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In Business and Life, Understand *Their* Needs

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I ordered a book from Amazon, gift wrapped for a friend’s birthday. It arrived complete with the little card that had my special message in it. And … Amazon’s logo on the outside. Really? Amazon feels the need to piggyback their branding on my gift? If they offer the service of gift-wrapping, that’s great. That’s wonderful. I even paid $4 for that! But if they want me to provide them with free advertising, piggy-backing on the emotional warmth of my relationship with my friend, they should be paying me. A lot. Because there are some things in life that just aren’t meant to be a business opportunity.

What Amazon is missing here is understanding my needs. I want to create a special, two-way emotional connection between me and a friend. They help by providing the book I’m buying, and wrapping it beautifully. And that’s where their involvement should end. Then when I think of Amazon, I think of them as facilitating what’s really important to me—that connection.

Consider Their Needs, not Yours

When you’re doing something nice for someone, be it providing a solution to a customer, a favor to a friend, or a surprise to a loved one, take a few moments to consider their needs. What do they want in the moment? If your goal is to strengthen your relationship with them, put their needs first. If you’re going to surprise your partner for Valentine’s Day, ask what they would consider romantic. Not what you consider romantic. My idea of romantic music is Blink-182. But if the person I’m romancing prefers a Wagnerian opera, that’s what will be romantic.

Just as considering their needs will create the tighter relationship, ignoring their needs can destroy it. A client wanted to acknowledge a summer intern for a job well done. The intern simply wanted to be in the team photo that was going out to clients at the end of the month. The boss thought an intern didn’t belong in a company photo, and instead gave a beautiful Thank You card. Unfortunately, to the intern, inclusion in the picture meant appreciation. Without that inclusion, the Thank You came across as an empty gesture. Rewarding someone means choosing a reward that they value.

Take a moment now to think about the important people in your work and life. What kind of relationship do you want with them? How do you want them to feel about you? What have you done to engender those feelings? Satisfy their needs and you’re on your way to a long, loyal relationship.

How do you find real community in a wired world?

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I really enjoyed Marina Keegan’s article “The Opposite of Loneliness.” The word I’d use as the opposite of loneliness is “community.” Community has been shown to be an important part of a happy, fulfilling life. Of course, there’s no economic model attached to community, so not only do we not manage it, we disregard it in our calculations and decisions.

It’s something I’ve thought a lot about the last 5-10 years, as it’s become apparent to me that the grown-up world we’ve created doesn’t provide much opportunity for it. Any sense of “we’re in this together” that may have existed in America seems to be long gone. The prevailing question seems to have become “How can I get mine and avoid giving any of it to anyone else?” Of course, if you feel like you’re in a community, getting yours becomes much less important, since you feel like someone’s there to help if you really need it.

The very things that we call “progress” are, I believe, a big part of the problem. Easy transportation and telecomm have made it easier ad easier for us to isolate ourselves in suburbs, with our work lives being played out far away, with people who don’t share our interests, who don’t like us, and who don’t live near us. Seeing someone once a month at a planned dinner out for two hours becomes the new definition of “friendship” (second only to the definition of friendship that involves reading someone’s status updates on social media).

If you have hobbies or interests that naturally lend themselves to seeing others (e.g. team sports), that can be a source of connection. But even there, it’s not clear to me that it’s the kind of connection Keegan is talking about in her article. I recall the feeling she’s discussing, and indeed, college is the last time I felt it.

For all you post-college folk out there, please share! How do YOU find community in your life?

Are You Forgetting The Big Picture?

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The Big Picture

A client asked me to facilitate her senior team’s big picture, strategic planning retreat. It was a $200 million company. They listed important issues on the whiteboard. Item #1? Replace the refrigerated water fountain with a ‘green’ ground-cooled fountain, to show commitment to the environment. Worthwhile? Maybe. But… strategy? big picture? Not even remotely.

