Many years ago, when I got to the point in my work life when I found myself sitting in meetings with a General Manager, I began to notice that once the General Manager had indicated his opinion of a problem, almost everyone on the team reflexively, and I am sure unconsciously, shifted their opinions to be in the same orbit as the General Manager. The scope of the discussion seemingly as on auto pilot shrank to encompass just the General Manager’s scope of thinking.

This phenomenon should not have surprised me. The usual power dynamics in an organization would predict that this would happen. After all the boss is the boss. And, even though this particular General Manager was really interested in having a wide ranging debate, even encouraged contrary opinions, as soon as he stated his opinion of the problem, which was frequently near the beginning of the meeting, the normal reflexes of organizational life kicked into gear.

Having noted this behavior I began to try out a different approach with my own team. When we got together to discuss a problem I very carefully gave a description of the problem, then asked others to expand or correct on the description of the problem.

Build on the Group to Define and Solve Problems

Once we had that done, I asked, “Well, what do you all think we should do?” My job now was to moderate the team discussion with special attention to drawing out the more reticent members. Sometimes, I would open the discussion by asking one of the quieter people their opinion to preempt the noisier folks from setting the starting point.

Of course, being a smart guy with no shortage of ego I always had a complete plan in my mind about how we should address the issue at hand. What I discovered was that the team discussion frequently revealed that (a) my description of the problem was inadequate or simply wrong, and/or (b) my solution was also frequently off base or completely silly. The talents ofthe team really did produce better results.

In my role as meeting moderator, I would sum up the decision we had come to and lead the discussion of how to implement it. This lead to a further discovery. This process by nature created a team bond with the solution. After all they, not me, had come up with the solution. They owned it. This made implementation a far easier and more reliable process.

So, keep your mouth shut.

By the way, this process works equally well in those one on one meetings in the hallway or over the phone. Let your people think for themselves, interact vigorously, but don’t close down the discussion before it even gets going by opening your mouth.

Some readers may think that all of this is not new. That is ceretainly true. There are lots of resources, especially in the world of lean enterprise and six sigma, about how to work effectively with a team. Nevertheless, the first step for every manager is still, “Keep your mouth shut.”⁽⁽¹⁾⁾

1. the source of the Zip It! image is unknown to me – widely used on the Web – appears to have a copyright symbol – be glad to pay for use if the owner contacts me

Screen grabs from my iPhone of some local Hudson businesses. Which do you think are mobile friendly?

Below are a few charts to illustrate the extent to which customers are now using their smart phones to search for businesses.⁽⁽¹⁾⁾

 The charts peak for themselves.

What Does Mobile Friendly Mean?

There is no strict definition for mobile friendliness. But, certain features are definitely required. When a website is displayed on an iPhone or Android, if you have to pinch, squeeze, swipe or perform other digital gymnastics to zoom in, out and around to find information, or just make it visible, you have a mobile unfriendly site. Thinking more specifically about retail business sites, if you have to navigate around a menu to find out where the establishment is located, what its hours are, and a phone number, you are on a mobile unfriendly site. Many users will simply  abandon sites like this. For a detailed introduction to this topic Google has some good resources here.

If You Have a WordPress Site?

WordPress is used for a very large number of business websites, millions actually. In the last year or so WP has focused on responsive design as an approach to the multi-screen world our websites now inhabit. Just sticking to the basics, try out the basic vanilla themes Twenty Eleven and Twenty Twelve. Plenty of theme developers offer responsive themes. They are not all created equal of course. But you should try them out to make your WP site mobile friendly.

The WP plugin WPTouch (and its better features for pay version WPTouch Pro) provide a different but very good method of achieving mobile friendliness (the TanzysHudson.com and DavisOrtonGallery.com screen grabs shown above are both using this plugin).

1. The first chart is from http://www.businessinsider.com/us-smartphone-market-2012-9; the others are from http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/mobileplanet/en/

I stopped right in my conversational tracks and remarked what a wonderful and unusual metaphor. He told me that he had come to realize that for all his expertise in the design, materials, and manufacture of his products, finding, winning, and keeping customers is the most important focus of a business. Excelling at operations is only useful to the extent that you have customers. This may seem obvious, even painfully so. Nevertheless many manufacturing company leaders are more focused on the making than finding more customers.

