Ben Franklin and Conversation

Lauren Ekroth is a delightful man, and the following is reproduced verbatim from Conversation Pieces, his weekly e-zine, Working Knowledge, conversation-matters.com. I love the way Franklin appears to have approached the building of networks and community, and I think his counsel against over-certainty is something we could do with hearing a lot more these days.

“Ben Franklin’s Brilliant Conversation Group”

In the fall of 1727 Ben Franklin organized a group of men into a club whose primary purpose was inquiry into a variety of questions. This club thrived for nearly four decades and was known as the Junto, also as “the leather apron club.” (This group eventually evolved into the American Philosophical Society.)

With few exceptions, the members of the group, like Franklin, were practical men: entrepreneurs, tradesmen, merchants. Only a few had much formal education. What they did bring to the group was curiosity, a variety of backgrounds and interests, and the willingness to help one another and the community.

To become a member, initiates had to answer four questions: “Do you have disrespect for any current member?” (No) “Do you love mankind in general regardless of religion or profession?” (Yes). “Do you feel people should ever be punished because of their opinions or mode of worship?” (No) “Do you love and pursue truth for its own sake?” (Yes)

Franklin set an earnest and yet convivial tone for these meetings, which regularly met on Friday evenings. He preferred a gentle, Socratic method of inquiry, and discussions were to be conducted “without fondness for dispute or desire of victory.” Members breaking the rules of civility were actually fined to draw attention to their lapses.

In a newspaper piece he published shortly after he formed the Junto, Franklin catalogued some of the most common conversation sins, which included “to talk overmuch,” speaking too much about your own life, prying for personal secrets, and telling long and pointless stories. Civility and genuine interest in the ideas of others were key.

In addition to general topics of debate, Franklin listed 24 topics of conversation through which members could best contribute. Among them were these practical questions:

“Have you lately heard of any citizen’s thriving well, and by what means?”

“Do you know of any fellow citizen who has lately done a worthy action deserving praise and imitation?”

“Have you lately observed any encroachments on the just liberties of the people?”

“Is there any man whose friendship you want and which the Junto or any of them can procure for you?”

The Junto was both an inquiry group and a mutual aid society through which members could borrow books and money and get support for various enterprises. Mutual respect and support were foundational values. No member was allowed to be merely a “taker.” All were required to contribute.

Although the membership could easily have grown large – many wanted to join, Franklin limited the group size and suggested instead that interested persons form their own like-minded groups. He recognized that a certain level of intimacy was required, true friendship, for the Junto to have both comraderie and intellectual honesty.

In his Autobiography, Franklin describes his own approach to inquiry and disputation, an approach he followed throughout his life and with consummate success as a politician and diplomat:

“[I had] the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence, never using, when I advanced anything that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion, but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me or I should think it so and so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken.” (Bantam Books (1982) 11-17.)

Try this at home

The other day, a friend asked me to explain about Improv. I invited her to do some with me, instead of listening to an explanation.

I thought I'd share the same exercise with you, dear reader. And please, find a partner to try this activity with and see what happens. (And thanks to Alain Rostain for first showing me this)

The exercise is simple: you're going to draw a face, together. It won't be a familiar face (probably) but one you're making up between you.

You need a pen and paper (we made do with a paper napkin from the cafe we were in).

Once you're ready, you work silently. Resist the urge to discuss the picture as it develops and don't comment on each other's ideas. You probably won't be able to suppress laughter though.

The first person draws just one feature of a face. It's up to you what it is: it could be an ear, an eye, a nose, a tattoo, an eyebrow... whatver. Rule of thumb: when you lift the pen off the paper, you've finished your turn. And remember, as you're working silently, don't explain what you've drawn.

Then your partner takes the pen and they draw a feature. It may be another ear/eye whatever, or it could be something else. Whatever it is, you then get the pen and carry on. Even if you're not sure what it is they've drawn.

If you don't know what on earth your partner has drawn, don't ask! Just carry on adding features as best you can.

Keep going like this for a few turns, each adding a single feature with each turn.

When someone gets the pen and hesitates about what to do, this means the face is finished. So that person now puts down the first letter of the name of this character. Keep adding letters until someone hesitates - when that happens, you've finished. And again, don't comment on what your partner writes, whatever you may think!

I've shown a couple of examples of what my friend and I came up to illustrate what happened for us!

