Artistry at Work: New School Rules

Posted on Friday, February 10th, 2012 by

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. – Albert Einstein

Business artistry is much more than simply becoming technically proficient at something. We all marvel at the wizards of the game who not only perform the basics to near perfection, but then actually change the game and achieve hero status: Jake Burton (snowboarding), Dick Fosbury (Fosbury Flop high-jump technique), Steve Jobs (Apple technology), Frederick Smith (Federal Express), Walt Disney (animation and theme parks). The examples are endless. Business artistry requires an application of imagination – calling on the natural childlike curiosity we may have buried and using our talents to blaze new trails in the frontiers of knowledge and skill. To do that well, we must move toward mastery; but we must redefine and expand the concept to move beyond simple competence and workmanship.

There are two sides to the mastery coin: expertise and ingenuity. Becoming expert requires us to first gain command of existing knowledge and competence in “old school” methods. Mastery at this level means being fully aware of how we individually prefer to learn and put new knowledge to work. The Taskmasters of the world prefer to build on past experience and historical fact to ensure practicality. The Playmakers of the world prefer the experiential approach: learning by doing and acting on new information and skills immediately. The Peacekeepers of the world prefer to find points of continuity and connection so they can strengthen their ability to collaborate and build deeper relationships with people. The Thoughtstarters of the world prefer the framework and context into which new knowledge can fit, so that they can advance in the most logical and optimal way.

We can then couple expertise with the discoveries we make through our own constant exploring and experimenting with new ideas, pursuing the kinds of questions found at the heart of most every breakthrough and drive “new school” thinking: Is there a better way, a different way? What’s possible, given my abilities?

This is a scientific approach to work, and to solving problems. There are several distinct steps: observing, designing, testing, and executing. Successful problem solving requires all four styles of thinking: the Taskmaster’s sequential thinking, the Playmaker’s applicative thinking, the Peacekeeper’s integrative thinking, and the Thoughtstarter’s big picture thinking.

Breakthrough innovation requires multitudes of smaller problem-solving efforts. This type of approach accounts for the vast majority of effective innovations in almost all areas: arts, business, science, academics, and athletics. In fact, studies of eminent genius reveal extreme productivity. The explanation is simple enough: the more works produced, the greater chance of changing a given realm of endeavor, and of leading within it. Innovation is one of the surest paths to leadership.

If, as Linus Pauling once said, “we can’t have a good idea without having a lot of ideas,” then the issue of the proverbial muse presents itself. Where do we look for inspiration and insight? How do we incubate our ideas? Some look to mentors and masters; some find success in reverse mentoring; some extract insight from other domains of work; some find a simple change of scenery works wonders; and others look to the surrounding culture and environment.

Visitation of the muse–the main event of the imagination–is more a matter of reframing problems, staying attuned to opportuni­ties, and channeling outside influences than of some mystical or divine intervention.

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The Wrong Way To Market Social Media

Posted on Friday, February 10th, 2012 by

Entrepreneur Kevin Ready tells a sadly humorous social media story in his book StartUp: An Insider’s Guide to Launching and Running a Business.The airport parking company that he uses has a shuttle bus that runs from the lot to the airport terminal. Plastered on the bus windows are posters that say: “Like us on Facebook. Plus us on Google. Follow us on Twitter.”

“This makes sense doesn’t it?” asks Kevin. “Not. Let’s break it down.

A. Somebody at the parking company has been tasked with the job of handling social media.

B. Second, that person’s boss has probably established some sense of the metrics in the space: likes, plusses, and follows.

C. Since this is what the social media person is being measured on, he or she creates the sign as described and posts it in the bus.

D. The irony is that they’ve ‘missed the bus’ with the marketing collateral that she just made.”

Sadly, this is how many small businesses are marketing their social media in an attempt to build an engaged following. So what’s wrong with it?

“Simple,” says Kevin. “They’re telling customers what the company wants. Why would any customer ever care what the company or someone’s boss wants? Why, why, why? I would not be surprised if out of 50,000 customers per month in those busses nationwide, not a single one ever responds to this poster as it is written.”

Every company needs to compose messages that get customers to do what the company needs done. But you shouldn’t confuse your need with the customer’s.

