The Key to Engagement
“Engagement” has become an overused and misunderstood term. Engagement is not just about marketing, and the secret to real engagement lies deep within yourself.
As a communication coach, I often work with people to improve their messages and the way they deliver them (whatever the medium – written, verbal or visual) so they can be more effective in their jobs. However, if you really want to influence people (and make no mistake, that is the goal of a good deal of our communication, in both our work and our private lives), there are three underlying realities that you must take to heart.
The first is that you will never get your message across – and you certainly won’t be able to influence anyone – if you don’t have their attention. Period. And guess what: A person’s attention is not something that is yours by right; it is something you earn – by being genuine, relevant and focused.
Second: It’s much easier to influence someone when you understand their point of view. How else can you be sure your message is relevant to that individual or group? Doing this requires that you pay attention – in the same way you hope that the other person will pay attention to you – and that you put in the leg work to understand their interests, perspective and concerns.
Third – and this is based on a lot of solid research – people learn best, and the learning persists longest, when they are engaged with the material, whatever it might be. And the more senses they use in the process, the better.
The world of social computing has done a lot to focus our attention on this issue of engagement. This is a good thing. But successful engagement starts long before you go online. All of the things we’ve learned about online engagement apply to the rest of our interactions as well. Consider the following, from a 2009 blog post, and think about it in the context not just of your company’s customers but your fellow employees, your family – whatever communities or individuals are meaningful to you.
When we are engaging others, we are not pushing content (products, services, advertisements), but rather we are conversing, asking for opinions, involving others in problem solving, idea and content development.
Engagement should be embraced by all leaders and all contributors in an organization – not just the marketing department. But real engagement requires humility and the willingness to be vulnerable, and too many of today’s leaders have been trained in authority and certitude first. (If you’ve any doubt how powerful – and how difficult – it is to be vulnerable, watch this excellent TED talk on The Power of Vulnerability by researcher, story teller and social scientist Brene Brown.)
It’s a very good thing that online marketing as put such a focus on engagement – it’s changed forever the way consumers interact with companies, greatly improving the relationship in the process. Now let’s take it into the rest of the organization and into our offline interactions. Our communications and our effectiveness will be better for it.
Persuasive Communication
This is an excerpt from my Persuasive Communication workshop. The previous post and the next one flesh out some of this content, but I thought you might like to see the slides – they’re pretty nice. The images are from either istockphoto.com or Flickr.com Creative Commons license. Enjoy!
Effective Communication: How to Get to the Point
To be a successful communicator, think of your listener first, and focus on attention.
Communication is hard. To successfully convey information requires taking what’s in my head and getting it into yours in some reasonable facsimile of the original thought or idea. If you think this is easy, just remember the last time you tried to inform a group of individuals about an upcoming change – and then remember the many (sometimes baffling) concerns and rumors that arose as a result!
As George Bernard Shaw once said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that is has taken place.” That’s because most of us focus only on the front end of the communication process – the part that’s all about us: the information we want to convey (the message) and how we plan to convey it (the medium).
To be an effective communicator, work all parts of the communication process
We ignore the back end – the part that’s all about the person we’re trying to communicate with. We rarely take into account, for example, the knowledge, experience and beliefs that might influence how they interpret our information. We don’t consider what might have happened to them that morning, or if we even have their attention at all! If you want to be a successful communicator, you have to work the entire communication process (see diagram) – including having a feedback loop to ensure that the message you sent is the one that got through.
Hey You, Over Here!
Attention is the single most important resource in successful communication. Without it, you can’t explain, sell, or influence anything. That’s because people only absorb information when they pay attention, and attention is scarce. It was scarce even before the advent of instant messages and texts, Facebook and YouTube, Twitter and RSS feeds. Today, getting someone’s attention is like trying to attract a hummingbird to a specific flower in a field of tulips.
Does your message stand out?
So what do we do? We push more information at people to get their attention, fighting the information glut with our own arsenal in an ever escalating arms race. Wrong! Herbert Simon, a social psychologist who pioneered the field of attention economics back in the early ‘70s, observed that since information consumes attention, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” These days we’ve gone beyond a wealth of attention to a state of full-on information pollution.
The first thing, then, is that we need to reduce “noise.” Noise is anything that distorts, distracts or interferes with the communication process. We do that by making sure our message is focused, relevant and clear, that we pursue engagement as much as understanding, and that we repeat the message until we know it’s been received and absorbed.
In my next post, I’ll delve into each of these areas and explain how persuasive communication is as much about change management as it is about messaging.
Effective Communication: How to Get to the Point
To be a successful communicator, think of others first, and focus on attention.
Communication is hard. To successfully convey information requires taking what’s in my head and getting it into yours in some reasonable facsimile of the original thought or idea. If you think this is easy, just remember the last time you tried to inform a group of individuals about an upcoming change – and then remember the many (sometimes baffling) concerns and rumors that arose as a result!
As George Bernard Shaw once said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that is has taken place.” That’s because most of us focus only on the front end of the communication process – the part that’s all about us: the information we want to convey (the message) and how we plan to convey it (the medium).
We ignore the back end – the part that’s all about the person we’re trying to communicate with. We rarely take into account, for example, the knowledge, experience and beliefs that might influence how they interpret our information. We don’t consider what might have happened to them that morning, or if we even have their attention at all! If you want to be a successful communicator, you have to work the entire communication process (see diagram) – including having a feedback loop to ensure that the message you sent is the one that got through.
[DIAGRAM]
Hey You, Over Here!
Attention is the single most important resource in successful communication. Without it, you can’t explain, sell, or influence anything. That’s because people only absorb information when they pay attention, and attention is scarce. It was scarce even before the advent of instant messages and texts, Facebook and YouTube, Twitter and RSS feeds. Today, getting someone’s attention is like trying to attract a hummingbird to a lone flower in the midst of a Dutch tulip field.
