April 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment

You are (so) not in charge

I listen to a lot of internet marketing advice, and I subscribe to blogs about productivity and email management, and I hear advisers telling me to “train my readers to open my email” and “plan your mailing to get your email opened” and “manage the customer experience” and all sorts of other blather that’s beginning to go a bit stale. You are not in charge of the customer experience. You can do a good bit to help the customer have a better experience in doing business with you, and most of us in business should probably do more. But you are not in charge. You are (so) not in charge.

I’ve heard, and perhaps I’ve even given, advice to be cautious about accepting requests from Linkedin Connections who “don’t write a personal note.” I teach this stuff. OK. Today, Linkedin went off on a jag of its own, and sent out 12 requests for connection without offering me the opportunity to customize the message in any way. Oops. Better eat those words quietly. I was completely ready to customize the message, to “hide email addresses from recipients” so they wouldn’t be able to tell it was a group request (cross check against my Gmail address book), even to send the requests individually. But no. Linkedin jumped in and ran. And now 12 new people “think” I’m a goober who can’t be bothered to write a tailored introduction.

Maybe I’ll never write a tailored intro again, and simply default to the canned message, and then I’ll find out who thinks they “control the customer experience” according to who refuses the connection.

In a second example, I received a “request for confirmation” (opt-in) email from someone I’d purchased products from six months ago. I wrote to ask why I was getting this opt-in message now, when I’d been on his mailing list for a good while. He replied that he was changing providers and the new provider required a confirmation (which is, by the way, good practice). I replied that he could have included that fact in the requesting email.

Four days later, I found his first email, buried in my in-box. He had explained everything. However, I hadn’t seen it. Now, on one hand, I’m the fool, for replying with a pointed suggestion. OTOH, he sent two emails where one would do, doubling the chances of a misfire. We’re even.

The larger lesson? Be careful about drawing larger lessons when technology is involved.

I’m probably not the only person with friends who read email on their phones, who regularly DON’T see the second paragraph because they have replied to your first paragraph quickly. Clearly, Linkedin has different data flows, depending on how you come into the system. There’s probably a switch in my email application that would make it process “read” and “unread” in a different direction, rather than marking “unread” items as “read” in the wrong direction according to my habits, and maybe I’ll go look for it.

Or maybe not.

Filed Under: Design 745.4, Process 153
April 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Knowledge, or Imagination?

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Albert Einstein

Why is it that the man known for his art and imagination reveres knowledge, while the man known for his science and knowledge reveres imagination? A quick search of the first pages of Google failed to turn up the text of the original Saturday Evening Post article (“What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck,” October 26, 1929, The Saturday Evening Post) which carried the interview with Einstein. I’d love to read the question that prompted his reply. It’s quoted everywhere; IMO, by people who could stand to invest in a bit more knowledge that supported their imagination. Wikipedia doesn’t hesitate:

In various spheres, however, even imagination is in practice limited: thus a person whose imaginations do violence to the elementary laws of thought, or to the necessary principles of practical possibility, or to the reasonable probabilities of a given case is regarded as insane.

Filed Under: Creativity 154, Leadership 303
March 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Frustrated Frugality

I can, in some cases, be exceedingly careful and frugal with my money; not all the time or I’d be considerably more well-off.  I set the thermostat at 80 in the summer and 65 in the winter.  I save the clean water that runs while it gets hot and use it to fill the dog bowls.  I saved spare change and increased my downpayment on my own home by 1.5%, enough to put me in a different category for PMI. 

Then the lid caves in on the septic tank in my rental property, and I discover it’s possible to spend $1500 before 9 AM on a Monday morning.  That’s hard to do.  House closings don’t start that early.  Stores that sell expensive merchandise don’t open that early.  Car dealers aren’t open before 9 AM.  The repair person showed up with a backhoe at 6 AM and the new tank was delivered at 7 and a good bit of the dirt was pushed back by 9 and I signed the check and they all left.  I suppose I could offer the fill dirt for sale, but not until the earth pushed into the old tank has thoroughly settled, and it takes a LOT more dirt than I have on hand to make up a $1500 bill.

