Superpowers we already have. Or don’t really want.

Women’s magazines regularly run survey articles about what superpowers we wish we had. Just as regularly, these article make me irritated, as the people who respond usually want powers they either already have, or really really don’t want because they haven’t thought through the consequences. Superpowers that are equivalent to absolute dictatorship are also irritating.

Herewith, my responses.

Can’t see a problem with these

I wish I could be with my mother in jail when she was arrested for civil rights work.

Other-oriented. Comforting. Not changing anyone else’s behavior. Check.
Time travel elements are always dicey, of course. Would the civil rights workers have worked any harder if they had known that an African American president was less than 50 years in the future? Probably not. Would they have given up if they thought it would take 50 years to put an African American in the White House? Also, probably not.

Grant worldwide equal rights to women

Sounds good. Say more. What would this look like and how will the various institutions have to change to make it so? How will the women be different on the other side of the power?

And when you’ve thought through all though, realize you have created the next set of seven Harry Potter – magnitude miracle stories. Start typing.  (There’s a reason people write about vampires–it’s easier than making up REAL miracles and superpowers.)

Learn new languages easily

Fact is, we can do this before we are six years old. Lots of neurological reasons why the ability goes away with age, and we’d be in bad shape if we all had the mental skills of a five-year old when we are 40. But if we could figure out how to reinstall the language learning connections into otherwise adult brains, we might have something…
It’s all that hard-shell brain casing. VERY limited real estate. I’d trade the lyrics to Hotel California for fluency in Spanish any day.

Wriggle my nose for a blast of energy

  • This woman hasn’t watched enough Bewitched; her goals are too low.
  • She can wiggle her nose? That’s a superpower all its own…

Probably a really bad idea

No sleep

Good luck with that. We don’t understand why we need to sleep, but it’s pretty universal across mammals, certainly, and most vertebrates (are sharks vertebrates?). Do you really want to be like a shark? There must be something we gain from sleep, and one of these days, we’ll understand it. Accept it.
Limits are good. Sure, you could get more done than every other woman in the car pool, but so can most meth heads, at least till their teeth fall out.

Respond with compassion, always

It’s not a superpower. It’s within you already. If you know that compassion is a possible response, than any time you don’t use it, you are making a choice, sometimes to be a bitch, at other times to simply be tired, or overwhelmed, or limited. 
Those are all fine choice and often necessary choices, IMO, but they are choices, not a lack of a superpower.  (People who have no clue that compassion is always a choice are simply ignorant {insert label here}.)

To be invisible and listen to conversations

Get a Facebook account.

To know the outcome of all the choices I have

This woman MUST be young. I don’t know that I know anyone over 40 who would wish this on themselves. Two words: Christopher Reeve.
Behavioral economics tells us that we are always happier with the choices we make than the alternative, because we’re wired to think that way. In other words, no matter what you decide or which choice you make, it’s the right one. There: I’ve granted a superpower.

The ability to manipulate time

You already have it. Thinking “time” is something outside of yourself, and an enemy that’s keeping you from enjoying your life is like thinking the problem with hoarding is a house that’s too small.

The facility to fly

I could get to Italy by this time tomorrow if I really wanted to go. Everything standing in the way of travel is real-world, not “superpower” related. Make it happen. (Suggestion: start with a passport.)

Components of a Decision Support System

Traditionally, the term “decision support system” is used to describe tools with some computer component to help people, usually managers, identify and evaluate options when faced with a complicated decision.  However, you don’t need a computer to use all the components of a decision support system.  A number of brain-based ways of thinking about decisions can be useful and are often much more accessible.  What you need is a way to systematically think through possible outcomes of your choices and compare the relative benefit of each.

10 Minutes, 10 Months, 10 Years

Suzy Welch’s book, 10-10-10, helps you think about the future outcome of decisions you need to make:  what will the outcome be in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years?  (Mixed reviews on Amazon; I found the book helpful.)  Many times, what appears to be more important in 10 minutes (finish the assignment) has a different outcome in 10 years (get more exercise).

