Doug Kreitzberg

Atentional

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I am heading this morning to a budget meeting. If nothing else, budget meetings are full of intentions. Plans, Analysis, Forecasts, Strategies, Objectives, Tactics. Everything is triple-checked and rehearsed.

All of this is necessary. We need goals, we need plans, we need to understand what trends are out there and project how we will perform against or with them. We need to have a disciplined approach to help align our teams and make sure that we are focused on the right things that will produce the results we want.

All of this is necessary. Yet it is not enough. When we are putting together budgets, we are drawing a picture of the Future while looking squarely in the Past. We say, “this is what the Future is” and then look to what we have done to see how we will perform. That works perfectly if the Future is, indeed, the Past. But how often does that happen?

Somewhere in our plans, we need to account for the unplan. An unplan is not what you do when your plans don’t work. An unplan is what you do when you are aware of an opportunity or challenge that wasn’t contemplated in your plans, at all. These unplans can only exist if you are prepared, but more importantly, if you are aware of them. And, these unplans can be a great source of innovation that can either lead to success or stave off failure.

So, I propose that we need to have to ways of seeing or acting in the World. One, we need to see and act with intention; we need to have goals and a sense of direction and focus. At the same time, once we have set those plans into motion, we need to see and act “atentionally”; not in unintentional ways, but consciously focused beyond intention, to be aware of changes that are going on in the macro context, with your staff, with your customers, with the environment, with how relationships are shaped and nurtured. Being “atentional” is being continuously curious.

And, when you combine your goals with your curiousity, you breath life into your plans and they can take on an energy that you could not have contemplated when you just looked backwards.

So, good luck to all those working on budgets for next year. But keep in mind that sometimes the right forecast is in front of you on the spreadsheet, but in front of you when you consciously put the spreadsheet down and look both within yourself and outside the world around you.

Death by Dashboard

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Two years ago, I had all the operations in my business put together dashboards — metrics on many aspects of our business (from sales calls to retention) — that could help us understand what was working and not working before we saw the results in our P&Ls. Since then, the dashboards have been extremely helpful in focusing our attention and adding more energy and resources where needed.

But dashboards, as helpful as they might be, are no substitute for thinking broadly. Dashboards (or metrics, or formulas or whatever set of tools you have which measures your business) are constructed based on your business model, your knowledge of the model and your ability to gather data with respects to that model as it exists today. Dashboards do not discriminate between good or bad models; they simply describe it.

And what they describe are the hundreds of critical tasks that managers and employees need to pay attention to every day. These are the “Critical but not Important” tasks Stephen Covey writes about. You can’t ignore them. They need to be done. However, these tasks may not be the ones needed to deal with something unforeseen or to exploit the next new opportunity.

Most financial dashboards did not describe the financial collapse of 2008 because they were not built to describe it — it was not in their models. Likewise, many health insurance brokers are scrambling to define themselves in the new world of Health Care Reform; a world in which the old dashboards did not anticipate.

Clay Shirky writes in his blogpost “The Collapse of Complex Business Models”, that businesses begin to fail when they become too complex to deal with changing realities. I actually think it’s simpler than that. Businesses (or individuals) begin to fail when they misread the processes and metrics used to describe the success of their model for the world itself. They fail when they focus too much inward. If complexity is an issue, it’s an issue if it impedes the ability to communicate with (and receive communication from) the world outside the model. It doesn’t matter if you’re AT&T or the florist on the corner. If you’re not paying attention to how people are buying and how their buying activities are beginning to change, your business will suffer.

Don’t get me wrong. Dashboards are important; they are good at telling you whether a process is on track or not. But they can’t be confused — and they often are — as an accurate forecast tool to predict how your business overall will fare in the future. A dashboard is no substitute for strategy. Dashboards are linear, specific, measurable. The world is nonlinear, chaotic, and challenging to determine ahead of time which cause will lead to which effect.

The key is to do what is critical, but raise your eyes to look over the dashboard and really look around you. Leave time to play around with what the world tells you is important. And “play” is the operative word, because if you want to predict something which cannot be predicted, you’ll have to make up a lot of stuff (and test them out in your make-believe world) as you go along.

