Bloghound

  Four friends called this week. Two are stuck in job ruts, trying to muster the energy and guts to do something different. Two others called to say they had just been diagnosed with cancer.

The conversations remind me to take heed in Michelangelo’s advice to his apprentice, Antonio — whether it’s moving ahead a career or seeking a more joyful, contented personal life amid what is. A few days after his death, this note was found in Michelangelo’s studio:

“Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.”

James March, professor emeritus of sociology at Stanford Univeristy and noted business thinker, explains his “technology of foolishness” concept in an interview in this month’s Harvard Business Review, “Ideas As Art.”

To illustrate the importance of of understanding where preferences come from, he offers this example.

“I used to ask students to explain the factual anomaly that there are more interesting women than interesting men in the world. They were not allowed to question the fact. They key notion was a developmental one: When a woman is born, she’s usually a girl and girls are told that because they are girls they can do things for no good reason. They can be unpredictable, inconsistent, illlogical. But then a girl goes to school, and she’s told she is an educated person. Because she’s an educated person a woman must do things consistently, analytically, and so on.

“So she goes through life doing things for no good reason and then figuring out the reasons, and in the process, she develops a very complicated value system — one that adapts very much to context.

“Men, though, are usually boys at birth. They are taught that, as boys, they are straightforward, consistent and analytic. Then they go to school and are told that they are straightforward, consistent and analytic. So men go through life being straightforward, consistent and analytic — with the goals of a two-year-old.

“And that’s why men are both less interesting and more predictable than women. They do not combine their analysis with foolishness.”

In a recent interview Oprah Winfrey said the secret to her success has been to “follow her bliss,” and bemoaned that fact that her partner, leadership consultant Stedman Graham, keeps telling her that she needs a plan.

Maybe that kind of planning is just foolish.

Conferences on global warming are being held throughout the world this week, from Alaksa’s meeting among 32 mayors of U.S. cities to a conference at the UK’s University of Leicester among global scientists to Al Gore’s speech yesterday at New York Univeristy of Law.

Facing this enormously serious issue, perhaps it’s time to stop calling it “global warming” and rename the issue “global heating.” It’s a small step amid the needed significant policy and scientific actions, but heat is a much more powerful and descriptive word for the problem than “warming.”

In fact, in an interview with The New York Times last week, scientist and planetary diagnostician James Lovelock said he uses the term global heating because “warming is something that’s kind of cozy and comfortable. You think of a nice duvet on a called winter’s day. Heating is something you want to get away from.”

Over heating is serious business —whether it’s a child with a high fever, a dehydrated athlete, or a disintegrating planet.

Heating vs. warming. What a difference a word can make.

Note: Picture is the Eiger, one of my favorite hiking spots, which is shrinking due to global heating, causing tons of boulders to fall off the glacier this summer. The worst threat is that glaciers are an important source of water and as they shrink, so does the water source for crops.

It always seems ironic to me when
something new gets published that links telling the truth to being
successful. Surprise! People – that is, employees, customers, anybody
— respond really well when you tell them like it is, including the
stuff that’s not so great. They’ll work twice as hard and come up with
amazing business-growing ideas if you are real and candid and involve
them.

This month’s cover story in Inc.
magazine features an excerpt of Bo Burlingham’s new book, “Small
Giants: Companies that Choose to Be Great Instead of Big.” Too bad it
seems to be one or other.

Must it? No, but it takes a special breed of leader to adopt the
straight talk, open books, inclusive MO that inspires and motivates
employees beyond all other incentives. I know this philosophy works
from my firsthand experience years ago working for Jim Mullen, founder
of Mullen advertising (now part of communications conglomerate
Interpublic.) (I think Inc. was a Mullen client for awhile, as Jim and
Bernie Goldhirsch were close acquaintances.)

Way back in the days of acetate overheads, Jim was opening the books
and showing us what we spent on paper clips and how profit sharing –
which every employee participated in — was trending for the quarter.
We all went back to work knowing exactly what we needed to do to fix
something or create something, and we knew how we would personally
benefit. The agency was consistently and highly profitable and earned a
reputation for strong values, great work and a ferociously loyal
workforce. (His book, “The Simple Art of Greatness” — out of print but
available from Amazon — would make a good companion to “Small
Giants”.)