Some of the books reviewers think this system is nothing but common sense, without acknowledging that “common sense” is the least common of all the senses.  Other reviewers, including me, realize that regularly thinking through the long term outcome of any of our daily decisions can be a discipline.

Her system gets a little complicated if you have to decide between more than two options or a “go-don’t go” situation.

Round the Clock

When I read Peter Bregman’s post about Visualizing Failure on the HBR blog this morning, I was reminded of another, brain-based, decision support tool I use called “round the clock.”

To use the Round the Clock system yourself, draw a circle on a blank sheet of paper.  Mark at least the quarter hour positions, at 12, 3, 6, and 9.  Now, close your eyes and imagine the best outcome possible for the decision you face.  Make a note of that outcome at the 12 position.

Next, imagine, per Visualizing Failure, the worst possible outcome, given the realistic facts of the choice you are considering.  This outcome goes at the 6 position.

Next, imagine two, different, outcomes, halfway between best possible” and “worst possible.”   One is more good than bad, one is less great and a little more difficult, but neither should be a total failure of the concept.  These outcomes belong at the 3 and 9 spots, respectively.

If your facts and imagination will accommodate you, keep going–differently successful, or un-, outcomes at each of the numbers on the clock face.  However, many decisions only need the major four positions covered, before you understand what course of action you need to take.

If you’re still not sure, give yourself a day to think about the worst possible outcome that you can imagine.  What exactly would that be like?  What warning signals would the situation provide to you, that could indicate a need for a change in plan?  Is it true, like one commenter suggested (admittedly as a very unlikely outcome), that:

What if you quit your job to start your dream company, and you fail, lose all of your money, can’t get another boring job, lose your house, can’t support your family, your family disowns you, you end up on the street, you acquire some deadly disease, and are homeless.

Equating “not starting your dream company” with “homelessness” is an awfully big leap.  Very few people make that leap in one step.  Very few people wind up homeless, as a result of entrepreneurial failure alone, although sometimes stories about business failure make for better cardboard signs than stories about other causes of homelessness.

If you’re pretty sure that your family would not disown you, or that you would find some job any job if your business could not provide the income you needed, then your “worst case outcome” is NOT homelessness, and “living on the street” should not be in the 6:00 position.

You may want to make a note of any warning signs you thought about as you imagine the worse case scenario.

Outcomes are Unknowable

The truth is, any outcome reasonably far into the future, involving other people, is pretty much unknowable from the start.  If it were a 100% sure thing, you wouldn’t need to put your idea through the components of a decision support system, by evaluating individual steps and outcomes against what you know about the world.

We know from research in a number of fields that people are pretty bad about predicting accurately.  However, most people are actually reasonably good at responding to out-of-the-blue unexpected events.  What hurts emotionally are the events that are completely predictable, that we didn’t predict, often because we became too attached to one potential outcome too quickly.

When you do a round-the-clock exercise, you have an opportunity to consider and document the warning signs that could appear along the way, telling you that your path is leading to a 6:00 outcome rather than the noon version in your best dreams.

Similarly, if you regularly practice 10-10-10 thinking, it’s much less likely that you’ll turn around on your next “0” birthday and say, “I sure  wish I’d exercised more…”  At the very least, you’ll understand that you made decisions in favor of some other outcome along the way.

Make a decision to decide…

Big decisions can be intimidating.  Using the components of a decision support system, even with pencil, paper, and your imagination, can cut a big decision into much more manageable parts.   All you need is a way to systematically think through possible outcomes of your choices and compare the relative benefit of each.

 

 

Organizing Your Website Files

I recently changed a licensing arrangement I had with a provider and needed to make sure I had all of their trademarked content off this website. I was a bit at a loss–there’s a lot of content here. I use WordPress to manage it all, and WordPress does not play well with paper. I suspected there must be a way to dump my content to a flat file that I could search for any of the controlled keywords, and after asking around on forums, I found it:

Export to Text

Export to Text is a nifty little plug in that takes content and meta data from posts and pages in a WordPress site and exports them to an MS Excel *.csv file.  VERY handy.

