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.

TV, Bishops and Systems

Thanks to Traci in Atlanta,  a convert to turning off the TV and using the web to watch shows when we want. 

On top of wasting time,  watching stupid TV made it impossible for me to sleep well - it was like some kind of very cheap red wine that wasn't very good but there was always that little bit more in the bottle to finish up before bed - I tell everyone not to underestimate the power of turning off the TV!

Tonight I went to a dinner for a bunch of bishops - that's right, the kind with the purple shirts and big rings. My colleague Jennifer remarked that there was no difference between it and the last 3 fund-raising dinners we were at, although there was a rousing hymn at the end.

So no trouble sleeping tonight! Up very early to deliver a keynote speech at a marketing conference with  hotels and resort owners; since international travel here has nosedived in the past 6 years, I anticipate a lot of tough questions.

I am going to tell them that with a marketing system, you really can get all the business you want,but if you don't install the system and do the tough work to keep it running, you won't.  Maybe you won't see results in 5 minutes, but it's like a diet - it took more than 5 minutes to put on that 20 pounds, and it's going to take ore than 5 minutes to take it off. Faith and willpower help too!

Do you know about helloWorld?

A MeetUP colleague of mine believes he is going to take over the world by re-marketing an app called "helloWorld". The VM Direct business model is multi-tier affiliate marketing, so it's all about finding sub-affiliates, and I guess we have all heard horror stories about that. My personal bias is that this is a great ploy if you are under-financed, but lots of people do it so what do I know?

I don't know much about the VM Direct technology, but it looks good, and for sure it is where the world is going. And, it makes sense for a small business owner, so who knows, maybe we should be promoting it!

Here's the pitch: "VMdirect’s exclusive web-based products are designed to help you manage your digital life. With so many ways to record our lives digitally, people need to manage their digital content from one easy to use application. helloWorld, available only through a VMdirect affiliate, is that application! Finally, it’s easy for all of us to create, publish, store and share our digital lives."

If you have a minute to let me have your feedback, I'd appreciate it.

Act now - or you'll need 7X your sales goals to make your year

A buddy of mine owns an interim management company called Atticus. They have this new nifty sales tool that shows the impact of failure to meet sales goals early in the year - an idea we get intellectually, but that is incredibly powerful when you see the real numbers. Look at the example below, then go to http://www.atticuscanada.com/html/evaluator/sales_evaluator_desc.html

Put your own numbers in and see what you get!

The Atticus Sales Evaluator
This interactive training tool was designed in response to an actual debate within a sales organization. It might sound familiar to you.
             
At the first quarterly sales review, a number of regional sales managers were quite complacent about their shortfall against targets year to date. Their sales averaged 2% ahead of prior year, when they had committed to 5% growth. Their calm assurance of catching up the shortfall in the second half made it clear that they did not really understand how difficult that challenge would be. In fact their lack of urgency would create a situation in which sales growth in the second half of the year would have to be seven times what they had achieved so far, in order to make plan for the year.
             
That statistic might seem unbelievable to you. It certainly did to them, and so the following interactive model was developed. It allows individual users to enter the data that applies to their specific situation. It returns results that are equally specific.
             
            In this example a typical sales region had:

• Base-line sales of $10 million
  
   
• Target sales for the current year were $10.5 million or 5% growth
  
   
• The regional sales managers confidently promised to deliver  annual targets, even if they only hit target growth rates by mid-year.

The interactive model showed each of these regional managers:

 

• If their team had approached the year with a balanced 12 months plan, they could deliver with month-over-month sales growth of a modest $6,400.
  
   
  
  
• However, by settling for first half results that only surpassed the prior year by 2%, they would dramatically raise their burden for the remainder of the year.
  
  
• In order to compensate for weak first-half performance and still achieve annual plans, month-over-month growth throughout the second half would have to be $16,800.
  
  
• That number is nearly 7 times what they were actually achieving in year-to-date     performance of 2% growth.
  
  
• If they hoped that getting to target   growth rates by mid-year would bring them close to annual targets   they were in for disappointment. Simply hitting objectives in the second half of they year would leave a sales shortfall of $220 thousand, or nearly half of the dollar growth to which they had committed.
  
  

      

Providing this analysis tool at that time may not have been soon enough to prevent shortfalls in the first quarter of that year, but it was enough to show the urgency of the situation.  Sales  managers could see that immediate action to deliver appropriate month-over-month sales growth would make the difference in whether or not they could save their annual plan.

         

• By acting immediately, instead of easing their way up by mid-year,a regional manager still needed to accelerate sales growth to $9,200 month-over-month.
• But that new objective is much closer to their original 12 month requirement of $6,400.  It is still a steep penalty to pay for letting the first quarter slip by, but far more realistic than the complacent outlook the managers conveyed in their initial report.

         

The real lesson here, of course, is that generating sales growth early in the year is critical to delivering a full year result.  We offer this example so that you can deliver the message to your sales staff at the time when it can do the most good.

Multi-tasking and information overload

Cool! Erik Brynjolfsson at MIT and his colleagues have done some interesting research on the increasing load of stuff that pours on our heads every day. Some  observations are no-brainers...but one is a real call to action.

