The Business Sensei

Three Cats, No Pride

I walked into the kitchen one morning to find all three of my cats playing together. I immediately wondered what was going on. The three cats never play together: the young male will happily play with either of the two, but the older female never wants to play with him. I started looking a little more carefully at what was actually going on.

At first glance, the cats were playing with one of the catnip mice we have kicking around. Then I noticed two more significant details: one, the mouse the cats were playing with was gray, not green. Two, when one of the cats dropped the mouse, it moved on its own. This is not a trait typically associated with catnip mice.

These two observations led, in turn, to a reevaluation of the action. The cats were not playing with one another. Rather, they were all attempting to be the one cat who caught the mouse. However, as soon as one cat dropped the mouse and it started running, another cat would block the first cat from chasing it. This would leave the third cat free to chase the mouse. As soon as the mouse was cornered, it would immediately bare its little tiny teeth and raise its little tiny claws and squeak fiercely at the cat. This would so surprise the cat that it would hesitate, the mouse would run, and another cat would get in the way again.

It was very much like an old Tweety and Sylvester cartoon, in which Sylvester and a strange cat spent more time fighting one another over which one of them would get to eat Tweety than they did trying to catch Tweety, with the result that neither got the bird. With the real cats, I eventually caught the mouse and tossed it outside. Had the cats cooperated, of course, the cartoon bird and the real mouse would each have been toast.

What we had here was the proverbial failure of teamwork. Like many teams, there was a clear and agreed upon goal: for the cats, it was catching the mouse; in the office, it is the moral equivalent. What there was not, however, was any organization or leadership. Without leadership, the cats had no pride. Similarly, in an office environment, a lack of leadership means wasted effort, miscommunications, and a lack of pride in the work. In other words, having what is nominally a common goal doesn’t work well without someone there to provide direction and to communicate that goal to the team. For example, the creations from Black Lagoon Technology are routinely badly flawed because the company insists on a policy of leaderless teams. Lacking leadership, the team members constantly argue and get in one another’s way until the pressure of a looming deadline either causes the team to come together to throw something out the door, or causes the team to come together to blame one another for failing to throw something out the door. This approach cost the company on the order of six figures per month in customer refunds and cancelled contracts. To make matters worse, much like the cats and the mouse, new companies were starting to enter their space and steal their customers.

Solving the problem involved a recognition that leaderless teams literally don’t work: to wit, they get nothing done.

It is the job of the leader to not just get team members excited and working together, but to keep them that way. People work hard when they have pride in their work. While threats of being fired may produce compliance, pride in the work is what produces commitment, enthusiasm, and the willingness to put in that little extra effort that makes the difference between “good enough” and “outstanding.” It is the leader’s ability to effectively and enthusiastically show each member of the team how their contribution matters that determines the quality of the outcome.

 Like the cats, when there is no pride, there is no teamwork. If you want to be successful, your team members need to care about what they are doing and take pride in the outcome. Otherwise, you may as well be herding cats.

That’s Impossible!

Remember the old Bugs Bunny cartoons? There would be a sudden snowfall and Bugs would strap a pair of tennis rackets to his feet and voila: instant snowshoes. These amazing tennis snowshoes would let Bugs run effortlessly along the top of the snow. It’s one of those things that looks incredibly easy, until you actually try it. Then it turns out that while snowshoes do help, it’s not quite so smooth and effortless as Bugs Bunny might have you believe. In fact, what Bugs did was impossible, at least outside the world of cartoon logic.

Attending a jujitsu clinic a few years ago, I had the opportunity to take a class from a 75 jujitsu master, a seventh degree black belt. He effortlessly threw people fifty years younger and easily a hundred pounds heavier than he was. It was quite the impressive demonstration. When the rest of us tried to imitate his technique, we had somewhat less success than he did. It wasn’t long before we were dripping with sweat and gasping for breath.

“This is impossible!” exclaimed one person angrily. “It’s all a trick!”

Now, to be fair, when you’re late twenties and in top physical condition, it’s pretty upsetting to watch a skinny 75 year old effortlessly doing what you cannot do. It’s even more upsetting when he effortlessly does it to you. But was it impossible? It really does take a special kind of person to argue that something is impossible, especially after experiencing that something up close and personal.

Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, was famous for the loyalty he engendered in his employees. When an IBM salesman was badly injured in a car accident that killed his wife and young son, Watson was waiting in the man’s hospital room when he woke up. Watson wanted to make sure the man knew that everything that IBM could do for him, IBM was doing for him. When a train full of IBMers on their way to the World Fair went off the rails, Watson drove out to the middle of nowhere New York to organize the rescue efforts.

Dramatic as these incidents were, they had their real power because they emphasized something that was already there. Tom Watson built loyalty by building relationships. He traveled around the company, visiting people, talking with them, getting to know them. No matter what job you did, Watson was willing to speak with you. As the company grew bigger, he hired managers who could do the same thing. People at IBM knew one another; because they knew one another, they trusted one another; because they trusted one another, they were loyal to one another and to the company. In its heyday, IBM was known for its customer focus and the customer loyalty it built. That customer loyalty came from employee loyalty: dedicated, loyal employees care about the business and that creates dedicated, loyal customers.

I’ve been told by many CEOs that Watson’s approach is impossible today. It just won’t work. They don’t have enough time or they have more important things to do. People are different, times are different, the world is different. The explanations are sometimes long, sometimes short, always persuasive, and always wrong.

Building loyalty isn’t difficult, once you know what you’re doing, but it requires consistent, sustained effort. Watson demonstrated loyalty every chance he had, and he made sure that he had lots of chances. It’s taking the time to do it that derails so many would-be CEOs: they want instantaneous results or instant loyalty. Watson built loyalty so that it was there when he needed it. At Silver Key Systems, their CEO took Watson’s lessons seriously. He took the time to get to know his employees. He built connections and kept them going. Most importantly, he was always sincere when he asked someone about their bicycle race or congratulated an employee whose daughter had just landed a part in the school play. When Silver Key hit a bad economic period, employees stuck with the company and pulled it through. Today, it is a thriving business. You might even have recognized the CEO and the real name of the company by now.

Running along the top of the snow like Bug Bunny in snowshoes is impossible. However, with a little effort and practice, you can certainly learn to move pretty well in snowshoes. You can definitely move a lot faster and through much deeper snow than you can without them.

Learning to throw someone twice your size does take more effort and a good instructor, but that too is eminently possible. The guy who decided it was impossible didn’t learn it. The rest of us got the basic idea and are getting better at it the more we practice. You can’t even start, though, until you believe that it can be done.

Learning to inspire loyalty in your employees is neither as impossible as running on snow, nor as difficult as learning to throw a person. It is an eminently teachable skill. It does, however, require that you believe that it can be done and that it is worth doing.

Some people find the idea of snowshoeing lots of fun and are willing to make the effort to do it even they can’t pull a Bugs Bunny. Some people find the idea of being able to throw someone twice their size cool and exciting. Suffering the bumps and bruises of practice is worth it to them.

What is employee loyalty worth to you?

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s a… Frog?

A frog?

Well, okay, it wasn’t a frog. But that incongruous answer definitely got people’s attention in the old Underdog cartoon. The whole phrase, minus the frog anyway, was made famous by the old Superman cartoons of the 1940s, before it was parodied by Underdog and Rocky the Flying Squirrel in the 1960s. The fact is, when we see something flying through the air, we can be reasonably certain that it really is a bird or a plane, not Superman or a flying dog, squirrel, or even frog. However, if it were one of those things, we’d probably have much the same reaction as the people in the cartoons: at first glance, we’d see what we expect to see, not what it is actually there.

Professional magicians rely on this phenomenon all the time. It’s not so much that the hand is quicker than the eye, it’s that in an ambiguous setting, the eye can be fooled quite easily. This can be quite enjoyable when watching a magic show. In competitive sports, such as fencing or judo, that sense of ambiguity or uncertainty is what makes it fun. On the other hand, being tricked into seeing and responding to the wrong thing is particularly frustrating as you can quickly have points scored against you. At least the feedback is immediate and you can quickly adjust your strategy now that you know what to look for.

If you’re leading a team or a business, however, that rapid feedback is frequently not present. While most people know to doubt the evidence of their senses if they do happen to see a flying dog, squirrel, or frog in or out of the office, most ambiguous situations are not so clear cut. The problem with ambiguous scenarios is that when we don’t know exactly what to do, we tend to do what we can do. As many an athlete has learned, that’s not usually the way to win.

The problem with ambiguous situations is that, without appropriate training, we tend to see what we expect, a bird or a plane, not what is actually there: that rare flying frog. Or, to be a little less facetious, we tend to ignore the warning signs of trouble exactly because we are so focused on the success we expect to find. After all, those warning signs probably won’t amount to anything.