So what should the company have done? Kevin offers a three-point strategy:

1. Start with “why.” Under what circumstances would customers ever want to interact with messaging from her brand? What do they need? What are they interested in?

2. After identifying possible whys, evaluate your resources and see how you can provide a solution to one or more of them. This is the process of building a value proposition around that why. The mantra here is, “Provide value. Provide value.”

3. Finally, follow up by attaching the desired actions (in this case, like, plus, and follow) to that value proposition.

How about these?

“Get one free day of parking! Just ‘like’ us on Facebook to receive your coupon.” (Value plus desired action)

“Love Hawaii? So do we! We are sending two lucky families to Oahu—just follow us on Twitter and we will enter you to win!” (Value plus desired action)

“A lizard in a suitcase? The funniest travel stories ever told—only on our Facebook page.” (Value plus desired action)

By providing value, and arranging the message in such a way that customers who are interested in the value do what you are asking them to do, you greatly increase your chances of getting customer buy-in.

Reprinted from my OPEN Forum column.

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Visual Communication

Posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2012 by

I’m lucky.  Scott McCloud is a neighbor. Not next door, mind you, but same town. In fact, we used to have offices in the same building. Don’t know who Scott McCloud is? He’s a cartoonist of Zot! fame, and a student of comics. He wrote Understanding Comics in 1993, Reinventing Comics in 2000 and Making Comics in 2006. He’s working on a graphic novel right now. (You can see his TED talk here.)

Scott is a master of the third law of subtraction: limiting information engages the imagination. That’s the heart and soul of comics. Why? Because the action isn’t in the panels drawn. It’s in the white space between them…the gutter. That’s why I spent time with him: he’s half a chapter in my upcoming book The Laws of Subtraction (October 26, 2012).

This past weekend, while most people were rooting for the Giants (I know, I know, don’t zing me), I was attending his 2-day “Making Comics” workshop at the Los Angeles School of Figurative Arts, to learn more about the art of visual storytelling, and to experience a new dimension in communication. It was not a drawing class–no skill was needed–it was a visual communication class. I learned the subtractive art of comic storytelling, which is actually quite difficult but engaging, because the fourth law of subtraction (creativity thrives under intelligent constraints) is in play.

I learned about the 5 choices: choice of moment, choice of frame, choice of image, choice of word, and choice of flow. If you think about it, aren’t these the five choices everyone needs to make no matter what they’re trying to communicate?

The workshop consisting of some theory, and exercises, with critique. The critique was not centered on technique, but rather a single criterion: did people “Get it.” On day one, for example, he handed out 6-sentence stories. And they were weird, nonlinear, and random. Everyone got something different, and you couldn’t reveal the script. You had to draw the story in six panels or less, using NO words. Then people had to tell you the story, and you couldn’t give hints, like you can in Pictionary.

Here are a few of the renderings. Mine’s in there. See if you can guess which one. I’m no sketch artist, but I do have some ability.

 

Right now your brain is undoubtedly working overtime to make sense of these stories. The challenge of course is there is no context or backstory, so you must rely solely on the images. Can you “get” the stories? The fun and enlightening part was the critique:

 

Let’s see…some of the stories:

A businessman walks into a grocery store. The cashier wave hello. The man looks at the watermelons. A rhinoceros falls from the sky. The man puts it in his cart. He walks to the cashier and checks out.

A robot walks toward Big Ben. A person on a bicycle crashes into the robot. The robot’s head falls off. It rolls away. A football player picks up the robot’s head. He kicks it over Big Ben.

A mom takes her three children with her to the hardware store. Two of the children have a sword fight with rakes. The third child gets on a riding lawnmower while no one’s looking and drives away. He leaves the stores and drives onto the freeway. He drives to a speedway and enters the race. He wins the race on the lawnmower.

A king walks into hamburger joint. He orders a king size hamburger. The hamburger is delivered to the king. The king puts his crown on the cashier. The king puts the hamburger on his head. Mark Twain drinks a toast.

Like I said: random.

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Uncommon Service

Posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2012 by

It should come as no surprise that the primary driver of our economy is no longer what we make but how we serve each other. Eighty percent of jobs in the U.S. and 80 percent of the gross national product are currently tied to the service industry. And not only is service our primary economic function, but according to psychologists, it’s also a core human ambition–we are born with an innate desire to help each other.

