In the News

I appeared in the Lafayette Journal and Courier today. Seems they wanted to hear from members of the hometown crew that do well in business and remember where they came from. Here's a little bit of it:

She coaches businesses to succeed with less struggle
By MAX SHOWALTER
mshowalter@journalandcourier.com

A zeal to help businesses chart a course for the future and train, staff, plan and coach employees led Lafayette native Lalita Amos to start her own firm in Indianapolis.

And the path to entrepreneurship was first paved with employment at the Sycamore Girl Scout Council in Lafayette, RR Donnelley & Sons in Crawfordsville and a nonprofit organization in southern Africa.

"I got to really make a difference there in the time I was (in Namibia) and got to spend quite a bit of time with their House Speaker, Mr. Mose Tjitendero, who suggested that I stop playing it safe when I went home. So I hung out my shingle in 1996 and haven't looked back," said Amos. "I started my company, Total Team Solutions, as a way to bring all the things I'm passionate about in business together.

"I help business owners and executives make more money with less time and have more satisfaction with less struggle. I challenge them to fulfill on meaningful goals and establish new capacities along the way so that they can maintain the ground they take." (read the rest)

Sweet!

Beijing Bans Billboards

I was just talking with some colleagues about the driving forces that impinge on marketing decisions. This article highlights one of those forces: government regulation. Marketing, I gather, is a heady business in China, with little of the organized licensing we have here. In a move to clean up the city's sky scape (of a certainty, in advance of the Olympics), the government has moved to remove billboards (both legal and unlicensed): all of them.

Read the Jason Leow article

More Raving

I got a call from a dear friend. He's started a consulting firm after having been a senior internal training and management consultant for a multi-national firm and an attorney in private practice before that. He's a good guy and a talented one, to boot (always wanted to work that phrase into a conversation).

He was explaining that he hated what's commonly practiced as sales and networking--that these processes leave little room for generosity or authentic communication.

I'm with him. I hate this aspect of sales and I don't like spending too much time with people who are the comsummate salespeople. You know who you are and you know that people run from you at parties and family gatherings, so don't give me any of your lip.

So, First, I Think This Guy Gets an "F"...

This one's wrong in so many ways. Picture this, if you will: Business law course. Taught by a judge. Student in front row. Fiddling with cellphone. Cell phone continues to ring. Student lets phone ring. And ring. And ring. Professor-Your Honor asks student to put a lid on it. Student has other plans. Professor-Your Honor confiscates phone. Class ends. Student wants phone. Professor-Your Honor says he can pick it up from the dean.

Student calls the cops and accuses Professor-Your Honor of theft.

OK, so the professor forks over the phone after being grilled by the local constables. About a half-hour later, the student emails the professor to apologize, claiming that he had urgent family matters he was attending to.


Now, people in the discussion forum on the article are spending their time on whether the judge had the legal right to remove the cellphone. Their discussion sounds kind of daft to me. It doesn't have to be against the law to be rude, self-centered and disruptive. My rights end when they infringe on those of someone else's. Besides, the professor had the right to eject the student, cellphone and all, from the classroom and dock the fellow points for his absence. Knowing my cellphone phone was apt to ring, not putting it on "silent" and sitting in the front row...all the while not telling my prof that I was expecting an urgent set of calls is just, well, arrogant and dumb.

Think about it: we do this kind of dumb stuff all the time. Oblivious of the fact that our cellphone habits are disruptive to others, we just let that little bugger ring. Our calls are important, don't you know. I've seen people mumbling into their cellphones at movies, in church, in interviews (yup, I was the interviewer) and in meetings with employees, customers, new vendors. One client, sure that this call was critical, tried to answer a cellphone call...while she was with her granddaughter...on a roller coaster...at Disney World. She just couldn't figure out why she didn't have a life.


They operate with nary a clue that (1) they're being rude, (2) that there are others in the room trying to pay attention to the goings-on (or to them) or (3) that their attention is needed elsewhere.