I exported my site and spent a day or two searching for the relevant words, hunting through pages that were in draft, published, published but private, published but not linked to, and otherwise hidden from easy access.  I could mark up the paper list as I worked through each page.  Along the way, it was easy to check for <title> and <description> tags, because that information was exported.  As I went, I could make notes on the paper copy about changes, links, and rearrangements that need to happen some time in the future.

I had to ask more than a few people before I found the plugin.  Perhaps most of my WordPress friends don’t need to review all their content, or maybe they’ve found an in-app solution that works.  If you know that paper has advantages that WP doesn’t yet offer, look at Export to Text.

Daydream Believer

Daydream Believer

Several days ago, I saw a request on the HARO email asking about business owners who daydreamed and how forced themselves to quit daydreaming and get to work.  IMO, “daydreaming” and “work” are not mutually exclusive.

I don’t know how businesses get created without a dream.  Business starts with an idea, and any way you label it, “ideas” aren’t too far from “daydreams.”

The trick, which is probably what was driving the reporter’s question, lies in turning the idea into reality.

For me, the first step between a dream and reality is writing.  Some people have their best ideas in the shower.  I have my best ideas with a pen in my hand.  Once I recognize I’m in a “day dream” (and, of course, not driving at the same time), I’m writing.  It helps that I write for a living, and paper and pencil are never far out of my reach.  Write the story.

  • What is it that I am thinking about?
  • What do I want to have happen as the outcome?
  • Who’s starring in the latest drama?
  • Why have I cast the story with these players?

Sometimes, simply writing a daydream is enough.  I’ll see, “Oh, I’m still processing XYZ______,” and make a note to discuss the issue next time I talk with the person involved, and poof, the story is gone.

Sometimes, however, I’ll see something bigger.  “Hum,” I thought, the last time this happened, when I found myself dreaming about teaching a class on a topic I know well but never thought to teach. “If she’s never thought of that approach, (this particular “she” is an expert on developing and implementing goals), then maybe this IS new material and maybe I should follow up on it….  Maybe this is a new way of looking at the problem!”

After I write out the story and identify the core elements, the daydream transforms itself into one more business idea.  It needs to be worked into my project list and acted upon, and grown into something that can be sold.  David Allen, of Getting Things Done fame, made his fortune working in this space.

The Universe Baits its Hooks with Daydream Bait

One way to explain daydreams is “universe bait”—God, maker, source; your choice of name—wants to have something created, and dangles hooks baited with ideas in front of our minds.  Those ideas first present as daydreams.  What if …?  Wouldn’t it be great if….?”  I wonder what would happen if …?  If we don’t actually take the bait, the idea moves on, and someone else takes the hook, implements, and turns an idea into reality.  In business, that usually means income.  When that happens, we’re left on the sidelines, saying, “But I had that idea last year!”

I have to admit, I used to be someone whose air castles stayed evanescently in the air, never descending to intersect with my real ilfe.  “Wouldn’t it be perfect if…”, I could go on for hours.  I’d exhaust myself.  Once I started writing out the stories, it wasn’t long before I noticed ideas starting to grow in new directions.  When I committed a train of thought to paper, the next step would appear.  I saw a knitted rug in a book and thought, “I could make that,” and I did.  I’ve since made 72, and sold 40.  Similarly, a thought that ran, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could take this Chatlist outside into my carving tent?” turned into the book Carve Smart a year later.

Two new books are cued up and waiting for me to take the next step.  The goad that will get me over the “it’s too hard” hump is imagining how irritated I will be if I see those ideas, written by someone else, on the shelf at Barnes & Noble.

