Thinking Faster

Getting past the niceties

So I was sitting in a meeting today with a couple of guys from a firm that may become a business partner and we were discussing how we could bring them up to speed on our approach and methodologies, what was in the relationship for them and so forth.  Then we hit the part of the conversation that everyone feels like having but often seems just like lip service.  Someone said, "We want you to win and us to win.  It should be a win-win."  Yeah, no kidding.

This is then followed by a rather long back and forth about how important it is for both sides to get something out of the agreement and that it should be commensurate with effort, knowledge and experience.  Both should put in equal contributions and both should take out equal benefits.  While I know this is the case, I often feel like 1) this is self-evident and is the basis for the discussion and 2) this never happens in practice.

Most firms or people agree to some commitment with another person or firm based on some mutually agreeable criteria.    If person X gives company Y his best efforts 40 hours per week, company Y agrees to pay him or her Z dollars.  If two firms agree to work together, they have certain criteria and conditions about how they will work.  This is what keeps the lawyers busy - writing the agreements and adjudicating them later in court.   If there aren't mutually reinforcing reasons to work together, then the partnership won't happen unless one of the firms is forced to work with the other.  Yet we feel the need, through politeness and camaraderie to explain to each other how important it is to be fair to each other.

Yet in practice most relationships are never 50:50 all the time.  Generally speaking, most partnerships are about one firm or individual leveraging the skills or channels of another partner.  In any specific situation, that means that one of the partners has more control over the situation and more experience.  The best that can be hoped for is that the pendulum swings and the weaker partner in the first situation has capabilities or channels that can be leveraged to the other partner's benefit.  Rather than talk about "win/win" situations, we need to instead define what a "win" is for each partner and make sure both partners can get to the level they can declare the relationship valuable for them. 

Perhaps I am impatient and too anxious to get to the nitty-gritty in this case, but I expect a partner to do what's right for himself or his firm first, and to do what is best for my firm based on the agreements we have in place.  I don't believe many partners will put my best outcomes in advance of their firm's goals and outcomes unless they are heavily compensated to do so, which then puts them in a terrible bind.  I'd like to think that most people are interested, rational actors who understand the need for me to accomplish certain outcomes in our relationship and that they need to accomplish their own outcomes as well.  Sometimes those outcomes are mutually reinforcing, sometimes not.

I'd prefer to say to a prospective partner - these are the things we can do and how we can best partner with you.  These features and capabilities are important to me, and here's where we think we differentiate and how we make our revenue.  Now, can we together create an offering or solution that helps me achieve those things, adds even greater value to a customer, and helps you achieve something that's important to you?  Too often when we use the niceties and "win/win" language we never get to what's important in each person's or partner's business model to understand how they make money, how they differentiate, and what they consider their strengths and weaknesses.

Telling Stories

I was at a seminar last night which was meant to help entrepreneurs think through the issues of starting a new venture.  There were a real assortment of people in the room - some of them had started businesses in previous lives and some were new to startups.  Some were straight from the lab and had a great idea but little business experience, and some were very experienced on the business side.

One of the exercises that got me thinking was the elevator pitch.  Three of the firms were brought up and asked to present their company or their idea as if the rest of us were investors.  Each firm was given one minute.  The first team represented two guys - post docs - working on genetic testing or slicing.  To be honest the guy spoke for about a minute and I had no idea what he was talking about.  It sounded impressive.  The second team stood up and talked about their technology and how cool it was.  From my perspective - two swings, two misses.

Then one of our guest speakers got up.  He has launched one successful business and is in the process of starting another.  Rather than get into the technology of the new company, he told us a story, including the word "snot" and an altogether inaccurate description of what his bio-tech product looks like.  But at the end we all had a rough understanding of what his firm did and why it could be successful.

I think some of the best communicators use stories to communicate their goals or their ideas.  A story is something that is familiar.  It does not talk down to us but it puts us on comfortable footing.  A story can set up a challenge, introduce key players and resolve any issues in a way that seems natural.  Telling a story about a problem in the environment and a method to solve that problem worked exceptionally well for the serial entrepreneur.  It turns out his firm is doing some fairly advanced genetic testing, but the way he talks to investors and potential customers is to tell a story.

I guess sometimes I can be a slow learner.  I'm constantly trying to throw in all the big words, the MBA speak into my presentations.  The speaker last night demonstrated how his first firm, SciQuest, communicated initially - "Expanding the business to business e-commerce opportunities over the internet for scientists who acquire pharmaceutical equipment" or something along those lines.  By the time they went public, one of their catch phrases was "Yahoo for Scientists".

I've had the good fortune as well to work with Cliff Atkinson at Sociable Media.  Cliff has take the concept of telling stories and helped firms communicate more effectively by using stories as the building blocks for their presentations in PowerPoint.  Cliff has succesfully used the storytelling approach with many firms to improve the way they communicate, internally and with each other.

I wrote another post about this topic a month or so ago, in which I compared good management communication to country music.  It struck me that most country music songs have a story which makes a point, and a chorus which is repeated until you can walk around all day with the words in your head.  Isn't that what we want when we as managers communicate to our teams?  Don't we want them to "get" the message and keep it current even when we aren't there?  What could be better than a good story set to a country music beat to do that?

Have I got a surprise for you!

Based on a question a reader asked recently, I thought I'd write a bit about one of the worst things you can do to anyone you report to.  That is, surprise them.

