persistence, faith in yourself, the ability to fail and keep going and self-motivation. Passion is the best source for the commitment needed to go on when the work gets hard. Without passion, few would get past early stumbling efforts. But fortunately, as a self-reinforcing effort, passion begets artistry and artistry begets passion.
9) What do you hope business leaders apply from this book?
I hope they learn to value and use qualitative intelligence. Many people ask how they can achieve artistry in organizations when they experience these organizations as hostile environments. I can help individuals develop artistic capabilities, but it will be leaders that use this book to create organizations that empower people to put artistry to work. Also, I hope they can take the information provided about Up and Downstream learning, so they can use it to their advantage. Organizations and individuals that can learn effectively downstream can be highly efficient—they win quality awards. Organizations and individuals that learn upstream effectively are innovative and distinctive—they win “most creative” and “most leading-edge” awards. Organizations that can do both do great things, while blowing away their competitors. If I were a CEO, I’d like that.
Thou Shalt Be Human First – The Hyper-Social Organization 1st Commandment
November 29th, 2010
For this Cincom Expert Access article we caught up with Francois Gossieaux, Partner at Human1.0 – www.human1.com and co-author of “The HyperSocial Organization” , which just garnered a USABooknews.com Best Business Book award.
Gossieaux explains how social media enables the social, for which humans have been hardwired for eons, to reenter business – why it’s important to understand the real dynamics of what’s happening in social webs by understanding the Human 1.0 rather than the Web 2.0 tools.
Francois’ is on Twitter at @twitter.com/fgossieaux .
Nettie: Why did you write this book and how is it different than other books focused on social media?
Francois: We wrote the Hyper-Social Organization as a business book to help executives make sense of this current wave of innovation, which is powered by social media. It is not a book about social media but a book about the changing relationships that employees, customers, prospects and detractors have with companies and with one another that is transforming the world of business as we know it.
Nettie: Can you tell us how you define Human 1.0 and why it’s important to understand in social media endeavors?
Francois: Biologists agree that there is no evolution in a 10,000 year period. When we refer to the Human 1.0 we mean the collection of human characteristics, such as reciprocity, our innate sense for fairness and our need for status and power, which has characterized human behavior for the past 10,000 years. Social media enables the social, for which humans have been hardwired for eons, to reenter business – and if you want to understand the real dynamics of what’s happening in social webs you’re better off trying to understand the Human 1.0 rather than the Web 2.0 tools.
Nettie: Why is reciprocity so important in application of social media and building community?
Francois: Reciprocity is a human reflex – not something that we learned from our parents or in grade school. Everything humans do is based on reciprocity – we are willing to help the community now because we know that we will get something back when we need it in the future. You see reciprocity at work in all communities – even in product support communities, which can be unexciting, but where you can sometimes find people, who are not affiliated with the company, helping others as if it were their full time job. That is reciprocity at work. Whenever you think of leveraging communities or social media as part of your business you have to make sure that they are steeped in reciprocity if you want them to succeed.
Nettie: What are the four fundamental elements to a successful community?
Francois: As John Hagel rightfully pointed out in the mid 90’s, when he published Net Gain, there are four forces of increasing return in communities – members, content, profiles, and transactions. The members are rather obvious – the more members you have in a community, the more buzz you will have about your community and the more members you will attract. Content works in a similar fashion – the more quality content you have in a community, the more value members will derive from that community and the more they will tell potential new members about it. The more members you have, the more content you will end up with, and therefore the more value you will deliver to your members – which will continue to feed this positive feedback loop. Content is often an overlooked element in communities. Many companies assume that community members will generate most of the content for the community. That usually does not happen. Most communities do not have enough members to create the critical mass of content needed to provide value to the other members – and even if they eventually do, they certainly do not have that in their initial growth stage. The next force is member profiles. The more members, and the more content there is in a community, the harder it is to find what’s really relevant. If you can leverage member profiles to recommend other members and content, you will deliver more value to the members – and the more value you deliver the more members you will have. Enabling members to do transactions is another element in communities that is often overlooked. If for example your customers buy from you online, and you create customer communities – make sure that your transactional e-commerce environment and your communities are connected. If they are, you will deliver more value to your members and…well by now you got the picture.
Nettie: In your book you say, “Forget market segments and consumers – think tribes and humans” – what does that mean in terms of companies and their customer base?
Francois: Classic business thinking views our customers as consumers who belong to certain market segments. Consumer is a loaded term because it implies the act of consuming our goods and services. It causes most marketers to focus on the transaction part of the relationship with their customers and prospects – not the ongoing relationship that they can have with them or that customers and prospects have with one another. That is where focusing on humans instead of consumers helps – by putting the human at the center you evoke a whole different context in which you deal with customers and prospects. Market segments are based on individual characteristics of people – often times demographic or psychographic characteristics. Those characteristics tell you very little about who they might want to hang out with, which is critical in successfully leveraging social media and communities. Tribes are based on social or behavioral characteristics of people that will tell you something about who they want to hang out with. Take Wal-Mart as an example. They have been very successful in building the world’s largest company by focusing on a market segment – frugal moms. They may not be as successful in leveraging social media because they continue to focus on that market segment – not realizing that the segment is a collection of tribes whose members do not necessarily want to hang out across tribes. There are frugal moms who buy frugally because they have no other choice, and they certainly want to help one another. Then there are those frugal moms who buy frugally because they love the art of the deal, and when they find one, they cannot stop talking about it – they too love hanging out with others like them, but not with the other tribe.
Nettie: Can you define what “human-centricity” means and how it appears in business environments?
Francois: Human-centricity refers to focusing your efforts on the humans that make up your tribes rather than around your company or your products. So instead of launching a community around scissors, start a community around scrapbookers – the way Fiskars did. Too many companies are single-mindedly focused on their companies, their departments or their products, and that is how they approach their social media efforts as well. They do not realize that people will hang out with others based on shared passions, shared pains, or shared symbols – and rarely based on a company or its products. One of the reasons why companies take that approach anyway is because of well documented communities that appear to be centered around products or companies – like Harley Davidson. What they don’t realize is that those communities are in fact not centered around the product but around the members’ shared passion – in this case a shared love for a riding lifestyle. The product is important in those communities, but it serves to strengthen the social bond between community members – it is not what is at the core of the community.
Nettie: What are the benefits to putting human-centricity above company-centricity?
Francois: The benefit is that like Fiskars, with their Fiskateer community, you will end up with a movement that nobody can stop instead of a social media based traditional marketing or customer support program, which have very little leverage. In some cases it can mean the difference between success and failure – and there are a lot of failed company-sponsored social media and community efforts on the web to attest to that.
Nettie: Too often in terms of social media companies are focused on these new tools as information channels, you say they should instead be knowledge networks. Can you talk about the difference?
Francois: According to research done by McKinsey, between 60 and 80% of all buying decisions happen without anybody from the company being present or any content from the company being used. People get the information on which they base their buying decisions from peers, colleagues or other tribe members. So for companies to look at social media as another channel to push information through when nobody is listening is wasting money. Instead they need to focus on how they can leverage social media to gain a seat at those knowledge networks where decisions are being made. Best Buy is a good example of that. When they entered the high end music instrument business they did not just rely on their sales and customer support people to help customers – they enlisted the help of everyone in the company who has a passion for music. So you may find someone from the finance department, who freelances as part of a band on weekends, helping prospects decide on what to buy in the Best Buy communities. That is leveraging social media to gain more seats in the knowledge networks that matter.
Nettie: You advocate companies “embrace social messiness” – and the process SEAMS – can you define it and give three tips on how companies can employ this?
Francois: When you embrace the social as part of your business you also need to embrace the messiness that comes with it, as not all communications will continue to flow along your well-defined hierarchies and not all solutions will fit nicely into your fixed processes. Some companies don’t just embrace the messiness as it happens, they actively seek it out – the way Best Buy did with their music enthusiasts or the way Xerox does it by enlisting all active social media employees as part of their product launches, even if they talk about things that have nothing to do with the company or the product being launched. SEAMS – which stands for Sense, Engage, Activate, Measure, and Storytelling – is a method that we suggest for companies to use as they are embarking on leveraging social media and communities as part of their business. Based on our research, it covers all the basic steps that successful companies have taken.
Nettie: Your book identifies Seven Myths of Hyper-Social Organizations – can you talk about Myth ## Let’s Keep it Small So it Doesn’t Move the Needle?
Francois: The let’s keep it small so that it doesn’t move the needle is a phenomenon that we see happen quite frequently. Companies start off with social media pilot programs and never take them out of pilot. They feel good for having a toe in the water, but they don’t allow their programs to become mainstream. Unfortunately, most pilots don’t do much for companies and in many cases they don’t even provide a good learning platform for what to expect as the programs scale. Companies that are hugely successful with social media, like Dell, realize that you cannot dabble into social media – it has to become part of the fabric of your company.
Nettie: Finally, can you give three things companies can apply to their current social media efforts in terms of human 1.0?
Francois: First, make sure that everything you do is steeped in reciprocity – will the people with whom you engage with get value from what you are offering them? Second, tap in the social framework that people use to take actions, not their market framework – so don’t offer to pay them to give you good product ideas, get them to give you good ideas because it is going to make them look cool. Thirdly, reward people for what they do with status, but realize that they will try to hoard that status and set up processes so that status can easily be achieved by newcomers.
SNAP! How to Speed Up Sales and Win More Business with Today’s Frazzled Customers
November 5th, 2010
For this issue of Cincom Expert Access we caught up with leading-edge sales strategist, business advisor and bestselling author Jill Konrath. Jill takes us behind the scenes for insights from her latest bestselling book – Snap Selling: Speed Up Sales and Win More Business with Today’s Frazzled Customers.
Jill helps sellers crack into corporate accounts, speed up their sales cycle and win big contracts. Jill is also the author of the instant sales classic, Selling to Big Companies, an Amazon Top 25 sales book for 4 years running. In 2008, Fortune selected it as one of eight “must read” sales books, along with classics such as How to Win Friends & Influence People, The New Strategic Selling and Getting to Yes. Her 2nd book, Get Back to Work Faster, came out in November, 2009. Jill’s clients include IBM, GE, Microsoft, 3M, Hilton, AAA, General Mills, Medtronic, UnitedHealthcare, and many more.
Nettie: What inspired you to write this book?
Jill: I believe we’re in the midst of a fundamental shift regarding what it takes to be successful in sales. It’s caused by a combination of factors all happening at the same time: downsizing, “lean” organizations, a bad economy, social media, delete buttons, information overload and Google.
