communications

For most of grade school and middle school, my granddaughter was homeschooled. . . at my house. Each morning her mom dropped her off before she went to work, and Aubrey and would I head to our shared office. Most days she jumped on her computer, loged into her curriculum (she is enrolled in an international online school), and knocked out her lessons. Some days though, she just couldn't get into it. And most of the time when that happened, it’s not that she wasn't motivated to do her lesson. It’s that she couldn't relate to it.

Sales motivation is not something that can be delegated like a task or taught like a lesson. We can try to motivate others by focusing on outcomes (carrots and sticks), but ultimately, the only type of motivation with staying power is self-motivation. Self-motivation happens when the desire to learn or achieve comes from a deep interest in or attachment to the work.

One aspect of marketing that manufacturers and designers should pay much closer attention to is retail sales training. That’s right, sales training—at least at your level—must be part of your marketing program. If you sell to retailers, you are entrusting much of your business success to the marketing, merchandising, and sales skills of each retail store. Ultimately, your sales fate lies in the hands of sales representatives you may never have met and who may or may not ever purchase fine or designer jewelry. What motivates them to sell your jewelry, and not just show it if a customer appears interested? You need to cultivate in them a deep interest in and attachment to your work.

Your sales training can be delivered in person, on your website, in printed materials, or as a video. Most companies doing a good job of sales training use a combination of these. So don’t get fixated on whether you are shooting a video or buying airfare. At least, not yet. To begin, create an outline of the information you can share that will stimulate salesperson interest in and passion for your work.

1.  Start with your people. We don’t establish relationships with things—not even with jewelry things. We establish relationships with people. So share information about your company and the people who work there. Share photos of your workspace, introduce your employees, and paint a picture of what it’s like to work in your workshop. Stories are your best, most powerful tool for evoking a feeling of attachment. Help the people selling your jewelry feel part of your organization.

2.  Move on to consumers. Next, share some stories about consumers who have purchased your jewelry. Talk about why they collect your work and what drew them to your work in the first place. Share a few customer tales that can convey the humor, sentimentality, ethos, or charm of your brand. By helping salespeople picture the ultimate consumer of your work, you will help them envision their own customers as buyers of your work. What we can imagine we can do, so stir the imagination.

3.  Now talk about the jewelry. Retail sales experience runs the gamut from brand-new-to-jewelry to 40 years in jewelry sales, and you must appeal to all of them. Describe your designs in terms of design aesthetic, what motivates you to create the designs, how you may have evolved to this point in your design aesthetic, and the materials you work in. Talk about any particularly meaningful, unusual, or important elements of your design in terms of why you chose them and what those elements mean as part of your brand.

When merchandising your line, consider whether or not the elements of your line sheet create any sort of connection for the salesperson. I love it when designers name their jewelry. There’s so much more emotional connection to a ring that’s named “Serendipity” compared to a ring that’s named DT-104. At the very least, name your collections, and explain the thoughts behind your naming.

4.  Share your selling experience. You’ve been out there selling your line at trunk shows, trade shows, chair-side visits with editors, and cocktail parties. You have a pretty good idea of sales techniques that work. Share them! Give the retail salesperson some tools to put in her toolbox in the form of anecdotes and approaches that work for you or for your salespeople.

5. Get to the salespeople. This part can be tough. For every store owner that immediately shares everything he learns from a salesperson or designer, there’s another who takes the box of candy home and forgets to pass along the line sheets. But it’s in your interests to get to the salespeople, so figure out a way. Some good methods include:

• Offer to provide in-person training. For an appropriately-sized order, this can be well worth your expenditure.
• Produce a booklet. Think “booklet” more than brochure or pamphlet. You need to entertain and entice the sales staff. As long as you’re telling stories, deliver them in a form that feels like a story-vehicle.
• Produce a video. Put the video on your website, send e-mail links to store managers and sales staff, or burn DVDs and send them via mail.

Now you just have to get to the salespeople. If you’re not traveling to the store, you’re sending something. Ask the store manager or owner for a list of salespeoples’ names and, if available, e-mail addresses. Send your training information with a personal note and perhaps a small gift (something as simple as a tiny box of chocolates or a $5 Starbucks card) to thank them for their time. This won’t be possible with all retailers, because some retail storeowners just won’t let you have access to their sales staff. But for those who do, you can establish a bond of increasing familiarity, interest, and mutual benefit.

When my granddaughter couldn't get into her lessons, we went into story mode. That’s was my role as a learning coach — to come up with the right stories at the right times to reignite her motivation. That’s your job too.

Once upon a time, there was a new medium called the worldwide web. The people who knew how to use it were the same people who had been using the actually-not-so-new medium for some time – researchers, programmers, and tech geeks. When people who did not fit into those three categories developed interest in the worldwide web, they turned to the programmers and tech geeks who knew how to use it. And thus was born a strange world of websites that had little commercial value, websites that were weak (or downright awful) in their design sensibilities, and websites that failed to connect to the non-virtual brands with which they were associated.

Thankfully another category of folk became interested in the web – graphic designers. They became interested in advance of their usual partners-in-crime, the marketing folk. So the web improved visually, but not operationally. Because we all know what happens when designers design without good marketing direction. The result is usually commercial art that looks pretty, but which has no commercial purpose, is disconnected from the customers (what customers??), and goes off on a brand tangent of its own, thereby reducing overall brand value. But still, the web was at least beginning to look better.

Finally everyone got it together. Marketing departments began to include their web designers instead of relegating them to the IT department. They began to develop marketing strategies that included the channel and integrated it to all of their other marketing efforts. At last the web was being treated as an equal in a company's marketing mix – not better, not worse, and requiring of the full range of marketing resources.

With the mainstreaming of the web came the mainstreaming of tools to use the web. Just about anybody who can use a computer can now go to GoDaddy.com, grab a domain name, and using their super-user-friendly tool called WebSite Tonight develop their own web presence. The result? A bunch of poorly designed websites that do not connect to the rest of the business, fail to support the brand, and have little commercial value.

Don't get me wrong – I am a huge fan of GoDaddy, and I appreciate the service they provide – for everyone from sophisticated web developers to day-old novices. But there is a trap that business owners must avoid, and it is the everybody-must-have-a-website philosophy. A website can be an economic benefit, producing sales and increasing visibility for a business. Or it can be an economic blunder, creating operational demands that cannot be fulfilled, presenting an unflattering face to the public, and distracting you (for hours, days, even weeks) from doing the work that actually produces the revenue and profit of your business.

The problem lies in the temptation to get lost in the selection of colors and color templates, font types, pre-selected layout options, and free clipart. Sound like a problem for novices? Not really. Sophisticated graphic designers fall into the same trap – only they're doing it on $4,000 worth of Adobe software rather than freeware or MS Publisher. It's like running on a treadmill without the benefit of weight loss. You go and go and go and when you're all done you realize that you didn't get anywhere.

So before you sit in front of that user-friendly, anyone-can-do-this template designer for instant websites, do yourself a favor. Ask the following questions first:

1.  What is the purpose of this website? What do I want to accomplish? What do I want my customers to do, or know, when they visit? You should be able to answer this question in a one-sentence statement.

2.  How will I know if I am being successful? Will I measure it in dollars? Leads? "Visits" is not a measure of success, unless you are running a business that generates revenue for click-through advertising. Set a measurement that will satisfy your business goals.

3.  What messages must this website convey to achieve the measure of success I have established? These messages should be written before you do any website design – whether you are doing it yourself, or whether you are paying a designer to put your website together for you. A copywriter can make your messages more succinct and elegant if you wish, but they can't determine what the correct messages are. That's your job.

4.  What does this website need to provide my customers? What will motivate my customers to act in such a way that I am able to achieve the measure-of-success goal?

5.  Which tools, resources, information, and services must you provide to facilitate your customer once they have decided to act? For instance, if you want to motivate customers to purchase a product, have you provided a shopping cart, an easy pay method, and a guarantee to alleviate new-customer doubts? If you have only provided an #800, chances are the customer's motivation will disappear, because you've made it difficult for them to act. If you wish to develop sales leads, and you have motivated the customer to request information, have you developed a system that provides you with immediate notification so you can respond quickly to the customer's request?

6.  Now that you know what you want to accomplish, in both descriptive and measurement terms, ask yourself if you have the skills and knowledge to create the entire website experience, or if you need some assistance or training. Once you identify the aspects that are outside your abilities, you can prudently select the resources you require.

I am fond of the internet as a communication channel, and I believe the web can offer distinct business advantages. But failure to properly assess these six questions has damaged businesses small and large. Today's web development tools put the majority of web development tasks within reach of everyone but the most fearful of computer users. Put these six exercises to work for you first, and you will dramatically improve the odds that your website will deliver results.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

Distilling customer relationship publishing into one simple blog post

I read dozens of business books and articles every month, and I look for common threads between them. Not surprisingly, I find more common thought than innovative or divergent thought in business theory. In general that’s good, because it means that ideas are being tested for practical application in business settings. But sometimes, the effort to repackage existing ideas as fresh, leads to making simple concepts seem complicated.

One good example of this is found in the literature related to customer relevance, relationship marketing, and customer loyalty. Every B-school has at least one professor publishing on the newest, greatest, latest methods for building customer relationships. Those ideas are then adopted by every POP and CRM software vendor eager to sell customer management tools, repackaged as gotta-have-it-or-risk-your-business enterprise solutions. No wonder business owners are perplexed.

Most of the information and solutions are quite good. Put them all together to gain insight across the spectrum of customer relationship management. The one remaining weakness is that business owners are frequently offered solutions for which they have not yet defined the problems. Problems are defined by asking questions. So let’s start there. The answers to customer relevance are found by asking these simple questions:

1. Why do my customers purchase my products or services?
2. Which features and benefits of my products are meaningful to customers?
3. How do my products stand out in customers' minds?
4. How do my customers use my products?
5. Are any of my customers using my products in a manner that surprises me?
6. What are the biggest hassles my customers encounter when buying from me, and what could I do to eliminate those hassles?
7. Are there any specific barriers to being my customer? If so, how can I remove them?
8. Which of my customers require substantially more or less sales attention than the others? Why? What insights can I glean from this? How can I find/develop more of this type of customer?
9. If my business were shuttered, to whom would it matter, and why? Which of my customers would miss me the most? How long would it take another business to fill the void?
10. If I were just launching my company today, would I sell the same things? What would I do differently?
11. What experience does my customer associate with my products, and how can I create an experience that adds value beyond the inherent value of the product/service?
12. Which methods of communication are most relevant to my customers?
13. How do those methods affect the messages?

Developing the answers to these questions is not difficult. It requires research, compiling existing customer data, and analysis. Some of the answers may require expertise you do not personally possess, but which you can access in your employees or business advisors.

It doesn’t matter if it takes a while to answer these questions – if you didn’t answer them, the time would go by anyway, right? And it doesn’t matter if you don’t know precisely how you will go about answering them, because just knowing they must be answered will lead you to methods for finding the answers. What matters is that you ask the questions, chip away at assembling the data, and start to make better decisions. Because when it comes to relationships, it’s best to work on them a little bit every day.

These questions were first posed in an article written by Andrea Hill in MultiChannel Merchant magazine, May 2008.

© 2009. Andrea M. Hill

Note to my regular readers: My apologies for the long delays between posts! The challenge of keeping my arms around a rapidly growing business seems to push blogging to the bottom of the priority pile too often. I’ll try to be a little more consistent now that my most recent staffing challenges have been addressed. Thanks for sticking with me!

One of the most important things you can do as a product designer is include customer feedback in your business thinking. I’m not talking about customer satisfaction surveys (though those are important too). I’m talking about impressions of your brand and your product. You can solicit that feedback through conversations, questionnaires and surveys, and by sifting through online comments and discussions.

Of course, you must know the difference between your core customers and the rest of the customers! If your core customers come to you because of your design vision, your brilliant use of materials, and your extremely high craftsmanship, then they probably don’t worry so much about your price. So what do you about price complaints? As long as your core customers demonstrate satisfaction with your value, complaints about price go in the interesting-but-not-allowed-to-change-my-strategy pile.  Likewise, if you design using unusual materials or quirky craft methods and you’ve found a client base that loves your approach, then when you get suggestions from customers to make your look more mainstream, you’ll let those comments slide on by.

Once you’ve clarified who your core client is, what types of questions can you ask them? Which questions will elicit the type of feedback that helps you learn more, refine your brand messages, and intensify your customer relationships? Here are a few questions to help you get those creative juices flowing. Once you get the feel for asking customer questions, you’ll come up with plenty more of your own!

The first approach is to ask direct questions. These include:

1. What do you think of our product value?
2. How would you describe our products?
3. Why do you buy our products?
4. What other products would you like to see from us?
5. How do you feel about our product quality?
6. What do you think our brand is about?
7. How would you describe our company?
8. How would you describe our service?
9. How would you describe the personality of our company based on your experiences?

Asking direct questions can yield terrific, specific responses, but you’ll find that only the customers most familiar with and attached to your brand will be giving those answers. If you want to get more insight from the people you want to sell to, but with whom you have not yet formed a strong attachment, you may need to ask questions that provide more guidance and structure. Here are some multiple choice examples to consider.

Product Value

If you had to describe the value of my (products), which phrase below would best describe it? Even if you want to choose more than one, force yourself to choose the best!

1. This (product) makes me feel beautiful
2. This (product) makes me feel unique
3. This (product) makes me feel special
4. This (product) makes me feel virtuous
5. This (product) makes me feel rich
6. (this list can include any adjectives, so fit the adjectives to the likely range of feelings evoked by your product offering)

How would you describe the pricing of my products?

1. Just about right
2. A little high, but worth it
3. A little high, so I have to really think about it
4. High, so I avoid it
5. You could probably charge more and I’d still buy it (don’t be shocked – some customers will actually choose this answer!)

Why do you buy our products? (allow them to choose more than one of these)

1. Actually, I’ve only bought one thing, because it just caught my eye
2. Your product always seems to be in the right place at the right time
3. I like to have more than one item from designers I like
4. Your product just suits my personality
5. Your product suits my style
6. I like the status I get from wearing/buying your product

Company/Brand

How would you describe my brand?

1. I don’t really notice a brand. I just notice the styles
2. Your brand is all over the place - I'm not sure what to think
3. Sometimes I think your brand stands for something, but then it shifts or changes
4. I think your brand is about (fill in the blank here – for whatever your brand REALLY stands for)
5. I think your brand is about (fill in the blank here – something similar to what you want your brand to stand for but not quite right)
6. I think your brand is about (fill in the blank here – something that really isn’t your brand)

How would you describe the personality of our company based on your experiences so far? Choose as many as you think fit.

That’s a lot of questions, right? Now how do you ask them?

Unless you’re buying your customer an expensive meal and you have advance agreement that you will be asking for input about your company, you’re not going to get away with asking these all at once. Rather, look for opportunities to ask them one-at-a-time. You can do this as a social media post, a pop-up on your website, or as a one-question-survey email follow-up to a purchase. And as I mentioned earlier, your social media conversations and comments are a treasure-trove of insights. Comb through them looking specifically for clues to how your customers would answer these questions based on the things they say.

If you are very, very curious about the way your customers view your company and your product offering, you will gain important insights into whether (or not) you are making the impressions you want to make.

Ever heard of the Love Lab in Seattle? No, it’s not a perk of working at Microsoft (nor a perk that they once had and then lost when they became big bad business – they never actually went for those Googleplex type perks anyway). The Love Lab is a lab at the University of Washington where emeritus professor of psychology Dr. John M. Gottman (also co-founder of the Gottman Institute) conducted extensive research on the nature of relationships, particularly what makes for a good marriage. One of the cornerstones of his findings on relationships of all types is that relationships rely on something called bids for connection - the verbal and non-verbal requests for attention and validation that take place hundreds of times per day in human relationships.

The relationships we have at work are significant. Like our families of birth, we generally have little control over who the members of the family are. Our work relationships have the power to bring us joy or cause us anguish. They can lead to the greatest creative breakthroughs or significant physical and mental breakdowns. Or they may be nowhere near those highs or lows, just droning on in the background of our work life, not driving us crazy but not making our lives any richer either. The bottom line for business is that an organization filled with happy humans is more likely to be profitable than a similar business filled with the unhappy sort. In his book The Relationship Cure, Gottman says “A bid can be a question, a gesture, a look, a touch – any single expression that says “I want to feel connected to you.” A response to a bid is just that – a positive or negative answer to somebody’s request for emotional connection.” According to Gottman, there are three types of response to bids: turning toward responses, turning away responses, and turning against responses. One example from the book (pp 36-37) works as follows:

Turn toward the bid
BID: How was your vacation?
RESPONSE: It was all right. The slopes at Sun Mountain are magnificent, but the ski conditions were lousy. Have you ever been there?

Turn away from the bid
BID: How was your vacation?
RESPONSE: Have you got any messages for me?

Turn against the bid
BID: How was your vacation?
RESPONSE: As if you really cared.

Relationships that involve mostly turning toward responses are far healthier than relationships that do not. Interestingly, relationships that involve turning against and turning away from responses both fail at equal rates, but the turning against relationships fail more slowly than the relationships where the predominant form of response is to turn away from, or ignore, the other person.

When I take on a new client, one of the first things I do is observe relationships among team members in the area in which I will be advising. It is not unusual for a business to possess all the knowledge and talent it requires to be successful, but for that knowledge and talent to be inaccessible to the organization - even as it collects a paycheck. Once I observe interpersonal communication I gain tremendous insight into how my help may best be offered. When I read Gottman’s latest book, I started watching the bid processes specifically. Some of the most difficult-to-understand team dynamics became much clearer to me with this simple but powerful information.

In one situation, I have a division head who, based on my observation, seemed would be a very unpopular manager. He is one of the worst interrupters I have ever met, and I found just trying to complete a conversation with him to be exhausting. Much to my surprise, I encountered a staff who is genuinely devoted to him. It’s not that they don’t notice he interrupts - they simply take the interruptions in stride. Without the information on bidding, I would not have been able to sort this out. But armed with my new knowledge, I realized that in all other ways this guy turns toward their bids, and bids them frequently (even if he interrupts their answers). The staff clearly feels connected to their manager, and they forgive him his irritating habit. Another constant interrupter who perhaps turned away from or turned against their subordinates’ bids - and who did not bid others effectively - would likely become negatively known for the habit of interrupting.

