Communication « 800 CEO Read

January 31, 2013

Sketchnotes on Brains on Fire: The 2013 F.I.R.E. Sessions

Filed under: Big Ideas,Blog,Communication,Events,Marketing,Thought Leaders — Tags: Brains on Fire, F.I.R.E. Sessions, Greenville, Jackie Huba, Jonah Berger, Love146 — Michael @ 3:03 pm

A few weeks ago I reviewed Mike Rohde’s The Sketchnote Handbook. This week Tuesday, as Jon and I were sitting inside Greenville’s Peace Center, eagerly anticipating the start of Brains on Fire’s 2013 F.I.R.E. Sessions, I picked up the blank Moleskine sketchbook (compliments of the Brains on Fire folks) that sat on the table in front of me and said to Jon, “I think I’m going to sketchnote this.”

What followed was an amazing day full of insights. From the author Jackie Huba we got a sneek peek into the world of Monster Loyalty. Then Brains on Fire’s own Geno Church delivered a compelling talk on creating authentic community interaction. Then we walked down Greenville’s sunny Main Street to a delicious shrimp and grits lunch at Devereaux’s. We returned for the afternoon session, kicked off by author Jonah Berger’s presentation on how things become contagious. Closing the day was Love146′s Rob Morris, a living, breathing definition of the word ‘passionate’. The common thread throughout F.I.R.E. Sessions was one thing: people. This event served as a clear underscoring of what Brains on Fire is all about, and we were honored to be there to share in the conversation. My personal take-away is this: put people at the center of your business, always.

For an even more in-depth re-cap of the event, check out John Moore’s blog post. To all of you at Brains on Fire: thank you!

Check out my sketchnotes from the two morning sessions below, but please withhold your criticisms—I will confess I’m an amateur. Be sure to keep an eye on the Brains on Fire folks in 2013. Since we’re book people and you probably are too, I’ll simply say that there is a new book on the way and it’s going to be good. If you can’t wait for the new one, make sure you’ve taken some time with the original Brains on Fire.

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April 25, 2012

Resonate: Now at the Tip of Your Fingers

Filed under: Book Reviews,Communication,Presentations — Sally @ 10:42 am

In the 2011 paperback edition of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, author Todd Sattersten included a new sidebar of the best books on using visual thinking in business because, to play off an old saying, sometimes a picture is worth more than 1000 words. The list of recommended titles included Dan Roam’s Back of the Napkin, Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points, and Dona W. Wong’s Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics.

The fourth book included in Todd’s overview was Resonate by Nancy Duarte. Todd describes her book this way:

Duarte and her company have produced presentations for renowned product launches and speaker presentations, such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Anyone can tell a story, but how it’s told–visually, sonically, physically, and linearly–is the key to true resonance, which in turn transforms your audience into active participants.

Resonate is a beautiful book packed with photographs, drawings, graphs, charts, diagrams, and even poetry, making it not only a truly enjoyable reading experience, but a book emblematic of the author’s message that storytelling is an essential component to the success of a presentation.

Now the magic of Resonate is available in a Multi-Touch format that brings this beautiful book to life on your iPad. And it is the first interactive business book built in Apple’s iBooks Author.

Here is a little taste of what this iBook can do:

In an increasingly cacophonous world, visual presentations can cut through the noise. Resonate steps you through the Sparklines or “the story flow of several speeches in the interactive sparkline widget,” introduces you to Nancy Duarte and the many behind the scenes stories she includes to support and illuminate the lessons, and provides you with the ability to “take notes and build your next presentation as you move through the book” via a Note Card feature. Chapter review test questions make remembering key ideas easy. Gorgeous imagery and provocative quotes keep the information lively.

The stories you create with the help of Resonante can help change your business, and even change the world, because stories put ideas into common language and ignite the imagination. Start by downloading Resonate to your iPad. Not only will you be in awe of the product before you and at your finger tips, you’ll learn that presentations don’t have to be boring, your great idea doesn’t have to die before it sees the light of day, and your audience won’t be texting surreptitiously under the conference room table while you present.

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February 29, 2012

The New Theseus and Novelty Minotaur

Filed under: Big Ideas,Book Reviews,Communication,Technology,Thought Leaders — dylan @ 1:44 pm

Theseus was always in search of his next adventure, choosing to travel overland to meet his father in Athens so he could clear the road of its notorious monsters and villains (such as Procrustes, who business book readers may recognize from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Bed of Procrustes) rather than taking the safer sea route suggested by his grandfather. And when he learned that Athens was sending seven young men and seven women in war tribute each year to be devoured by the Minotaur—the half-bull, half man pet monster of the cruel King Minos of Crete—he decided he would be one of the fourteen to go, that he would try to rid the world of yet another monster.

Winifred Gallagher’s recently released New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change, explains the tendencies each of us has (or lacks) for novelty and new experiences—or neophilia—and what those tendencies mean for each of us and our collective future. The author identifies three personality types—neophiliacs, neophiles, and neophones—which have three different levels of affinity for “the new.” Neophiliacs passionately, sometimes addictively pursue new technologies and experiences, while Neophobes actively avoid them, preferring to stick to the safety and known outcomes of their routine. Each of these extremes accounts for around 10 percent to 15 percent of the population, leaving most of us reading the book from the comfortable middle as neophiles—not scared of too much change nor bored by too little, neither first adapters nor Luddites.

