Change Your Character – Writing Like a Reporter

Amid too much jargon, the state of business communication isn’t stellar. We could all benefit from delegating a writing assignment to a great reporter to see how they’d approach it to ensure it’s as clear, concise, and memorable as possible. Here are some of the things a good reporter is going to concentrate on during a writing assignment:

• Interview people directly involved in the story
• Use multiple sources of information
• Write in order to gain attention right away
• Put the most important things at the start of the story, followed by supporting material, then background information
• Address fundamental questions – who, what, where, when, why, and how
• Use specific, concrete examples
• Have an editor who reviews it and makes changes

In addition to identifying at least three new ways to incorporate each of a reporter’s approaches to improve your writing, here’s a bonus book recommendation - do yourself a favor and track down a copy of “How to Take the Fog Out of Business Writing” by Robert Gunning and Richard A. Kallan. It’s a precursor to “Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter's Guide” and is a short, straight-forward guide to dramatically simplifying your business writing.

Note – for the previous post on how to use the Change Your Character technique, click here.

“When There’s Something to Lose and There’s Something to Prove . . .”

In business, people typically spend time thinking about arguing and defending their own points of view. It’s rare though when someone spends time thinking about how they’d argue against themselves.

So next time you’re advocating a particularly contentious position, grab somebody who is less tied to your positions and swap sides – have them argue for your position while you challenge their pro arguments smartly and strongly. Seeing what new logic they develop to defend the position you really hold can help unlock new perspectives you can use later.

Debating against yourself (or at least your viewpoint) is a fantastic way to challenge and shore up your thinking before somebody else forces you to do it on the spot.

Nobody Cares About You!!!

"In a conversation, keep in mind that you are more interested in what you are saying than anyone else is." - Andy Rooney

The title may seem harsh, but it’s a safe premise: NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOU.

There are probably some exceptions (your parents, a loved one, a few altruistic souls), but unless you’ve EARNED the opportunity for someone’s sustained interest, NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOU! This reality is important because most brands have not created important enough relationships with customers for them to be more interested in the brand than themselves.

The questions to ask for any brand communication are:

• How does this information benefit our audience? AND
• Why should they care about it?

A brochure draft recently came to me for review. Technically it was written fine, but it contained mind-numbing details about the brand’s history, awards, and operational statistics. The questions above obviously weren’t considered. It was only about what WE wanted to say. There was no recognition of the utter lack of benefit for our customers, and the near certainty that they wouldn’t care about a history lesson on us.

Recently, I’ve received the other end of this treatment as well. A service provider repeatedly leaves me voice mails about his “concerns” about us. Remember, we’re paying his company money to provide us a service. Quite frankly, his concerns aren’t at the top of my list, i.e. I DON’T CARE ABOUT HIM! At least not until after he expresses interest in what benefits us.

Use these two questions liberally when providing information and building relationships. Think and act outside in, seeking first to understand and benefit others. In this way you can hope to win the coveted position in the minds and hearts of customers where they might genuinely care about you.

Stopping to Ask for Direction - You Can Quote Me

• "Strategic planning is worthless - unless there is first a strategic vision." - John Naisbitt


• "A large number of execution problems are really direction problems." - Geoffrey Moore


• "What's the use of running when you are not on the right road?" - Unknown


• “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” - Lewis Carroll

How Close Are We Forecasting Here?

Forecasts and size estimates shown with multiple decimal points are scary because they invariably imply a phony level of precision. When you’re estimating something, understand up front how precise the answer has to be, and present the result accordingly.

Doing a near-term estimate for a production forecast is one thing. But if the question relates to a market’s size to gauge relative market share or reasonable long-term growth expectations, it’s probably appropriate for your answer to be a range, and maybe a pretty wide one (2x or 3x differences between the low and high end may even be reasonable).

Also, rather than investing all your efforts in one estimate, approach it with multiple methodologies or sets of inputs to create credible boundaries for your estimated range. That’s “precision” that’s more valuable than any level of phony decimal places.

Change Your Character – Competitive Strategy

In terms of competitive strategy over the past thirty years, a variety of villains has been able to create damage, wreak havoc, and end lives (all defined as success for them) by very often using non-traditional & apparently illogical techniques.