I invite you to try this at least three times to see how the work develops.

Learning

What you learn from this exercise is... well it's for you to say.

But I invite you to sit with your partner and discuss any or all of these questions. You may be suprised by what you find out!

What was this experience like? Try to give some detail of how you felt doing it, and find out what it was like for each other.

What suprises (small or large) did you experience?

What made this difficult for you? What made it easy?

Did you have a little voice with its own plans for a picture that your partner interrupted?

Whose pictures are these?

Did any of the pictures end up according to a plan you made?

What did you learn about your partner playing this game?

What's it like to work with another person where you don't get to criticise what they do?

And what's it like to work with someone who isn't commenting on each step you take?

Did you laugh during this exercise? (If you did, do you know why? What could have been satisfying you when you were laughing?)

What have you learnt about yourself and your partner from this experience?

What experiences that you had doing this would you like to have MORE of in your working life? And LESS ?

And if you have time to let me know what happened, I'd love to hear from you!

It started with a Hiss...

According to New Scientist,

The Universe began not with a bang but with a low moan, building into a roar that gave way to a deafening hiss. And those sounds gave birth to the first stars.

And here's the sound (.wav file), allegedly. (Thanks to Chris Corrigan for this)

Inside the Gherkin

The strangest building on the London Skyline is generally known as The Gherkin. I was invited a launch party there by my friend Sue Glasser and it was quite fun to hail a cab and say "Take me to the Gherkin".

From the inside, great views over London... and an interesting tour of high tech meeting spaces, only lacking Blofeld and his white cat. I found myself discussing Building Management Systems, a topic on which I have recently become a bit of an expert*, thanks to a current branding project I'm invoved with. Quite fun to bluff my way with the jargon.

They were celebrating a fit-out and I was celebrating Sue's new website - check it out, she combines her talent for dance and choreography to do facilitation work with companies.

* Update, April 2007. Let's emphasise the word "bit" in this clause. I just got a phone call from a researcher on Building Management and had to admit to being unable to offer much intelligence on this at all. Fading memory etc.

Flow and Complexity

I'm currently enjoying the book Good Business: Leadership, Flow and the Making of Meaning by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (try spelling that after a couple of beers!)

Some good material in here as he stands up for the idea of meaningful work. His research suggests that sustained happiness is more likely to come from engagement in satisfying work than the pursuit of pleasure, a theme taken up by Martin Seligman in Authentic Happiness (also in my intray).

I've been reading the book and enjoying Curt Rosengren's posts on climbing which echo Csikszentmihalyi's thinking on flow states - the power of being in the present and focussed on the immediate next step.

And here's a chunk of the book that really resonates for me. He explains that complex systems combine differentiation and integration. (So in the human body we have lots of different organs, that are highly integrated to make the whole system highly effectively; less complex life-forms have much less differentiation and function at a lower level.) He continues:

Groups of people can be described as being more or less complex. A crowd is neither differentiated nor integrated; a bureaucracy is usually the latter but not the former. Is the typical department that is run along "command and control" lines a complex system? Probably not, because by not utilising the employees' unique skills it is not very differentiated. It may be well integrated in that everyone knows his duties and collaborates smoothly, but maintaining order in such a system is both costly and inefficient...

However a very laissez-faire organisation would not be complex, either. It may be differentiated, but its components would not fit well with one another or work together seamlessly... One of the key tasks of management is to create an organisation that stimulates the complexity of those who belong to it.

I really like that thought: stimulating the complexity of the people you work with. That isn't "making their lives complicated"; but it is (for me) respecting their diversity and giving them scope to bring their own unique gifts and skills to bear.

Predictably, I'm going to point out that this is what Improvisation is largely about. In Improv, people experience that paradox of Structure (the simple rules of each activity, standing for Integration) and Freedom (the scope for each player to bring his/her own authentic voice and idea, standing for Differentiation).

Of course, you don't need to understand any of this to really get Improv. It functions implicitly because - I'd argue - it taps into our basic human talent for rubbing along together.

/lecture
(as Mark at Fouroboros would say.)

Metabolic Management

Another great item from eCustomerServiceWorld's weekly update.

Just took my son to see the latest Harry Potter film. The Dementor characters, who suck the life and soul out of people with something known as ‘the Dementor’s kiss’ reminded me of a few people I’ve worked with in the past.

