In the past two days, I’ve received emails out of the blue from three people I have not communicated with in several years. They all have two things in common.
First, I haven’t communicated with them for one simple reason: some years past I was the one trying to get in touch with them to talk about training opportunities. These were not cold calls; I had established relationships with all of them and had done good work for them in the past. In at least one of the cases, they had initiated the conversation. Yet all three went dark on me, not even bothering to tell me that they were not interested—they simply stopped replying.
The second thing they all have in common is that now they are asking for my help. Two of them are looking for jobs and want to tap into my contacts, and the third is now selling financial services and wants me for a client.
In each case, there are three possible ways I’ve thought of to respond:
Ignore them entirely
Try to help them, but remind them how they’ve acted towards me in the past
Shut up and try to help
I admit that the first two are what I want to do, but the third option is what I will do. Actually, that’s not totally true. I’m going to try to help them, but if they read this post, then I guess I’ve accomplished number 2. So, Mike, Joe and Pat—and those are their real names—I’ve got one piece of advice for you: as Harvey McKay says: dig your well before you’re thirsty.
Back to the third option: Why should I help someone who has refused to help me—and been rude about it? I don’t really know. Maybe I’m just a nice guy—no, I’m sure that’s not it.
Do I think there’s a small chance that helping them will help me down the road? Yes, but a very remote chance, because they have shown themselves to be the kind of people who only think of others when they need them. That’s not to say they’re bad people—it’s actually quite normal behavior that most of us practice most of the time.
The real reason I’ve decided to help them is that I would like to believe there is such a thing as karma, and what goes around really does come around. I personally haven’t seen enough evidence that it’s true, but why take a chance?
But I’m not superstitious, so I’m going to refer to it as referral capital. If you ever want referrals or help in the future, you need to start building capital now. When you least need help from others is when you’re most able to pay into the help bank. Then, when you ever do need it, the check you draw on won’t come back marked, “insufficient funds”.
In a free market, companies create profits for themselves by creating value that others are willing to pay for, in excess of their costs of production. If they want to generate more profits, they must either increase the value or reduce their costs, and this focus on the bottom-line forces a customer-centered discipline. Before introducing a new product, they have to think carefully about whether customers will buy it, and whether they can produce it profitably. To help them, many companies have adopted the lean production as a framework for constantly looking for ways to maximize value and minimize waste.
When their customers consider whether to buy their products, they measure the value they receive in terms of ROI, which simply is a division problem, with Return on top and Investment on the bottom. While there is always a lot of gray area in deciding what results and costs to include in the calculation, it’s still a reasonably straightforward way of prioritizing how to invest their limited capital.
We all take this for granted when it comes to business, but is it possible that we forget it when we communicate? Just as companies don’t pump out products unless they think they’ll sell, we should not just pump out words without thinking about whether they are worth listening to. Will listeners be willing to pay the price in time and effort to hear what you have to say?
It may seem like a no-brainer, but if you’ve ever sat through an interminable and unproductive meeting, and calculated the total opportunity cost of everyone in that room, if you’ve had to wade through hundreds of emails to glean actionable information, if you’ve worked hard to decode what someone is really saying, if you’ve had to tolerate a chatty co-worker when you’re in a hurry, you know how rarely people think about communication in this way.
Maybe one reason is that we don’t consider the costs of communication. In a world where it is so easy to communicate instantly and electronically, it would seem that talk is cheaper than ever. But the real cost is the hidden opportunity cost: what is the combined value of the time that is used by speaker and audience, including all the process steps from composing the thoughts, writing/speaking, transmitting and discussing?
Return on Time and Effort
Is there an economic value to business communication, and if so, can it be calculated?
It’s much more slippery to pin down the return on communication, but we can at least try to measure the unmeasurable by applying the same thought process as ROI. I call it RoTE, or Return on Time and Effort.