Despite how reprehensible their approaches are, they provide the basis for identifying potential competitive strategies in business. Here are potential approaches to plug into the character exercise to identify new competitive strategies:

• Be very low profile
• Conceal your appearance
• Stay in hiding
• Move around continuously to evade detection
• Select an attention-getting target
• Plan out all variables in the competitive attack
• Work through a network of loyal followers
• Patiently wait for the right moment to act
• Do things differently each time to avoid detection
• Conduct attention-getting attacks
• Frighten large groups of people
• Publicize your motives
• Create the perception of future potential moves

Again, this isn’t advocating being a villain. But it is suggesting that variations on many of their planning techniques can be used legally to compete in business with a high degree of surprise and effectiveness.

Note – for the previous post on how to use the Change Your Character technique, click here.

Becoming a Creative Instigator

For strategic thinking sessions at Baker University last month, we got an insane amount of work done – three ideation exercises and prioritization within a 50 minute class. Going in, I was skeptical about completing it all in time. In retrospect the key was having a person assigned to each group to not only help, but to serve as a “creative instigator.”

While Jan Harness, who has the official title of Chief Creative Instigator at her company, was among the group, each person on the team filled that role for the students. Going beyond simply facilitating, a creative instigator’s role involves:

• Being an energy source – using enthusiasm to spark excitement within a group
• Providing approbation – reinforcing people for sharing ideas, creating a verbal reward that engenders more ideas
• Making connections – listening to what people suggest and tying things together the group might miss in the throes of ideating
• Drawing out non-participants suffering from self- or group censorship – going out of the way to solicit input from reluctant group participants

That’s the job description. If you’re good enough, maybe you can be a get to the C-level of creative instigation some day yourself!

P.S. April 22 is Jan's birthday, so visit her blog and leave her a birthday wish!

Surf's Up!

Here are three links that can benefit you in varying (and sometimes fun) ways when preparing marketing plans.

Guerrilla Marketing Plans

I haven’t “blogged” other conference presentations yet, although I typically write pages of notes and idea starters. One of the most valuable note packets was from a 2003 Transportation Marketing Communications Association presentation by Jay Conrad Levinson, the father of guerrilla marketing. He covered essential elements of a marketing plan and the number of times you need to get a message in front of potential customers to move them to be repeat buyers. Interestingly enough, surfing the web recently, I found this Spark Insight page with notes taken from the same speech Levinson was giving then. Not sure if he’s still covering this material, but it’s a great quick reference on guerrilla marketing.

Marketing Plan Simplicity

This link to Entrepreneur magazine content popped up on AOL recently. It’s a great reminder on the importance of simple prose, reasonable length, and a direct style when preparing a business plan. While its target audience is people writing business plans for their own start-ups, it’s certainly applicable for any marketing or business plan you’re putting together even within a big company.

Deceptive Simplicity - "Indexed"

I love a Venn diagram just as much as the next person. Okay, I love a Venn diagram more than most people. This book and website by Jessica Hagy capture her commentary on a wide range of topics through Venn diagrams, x-y charts, and other graphs. She produces an amazing amount of content on her blog and generates a lot of comments debating what the charts mean. Her ability to translate complex issues into a few lines and words on an index card is inspirational (and maddening – if you struggle mightily to express ideas simply!).

Offered Without Comment - Famous Creative Blocks

Creative Blockbusters - From Me to You

Here are five things that may help bust a creative block. At least they work for me…most of the time:

1. Start with the familiar – What forms / styles / characters / media are the old stand bys that always work for you creatively? Use them to get started. (As the cartoon suggests, when I’m stuck for something to draw, a cow or a growling dog usually shows up on the page first.)
   
2. Do something mindless – Start something productive that requires no creative energy to get your mind off the block. (For me, that’s usually some type of data entry or spreadsheet work.)
   
3. Perform very yes/no or close-ended tasks – Find things with clear right & wrong answers (math, puzzles, etc.) and work on them. (I will often create flow diagrams for something I’m working on that force yes/no points or provide only a couple of choices at each step.)
   
4. Go where you’ve gone before –Return to a setting where you’ve been creative before or get out tools that have stimulated creative ideas previously. (It’s Sharpie markers, a blank piece of paper, and starting to write or draw bold lines to get me going.)
   
5. Create a variation on the theme – Modify something you’ve done or build off of somebody else’s creativity. Start working with it, but vary it in increasingly bold ways until you’ve moved into creating something new. (For me, that may be drawing Dilbert characters in unusual settings or searching Google images for offbeat pictures that convey what I’m trying to say.)

Those are five potential blockbusters. For a bonus 6th creative blockbuster, here’s a link back to a previous post. And share a comment on what you do. Happy busting!

Change Your Character – Fighting Business Fires Like a Real Fire Fighter

The phrase “fighting fires” gets thrown around pretty casually in business. For real fire fighters, however, it’s a highly skilled, dangerous endeavor focused on both prevention and ensuring public safety amid life threatening fires.