The story of New is the story of human progress, and the first part of the book explores the origins and evolution of our neophilia. As Gallagher puts it: “As we’ve moved from the epoch of hunter-gatherers—the vast majority of our time as a species—to the agricultural, industrial, and information ages, our neophilia has changed and developed with us.” It’s a story given greater depth from recent advances in neuroscience and and increased understanding of how the brain functions—advances that are well documented and made easy-to-understand in the book. Early on, Gallagher helps us begin to view our brains less as an impartial data crunchers and more as surprise detectors, focusing on what’s new and different in the world around us, reacting to the dangers and opportunities presented. This has profound implications for how we understand the world, shapes our interactions with and reactions to it. As Gallagher explains it:

The main reason you’re drawn to the novel or surprising is that it can upset the safe, predictable status quo and the game plan you’ve based on it, perhaps even jeopardizing your survival. [...] To survive, you must be aroused by the new and different. To be efficient and productive, however, you must focus your finite mental energy and attention on those novel sights and sounds, thoughts and feelings that somehow matter and screen out the rest. Just as arousal alerts and orients you to new things, the complementary process of adaptation helps you filter out the unimportant ones.

This has been critically important not just for how we understand the world and evolve as a group, but for how we develop as individual personalities. So, the second part of the book focuses on our personal inclinations for novelty and what that means for us as individuals. Ms. Gallagher writes that “The tendency either to approach or avoid novelty is the most important stable behavioral difference among individuals in the same species, period.” But it is not just orientation to and adaption of novelty that is important, it is the adaption to and reorientation of perception, the ability to reinterpret, to find something unknown in what most assumed was already known, to find something novel in what has become commonplace. It is how we innovate in the arts, in the sciences, in business. Gallagher offers up the example of Einstein:

Einstein’s ability to interpret the same old math and science that his peers knew by heart in bold new ways testifies to his virtuosity in … neophilic, uninhibited, right-brain thinking. As [Oshin Vartanian, a psychologist at Defense Research and Development Canada-Toronto] says, “Novelty-seeking is talked about as if there’s a novel object out there somewhere that you find, but usually it’s the perceiver who has to interpret it as novel. Creative people can see things in a fresh way and produce new ideas because they can relax the usual perceptual and conceptual constraints that define entities.”

That holds true in every field and for almost every innovation. The author could have just as easily used the example of Steve Jobs in consumer technology, Pablo Picasso in the arts, or Bill James in baseball to illustrate her point. Each found new dimensions to explore in an established order, exploded preconceptions, and altered the fields they worked in (and the culture) forever.

Even here, though, in the exploration of psychology, human temperament and how individuals can shape the culture, there are stories of how the culture around us shapes our neophilia. One such example is illustrated by the fascinating etymology of words such as “curiosity” and “interesting.” Rarely used before, the words became more commonplace with the increased number of, and time for, “curiosities” and objects of “interest” during the the industrial revolution. These novelties became so commonplace that the lack of such distraction began to equal “boredom,” a term that didn’t appear in the English language until the later eighteenth century. Since then, boredom has gone from being viewed as an individual vice to the natural state of man, with a steady stream of new inventions and entertainments devised to feed our neophilia.

This brings us to third part of the book, which explores how our environment shapes our neophilia and what the digital information revolution is doing to it. Technology has gone from something that simply helps us cultivate and navigate the world to become a labyrinth of consumer choice and novelty that needs to be cultivated and navigated in its own right. The complexities range from information overload—we now have access to more information than we’ll ever need, want, or use at our literal fingertips every waking moment of our lives, and it can now take us hours just to check our mail everyday—to navigating a world we’re increasingly living online, creating a lot of “something’s gotta give” dilemmas.

The simplest one concerns a basic quality shared by all living things: responsiveness to the environment around you. As you know if you’ve had a run-in on the sidewalk or highway with someone who was engrossed in his or her wonder phone, you can’t live in a screen and the real world at the same time.

These seem like modern annoyances that come in tandem with modern conveniences, but at some point we have to reevaluate whether it’s all even convenient anymore—what with all the overload and distraction these devices are producing. And all the while it’s changing the way our brains are wired and societies are structured. We’re creating a new Minotaur, half man, half bull to navigate. Gallagher sums up the difficulty we now face.

The larger problem that underlies the pursuit of new things just because they’re new isn’t the waste of time and money per se but the fact that we’ve lost touch with neophilia’s purpose. This great gift isn’t meant to push us to buy stuff we don’t need or seek constant entertainment but to help us adapt to change, from the economy’s volatility to the climate crisis, and learn about and create useful new things. [...] Like the agricultural age’s plow and the industrial age’s steam engine, the information age’s electronics have changed the human experience as previous generations have known it. Just as we once focused our neophilia on advancing the ways of life enabled by farming, and then by powerful machines that mass-produced goods, we’re now concentrating it on processing and organizing all kinds of electronic data that are the foundations of our work and play. Like the upheavals that preceded it, this revolution is already propelling us into the next phase of our cultural if not quasibiological evolution. If we’re to make the best use of our neophilia in a new epoch of endless novelty, we must make conscious decisions to ensure that it’s working for us, rather than the other way around.