The fencer, of course, solves this problem through training. When something they ignored hits them, in a very literal sense, they practice to avoid making the same mistake. They can do that because they are in an environment in which they get rapid feedback and in which they have a coach who can help them analyze what happened.

For a manager or a business leader, it’s more difficult. While I’ve certainly helped various managers, directors, and so forth, analyze a situation and develop a plan to move forward, coaching is only half the solution. The other half is learning to become comfortable in ambiguous situations. Like the athlete, we have to become aware of the types of mistakes we tend to make before we can act to correct those mistakes.

The secret, in turn, to becoming comfortable in ambiguous situations is to spend time in ambiguous situations. However, not all scenarios are created equal. Fencers learn to deal with ambiguous situations in fencing by practicing sword play. Judo players learn to deal with ambiguity by practicing throwing one another competitively. We want to be in scenarios that require us to use our professional skills: that force us to lead others, motivate people who may not be interested in our goals, and negotiate with those who are opposed to our success.

In one such predictive scenario, a manager wasn’t sure whether he could count on a particular team member. He responded to that uncertainty by minimizing the person’s involvement. Eventually, that person become so frustrated that he went to another team in the exercise and offered to work with them. They enthusiastically accepted his contribution. His original team failed to complete their goals without his involvement. Afterward, that same manager was able to recognize that his handling of similar situations in the office had cost the company several top employees. Similar situations provoke similar behaviors… and results. Finding out what those results are is much cheaper in an exercise than in the real world.

Whether you see what is there or whether you overlook key clues is up to you. What are you doing to increase your ability to handle ambiguity?

China Design Torture

China can be a problem.

No, not the country. The dishes. Choosing a China pattern can be a particularly stressful and exhausting proposition, a form of torture not dreamt of by the Inquisition. And somehow, I suspect that making people have to choose China patterns as an interrogation method wouldn’t make particularly convincing television. Nonetheless, the process of making multiple decisions leaves many people so drained they can’t make even a simple decision afterward.

Decision making is an interesting phenomenon. As simple as making a decision may seem, it turns out that we can only make so many decisions each day. Actually, let me be more precise: we can only make so many good decisions each day. The more decisions we make, the harder each one becomes. And while taking a break or having a meal can help recharge our decision points, that trick only goes so far.  Ultimately, decision points run out and the only option for recharging is rest.

How much of a problem decision fatigue causes really depends on what you’re deciding. If it’s China patterns, maybe that’s not such a big deal so long as you don’t mind becoming skilled at covering the plate with food. However, if you’re making major financial decisions or running a company, well, that’s a bit more serious. Making the wrong decisions can have long-term consequences, and, in this case, there are two types of wrong decisions: first, there are what most people think of as wrong decisions. When we run out of decision points we become increasingly prone to decisions that appear to not change anything, but which lead to poor outcomes: decisions which make the problem worse, decisions that miss critical opportunities, and decisions that lead us down blind alleys.

Then there’s making the wrong decisions: making decisions that are below your paygrade. If you spend your points making decisions that could be handled by someone else, then you risk not having anything left for the more important financial and strategic decisions that can only be made at your level. The second type of wrong decisions leads inexorably to the first. If you use up your decision points on decisions that should be made by other people, you will inevitably miss strategic opportunities, persist when you should change direction, and become up close and personal with a lot of blind alleys.

Knowing how decision-making works is the easy part. Changing how you make decisions is hard. It requires a lot of decisions! It requires putting in the time and energy to find and train people who can make those lower-level decisions for you. It requires creating the infrastructure so that they have the necessary information. And, it requires accepting that they may not make exactly the same decisions you would make; rather, the question is whether or not they are making decisions that you can work with.

Fortunately, there are ways to make it easier to make good decisions.

• The best decisions are made early in the day, after lunch, and after an afternoon break. There is a theme here: being rested and having eaten recently do help with making better decisions. In general, it’s better to sleep on a decision than make it late in the day.

• Conduct meetings and discussions in light, well-ventilated rooms. Recent studies find that the carbon dioxide content of meeting rooms goes up rapidly with only a few people in the room. Sitting in a stuffy meeting room quickly makes us feel sleepy and interferes with our abilities to make good decisions.

• Take frequent breaks. Decision making is an endurance activity. Don’t try to sprint the marathon.
• Don’t make important decisions after choosing China patterns 😊.