Who not What

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Let’s face it. It’s always all about us. The world we see is a world where we see ourselves, often only ourselves, what we want and what we do. And our self-centeredness is fine and probably necessary as some darwinian self-selected survival instinct.

But there are limitations. When we focus only on ourselves, we sometimes make the mistake that others are also focused on ourselves. We forget that they have needs and wants and may be focused on themselves. This creates problems for relationships, certainly, and also in business.

As a business grows and becomes successful, it creates an organization that initially is built to enhance and ensure future success. After a time, however, many organizations lose themselves in self-adoration; internal discussions focus on what the company does and the products it makes as opposed to the people or businesses it serves. It’s a well-worn tale. Business starts out extremely customer-focused, becomes successful because of that focus and grow processes and bureaucracies which detach strategies from the customer. Business then crumbles to more nimble-footed competition that is as focused on the customer as the original business once was.

I’ve been engaged in too many conversations recently which has been focused more on what is sold than who actually buys it. Sure, there’s talk about market segments, such as lawyers versus doctors or baby boomers versus millennials, but there’s no dimensionality to that part of the discussion; the talk about products is real and tangible — the talk about customers is vague and almost an afterthought.

Technology has provided us with tremendous and low-cost tools to engage customers and prospects as unique individuals (or businesses) with unique interests, needs and desires. But all those tools will be useless if the organization retains a culture that is more inward focused than outward, that talks about the features of its products rather than the benefits to the customer.

If you listen to, and think more about the who, the what will take care of itself.

On the Hinge

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During last week, I took the family to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  While the Museum has a lot of interesting work on display, I was particularly interested in one piece which I had read about in a book by Lewis Hyde, entitled Trickster Makes This World.  It is a work by Marcel Duchamp entitled “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors”, or “The Large Glass”.  It is indeed, a large work between sheets of glass, supported by a metal border and a piece of metal which almost looks like the hinge of a window pane running through the bottom third of the piece.  In the upper panel suspends the bride, the lower contains the bachelors.

According to Hyde, Duchamp wrote that “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors” was a “delay in glass”.  The Bride still retains an infinite number of possiblities for her life, standing on the hinge between desire and fulfillment.  Fulfillment has its advantages, to be sure, but it also has it’s drawbacks; fulfillment weds us to a choice, and choices both define and place limitations on the future.  Duchamp is not necessarily stating, “never chose”; as Hyde states, “a ‘delay’ both suspends but not suspends activity.”  The action will continue, the choice will be made.  However, Duchamp shares this moment with the viewer as if to say, “we are all brides sitting on the hinge of possibility.”  Regardless of choices we have made, or how we view ourselves — or how others view us — right now, at this moment, we still have infinite possibilities in front of us.

I find that those times I feel at my lowest is when I feel I have no choice, or that something is totally out of my control.  And yet, even during those times, if I take a moment, I do see that I have choices and there are possibilities (even if most of those possibilities simply involve changing how I feel about the situation).  When I sit, like that bride, on the hinge of possibility, eyes not filled with dreamy stars but clear and bright, my fear subsides and I make a decision with calm and confidence.

Every New Year is a time for both reflection and resolution.  Whether you are making resolutions for yourself or for your business, recognize that possibilities before you are perhaps greater than you might initially realize.  Be that bride on a hinge, stay suspended there for a moment and take wonder in the possibilities that are actually available to you.

Stay Hungry

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Thanksgiving Sunday is hardly the day to talk about keeping hungry.  If you’re like me, you’ve had three days of turkey, stuffing, potatoes and pies, plus all the weird side dishes that your mother served and that you hated growing up but now can’t do without.  You’re probably sitting in front of a TV, watching the umpteenth football game of the weekend, in a near comatose state with your hand idly swimming in an empty potato chip big.  Hungry? You’re convinced you don’t need to eat until Christmas…..wait, are those chocolate covered pretzels in that tin over there?

But, as we approach the end of this year and the beginning of another, it pays us to be hungry.  Being hungry forces you to be alert, to be dissatisfied with the way things are and to search for ways to reach your goals.  Hunger feeds desire and its energy fuels innovation.