In this week’s Change Your Character exercise, let’s see what fire fighters can teach us about stopping the non life-threatening challenges we face in business; brainstorm 3 potential ideas for each of the fire fighting approaches listed below:

FIRE PREVENTION

• Performing community outreach & education on fire prevention
• Training with real fire situations
• Inspecting buildings to ensure susceptibility to fire is reduced
• Having a special number for people to report problems

DURING A FIRE

• Getting to the scene of the fire quickly
• Bringing specialized equipment and proper tools with them
• Using resources at the scene
• First finding the fire’s origin
• Identifying potential risks
• Rescuing people in danger / harm’s way
• Locating casualties / people injured & providing assistance
• Analyzing the fire for potential future trouble spots
• Removing the fire’s source of fuel
• Addressing self-preservation

Note – for the previous post on how to use the Change Your Character technique, click here.

Even More PowerPoint Presentation Advice for Bad Presenters – Check Up on Yourself

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on combating overly detailed PowerPoint slides, here are two quick checks to keep yourself honest on the detail level and clarity of your slides:

Check #1 – Print out your “finished” PowerPoint presentation with 16 (or at least 9) slides on the page (you can usually do this in the Printer Setup dialog – not directly in PowerPoint). At that resolution, see if you can read what’s on EVERY slide without squinting. If you can, you’re audience will be able to read it as well. If you can’t, neither will your audience, so go back to yesterday’s post and start again.

Check #2 – Cover the headline on each slide and ask, “Can the audience get my point from the slide’s content?” Next, cover up the content and ask, “Can the audience get my point from the headline?” Then determine, “Is the point consistent for both the headline and the content?” The right answer to all these questions is “Yes,” if you’re slide is a good one. If not, you’ve got some more work to do.

Simply using the principles outlined in the past two posts will demonstrate to your audience that you’re thinking about them and are making strides to deliver value to them with your content.

More PowerPoint Presentation Advice for Bad Presenters – Step Away from the Detail

In a continued effort to dissuade bad presenters from their PowerPoint misconceptions, here’s some advice. If you’ve ever said during a presentation,

“I know this is tough to read, but I think you’ll get the point”

that means even you realize the SLIDE DOESN’T WORK!!! Fix it or get rid of it. Don’t subject the audience to your LAZINESS!!!

Sorry about the outburst, but if you choose to fix the slide, here are three possible approaches:

• Prioritize the material on the slide - use the forced choice technique approach from a previous post to narrow the content.
  
• Help the audience focus – if it’s an overly detailed chart or spreadsheet, consider using custom animation to circle the area that you’re addressing or a picture insert to enlarge what you’re referencing, breaking it up into multiple slides that are legible, or developing a graphic with only the point(s) you’re making.
  
• Do something completely different – think hard about whether there’s a story, anecdote, or image you could use to make your point and (I realize this is radical) completely eliminate the detailed slide.

I know that none of this makes sense to a bad presenter, because the audience REALLY needs to see everything on the slide to get your point.

But on behalf of all your audience members, we can’t SEE what’s on the slide anyway; it might as well be blank. So pick a course of action (and reach out to somebody for help if you’re struggling with #2 or #3), and get back to us when you’ve fixed your slides!

Quotes in the Spirit of "Hit ‘Em Where They Ain’t" Week

To wrap up “Hit ‘Em Where They Ain’t Week,” here are strategy quotes that reflect Wee Willie Keeler’s competitive perspective:

• "Resist the Usual" - Raymond Rubicam


• “Successful business strategy is about actively shaping the game you play, not just playing the game you find.” - Adam Brandenburger & Barry Nalebuff


• “Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing to perform activities differently or to perform different activities than rivals to deliver a unique mix of value.” - Michael Porter


• “Strategy used to be about protecting existing competitive advantage, but not any more. Today it is about finding the next advantage.” - Vijay Govindarajan, Chris Trimble


• “K is for Keeler
  As fresh as green paint
  The fustest and mostest
  To hit where they ain't.” - Ogden Nash

Photo: http://losangeles.dodgers.mlb.com/la/photo/history/ph_history_timeline_keeler.jpg

Readin' Where They Ain't

How many people in your company read trade pubs and websites from your industry? Probably a lot of them.

How many of them are deliberately perusing content from industries outside yours or in functional areas outside their fields of expertise? Probably not all that many.