This reminded me of early work experiences as an engineer at C&K Components (Newton, MA). This company was so focused on customers that everyone down to those on the factory floor knew the names of all of the customers. I had been tasked to design a custom switch for HP. The design made its way to the factory floor for production without a hitch. One morning I was in my cubicle when I heard a loud woman’s voice across the room asking, “Where is this Mark Orton?!?!”

I stood up and waved. She rumbled over waving a shop order packet above her head, not waiting to arrive to say, still in a loud voice, “What’s wrong with you, don’t you know that HP never gets this spring. They need a 3 oz. actuation force!!” She was right of course. 

At C&K you could never go wrong making a customer happy. This culture penetrated throughout the organization. Sales people fearlessly made promises and everyone worked to make them come true. It was chaotic, but energizing, and in those days C&K was the powerhouse in their markets.

C&K was a sales company that manufactured things. They were incredibly good at the design and manufacturing, but it all existed only to serve customers. 

Do Financial Incentives Work?

Economics and psychology research conclusively demonstrates the need to change our human resource management strategies to reflect why reallly people work and what makes them work more effectively

Multiple research studies show that for work involving mental engagement financial incentives, especially large ones, actually reduce work performance.  

• Read “Large Stakes and Big Mistakes”(download a PDF) by Dan Ariely, Uri Gneezy, George Loewenstein, and Nina Mazar for one study that includes experiments in India to check for cultural biases.
• Dan Ariely recasts tjhis study and adds more in his New York Times opinion piece from 2008 “What’s the Value of a Big Bonus?”⁽⁽²⁾⁾
• Then, for the last Dan Ariely reference, here he is showing lots of his experiments in a twenty minute TED Talk “What makes us feel good about our work?”
• Or, for an 18 minute video, see Daniel Pink’s TED talk “The Puzzle of Motivation”  
• Finally, “Pay-for-Performance Doesn’t Always Pay Off”  by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Beer.

You might argue that this does not explain away the body of academic studies that show that there is a positive relationship between financial incentives for executives and company performance. I will leave it to someone else to wade through that material. I will only offer up the simple gross fact that CEO compensation as a multiple of average worker pay has risen from 20 to 1 in 1950 to over 200 to 1 today.((http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-30/ceo-pay-1-795-to-1-multiple-of-workers-skirts-law-as-sec-delays.html Top CEO Pay Ratios))

Has corporate performance in real terms increased by 10 times over that period? Obviously not.

Daniel Pink argues in his TED Talk that the key motivators in work are:

• Autonomy – control over one’s work, how you approach it, where you do it, at what time

• Mastery – learning and mastering new skills – enhancing capabilities

• Purpose – working on tasks that are greater than the individual or the company – something good for the greater whole.

These three are at least a good, provocative starting place. The key is to start thinking about how your human resource management strategy is structuring work to respond to these needs and not simply throwing money at the problem of performance.

Money Does Matter – Relatively

We might close with a note that money does matter in one dimension. Employees need to feel that they are being compensated fairly. In order for non-financial intrinsic motivators to work, they need to know that they are not being ripped off. If you pay strategy puts your compensation significantly below the average for your type of work in your local area, you will very likely spend more time thinking about finding a new employer rather than how much autonomy, mastery or purpose is being fulfilled. Essentially you need to pay in a fashion that takes that issue off the table.

1. Note that we are talking about individuals here. Organizations, for profit, non-profits and government, definitely react positively to financial incentives and disincentives
2. I must admit to having just finished up a course Introduction to Behavioural Economics taught by Dan Ariely on courser.org

Dan Ariely at TED in 2009

I am currently enrolled in an online course at Coursera.org, Introduction to Behavioral Economics taught by Dan Ariely (well known for his  Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, HarperCollins, pp. 304,ISBN 978-0-06-135323-9). 

1. Keep in mind that he did not start out to manage stress, rather improve customer service. The stress management came as a side effect.

Many people struggle with how to open a business conversation with a new person or prospects. Lets assume for the moment that you have solved that puzzle and are now actually engaged in a conversation, whether in person, on the phone or via email. Typically little thought is given to how to close a business conversation. Yet, this is a critical moment. Done with a little thought you set up the next conversation and deepen your business relationships with prospects and networking contacts. Before you say, “Thank you for taking so much time to speak with me.”(or whatever phrase you use to close a conversation), you must set up the next conversation with your prospects and networking contacts.

