Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Responding to Emergencies

On Friday, September 21, 2001 there was an explosion in the city of Tolouse, France. Since it happened ten short days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it meant immediate panic about a terror attack.

The public had already been primed in that direction by both politicians and the always-on news cycle. At the time, I had flights to Italy booked 20 days out and, though I didn't know it yet, I would lose my job right before Christmas.

It was a volatile time, marked by ambiguity and uncertainty. Making decisions with a clear head and resolve, and creating a plan to respond in this environment is very hard. But not impossible. This is the time we're in now.

Something happened in a VUCA world

The nature and speed of change were accelerated by what happened on 9/11, an unthinkable act. There was a lot of haziness in the air, with mixed meanings of conditions and confusion over cause and effect. This made the prospect of surprise higher, and decisions harder.

Lack of predictability further increased the level of complexity perceived in the situation. While the world was mourning a great loss of lives, trying to make sense of what had happened and reacting to it, emergency respondents and leaders were making short-term decisions very fast.

The emergency did lead to a crisis, even as so many years out the details have faded. Plans and decisions that followed that crisis stayed with us until the present day, their usefulness for what's next hardly questioned at all.

But here's the thing with crises: No two are exactly the same. Because VUCA. The acronym stands for the more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous multilateral world that came at the end of the Cold War. VUCA is the reason why many of the challenges organizations face today are adaptive in nature.

Strategy gives you power

“To live in a moment that will be in history books is not a particularly pleasant experience; history, though, has another cruelty: those that are not remembered at all.” This is how Taiwan-based tech analyst Ben Thompson opens a recent article on Compaq and coronavirus.

In an incredible feat of ingenuity and hard work, Compaq figured out how to create a version of firmware that made the computer turn on and load the operating system. They deconstructed and reconstructed the code without copying IBM's copyrighted version.

Co-founder Rod Canion says, “[We had] just a bull-headed commitment to making all the software run. We were shocked when we found out none of our competitors had done it to the same degree.” As a result, Compaq grew very fast, hitting $100 million than $1 billion in revenue. It was the largest PC-maker in the world by 1994.

What came next is not as surprising looking back, but worth remembering. Disruption happened—cheaper, good enough, computers entered the market. Compaq tried to compete at that level with the Presario, then to go the virtualization route, which worked for a while.

Then the company started outsourcing service functions instead of investing in them. Get the benefit, without incurring the cost. However, over reliance on intermediaries can backfire. “The real solution is to create your own capability. It takes longer and is more painful, but ultimately, it is more successful,” says Graham Kemp, president of G2 Research Inc. 

Eventually Compaq was folded into HP and disappeared, with huge destruction of value in several directions: Intellectual, human, social, promissory and manufacturing, along with financial. Let's not forget those other capitals, because as Thompson says, “no one even noticed.”

You can imagine your way into the future...

... While there is still time to change. It's an exhortation Max McKeown put front an center in the new edition of The Strategy Book, and for good reason. To excel at strategy, you need to excel at bridging the gap between thinking and taking action.

The best time to make progress toward any future is to prepare. A second best time is now. The opportunity to stop SARS-CoV-2 was late last year. By January, when it was still unclear what was happening, it was already too late.

Too late to stop the global spread of the virus. Too late for Italy to bring back the thousands of people who already died. Too late to be prepared to respond to the emergency in a coordinated manner, one that saves lives and manages uncertainty and ambiguity in the U.S.

But not too late to prepare for the change that will come after the crisis. However, while there's still time to change, there's no time to waste. Strategy gives you power only when you can bridge the gap between thinking (and planning) and taking action.

In a crisis, clarity of action comes from having done the work to identify who needs to be involved based on their circle of competence, who handles communications, what's the chain of command, and what's the process to handle situations that arise.

Because, as I noted in my article on responding to adaptive challenges:

Many leaders don't have enough experience creating full engagement with colleagues, asking deeper questions, connecting insight from difference sources, and doing so in real time. Analysis works well with technical challenges, but is unable to provide the coveted “silver bullet” when it comes to adaptive challenges.

There's often a new, cross-functional team with the skill sets and hard-won experience who engages with a crisis as a first line of response. It's their job to assess the situation, establish communication with experts to handle the emergency and be accountable to keep the public (employees, customers, communities) and leaders informed.

Good communication is clear, concise, correct, current, and curated, and helps prevent outrage. Good preparation involves documenting how you should act to respond in an emergency. Each member of the first response team should have a wallet-laminated card with the essential information.

Usually, this is a tri-fold card with approved protocols on the inside, and useful information on the outside: For example, how to categorize a crisis level, why this card exists, how to use it, important names and contact details. I have souvenirs from my days in chemical manufacturing and IT infrastructure services.

The stepped approach to re-build the future

A little card is not enough to respond appropriately to an emergency. It's useful for the first hour. To be honest, I don't think it goes much further than that. It's designed to take action quickly, engage the appropriate experts, and start the parallel paths of responding to the issues and figuring out what's after that.

When dealing with chemicals and biological issues, there needs to be a more robust document with “action steps.” We had a more detailed, 7-steps accordion card folded into a plastic holder (see images above) with short examples, contact information for experts, and how to handle surprises.

This allowed us to exit the crisis as quickly as possible to debrief and learn how to handle the next one better. The point of preparing is to have a flexible structure that does the heavy lifting on thinking to take action. It's the measured action  that allows you to learn from the past and support the future.

In his Compaq and coronavirus article, Thompson summarizes well how, even when late, different cultures responded differently to the current health crisis. Since the virus spread, “there has been divergence between countries that acted and countries that talked. Taiwan, where I live, is perhaps the best example of the former.”

Italy, where my family lives, has been a glaring example of the latter. There was uncertainty about drastic measures. When the response did happen, it was patchy and did not have the full coordination of the national, regional, and local bodies. Without getting too deep into Italian (or any) politics and current state of things, the response was both ineffective and insufficient.