Yet when you zoom in on our day-to-day interactions, the majority of our service experiences are overwhelmingly negative. So, why the disconnect? Why is great service still so rare?

In Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business, authors and experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that despite the fact that we’re wired for service, it’s not enough to simply demand service excellence from your employees. Instead, companies must design excellence into the very fabric of the organization.

“It’s easy to throw service into a mission statement and periodically do whatever it takes to make a customer happy,” write the authors. “What’s hard is designing a service model that allows average employees–not just the exceptional ones–to produce service excellence as an everyday routine.”

Uncommon Service offers a pathway to doing that–a system that allows companies to deliver consistently great service, regardless of the industry, employee, customer or positioning. They argue that taking care of customers is not the exclusive domain of high-end companies, it’s a basic imperative for anyone who wants to survive in a volatile economy, where the old rules of competition no longer apply.

The authors begin with a single big idea: Great service is not mysterious–it’s the product of careful design and deliberate tradeoffs–you just need the stomach to make hard choices.

The authors identify the four hard-hitting, no-nonsense truths for delivering uncommon service:

You can’t be good at everything.

Striving for all-around excellence leads directly to mediocrity. Achieving service excellence requires underperforming on the things your customers value least, so you can over-deliver on the dimensions they value most. Decide what trade-offs you will make–where you will do things badly, even very badly,in the service of great–based on deep insight into who your customers are and what they need operationally. Then be unapologetic about it.

Someone has to pay for it.

Great service must be funded, or you risk giving it away. Either find a palatable way to charge your customers for it, reduce costs while improving the experience, or get customers to do some of the work for you. Choosing among these strategies will depend on both industry dynamics and the specific relationship you have with your customers.

It’s not your employees’ fault.

Too many organizations have designed service models for phantom employees, superstar employees they wish they had but actually don’t. Hiring those superstars–or getting your current employees to act more like them by “trying harder” is not the solution. Instead, you must design a service model that sets up average employees to deliver excellence as a daily routine.

You must manage your customers.

Customers are major players in any service experience. They don’t just consume or purchase the service; they help create it, even if it’s just by showing up for an appointment on time. You need a strategy for managing them, just as you need a strategy for managing your employees. You and your customers must work together to deliver great service.

The authors also offer a plan for shaping the other half of the service equation: organizational culture. Culture defines an enormous part of the customer experience. Design and culture must work together:”A great service organization needs to get both right, the service design and the culture that animates it. Both must be pointing in the same direction, toward the outputs you’ve identified as critical to your organization’s success.”

I found Uncommon Service to be a refreshing, frank and honest look at how any organization can increase profitability, satisfaction and competitive advantage by delivering consistently outstanding service.

I especially liked the authors’ argument that an organization cannot be excellent without first being bad in some service dimensions. Resources are always limited, and so you have to optimize, and make smart tradeoffs. To be able to invest in excellence in the areas your customers care about, you need to conserve your resources elsewhere. The authors call it “bad in the service of great.” In other words, you can try to be great at everything–and many companies do–but you will exhaust yourself along the way, and the outcome is nearly always mediocrity, which, let’s face it, is a death knell these days.

I suspect a good many leaders will find the truth of Uncommon Service hard to accept. As the authors state, “Giving up the fantasy of all-around excellence is hard, understandably hard. For mission-driven companies, in particular, it almost sounds immoral at first–until you realize that on the other side of it is the chance to be great, truly great at the things that matter most.”

I believe the authors tee up a critical challenge for anyone in charge: get your people and culture–values, purpose, brand ideals–aligned to your service design, or kiss service excellence goodbye.

“Customers remember how you make them feel. The employee handbook only gets you so far in making sure your customers feel cared for. For everything else, for all the discretionary decisions that your employees make–how they answer the phone or respond to an unprecedented request–you need a strong culture. Culture tells everyone what to do in the absence of clear instruction, and there’s a lot of ambiguity in service management. Customers are wonderfully unpredictable.”

How wonderfully true.

Reprinted from my OPEN Guru Review.

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Artistry At Work: Lean Into Discomfort

Posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2012 by

“An artist’s creative intelligence can truly express itself only when prompted by his intellect and when he is in a state of inspired rapture; it is then that he abundantly demonstrates his God-given powers and sublime ideas.” –Georgio Vasari

Every artist seeks those precious moments that have the power to transform simple activity and busyness into an exhilarating experience in which the heart, head, and hands are unified in action.