Networking

If you are in a networking situation, you have already determined that the person you are speaking with has interests in common with you. After all, as good networkers have we have developed skills at politely closing conversations with people with whom there are no common points of interest. For example, if you are an engineer and meet a mortgage broker at a networking event, you know that this person is not worth more than a polite smile and a swift exit, “Nice meeting you and good luck with the rest of the evening.” On the other hand, if you meet a person whose business or technology interests match up in some way with yours, you will have a brief chat during which you will ask them an open ended question to get them to tell you something that will fill out what they are up to. Then you will respond and establish your credibility with a good story about a project you are working on or have worked on, or some other engaging bit of technical content. At this point, as an experienced networker you will probably be pushed to close the business conversation because there are more people for you to meet at the event. But you have two tasks to accomplish before saying thanks.

The First Close in Networking

First, you want to establish a follow up time and method to continue your conversation. “Gee, this sounds really interesting. I’d like to talk further with you about this. When can we get together? What’s best for you, coffee next week or a telephone call?” Almost always they will say yes. Now is the time to establish a time. “When is a good time?” So now you have done the first and most important part of closing this sort of business conversation.

The Second Close in Networking

Time for the second part of the closing. You undoubtedly know people who have the same interests and you can say, “I know so and so who you should meet”. Your interlocutor will almost always be glad to learn their names and this gives you an opportunity to make these connections. Then you can ask, “Are there other people you know who you think I should meet?” Sometimes this will lead immediately to someone else who is in the room right now. Or, they will answer in the affirmative and you can then get a commitment for a follow up email or telephone call to capture these new contacts.

Prospects

Prospects present a different situation for the close of conversations. Generally, conversations with prospects are about some problem they have that they need help in solving (of course you need to be sure to qualify the problem as real and requiring immediate or near term solution). Without going into the complete taxonomy of this class of business conversations, the close of these conversations must include a commitment to continue the discussion. You must get a date and method for you to reconvene with your  prospects. (Remember that you are never selling in this phase of business development – the conversation is all about the problem, never about your solutions) Even in situations where the problem is ill-defined or they are already talking with another party, ask for a time when you can contact them again. This next contact may be to talk further about what the problem really is or to just check in that they are making progress in solving the problem. The former situation is obviously more interesting because if you help them define the problem you will very likely be invited to the party. But even where you are not part of solving the immediate issue, your interest will be remembered. This further bonds you together. your prospects will become much more productive

Follow Up

Follow up is incredibly important. Follow up to both networking and prospects the next day, not next week. This step in follow up is an email that thanks them again for the conversation or meeting and reminds them that you agreed to contact them again at some specific point in the future and what the purpose of that business conversation will be. If you mentioned people they should meet, give them the contact information again. Let them know that you have alerted your contacts to expect a call or email from them. Again, do this immediately, not next week. If you follow up immediately they will always read your email. After all they met you just the day before and they will want to know what this message is about. In a week or two weeks they may have forgotten you or at the least the urgency will not be there.

Photo credit: The Conversation by William McElcheran (photo by Danielle Scott [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons)

Proposal writing, white papers, and blog postings is a frequent topic of discussion with clients.

Recently a client forwarded an article on scientific writing,”The Science of Scientific Writing by George Gopen and Judith Swan ((American Scientist November-December 1990))

From the end of the article:

We began this article by arguing that complex thoughts expressed in impenetrable prose can be rendered accessible and clear without minimizing any of their complexity. Our examples of scientific writing have ranged from the merely cloudy to the virtually opaque; yet all of them could be made significantly more comprehensible by observing the following structural principles:

 

1.  Follow a grammatical subject as soon as possible with its verb.
2. Place in the stress position the “new information” you want the reader to emphasize.
3. Place the person or thing whose “story” a sentence is telling at the beginning of the sentence, in the topic position.
4. Place appropriate “old information” (material already stated in the discourse) in the topic position for linkage backward and contextualization forward.
5. Articulate the action of every clause or sentence in its verb.
6. In general, provide context for your reader before asking that reader to consider anything new.
7. In general, try to ensure that the relative emphases of the substance coincide with the relative expectations for emphasis raised by the structure.