So what should you do about it? Be a contrarian – go where everybody else isn’t, checking out trade pubs and web content from outside your industry such as:

• Industries known for innovation or performance in areas where your industry lags.
• Industries with similar, but more advanced life cycles than yours.
• From functional areas that your business may ignore, but probably shouldn’t.

Pursue this approach and keep answering the question, “How can we apply this out of industry content to our business situation?”

Change Your Character - Wee Willie Keeler

Since it's "Hit 'em Where They Ain't Week," it was only natural that this Wednesday's Change Your Character exercise focuses on Wee Willie Keeler.

Wee Willie Keeler was a great baseball hitter in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and at 140 pounds and maybe 5 feet, 4 inches, one of the smallest players ever in professional baseball. Beyond his impressive performance (lots of hits, hitting & bunting in unusual ways, rarely striking out, hitting sacrifices to advance runners, being part of five championship-winning teams, etc.), he is best known for his success mantra, “Hit ‘em where they ain’t.”

Keeler is certainly a great example of someone small making the most effective use of resources and talents to beat much larger and more substantial competitors. His approach to baseball can be a great help when you need to succeed against bigger competitors. Go ahead and delegate your challenges to him as he:

• Focuses on being more productive
• Does things to be able to perform more consistently
• Takes steps to rarely fail (or at least less than his competitors)
• Takes advantages of competitors’ weaknesses and gaps
• Concentrates on how he could help others advance to help his team win
• Embracing an unconventional & hard to defend against approach to execute his role
• Uses a smaller asset (in this case, a bat) than was thought practical
• Helps the team succeed as a collective group

So figure out where your competitors are positioned, take a practice swing or two, and smack the ball right between them to advance your brand teammates!

Note – for the previous post on how to use the Change Your Character technique, click here.

A Spoonful of Unconventional Makes the Conventionalism Go Down

Today's post for "Hit 'Em Where They Ain't" Week examines ways to look at your market and business to take advantages of opportunities where your competitors aren't located.

Many markets, especially in the business-to-business arena, are relatively conventional, i.e. they don’t necessarily have a lot of breakthrough, cool new developments such as the iPhone. Even in these cases, however, there’s still a great opportunity to make a mark because in a conventional market, small doses of unconventional can really stand out. Sometimes, dramatic change comes from doing simple things that nobody else is doing.

Here are a few questions to ask and answer to help identify ways to be more unconventional in your own market:

• What are things that customers have been requesting that we’ve yet to deliver?
• What are the most frequent customer-precipitated exceptions to our product or service?
• What are the most frequent employee-created exceptions to our product or service?
• What are the best, most successful companies (regardless of industry) doing to grow customer relationships with their brands? How can we emulate them?

If a competitor isn’t already doing your answer to one of the questions above, you’re set with a potentially great opportunity for an unconventional move.

"Hit 'em Where They Ain't Week" - We've Seen the Enemy & They Don't Look Anything Like Us

Since baseball is getting into full swing, this week's posts are dedicated to one of my favorite all-time players, Wee Willie Keeler. You'll learn more about him Wednesday, but the reason he's a favorite is because of his famous strategic quote: when asked about his hitting approach, he replied, "I hit 'em where they ain't."

That approach works in so many ways strategically, we'll use it as the inspiration for the posts all week. Today's turns the quote around, concentrating on not getting hit where you ain't looking.

I spoke a couple of years ago on the same program as the then-COO from Sprint. During his presentation, he highlighted the incredible number of photographs being taken and sent via cell phones on a monthly basis.

It would have been interesting to sit inside Kodak in the years leading up to the emergence & explosion of this capability to see if cell phones were ever considered as competitive threats. I suspect they weren’t, especially since a Kodak exec I saw presenting at a Frost & Sullivan conference in early 2007 couldn’t get beyond his focus on printing things. There wasn’t much recognition of alternative means of communicating and transmitting images and the impact on Kodak.

The scary implication for any business is that not all future (or even current) competitors will “look” like you. Cell phones don’t look like cameras, and the images that they produce aren’t too conducive to printing. Yet, for capturing & sharing images, they’re a lot more functional than a traditional camera (or even an electronic one).

How can you begin to assess and project the nature of future competitive threats. Beyond cursory exploratory research, here are several questions to consider:

• What benefits does your company deliver? If you didn’t deliver them, who else currently would / could deliver them?
• What if your company never existed – how would customers satisfy their needs?
• What if your industry never existed – what alternatives might develop to satisfy needs?
• Who are the niche players in your markets today that could grow in prominence? How might they be defining your business for you right now?