As a result, Italy — a country that counts as many World Heritage Sites as China (167), at thirty-two times its size, not to mention the natural beauty, culinary wonders, the arts, and so on — is now suffering greatly. Brand Italy will need to reinvest heavily into its future.# Paolo Labicino, former Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy & Mather Italy, has some ideas.

What can Italy do now to help itself into the future? It can invest in its brand by doing what it should have done in the first place. How a company or nation  behaves is also part of its brand. It lost weeks, and lives, but virologist David Ho says, “we could still make a difference and bring [the situation] under control with hard measures.”

In Informazioni Senza Filtro, notary and writer Carmelo di Marco outlines the stepped approach the Italian government should take (translation/paraphrasing mine):

1. Face the emergency as such — do what needs to be done, communicating clearly with realistic sanctions; the government takes care of the social costs in loss of work (remembering that for many that means staying in business) because people have to eat / have shelter to survive, but also because they need a future to go back to; scientists and experts do their part; citizens do their part.
2. Justify the decisions based on the future — demonstrate how today's (exceptional) decisions feed future prospects; “The central element of this future perspective must be a clear and irrevocable decision to return as soon as possible to the full exercise of the rights, to full respect for the constitutional principles and to the full exercise by the State of all its prerogatives and functions, and no more than one.” An emergency cannot become the new normal (we'll get back to this).
3. Take strategic action — now that we have data on how other countries were able to nip the virus in the bud, we have a new baseline to follow; di Marco says, this also means using the funds so many companies and citizens have collected to both take care of the now and fund the future.
   
4. Form and communicate a realistic vision of the future — not paternalism, no reductionist statements, and none of the other shenanigans that are tempting to politicians.

It's not enough to eliminate fear to be free and healthy. The people affected want to be part of the solution. They want decisiveness and action. Italy, like many Western governments, acted late, at a great social, human, and economic cost. They suffered from overconfidence in their ability to calculate exponential growth.# Hence the cascade effects of non-decisions and poor trade-offs.

Because we did not take action then, now we're at the large-scale economic bailout stage. Barry Ritholtz explains what the bailouts could accomplish. If we're thoughtful and intelligent in our approach. Every day and hour of inaction, indecision and waffling over the remedial steps will cost lives, literally, and livelihoods. Mariana Mazzucato says this is a chance to do capitalism differently.

Thompson adds an excellent thought, “if the real trade-offs to consider are about trading away civil liberties — which is exactly what has happened in Taiwan, at least to some extent — then the imperative to preserve debate about these matters is even more important.”

The ability to talk is the most precious civil liberty. But there are others worth considering, as di Marco says; they were worth fighting and dying for when they were put in place. After a major crisis, it's useful to monitor the remedies you apply, and take action to move towards a future that learns from the past and improves upon it. 

As for the planned trip to Italy back in 2001, it all went well. I lost my job just before Christmas of that year. Two weeks later I started working for a chemical company. I had the opportunity to test the importance of preparation: To separate the signal from the noise, and take purposeful action to respond to the emergency and prepare for the future.

Most of my work today focuses on building resilient brands that can take positive action, building the steps for a better future. Throughout my career, I've learned that how we measure impact is, mostly, wrong.

 

Why the Little Decisions we Make Every Day are of Infinite Importance

We earn success a little bit a time, in the moment to moment decisions that in themselves make no visible difference whatsoever, but the accumulated compounding effect is profound.

    Understanding that the effects of small actions build over time helps us do something we may have struggled for years — to start. Whether we want to be healthier or pick a more diverse panel of speakers at conferences, we can make big changes with small steps.

C. S. Lewis# once said, “Good and evil increase at compound interest. That’s why the little decisions we make every day are of infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may go on to victories you never dreamed of.” 

Could you interpret the expression, “the devil is in the details” in this light? Rather than it being about perfection, it's about the small decisions.

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The Most Important Question: How do you Know?

The amount of knowledge we generate and store is growing exponentially. Much of what you learned in school or in the early years of your work has likely changed. It takes a little effort to stay up to date. It costs a lot to stay behind.

The speed at which you need to make decisions has accelerated. This begs for getting your hands on reliable information and knowledge fast. Fortunately, there are also many more ways to gain insights and the skills today. It takes little effort to stay up to date.

But you score no points for trying, effort is a means to an end.  The outcome is learning and improving and you demonstrate that through using your knowledge in practical applications or as a building block for a model of thinking that can serve in sorting out problems.

How do you know?

Much to remember, not enough time. In a 2018 lecture, Alessandro Barbero outlined the difference between memory and history. The topic is complex, but we can make a high-level distinction:

Memory is individual, it's the point of view of one person.

History is the understanding of what happened from all points of view.

In 1996, Barbero received the Strega Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in Italy, and in 2005, the Republic of France awarded him the title of Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He is a historian.

You're likely under the impression that the study of history is a dry series of data points, with the occasional bright spot. That is before you listen to one of his hour-long lectures on any topic.

One you do, you know that reasoning on what happened, all the people who were involved at the time and what they were thinking is the highly engaging. The hour just flies. You don't get to it in school — too much ground to cover, too little time.

Yet, this is why history is important. Reality its complex. To understand what actually happened, a view of the events from above is critical. One of the ways to learn from the experiences of others is to get out of a personal point of view, widen the gaze. This is what history does.

Because it's the sum of all the things that happened to human beings, history answers the question: What really happened? Memory is important, but by its very nature is limiting. It takes into account only one point of view.

In the same ways as it's become difficult to stay up to date on everything, so is teaching and studying history. More things happened and more people were involved. More information is accessible today, but you have a harder time telling which one is the official version and why.

Reality is complex, yet there's a simple way to get good maps and directions: How do you know? Proof can mean a direct citation of a person or document that creates the genealogy of an idea, data point, or statement. Then you go from there.

What are consequences?