It may seem obvious that a scientific document is incomplete without the interpretation of the writer; it may not be so obvious that the document cannot “exist” without the interpretation of each reader.

This is really quite interesting. I particulalry liked the positioning of the summary seven rules at the end of the article. This is the exact opposite of current web writing styles. But it is the last phrase, “it may not be so obvious that the document cannot “exist” without the interpretation of each reader.” that provoked the following about proposal writing. It is precisely fulfilling the expectations and requirements of the reader that is really the starting point for proposal writing. Like much of business development, proposal writing starts and ends with the client.

My major comment about this article is that, although useful, it is way too granular in it’s approach. Long before you get to the level of sentences and paragraphs it is useful to answer some other more global questions.

For example, with regard to proposal writing:

Who is the audience?

In the case of proposal writing  the answer to this question must include the boss, or even the boss of the boss, of the person the proposal is nominally addressed to. Your contact in an organization will most likely have to get approvals to spend the money to hire you. This means that the contextual information and technical level of the proposal must be adjusted so that the boss can understand what the proposal is about and why they should approve it. Understanding and responding to the decision making sturcture of your client is a key step in business development.

Make sure to answer these basic questions: who, what, why, when, how, and how much.

Who is involved in the project and what are their credentials.

Why are these people the right people? Do you have additional resources available? In some cases the proposal will specify who on the customer side must be involved to support the project

What and Why

What are the deliverables of the project and why are they important to the customer. Here you need to be careful to first speak of the business benefits of the project and only then the technical features. Remember when you buy a pen you want to write with it. The specifics of its construction are not why you bought it. This is basic Feature Attribute Benefit analysis (FABing).

How and When

These are answered first through a brief narrative description of the work to be performed and the phases of the project. Then, depending on its length and complexity, you may add a more or less detailed timeline or even full blown project plan. Be sure to set some milestones that connect with technical decision points about the deliverables as well as moments for progress payments.

Where will the project work be done?

All of it in your facility? Where will final acceptance testing be done? And so on.

How Much is your cost statement.

Pricing is too complex to address in detail here. Nevertheless, do not automatically start your pricing calculations from the traditional consulting model of:  Price equals hours plus materials plus profit. Consider the end value of your work to your client. How much technical and competitive risk is involved?How much competition are you facing? Your business development work should provide much useful information here.

But, do make a detailed estimate of your time and materials. Otherwise you are setting yourself up for failure.

Risks

If the project involves significant risk you should address this issue. This discussion should reflect conversations you have had with the client as part of your business development work. Frequently this will lead to project milestones and decision points related to the risks identified.

Outside Review

Be sure to ask someone outside of the project team to read the proposal before it is sent to the client. This person should preferably not be intimately knowledgeable of the client or project. Can they make sense of your proposal? What questions did you leave unanswered or answers lacking in clarity?

Although the article forwarded to me by my clients made some valuable points about scientific writing, you might first refer to the classic The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. And E. B. White or the Chicago Manual of Style for a more general introduction to writing.

Defining the audience for your proposal and being sure to answer the critical questions of who, what, when, how, where, and how much will take you a long way to more success.

On June 19, 2012 the New York Times published an article, “The Body’s Protein Cleaning Machine” about the Nobel Prize winning chemist Dr. Avram Hershko. His life work has been on understanding how the body’s cells rid themselves of old, defective proteins. Every cell has a protein ubiquitin that tags old and degenerated proteins for destruction. “Maybe you’ve heard of Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s? There we have bad proteins accumulating in the brain and destroying brain cells. The reason we don’t get Alzheimer’s when we are 10 is that when we are young, the bad proteins are disposed of quickly. With age, the cell’s machinery may lose the ability to do that.”

This very interesting notion that the body has a built-in mechanism to rid itself of bad proteins reminded me of old lessons about the need for our businesses to have a similar mechanism. Product obsolescence is a terrible drag on sales and gross margins. A better strategy is to have an end of life process to drive out product obsolescence. Peter Drucker ((Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive, Harper Colophon Books, p.108)) put it this way:

Systematic sloughing off of the old is the one and only way to force the new. There is no lack of ideas in any organization I know. “Creativity” is not our problem. But few organizations ever get going on their own good ideas. Everybody is much too busy on the tasks of yesterday. Putting all programs and activities regularly on trial for their lives and getting rid of those that cannot prove their productivity work wonders in stimulating creativity even in the most hidebound bureaucracy.