There’s no question, it’s harder – at least in the
beginning – to say it like it is. But the good news is, you can start
in small ways. As you look at the next speech, employee update, press
release or call center script , see if there isn’t a way to say what
you need to say with a little more candor, and like you really mean it.
Watch what happens. I’m guessing you’ll do it again. (Imagine what
might happen if our politicians started behaving this way…)

Women stepping up to run countries were in the news today.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a 67-year-old Harvard-trained economist, is being inaugurated as the president of Liberia, the first woman president in Africa. Michele Bachelet, a doctor and former political prisoner, was yesterday elected as Chile’s first woman president. German Chancellor Angela Merkel just finished a visit to the White House. And Finland’s first female president, Tarja Halonen yesterday failed to win enough votes to secure re-election, forcing a runoff against a conservative challenger.

Why is it that women are succeeding as CEO’s of countries, but not of businesses?

I believe it’s because people today are screaming to be heard and to be understood, and women use a conversational communications style that recognizes those voices.

Look no further than the online world for evidence of wanted to be heard and involved. An estimated 50,000 new blogs start every day. Millions share product reviews and recommendations online. Communities are thriving. MoveOn.org has changed political advocacy, making it easy for people to be heard and get involved.

Women‘s communications styles tend to be more engaging, involving, and conversational than men. Most men talk more than they listen, not recognizing other people’s voices. Women, it seems, may have the inside track on knowing how to genuinely connect with people.

In her fascinating book, “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation,” Deborah Tannen explains that men are more comfortable using “report-talk” while women use “rapport-talk.”

“For most women the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships,” she writes. “For most men, talk is primarily a means to preserve independence and negotiate and maintain status in a hierarchical social order.”

In Alice Walker’s novel “The Temple of My Familiar,” the main character falls in love with a man because she sees in him “a giant ear.”

Maybe women are succeeding because they are giant ears, and people prefer to be led by big ears instead of big mouths.

Dov Gordon of The Gordon Group, a management consultancy in Israel, was surprised to learn from one of
my posts that BK’s Subservient Chicken campaign hadn’t increased sales.
From reading about the campaign in marketing publications, his
perception was that it was hugely successful.

"When
you get a chance, please tell me why you think it is that advertising
and marketing people continue with these viral campaigns if sales have
not gone up. What’s their rationalization?"

First I sent Dov a link to Adrants about the new Maxtor campaign, yet another Subservient Chicken copycat.

Then tried to answer his question.

1. Marketing and advertising people are getting rather desperate.
   Traditional advertising isn’t working so there’s a rush to create
   something new that will.
2. Many don’t know how – or may not
   want to – or aren’t responsible for – doing the heavy lifting needed to
   increase sales. Making less “stuff” and listening more to customers in
   new ways to get ideas on how to deliver more value. Developing more
   thoughtful insights and new ideas to help customers and create loyalty.
   While new roles are emerging in marketing, the silos and old rules
   still remain. Advertising is still very promotional and creative driven.
3. Wacky “innovative” ideas, spun right, look good on a resume Most
   marketers aren’t responsible for creating new customer value models,
   which is a real career builder. That’s usually the CEO’s domain. So
   they often feel stuck in the realm of tactics.
4. Now this one is likely to get me in trouble, but I have data from a study by Dr. Kevin Clancy, CEO of Copernicus
   to prove it. There’s a whole lot of testosterone in marketing and
   advertising. The boys posture, brag, taunt, copy — and are afraid to
   say the emperor has no clothes. They make more decisions based on their
   gut than women do. They create campaigns and promote them so well that
   people like Dov think they were successful, when they were not.
5. And then there’s the copycat mentality…

Marketing is about conversations. “So what does that mean,” people
ask me? How do you take the concept and apply it practically to
everyday marketing?

Conversations are by their nature friendly — people listening and chatting with an interest in the other person.

So
maybe one pragmatic way to reshape marketing activities and programs is
to make them friendlier. Friendly. What a small but big concept.

Here’s how various dictionaries define friendliness:

• Helpful
• Approachable and accessible
• Hospitable
• Cordial

Friendly
people and companies listen because they’re really interested in what
people have to say. They make it easy for people to chat with them.
They share what they’re hearing about new ideas, what’s happening that
might be helpful, what they’re learning. They don’t lecture or promote
but converse in the best sense of the word, which comes from Latin con
versare – to turn or dance together. They ask questions – and make it
easy for others to do the same in a welcoming kind of way. They’re not
judgmental, but offer sincere advice if a friend is doing something
dumb.

The Wikipedia says that “Value that is found in friendships is often the result of a friend demonstrating on a consistent basis:

• The tendency to do what is best for you.
• Mutual understanding
• Sympathy and empathy
• Honesty, particuarly in situations where it may difficult for others to speak the truth

What
if we reframed our marketing thinking around one simple idea: to be
more friendly? Yes, it sounds Pollyanna-ish, but many companies who get
the “marketing as conversations concept” exude friendliness. In their
people, actions, business practices, and in their style of oral and
written marketing communications.