All these issues have a profound impact on sellers – and they needed fresh strategies to deal effectively with them. They’re literally changing the game.
Nettie: You have talked about the “crazy busy” shift – can you describe what that is briefly and how it affects sales?
Jill: Today’s prospects are so overwhelmed with work that they can’t think straight. They’re expected to do more, with fewer resources and in less time than ever before. They’re bombarded with emails. Their days are filled with meetings. They have no time to think.
Truthfully, the last thing they want to do is make a change. It’s disruptive. It creates conflict and it’s risky. They can’t handle this complexity on top of their current workload. All this lengthens the decision process or grinds it to a screeching halt.
Nettie: Why is understanding that time is a precious commodity so important in sales today?
Jill: If you waste one iota of a crazy-busy prospect’s time, they’re merciless. It’s the only thing they have control over so they protect it at all costs. Most sellers have no idea just how sensitive their prospects are in this area.
Within 2.7 seconds, prospects determine if they’ll delete an email.. On the phone, sellers are evaluated in 5-7 second increments. If an initial meeting doesn’t provide them value, sellers don’t get a second chance. Also, any seller who can expedite things and cut the complexity will stand far above everyone else competing for the business.
Nettie: Can you define what SNAP means?
Jill: SNAP is an acronym that stands for 4 criteria that prospects use today to determine if they’ll continue working with a seller or not. Briefly, they are:
In SNAP Selling, I focus on numerous strategies that sellers can use to ensure that they’re doing the right things to pass their prospect’s SNAP Check.
Nettie: Can you describe how the mindset of “closing early and closing often” creates barriers to sales success?
Jill: Those are old sales tactics that totally turn off today’s crazy-busy prospect. If you use them, you’ll be laughed out of the office. If you’re selling to the corporate market today, you can expect that it will take multiple calls and involve multiple decision makers. By failing to recognize that and closing early/often, you’ll be viewed as a total lightweight or a dinosaur.
Nettie: How important is it to help guide your potential buyers through a sales decision?
Jill: Unless your prospect’s make decisions on your product/service on a regular basis, they won’t know what the logical next steps are, who to involve, what to look for and how to decide.
Savvy sellers are not taking a leadership role in this area. They’ll suggest what to do next. They’ll provide a roadmap that outlines the suggested decision path. They’ll have content that addresses key issues and concerns – and then share it on an “as needed” basis. All this helps their prospects feel at ease, like they’re in good hands with a pro who’s done this many times before.
Nettie: What do people need to understand about selling to today’s frazzled customer?
Jill: Here are just a few things they should take into consideration when selling to these frazzled people.
They’ll rarely call you back. From their perspective, it’s your responsibility to keep in touch.
(Quick editorial interruption – for a Jimmy Buffet quote.)
“If the phone doesn’t ring – it’s me.”
I could go on-and-on. The reality is, they’ve totally changed their expectations of people who sell.
Nettie: Where does content come into play in terms of selling because of so much more access to good content via social media?
Jill: Content is critical today. It can demonstrate your company’s understanding of your prospect’s issues and challenges. It can give them fresh perspectives that can expand their thinking. It can help them determine the best way to move forward. It can simplify their decision making.
Savvy companies should ditch the 4-color brochures and focus on the myriad thought leadership venues available to them today. I’m talking about blogging, webinars, ebooks, white papers, articles, seminars, tweeting, YouTube.
By doing this, they’ll attract customers to their website, engage them with contagious content, demonstrate their expertise and influence their thinking. All this can happen before the salesperson ever gets involved. And finally, sellers can use this same content as part of their account entry campaign. So it serves a double purpose – and it’s all good!
Nettie: Can you give three tips for SNAP Selling in the next decade?
Jill:
1. Recognize that YOU are now the primary differentiator. Focus on developing your personal and professional expertise so people will want to work with you.
2. Learn how to think like your customers. In SNAP Selling, I teach people how to do “mind melds.” It’s not hard, but by doing that one extra step, you’ll always be more success.
3. Spend more time planning your customer interactions. If their time is their most precious commodity, make sure they’d feel that every minute spent with you brings them high value.
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RELATED LINKS
Snap Selling – website
Selling to Big Companies – website
Nettie Hartsock website
Social Media Marketing GPS
September 3rd, 2010A Guide to Social Media One Tweet at a Time
For this edition of Cincom Expert Access we caught up with author Toby Bloomberg.
Toby will talk about her extraordinary e-book, “Social Media Marketing GPS”. The ebook now has thousands of downloads and fans. The book is truly an actionable how-to for marketers who must understand social media in order to do their jobs.
(My own confession is that Toby is one of my dear friends from the world of blogging and after having known her for almost 7 years online – we finally met in person last month in Texas. She’s just as wonderful in person as she is online!)
Nettie: Tell us about the ebook and what it will empower people to understand about marketing
Toby: Social Media Marketing GPS is the first business book that is based on interviews conducted on Twitter.
The book is structured into twelve chapters that begin with helping marketers understand why social media is critical. Other chapters discuss ethics, research, metrics, seven popular tactics, branding and blogger relations. The Twitter interviews, with forty highly respected marketers, form the heart of each chapter.
In addition, each chapter includes a wrap up, key points and Continue The Conversation questions. The questions, along with the information from the interviews, will help the reader understand how to develop a plan. What that book turns out to be is a thought process model for developing a social media marketing strategy.
Nettie: You’ve been online a very long time Toby, can you talk about how you first started blogging and how you view social media?
Toby: In the world of social media I suppose my blog, Diva Marketing might be considered a senior citizen or at least middle age! This month is Diva’s sixth blog anniversary.
I launched Diva Marketing as an experiment. At the time, I was conducting workshops for SCORE. I thought it was important for small business owners to have an online presence. Websites were costly and needed a web master who could code to maintain. I discovered this interesting website called a blog that was free, no HTML coding was necessary and there was this cool feature where people could talk back to you right on the post.
Diva Marketing was developed to help me understand the logistics. I fully intended to run it only for a couple of months. I mean, I had a website, why did I mean a blog too? However, something interesting happened. Within days people started reaching out to me in comments and eMails. They welcomed me to the blogosphere and told me they liked what I was writing. No one had welcomed me to the world wide web when I launched my website. I thought .. this is something different. Before I knew it I was sold.
Nettie: This is an incredible book – it is the first book on marketing/twitter to have had all the interviews conducted as well on Twitter – can you tell us more about why you felt it was important to have it in that format?
Toby: Thanks, Nettie! First, I was curious to understand if marketers would be receptive to a series of tweets focused on one topic over a period of time. This was before tweet chats became popular. To give the idea structure, I decided to format the content into chapters, similar to a ‘real’ business book. The chapters are developed based on the interviews with people working in the social media web. My thoughts were if it worked we’d produce a body of work that could serve as an easy to read resource to help people, not only understand the complexities of social media, but to serve as a guide to develop a social media plan. Twitter became not only the content platform but the distribution channel.
Although I got great response from the Twitter community, Twitter streams move fast and many people missed, or never saw the tweets. The content is too valuable not to be consolidated into a format that makes it easier to read. Since it was structured to be a “book” this was the next logical step. The response has been overwhelming! And of course the Twitter community has been instrumental in creating awareness!
Nettie: You talked to leaders in marketing including David Meerman Scott, Geoff Livingston, Ann Handley, B.L.Ochman and others – what was the one thing that most surprised you in the interviews overall?
Toby: No matter the topic, keep in mind there are twelve chapters and 40 interviewees, every person reinforced that to be successful social media must first begin with a strategy that includes objectives, goals and success measures.
Nettie: The book provides a “the roadmap GPS to empower your marketing journey” – what are three tips from the book interviews about using social media marketing?
Toby: Wonderful question and difficult to narrow it to three!
Nettie: With social media changing daily can anyone really call themselves a social media expert?
Toby: Perhaps not.
However, there are people who understand that social media is a unique strategy built on values of transparency, authenticity, honestly and a little passion. Those people understand that social media is not a cookie cutter one size fits all solution. They know that social media initiatives must be created to support brand values and the brand promise. They also realize social media is not contained to one department but impacts all aspect of the enterprise. At the end of the day, it’s about how to build stronger relationships in a digital world and I suppose who ever can do that well, can claim what ever title she wants. A rose by another name …
Nettie: What do you think is most exciting about how companies are using social marketing and how they will use it in the future?
Toby: I could say that the hot topics or shiny new toys are tools that focus on mobile and geo social networking like Foursquare and also augmented reality. However, as we’ve seen in social media what is here today can be gone tomorrow.
What I believe is people have a need to feel that they have influence over what is important to them in their lives (the products and services they use) that they matter and that they belong. When you think of it in those terms, the concept of social media –people talking-to-people brings us back to what I call the corner grocery story relationship. Shop keepers knew their customers, listened to their concerns and were active in the same community. It doesn’t matter what the next rendition turns out to be as long as it continues to create opportunities for people to better communicate within the digital world.
Which of course, so often leads to taking those relationships into the offline world!
Download Social Media Marketing GPS.
Trouble with the Hubble: How Does NASA Build Teams?
August 24th, 2010
Interview with Dr. Charles Pellerin, Former Director of Astrophysics NASA
For this issue of Cincom’s “Ask the Expert” we caught up with author and principal of 4-D Systems, Dr. Charles Pellerin, Former Director of Astrophysics NASA, Author – “How NASA Builds Teams” (Wiley)_- and Founder 4-D Systems – http://www.4-dsystems.com .
In this interview Dr. Pellerin talks about the Hubble Space Telescope, a flawed mirror, what story-lines mean and shares his insight on the future of space program.
Nettie:. Can you tell us about your book and how you came to understand how the social issues affect leadership decisions and project failure?
Dr. Pellerin: When the Hubble Failure Review Board named a “Leadership failure” as the root cause of the flawed mirror, I became extremely curious about social factors and their effect on teams. How did something we never even discussed trump the work of many of the best technical minds in the world? After I assembled the space mission to fix the telescope, I began to research space failures.
I began my inquiry as a Professor in the University of Colorado’s Business School in 1993, reading the reports and books about space accidents. To my surprise, every failure had a social shortfall as root cause!
Why focus on space accidents?
First, when astronauts (and teachers) die in space accidents, the cost of the investigation is irrelevant. Superficial investigations find the technical mistake and move on. Space accident investigations run for months with dozens of experts engaged. Second, and obviously, I understand the technical issues and know many of the people these reports reference.