In another company, an extremely capable and hard-working specialist is failing miserably, and her senior sponsor is worried about whether or not the situation can be turned around. She is responsible for three teams, and in each team is entirely dysfunctional. Not cruel to one another, overly competitive, or filled with slackers. Quite the opposite, in fact. The teams simply do not engage. Trying to get a handle on this problem - because this strange staff demotivation was my only real clue regarding my clients’ difficulties - I asked to observe two team members who were also on other teams with different leaders. I observed that both individuals were participating energetically in those other situations. Using my new knowledge I realized that this woman systematically turns away from bids, ignoring them, changing the subject, or vaguely “um-hmm”-ing a response. Gottman says that bidders who are ignored learn quickly not to bid again. I was brought in to solve what seemed to be a management and strategic problem, but I honestly think this woman has all the management and strategic skill she needs. So in addition to reviewing and tweaking the existing management and strategic framework, I have shared this information with her and started coaching her in turning toward the bids of others. Already we are seeing a warming up of the operating environment - though team members are understandably skeptical and may take a while to trust that their manager intends to respond to their bids consistently.

I personally find turning against responses difficult to work with. People who are cynical and antagonistic toward others seem to me to be less inclined to work on their communication skills than those who are simply mindless. But when I see turning against responses now, I have a better understanding of what they are. I have always had a negative gut reaction to people who use strong sarcasm or express cynicism during job interviews, though I couldn’t always support why I thought those behaviors were bad signs. Now I understand that there is a good chance those behaviors will present themselves as turning against responses in the work environment, which will disrupt team harmony and ability to innovate.

Not that argument and debate can’t be consistent with team harmony. One of my customer sites is an absolute joy to work with and they are constantly arguing with one another. My new Gottman knowledge helped me get beyond knowing that they are a joy to work with, to understanding why. A recent meeting to discuss the launch of a new product illustrated the power of turning toward the bids of others. The team was divided in three camps over the product launch and their debate was heated within minutes of the beginning of the meeting. Yet the atmosphere in the room was one of excitement and fun rather than competition and discord. The team members turned toward one another’s bids even as they argued against them, peppering the argument with humor and laughter, and building on each others’ ideas even as they fought to make sure their own were heard. I didn’t record one moment of sarcasm or criticism during the exchange. There was no point at which a team member cut another down. Over the next two days I watched the team closely, and sure enough, they turned toward one another’s bids constantly, and bid one another constantly. This behavior is described by Gottman as a sort of bid banking, storing up a savings of positively-exchanged bids, to be cashed in at times of conflict, making the conflict easier to deal with and the relationship more likely to repair afterw
ards.

Many years of corporate management have taught me that one dysfunctional person can alter the chemistry of an entire department and hold that department’s performance to suboptimum levels for years on end. This new information on bidding has introduced me to a whole new way of evaluating work groups. I highly recommend that you evaluate the following questions to improve your work relationships and results:

• Evaluate how often you bid
• Evaluate how effectively you bid. Are you direct or round-about? Positive or negative?
• Evaluate how you respond to the bids of others. Do you turn toward, turn away from, or turn against most often? When you are turning away from or turning against, why are you doing so?
• Evaluate your most important work relationships in terms of how those people respond to your bids
• Have you stopped bidding anyone? If so, why? Is it hurting your work relationship or your professional performance?
• Is there any particularly influential person in your work experience who consistently turns against or turns away from your bids or the bids of others? Is there anything you can do to bring this problem to their attention?
• How do you react when someone turns away from your bids?
• How do you react when someone turns against your bids?
• If you can’t influence the person who is responding in undesirable ways, what steps can you take to protect your feelings (i.e., most people feel insignificant or insecure when they are ignored) and manage your reactions to minimize their negative effect on you and your performance?

We’ve all experienced some work situation that got under our skin and we couldn’t figure out why it bothered us so much. The woman who ignores you every time she walks past in the hallway, the guy who wanders off or answers his cell phone just as you begin to speak to him, the person who turns even simple inquiries into cynical little jabs. Everybody is moaning and groaning about the economy and Wall Street, but economic down cycles come only every five or six years and only last for 8-10 months. Negative work relationships last for years and damage your business even when the dollar is strong and the economy is booming. So one more thing to add to the list. Next time you’re book shopping or at your local library, check out a copy of John M. Gottman’s The Relationship Cure. Because building better connections with co-workers may be the best economic boost a company can hope for.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

This blog post is one in a series of eight articles that explore the most important characteristics of a strong leader. These articles are linked to a Prezi visual presentation, which you can view here.

Anyone who has ever held a leadership position knows that it can be difficult to get others to share your passion for progress. In fact, one of the things that makes a leader effective is her drive.

Getting others to share that drive, however - particularly people who may not see as much upside to the effort as an owner or a better-compensated manager - can be frustrating at best, or demotivating at worst.

It's easy to end up too far to either end of the pendulum; either too lax with people and their personal timetables (and feelings) or too aggressive about driving the agenda. Neither pole is productive. Here are some tips for maintaining your drive and your impatience with getting there against the need to properly motivate others to run along beside you.

Use Clear External Motivators

To create a sense of urgency, the better leader uses motivational drivers like goals, objectives, and metrics. Setting clear goals about what will be done, when it will be done, and the expected results - reported as a metric like total sales, calls made, packages shipped, orders taken, or customers in attendance - makes expectations visual and measurable. When the expectations are posted on a whiteboard, on a daily computer popup window, or other public visual forum, they become top-of-mind.  They also become somewhat separated from you as the leader, and as a result become a driving force unto themselves.

Share the Reasons for your Urgency

"Because I said so" probably didn't work for you when your mom said it, and it doesn't work so well coming from the boss either.  But don't believe just because you've never said the words that they weren't inferred. In fact, any time we ask anyone to do anything without clear reasons and benefits for doing so, there's a good chance that "because I said so" will be the underlying message.

So share the reasons for your urgency to get things done. Explain the business need in terms of profitability, cash-flow, the ability to invest in tools/equipment/technology, or to invest in marketing. Outside deadlines (bank requirements, trade show, holiday selling seasons) are also powerful. When people clearly understand why they are being asked to do something, they are better able to embrace the urgency attached to it.

Set Rational Expectations

If you don't have a clear understanding of what people can accomplish - including at what speed and with what proficiency - then you can't have proper expectations. One of the things that really gets in the way of proper expectations - particularly in small businesses - is a failure to establish clear roles and responsibilities.  The smaller the business, the broader each individual's range of responsibility will be. Don't let that stop you. Create a mind map, a spreadsheet, an organization chart, or some other visual form to represent who does what in your organization. Then step back. Are there any whats not attached to a who?  Fix that!

Next, determine how proficient each of your people are at the things they are expected to do. Chances are, most of your people have some responsibilities that they are completely competent at, and others for which they are still developing skills and understanding. This is where your Patience with People begins. By acknowledging that not all employees are equally prepared to succeed in all tasks, we can create training opportunities, assign them responsibilities with a more seasoned co-worker, or adjust our timetables to accommodate the necessary learning curves. If you provide this space for developing competence alongside clear expectations that people excel at the things for which they already have demonstrated proficiency, you will be sending a loud and fair message to all that this is a place where people can both learn and succeed, and that one leads to the other.

Make it Safe

Everyone makes mistakes. Making the same mistake over and over isn't something you should accept, but first mistakes, learning mistakes, honest mistakes  - you must create an environment in which it is safe to make them. Most people beat themselves up for a mistake far more than you would ever think to do. In those cases, don't ignore it or brush it off, but don't rub salt in the wound either. I find the simple question, "Well, what do you think you will do differently next time?" is more than adequate to address most mistakes.

Be Your Own Example

If it's urgency, diligence, and performance to specific goals and objectives that you want, then you must demonstrate the same discipline and dedication, and be openly accountable when you fail to meet your objectives.  When you demonstrate grace as a leader - a certain sense of propriety, a clear quality of accountability and thoughtfulness - this is a profound way to demonstrate your patience with people in the midst of impatience with progress.

Watch for the next article in this series, coming in two days!

For the first time in 20 years I had to miss the jewelry shows in Vegas. It gave me an interesting opportunity to observe the shows entirely through social media. At one point, in support of my (almost entirely female) writing brethren covering the shows, I started the hashtag #WomenWithPens. Shortly thereafter, Lorraine DePasque offered the insight that she wished the coverage had more depth than #WomenWithRingsOnTheirFingers, a thought that had already been very much on my mind.

You see, in my attempt to ‘experience’ the shows through social media, I was very disappointed. Oh, I love all the pictures of people and jewelry – and it’s great to see the smiling faces of so many people I care about. But I wanted content. I wanted analysis and insight. And that, I’m afraid, was in short order.

Why does this matter? Because the future of marketing is about content (here's an infographic that includes information on how Content fuels sales). In both B2B and B2C marketing, content is now a requirement, a minimum standard necessary to compete. If we’re not practicing the job of developing content with each other, if industry leaders and writers aren’t modeling this behavior for the brands, designers, and retailers, then we risk becoming irrelevant on the new marketing stage.

What is content? Content is information of interest to consumers – information that educates, entertains, challenges, creates respect and trust, and inspires – information that leads to the desire to engage with the brand. Yes, images are part of that, but alone they are insufficient. The mainstream jewelry industry is consistently out-Instagrammed and out-Twittered by consumers and hobbyists showing jewelry pictures.

I’d like to take a moment to recognize a few of the industry’s top next-wave content-developers and publishers. I am intentionally leaving out the style editors for this article. Don’t get me wrong – journalists Jennifer Heebner, Lorraine DePasque, and Tanya Dukes, PR Mavens Amanda Gizzi, Michelle Orman, Andrea Hansen, and Helena Krodel Wegweiser, and bloggers GemGossip, Katerina Perez, The Jewellery Editor (and quite a few others – these are my go-tos) all have a very important role in the promotion and understanding of jewelry – and their coverage is fantastic.  But I want to talk about the other writers for a moment.

Let’s start with Peggy Jo Donahue. Nobody does more to convey the thoughts and lessons of the jewelry industry via social media than Peggy. She captures the most valuable sound-bites from educational sessions and pushes them out to the rest of us – in fact, she was the only social media publisher doing so at the shows this year. Like the dyed-in-the-wool journalist that she is, Peggy Jo is always on the hunt for something new, something insightful, something of depth to share with the rest of the industry. She is a true industry treasure, and this year, my most dependable eyes on the show I had to miss. She is the reason I started the #WomenWithPens hashtag. Let me make this point one more time: Nobody else provided any significant body of non-stylist jewelry industry content from the shows this year. For the thousands of retailers and brands who did not attend the show, they saw lots and lots of style information, but very little information of business value.

Beyond the show, there are a few journalists and essayists who regularly publish content on social media that meets the definition of interesting, educational, inspirational, challenging, engaging. (Why do I differentiate between journalists and essayists? Both are equally important – but different in significant ways. Journalists sometimes write essays, but essayists rarely employ the disciplines of journalism. Click the links above if you’re curious about the difference.)

Sometimes people forget that Cindy Edelstein is not just the industry’s biggest mensch, but also a trained journalist. Though her day job involves much more than writing, Cindy uses social media platforms all day every day to develop, curate and share industry knowledge to her customer base. Very few days go by without something educational, thought-provoking, or industry-promoting from Cindy. She does this for two reasons: A) to model to the industry what we should all be doing, and B) to ensure that her important content makes it to every potential audience member.

Two relatively new writers, Monica Stephens (iDazzle) and Barbara Palumbo (Adornmentality) are helping take industry content-writing to the next level. They use social media platforms with the ease of the Millennial, and they use their pens to advance causes and thought processes. Late last year Monica published an article that implored the industry to stop differentiating between precious and semiprecious gemstones. It was important work, because it pointed out that the difference is just so much industry navel gazing, not relevant to the next generation of jewelry buyers. She made us think.

When JCK Magazine’s annual Top 50 Industry Powerbase article appeared this year with only 13 women in it, Barbara Palumbo made it a personal mission to correct the imbalance. Her #FiftyWomenOfJewelry series has been recognizing women who have made and continue to make serious contributions to the jewelry industry. As Cindy Edelstein said just last week (before she was ever included, by the way), "Barbara's choices for the series have been well-researched and right on all the way."

Two men, Rob Bates and Matthew Perosi, also regularly develop meaningful industry content and use social media effectively to expand their reach. They get to be honorary #WomenWithPens – but there is nothing ‘honorary’ about including them in this list of writers who are at the forefront of new publishing in the jewelry industry.

And here my list ends.**  No, seriously. It ends here. The industry has many terrific writers (please, acknowledge your favorites in the comments! The writers of industry are the thought leaders, and we need to celebrate them every chance we get), and several excellent magazines.

But as an industry, we aren’t maximizing our use of social media – yet – to get our stories across. For the magazines, having a strong website filled with constantly updated content is a minimum standard necessary to compete. I’m talking about going beyond that standard, for editorial and brand entities alike to proactively engage with readers in all the places they congregate - and with more than just pictures of jewelry.

I am regularly asked – by brands, jewelry designers, and retailers – how they can justify and maximize their use of social media to get business value from it. I tell them all the same thing. Find your story, your perspective, your specific angle on the jewelry business and create content about it. Tell stories, write blogs, publish images with interesting and thought-provoking commentary, engage in social media conversations where you can bring your unique perspective to the audience, and pass along content developed by others that is consistent with and expands upon your viewpoint.

Follow the people mentioned in this article. You will learn a tremendous amount about how to use social media to engage your own audience, and you will experience a constant supply of quality information that is suitable for passing on. And that’s how it’s done.

We all know that responsive is good. Responsive means your spouse is happier than most spouses. Responsive means that your teenager is capable of doing what you ask of him. Responsive means the drugs are working.  Responsive is good.

Especially when  it comes to websites.

In February 2015 Google announced that it would change its search algorithm to give extra points to websites that proved to be mobile friendly.  What does that mean? A mobile friendly site is a site that:

1. Does not use Flash or other software that does not work well on mobile devices
2. Uses text that can be read without zooming
3. Sizes the content on the screen so users don't have to scroll horizontally or vertically to see it
4. Places links far enough apart so the correct link can be easily tapped - even with large fingers (or provides an automatic zoom feature to bring the link up for verification).

Google's Day of Mobile Readiness came and went on April 21, 2015, and guess what? Companies that previously enjoyed high search engine visibility - but which did not update their sites to be responsive - have dropped precipitously since that time.

Perhaps you figured you had other, more pressing business concerns to invest in. Perhaps you hate spending money on marketing. Perhaps your previous experience with website design left you with a bad taste in your mouth. But none of that matters, because mobile website traffic is growing at 3.5% per month across all sectors and industries, and mobile search will surpass desktop searches this year. So even if Google hadn't changed their search algorithm in April, consumers and B-to-B customers are already voting with their smartphones.

When is the last time you even looked at your website from your smartphone or tablet? If you have to scroll, pinch & pull, or squint to view your website, it's not mobile friendly. But don't take my word for it - take Google's. They've produced a Mobile Friendly Test that you can use for free. Just visit this site, enter your domain name, and watch the analyzer do its work. Go ahead and test it now.

If your website came back with a "mobile friendly" result, congratulations! Keep up the good work of keeping up with change on the internet. If you received a "not ready" result, it's time to make some changes.

There are essentially three different ways to make your website mobile responsive. The first (and oldest) approach is to offer a mobile version of your website, perhaps with the domain type of .mobi. This isn't a great option. It creates double-work for you and your staff, and it means that your SEO results get diluted across two domains. If your website provider suggests this, tell him no. The only person who will make more money doing this is him.

The next approach is something called Dynamic Serving. Think of it as a device sniffer. Someone calls up your website, the Dynamic Services sniff out what device is being used, and delivers the correct version. This approach tends to have a high error rate, and with devices changing constantly, it must be updated all the time. Like the previous option, tell your development partner no. This approach ultimately has a high cost-of-ownership.

The one approach you should use is a Responsive Design for your website. Responsive Design means you create and maintain one website. How does it work? Well, picture your website as a grid - which is how most websites are programmed. Here is an example of a grid from a website:

 Until fairly recently, these grids were always static, which means that the elements were in a fixed position to one another.  If you view a static grid website from a mobile phone, you will have to scroll to the right if you want to go from the logo to the header content.

In a responsive website, the grid elements are flexible. On a desktop, the grid elements will appear as in the drawing. On a smartphone, the elements will shuffle and become a vertical stack. You can even decide that some elements will only be visible when viewed from a desktop or tablet, and create specific alternative elements that show only on mobile phones.

If your site isn't mobile ready, it's critical that you invest in updating it as soon as possible. It is next-to-impossible to compete in the current business climate without a good website, and consumers increasingly disregard businesses that are falling behind on the digital marketing front. Until you do, Google will penalize you in their search, though you can earn your search position back once you update your site. And don't think this is just affecting you in Google. The only way a search engine makes money is if the people using it believe they get good search results. Being sent off to a website that offers a bad user experience reflects poorly on the search engine, so all the search engines - Bing, Yahoo, AOL, etc. - are highly aware of the fact that mobile search is where consumers are driving the internet.

If your site is built on a hosted engine like Shopify or Etsy, you are already covered. If you have a stand-alone site, move away from custom website design if you can. Using a website platform that is constantly being updated (think WordPress, Joomla, or Magento) is a far superior approach that will keep you up-to-date and save you money in the near and long-term.

Modernizing your website may seem daunting, but it's a good thing. A responsive website will better meet the needs of your customers, which means you will ultimately experience more foot traffic, website sales, and loyalty. Sure, the Mobile Bandwagon may have just passed you by, but with a bit of an effort you can catch up again.

When Jackson Pollack was alive and painting, the art/critic world divided in two camps: those who thought his work was beautiful but couldn’t understand it, and those who thought his work was not art. There wasn’t much room for discussion because nobody could explain, really, why Pollack’s paintings were so noteworthy. How does one argue with “I know what I like when I see it?” Only with “you don’t know diddly.”

In 1975, 19 years after Pollack’s death, Benoit Mandelbrot coined the word fractal, which is an irregular geometric pattern that repeats itself at many degrees of magnification. A snowflake is a fractal – its smallest element is roughly the same shape as the finished snowflake. It turns out that nature’s patterns are largely fractals and that the human eye is finely tuned to fractal patterns. This idea was – and continues to be – tested heavily by Richard Taylor, a physicist at the University of Oregon. In 1995 Taylor produced a painting using wind, rain, and tree limbs, which unexpectedly led to something that looked remarkably like a Pollack painting. Intrigued, he scanned Pollack prints into his computer and analyzed the patterns. It turns out that Pollack was painting within nature’s most common fractal range (this story and much more can be found in Matthew E. May’s In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing).

It took nearly 40 years for someone to articulate the reason that Pollack’s work is so gripping, but the patterns were there all along.

The Internet presents a similar problem today. It feels like a lot of noise. It’s difficult to sort the valuable information from the muck. At the low end of participation, small business owners and corporate communications staff monitor Internet conversations about their companies, celebrating the endorsements and dreading the oh-so-public complaints. At the broad-sourcing end of the spectrum, companies collect customer feedback on social media sites, ask the masses to participate in product naming and design, and put software development bids out to the public.