It may have been possible to prevent this problem.  The last owner of the house told me where the tank was.  We took her word for that and carefully avoided parking on that part of the yard.  She was wrong.  The current tenant has parked where the tank actually was, and eventually, the lid cracked, taking enough of the tank with it to prevent repair by replacing just the lid. An entirely new tank, taking up a huge section of the yard was the only solution.

There is no discount fix for a broken septic tank.  There is no DIY solution, either.  The only answer is writing big checks to people who have access to and know how to use big equipment.  I am practicing gratitude, for knowing plumbers who return calls, who know the guys that can replace septic tanks, who show up ready to work at 6:00 AM on a Monday morning, even if that means they’re operating a backhoe before I have a chance to mark the gas line.  I can try more gratitude for its being July, so the gas was not flowing at the time the backhoe sliced through the line.

I don’t want to say “now I’ve replaced every system in that house,” because it’s still running on its first central air conditioning unit.  But when I read David Giffels’ All the Way Home, I could identify.  It’s never done.  There’s only so much money you can save.

Filed Under: How to 680 Tagged With: ,
March 10, 2010 By 2 Comments

Counting and Dental Floss: Measuring Productivity

Today’s post at Productive Flourishing, Charlie Gilkey’s blog about productivity, was written by Ali Hale, who gets paid to write blog posts. She writes about a woman’s approach to the Cult of Productivity, in which everything is counted and optimized, often at the expense of experiences that don’t quantify well. Ali suggests (excessive) “counting” is a masculine approach to productivity. Certainly, counting is a left-brain skill.

I like to count; I feel a little better when I start a week with fewer items on my to-do list (287 this week) than the week before (316). I also recognize sometimes I will manipulate the numbers by not adding items to the list until I do the weekly clearing of completed items. This would be cheating if I were a public company. I counted LOC (lines of code, a unit of measure in the software industry) for years.

I’m all for maximizing the use of my time, and I regularly (and somewhat legitimately) multi-task. Much of what was traditionally “women’s work” (sewing, knitting, housework) supports concurrent conversation. OTOH, one story has stuck with me for several years:

A young boy gave a report at school:

If you (do this productivity thing) regularly, you’ll save fifteen minutes a day, and at the end of the year, you’ll have an extra 3 1/2 days saved up!*

Even though most of us in the personal productivity trade will argue that “time compounds,” we all have to admit that saving time doesn’t work quite the same way saving money does.

But I do catch myself verifying. For example, is flossing worth it? When the payoff for regular flossing was a bit less time with the hygienist, the long-term benefit wasn’t so clear. When a friend died of a heart attack, very young, and I knew dental problems may have been a factor, I rethought the equation.

Allow one minute a day for flossing.
365 x 1 minute x (50 years**) = 18250 adult lifetime minutes = 304 hours = 12.6 days.

Lost time recovering from major heart surgery***:
At least 3 months for the patient alone, not counting time lost by the family.

Flossing is the more productive use of time.

*Both Andrew Tobias and StoryPeople have been asked if they are the source of the story and denied authorship; I’d love to know who wrote this story.

**Allowing that many people have that “wake up and smell the coffee” moment around age 30.

***While once-a-day flossing is “good enough,” the equation works even for people who floss three times a day. There’s no guarantee that a person would only have one major cardio-surgery in a lifetime.

Filed Under: Metrics 389
March 3, 2010 By 2 Comments

Umm… Uhh…

There’s a simple solution to the non-words “umm” and “uhh” in public speaking*:  it is virtually impossible to “umm” and “uhh” when you are making eye contact with a specific person.

Umms and uhhs happen when you look at your notes, the wall, the ceiling, the floor, or a crowd = collective, not crowd = individual therein. They never happen while you are looking directly at another person’s eyes. Try it for yourself. Observe how people make eye contact when they speak, or don’t, at the next meeting you attend.

If you’re on the phone, look at a picture of a real person. (Caveat: make sure the person in the picture is someone who elicits appropriate vocabulary for the call. You don’t want to accidentally slip into baby talk during a marketing presentation.) In a pinch, speaking to a drink bottle or a coffee cup, pretending it has eyes, will do, but a picture of a real person is better.