The bells and whistles can be incredibly invigorating, entertaining and even helpful, but it’s important to step away from time to time to make sure the technologies we adapt into our everyday lives serve their intended purpose—to help us stop the needless yearly sacrifice of Athenian youths to the man-beast Minotaur. Or as Gallagher more accurately and succinctly puts it:

Our capacity for handling new things is already being tested by an unprecedented explosion of them. Figuring out how to respond to this embarrassment of riches by becoming more productive rather than more distracted is easier if you understand a few basics of how and why you brain reacts to new things.

It is not that the digital revolution is inherently good or bad for us or our businesses—it’s not, or it’s both. Or it can be either depending on how we use it. It can distract us or make us more efficient. As Nicholas Carr writes in The Shallows, Douglas Rushkoff talks about in Program or Be Programmed, and Charles Duhigg will teach us in his upcoming book The Power of Habit, we have to be conscious of how we’re being conscious. We have to mindful of what we’re mindful of. We have to make a habit out of forming good habits. Add Winifred Gallagher to that important chorus of voices, and let’s hope their song is catchy enough to get stuck in people’s heads.

Before entering the Labyrinth to battle the Minotaur, King Minos’s daughter Ariadne became smitten with Theseus and his cause, and gave him a ball of thread so that he could find his way out again if he could indeed defeat the beast. In this book, our neophilia is our Theseus and Winifred Gallagher our Ariadne, showing us deep into the labyrinthine structure of our brains, our culture, and our technologies, helping us explode myths and misconceptions along the way, and unraveling just enough thread for us to find our way out again with a more complete understanding of ourselves and the moment we find ourselves in.

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February 22, 2012

Who’s in the Room?

Filed under: Big Ideas,Blog,Book Reviews,Communication — bob @ 8:31 am

There is a misconception in American business that Bob Frisch says is getting in the way of getting things done and hewants to correct it. That’s the misconception that senior management teams, or SMTs, make the decisions in business today.

I may have shocked or surprised you with that statement, but if you have ever asked, or been asked, “Why wasn’t I in the room,” then you’ve had a taste of the challenge. Frisch outlines it all, as well as what to do about it, in his book, Who’s in the Room? How Great Leaders Structure and Manage the Teams Around Them.

Frisch, a managing partner with strategy consultancy, The Strategic Offsites Group, has worked with many organizations, including Fortune 500 companies to family businesses and even the Federal government. He advocates the radical step of unseating the SMT as the “epicenter of decision making.” In writing of the real way decisions are made in businesses, he says:

“The senior team may be consulted or informed, but the most important decisions are rarely made by a group like this sitting around a conference table. Instead, the organization leader typically calls in an inner core of intimate advisors–a kitchen cabinet– along with any other individuals who might shed light on a specific situation. It is this team with no name–ad hoc, unofficial, and flexible in makeup–that is the group in the rom as the actual decisions get made. Yet we all persist in believing that the senior team should be the forum for decision-making.

It can be a destructive belief.

Frisch Recommends that the role of the SMT in guiding the president or CEO (the person at the top) begin by calling on the SMT to advise on three areas, leaving the ad hoc teams to advise on more specific challenges, issues and opportunities. The SMT should advise on:

• Developing a shared view of where the organization needs to go and why.

• Managing a prioritized set of strategic initiatives designed to get there.

• Managing dependencies within and among initiatives to ensure their success.

In short, he says the three areas are vision, allocation of resources, and execution–what he says are three of the most critical responsibilities of top leadership.

Frisch believes that this will leave the company with “the right teams addressing the right issues at the right time, a renewed sense of collective purpose for the organization’s, most senior and valued leaders, and, most importantly, bosses seeing the end to people asking, “Why wasn’t I in the room?”

Frisch draws on his many years of experience working with companies and provides plenty of examples of how to get advisory teams and groups aligned with their purposes so that confusion regarding roles and the appropriate areas on which each group should advise the boss on.

Who’s in the Room? is a great guide for any leader to use in mapping out his or her advisory teams and get the company working in the same direction.

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February 16, 2012

A (Quiet) Room of One’s Own

Filed under: Communication,Leadership,Personal Development,Uncategorized — Sally @ 1:12 pm

In a 1929 essay, Virginia Woolf wrote that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” There has been much literary analysis (and some criticism) of this assertion, and, over time it seems her call has been taken up by proponents of nearly every minority facing systemic repression, but in the context of the time, Woolf was being quite literal and pragmatic. Women rarely had space to call their own in which to do their own work. Women belonged to the household, not to themselves.

While I feel a little bit guilty for cribbing Woolf’s famous line for the title of this post–partially because it’s overused, and partially because this is a somewhat lighter topic to which I am applying it–, as I read through Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain, the phrase came leaping to mind and stayed there. There are a lot of angles to come at Quiet, but I think the practical, in terms of space, is a good place to start.

Cain’s book sets out to show us how and why ‘the extrovert’ has become the American ideal, and for our purposes, particularly in the workplace. She argues that introverts–nearly 1/3 of people– are misunderstood and devalued. In an interview on NPR.org, Cain explains:

“Many people believe that introversion is about being antisocial, and that’s really a misperception. Because actually it’s just that introverts are differently social. So they would prefer to have a glass of wine with a close friend as opposed to going to a loud party full of strangers.