This is flow, the holy grail of creativity. Flow gives us the ultimate artistic edge – time flies, focus intensifies, and distraction disappears.

To find and maintain it, we have to pit our deepening strengths against ever-greater challenges, taking intelligent risks that test our perceived boundaries and carry us into uncertain territory. If we don’t, if we forever indulge in our fear of failure, we will never experience the highest levels of our creativity.

Intelligent risk-taking is action that falls within the realm of our strength, but which may test our abilities beyond their proven limit. Most of our limitations are self-imposed; we generally don’t know how far we can go until we put our capacity on trial. Laura Wilkenson risked her broken foot to win the high-dive gold medal the 2000 Sydney Olympics. We often surprise ourselves with enormous achievements when we take the chance to step outside our comfort zone, engage our talents fully, and rise to a new challenge.

This not as daunting as it seems. When we’re working from our strengths, stretching them comes rather naturally. It’s when we stretch that we have a chance at excellence. It’s when we stretch that we experience the greatest growth and development in our creative talent.

Can limits be of any benefit? Absolutely. When the limit is one of finite resources. Constraints of time, money, material and space all drive creativity. The editor knows the value of a deadline. The child with but a single toy will demonstrate far more imaginative play with it than a child with a hundred others. The solo voice can be every bit as powerful as a full orchestration. A single quote can be more powerful than an entire epic novel.

Self-imposed limits of energy and effort, though, are the death knell of true artistry. Do not step away from the edge. Seek it out. Lean into discomfort.

Posted in Artistry at Work, Law #4 | 3 Comments

Presentation Secrets Of Charlotte Beers

Posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2012 by

Charlotte Beers is one of the most successful business women in the world. She has only failed miserably at one thing: retirement. She’s tried four times.

Her resume is impressive: first ever female senior vice president at J. Walter Thompson Advertising, CEO at Tatham-Laird & Kudner, Chairman and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, and Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy & Public Affairs under Colin Powell. She’s graced the cover of Fortune and BusinessWeek, and been named “the most powerful woman in advertising.”

In her new book, I’d Rather Be In Charge, Charlotte says that “life at work is just one presentation after another. In every email, meeting, conference, speech, or document bearing your name, you are presenting who you are and what you have to offer.”

Over the course of her luminous career, Charlotte developed an 8-point guide for how to put yourself, your insights, wisdom, and distinctive traits up front, in full view:

Begin in the Middle

“Buried in every presentation is the point of greatest interest or at least one surprising element,” says Charlotte. “Start there, out of order, and then spend the rest of the time defending that eye-opener. It increases tension, it’s not predictable, and it forces you to state and then support a conclusion.”

Find the Drama

“Dare to bring the drama and energy of real, raw life back into a dry presentation,” Charlotte advises. “Put people back in your presentations by using tapes of them speaking, photographs, or quotes.” In other words, put the people behind your data and argument in the room with your audience, virtually.

Use Unexpected Visuals

“Borrow shamelessly to open up the density of the material,” recommends Charlotte. “Try music, sound effects, anything to get out of your rut…always have one or two touches that expand the ideas or remind the viewers of the life around the issues at stake.”

Let Silence Develop

“I used to think a seamless flow was the mark of a good presenter,” Charlotte writes. “but I learned that a deliberate pause, a hesitation, returns an audience from its wanderings. You don’t have to be at the podium. You can say in a meeting, ‘I’d like to comment on that’ and pause, and the room’s attention will shift toward you. It is hard to do this, but it’s worth the risk. At the very least you will be recognized as thoughtful.”

Avoid Predictable Sequences

“This includes not telling the group what you’re going to tell them,” explains Charlotte, “and not noting how long your talk will take. This is a dreadful habit some speech teacher passed along in the 1940s. If people think ‘I always know what Jan is going to say,’ you have become way too orderly in giving out your information.”

Draw an Implication

Charlotte says, “They [the audience] can read the charts…the numbers…without you. Your job is to try to say what it all means. Even if you only have an opinion starter as a complex issue unravels, you have been the one who fielded the first ball.”

