Writing a book is good for you. It clarifies your thinking and it’s generous as well. You might not publish it professionally, but sharing it with people you want to teach and lead is a useful practice.
The first draft can be challenging. We’re facing a blank page, trying to find our “voice” and it often ends up sounding stilted, fake or just plain boring.
Perhaps this alternative might help:
Get a cheap digital tape recorder. Go on a walk with someone you want to teach about your topic of expertise. Spend half an hour explaining, in the most cogent way you can, person to person, what they might learn from you.
When you’re simply talking and walking, teaching from experience and anecdote, your best voice arrives.
Go ahead and transcribe the recording and your first draft is done.
December 18, 2024
A generation ago, the Generals ruled. General Motors, General Foods, General Mills, General Dynamics… they were big, and they had a lot to lose. As a result, people trusted them to show up and keep their promises–it just wasn’t worth letting a few people down at the risk of their reputation. The same was true for folks like Mr. Peanut, Mr. Coffee and Mrs. Butterworth. They might not be royalty, but they had a valuable slot on the store shelf, and they weren’t about to blow it.
The path was difficult but simple: earn trust, generate word of mouth, gain market share and then fame. A few million dollars in TV ads couldn’t hurt.
Over time, we came to associate fame with trust.
Social media presented a shortcut to some. Hack your way to fame and don’t worry about trust. Assume that people will give you the benefit of the doubt simply because they’ve heard of you.
And now, people in many lines of work, people who were trained to know better, are finding the pull of this shortcut irresistible. It’s tempting to trade credibility for fame.
When the hustle increases, it goes from ‘trust leads to fame (sometimes)’ to ‘fame despite untrustworthy behavior.’
The simple question worth asking is: That piece of media or interaction or investment you’re making–is it to earn trust or simply find attention?
It’s a race to the bottom, and my guess is that you’d rather not win.
This is cyclical. The audience might not be smart in the short run, but over time, we figure it out. Well-earned trust might go out of style for a while, but it’s always going to be a useful tool.
Asymmetrical information creates real problems. And fixing the flow of useful proxies benefits both sides.
Cigarette companies knew a great deal about the addictions they were causing and the illnesses that resulted. If the public had known, they would have made different choices.
Car companies are required to report malfunctions and injuries to the government in the US. As a result, car designs improve, safety recalls are made and lives are saved.
Should a prospective college student be told the truth about placement rates, class sizes and the training their professors have? What about campus safety and student satisfaction and well being?
The companies that sell artificial turf travel from high school to high school, seeking to sell an alternative to grass. Each school committee is underinformed and rarely has access to the data that the company has. Who benefits?
Insurance companies and hospitals know, to the penny, how much surgical procedures cost. And they also know which doctors have the best (and worst) outcomes. How does keeping this a secret help the patient?
In issues of public health, how loudly do we hear anecdotal stories compared to how clearly are we presented with verifiable and relevant statistics? Is an intervention actually risky or does it just feel that way?
In the short run, economics appear to push businesses to keep information secret and to fight against community action. But history makes it clear that a well-regulated industry serving well-informed consumers actually creates more value (and generates more profit.)
The FDA was expanded in 1938 because eye and skin cream easily available at the drugstore was causing women to go blind. Armed with better information and more confidence from consumers, that industry is now 10,000 times bigger than it was.
It’s tempting to lurk in the shadows, conceal the truth and race to the bottom.
The race to the top requires a foundation of trust, and trust comes from relevant information. Sunlight makes it easier to see where we’re going.
December 17, 2024
Everyone needs more chances, more benefit of the doubt, more opportunity.
But what turns a chance into a big break is what we do with it once the chance arrives.
December 16, 2024
Like all good metaphors, it might be practical too.
Your ‘shoes’ are the point of greatest leverage. The spot where you have traction and engage with the world most directly.
For a freelancer, it might be the way you engage with customers, or your software tools. It might be the reputation (or lack of reputation) you have with your peers.
Organizations that struggle with marketing often seem to struggle with customer service, product design and supplier relationships as well. All places where a new set of shoes might help.
Customer traction is everything, and traction is something we can work on. It’s not as easy or direct as buying a new pair of shoes, but it’s worth it.
PS If you play competitive Frisbee or soccer, a pair of cleats will change everything.
And if your back or shoulders hurt, if you’re out of energy more often than you’d like, consider getting a pair of insoles. Pull out the disposable ones that came with what you’re wearing now and put these in instead. It might make an astonishing difference. And they’re a fabulous gift…
December 15, 2024
Forms are a convenient way for bureaucracies to collect information. They’re convenient because they offload the work to the patient/customer/taxpayer.
The shift in labor led to an explosion of self-serve forms, but the built-in inefficiencies punish everyone.