Sorting wheat from chaff comes next. In a 1964 lecture, Richard Feynman described his method:

In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it... Then we compute the consequences of the guess, to see what, if this law we guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computational results to... experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works...

In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn't matter how smart you are, who made the guess of what his name is... If it disagrees with the experiment, it's wrong. That's all there is to it.

The rigor you use to evaluate the consequences of decisions is what matters, this is the scientific part. The process that produces decisions may look scientific, but may not be. Value of the solution is what matters.

As you decide based on the understanding of something that happened, it's also useful to know that at some point in the past there were different rules. For example, if you spoke to an ancient Greek about democracy, they'd tell you that it means everyone in the city goes up a hill and votes right there and then on an issue. Every citizen (well, except women...)

One more reason to insist on understanding context.

What is High Resolution, what is Low Resolution. Can we Tell?

Many authors and journalists know how to write, few know how to be read. Few writers have the gift of introducing the reader to the pleasure of reading. It's a gift we receive from select classics. In Italy, Idro Montanelli had the gift of knowing how to reduce concepts to the essential ideas without subtracting depth from his message. Thus starts a review of Massimo Mantellini's Low Resolution.

In the short book (Einaudi, 2018), Mantellini says with depth that the Internet has radically changed our approach to information, social relations, markets and culture. We traded higher resolution experiences with music, photography, and information sources for speed.

Memory is a funny thing

There's no question that listening to music live is preferable to vinyl, which is still a much higher resolution than digital. Do we remember what that experience was like without repeating it?

As for photography, does the reliable quality of the smartphone stand in contrast to the resolution and frame we could achieve with a Leica? Or does it stand in contrast to actually enjoying the experience before we snap the photo?

Should we reduce noise pollution in the kitchen with the same discipline and patience we use in sauce reductions? IKEA cabinets as new low resolution artifacts that fill our lives included.

There is a serious angle to the loss of memory and that is the loss of space between thought and action. Real time overwhelms caution because it engages our primal instinct to keep up.

It's true, technology cannot tell time, says Stewart Brand in The Clock of the Long Now. When we entrust our thoughts and artifacts to the archive, we forget the Internet doesn't have a resilient method of preserving those thoughts like paper and books did in the past.

As I wrote to a friend this past week, this is a good argument in favor of books (persistent) vs. blogs (evolving/ephemeral) because the latter lead to an explosion of content that doesn’t get used as much.

Like with the physical memory, exercise (or practice) is the best preserver. The most read, analyzed, discussed books get handed down to future generations because they remain persistent. Torah, Koran, I Ching get passed down through generations. Dan Pink ran a non statistically valid survey with his 140,000 readers this past year: The Bible is still most read book out there.

Every age copies, translates, analyses, critiques, uses those books. 

Why practice makes sense

Practice makes perfect is a proverb that has been traced back to the 1550s - 1560s, when its form was 'Use makes perfect.' The Latin version is: Uses promptos facit.#  I suggest in this meaning it makes sense, too.

We learn by use. It's the whole premise of critical thinking that we play with ideas to kick their tires, so to speak. Do they hold under the weight of opposing views? Can we prove the opposite?

In this sense, the Internet is a great place to practice ideas if, and that skinny word is quite important, if we do it with intent. That is recognizing that they're a work in progress, and appreciating our responsibility in editing, correcting, improving those ideas over time. In other words, being good stewards to the words that go into the archive.

Digital created the economy of the immediate, with grainy images, ready to disappear without memory. We're out of practice staying with the questions. Even worse, we're out of practice engaging in productive conversation and building connections that go beyond the usual superficiality.

Online, we're seeing a downward trend, so that everything can circulate more quickly. We might be asking better questions offline. The Internet has not canceled our desire to be social, in fact it has heightened it through our sense of isolation.

A counter-intuitive move

It's fascinating how we put on noise-canceling headphones as soon as we get on a plane, yet we manage to wade into the massive avalanche of inputs coming at us through the online stream without protection of any kind for the everybody that talks at us, bots included.

There's lots happening inside our heads. Only we are able to parse through it with practice using ideas, asking questions, before we jump to searching for solutions. In this, technology has permeated every aspect of our lives, prompting us through needs and taste. We do exist without TikTok or Facebook accounts.

We're interconnected. But in the lone place we occupy in front of a screen, we hardly see how we're interdependent. Says Mantellini (translation mine):

“Each of us is now alone, surrounded by many others who are similarly alone and lost: technology is the first breaking point of this loss of direction of complex societies.

[…]

Everyone today can say they know everything, and basically everyone knows they don't know much, in an atmosphere of mutual mistrust and arrogance left to flow under trace, which is one of the constants of our feeling at the same time modern and reluctant.”

It's cumbersome and complex to use a real camera. Smartphones are more convenient and take a reliably good image. Plus we can share it immediately. We could make a similar argument of portability with music.

Where to invest

Mantellini weaves technological themes with artistic, literary or historical references. This is a valuable exercise in a persistent medium, the book. Exercise in the sense of practice and use of ideas would benefit us in business.

When Italians fill piazzas and theaters to go back to the ideas of philosophers and poets – every year, people crowd in the piazzas of Modena, Carpi and Sassuolo for the festival of philosophy, the tour actor Roberto Benigni did reading Dante Alighieri was sold out and had great success later on TV – it’s a testimony to this desire to reconnect with culture, what is most enduring.

Heather McGowan says we're currently undergoing several dimensions of cultural change that are happening in society: racial demographics, age demographics, what gender means, what leadership is, what are the rules of education, which institutions to trust.

These changes are making it hard to answer the question of who we are. When we go from one situation to another, like a new job, for example, that makes us uncomfortable because we don't know who we are anymore. There's an identity piece we may quite never recover.

Technology is not inherently bad, it can facilitate connection. But it can shorten our attention span. Understanding how to operate within the tension between knowing and learning depends on a skinny “if.”

Everyone Has a Story

A 24-year old boy seeing out from the train shouted:

“Dad, look the trees are going behind!”