Think about Southwest Airlines
or Virgin Atlantic (vs. the unfriendly United, American et al). Zappos
shoes vs. the big department stores. Whole Foods vs. Stop & Shop.
And all the small local businesses we’re so loyal to because of
friendliness.

It’s hard to change, but friendliness seems like an easy way to start. Thoughts?

People are talking this week about “PR problems” at the Boston Red
Sox and Wal-Mart’s new War Room media strategy when the real problems
are leadership problems.

At a press conference yesterday Theo
Epstein talked to the media for 30 minutes about his resignation as
General Manager of the Boston Red Sox. He never explained the real
reason for resigning, and the rumors about a the nature of the falling
out between Epstein and Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino went supersonic.
Especially since Lucchino didn’t attend the press conference. (All the
other Sox execs were there, including owners John Henry and Tom Werner.)

Sportswriter Bill Reynolds wrote in this morning’s Providence Journal:

You would think he (Lucchino) would have been there for no other reason than he’s
the public face of this franchise, its CEO. You think he would have
been there to send out the message he wishes things could have been
resolved, that he wishes Theo well, blah, blah, blah, the new spin. You
would think he would have begun the first day of damage control, both
to his image and the perception that the Red Sox are going to be fine,
that the organization is strong enough to withstand the loss of anyone,
Epstein included.

Lucchino’s absence and the way the Epstein contract negotiations were handled tell you there are bigger leadership problems.

A front page story in Tuesday’s New York Times, “A New Weapon for Wal-Mart: A War Room/Retailer Tries Political Tactics to Help Image,” talked about how the retailer is taking a page from the political playbook to try to sell a better image to the public.

No
PR tactic – or even the best political strategists – can help a company
with weak leadership. And Wal-Mart is flip flopping all over the place.

Last week The New York Times
also reported on a leaked Wal-Mart memo discussing the company’s
strategy for selling its new employee healthcare plans to the public.
The memo said the company is testing the plan’s proposed changes “to
determine whether these investments would effectively ‘move the needle’
on Wal-Mart’s public reputation.”

Here’s what Wal-Mart should do to move the needle:

1. Get
   with the most innovative health care reformers in the country and
   develop a plan that’s good for employees and doesn’t break the
   company’s back (as is GM’s employee/retiree health benefits).
2. Take its huge PR budget and at least half of its advertising budget and use that to fund employee healthcare.

Poor management begets poor reputation. PR has nothing to do with it.

On Friday I’m giving a guest lecture to a “Consultation Skills”
class at Northeastern University. The communications and business
students want to know what it takes to succeed in consulting, how they
should get started, and some color commentary on my 25 year consulting
career.

Here’s what I plan to tell them.

First off, I
never planned to be a consultant. I left a promising corporate
communications position at AT&T’s Western Electric division and
headed up to Madison Ave. to work for a public affairs/crisis
communications consulting firm on the advice of a respected — and
often feared — executive who thought all ambitious people should be
connected to revenue vs. overhead. And corporate communications to him
was big time overhead.

I found that I thrived on working with
demanding clients, being under the gun to deliver position papers,
executive speeches and interviews with The New York Times, and being recognized and promoted for the value of my ideas vs. politics and time in position metrics.

Indeed,
what makes consultants successful — and different from their corporate
brethren — is that they are very good at quickly diagnosing problems
and providing ways to solve them. Chaos, complexity, urgency,
uncertainty doesn’t phase a good consultant. But routine, process
management, and operational minutiae certainly does.

There’s a difference: contractors vs. trainers vs. consultants

Trainers
teach skills. Contractors are extra hands to get work done. Consultants
help cut through the organizational clutter and quickly frame problems
and provide ideas on how to effectively and quickly solve them. Or they
have specialized expertise for especially thorny problems. Some thorny
situations I’ve been asked to address recently:

• We spend $15 million a year on sales materials but the sales reps don’t use them. What’s wrong and how do we solve it?
• Investors
  don’t understand how our strategy fits within the competitive
  landscape. How can we explain our growth strategy so they get it?
• Employees are leaving since the merger because they have no confidence in the new management team. What should the CEO do?
• We just spent a year and $350,000 on a new brand strategy but our sales reps don’t know how to talk about it with customers.
• We’re
  starting to be attacked by community leaders, politicians and major
  funders. How can we diffuse the crisis and help them understand why
  we’re doing what we’re doing?
• We spend $10 million on PR
  agencies but the performance is lacking. Is it us? Is the agencies? How
  do we know we’re getting value?