We do this in our daily lives, too. A friend tied himself up in court for a year to win a few hundred dollars damages from a fender bender. Was he right? Sure. Was that a good use of his time? No way.

The Big Picture Guides Decisions

“The big picture” matters because it tells you how to spend your time. It guides decision making. If you’re starting a business to build a world-changing empire, that’s one thing. Creating a comfortable business that runs on four hours’ effort a day so you can have free time for friends and family is something different. Even when doing the same activity—building a business—a different big picture leads you to make different decisions in the day-to-day.

If you lose the big picture, you can go very far afield. I once had a client who had 60 employees. The company was bringing in a couple million a year, but it all went to salary for the employees. My client was sleeping on friends’ couches because he wasn’t paying himself a salary. He was living the “build an empire” big picture when what he wanted was a comfortable life. Linking his big picture and his day-to-day transformed his life. By closing his company and becoming a sole practitioner, his income and lifestyle became everything he wanted.

The big picture also gives you important information. If someone makes a bad decision, how you judge it depends on the big picture. If a money manager loses money after representing themselves as a knowledgable professional who manages risk, that mistake may be very bad, indeed. But if someone is carefully investing calculated amounts with the goal of teaching themselves investing, that same loss may be a very good thing. It’s a chance to learn that will help them make good decisions later. A big picture of “I’m guaranteeing your security” versus “I’m learning my craft” changes how we treat the outcomes.

Revisit Your Own Big Picture

Are you paying enough attention to the big pictures in your life? Next time you make a decision or form a judgment, stop and pause. Consider the big picture. If you’re making a decision, what is the reason for making that particular decision? Is there a big picture point of view that will make the decision easier or more obvious? “Should I take out a loan to buy this car?” It’s easy to believe this is a real decision … until you consider that you take the subway to work, you have no need to drive, and you just like the mental image of how you’d look in a cool, sporty convertible. At least in my life, a big picture of “I want to be cool” versus “I need a car to survive in my daily life” makes the decision obvious: no loan, on any terms.

When you make a snap judgment, it’s also a good time to revisit the big picture. “She’s a poor employee because she missed three days of work last week.” If your big picture is “I want compliant workers,” you’d be tempted to give her a pink slip. But if your big picture is “I want skilled employees who do a great job,” you might dig deeper to find out she’s completing her masters degree, coping with finals, and her extra skills are already showing up in the form of high-quality work.

Spend time on a regular basis to revisit your big picture. You may find it guides you towards not only towards a better decision, but towards a wise decision as well.

Use Emotion in Marketing? Only With Care.

Pretty much every class in marketing I’ve ever taken is all about how to trigger knee-jerk emotional responses in people so they act NOW to buy your product, even if it’s not right for them, or if there are better competitors on the market, or if they actually don’t need it, etc. But if you’re going to trigger emotion, at least learn how emotion works.

I just logged into Paypal, which gleefully proclaimed they’re the “most loved” way to send money. Loved? Really? Someone in their marketing department needs serious therapy. I don’t love Paypal. In fact, I find the interface ugly, and the workflow tedious. And did I mention annoying? I often want to pay a Paypal-only vendor from my credit card, to make bookkeeping easier. But they force me to pay from my Paypal balance if I have a positive balance. Love? Nowhere in the equation.

I’ll bet if you were asked to describe your feelings towards Paypal, “love” wouldn’t be what jumps to mind. And here’s the thing about emotions: the best way not to evoke an emotion is to name it. When you name an emotion, if you’re right, you establish rapport with your reader. But most of us have very different emotions about many things. When you name an emotion and it doesn’t match what your reader is feeling, you lose credibility, big-time.

If you want to be “the most loved” brand of anything, create experiences that evoke love, not experiences that talk about love. My bank, Eastern Bank, is constantly telling me how great its service is. Yet their online system won’t let me download copies of my recent (or non-recent) statements, and that’s virtually the only banking activity I find useful to do online. Rather than telling me the service is great, they should find out what service I want or need and provide that.