Dad smiled as a group of young people sitting nearby whispered snide remarks about the 24-year old's childish behavior.

Suddenly, the young man exclaimed again:

“Dad, look the clouds are running with us!”

The group couldn't resist anymore and they said to the father:

“Take your son to a good doctor, why don't you?”

The father smiled and said:

“I did. We're coming back from the hospital now. My son was blind from birth, he just got his sight today.”

How would you feel if you were part of that group?

Every person has a story, yet in our haste to draw conclusions, we often overlook it. As we debate whether we've entered a new century or not, we're still long on tools and technologies and short on insights and empathy.

It's hard to see things clearly when the things we look at seem to change so fast. Yet, like in a moving train, the landscape changes at a different speed than that of our perception.

The opportunity before us: make 2020 a year of vision and clarity. My work is focused on getting the story and conversation right.

Happy New Year.

P.S. Italy is celebrating Epiphany. What's the role of tradition in culture?

[image from an Intercity train between Bologna and Modena after a rainy day]

To Lead You Need Thought. This is How it's Made.

“Thought leadership” is a common expression we use with varying definitions. How we define a term says a lot about culture. When I wrote about the topic, I boiled it down to:

The simplest definition of leadership is the ability or capacity to lead. If thought lends credibility to the expression, this part gives it direction and coherence. Can we separate the big ideas from other kinds of thoughts?

Definitions help us navigate thought. At the atomic level, words are the smallest meaningful unit we use to form thoughts and actions. I'm not forgetting sounds, which are inside words and especially useful as we transition to voice commands.

But we're not yet reduced to grunts in our communication. Accents and cadence matter to the rhythm of conversation to convey meaning. Our command and range of words is changing.

Change is part of life, the people we meet and experiences we have change us. We change in response to our environment. But technology has escalated the demand that we adapt to change rapidly.

Each phase of change comes with great benefits in our thinking and our ability to create new worlds — as well as costs.

The birth and development of thinking

When we're children, we connect more readily with things that are physical and human. Because we're experimenting with what it feels like to be alive, and learning is part of our survival strategy. Our environment provides enough stimuli — in good and bad — from which we can draw and learn.

On balance, if we're lucky we're able to invest of our natural curiosity to soak up life's lessons, rather than coat our senses with impermeable defenses because of difficult circumstances. We paint, talk our thoughts out loud, and ask a thousand “why” questions all day long. That's how we find the words to put into writing and populate our dreams and imagination.

As we get older, we refine our technique with practice and the influence of the people and situations we experience. We start collecting the things of others in an attempt to make sense of what we're thinking.

Then our drawings, writing, and talking start reflecting what we're experiencing. This is a new threshold of awareness. We sing ourselves into existence in more than one way.

We may not have the ability to tell who's doing the editing or where the motivation is coming from, but we get words out of the process. We latch onto expressions and terms from culture and social experiences. That's how we try on thoughts and drive our actions.

But these words and thoughts might be fleeting, and thus fragile over time.

A corollary to this phase is that we may discover data and associate it with more durable properties. We begin to seek evidence and data as a means of gaining insights. We're currently experiencing the human version of adolescence in business, for example. The insights we can gain from data are still pretty limited and insufficient, they don't teach us anything new. Nor they tell us where we want to go.

Maybe we can focus the lens enough as we look at the data to see better and learn more. It's an argument we're considering with artificial intelligence (AI). However, many commercial applications are still tracking and measuring the stuff that is easy to track and measure, rather than what we want to know about the future.

It's hard to get life out of data.

Like a painting or an infographic becomes interesting and long-lasting when it contains a deep insight as the organizing principle, so do our thoughts, words, and actions. If you're just adding aesthetics to something, you're not making it meaningful.

Life is in real world situations. When we get out of our office and our heads and observe what's going on around us. This is a step that is becoming rare. When we do step out, we can learn to see a lot. Yet young people are not leaving their apartments anymore#. Going out is too much effort, researchers found.

Digital life is a performative stage — the thinking goes that online we're both safe and comfortable. Online we have the illusion that something is happening, without putting actual skin in the game. Online, our solitude can mimic the solitude of others.

But thinking needs both words and action to flourish, that's how we get feedback. Conversation is thought in action, for example.

How we scale thought

As individuals we have limited scale. You and I can do, process, and think about only so many things at once. In the haste to do and think about as many things are possible, we limit depth. Our words become more efficient. But we trade off meaning.

We also cannot access what other people are thinking. As you're reading this, there's an inner conversation you have that is off limits to me. The good news is that parts of inner conversations download into relationships over time and parts spill into physical things. When we talk and make things together, we enrich our thinking vocabulary.

At some point, we turn our search for meaning from the outside world to our inner world. We explore our thoughts and actions. Sometimes it's easier to borrow the words someone else thought about and apply them to our context. Like I did above with Ferrari. We reference the insight behind what someone else says because of what they make us feel.

The time and energy limitations force us to close doors on some experiences in favor of others. Editing in this stage may be a tool of necessity. We need to stop adding new words to operate in a specific place. To climb faster, we discard or park thoughts as we would things.

Memories are our storage space for parked thoughts. We used to put the words into diaries and entrust them to the care of friends, now we put them online, spreading them widely, often forgetting what we said the minute we write it. Worse, we forget to think through what we want to say. A thoughtless comment is a waste.

What kinds of thought are we scaling in a wasteland?

Building engines

A blog is an example of evolving thinking through words over time. Social media, not so much. Evolution comes from conversation — with thoughts and also through the act of building something.

Likes and traffic give us ego boosts engineered to build cash reserves for a certain business model. We end up watching them, instead of observing and feeling the person and situation on the other side of the conversation. A learning opportunity missed.

I'm an idea person, and I've always gravitated toward activities that would allow me to build tools. When I was little, I used to convert the boxes my sisters gifts came with into environments for them to play. Once I built an entire apartment building with rooms their dolls could use to do things together.