They also reminded me of this, from John Seddon’s most recent newsletter*:

“When Forrester (Research) recently visited DaimlerChrysler's diesel engine factory in Germany, we learned that its night shifts are more productive than its day shifts. DaimlerChrysler explained the discrepancy by the absence of management interference during the night shift."

And it reminded me of this, from Mike Harris, founding CEO of First Direct bank and now helping to lead the online bank egg:

“You can spread ‘life’s not worth living’ through your organization at viral speed, because the leader’s mood is infectious. A leader displaying great tolerance for stress and great vitality can infect the whole organization with that mood.”

Tom Peters says too many managers sap energy from their people by over-interfering or by failing to encourage or by lacking energy themselves.

Tom Peters talks about this as Metabolic Management and I relate it strongly to what happens with Improv work, where the energy of the group rises as people start firing off each other. And I'll chalk that DaimlerChrysler anecdote up as another "get out of the way" example.

Ways with words...

Thanks (again) to the eCustomeServiceWorld Newsletter for this:

Some more metaphors and analogies in student essays submitted to English teachers for grading. I think a few of these are actually quite clever, especially the last three…

1. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

2. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

3. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.

4. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

5. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

6. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

7. Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.

8. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work

Squashing creativity with rewards

A great story posted by Curt Rosengren, useful for two things.

First, in case you ever feel a pressing need to Squash a Chimpanzee's Creativity, this is how to do it.

Second, of even more value, this is a neat way to squash human beings' creativity too: reward them for it. That will come out of left field for most people, but not those who've read the brilliant book, Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn.

Improv Rocks

I spent last Thursday doing a teambuilding workshop using Improv. I'm still buzzing from it. Improv Rocks!

Something very powerful happens to people when they engage in Improv activities. The level of energy and engagement among participants goes up and their focus and sense of being "in the moment" with it. Last week I focussed on a few simple, on one level trivial, games. For instance, I got people to stand in a circle and throw an imaginary ball from one to another. They had to make a noise when throwing the ball. When catching it, you had to repeat the noise of the thrower before making your own noise as you threw it on.

Pretty silly, pointless game, eh? Yet when you play it, people become very involved and focussed - as well as prompting frequent bouts of laughter at the strange noises, or delight when mistakes are made. Typically, the pace of the game accelerates as the group becomes more experienced, so in one session I threw in a second ball to raise the stakes.

So this game commands attention and engagement almost unheard of in your average business meeting... but this is a silly game, whereas business meetings are about important things that affect our whole lives, aren't they? What is going on here, people?!

That's a rhetorical question (you spotted that, didn't you?). And I think what's going on is that people are freed to do what they want to do at a most basic human level: to engage with each other, to pass things to and fro, and form a coherent group. Set up a simple exercise which offers folks a way to raise the level of challenge as they learn, and they get together and they get... high. I often think that many of the clumsy things organisations do to build teams ~ long statements of goals, values, procedures ~ just get in the way of something that comes naturally to people anyway.

I love using Improv because I always get surprised myself, usually delightfully. There were many of those moments last week, but here's my favourite. At one point, after we'd done a lot of exercises involving talking, I decided to run a long session where all engagement was non verbal: a session of movement work done silently (well, apart from fairly frequent laughter). And at the end of this, a participant commented, very matter-of-factly, that she'd got to know her colleagues better during that session.

Isn't that great! Here's a group of people, with serious jobs to do, getting to know each other without talking. How often do we think that the only way we get to know people is by reading the CVs or engaging them in an interview or something?

I'll say it again. Improv Rocks.

Beyond Bullets

I had a nice email the other day from Cliff Atkinson, who keeps the Beyond Bullets weblog. Cliff gives really well thought out advice on how to transcend the usual death by PowerPoint and really use it effectively.

I was reminded of his blog again today by Tony Goodson who's done a nice summary of some of Cliff's highlights. And for those who are short of time, here are my highlights of Tony's highlights.

It's always struck me that story"making" is the right model for our time rather than story"telling". Storytelling implies that I'm a passive recipient of your story, which is the model for most film and TV: I sit and receive your pre-determined message that already has a beginning, middle and end, and I don't have any involvement in its outcome. That's fine if I want to sit and be entertained -- to laugh, but not think.......