• And, circling back around to the beginning, avoid making decisions below your paygrade. Use your good decision-making time to create the infrastructure you need to delegate. Save for yourself the decisions that only you can really make.

The ability to make good decisions is a powerful, yet limited asset. Treat it accordingly.

Leaders, Followers, and Jokers

As an organizational psych professor, I would ask my students to list leaders. They could name anyone from real life or fiction. The list invariably included famous historical figures like George Washington and Abe Lincoln, well-known business figures like Steve Jobs or (later) Tim Cook, fictional characters like James Kirk or Jean-Luc Picard, Luke Skywalker, and even Aragorn from Lord of the Rings.

Eventually, I’d pause and ask the students if they could identify anything that all of their leaders had in common and anything that was missing.

With enough prompting the class eventually noticed the obvious: the lists were almost entirely made up of men, usually white men, and the choices of leaders listed were mostly unaffected by the racial and gender makeup of the class. This is one of those results that is both unsurprising and surprisingly unimportant. While race and gender are certainly factors, they are also hard to change. Going down the rabbit hole of the obvious obscures the more interesting questions: what else did these leaders have in common, and what causes some people to be seen as leaders and others not to be seen as leaders?

The key point that students consistently missed is that leaders have followers. A leader without followers is just some joker taking a walk. While this may sound like the first rule of tautology club (which is the first rule of tautology club), the relationship between leaders and followers changes the question to “how do I get followers?” This isn’t always easy.

How leaders get followers varies considerably with the leader and the situation. For example, being tall and having a deep voice — characteristics more common in men than women — can provide a significant leg up. However, if that doesn’t describe you, there are plenty of other methods. Indeed, one of the key points in understanding leadership and how to become a leader is realizing that there are many paths and part of being a successful leader is figuring out the techniques that work for you. While I’ll talk about a few of them here, I can’t possibly cover all of them in a short article.

Leaders are perceived as being confident. Therefore, appearing confident is a way of looking like good leadership material. Unfortunately, appearing confident doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is actually competent. Appearances can be deceiving, and often are. However, just as our fictional leaders always seem to know what to do and always appear very confident when they take risks, we expect the same of our real leaders. Similarly, appearing to be energetic makes you seem more like a leader; conversely, if you can make other people seem low-energy, they will also be seen as less charismatic, and hence less like a good leader.

One of the currently popular concepts around leadership that we hear in politics is the “beer” metric: is this someone I’d like to have a beer with? The beer metric is really a narrow slice of the more general concept of likability. It’s well established that people like to do business with someone they like, so good salesmen try to get you to like them. Some leaders will do the same, particularly if likeability is important to them being a leader. Naturally, it is to a potential leader’s advantage to define likeability in terms that favor them and exclude as many other people as possible. If it’s the case that the beer metric were to favor, as a wild example, men over women, then it is clearly advantageous for a man to emphasize that metric. Understanding that’s what is being done makes it easier to reframe the debate and focus on other areas of likeability.

A powerful likeability technique is demonstrating that you are similar to your potential followers. This can be done via speech patterns, cultural references, modes of dress, shared activities, and pretty much anything else you can think of. A particularly pernicious form of similarity is created by attacking outside groups, such as the other teams in sports, other companies in business, or other racial or ethnic groups in politics. Attacking the Other creates a point of reference that is not your target group of followers. Because the Other is now a psychological anchor, the differences between the would-be leader and their potential followers are minimized (or erased) by comparison. This may not be such a terrible thing if we’re talking about Red Sox vs. Yankees, but can easily spin out of control as the stakes get higher.

A strong situational component of leadership is that leaders are seen as providing safety, structure, and inclusion. How much these factors matter depends on the specific circumstances. In small groups where no one really knows anyone else, the person best at providing structure and sense of safety often becomes the leader. Even when a formal leader is assigned to the group, de facto leadership may well devolve on the person who best provides for a sense of safety and inclusion. Creating structure, for example by helping people know how to behave or how to deal with a confusing situation, is seen as a mark of leadership. Potential leaders who can do that, even if by creating chaos that they then solve, can build followers, particularly since chaotic situations are harder to keep track of and the relief when the chaos is resolved is often a powerful form of “safety.” Indeed, one of the very effective strategies I’ve observed in years of live role-playing games is that if you can get people excited, scared, confused, or into a variety of other strong emotional states, and then provide them a path of action, they will usually take it. That’s in a game; it works even better in real life.