While able to make choices that suit them in their personal lives (no one has to go to a rock concert to hear their favorite music performed live thanks to the Internet), introverts are often forced to work in an environment that doesn’t suit their creative and productivity needs. This can mean that introverts are less likely to perform to the top of their potential. Also from the NPR Q&A:

It’s quite a problem in the workplace today, because we have a workplace that is increasingly set up for maximum group interaction. More and more of our offices are set up as open-plan offices where there are no walls and there’s very little privacy. … The average amount of space per employee actually shrunk from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet today.

Our offices at 800-CEO-READ exemplify this in microcosm. The majority of us work just a few yards away from another person with no doors, walls, or windows dividing us. Discussions quickly become group discussion, interdepartmental, no matter the topic, which is a great way to stay on top of vital information and everyone’s mood. But occasionally we have create our own “walls” by putting on a pair of headphones and listening to whatever music that keeps us focused and tuned inward. It’s a way of us saying, non-verbally, “Not now. I need some space.”

Workplace dynamics aside, another danger, Cain says in her chapter “The Myth of Charismatic Leadership” , is that when work only happens in an open office environment, or in team situations, introverts are often unable to share their valuable contributions simply because they habitually think before they talk. And, well, extroverts, are much more used to talking as they think.

If we assume that quiet and loud people have roughly the same number of good (and bad) ideas, then we should worry if the louder and more forceful people always carry the day. This would mean that an awful lot of bad ideas prevail while good ones get squashed…..We perceive talkers as smarter than quiet types–even though grade point averages and SAT and intelligence test scores reveal this perception to be inaccurate.

Cain expounds on what is lost when this myth of the charismatic leader persists in her NPR Q&A:

Introverts are much less often groomed for leadership positions, even though there’s really fascinating research out recently from Adam Grant at [The Wharton School of business at the University of Pennsylvania] finding that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes when their employees are more proactive. They’re more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extroverted leader might, almost unwittingly, be more dominant and be putting their own stamp on things, and so those good ideas never come to the fore.

Cain isn’t making a call for everyone to work behind their own closed door with no interaction with their fellow workers. And her “criticism in the book is not of extroverts at all, but rather of the extrovert ideal.” Quiet is instead a call for equal opportunity for every type of worker, in the same vein that Woolf called for all women and men to have the space in which to do their best creative work.

None of this is to say that it would be a good thing to get rid of teamwork and get rid of group work altogether. It’s more just to say that we’re at a point in our culture, and in our workplace culture, where we’ve gotten too lopsided. We tend to believe that all creativity and all productivity comes from the group, when in fact, there really is a benefit to solitude and to being able to go off and focus and put your head down.

In the Introduction to Quiet Cain includes a brief questionnaire of 20 True/False questions to help readers determine their level of introversion. I took the quiz and not-surprisingly to me, answered True to 17 of the 20 questions, marking me a true introvert. Of course I’ve known this most of my life ever since I took my first Myers-Briggs in college (INTJ, for anyone who is curious) to more recently when I reveled in a weekend day at home during which I sat in the quiet (no tv, no radio, no husband, no child) for 6 hours.

Some of my affirmative answers were to the questions: “I often prefer to express myself in writing”; “I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities”; “I dislike small talk, but I enjoy talking in depth about topics that matter to me”; “I often let calls go through to voice mail.”

Before reading Quiet, I’d been lately questioning whether my introversion is a weakness. At times I joke about being a misanthrope, but truly I wish public events and cold calls didn’t give me hives. We certainly get enough books passing through the office that talk about how networking is a prime essential for advancement in business. But I’m certainly not alone in my introversion and can take comfort in the fact that success is not dependent on me adapting some new personality. There are any number of deeply successful introverts as history shows. Cain showcases a few in this book trailer:

Cain also proffers examples of introverts who have become successful in realms atypical to the typical introvert. She emphasizes that sometimes the work you choose to do means needing to get out of your own way. She speaks passionately in her book’s conclusion titled “Wonderland”:

Figure out what you are meant to contribute to the world and make sure you contribute it. If this requires public speaking or networking or other activities that make you uncomfortable, do them anyway. But accept that they’re difficult, get the training you need to make them easier, and reward yourself when your done.

The book offers examples of ways to transcend our intrinsic personality types in order to be better communicators and more assertive team members when the situation calls for it. Learn how you may respond, as an extrovert, during competitive vs cooperative games. Learn how the introvert might adjust her tendencies towards distancing herself via a quiet state during a heated conversation.

Throughout the book, Cain isn’t making these observations and assertions without support. Quiet is well-researched and references contemporary neuroscience, psychological research studies, and popular business literature to provide the answers to her own questions regarding her introverted personality. Whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, you will learn plenty about yourself, how you communicate, and how you work–whether you need that quiet room for yourself or not–by reading Quiet.

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January 16, 2012

Story Craft

Filed under: Bestsellers,Communication — Sally @ 12:11 pm

The power of storytelling in business is not a new subject, but it is an under-utilized skill because oftentimes what makes a person a good leader doesn’t make for a good story teller. But a good story isn’t the sole property of the marketing department; instead, anyone can master some basic techniques for selling themselves or their point of view or their long-term vision through story. Here are some of the best books to help you work on your story craft.