...Everybody is doing the same thing with PowerPoint, so why not try a little experiment outside the PowerPoint box? Find a photograph that is interesting, but the meaning might be unclear. Let's say it's a picture of a swan. Place it on a PowerPoint slide, with no additional text or description. When you project the image on the screen, ask your audience, "What does this mean to you?" Listen to their responses, and repeat them back so everyone hears them. Then, as you begin your talk, spin the image into a theme you'll develop through the story of your presentation, for example: "Has anyone seen the extreme makeover shows on television, where the ugly duckling gets turned into a beautiful swan? Well today we're going to talk about the extreme makeover of a business strategy. Because with some hard work, even the ugliest strategy can be transformed into beautiful results. Let's see how...."

...I created a PowerPoint presentation with 50 blank slides, then inserted a photo object from a clip art collection on each slide. I set the transition timing at 1 minute, with each slide fading to the next automatically. I told the group we were going to do a little visual improv, and asked for one person to volunteer to stand up. When an image showed on screen, they would begin to tell a business story -- the only constraints were that they had to refer to the image in some way, include the name of their business, and that when the minute was up they had to sit down. At that point, the person to their right would stand up and carry on the same story, using the new image to prompt their part of the story. The story continued around the table until everyone had contributed their piece of the story.

I love Cliff's appraoch, which resonates strongly with my own passion about presenting and engaging the audience. I think his ideas challenge many of the conventions we hold about how to behave in presentations, indeed in work generally. And he focuses our attention on relationship. Not talking at people, but engaging them in conversation. Great stuff.

Made me smile

I'm not a big fan of rules and lists, but I enjoyed stumbling into this online: Jeff Mellor's Grammer and Style Rules

Asked and answered...

The Group Jazz Chautuaqua is marking its 10th anniversary and they're asking people who've taken part some questions about what they're up to. I answered their questions and thought it would make do as a blog entry for today! (Does this qualify as a bit of Wu Wei, Evelyn?)

What are YOU reading this summer?

I start more books than I finish, and lately I've been reading only very short books. I've just finished "Management of the Absurd" by Richard Farson. However, despite this, I've started two medium sized-books, "Good Business" by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi and "Authentic Happiness" by Martin Seligman.

Describe a book that had a big influence on you. When did you read it? How did you come to read it? (was it recommended or assigned? did you just stumble across it?)

"The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. I read it about three years ago. I was half-attending to a TV interview with Jim Carrey and he (I think) used the words "The Power of Now". I wasn't really listening closely, but I got the impression that he and his interviewer were referrring to something they'd both read. It stuck in my brain and I looked it up on the net and bought it.

Reading it is like taking a cold shower when you're used to warm ones, and where the difference shocks but also, if you let it, delights you. His writing style manages to be in your face without the annoying vehemence of many books that instruct you in what to do. I find his voice compelling so that this is not simply a book "about" being in the present; my experience is of being brought vigorously into the present just reading it. More and more I seek the blend of Simple yet Profound that, for me, this book embodies. (Hence my increasing preference for very short books!).

Do you have a favorite book on writing? Or, what advice do you have for people who are thinking about writing a book?

I'm sure I SHOULD have a favourite book on writing, but I don't!

My advice for people should not be taken very seriously as I don't follow it myself nearly enough of the time to speak with any authority. But it would be: when stuck, separate

judgement and editing

from

production.

Give yourself permission to write anything and not worry for now whether its good or not. If that doesn’t work, give yourself the task of writing utter rubbish for 5 minutes. The worst obstacle for me is the blank sheet of paper. Once there are some words on it, however poor, there is something to edit and the task moves forward.

Bonus advice - if, like me, you tend to islolate yourself when writing, when you get stuck find someone to talk to about being stuck. Socialising the problem sometimes releases the block.

What are you working on now? (a new book? a new project?)

I'm doing a certain amount of "business as usual" and I notice how tiring I find it when work becomes routine. So I'm working on taking a current project brief and going back with something that has less to do with what the client says they want and more to do with what I feel like doing. It's a competitive tender so I feel fine about giving them a provocative choice.

I'm hoping to write a very short book about branding. Not a story about branding as told by the "experts" who claim to have the magic formula for success (very boring and phoney, I think) but an allegory about how brands really come into being as an act of collective improvisation...

Busy coupla days

I'm off to a meeting of the London Fast Company of Friends in a few minutes. The theme is the book, Beyond Branding, which I co-wrote last year. Not sure who else is going to be there but I am looking forward to a sparky debate.