One of the funny things about attracting followers is that eventually it becomes a self-perpetuating process. Here’s a simple experiment you can do with the help of a few friends: on a city street, stare up at a spot on a building. Every five minutes or so one of your friends joins you. While one person staring at a wall is just a joker staring at a wall, once several people are doing it random people start to join in. They might even convince themselves that they’re seeing something. So yes, one way to get followers is to pay people to be followers until the real ones show up.

Ultimately, leadership is really about attracting followers. Without followers, you don’t have a leader, you have a joker. The mere presence of followers is often enough to attract more followers, and so on, leading to the impression that you are following the leader. Therefore, when someone impresses you as a good leader, see if you can spot the techniques they’re using to get you to feel that way.

There’s a lot more to this topic and I’ll talk about some other techniques in future posts.

Balanced For Success

The story is told of a young student watching Aikido founder, O’Sensei Morehei Ueshiba, sparring with a much younger, stronger opponent. No matter what the opponent did, he could never strike Ueshiba or throw him to the ground. Afterward, the youngster said to Ueshiba, “Master, you never lose your balance. What is your secret?”

The master replied, “You are wrong. I am constantly losing my balance. My skill lies in my ability to regain it.”

Ueshiba could not be thrown because he knew the instant he was off balance by even the slightest degree, and he would shift to regain his balance before his opponent could take advantage of the opening. From the outside, though, this constant adjustment was invisible. It appeared to observers and to those he fought that he never lost his balance.

Ueshiba recognized that training with the idea that he would never be off balance was an impossibility: either through the skill of an opponent or through mischance, sooner or later he would be drawn off balance. If he always planned to be on balance, then that moment of off-balancing would prove to be his undoing. Thus, he trained not to be perfectly on balance, but to rapidly and smoothly recognize being off balance and correct it before it could be used against him.

In the business world, being physically off balance may not happen all that often, at least not the way that Ueshiba Sensei might experience it. However, being mentally off balance can happen quite easily, with potentially devastating results. Consider Darren, the CEO of a mid-sized, publically traded company. One quarter, his company missed its numbers. This had never happened to him before, and he was stunned. Rather than stopping to regain his mental equilibrium, he panicked. Within two weeks, he’d sold the company for a song to his largest competitor. Darren did learn from the experience, though, as his performance in his most recent, highly successful, venture demonstrates: he’s managed to regain his balance despite several significant setbacks, and come back stronger each time.

Fortunately, learning to regain your balance isn’t that difficult: the hardest part is remembering to do it! Unlike Ueshiba Sensei, if it takes you a few minutes, or even a day, to collect yourself, odds are no one will be throwing you to the ground in that time. There are a number of techniques that are used by martial artists and Olympic athletes when they need to rapidly recover their mental or physical balance in competition.

The first is a technique used by martial arts legend Bruce Lee. Whenever he felt disoriented or overwhelmed, he would ask himself what he had just thought or imagined to make himself feel that way. He would then imagine writing that thought down on a piece of paper, crumpling it up, and throwing it away. That let him focus on what could go right instead of what might go wrong.

Another technique is to simply pay attention to your breathing: a few deep breaths can work wonders. When we’re feeling off balance, though, the tendency is to take short, rapid breaths. Deep breathing breaks the cycle and convinces our bodies that the danger is past, allowing us to think clearly and act calmly.

Ueshiba achieved his amazing ability to regain his balance by paying attention to his balance all the time. Any time he noticed he was standing off balance or in poor posture, he would adjust his position. He would also stand when riding the subway and not hold on to anything: the fine art of subway surfing. Paying attention to balance all the time seems like a lot of effort, but the exercise becomes second nature very quickly. Oddly enough, when someone is physically on balance, it is very difficult to take them mentally off balance.

One mistake many managers and even CEOs make is to talk to someone close to them in the company. Unfortunately, when the problem is at the company, the other person is also off balance. Two people who have both lost their balance are going to be figuratively hanging onto one another to avoid falling over: very amusing when done in a slapstick comedy, but not so funny at the office. This is what happened to Darren: by talking to the people around him, he only magnified his sense of being off balance. Instead, find someone unconnected to the company with whom you can talk. This can be a close friend, coach, or trusted advisor. Their lack of deep emotional involvement means that they are not going to be knocked off balance and hence will be able to act as a stable anchor.

In the end, Murphy’s Law is inevitable. It’s not a question of whether it will knock you off balance, but how rapidly you’ll recover when it does.