I look at conversation the same way. Conversations create spaces to put words to work. They in turn build our thinking. After we build thought through experiences and encounters, this is how we scale.

Enrico Fermi was the last physicist who could embrace the whole of his science.  He excelled in both theoretical and experimental physics. As a person he was simplicity embodied. He liked a good game, and disliked complicated theories. hence why our quick back-of-the-envelope calculations became the “Fermi method.”

His scientific work has stood the test of time.

Toward the end of his life, Fermi questioned his faith in society at large to make wise choices about nuclear technology. He said:

Some of you may ask, what is the good of working so hard merely to collect a few facts which will bring no pleasure except to a few long-haired professors who love to collect such things and will be of no use to anybody because only few specialists at best will be able to understand them? In answer to such question[s] I may venture a fairly safe prediction.

History of science and technology has consistently taught us that scientific advances in basic understanding have sooner or later led to technical and industrial applications that have revolutionized our way of life. It seems to me improbable that this effort to get at the structure of matter should be an exception to this rule. What is less certain, and what we all fervently hope, is that man will soon grow sufficiently adult to make good use of the powers that he acquires over nature.

To lead we need thought. This is how we make it.

"The Transparency Sale" Explains Why Unexpected Honesty Works

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Ask any person, and they'll tell you they avoid being sold to by anyone—even on behalf of the brands they love. We may enjoy buying things, but on our own terms. To vet products or services we rely on ratings and reviews, word of mouth, and the opinion of the people we know.

Flip the situation and now we're the ones selling—even if it's only an idea. How do we convince the other person or party to hear what we have to say? Are we comfortable communicating the value of our product and service knowing they've done their research, just like we do?

I forgot who said it first, “nothing happens until someone buys.” It may be a little extreme as a statement, but it rings true. This is especially true for businesses that sell to other businesses.  

The Transparency Sale offers a path to selling that doesn't feel icky—on both sides of the transaction. Todd Caponi says, “A newish, top priority for marketers is the need to know what buyers will find when they look — and help their organizations lead with self-aware authenticity.”

Three layers of value

When I read a book, I examine the ideas in three ways—as a learner, as an author, and as a practitioner. Here's my take on The Transparency Sale.

First as a learner—the book starts by redefining transparency based on the brain and decision making and buyer empathy. Caponi explains why doing it right matters and proceeds to make the case for change. The next three sections expand on the question of why change? Why you? Why now? Section five outlines why stay, buy more and advocate. A bonus chapter is about applying transparency to things like job search, recruiting, requests for proposals and more. Simple charts and graphs visualize some of the key concepts. The chapter on mutual decision plans is quite useful in complex sales where more than one decision-maker is involved.

Then as an author—the book is structured as a logical progression of questions, each with a few chapters to explain different aspects of the answer. The afterward about the end of lying drives home the message with a relatable personal story.  Keepers at the end of each chapter summarize the key concepts. Caponi weaves brain science with his sales experience to make the case for transparency. “The second the buyer’s brain senses insincerity, ineptitude, or inconsistency, their brain’s ‘uh-oh’ alarm will sound off subconsciously.” 

Third as a practitioner—unless our mindset about what needs to happen changes, our strategies and tactics are not going to change. What Caponi says rings true from experience, “buyers don't trust what marketing and sales put out anywhere near as much as their accelerating dependence on reviews and feedback. This content is now easily accessible across every channel - used by buyers to better attempt to predict their experience with you, your products and services.”   Based on his research and work, being honest increases the number of qualified opportunities, the average deal size, and the likelihood of closing the deal — and decreases the length of the selling cycle. 

The book offers practical strategies for implementing this type of sales process. It describes the process from email strategies to how to get and why to get references, to negotiating strategies and dealing with legal.

My highlights

This section is about the key actions or takeaways that I'm going to implement—or do differently— because of what I learned in the book.

We so dislike being sold to that we've gone from hiding in our own homes when doors to door sales people approach our neighborhood, to not answering the phone at dinner time, to ignoring emails within the span of ten years. 

Yet email is an effective tool when we learn to empatize with the buyer's inbox. Technology is changing the way people buy, and it can help us change the way we sell, too. The chapter on email contains a very detailed walk-through of what blends in and what stands out.

I read an email pitch recently that was a soft sales pitch using almost every motivational angle.  It tried the celebrity worship angle, the “I'm trustworthy” angle, the personal connection angle, the patriotic angle, the “insider” angle and the FOMO/trendy angle. It read like someone throwing spaghetti at the wall, hoping something sticks. 

Most importantly, it felt insincere, because if things were going so incredibly amazingly awesome, why send out these e-mails?  When people are that wonderful, other people will tell them or they will know.  

If you want to get someone interested in you and what you have to offer, the first step is to show them you are inerested in them. To show them you are interested in them, you must actually be interested in them.

It seems obvious, but clearly so many miss the point. Personalized value lasts, while gimmicky tricks don't go anywhere, as in my example above. 

On mutual decision plans Caponi says:

It is important to remember that with every interaction, you're eigther building trust or eroding it. Using a mutual decision plan builds confidence that this isn't your or your company's first experience addressing the issues that will arise during the purchasing process.

On presenting, he says your last slide shouldn't be a question mark. That slide should contain the information you want people to remember—two key points. 

How behavior spreads

The reason why I talk about behavior may seem obvious—unless we observe what people do and and understand how actions spread, we won't get to the root of motivation. And motivation is one of the powerful human levers, along with availability and triggers, that get us what we want.

There are many things we can do to create rapport before we try to sell something. But it's the post-purchase interaction that will determine if we were successful or not. In other words, signing the contract is the beginning of our relationship, not the end.

It's important to stay involved in the relationship—sales and marketing people are not done. An email confirming the purchase and outlining what will happen next creates the bridge to the team that will deliver the work. This sets the tone for the engagement and carries the momentum forward.