If we remain stuffed and satisfied with ourselves and the way things are, we run the risk of losing to a faster, more agile and hungrier competition, who will be chewing our legs out from under us before we have a chance to get off the sofa.

So, pat yourself on the back for your accomplishments and be grateful for all that has been given to you.  Then, step back from the table, pause,  and think about your goals that you have yet to achieve.  Let the hunger for those goals begin to gnaw at you and you will have a new sense of awareness of how to achieve them and the commitment to actually get things done.

Surface Area

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I’m on a green tea kick and this weekend I was researching tea pots, specifically one called a Yixing tea pot.  The Yixing is a clay pot and, according to the description, because it is clay, it is porous, which means that the surface area is many times larger than a traditional teapot.  This provides, among other things, a faster heat time and the ability for the pot to retain water, or to be seasoned.
 
Of course, this got me thinking about business.  If a business is to be successful, it must be continually searching for ways to increase its surface area, to increase it’s touch points with its clients, its competitors, its vendors and its community. Businesses which focus too much within may have great processes and procedures and even a great “culture”, but are so dense that they let nothing in — whether innovation, dissention or new customers.  These type of businesses have a contracted surface area and are less adaptable to change or growth.
 
This is a danger I think every organization faces as it grows — that more time is spent on internal issues than external, and that the time spent on external issues is not adequately communicated to the rest of the organization to help overall growth.
 
The way I’ve tried to address this is by focusing on growth areas on a weekly basis; not so much as to follow up on what was to be accomplished, but to brainstorm ideas to promote growth and to communicate what’s working and not working as quickly as possible to the rest of the organization.
 
But if these discussions don’t reach out into the frontline, then you won’t take full advantage of the resources you have.  Managers need to be focused on: 1) engaging with customers and clients and frontline staff; 2) improving methods for the overall organization to engage with customers, clients and frontline staff; and 3) sharing, learning and communicating what works and doesn’t work with their peers.
 
Increasing the surface area of your organization doesn’t make you weaker.  As you know, clay has a tremendous capacity to withstand extreme heat.  It makes you stronger.
 

Pepsis not Pepsi

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There is a great TED talk given by Malcolm Gladwell (link here) in which Gladwell talks about the findings of Howard Moskowitz, a psychophysicist who has made a career out of consumer preferences.

In the early 1970’s, Pepsi asked Dr. Moskowitz to determine which percentage of Aspartame it should put into Diet Pepsi to give it the right sweetness.  Dr. Moskowitz conducted a survey of consumers drinking Pepsi with anywhere from 8% to 12% Aspartame.  When the results came back inconclusive, Dr. Moskowitz was stunned: he had expected a traditional bell curve with preferences hovering around 10% or at very least a cluster of preferences hovering around a single percentage.  Instead, there was no single cluster; the data appeared random.

Dr. Moskowitz did not believe the data was random.  After considerable thought.  He hit on it.  The answer was that people did not prefer Pepsi.  They preferred Pepsis.

Moskowitz demonstrated this when he worked with Prego in the mid to late 70’s. At the time, Ragu held the dominant market share and Prego asked Moskowitz to come up with the right type of sauce to unseat its rival.  Moskowitz asked Prego’s kitchens to come up with a multitude of varieties of sauces and then conducted tests; what he found was that people did not prefer one specific sauce, but that they tended to cluster around 3 different sauce types:  plain, spicy and extra chunky.  Ragu and Prego both had plain and spicy.  Neither had extra chunky.  Moskowitz recommended Prego introduce extra chunky and all of a sudden its market share sky rocketed.  Walk down any grocery aisle of spaghetti sauces and you will most like see 30 to 40 varieties, within the same brand.

As Gladwell states, we owe Moskowitz three key ideas: 1) the importance of horizontal segmentation (we should not segment products by least complex or expensive to most complex or expensive, rather we should segment according to the variety of attributes it may possess); 2) the fact that he democratized taste, which was based on the fact that; 3) variability is key in gaining marketshare as opposed to coming up with the “perfect” product.