The Solution is the Problem

“I sit down in a meeting and my phone goes nuts. I can’t even take a vacation!”

This very frustrated comment was made to me by a manager about his team. Whenever he’s in a meeting or away from the office at a client site, no work gets done. His team is constantly calling him to make decisions or help them solve problems.

“I don’t get it. The solution is obvious!”

This was a completely different manager at a completely different company. Same basic problem though: when he wasn’t there, nothing got done. He was frustrated; his team was frustrated. They were all loyal, all eager to please, but they also wouldn’t do anything if he wasn’t there.

Indeed, teams which don’t work when the manager isn’t around are legion. It’s a common problem, and common wisdom suggests that the team members lack motivation or are trying to goof off: when the cat’s away, and all that.

Common wisdom may sound good, but is often wrong. This is no exception.

When apparently enthusiastic teams are unable to get any work done when the boss is away, there are really three common causes:

1. The goals are unclear.
2. The group can’t make decisions without the boss.
3. The group is either unable or unwilling solve the problems that come up.

While the first two are important, the third is critical: if the team doesn’t think it can do the job, or isn’t willing to try, then it doesn’t matter how skillful they are at decision making and it doesn’t matter how clear the goals are. It’ll merely be that much clearer to them that they cannot do it.

In each of the cases mentioned above, and countless others, the situation was the same: a highly skilled, knowledgeable manager, a competent team, working under a tight deadline and the perception that there was no time for mistakes.

Perception can be dangerous: in this case, that perception that mistakes had to be avoided caused more delay than the mistakes would have!

In each situation, when the team ran into a difficult problem, they’d call their manager. He’d run into the room, quickly size up the situation, and tell them what to do. It usually worked; if it didn’t, they’d call him in again and the process would repeat.

Given the tight deadlines and how busy the manager was, this always seemed to be the best thing to do: solve the problem, move on. Unfortunately, it meant that the team never had to learn to solve the problems for themselves. Even worse, they were being given the very unmistakable message that they couldn’t be trusted to make the attempt lest they make a mistake.

In each case, the solution was easy, although the implementation was not: the manager had to slow down and work through the problem solving process with their team. Rather than solving the problems, they had to let the team see their process for problem solving, and understand their criteria for success.

Then, came the really hard part. Each manager had to step back and let the team move forward on their own.  Yes, the manager could help, but they also had to resist the urge to solve the problems. They had to accept that the teams would make mistakes.

This did not always go smoothly. It is not easy to tolerate mistakes, especially when the right answer is obvious to you. However, if the teams were not allowed to make mistakes, and then recover from those mistakes, the team couldn’t develop either the confidence or the ability to solve problems on their own.

Some managers couldn’t accept this. They couldn’t tolerate the inevitable mistakes or they couldn’t stop themselves from solving the problems. Others went the other direction: they were too quick to pull away, refusing to help at all. A couple firmly believed that they were making themselves irrelevant, and refused to move forward.

Most, however, were able to make the transition. Many needed some coaching: an outside perspective is very helpful. For those who were successful, they found that their teams became far more skilled and motivated than they had ever dreamed could happen. Instead of spending their time running around solving problems for the team, those successful managers were able to take a more strategic focus, further increasing team productivity. Several were subsequently promoted into more senior roles in their organizations.

In the end, teams don’t learn to operate when the boss is away by watching the boss solve every problem. It’s learning what to do, practicing, and recovering from the inevitable mistakes along the way that transform a dependent, low-performance team into an independent, high-performance team that gets things done when the boss is away.

It Was Supposed to Fly?

“Alright, let’s see it fly.”

“We can’t do that.”

“What do you mean, you can’t do that? It’s a helicopter. Of course it flies!”

“Look at the specs. You didn’t say it had to fly!”

Imagine that you’re in a design contest to build a helicopter. You are being evaluated on various criteria such as efficiency, beauty, cost to build, and so forth. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable contest. In fact, it actually exists, although the details are omitted to protect the guilty.

The second place finishers designed a really quite excellent helicopter. There was only reason they didn’t come in first was that their helicopter wasn’t as cheap to build as the winning model. The second place model included an engine.

I wish I could make this stuff up!

The team designing the first place helicopter noticed a minor omission in the criteria: there was no rule that said that the copter actually had to fly! They saved an enormous amount on cost and weight by not including an engine. As a side benefit, their helicopter was also the most fuel efficient and the safest model in the contest.

