Having trouble thinking of that perfect gift for that special someone? I have an idea for you.
It’s the perfect gift, because:
- It’s rare and precious.
- It’s highly individual and personal.
- If it’s truly the thought that counts, this one takes no thought—and yet a lot of thought.
- It won’t break the bank, yet can be priceless.
- It doesn’t wear out.
- It’s portable and highly user friendly.
- Everyone, regardless of their age, gender, or occupation, loves it.
- It comes in all sizes, but bigger is better.
- You will get as much out of the gift as they will.
- You won’t mind if it’s regifted.
- You don’t have to wait until Christmas morning to open this gift. In fact, your holidays will be better if you give it early and often.
Give someone the gift of your full attention. Be with them 100%, body, mind and soul. Put down the device, set aside your other concerns, still your tongue, and focus entirely on the other person. Talk, listen deeply, and enjoy their company. Don’t be stingy, give them the biggest chunk(s) of time you can afford.
I would like to thank you for the gift of your attention in reading these thoughts. This is my last blog post of 2013. My kids arrive on Saturday, so during the rest of this year, I plan to devote my normal writing time to giving them, and my wife and my friends the gift of attention. And, since you won’t be spending time reading this, you may want to do the same. Regardless of how you celebrate this season, it is a time of gifts.
A very useful ingredient when being sold
We all know how important it is to be a critical thinker, especially so today, when we are deluged with so much misinformation and it seems like we are being sold almost every single minute. That’s why most of us find it easy to turn on our skeptical radar whenever someone we don’t know pitches us with an idea that’s a little different or seems too good to be true.
But, in terms of cognitive resources, skepticism and critical thinking are expensive. It’s mentally exhausting to be on your guard at all times. According to what Daniel Kahneman calls the law of least effort, we gravitate to the easiest thinking path when we can. So, it’s tempting to simply trust and accept what the other person is saying.
Trust is comfortable. Trust is a shortcut. And trust that is built up through long years of familiarity and experience with someone is can be an extremely reliable and useful shortcut. In fact, unless you’re on a desert island somewhere, it’s impossible to live without it.
The problem is that we generally overestimate our ability to accurately size people up and determine their trustworthiness. Regardless of how smart we think we are, we use shortcuts to form our judgments of trust.
We’ve heard the phrase that Reagan made famous: “trust but verify”. But while trust is comfortable, verifying is hard. And sometimes, that comfort gets us into trouble.
Crafty persuaders know this, and they work hard to establish the conditions to relax our skepticism. Bernie Madoff belonged to the right organizations, he gained trust vicariously through word of mouth, and he worked hard to produce the bogus results for so long.
But the crafty persuaders may be the least of our worries. It’s the sincere persuaders, who truly believe in what they’re selling, that can get us into the most trouble. We may need our skepticism more than ever, not only to keep from going down the wrong path but to save others from themselves.
Here’s where I’m conflicted. I strongly promote all the things that make for successful persuasion: passion, stories, credentials, etc. But none of those factors, or even all of those factors combined in one package, guarantee that it’s a good idea. Whenever the following ingredients are present, remind yourself to dial up the skepticism:
Passion. I put this number one, because when someone is passionate about what they do, they almost always ignore any contradictory evidence or differing interpretations.
Stories. I love stories just as much as anyone else. Stories suck you in, and get you to suspend your disbelief. Of course, good stories don’t mean the person isn’t telling the truth, but remember that the plural of anecdote is not data.
Credentials. They are generally a reliable guide to credibility, but watch the limitations. Peyton Manning is a great quarterback, but that doesn’t mean I trust his taste in pizzas. Besides, if the person speaking is highly important, they may have cut corners themselves, because they have grown too accustomed to being believed because of who they are.
Confidence. As pack animals, we respond to outward shows of strength, and when we reflect that confidence back to the speaker, it just reinforces it. It never hurts to scratch beneath the surface by asking a tough question.
Evidence. Pay attention to the diagonals. When someone says that successful companies did these three things, have they said anything about the companies that did those three things and failed, or the companies that did not do those three things and did succeed?
Optimism. I learned early in my banking days to use the borrower’s worst-case projections as my best case. An engineer in my Precision Questioning class once taught me that any projection that looks like a hockey stick on a graph is wrong.
When you’re selling your ideas, every one of those ingredients can help. When you’re being sold, every one of those ingredients should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Ka-ching!
I came across an article yesterday in Bloomberg Business Week that was very disturbing in its implications. The title is Proof That It Pays to Be America’s Most-Hated Companies. Its key message is that measures of the American Customer Satisfaction Index have virtually no correlation to stock market returns (at least for 2013, the only year shown). In fact, a regression line actually shows a very slight negative correlation.
