I don’t know why it has taken me so long to address the topic of trade shows. It must have something to do with the number of them that I have attended and the somewhat painful (read “aching”) memories they engender. I can remember my then excitement at being assigned to attend my first trade show and to man my specific technology aspect of the corporate tradeshow booth. It has been many years, and many many trade shows since that first trade show. For whatever reasons I don’t seem to go to them nearly as often anymore, but that won’t stop me from discussing their usefulness to both the displaying company and attending individuals. Trade shows are really expensive undertakings for businesses. There are registration fees, and floor space rental fees (usually by the square foot), and then there are the costs associated with the creation of the booth or display. If there are live products or demonstrations in the booth there is the cost of that equipment that must be added to the bill. There are the communications and connectivity requirements and costs. There is also the travel and living costs associated with the people who will man the booth as well as the salaries that they are paid while at the show. Finally there is an opportunity cost of what other things you could have been doing with all the money and people that were applied toward attending the trade show.
When you add it all up, like I said it gets very expensive. If you are going to spend that kind of money and commit those kinds of resources, one would expect that there would be a significant return on those investments.
At first I thought attending a trade show as an exhibitor was going to be an interesting business experience. Then I attended one. When I was contemplating the prospect of attending the show I had forgotten that I was going to have to stand on a concrete floor for eight to ten hours a day without the ability to sit down, dealing with the people who came into our booth, who may or may not have been customers or potential customers, or who may or may not have been competitors looking for information, and all the time look like I was enjoying myself. This may be possible for the first day. It is very improbable to do for the entire second day. And darn near impossible to do for almost any part of the third or any subsequent days thereafter.
Then once the exhibit hall is closed for the night you would think that would be the opportunity to rest and recover for the next day’s ten hour booth march. That would be wrong. In most instances there was a corporate hospitality suite that you were expected to spend time in and be available for questions and inputs from executives or the sales team when they actually had a real customer available that wanted to discuss your product. This too could go on for quite a while, but at least there was usually a chair available where you could sit down from time to time. There was also usually food and drinks available, but like when your parents threw a party when you were a kid, it was supposed to be for the guests.
After you had done your time at the hospitality suite, and the crowds had begun to thin out, you could then go back to your hotel room. If you were lucky it was at the same location as the exhibit hall or hospitality suite. More than likely you had to go to another more distant location. You could then look forward to doing it all over again the next day. It was not quite as glamorous as I had initially thought it would be.
In looking at the relative value to the business of attending a trade show, it usually came down to what kind of a show it actually was. If it was an industry forum or association that was sponsoring the show, then the value was basically that of being an opportunity to use the forum as a platform for whatever product or business announcements that the company wanted to make. The actual number of “customers” that attended these shows was minimal and in fact most of the booth traffic was competitors strolling around looking at the competition and collecting each booth’s “trinkets and trash” that were being given away, and the industry press and writers strolling around asking a few questions so as to justify their attendance as well as collecting the trinkets and trash giveaways. The only way that a large exhibitor would be noticed at one of these shows would be if they decided to save the money and not attend. They would then be conspicuous only in their absence.
The more focused trade shows, be it regional or business aspect in nature were those where the exhibitors and attendees had more in common than just being in the same industry, seemed to have a little more value to the business in that the one incremental level more of specificity assures that there are attendees on both the demand and supply side of the trade show topic. These are typically the trade shows where business is actually conducted as opposed to the larger industry shows are basically announcement forums.
The bottom line was that it seemed that the larger the trade show, the less valuable to the company or its customers for business, but more the value for visibility. The smaller the trade shows the better for customers and companies to do business. The question for all companies and large tradeshows is: How valuable is visibility? What can companies now afford to spend just for “being there”? It is interesting to look at the reduction in the number of large technology industry trade shows over the years as companies have come to grips with this question.
For the individuals manning the booths at either of these types of trade shows, the value truly lies in the opportunity to network with people in the same industry. Making contact with suppliers, competitors and customers within both the appropriate technology and market segments may not provide immediate benefits but it will provide them longer term.