[TULIPS]
So what do we do? We push more information at people to get their attention, fighting the information glut with our own arsenal in an ever escalating arms race. Wrong! Herbert Simon, a social psychologist who pioneered the field of attention economics back in the early ‘70s, observed that since information consumes attention, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” These days we’ve gone beyond a wealth of attention to a state of full-on information pollution.
[ILLUSTRATION]
The first thing, then, is that we need to reduce “noise.” Noise is anything that distorts, distracts or interferes with the communication process. We do that by making sure our message is focused, relevant and clear, that we pursue engagement as much as understanding, and that we repeat the message until we know it’s been received and absorbed.
In my next post, I’ll delve into each of these areas and explain how persuasive communication is as much about change management as it is about messaging.
Four Keys to Successful Change
Ever try to get someone to change the way they do something that they’ve been doing the same way for years? Ever try to break one of your own habits? It’s not easy. Not because people are intentionally contrary or obstinate, but because big parts of our brains operate on autopilot, in deep grooves of habit, and establishing new pathways is hard.
This can be a serious problem for individuals or managers who find themselves in the midst of major change efforts.
There are four things you can do to help make change happen:
Sell the problem, not the solution.
People aren’t in the market for solutions to problems they don’t see or understand, writes William Bridges, author of Managing Transitions. For example, prehistoric humans were probably more inclined to give up their hunter-gatherer ways to grow crops once they really understood that the wooly mammoths were dying out.
Prehistoric man only began raising crops in earnest once the wooly mammoths started dying out
To really sell change, you have to touch people’s emotions. “Motivation is not a thinking word; it’s a feeling word,” says John Kotter, Harvard professor and best-selling leadership author. People have to feel a sense of threat, crisis or dissatisfaction before they have enough motivation to start the process of unlearning and relearning, according to Edgar Schein, an MIT Sloan professor and expert in organizational culture.
However, you have to be careful with how you use burning platforms, warns Kotter. If that’s all you do, you can create a panic that stops new action. Fear makes people focus on self-preservation instead of organizational transformation. The way around this, says Schein, is to make sure that while people feel a sense of threat in the old, they also feel a sense of psychological safety about learning the new.
Focus attention.
Once you create the impetus for people to move away from the old, you have to provide them with a clear vision of the new alternative. Imagine the panic among the cavemen and women once they understood that their prey was disappearing from the land and before they realized they could domestic certain plants and animals to generate their own source of food.
Focus is essential because the working memory part of our brains can only hold a few concepts in mind at one time. The worst thing you can do in a change effort is overwhelm people with lots of extraneous information and detail. (For a great talk on this topic, check out David Rock speaking at Google on YouTube.)
It’s important to distinguish between the overall mission of the group and its specific objectives. As long as you can show people that the new objectives still support the mission or core purpose of the group, it will be easier for them to switch. Early man’s mission was to eat to survive, not to hunt and kill mammoths.
Engage everyone in the change.
Everyone should have a role to play in the change – otherwise it will be something that’s being done to them. People have to be able to see themselves in the new future, and that will be easier if they play a part in shaping it.
The prospect of change causes uncertainty and anxiety in people. That anxiety is overcome when people have a personal insight. People have an insight by paying attention and reaching their own conclusions. And such insight is solidified when people voice their ideas. In fact, brain research shows that paying attention, having an insight and voicing ideas create a lot more activity and connections in the brain than reading about or hearing someone else voice a new idea.
What’s more, insight makes people feel better. Just as uncertainty causes anxiety, reaching a personal insight causes real pleasure. This reinforces the learning in ways few other things can.
Craft a message that’s simple and strong.
There are three keys to communicating change.
- When formulating your message, choose your words carefully. Words matter, and many a change effort has been derailed by a careless remark by a company leader.
- Images are better than words to create an emotional connection, so show, don’t tell, by telling stories that paint a picture or using actual physical evidence or demonstrations to emphasize your point.
- Effective communication requires repetition. There is so much that can get in the way of human communication. It’s rarely sufficient to tell something once and expect the message to get through. Don’t stop at the memo; use blogs, posters, town hall meetings, one on ones…. and then ask questions and listen to make sure your message is getting through in the way you intend.
Most people don’t resist change intentionally; resistance to change is part of our DNA. So if you want to change people’s behavior, remember these four things:
Sell the problem, not the solution – you’ve got to help people get unstuck from where they are.
Focus people’s attention – be very clear about the new priorities.
Engage everyone in the process of solving the problem – this is much more important than any particular solution.
Finally, keep your message simple, strengthen it by painting a picture that captures people’s imaginations, and broadcast it far and wide.
See my recent presentation, “Leading in a Turbulent World,” on Slideshare. You can view the slides on my previous post, but to read the substance of the talk, go to the Slideshare version.
How to Survive in a World of Constant Change
About five years, ago, when I was still editor in chief at CIO, we began a major transformation from a print-centric media company to online. During that time, every day brought new challenges, frustrations, discoveries, joy and despair. I think many of us thought we’d power our way through all that turmoil and, eventually, things would get back to “normal.” After a couple of years, it began to dawn on us that if there was ever to be a new normal, it was well over the horizon, and in fact, we’d better learn to live in a state of change.
Change is a process
I’ve been interested in the topic of change since I started working with CIOs over 20 years ago. Information technology is a serious catalyst of change. In the course of my research – and through my own experiences, I’ve come to believe that change in itself is neither a negative nor a positive, but it is a force – a force to be understood, reckoned with and, to some extent, managed.
We published a great article by Chris Koch on the neuroscience of change back in 2006. It explained:
Change hurts. Not the boo-hoo, woe-is-me kind of hurt that executives tend to dismiss as an affliction of the weak and sentimental, but actual physical and psychological discomfort. And the brain pictures prove it.
Change lights up an area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, which is like RAM memory in a PC. The prefrontal cortex is fast and agile, able to hold multiple threads of logic at once to enable quick calculations. But like RAM, the prefrontal cortex’s capacity is finite—it can deal comfortably with only a handful of concepts before bumping up against limits. That bump generates a palpable sense of discomfort and produces fatigue and even anger….