Return: What value does your audience receive from listening to you? We measure value in lean communication in terms of outcomes and results. When the information shared improves a decision or leads to effective action that generates measurable outcomes, you could theoretically put an actual dollar value on that conversation or presentation. Of course, that’s tough to measure, especially since most decisions are the results of not just one single communication, but of countless conversations, presentations, messages going back and forth, etc. But still, it’s one of those things that people know when they see it or hear it. It’s also important to note that value is defined by the listener, not the speaker.
Practically and mathematically, R is the most important factor in the equation. If it’s zero or negative, no amount of brevity or clarity will make the communication worthwhile, and if it’s high enough, almost any amount of time and effort will be worth devoting to it.
That said, it’s still important to concentrate on the denominator of the equation. Unlike ROI, in which the investment is only calculated in dollars, communication requires the investment of two costly currencies: attention and cognitive effort.
Time is of course the most easily measurable factor. How much time do you take in getting your message across? Do you get right to the point, or do you overload your listeners with information they already know, do you hold back vital information out of fear of offending, do you have trouble resisting interesting but irrelevant snippets and trivia?
The paradox of brevity is that it takes time to produce. When Mark Twain received this telegram from a publisher:
NEED 2-PAGE SHORT STORY TWO DAYS
He sent back this reply:
NO CAN DO 2 PAGES TWO DAYS. CAN DO 30 PAGES 2 DAYS. NEED 30 DAYS TO DO 2 PAGES
So, there is a cost/benefit analysis you have to run through your mind: is there any net value added when you invest your time to save time for the listener? The answer is almost always yes, first because when you are presenting to audiences of more than one person, it’s easy to see that an extra hour of preparation to shorten your presentation can pay off in multiples, especially when you are presenting to higher-level people whose opportunity cost of listening can quickly add up to big numbers. Second, the thinking you put into effort of making things brief carries over to the next part of the equation, effort.
Effort is harder to measure but no less important than time. The simple truth is that thinking is hard work, and we generally avoid doing any more than is absolutely necessary. As with brevity, you work hard so they don’t have to. The harder you make people work to understand what you’re saying, the more of their time you take and the less value you add to them.
By making it easy for them to understand, you also do yourself a favor, because they will be much more likely to repay you by accepting your logic. Make your “product” user-friendly by making your reasoning transparent, using plain language that all can understand, and illustrating your reasoning with stories, analogies, visuals and concrete examples.
Building equity
When companies create profits, they build equity which strengthens their balance sheets and provides resources to generate future profits. It’s the same way with personal communication. As you build a reputation for delivering good value through lean communication, you are building personal equity in the form of credibility.
Credibility can lead to the Matthew Effect, the idea that the rich get richer. By consistently delivering a Return, at low cost in time and effort, you will generate greater trust, with more decision makers who will require less verification of your arguments and facts, and accordingly save time over the long run—for yourself and for others. That is priceless, whether you can put a dollar value on it or not.
In my work, I train a lot of engineer “doer-sellers” to think more like salespeople. By doing so, they become better at actively identifying opportunities for additional business within their existing clients, and become more businesslike in their approach with potential new clients. Most of them are initially skeptical that they can learn anything from mere salespeople, but they almost always come to accept it.
Before you begin to smirk about those clueless engineers, ask yourself if it works in reverse: can salespeople benefit from learning to think more like engineers? I think they can.
I came across an interesting article in the Farnam Street blog[1], entitled, “The Three Essential Properties of the Engineering Mindset”. It cites a thinking template for engineers created by George Heilmeier, a former director of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA):
What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
What’s new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
Who cares? If you’re successful, what difference will it make?
What are the risks and the payoffs?
How much will it cost? How long will it take?
What are the midterm and final “exams” to check for success?
What struck me is how closely those questions parallel the types of questions I ask in my own opportunity planning template. Every one of these questions is valuable for a salesperson to think about when approaching a complex B2B selling opportunity. Asking and answering these questions during the sales process will cover almost everything you need to know about the customer’s need, your solution fit, and the stakeholders who will be affected. Asking and answering these questions with your customer will put real meaning into (solution, consultative, insight, challenger, etc.) selling.