In 1995, I began experimenting with commercial workshops, coaching and assessments to manage team social contexts. Experimentation came naturally, as I have a PhD in experimental physics. Our assessments produce quantitative data that we analyzed every-which-way to see what works and what does not.
In 2003, NASA awarded us a large contract to apply our processes to NASA teams. Dr. Ed Hoffman, Director of NASA’s “Academy for Program/Project and Engineering Leadership” sponsors our NASA work. We now have data from over 1,000 project, engineering and management teams. About two years ago, my colleague, Skip Borst, showed me a graph he just completed that amazed me Skip had graphed the performance enhancement of the 198 NASA teams with multiple assessments. The lowest 60% of the teams improved performance an average of 5% per 15-minute “Team Development Assessment” cycle! Moreover, on average, every team advanced no matter where they started. That is what spurred me to write How NASA Builds Teams (Wiley).
Nettie: How do you define social issues and how did this ultimately impact your work as Director of Astrophysics at NASA for your almost decade long tenure?
Dr. Pellerin: The technical world has a well-defined and broadly understood vocabulary. I can go anywhere in the world and speak about entropy, critical mass, and first derivative and be completely understood. This is not true in the social world. There is no universally accepted terminology for social matters. In fact, teams often comment following our workshops, “Perhaps the most valuable take-away is a common language to talk about social matters.”
As I studied failure reports, I noticed variation in descriptions of the causes. A “leadership failure” caused Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror flaw. “Normalization of Deviance,” caused Challenger’s explosion. A flawed “culture” caused Columbia’s disintegration. I chose the term “team social context” because context powerfully drives behaviors, and the terminology has sufficient breadth to include all descriptions.
I used my intuitive understanding of “4-D” when I was leading my Hubble team through the horrible aftermath of the discovery of the flaw, and in assembling the space Servicing Mission. My insights were, however, nothing approaching the effectiveness of current “4-D” methodology.
Nettie: Can you briefly tell us about the flawed mirror found after launching the Hubble and how the communications/social issues contributed to this?
Dr. Pellerin: In 1990, in my 8th year as NASA’s Director, Astrophysics, we launched Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. I worried about this mission because of the daunting pointing requirement. The telescope needed to point with the precision of a laser on a 25-cent piece at 200 miles. If we missed this specification by a factor of 10, the telescope would be useless. During on-orbit testing, we found to our dismay that all the difficult systems worked fine, but the mirror had the wrong shape! This rendered the telescope useless for its most important research, cosmology.
NASA appointed me liaison to the Hubble Failure Review Board because the mirror manufacturing was in the late 70’s, and I became Director in 1983. Therefore, they reasoned, I had nothing to do with the flawed mirror. (As you will soon see, that assumption was incorrect.) The Board worked for months trying to figure out what happened. One morning, one of the Board’s optical experts said, “I have an idea. Last night I calculated that an error in spacing the “null corrector by a centimeter would cause the error we are seeing.” This was an unbelievably large mistake for an optics house to make.
The original null corrector was in “bonded storage,” so we pulled out and measured it, confirming the source of the error. I thought, great, I could go back home and do my job again. The Board Chairman, Dr. Lew Allen had other ideas and persisted in his inquiry. He found that there were numerous instances where the contractor dismissed hints of a problem with “fault tree analysis.” When he inquired as to why NASA never “ran these problems to ground,” he learned that the contractor (Perkin-Elmer) never told NASA of these occurrences. (We settled a lawsuit against the contractor for $25M.) He concluded that NASA failed in leading the program because we created an environment so hostile that the contractor only told us of problems they were sure were real and threatening. Moreover, I was the Hubble program Director. Ouch!
Fortunately, in the turbulent aftermath, neither NASA nor I connected me with the flaw, despite the Board’s finding. I proceeded to assemble the mission that repaired the telescope on orbit, exceeding the original performance specifications by 50%. NASA awarded me a second Outstanding Leadership Medal when the servicing mission succeeded. (It is a wonderful world when you can break something, and then receive a medal for fixing it.)
Nettie: Your book “How NASA Builds Teams” describes the concept of “story lines.” Can you talk about how that works with leadership and how what stories we carry with us affect an organization?
Dr. Pellerin: Our most powerful means of influence is what we say, to ourselves (self-talk) and to others. Story-lines are things we say that seem like the truth, but are not because they are arguable. Since Story-lines are not actual truth, we are free to change them. We teach people to color their Story-lines as “red” when they distract people from outcomes they want, and “green” when they improve focus on actions that take us to desired outcomes. Here is a “red” Story-line: My boss gives me too much work. It is “red” because it is a Victim Story-line, “It is useless, and there is nothing I can do. The “green” replacement Story-line is: “I am responsible for managing my workload. I will communicate with my boss in a way that matches my workload to my capacity.” (We have a communication methodology, “4-D Communication” for this conversation.”)
Story-lines can take entire industries to success or ruin. Can you guess which US industry ran this Story-line? “Improving quality is too expensive.” They only considered shifting their Story-line to “Improving quality is the best way to lower cost,” copying their main competitor, when they lost 65% of market share to a foreign country. It was the auto industry, of course.
Nettie: How did these stories affect the Hubble error? And how do stories contribute to decisions we make on teams and projects?
Dr. Pellerin: The NASA contract managers ran a Story-line that “the best way to get performance from our contractors is to beat them up.” This is ill-conceived. People perform complex tasks more efficiently when their contributions are authentically appreciated and they enjoy their work. This kind of Story-line caused “the biggest screw-up in the history of science.” When we encounter broken government-contractor interfaces, we initiate the team recovery with authentic appreciation exercises. You can download the PowerPoint slide we use (free) at NASAteambuilding.com.
Red Story-lines cause decisions that are detrimental to success, and Green ones bring success.
With a little training, people can “color” their Story-lines and make choices. I spent my first 8 or so years with about 50% of my time consulting for aerospace companies and 50% experimenting with the 4-D System. My consulting clients took the 4-D workshop and I observed them afterward. As I walked through their buildings I loved hearing people on a telecon ask, “If we ran that Story-line, what outcome would we realize.” All saw immediately that the story-line was red and replaced it with a green one. (Do not tell anyone but this is cognitive psychology, simplified.)
Nettie: What do you think are three common misconceptions about leadership and project management that organizations have?
Dr. Pellerin:
1. That you can safely ignore team social context, because you ignore this at great peril as in the examples of space accidents.
2. That there is no way to measure and manage team social contexts, when our assessments measure team social context by measuring eight behaviors against defined standards.
3. That managing team social context is expensive and only affordable by big organizations like NASA. This is not true. Developing individuals by managing team contexts is highly efficient. We offer wholesale assessments to 4-D Network Members (see NASAteambuilding.com) and routinely waive all fees for academia and organization who cannot afford to pay.
Nettie: Can you describe the 4-D system briefly and how it can be used as a tool to analyze team and individual performance?
Dr. Pellerin: The 4-D System is a Cartesian coordinate system based in work Carl Jung did in 1905. The 4-D organizing system has two essential functions:
1) It analyzes complex team and leadership characteristics into simple manageable components; and
2) It aligns all 4-D processes (assessments, workshops, consulting and coaching) around the fundamental four dimensions.
It is at the heart of why our processes are so powerful—repeating the same theme everywhere.
Nettie: What is one of your success stories using the 4-D System described in your book and what types of organizations have you worked with?
Dr. Pellerin: Actually, I have two favorites:
1. Our processes took a contractor’s fee pool from 67% to 96% in a $1B+ contract (HNBT page xix). This change was rapid and profound. Moreover, the contractors’ top management credited us with the change; and
2. The STEREO project (HNBT page 54), where the government and contractor team monotonically improved in near lockstep. The project leadership reported high correlation of our social context measurements with both team performance and customer perceptions. Perhaps this is a favorite because it was a dramatic early success for us, when we were not as confident about our effectiveness.
Nettie: What do you think about the space industry now, as it exists? Are you hopeful for the future in regard to space exploration?
Dr. Pellerin: I have given this a bit of thought, as I was head of NASA strategy for a time. Here is the difficulty. Human flight is the heart and soul of the agency. It is also expensive, costing perhaps 10 to 100 times as much as unmanned programs. NASA has not had adequate funding for human space flight programs since Apollo. At this moment, political turmoil confuses civil space. The Administration wants more NASA funding to go to “commercial” space programs with less NASA oversight. The Congress worries about losing jobs in their districts. While I remain hopeful for the longer run, it is not clear how the near-term will play out. Note: NASA spends 90% of its budget on contracted work.
END
Accidental Genius: How to Use Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight and Content
July 16th, 2010
Nettie Hartsock interviews Author Mark Levy:
Mark Levy is the founder of Levy Innovation, a marketing strategy firm. David Meerman Scott has called him “a positioning guru extraordinaire,” and Debbie Weil referred to him as “a horse whisperer for writers and business thinkers.” He has written for The New York Times, and has written or co-created five books.
Mark’s latest is a revised, expanded, and re-subtitled edition of his bestseller, Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content. Mark also creates magic tricks and shows. His work has been performed Off-Broadway, in Las Vegas, and on all the major television networks.
For this issue of Expert Access we caught up with Mark Levy to talk about his new book. It’s already garnering rave reviews. Mark talks about the power of free-writing, how ideas are generated and why having a big, sexy idea is key in market differentiation.
Nettie: You’ve worked with some incredible people like David Meerman Scott, Debbie Weil and others. Can you tell us about your work?
Mark: Consultants and entrepreneurial companies hire me to increase their fees by up to 2000%. I predominantly do that by helping them come up with their marketplace position. Most business people know what positioning is, but let me tell you what I consider to be positioning. Every day when people walk down the street, they make snap judgments on everything they see, based on very little information. They say, “That guy’s fat, that woman is brilliant, that guy’s a moron.” You can say that making these kinds of judgments is wrong, but people do it all the time, and probably you and I do it too. It’s the way we are hard-wired.
They are also making these same snap judgments about your business, and what I do as a positioning consultant is I talk to you and your clients, and I find out what your single, sexiest idea is and what positions you most uniquely in the marketplace. Then we make sure that single idea comes through loud and clear in everything you do: in your website, books you write, blog posts you write, elevator speeches … . That way, when people make a snap judgment about your business, they’ll make it based on your most compelling idea. Leading with your big idea gives you the best chance of getting through to people.
Nettie: Are people going to hire someone based on this sexy idea that they see everywhere?