When I hear people talking “air castle talk,” I don’t suggest they stop. Instead, I ask, “what does the foundation look like?”  They look at me with a blank stare, so I go on.  “What’s the first thing you would need to do if you wanted to live that life?”  A rock-star wannabe girlfriend needs to take guitar lessons.  Her dream of performing in Madison Square Gardens may never happen, but she’ll be a whole lot closer when she knows four guitar chords.  It may turn out that she’s called to be some very different kind of performer, and the universe only dangled the rock concert in front of her because it knew she’d jump at that bait.  She won’t know until and unless she learns to play.

Daydreams outlast dreamers

Ten years ago, a friend was forced to leave her new house because of Black Mold.  She had an agonizing two years of health problems, followed by two moves and attempted remediation, before the problem was solved with a new house.  She dreamed of telling her story on Oprah.  She contacted the producers of the show, but she never heard back.  One woman, one house?  Oprah likes to hear from movements, not individuals.  It’s possible that a different first step—a notice in the grocery store, or Craig’s List, looking for other people affected by mold, suggesting a meeting, self-help, activism–could have been the start of a national movement.  She’ll never know.  Her life moved on.  I just checked today, and there is a “Moms Against Mold” website, started by someone else, several years after my friend’s story.  The idea was in the universe, waiting to be developed.

There are two paths away from “not daydreaming:”

  • Not dreaming
  • Implementing the dreams and making them real

Only one of them has any value.  I can’t stop daydreaming.  I can learn to become faster at taking the hook and building foundations under my air castles.  It’s a nice life.

Where’s the Willpower Store?

According to a number of long-term studies quoted in The Key to Health, Wealth and Success: Self-Control in Time magazine’s health website, children who exercised more self-control when they were four years old earned more income and did better in school 20 years later, than their peers who exercised less self-control.

It doesn’t take much social awareness to understand that people who exercise more self-control, as a rule, do better in life. Perhaps, years ago, the impulsive and quick to act survived better than the careful thinkers.  Perhaps they lived when the prudent, thoughtful person was killed by the sabertooth tiger. Today, we’re far more likely to die as a result of impulsive actions, then of taking a moment or two to think through our options.

Marshmallow Study

Widely known as the “marshmallow study,” scientists at Stanford looked at whether children could resist eating one marshmallow right in front of them.  If they could resist eating the one, they got two marshmallows 15 minutes later. As reported in Time Magazine, the study doesn’t say anything about what you could do today if you happen to be one of the children who ate the marshmallow quickly. It also doesn’t say anything about whether the children who could resist simply didn’t like marshmallows.

I can resist coconut frosted cupcakes until the cows come home. I can resist a lot of things I don’t like. The problem is resisting the things you do like.

The article was actually quite depressing. Apart from saying that 7% of the children appeared to be able to improve their self-control over the course of their lives, the researchers (at least as quoted in Time) had no suggestions to make.  However, people who study how people change know that there are a lot of interventions any individual can make to improve his or her own outcome in life.

No Willpower Store

There is no willpower store. If you find yourself saying, “I simply don’t have enough willpower,” it’s not like you can go somewhere and buy more.

The truth is, you already have enough. People who can resist temptation use strategies that are entirely different from the behaviors used by the people who succumb. A different report of the same study, covered in the New Yorker magazine a year earlier, provides direction.

If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”

In other words, you can learn how to use the willpower you do have in a direction that’s useful.

Willpower is not about resisting. Willpower is actually about moving towards something else. It is very much easier to take action in the direction of a contradictory goal, then it is to stand still and resist the pull of something attractive, that isn’t in your overall best interest.

The twelve-step programs that fight active addictions work, in part, not by telling their members to stand outside the bar and not go in, but by teaching new and very different behaviors that have nothing to do with alcohol.  People who learn live without addictive substances develop lives that intersect very much less with drugs and alcohol.

People who stand around the buffet line at a crowded party are very much likely to eat more calories than the people who take a plate of healthy food and move to the other side of the room, sitting down in a low soft couch that’s difficult to get out of.

We know that telling people about savings rates and the benefits available to them in a 401(k) match does little to increase the savings rate of any corporate employee pool. What does work is changing the default. If people are automatically signed up for 401(k) deduction when they start at a new job, everyone saves more.  When you select restaurants that don’t have an “all-you-can-eat buffet,” or that don’t put chips and bread on the table when you arrive, you will probably eat much less than you will if you spend your entire mealtime using willpower to resist the basket of chips.