What are businesses doing with all that data? Data isn’t information. As a high school debater, I quickly learned that one could find a fact – complete with citations – to support any position one wished to argue. Later I worked with a woman who would regularly mobilize entire corporate departments to make sweeping changes because of a single customer complaint. “Ah,” you say, “but we’re turning that data into information.” But as I’ve mentioned before, if indeed information is power, librarians should be the most powerful people in the world.

Never before have so many conversations taken place in one forum. So much information is startlingly present at our fingertips, and there is significant temptation to read too shallowly, give credence too readily, and draw conclusions too quickly.

The actual value of all that data, the beneficial information that could be gleaned from it, is presenting itself to a select few individuals and companies who examine the conversations on the Internet in the way Taylor examined Pollack’s paintings.

Perhaps we would all be wise to view the Internet as a new kind of fractal. Step very close and observe only an inch of it. Back across the room and take in again. Business must develop the ability to recognize complex patterns in broad conversations, to comprehend their meaning, and to develop appropriate responses. The value is in the patterns.

People who know to look for the common threads, who have trained themselves to read a little deeper, listen a little harder, who have honed a skill for seeing patterns, these are the people who are figuring out why the Internet is beautiful. Do you know who these people are? Probably not the guy with the degree in statistics or the young lady with a PhD in computer science. Not unless they also spent considerable time learning to interpret literature and poetry, studying art and art history, or have deep knowledge about history, anthropology, or psychology. In this new renaissance that is the Internet, only the richest collaboration of arts and science will yield its ultimate benefit.

Do you know it when you see it? Only time will tell I guess.

© 2010, Andrea M. Hill

Business downsizing is beginning to happen in earnest, and it’s only going to get worse through the first and second quarters of 2009. But there is a lot of work that still needs to get done, so contract workers will be in demand for the foreseeable future. Enter the virtual team.

If you find yourself assembling virtual teams of home-based contract workers, you will need to develop new skills and sensitivities to motivate, manage, and assess them. A lot of folks will put themselves out there as contract workers while they search for permanent employment (white collar workers are going to get hit with downsizing after blue-collar, but they're still going to get hit by this).  But not every talented professional is cut out for independent contract work.

In my experience, the people who are successful in virtual work teams tend to be more motivated than the average worker. I think a lot of people try virtual work, or get assigned to virtual teams, but the ones who excel at it tend to be self-motivated self-starters. And they are the ones who return to virtual team assignments again and again (either because they like them, or because their employers recognize they are good at it and keep assigning them). These folks may enjoy the self-employed route so much that they continue to work in this capacity even after the job market opens up again. And if you want to maintain access to these folks, there are a few things about motivation you’ll need to know.

One of the differences in managing a virtual team is recognizing that your high performers require a lot of recognition. People tend to think that self-motivated self-starters don't require as much recognition as other workers, and that's a mistake. They perform for the pride and joy of performing, and while receiving the right monetary compensation is important, receiving the right recognition is critical.

When you are managing a traditional office team, you can convey recognition in a lot of ways - through brief chats to give them personal attention, by responding with laughter or a smile to something they say, by nodding at their recommendations in a meeting. When you are managing a virtual team, you have to work a lot harder to provide the appropriate recognition for their efforts.

This requires more consciousness than some people might think. For instance, a lot of people aren't good at giving specific recognition, but their body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, and other responses convey approval, so the employee still gets recognition. If you are managing virtual employees, you need to take the time to offer specific and effective recognition, and consider whether that recognition should go to the whole group or just the individual (there's a time and place for both).

If using email, you need to state the recognition in written words, then decide whether this is a "reply to all" or just "reply." If on the phone, it's important to include a few extra minutes for chit-chat, so they can warm back up to you as a human and sense your approval through your gift of time. I've found IM and other methods of CHAT to be great ways to send a quick "hey - haven't heard from you all day. Just checking in to make sure you're OK!" I've been told by employees that this was very meaningful to them. I've also found meeting minutes to be a tremendous source of communication beyond the details of the meeting. I take meeting minutes very seriously, because if it's not written down it won't get done, and I've always taken my turn with taking the minutes. People began to look in my minutes for a joke or recognition buried within them, and the person recognized in each case feels pretty good about that.

Don’t take for granted that your virtual team workers are just excited to get the paycheck. Perhaps they are, but with every other business around you downsizing too, the competition for the highly competent virtual workers could be high – and those are the only people you’ll want to hire.

© 2008. Andrea M. Hill

One of the challenges with relying on email marketing is that so many people hate receiving email. When you consider just how much SPAM is flying around these days, it’s not hard to understand why. Most of us work hard to keep our email communications interesting and relevant, and we watch our mail frequency. But even the most careful email senders ran into difficulty sending email during the months of October – December, 2021.

This is because the email services have implemented “rate-limiting policies.” You can expect email delivery and open rates to go down and bounce rates to go up. Here’s what we know so far:

The Big 5 Are All Experimenting with Rate-Limiting

• Yahoo
• AOL
• Google
• Microsoft
• Apple

They have decided to rate-limit all mass marketing emails from ANY large sender of mass emails:

• Constant Contact
• Active Campaign
• Keap/Infusionsoft
• Salesforce
• Mailchimp
• Klaviyo
• Etc.

Why Are They Rate-Limiting?

They want to reduce and prevent spam and mass-marketing emails coming into their systems. Email limiting used to be based on blacklists, wherein a domain could be blacklisted for sending too much unsolicited or SPAM email. The new rate-limiting policies are not based on blacklists. Instead, this was a decision made by the Big 5 companies themselves. It’s not just bad actors being limited anymore.

Yahoo was the first to implement rate-limiting. If you sent an email in the early autumn of 2021 and suddenly saw a bounce rate of 31% or higher, this was the reason why. Yahoo was pleased with the massive reduction in mass-marketing and spam emails, and now the other companies are copying their rate-limiting policy. As of the end of December, bounce rates were generally down to the 13% range, but that’s still very high compared with the 2% - 5% bounce rates that were the norm before these new policies were implemented.

So How Many Email Can You Send?

Single emails will almost certainly be allowed through without rate-limiting. But any email broadcast is at risk. It all depends on how the individual companies' receiving policies are set, and so far at least, the Big 5 aren’t publishing those policies.

If you’re a WerxMarketing customer, you’ve already been transitioning to more and more drip-style email, and that’s a good thing. Using marketing automation to send targeted messages to specific customers enjoys higher response rates overall, tends to have experience better response rates, and will not trigger the email system receiving policies the same way that broadcasts do.

Broadcast Time Spread

Yahoo has shared some details of their rate-limiting policy. At Yahoo, mass-marketing emails sent from from one marketing account (Constant Contact or Keap for example) attached to your domain will be watched over a 12 hour period by Yahoo. If you send two broadcasts within 12 hours, they will be counted cumulatively, and will be rate-limited. The watch time frames for other email services are still unknown.

How This Affects Your Marketing

Depending on the policy of each company, this could mean significant delay in the delivery of your email, or even non-delivery in some cases.

Here’s how we think it will work (“think,” because nobody is sharing their policy. This is based on monitoring email sends and what little information we can glean through online research). It appears that a high percentage of emails sent through broadcasts will be “soft bounced,” which means they aren’t turned off for future email campaigns in your marketing system, but that the recipient will not receive the email for that particular broadcast.

It’s also possible that an entire broadcast could be blocked by the receiving mail server. In that case, the receiving mail server may request the sending mail server to send the (broadcast) emails again. This would likely be handled entirely at the server level, and could lead to delays in your email delivery. In these cases, the email services are interested in determining if the sending mail server was a mass spam source, and the assumption is that if it is, they most likely will not try sending again. On the other hand, a legitimate mail server will try sending again (up to a certain number of times / over a certain time period). So on the second send attempt the email may get through. Getting through still doesn’t mean the email won’t be classified as junk/bulk but at least the client will receive the email somewhere.

As mentioned above, so far only Yahoo has been willing to communicate with the marketing services about what is going on and why. Apple has always had a strict delivery limitation on mass emails, so we may not notice much change to Apple recipients. Microsoft is currently implementing the rate limiting in a light way but will almost certainly implement more fully soon based on what we’ve learned from people in conversation with them. Google also appears to be implementing a similar rate-limiting policy, which is consistent with their migration toward more privacy and less spam in general on the internet.

What Can You Do?

Here are a few ideas that may work, based on the limited information we have so far.

1. Strongly encourage all your email recipients to whitelist your domain. There’s no guarantee that this will help, but it certainly can’t hurt.
2. Look into making your email more constant, less broadcast-y, by using drip and automation techniques. This has other marketing benefits as well, but it does require campaign planning and list clean-up and management to implement.
3. You could try timing broadcasts to be sent 12-24 hours ahead of when they will need to be received. If you’re good about sending messages to be delivered during the “most likely to be opened window,” this will feel like a step backward. But getting delivered at a less-than-optimal time is better than not getting delivered at all (or late).
4. Review your data to see how much delivery delay is made by each of the Big 5 providers, which will help you determine the lead times needed for broadcasts. Ask for feedback from cooperative customers with some test sends. Some deliveries will go through without rate-limiting and some will be rate-limited, and there’s no way to anticipate or know which condition you are sending email into.
5. Final sale, webinar reminders, and other timely messages may not be effective. This is another area to test and monitor. Consider using text messaging for time-sensitive messaging. Or consider having an alternate service just to send time-sensitive emails.
6. Ask your domain/IT support to increase the strictness of our domain DNS SPF record. Most SPF records are set to “loose” by default. Apple apparently likes to see strict settings on domain email related records regardless of whether an email was sent as part of a broadcast or individually.
7. Ask your marketing service (Constant Contact, MailChimp, Keap, etc.) about their list and email collection policies. If your emails are sent by a service that mass distributes a lot of SPAM email for other customers due to loose policies, rate-limiting policies that punish your marketing service will hurt you too, no matter how careful you are with your lists.

This isn’t the best news. 2021 saw an increase in the cost of reaching customers through advertising, and now email efficacy is going down. But this is the nature of digital marketing. The various service providers and technologies keep evolving, and we must stay on top of the changes and make smart evolutionary changes of our own.

The good news is that customers are happier when they receive less SPAM, and they’re happiest when they receive email that is interesting, relevant, warm, witty, and feels very personal. If you work toward delivering on those characteristics, you’re likely to stay out of the rate-limiting filters too. So let’s focus on doing better marketing, and everybody wins.

Quick. Take out your smartphone. Open your website. What do you see?

If your website seamlessly reconfigured itself to be easily readable on your phone, you're in good shape. This automatic sizing is called responsive, and it's what website visitors demand today. If, however, your reading panels are too wide, if you have to move your phone into landscape mode to read the text, if your pictures run off the sides, if you have to squint . . . you have pretty much demoted your own site to the nether regions of Google search.

Why? Because 98.3% of smartphone owners use their devices to access the internet. So Google - which has a vested interest in delivering good search results - is taking its belt to sites that haven't upgraded to responsive design. If your site won't automatically reconfigure itself to any device of any size, you need to fix it now.

Consider this more of a PSA than a blog post. Let's get on this folks.

When my oldest child was eight years old, I stumbled upon a brilliant method of doling out consequences for less-than-desirable behavior. Instead of telling her what her punishment was, I asked her to decide on the punishment herself.

Invariably she came up with a more harsh punishment than I would have suggested – often more harsh than I could support. But what really struck me about the approach was how much she hated the process of creating her own consequences. On one memorable occasion she stomped her foot and ran from the room screaming “Why can’t you just punish me and get it over with like normal parents?”

Though we went through our fair share of trials and tribulations on the way to adulthood, now she is 25 years old and one of the most personally accountable, self-disciplined people I know, able to defer personal gratification for good cause, possessed of an incredible work ethic, and filled with a sense of purpose in her life. Can we blame it all on forcing her to come up with her own consequences? Certainly not, but even she credits that early accountability as among the most influential experiences of her life.

This reflection comes to me as I help clients prepare for the oh-so-common annual employee review process.

Recent publications indicate that human resource professionals are beginning to doubt the value of the employee review process, and many companies have abolished it altogether. Considering that most employee reviews consist of a manager making a hasty and vague list of canned desired improvements and delivering them impersonally in a 15-minute stress session, this is not surprising. Having been at the receiving end of that type of review myself, I see no value in wasting any corporate time on such activities. But what if the employee review could provide the adult version of the strong sense of personal accountability and purpose that my daughter gained when asked to create her own consequences? Isn’t there room for meaningful employee-manager exchange about goals, objectives, accomplishments, and potential?

I think there is, but it requires commitment and preparation on the part of the manager to achieve. It starts with engaging the employee in the process from the very beginning. It starts by asking the employee to be his own reviewer.

The most successful review process involves providing employees with a self review questionnaire, asking them to take time to consider their performance over the past year, and giving them the opportunity to present their assessments during a private, relaxed, sufficiently scheduled time for discussion. By putting responsibility for self-assessment in your employees’ hands you open the door to insight you could not gain if you were to review them and ask for their compliance. You also walk the fine line of approaching them as an adult peer while appropriately acknowledging your role difference, which can make all the difference between a successful or resentful working relationship.

When asking employees to prepare a self-review, suggest that they answer the following questions:

1. How did my performance contribute to my department’s achievement of our strategic goals?

2. What was the impact of my performance on the challenges faced by my teammates?
Did I accomplish goals that were set for me during my last performance review? (Please be specific.)

3. Please explain how you understand and are working to convey the company brand?
Please explain how you understand and are working to convey the company philosophy (or principles)?

4. Were there any actions or factors that inhibited your work performance? If so, please describe:

5. The new skills I have developed and demonstrated are:

6. How did these new skills add value to your team or the company?

7. How can my supervisor facilitate my contribution to the achievement of my personal goals?

8. How can my supervisor facilitate my contribution to the achievement of the company goals?

9. My goals for next year are:

Managers should answer the same questions for each employee they plan to review. A manager who doesn’t have enough information to answer those questions about each of her direct reports isn’t paying enough attention – an important form of self review for the manager.

On review day, set aside enough time (45-60 minutes) and a private space to have the discussion. Ask the employee to present his review first, in its entirety. This gives the manager the opportunity to listen carefully and learn about each direct report, which will help her be a more effective manager and will help the two of them together to provide greater value for the company and a better working experience for themselves. Once the employee has completed his review, the manager should first acknowledge all the things about which they agree, congratulating the employee on accomplishments and offering support for improvements the employee wishes to make. After that, the manager can offer insights from her own review that did not appear in the employee review. Finally, invite discussion about those points and come to agreement about the most positive goals and objectives for the coming year.

If you have a trusting relationship with your employees – and the requisite amount of confidence yourself – you can also ask for input on your own performance as a manager. Your employees possess insight about your performance that is relevant to your long-term success and different from what your boss has to offer (of course, none of this process has value without trust. If a manager has a conflicting relationship with an employee, the employee will feel set-up and unsafe when asked to come in and review himself).

One of the most common objections I hear to this approach to annual employee review is that it will take too much time. To respond to that, I like to retrieve a copy of the P&L/Operating Statement for the year. The largest company expense is almost always product cost. The second largest? Human resource. The ultimate key to competitiveness lies in the excellence and happiness of your employees. Invest in that, and you are investing in profitability.

Happy Reviewing!

© 2010 Originally published on the Hill Management Group/StrategyWerx Website, 8/29/2010. 

Better Feedback Means Better Productivity and Higher Morale

Engaging in effective communication is one of the most important – and difficult – things for a team to do. Communication becomes particularly difficult when we need to give feedback of an uncomfortable or possibly critical nature to a teammate. The “I Statement” approach will help you give better feedback and get better results.

An I Statement takes the you out of hurt feelings, as in you hurt my feelings. Instead, it helps you describe the behavior that contributed to your feelings getting hurt, and helps you express how you interpreted that behavior and why your feelings were hurt as a result. In other words – someone else did a behavior, and you own your own feelings. Expressing feedback in this way leads to far more productive conversations!

So here is the format of the “I Statement.” The more you use it, the more naturally it will come to you.

Giving better feedback is one of the most important things a company can do to improve productivity and morale. Most all of us want to do a good job - in our interpersonal relationships and in our work. We deserve to receive the feedback that will help us accomplish that. Using the I Statement helps everyone become more comfortable giving - and receiving - that important feedback.

Do you have a wine snob in your life? Everyone should have at least one. Wine snobs are important, because they teach important lessons about perspective, lessons which we all need from time to time. Right now is a good time for some perspective.

My favorite wine snobbism is that of the correct wine glass. Never a rounded rim, which drops the wine dully on the wrong location of your tongue. Large bowls to allow red wines to breathe, narrow flutes to retain the carbonation of a good bubbly, gently tipped out rims to properly deliver a young white to the correct area of the palate. All good advice of course, meant to enhance the bouquet and taste of a fine wine – or even improve the performance of a lesser wine. But a truly obsessed wine-snob-with-a-glass-issue can turn a simple dinner into an embarrassment of instruction if given a poor choice of glass – and woe to the restaurateur (or host) who does not have a better glass to offer. At this point, one would hope the expostulating oenophile would simply accept that the glass is but a delivery device, and that the true value of the wine can be found in the wine itself – even if you’re drinking it from a jelly jar.

Which brings us to social media. Social media is but a delivery device. For only a very few will it prove to be actual content, and most of those people are already in play. For the rest of us, social media is a delivery device. A marketing delivery device.

Back to the wine for a moment. My nephew and his wife are 20-somethings with two small children. They don’t have much money, but they love fine wine. Not long ago my nephew (while handing me a glass of his newest discovery) said, “Every time we have a little extra money we mean to buy good glasses. But then we decide to spend the money on the wine instead.” He said this as an apology, but I acknowledged that his priorities were in the right place. Given a choice between delivery devices and content (assuming the delivery device isn’t required to get at the content) one should choose the content! I would have been concerned had he offered me Boone's Farm in a fine crystal goblet.

So, back to social media. Right now the internet is rife with Boone's Farm in crystal goblets. It takes very little talent or skill to establish a Facebook account or post what you ate for lunch on Twitter. It takes very little time and almost no money to download your Yahoo mail addresses and send an invite to everyone you know on LinkedIn. In fact, not only can your middle-school student do it – they led the way.

But it takes a great deal of thought, planning, and discipline to integrate social media into your online presence in a way that is meaningful to your customers. It takes time to build customer relationships, and it requires sincerity and genuine concern for getting to know them. Beyond social media, it requires discipline to develop a marketing strategy that delivers relevant information in a timely manner to the right customers.

The fact that marketing media options continue to expand is directly related to the evolution of customer experience – not product superiority – as the surest route to competitive advantage. It is exciting to have so many choices, from radio, TV, newspapers, direct marketing, and events, to websites, blogs, video and podcasts, and yes, social media. But your responsibility, oh marketer, is to take great care in defining, refining, and crafting your message, then selecting the medium that is best suited to each message and your overall brand image.