The Modern Classic

Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling by Annette Simmons, Doug Lipman

“Simmons identifies the six stories you need to know how to tell and demonstrates how they can be applied. The revised edition offers a guide to using storytelling in specific business circumstances, including corporate reorganizations, layoffs, and diversity issues.”

The Master Storyteller

Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative by Stephen Denning

“This book shows how storytelling is one of the few ways to handle the most important and difficult challenges of leadership: sparking action, getting people to work together, and leading people into the future. Using myriad illustrative examples and filled with how-to techniques, this book clearly explains “how” you can learn to tell the right story at the right time.”

The Best Seller

Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story by Peter Guber

“Peter Guber, whose executive and entrepreneurial accomplishments have made him a success in multiple industries, has long relied on “purposeful story telling” to motivate, win over, shape, engage and sell. Indeed, what began as knack for telling stories as an entertainment industry executive has, through years of perspiration and inspiration, evolved into a set of principles that anyone can use to achieve their goals.”

The Picture Maker

Resonate: Present Visual Stories That Transform Audiences by Nancy Duarte

“Presentations are meant to inform, inspire, and persuade audiences. So why then do so many audiences leave feeling like they’ve wasted their time? All too often, presentations don’t resonate with the audience and move them to transformative action. This book helps you make a strong connection with your audience and lead them to purposeful action.”

The New Kids on the Block

Storybranding: Creating Stand-Out Brands Through the Power of Story by Jim Signorelli

“Modeled after the way stories work, this book provides a unique planning process for creating authentic brand identities. It also reveals a number of concealed traps that other branding approaches often overlook. Drawing on the persuasive power of stories, the author argues that a great deal of wasted effort is put into creating advertising messages that do too much ‘telling’ and too little ‘showing.’”

Power of Storytelling: Captivate, Convince, or Convert Any Business Audience Using Stories from Top CEOs by Jim Holtje

“A guide to crafting unforgettable, attention-grabbing business communications–from speeches and letters to business plans–using stories from the world’s top business leaders. It’s an easy-to-use reference for anyone who needs to lead, inspire, and motivate an audience in a business setting, whether they’re writing speeches, pep talks, interview talking points, employee letters, or Op- Eds.”

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October 25, 2011

Liespotting

Filed under: Book Reviews,Communication — Jon @ 3:21 pm

Oftentimes, when someone lies to us, we think, “I knew that wasn’t true.” Yet, for a moment, we trusted them, and we believed they were being honest. We then wonder how we could have been more certain up front, and not have been fooled. We’ll be more careful next time, we tell ourselves. Then, one day, it happens again.

But now, the process can stop.

Pamela Meyer’s book Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception has been reissued in paperback, and is packed with information on exactly what the title describes – identifying lies, and how to respond to them.

But it’s not all about calling people out on dishonesty, it’s about how to get to the truth and build better and stronger relationships.

Check out the author’s recent TED talk which reveals more about the book and the ideas within:

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October 3, 2011

Talk Normal

Filed under: Book Reviews,Communication — dylan @ 2:57 pm

Jack reviewed a great book a few years ago called The Management Myth: Why the “Experts” Keep Getting It Wrong. It is a serious book critiquing what the author calls “the pseudoscience of management theory,” a call for us to look at management theory not as a science, but as a philosophy.

A question at the heart of that book is the efficacy of business jargon—that is, does the language we invent around business topics really produce a better understanding of those topics, or simply make the speaker of that language sound more clever, studied and imbued with expertise. The author begins the book with the story of how he, with just one “miserable summer at a fast-food restaurant” and a doctorate in nineteenth-century German philosophy under his belt, decided to try for a job in consulting. To prepare for his interview, he read the Financial Times every day for two weeks and devoured In Search of Excellence to master what he called “management speak.” And, despite his total lack of management experience or business expertise, he left that interview with a job as a management consultant. Soon he was being billed out to clients at a rate of half a million dollars per year—not because he was an expert on management, but because he could talk like one.

Now there comes a book that tackles the topic of business jargon from another, much more satirical angle, Talk Normal: Stop the Business Speak, Jargon and Waffle by Tim Phillips. This is a book for those in the trenches of the jargon war, those just trying to get through and make sense of yet another indecipherable email or memo. Phillips is the author of two previous books, Fit to Bust: How Great Companies Fail and Knockoff: The Deadly Trade in Counterfeit Goods. But why did Tim Phillips write this book? As he writes in the forward:

Talk Normal facilitates information delivery through mutilpe media formats and monetises eyeballs.

London, UK, Mar 30, 2011/TalkNormalWire — Talk Normal (http://talknormal.co.uk), the leading solution for information clarity optimisation and humour-based jargon mitigation strategies, has announced that it will henceforth facilitate information delivery through multiple media formats.

The expanded service offering encompasses a paper-based added-value offering which leverages content originated in the pre-exosting electronic service delivery method. Utilising multiple delivery channels matches eyeballs to content in an optimised and diversified platform: while retaining unity of purpose, the paper-based variant can reach Talk Normal partners who face electirical or data-access challenges, and additionally it interfaces with partners who want to make proactive moves to Talknormalise the jargon portfolios. It will also expedite the creation of enhanced revenue streams by monetising Talk Normal’s attention endowment.