Aside from whether we have the legal right to use our cellphones when we want (we may), we certainly need to be concerned about our reputations--how we're viewed. And how we're viewed comes, largely from how we leave people feeling. People thrive on feeling like they're important. Splitting our attention, while we firmly believe (despite all evidence from brain science) that we can pull it off, is a less-than-optimal way to operate. In multi-tasking, we don't give any task 100%. With each additional task, our overall task effectiveness drops further and further towards the "negligible" category. I've never felt good with a provider who says they're giving me 100% when it's clear that this isn't the case.

Clearly, if the student had a family emergency (and given my recent history, I'm not one to talk about being emergency-free), he could have still exercised better communication skills. If you're expecting an important call, center stage isn't the place to plop yourself. We've seen people take a call from smack-dab in the middle of the action in a seminar and talk and chat (loudly) out the door while others wait for them to get-gone or hush up.

Telling a customer, vendor, supplier, prospect, referral resource or employee that you're expecting an important, brief, unavoidable call (and that it's the only one you'll take during your meeting), is a sign to them that they're important and that you'll use your time well.

Better still: Don't interrupt your work with another because you're emergency-driven. You may squeeze in that call, while foregoing ever being able to call on that person again.

Ever.

(Illustration credit: Zach Riggin)

He Steals, Dum! Dum! Dee!

Please follow the train of thought, here. I'll make sense soon, I promise (oh, you trusting souls).

Last week I sent a package of lupins to my brother, Rodney in Atlanta. He's been calling me Lupins since saw the Monty Python episode on Dennis Moore he was 10 an I was 13. He laughed like a goon when he opened the envelope.

Yes, the flower Lupins. See, in these sketches, the fictional highwayman, Dennis Moore, a kind of moronic Robin Hood, who steals lupins to give to the poor. The poor, on the other hand, want food, medicine and money.

(Here's the tricky part where I connect this powerfully to the business of being in business...um, here goes....)

Have you ever noticed how clueless we can sometimes be with prospects? They may want something we don't sell, but, by gum (and I do so know what that means), we're going to find a way to foist off on them something we sell.

We're just not in their world, instead happily lazing about in our own particular orbits. I remember the first time I really listened to the answer when I asked a new associate I was meeting at a networking event "Where are you challenged and how can I help you?" To be frank, it took several passes at the question before he realized that I really wanted his answer (note: not the answer I could have set him up for). First, he said he wanted more money. Knowing that most people really aren't motivated by money, I kept asking. His answers surprised both of us. He wanted his newly-widowed mother to be safe. He worried about her at work and it was effecting his performance. She lived far away and he didn't want her to be lonely.

Now, instead of leaping in to tell him all about how I could help him, I did something completely different. I found someone who could help him with his mother, a family concierge who did errands and companion services for the otherwise-healthy elderly and arranged a three-way call to get them together.

Unlike Dennis Moore, I didn't offer him lupins when he wanted his mother safe.

He was delighted. Later, he surprised me by asking me for help on something I could sink my teeth into and referred me, generously, to others.

Kill Me Now!

OK. This one hurts.

Remember a few years ago when advertisers were convincing poor (silly) college students to walk around with logos and branding materials on their heads? Well, this goes quite a bit further down the road.

CBS is tattoing eggs with logo information...on eggs.

Really.

Here's a potent ad message, critical to the progress of civilization: "CBS Mondays - Leave the Yolks to Us."

Business innovation is being driven by design and creativity. However, we need to consider not just what we can do, but what's worthwhile. This falls into the "just because you can do it, doesn't mean that you should" category.

I fear for us all.

Read the Money.cnn.com article.

Ramsey Suspect Captured, But Who Else Might We be Killing?

Just weeks after Patsy lost her life to ovarian cancer, it appears the murderer of her six year old daughter, JonBenet, may have been captured.

The JonBenet Ramsey case is an unfortunate example of negative buzz -- the kind of "where there's smoke there's fire" thinking that spreads almost as fast as the hype around "Snakes on a Plane." The public immediately seized on the peculiar nature of the pageants that JonBenet participated in with her mother, another pageant winner and lifelong pageant enthusiast. Under a cloud of suspicion, Patsy Ramsey tried to live her life, raise her son and struggle with cancer while grieving a daughter that many thought she'd killed.