It didn’t actually work, but that wasn’t an official requirement at the time.

While we might celebrate the team’s ability to think outside the box, there are times when being inside the box isn’t such a bad place to be. Imagine shipping non-working helicopters to the customer… possibly not a problem if the customer ordered scale models for a display or for kids to sit in, but maybe not such a good idea if the customer wants to fly rescue missions. Indeed, when dealing with customers, it’s often a good idea not to get fixated on exactly what the customer says they want: what the customer asks for is often their best guess as to what they want, not something that will actually solve their problem.

Soak Systems, a software vendor, landed a huge contract with a certain major telecommunications company. The telecom provided Soak with a very detailed set of specifications for what they wanted. The company set a team of engineers to work on the contract. Although several people wondered aloud about some of the elements in the spec, no one bothered to go and ask anyone at the telecom. After all, the reasoning went, if they didn’t explicitly say they wanted something, clearly they must not want it. No doubt it would all make sense to the customer.

After all, helicopters don’t really need to fly.

When Soak delivered the product, it was, shall we say, missing the engine.

Confronted with this, everyone at Soak, from the lowest engineer to the VP of engineering to the CEO all responded by saying, “But we gave you what you asked for. And just look at how elegant and efficient our solution is!”

Replied the telecom, “You didn’t solve the problem.”

“But you didn’t say it had to have an engine! And it is what you asked for, so stop complaining.”

Fundamentally, when a customer has a problem, they can really only imagine the solutions they wish you could provide. If you don’t know how to ask them what their problems are and then help them see how your solutions can benefit them you are likely to deliver a helicopter without an engine.

Even worse, most of the time what the customer is actually complaining about is not the problem at all: they are complaining about the symptoms of the problem. They might think that they are solving the problem, but really all they’re doing is treating symptoms. The software the Soak designed did, in fact, address some of the more irritating manifestations of the problem, carefully replacing those manifestations with a different set of irritating manifestations. They no more solved the actual problem than painting a helicopter green, making it soundproof, and providing a really good stereo system will enable it to fly. Only providing an engine will do that.

In other words, it doesn’t matter how elegant and efficient your solution is if it doesn’t work!

Thus, it’s critical to take the time to find out what’s behind what your customer is looking for. What do they really want and why do they want it?

Realizing that the rules don’t specify that the helicopter needs to fly may work fine in a contest, but it doesn’t win you friends in the real world.

The contest rules were subsequently corrected. The cool thing about design competitions is that each year you get a do-over. Soak, on the other hand, did not.

What are you doing to make sure you know how to speak to your customers?

Tortoise and Hare Schedules

Remember the old story of the tortoise and the hare? Aesop’s old fable about a race between the extremely fast hare and the slow tortoise is a famous one, appearing in countless children’s books. It also made its appearance on Rocky and Bullwinkle and The Bugs Bunny Show. In the latter case, the role of the hare was played by no less a personage than Bugs Bunny himself, which is almost, but not completely, totally unlike getting Sir Lawrence Olivier to appear in a high school production of Hamlet.

The fact is, though, the story has tremendous longevity. This little race fable has, as it were, “legs.” If there is one thing that story tortoise, it’s that speed simply isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Indeed, one of the fastest people I’ve ever met was a 75 year old Judo master. He never seemed to move all that much, but no matter how fast we tried to hit him, somehow we always hit the ground instead. His secret, he told us, was that we simply had to be in the right place at the right time. As long as we could do that, we didn’t have to move very fast.

This same question of speed plays into how we experience time and, by extension, how productive we are. When we feel that we don’t have much time, we try to move faster. This is tiring: the hare, as you’ll recall, fell asleep before the end of the race. Not only that, and odd as it may sound, the faster we move, the less time we feel like we have. In a shocking counterpoint to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which says that the faster we go the more time slows down, when we go fast, time seems to speed up as well. My physicist friends assure me, however, that this would change if I could simply move at a rate approaching the speed of light. Failing that, we need to learn to experience time differently, and use time in ways that maximize our productivity without leaving us exhausted.

Fortunately, there are ways to do this. Instead of viewing time as ticks on a clock or blocks on a calendar, we need to step back from that rigid construction of time and instead view time for what it actually is: Nature’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen all at once. Time imposes a sequence on our activities, and it does that no matter how much we may wish otherwise. That sequence, however, can be used to our advantage. Instead of being locked into a rigid, clock-based image of time, we can instead view time as a series of events. Each event triggers the next event. What does this mean?