Talk Normal’s chief solution advocate, Tim Phillips, commented that ‘Many people ask me what this means to me. It means that I’ve written a book about my blog so I can earn some money.’

As you can probably tell, this book has a lot of humor (and British spelling) in it. But it’s also deadly serious, providing real answers to a real problem in offices all over the world. On the one hand, if you’re in business, you had better learn the language of business if you want to survive and thrive. But, on the other hand, so much of that language adds absolutely nothing of value to the conversation and obscures the issues for those involved in the process and/or just trying to figure out what the heck is actually going on. It’s similar to the idea that artists must learn the rules of art before they can break them, except that the rules of art (composition, perspective, etc.) were put in place to better represent reality, whereas the rules of business jargon… well, there don’t appear to be any real rules to business jargon. The author has come up with three guidelines to help:

Try to be understood by everyone who’s listening.
Stop trying to sound clever for no reason.
It’s about attitude, not rules.

The first two are rather obvious, but the third may need a bit more explanation. Phillips write of rule three:

I’m constantly contacted by amateur grammarians who want me to post something about the abuse of dangling modifiers. I don’t do this because I don’t really know what a dangling modifier is. I could look it up on Wikipedia and pretend that I know what I’m talking about but that would mean I was trying to sound clever for no reason (see above).

We need to think clearly to write clearly, not swallow a book about grammar. I edit some terrible articles. The first thought is that there’s a problem with the grammar: then when you fix the grammar you often find that there isn’t a clear train of thought underlying what they wrote. That’s the problem, not the dangling modifier.

As a reviewer of business books and the managing editor of ChangeThis, I couldn’t agree more.
Talk Normal is both a lot of fun and extremely practical at the same time. It will leave you laughing and thinking more clearly. And it will be released by Kogan Page later this month. Be sure to check it out

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February 4, 2011

Split Second Persuasion

Filed under: Blog,Communication — Jon @ 3:31 pm

How do you change people’s minds?

In psychologist Dr. Kevin Dutton’s new book Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art & New Science of Changing Minds, he explores that very question. Dutton’s research shows that not only do we often try changing other people’s minds, but our own minds are nudged to be changed every day. How often per day? 400 times, found Dutton, and his book reveals how we can better manage that influence, and also use it in our interactions with others.

A fascinating read, I sent Dutton a few questions to give our readers a glimpse into some of the ideas within the book. Here’s our exchange:

Can’t people make up their own minds?

The question of whether social influence techniques are ‘ethical’ is an interesting one. I think it very much depends on how, precisely, you view persuasion. If you see persuasion as a drain on free will, then you might, quite justifiably, have yourself a case for prohibition – depending, of course, on where the persuasion is leading! However if, on the other hand, you see influence techniques as informing free will rather than debilitating it, then there’s no case to answer.

My own position lies somewhere in the middle. Generally speaking, there are two main ways we can approach the idea of shaping behaviour. Firstly, we can influence what people consciously think about. In other words, we can inform free will. Here, the underlying assumption is that individuals cognitively evaluate incoming information – and then act in their best interests. This we might call the ‘rational’ model. Say, for instance, that you’re a company CEO and put a deal out for tender. Two rival candidates give presentations in an attempt to win your business. When you have listened to them, they each go away and you are left to make a decision based on what you have heard. Do the presentations detract from your ability to make up your mind? Or enhance it? Do they add to the quality of your decision-making? Or reduce it?

On the other hand, the contrasting model of behaviour change – let’s call it the ‘context’ model – focuses on the more automatic processes of decision-making. Here, the emphasis is less on the provision of facts and information and more on manipulating the context in which people act. It’s a fact of life that we humans often think that we’ve come to a rational decision, often think that we’ve made up our minds with due care and attention, when in reality our choices have been dictated by simple quirks of circumstance.

Take what’s known as the ‘default bias’, for instance. Our brains have an in-built tendency to take the path of least resistance – a tendency so strong it sometimes leads us to behave irrationally. Example: It’s rational (especially if you don’t already have one) to opt in to a pension plan when you join a new company. Yet strangely, the majority of us choose not to. Not because we think pension plans are a bad idea. Not at all. But rather because the brain’s default setting is to go with the flow – and the flow is to do…that’s right, nothing.

So, how do we get more employees to participate in pension plans? Easy. We make signing up to the plan all part of the deal, but add in a facility whereby employees may ‘opt out.’ In other words, we simply reverse the default setting.

It’s interesting to note that both the ‘rational’ and ‘context’ models of influence do not affect the ability of an individual to make up his/her mind. The ‘rational’ model enhances it, while the ‘context’ model seeks not to change minds, but rather behaviours. Which is different. Most people believe pension schemes are a good idea, right? So nothing changes there. All that changes is that they act on those beliefs. Whether or not individuals have a ‘right to be wrong’, of course – especially when their actions have a deleterious effect on both their own well-being and that of others – is a separate matter entirely.

