Monthly Archives: February 2010

Occurrence.

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I recently finished The Three Laws of Performance and while I’m not one to use my blog for book reviews, this book warrants a few words as I’ve found myself thinking about it quite a bit lately. While neither author is credited with a psychology background that I could see, the book seemed to draw a lot from psychology. As the title suggests, the authors have three laws with three corollaries for leaders. The laws are beautifully simple:

How people perform correlates to how a situation occurs.

How a situation occurs arises in language.

Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people.

‘Occur’ is a pivotal term for the book. It strikes me as profound one when considered in reference to co-workers, stressful work situations, market leadership, new technology and just about every other aspect of day-to-day business. Implied in ‘occur’ is that no one perception is ‘true’. That is to say, while a situation may seem one way to me, it may seem wholly different to another. These differences then impact performance both on a personal and on an enterprise level.

Let that soak in a moment.

Now add to this the impact on occurence that language has. Think about business with its combative terminology. Think about social media with its communal, collectivist terminology. Think about what the word ‘share’ means to Wall Street vs. Facebook. Then add to this thinking how that language influences the behaviors of the people on Wall Street and on Facebook.

One of my favorite passages from the book explains an exercise whereby we are asked to attribute human characteristics to companies, describing them as if they were indeed people. This is all the more interesting when you consider the legal standing of corporations. From the perspective of the law, companies are in many ways like people. They can have employees, own land and property, sue and be sued. They pay taxes and in return enjoy the protection of government.

If you asked your employees to describe your company – remembering that this is how it occurs to them – what kind of person would your company be described as? Would it be a different description coming from the C-suite than from the sales floor? What about from a customer? Would the person described be a living example of the mission and vision of the company? Would it be the kind of person you would want to spend time with? Would it be someone you trust? The answers to these questions can reveal a lot about the state of a business.

It used to be that a company could tell people about itself – in favorable terms, through unavoidable media – and do quite nicely. Most of the time people were incapable of knowing if the company was being truthful or not.  And when a company treated a customer poorly that irate customer’s voice did carry very far.

Today though, that’s all changed. When a company says one thing and behaves differently now the world knows very quickly. Anyone can pen elegant words and bold mission statements. Anyone can buy millions of dollars of CRM software. Anyone can hire a company to dispatch endless tweets and gather thousands of Followers and friends online. None of that, on its own, will do anything to change how the company occurs to the people engaged with it.

Living the mission statement and operating that software in a way that is consistent with the values of the company is a whole different thing. This is the value of investing in alignment. Operational alignment increases the likelihood that the way the company occurs to the senior executives is similar to how it occurs to the employees, customers and other stakeholders involved in the business of the enterprise. When alignment breaks down the success of any particular tactic, plan or execution is compromised from the start.

Marketing people today like to say you have to “surrender control of your brand to your customers”.

Nonsense.

First look at the very word ‘surrender’. It is just another instance of the traditional combative language of business – telling clearly exactly how the business of marketing occurs to the people using the word. Does it seem sensible to expect that loyal customers will be the outcome when the language of occurrence inside the marketing department sees these same customers as ‘targets’ and views the whole affair as a struggle?

I might offer a different vision.

When employees, managers, leaders and customers are all describing the same type of person as they talk about a company, there is then no need to surrender the brand because there is no fighting going on in the first place. My mentor in college used to say, “Marketing it like pre-customer service.” The tone and applicability of that statement – it’s now been 20 years since he said it to me – seems more appropriate than ever.

Twitter Purge and Foursquare Surge

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Even as my friends were adding followers left and right, I never did the auto-follow thing or go follower fishing. Some of my friends wound up with thousands of followers. I’ve held steady at about 130 (coincidentally the average number of friends people have on Facebook). I did, however, uploaded my address book to see who I knew was on Twitter. While my profession skews my contacts toward the media, technology and internet industries I like most people have a diverse base of friends and acquaintances from all walks of life. Whereas I knew all these folks, I figured I would follow most of them just to feel out the Twitter experience and see how people I knew used it. Call it an involuntary focus group.

Well today I went through the list of people I follow (mind you, it is a modest list by most measures) and decided to do some house cleaning. It’s a personality flaw of mine. I keep my desk really neat and organized too and kept my CDs in alphabetical order back when I listened to CDs. So I went through my Twitter followers list and began purging names. I chose to unfollow people who didn’t Tweet or whose accounts had been dormant for months (plus some celebrities and publications that weren’t interesting me any more). It was an insightful exercise I might recommend to people now and then. Here’s what I discovered:

+/-25% of the folks I followed weren’t Tweeting at all.