The prefrontal cortex crashes easily because it burns lots of fuel of the high-octane variety: glucose, or blood sugar, which is metabolically expensive for the body to produce.
Given the high energy cost of running the prefrontal cortex, the brain prefers to run off its hard drive, known as the basal ganglia, which has a much larger storage capacity and sips, not gulps, fuel. This is the part of the brain that stores the hardwired memories and habits that dominate our daily lives.
“Most of the time the basal ganglia are more or less running the show,” says Jeffrey M. Schwartz, research psychiatrist at the School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles. “It controls habit-based behavior that we don’t have to think about doing.” Like, for instance, many aspects of our jobs.
This explains why even when people buy in to change intellectually, they often fall back on the old way of doing things.
So how does change happen? First, it’s important to really understand that change is a three-stage process, not a flip of the switch. William Bridges, author of Managing Transitions, describes the three stages as ending or letting go; the neutral zone; and the new beginning.
This of course is a variation on the classic three-stage model of change –unfreeze, change/learn and refreeze – developed by Kurt Lewin, one of the pioneers of organizational psychology, and adopted by many practitioners and consultants in organizational development.
The first stage involves overcoming inertia, defense mechanisms, existing biases and ingrained behaviors. As William Bridges writes, “every new beginning starts with an ending.”
The second stage is where the change occurs. The old is gone, but we don’t yet have a clear picture of what the new reality will be. This is a time of both great potential and innovation – and of uncertainty and trepidation. Of all three stages, this one is where things most often go awry.
The third stage is about locking down the new behaviors, norms and beliefs.
Change requires that people feel at least two seemingly conflicting emotions at once: what Edgar Schein calls survival anxiety – or fear that staying the same is dangerous – along with a sense of psychological safety that comes from seeing that it’s possible to solve a problem and learn something new without a loss of identity or integrity. For people to change, survival anxiety must outweigh what Schein, an expert on organizational culture and change, calls learning anxiety.
In fact, a culture of change is a learning culture. Jack Welch has said, “An organization’s ability to learn, and to translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.” So what exactly is a learning culture? First of all, the organization’s assumptions, values and beliefs must support adaptation, learning and empowerment. And, pay attention, all you perfectionist managers: It’s more important to be committed to the process of solving the problem than to any particular solution.
These days, with waves of change following one upon another, a learning culture may be not only a competitive advantage – it may be a condition of survival.
Of course, to Welch’s second point, learning in and of itself is not enough if you don’t quickly translate what is learned into action.
In my next post I’ll write about four keys to successfully managing change.
See my recent presentation, “Leading in a Turbulent World,” on Slideshare. You can view the slides below, but to read the substance of the talk, go to the Slideshare version.
A 21st Century Renaissance
The New Polymath, by Vinnie Mirchandani, is an ambitious, wide-ranging and celebratory exploration of technology innovation in the 21st century. The book epitomizes the title (a polymath is someone who excels in many disciplines) in taking on the distinct, though certainly overlapping, disciplines of infotech, cleantech and healthtech – and all the various technologies and practices that support them. It evokes the spirit of polymaths throughout history (Sir Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Hypatia of Alexandria, and the ultimate polymath, Leonardo da Vinci) and seeks their equivalents in our own times in both individuals (Bill Joy, Nathan Myhrvold) and organizations. Most provocative, it sets up a parallel between our age and the 14th century, when the Late Middle Ages, or Dark Ages, gave way to the Renaissance, or rebirth. Mirchandani is hopeful that we are entering another Renaissance.
There is much to like about The New Polymath. It is an absolute refutation of the idea that there’s a lack of innovation going on; the book is a veritable firehose of innovation examples, presented by someone who knows what it takes to make innovation happen inside organizations large and small. The examples are laid out in the context of Mirchandani’s RENAISSANCE framework – his attempt to marshal today’s technology innovations into some kind of logical order. This feels a bit contrived, but I suppose it works as well as any other organizing device. The framework includes:
Residence: Better Technologically Equipped than the Office
Exotics: Innovation from Left Field
Networks: Bluetooth to Broadband
Arsonists: and Other Disruptors
Interfaces: For All Our Senses
Sustainability: Delivering to Both the Green and Gold Agendas
Singularity: The Man–Machine Convergence
Analytics: Spreadsheets, Search, and Semantics
Networks Again: Communities, Crowds, Contracts, and Collaboration
Clouds: Technology as a Service
Ethics: In an Age of Cyberwar and Cloning
What I like most about the book is Mirchandani’s premise that we are in a kind of modern day Dark Ages with the potential for another great Renaissance. He outlines the paradox that we have so far been unable to solve the “wicked problems” of our time despite great technology abundance. He focuses his argument on the enormous waste in technology spending ($3 trillion A YEAR on information technology and telecom; printer ink for $5,000 a gallon; support and maintenance agreements that amortize to over $10,000 for every 20-minute help-desk call); the lack of agreement around sustainability; and the lack of access to healthcare for many people around the world.
But Mirchandani fails to address one of the greatest barriers to solving these problems: the market forces that drive the majority of our technology innovation. As long as consumers demand and will pay for the next new advance in entertainment and convenience and stockholders demand the greatest possible returns, that’s where the innovation focus will be – not on solving the big problems that the average consumer is able to ignore from the comfort of their own couch. Perhaps the problem is less one of ability and more one of priorities, focus and resolve.
This point is thrown into stark relief in the second to last chapter of the book, which profiles BP’s CTO organization. Written before the tragic explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform and subsequent and still unstaunched gushing of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the chapter paints a picture of an amazingly effective innovation engine inside a large organization. Yet all that technological prowess didn’t prevent a failure of epic proportions, reinforcing the need for more focus on the final “E” in Mirchandani’s Renaissance, the ethics of decision making inside corporations today.
Each chapter of the book concludes with a recap of its main points – which is good, because the examples are many and diverse, and the recaps create a sense of order and progression to the book’s themes. The final chapter brings these all together into 10 grand challenges for readers who want to develop their own ability for compound technology innovation.