Mark: Not necessarily. Some people might see this big idea and they might not like it. That’s ok, because that big idea acts like a gatekeeper. If people don’t like that big idea, they’re not going to contact you nor should they contact you. The people who are attracted to that big, sexy idea are the ones who will be calling you. They’ll see the idea amplified everywhere, that signature idea, and they’ll want to be a part of it.
Nettie: Can you give an example of this big idea/uniqueness?
Mark: One example is my client Bill Treasurer. He is a management consultant, and he wasn’t getting all the gigs he deserved.
I interviewed Bill and his client and colleagues and discovered he had been a professional high-diver in theme parks. Bill was “Captain Inferno.” The most interesting thing? He had the courage to do his job for ten years even though he was afraid of heights.
I took the idea that he did what he had to do despite his fears, and we married it to the fact he did leadership development and team-building workshops. We made his company, Giant Leap Consulting, the world’s first courage-building company. Subsequently, all of Bill’s keynotes, workshops and consulting started to revolve around ways of driving fear out of the workplace so people could take the risk they were supposed to take.
Bill is booked months in advance now and makes thousands of dollars a week because of his new positioning.
Nettie: Let’s talk about Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content and what you hope people will get from the book.
Mark: Accidental Genius gives people a wonderful tool that I’ve used for over a decade and a half called freewriting. I teach people how to use freewriting as a problem-solving tool. It can help people solve their deepest business problems: strategy, finance and positioning. Freewriting helps them come up with options they did not realize they had before and help them make decisions on which option to pick. Secondly, the exact same tool as freewriting also acts as a tool for thought leadership for them. So they can come up with one-of-a-kind speeches, books, blog posts, white papers, speeches and anything else they need to stand out in their field.
Nettie: What about people who say they can’t write? Or have writers’ block?
Mark: When people say they have writers block, they probably are just stuck thinking the same thoughts over and over again. And when they’re thinking about situations that they need solutions for, like, if they’re trying to think through a problem, they’re probably looking at those situations as unchanging or calcified. They’re seeing all the players in the situation as unchanging—and everything is just log-jammed. They’re only looking at the situation in a very status quo way, and there’s no movement. If that’s what’s happening, you have to force motion into your thinking, and freewriting can help you do that.
Nettie: How does this also relate to people’s internal editors?
Mark: When we write, we always have an internal editor there cleaning up our writing trying to make us look smart together, and confident. The internal editor tries to control it all. It helps society run. We all need our internal editors; the only problem is when we have to think thoughts unlike we’ve ever had before, then our internal editor gets in the way. In order to think new and totally different thoughts, we need to go to places in our brain where we do more raw thinking, more edgy thinking and create there. Those places are where unusual ideas can be found and we can find them and shine them up and bring them back to the front.
Nettie: How do you define free-writing?
Mark: Writing as fast as you can for a fixed period of time without worrying about whether your writing is interesting, grammatically correct or has proper punctuation. The goal is to just attack a subject that is interesting to you and start writing. You do this kind of writing knowing that people will not necessarily see it—it’s for your eyes only. When you do that, your mind gives you your more-honest and true thoughts. It’s like what Ray Bradbury says, when he says, “In quickness there is truth.” Ginsberg said, “First thought, best thought.”
I don’t necessarily think that, but I’m saying that you need to think fast and trust that each thought that you have is potentially the right thought in solving your problem and getting into your book. Each thought has that potential as it appears.
Some thoughts are stepping-stone thoughts, so you just have to write as fast as you possibly can, and spewing all these thoughts and ideas. And some will be great and some won’t be as good. You won’t be able to reach the right thought until you spew out maybe the wrong eighteenth thought, but the nineteenth one is the perfect one.
Edward de Bono, the creativity expert, said, “All great ideas are only logical in hindsight.” If you could have thought of the great idea right away, you would have. More than likely you had to think a lot of bad ideas and illogical ideas before the real one came to the top.
If you allow yourself to play, make mistakes, and do it with speed, you’re creating all these kinds of accidents in what you’re doing, and some of them become happy accidents.
Nettie: So more play leads to more insight—perfect way to end the interview.
Thanks for sharing your wisdom Mark! And here’s to lots of happy accidents.
###
Everything Hurts – Interview with Author Bill Scheft
May 9th, 2010For this issue of Cincom Expert Access we caught up with writer and humor novelist Bill Scheft. Bill’s latest novel is “Everything Hurts,” (Simon & Schuster) Bill’s writing career spans comedy, sports writing, novels and 18 years writing for The Late Show” with David Letterman.
Bill shares his insights on writing, humor, life and why funny is always good.
Laughter, Writing and All is Well…
NETTIE: When did you realize that you wanted to be a writer? And more important, when did you realize that you could be funny?
BILL: I have wanted to be a writer from the time I was eight years old and found out my uncle (the legendary New Yorker writer Herbert Warren Wind) made his living that way. He was incredibly generous to me about showing me the possibilities of a writer’s life, especially when I moved to New York in 1980.
I knew I was funny when I realized I could make my mother laugh. Once that happens, if you’re any kind of self-hating Jew, making others laugh as you made your mother laugh becomes your life’s work.
NETTIE: You were a writer for Sports Illustrated for several years with your column, “The Show” – is there any difference at this point in writing about sports figures and comedy?
BILL: No. It was and is just like writing monologue jokes for Dave. Sports is no longer just games and athletes. There’s economic items, there’s crime, there’s gossip and there’s politics.
NETTIE: What is your favorite story from writing your column for Sports Illustrated?
BILL: My favorite single joke was about the Raiders kicker, Sebastian Janikowski, being arrested for DUI. Typical drunken Raider. He was blacked out locally. If you write a joke under 10 words, you get a check from God.
NETTIE: Who in your humble opinion is the funniest athlete in sports today?
BILL: They all line up behind Peyton Manning. I did a big piece on why he’s so funny two years ago in Sports Illustrated .
NETTIE: Your novel “Everything Hurts” is now out in paperback, and was just featured as an AARP hot pick, what are three tips you would give anyone who wants to write literary humor novels?
BILL: 1) Write what you know, 2) Make your characters lives complicated, 3) Even though it’s funny, avoid the word “rectum.”
NETTIE: Do you believe in writers block?
BILL: No. I believe in good days and bad days. But any time you attempt to write, you’re a writer. So, where is the block?
NETTIE: What is the hardest thing about being funny in fiction?
BILL: Hands down, it’s answering the question, “What’s the hardest thing about being funny in fiction?”
NETTIE: What is the best advice you ever got about writing?
BILL: The best advice I ever got I pass along freely: WRITERS WRITE.
NETTIE: How do you know when you’ve create a superb piece of funny fiction?
BILL: Can we change “superb” to “satisfying?” Good. I know it’s satisfying when it is simultaneously absurd and plausible.
NETTIE: Richard Russo said of your book, Everything Hurts – “How rare it is for a novel to be both hilarious and profoundly moving,” – what do you think is key to creating characters that are both poignant and comic at the same time?
BILL: Well, who am I to disagree with Pulitzer Prize Winner Richard Russo? I think a character can be poignant and comic if the reader can be entertained by the behavior and relate to the humanity. Somebody once told me “We always worry about the wrong thing.” I think it was Pulitzer Prize Winner Richard Russo.
The point is if you can read about someone’s denial and find yourself laughing and shaking your head in identification, how can you not be moved when the same person learns?
NETTIE: What writers had the most influence on you and how you write your novels?
BILL: Phillip Roth, Richard Yates, early Richard Price, JD Salinger, the Latin poet Catullus. Catullus taught me the value of the word, Salinger and Price the notion of a fearless voice, Yates the idea of broken people trying to put each other back together and Roth the excitement of wit, the irrevocableness of aging and the inevitability of being Jewish.
NETTIE: A lot of business writers will be reading this interview, can you describe your cubicle at your office and how your writing practice goes?
BILL: I have a real office at the Letterman show, but I do my fiction writing at home in two places: A converted 5×5 closet off the living room and a tiny desk in the corner of the bedroom. I spend more time at the tiny desk because I can’t get the Internet (the great distracter) on that computer.
Quickly, here’s the practice. Before I write a word, I
1) Wash my face
2) Read 2-3 pages from Philip Roth’s Reading Myself and Others.
3) Do 3-4 minutes of “organ breathing” (A meditation exercise, look it up)
Then we lock in and stare into the abyss.
NETTIE: You were a giant hit as the keynote at the Erma Conference – the speech had them rolling in the aisles, how do you think humor moves us all in life to a better place?
BILL: You mean rolling in the aisles before the TWO FULL ROOM STANDING OVATIONS, don’t you? I thought so. (Interviewer Note: I was at event, and ok, the rolling was before the standing.)
I will repeat myself a bit from a previous answer, but I think this bears repeating. When we laugh at something because we relate to it, for that moment we are not alone. It is the best way I know of to deal with fear. I know this. There was no one more fearful than myself before I went up at the Erma Conference. What if they don’t get it? What if they’re pissed off I’m not Steve Doocy? What if I set off the Jew Alarm? Then they start laughing, I start laughing and all is well. And isn’t that the idea? To feel as if all is well, even when it might not be?
Quick, somebody get Hallmark on the phone!
David Letterman Interviews Scheft about his book:
The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present
April 25th, 2010
Interview with author and New York Times Columnist Gail Collins
Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, “America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines.” She returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007.
Before joining the Times, Ms. Collins was a columnist at New York Newsday and the New York Daily News, and a reporter for United Press International. Her first jobs in journalism were in Connecticut, where she founded the Connecticut State News Bureau, which provided coverage of the state capitol and Connecticut politics. When she sold it in 1977, the CSNB was the largest news service of its kind in the country, with more than 30 weekly and daily newspaper chains.
Besides “America’s Women,” which was published in 2003, Ms. Collins is the author of “Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics,” and “The Millennium Book,” which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins.
Her latest book is “When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present” (2009, Little, Brown & Company)
For this interview Ms. Collins shared her insight on leadership, women and how one “twist” can make all the difference in the world.
NETTIE: How did the book come about?
Gail: My editor wanted me to write an introduction to a magazine edition we did that was just about women. What women had done in the last 1000 years and my editor handed me the assignment and said, “I don’t know what you want to do with this, but this feels to me like a story of a win.”
I hadn’t much thought about it in that fashion, I’m sort of in the business of complaining …it’s what I do for a living. But I really thought about the idea of the win in the last 1000 years and realized most of those wins came in the last 50 years from my decade to present.