Then tomorrow I'm co-hosting an Open Evening with my friends at The Clarity Partnership. The theme for that is "The Elephant Under the Table:Speaking the Unspoken". We're planning a lively evening sharing our ideas of what supports change in organisations and what just gets in the way.

And on Thursday I'll be running a one-day workshop on Improv and Storytelling for managers of an international hotel group. I'm really looking forward to that - it brings together many of the themes that excite me - how brands are created in-the-moment by the engagement of the people working there. It will be very experiential, just the way I love to work...

Expect light blogging, as they say.

An hour off from cleverness

Last week I went to a meeting organised by my friend Chris Macrae. Chris is an ubernetworker and has connected me to all sorts of fascinating people. He organised an evening meeting with George Por, author of the Blog of Collective Intelligence.

Chris had assembled a formidable group of people and, frankly, I had mixed feelings about attending. Because meetings of very bright people can go different ways. Sometimes they can be delightful, but at other times I get quite depressed, because conversation turns to "jousting", where you get the feeling people are more interested in asserting and defending a position than in learning something new.

What a joy, then, when George kicks off by saying, what if we start by focussing not at all on what we know, but instead acknowledge what it's like to be here together trying to explore what we don't know. He encouraged us all to make personal statements about our own experience, rather than referencing our various bits of expertise and knowledge. I felt the stress fall from my shoulders and found myself engaged and (hopefully) engaging.

What followed was a rich, human conversation where experience was shared without a sense of competing to be clever. A blessed relief. And what always excites me about such meetings is they remind me that people have an innate ability to socialise and get along. This doesn't actually need a huge amount of organising to happen, once we spare ourselves the strictures of maintaining a certain kind of appearance to the world.

This reminds me of my long held view that Knowledge Management is an unattractive term. What really engages me is how we manage our NOT knowing... if we can handle that lightly, then other things have a chance to drop into place.

(By the way, my friend David Wilcox also blogged this meeting).

Slouching towards success

I've not blogged for a week. The inspiration just hasn't been there for a few days and it's good to award myself a few days off. So it seems fitting to resume with a lazy post about Evelyn Rodriguez's entry Slouching towards success.

Much of the essence of Tao is in the art of wu wei (action through inaction). However, this does not mean, "sit doing nothing and wait for everything to fall into your lap". It describes a practice of accomplishing things through minimal action. By studying the nature of life, you can affect it in the easiest and least disruptive way (using finesse rather than force).

I'd like to tel you I've been practising We Wei this past week, but that'd be fibbing.

Blogging ethics

Seth Godin discusses how blogging shades into journalism and asks

Now, everyone with a blog is a journalist. When you run a post accusing a politician of having no personality, for example, you're indulging the public's desire to elect a dinner partner, not a president. When you chime in on the day's talking points, you're a tool, not a new voice.

So, we come to the moment of truth. Now that anyone who wants to be a journalist CAN be a journalist, are the ethics going to get better... or worse?

It's an interesting question, and I think we need to see how old-stryle journalism and new-style blogging differ. In the era of conventional journalism, only a minority could practise the art. So the importance of them being accurate and fair was high. When there are millions of journalists, all interconnected by trackbacks and comments, then what they say can be tested and challenged immediately.

So there is perhaps more potential for a more communal form of ethics. For that, transparency (anyone can read and comment on your stuff) becomes the key. What's good about this is that it is not dependent on identifying absolute truth and trying to legislate for fairness, always a struggle for mainstream media. The focus instead is on the openness of the debate.

On which note, it would be very nice if Seth added comments to his blog. :)

Flexibility

On a link from The Nub, I found this short report Expressing yourself isn't always ideal Research shows that psychological health is not about always expressing your feelings, but being flexible about what you show and what you keep to yourself.

Not exactly rocket science. But still worth stating. Some people think that being "authentic" is a licence to let rip with whatever you're feeling at the time. This can be used as cover for all manner of potentially destructive behaviour.

In reality, if we stop to notice, we are experiencing all sorts of emotions moment-to-moment and we couldn't find time to articulate our total experience, even if we wanted to. It seems to me that emotional intelligence is partly our ability to make wise choices of what we share and what we don't.

Some people, in some contexts, need to do better at containing their emotions; others need to be more willing to express them.