The Polymath sensibility is one of AND, not OR, and the challenges of our time require nothing less. Mirchandani offers us a clear picture of what that looks like and a starting point for the renaissance man or woman in us all.
The CIO’s Dilemma
CIOs are facing a dilemma. On the one hand, they must innovate with technology to help their businesses grow again as we come out of the recession. On the other, because the recovery of 2010 will be slow and drawn out, they must continue to cut costs and focus on operational efficiency. In fact, 57% of executives surveyed by Accenture in November 2009 said that innovation and cost reduction are equally important to their company’s ability to achieve future growth.
The list of seemingly competing forces CIOs have to manage is long.
Cut costs Build new capabilities
Be more efficient Be more responsive
Standardize Customize
Be secure Be open
Make IT predictable Make business agile
Execute flawlessly Think strategically
Enterprise goals Business unit goals
And the list goes on.
CIOs have always been faced with competing imperatives, but curent trends have increased the tension. Today it’s not a matter of shifting from one end of the spectrum to the other but of finding a way to do the things on both sides of the list.
Stuart McGuigan, CIO at CVS Caremark, was recently quoted as saying, “Part of creating change involves holding two incompatible ideas in your head at the same time and somehow still functioning. Being highly responsive to our business partners’ and customers’ needs and creating standardized processes and technology platforms can seem like conflicting goals, but doing both is key to maximizing value.”
While there are many levers companies can pull in their quest for profitable growth, IT is one of the most important. According to research by MIT CISR, firms that are IT Savvy are 20% more profitable than their competitors. This is because everything about business is becoming more digitized.
We’ve finally put to rest the question of does IT matter. The question now is how do you make it matter when everyone has access to the same tools? Competitive advantage comes from how well you use technology, and how quickly your business is able to respond to new opportunities.
At this year’s National Retail Federation conference, Rollin Ford, CIO at Wal-Mart, said, “There are very few secrets out there anymore [and by secrets, he was talking about technology secrets]. The only competitive advantage becomes speed. Organizations need to keep embracing innovation and new technology models. At the end of the day, it’s about getting from point A to point B quicker than everybody else.”
A big problem in the quest for speed is that many companies are weighed down by overly complex or outmoded systems that have been built up over the past 20-30 years. Businesses have built up system upon system, feature upon feature, until their infrastructure looks like a hoarder’s basement. There may be useful stuff down there – the furnace, the very foundation of the building, some tools. But try finding what you need when you need it. Most of it is rarely used and never will be.
No one wants to give up their pet systems, but it’s time to clean house. Companies just can’t afford to have multiple disjointed systems – both for cost reasons and because fragmented data is a lot less useful.
According to various surveys, the average company still spends 70% of its IT dollars on non-discretionary fixed costs. Just think if you could shift an additional 20% of that to new capabilities – and make your core systems better at the same time. The goal is not only to reduce fixed costs — but also to reduce operating complexities, making it easier to respond quickly as business conditions change.
Consider this: Companies that spend more of their IT budgets on new rather than sustaining efforts have notably higher revenue growth and net margins than their competitors, according to MIT CISR.
There’s a big gap between where companies are and where they want to be when it comes to leveraging information. 85% of Harvard Business Review subscribers surveyed recently said that information is a key strategic asset, yet only 36% said their organizations are well positioned to use information for growth – and only 7% said they are very well positioned to do so. Respondents blamed organizational silos, a lack of data integration, a lack of analytic skills, and outdated, overly complex information systems for their inability to make better use of information.
It’s not like CIOs don’t know there’s a problem, but optimizing IT, like laying any new infrastructure, takes money. And money is scarce. The good news is that things are starting to thaw. CIO magazine’s most recent economic impact survey shows a big shift in budget direction — while 50% said their budgets were decreasing and only 14% said they were increasing as recently as May 2009, by December those numbers had almost flipped, with 40% increasing and only 28% decreasing. Of course, the size of the increases are still small — not enough to do a lot of new things unless you do a lot of things differently.
There’s really only one answer to the CIO’s dilemma: Simplification. Simplification of processes, standardization of information and technologies – and enabling innovation at the edge. Simplification is not necessarily easy – or cheap — but it’s not brain surgery, either. The practice of IT management is reaching maturity. We have the tools and techniques today to build effective digital platforms.
My presentation, The CIO’s Dilemma, has examples of what a robust yet simplified enterprise IT model might look like. In future posts I’ll drill into these and other examples.
Great Communicators: Steve Bandrowczak on What CIOs Can Learn from Sales
Steve Bandrowczak, former CIO at DHL, Lenovo and, most recently, Nortel, knows what IT leaders can learn from sales and vice versa because he has recently made the transition into a sales leadership role himself. As vice president of global sales at Avaya after that company’s acquisition of Nortel, Steve leads sales, marketing, channel strategy, services and service strategy for Avaya’s data business. I spoke with him recently. This is the third in a series.
Steve Bandrowczak
Abbie Lundberg: You’ve made the shift from CIO to leading a global sales and marketing organization. What are the differences and similarities of those two roles?
Steve Bandrowczak: Sales & IT have a lot in common. The thing that you learn from sales and can take back into the IT world is that every customer is different. Every customer has a unique set of challenges in terms of how you communicate, how you work with that individual company or customer.
To be an effective CIO leader, you must understand the different parts of the various groups you serve. The way you speak to the head of sales is different from the way you speak to the head of operations, the CFO or the head of R&D. In order to be effective leading IT, business transformation and change, you have to understand what various leaders are trying to do within their own business area, align with that, and then communicate the value that IT brings.
If you start talking to the head of sales about IT or operational metrics, they’ll glaze over very quickly. If you go in talking to them about how am I going to help you drive sales, how am I going to help you drive sales productivity or lead management, you’ll have a much better reception than if you go in there and simply say we’re going to implement Salesforce.com and give them a project plan. You need to show them you understand their challenges as well as the value proposition of what IT can bring.