As I was writing the introduction, I realized that all the presumptions about what women could do and their place in society had changed during my lifetime. All of those had shattered and that was such a huge thought for me, I knew I wanted to write a book about it.
NETTIE: You start the book out with the pants story and the theme of pants. What is it about pants and women?
Gail: I’ve always found it amusing that the judge in that opening story seems to equate putting women up on a pedestal with having them up there wearing skirts. Which doesn’t make any sense at all really.
When there’s a real rule of what people ought to be wearing it does really say something about your role in general. That is really all about a vision that women should not move around very much. You can’t go outside the house basically. In the 19th century women were presumed not to go out much, they just stayed home. Different world then but that whole idea of not moving much really struck me.
That was before pantyhose came out, and if you were wearing a skirt you were probably wearing a girdle and nylon stockings. And even girls in junior high were wearing that and that’s a lot of restriction. You weren’t going to bounce around a lot.
That was the same time girls couldn’t play sports and you couldn’t get a job that involved travel unless you were going to be an airline stewardess.
NETTIE: Did you feel that growing up?
Gail: It’s funny and what’s interesting about the book is if you talk to women in their 50,60,70s about life back in the day they did not remember a lot of this stuff until prompted. Because back then you didn’t feel oppressed, you didn’t feel like things were bad, it was just what everybody was used to. Things were also getting better economically. Women didn’t feel like they were being beaten up on. So you tend not to remember that type of stuff.
NETTIE: What is a childhood memory you have about it?
Gail: I remember my brother was allowed to play in the woods and I was not allowed to play in the woods. I did not however regard that as a central crisis in my life. (laughs)
NETTIE: How do you feel your wit and humor shaped your work? It’s a really amazing gift to make people think and laugh at the same time.
Gail: That’s a great question; awhile back a magazine editor called me and wanted to talk to me and Maureen Dowd and how we use humor. I thought about it and realized I started doing it when I had a news service in Connecticut. I covered the state legislature. No one wanted to pay attention to the coverage and so we started trying to come up with ways that people would be engaged. We came up with quizzes, songs, puzzles and bits of humor to make the news pieces livelier and hopefully draw more awareness to the stories and what was really happening in the legislature.
I did find if you wrote things that were funny people were much more likely to read them. I really started it to get people to read about their own state government
I love to do quizzes but it’s harder more than ever because people’s attention spans are so much shorter.
NETTIE: What do you think about your book and all the advancements in your own career? I think you said in the book that all the women who paved the way were two steps ahead of you. How do you define baby boomer?
Gail: There definitely was a really large multi-generation that came of age during that period of super prosperity in the late 50s and early 60s. They grew up feeling that they could do anything and not feeling restrained anymore. That was the generation that did civil rights and women rights and it’s also the generation that people find very irritating because it’s a very sort of self-aware and self-evolved generation. But I think it is still a very spectacular moment in the history of our nation.
NETTIE: How do you feel about the new generation of women, alphawives, 24/7 moms juggling it all and a career on top?
Gail: The great thing about our problems is that they were so specific and there were laws and policies and it was very easy to rally around those issues. Now things tend to be so much more personal. You have a problem with your boss, or in your house, and people don’t see those as universal problems so it’s very hard to get people to rally around them. I think there is a benefit to not having everything so personalized.
Class, gender and Woodstock moment…
NETTIE: You say in our country one of the biggest problems is class now as opposed to race or gender?
Gail: I think we live in a time now that if you come into the world your dad is going to be happy that he has a girl and there is a presumption you can do anything you want to do. It’s not attached politically. I don’t know a single conservative that didn’t have the same dreams for their daughters as they do for their sons. A little girl baby being born doesn’t have any expectations different than what a son might accomplish. I think now the challenge is very much predicated on education and whether you are born at a significant economic disadvantage. The economic disadvantages are really the whopping barrier now and very difficult to overcome.
NETTIE: I know you said “Obama being elected was a Woodstock moment.” What did you mean by that?
Gail: It’s funny when I was thinking about the Woodstock thing at the inauguration I was struck first, that once I made my way to where everybody was you realized there was no way out. No way to leave. People were all very cold but incredibly cheerful and happy and you kept walking places in the middle of crowds and feeling squished but all those things really reminded me of being at Woodstock. It was in its affect a very Woodstocky moment. It just felt like such a big deal and it was a moment to savor because of course it’s not going to last. But it was such a privilege to have experienced that.
NETTIE: I loved the Obama’s first dance at the inaugural ball and it reminded me of how you wrote in your book about the Twist and how the 50s changed in terms of women dancing with men.
Gail: There are all those kinds of little moments in history that really fascinate me. It’s like when the bicycles came along and it was ok for women to ride those and you finally saw them emerge and zipping down on all these bicycles. What a feeling that must have been. This impacted history because it led to dress reform and that led to more freedom about where you could go. Getting back to the Twist, it was really the first time you had a popular dance that anybody could do but also that women did not have to follow the guy for the first time. That led very soon to women just getting up and dancing whenever they want to dance and that’s very freeing.
NETTIE: When I went to Goddard College many of the women, we would dance all in the middle of the night and that really struck me that we didn’t need anyone else to dance with us.
Gail: Absolutely, it’s an amazing feeling that brings to you and helps you understand what can do all by yourself! That transforms us each time something like that occurs.
NETTIE: And we’ll end with a call to dance. Thank you again.
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Making a Curse a Blessing – Interview with Dr. Bernie Siegel
March 25th, 2010Interview with Bernie Siegel
Dr. Bernie Siegel is the author of Faith, Hope and Healing: Inspiring Lessons Learned from People Living with Cancer (Wiley 2009). Dr. Siegel speaks and runs workshops across the country and is devoted to humanizing medical care and medical education. His books are inspiring to readers worldwide. For more than 20 years, he has been educating cancer patients on the importance of a spiritual life in facing and recovering from cancer.
In this interview, he talks to us about being a baby boomer, age-old wisdom and the current healthcare crisis. His website is www.berniesiegelmd.com.
(This interview is conducted by digital strategist and teacher, Nettie Hartsock.)
NETTIE: Hi Dr. Siegel, tell us a bit about what inspired your latest book.
The more I learn about survival behavior, how a curse can become a blessing, how to save your life and being reborn by creating your authentic life, the more I want to share this age-old wisdom by making it current, understandable and useful to people today. When you heal your life, your body is aware through the changes induced and then does all it can to cure itself of any afflictions. Self-induced healing is not an accident. It is a work of art. What inspires me is life, its opportunities and potentials.
NETTIE: What do you think is most empowering about being a baby boomer?
I don’t know why being a baby boomer is more empowering than not being one. If you are alive today, you are exposed to the same environment and opportunities. Yes, they have technology available to them and can be empowered by it but also overwhelmed by it. We need to understand that happiness makes you a success while being a success, in the sense of accumulating material things, does not make you happy. Baby boomers should be empowered by their opportunities to help others and create the family of man and get beyond personal interest.
NETTIE: How do you stay active in your life and what do you most enjoy about this time in your life?
I do what makes me happy. I accept my mortality and don’t waste my life’s time. I am not troubled by what others think of me and my actions. I am here to serve in my way and not one imposed by others. I hear from people all over this planet and try to help them, and the opportunity to do that is a great gift. It gives my life meaning and lets me know I have not lived in vain. We also have a house full of love and pets.
NETTIE: Do you have an opinion on the current healthcare issues that are facing our country?
Yes, we need to treat people and not just a diagnosis. People have an experience and we need to help them with their experience of illness. We need to help children to feel loved so they will not be self-destructive and destructive to others in revenge. People need inspiration so they will make use of the information that can keep them healthy, and through self-worth, lead to self-care. Parents, teachers, clergy, doctors and other authorities are all a part of health care. If you did not feel loved by your parents, you are in for big trouble regarding major illnesses and a much shorter life. We need to let people know we care and make health care available to all and treat people as well as we do our animals. Nine hundred years ago Maimonides said, “If people took as good care of themselves as they do their animals, they would suffer fewer illnesses.” I think it is time we woke up to this fact and get people to love themselves as much as they love their pets. Smoking outdoors to protect your pets while you kill yourself doesn’t really make sense.
NETTIE: You’ve long been a beacon of healing for people struggling with illness; why do you think it’s so important for our doctors to also focus on the human side of healthcare?
Because people get sick. When medical advertising and medical care is only about what you prescribe for depression, flu, cancer, AIDS etc., we are not treating people. We need to help them understand how their life contributes to their health. Like Monday morning having the most heart attacks, strokes, illnesses and suicides. Then a curse can become a blessing. As hunger leads to seeking nourishment for the body, a disease can lead to seeking nourishment for your life.
NETTIE: If you have to give three tips to baby boomers who want to live a long and fruitful life, what might they be?
Love yourself, and re-parent yourself if your parents didn’t love you by getting your baby pictures out and loving that kid. Live your chocolate ice cream and by that I mean what makes you happy. Exercise, meditate and eat a healthy diet because it feels good to do so and because you love yourself and your life. Your body loves you but needs to know you love it and your life. Do not do things to not die because it doesn’t work, and when you die, you will be very bitter that you did everything it suggested and died anyway.
NETTIE: Do you have a favorite motto or mantra that sums up your beliefs?
Be content with what you have .
Rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.
Lao-Tzu.
NETTIE: You’ve been often quoted in terms of believing that disease can be a wakeup call for changing one’s life. Can you talk about how you think that works in reference to your latest book?
When people truly confront their mortality, they realize time isn’t money it is everything. Then you spend more time with the things and people you love and who love you and less time with those who you don’t love and who don’t love you. When your body senses that love, amazing things can happen. I talk about reflections related to the various inspiring stories from cancer patients, and people need to understand it is about quieting your mind and your life so you can see in the still water you are not an ugly duckling; you are a swan.
NETTIE: What are you currently working on?
Being a more loving human being and living the sermon.. I am hoping to write a book about so-called miracles, which is really what life is. Creation is not explainable, but it is a joy to experience. I also want to write about the non-local nature of consciousness. What we call past lives. How we can communicate with animals, the dead, predict the future, organ memories in transplant recipients, near-death experiences and more. Through my experiences, I know these are all meaningful and help us to understand the nature of life.
The Right Five Words are More Important than Five Thousand Words
February 26th, 2010An interview with Bill Schley, author of Why Johnny Can’t Brand and the soon to be released, Micro-Script Rules.
Bill is also President and Chief Creative Officer of international branding firm, davidID (http://www.davidid.com/) and an avid skydiver. In this interview, Bill talks about skydiving, why five words are more important than five thousand and why everyone needs to know the micro-script rules.