There is no one-size fits all prescription but in the world of organisations I find a people suppress an awful lot and that ain't healthy. But finding the way to "speak our truth" is not something for which we can write the rule book. What I like to think I do, when facilitating, is create a climate in which people find it a bit easier - and that's partly by being more open myself and partly by helping people be more careful and specific in giving appreciations and making complaints.

Better conversations, please

Rob Paterson's New Bedford post linked to a long article by Dave Pollard. This is the bit that most engaged my attention. (Dave's great reporting, my italics for the bits that really jazz me)

What is the problem KM [Knowledge Management] has been trying to solve?... I surveyed the people of Ernst & Young about this three years ago, and here's how some of them answered this question:

1 "We don't know how to effectively organize, manage and find the information we have now, in our offices, on our laptops, and in the few shared databases we use, so we waste a huge amount of time 'looking for stuff'."I heard this a lot, and only personalized, one-on-one coaching, can alleviate this problem.

2 "We don't know who to talk to, to get information we need quickly, inexpensively and effectively." I heard this a lot, too, which is why I'm such a fan of expertise-finders and other social networking applications, even though the first generation of such tools fall short.

3 "When we do know who to talk to, we can't get hold of them." It's a tragedy that we have these wildly over-engineered communication tools with 1001 useless functions, but no one has grappled with the very human, critical problem of setting priorities for conversations, and getting the people who most need it access to the experts quickly. There has to be a better answer to telephone-tag and e-mail tag.

4 "Meetings, training courses, presentations and other group activities are largely a waste of time -- they're badly managed and often unnecessary, but we participate because we're told we have to. Teaming and collaboration are largely management myths -- the real, important, effective, valuable work is individual or one-on-one, and we know how to do it." Many business-people spend up to 30% of their time in group activities scheduled by others.

5 "We need to find ways to stop doing a lot of things that aren't important." E-mail and other new technologies are causing people to spend more and more time doing things that are urgent but not important, and sometimes things that are neither urgent nor important but easy to do, so the important things get deferred and added on to an already long and onerous workday. Paperwork from management is another contributor -- front-line people say it's all one-way communication (up), that most of it is unnecessary or automatable, and that cutbacks in administrative support staff simply shift this administrative work to front-line people, adding to their job.

6 "We don't know what we don't know. When we fail (to win a proposal, to complete a project on time or on budget, to keep an important customer or employee etc.), it's almost always because of what we didn't know, not because we did our jobs badly. If that knowledge was available, we'd have it, and we'd never fail. It's not, and nothing anyone can do will change that. The famous saying 'If only HP knew what HP knows' is wishful management thinking -- HP does know, 99% of the time, what HP knows. And in the other 1% of cases, the problem is size and bureaucracy, not bad knowledge management systems."

7 "We're past information overload, we've reached information exhaustion. There's not enough time in the day to read everything we should, let alone everything we'd like to." How can we help workers filter and rank the material in their various reading stacks and inboxes, and how can we get it to them in more succinct form without sacrificing important context?

8 "We spend far too much time wordsmithing and writing, and not enough time talking to people -- customers, employees, colleagues, experts and thought leaders in our field." 'Face time' is a critical factor in relationship building, in selling, in customer and employee satisfaction, and in learning effectiveness. Key decisions are made and key contracts won more often on a few well-spoken words than on a finely-crafted written report or proposal. And most workers' oral communication skills -- one-on-one and in group settings -- are sorely lacking.

I don't know about you but that makes a lot of sense to me. My italics draw attention to the need for really good one-to-one conversations, instead of superficially efficient but clumsy mega-systems and more blankety-blank conferences. That final point about obsessive wordsmithing really resonates. That's exactly where so many brand consultants waste their time and clients' money: in ridiculous perfectionism about copy and fonts, as if they control how people respond to the brand. The good brands (in my life, anyway) are the ones where I feel like I can have a good conversation with the people.

The trouble is, as I've moaned before, is that organisations tend to reward grandiosity and clever-sounding, complicated proposals over much less pompous, simple interventions that are just common sense.

Brand... or community?

Nice post by Robert Paterson looking at New Bedford as a historically successful "knowledge community". Minus all the fancy jargon.

Marketing and CEOs

Rob at Business Pundit quotes Nirmalya Kumar from HBS Working Knowledge.