Where a lot of IT guys get hung up is they talk about “the data center is up 7/24” and “I’ve got five nines reliability” or “I can role out projects…” But you know what? That’s a commodity these days. The real value that you have is where you understand a business unit and its key metrics. I’ll just take a real simple example: If you’re going to roll out a CRM project, the sales team, in general, is looking for… well, they’d say it’s really about lead management, it’s about getting my contacts in a single database, it’s about making my day easier. No it’s not! It’s about sales productivity and driving revenue.
And oh, by the way, if I don’t understand where my baseline is today and where my competition is – meaning the best in the industry – then I don’t know what gap I’m trying to close and how I’m going to improve it. One of the things the CIO brings is understanding the baseline of what that business is doing. So very simply, in sale, if you know that the average revenue per head in your company is, say, $1 million per head, and you know the best in the industry is $4 million, then your CRM goal should be, how do I triple my productivity, not how do I implement CRM. Big difference.
The more that IT executives understand those business goals and metrics and then can bring successful programs to close that gap – that’s where they’re hitting home runs. What we’ve seen through the years is that, from an IT perspective, people focus on: I hit every single milestone – SAP was in on time, on budget. Then five months later, the company’s going out of business.
A lot of IT professionals are uncomfortable with the idea of “selling” or “marketing” IT to their colleagues in other parts of the business. Is this really necessary?
What you’re talking about is communicating the value that IT brings to the business, and that’s absolutely essential. If the only thing the IT organization is doing is the same thing that an EDS or IBM Consulting Services or Accenture is doing, the reality is they can be outsourced. And because external companies are variable in cost, they become more attractive. The difference between the two options becomes variable versus fixed cost, and am I lowest cost versus an external provider.
Where I bring value and why we need to communicate about the value that we bring, lies in understanding the business and being able to communicate about the value IT brings to the business and how IT helps to drive that business transformation. That’s where the uniqueness and the challenges come in. CIOs today – and it’s not just CIOs, it’s the whole IT community – need to communicate the value in a business-centric set of communications. That’s where you become much more effective and much more valuable.
Communicating that value is necessary, and it needs to be frequent. We used to do an annual newsletter. We used to do a monthly achievements memo. Whether it’s in staff meetings, one-on-one, big presentations to groups, newsletters, an annual report… there’s never, ever enough communication.
The key there is it’s not just IT communication – it’s we rolled out with the sales force and achieved these things, we rolled out with finance and achieved these things, as opposed to we did an SAP system, and we did it on time, on budget. No, we worked with the finance community, we redesigned the receivables, the payables, collections, and here are the end business targets that we’re going to achieve and the timeframe in which we’re going to achieve it, and by the way, we’ll give you updates on a monthly basis. Much different than you’re tooting your own horn.
What separates a good communication program from a bad one?
If somebody doesn’t understand what I am saying, it’s my fault, not theirs. I have to take ownership that if somebody doesn’t understand something, it’s because I have not communicated effectively.
Bad communication is when you have sent out a monthly communication or whatever it is, and the business is still shaking their head or they don’t understand it or they just haven’t paid attention. If that happens, you haven’t done your job. And you see that from a lot of IT organizations. All too often, IT says, “I’ve communicate that 100 times. Why doesn’t the stupid business understand it?” You know, “we tell them what we’re doing; what’s wrong with them?”
The reality is, everybody is different. Every CEO is different. Some CEOs have a sales background, some have an operations background, some have a finance background. Each CEO likes to be communicated to differently, and you’ve got to be able to communicate the way the business units want to be communicated to.
Each level is different too. The way you communicate to a senior VP is different from the way you communicate with someone inside a call center or warehouse, but equally important. Everyone is important.
So what makes effective communication? When you talk to the business and they understand the last 10 projects you rolled out and how you did it and what the value was. And you’ve got to keep checking that communication vehicle that you’re sending.
Does it mean you do one-on-ones and staff meetings? Yup. Does it mean you do town halls with business units? Yup. We used to have something we called breakfast with Steve and meet your customer where I’d talk to the IT community about a particular function – this is what’s going on with sales, this is what’s going on with supply chain, this is what’s going on with the finance community. Meet your customer. Someone from that function would come in, explain from their perspective what their top 10 challenges were and why they needed IT and how important IT was. That’s the way you close the gap and eliminate this Chinese firewall where they do the requirements and throw it over the wall, you do something, you implement it and hopefully it works for them.
How do you check the fidelity of your message? How do you make sure that the message you intended to communicate actually got through?
There are a number of things. We used to do quarterly surveys – that’s one mechanism. Also, spending one-on-one time with the senior management team and just getting a feel for, OK, what can we do better? Do you know where we are with this rollout?
I used to have one person on my staff sit in with each business unit/function. My head of operations would sit in with their head of sales, and sit in on their staff meetings and global communications meetings. So we had someone inside the function, understanding what the function was doing, who would bring that back to the IT executive leadership team.
What’s the role of effective communication in change management?
It’s huge. It’s huge in establishing the right set of goals, showing how you’re doing along the path, and when you finish a project, seeing the benefits post implementation. It has to be a running track alongside any transformation initiative.
Describe a change effort and how you used communication to make things go more smoothly.
When DHL acquired Airborne, we had a significant external set of eyes on the integration. FedEx and UPS were just sitting there waiting for the integration to fail, and it would have cost us significant market share. When you do large integrations like that, you tend to do some unnatural things in terms of timelines and the way you put things together. So the communication aspect of that is very important, in terms of why you’re doing it this quickly, with this kind of 7/24, 15-week effort. In that particular one, we were going to lose something like $10 million per day for every day we couldn’t integrate.
When you communicate in that perspective and set that kind of burning bridge, teams understand why the pressure, why you’re making the decisions you are, why you’re taking some risk. If you don’t communicate the reasons, that sense of urgency is just not there, and that’s important when you do large-scale transformation programs like that.