Another 20-25% had Tweeted at some point, but that was a year or at least 6+ months ago.

Most of those actively using their Twitter accounts (weekly at least) were either celebrities/brands or people in the internet/tech/media/marketing space.

The few people outside the internet/tech/media/marketing space who were tweeting regularly weren’t really ‘using’ the technology for much more than the banal type of comments popular in Facebook status windows. You know, the kinds of tweets Twitter is mocked for -”Have a gr8 mocha @starbucks. Need caffeine now.”

[Question: Why are these types of comments mocked if Tweeted but if you run it through Foursquare, suddenly that Starbucks coffee update makes you cool?]

All this got me thinking about ‘following’ and the utility of it (for regular people, not marketing/media types).

‘Following’ doesn’t guarantee following along. Do you follow me?
The curious thing about digital platforms is that they can easily gather ballast. It costs someone nothing to accept a friend/follow someone/become a fan. Over time you can have an account full. If it gets big enough, it becomes a hassle to administrate and so people just let it go, and grow. At some point having all those ‘friends’ or  ’followers’ becomes almost meaningless given the realities of how much information any of use can focus on.

[Question: Why do we not hold social media and our friends and followers to the same rules of attention we apply to brand messages? If there's too much clutter out there to notice advertising why do we assume we can focus on and recall the dispatches of 500 Facebook friends?]

Of course a Twitterer’s intent may not be to focus on what’s being communicated to his by the people he follows but rather to build a network of followers broadcast out to (as most internet/tech/media/marketing people seem to). In that case, why does no one seem to acknowledge that if they’re following 500 people but not really noticing much of what any of them say (save a select few ‘real friends’) it probably goes without saying that having 500 people following you means most of those people aren’t really noticing much either (unless you’re a ‘real friend’ to them).

As I was doing my clean-up, I was thinking back to this passed summer when the Twitter hype machine was in full swing. The name and blue bird showed up everywhere. Everyone yammered about the inevitable seismic paradigm shift Twitter was ushering in. Such is the hysteria we go through cyclically with these new technologies.

Now, months later, it all seems to have settled down – in the media, in my Twitter account and even in conversations among media people. I’ve noticed far fewer people tweet about Twitter these days (thankfully). The utility of Twitter seems to be selecting for certain groups of people and certain uses. It’s not the broadly relevant social media phenomenon everyone was talking about last summer. Is this surprising? For the last 30 years media has tended to fragment us, not create mass audience. Even Facebook is more a large collection of small fragmented groups than a 400MM-strong mass audience. Just as Second Life has its set of core users, so now does Twitter. For that group it may be a paradigm shift, but  for most people, no. (In which case, is it really by definition a ‘paradigm shift‘?)

As I type, Foursquare is now beginning its ascent up the hype machine. It’s hip, cool, all my early adopter friends are become the mayor of their local laundromat. Brands are hot on the heels trying to figure out GPS-enabled couponing and promotions. And inevitably people are talking about paradigm shifts again.

Soon though, Foursquare’s name will burn through its novelty value like Twitter and Second Life. It will move from headlines to bodycopy. It will become a part of our daily lives, with its hardcore users and a lot of account ballast inflating numbers and giving an artificial sense of ubiquity and broad utility. What will be trumpted as the next mass sensation will in fact be another fragmenting niche media play. So yes, Foursquare may well be the next Twitter.

At least with Foursquare though,  when I feel compelled to tell people I’m getting a latte I can hold my head up high instead of being picked on by Twitter users for wasting my precious 140 characters on the trivialities of my life.

People vs. Process

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At the office, we were having an internal discussion a few weeks ago about people and process. Everyone knows the famous saying, “Our people are our greatest asset.” It’s a popular, feel-good phrase but I’m not so convinced its true (no knock on my co-workers intended).

For one thing, a company that relies on the quality of people puts itself in a vulnerable position. Good people are hard to find and if they’re really good, even harder to retain. Almighty Google is legendary for producing entrepreneurs who leave the company to start their own businesses. I’m guessing part of the decision to allow employees to pursue their personal projects for a portion of their company time is an attempt to keep all those brilliant ideas, and people,  in house.

The trouble with a company who’s people are its greatest asset is that it is at the mercy of those people. The well-worn executive sentiment, “Without you [employees] our company would be nothing,” is a nice thought until you really think about it. When you do it should make you uneasy.

I would instead posit that people might be a company’s most under-leveraged asset. That is highly probable in many companies where latent talent goes unrecognized or underutilized in the melee of modern business. However, the greatest asset a company can have is a process for unlocking people’s performance potential.