Intuit did that in the early days of Quicken. We followed people home, watched how they used the product, and created a product that was so easy to use and so much fun to use that customers did, indeed, love the product. We didn’t tell them how much they loved the product; we made the product so lovable that the customers did the rest.

Apple didn’t say, “Stever, you love your iPhone.” Apple made the experience of using the iPhone so pleasing (at least to me) that I can hardly put the darned thing down. I love the product because the product is lovable.

The lesson for you:
– If you want to be loved, be lovable.
– If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy.
– If you want to be admired, be admirable.

Don’t tell us what you want us to feel, just give us the experience. And if you do it well, you’ll end up getting everything you want.

Perfectionism. Sucks.

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How much of your life is controlled by perfectionism? Every time I think I have finally reached a balance, I manage to put myself in a situation where nothing less than perfect will satisfy me.

Last week and this I have been holding myself to impossibly high standards for a client engagement, 2 shows, a TEDx talk, and an audition for a summer musical theater program. I worked my butt off for the client engagement and believe it went well (awaiting evaluations still). But for the others, I have no standard for “good enough,” so I’m holding myself to impossibly high standards. The resulting stress is wasting mental resources that could be going into preparing as best I can for everything.

The problem isn’t the perfectionism. The problem is the stress caused when I don’t reach my standards. The stress doesn’t come from the activities themselves–I’ve done well in shows before, and I’ve given great speeches before—but from the beliefs that are surfacing around them: “I have to do it perfectly.” “Everyone’s counting on me.” “I should be able to do better than this.” and “This is the most important presentation ever.”

These are just thoughts, however. They may or may not be true. When I don’t think them, in lower-stakes situations, I’m fine. I step up, perform to the best of my ability, and learn to do even better next time. When I get wrapped up in the thinking, though, it becomes a stress-fest. Even if the thoughts are true, the stress does nothing but get in the way of doing my best.

My solution is to stop working on my performance for the next half hour and instead work on reducing the intensity of my beliefs. When my mental landscape is calm and clear, I can apply myself fully to doing the best possible job at my current skill level.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

(And any of your ideas on how to deal with perfectionism and perfectionist-thinking would be greatly appreciated!)

Have a Great Life. How?

I’m pondering once again my sign off: “Work Less, Do More, and Have a Great Life.” I have a great many thoughts on how to have a great life, but I’d love to hear yours. What do *you* think goes into making a great life?

7 Tips for Work-Life Balance

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Today’s Get-it-Done Guy episode is about work-life balance. I actually don’t think there’s any such thing. There’s only your life, your time, and how you choose to use your one life and your limited time.

I’d really like to put together an open Q&A/brainstorming teleseminar on the topic. It would be part lecture, part Q&A and real-time coaching. Would there be any interest?

Listen or read the episode on how to manage work life balance here: http://getitdone.quickanddirtytips.com/manage-work-life-balance.aspx.

Products Be Gone

One of the keys to business (and to life!) is putting your time, money, and attention where it gives the greatest return. The return needn’t be money—it can be meaning, legacy, or achievement—but it has to justify the investment.

I recently reviewed my business and realized that the fancy e-commerce platform I’m using costs more than I’ve made on the products I sell using that platform. So, as a good businessman, I will be switching to a new, less expensive platform.

However…

It will take time and money to move my existing products over to the new platform. Plus, I’m changing the direction of my business and the old products won’t be a good fit. (I’ll write more about this soon.) So I’ve decided to stop selling my existing suite of products.

Effective March 31, 2012, the current products in my online store will no longer be available for purchase.

The Time Control programs will be going away forever; moving their automated parts to a new platfom is too much work. My other products may not be gone for good, but I currently have no intention of bringing them back.