The ideal wine collection includes different types of glasses to accommodate different wines. But where would you rather spend your time – at the wine bar with gleaming glass racks and substandard wine choices, or in the company of a terrific little bottle of Cabernet Franc and four juice glasses?

© 2009. Andrea M. Hill

As a society, we appear to have no skills related to argument. What's that you say? We argue a lot? Actually, most people quarrel rather than argue, though they may do so without physical involvement or raised voices. In fact, most people do not know what argument is.

This is unfortunate, because we need good, productive, challenging argument - in our family life, in our businesses, and in our shared communities. Argument is supposed to be the act of thinking together. Of both offering and considering persuasive ideas backed by facts and observations in order to advance our understanding.

Our American culture is most comfortable with competitive analogies - football, baseball, getting elected; each team or individual working to score points at the expense of the other until someone wins. But approaching argument with a desire to win guarantees that you will lose. 

The True Goal of Argument

A better analogy for argument is something collaborative: raising a child together, doing a research paper together, hosting a party together: when we collaborate, we offer ideas to one another, and we consider them together, and we toss out the bits that don't work, adopt the bits that do, and together come up with bits that we wouldn't have even thought of on our own. In fact, that last part is the most powerful - we come to understanding and knowledge that alone we could not have accomplished. That's exciting, it's empowering, and it's the stuff that makes our lives vastly more interesting and engaged. 

What Not To Do When You're Arguing

Zingers have no place in an honest argument. The minute someone throws a zinger (usually a sarcastic comment, a stinging criticism, a rebuke masked as comedy) walls are erected and communication stops. Zingers lead to anger and defensiveness and more zingers and retreat, and the shared act of creativity devolves into something ugly and uninspired.

Fact Baiting (also known as de-bating) is also not an effective form of argument. Throwing factoids at one another in an effort to win or shame or score a point simply leads to more factoids - it becomes a form of fact-littered quarreling. Facts have a place in a good argument, but their place is to present a concept, discuss the relevance and the reliability of the resource, explore together whether that concept is meaningful and useful in the context of the argument, and see if both parties have been enriched by the admission of it - as well as any facts that contradict it.

What counts for political, pundit, and most community discussion these days is a bunch of zingers made up of out-of-context facts thrown at an opposition in an effort to win.  Recent social reports show that people are feeling uneasy and not very hopeful - and that makes sense to me. We put far more energy into defending and tearing down than we do to creating and building up.

Argue for Mutual Success

So why do we need argument? Because we need solutions, we need common ground, we need mutual awareness and understanding, and when we do the thinking together we find these things. Sometimes argument gets passionate and noisy, and that's OK when passionate people are also respectful people. The key is to listen, absorb, think, consider what the other person is saying. Ask yourself over and over, "What aspect of what this person is saying is right? Why does this matter so much to this person? What can I learn from this idea that's different than my idea?"

We have become so polarized in our national discussions of religion, politics, and social values. The further we retreat to our respective ends of the spectrum, the less likely we are to get anything done, let alone learn anything new. But if we all tried arguing, rather than quarreling, we might just come to some new insights, which could lead to new conclusions, which could lead to new solutions.

The next time someone presents an idea that you are opposed to or disagree with, try asking yourself what you can learn from that person and what they can learn from you.  When it comes to putting our heads together, one plus one nearly always sums up to more than two.

One of the most important tasks of a marketer is to take the company's secret sauce - its special blend of products, services, and personality - and find the customers to whom it matters most. This is the work of marketing relevance. And we have better tools than ever to do this work with social media, email marketing, and website analysis.

Which is how I found the modern world's newest form of rejection. The Unsubscribe.

That unsubscribe is a killer, isn't it? Rejection-in-an-email. I used to catch my breath a little bit every time it happened to me. But that's when I realized that the unsubscriber is doing me a favor. He (or she) is giving me notice that he doesn't find my product, service, message, or method of reaching him to be relevant. He is opting out. And rather than seeing it as a rejection, I now recognize it for what it really is: the opportunity to not waste my precious resources talking to the wrong people.

The unsubscriber is an honest soul. He doesn't want something, and he tells you so. How many people receive email after email from a company and simply delete it without reading it? The company is left with the impression that they have an interested, albeit slow-to-engage, person on the marketing list. The unsubscriber says "stop including me in your thinking! My habits and responses (or lack thereof) have absolutely nothing to teach you about your messages, products and services!"

Now I don't let it get to me when someone unsubscribes. I send them a silent thank you and continue building my marketing lists, searching for those who find my business's secret sauce an irresistible addition to their business diet. The search for marketing relevance is filled with unsubscribes and SPAM complaints (really? Like, I just met you at a trade show, you gave me your business card and told me to let you know when we were offering another class, I send you an email to let you know the schedule, and you make a SPAM complaint??). But that's OK. Because once those people are off the bus, I can focus my time and energy on the ones who stay on board for the ride.

One of my earliest jobs was at an advertising agency, and the main thing I remember about working there is that everybody screamed at each other all the time. Sometimes the screaming was loud, sometimes it was more of a hiss, sometimes it was profane, but invariably, the people who worked there were entrenched in conflict with one another. Everything was an argument, from who made the coffee to who was smarter than whom. They fought over ideas, handling of clients, kissing of asses, and compensation. I left that job as soon as possible, and with a minor case of PTSD.

Each subsequent job I took involved a careful screening of the environment. I was not going to work in an angry and competitive culture ever again.

And I never did. Instead, I found something even more disturbing. A place where nobody was supposed to argue or dissent at all. Over anything. It wasn’t nice. It wasn’t part of the culture. It was conflict.

I am neither a screamer nor a fighter. I am, however, very comfortable with argument, and I am very direct. Some of that is just my personality, but some of it is purposeful self-development. Two of the things I value are clarity and progress, and a good argument can be a tremendous facilitator of both. So working at a company that stifled anything that looked like conflict was very disturbing. And as you might guess, the company had stagnated. Everyone was happy, though nobody got a raise. Everybody was equal, but the company had dropped to the lowest common denominator.

You company – heck, your life, your marriage, your relationships – need argument. Argument isn’t necessary all the time, nor does it need to be disrespectful or demeaning, but it must exist for change and progress to occur. A collaboration of any sort without at least an occasional clash of diverging or opposite ideas will be as satisfying as a diet of chicken broth and as energizing as a dip in a tepid bath.

Progress, innovation, and breakthroughs happen in the space between assumptions and ideas. When two or more people engage in a passionate discussion, throwing all their experience and beliefs out on the table for dissection and examination, great things can happen. Of course, it’s not actually an argument if nobody is listening. An argument is defined as an exchange of ideas. If each side is only throwing and not catching, that’s a game of dodgeball.

If you want to cultivate an environment that encourages people to bring their whole self to work, you need to encourage an environment that makes it safe to argue. That means helping people who like to argue do so in a respectful manner, and it means making argument safe for people who are terrified of argument. It means helping managers understand that the exchange of ideas must also come from their subordinates, and it means creating a safe environment for subordinates to bring their ideas to the table and even fight for them.

One of the best ways to do this is to create a culture that identifies and encourages arguments as debates. First, you must help everyone understand that a debate is a structured forum in which opposing ideas are presented, supported with facts or evidence, and dissected to find the flaws. In a debate, one side listens while the other side speaks. Speaking with passion and heat are perfectly OK, but attacking the other side professionally or personally is not. The goal is to at least decide on the best course of action among the alternatives, or at best to determine an even better course of action than anyone had thought of prior.

In the early stages of introducing this idea to a culture, the debates must be moderated – and some companies get so much out of the format that they continue to moderate forever, just to get the best results possible. The most common time to find such an argument brewing is in a meeting. It should be acceptable for anyone in the room to say, “It looks like we have a few conflicting ideas here. Let’s debate it.” This simple statement validates that it is perfectly acceptable to have conflicting ideas, and it serves as the cue for the group to move into the debate structure. One person should be at the white board, capturing the main ideas of each participant. A moderator is needed to summarize and reflect back what is said (which ensures understanding) and to make sure people wait their turn to talk (and to remind them to write a note so they don’t forget what they wanted to say).  It helps if the moderator is an extremely good listener with an ability to see the points of agreement among the debaters. And if a few raucous free-for-alls break out with everyone talking at once? The moderator steps in, cools things off, tells everyone to write down what they wanted the rest of the group to hear, and moves the group back into the debate structure – without judgment or criticism. Just re-focus.

Will every debate end up with a group hug? Definitely not. But neither does most passive aggression and conflict avoidance. By implementing this approach and practicing it over time, your company can gain skills in the cultivation of new ideas. Eventually people in the organization will get comfortable enough to realize that conflict is neither good nor bad, but how we embrace it makes all the difference in the world.

I have been following Sony BMG's advertising campaign for the 25th anniversary of the Thriller album with a great deal of interest. I think it's a brilliant marketing effort. In case you've missed it, Sony BMG has melded new marketing media and traditional marketing media to introduce a remake of the highest selling album of all time. The company has a particular challenge in introducing the remake of the album. The average consumer thinks Michael Jackson is a freak at best and a pederast at worst, and Jackson's financial challenges can be credited in part with Americans' faint disgust with him as a human being. The music world still considers Jackson to be a genius, but while they regularly incorporate his work in their own work – either directly or through significant inspiration – that influence is less obvious to the public. So the typical approaches to a 25th anniversary album – a tour, appearances on all the talk shows, etc. – were not an option. So in a brilliant display of their understanding of new media options, the company challenged professional dancers to perform Thriller's zombie dance in public venues from London's Chinatown to Cophenhagen's busiest train terminal. In each case, the audience for the dancers was 100 people or less. But every performance was posted on YouTube, and the videos have been downloaded nearly 1.5 million times so far. Every YouTube viewer of a Thriller promo is also exposed to the Michael Jackson YouTube site, where a promotion of the 25th anniversary album has been viewed over 600,000 times. The story received so much viral play that it was picked up by the New York Times and other major papers. In the first week of release the new album rocketed into the number one spot on Billboard's Top Pop chart and placed in top five or better rankings in music markets around the world.

Marketing continues to change. Today's marketers absolutely must understand not only what these marketing tools are and how to use them, but also the social implications of the new marketing tools. A reflection on the recent history of marketing and its evolution over the past 60 years helps illustrate this point.

Marketers who came of age in the 1940s – 1960s were selling to a very different consumer than are the marketers of today. From a social standpoint, there was little deviation from what was deemed conventional behavior, and deep social conformity led to conformity of taste and product usage. This was reinforced commercially, because product differentiation was expensive to achieve. Individuation of taste and access to unique products was reserved for the wealthy. From the marketer's perspective, the communication venues were limited (though significantly expanded from prior decades). Print, radio, and television were the primary means of reaching consumers, and all three mediums were focused on addressing mass audiences. This led to programming and advertising that was overwhelmingly homogeneous. How were the major social issues of the time influenced by the dramatic rise of the television as a communication medium during those years?

The 1960s-1990s saw dramatic change in cultural and social tastes reflective of the nonconformist predilections of baby boomers. Not surprisingly, direct marketing came of age during this time, bringing to a society that was still treated homogeneously by mass media a refreshing ability to cater to diverse tastes and interests. By the 1980s cable television ushered in the segmentation of America on a large scale, replacing the big three networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) and their virtually indistinguishable programming perspectives with literally hundreds of alternatives – many of them geared to comparatively tiny segments of the population. Cable television was the gateway to today's internet world – a world in which consumers take for granted the expectation that they can control the content they consume. The PC revolution was aided by the launch of Compuserve and AOL, delivering the ability to customize a media content experience. From that point it was a small leap for customers to begin to expect they could also control the marketing messages to which they were exposed.

Today's marketer faces a complex array of marketing choices. Email, wikis, social networking, personalized search, user-generated content, blogs, streaming video, vertical search engines, targeted communities, web enabled phones, location-based services and mobile search, participatory advertising, RSS, and VOIP are all new tools in the marketer's toolbox.

Marketing is simply the business of communication. The proper definition of communication involves two or more parties. Traditional approaches to marketing, limited by the technology and social perspectives of their times, reduced marketing to a one-way method. Today's marketers have the opportunity to embrace genuine communication with their customers. And this opportunity comes with a significant learning curve. But the learning curve is somewhat more than the average marketer may be realizing. Yes, a big part of the learning curve is simply mastering all these new tools – remembering your log-ins for the different services, and figuring out how to use them, which customers are attracted to them, and what purpose they serve. But in fact, those things are the easiest part of the learning equation.

Remember the book – and the saying – the medium is the message? Marshall McLuhan, author of the saying and of the 1964 book of the same name, theorized that every message is not only influenced, but defined, by the medium by which the message is delivered. McLuhan died in 1980, before any of these new digital marketing mediums were possible, let alone conceived of. Yet his work is as relevant today as it was back when he was worried about the ultimate social impact of the television. McLuhan argued that at the intelligent, rational levels of perception, human beings take a message and consider its content carefully. However, at the empirical – experiential – level of consciousness, the medium itself is the message.

As we have discussed numerous other times in these columns, humans are not all that skilled at critical thinking. When you consider this disjunction between intended content and medium, it's not hard to understand why young females suffer from a variety of eating disorders, young males begin to suspect that their role in life is to be sexy and adolescent for ever, or young children find it difficult to differentiate between cartoons and real life. The subtext of every advertisement is at least as powerful – and sometimes more powerful – than the intended content.

Maybe Sony BMG stumbled into this idea through sheer luck, but I prefer to believe they carefully considered all the aspects of this challenging marketing situation. They took the product of a once-great but now sullied star and removed the taint. By highlighting the creativity, gumption, and sheer fun of young people with talent providing impromptu performances in public places, Sony BMG created focus on the music, how it made us feel in 1983 when we first heard it, and how it still makes us feel today.

Marketers today would be well-advised to expand their thinking well beyond the typical questions of features and benefits of products and services. Features and benefits continue to be of significant importance, but they are only the starting point. Marketers must also consider the mediums that are most relevant for the delivery of the message. That evaluation needs to be expanded beyond the questions of who is using this medium and what is the expense of using this medium. The evaluation also needs to include an assessment of how the medium itself influences the message – both from a message efficacy standpoint and from an ethical standpoint.

Sound complicated? No more so than when McLuhan first started publicly exploring these ideas in 1951, in his book The Mechanical Bride. Society may seem more complicated to us now, but it seemed plenty complicated
to those who were our age in the 50s and 60s. And though we may be the first generations to experience the explosion of digital marketing, I daresay the rise of radio and television felt every bit as earth shaking in their time. At the end of the day, marketing is a social effort, informed (hopefully) by history, and both defined by and defining of current cultural norms. When marketing is approached with respect for all the disciplines involved – analytics, verbal and graphic arts, psychology, sociology, and ethics – it can be a resoundingly satisfying career choice.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

In the middle of the 20^th century, marketing and advertising were easy. Three major television networks directed us to a handful of brand choices at the grocery store, and big box retailers were decades away. Simplicity ruled. Simplicity of communication channels. Simplicity of product choice.

Today market advisors encourage companies to actively engage the newest forms of communication, because the old forms of communication no longer suffice. New social media demands that we all say something to our customers in order to stay relevant and top-of-mind. So small-to-midsize business executives that still can’t figure out how to operate their computers without calling the IT department for their own personal MacGyver are now trying to figure out how to make friends on Facebook, tweet on Twitter, and add their work history on LinkedIn. I suspect that many of them – unless they pay someone to monitor their social networking for them – end up with 14 friends on Facebook and a profile on Twitter that looks like 150 following, 72 followers and 4 posts. Big corporate executives don’t even struggle with this step. They assign the marketing department to set up accounts on all these services. But they fail to share strategy goals in a meaningful way, so the marketing department approaches social media as another form of advertising. And the tweet goes on. 

There is something significantly different about marketing now than marketing 40 years ago – something beyond the plethora of channel and brand choices. Back then, we all watched the same primetime television shows, during which we were told which products we could and should trust when cleaning, feeding, and caring for our families. Our social relationships were fairly fixed. We generally lived near not only our families, but also the people we went to high school and grade school with. We worked with the same people for 15, 20, 30 years. Why does that matter? Because what we bought, used, and displayed had influence on our friends, neighbors, and family – they knew us enough to trust us.

So when Donna Reed told you to eat Campbell’s Soup, it came, not from the star of a reality show you may never have watched, but from the personality of a home-town girl you had grown to love after watching her movies and television shows. When your father said “we don’t buy Cadillacs, we buy Fords,” that statement informed your personal identity. And when the sugar your neighbor lent you was G&H, you realized that it would be important to lend the same thing back when she asked.

In other words, we had inferred relationships with the products we purchased because we had relationships with the people who sold them to us.

But even as the iconoclast Marshall McLuhan tried to warn us about how media would ultimately shape our understanding of the world and indeed, the world itself, the economics of globalization were creating confusion between the concepts of comparative advantage and competitive advantage, and the result was an explosion of just-like-me products and undifferentiated services. Unable to sell any inherent value, marketing became about selling. This was when SPAM actually began.

Marshall McLuhan’s argument went beyond how media was changing the world. He demonstrated that the decentralization of modern living would ultimately thrust human experience back to the life of the tribe.

Our customers no longer trust marketing, which they perceive to be synonymous with advertising. It’s not. But as we stretched our understanding of business communications to encompass progressively more media channels, we thinned its content to a mere schmear of superficiality. Nearly all modern advertising presents product, price and place, with a superficial nod to style, design, or sex appeal. None of which contribute to relationships. 

Without the support of wild growth based on expansion, we must return to offering things of inherent, comparative value. Relationships are once again essential to business success. Relationships within the business, and relationships with the customers, vendors, and communities the business depends on. But has our understanding of relationship become superficial as well? Is paying on time a good relationship, or just a component of a good relationship? Is delivering on time at the promised price a relationship, or a common courtesy? Is giving the customer in-depth product information a relationship, or a savvy business move?

Each industry, community, and business must manifest this concept in different ways. Before I offer specific suggestions for marketing through business relationships, I’d like you to have a chance to consider these ideas for yourself. I hope you’ll join me tomorrow for Part II of this discussion. 

© 2009. Andrea M. Hill

Note: This is the second entry in a 2-part series. You may want to read them in order for the sake of clarity.

What things of inherent, comparative value do you sell? If you’re 20^th Century Fox that’s easy – you have Slumdog Millionaire. But for most businesses, highlighting a certain thing requires significant narrowing of focus, to a specific design sensibility, an extremely low price point, or something that is nano instead of micro. And unless you’ve figured out how to hermetically seal that product in patents, you won’t be able to claim such tenuous value for long.

The corporate approach to value has become a competition for eye-level shelf space (whose eye-level, one wonders), end caps, brand associations (ad dollars), celebrity endorsements (steroids anyone?), sex appeal and its ugly step-sister snob appeal, and market lockout (Gannett). The problem with these approaches is that there is nothing valuable about them. They are all superficial attempts to secure a place in a buyer’s mind and heart.