Are you persuaded that your business needs An End Of Life Policy?

Perhaps we should back up a moment before exploring methods for tagging and destroying the destructive old products, services, and processes in our businesses and ask, “Am I persuaded that my business needs a process to cast off the old? Am I persuaded that product obsolescence in my business might really be a cancer sucking away the future?”

Here are some questions to ask:

• Are customers leaving you because they no longer find what they need? 
• Are prospects not becoming customers because your products and services are not in synch with their needs?
• Are there products and services that you know of, or have envisioned, that would keep existing customers and attract new ones?
• Do you have so many products and services that customers are dazed and confused? 
• Are the gross margins on some of your classic offerings declining to mere break even (or worse, secretly loosing money because you don’t know the gross margins)
• Are your business processes as expensive (or worse, more expensive) to run this year as two years ago or five years ago?

If you answered one or more of these questions with a “Yes”, don’t be embarrassed, most companies are in the same bed with you.

How to Enforce End of Life for Old Products and Services

1. Start when you introduce new products and services. Consider the life cycle of products in your industry. For example, computing product technology changes rapidly so planning for obsolescence within six months is a reasonable end of life horizon. Plan for product obsolescence. Build in an end of life date when you will obsolete today’s products even at the moment you are introducing them.
2. Talk with your customers. Survey your customers. Listen to your customers. Propose new products and services and study their feedback. Do they see your offerings filled with product obsolescence?
3. Perhaps you are in the antique furniture business and changes in fashion and design trends move much more slowly. Even here looking at your product mix should be at least an annual exercise.
4. Examine the trends in prices and gross margins for all of your products. It is a commonplace event for aging products to become more commodity like and therefore subject to thinning gross margins.
5. Study your competitors. This is not to copy them but to see if they are changing their product or service offerings in reaction to perceived changes in the marketplace.
6. Follow trends and “mega trends” in your industry. Don’t be like Kodak (and there are lots of other examples) and ignore a technology that will change your customers’ behaviors forever.

Building a Product End of Life Policy

The action plan for putting an end of life policy in place requires two phases. First, the review of the performance of your current products and services. How do they fit within the  marketplace, what are their gross margins, how do they support other parts of your offerings? Do you have products already competing with them or now being developed? How old are the equipment that produce the products? Can this equipment be used to produce other products? Answering these types of questions will quickly produce candidates for obsolescence.

Once you have created this list and re-checked your data communicate your plans to customers. Offer them replacement offerings or special final buys. Be prepared for complaints from your own sales and marketing personnel. They are used to selling these old products and will need to refocused on the new opportunities that a refreshed product line will bring to them.

The second phase of your product obsolescence policy is to make obsolescence planning part of the product development process. This requires much of the same market knowledge used in the first phase. What are the technology trends, typical product life cycles, market basket analysis, cost and price trends, gross margins, and so on. Also to one really successful your obsolescence policy needs to be integrated with your overall product and service strategies.

Other consideration include  planning for the impacts on your operations. What is your capital equipment strategy? Lots of dedicated equipment or more focus on flexibility? You will also need to communicate your end of life policy to your sales force and distribution channels. Finally, your long term customers need need to understand the whys and what’s of this policy.

Le Petit Prince book cover borrowed from GoodReads.com

Listening to an interview with an author about his writing process brought this wonderful quote from Saint-Exupery.⁽⁽¹⁾⁾

Simple, clear, direct, user-friendly, straightforward, honest, classic, understated. These are some of the attributes that flow from thinking about your business with Saint-Euxupery’s aphorism in mind. In philosophy, science, and engineering Saint-Exupery’s aphorism is best expressed by Occam’s Razor where the razor shaves away the unnecessary assumptions.

Then, of course in the day-to-day world we have KISS – keep it simple stupid – that stands in for these more elegant formulations. The general lesson here is to beware of complex explanations, strategies, and plans.

1. He is the author of The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince if you got to third year French in high school), though the quote come from Terre des hommes