In one real sense, Moskowitz proved that individuals cannot be categorized into one platonic product category; rather they have different tastes, needs and desires.  As such, companies who want to gain marketshare need to consider variety and choice in their product offering.  They cannot just offer Pepsi.  They have to offer Pepsis.

This has important implications for any business.  Instead of just focusing the the “perfect”  or “cheapest”, Moskowitz/Gladewell tells us to focus on providing an array of different product flavors based upon consumer or business preferences.  If you want to maintain or grow share, you need to offer choice which gives the product selection back to the customer where it belongs.

What are you waiting for?  Pop your favorite beverage and get to it!

A Stick of Gum

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I was on a flight yesterday from San Antonio to Charlotte.  A woman sat next to me and ahead of us were, it seemed, her parents. As we were taking off, the woman pulled out a pack of gum, offered a stick to each of her parents and turned and offered me one.

It was, as the cliche goes, a random act of kindness, without strings. And it made me think, that’s what a stick of gum is for.  To share.  When people pull out a pack of gum, it triggers some primitive urge to reach out to someone.  The gum doesn’t cost much and the act of sharing doesn’t come saddled with commitments. Yet the small gesture makes both parties grateful, a small ritual of acceptance and recognition that we are human and somehow connected. And it’s all wrapped in minty freshness.

What if we consciously turned every interaction we made into that ritual?  If every time we met someone, or spoke to them on the phone, or sent something in the mail or posted something on the web for them to see, we made them feel like we had offered them a stick of gum, that we said, “I know you”, “I’m just like you” and “You are special.”

I barely spoke to the woman on the plane.  I will never see her again.  Yet, for that one small moment, we shared something and it made me feel good and I won’t long forget it.

I think I’ll carry a pack of gum with me, from now on.

Time to face your Nightmare

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What keeps you up at night?

What keeps you up at night?

OK, so you’ve ridden out the worst of the this economic storm.  You’re still alive, but your car’s sputtering and running out of gas.  And it’s dark and you’re not sure where exactly you are or going.  It there was a soundtrack to your life, now would be the time when the music raises the hair on the back of your neck.

You wish you had more choices, but you don’t.  To make it through the night, you have to get out, face your worst nightmare and defeat it.

Unfortunately, our own nightmares aren’t as simple to identify as needle-boy above.  Our own nightmares are facing up to things we need to do, but that we hate doing.  Not only do we hate doing them, but we’ll swamp ourselves with busy work just to keep from thinking about doing them.  When times are good, or we feel we can get by on inertia, that may be fine.  But neither is true today.

So, how do you identify your nightmares?  One way is reflect on what are those things that you do that just seem to sap the life energy out of you.  Or that give you a knot in your stomach just thinking about.  For each one of those activities, think about whether they actually help you grow.  Also, think about how you’ll feel once you actually do them.  If the answer to the first is “yes” and the answer to the second, “Great” or at least, “Relieved”, then it’s time to Cowboy Up!

What may be some of these nightmares?

Getting a referral.

Making a cold call.

Giving a presentation.

Launching a new product or marketing campaign that might fail.

Doing anything that everyone, except your gut, tells you won’t work.

Having a tough conversation with a vendor or employee. Or your boss.

Shutting down the product line that got you started, but isn’t selling any more.

Like Dreams, Nightmares are best dealt with in bite-size chunks.  Think about what you need to do today to help you get through this.  Don’t try to get it all done at once.  Just one, small thing.  Setting an appointment, for example.  Getting a phone list.  Asking for a P&L.

Now, that wasn’t hard, was it?

The other thing you need to do is to tell people what you want to do and ask them to support you.  Sometimes, support is in the way of assistance, but in this case, support may feel more like a kick in the pants.  In any event, don’t keep your nightmares (and what you intend to do about them) to yourself.  Share them, tell people why you are facing up to them, tell them how you’ll feel once you actually get through them.  That way, when they do come to kick you in the butt (as they invariably will), they’ll be able to remind you why you’re doing this in the first place.

And remember, facing up to your nightmares does not mean turning away from your dreams.  Most often, you must face the nightmare in order to grasp the dream.