Another consideration to bear in mind here is whether, when it comes to influence, there is any such thing as a neutral gesture. The question ‘Can’t people make up their own minds?’ implicitly assumes that their exists, in some secluded neural zip code deep within the brain, a computational realm of pure, disembodied decision-making, partitioned from context and the impurities of spin. But even if I elect not to try to persuade you into taking a course of action I am still, inadvertently, informing your actions: sending you a message of ambivalence, noncommittal or uncertainty (delete as appropriate) which you will take into account when making your decision.

Influence and inference often go hand-in-hand.

Finally, like it or not, we have to face up to the fact that we’re pretty much stuck with persuasion. Estimates hover around the 400 mark when it comes to how many times a day someone tries to persuade us. Comes as a bit of a shock, doesn’t it? And it starts even before we get out of bed in the morning. With our radio and cellphone alarms.
Could it really have been any other way? Probably not.

In the animal kingdom, before natural selection invented language and consciousness, courtship rituals, threat displays and submission postures constituted the currency of persuasion. And still do, of course. Consider, for example, the peacock’s preposterous tail – the ultimate in evolutionary bling.

Without it, how else would the peahen ‘make her mind up’?

What are some of the ways we nonverbally persuade people?

“When you’re trying to influence someone,” says Lindsay Meredith, professor of marketing at Simon Fraser University, “you want to hit them on as many perceptive neuro-pathways as you can.” For most people, in everyday life, that usually means just the one: the gridlocked neural interstate to the brain’s linguistic quarter. But there are, as Meredith’s observation suggests, a number of others to choose from.

Probably the best known conduit of nonverbal persuasion is body language. Much has been written about body language over the years. And not all of it, it has to be said, is worth reading. Nevertheless, there is strong scientific evidence to show that certain nonverbal techniques, such as mirroring for example, do actually make a difference to how others perceive us – and hence ‘smooth the way’ for whatever comes out of our mouths.

One study, for instance, conducted in 2007 and published in a respected, peer-reviewed journal, demonstrates this in an arbitration setting. Negotiators who strategically mimic the mannerisms of their opponents (e.g. rub their noses when their opponents rub their nose; lean back in their chairs when their opponent leans back in their chair) achieve better outcomes, are more successful at uncovering underlying compatible interests, than those who do not engage in such mimicry.

In many ways, this is not surprising perhaps. Although negotiations are often restricted by numerical parameters, final outcomes often depend on feel-good factors such as liking, trust and familiarity – and mimicry (so long as it goes unnoticed!) builds rapport.

Yet there are other nonconscious routes to persuasion aside from body language. On the subject of rapport, for instance, we are more likely to spend time studying a prospective employee’s resume if their name happens to be similar to our own. And on the subject of feel-good factors, we are (i) more likely to put money in a charity box if we have just come up an escalator than gone down one; and are (ii) more likely to think of a stranger as warm and friendly if they offer us a hot drink rather than a cold one.

This latter pair of observations, both empirically demonstrable and both scientific proven, are artefacts of something called metaphor-enriched social cognition: the representation of abstract concepts in bodily, or physical, states. So, next time someone accuses you of taking the moral high ground, you might want to stay away from escalators.

In fact, talking of metaphors and physical states, persuasion can sometimes, quite literally, be ‘in the air.’ Since launching in 2008, in the wake of growing interest in the field of neuromarketing (a hybrid of marketing and neuroscience), ScentAir UK is picking up clients by the dozen. Its ‘scent delivery system’ has been installed in a wide variety of venues including nightclubs, hotels, theme parks…even fast-food outlets. In the US, a scent specially formulated for McDonald’s called ‘Apple Pie’ has seen a hike in sales of an incredible 30%, while at Legoland, in the UK, the fragrance of ‘Chocolate Chip Cookies’ pumped into the doorway of a café has had a similar effect on ‘dwell time’, mainly by appealing to children who are often turned off by the more ‘adult’ aroma of coffee.

Influence, you could say, not to be sniffed at.

How can we, as those being persuaded, be on better guard for scams?

I can remember as if it were yesterday: the moment I realised that if a scam is good enough it’s pretty much going to outfox anybody. In 2001, at a busy train station in London, I noticed the cops had put up signs alerting commuters to the fact that pickpockets were at work in the area. About time too, I mused indignantly. Several hours later, down at the local police station bemoaning the disappearance of my wallet, I discovered that it wasn’t the cops at all who had put up the signs. But the pickpockets themselves. The cops, it turned out, were forever taking them down. Why? Duh! Because as soon as people noticed them they, like me, would automatically pat down their pockets, just to make sure that whatever it was they had in there was still in there. And the pickpockets would be watching them like hawks. I might as well have just handed them my wallet on a plate.

There’s not much you can do about scams like that. And so, somewhat begrudgingly, I doff my cap to the architects of my misfortune and defer to its fiendish simplicity. Eventually, thank goodness, they become common knowledge – as has this one. And the spell is broken. But there are always new ones waiting in the wings, ready to take advantage of our brains’ evolutionary blind-spots. To whip the rug of expectation from underneath their feet. To sneak up on them from behind.

Many scams take advantage of the brain’s hardwired reliance on mental rules-of-thumb to make decisions. A warning sign informs us that pickpockets are in the area, and so we give ourselves a quick once over – just to be on the safe side. And why on earth wouldn’t we? We can’t spend hours on every single decision we make. Life, as Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, happens too fast for it to be any other way. So, we prioritize.