As a kid, we were excited by surprises because the implied message is that a surprise is a gift.  Something that someone got for you, that they thought you'd enjoy, at no cost or obligation to you.  However, as an adult, a surprise, especially in the business world, is almost always a problem. Let's use an analogy.  Since it is football season, we'll review Bear Bryant's attitude towards the forward pass.  He felt that 3 things could happen when his team threw the ball, and 2 of them were bad.  The same ratio applies when you tell your manager you have a surprise.  Surprises in business are almost always uniformly bad.  You can go over budget.  You can consume more resources than expected.  You can work on a task or project much longer than was expected.  Even a "good" surprise - like adding more features than expected or bringing in a project a little early - can be a negative since the manager may have had plans to use those resources in a different way - or had different prioritizations.  There's very rarely a good "surprise" in business.

Managers are people who like predictability, stability and consistency.  They want to know that what has been forecast will, as much as within their control, come to fruition.  Managers don't like last minute changes, scope creep or budget deficits.  This is not to beat up on managers - this is what they are paid to do.

I wrote on this topic because a reader wrote to me and asked how to balance the desire to do more than expected but not impact the timeframe or budget of a project.  I responded in an email that people who are truly productive are not trying to do "more" work, but the best work they can do within the circumstances afforded to them, with the least amount of effort.  This means they understand the scope of the work, the intent of the result, what their customers and managers expect and how to get the work done efficiently and effectively.  While an individual or team may be able to accomplish more work in a given time, or provide more functionality in just a little more time, that's not what the customer or the manager requested.  It's important to consider what sales managers call a great win - when you expend just enough effort to win, and no more.  That's the way we should approach each project - how much work will it take to do the job well, bring it in on time and on budget and no more?

A manager will always want to deliver a result on-time, on-budget and on specification.  He or she will prefer, in almost every situation, to deliver less functionality in a project but bring it in on time and on budget, rather than miss deadlines or budgets.  Individuals and teams interested in productivity need to understand these expectations and work as effectively as possible to provide the right product or service within the timeframes, using the tools and processes available to create the best end result with the least amount of effort.

The only surprise you want to provide to your manager is a birthday cake on her birthday.

Let me be clear...

I like to think of myself as a reasonably good communicator.  Maybe that's just hubris, but having worked in marketing and sales, hopefully I've learned a few things about communicating and getting my point across.  However, I've had some lessons on communication foisted on me this week.

First, I've learned (or really re-learned) to ensure that everyone on a team has the same expectations about what the goals are, what we are trying to produce, and the roles for every person.  Recently we were working with a person in another firm who seems to believe that any constraint, any commitment is changeable at any point in time.  I am not certain whether this person does not understand the chaos she causes in constantly changing her mind, or if she has a sinister plan, but I have learned to carefully establish my expectations and communicate and document them.  That way I can defend the direction and goals of our project and demonstrate why the latest change she introduces is contrary to the project goals.  Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice..well, that wasn't going to happen.

The second thing I learned about communication is what my dad (the ex-Marine) always called the KISS principle - Keep It Simple Stupid.  I was reading a book review in the WSJ about a book called "Why Business People Talk Like Idiots", and recognized a lot of web text and white paper buzzspeak that I have been guilty of as well.  I need to learn to speak and write as concisely and clearly as possible, and with the absolute minimum of jargon, buzz words and so forth.  In case you're wondering, no, I haven't read the book, and the WSJ did not give it glowing marks.

Finally, I learned, from a comment left on my blog, that while business people think IT people speak in three letter acronyms (ERP, CRM, EAI), IT folks think business people speak in ancient tongues as well.  This comment was a very fair assessment, as I remember one CFO of a company I worked for would bring up EBITDA in every meeting I ever had with him.  In fact, I'm not sure he worried about anything else but EBITDA.  We business types need to learn to explain, without acronyms and business-speak, exactly what we want from our computer systems.  What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Talking past each other

We are some of the most connected people on the planet.  We talk, IM, email, voice mail, blog, WiKi and communicate in hundreds of short and long face to face conversations every day.  It seems that all we do is communicate with each other.  But I have to believe we talk a lot but we learn little, mostly due to two factors:  we listen with filters and we don't even explore or ask some questions.

A great example happened yesterday.  In our staff meeting we were catching each other up on new tasks and ideas for new software projects.  One of our support sites needs to be updated, and I suggested a few changes to the site.  Now, I'm a marketing guy - not technical.  One of the technical guys in attendance at the meeting noted that the support site had been built in ASP some time ago and should really be updated to catch up with our other sites and software in PHP or Java.  Well, I didn't know:  1) the site was built in ASP 2) that it was the last vestige of ASP software in our shop 3) that the tech team wanted to rewrite it.  What was obvious to them was completely lost on me.  But what really sparked my interest was that the technical person who brought up the concern was someone I had been working with designing some other product support sites.  He and I had actually discussed the site in question earlier in the day, and he had not mentioned these concerns at that time.

Did I neglect to ask these questions of him?  Did he think I did not care?  We had exchanged information about this site and others via face to face meetings, email, voicemail and a support forum.  Yet I had failed to get information about this site that he considered critical.

More communication paths and tools are not necessarily better for us.  In fact, I am going to try to make it a habit to ask everyone I communicate with what is important to them about the topics we are discussing.  I think I have missed information by assuming I knew what was important and by using filters - consciously or not - to get just the information I was concerned about.

In a situation where only my opinion matters, that approach might be fine.  But in a situation where we can all learn and improve, learning only the information that I think is important really is like the blind men describing the elephant.

What can we do now?  First, don't assume because you are connected to many people with many different communication channels that you have all the information.  We receive a lot of DATA but we don't have much INFORMATION.  Second, consider your filters.  What do you hear?  What do you want to hear?  What do you ignore?  Third, consider the people you communicate with.  Do you know what's important to them?  Usually there is information in any conversation that is missed, or dropped, or not even raised at all.

Being more productive as a group means understanding all sides of the argument and making the best decision possible in the light of all information.