Our behavior is more likely to fall into step with a process when we have an idea of how things will go. When a team is involved in delivering a service or product, a good way to get on the same page is to hold a kick off meeting outlining—the buyer's objectives, why they chose you, a reminder of what they purchased, and introductions.

How we behave at each stage of a collaboration either builds trust or erodes it. Companies that sell directly to consumers are not off the hook. Customer support and the service team are an extension of the team behind the product and service. If the experience is not the same, we know it.

We don't like being sold to, and we don't like having to call support. “Your customers don't want to talk to you,” says Caponi. We really don't. And we really don't want to fill out a survey after troubleshooting. If you learn these simple behavioral norms you're halfway there.

Clients who choose to move on and stop doing business with you will likely give you the logic for their move—little ROI. But dig a bit deeper, and you will find a “feel” answer. Something didn't feel right. Feelings will get you every time, and they spread from one person to a whole team.

Honesty is the best policy

We don't expect honesty. But when we choose to be honest, we lay the ground work for a potential long-term relationship. If the person who emails you out of the blue with a soft sell using every motivational angle were honest, the message would likely come across and might have impact.

Feelings and emotion drive how we make decisions, then we justify them with logic and rationality. We respond to genuine interest, we read it in the tone of an email as we do in the inflection of someone's voice. 

Our brains are wired to make decisions with emotion and gut feelings. We move toward a reward and away from risk. Dr. David Rock created a model to talk about how we make decisions. The five domains of feeling include:

• the relative importance of a purchase to others (status)
• how we feel we can predict the experience (certainty)
• our perception of a sense of control (autonomy)
• whether the purchase will perform as we expect (relatedness)
• a cost/value assessment (fairness)

Plus, we make over 90 percent of our decisions subconsciously. All these reasons and the fact that we resist influence make a case for honesty as the best policy.

I'd give The Transparency Sale a 4.2 star rating. And that, says Caponi, is reason enough to read it. It's a departure from the typical sales book, and this might add an incentive to check it out.

 

"The Strategy Book" Bridges the Gap Between Thinking and Taking Action

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Say “strategy” to anyone and their eyes glaze over. It's not that we don't understand the value of strategic thinking, we do. But there's never enough time to do a proper job of it.

Market pressure seems to override a desire to learn more about the problem—or focus on the right one—the context, and the players. We often don't know enough even about our own business.

Action is how we show results, we reason. Yet, we'd still want to focus on the right actions, making good decisions, understanding competitive pressure, engaging our team, and using a proven process.

If you've ever felt you could use some help thinking strategically about your doing, The Strategy Book will get you there. It will ever teach you how to sell your strategy, not to mention how to measure progress.

“Strategy is moving from where you are to where you want to be,” says Max McKeown. “Smart strategy is the shortest route to desirable ends with available means.” It should include what we're not going to do, along with an intelligent reaction to what others are doing.

Strategists see the past, present, and future as connected and think beyond the tactics.

Three layers of value

When I read a book, I examine the ideas in three ways—as a learner, as an author, and as a practitioner. Here's my take on The Strategy Book.

First as a learner—five of the six parts in the book are about the challenges of creating the strategy and making it work. This is the most important part for success; a compendium of the best ideas on strategy in a format that makes it easier to access and use them. Anyone who's ever tried to teach something knows how hard it is to translate what we know into what other people could use. Starting with “what” we need to think about is a good approach for this topic. The toolkit follows.

Then as an author—the structural organization makes it easy to dip into any of the main questions around strategy like how frequently should I do this? Who should be part of the team?— starting with “your strategic self” and “thinking like a strategist,” to “creating your strategy,” “winning with strategy,” and “making your strategy work.” Each part includes a description, examples, ratings, objective, context, challenge, success, measures for success, checklist, and related ideas. The models and tools section includes diagrams and simple explanations of how you use them. 

Third as a practitioner—here the most important question I ask is whether I would be able to incorporate the learning into my work, both in mindset and practice. The strength of the book here is its organization. McKeown summarizes the answers to the common questions you should address, so you can feel prepared to engage the rest of the organization (or your client) right from the start. The best (or most perfect) strategy will fail with no buy-in or ownership. I love the attention to addressing what could go wrong along with the pitfalls of negative thinking. While we should focus as much as possible on preparing for the future, learning to adapt ranks high on successful executions.

The book is written for business leaders with profit and loss (P&L) responsibility—general managers, Vice Presidents, Chief Strategists, CEOs, Presidents, COOs, advisors, and professionals who teach strategy.

If you're a student, you might want to get your hands on it. You'll learn to ask better questions, how to pay attention to market signals, and how to maintain coherence of vision through change.

My highlights

It's often difficult to see how our lives are the product of many decisions and consequences. Businesses face the same challenge. Every company starts with a decision, and from there on, we can see how good or bad each new decision was only after the fact.

Strategy decisions are meant to be about the big picture but some big decisions turn out to have small impact. And often there are small decisions that have a big (or strategic) impact. There are also decisions that appear to be urgent and those that seem less urgent.

We're all aware that priorities matter. But what comes first could change, and different kinds of decisions have different kinds of impact on strategy. This is an example of digging deeper into the question based on context.

The more complex the challenge, the more important to know what we're dealing with. Customers are not just waiting for us to decide, or make a move. They have their own lives to run. “It's hard for people to focus on anything outside their immediate surroundings,” says McKeown.

Anything new coming at us creates more cognitive and material work. Often survival is based on not questioning the way we do things... up to a point. This reminds me of a chart that illustrates the lifespan of the average S&P 500 and that of human beings.

Organizations are dying at a faster rate because they don't calculate the full commercial ROI. Energy is not a consideration so they miss the value of reputation, trust, and brand. Where regulatory pressure or monopoly situations don't protect them, not considering the social and intellectual costs can be disastrous.

It's a slow decline, thus not obvious as we optimize our way into a cliff. Amazon's Jeff Bezos says:

To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come.