Superficial beings don’t recognize that others do not love them, because they are so busy loving themselves. They eventually look around in their dwelling-space, find it empty, and wonder when everyone left. This is the plight of most business – a plight that finds many scrambling in desperation to the one measure that remains. . . a lower price.

Are all business people foolish? No. We are victims of recent and overwhelming success. Though we cannot do justice to a post WWII cultural and economic overview in two paragraphs, I’ll try to briefly illustrate the trajectory that delivered us here.

First consider the dramatic cultural impact of the evolution of the media we depend upon to deliver nearly all our marketing. What did Marshall McLuhan mean when he said (in 1960) that the new world of media would return man to the experience of the tribe? He was drawing a distinction between literate man, educated and informed in the era of books, and a new tribal man, educated and informed in the era of media. Literate man, in McLuhan’s view, was an isolated being, experiencing new meaning and ideas in private, one line at a time. Books are a form of private imagery. In contrast, the explosion of new media would cause world populations to experience new meaning and ideas at the same time. McLuhan called it tribal, because tribes do their sense-making collectively, publicly. He defined media as corporate imagery, meaning it is for public consumption. Previously, the only imagery consumed publicly, en masse, was liturgical in nature. McLuhan was warning us that media was becoming the new forum from which people would seek meaning. 

Now consider dramatic shifts in economic production. Before the 20^th century, the comparative abilities of regions and nations were fairly static. Isolationism was the most common trade theory (i.e., stout protection of comparative advantage), and the United States took advantage of it to build the world’s strongest economy. The (primarily Western) age of making and selling products of convenience to classes lower than the uppermost had begun. But after two world wars and a devastating international depression we found ourselves faced with a world in crisis. It was in our national interest to help rebuild devastated economies, to sell our goods to their people, and ultimately, to reduce prices for our own citizens. As we transferred technology to other countries, the comparative abilities of regions and nations changed dramatically. Combine new international competitiveness with our own accelerated technology development curve, improved infrastructure leading to superior transportation systems, and a wildly reproductive media market insatiable for advertising, and it is not surprising that we have an explosion of products and services that cannot be differentiated from one another except by price.

What happens when the social structure of the nuclear family (opposite of tribal man) and its insularity (including the comfort of knowing what to buy and from whom) loses some of its influence? What happens when this cultural shift occurs simultaneously with an explosion of products and services? What happens when these things occur alongside the serial introduction of new technology media – so much media that we can watch multiple cable channels while internet surfing and texting our friends, receiving advertisements on all of them? When happens when populations begin to look to commercial enterprises for meaning and do not find it?

We tune out. 

This is the challenge facing the modern marketer. The challenge to do something other than advertise. The challenge to do something other than reduce the price, show more skin, or try to figure out a way to be heard amidst the sounds of marketing bombardment. It is the challenge to be relevant and to relate. 

Understanding how to market to our customers – existing and prospective –begins with the etymology of the words relevant and relate. Relevant comes from medieval Latin to raise, or to lift up. Relate hearkens to early Latin, meaning to carry or to translate.

At one time simply buying a Cadillac raised up one’s perception of their own status – in both their eyes and in the eyes of their neighbor. Using Donna Reed as a spokesperson helped to translate Campbell’s Soup from an inferior – because store-bought – version of something your mother should cook to the trusted and delicious soup your mother was cooking. And the implied social pressure of which brand of sugar your neighbor buys no longer carries over as a suggestion for your own purchasing behavior.

One more semantic sidebar. The word market comes from the word trade, when trade literally meant to do so, to barter one thing of value for another.

Simple exchanges of cash for product are increasingly about price. That may be fine for Wal-Mart, but the rest of us need margins. If all products are similar, what nuance will you offer that increases value? What can you do to raise up, carry, and translate for your customer – to offer in trade beyond the item? Let’s look at it through the use of examples.

One corporate marketing campaign that did this well was Sony’s 2008 promotion for the 25^th anniversary version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. They hired dance troupes around the world to stage impromptu, public performances of the Thriller music video dance. This created instant communities of people sharing a surprising experience of public art. They filmed each performance and put them on YouTube. At this point they were reaching out to two different tribes in highly relevant ways. People my age lived the novelty and drama that was Thriller all over again – carrying us back to our 1982 selves for a moment. Much younger people experienced Thriller in their own medium and performed by people their own age, translating the experience from one generation to the next.

Recent decades of presidential politics had turned off swathes of voters as political persuasion was reduced to the level of a sales pitch. President Obama rode to the White House on the tails of an electorate that had been electrified. By what? By being invited to participate. His campaign was a miracle of modern marketing. He organized a community, primarily using new media. He traded – for votes – the promise of involvement (raise up), a commitment to carry issues of importance to the national stage, and an ability to translate generalized angst into clear talking points.

Good marketing doesn’t require million dollar budgets or a national stage.

Gary Dawson owns Goldworks Jewelry Art Studio in downtown Eugene, Oregon. He has been in business for over 25 years, and is currently having a fantastic growth year in spite of the recession. Part of his current marketing strategy is to offer a monthly wine & cheese evening for his customers. He organizes a segment of his customer base into a group of people with common interests in jewelry and wine. He invites local wineries to do a wine tasting and he provides the food, the gathering place, and the atmosphere. Gary has created a trade environment where his customers make new acquaintances (tribe/community) and obtain new knowledge and experiences (raising up). The wineries contribute wine for the tasting, but benefit from the wine sales and future customers (carry/translate).

Ganoksin and the Orchid Forum – the brainchild of Hanuman and Charles Lewton-Brain – is another jewelry industry example of new marketing. An internet forum, their marketing premise is to actually be a community – a tribe of jewelry artists. They exist solely to educate their community. Contrast this with other social media venues where jewelers gather – like Twitter or Facebook. Those environments offer a gathering place, but Ganoksin turns its content into a searchable jewelry-making encyclopedia shared by all. Member organizations who sell to jewelers have the opportunity to use Ganoksin in a new marketing way – or in the old way. They can buy an advertising banner and be done with it. Or, they can buy an advertising banner and participate in the Orchid forums, answering the questions for which they have expert answers to provide value to their customers. 

To manifest your marketing is to make your unique offering of value obvious to your customers. Sony did it by showing that their value wasn’t just Michael Jackson or Thriller, it was art, entertainment and nostalgia. President Obama did it by moving the presidential conversation away from the dead ideas of conservative and liberal (yes these are dead ideas) and into value concepts like participation, health care, the environment, and opportunity. Gary Dawson does it by serving up new friendships, knowledge, and community-focused business growth. Orchid does it by investing in the intellectual capital of an industry. All these winners offer products and services remarkably similar to their competitors. But it’s the rare 25^th anniversary rerelease of an album that reaches #2 in the US charts and certifies gold in 11 countries.

To raise. To lift up. To carry. To translate. To recognize the importance of community, and seek meaningful ways to organize customers – by which I mean meaningful to them. To use new media adroitly, as it befits your value proposition. These are the challenges - and opportunities - facing today’s marketer.

© 2009. Andrea M. Hill

You've heard it. That awful moment when the speaker's mic comes a little too close to the amplifier and that ear-shattering screech rings out through the auditorium. That's feedback. Right? No, Feedback is a superhero, a former member of the team Beta Flight. Dig out your Marvel Comics. Unless you're into hip hop, in which case Feedback was Jurassic 5's last album. It's also an annoying but essential process of being a participant in eBay, a studio EP by the rock band Rush, and a 1972 album by the rock band Spirit (remember them? Neither do I).

Most people would rather look up the many definitions of feedback than actually put themselves through the agony of giving it or receiving it.

Feedback is sort of a stupid term. I'm sure it was invented by some management theory enthusiast who thought it sounded more intelligent, more B-school, more commercial than the plebian "hey, can we talk for a minute?" Feedback is the process-ized, depersonalized, anti-literate term for a mere element of the human process known to most of us as communication.

The idea is good. The idea is that we should be telling the truth in our organizations, and that by telling the truth, we avail ourselves of information and insight that will enable us to do a better job. Believe it or not, that idea is revolutionary. Though that begs the question - can an idea whose time has come again, and again, and again still be revolutionary? Hans Christian Anderson alluded to the importance of truth-telling (or our lack of willingness to engage in it) in 1837 when he first published The Emperor's New Clothes. Shakespeare plays with it in Measure for Measure and Alls Well That Ends Well (actually, it's a major theme throughout his work). Boccaccio loved a sexual masquerade, and both Socrates and Plato devoted a hefty part of their storied lives to holding forth on the topic.

Yet most of our early memories of truth-telling consist of our mothers telling us not to tell Aunt Etta that we love the way the skin on the underside of her arm jiggles when we touch it; of our fathers telling our mothers "No! I never think you look fat!" and then winking at us; of our early lessons about never telling the boy or girl you like that you actually like them; and of our parents' Sunday brunch discussion about how Pastor Williams' sermon was so much hokum, when we clearly heard them tell him what a great sermon it was as we exited the church.

If centuries of philosophy, religion, social and political discourse have not led to comfort with telling uncomfortable truths or indeed, hearing them, then I think it is possible that the notion of truth-telling at work is, indeed, revolutionary.

Our discomfort with truth-telling leads us to say we like things we don't actually like. Such as your girlfriend's chicken tortilla soup, which tastes like soggy flour. But you can't say that, so you eat it while cringing inwardly. When does she find out? When she's been your wife for two years and suddenly you can no longer tolerate it and you blurt out that you absolutely hate that stuff. The risk that was avoided during the courtship was not the risk of hurting her feelings. Not really. It was the risk of mustering enough courage to say what you thought in a kind and loving manner. If receiving feedback is difficult, giving it is more so.

Most of our failures to tell the truth are due to cowardice rather than sensitivity for others. That cowardice hurts the deserving recipient far more than the information from which our pseudo-sensitivity was protecting them.

In business this cowardice leads to employees who don't realize they are doing a terrible job until their annual review – at which point it costs them a raise and causes a probationary period, demotion, or possibly termination. The same cowardice results in senior executives being shielded from important information from the field, because it's risky to provide information that hasn't been asked for, or, even if it has, might prove to be irritating. Cowardice leads to failure to provide a peer with an observation about how their performance could be improved, how they could make a better impression, or about a mistake they made. Could malice drive some of that? Probably, but I'd wager not as often as cowardice is the culprit.

So. Feedback. It's a dumb word. But if we could all develop a knack for telling the truth - with kindness, empathy, a genuine desire for the betterment of  the other person and for the enrichment of our relationship – we would enjoy a more nuanced, more productive work experience. And maybe we could even un-name it after a while. Maybe the word feedback would go away, a silly historical reference to a time when communication skills were bereft of an effective means for telling one another about what is real.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

You know the saying No Pain, No Gain, but here's a little different way to look at it.  I have been reviewing/refining 2014 sales & marketing strategy for several clients yesterday and today, and the pain or gain aspect of market planning is really resonating with me right now.

One thing we understand about selling (and therefore, marketing) is that every purchase someone makes is either to eliminate a pain or to create a gain. If you can resonate with the potential buyers' emotions associated with either eliminating pain or experiencing gain  (or both) you can use that in your marketing messages, images, and strategies.

The way to figure out what pain you can eliminate is to ask. Just ask your customers for the list of things they are frustrated with relative to what you have to sell. Then figure out a way to express what you have to sell as a solution to a pain.

The gain aspect can be a bit more challenging to define. For many purchases, the gain is simply that it makes the buyer feel better. Savvy marketers dig in and try to understand why and how the product makes them feel better. They also look for ways to make the experience of buying the product feel like a gain - not just the purchased item itself. When selling business-to-business the gain is often outside the actual product. The gain may be in the services, brand cache, terms, or other support you can provide.

What pain are you alleviating, or what gain are you providing, with the product you sell? Think about it for your business!

Better Decision Making Starts with Better Reactions to Requests

When I was growing up, one of the next-door-neighbor moms was, well, sort of rough. Whenever the kids would ask if they could do something (go outside and play, go to the pool, etc.), she would respond with a series of rapid-fire questions:

"Did you clean your room yet? Did you pick up the family room like I asked you to? Are there dishes in the sink? Are your dirty shoes still on the back porch?"

A saner mom (like my own, or the one on the other side of us) would say, "Well, if you've done everything you're supposed to do then of course you can go." The difference is profound.  The rapid-fire question-asking was intended to induce anxiety over asking for something. The calmer statement of fact was intended to get something done.

Later on in business I encountered bosses who did this sort of thing. When you approached them to ask if you could do something (perhaps something special for a customer, or spend some money on an advertising opportunity, or buy a new tool), they would respond with a series of questions designed to instill anxiety: "Do you know how much you've spent already this month? Do you know what it would cost to do that for every customer? Did you shop all the competitors to make sure you have the best price? How are you doing on your performance metrics?" At those times I would feel the anxiety-bile rising in my throat, just as it did every time the neighbor mom did it to my childhood friends.

One day when I was at the zoo with my daughter I heard a mom using the rapid-fire question strategy on her son who had just asked for a hot dog. We happened to be in the Ape House, enjoying the much-anticipated poo throwing ritual. I put the two together forever and always.

It occurred to me that people do this type of poo-throwing when they are being asked for something. Many people don't like the feeling of  being asked for something - it feels like pressure or an imposition.  They are even more inclined to throw poo when asked to make a decision that they don't feel prepared to make; the send-them-scrambling-poo-throw delays the time when they must make a commitment.

So here's your challenge for today. Examine how you respond to being asked for things, or asked to make decisions. If your reaction apes anything like the situations I have described here (yeah, OK, pardon the pun), take a look at why you do it, and how you might respond more effectively.

Note to you "let me think about it's" (like me): that can be a delaying tactic too! Not quite as messy, but ultimately just as frustrating for those who need you to make a decision.

I am fixated lately on the topic of outstanding customer service. As a road-warrior and constant consumer of restaurant, hotel, car rental, coffee shop, salon, apparel, and convenience store services domestically and abroad, in community sizes ranging from tiny Iowa towns to London, I suspect I encounter a reasonable approximation of what customer service means today. What I have encountered is a strange dichotomy.

Customer Service Out, Customer Service Culture In

On the one hand, excellent customer service is no longer treated as a differentiator by consumers. Twenty years ago, a business could set itself apart by touting its fantastic service. Advertising one’s customer service prowess or awards for customer service meant something to consumers, and it was often excellent service that businesses chose to feature in taglines. Today, excellent service is a minimum standard necessary to compete. Boasting about or branding with excellent customer service is like advertising an automobile and saying, "It runs! It goes up to 75 mph!"

On the other hand, excellent customer service can be very difficult to find, even in the luxury sector. At a time when consumer expectations regarding service are higher than ever, why aren’t businesses stepping up and delivering?

Because excellent – no, outstanding – customer service is one of the hardest things to do. You can’t automate it. You can’t script it or cookie-cutter it. You can’t ensure it with policy or rules. Excellent customer service is about people, and people run on motivation.

When I refer to customer service, I’m not just talking about direct personal interactions. Think of all the people in non-customer facing roles that have significant influence over how the customer feels about the company:

• The web developer that cares about customer experience creates shopping interfaces that are simple, fast, and efficient and filter or search functions that quickly provide the right answers.
• The systems person that creates strong data warehouse tools helps customer-facing team-members quickly find and deliver information to interested customers.
• The purchasing staffer who does such thoughtful forecasting and planning that the right products are in the right places at the right times – so customers can find them.
• The CFO who supports the creation of simple, easy return policies to ensure customer satisfaction.
• The marketing team member who thoughtfully manages customer lists to ensure that the most relevant email campaigns go to each list subscriber.
• The production worker who looks for the tiniest errors to ensure a customer never finds one.
• The shipping clerk who packs every box as if the contents are fragile and going to his own mother.

To deliver outstanding customer service, a company must motivate every single employee in every single role to think about how his or her work will affect the customer.

Outstanding Customer Service Starts with the Right Ingredients

I do not believe in the adage you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But I do believe that our essential ingredients – personality, character, and self-discipline – are fairly set by the time we reach adulthood. The truth is, some people are wired to deliver an outstanding customer experience because they are empathetic, interested in others, and motivated to serve. If the people you hire don’t start with those essential characteristics, no amount of training, cajoling, or threatening will induce them to become passionate service people.

But it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? Because those aren’t the only ingredients you need. When you hire a sales person who must deliver outstanding customer service, they must combine empathy and service-orientation with self-confidence and the ability to influence someone to part with their cash. On the other hand, if you are hiring a nurse, you need a person who combines empathy and service orientation with the ability to handle tremendous pressure, mete out pain, and deliver difficult news with pragmatic calm, all while keeping the patients from becoming frightened. An airline attendant must combine empathy and service orientation with vigilance. These are three very different recipes.

The Human Resource function has evolved to do a much better job of finding the best ingredients and matching them with roles and teams, and many new business tools and practices are available to support best practices in hiring, onboarding, and training. But are most businesses using these tools? Unscientific research (i.e., observation) would suggest that they are not. If you invest in one area of improvement for your service-dependent business this year, do a better job of matching the right people with the right teams and jobs.

Pre-Employment Assessments that Help You Build a Customer Service Culture

First You Solve the Processes . . .

The full saying goes, first you solve the process, then you solve the people. The source of most people-problems at work is process problems. If your processes are unnecessarily complex, cumbersome, inconsistent or – worse! – nonexistent, your people cannot give consistent – let alone outstanding – service. Make sure that your business processes are simple, effective, complete (which means no opportunities to drop the ball), documented, and trained. In that order. Let’s do that again:

1. Simple
2. Effective
3. Complete (this means that each process design is complete, from beginning to completion and monitoring)
4. Documented
5. Trained

Walk into any company that delivers consistently outstanding customer service, and you’ll find excellent process management. Why? Because the end result – outstanding customer service – is dependent on each company defining what service means according to its own brand and standards, defining the services that deliver the required level of care, and being able to train all employees involved in each service area to deliver the same services in the same ways.

Outstanding Service Comes from Effective Management

Good management is essential to business success. Too many businesses approach management as a personality trait, or the thing we do when we’re creating schedules, granting time off, or creating reports. In fact, great management comes from two terms that are not terribly in vogue these days, concepts that seem related to old, hierarchical models of business: command and control. But when you break these concepts down and examine the details, you see how important they are.

Command

I use the term command because it’s still the term that is taught in business schools and recognized as one of the pillars of management. Other effective terms would be influence, motivate, and inspire. In fact, “lead” is the concept we’re going after, but in management theory terms, leadership is more than just this element. So, what is a manager supposed to be doing in this regard? Command is about having a clear vision, communicating it to the team, and ensuring that the team achieves its objectives. Communication skill is critical, because constant, effective communication helps a group of people embrace and share a common set of goals. A manager with a grasp on command creates an environment where people understand what is expected, have enough information to buy into the goals and objectives, are excited about the pursuit of excellence, and are clear that failure to deliver on the team’s goals will result in consequences.