I always pick what I call the top-five burning bridge things. What are the top five things that, when any other question comes up, you raise them against those five goals. So a simple example: Many people do SAP implementations and say, “I need this report before I go live.” So we would say, what is the value of going live? Whatever it is, let’s just make up a fictitious number and say I’m going to gain $5 million per week operational savings. Which means that for every day I don’t go live, I basically waste a million dollars. When someone says, “I need this report before we go live,” you simple say, “OK, where’s the million dollars?” “Well, I don’t have a million dollars.” “Then you’re not getting the report.” It puts the conversation in perspective and gives it a definitive metric and focus so for every single question that comes up, you can target against a broader set of objectives.
Why do IT professionals often have trouble communicating with business colleagues?
We teach IT as a science, not an art. That touchy-feely soft stuff we’ve learned through the years around program management, change management, training – that’s not taught in the schools today. Everything is black and white, ones and zeros, on and off – they don’t really get that communication set of skills. And by the way, many of them don’t have the business set of skills either. What you’re starting to see now is people from the business who have worked on a project coming over and having some of those skills get into the DNA of IT.
When I got to Nortel, they had just completed an evaluation of the entire staff, and they ranked them for me, one through seven, with one being the best. After my own two-week evaluation, the order was completely flip-flopped. The quote/unquote “best” IT person was my worst. Why? Because the best IT person, the way it was ranked, was the best technical person – no business skills, no transformation skills, no leadership skills. Tremendous technically – but I can go buy that. The person who was ranked the lowest was the one who was touchy feely – focused on training, worried about employee sat, retention, customer sat, communications, business value. She didn’t know anything about IT operations, networks, the technical side of it, and that’s what I loved about her. She turned out to be one of my top leaders.
What are some classic communication mistakes IT professionals make, and what can a CIO do about them?
The first thing is putting out a status report that doesn’t have any business impact in it. Focusing on the top 10 IT accomplishments – we implemented a local area network, we had five nines reliability, the data center had zero down time – being too IT centric and not realizing the business doesn’t give a hoot about those things.
The second thing is one size doesn’t fit all. Whatever the format, each function needs to be communicated to in a different way.
Most IT organizations tend to have one or two people who can do that, but it tends not to be widely shared across the organization. The also don’t focus on it, don’t measure it. One thing IT people are good at: when they have a clear set of metrics and goals, they tend to get things done. But go survey the top 100 IT organizations and ask them how they measure the effectiveness of communications. You’ll get blank stares – what do you mean?
What’s the most important thing you’ve learned about communication in the course of your career?
There tends to be a certain arrogance around the CIO role. That’s partly because they got where they are because they’ve been successful, and they think they understand. But when you start with, “I don’t know anything, I’m humble, and each business day is something I can learn from customers, employees,” that’s when you really understand the art of communication and can be most effective. When you have arrogance around, “I’ve said it, therefore everyone must understand it,” you’ve got nothing but a lose/lose.
Year Up: A Non-Profit that Can Teach Business and Education a Thing or Two
Year Up offers urban young adults a chance at a better life. It also offers a model of training that educators, managers and HR professionals should pay attention to.
I recently had the pleasure of visiting the birthplace of Year Up. Like many successful startups, the original space in Boston’s financial district is funky, distinctive and graced with personal touches. Creaky wood floors are warmed by oriental rugs; high ceilings with exposed pipes provide architectural interest; colorful handprints of the members of the first graduating class claim the wall of the common area, where visitors and students can relax on oversize leather sofas and chairs.
While Year Up’s leaders are fond of their original space, locations in Atlanta, Providence, New York, San Francisco and Washington (with Chicago and Seattle soon to follow) have assumed more corporate settings. This is meant to help the students acclimate to a typical work environment from the start.
This focus on business sets Year Up apart. It combines a powerful vision (“In the future, every urban young adult will have access to the education, experiences and guidance required to realize his or her true potential”) with the application of sound management principles to help students succeed and to provide businesses with a reliable source of well-trained, well-rounded entry-level employees.
The program provides students with marketable job skills (currently in IT help desk, desktop support and investment operations); stipends so they can focus on their studies; six months of business experience through internships with corporate partners, and 18 college credits.
The program includes training in business etiquette and communication. “It’s one thing to train in the technology skills,” says Mary Finlay, deputy CIO at Partners Healthcare in Boston, one of the original corporate partners of Year Up. “There are a number of worthy programs out there that do that…. But Year Up also covers the basics of how to show up on time, how to act [and dress] appropriately and how to deal with difficult situations.” As a result, students are “ready and able” to be productive when they show up for their internships, Finlay says.
Year Up's Values and Guiding Principles
Year Up inculcates a set of Values and Guiding Principles as part of its “high support, high expectation model.” This includes how to give and receive feedback in a positive way.
Another thing that distinguishes Year Up from other programs is that it provides ongoing support once interns are placed. Every intern is assigned an advisor, with whom they meet once a week to receive coaching and talk through new experiences and problems. They also are assigned an outside mentor with whom they speak at least once a month.
Supervisors at partner companies go through an orientation and have access to Year Up staff whenever they want it. First-time managers benefit from the indirect coaching they get from Year Up staff – themselves an impressive lot, with backgrounds in business and non-profit management, academia and international development.
All of this is designed to make sure students are successful or, in the one in 10 instances where things don’t work out, to gracefully move that person out and replace them with another intern, with as little disruption to the company as possible.
There are additional benefits for corporate partners. For example, companies like Partners that care about diversity see Year Up as a valuable part of their sourcing strategy. And managers get a lot out of it too. “My managers love the opportunity to be able to take in an intern, provide mentoring and coaching, and give these young men and women their first break in their careers,” says Finlay. “They see it as one of their benefits.”
Founded by businessman Gerald Chertavian 10 years ago, Year Up has been honored by Fast Company and The Monitor Group with its Social Capitalists Award for world-changing non-profits. President Obama visited the Washington site in June and praised it in his press conference that week.