A company that has a process for tapping all the potential from everyone they hire has a truly great asset. That asset is also easier to protect. Plus, this asset creates a barrier against revolving doors and headhunters who lure away good people with better pay offers at other firms. In fact, I would go so far as to wager that a company with a process for tapping the full potential of anyone hired, will have a better chance of keeping those people because they feel fulfilled in their work.

If the vast amount of user-generated content that fuels Web 2.0 tells us anything it is that people are willing to invest a lot of time and energy, compensation aside, to do something that fulfills them.

This begs the question; What goes into building a process that extracts the greatest potential from any employee?

Some sort of employee training is of course top of mind. Possibly more important though is a management layer within a company that takes responsibility for the performance of employees. This means management needs to own the process, not the work itself (which should be left to the skills of the employees). The job of a manager is ensure that employees have clear direction and the resources and means to accomplish their jobs. Management also serves as a resource for questions and a mechanism for recognizing when employees accomplish tasks well. To that end, managers need a very special ability to be somewhat selfless and to see themselves as enablers of others (rather than guards or gatekeepers). This has implications on management’s MBOs and compensation as well as on the establishment of their relative interdependence within the company.

Approaching employee performance from this angle also means executive leadership plays a critical roll. The executive team of the company must articulate the vision and values of the enterprise well enough that management can work to install and oversee processes to realize it – including the processes for extracting employee performance. A process cannot exist without judgement calls and pre-defined pathways and these must be informed by the company’s vision and mission or they will be impediments to growth.

The quality of a company’s people overall is of course partially contingent on the hiring of smart, motivated, skillful talent. However, a lot of time and money can be spent looking to hire exceptional people rather than providing a process and environment where people can become exceptional. Following the latter path and investing in the creation of a work process wherein employees are capable of realizing their fullest potential ensures that the company’s ‘greatest asset’ doesn’t walk out the door when people do.

Virtue of the Small

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The Death Star was a massive weapon capable of destroying entire planets. How was it defeated? By a nimble, tiny, mosquito-like X-wing fighter.

‘Too big to fail’ is a term spat out by angry citizens frustrated with our government’s handling of the economic crisis. Indeed, the very concept ‘too big to fail’ may be indicative that we’ve not yet come to an important realization: The planet is moving toward smallness and ‘big’ may be more a liability than an asset in the future.

Even as we talk about global markets, global warming and global culture it seems everywhere we look things are trending smaller. Smaller portions. Smaller cars. Smaller processors. Smaller mobile phones. Smaller niche brands. Smaller sound bytes.

In evolutionary terms small is being selected for in many sectors of the economy and aspects of our culture. Here’s why:

We’re abandoning mass production for micro customization.
This is not a new idea. It is fairly easy to see how mass production (Henry Ford’s ‘Any color you want as long as it’s black’) has given away to individual customization (Mini Cooper’s many customized paint options). Alongside production, media is mirroring the trend. The big mass networks simply can’t compete with my ability to find anything I want, on any topic I want, at any time I want online.

Replacing the Industrial Era mentality which favored bigness is an Internet mentality that reflects the Net’s very structure – flat and nodal. (McLuhan would be pleased as this is a true expression of the Medium being the Message).

The evolution of the social web is taking that technical equivalency found online (i.e if the CEO of Coke and I both set up a WordPress blog, on a technical level, we are the same), and amplifying it to impact advertising, entertainment, publishing, organizational efficiency, shopping and distribution.

The overall effect of this is decentralizing. Replacing the idea of ‘rolling up’ a hierarchical pyramid of authority, we now think in terms of sharing ideas, insights and authority across nodes.

The speed of change is forcing our hand.
You can’t turn a proverbial Titanic on a dime. Small is nimble and nimble is an evolutionary advantage. Increasingly, large institutions like governments and churches are proving incapable of keeping up with the times. Legislation is often obsolete by the time it passes through the bureaucratic approval process. People’s lives change faster than church dogma, making sermons feel out of touch with parishoners’ concerns. In financial markets short term volatility, powered by rapidly changing information made readily available in real time, is adversely impacting longterm benefits by scaring people out and enticing them back in in a way that actually undermines overall returns. And of course, as any executive knows, the pressure exerted by quarterly expectation by shareholders disrupts and sometimes compromises longterm strategic planning.

Mind you, the efficiency of any institution may in fact be improving thanks to new technologies. Unfortunately technology alone can’t make us nimble enough. The truth is, the societal pace of change has gotten too fast for many large, traditional, hierarchical organizations to keep up with, despite investments in efficiency-enhancing technologies.