Control

Control is not about controlling people – it’s about controlling the way in which the work is done and whether or not the work is done correctly. Processes, procedures, efficiency, and structure are the domain of control. Good managers not only communicate expectations and motivate people to do as required (command), they also create project plans, delegate activities, evaluate, monitor, measure, and share progress with their teams.

If you’re not being successful in the management areas of command and control, then it is unlikely that your team is capable of delivering outstanding customer service.

Culture is the Binding Agent

A company’s culture is the glue that binds all the important elements of the company together. A strong, positive business culture reinforces the brand, and in the best examples, defines it. The culture of a workplace determines and reflects employee commitment. To create a company culture that will nurture and serve customers, you must have a culture that nurtures and serves employees. Please don’t confuse nurturing with coddling – they are not the same. Employees want to be treated as professionals, with dignity and respect. Study after study demonstrates that employees who are trusted and expected to perform admirably will rise to the occasion.

A strong, positive business culture is created by thoughtful leadership, the right people in the right roles, good processes, strong management, and positive, goal-oriented behavior.

Every business culture is different, but all should include these ingredients. Without a strong culture, you cannot achieve outstanding customer service.

I’ve heard people blame today’s lack of customer service on the continued automation of service, reduced congeniality in society, or on an angrier, more demanding workforce. There may be particles of truth in all that, but I don't think those are the core reasons. Rather, what I observe in both the businesses I patronize and those I consult, is that the frantic pace of business combined with frequent economic and social uncertainty causes business owners and executives to work in a very tactical manner. This leaves little time for thinking about and managing the basics, and does not lend itself to long-term thinking and planning. Which, among other problems, erodes the company’s ability to deliver outstanding customer service.

Delivering outstanding customer service is one of the most critical things a business must do, particularly at a time when consumers expect nothing less. The good news is that dedication to known management fundamentals is half the battle. What will be harder for many companies is the creation of a strong, positive business culture. In fact, strong, positive business culture may be the differentiator of the future. A worthy, rewarding goal to shoot for.

Ready to hire outstanding customer service people? Use Andrea Hill's highly informative, immediately useful handbook, "The How-to-Hire-Handbook for Small Business Owners," and make better hiring decisions today!

Watching the movie "Something's Gotta Give" last night got me thinking about power paradigms and how they play out among individuals and within small businesses. In the movie, Jack Nicholson portrays a 63-year-old over-the-top stereotypical playboy who only dates 20-something women. He is simultaneously an anachronism and a highly sympathetic character in the movie, partly because the one 20-something relationship we see him in is one in which the woman enjoys a balance of power with him.

Balance of power. This is the thing that determines the difference between an off-color joke and a sexual harassment. Balance of power differentiates between a fist-fight and an assault, an argument and an attack, a gamble and a fraud. Every business owner, manager, and supervisor must be acutely aware of the balance of power between them and their subordinates.

My particular reason for thinking about this issue now is that this super-heated political season has brought to my attention numerous instances of employees feeling discomfort and dismay over the political climate at their places of work. After spending many years as the only center-left member of an organization with far-right ownership, I can certainly relate to the tip-toeing and side-stepping one must do to avoid an argument that has no value to the business at hand. But for people reporting to a supervisor, manager, or worse - business owner - who holds political opinions significantly different from their own, the discomfort goes beyond the desire to avoid fruitless discussion. It touches on their fears about keeping their job or being considered viable for promotion. The imbalance of power can turn political discussion and pressure into a form of abuse.

The same is true for holding forth on religious beliefs, divisive social issues, or any other non-business - and therefore unnecessary - topic. Even if you would never discriminate against someone because their belief system is different than your own, it is the mere perception of threat - due to imbalance of power - that causes employees to feel threatened or uncomfortable.

The primary goal of a business is to create value for its customers, and each business relies on its employees to deliver that value. Employees who feel respected, safe, and appreciated do a much better job of delivering customer value than employees who feel compelled to put up self-protective walls. One way to cultivate happy, confident employees is to tell them to leave the political buttons, cause t-shirts, religious missives, and other non-business messages and opinions at home. Let them know you respect and honor each member of your organization, and part of that respect means allowing them to feel safe and harmonious at work so they have energy and motivation to pursue their individual interests and causes when they are off the clock.

Beyond avoiding unnecessary conflict at work, keeping divisive topics out of the workplace will yield one other essential benefit: Creativity. The more commonality a community enjoys the less creativity that community puts out, so the more diversity you can encourage in your people the more that creative sparks are likely to fly.

Which only sort of explains why Diane Keaton's character in the movie would ultimately choose Jack Nicholson over Keanu Reeves. That part of the movie just didn't make sense to me. But hey, the point is, to each her own, right?

(c) 2010. Andrea M. Hill

Chatty Challenged

A long time ago I had a neighbor named Nancy, and she had a daughter named Rebecca. Rebecca was a lovely girl; 12 years old, bright, funny, and sincere. She was also an only child, and had been raised by smitten parents who believed that everything Rebecca said was publication-worthy. One evening I hosted a dinner party and invited my neighbors, including Rebecca. The evening was a disaster.

Rebecca dominated the entire dinner with her 12-year-old conversation. Her parents had no skills (or interest, apparently) for redirecting her, and Rebecca was so unaccustomed to being redirected that the gentle clues the rest of the party gave her went unnoticed.

I knew better than to point out to Nancy her daughter's faux pas, because that wasn't the sort of thing Nancy wanted to hear. But a few days later, as I sipped a cup of coffee and read the paper at our corner coffee shop, Rebecca came in on her way home from school. She came over to my table, sat down, and said, almost immediately, "I talked too much at your house the other night didn't I?" Her question was so sincere and her anxiety was real, so I decided to give her the honesty she was seeking. "Yes," I said, "I'm afraid you did Rebecca." Her eyes welled up with tears and she said, "I knew it. I said something to my mom and she said I was fine. But I felt like I was talking too much."

"Why did you feel the need to talk so much?" I asked her. She wasn't quite sure herself, but as she reviewed that night it was clear that she felt she was somehow supposed to be talking, and then once she started she couldn't stop.

How this Relates to Sales Skills

I have observed this same dynamic repeatedly when watching business people try to pitch something. Whether they are sales professionals pitching their products or a business owner pitching his business to investors,  sometimes they get started talking and they just can't stop. The people being pitched start giving subtle cues; looking down at their paper or hands instead of at the speaker, or starting to look over the shoulder of the speaker, or looking uncomfortable or as if they are becoming impatient. Those cues often (way too often) go unheeded. A cycle of desperation sets in, as the pitcher tries ever harder to get a response, and the pitchee tries to make it all stop.

If you are squirming in your chair feeling the familiarity of this scene, you're not alone. Now let's talk about how to make sure it never happens to you (again).

When you approach someone to make a sale, the typical response will be for the recipient of your pitch to sit back and listen to what you have to say. They may only give you 90 seconds, but during those 90 seconds they want you to do the work. This puts huge pressure on the seller to say the right things, in the right way, and in the right order. This pressure causes a specific flavor of fight-or-flight to set in; it's called talk-or-clam-up. Neither of those instinctual reactions will get you where you want to go.

Every successful sale starts with a conversation, and every successful sales person starts with questions. Questions like:

• What are you trying to accomplish?
• What are your strategic objectives?
• What interested you enough to take this meeting with me in the first place?
• Is there a specific business need you think I may be able to help you with?
• If you could solve a business problem right now related to (whatever it is you sell), what would that problem be?

These questions and questions like them are conversation starters. Once the conversation is rolling, your curiosity should lead you to the other questions that need to be asked. Is it starting to sound like the person being sold to should do more of the talking than the person doing the selling? Well, you're right - that's precisely what is supposed to happen!

The more genuinely interested you are in the person to whom you wish to sell, the more lively and informative the conversation will be for both of you. It is conversations like these that lead to sales - not pitches.

The next time Rebecca came over to dinner (and I made sure it was sooner rather than later), she practiced the skills we had discussed at the coffee shop. She politely asked questions when it was appropriate for her to do so, and she listened carefully to the responses and the conversation that ensued. As she hugged me goodnight she whispered in my ear, "That was SO much more fun! Thank you!"

The next time you feel pressured - compelled - to talk, take that as a cue. Stop. Take a deep breath. Then summon all your curiosity about and interest in the person with whom you are speaking. Ask a question. Ask another. Engage them. You will be far more likely to make the sale. And it will be SO much more fun.

One of my retail clients was just pitched by a local marketing firm on paying for text marketing services. For $1,000/year, the retailer can send unlimited text messages to their consumers. My client wanted to know if it was worth the money.

Here's how I responded:

Regarding text marketing, the jury is still out. While mobile marketing is definitely where marketing is going, I do not believe that text marketing will be how mobile marketing ultimately evolves. Research indicates that youth users of mobile are as offended by text ads as their parents are by getting telemarketing calls at the dinner table. Youth text users view text the way their parents view phone conversations. So text marketing is a good way to alienate the youth crowd.  While their parents aren't quite as offended by text messages (which isn't to say that they aren't offended - they just aren't AS offended), they are also much less likely to use text messaging than their kids.

When does text marketing work? When it comes from within the community - to tell their peers to gather for events, parties, etc. Mass texting is happening, but in a social context rather than a marketing context.

I know the agency said the text users would be "opt in," but part of the problem with building an opt-in text list is all the people you irritate while sending out texts to them to see if they want to opt in! I haven't seen any case studies yet to indicate that text marketing is actually yielding strong sales for any given retailer. All we have at the moment is a lot of testing.

Your reach as a local brand would be better focused on building social media relationships, doing opt-in email messages to people who have provided their email address to you in the first place, and hosting lots of events and other reasons to come into the store. I think it is more likely that a mobile app is in your future than that we want to do text marketing a'la telemarketing.

The owner of a small retail shop in Canada recently asked me how she could discourage conversation with her one employee without making the workplace seem cold and uninviting. This is an issue many owners of small businesses face.

The employer/employee relationship is particularly intimate in very small workplaces, and the temptation to chat all day can be a significant detriment to productivity.

I suggest that you address this issue in a forthright manner. A conversation that goes something like this will set the stage for more productive - yet collegial - days:

"I really enjoy the time we spend together in the store/studio, and I get so much out of our conversations. But one of the things I am working on is learning to minimize my conversation during the day and maximize my focus. I'm learning that the best way to maintain camaraderie and communication while also maximizing focus and accomplishment is to schedule time for both.

Why don't we start each day (or shift) with some time to catch up - personally and on business issues - and let's spend 10-15 minutes engaged in conversation over a cup of coffee or tea. That will help us stay in touch. The rest of the day, let's keep our conversation focused on the business issues, training, etc. Then, at the end of the day (or shift), let's spend another 10 minutes recapping our day."

This approach will help your employee understand that your limitation of conversation is based on a business objective, and not on unfriendliness. It also helps you when she starts talking during the day, because you can say "I'd love to discuss that with you (hear about it, etc.). Let's save that for our end-of-day recap - it will be something for me to look forward to!"

The nature of a small business culture is more fragile than that of larger workplaces, so the issue of reducing casual conversation must be handled with care. Failure to address it will only lead to frustration and an underlying tension that your employee may not understand. But if you address it effectively, with reasons and benefits, you will likely create the more effective workplace you desire while maintaining the fun and intimacy of working with someone whose help - and camaraderie - are both of great benefit to you.

(with a big bow to Marshall McLuhan)

When you were a mere toddler, it's likely you took boxes, pots and pans and turned them into toys. In grade school, we took plastic sheeting and turned it into sleds on the perfect snow of Hospital Hill. In high school we turned Chevys into love machines, and I furnished my first apartment with crates and boards transformed into tables and shelves.

We humans are geniuses at repurposing. We take a thing and apply it for the purpose that we require of it, even if that is not the purpose for which it was intended. And we come up with some pretty terrific solutions.

But sometimes, we repurpose something accidentally. We actually think we are using it correctly, when in fact, our failure to understand its essential purpose means that we are under-utilizing it.

This is what has happened with websites. Here are a few examples:

The company that spends $40,000 on a custom website design to have a look that is unlike anyone else's.  Only to have to redesign the website from scratch two or three years later because the look is no longer current.

The small business owner who puts off his website design for months on end, because he has a "look" in his head and he's determined to achieve it. In the meantime, his online business suffers due to outdated technology and appearance.

The woman who loves minimalism - in her home, in her office, in her wardrobe - and insists that the website for her business mimic the same minimalism in its design - even though her business demands that a lot of information be shared.

What thinker/philosopher Marshall McLuhan taught us nearly 40 years ago was that we must employ each medium in a manner consistent with its inherent qualities and the way people use it. His point was that you couldn't separate the message from the medium (i.e., the medium is the message). Take billboards (please).  A billboard is designed to be read while driving by at 55+  mph.  You could certainly write a novel on one, but nobody would be able to read it. To use a billboard well, you have to think about what the user is doing when they encounter the medium (driving), whether or not the viewer can react instantly to the information (yes if it's to get off at the next exit, not as likely if it's to make an appointment), and what the user most appreciates in the billboard medium (tidbits of entertainment that can be fully digested in milliseconds). The physical reality of the billboard and the experience of the people viewing it are an essential part of the message itself. To use a billboard well, the message must be crafted in very specific ways.

The same thing is true of radio. Unless you have your own radio program, your options for reaching a radio audience consist of 15-, 30-, and 45-second spots. The medium requires that the message be fully understood without the use of visuals. The medium requires very tight writing. If the radio station is a music/entertainment station, the message has a better chance of being heard if it is itself entertaining. If the station is information-based, then an information-based message is likely to be effective. As with the billboard, the medium of radio plays a fundamental role in its message.

The concept of the website was developed by graphic designers excited about wireframes and by business visionaries excited about possibilities. And rightly so. But now it's time for us to be more thoughtful about the medium and how it interplays with the message.

Every type of website you can imagine - from a film studio to an accounting firm, from a music label to an online store - must provide content to its users. This is what people want from a website. They don't expect the website to give them a reflexology session, they don't expect it to repair their car, or test them for strep. Content. Information.

The information can come in the form of video, articles, infographics, pictures, social media streams. blogs, podcasts, and online flipbooks. Many of those content types are highly visual in nature. But here's where business owners often get off track - the website itself isn't a work of visual art. In fact, most websites - given what they need to accomplish - don't need to be very artful at all. They are containers for a broad range of content - content the consumers of your products and services want to access in order to cultivate the desire they need to make the decision to buy.  And when the container gets in the way - either by being too much the center of attention or by taking too long to achieve - it undermines the real purpose of the website.

Think about it in terms of a retail store. A store is a physical reality, a room or a series of rooms in an architectural structure. The structure itself needs to accommodate the store - space for safes with floors strong enough to hold them, space for displays and consumer floor traffic, counters, cabinets, offices, and bathrooms. Some physical spaces are very elaborate and some are plain, but at the end of the day they are just physical spaces with conduits, plumbing, drywall, and flooring.

What ultimately makes the space is the information you put inside it. The information includes display cases, the products within display cases, the colors of the paint,  light fixtures, lounge furniture, publications on display, signage, scents, sounds, and tactical experiences. The most magnificent architecture in the world won't compensate for poorly planned information inside the store.

The information in your website includes products, expanded information about products, company information, fonts, feeds from related content, embedded videos and graphics, interactive/social content, wish lists, ask-an-expert forums, and the shopping experience. The fanciest wire-frame design and most pricey website graphics in the world will not compensate for poorly planned - or missing - information.

Unlike real estate, the architecture of web design is changing rapidly. The conventions that looked good four years ago look stale today.  The designs that look appealing today will be out-of-date again soon. And though most of us know it's too expensive to give our real estate a face lift every other year, the stakes for not maintaining a contemporary look on a website are high.

Is there a solution? Yes, there is. It's to stop spending all this money on custom websites! I imagine a lot of graphic designers are cursing me right now, but as far as small business owners are concerned, custom websites are a waste of money - and they are not necessary. You can create a website in Magento, Joomla, Drupal, or Wordpress with complete confidence that the underlying technology will continue to evolve. That means you don't have to invest in that evolution (though I strongly recommend providing some financial support to the open source community you commit to).

But what about the design? you ask. First, remember that design means a lot of things. The beauty of the design of each of these open source web platforms is the functionality, the ease with which you can integrate them with extra functionality, their tight integration with databases, and their constant evolution. And yes, design also means the look of the user interface.

If you take an open source program like Magento, Joomla, Drupal, or Wordpress, then pay a designer to create a custom front-end design for it, you are still throwing money out the window. Why? Because the next time you want to update your look, you will have to pay for additional custom design. The next time your core software takes a technological leap (which is happening every few years), you will have to pay for more custom design.  The next time website styles change (which is happening every other year), you will have to pay for additional custom design.

Instead, use a design template made by a company who is making its money developing templates. Not just any template. Don't buy any one-hit wonders. Buy the template from a company like Infortis or Yoothemes, a company that is dedicated to updating its templates and keeping them relevant and functioning with the current technology. A company that is staying on top of - or even setting the trend for - what is hot in website design. Then pay a website expert to tweak and tune that template to match the colors, fonts, and essential feeling of your brand.

Now it's the designer end of my customer base that's in a dead faint. "But I make beautiful jewelry! My website has to convey my design ethos!" one says. "I am known in the fashion world as a fashion adviser. My site has to convey my fashion sense!" But is that true?

When you advertise in a magazine, does your ad pop up in 3D to show your design ethos? Or do you simply choose colors and a layout that express your brand in a consistent manner? Because print ads are terrible at being anything but one-dimensional, though they are terrific at showing a photograph of amazing design.

When you run a radio spot, does your spot appear to be adorned in fashionable clothing? Or do you simply choose words and music that express your brand in a consistent manner? Because radio is absolutely awful at showing anything visual, but it can do a terrific job of conveying a message.

When we expect any medium to achieve things for which it wasn't designed -or that the cost of achieving isn't worth - the medium, and therefore the message, is undermined.

If you look at some of the most powerful, profitable websites, you will see that the design isn't particularly noteworthy. Amazon isn't that great to look at, but it is the king of all content providers. Lands End's design elements begin and end with simple navy blue elements, but they sure do sell a lot of clothing and home goods. The website for the Art Institute of Chicago has exceedingly basic design elements, but the website performs beautifully and looks beautiful because they use images to convey the mood.  There is nothing designerly or artiste about Jeff Koons' website, but it does a terrific job of sharing information about his body of work.

The underlying promise -and therefore, the message - of websites is content, experience, information, engagement. To sacrifice any of those things for an idea of the prettiest, funkiest, coolest, or most luxurious graphic design is to undermine the medium. To pay $50,000 for a look when you could have spent far far less and put the rest of the budget into content development is to undermine both the medium and your business. And to spend precious marketing dollars on elements that don't ultimately bring value to your business or meaning to your message is unwise.

