The 80-Hour Week

You can learn to be lucky

Looking at Scott Ginsberg's segment on 20/20 on John Jantsch's blog made me want to go back to an interview with Richard Wiseman that appeared in Fast Company a couple of years ago.

Have a look at the article. Read the highlights I've outlined below, and then look for the business opportunity. If you do any corporate consulting or training, there's a big idea here.

What I'm arguing is that we have far more control over events than we thought previously. You might say, "Fifty percent of my life is due to chance events." No, it's not. Maybe 10% is. That other 40% that you think you're having no influence over at all is actually defined by the way you think.

What are some of the ways that lucky people think differently from unlucky people?

One way is to be open to new experiences. Unlucky people are stuck in routines. When they see something new, they want no part of it. Lucky people always want something new. They're prepared to take risks and relaxed enough to see the opportunities in the first place.

How did you uncover that in your lab?

We did an experiment. We asked subjects to flip through a news-paper that had photographs in it. All they had to do was count the number of photographs. That's it. Luck wasn't on their minds, just some silly task. They'd go through, and after about three pages, there'd be a massive half-page advert saying, STOP COUNTING. THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER. It was next to a photo, so we knew they were looking at that area. A few pages later, there was another massive advert -- I mean, we're talking big -- that said, STOP COUNTING. TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU'VE SEEN THIS AND WIN 150 POUNDS [about $235].

For the most part, the unlucky would just flip past these things. Lucky people would flip through and laugh and say, "There are 43 photos. That's what it says. Do you want me to bother counting?" We'd say, "Yeah, carry on." They'd flip some more and say, "Do I get my 150 pounds?" Most of the unlucky people didn't notice.

But the business culture typically worships drive -- setting a goal, single-mindedly pursuing it, and plowing past obstacles. Are you arguing that, to be more lucky, we need to be less focused?

This is one of the most counterintuitive ideas. We are traditionally taught to be really focused, to be really driven, to try really hard at tasks. But in the real world, you've got opportunities all around you. And if you're driven in one direction, you're not going to spot the others. It's about getting people to have various game plans running in their heads. Unlucky people, if they go to a party wanting to meet the love of their life, end up not meeting people who might become close friends or people who might help them in their careers. Being relaxed and open allows lucky people to see what's around them and to maximize what's around them.

Much of business is also about rational analysis: pulling up the spreadsheet, running the numbers, looking at the serious facts. Yet you found that lucky people rely heavily on their gut instincts.

Yes. You don't want to broadly say that whenever you get an intuitive feeling, it's right and you should go with it. But you could be missing out on a massive font of knowledge that you've built up over the years. We are amazingly good at detecting patterns. That's what our brains are set up to do.

What are some other ways you found that lucky people's minds operate differently?

They practice "counterfactual thinking." The degree to which you think that something is fortunate or not is the degree to which you generate alternatives that are better or worse.

Unlucky people say, "I can't believe I've been in another car accident." Lucky people go, "Wonderful. Yes, I had a car accident, but I wasn't killed. And I met the guy in the other car, and we got on really well, and there might be a relationship there." What's interesting is that both ways of thinking are unconscious and automatic. It would never occur to the unlucky people to see it a different way.

Here's the business idea. Wiseman, who teaches at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK,  opened a Luck School to test the proposition that people can learn to be lucky. In year one, he had an 80% success rate.

Now what lucky entrepreneur wouldn't want to teach every single employee how to be lucky? 

The four non-negotiable secrets for high-margin, loyal clients

Years ago, I was involved in a project that hoped to solve problems facing retail bankers: how to improve customer loyalty, and, not incidentally, how to keep bankers from burning out as they ran between being super sales people, and advisers in the incredibly stressful world of complex financial decision-making.

A core issue was defining the relationship bankers had with very profitable, loyal clients. How come these customers thought of themselves as the clients of a professional and happily took their advice with no questions asked, while others made decisions based on price and cost the bank a ton of dough?

How could the relationship be more like the one you have with your dentist? When the dentist recommends cleaning, filling or even root canal work, we might blanch at the cost, and we might negotiate it if we don't have insurance - but we still buy with no questions asked. And we don't tell the dentist what to do as she works, or change the specs on the job have way through or decide at the end of the project we're not going to pay, or even switch dentists in spite of the discomfort of having the work done.

There seem to be four key attributes, and I'll bet the way they are familiar to you from working with the clients you like best.

Trust: your client trusts that you will keep the promises you make, and act ethically. You trust that your client will do the same.

Superior Knowledge: you have the requisite expertise in your discipline or business to perform the work. Your clients accepts that you know most about the product or service, and feels no need to challenge that knowledge. You accept that your client knows most about his or her needs, and feel free to probe for understanding.

Process Credibility: the fit between the result you promise, and the means you use to achieve the result makes sense to your client. The fit between your clients' actual needs, and what they ask you to do, makes sense to you.

Single Source Accountability: when something goes wrong or there is a problem, your client holds you accountable - no questions asked, no excuses offered. When your client sees fit to inquire about the work, he speaks to you, not a "Stand in". If there is a problem in how or when you get paid for your work, you hold your client accountable under the same terms.

I'll leave this post with a couple of thoughts for you: do you have any relationships like this right now? What would you have to do differently to create this kind of relationship with more of your clients?

Highest-Rated Tools, Tips and Tricks: Atom of Work

A while a go I said I would share the Highest-Rated Tools, Tips and Tricks from participants in our Account Management course at the Schulich School of Business at York University. So here goes.

The Atom of Work
Every project or interaction can be seen as a simple, 4-step process. Think of it as a conversation between 2 players - the provider, and the client. Clients can be colleagues, direct reports or customers: anyone for whom you as the provider perform a service or deliver a product.