It took me a long time to learn this fact. Just trading and collecting business cards is a waste of time and your business cards. If you are going to make the effort to trade business cards, make the effort to follow up and reach out to make contact. It really doesn’t take that much effort. I wish I had learned this fact in time to put it into execution then. I didn’t, and those new contact opportunities were lost.
There is also the opportunity to reestablish connections and relationships with old friends and past business associates. In today’s business environment it seems that more of our friends move on to new opportunities with other companies. While industries may be considered very big, they are in reality reasonably small and tight knit when it comes to relationships. The ability to maintain older contacts and gain new ones has to be the primary value to individuals who attend tradeshows. That, and learning the ability to stand on your feet, smile and try to have intelligent discussions for ten hours at a time.
It’s been a while since I have actually attended or manned a booth at a trade show. It could be said that it has been so long since I have been at one that I might actually look forward to attending one in the future. I didn’t say that was the case. I just said that it could be said. Trade shows are much more work than anybody who has not been to one would believe. They are not the two drink minimum professional equivalent of a fraternity all-nighter that many have believed them to be. Maybe they are for some; it’s just that I never seemed to have the ability or where withal to be able to stand in a booth all day and then go out all night at one of these venues. However by understanding the value to both the business and the individuals who attend the trade show you will be better able to quantify the benefits to both by attending.
All posts by Steve
Process
If there is one word that should strike fear in the heart of business leaders it should be the word “process”. Please don’t get me wrong. I understand the need for and support the idea of some form and amount of standardization of business conduct. There are efficiencies that can be gained. A certain amount of uniformity of methodology will remove customer variability and should improve satisfaction. I get it. But as the old saying goes: Too much of a good thing is bad, and process is no exception. Simply put processes are defined as a sequence of events. They are a model of the flow of how things should be done in an optimum environment. The idea being that by establishing a process for an aspect of a business you will remove unwanted variance from the way the business operates. Reduced variance should mean more consistent performance and increased efficiency in the business. Consistent performance and increased efficiencies should lead to more satisfied customers and more profitable operation. What’s not to like about that? Process was initially introduced into the manufacturing or production environment, where the variation in the end product produced was an undesirable outcome. The idea was to assure that each product was manufactured the same way with a resulting uniformity in the output. This uniformity of output or outcomes seems to be the driving force behind the drive to apply process science to non-production oriented business functions. If a little bit of process formalization delivers significant returns, then a full scale push toward total business process formalization should be the answer to all our business needs, right? This direction leads you down the path toward higher order, more complex controls and processes, and as many of the old maps would indicate about uncharted territory, “here there be danger”. The problem is that as the process gets more complex in its efforts to be more broadly applicable, it becomes more cumbersome to document, follow and apply. This necessitates a greater process staff whose task it is it to marshal the process to assure that it is being followed. By creating a process staff you are now introducing another drag on the business. The process staff is not focused on achieving the goal. They are focused on how you go about achieving the goal. Incremental staff associated with documenting and implementing the process means incremental costs that must now also be offset by additional process efficiencies before the business improvement driven by the process can contribute in a positive manner to the business performance. We now find ourselves in the position where the law of decreasing returns comes into play. The more we depend on the process for improvement, the more people we must have to support the process. The more people we have supporting the process the more improvement the process must provide in order to overcome the incremental costs associated with the increased number of people supporting the process. Circular logic now ensues. The process gets bigger trying to drive more savings. More people are required to sustain the process. The process has to get even bigger to cover the extra costs of the incremental people. The major issue that I have with processes is that as they evolve and grow and become bigger, more complex and more all encompassing, they have a tendency to become too focused on how things are being done and seem to lose their focus on the objective of what is being done. Business is about getting things done. If you can get more things done, and done right than your competitor you should have a competitive advantage. When you start to expend increasingly greater amounts of resources on how you should get things done as opposed to the quantity of resources focused on actually getting things done you have probably hit the point of decreasing returns for your process investment. The idea of process and process refinement came about when the market was primarily involved in a production and production worker environment. As we have evolved into a