Learn to use each medium for the purpose it serves best. Use the print medium to engage the visual senses and convey color and richness in a way that cheap monitors cannot. Use video, film, and television to tell big stories. Use billboards and social media to deliver snackable content. Use radio to speak directly to your customers and engage the sense of hearing. And use your websites as a container for all those exciting elements - and more. More information, more detail, more engagement, more content. Stop trying to make the body into a dress. After all, in the case of the website, it's what's inside that counts.

(minor updates for changing technology on July 22, 2023)

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by all the things we're supposed to be doing on social media . . . TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, blogging, landing pages . . . Threads? . . . who has time to run a business, right?

No doubt Social Media has an important place in at the table of marketing disciplines. But it's just one chair. If you are feeling burdened by your lack of a TikTok presence or the fact that you can't figure out what to blog or tweet about, consider:

• If your company sells to businesses but needs a direct brand awareness with consumers, then Facebook, Instagram and TikTok should be part of your marketing efforts.
• If your company sells to businesses and has something very meaningful to teach or share that your potential business customers want to learn and that something makes it more likely those prospects will call you to do business, then you should  blog.
• If your company sells to businesses and you have something so compelling to say about that business that your potential customers are likely to flag it so as never to miss it, then you should consider leveraging the power of LinkedIn to reach business owners and professionals.

Every business needs a business legitimizing website. It's no longer an option. But what you do with that website must be determined by your business objectives.

Are you experiencing the leadership challenge in your business now?

One of the most constant things we must do to run a successful business is lead, and that's really hard work. Leadership requires a lot of consistency and discipline. In a very big business you can distribute that leadership among many managers, and as long as most of those managers are effective in that role the overall business does OK. But in a very small business, any deficiencies in leadership can quickly lead to morale problems and other types of dysfunction in the workforce. This is the small business leadership challenge.

It's one of the biggest challenges facing small business owners, because they are not only faced with the constant demands and worries of the business itself, they must also take leadership roles for which they don't always feel equipped or perhaps even interested. Dealing with the people aspect of running a business is often more exhausting and demanding for small business owners than cash flow, financing, or sales struggles.

The good news is that these skills can be honed over time, but it's not always the way you want to spend your energy, so it's a challenge. And it's a challenge unlike developing new computer skills or financial knowledge. It requires looking hard at yourself and evaluating how effective you are inter-personally,  what you can do to be a better communicator, and how you can express your irritations and frustrations in positive ways even when that's not what you feel like doing.

If you have more than three employees, take a look at your current business experience and analyze what percentage of your frustrations are people related versus business/task related. It may be that you are experiencing the small business leadership challenge right now.

As a writer, I value the editors in my life. They find my errors, recognize when I need to clarify, and push me to be better. An excellent editor approaches the task without self-involvement or ego - she seeks excellence for the sake of excellence.

Back when I was first studying the craft of writing, my professors drilled into me the importance of loving - and not resisting - the red pen of the editor. It wasn't easy at first, but as I began to see how much better the edits made my writing, my appreciation grew.

Once editing is an essential part of your life, you seek its benefits in other areas. We all need the impartial eye of someone we can trust, someone whose discernment is impeccable, to bring us thoughtful critique. A trusted life-editor - a mentor - can help us recognize when our judgment is off, when we are exhibiting less empathy, more ego, or reduced awareness of how we are behaving. Truly honing the self requires the insight of others.

Of course, not everyone can be trusted with this role. If you've ever had the experience of someone criticizing or manipulating you to do something 'for your own good' when clearly they were driven by selfishness, greed, or insecurity, you know what I mean.

When we look for relationships in life, this quality should be part of our consideration, and building the trust necessary to give and take the editing should be part of the commitment. This is also true of the mentors in our professional lives. We often perceive a mentor to be someone who coaches us on skills, but the best mentors coach us on behavior, professionalism, accountability, and maturity.

I have been blessed with excellent editors in my personal and professional life, and as the decades go by, their advice and guidance has become better and better. If you do not have these editors in your own life, its time to seek them

The process starts with you; you must evaluate your ability to accept feedback and work on your 'editability'.  We can only lay the groundwork by ourselves though, cultivate the willingness. The sometimes painful, sometimes revelatory, always challenging work of being edited is something we hone over time, and only with practice.

Of course, no successful relationship is one-sided. It is essential that we cultivate the ability to be a thoughtful, not self-interested, non-judgmental editor for others as well.

I've learned to love the red ink in my life, though on occasion it can still be hard to embrace in the moment. But at the end of the day, as my self-review rolls by in almost cartoon form, with red scratch-outs, redirects, and suggestions appearing in the margins, I enjoy the peace of mind that comes from knowing that, though one gets no re-dos, one need not suffer from repeats.

Ideas are a lot like zucchini. They tend to be prolific in production, but after a while you realize that a giant pile of zucchini isn’t all that useful (or appetizing). To get the full value out of a garden full of zucchini, you must use a recipe and transform them into something else — like zucchini bread, zucchini casserole, and my favorite - zucchini sushi.

To turn your giant pile of ideas into profits, you need project planning. Why? Because a project plan is the recipe that helps you define, manage, and complete the transformation of an idea into a new reality.

Thankfully, project planning isn’t that complicated. Oh, it can be – particularly given how people like to over-complicate things! But with an affordable project management software and some project management basics, you can become a project management guru. Read on to find out how.

Elements of a Project Plan

Purpose and Scope

Begin every project plan by defining its purpose and scope. This is important. Without purpose and scope, every person who hears about the project may have different expectations. Let’s use an example. If we created a project to select a project planning software, the purpose and scope would be essential to choosing the right tool.

For instance, some project planning tools are good for small projects, but not for large, detailed projects with many due dates and participants. Some project planning tools are good for only 5-10 people, and others are useful for large organizations.

Project Scope and Purpose A:

We need a project planning tool for our 7-person marketing team. We manage short-term projects, and the projects rarely exceed 1 level of task detail. We need this project plan to help us reduce our planning cycles and do a better job of hitting deadlines.

Project Scope and Purpose B:

We need a project planning tool for the 70 people in our head office. We manage large and small projects, and our most complicate projects can go to 2 or 3 levels of detail per task. We need to be able to include outside participants. We need this project plan to achieve strategic objectives, improve corporate communications, and create global transparency regarding our projects.

As you can probably see from those two descriptions, the project plans and software selections would be quite different from one another.

Create an Outline

The best way to start a project plan is to create an outline. This doesn’t have to be done in your project planning software. Sometimes, it is easiest to create the outline on a piece of paper, with lots of room to move things around, scratch things out, and develop good descriptions. For example, let’s use “Project Scope and Purpose B” from above.

We begin by asking, “what are the broad tasks that must be done to achieve the objectives of this project?” Your list may look like this:

1. Review current project planning processes and tools
2. Identify needs and wants related to project planning
3. Create short list of project planning software to consider
4. Assess each software against our software requirements
5. Shortlist and Test
6. Select project software
7. Implement project software

Are you done? No, but that is a good start. The next step is to create more detail in your project outline. It looks like this:

1. Review current project planning processes and tools
   1. Operations Team project planning processes and tools
   2. Marketing Team project planning processes and tools
   3. Merchandising Team project planning processes and tools
   4. Sales Team project planning processes and tools
2. Identify needs and wants related to project planning
   1. Senior Executive/C-suite needs and wants
   2. Department Head needs and wants
   3. Team member needs and wants
3. Create short list of project planning software to consider
   1. Develop list of known project planning software
   2. Request references and recommendations from business partners who use project planning software
4. Assess each software against our software requirements
   1. Using online information, develop preliminary description of each software
   2. Narrow list to 5 software packages to consider
5. Test Shortlist
   1. Contact vendors for product demonstrations or do online product demonstrations
   2. Document advantages and shortcomings of each software
   3. Review findings with representatives from each functional area
6. Select project software
7. Implement project software
   1. Create implementation plan and schedule (this is a mini-project — which would be created exactly the way we created the overall project plan).
   2. Follow the implementation plan

Assign Resources and Dates

The next step is to assign a point person for each aspect of the project plan. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the person who will do all the tasks themselves — they will likely be delegating many of the tasks, and keeping other tasks for themselves. But this person will be responsible to ensure that whomever is assigned the task is doing the task on time and correctly.

The date part is trickier. The way we set dates on a project plan depends a lot on the type of project plan; long-term or short-term. But let’s start with the way they’re both the same. Every project, large or small, must be assigned a completion date. This is the date at which we expect the entire project to be completed. Every other date assigned within the project must meet that overall due date. So, you can’t have an overall project due on October 15, 2019, but have a task within that project due on December 1, 2019.

Now let’s look at the way long-term projects and short-term projects are different.

For a short-term project, you will likely assign all the due dates at once. Many short term projects are repeated year after year (Valentine’s Day promotion, summer sale, Black Friday or Cyber Monday, Trade Show Plan). In those cases, the participants know the steps that need to be done and they launch and complete projects like this every single month. So assign due dates for each task at the same time you assign responsibilities.

For long-term projects, you set milestone dates at the outset, but save individual task dates until you are closer to working on those tasks. What is a milestone? Milestones are the significant stages or segments of a plan. The numbered items in the above list are the major segments of the project. The completion date for each group of tasks is a milestone.

For example, you would set the due date for the entire project. You may also set dates by when you want to accomplish the first level (milestone) tasks in your outline. But for the individual tasks within the outline, you may not set due dates or delegate responsibilities until you turn your attention to that task group. This is part of managing the project.

Once you have your project scope, outline, resources, and dates identified, it’s time to plug all that information into your project software.

Managing a Project

The best projects are inclusive, cross-functional, and heavy on communications.

With today’s Project Management tools, we pretty much have it made when it comes to project management, because this software category is well-defined and robust. Whether you use programs like Basecamp, Asana, or Trello for loosely structured projects and communication, or programs like Plutio, Zoho, Wrike, or Microsoft Project for highly structured projects and communication, all modern project management tools have a few common elements:

• The ability to create a list of tasks and assign due dates and people to them.
• The ability to create conversational “threads” on each task and on the overall project, which helps eliminate phone calls and email and creates better overall information sharing.
• The ability to track progress on the project plan, maintaining accountability and transparency.

Now back to due dates for a minute. In the long-term project plan, you may start out with due dates for the total project, and for the major groups of project tasks or significant time intervals, but few dates or assignments at the detailed task level of the project. That’s not only OK – that’s good.

In the not-so-distant past, project management software forced us to set dates for the entire project at the outset. But we all know that it can be hard to envision all the necessary detail for long-term projects. And once all those dates and details are set, we have to manage a lot of detail that may or may not be accurate or relevant – particularly as the project goes on.

The best way to set and manage accurate dates and responsibilities in a major project is one chunk at a time. The project team should meet weekly or bi-weekly. At those meetings, they should decide as a group which elements of the project to elevate next. Once decided, the project plan should be updated to reflect those dates. This method makes the project plan more accurate and meaningful, and it ensures that all project team members are focused on the right things at the right times.

The project team should also hold one-another accountable for due dates and results. If there’s no pressure within a project team to meet their responsibilities, the project will languish. A manager can certainly help to apply pressure, but case-study after case-study demonstrates that the best-executed projects benefit from peer group commitment and motivation.

Why Planning?

It may be difficult to imagine, but not everyone loves project planning equally (a bit of sarcasm here). Yet, there’s a huge benefit to project planning that turns all motivated professionals into raving fans.

As this graphic demonstrates, the cost of planning is lower than the cost of execution. So by spending more time in the planning phase, you can shorten the time you spend in execution phase and reduce your overall cost.

Because planning helps mitigate time-consuming execution errors, spending more time in planning also tends to speed up the entire project.

You can also improve the quality of the project with better planning. Well-planned projects experience better overall results than projects with little planning effort.

The message is clear. Professional project planning is more economical and effective, and ultimately of higher quality, than seat-of-the-pants project management. And considering the fabulous software tools available today, project planning is easier than ever.

So that’s your recipe! Now it’s time to sift through that giant pile of ideas you have, and start turning those ideas into profits, using a project management approach that is easy to implement and makes managing the project (the real work) more effective than winging it. You’ve be so excited at how much more you will accomplish this way.

I can't believe I even have to say this, but . . .

Now that the election is over and we are all moving forward with our lives, I just have to call out one form of business owner behavior which is never acceptable.

We don't get to tell people how to vote.

I heard horror stories from neighbors and friends of letters from the CEO coming home on Monday November 4, warning of dire consequences if one candidate or the other won. I talked to a shaken business acquaintance who was pulled aside by her manager and scolded that he expected more of her than her professed affinity for her candidate (employees who favored the manager's candidate were not similarly demeaned). Business owners took it upon themselves to tell their employees how to vote - in some cases or else.

We don't get to tell people how to vote. This violates one of the most important responsibilities we have as human beings - respect for the other's right to his or her own values and opinions.

We don't get to feign concern about our employees' preferences, using the condescending narrative that we worry they don't know what's best for them. We don't get to make it uncomfortable for some employees to talk about their politics but not others (i.e., those who agree with us).

We hire people for their talents and their dependability. We want them to bring their whole selves to work, so we can benefit from their ideas and their motivation. When we discount their personal authority by telling them how to vote, we show our employees that we don't trust them to make adult decisions. How can that that message possibly help our businesses thrive?

I know the next general election is four whole years away. But let's try to remember this. We don't get to tell people how to vote.

“Being able to do something online that you can’t do in any other way is important . . . That’s because the web is a pain to use today! We’ve all experienced the modem hangups and the browsers crash — there are all sorts of inconveniences: websites are slow, modem speeds are slow. So if you’re going to get people to use a website in today’s environment, you have to offer them overwhelming compensation for this primitive infant technology. And I would claim that that compensation must be so strong that it’s basically the same as saying, you can only do things online today that simply can’t be done any other way.”  Jeff Bezos

Website Innovation Goes Beyond the Technology

This quote is from an interview Jeff Bezos did in 1998. I remember reading it at the time and trying to wrap my mind around how I could take advantage of the internet in the business I was then running. It seemed clear to me in 1998 that even though we could use the internet to take orders and ship goods (the business was a jewelry industry distributor), using the internet as a simple replacement for phone or fax orders was not going to take sufficient advantage of the emerging technology. Back then, we didn’t even have the computer systems necessary to facilitate significant use of the internet. We didn’t have fast bandwidth to the building. We didn’t have employees who could type fast enough (or in some cases spell well enough) to manage online orders in the absolutely superb way they handled phone orders. We needed all the building blocks and had to build them fast.

So much has changed since then. Today, 70% of internet use takes place on a pocket-sized device with 4G or 5G. Still . . . if you take away the modems and terribly slow internet speeds of 1998, what Jeff Bezos said back then is still highly relevant: Every website must present a compelling reason to use it.  And yet, most businesses in 2021 are still not providing a meaningful, differentiated, online experience. That’s what website innovation is all about.

In 1964, communications theorist Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” Back then, he was focused on the communication medium of television, and how television was changing not only the way households received information, but the culture itself. But he could have easily been speaking about every communication revolution since then: cable tv, digital distribution of music, video games, then online games, social media, the internet. Each new form of communication brought with it new opportunities for communication, new ways of achieving objectives, and new cultural implications.

Business websites are also a communication medium, capable of changing the way customers interact with, experience, and feel about a business. But instead of using all that potential, most business owners have attended to only the most superficial aspects of offering a website.

• The standard page format of websites has barely changed since 1999: Home, About, Services, Contact, Shop. . . maybe News.
• Many retail websites feature pictures and in-store videos to show the website visitor what it would look like if they paid a physical visit. Some go so far as to spend tens of thousands of dollars producing virtual tours, à la real estate agent home videos.
• Product selection on retail websites is often limited to images and iframes provided by suppliers, or which come as part of an industry platform environment.
• B2B websites are even further behind, failing to put full product offerings online or offer the specific services (and price levels) their customers expect to access when meeting up at a trade show or picking up the phone.

Website visitors do not expect the website to replicate your store, are not motivated by seeing all the same products on your website that they find on every other website, and they certainly do not want to purchase your building. Much of what businesses are doing with their websites is missing the point — and the potential — entirely.

That's because most of the work of creating an effective business website isn’t about building the website at all. Effective websites are borne out of the work that comes before they are built.

The Pandemic Effect

Business as we know it has changed forever. Online shopping and buying trends that were happening prior to the pandemic have been dramatically accelerated – economists and social scientists have estimated that we experienced five years of technological evolution in the eight-month period of March - October of 2020. When physical restrictions are lifted, we will not go back to the old ways of working, shopping, buying, interacting with brands, collaborating with known suppliers, or finding new suppliers.

In many ways, this is excellent news. By 2019, most businesses had become mired in price competition. Too much corporate energy was being focused on driving prices down to satisfy price sensitive B2B and B2C customers. But chasing prices is a zero-sum game, forcing companies to offshore work, lay off employees, pile more work on the employees they have left, and ultimately, reduce quality.

Price sensitivity is not going away, but there is another truth here to which most business owners pay insufficient attention: You don’t need all the customers. You just need the right customers. Your value offering can be . . . must be . . . about more than price. Click to Tweet And your website, which will remain a central part of your communications strategy from this point forward, must communicate your value offering in more than just words. Your website must communicate your value offering through experience and benefits.

The Cost of Pricing

Ah, now you're thinking, "But price does matter! People bring up pricing all the time!" Sure they do. So let's break that down. When does price matter most? Two scenarios come to mind:

• Price matters when selling to highly price-sensitive consumers.
• Price matters when there is no other point of differentiation between products.

If you are a grocer in a food desert, God bless you and this article probably is not for you. For everyone else, if you are feeling the squeeze of price competition, it is probably because you have not done the work to differentiate your business from your competitors. Sure, there will always be customers (or potential customers) who complain your price is too high. But if you peer beneath the surface, you will quickly realize that those customers are not your ideal customers. Unless you are interested in competing solely on the basis of price, and are prepared to do all the operational improvements necessary to still make a profit while selling at the lowest price, you shouldn't be competing on price at all.

Doing the Work of Website Innovation

You can't produce a website that delivers an ideal experience to your target customer if you haven't defined your strategy. You must be able to articulate who you are, what you do that makes you different, and why you matter to your target customer. It is a big topic, but for a quick overview of what’s involved, here is a 17-minute podcast and transcript.

How you apply your business strategy to website innovation should ultimately be as unique as your strategy itself. Let’s look at a few examples to illustrate the potential.

An Online Retailer’s Website Innovation

This example involves a jewelry designer who sells to both boutiques (B2B) and consumers (B2C). Her product is fine jewelry, so it's expensive. She produces two collections for boutique distribution, for which she stocks small inventories and has the capability to produce reorders quickly. For consumer direct sales she only offers one-of-a-kind and custom. A big part of her brand value is her aesthetic – people come to her for her design. But her customers return because of her commitment to developing and nurturing relationships, and because she has an uncanny ability to help her customers articulate their ideas and desires and then realize those ideas in physical jewelry form. Finally, this designer has the exquisite ability to help a customer give herself permission to spend money on herself.