“The companies you hate are making plenty of money. In fact, the scorned tend to perform better than the companies you like.”
The implication, of course, is that treating customers poorly is not bad business, and might even be smart business because of the money they save on luxuries such as good service, responsiveness, and actually being nice to people.
I would like to think the implications of the data are wrong. With only one year’s worth of data, it’s possible; maybe 2013 was an anomaly. Maybe it only applies to B2C companies. Maybe the old saying about any publicity is good publicity is true, and the companies everyone complains about are the most well-known, so everyone buys their shares. Maybe they provide superior value to customers in other ways, so they can get away with not being nice. I don’t know; I’m sure readers of this can suggest other explanations.
I have to admit that this article jolted me a little bit, because one of my most cherished principles and key themes of this blog, is the crucial importance of customer focus and treating them right.
But another side of me was actually pleased to get the information. It’s healthy to have your most cherished ideas challenged occasionally, and to get a reminder that the world is not as simple as we try to make it. It keeps us from locking in to rigid certainties that stop growth and learning. It preserves a touch of skepticism and humility. It reinforces the fact that in persuasion, there are no absolutes.
If nothing ever surprises you or challenges your thinking, you either know everything there is to know, or you’ve simply stopped looking.
What do you do when you encounter contradictory information?
- Ignore it?
- Attack it?
- Think about it?
On a slightly related note, I’ve been writing about entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs recently. They succeed precisely because they challenge conventional wisdom.
It’s going to take a special mindset to raise this one
The previous article about the intrapreneurial mindset focused on the thought processes that sales intrapreneurs use to generate insights for identifying new value, for their customers and for the companies they work for. But, as I also hinted in that article, insights are usually only a very small part of the successful intrapreneurial equation; they are just the stakes that allow you to play at the table.
When you consider your own experience, that makes sense. Often our response to seeing an innovation is not “why didn’t I think of that?”, but “they stole my idea!”
Good ideas are a dime a dozen. If your mind is like mine, you have a mental junk drawer filled with good ideas that never saw the light of day, because you thought of them once and never did anything with them.
A more empirical estimate of the relative value of the new idea is given in Daniel Isenberg’s excellent book about entrepreneurs, Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value
Seeing the value is the easy part—creating and capturing the value is by far the hardest.
Although Isenberg’s book is about entrepreneurs, many of the same dynamics apply to intrapreneurs.[1] The paradox of valuable ideas is that they are almost inevitably seen as bad ideas at the beginning. Why is that?
- The current situation is the product of good thinking and careful decisions by many smart people, so if the idea had any merit at all, it would have been proposed already.
- When a subordinate proposes a new idea, he or she may be implying that they’re smarter than the boss.
- If the status quo is working, new ideas are seen as a threat. Why fix what isn’t broken?
- Anything that distracts from the salesperson’s main job of “selling what’s in the bag” is a bad thing.
Good ideas are like ugly babies—only their parents love them. So if their parents want their babies to grow up into successful and productive adults, they are going to need more to their mindset than just creativity.
Risk tolerant
Let’s be clear about one thing up front: intrapreneurs do not face risks as high as those faced by entrepreneurs, because they have the corporate safety net below them. But they still face considerable risk for the reasons discussed above. They risk their productivity, their customer relationships, and their jobs. The kind of opposition they face generally discourages most employees, but intrapreneurs may be more willing to take risks because of their self-confidence and sense of accountability.
Self-confident
They have tremendous self-confidence, sometimes to the point of insubordination, which allows them to have the temerity to think they may actually know better than anyone else, and gives them the guts to speak up in defense of their point of view. They are not great respecters of the chain of command, which can make them unpopular and difficult to manage.
Accountable
Not-my-job is not in their vocabulary. The successful ones I’ve seen take a larger view of their roles than their job descriptions call for. They do whatever it takes, accepting responsibility for results, for their customers and for their company. They think like owners of the business, and owners of the relationship.
Loyal
The key ingredient that separates intrapreneurs from entrepreneurs is that they are extremely loyal to their employers, sometimes irrationally so. I don’t have outside evidence on this, but my own observations are that they are usually lifers who joined their companies right out of school and rose through the ranks. That loyalty is their saving grace and the reason for putting up with them, because without it they might easily leave to pursue their idea independently, or side too much with their customers when interests clash.
[1] According to Isenberg’s definition, which I mostly agree with, entrepreneurs take far higher risks and greater obstacles than intrepreneurs, and are therefore entitled to capture a much larger proportion of the value from their ideas.