CEOs have lost faith in marketing primarily for two reasons. First, shareholders and analysts are pressuring corporations and their CEOs to deliver against short-term profit and revenue objectives. CEOs are unsure of returns from marketing expenditures and marketers have acquired a reputation as a "spend" function rather than a "save and make" function. The belief is that a finance person managing a brand would probably take more time to determine how much to spend to support it and how to measure the effects of the spending than a marketer, who would just ask for more money. Marketing initiatives must have a substantial, demonstrated, top- or bottom-line effect to excite the CEO.

Hmm, hardly the first time we've heard this one. It strikes me that the relationship between CEOs and Marketing is frequently abusive. The CEO plays persecutor/bad parent and the Marketing Director plays victim/hurt child. They are stuck in a tedious script. It seems to go a bit like this.

CEO demands bottom-line proof for the value of any marketing initiative. Marketing knows that's barmy because not all value can be measured immediately. But instead of engaging in a rational conversation, the Marketeers hire a mob of so-called experts to do complicated research and econometrics to come up with plausible sounding numbers to placate CEO. CEO smells a rat but probably enjoys having a victim to abuse (after all, he takes all the crap from the teenage scribblers in the City, why can't he pass some of it on?). So he doesn't fire the marketers, but sneers at their numbers, and carries on.

Meanwhile, the marketing department is now enslaved to metrics it doesn't really believe in anyway. And wonders why employees struggle to "live the brand" and all their other slightly power-crazed ideas. Indeed, they compensate themselves for the obvious lack of respect of their CEO by indulging in self-aggrandising schemes to "build the brand".

Now let's add a generous dollop of denial. From time to time I go marketing events and hear Marketing Directors parading their numbers, thumping their chests and shouting their utter faith in everything being measured. They do it with the characteristic vehemence of those trying to persuade themselves.

Lest this sound like a long lament, I don't think the answer is either (a) trash all metrics as absurd. There's nothing wrong with metrics if honestly compiled and carefully interpreted. In fact, they're jolly good things to have around; or (b) fire all marketing directors, much as their creepy sychophancy may offend. I'm sure that on a good day most of them are able to be imaginative and persuasive if managed well.

It's an unfortunate fact that stock market companies are massively constrained by the finanical community's short termism. But that doesn't make it impossible to create value for customers, and somehow satisfy the City. It just makes it very difficult. A few businesses do seem to pull it off over a period of many years.

Do I claim to know why that minority of companies succeeds? No, I don't actually. In fact, I'm rather wary of all these experts who claim to have the formula for success distilled from the folks who achieved it. Let's face it, if business really were just a question of following one of those instruction manuals, how come no airline (except maybe JetBlue) has come close to emulating Southwest Airlines in all these years?.

What would I do? I'd try to get the CEO and Marketing to cut the crap and have an honest conversation about what is and isn't measurable. I'd ask the CEO to stop bullying marketing and do a better job of standing up to the clever-clogs analysts instead. And invite the marketing guys to get more real in the ambitions they set for their brands.

Actually, I'm not sure that even this is the answer; but I would like to think that a more authentic relationship between the two could uncover some much more satisfying ways of succeeding in perplexing, unpredictable circumstances.

The future is not known. For myself, I'd much rather go on that journey with fellow travellers who are open to surprise than a bunch of high-strung experts who claim to know what's going to happen. Maybe the CEO and the Marketing Director could give it a try too.

Benchmarking and abstraction

I see that Seth Godin is pointing out the pitfalls of benchmarking.

We can benchmark our eyesight, our rowing speed, our memory or even our ability to come up with great ideas at a moment’s notice. As a result, we benchmark ourselves into a funk. We get stressed because we have to acknowledge that nothing is as good as it was.

In addition to the stress, benchmarking against the universe actually encourages us to be mediocre, to be average, to just do what everyone else is doing.

The problem with benchmarking is that it so easily takes us away from our actual experience. For example, if we assess our gym performance only by the heart rate monitor, we might forget to pause for a second and sense how we actually feel... have we strained muscles... half-an-hour later, do well feel good for the experience?

I agree with Seth. In business the pursuit of "best practice" can sometimes destroy the fun of people creating their own ways of doing things, and remove the spontaneity that itself is part of creating the fabled "customer experience". Market surveys love to benchmark, as if their averages are a fair representation of the mulitplicity of human responses to a product or service. But they aren't... and they tend to keep us in the realm of the known instead of the more creative realm of the unknown.