Fewer transactions, product and service commodification, difficulty attracting and/or retaining customers, and higher customer acquisition costs are just some of the symptoms of a low energy business. Money alone doesn't buy happiness... or longevity.

Before we go ahead and change the game, it's useful to understand the kind of game we're in. Victory is never final, especially if we don't survive it. Avoiding screw-ups is as important as creating winning strategies. This is the most valuable advice in each chapter of the book.

How behavior spreads

A strategy is only as effective as its implementation and it must be a fit to the situation. Winning direction is not enough—if people and teams don't engage with a course of action, it's not going to be effective.

Standard recipes don't work, as it doesn't work when you just copy tactics. But the most important lesson is that leaders fail when no one is following. It's not enough to be smart or to be right to make a difference. Followership matters.

Strategists help companies use what they do best to their advantage, and want to do it, or help them know what they don't know, and want to learn it. We can use the process of strategy to “increase the real-world value of the ideas and icrease engagement with the strategy.”

Process is how we spread ideas and engage others. We need to consider what we intended, but also what emerges from the way people do things, our strengths, collective knowledge and behaviors.

In other words, to succeed it's critical we prepare people to participate. For behavior to spread, we need to address what the strategy looks like at every level of the organization. This involves change.

Two key aspects of managing change are: 1./ saving effort arguing about what to change, and 2./ focusing on the right action to make it happen. Clarity helps with both.

Making your own circumstances

We can learn and adapt from the most successful strategists. But to make something of our work, we must first make it clear what strategy is and what it's designed to do. The business of shaping the future is not a solitary pursuit.

There are five fundamental questions we can use to clarify our own thinking and communicate value and direction:

1. Where are we?
2. Where do we want to go?
3. What changes have to be made?
4. How should changes be made?
5. How shall we measure progress?

The answers are interrelated—change one, and you impact the others. A good strategist has opinions and knowledge, that's how we navigate our work. Many of the tools can help us help others get oriented and create a sense of ownership.

You're probably familiar with the SWOT, an analysis of strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Or know about Porter's Five Forces of competition, general strategies, and value chain and value systems.

The tools section includes many more techniques and best practices for scenario planning, growth models and handling change. You can use what's appropriate based on your circumstances. Practice by finding examples from your experience, and apply what you're learning.

I hope The Strategy Book will give you better questions and tools to succeed at whatever you're pursuing.

4 Ways Technology Impacts our Ability to Make Decisions

This post is part of a new series on conversations worthy of attention. New email subscribers will receive it as part of the weekly digest.

Marshall McLuhan observed the effects of media and technology. “The medium is the message,” “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us,” and “First we build the tools, then they build us,” are three ways of talking about the impact of technology.

True to the Canadian educator and communication theorist observation that “Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers,” we're still working on our understanding of the effects of media and technology on business and human behavior.

Jennifer Sertl says it's important to reinforce the usefulness of being human, rather than thinking of humans in technological terms. We don't have an on/off switch, for example. Our presence impacts people at a deep level—through feelings and emotions.

In an interview with rdigitallife#, she says technology evolves so gradually that, if we're not careful, we could lose our humanity without even noticing. We're losing our ability to do four things that impact decision-making:

1. scenario-plan — this is a strategic method we use to make flexible long-term plans. We create different scenarios for different future landscapes, so we can make better decisions when problems or changes occur.
2. gain perspective — growth is an imperative in business. As we grow, we have a certain way of looking at what happens. When we see things from a different perspective, we gain a broader appreciation of the world. 
3. know ourselves — the aphorism know thyself is ancient. It's about understanding one's own emotions, desires, and abilities. We cannot set goals, go about life, and have successful relationships if we don't know who we are or what we want.
4. empathize — empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference. It has four important attributes. Cognitive empathy works in tandem with reason. 

These are the things that separate us from the gadgets. 

Our ancestors were tightly connected with each other, which is why they felt only the pain of their family and the people in their village. As we started to travel more and learn new things, we expanded the circle of sympathy to the clan, the tribe, the nation, the race, and maybe all humankind.

It was a process that at its origin had what physicist David Bohm called “participatory thought” — in some cultures there was a shared understanding that everyone was part of the same experience. In his excellent On Dialogue, Bohm explains the meaning of participatory, it's about “to partake of,” and the idea was everyone drew from the same source of energy.

There's more reason to it. 

For the ambitious, near enough may not be good enough.

These are things we can control through our values and principles. Value never disappears, it just shifts to another place. Technology is a useful tool. But we need to reinforce the usefulness of being human to drive innovation.

How much screen and app time is enough to program us? Can you separate how you hope to be from how you're being with your actions in social networks?

 

"The Formula" Explains the Hidden Patterns that Separate the Best Seller from the Flop.

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Failure has become a badge, a rite of passage on our way to success. But generally-speaking nobody likes to fail, or even wants to think about it. We enter every project and new venture with a sense of adventure.

It's easy to talk about failure from the gold medal podium. Western culture doesn't look upon people who fail to succeed kindly. Unless you can draw a line from failing your way up the ladder to more money and bigger glory, we're just not interested.

Yet any study of success needs to start where things are not going so well. Albert-László Barabási, a self-professed tinkerer, started with disaster. A lifelong student of whore and how links form, Barabási loves to understand the math behind our social fabric.

Numbers provide a framework for figuring out the essence of how we're connected. Hence, why the title of his book, The Formula. The subtitle explains what he set out to break down the mechanism that create success, hence The Universal Laws of Success.

The title sounds gimmicky, but the focus is worthy—the science of networks and how success is the product of collective work. Barabási puts some meat behind the statement, “Your success isn't about you and your performance. It's about us and how we perceive your performance.”

We find the same principles for influence—it's about the influenced. There are hundreds of questions we'd love to answer, from success to achievement and reputation. 

“Is it our performance that pushes us the corporate ladder?”