When we are locked into a clock-based view of time, we attempt to start and stop activities according to the number on the clock: 3pm have pre-meeting meeting, 3:30pm meeting, 7pm post meeting discussion, and so on. When we are working with others and need to coordinate a variety of different people, use of space, and allocation of other resources, then we need to impose some of that clock based ordering. Too much of it though just slows us down: if something takes longer, or shorter, than expected, suddenly the whole schedule is thrown off. We get distracted and suddenly find ourselves running behind or forget to take breaks and wear ourselves out too soon.

Instead, within our blocks of time, and whenever we are working in a relatively unstructured environment, we need to think in terms of events. What events are happening around us? What events are we causing? Our events can be used to trigger us to change activities or take breaks. In one office, the coffee cart coming around was the trigger for people to take a break and move to a different task. An engineer working at home used the school bus driving by in the morning and mail deliveries in the afternoon as events to trigger him to switch tasks. We can even take this a step further, and create explicit linkages of events for our own uses: when I finish testing this piece of code, I will make a cup of coffee. When I finish my coffee I will review the documentation. When I finish… and so on.  When we plan and connect events this way, it’s amazing how much time we don’t waste just trying to decide what to do next.

The other piece of managing our perception of time is to create a schedule that we can beat. It’s quite amazing: when we’re ahead of schedule, we are simultaneously more relaxed and more energized. We focus better and come up with more creative solutions to problems. Unexpected obstacles are fun challenges. When we are behind schedule, we feel rushed. Every delay feels like a crisis. We take shortcuts and make more mistakes.

Ultimately, teams that are ahead end up further ahead. Teams that are behind, end up further behind. People who are rushed don’t see what is in front of them, lose track of where they are, and exhaust themselves too soon. If you want to win, design a schedule that you can beat not one that beats you.

To Sell More, Follow the Show

What do shoes, wine, and spies all have to do with selling products?

If it were a James Bond movie, the answer would be obvious. However, it’s not a James Bond movie. Rather this is about Russian spies trimming the hydrangeas, wine with fancy labels, and Palessi Shoes (https://www.palessishoes.com):

Several years ago, the New York Times reported on Russian spies living in New Jersey and sending information back to Russia. It’s not entirely clear why they were doing that as the information they had access to was available to anyone who listened to the news. Their neighbors were quite surprised when the spies were arrested, with one person commenting that her neighbor couldn’t be a spy because of “what she did with the hydrangeas.” I assume the reference was to killing bugs instead of planting them.

A group of wine experts were asked to review two wines. The first wine was presented in bottles with cheap, peeling labels. The experts panned the wine. The second wine was in fancy bottles with beautiful labels. Naturally, everyone loved that wine. Of course, it was all the same wine; only the bottle changed.

Finally, Payless Shoes famously opened “Palessi,” a fancy, upscale shoe store where they charged $600 dollars for shoes that normally sold for $20. The invited fashion experts were all fooled.

What this all goes to show is that context is a very powerful influence on perceptions. The context determines what we expect: spies don’t trim hydrangeas in a New Jersey suburb, so of course someone trimming hydrangeas in New Jersey can’t be a spy; wine from expensive looking bottles seems to taste better because the appearance of the bottle changes our expectations of the wine inside; and naturally the shoes in a fancy, upscale store are going to be very expensive. In each of these cases, the context set the tone.

In none of these cases was this halo effect an accident. The spies wanted to blend in, in way that James Bond never does. They made use of people’s expectations in order to divert suspicion. The wine was an experiment investigating manifestations of the halo effect.

The shoes, though, were quite brilliant. Sure, Payless got to have some fun with fashion critics and generate a lot of free advertising, but that was only the beginning. Payless actually accomplished two other things: First, they demonstrated the people were willing to pay $600 for their shoes, a powerful statement of value. Second, they created a contrast between their shoes at $600 and the same shoes at $20. Contrast is a powerful technique, one that appears central to our brains process information. Contrast creates a context in which we evaluate information and experiences. In the context of people willing to pay $600, those $20 shoes suddenly become much more likely to seem like an incredible bargain. As an added bonus, Payless shoppers get to feel smug and superior to the fashion critics who paid 30x more for the shoes. Very clever indeed.

While there are many ways to convince people that your products or services are a good deal for the money, as they (almost) said in Monty Python’s Life of Brian: Follow the shoes!