We’re bumping up against some global limits.
Until recently mankind has been on an endless journey of global expansion. America in particular was founded on a manifest destiny mindset where settlers would push west into new frontiers. The goal was a big family living in a big house on a big parcel of land with a big car in the driveway. As mankind has continued to grow our awareness of the true size of our planet has been coming into focus. Top of mind for many is of course the environment and our finite fossil fuel resources. However, food production, living space, room to dump our refuse, the size of marketplaces for various products and the amount of attention we can offer in a day are all being realized for their inherent glass ceilings. Even our ability to process information and do work is reaching some mortal barriers. Multi-tasking is a convenient concept, but scientifically it might not be a realistic expectation.

No doubt there are still frontiers to be discovered, but generally our modern era has been about solving problems of getting more out of existing and limited resources. Doing more with less is another expression of smallness and another evolutionary advantage.

It’s a small world after all.
So if, as I’m suggesting, the world today is rewarding small over large; how might we use this insight to improve our situation? I believe it comes down to thinking small, even if you’re not. Here are some ideas:

Do 1,000 (small) things 1% better. This is the Disney philosophy and it gets right to the individual customization paradigm of the post-industrial world. Rather than try to do one thing 1000% better – which is a tall order with high expectations and a lot of room for disaster – Disney endeavors to make every small experience just a little more special. This series of incremental improvements creates the perception of a single great experience. (One people will pay a premium for too, I might add.) The devil is in the details, exorcise it by doing the details well.

Hearts and Minds, Not Shock and Awe. This will sound like Social Media 101 but it is directly related to individual customization and smallness. Mass marketers used to use coarse demographic data to parse out targets for their mass market campaigns. (Have you ever noticed traditional marketing lingo borrows heavily from military terminology?) The goal was to bludgeon people with a message calculated to address their needs based on this demographic data.

Today’s nodal world doesn’t fit cleanly into geographic, income,  racial or other old-school demographic categories. Like everything else in the nodal world, groups have narrow sliced and begun defining themselves on other matters. Entire communities form around wholly different organizing principles than HHI, location or race. To win over these new groups you need to respect their sometimes small differences and seek to understand the context of their lives and how what you’re trying to accomplish fits into their agenda.

Seek small ideas. The old advertising industry focused on selling The Big Idea. This is Bill Bernbach-thinking and it was perfect for the industrial era. Big ideas led to big campaigns targeting big demographic groups through big media channels. That infrastructure no longer exists. Today small ideas executed well make an organization remarkable (to summon Seth Godin’s Purple Cow and  Free Prize Inside). Remarkable replicates across the nodal world we live in – it’s worth transmitting. It also more accurately aligns with the way we all engage with the world. There is no dominant medium or channel. Its an accumulation of experiences across channels that define overall perceptions. Lastly, seeking small ideas from across your entire company or organization is inclusive and communal – another strong driver of the Internet era.

Reconcile the time conflict. Expecting mass media timetables in a nodal, micro media world is a recipe for disappointment. Awareness, which used to be predictable by formulating the right blend of TV, radio and print advertising is today much harder to predict. It also takes longer due to the very fragmentation that has produced more (and smaller) products, media channels and constituency groups. It may take you longer to get to your distributed customer base than it used to. Build this into your business plan and budget. The realities of how fast or slow prospects make their way through the marketing funnel has changed.

Lastly, organize small. Smallness, for many of the reasons outlined above, is an advantage. That said, you need not be a small company to act like one. Instinctively many executives know this. ‘Start ups’ are often romanticized as being the most innovative, fastest moving and exciting companies. Imagine though the energy of a startup with the resources of an established enterprise. This is the magic of Google which has been able to demonstrate excellence in disparate markets like search, advertising, mobile devices and cloud collaboration tools. To do this the executive leaders of Google teach the company a governing mission and vision (among many things they do well). They then empower small work units capable of being nimble and innovative to realize that mission in the way that is right for the dynamics of the marketplace that particular unit is competing in.

As an analogy this idea might be thought of as like networked computers. Every computer on a network can run its own programs and do its own job. Design machines can render designs, data processors can crunch data, file servers can serve files. What these different machines doing different tasks all have in common is a lexicon through which to interoperate. For computers this is code. For companies it is a clear mission and vision. In both cases this lexicon serves to make sure all the small tasks the nodes do contribute to the larger goals without slowing down any of the other nodes in the process.

Organizing a company this way, any company, is one means of making sure that as your business grows it continues to reap the benefits of acting small.