Category Archives: How To

Effective Communication: How to Get to the Point

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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.

Photo by German Meyer

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

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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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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 Succeed as an Early Adopter: Interview with Genentech CIO Todd Pierce

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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

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.

_____________________________________________________

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.

How to Start Your Own Business Without Wasting Time and Money, Part I

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Starting your own business is a blast. There’s so much to learn and try out, without the benefit (or buffer) of a team of people to help execute. I haven’t had this much fun in years! It requires resourcefulness, resolve and resilience — all great characteristics to develop no matter what your situation. It helps to be completely open to opportunity as well.

A few weeks ago, Computerworld ran an article titled, “Becoming an IT consultant: Do’s, don’ts and disasters to avoid” for executives thinking of striking out on their own (or who find themselves there regardless of intention). It provides a great overview and shares the real-life experiences of some former CIOs, but it left me wanting more in the way of nuts and bolts.

Then today a CIO friend and blogger sent me a note suggesting I write about my own experience starting out and “all those details that make a difference.”
So I’ve decided to do a short series on how to start your own business pretty much on a shoestring. Installments will include how to get started; identity and branding; setting up a great home office; setting up your website and company e-mail; writing proposals, etc. By the time I finish those pieces, I hope I’ll also be able to share how to close business!

Getting Started

The first thing I did was go see my accountant, who also runs seminars for entrepreneurs. Based on what I was setting out to do, he advised me to set up as an LLC (limited liability company) versus incorporating or “doing business as.” Registering as an LLC in Massachusetts costs $500 a year, but it has many advantages. (Here’s a comparison chart very similar to the one my accountant sketched out for me on the differences between LLC, C Corp. and S Corp.; Mass.gov also offers a step-by-step guide to forming a business.) I saved the estimated $1,000 I would have spent to have a lawyer handle it by registering online (my lawyer’s secretary even gave me the URL and walked me through it!), which was quite simple. (Note: some parts of the process didn’t display properly with Firefox so I had to switch over to Internet Explorer.) I did wait a few days, however, before filing, as I wanted to make sure I was really happy with the company name I’d chosen. This is not easy to change once you start opening bank accounts, registering domain names, designing business cards, etc.

Once I had registered Lundberg Media LLC, I needed an employer identification number (EIN), also known as a Federal tax ID (FID) to use in place of my social security number on invoices. My accountant did this for me, but you can also do it yourself online at the IRS website.

Business Banking

Once you have a registered business name and FID, you can apply for a business checking account and credit card to keep your business expenses separate from your personal finances. This will make things easier at tax time — not to mention make it possible to see if you’re running a profitable business!

Your bank will show you all sorts of fancy ledgers and checkbooks; I went with a simplest model — the same kind I use for my personal account. And the accounting program you’ll need (e.g., QuickBooks) also lets you print and write checks, among other things.

I looked at lots of different credit cards and went with American Express (not their charge card, which has an annual fee and requires full payment each month, but the credit card). In addition to offering a free rewards program, their Open Savings program offers discounts at some of my favorite travel and service providers such as JetBlue, Marriott Courtyard, FedEx and Kinkos.

Quicken v. QuickBooks

When I asked the people in my network whether I should go with Quicken or QuickBooks, the response was fairly unanimous for QuickBooks. This article from Web Developer’s Journal has a pretty good explanation of why as does this older article, but the gist is that Quicken functions more as a checkbook while QuickBooks provides general ledger, with double entry bookkeeping. Once you make the QuickBooks decision, you still need to decide whether to go with the Simple Start version (similar to Quicken, but unlike Quicken, easy to transfer your data to QuickBook Pro if you later decide you need to go there), QuickBooks Pro or QuickBooks Premier. Intuit offers a helpful comparison chart. And they’re making the decision to go with Pro an easy one right now with a huge discount, from the usual $199.95 to $119.95 for a single user (Simple Start usually sells for not much less than that) when you order from the website.

Tracking Expenses

But don’t wait to make this purchase before you start tracking your expenses. The first file folder I created was for my expense receipts; the second spreadsheet was one for tracking mileage (at 55 cents a mile, this adds up fast!). My expenses so far have included an hour with the accountant, registering the business, buying a new monitor and keyboard, various office supplies and a new desk and file cabinet. In a future installment of this series, I’ll write about setting up my home office — deals to look for, where you can cut corners and where you need to splurge.

This is the first in a series. In Part two, we’ll talk about setting up your home office, registering your domain and more.

————————————

How to Get Started

  1. Name your business
  2. Meet with your accountant
  3. Decide what kind of company to form and register it
  4. Get a federal tax ID
  5. Open a bank account and get a business credit card
  6. Pick an accounting software program and learn how to use it
  7. Track your expenses and file all your receipts