We used the first benefits-oriented set of questions a couple of weeks ago at the Kansas City Business Marketing Association in looking at how Apple had disrupted other markets, yet could be disrupted itself. The exercise interestingly yielded Microsoft, Garmin, YouTube, and Louis Vuitton as all potential competitors to deliver the same benefits Apple does. That's quite a wide-ranging list!

This type of work is challenging and highly speculative. But it pays to consider, anticipate, and prepare for as many competitive possibilities as you can picture.

"Do you like doing ice breakers? Yes or No?"

Here’s a great ice breaker for a moderately sized group (15 – 20 people) that doesn’t know each other that well. It creates interaction and puts a new twist on the standard, boring personal introduction at meetings.

Give every attendee a sheet with a single, different question and a list of everyone in the meeting. As people gather, each person attempts to ask their question of as many other people as possible, recording the answers on the sheet.

Then during the introductions, instead of people telling about themselves, the entire group reports the one piece of information that they have on the person in a rapid fire format, providing a brief and varied introduction.

You can limit the introductions to 30 or 45 seconds to keep the report out moving; if not, it can take 90 to 120 seconds per introduction.

One key is to mix up the types of questions and have some fun with them. There may some personal, but not too invasive questions (i.e., How far do you drive to work?) along with questions that can tie to the person who is doing the asking. I once had a rather notorious beer drinker ask each person about favorite hangover remedies; he had a blast with it as did the people he was asking.

For a first hand account about the technique, check out a recent post from Jan Harness about her participation. (Yes, I’m the impersonally referred to “client” in her post!)

By the way, do you dream in color or black and white?

Steal this Idea!

Speaking to a graduate level class on innovation several years ago, we covered the concept of borrowing ideas from other sources, looking for opportunities to change & incorporate them into your business.

One student, a communications professional at a major local company, said his department held “Plagiarism Fridays.” They were trying to upgrade their marketing effort, and Plagiarism Friday was a bit of a show-and-tell to get employees looking at strong creative from other industries, thinking about how their company could learn from it.

Here’s a way to take this approach and adapt it for your own business:

• Schedule time and ask employees to look for examples of great ideas to share. The only rule - they have to be from outside your industry or competitive set.
• Have participants present the selected ideas – perhaps 2 or 3 pieces per session.
• Get each person to do a quick personal assessment. For each idea, identify what’s strong, what’s weak, what’s intriguing or unusual, and a recommendation for how your business could incorporate some learnings from it. Share the assessments as a group.
• Select one of the sample ideas and using the input from the assessments, have the group apply it to one of your business challenges to see what possibilities arise.
• Select at least one new possibility and do something to advance it.

Plagiarism Friday sounds like a great idea to me, so…go ahead, steal it and take it to work tomorrow (just be sure to change it and make it better)! If however, you're still having qualms about stealing the idea, check out Jan Harness' post today at creativeinstigation.blogspot.com for some great rationalizations on the creative value of stealing ideas!

Change Your Character - Having Garrison Keillor Sell Intangible Ideas

Many people struggle with selling intangible ideas, benefits, and points of view. If you have a discomfort with abstractions, it’s difficult to modify your communication style to create a picture in someone’s mind of something that doesn’t physically exist.

One person who does a wonderful job of that on a weekly basis is Garrison Keillor along with the cast of “A Prairie Home Companion” radio program. Every Saturday afternoon, they bring to life a whole host of situations, characters, and even products that are completely fictional. So for today’s Change Your Character exercise, let’s delegate our task of conveying intangible ideas to them and see how the cast would approach the task by:

• Writing a script
• Incorporating rich, vivid language
• Featuring reoccurring characters
• Employing a variety of entertainment formats
• Telling stories
• Acting out skits with multi-talented performers
• Booking guests to help act out the stories
• Interviewing guests
• Intermixing real and imagined entities (sponsors, characters, etc.)
• Mixing comedy and drama
• Incorporating sound effects
• Having a band play music and theme songs
• Performing in front of a studio audience that provides real reactions to the material

Step right up to the microphone and share three new possibilities for helping your audience visualize intangible ideas based on each of the techniques above. If you need an additional push, try some Powdermilk Biscuits – they “give shy persons the strength they need to get up and do what needs to be done.”

Note – for the previous post on how to use the Change Your Character technique, click here.

Only for Today - An Important Process Map

At a recent dinner, a colleague was talking about a wine-tasting class his son had taken. One of the most memorable wines he tasted was creatively named “Cat’s Pee” – I kid you not. Always trying to have a business orientation, the conversation suggested this potential process map, drawn on the paper tablecloth at dinner. Happy April Fool's Day!