If you don’t have enough willpower, it’s usually because you’re trying to use it as “won’t power.” The truth is, humans have very very little “won’t power,” and enormous reserves of willpower. People who successfully use willpower focus on something they are moving toward, not on something they are trying to resist.

If you’re trying not to eat cupcakes, and cupcakes are in the room, it’s going to be hard. Even if you successfully resist the cupcakes, chances are you will use up all of your resistance for the day, and then succumb to some other temptation later that afternoon. However, if you ignore the cupcakes by engaging in a different activity that has nothing to do with eating, you will find that your small steps toward the new goal actually create more energy and resolve.

“Won’t power” quickly depletes and runs dry.  Willpower, appropriately applied, replenishes itself every time it is used.

Have you replaced “won’t power” with will power?  Let me know in the comments.

Innovation in a Be Here Now Model

Showing my age in that title, no?

I spent most of December rethinking what services belong under the Red Tuxedo umbrella. I’m really comfortable working with innovation design processes, change management and staying changed, metrics, and the intersection of behavioral economics and marketing (to the extent they’re not the same arena, as some marketers suspect). Created seven huge mind maps about these topics and my plan is to turn some of those notes into articles, blog posts, and possibly, products.

At this very minute, I’m not quite sure how the notes will turn into a business. That’s not the point of today’s post; and neither is it the point of the work itself. I’m letting the process tell me who the clients will be. I have some ideas, based on what I already know about the business world and who might benefit from this information:  patent lawyers, for one, actuaries, CPAs, and other degreed professionals whose gifts don’t often run to marketing or process design. But that’s just what I understand today, and it may change.

A business advisor told me that the next step would be for me to go out and meet these people and find out what was on their minds, what problems they had, and what they services they would be willing to pay for. I’m not surprised that I resisted; could have simply ignored the suggestion, although that would have been awkward to handle conversationally. It’s not where the work is, yet.  The work needs to be written; now, first, before I try to take it public. (I want to capitalize “work,” but Byron Katie uses “The Work” to describe her process and I don’t want to step on those toes.)

When I think about this decision point in terms of innovation and design processes, I can see that:

  • Not going public is one way on not “failing fast,” by not getting feedback
  • You can’t innovate through focus groups. Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have told me, ‘faster horses!'”
  • Ideas need protection in their early stages.  The first sign of green rarely looks like the adult plant.

“‘Seeing what happens next’ is not a business strategy,” my advisor said. “Yes, it is,” I answered. Given that we cannot ever predict the future in all its detail, “seeing what comes next” is what we always wind up doing, regardless of what additional actions we take. Sometimes we poke the bear by taking action, and call it “business strategy.” Sometimes we just watch to see what the bear will do on his own. (Your bear may be different from mine.) In the end, we always get an opportunity (unless we’re dead) to see what happens next. For that matter, plenty of people believe that being dead is the ultimate vision of “what happens next.” I’m simply choosing not to poke the bear right now.

Thus far, my writing reveals that I have more research to do. Hum. Ideas are always perfect, until you try to implement or execute on them. That’s when things get really interesting, at least if you understand creativity. So my ideas aren’t as perfect as I’d like to think they are. I’ll stay with them. I’ll post most here, or at www.hiringhowto.com, or at karentiede.com (my art blog) as they take form.

It’s not that I think I have such a great process, exactly. Like Churchill said about democracy, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Innovation by “being here now” may not be the “best” process.  It isn’t what they say happens in Silicon Valley, or what Wall Street invests in. But when you’ve tried everything else, it doesn’t hurt to use what’s left. Stay tuned.

Feel free to share your experience with “let it be” innovation in the comments–thanks!

Print to Edit Your Content, Before Publishing.