Scams fan out along a continuum of sophistication. Some, like the barely literate and impenetrably confused requests to deposit precarious, tropical inheritances into your bank account (just supply the digits), are risible. If you can’t spot them I’d be amazed if you can even spell IQ, let alone have one. Others, like certain sales techniques (who said all scams were illegal?) are a little more nuanced. Most of us, for example, have a strong desire to behave in a manner consistent with our self-image. What this means, amongst other things – one of the corollaries of this need for consistency – is that we’re far more likely to acquiesce to a subsequent, larger request from someone if we’ve previously agreed to a previous, smaller one from them. Any idea why so many sales pitches include a ‘free trial period’? If you didn’t before, you certainly do now. It’s called the ‘foot-in-the-door’ effect. Once we’ve made a small, seemingly innocuous commitment to a product, we’re far more likely to sign up for a bigger, more serious tour of duty. Cha-ching!

But what about the rogue traders, bogus callers, email scammers, and direct mail fraudsters (to name but a few) out there? Is there anything immunological we can do? Can we fit our brains with virus protection software? Fortunately, the answer is yes – although, as with all vaccinations, nothing is 100%. Scams, like bacteria, are evolving all the time. And will always be one step ahead.

That said, there are two golden rules when it comes to dealing with scams:
1. If something seems too good to be true, it usually is.
2. Stop and think. Get your brain off autopilot, and take over manual control.

Bearing that in mind, here is a simple ‘scams checklist’:

• Was the offer unsolicited?
• Do you have to respond quickly? What’s the rush?
• Do you have to pay for a prize or ‘free’ gift?
• Do you have to ring a premium rate number?
• Are you being asked for your bank or credit card details?
• Is the business reluctant to give you its address or contact details?
• Are you being asked to keep the offer confidential?

If the answer to any of these is yes, you have been warned…

Is social media dangerous?

The history of opinion is exponential. For millennia, it was delivered exclusively to live audiences…until the clever Chinese were rumbled, and paper came along. After paper came radio. And after radio came telly. Now we’ve got the web.

The gargantuan global amphitheatre that engulfs and encircles our personal ideological stages is one thing. But how we perform on those stages is really quite another. In days gone by, “Commonsense Conservatives and lovers of America: Don’t retreat – instead RELOAD!” would have reached only a fraction of those who both received, and passed on, that biblically portentous tweet at 9.31 am precisely, on March 23rd last year. Which means, by the simple law of averages, that the chances of it ending up in the mailbox of a juvenile, gun-toting megalomaniac, with a psychotic, self-referential soft spot for anti-government rhetoric – like Jared Loughner, for example – are considerably higher.

On the other hand, playing to a big audience can also be a force for the good.

In recent years here in the UK, it’s become as predictable as a Bernie Madoff hedgefund scam. Performer wins X Factor, performer’s debut single goes to No 1. So when Joe McElderry won the TV talent contest in December 2009, he had reason to believe that his song, The Climb, would be top of the charts at Christmas. Alas, it wasn’t to be. Instead, following a powerful and concerted internet campaign, a ditty very nearly as old as he was pipped him to the post.

Killing In The Name, an expletive-rich funk metal song first released in 1992 by the Californian rock band Rage Against the Machine – and nothing whatsoever to do with Sarah Palin – outsold McElderry’s simpering ballad by 50,000 copies in the all-important lead-up week to Christmas, thanks mainly to the volume of downloads.

Of the campaign that gave them victory, the group’s guitarist, Tom Morello, had this to say: “It’s trying to save the UK pop charts for this abyss of bland mediocrity. I don’t believe it has anything to do with Simon Cowell personally. I like that guy. He’s a great entertainer. He’s going to do fine with his No. 2 this Christmas. What you’re seeing is real democracy.”

Morello further elucidated that the band would be donating the unexpected royalties to the homeless charity Shelter.

‘We graciously extend the same invitation to Simon Cowell,’ he added.

Depending on your view, Rage Against the Machine’s feisty festive heist was either a delectable demolition of the X Factor No 1 juggernaut or an asinine assault on the cuddly Christmas charts. Me? I’m with the Rage. But wherever you’re coming from, there’s no getting away from the moral of the story: the behemothic power of the internet as a vehicle for social change.

Social media is as dangerous as a 9mm Glock pistol: the gun which took down Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords on January 8th, and which ended the lives of six of the people who were with her that morning in Tucson.

It depends where it’s pointing and whose finger is on the trigger.

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Comments (1)

Conversations for Change

Filed under: Blog,Communication — Jon @ 9:42 am

I first met Shawn Kent Hayashi at our Author Pow Wow early this year. Her talk at the Pow Wow, as well as her book, Conversations for Change: 12 Ways to Say it Right When it Matters Most, are about understanding communication styles, and developing your own in order to achieve objectives and strengthen relationships.

Recently, Shawn asked me a few questions about good books for leaders, and my opinions of communication that works, and doesn’t. Read our chat here, and think about how your communication style works well, and about the ways it could be improved. Then check out Shawn’s book for some great ideas on how to create your own conversations for change.

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