Nettie: Bill, tell us a bit about your background.
Bill Schley: I started as a copywriter at Ted Bates back in the 80′s and got into advertising because I thought I was going to make funny dog-food commercials. What I learned was the unique selling proposition from the guys who invented it (Rosser Reeves and Ted Bates), and that changed my life. The unique selling proposition later became the “dominant selling idea.”
That made me realize how important a big idea at the center of any brand communication was paramount—that a big idea could move mountains and move markets.
Nettie: Did you get all your ideas while you were skydiving?
Bill Schley: (Laughs.) I got the biggest idea while I was skydiving, and that idea was that the hardest thing to do in branding was to commit to that one big idea. Committing to one big idea instead of throwing out all 20 features and benefits is as hard as jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. That lack of commitment is why Johnny Can’t Brand. Whereas if you close your eyes and you jump, you’re more committed than you’ve ever been in your life, and an amazing thing happens. You get a focus, clarity, creativity and simplicity that are brand-changing. It’s the universal paradox that the narrower you focus, the wider, farther and deeper your message goes.
Nettie: Can you define heuristics as it relates to marketing?
Bill Schley: A rule of thumb and when human beings are forced with some kind of stressful event or mortal danger, we go right to unconscious thinking that is super fast and gets to the heart of the matter in nanoseconds. That’s the thinking without thinking that’s the unconscious intelligence that cognitive psychologists have been studying for years.
Psychologists tell us that in moments of crisis, we shift to intuition. It’s remarkably fast and accurate—unconscious intelligence that acts before we even have time to think.
The intuition is based on heuristics or rules of thumb, which are just built-in instructions that tell our brain how to act instantly without analyzing a bunch of facts.
Nettie: What are the rules of thumb revealing to us?
Bill Schley: What they’re showing us is the heart of the matter—the real bottom line by telling us to do the opposite of what we’ve always been taught. They make us discard information not collect more of it, to make ourselves smarter. Too much data makes us dumber. The simplest message always wins, because our brains love it that way.
For a hundred years, people have said KISS—keep it simple stupid. We pay lip service to it, but we never do it. And in this hyper-connected world, it is “survival of the simplest.”
Nettie: Can you also talk about how your term “micro-scripts” relates to this?
Bill Schley: I can, and give you the four micro-script rules:
1. It’s no longer important what you say or what people hear.
The only thing that matters is what people repeat after you’ve said it. They won’t repeat anything because you tell them to. They’ll repeat it because they like saying it, and they gain from saying it. They say it two places: first to themselves, and then to their community.
2. Every screen’s a word-of-mouth machine.
In the old days, there were three mediums, now there is only one, and it’s not the Internet or social networking—those are just mechanical. It’s a brand-new, 50,000-year-old medium called word-of-mouth. We need to position and reframe what word-of-mouth is.
The fact is, people need to realize that all the digital machines in their pockets or palms are just 21st-century, word-of-mouth machines. Word-of-mouth never went away—it’s just sort of hid for 80 years because TV/radio only went one way. Now that technology goes both ways, it’s caught up to word-of-mouth. The ultimate equity in marketing is trust. Word-of-mouth flips the relationship with trust on its head. It puts trust at the beginning of the interaction instead of the end.
With word-of-mouth, either trust comes first or there won’t be a relationship.
So to rule #3, where we answer, “What kind of messages do they want to repeat?”
3. The answer is (the rule) they want to repeat “micro-scripts.” Here are some examples. Remember “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” or “the bridge to nowhere”? These are micro-scripts. It’s any set of words, from one word to a sentence or two—no more than you can fit on a Blackberry screen—that uses metaphors, vivid language or just rhythmic words to verbalize your idea in a way that people like to repeat it.
Micro-scripts are like magic words that have been used by master communicators since time immemorial. Their messages verbalize in a way that’s optimized for our heuristic brains. The truth is we’ve always had them; they’re just more important today than ever.
You might ask, isn’t a micro-script just a catchphrase or a sound bite? I say, yeah, but it’s a very special kind of sound bite. It’s an “idea-bite.” It either tells a whole story or provides a piece of a story that’s already running in my brain.
It’s just enough information to persuade people to act.
Here are more examples: “It’s made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar,” “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” “Where’s there’s smoke, there’s fire” and “Airborne works because it was invented by a second-grade teacher.”
The last rule answers the questions, “What’s the subject of your MS? What should it be about?”
4. Your micro-script has to be built on a dominant selling idea. The ultimate idea at the center of your communication—the idea of a difference you’re trying to communicate. It’s the ultimate value, the one big advantage you can claim that others can’t. Your single best differentiating attribute.
In marketing terms, it’s your brand positioning, brought to its sharpest edge.
If I was going to apply one big idea to skydiving, it would be, “It’s not like falling it’s like flying.” In micro-scripts I would say, “If you want to fly like Superman, then put on a parachute and take a jump.”
Nettie: Any last tips?
Bill Schley: It all comes down to this. The right FIVE words are more powerful than five thousand. It’s more important than ever to tell your story—you just have to say it in a couple sentences or less.
If you’re branding, it’s more important to work from the ground up—from something incredibly simple—than from 50,000 feet down, even if you have a parachute.
David Meerman Scott: Changing the Rules of Marketing, PR … and Business
February 9th, 2010EDITOR’S NOTE:
David Meerman Scott has been a contributor to Cincom Expert Access since 2006. Check out the interview below and win a free copy of his worldwide bestselling book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly“courtesy of Cincom Expert Access. Thanks to David for freely sharing his time and ideas over the years. We only have 50 copies – so first come first serve.
Contact Steve Kayser at skayser@cincom.com or on Twitter at @SteveKayser.
INTERVIEW BY EXPERT ACCESS CONTRIBUTOR NETTIE HARTSOCK
David Meerman Scott’s best-selling book, “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” has been extensively updated and features several new major marketing campaign stories as well as how Facebook and Twitter’s usage have impacted the online marketing world.
Nettie: What’s different in this new edition?
David Meerman Scott (David): This second edition of the book has gone through an extensive rewrite. Of course, I have checked every fact, figure, and URL. But I’ve also listened. In the past two years, I’ve met thousands of people who have shared their stories with me, so I’ve drawn from those experiences and included many new examples of success.
While including so many new stories and examples has resulted in my removing many of the less interesting originals, I’m convinced that these exciting replacements are even more valuable.
Nettie: The book also covers the new emergence of tools like Facebook and Twitter?
David: Yes, when I wrote the first edition of the book, Facebook was only available to those with a .edu email address (students and educators), so I didn’t feature Facebook. Twitter didn’t even exist at the time I was researching the first edition. I added extensive new information and examples on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites.
In fact, the rise of the term social media has been so strong in the past few years that I’ve even changed the subtitle of the book to include it.
Nettie: What are a couple of favorite case studies in the book that are new and will be of interest to readers?
David: I have dozens of examples in the book, but I’ll share two here:
Facebook group drives 15,000 people to the Singapore Tattoo Show (www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=32140274011)
In its first year (2009), the Singapore Tattoo Show had an aggressive target of 5,000 attendees. Organizers launched via a Facebook group called Tattoo Artistry three months prior to the show. The group grew very quickly, securing a place as the center of tattoo artistry for the Asia region.
The passion of the Tattoo Artistry Facebook group members meant they would help promote the group to their friends, so the online community eventually included many people eager to attend the live event. Instead of relying on expensive advertising, show organizers built a community of passionate fans who built anticipation and buzz for the event. The Tattoo Artistry Facebook group quickly reached 3,000 members and was an important reason that more than 15,000 people attended the first Singapore Tattoo Show—that’s three times the expected number of attendees!
Film Producer Creates a World Wide Rave by Making Soundtrack Free for Download (http://www.thegraduatesmovie.com/)
As I say many times in the book, a great way to generate interest in products and services is to make select content available for free online. There’s no doubt that free content sells. The Graduates, a feature film released in 2009, is an award-winning comedy about four friends who head to the beach without a care in the world. Prior to release, the film had been developing a loyal following among the 18- to 34-year-old demographic following a dozen sold-out festival and sneak preview screenings. It had been advertised solely by word-of-mouth and in a clever marketing technique, via a free soundtrack download.
The film features the music of some incredible indie bands (The New Rags, Plushgun, Sonia Montez, The Mad Tea Party, Our Daughter’s Wedding, and The Smittens) that are popular with the buyer personas who might see the movie. So the idea of making the entire soundtrack available for free is a brilliant strategy.
Of course, the bands also benefit because new listeners are exposed to their music and, if they like it, may decide to buy an album or see them live. “We felt it made sense to give away the soundtrack to build loyalty, show off the product, and compensate for a zero-dollar marketing budget, all in one fell swoop,” says Ryan Gielen, executive producer of The Graduates.
I wondered about the musicians whose music was given away. Did any of them resist? “The worst-case scenario for even an established band is that we just crafted a $100,000 music video for them,” Ryan says. “The Rolling Stones should laugh us out of the room, but this is a good opportunity for many, many bands.” The strategy has worked well for Gielen. “The free soundtrack has been a real success,” he says. “The totally free music promo opened us up to many more people.”
What is a World Wide Rave?
Nettie: What surprised you most in the period since 2007 when the first edition was published?
David: Let me disclose a secret. Back when I was writing the first edition in 2006 and when it came out in 2007, I was a bit unsure of the global applicability of the new rules.
What is heartening is that since that time, 25 percent of the first edition’s sales have come from outside the United States. As I write this, the book has been or is being translated into 24 languages including Bulgarian, Finnish, Korean, Vietnamese, Serbian, and Turkish. I’m also receiving invitations from all over the world to speak about the new rules. In the past year, I’ve traveled to countries including Saudi Arabia, the UK, Estonia, Latvia, Turkey, Croatia, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, and the Dominican Republic.
So I can say with certainty that the ideas do resonate worldwide. We are indeed witnessing a global phenomenon.
Nettie: Your books are now being used as part of dozens of notable university marketing programs. Do you have any tips on how universities need to be educating marketing students in terms of social media?
David: At first, when the first edition was released in 2007, College and University marketing programs were resistant to the ideas. But a few professors, including Karen Miller Russell, Associate Professor, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia and Stephen Quigley from Boston University, quickly adopted the ideas in the book and began assigning it to their students as part of classes.