“Do we get less or more creative during out lifetimes?”

“Should we collaborate or compete with superstars?”

Three layers of value

When I read a book, I examine the ideas in three ways—as a learner, as an author, and as a practitioner. Here's my take on The Formula.

First as a learner—the book follows a logical progression. It starts with a personal introduction to connect us to the question, then the history of how he got to the structure. Barabási presents the scientific method he used to reverse engineer success based on the complex but consistently reproducible mechanisms that orchestrate positive outcomes. Before we can learn about something, we need to define what “it” is, what it means in our context. Hence the definition of success as “the rewards we earn from the communities we belong to.” Are you a collaborator? The recognition is important. Are we talking about a brand? Then visibility matters. Are you a business? Then revenue is critical. Do you hope to make a difference in any field? Then we're talking about impact. I love positive impact, it's in my Twitter bio for a reason. 

Then as an author—structurally, I look at how the information is laid out. Where does the book belong to as a topic? Does it include primary research or just secondary, or merely anecdotes?  Does the evidence balance out the stories? The simple logical progression from first to fifth law is easy to follow. Questions underscore each chapter and help us make important distinctions. For example, between success and achievement. Both rewarding, but with quite different contributions to the substance of our lives. Each chapter begins with a summary of the law, which you can use as a shorthand to review the material later. There are no diagrams. You won't miss them.

Third as a practitioner—here the most important question I ask is whether I would be able to incorporate the learning in mindset and practice. The book's design is to affect how we think about “success” and what we do with that information. It's like when you learn about the theory of flight, and understand the laws of aerodynamics. Or when you're learning how to drive and friction figures in it. For the boaters among us, it's about fluid dynamics. The Laws of Success are similar, says Barabási. We've got to use the insights that are appropriate to how we work. We've got to understand the forces that boost our performance, or we won't be able to repeat the outcomes.

Overall, the book is fascinating. After the introduction there's a story, then 10 more chapters, each law taking two to explain, except for the fifth law, which has only one chapter after which is the conclusion. Several of the notes are worth annotating as well.

Plus you'll learn how Einstein became the most quoted lovable genius.

My highlights

“How do networks—social and professional—affect our access to success?” In an age where it's become harder to be dis-connected than the other way around, this is a vital question to explore. Barabási says success is a collective measure, it's how people respond to our performance.

We do a lot of performing in social situations, online and offline. To figure out how we're doing, we need to study our community and other people's responses to our contributions. It's a collective effort. We put in the work, the others put in the recognition.

Of course, quality and competence need to be there. But if someone accomplishes incredible feats without anyone knowing... or appreciating, it ends up disappearing. They say the winners write history. A similar concept might apply to success.

This is something Enrico Fermi understood well. As one of the first physicists in Italy, he learned German and English so he could publish his research in the journals his community of peer scientists read. 

Any of us has a hard time seeing the impact we have on our networks of family, friends, colleagues, etc. We'd have not to be there to see the control. Just like in the movie, It's a Wonderful Life.

The exceptional rewards of athletes and celebrities are not linked to day-to-day performances. Instead, they reflect the cumulative visibility generated by their wins and losses. Performance is the starting point, along with ambition.  

In education, comparing two schools, one superior in every way from the teachers to the other students, and the other a regular school finds something interesting:

What the data tells us, is that the difference—despite what parents think, teachers suggest, and principals claim—is not because the school enhances their performance. It's because high achievers continue to excel no matter what education a school offers.

It's the superior collective SAT score of who shows up that makes the school superior, not the other way around. The student matters. Two Princeton economists studied the long-term factors of success of college graduates. They found that it derived from the best college a kid applied to, even if she didn't get in.

Confidence and self-belief need to match strong performance. It seems obvious. But what if performance is hard to measure, like in art or the less tangible professional services? The meaningful connections we build around them shape out perception and determine the market price.

You can go through each law and find examples of how it plays out in your life. It's useful to figure out how performance is bounded and success is unbounded to explain a lot about contemporary life.

How behavior spreads

At some point, performance hits an upper ceiling. There's only so much we can do to shave a few seconds off our time, or improving product features. Beyond that point, it's the order in which we speak or present information that wins the day.

Order determines who gets to “frame the key questions” at FDA approval meetings. Order also determines the higher probability of winning music competitions. If you plan to run in one, try to perform second on the last day. 

You get to set the tone in one situation, while in the second, you want to complete it. With a caveat, if you're a female performer, you'll rank two positions below males, no matter when you perform. This is social behavior at work in the form of gender bias. 

The reason why in music performance it's the last who reap the benefits is that the music is new to all at first. But by the last day, everyone's become familiar with it. Mystery solved. How many other instances in life have similar variables?

Creative pitches? New campaign ideas? Job interview? You'll need to balance enough novelty of insight with familiarity to bring people along. 

Sometimes the diversity necessary for positive reception is about relationships. Two people who share a common, strong tie. Say, a colleague and a cousin. This is why it's easier to work with someone you've worked with before, yet might not know too well. The colleague and relative might get along fabulously, because they're both connected to you, yet not to each other. 

Success can come at any time

With persistence, because creativity has no expiration date. Thank Heavens.

If you're willing to try repeatedly for a breakthrough, you will eventually have one. Actor Alan Rickman landed his first movie role at 46; Ray Kroc joined McDonald's at 53; Julia Child was 50 when she hosted her first TV show.

It's not the idea in itself that counts. It's “your ability to turn an idea into a discovery” that makes a difference. Barabási and team call this the “Q-factor.” Success is the product of a creator's Q-factor and the value of idea r. When Q and r are both high, they enhance each other.

Then they found something surprising, the Q-factor doesn't change over the course of our lives. However, there's a silver lining if you keep striking out. If your Q-facto is not resonating with your job, you might be in the wrong career.

Match your Q-factor with your vocation, and your chance of succeeding will improve.

I hope The Formula will give you better questions to succeed at whatever you're pursuing.