Let's face it: We're a nation of gossips. And I don't mean GOSSIP -- Gadget-Obsessed Socially Superior Independent Professional...those cats who have a blackberry, a personal and work cellphone and drink pricey, branded coffee even if the coffee's free at work. Our amusements are rife with reality programs that allow us to voyeuristically eavesdrop on people and then chat, IM, blog and talk about it the next day. But the line between what's real and what' spun is getting blurrier. One story can become a runaway train with little hope of turning or slowing when new facts come to light.

A couple of years ago, a local businessman was rumored to have hit his wife. It wasn't true, as it turned out, but people were talking about it. He was shunned, asked to step down from a public accountability and his business suffered. His wife, a chick with some substance, denied the rumors and even found the person that had started it -- a little self-aggrandizing that got out of control -- but it didn't matter.

For me, when I met with him shortly after this began to heat up, I felt a little ashamed of what I'd heard, so I told him what I knew and from whom I got it. Then, I went back to my "Don't talk about that with me or I'll squeal" policy that had been so useful years before.

One of the worst things I think we do in business is assume. We do it when we network, when we prospect, when we hire. We shortcut our thinking because, many times, it works....Except when it doesn't. Now, I'm not saying never assume. What I am asserting is that assuming without assumption-testing is worst than going off half-cocked. See if you're right about your assumptions.

Our most powerful weapon against false info: the question. So, be sure you ask.

Samuel L. Jackson Called My Husband

OK, fine! So it wasn't actually Samuel L. -- it was a recording of Samuel L. that called Garland. When he gathered the voicemails on Sunday, what did he hear? "I can't stand all these %@#!$#@%#@$ snakes on this %@#!$#@%#@$ plane!"

Choice.

Now, I'm not entirely sure that this movie is my cup of tea. Yes, I enjoyed lots of slasher movies in my earlier years (Shu-shu-shu-shu-shu. Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah.*). However, I think I've grown significantly over the years.

Not really.

I had a point. Oh! The cool thing about the movie isn't the scene where a couple, trying to get into the Mile High Club buys the farm in the lave (evil laughter). It's the fact that Samuel L. solicited so much word of mouth to generate buzz for this flick. He listened to his fans and supported them, even when they suggested substantive changes to the movie. An army of fans rallied around the project, starting websites, selling t-shirts and other merchandise. They even pressured the studio to change the name of the film from Pacific Flight 121 to Snakes on a Plane, which the studio did.

This movie has achieved cult status -- and it isn't even out yet.

What does this have to do with your business?
The studio execs were surprised and Time magazine did an article on this "phenomenon." Though word of mouth is the least studied marketing method, it just happens to be the most effective...and the oldest.

There is an endless list of products that people have bought because someone else said it was the neatest thing since deep-fat fried turkey (I ate it only because I heard people raving about it --Eh!). Our customers know what they want and, for the most part, there's no amount of focus grouping or consumer psychology that will shake them once they've decided that a thing is cool.

The thing is: How to we more effectively dial-into WOM buzz? Companies are beginning to spring up to answer this question. Their magic bullet? Ask 'em. Customers will tell you what they want when we stop talking. They'll tell us what they want, how they want it, when they want it, what color they want it in and what they want you to call it.

We just need to do more listening than talking.
Like this movie, the fans decided that they "owned" the film. They were more than consumers. They were stakeholders of the highest order and they felt that their opinions counted. Luckily for them, Sam Jackson listens to fans. As he pointed out in a recent Time magazine interview, most directors only work on about a dozen films in their professional careers -- he has over 100 movies to his credit. In all that time, he's learned that his fans are smart about their entertainments and will vote with their feet if they don't get what they want.

Your customers, too, are voting every day about you and your product and services.

Have Samuel L. Jackson call a friend and tell them to see his movie...

Cheers!

* A reference to the Jason, Friday the 13th movies that dominated the 80's and 90's slash and dash movies.