If you want to check out what’s available, visit my online product page for products including:
⁃ Time Control – personal productivity accountability programs
⁃ You Are Not Your Inbox – mastering email overload
⁃ It Takes a Lot More than Attitude to Lead a Stellar Organization leadership essays
⁃ Social Survival Skills for Geniuses how to master the non-logical part of business

Remember: these products will only be available until March 31st, 2012, after which time they will no longer be offered. This is your last chance! Click here to buy!

Thank you for your support so far, and I hope we have a long future together. But it will be in a somewhat different direction 🙂

Stever

What do *you* think would make a good workshop?

By “Building Our Best Lives” day was designed to give people an accountability structure for working through a year planning and alignment exercise. In my mind, the value was in the structure of helping people complete the day.

One of the attendees was dissatisfied, however. She wrote saying she would rather have spent the time together going deeper into people’s answers and doing the “real” work in the phone calls.

She suggested I ask everyone to fill out the worksheet packet in advance. Then we’ll spend the day debriefing answers & going deeper. The design makes sense to me at a high level, but I don’t quite know how to pull it off in practice.

In particular, there are a couple of big questions in my mind:

  1. Will people fill out 24 pages of worksheets thoughtfully, in advance?
  2. Is it possible to go deeper with 20 people live on a teleconference?
    … how?

What do you think?

Our Intuitive Knowledge Isn’t Always Right!

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I was recently listening to a lecturer discuss how risk-taking is an integral part of “the entrepreneurial mindset.” He was very inspirational. Unfortunately, he was also flat-out wrong. There has been a lot of research into the psychological qualities of entrepreneurs. What has it concluded? There is no “entrepreneurial mindset”–entrepreneurs are a very diverse group. But especially among lifelong entrepreneurs who have experienced multiple successes, there is no evidence that they are any more risk-taking than anyone else. In fact, they do everything they can to mitigate risk.

My point, however, has nothing to do with entrepreneurs. It has to do with conventional wisdom. We intuitively (or culturally) want to believe that entrepreneurs are a special breed of person. That way, we have an excuse to be an entrepreneur if we deem ourselves “that breed.” Or we have an excuse *not* to be an entrepreneur if we aren’t “that breed.” Either way, we get to shift the responsibility for the decision to our personality type, rather than our decisions and efforts. That makes the very notion of an “entrepreneurial mindset” attractive, as a flexible rationale we can use for all kinds of stuff.

A lot of conventional wisdom is similar. The American myth that CEOs are somehow to credit for the entire performance of their companies, for example, is unsupported by any data whatsoever. W. Edwards Deming, the statistician who created the Total Quality movement, said that no more than 10% of a company’s performance could be attributed statistically to the CEO, and then only in highly unusual cases.

The problem is that our minds aren’t very good at understanding complex things. For 100,000 years, our minds weren’t able to do much beyond farm. Then we invented the scientific method, which was the first time we had a rigorous way to separate our intuitive-but-wrong ideas from the nonintuitive-but-accurate ways the world really works.

There is a lot of poorly-done science in the works. There is also a lot of excellent science, which is why we live 2x as long as our ancestors, in comfort, with electric lights and polar fleece.

Especially in the human potential fields–self-help, business leadership, etc.–there is a substantial body of research about how people and human systems actually work. Much of that research has even been popularized and published in books accessible to everyday people.

Before jumping on the pleasant, inspirational stories propagated in our cultural myths, take the time to read some of the research-based books on the topics. You can even go further and read the studies the books are based on. Some of the science (or the way it is being interpreted) may be ‘iffy,’ but some may be solid. And you may learn how the world *really* works, which will only make it easier for you to create the life you want.

(*) this is what I did for the Get-It-Done Guy episodes on visualizing for results. “The Secret” doesn’t work. They’ve done controlled experiments to find out. But some slight tweaks in the visualization technique *has* been shown to boost results. Not because of a deep spiritual principle, but because the right visualization gets people motivated and moving to make their dreams come true.