Becoming a master at using the Atom of Work can practically guarantee you will get rave reviews,  and high margins for every product or service you provide a client!

Before you can start work, there has to be an overlap between what's important to the client, and what's important to you. If you sell trucks, and the client doesn't need to transport goods, chances are you won't do work together. Or if you are an IT guru, and the client is my 86-year old mother, working together is possible, but unlikely.

It's interesting to think of work, or projects, or interactions - however you want to call it - unfolding in 4 steps centered around what's important to the 2 main players. The steps seem always to occur in the same order:

1. preparation: what are we talking about here? Are we on the same page? Do we have the same expectations?
2. negotiation: what do you and the client mutually agree Value looks like? How will the client assess the end product or service you are providing? (note: if it's price only you're often better off to run away and not play!) Do you agree on the value of financial return, environmental impact, and other ways your work might be judged?
3. performance: this is the stage when you deliver what you have negotiated. A word of warning: don't make a commitment to deliver something you haven't negotiated! And don't forget to go back and renegotiate as conditions change during the project's life.
4. assessment: the client assesses how well you delivered against expectations. If you are really good at negotiation, you will always get rave reviews, because you will always deliver exactly the Value your client agreed

In our experience, you don't get get bad reviews for your work because you are incompetent. Most often, you've left out a step: your basic premise for the project doesn't match your client's;  you don't know how the client will judge your work, or you guess and you guess wrong; you don't renegotiate what will make you client satisfied with the work as conditions change. As a result the  process or working together becomes so painful it's not worth whatever the final deliverable is.

If you want to know more about where Atom of Work came from, let me know. It's very cool, and it works.

Customer Service

Last night we had a really good conversation about marketing at the Tech Entrepreneurs & Emerging Companies Group MeetUp I belong to here. (Kudos to Matthew the organizer for ensuring that only legitimate tech entrepreneurs are part of the group - it's refreshing not to be confronted by MLM and consultants looking for gigs.)

Sunir Shah, the Marketing and Community Development head for FreshBooks was there, and pointed out how important the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) is for small business and entrepreneurship - good for FreshBooks for committing to build small business, the backbone of our economy.

In a recent blog, FreshBooks talked about another subject close to my heart - customer service. Now one of the things about CS is that it's honoured more in the breach than the observance; we all know what lousy CS is...and then we are often guilty of behaving in the same awful way to our clients!

Here's the commitment to responsiveness, a key component of CS, from Mike McDerment

Since May 2004 when our service went live we have maintained a two hour call return policy. 90% of the people who call us never expect a response. Period. They figure we are an internet website with no one behind it. When someone answers the phone, people frequently say, “I can’t believe you answered the phone. I never expected to get a real person!”...

As for email responses, it’s about the same. Sometimes there is a back log of emails from the night before, and responses to these can take 3-4 hours, but most of the time you will hear back from us in one business hour.

BTW June 15 FreshBooks is hosting a free tele-seminar with John Jantsch. John is the author of The Referral Flood and the man behind the Duct Tape Marketing brand - we are the authorized DTM coaches in Toronto. Hope I get to meet you there!

John Jantsch on Referrals and MESH

Hey it's June already! I'll be getting back to exploring what account execs in complex environment find most helpful - but in the meantime, I had the chance to spend time with John Jantsch while he was in Toronto for the MESH Conference.

John led a session on Referral Marketing at the Intelligent Office site in First Canadian Place, making the point that referral generation needs as much discipline and systemization as any other business development approach. Participants found the biggest challenge was to move from simply describing their business to making it intriguing and relevant to prospects - I loved his idea of creating a statement you can use at a party when someone asks "And what do you do?" - one that will get them asking "How do you do that" instead of heading for the bar.

I couldn't go to MESH since I was in the thick of a client meltdown, but here's what some other people had to say:

Jack Kapica reported:

Things got to be much better today in the afternoon, with an intelligent group of people who have had extensive experience with Teaching Old Media New Tricks, as the conference was titled. Jennifer Evans (president and founder of Sequentia Communications), John Jantsch (creator of the Duct Tape Marketing small business marketing system) and Maggie Fox (president and founder of Social Media Group) offered up their experiences trying to drag companies mired in old-media thinking into the world of social networking...

Jantsch also offered a great way for bloggers to feed the insatiable hunger of the gaping blog, which he recommended updating three to five times a week. “Use a tape recorder,” he said. “Just walk into someone’s office, shove the microphone at them and say, ‘What do you think of this?’”

Parker wrote:
One of the other people that I had the chance to meet at mesh07 was John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing. During his panel discussion with Maggie Fox (who said she liked my shoes) and Jen Evans, someone asked a question about why he blogged and about the return of investment on blogging.

John’s answer was probably the best that I have ever heard to this question. He said that when he first started blogging, he didn’t think anyone would ever read it. Blogging gave him a chance to gather his thoughts, and forced him to research some of the topics he was writing about. As a result, John said that he became a better writer, and was able to speak more confidently about what he was writing about.

Those two reasons alone are enough for most people to start blogging. While it might be possible to make similar improvements by just keeping a journal, a blog forces your thoughts and writing into the public sphere. You become much more accountable for what you’ve written, and as a result are more likely to take it more seriously.

Another point that was brought up in the same panel discussion (I don’t know who said it, but I’ll attribute it to Jantsch just because I like his good-natured attitude) (Note: apparently Maggie Fox actually said this - Liz) was that we don’t try and measure the ROI on taking a client out for lunch. A meeting like that might not result in anything tangible at that moment, but its about building relationships.