sopkos

The Kaiser Problem

I just finished Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August" finally I understand the Belgians. Just a word of advice, they'll share their beer but whatever you do keep off their lawn.

One comment struck me as very telling, in a description of the German army's strategic training for war, they played war games.  However the Kaiser insisted on playing and also insisted that his team always win, leading to big problems.

This is a key lesson leaders today can ponder. When setting up strategic thinking challenges, team builders, ropes courses, etc. we often set the leader up to win. Generally it is because they are footing the bill, but also because we want them to have a good time. Teams that let the leader win, or only bring good news, are weak in the area of objective reality. Very dangerous for a military group, surgical team or accounting auditors.

Make sure that as a leader your teams have rehearsed how to give you bad news, tell you that you are just plain wrong, and have seen you lose. This is not so much about building humility as it is about having eyes on the back of your head, increasing your field of vision. One of the great advantages of using games and simulations is to see cause and effect.

What you know and what you don't know become obvious in a game. Use this as an opportunity to test the big plan, work out new reactions, and fill in gaps.  If the Kaiser had been beaten by his own team, perhaps he would have avoided messing with the Belgians at all.

Fun Trumps Fear

What a great post by Seth Godin - Two Kinds of "Don't Know"

Man-o-man have I seen a lot of the fear based "Don't Know".

Best thing for it - fun. Specifically making the new material into a game. As kids we learn a lot of scary stuff in the form of a game, playground rules still apply. Games put things in perspective, let us sort out the important from the merely urgent.  In a game we see lots of different strategies, we try new things, we all fall down, we laugh, and we get back up again. 

Sometimes it's the people playing the game that's important, sometimes the game itself. It depends on what is causing the fear.  Say you have two teams merging into one team.  Say they don't particularly like one another. My suggestion play a game with lots of unexpected communication, like charades, or improv. These desensitize the group and break down stereotypes, we use Pitches & Products for these situations.

If it's new material or new situations that are causing the fear, put the material into the game and let the team play with it until it gets silly.

Remember fun trumps fear.

Emerging from the Burrow...

...and if we see our shadows it is 6 more weeks of winter.

A cool winter hiatus for Karen and me - sorry we've been a bit scarce.  Back now, ready to blog about all kinds of miscellaneous stuff.

Happy mid-winter.

Weasel Words

I just had to laugh when I saw Seth Godin's advice on copy writing

But [most of the time] avoid using [carefully selected] weasel words that [sort of] dull your story.

His point being that, clear, unambiguous writing gets attention.

Funny story, back when I was writing telecom proposals, we had so much marketing boilerplate to cram into the technical document that I would leave room in the introductory sections for the ubiquitous marketing weasel words, the same stuff we used over and over again. For one especially complex RFP response I failed to delete one of my place markers, leaving the customer to roll on the floor laughing when they hit <insert commercial bull*hit here>.  I suppose if it had been less funny to them I would have had to find a new phrase such as <insert foot here>.

For technical documents where both the writers and the readers can be very, how to put it, picky about the choice of words.  Offer a compromise, make a statement then identify clarifiers for specific situations:

Client XYZ will benefit from Product 117X's End-to-End visibility of all network elements:

• Creates a directory of network connected devices
• Provides real-time visibility during scheduled scans
• Determines data critical for Asset Management verification

In my experience engineers and other detail oriented folks worry about the exceptions, marketers and sales try to communicate the desired outcome.  When you are trying to make both parties happy, use the main sentence to focus on the biggest benefit and use the modifies to place limits and extras into the customer's mind.  As a rule of thumb, avoid a clarifier that starts with "non" or "out" these are hooks for customers to assume that an area is not supported. 

On the other hand slimy marketing folks frustrate engineers by glossing over problem areas.  In the example above the product does not do Asset Management or link to asset management, it creates data for use by asset management.  From a reader's perspective it assumes they do asset management which is good, but does not try to insinuate that the product does more than assist them.

Here are some different approaches - the IBM Way,  the Dell way,  the Cisco way, all with their own spin and all effective.

Now as my friend Kevin Koym likes to quip - "Go Sell Something".

On Change and Newton's laws

While I am still glowing over the successful trade show for Creative Bandwidth, I am in a mood to think about what we did right, we changed. The thing I am most proud of (besides not eating all the M&M's) is that we took Frank Rumbauskas advice, and did something different.

We were on a path that Frank hates that leads to cold calling, and it's kissing cousin, power networking (which our good friend Steve Harper has warned us about). Instead we got lucky, and got invited to see a group of people that we have the power to help.  I love to help, really, it warms the cockles of my old outsourcer's heart. Besides I REALLY need the good karma.

We were waiting to launch at an "industry" event, which for us would be games or training. But instead we made our first event our customer's event. So the great thing was, we were the only games company at a technology trade show.  We were the fun ones. If we had gone to a games trade show, we would have been snubbed as sell outs by the rapidly dwindling gamer crowd. Which would have been unfair, we are trying to lead people back to the games table, to get folks interested in face-to-face entertainment and away from their instant messenger addiction.

What surprised me as an ex-big5 consulting person was the momentum that the message "we are smarter than you so buy whatever we are selling" still has among the solutions provider crowd.  I thought that went out with the "Vote Ross Perot" buttons. I guess I am old fashioned about technology, just tell me what it does and assure me that it works.  My cell phone thinks it is so smart with the blue-tooth headset that sends my calls to the glove-compartment. It doesn't make me look all that smart.

I get a kick out of the new marketing campaign for men's shower soap, "Does not wash off testosterone" lets face it testosterone has much more momentum than perfume. As Sir Isaac Newton warned us in his first law,

Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

Generally that external force is luck, so be prepared to get lucky, get OK with being the external force acting on someone else's uniform motion.  However, look out for Newton's 3rd law about equal and opposite forces.  Keep watching this could get interesting.