The 13 most important traits for a consultant:

1. Expertise that provides real business value
2. Ability to cut to the core of an issue or situation and diagnose causes of the problem
3. Creative thinking to develop pragmatic ways to solve the problem
4. Outstanding oral and written communications skills
5. Responsiveness
6. Perspective
7. Influence
8. Confidence & self-esteem
9. Intellectual curiosity
10. Thick
    skin (clients pay you to be frank, but they’ll often push back and
    challenge, as they should. You can’t take it too personally.)
11. Fearlessness
12. Flexibility to create “work arounds” to deliver value within every client’s realities
13. Integrity. A consultant’s only asset is her/his reputation.

How to succeed in consulting by really trying

• When
  job hunting early in your career, look to work for the most demanding,
  smart, respected and disciplined manager. You don’t need nice. You
  don’t need a pal. You need someone from whom you’ll learn.
• For
  communications majors, consider starting out by working for a political
  campaign, a national political representative, or a crisis
  communications agency.
• Do two career-related things every
  year that scare you. Give a speech. Write an article. Volunteer to help
  a highly visible NGO launch a campaign. You’ll learn a lot and build
  your self-confidence.
• Know your way around a 10K. If you can
  talk numbers, people listen to the other ideas you have. I was in a
  meeting recently where a CFO of a large publicly traded firm remarked
  that I was the smartest marketing person he had ever met.
  Interestingly, I don’t think we ever had a conversation about
  marketing. We were just talking financials, but I earned my credibility
  from being number savvy.
• Read. The Wall St. Journal. Harvard Business Review. Fortune. The Economist. Sports Illustrated (the best writing although I’m no sports fan) and Entertainment Weekly (because we all need a little fun)
• Follow
  stories and trends from your consulting perspective. For example,
  there’s no more fun for me as a communications consultant than the
  presidential elections. Aside from feeling for the shareholders who
  were hurt, I also really enjoyed following Tyco, Enron, MCI and AIG
  from crisis and executive communications perspectives. Harvard
  President Larry Summers is a fascinating leadership communications
  subject right now. (Plus I think he really understands how the power of
  influencers.)
• If you want to become an expert in an area, sign
  up to teach a class. The needed research and preparation before you get
  up in front of a class will teach you things you never knew before.
• Never
  stop challenging yourself. Clients have said I’m like a Navy Seal —
  equipped to conduct intense, special assignments that are beyond the
  capabilities of the existing resources. So like a Navy Seal, I train
  constantly, learning about new ideas, staying up on trends, and caring
  for my mental and physical well being.

I have a passion
for consulting. I dislike the occasional periods between assignments
and some of the work it takes to develop new business. But, overall, a
life in consulting is an ideal life for insatiable curious, problems
solvers like me.

During the holiday party season I asked a simple question that
surprisingly took many business executives by surprise: “What are your
biggest opportunities for next year?”

“Good question. I hadn’t really thought about business in that way,” almost all replied. Then they got quite animated.You
see, most of us get bogged down in the “how to run” our business, our
organization, our projects. How to increase customer loyalty 2
percentage points. How to generate more sales leads. How to improve
order pace.. How to increase efficiencies. How to implement new
systems. How to measure performance.Too much “how” and not
enough “what” is a recipe for slow growth, both professionally and for
business. Plus, let’s be honest, too much focus on “how” without enough
“what” can be exhausting and demoralizing. It’s far more energizing and
strategic to ask questions like, “What are the opportunities? What are
the biggest obstacles? What’s most relevant to our prospects? What new
partnerships might help us grow more quickly?”

Peter Drucker has
long advised business executives to look outside the company – and
their industries — to observe new patterns and connections. By doing
so, we’re then able to see opportunities and focus more on “what.”“For strategy, we need organized information about the environment,” he wrote in Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management.
“Strategy has to be based on information about markets, customers and
non customers; about technology in one’s own industry and others; about
the changing world economy. Major changes start outside an
organization.”

Yet research geeks, take note. Drucker warns
about going too deep. He learns enough to see patterns and important
connections but not enough to lose his point of view.Gary
Hamel, another of my favorite business thinkers, says that “a fresh way
of seeing is often more valuable than sheer brainpower.“One of
the reasons many people fail to fully appreciate what’s changing is
because they’re down at the ground level, lost in a thicket of
confusing, conflicting data. You have to make time to step back and ask
yourself, ‘What’s the nig story that cuts across all these little
facts.’”

Look outside in 2005. You might just see how to be different in ways that can make a real difference.