How many of these questions can you answer about your top sales opportunities? How many of these topics have you actively discussed with your current customers?
Want to be a better salesperson? Think more like an engineer.
[1] If you’re not reading this every day, you are missing an excellent resource.
Many communications are a “data dump” in which the speaker tells everything they know, and the listener has to draw conclusions from all the detail. If you present all the information in your head without analysis or recommendation, you are asking the other person to do your work for you.
When Henry Kissinger became President Nixon’s National Security Adviser in 1969, he brought a reputation as a demanding taskmaster. So, when a staffer was given an assignment to write a position paper for his new boss, he understandably put in extra hours and took great pains to produce top-notch work. A day after he had turned it in, Kissinger called him into his office and asked him, “Is this the best you can do?”
The staffer promised he could improve it, and went back to his desk. He cancelled his other appointments, called his wife to tell her he would be home very late, and worked feverishly on the report: fine-tuning it, adding information, clarifying where necessary, etc. At the end of the week, he turned it in. On Monday morning, Kissinger passed by and contemptuously dropped the report on his desk. In a loud voice, he again asked, “Is this the best you can do?”
Stunned and not a little frustrated, the staffer vowed to do even better, and redoubled his efforts from the previous week, putting even longer hours and finding even better ways to express and support his position. Two days later, convinced that it was as close to perfect as he could get it, he turned it in again. The next day, Kissinger again asked, “Is this really the best you can do?” The young man had had enough, so he looked at Kissinger squarely and said, “Yes, that is the best I can do.”
Kissinger replied, “Good. Now I will read it.”
Kissinger could have read the first draft himself and—with a little thinking—had what he needed to make a decision, but he got more “value” from having his staffer do that work for him. He made the staffer do the work so he would not have to—not because he was lazy, but because he had so many other important things to do with his time. In economics, it’s called comparative advantage—even if you can do something better than someone else, you’re better off paying another person to do it and using your time for higher value activities.
Suppose you go to your executive team to propose a project. You have a ton of information and data that could bear on the decision, and you want them to make an informed decision, so you give them everything you know. At the one extreme, you could give them a data dump of every fact that is in your head, and you know that they will know as much as you do about it, so coupled with their superior vision and judgment, they can make a better decision than you could by yourself.
What value have you added in that case? At least you have collected the relevant data, so that’s a good thing. But they still have to do a lot of the work of interpreting the data, sifting out the critical from the irrelevant, making judgments about the accuracy and truth, and so on.
Thinking is hard work, and it takes time. Especially if you’re communicating upwards, your listeners are perfectly capable of handling the hard work of thinking, but rarely do they have the time to put the required depth of thought into every decision they have to make every day. It’s like buying furniture from Ikea: you save money but then you have to assemble it yourself.
Fox News has a slogan: “We report, you decide.” It’s a nice sentiment for a reporter, but you’re not a reporter. You need to do more than report—you need to at least advocate for a position. Otherwise you run the risk that they will take the facts that you supplied and interpret them in their own way—maybe differently than what you intended.
You can’t make the decision for them, but you can recommend a decision after you’ve done all the hard work. By doing this work for them, you add more value by making it easier and faster for them. Value is defined by the customer, and the amount of work they have to do will affect their perception of value.
Thinking is hard work, even for people who are paid for thinking. Anything you can do to ease this “cognitive strain”, as Daniel Kahneman calls it, will make your message more persuasive and actually more pleasurable to listen to.[1] In another context, Samuel Johnson said: “What is written without effort is read without pleasure.” If you want to maximize your chances of getting through to the other person, keeping their attention, and getting the agreement that will benefit both parties, you have to do the work.
The number one task in lean communication is to ensure you add maximum value, and one way to test for this is to gauge who does most of the work. Do you deliver a finished product, or is some assembly required?
[1] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, pp. 62-67.