Last week, I paid a writing coach a small chunk o’change to give me some guidance about creating content.  It feels like it takes too long to create the material that makes up my business life, from home study courses to blog posts to comments in the blogosphere.  I want to be faster.

As part of her coaching package, Ali Luke will review and edit up to 2000 words of your writing, so I sent her links to three substantial blog posts.  She pasted the content into MS Word and then used Word’s “comment” feature to share her thoughts about my material.

Friends, I am a bit miffed.  Her editorial comments were useful, and actionable (good “business” word there), and except for one or two tiny typos, substantial.  What struck me is that I probably would have seen most of the edits myself if I had printed the content onto paper and read my own material on the couch first.  I can make these edits for free.

To be true, Ali and I are 25 years apart in age, so she has an eye for my tendency to preach in a way that perhaps my peers wouldn’t sense.  That is good stuff.  And I’m not in any sense denying the value of her editorial suggestions–the fact is, I hadn’t seen the sticky spots she pointed out, and the posts are better for the changes.

Before I work with her again, however, I plan to print out all my site content, double-spaced, and sit down on the couch with a green pen (kinder on self than red) to edit and mark it up.  Then we’ll see what she has to say about flaws I can’t see myself, rather than sticky spots I would have seen had I looked.

Doing a “preview” out of WordPress and looking at the content on the screen is simply not the same thing at all.

In the course of preparing Hiring is Hard:  How to Hire Your Third Employee for release, I printed the entire document (150+ pages) at least three times.  I used a professional printer, so that I could get the document bound.  Reading a “real” manual made the needed edits jump out at me in a way they simply didn’t when I looked at the material on the screen.

It may be that people who learned to write on computers have a different editing process, and that printing, for them, is a waste of time.  Can’t say.  All I know is that for those of us who learned to type on manual typewriters, who thought correcting Selectrics were simply the greatest thing since sliced bread, printing out a blog post and taking a good look at it with an editorial eye while you sit on the couch can do wonders for your internet expert status.

Creating High-quality Audio Files

I drive about 500 hours a year, and I listen to audio files most of the time I’m in the car, especially when I’m on the longer legs of a journey.  I listen to lots of “how to be in business” content, as well as the occasional fiction; recently, I discovered college classes available for free from Open Yale.  At 500 hours a year, a body gets a feel for what makes a good audio file and those courses from Yale crystallized my thinking. Here are some suggestions that can make your audio files easier to listen to, and perhaps, therefore, easier for your listeners to recommend to their friends.

File naming

Remember that MP3 players sort and display by the Title field, while many people work with their files by file name. Ideally, the two should be the same. If you are selling a series of files to your listening audience, it can be helpful to select file Titles that alpha-sort in the correct replay order. If you want your listeners to be able to select your file from a list in their player, you may want to think about including your name (or business name, or series name) in the file name. We your listeners are more likely to remember that we wanted to listen to “that latest download from John Gold” than we are to remember exactly what he called it.
We have the length of a red light to find the file. You can help us find your file, or not. We’ll listen to whatever comes next on the player when the light turns green if we haven’t found your file yet. (In addition, if your listeners are likely to be wearing reading glasses, they may not be able to see the display clearly anyway. The shapes of names we know are more easily recognized than the shapes of words in a title we don’t remember.)