However, what I found most interesting is that it was the students demanding that their professors use the book that pushed adoption in dozens of universities. Students would email me exasperated that they were not being taught online marketing and PR and the tools and techniques seemed to be stuck in the 1980s. Several admitted they had cried when they read my book because they felt their investment in an education had been wasted.
So I would say to the professors out there: OPEN YOUR EYES. Study what’s going on and how smart marketers and PR pros are reaching audiences today and educate yourself on the new ideas so you can better prepare your students.
Nettie: What do you think are the three things everyone needs to understand about new marketing and PR for 2010?
David: Before the Web came along, there were only three ways to get noticed: buy expensive advertising, beg the mainstream media to tell your story for you, or hire a huge sales staff to bug people one at a time about your products. Now we have a better option: publishing interesting content on the Web that your buyers want to consume.
The tools of the marketing and PR trade have changed. The skills that worked offline to help you buy or beg or bug your way in are the skills of interruption and coercion. Online success comes from thinking like a journalist and a thought leader.
The Web allows organizations of all kinds (large and small companies, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, political candidates, consultants, even rock bands and churches) the ability to become publishers of content.
So to be successful in 2010, everyone (including me) needs to be asking this series of questions:
1) Who are my buyers? (Or who are my donors, voters, readers, etc.)
2) What problems do my buyers have that my products or services solve?
3) How can I create some amazing information on the Web (a YouTube video, ebook, blog, Webinar, series of photos, charts and graphs, survey results, and so on) that my buyers will be eager to consume and that will brand me as someone to do business with?
Nettie: How do you deal with skeptics?
David: Here is my video response for that:
David Meerman Scott keynote at BMA 2009 national conference from David Meerman Scott on Vimeo.
At every speech, I pose four questions to the audience and ask them to raise their hands if the answer to a question is “yes.” How would you answer?
In your personal or professional life in the past two months, when looking for an answer to a problem or to research a product, have you
(1) responded to a direct mail advertisement?
(2) consulted magazines, newspapers, TV, or radio?
(3) gone to a tradeshow as an attendee?
(3) used Google or another search engine?
( 4) electronically contacted a friend, colleague, or family member (email, IM, Facebook, etc.) who responded with a Web URL that you then visited?
I just love asking these questions in front of skeptics. I’ve asked them in boardrooms filled with senior executives who are adamant that my ideas are not appropriate for their business. I always turn people around.
Over the course of a year, in front of over ten thousand people from many dozens of groups all over the world including college students, marketing professionals, technology buyers, and executives at Fortune 500 companies, the answers were surprisingly consistent. Between 5 and 20 percent of people answer each of the first three questions affirmatively.
These answers mean that the ways most companies have historically reached people—advertising, direct mail, tradeshow booths, and pleas to the mainstream media for coverage—are only effective in reaching a small portion of potential customers. However, between 100 percent of people raise their hands to indicate that they have used a search engine to find a solution to a problem or to research a product and 90 percent report that they have checked out a Web site suggested by a friend, colleague, or family member.
Clearly, establishing a new rules of marketing & PR strategy and creating effective Web content that is indexed by search engines is critical for any business. When people are looking for answers to problems, they go online first.
Nettie: What would you say to people who think social media is a fad?
David: I’d say they are correct.
But let me explain. “Social media” is a misunderstood and over-hyped phrase. Much like the overused “Web 2.0,” many people think they know what social media is, but few can actually describe it. So in my experience, the use of the term “social media” is absolutely a fad.
By way of clarification, here is my personal definition: Social media describes the way people share ideas, content, thoughts, and relationships online. Social media differs from so-called ‘mainstream media’ in that anyone can create, comment, and add to social media content. Social media can take the form of text (blogs & wikis), audio (podcasts), video (YouTube), images (Flickr), and communities (Twitter, Facebook, & more).
What’s not a fad is that creating interesting information and publishing it online. The New Rules of Marketing & PR is incredibly effective and most certainly not a fad. The ideas in my book are much more than just “social media.”
Nettie: Thank you.
Leadership Lessons on “The Road to Woodstock”
December 7th, 2009
INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL LANG
Michael Lang is a producer who is best known as co-creator of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969. He has produced festivals in East Berlin, the concert at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Woodstock 94 and Woodstock 99. He is the head of the Michael Lang Organization, which encompasses live-event production, film and theater production and artist management.
He is also the author of “The Road to Woodstock: From the Man Behind the Festival” with Holly George Warren. The New York Times best-selling book is available everywhere books are sold.
In this interview Lang shares some inside secrets from Woodstock, and his take in inspiration, preparedness and intuition.
Nettie: Are you starting to suffer traumatic interview disorder?
Michael: Not yet, but it’s getting close. (laughs)
Nettie: I loved the book. One of the things I read is that you said, “Money has never been my aim – always a side effect of what I do,” can you talk about that in terms of your life and career path?
Michael: I’ve been very lucky in that anything I’ve done I would have done whether it was something that was a paying proposition or not, so I’ve never really had to work at something just for money. That’s been a wonderful way to have gone through life and I’ve been very lucky to have done that. And luckily enough the things I’ve done have made me a comfortable life and enabled me to continue to do the things I’ve wanted to do.
I’ve always sort of looked at money as a tool to do other things.
Nettie: How do you define instinct and intuition, because you’ve said that’s what you really operated on?
Michael: I think if you trust your intuition and your instincts you’re really getting the benefit of that inner thought process without having to filter too much from what your environment tells you and I think that’s a much clearer form of information and much more accurate bit of information because it’s hard to put everything into concise thought and terms and analysis.
You know certain feelings come from just gleaning meanings from body language, and other things you don’t interpret necessarily consciously but provide you with huge and important amounts of information. I’m very much someone who is intuitive that way.
Nettie: Can you tell us the story about your Dad being on the scaffolding at Woodstock and who was playing?
Michael: Sure, that is something I just discovered last year as I was the DVD of Woodstock which had not watched for year. We were looking through some of the outtakes and footage. And as Richie Havens is walking offstage I caught a glimpse of my father, sitting above the deck, about 15 feet off the deck of the stage on the scaffolding. It had never registered that weekend and it was just a great moment for me seeing that footage.
I discovered it when we were making the new film.
Nettie: Was your dad smilling?
Michael: Oh yeah he was having a great time.
Nettie : It’s like the metaphor for dads in Texas sitting in the football stadium. Except your dad got to sit in an amazing music stadium and watch his son.
Michael: (laughs) That’s right. And he had the best seat of the house.
Nettie: Can you talk about John Lennon, in your book you talk about wanting him to come. Was he in Canada?
Michael: Yes, he was in Canada. He had been busted in England and was in Canada in early 68 – 69. The Nixon administration was very much trying to keep him out of the country because of his anti-Vietnam war stance and he was very vocal about his stance on the war. So there was really no way to get him a visa. We’d been working a long time with Apple in trying to make it happen.
In writing the book and doing my research, I went through what I euphemistically call my files, which are old boxes stuffed in the basement. And I came across this letter from Apple with all the Beatles copies, and it had an offer they made (because we couldn’t get John) for them to send The Plastic Ono band, James Taylor and Billy Preston, which all three would have been wonderful to have. But the letter came just as we were getting thrown out of Wallkill. And with the office being all packed up and all the confusion, I never saw the letter until last year.
Nettie: Was the letter opened? Or you found it and then opened it?
Michael: It was opened probably by one of my assistants and then left in my pile.
Nettie : Wow, that’s even a good lesson for the digital age – clean out your inbox.
Micheal: (laughs) Exactly stay on top of it.
Synchronicity, luck and being prepared…
Nettie: What do you think about the role of synchronicity and serendipity in your life and how this event played out?
Michael: I felt we were in this energy flow that was moving us forward. I’ve always had, I guess what some people would call luck. I really look at it more as though if you’re really prepared as well as you can be in every way that you can be and an opportunity presents itself, that’s luck. Lucky that you’re in a position to take advantage of whatever comes along. That’s how I interpret luck, there might be something beyond that, but being prepared is really 90% of it.
Be prepared for the opportunity to come. Because of all the work we did – preparation, planning and how thorough we tried to be, I think that’s why when those moments came along and things looked grim, and we might have needed that extra moment of faith or luck or whatever you want to call it that it happened for us.
Nettie: Is there a lot of pressure on you to be the best party thrower in the world? What is it like to be an icon?
Michael: (laughs) It’s always been really a positive experience. Everyone that comes up to me seems to relate it as a positive memory.
Nettie: Is it true that the helicopter dropped flowers and dried clothes?
Michael: It was not true. It is close to truth. It was small plane and it was rose petals.
Nettie: And what precipitated that small plane dropping rose petals?
Michael: I had hired the plane early on because I thought it would be neat. It was a lot of rose petals and it cost us like 400 or 500 dollars.
Nettie: What is your favorite performance?
Michael: I was stunned by Richie Havens, Country Joe, Joe Cocker, Santana – the highlight of the energy created by the audience was Jimi Hendrix redefining the national anthem.
Nettie: Has Pete Townshend been less grumpy since Woodstock?
Michael: (laughs.) Yes, I think he realized it was a good thing he did.
Sustainability, Woodstock.com and the future…
Nettie: You said about Woodstock, “we just avoided the silly confrontations that stupid rules can create.” Do you still do that in business?
Michael: Yes. Absolutely.
Nettie: What about Woodstock.com – http://www.woodstock.com , as a brand for the 21st century, sustainability, the green movement and your venture?
Michael: We want to be successful at promoting those ideas that are critical to our planet’s survival and the well-being of our kids and make some sort of contribution to empower the way people get along. I think Woodstock symbolizes that potential for things to work in a better way and I hope we’re useful for that to continue. I’m working on a musical now.
Nettie: What are you doing with that?
Michael: It’s called the Summer of 69 and it’s really about that summer when everything changed for us and hopefully, it will give the audience an experience of what it was like to go through that experience.
Nettie: Do you still drum?
Michael: (Laughs.) I do, but not outside of my childrens’ drum sets. My kids are into heavy metal.
Nettie: What happened to the BSA Victor you were riding around? Does it still run?
Michael: It’s still in my garage. It runs, but it’s incredibly hard to start, so it doesn’t get started very often.
Nettie : Have you come home again with all of this? Do you feel you’ve completed a circle?
Michael: Yeah, I do funnily enough. It’s an experience that I tried to move away from for a long time and I’ve embraced it to write the book and it has been very rewarding. I’ve gained a new perspective on it all and at the same time the people that worked on it are a pretty close knit bunch of people and we’re all still together.