Think About Voice, Vocabulary

“Avoid telling rather than showing,” Charlotte says, “as in, ‘I’m so very excited to be here.’ Exaggerated claims about the depth of your feeling leave people uneasy, especially early in the presentation. Show your involvement or your intensity as the presentation unfolds. Let your voice reflect the power of your personal conviction.”

Tell a Story About Yourself

“This can be a simple aside or a quick illustration,” counsels Charlotte. “Or it may feature you as a witness rather than the hero.”

Charlotte wraps her presentation secrets around what she calls “the golden rule” of communication: It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.

Reprinted from my OPEN column.

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I’d Rather Be In Charge

Posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 by

Charlotte Beers has been called “flamboyant flirt,” “our puppy,” “scarlet,” “very steel magnolia,” and “hurricane Charlotte.” She’s also been called Chairman, CEO, and Undersecretary of State.

Her friends call her “Shards,” as in glass, for all the glass ceilings she’s broken: she was the first female senior vice president at J. Walter Thompson Advertising in the firm’s 106-year history, CEO at Tatham-Laird & Kudner, where she tripled billings to $325 billion, and Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. Harvard Business School teaches a case based her track record there. Oh, and from 2001 to 2003, she served as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy & Public Affairs under Colin Powell, taking on the challenge of bringing Brand America to the world, along the way being awarded the State Department’s highest honor: the Distinguished Service Medal.

Think Charlotte Beers knows a thing or two about business and leadership? Judging from her new book just out called I’d Rather Be In Charge, she’s knows a good bit more, and you need not be of the female persuasion to get a great deal out of it. But it helps.

Beers is on a mission to empower women and help them break a few glass ceilings of their own. Current statistics show that only 12 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women. Quick math: that’s only 2.4 percent. This is particularly dismal given that women outnumber men in colleges, universities, and even management positions. This a statistic that bothers Beers, and forms the central question driving her book: when women are more educated and accomplished in the workplace than ever, why are they still so underrepresented in the highest seats of power?

“I’ve distilled all I’ve learned and witnessed,” she writes. “I want to show you how to lead, inspire and influence others–maybe only one or two others, maybe hundreds or thousands or even millions.” I’d Rather Be In Charge provides a comprehensive approach for how to accomplish that.

While Beers delivers time-tested, practical strategies, tactics, techniques and tips, what I liked most were her provocative arguments from which those practices derive.

First, Beers believes women have it harder today, not easie. Despite the advances of the last few decades, the workplace remains hostile to women’s leadership aspirations. She argues that the discrimination has gone underground, leaving women with less of the feedback they need to strengthen professionally.

Second, she believes women have everything it takes, except the ability to communicate their own skill at leading. While men have long been socialized into the ways of leadership, women have not. No blueprint for women leaders exists, leaving each woman responsible for looking inward to find her own unique vision. She offers her experiences as a remedy, the needed blueprint.

Third, the “Mother Hen” persona isn’t going to cut it, in Beers’s view. Women’s home personas–mother, wife, lover–do not travel well to work. The nurturing, maternal leadership style many female managers employ simply does not work at the highest levels. Beers encourages women to create a separate “work self” that is bold, tough, and willing to fight for ideas and reputation.

In Part I, she leads the reader on a journey of self-discovery to examine messages they absorbed within their families that may need to be questioned, to consider their personal approaches to work and whether they might be tweaked to suit the demands of high leadership roles, and to investigate their self-image to form a more positive and solid understanding that will better translate into recognition by others.

With this interior work done, Part II helps women take their best selves public, showing them how to bring their strengths to relationships and communication, develop a personal leadership style, and master the important arena of presentations, where much of one’s professional impact and image is made.

Beers is passionate about giving the next generation of women the keys to success and advancement. “I promise you,” she writes, “women are going to set a whole new standard in authentic leadership.” Any woman wanting to break free of mindsets and habits limiting her rise will soak up the revealing stories and insightful lessons.

But don’t just take my word for it. Beers has a few illustrious women as ardent fans, including Martha Stewart and Suze Orman, who says: “Charlotte is the greatest master of knowledge I have ever met. This book will help business women remove their self-imposed blocks and become as great as they are meant to be.”

I agree.

Reprinted from my OPEN Guru Review column.

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