Here's the thing. Twenty five years ago, when I started working, there seemed to be enough money to actually train people on how to do things based on what we had learned in the past. In other words, no-one was in danger of reinventing the wheel. Then came the recession, and since then we've all had to make it up as we go along (hey I don't mind - I earn about 30% of my living filling the gap with companies and organizations who should know better.)

Information, Technology and Information Worker Productivity: Task Level Evidence
The Juice:   Overall, these data show statistically significant relationships among technology use, social networks, completed projects, and revenues for project-based information workers.

• IT use is positively correlated with non-linear drivers of productivity
• the structure and size of workers' communication networks are highly correlated with performance
• an inverted-U shaped relationship exists between multitasking and productivity such that, beyond an optimum, more multitasking is associated with declining project completion rates and revenue generation
• asynchronous information seeking such as email and database use promotes multitasking while synchronous information seeking over the phone shows a negative correlation.

Optimize May 2004, Issue 31
4 strategies  companies use to manage information overload and overcome the bottlenecks

1. They  simply ignore some of the information, either by not gathering data at all, or when they do, by making sure to focus only on what's most important. An obvious example is spam filters. But the filtering and focusing usually don't even involve technology. Many companies have explicit, conscious strategies to prune back the number of service and product lines they manage. They constantly eliminate low-performing areas and strive to avoid spreading their managerial capacity too thin. By necessity, focus means learning what to ignore, as well as what to pay attention to. This strategy for decision making can be used at every level—individual workers, work groups, divisions, as well as the corporation as a whole.

2. Develop intelligent, machine-based filters and automated decision makers that off-load processes from humans via computers and software. One of my favorite examples is the E-kiosks popping up to speed the check-in process at airports. Other examples are automatic expense-tracking systems, online reservations, and data-mining add-ons that automate human processes, such as sales, maintenance, and demand forecasts. These technologies are promising, but they have important limits.

3. Introduce more distributed decision making. The hierarchy of traditional businesses puts most decisions at the higher levels. This causes overload at the top of the company. If you distribute decision making to a flatter organizational structure, empowering employees to make decisions, you get more brains working on a problem. In fact, there's no reason this needs to be limited by company boundaries. Customers and suppliers can also do more self-service and, in many cases, timeliness, accuracy, and overall satisfaction will go up. This is especially true when smart technologies are combined with redefined decision rights. Examples are human-resources self service, online customer support, ATMs, and Web sites that let customers configure their own products.

The 20th-century company was characterized by a separation of conceptualization and execution; a small group of people—the "brains"—developed a plan, and a large group of people—the hired "hands"—carried it out. That distinction is obsolete in the information economy.

4. Improve employees' information-processing capacity. If you distribute decision making, you'd better make sure your employees have the skills to make the right decisions. Better training, education, and hiring are needed. Of course, your competitors are trying to do the same thing—it's an arms race in that regard—so there's a growing premium on talent and retention. But in an economy where employees are being given more decision-making authority, one A player is worth 10 B players.

These approaches aren't mutually exclusive. Businesses have to be creative on all four bases.

 

Erik Brynjolfsson is professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of the Center for eBusiness at MIT

What? So What? Now What?

I wake up the the radio every morning at about 5:30. Weekdays, that gets me the weather report, a topline on the local news and 15 minutes of business news. (On weekends, I get some fabulous programming from Australia's Radio National that's so good I want to move there.) Anyway, this morning there was an interview with people from a major hospital here who are training armed forces chaplains on how to deal with trauma on their tour of duty in Afghanistan.

I wanted to understand what they were doing, I really did. But it took till the end of the interview to figure out that the chaplain trainees were somehow involved with the hospital Trauma Unit and sat in on a couple of autopsies. There was a lot of fuzzy talk about identifying your personal response to trauma, and how important it all was,  but I till have no idea of what they were actually doing, how it worked, why the program was started - all I have is some theory and not a lot of it at that.

York University's Schulich School of Business   has a course in Critical Thinking that would have been a big help to the people I heard being interviewed this morning. Among other bright ideas, they teach that organizing data and interpretation into three buckets - What? So What? Now What? - helps enormously.

Here's how I use this: if you are making a presentation, trying to sell an idea, enlisting support for a program or going for budget approval, start with a list of things everyone knows and agrees on. That's the "What" and it can be a pretty long list.

Now comes the hard part, and, frankly, where we earn our money: "So What?"  What does this laundry list of  facts imply?  What  insights, implications, and indicated actions do you see?  Anybody can list the "What" but it takes talent and the hard work of critical thinking to identify "So What" (which by the way is what every single one of my senior clients wishes his or her managers would do. Not getting it makes them weep with frustration.)

Then, magically, the "Now What?" takes care of itself. It becomes blindingly obvious what the next steps are - and you are a hero for clearly identifying  what revenue and profit-making action your organization needs to take.

By the way, you'll also find that you can go back to your "What" laundry list and see that about 80% of it is  irrelevant to the problem at hand.

Here's another bonus: you'll find you can make decisions faster, and in my quest to get us all working fewer hours that's enough reason to use this thinking tool.