Nettie: Are there parallels you see today in how this culture is changing and embracing a more authentic truthful way of being in the world?
Michael: I think absolutely. You talk about authenticity in that day we were really interested in the real thing, not just appearances. We felt we were really dealing with real issues and we’ve come back around to that. We’ve dealt with the 80s and the 90s, and we’re left in a position where we treated the planet badly and treated each other badly and now we’re facing the consequence. I’m very hopeful for the future and that we can all work for the greater good. Young people are getting more involved and creating a big difference in where we’re heading.
Nettie: What do you hope will happen with the Woodstock.com site long-term?
Michael: I hope it becomes a place where people can exchange ideas, and becomes a place of sustainability where we can all work together for the future.
Nettie: Thank you Michael.
Hoodwinked! An Interview with the Economic Hit Man John Perkins
October 28th, 2009
WHY THE WORLD FINANCIAL MARKETS IMPLODED – AND WHAT WE NEED TO DO TO REMAKE THEM
On November 10th, John Perkins’ latest book, “Hoodwinked”(Broadway Business, 2009) – Amazon Pre-Order Link – will be released.
John Perkins has seen the signs of today’s economic meltdown before. The subprime mortgage fiascos, the banking industry collapse, the rising tide of unemployment, the shuttering of small businesses across the landscape are all too familiar symptoms of a far greater disease. In his former life as an economic hit man, he was on the front lines both as an observer and a perpetrator of events, once confined only to the third world, that have now sent the United States—and in fact the entire planet—spiraling toward disaster.
Here, Perkins pulls back the curtain on the real cause of the current global financial meltdown. He shows how we’ve been hoodwinked by the CEOs who run the corporatocracy—those few corporations that control the vast amounts of capital, land, and resources around the globe—and the politicians they manipulate. These corporate fat cats, Perkins explains, have sold us all on what he calls predatory capitalism, a misguided form of geopolitics and capitalism that encourages a widespread exploitation of the many to benefit a small number of the already very wealthy. Their arrogance, gluttony, and mismanagement have brought us to this perilous edge. The solution is not a “return to normal.”
But there is a way out. As Perkins makes clear, we can create a healthy economy that will encourage businesses to act responsibly, not only in the interests of their shareholders and corporate partners (and the lobbyists they have in their pockets), but in the interests of their employees, their customers, the environment, and society at large.
INTERVIEW BY NETTIE HARTSOCK
We had a chance to catch up with John Perkins back from his trip to Panama with Jane Goodall and Lynn Roberts of Dreamchange.org and he answered our questions about his latest book, economic hitmen and his own mission for his grandson.
John Perkins has lived four lives: as an economic hit man (EHM); as the CEO of a successful alternative energy company, who was rewarded for not disclosing his EHM past; as an expert on indigenous cultures and shamanism, a teacher and writer who used this expertise to promote ecology and sustainability while continuing to honor his vow of silence about his life as an EHM; and as a writer who, in telling the real-life story about his extraordinary dealings as an EHM, has exposed the world of international intrigue and corruption that is turning the American republic into a global empire despised by increasing numbers of people around the planet. His website is www.johnperkins.org and he’s also co-founder of www.dreamchange.org . His TWITTER ID @economic_hitman .
Nettie: Could you please describe the term economic hitmen?
John: It is a tongue-in-cheek term, like “spook” or “spy’ for a CIA agent. My real title was Chief Economist at MAIN, a firm of over 2000 professional “consultants.”
Nettie: Can you talk about how economic hitmen work in third world countries and how establishing high debt is one of the things that contributes to the power of the global empire?
John: The most common approach for EHMs is to identify a third world country with resources our corporations covet, like oil. Then arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or a sister organization. But the money does not go to the country. Rather it hires US corporations to build power plants, industrial parks, and other infrastructure projects in that country. These benefit a few wealthy local families, as well as the US corporations, but do not help the majority of the people who are too poor to use electricity, not skilled enough to work in industrial parks, and basically live outside the economic system. The country ends up owing a huge debt that it can not repay. So we EHM go back to the country and say “since you can’t pay your debts, give us a pound of flesh: sell your oil real cheap to our oil companies, or vote with us on the next UN vote, or send troops to support ours in someplace like Iraq.”
On the few occasions when we fail, the jackals are sent in to overthrow the government or assassinate the leaders we EHM were unable to corrupt. This happened with me in Panama and Ecuador where Omar Torrijos and Jaime Roldos were assassinated as a result. If the jackals fail too, then the US military goes in — like in Iraq.
In this way we EHMs have created a global empire, the first in history to be developed primarily without the military.
Nettie: What are the political implications of this recession and the economics behind it? Are there things happening that the general public is unaware of in terms of the shifting of global power?
John: The geopolitics of the world has changed radically. No longer is it so much a question of countries as of corporations. We used to think of the planet as a big globe with 180 or so countries; a few of these — especially the US and USSR — influenced many others. Today, we still have 180 or so countries but we now see the power base as looking something like a group of large clouds that circle the planet. These are the corporations. They know no national boundaries, adhere to no particular laws. The strike deals with the Chinese and Taiwanese, the Israelis and Arab countries. . . We are at a time that is similar to when city states merged into nation states, except now the nations are becoming less and less important. A radical change in world politics and business is occurring.
We are at a time in history when everyone on this planet is faced with the same crises — global warming, resource shortages, rising prices. We are also — for the first time ever — highly interdependent. We communicate through the internet and cell phones with the most remote areas. We recognize that we are a fragil species living on a small planet. Now is the time for us to come together and devote ourselves to solving these problems in ways that will establish better lives for all of us, on every continent.
Nettie: Can you define corporatocracy and how it is operating in the world today and why it is dangerous?
John: It is the modern equivalent of the emperor — a leader who is not elected, does not serve a limited term, and essentially reports to no one. Today, rather than one person, we have a group, the people who run our largest and most powerful corporations; we call them the corporatocracy. As the major financiers of most political campaigns (directly and through their stockholders) and employers of powerful lobbyists, they control governments. They also control the mainstream press –through direct ownership and also advertising budgets. And because of the “revolving” policy they are constantly moving back and forth between the highest corporate and government positions. They control most of the world’s resources and institutions.
Nettie: What are some of the positive changes you see in terms of the world and how the awareness is growing in terms of these issues?
Since the publication of “Confessions” in late 2004, I have seen major changes in attitudes. One example: students. In 2005 when I dined with MBA students before my speeches at their schools and asked them to describe their goals, nearly all of them talked about making money and attaining power. In the fall
of 2008 and the first half of 2009, I did not hear one student speak like this. Not one MBA student from Stanford, Columbia, Wharton, the University of Michigan, Ohio State, Boston University, Harvard, Antioch, or the China Europe International Business School. Nor did I hear it from undergraduate students at Olivet College, Regis University, St. John’s University, William Patterson University, or Wilmington College. Attitudes had changed in just three years. Not a single student who attended those dinners and other meetings with me listed as his or her primary goal the accumulation of either wealth or power. What they said instead was that they wanted to help create a better world.
Nettie: Can you talk about your personal mission and your books and why it’s important for people to take action now?
John” My mission is to create a sustainable, just, and peaceful world for my 2 year old grandson, Grant. I know that in this highly integrated world, that is only possible if every child in every country enjoys that same opportunity. This is totally new. Never before has everyone on this planet been so closely related to everyone else. We are truly interdependent. We are all impacted by the same crises: climate change, diminishing resources, over population, increasing prices for the essentials of life, and violence due to deprivation and desperation.
And, for the first time, we all know it. We are all communicating with each other, over the Internet and cell phones. We the people have always been the ones to foment change. Whether it was about getting rid of slavery, women’s rights, cleaning up polluted rivers, or ending wars (like Vietnam), we have had to force the
politicians and CEOs to do it.
Nettie: Can you talk about your transformation in terms of your mission and how you liberated yourself from being an economic hitman?
John: A very long story which is discussed in my new book, HOODWINKED (Random House/Broadway Books, November 10, 2009). Short version: I came to understand that the world we have created is no longer viable and that it is in our self-interests to alter our path.
Nettie: What can companies do to make the world a better place?
John” They must change their primary goal from “maximizing profits, regardless of the environmental and social costs” to “making profits only within the context of creating a sustainable, just, and peaceful world.” We — you and I — must commit to buying only from companies that make that commitment — and we must let them know, by sending them emails and letters.
Nettie: You also work with DreamChange – Dream Change and Pachamama Alliance – can you talk about those groups and what inspires you most in terms of your work with them?
John: I helped to found both Dream Change and The Pachamama Alliance back in the early 1990s and continue to serve on their boards. They are non-profits dedicated to creating a sustainable, just, and peaceful world. Both of them honor indigenous wisdom and ways of relating to the earth as part of their teaching tools and also help indigenous communities protect their lands and cultures from those who would exploit them, including oil, agribusiness, cattle, and timber companies. You can learn a great deal more at www.dreamchange.org and www.pachamama.org.
Nettie: How and why should corporations redefine themselves? What does it mean for a corporation to be a good citizen?
John: Ultimately, our survival on a planet any of us will recognize depends on it. So does the survival of these corporations. Once we all understand this, we will change.
Nettie: Can you talk about your new book Hoodwinked and what your mission was in terms of writing it?
John: In summary, HOODWINKED discusses the following.
As and economic hit man, I experienced today’s economic collapse before. The banking industry and sub-prime mortgage fiascos, the rising tide of unemployment, and the shuttering of businesses are all too familiar in the Third World countries where I worked. I have to say that I was both an observer and a perpetrator of events that have now sent the US – in fact the entire planet – spiraling toward disaster.
The real cause of our global financial meltdown is predatory capitalism – the mutant form of an economic system that encourages widespread exploitation of the few to benefit a small number of already very wealthy people. A new geo-politics has emerged; today the CEOs of big corporations, rather than governments, control human and natural resources around the globe, as well as politicians and the media. Their arrogance, gluttony, and mismanagement have brought us to the perilous edge. The solutions will not be “return to normal ones”.
HOODWINKED offers a way out. As I say in the book, “Unlike other empires,this one is not built primarily on the back of the military. It is subtle, market-based, and it depends on our voluntary choices. We hold the power – if we only recognize it.” HOODWINKED provides a blueprint for creating an economy that fosters a sustainable, just, and peaceful world for us and our children. It offers concrete actions each and every one of us can take..
Nettie: What do you hope to achieve with this book in terms of effecting change in the world?
John: A sustainable, just, and peaceful world — in my life-time.
END
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