In its first year, Year Up graduated 22 students. This year the Boston chapter alone turned out almost 300, with over 1,500 students going through the program nationally. But that’s not even close to the most interesting stat. Get this:
- 83% student retention
- 100% placement of qualified students into internships
- 90% of interns meet or exceed partner expectations
- 87% of graduates placed in full or part-time positions
- $15/hr average wage at placement
This is all the more impressive considering that national retention rates for students at two-year public colleges is only 54 percent – not apples to apples, but it gives you an idea.
Partners Healthcare takes 8 to 10 interns from each class, and hires a number of graduates every year. Finlay is explicit that this is not just altruism. “Right now it might not be so hard to get talent, but the pendulum is going to swing back.” She recommends the program to other CIOs, saying, “develop the partnership now, get used to working with Year Up and make it part of your sourcing strategy so you’re already engaged and not scrambling to get things in place” when the economy picks back up.
Year Up currently operates in Boston, Atlanta, Providence, New York, San Francisco (Bay area) and Washington and expects to open chapters in Chicago and Seattle next. CIOs interested in learning more about becoming a corporate partner should contact the local chapter. Individuals can get involved by serving as guest speakers, job coaches, college application advisors, mentors, curriculum coaches or instructors, or by making a donation.
How to Succeed as an Early Adopter: Interview with Genentech CIO Todd Pierce
This is Part Two of my interview with Todd Pierce, CIO of Genentech. In Part One, we spoke about effective communication.
Abbie Lundberg: You were an early adopter on a pretty large scale for iPhones. What was the business case for that?
Genentech CIO Todd Pierce
Todd Pierce: The business case for me has always been mobility. It’s one of the most important mega-trends of the last six, seven years. [The iPhone was] smaller, higher functioning, with greater reach – a laptop in your pocket – and oh, by the way, it does an application that everybody has to have called telephone. And then when I saw the touch-screen interface, I said, “This is it.” Because I had been on the Newton, I’d been in on the first Palm, we had lots of Treos, I’ve used every HP device that they had made for the last nine years in that area. And dumping the stylus and going with the finger, I said, this is it. Unbelievable.
So you had that personal revelation. How about the rest of the organization? Who did you have to convince?
The end-user management concern was, is this a toy? Is this frivolous… is this just spending dad’s money? Which was the same thing, by the way, when the Blackberry first came out – there was the question then, like, wow, that’s a lot of money. Who needs to do e-mail real time anyway? It’s better to just do it in the evening, or when you’re at your desk. So, there’s frequently the concern, are we signing up for something just because its cool… are we just wasting our money?
The way you answer that is, well, let’s not prejudge something. Let’s do an experiment. So we did an experiment with initially 120 people. We got a mix of users. One group were heavy Blackberry users – because one question was, why change? Is it going to do anything that a Blackberry doesn’t do? By that time we had 5,000 Blackberry’s. And at that time, it looked like the iPhone was more expensive. So, we got a mix of people who loved the Blackberry and understood the value of mobility and people who were not Blackberry users. They had tried it, but didn’t like it. Those were our two segments. And I was blown away by the feedback.
Overwhelmingly – and now it’s going to be memory recall – something like 90 percent of hardcore Blackberry users preferred the iPhone, which surprised me. Originally when we thought about mobility in these devices, we thought e-mail. What we didn’t fully appreciate was it’s about the web. E-mail is 1980s, the web is now. To have a full-feature web experience on this device was revolutionary. The touch screen, the gesturing, allowed you to navigate – we didn’t have to do WAP or all of this other stuff that really narrows down the amount of content that you can get. The entire web is truly available. That also got our non-Blackberry people, people who didn’t like e-mail.
Originally I thought the lack of push e-mail would be a problem. iPhones have that now, but they didn’t at the time. One of the reasons people liked their Blackberry’s was [laughs] it’s kind of a stimulus to get interrupted every five seconds as the e-mails come in. You never get bored. So what won us over on e-mail was being able to read attachments: the ability to zoom in, roam around. So many of the Blackberry attachments were just unreadable – it was completely worthless. Now you had a device that lets you actually read the attachments.
The business case is mobility. The breakthrough for iPhone turned out to be the web and really being able to navigate through rich, dense attachments.
I don’t know why there aren’t IT executives all across America marching in the streets, burning their software licenses and saying, “let my people go.” I mean, this is the promised land.
A lot of people were concerned about security early on. What risks had to be mitigated at that point, and how did you deal with that?
There are all kinds of ways to have accidental disclosure of information. The majority is through employees: sending information to the wrong people, auto complete on e-mail addresses. [It’s important] not to kill something new for the marginal case when we’re already taking quite a bit of risk. Functioning in the world requires risk, getting in your car and driving to work is very risky. It’s just reminding people that this wasn’t any more risky than other things we were doing. And then it’s the benefit. One of the things that we found was that we got, on average, an hour more work out of everyone that had an iPhone per day. That is enormous, and you get that because people appreciate the ease of use and mobility.
There’s a psychological aspect to all this. We’re moving away from the paternalistic approach to IT – you know: “we’re the IT Department, we’re 10 years behind where you are, but we know best.” We hire smart people and we give them the best tools. We let them have admin rights to their computers. It’s getting out of that mainframe mentality of closed networks and all that stuff and really shaking that off.
One of the things that I said to my staff was, I do all of my banking online. All my money, which I care a lot more about than my e-mail at work, I do it all online. I can’t tell you the last time I went into a bank, met a banker…. So, if I pay all my bills, do all of my transactions on the internet, why can’t I approve an SAP shopping cart on the internet? Our job as IT professionals is to figure out how to mitigate the impact of that. So we did. We put in Junipers, we put in scanning and filtering and other things to help with that. We educated employees, and then we worked with Apple on, hey, here are features that we want that will continue to improve this. And not being late to go up the innovation curve because something’s not perfect. When it comes to innovation, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
I have probably 30 apps that I have written for the iPhone. If I had waited until release 3.0, which was the one that had all the enterprise features – push e-mail and VPN native support, and all the things that corporations said they couldn’t live without – that was two years into the product. Well, I’m two years down the road. It’s a better mousetrap. My workforce got the advantages sooner, and we’ve moved up the learning curve. We have our own app store now – a Genentech app store – with our own apps. We’ve integrated it with various things.
And we give employees a choice. Here we had over 5,000 Blackberry’s. People loved it; it was one of our top-rated devices. We did this little trial and said, great, we’re going to add it to our portfolio of products. We didn’t promote it, we didn’t say, this is better than that; we just put it out there. Today we have over 5,000 iPhones and about 1,500 Blackberry’s.
Let’s talk about Google apps, which you adopted last year. Did the whole company go to Gmail?
We license the whole suite for 18,000 accounts. On that, there’s Google docs, and spreadsheets, and presentation, and chat, and IM, and video – all that’s available for everyone. The only thing that we forced everyone onto and had to do a weekend cut over for was calendar. At the time, there wasn’t cal-dev support, and interoperability between calendaring systems, and you don’t want to maintain two calendars because you’ll miss every meeting – plus drive all your admins crazy. So, that was the forced cutover that was the big event. That was October 2008.
Everybody went home on Friday, we turned the calendaring system to read-only and then migrated 2.7 million records into Google. People came to work on Monday morning and I was like, boy, this is going to be a rough Monday. And we only had 460 calendar calls. That was fantastic! I mean, how could you touch 18,000 people and only get 460 calls? So, that was, I thought, a true measure of this is a good thing.
We have about 2,000 people on e-mail. The reason that we don’t have the rest on e-mail is Google has delayed how to handle larger attachments. There’s a 25 Megabyte limit. We’re now moving forward with a voluntary opt-in program so people can move – because for e-mail you don’t have to move everybody at once. You can do server side, or client side migrations, and you can move one person, or 10,000 people.
The rate of innovation at Google is – well I mean, the Oracle, SAP and Microsoft product cycle is five years; Google’s product cycle is five days. It’s incremental. In five days you’re not going to be able to cancel your Microsoft Office license, but in five years, you won’t have Microsoft Office.
I spent $10 million making my purchasing system usable on SAP. I spent $10,000 making it usable on my iPhone. You do the math.
What benefits have you seen so far?
It fits into the mobility paradigm very well. Browser-based apps are getting better and better. You can deliver more of that experience and get mobility and simplicity. Because they’re not coming behind your firewall, you don’t have to VPN in. You have a secure session to Google, and you can access your information anywhere, anytime from any device. You don’t have to be on a corporate device, you don’t have to have a VPN fob. And it works on your iPhone, your Blackberry, your laptop, anywhere, anytime. So, fabulous. That would be the thing that people talk about the most.
The second is the integration of all the different tools. If you’re a multi-modal communicator, it is the best experience and the best set of tools and it all works, seamlessly, easy, together. So, that would be the second thing.
Then, the third thing is, $50 a year. That’s it! You don’t have to go to lunch with your sales rep. You don’t even have to know your sales rep. Your contract will fit in your billfold. You don’t need a three-ring binder for it, or a battery of attorneys to tell you what the hell it means. I mean, I haven’t read the Microsoft Licensing Agreement lately, but when they came out with the how’s and the this’s and the that’s, I mean, enterprise assurance, you’d have to be in like a two and a-half hour meeting to get briefed on what you’re buying. Two and a-half hours. And I have a PhD. It’s like, could you make this more complicated? Probably not. Google, $50. And it’s the same $50 from 61 features ago. Sixty-one new products, YouTube for the enterprise, video conferencing. Now, what software company, Microsoft, SAP, or Oracle, would give you 61 new things with no deployment, and no price increase? Introduce me to that software company. They don’t exist. Goggle has an absolutely radical, wonderful – it’s an IT dream come true. I don’t know why there aren’t IT executives all across America marching in the streets, burning their software licenses and saying, “let my people go.” I mean, this is the promised land. I don’t know how it could get any better.
Is that just Google, or are you learning things from this experience with Google that you would apply to other types of applications?
Oh, well, I’m totally revolutionizing the sales part of the business with Salesforce.com. And I would love to revolutionize my HR system with Workday, but I couldn’t get my HR person on board with it. But look at Workday, look at Salesforce.com, and look at Google. Revolutionary. It’s going to gut the whole industry.
Is there more coming for other areas of the business?
Oh, definitely. Just look at iPhone apps. That’s another important paradigm that’s happening: what I call snackable apps. We spent 30 years figuring out how to get 200 drop-down menus with 3,000 features. And a whole industry of training and manuals. And now we’re delivering single-function apps that require no training. And they’re absolutely fantastic. I hooked SAP up to my iPhone for shopping cart approvals; 30 percent of all of our approvals are now done on iPhones into SAP because I stripped away all of that complexity that’s in the SAP mySRM. I spent $10 million making my purchasing system usable on SAP. I spent $10,000 making it usable on my iPhone. You do the math. And, which would you rather do? Would you rather approve the shopping cart on your iPhone? Or would you rather log in, literally, you can answer three e-mails by the time it loads all the tabs and screens and all the pieces, and then try to remember behind which of these mystery tabs is my answer. It’s like playing a game of Jeopardy every time. Is this it? Is this it? Is this where I go? Oh, look, thank God I found it. It’s like a treasure map. And that’s just so you can buy something. I mean, come on.
There are many things happening here that are good for users, good for the IT profession, good for business. It’s just good, good, good. You know, what’s slowing this adoption are all the priests of the past – all the preservationists. All the interests that are built up around the edifice that is enterprise software…. Cloud computing is a dream come true.
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Todd Pierce is senior vice president and CIO of Genentech, the $13,418 million San Francisco biotech company that this year became a wholly owned subsidiary of Roche. He joined Genentech in May 2002. Pierce’s IT leadership experience spans a broad range of industries, including commercial software products, health insurance, clinical care and government. Prior to joining Genentech, he served as CIO and Director of Information Systems for the Santa Clara County Social Services Agency. Pierce holds a B.A. in Economics and Finance from Austin College and a M.A. in Health Policy and Administration from the University of California, Berkeley.