*Some people in the online business community don’t realize that recording a teleclass or webinar to create an audio file for subsequent sale is effectively the same thing as public speaking. While a live audience may forgive Umms and Uhhs and the doubleplay “umm and,” people who listen to the content while driving find the filler words slamming into their brain like bricks. Look at a picture of a business colleague. SPEAK to that picture. The number of filler words in your audio file will decrease dramatically. (See the post, Creating High-quality Audio Files, for additional tweaks that will make your files sound more polished and professional.)

You can substitute your dog for a person; dogs cooperate more than cats. Fish are useless.

The first time you try to make eye contact with a real person when and every time you speak, your eyes will hurt by the end of the day. Then, you’ll start noticing how few people make eye contact all the time.

Spread the word. Make eye contact when you do it.

We discovered this solution in Powerful, Persuasive Speaking, a two-day class presented by Alan Hoffler of Mills Wyck Communications. If being more persuasive would help you be more effective in your work or vocation, we cannot recommend this class enough.  In my session, one professional (NSA) and one pretty good amateur speaker both observed marked improvement in delivery skills.  People with no prior training in public speaking made amazing improvements.

Filed Under: How to 680, Leadership 303
February 24, 2010 By 1 Comment

Twitter for brick and mortar businesses

I’m not, at this moment, a Tweeter.

I listen to and read about discussions of how it’s possible to use twitter to grow your online reputation; that it’s vital for companies to have the instant reputation management that Twitter facilitates, and that “Twitter is where the conversation is happening.”

OK. I am not sure what all of this means, or that I need to participate.

However, one sentence in one conference call floated out of the ether onto my notepad:

What most people don’t realize is that Twitter for off-line, non-personality-based businesses is an entirely different animal.

Naomi Dunford, in an Ittybiz Speakeasy call, late in December 2009.

I post this simply to have the statement in an accessible place to which I can send clients who are also baffled by Twitter.

Filed Under: Twitter
February 10, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Blog Categories, Taxonomy, and the Dewey Decimal System

Ever pondered the list of blog categories any particular author uses to aggregate his or her posts?  Ever tried to categorize your own?  Easy, the first time or two.  But before you have very many posts at all, you have almost as many categories and you can’t quite remember why you put any one post in any particular category in the first place.

In an attempt to maintain some control and consistency in this website’s categories, I thought about who had been “doing categorization” longer than blogs have been around–librarians.  I spend more time in the local public library system than I do in university libraries, so the Dewey Decimal System was a natural choice.  I copied off the categories from Wikipedia and started editing the list, removing the topics I am pretty sure I’ll never write about.

The list itself makes for interesting reading:

000 Computer science
001 Knowledge
002 The book
003 Sex
004 Data processing & computer science
005 Computer programming, programs & data
010 Bibliographies

Now, I can see how “sex” and “the book” fall into nearby branches of a taxonomic tree, but I suspect a lot of people would be more likely to link “sex” and “the TV,” if they had to pick a communications medium.  Suddenly, a possible source of the idea for the movie Lars and the Real Girl takes shape.  (An aside:  see the movie if you’ve ever worked as, or near, computer programmers.  Also recommended is The IT Crowd, a comedy TV series from the BBC.)

Moving to the next set of shelves, we come to Philosophy.  While I might be seen to have a somewhat philosophical approach to some areas of my life, it’s not a topic I spent any time on in school.  The topic might well be served by deleting everything but the top level identifier.  (Missing numbers indicate the list has already been pruned.)

100 Philosophy & psychology
110 Metaphysics
114 Space
115 Time
116 Change
117 Structure
118 Force & Energy
119 Number & quantity
120 Epistemology
126 The self
127 The unconscious & the subconscious
128 Humankind
129 Origin & destiny of individual souls
130 Paranormal phenomena
135 Dreams & mysteries
137 Divinatory graphology
138 Physiognomy

But darn it, there’s “graphology” (and is “divinatory” graphology different from and shelved elsewhere than forensic graphology?) near the bottom of the list, and “physiognomy,” and that’s where librarians put the “facial analysis” books (I think), and those are both interesting areas of non-scientific reading that feeds intuition. But will I actually write about them, enough to need their own category? Would readers understand the connection if I did write a post about handwriting analysis (met someone who does forensic graphoanalysis in Linkedin Answers the other day) and then categorized it under Philosophy?

Questions like this keep taxonomists up late at night.

Religion is easy. Don’t expect a lot of posts about the topic on this website and should any appear, they can all go into the same bucket.

Social Science, which is a topic I would have said I don’t cross paths with much (my clients tend to be natural scientists), contains law, education, economics, and communications. This is going to take some thought.

Language falls like religion. Not a lot of posts (given that “communications” is a subset of Social Science, not language), and any that do get written can go into one category. (Ditto Literature. Thinking about the difference between Language and Communication and Literature makes me wonder what it was like to sit in the committee meetings when the system was originally devised… Are the minutes of those meetings available, and where would they be shelved?)

Eventually, I’ll edit the list and then print a copy for the wall next to my PC, and if I’m really on top of my game, I’ll enter the categories I decide to keep into WordPress so I don’t have to think about this every time I write a post.

And then I’ll go back through what I’ve written so far and recategorize.

Filed Under: Design 745.4, Process 153
February 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Cash Register Kaizen

My corporate life was consumed by Six Sigma and process improvement.  While we rarely used the term “kaizen” (the tiny incremental changes that have been used to drive long-term improvement in factories), we nevertheless thought about the behavior constantly.  In my private practice, I support clients in the slightly more informal “Lean” office design, which is an apple that hasn’t fallen too far from the Six Sigma tree.

I was looking at my Sam’s Club receipt this morning and I noticed the sentence, “comment, continued on back…” I turned the receipt over to see: “items sold=2, the standard paragraph about doing a survey, the date and time stamp.” Although I have seen two-sided receipts before, generally they only contain standard boilerplate text that is printed before the paper is loaded into the cash register. This receipt had been printed on both sides, on the fly, as my purchases were rung. I thought about what it took to print receipts on both sides. It requires some changes in the cash register. It also required an investment in programmer’s time to write a routine that could determine how long the receipt was, then divide that length in half and print half of it on each side of the paper.

Receipts printed on two sides of paper use exactly half of the paper of standard receipts.  Sam’s Club must print an enormous lineal footage of receipt paper in the course of the business day. Halving the number of receipts they print is a guaranteed 50% reduction in the cost of receipt paper.

  • A little bit of research shows that receipt rolls cost $.40 each in boxes of 24; presumably Sam’s Club can get them, in bulk, at a lower price.
  • Additional research at my local grocery store indicated that a cashier can expect to change out a roll at least once a shift.
  • A rough estimate of register hours per business day at my local Sam’s Club yields approximately 70 hours; at eight hours per shift that’s roughly 10 shifts minimum*.
  • Wikipedia tells us that Sam’s Club had 713 locations in the United States in 2008.
  • That’s about 2 1/2 million rolls of receipt paper a year (713 stores * 10 shifts / day * *1 roll/shift * 363 days / year)
  • Allowing $.25 per roll and cutting the total in half comes to something like a $500,000 savings per year. That will buy a couple hours of programmer time**.
  • In addition to the absolute cost of paper saved, Sam’s Club would be able to save the cost of the cashier time lost to changing rolls, the customer dissatisfaction engendered by roll changing delay, the amount of paper they need to keep on hand, the cost of shipping that much paper etc. etc. and so forth.

I do what I can to be green in my life. I write on both sides of the paper. I printed on recycled paper I get from someone else’s office. I save water in the shower and I have a low flush toilet. However, it would not have occurred to me to invest very much effort at all in trying to reduce the amount of paper that goes through a cash register receipt. While I am not accustomed to thinking of the Wal-Mart empire as a bastion of traditional kaizen, I have to step back and take this little observation as inspirational. There are many tiny incremental improvements I could be making in my own life and work, things that require a small investment to get right in the first place and then reap the benefits thereafter. I will be looking harder for them.

2/2011 Update

This post was written in December of 2009.  Sometime between then and now, I met a district manager who managed 12 Sam’s Club stores.  I asked him about the value of the double-sided receipt printing.  He said, “millions.”  I have clearly underestimated all the costs of managing register tape.  One element not included in the list above is “waste.”  Clearly, register tape cardboard cores do not take up a lot of space in the trash, but Sam’s Club has made a major effort to increase the density of products they sell, thereby reducing the number of cartons they have to get rid of.  The manager told me they’d gone from twice-a-week to once-a-week trash pickup, which is a 50% reduction in hauling costs.

*Estimate derived by counting the number of registers open at the various times of day I shop.  It’s probably much higher because I will avoid the store if the parking lot is crowded, and one presumes that more registers are open when the parking lot is full.

**May we also assume the company that supplied the cash registers picked up most of the cost of making the programming change?

Filed Under: Design 745.4, Process 153 Tagged With:
February 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Leadership in Science

I went to hear Robert Langer from MIT speak at the Carolina Innovations Seminar tonight.  His bio spells out the awards and papers and degrees.  I followed a lot of the science, and most of the discussion that follow at the free-beer-and-pizza mixer after the speech.  It’s been a while since I was in the lab.  The science, while important and interesting, wasn’t really what caught my attention.

Dr. Langer mentioned 20 or 25 former post-docs and graduate students, and to a person, they were introduced as the “Endowed Chair of the XYZ Department of this major school” or “Dean of the School of Medicine at that prominent university” or CEO or CTO of a biotech company recently sold for $12B or …  I lost track.  If I’d known I was going to be writing about what he said, I would have taken better notes.

At the mixer afterward, a young man who had also noticed how Dr. Langer mentioned his former students wondered how all those smart people came to be in the same place.  I think it’s the other way around.  Those grad students and post-docs were successful because they were in that place, working with and being encouraged by a real leader, as opposed to someone who was merely the “director of the lab.”  Jack Welch had a similar effect on people who worked for him–more Fortune 500 CEOs came out of GE during his time at the company than from any other company ever.  Similarly, I recall reading that everyone at the top of GE had, at one time in their careers, worked for one man who sent each of them on to bigger jobs.

Is it that all the smart business people went to GE, and all the smart biotechies went to MIT?  To a certain extent, yes.  But I have also seen the opposite behavior.  I worked for a boss who, to the best of my recollection, never promoted anyone above himself.  I could have missed someone, of course; again, if I had known I would be writing about it these many years later, I would have kept better notes.

Dr. Langer mentioned that all the students whose grant applications were rejected in the course of tissue engineering progress had gone on to positions of significant influence in the field, while the people who rejected the applications were still reviewing, and rejecting, grants.  Funny how that turns out.  Most of us who didn’t get promoted have since left the company and gone on to interesting new opportunities.  I wonder how the manager explains that to himself?

Filed Under: Leadership 303 Tagged With:
January 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

On Notebooks

I started a new notebook this morning. It’s the latest of more than 50 (at last count*). This one is thoughts about business of Red Tuxedo, <> morning pages. It’s a 10×7, wire bound, 100% recycled paper sketchbook. I bought it last Friday evening at the bookstore specifically for this purpose — knowing I needed somewhere to write about business <> blog posts <> journal or diary or morning pages <> daily planner <> client meeting notebook. And now it starts. I’ve numbered the pages, to 31 so far, numbering only the odd numbers. I left two pages for a table of contents.

Active Notebook Inventory

  • 8.5 by 11 blank hardbound journals. Mostly, I use these for art. Textiles has three volumes, jewelry has two, color has two.
  • composition books with the black-and-white cover. I can count 14 on the shelf from where I sit. Mostly, they are full of written notes that don’t warrant a larger volume, often notes about websites I’m developing, or events that happen repeatedly but not very often, like my annual Penguin party or what I gave people for Christmas this year (and every year since I started the book in 1994.
  • Page per day record books–the green ones, they don’t have a year: I keep one for the garden and one for big events in my life so I can remember when it was that happened.
  • page per day record book, dated: I found a 1985 edition of the page a day record book, the oversized kind that costs $59.99 at Kmart today at the thrift shop in 2009. They wanted $1.50 for it. It had not been used very much at all, and I glued some blank paper over the entries I didn’t need to see. I think I have a smaller version of this book in stash from a different year.
  • Small blank books that I received as gifts. Some of these have lines. I them for health records, one for me and one for my animals, in separate volumes. I keep these records by month. It’s good to know when the newest dog was neutered,  when the cat disappeared, or when did I receive the rabies series?
  • 5.5 x 8″ blank books, with a glued spine. I used to keep my reading list in one of these notebooks, but this year I started keeping a list in MS Excel.
  • 11 x 14″ blank sketchbooks. I keep ideas for the bigger art in here, but carving and my furniture. I have four of them within reach.
  • An engineering notebook, with graph paper. I use this to sketch layout plans for furniture and construction projects, such as the installation of the rain barrel system at my house.
  • A record book with lined, eye–ease green pages that are numbered. I use this as my daily planner. I started this system in 2004.
  • Plastic portfolio books: a 8.5 x 11 for my formal art portfolio. I carry a 5 x 7 version in my purse all the time. I keep two 11 x 14 books, one for press clippings about my art and one for organizing magazine articles about different ways of managing ideas.
  • Engineering field record book with waterproof paper. I found four of these at the swap shed several years ago, and I keep one in my street fair backpack to record hoop sales.

Notebook Qualities That Matter

Notebook size. Binding. Flatness when open. Paper quality, feel, and tooth. Paper color. How the different pens that I use move across a particular paper. Whether the paper is lined (not as much fun), graph, or blank. Blank paper is the best but it’s hard to find.

Editorial

I sometimes have to smile when I see bold or extravagant or creative covers on the blank books section at the bookstore only to open the journal and find it full of neatly ruled paper. I can only assume the vendors have tested the sales of the product, and that lined paper sells much better. It is unfortunate, in my opinion, to be encouraging creativity by telling people to stay within the lines. Daytimer, the planner people, once offered blank calendars — each page had the day and date printed in the upper corner and the rest of the page was blank. I had planned to buy the set the year after I saw it in the catalog, but it was gone by the time I was ready to order. I suspect that Daytimer recognized that creative types wanted more freedom in their planner, but at the same time, creative types are perfectly capable of inventing their own planners.

Yesterday I purchased a brand-new 2006 planner for $.25 at the Habitat Re-store. I think my life would be smoother if I did a better job of planning out the shape of my week, and where I intend to get various tasks and projects done. I’m hoping to use the shape of the week inside this new book for that purpose. To that end, it doesn’t matter about the number on the day or the year; all I need is the shape.

I suppose I could get much the same benefits by printing out the week view onto a blank or recycled sheet of paper. However, you can’t ignore your own history. I like the feeling of a notebook as it fills up. I like the way the paper changes over time, with writing. I like the way the notebook gets thicker. I like the way I can flip through the filled pages and see what I’ve done, or not done; I simply like a notebook than a collection of sheets of paper. For a quarter, what do I have to lose?

Incidentally, a friend of mine once lost her ability to pursue intellectual property theft because she tore her notes out of a pad of paper before she went to her lawyer to discuss the case. Ever since then, I’ve been particularly careful to keep important notes about my business in a bound book with numbered pages. I could probably make the case that it’s the value of my own intellectual property that drives me to keep notebooks, but the fact is that I have kept them since I could write.  I have them all and I pay a mortgage on a house big enough to store them and as my BF says, “that’s how I roll.”

*I know this because I really did count them all, once. I read some creativity teacher encouraging students to get a special journal for a particular body of work, saying it was OK to have more than one. “More than one?!?,” I thought. “I must have 10!” and then I counted, and stopped at 51, in active use within reach of my desk, not counting the new or recycled notebooks in inventory, waiting for a brain storm, and that was several years ago.

Filed Under: Creativity 154, Process 153
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