Technical tweaks

  1. Repeat the name, host and basic identification information of the call after you start the recording. It’s disconcerting to be dumped into a conversation with no way to verify which file queued up next in the MP3 player, esp. when your listener may have loaded a dozen MP3 files onto a player at one time, and be driving on the highway while listening.
  2. If the call belongs to a series or package, identify its unit within the package.
  3. If the call has any kind of seasonal content, identify the at least the month or time of year during the introduction.
  4. Please please please put a large audience on auto-mute. Unless audience members have practice participating in large corporate conference calls, your call-in audience hasn’t learned to keep their own phone on mute. We, the listeners of your recorded product, do not want to hear you asking users to “press *6” a dozen times as people turn away from your content to address their own lives. I decided against purchasing a collection of one vendor’s products because the vendor managed “group mute” so badly on the free example audio files.  I lost access to her content.  She lost access to my $250.
  5. Lock your own dog up.
  6. Make sure the conference call software does not audibly announce hangups. It’s embarrassing to hear people drop off in the middle of the call and the speakers working not to pay attention to tones announcing that one more person got bored and left the call.
  7. Listen to the prompts your conference call software gives when you put the audience on and off all-mute. “Presentation mode enabled” takes eight syllables to convey two syllables of information: mute on.
  8. Consider your vocal volume, particularly for female speakers. The older your audience, the more likely they are to have some hearing loss. Please adjust your recording volume so that they can increase the playback volume on the audio file, if needed. More than one MP3 file is inaudible in parts to me because the speaker allows her voice to get very soft.  (Few files recorded by men have this problem.) I am already have the volume cranked all the way up. (People who sell much more product record at a louder volume, and I am able to adjust the volume on their files downward.)
    Note: It turns out that some conference call software has trouble with the volume for “remote hosts,” that is, when the voices of two people in different locations both matter to the quality of the call. (This is less important in a Q&A setting, where the host can always (and should) repeat the question.)
  9. About those Umms and Uhhs: listen to yourself before you distribute the call. You will give a better impression of your expertise if you edit them out. Better yet, learn how not to use filler words and phrases in the first place: See the post, “Umms in Public Speaking” for a simple and easy-to-implement fix.

Content considerations

It’s highly probably that the worst offenders will not see themselves in the following items, in part because they have never given the matter serious consideration.  Here’s a hint:  they call it content for a reason.

Fill your audio file with CONTENT.  Real information, steps, facts, your experience, perhaps even stories.  Dale Carnegie teaches the “incident, point, benefit” model for public speaking and it works.  Following any of a number of similar models helps speakers stick to the point.  Read Made to Stick and check your transcripts against Chip and Dan Heath’s six factors.
Get the “I love us all, aren’t we great” welcome messages out of the way before you start the recording. I don’t want to hear very much at all about how fantastic, unique, special, devoted, determined, or any other adjective describing the audience, we all are for having the wisdom, good sense, foresight, judgment, or lack of productive alternatives to be on the call today. Chances are, I couldn’t make the live call and I’m listening to the recording some months later anyway.

Consider carefully before veering off into opinion or advice that you are not linking to a specific situation or incident.  Very few speakers are skilled enough to deliver useful opinions into the ether.  (I might add that few professional commentators are, either, but I don’t buy their files and they don’t read my blog.)

Interviews are particularly vulnerable to this problem.  The host says, “tell us what you think about creating products….” and the guest goes off into, “Well, you have to work really hard to figure out what your audience wants…” and “then you may not sell very well if you don’t get your launch right…” and “people want to do joint ventures with me but they don’t bring a good game to the table…” and on and on and on.  I yearn for a audio file transcript that I could edit with a red pencil, crossing out entire paragraphs of rambling opinion that fails to educate.

Here’s another hint:  I don’t care what you think.  I care about what you know, and about what you did, and what happened, and possibly about what you would do differently next time, as long as you can point to the reasons you would try something different.

I grew painfully conscious of rambling in audio files after listening to Kelly Brownell at Yale talk about food politics for semester.  In 30 hours of audio downloads, Dr. Brownell and his guest speakers don’t waste a sentence on unsubstantiated opinion; every lecture is full of tangible facts and real information about food as we produce and consume it around the world today.  Similarly,  Ben Polak, although inclined to a few filler words and phrases, manages to deliver his understanding of Game Theory week after week without diverging into unsupported opinion.

I came back to “amateur” audio files with a shock as I found myself daydreaming not long into a call.  I couldn’t have told you what the host and guest were saying.  The third time it happened, I caught on.  The speakers weren’t saying anything–that was the problem.  It was just opinion, and advice, and telling us to work hard, and be original, and this, and that, and other rambling.

Phooey.  Give me Game Theory if you can’t give me real marketing.  At least Game Theory can explain elections.

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.

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.

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