- Organizations don’t see the cost of inefficient or badly designed forms, since the user engages in private.
- Organizations continue to add more to the forms, since it doesn’t cost them much to do so.
- Legacy systems and forms persist, because it’s expensive and organizationally challenging to upgrade them.
The fundamental inefficiency is this–the form creator has to imagine all the possibilities before printing the form that will be used for years. As a result, the user finds themself plowing through irrelevant questions, because the form is already set. You are 9 years old and the form wants to know how many kids you have. You live in Buffalo and the form asks about a New York City resident tax…
There are four problems here.
- The first is that time is wasted by every single user, every time.
- Because there’s so much nonsense, even alert users glaze over and skip over things that might be important.
- The form can’t check for errors and inconsistencies, and can’t prioritize the questions with the most important ones first.
- And most of all, the form is unable to intelligently dive deeper on the areas that matter.
When we moved to online forms and PDFs, almost nothing changed. By building an analog of the paper form, we captured all the kruft and waste and redundancy without adding much in the way of value. Tell me again why we need to sign this 24 page electronic document in 9 places?
Leaving technology out of this for a moment, imagine what intake might be like if, instead a form, you were talking to a human who could make decisions based on what you said? If you’re applying for a visa to Spain, they wouldn’t ask you questions that are irrelevant to this fact over and over again. But they might ask if you’ve had a travel vaccine yet.
This person wouldn’t keep asking you for your name and birthdate, over and over. You already told them.
Even more powerfully, though, a thoughtful person who heard that you had a problem with your spleen when you were a teenager would go on to ask you a number of clarifying questions about this issue, not simply instruct you to jump to the next box on the form.
AI is already capable of doing this, and with some training, I’m imagining it could do an ever better job than a human interviewer. It could have more domain knowledge, more patience and provide (some people) a greater sense of privacy.
A dialog (even by audio if that’s what the user benefits from) would take far less time and yield far more information, presented in a much more useful format. And it could highlight any missing information or discrepancies in the report it creates. It would also score the way it was trained, highlighting for the bureaucracy that they were asking for dumb things or creating user frustration.
It would save millions of hours of user time, but much more usefully, it would save lives.
If it’s worth filling out a form, it’s probably worth replacing the form with an actual gathering of information.
December 14, 2024
Great companies and teams often get stale and then fade away. Here’s what we hear as it happens:
“I’m way too important to listen to customers. Send them to the call center.”
“It wasn’t a bad idea when we implemented it, so it’s not a bad idea now.”
“My boss won’t let me.”
“The IT department said we can’t change that.”
“Our focus is on cutting costs, not increasing customer value.”
“No one will notice.”
“I’ll add this to the file.”
“I’m just doing my job.”
“They don’t pay me enough to care.”
“They pay me enough not to care.”
The thing about “under the circumstances” is that the team members are the circumstances. You’re not just sitting in traffic, you are traffic.
December 13, 2024
In most competitive markets, when an organization offers a new benefit, others will quickly move to match it.
This means that it’s hard to justify the hard work of creating something better, because it’s just going to become a new standard. It doesn’t pay for a credit card company to invest in customer service, the thinking goes, because that won’t pay for itself, it’ll just raise costs for the leader and for all of its competitors. That’s how the race to the bottom begins.
Perhaps it pays to simply focus on being better at making a profit, or being better at getting new customers, or being better at making the stock price go up. These proxies push short-term thinking and aren’t resilient.
What truly changes the game is when an organization decides to commit to being better at being better.
That’s hard to do and difficult to compete against.
December 12, 2024
That’s the tempting question. How much hustle, hoopla and initiative do we need to get this idea ignited in the marketplace…
But the much better question is: How much kindling do we have?
Kindling doesn’t happen all at once. It’s the result of investments over time. We can earn the benefit of the doubt, create remarkable products and services and develop the empathy for the people we seek to serve.
If the wood is wet, it actually doesn’t matter how many matches you have. But when we do the hard work to create the conditions for an idea to spread, one spark might be enough.
December 11, 2024
Professionals make choices. Including:
Don’t exploit friends and family. Surgeons shouldn’t do surgery on their kids, and investment advisors shouldn’t manage their dad’s retirement fund. It doesn’t matter if you’re sure you’re the best in the world. Swap with the person who’s second best.
Demand that clients ask hard questions. Don’t be offended if they shop around or ask you about your training and performance stats. In fact, that’s precisely what you want.
Say, “I don’t know.” Then find out.
Embrace technology that amplifies your judgment while increasing benefits to your constituents.
Call out the bad actors and the forces that push you to do a lesser job for the people you serve.
Eagerly refer people to someone more specialized than you whenever it makes sense for the client. “I’m not for you,” is a symptom of care and confidence.
Don’t show up because you feel like it. Show up because you said you would.
December 10, 2024