A Shopify style, put-a-product-in-the-cart-and-ship-it website will never be able to deliver on this value proposition.

To start, her website needed both a consumer front end and a gated B2B back end.

One-of-a-kind products that are ready to ship can be ordered as is or can be adjusted according to the client’s wishes. From within those product listings, it is easy to book a quick video chat or send an email or text message.

The collections available only through boutiques are also available for browsing, with easy links and directions to the retailers that carry them. She uses these pages to explain why she makes some products available only through retailers, and why she thinks it is important to protect and buffer her retail partners. This transparency builds trust and respect for her business principles.

All her product pages are peppered with links to articles with images and commentary about what she is creating and why. This invites her website visitors into her design process in a way that is unique to an online experience. When a customer visits the physical shop, she can experience the design process in a way that is intimately about herself. Visitors to the website can experience the design process in a way that is more intimately about the designer. Both are excellent experiences, and each is designed to work most effectively relative to the benefits and drawbacks of its respective channel.

The site pays extensive attention to the experience of creating custom design, with obvious and easy options to launch or schedule a phone or video call throughout the site. She toyed initially with trying to figure out how to create a ring builder, a website convention showing all the possible components and iterations of a design. But she ultimately decided against it, because dragging a graphic around to make a new graphic could not possibly replicate the rich experience of letting a talented designer guide one through the creative process.

Her B2B clients can log in to a secure back end, where they can see their negotiated prices and order products. They can place a purchase order or credit card order immediately, or schedule or launch a video or phone call to speak with the designer. B2B clients can also see past orders, track order progress, and see shipping details.

This website does not require expensive software or management. The technology is fairly basic. Superficially it may even seem like a lot of other websites. But by approaching her website through the lens of her strategy and value offering, this designer went beyond setting up a website and deep into website innovation.

Website Innovation for B2B

Let’s look at the website of a company that distributes instrument and music supplies to music stores and schools. They manufacture some of their supplies at their northern European production facility and distribute thousands of supplies from other manufacturers. Not only are they faced with a shrinking market, but their suppliers can also take advantage of the same internet technology to cut them out as the middleman.

To shake themselves out of survival mode and actually start growing again, they did a strategic overhaul in the years before Covid-19 came calling. During that process, they recommitted to the idea that their deep knowledge in all things music supplies was just as important as the products they sold. They decided to stop worrying about how much cheaper their clients could find things on Amazon, eBay, CDiscount, and Otto, and instead focus on how much their customers trusted them to not only sell the best products, but to help them select the right products.

They knew all their products had to be available for shopping and comparison, and that their business systems had to be upgraded to support that. Their systems overhaul made it possible to manage all their products in only one system and make those products sellable both through their traditional office support and on the website without any extra administration. The systems update also made it possible to show each customer their negotiated prices automatically and made it easy for customers to check on order history and statuses.

Implementing an Inventory Control System

But the big work of website innovation involved answering these questions:

• What are the things we already do really well – the things that gained us trust and respect from our customers?
• When we update our website, how might a website underperform on those important things due to the insufficiencies of a website compared to a phone call or a meeting?
• What can our website do to mitigate those shortcomings and offer something new and better, ideally in ways that a phone call or meeting could not do?

The answers to these questions clarified that their website needed to provide all the information, training, recommendations, and knowledge that their customer service team had been providing all along. The solution was to create a wiki-like information architecture using tagging and categories to make it easy and intuitive for customers to learn about any product, find other products like it, compare products, and do deep-dives into product features, functions, and benefits.

Because so many of their clients are music teachers, they had always offered proforma quotes and provided an extensive form library to assist teachers with budget requests. They turned these forms into an on-demand, easy-to-use, interactive, system. They are currently in the process of refining that system so they can more closely collaborate with individual schools relative to budgets for music supplies.

The website also makes it easy to jump on a phone or video consult, which blurs the line between online and in-real-life interactions, builds trust, and increases close rates. For this company, website innovation was about making sure the online experience was the best possible experience of their company by mitigating the downsides of the channel and playing up its potential.

What Will Your Website Innovation Involve?

You, too, can use your website as a strategic extension of your brand value. Customers are not looking for thousands of products on one site, without curation or context. Sure, they want to be able to buy things, but it is easier than ever to find things and buy them. In fact, consumers are currently overwhelmed by choice, much of it meaningless. 

No, if you want to stand out online, you must identify your target audience and do the brand-relevant things that matter to them (or that will appeal to the right subset of new visitors). The technology is available, and it is affordable. What is generally missing is thoughtful analysis, planning, and imagination. Once you do that work, new answers will occur to you that simply had not occurred before.

So stop. Before you jump into Wix (or Weebly, or Square, or Shopify) and start dragging and dropping your way to a same-as-everyone-else website, do the work. The thinking work of website innovation.

If you want to stand out online, you must identify your target audience and do the brand-relevant things that matter to them. Anything less is just a waste of website space. Click to Tweet

I got to thinking this morning about one of my more entertaining (in hindsight) experiences with the venerable TSA (Transportation Security Administration). In 2005, as I rushed from one geographical location to another, a highly trained (I'm sure) TSA agent did a hand search of my purse and retrieved from it a short tweezer in a tiny leather case. This was a travel tweezer, designed to take up very little space in a handbag and measuring only 2" in length. With flat tips (I don't like the pointy ones).

The agent informed me that I would have to surrender the tweezers.

I laughed and said, "you're joking, right?" The young man was clearly not born with a sense of humor, and my laughter didn't improve his mood.

"No," he said. "I'm serious."

"How can that be? Tweezers aren't listed on any TSA unauthorized list I've ever seen!"

"Ma'am, as a TSA agent I'm authorized to use my judgment to remove any item I believe could compromise the safety of an aircraft. I'm afraid you'll have to surrender the tweezers." (I am not exaggerating – the conversation was so crazy it is ingrained on my memory).

This is where I perhaps lost my intelligence, if not my cool. Without raising my voice or acting angry, I said, "Then perhaps we should be discussing your judgment here. It would be a lot easier for me to kill the pilot with one of the pens you left in my purse, than it would be to kill him with a 2" tweezer with flat tips."

OK, obviously, we should be talking about my judgment here, and not the humorless young fellow's. Because as soon as I uttered the words "kill the pilot" I was quietly escorted to a small cubicle at the corner of the security area, to be interviewed by another serious fellow who clearly found it feasible that a chubby, middle-aged woman with more round-trip tickets to her name than the average consumer was planning to murder the pilot with a Sharpie or a 2" tweezer.

After about 45 minutes of lecture, a serious admonition never to utter the words "kill the pilot" again (I'm serious), and the ultimate loss of my $12 tweezers, I boarded the flight. I'm sure the flight crew had been warned and was terrified.

Some of our communication is insane. Let's not get into the types of insane conversations we have had the past eight years as a country. Let's just talk about the insane conversations we have at work and in our inter-job (i.e., traveling businesswoman and TSA agent) communications.

The word insane means to be lacking in logical or practical basis. I started thinking about the TSA incident this morning as I reflected on a business team that recently debated an issue that seemed to be entirely lacking in logic or soundness. But unfortunately, that team is not unusual.

Insane business communications include:

• Discussions about whether or not to allow two consenting adults to hug one another upon greeting, for fear that a sexual harassment suit will result.
• Discussions about whether or not to inform customers of a significant flaw in a product they purchased in good faith.
• Customers desperately trying to explain to customer service reps a problem with a product, only to be handed off repeatedly to a new person, requiring a new explanation, because nobody has the authority to simply solve the problem.
• Invasive oversight of adult behavior. For instance, one company instituted a global "no-walking policy" after a group of employees decided to use their half-hour lunch for walking instead of eating.
• Employees hiding a minor employee injury, because the consequences for safety infractions are perceived to be greater than the consequences for employee injury.
• Employees hiding errors, because the consequences for making mistakes are so great at the personal or department level that the employees do not consider the global customer impact of failure to correct mistakes.

The list could (and does) go on and on. Why do we have insane business conversations? Two reasons: insufficient ethics, and policy constraints.

An ethics constraint occurs any time an individual has failed to develop sufficient control over their own feelings, behavior, and actions, or any time a company's policies or management expectations create conflict between ethical behavior and company requirements. Ethical individuals will stand up to the policy or expectations, but the individual cost can be extremely high.

Policy constraints occur any time a business policy has been drafted for a narrow purpose, but is implemented in such a way that it must be applied to a broad swath of issues. Rigid controls limiting employee empowerment, punitive safety and error policies, and authoritarian control over adult behavior are all examples. Other policy constraints, such as extreme reaction to sexual harassment rules and regulations, exist because of the real fear of litigation and the high costs associated with it. As with any law, there is always risk that unethical individuals will distort them for their own benefit, at the expense of the intention of the law.

Those of us who still possess an appreciation for what is logical and practical, and most importantly, for what is ethical, must redouble our efforts to demonstrate in all aspects of our lives sane communications. This includes asking questions when a policy or practice is not ethical or logical. We may not get the policy to change, but at least we have introduced the question of its sanity to others. 

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

It was all over the news this month - Verizon Communications will buy AOL, Inc. in a $4.4 billion deal. Yes, this is big news for investors and Verizon competitors, but does it matter to you? It certainly does, and here's why.

Content Content Content (but this isn't the main reason)

The mobile market, dominated by Verizon, Sprint and AT&T, is fighting harder and harder for market share now that nearly everyone who wants a smartphone has acquired one. So how do they grow? They grow by competing in two areas: content and advertising. And the reason that content and advertising matter to the big mobile companies is that content and advertising matter to consumers. In 2013 (the last time we have numbers for this statistic), less than 35% of smartphone users reported they used their phones to make phone calls. You can see why that matters to the big mobile companies. But it also matters to you. Because what are they doing on their phones? They are accessing content.

AOL may have fallen off your radar, but one of the reasons they matter to Verizon is that they own some big content providers, like Huffington Post and TechCrunch. If Verizon is willing to spend $4.4 billion to acquire a company that looks like a has-been, you can bet your lunch money that they've studied this acquisition and decided it makes sense to them. They are betting that consumer hunger for content will only continue to grow. Sure, they could be wrong, but the folks at Verizon have been very smart so far, making less mistakes than your average bear. So tuck this in your idea bank: content matters now and it will matter more in the future. Ask yourself how you can participate in the content marketplace in the years to come.

Advertising Relevance

Another thing that AOL has and Verizon wants is the ability to sell and serve ads. We all know why selling ads matters. But what about serving ads? 

Think about this: The last time you considered buying advertising for your business, did you think about going to Verizon? Next time, you should. AOL earned nearly $1 billion last year from advertising revenues on sites that it owns, and another $856 million selling advertising for third party sites. That's a lot of consumer eyeballs. Even more important, the technology that AOL has developed for selling and delivering ads is very advanced, enabling them to slice and dice and target consumers better than most other advertising companies. Because of AOL's innovations, using technology to manage advertising is not only making targeting better, it's lowering the cost of advertising overall. Expensive human management has been replaced by algorithms that can decide in a split-second which ads to show each time a web page loads. 

Now that you're competing with businesses all over the world (and you have been, for much of this past decade), you can't just sit around and wait for consumers to remember you or to find out about you. You must advertise. But today's consumers are busy and distracted and they have no patience with irrelevance. You can get their attention though, if you catch the right people at the right time with the right message. Verizon is betting big that AOL's advertising technology is worth a lot of money. You should be betting that too. If you're not doing so already, start thinking about how your business can stretch its advertising wings and use the internet to reach more relevant consumers on their phones and tablets. 

Pay Attention to Video

Verizon believes that video will be one of the primary reasons people use smartphones in the years to come (AT&T believes it too). Verizon has already developed plans to launch a video service specifically geared to mobile devices. Enter AOL, which has created some nifty tools for delivering video advertisements. Their technology makes it easier for ad agencies and brands to enter the video advertising space.  Why does this matter to you? The consumer appetite for video seems to have no limit. If you're not already looking at ways to use video for your advertising, it's time to start. The tools to shoot and edit video are getting less expensive all the time, but it takes experience and skill to pull off video offerings that appeal to consumers.

When a solid company like Verizon, with deep pockets and lots of research staff, decides to invest in online advertising delivery, video, and other content, we need to pay attention. They have done the analysis and decided that mobile content is where all the consumers are going to be in the next few years. If they're right, then small business needs to be there too.

One topic that seems to create a lot of concern – with both customers requiring consulting and blog readers – is the topic of using systems to facilitate communication. There are three camps. Camp 1 is the group who is convinced that systems create bureaucracy, slow down the process, and undermine creativity. Camp 2 is the group who has no systems in place, is not innovating, and isn't finding their process moving along quickly at all – and therefore is willing to consider something better. Camp 3 is the group that has implemented effective systems and seen the benefit. Oh – in all fairness, there is also a Camp 4 – the folks who have implemented a system and turned it into a bureaucracy, at which point they turn back into Camp 1. Which is a shame.

The most commonly sought type of communication system is a project planning or project management system. Every company is engaged in some sort of project management and/or product development, and those projects are usually the basis of the primary value-added activities of the company. Value-add activities are the foundation of profitability, so it is no wonder that companies who do not do a good job of managing projects also do not do a good job of turning profits. The observations I will make in this column can be applied to other types of communication systems, such as knowledge-management applications and CRM, but for the sake of broadest reader application, we'll talk about project management.

In every company I have ever gone into and set up a project planning system, there has been significant initial resistance. The objection is always the same: "We have enough to do without an extra layer of reporting." So my first step is to help them analyze what has worked and not worked about previous project management efforts. Nine times out of 10 the failures are related to project communication, and when they can see that in graphic form, diagrammed on a white board, they give the system a chance.

It is probably no surprise to you that many project management efforts are doomed from the beginning. Why? Because project sponsors frequently do not agree with one another about project scope, desired outcome, or budget requirements. Sometimes this disagreement is opaque even to those in disagreement. This happens because people use the same words but mean different things by them, or because people assume knowledge or agreement on the part of others and do not explore their assumptions. Sometimes the disagreement is clear to the top managers, but they proceed anyway. The two primary reasons for this are: 1) They do not wish to engage in conflict and think that by avoiding it, the conflict will go away (sound crazy to you? Start observing and see how often intelligent people engage in patently crazy behavior), or 2) the participants are aware they disagree, but they figure they will fight it out on the details instead of at the beginning. Yes, these illustrations are examples of management dysfunction and failure, but they are also examples of the types of communication failure that prevent an otherwise worthy project from ever getting a chance.

Even if a project is launched with full agreement and clear communication, it can fail due to communication glitches throughout the life of the project. Creating open, accessible information systems is the goal of every project management effort. The most common complaint I hear about project management systems goes something like this: "Project management systems make all the employees do the work twice, once when they perform the action and once again when they fill in group members through software programs or required reporting."

In a well-constructed project plan there is as much reporting as is necessary for the team to function well together, no more and no less. If a group is engaged in product development of a complex nature, with lots of participants from engineering through marketing, there is much information to be shared. If a group is engaged in simple project planning, then less information sharing may be necessary. If you consider that failure to provide enough information (or the right information) keeps other team members from doing their jobs effectively, then fears regarding recording and reporting requirements can be looked at in a different way.

Ideally the construction of the project plan is such that the communication step only takes a moment or two to complete. But there are times when doing the work means providing complete documentation of a step just taken. If it is important for other team members to be able to access the information, it is not double work. It is a necessity. Even in projects that only include one or two people working in the same room, assuming that the participants hear one another's conversations or paid attention every time the others spoke is dangerous. That old saw about the meaning of the word assume is still correct. Furthermore, many times decisions have to be made by some team members when other team members are unavailable. The presence of effective documentation and status reporting can make the difference between a great decision and a disastrous one.

Finally, do you think that reporting of projects doesn't occur in environments without project management systems? Of course it does. But it is highly inefficient. Person X is waiting for technical information regarding a step taken by Person B, but Person B is unavailable. So Person X wastes three days on the project, because they can't proceed without the information. 

Communication is one of the most difficult things to get right in a business. Actually, this is true of life in general. Even in a business that is utterly committed to open communication, the most common failings point back to communication every time.

My last job taught me this lesson daily. I was the CEO of a company that employed roughly 500 people. We were a team-based business engaged in open book management. I think we did as well as any other company committed to open communication, yet nearly every exit interview indicated a need to improve communication. Once or twice a year some department or team would suffer a decline in morale and invariably we would discover that a group of stakeholders had made a poor decision which they would not have made had they been aware of readily available information.

Some of the problem with practicing consistently good communication is inequality of basic understanding. We see this all the time in the smaller communication unit of the family. Our dinner table includes two adults, a 22-year-old, a 16-year-old, and a 6-year-old. Dinner conversation involves adult conversation punctuated by explanations and discussion at multiple maturity levels. With only five people at the table it frequently takes a full hour for one relatively benign topic to be presented, explained, discussed, argued, explained some more, questioned, and eventually polished to a completed idea. And still it is understood at the levels of a 6-year-old, 16-year-old, 22-year-old, and two plain-olds with very different educations and world experiences. Multiply this complexity by 100, or 500, or 5000, and you have the fundamental challenge of organizational communication.

Our assumptions about levels of knowledge – both our own and others’ – interfere with good communication. Let’s start with self-awareness (because it’s always best to address the most difficult things first). The essential challenge of knowledge is to be aware outside of or beyond our current awareness. This constant stretching is the work of a lifetime. On an hour-by-hour basis, however, we are expedient at best. When confronted with another’s superior knowledge, experience or insight, an all-too-frequent response is to discount the other’s abilities rather than question our own, thwarting meaningful exchange. Good communication depends on our awareness of our own limitations.

We tend to both overestimate and underestimate the knowledge of others. In some cases we assume that the things we know are or should be common knowledge, and we attempt to build a communication structure that has no foundation.

In other cases we assume lack of knowledge. I had this experience with my son recently. I began to explain a philosophical concept as a prelude to a discussion. He tried to delve into the discussion and skip the explanation. In my infinite parental wisdom I plowed ahead with the lecture. Luckily, he brought me up short by insisting that I recognize he had been studying this very concept on his own and was perfectly prepared to discuss it. Lucky, because we were able to proceed with an excellent conversation during which I learned a lot and enjoyed myself. But how often does communication fail because someone will not or cannot convey their adequate – or even superior – knowledge of a topic?

The list of barriers to good communication is vast, and the achievement of good communication is the worthy practice of a lifetime. But the first step in the path to better communication is to recognize how our diversity makes communication both richer and more difficult.

When we start with this understanding and seek to accommodate the fullness of human experience present in every communication experience – whether it involves 2 people or 20 – the rest of the communication lessons will be much easier to learn.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill