Rules of Engagement - Part 2

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

2) Be productive or be quiet. No armchair quarterbacking. It’s really easy to say what the problems are. It’s much harder to come up with solutions. 95% of the people in the world will be more than happy to tell you what is wrong with a situation. 2.8% will have some type of knee-jerk solution to offer up short term fix to the problem. These tend to be short sided and biased toward whatever department the person with the idea works in. 2% will actually be trying to think of the big picture, but not willing to put forth the effort to really fox the problem. “A” for effort, but that’s about it. It’s only about .2% who are willing to actually put forth the effort to solve the problem and follow through to make sure it was a success. You are that .2%, like it or not. Take it seriously. Make some real change. This involves the dreaded words in business – “Take a chance” and “Do the work.” GASP! Too many companies today have a corporate culture of cover your butt and tow the line. No great innovation EVER comes from this mentality. The key is to not necessarily make huge quantum shifts. That’s too risky and too much to ask of most people. But making incremental and measurable change toward a quantum shift is fine. In the end, it’ll take longer, but it will minimize risk, keep everyone motivated, and it just makes good business sense.

Rules of Engagement - Part 1

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Building off my last entry on Zen and the Art of Project Management, I got to thinking about meeting dynamics. Specifically - creative meetings. When I say creative meetings, I don’t just mean brainstorming sessions with the marketing department on the new ad campaign. I’m also talking about the kind of meetings where we evaluate the company’s past performance, latest progress, and forge a new business initiative. (You are doing that, right?) Some might wonder how this could be a “creative meeting.” It’s an analytical meeting where we evaluate hard metrics of past performance to spell out the future of the company. That is 100% true. However, if it’s a purely analytical venture, we end up simply repeating what we have done in the past to a greater or lesser degree. The conversation tends to stay in the realm of ‘sales were down last quarter, so we need to look at scaling back production for the short term and increasing sales initiatives in these key markets.’ This is not a bad thing. It makes good business sense. But it never innovates. If you include some creative types in the room, they tend to look at the data (in far less detail mind you) and come up with much bolder company moves. It was the creative thinkers in the conference room at Apple that brought that company back from the brink of bankruptcy. Why would a computer manufacturer make a high tech Walkman®?

“That’s not our core business.”

“We don’t do small consumer electronics.”

“It’ll dilute our brand.”

Now we have the iPod®. The best selling consumer electronic device on the planet.

It takes the creatives to think outside the normal business model and test the waters of the unknown. It takes the support of the analyticals to quickly and efficiently ground the creatives, so they aren’t expending a lot of time and money down an ill fated road. The analyticals also keep the core business moving ahead at a safe and steady pace. This allows the creatives to run ahead and try new things.

I was talking to a friend who works for Toyota corporate. He was saying the biggest difference between Toyota and Nissan is that Nissan is always trying to push the envelop. Nissan’s sales figures show that as well. It’s up and down like the Rocky mountains. Nissan has too many creatives in the room. Toyota on the other hand tended to have too many analyticals in the room. Their sales were always steady and growing, but very few people would say they bought a Toyota because it was a “cool car.” The Camry doesn’t really stand out in the crowd.

However, it appears that Toyota got a couple more creatives in the room with the advent of hybrid cars and the Scion line especially. Toyota got wise to the balance and executed it perfectly. They saw an untapped market of young new car owners who wanted inexpensive, cool cars. So Scion was born. It doesn’t say Scion, a Toyota subsidiary. They were smarter than that. Toyota let their creatives develop a new brand, with a small lineup to test the waters and try something that was historically not Toyota. They created a brand of cool, hip cars that are customizable and stand out from the crowd.

Bottom line, if you team up analytical thinkers with creative folks, you end up with a winning combination. But they have to balance each other out. Swinging too far in either direction can make the whole thing crumble.

You’ve got to let each group “do their thing.” The kicker is that these two groups tend to go in seemingly opposite directions and have a tendency to trip each other up as they go. Here’s where the Rules of Engagement come into play. Each group MUST respect the other and have trust in the other. If you set ground rules from the beginning and give each group just enough understanding of the other that there is some level of mutual respect, things go very nicely. You don’t have to “like” how the other does things, or agree with the way they go about it. You just need to know that they are doing their job and more importantly, IT”S NOT YOUR JOB. You stay focused on your portion and they’ll stay focused on theirs. When they overlap, it needs to be clearly defined whose opinion carries more weight. The Rules of Engagement, at their core, are a clear code of conduct. That way, poor personal behavior (which truly affects company growth) is pulled out of the realm of inter-office politics and into the realm of the bottom line.

The funny part about the Rules of Engagement is that even if you don’t believe what you are saying, simply obiding by the Rules of Engagement works. Everyone may know that you are not saying what you really think, but it doesn’t matter. It keeps the peace and your point was made; Maybe not to the degree that you wanted, but it was still made and you didn’t grind the meeting to a halt over your personal point. I’m not suggesting anyone lie. I’m just saying there is a big difference between “Sue, that’s a horrible idea” and “Sue, I see a lot of challenges that we would need to overcome to make that work, but we’ll look into it. Even if we can’t do what you are suggesting to it’s fullest, I can see some aspects that would be of benefit to the company now.” It may be something you feel really strongly about. Sue’s idea may sink the company in two days if it’s implemented. If it’s that bad, there are ways to express that, without pointing it at Sue. Focus on the issue, not the person.

Rules of engagement:

1) Leave your personal feelings at the door. Be objective. Don’t take criticism personally. On the flip side, be aware that you are talking to and potentially critiquing a person. Be constructive, be objective, but NEVER make it personal. Leave baggage, history, and excuses at the door. We’re here to fix the problem and improve the organization, not point fingers about why it didn’t work in the past. If you make it personal, you will single handedly kill that initiative before it starts. You’ll suck all the energy out of the room and the whole meeting will be wasted. Someone will try to salvage the meeting and try to move on. It won’t work. You might as well stop now and try again in two weeks...and it’ll be awkward then too. You’ll also strain relationships outside the conference room. This is the single fastest way to become the office jerk and be the person who kept the company from expanding. DON’T GO THERE.

More to come.

Adopting Technology vs. Understanding Technology

A while back I wrote about the gap in technology use that separates children from their parents. There are the usual jokes about how it defines who can program a VCR and who can send a txt message. When you grow up around technology you adopt it more easily. But there's a big difference between understanding how to use an interface that someone built for you (cell phones and video games) and understanding how the underlying technology works (DOS Prompts and TTL(Transistor-Transistor Logic)).

It's the same thing that happened to automobiles. There's less and less reason to look under the hood and there's less and less reason to troubleshoot your MP3 player or cell phone. This is not a bad thing. Your phone shouldn't crash. But as a result we have fewer opportunities to really understand the technology that we've become dependent on. So what happens when the technology fails and we've never looked under the hood before? Without understanding how something works, what chance do we have of fixing it?

Today, kids are exposed to branded, packaged technology and they are far better at using it than I am. This is a great thing. They get all the benefits of the technology but don't have to spend all the time I did to get things to work. No one wants to take a computer programming class just to record a TV show or dial a phone. There's too much life to live and too many other pursuits we need to follow. But there is a downside. When something is all packaged up, you rarely get a chance to see the "naked technology" behind it. As we become more isolated from the "naked technology" that does the work, we become more dependent on those that package the technology for us.

I'm certainly not advocating that we do away with modern conveniences or start programming our own cell phones. This is just a word of caution to be aware that as technology becomes more "prepared" we give up control over what we want the technology to do.

Zen and the Art of Project Management

After ten years in the design field, you learn a couple things. If I had to narrow down all my experience and pass on just one tidbit of knowledge, it would be the fact that in order for a project to succeed, you must focus more on the people involved than the timeline, budget, and project specifications. In order for a project to be successful, it takes everyone moving in the same direction. I know that sounds obvious. Everyone must be on the same page – have one voice – work as a unified group. We’ve heard it all before, but to say it is one thing; to do it is quite often a different matter. It’s often my job to bring together two things more opposite than oil and water. I have to make marketing and IT into chocolate and peanut butter. The two great tastes that taste great together. In order for a website to truly be successful, it needs good marketing to draw people in. It needs great content to keep them around and it needs great backend applications that allow the users to easily complete a transaction - be it purchasing an item, downloading content, or requesting more info. Whatever the end goal, that process must be seamless and intuitive to the user. That means that IT and marketing MUST work hand in hand. The user must not see where one department ends and another starts.

The reason it’s so difficult is because many people fail to understand the concept that other people think different than they do. Not “think differently” in regards to opinions on music or politics, but “think different.” Their brain is wired different. They approach a problem in a different manner. They bring a different set of life experiences to the table. They bring a different personality – which affects how they deal with a problem. All these things factored together spell out how a person’s brain functions.

The free spirited, live-life-as-it-comes person will approach a problem much differently than the calculating person who must have everything planned out. It seems obvious. But what people fail to realize is that not everyone thinks like they do. People today tend to view ‘different’ as a negative. We want everyone to be the same and the suggestion of ‘different’ is a slippery slope to ‘not equal’ which leads to ‘not as good as.’ Not true. It has nothing to do with talent which people often wrongly associate with self-worth. Well, we’re all different, so we are not equal and no, I’m not as good at some things as other people. So what. I’m no Tiger Woods on the golf course. Big deal. That doesn’t make less of a person. That doesn’t make me bad, I just suck at golf. But I can write code better than Tiger. This isn’t a case of who’s right and who’s wrong. Different can just be different. It’s just the understanding that people “think different” and therefore approach problems or challenged differently. One way may be better than another, but that does not negate all aspects of the lesser way.

If you ask a "creatively" inclined person what the name "Old El Paso Salsa" evokes emotionally, they'll easily give you an answer. It comes naturally to them. If you ask an "analytically" inclined person the same question, they'll simply blink at you in confusion (and probably think it's a foolish question). I'm not saying either group is better or worse. They are simply different. We need both. It's just a matter of recognizing the type of person and knowing what type of job to give them. Trying to force an analytical person into a creative role will only make them frustrated. Best case scenario, they "try and fix the problem" by applying methodologies that they understand to a foreign problem. You would end up with a micro managed brand name that explicitly and fully states what the product is in a very unimaginative and straightforward manner. You’d get "Farmers' Best International Fresh Mango Pineapple Salsa with Lime" and a tagline of "no preservatives". It says what the product is, but it doesn't evoke any reaction or emotion from the customer. You can’t blame the “analytical” thinker. They did their best. If you put someone in a role they are not suited for, they will fail. The person well suited for the job could have done it 5 times faster, cheaper, and easier. But we often do this in business. We plug people into roles they are not suited for and then wonder why the end product wasn’t so good. Put them in a role they are good at. Get them in there to ground everything the “creatives” are doing. They are there to make sure that the “creatives” are considering all the parameters of the project.

You need a combination of these things, but they must be balanced according to the criteria established by the project. There is a time and a place for each and the important thing is to know when and how much weight to put on everyone’s different role.

Put the “analytic” in the room during a “creative” brainstorm session and it’s a train wreck waiting to happen. The “creatives” are firing off ideas in the “safe” environment of a thought shower where no idea is a bad idea. If an “analytical” is there shooting down ideas as they come, the creativity will dry up faster than a noon-day sprinkle in the desert.

It’s simply a matter of knowing everyone’s strengths and what they bring to the table. Play to their strengths and know throughout the process how much weight to put on everyone’s opinion. In the brainstorming meeting the “analyticals'” opinion carries 2% weight. In the meeting where the “creatives’'” are presenting their ideas, the “analyticals'” opinion carries 85% weight. The conference room isn’t a missionary trip to convert the unfaithful to your way of thinking. So don’t try. It’s a mistake to think you can change the way someone thinks. You can change their opinion on a topic, but you can’t change how they think through a problem. Understand that and also have some insight into their approach, even if it doesn’t work for you. At least you know where they are coming from. It’s not about touchy-feely understanding how Bob really feels on the inside. It’s about getting the job done as saving some time. If you have a clue where Bob is coming from, you can disagree, but understand his thought process and move forward together to improve the idea – and no one feels insulted, disgruntled, or unmotivated.

The bottom line for success is to go with the flow. That is not to suggest being lax or flippant. But be open and patient. Understand that others have a different opinion and different way to solve a problem. Play to their strengths and don’t try and make them something they are not. We need to know when speak up and when to keep our mouths shut. We need to know our role in the company universe and know when our opinion matters and when it doesn’t. Yes, I said it. Sometimes our opinion doesn’t matter. Our point may be very valid – just not right now. It’s called a pen. Write it down and bring it up at the appropriate time. Because it’s truly about making the project a success and in order to do that, everyone must have ownership in it. To get respect, you have to give respect. To be heard, you must listen. Know you’re role and understand that sometimes it’s about you and sometimes it’s not…and that’s okay.