knowledge and knowledge worker environment we still seem to be increasingly focused on formulating and formalizing the way we want our knowledge workers to work. We are in effect trying to dictate the way our knowledge workers use their knowledge. This also seems fundamentally flawed to me. Henry Ford ushered in the mass production process when he stated anyone could have a car in any color they wanted, as long as it was black. He built the ultimate no variability process. He built black model A’s. And that worked for a while. Mass production gave way to mass customization in the manufacturing environment. At one point not too very long ago you could buy any combination of features and colors on just about any car model you wanted. It was during this period that a number of car companies started going out of business as their processes, amongst other issues had become too cumbersome to be profitable. The process that worked well for the simple did not hold up as well for the multiplicity of options or the complex. And so the pendulum began to swing back toward far fewer and more simple groups of options or option packages, in order to reduce option complexity. This seems to be the current status of the production process in the automotive industry. It appears that knowledge worker processes are still going through the “mass customization” stage of application. It seems that the processes themselves are becoming more complex in an effort to address the multiplicity of variables that are present in the knowledge worker environment. We are creeping ever closer to potentially strangling ourselves with the very processes that we hoped would be our profitability generating salvation. Processes need to provide guidelines on how to deal with the known as well as unknown in business. They need to have enough specificity to provide direction, but also need to allow those that are working within them the ability to vary and adapt them to the changing needs of the customer, company and environment. One size process cannot fit all unless it is so big and so complex as to be able to handle all variables present in the business. Why would you want to build a process, or a model of how you are to conduct business that is as complicated as the real business is? Processes are supposed to simplify things, not mirror their complexity. We need to keep our processes simple, the staffs associated with them minimal, and allow enough flexibility so that those operating within the process can react and adapt to new situations. Trying to expand the process to work in every instance of business inevitably leads to increased complexity and decreased returns for the effort.
Resumes
A necessary evil in today’s business world is the resume. It is the document where you must distill down all that you have accomplished since high school into no more than two self aggrandizing pages, and yet still be enthralling to the reader. It is one of the few documents on the planet where both form and substance are required, and where lacking either can immediately land it in the trash can. It is a living document which must be continually updated with the latest catch-phrases and Boolean search words to enable its easier location on the web by automated search programs. While being no acknowledged expert in the field, I have been on both the sending and receiving end of a boatload of resumes. I’ll share some of my findings and views.
The color of your resume does not matter, unless you choose a color other than white for your paper or electronic background, and black for your ink. I am not the only one that feels this way. I have checked this one out with some of my recruiter and head-hunter friends. Beige or pastel colored paper will in fact stand out in a stack or resumes. Beige or pastel colored resumes will remain in the resume stack. It’s a professional document for goodness sakes. The only reason that the Declaration of Independence is on yellowed paper is because the paper has aged to that color. Once your resume hits two hundred plus years of age it too can be on yellowed paper, but until then, print it on white paper.
The length of your resume does matter. A one page resume tells people that either you have not tried hard enough to write a viable resume, or that you do not have enough experience or qualifications for the job you are applying for. That would go for any job you were applying for. A three page or longer resume would indicate that you are truly enthralled with your own capabilities and accomplishments to the point where you couldn’t possibly bear to remove even a single event in your life from the document in order to better respect the readers time. Trust me on this. Nobody’s life is so awe inspiring so as to require more than two pages on a resume.
Provide information on your areas of expertise and the things that you actually can do. A historical list of the things you have done is nice, but it won’t get this job done, nor will it get you this job. It is a slight difference in approach and voice in your resume, but providing information on what you know how to do is much more compelling then reciting a list of the places you have been and the things that you did while you were there.
Front load your resume. Provide more detail and information on your most recent assignments and positions. I understand that you have done some really neat stuff twenty plus years ago. I did too. But there is a thing called currency as it relates to your experience. If your best stuff is twenty years old then it is possible that your business skills may be considered out of date.
Tell people what it is that you do. If you are looking for a sales role, then just about everything in your resume should scream sales. There should be few if any sentences in your resume that do not have the word “sales” in them. The more specific you can be about what you do, and what you can do, the more appreciative the reader of your resume will be. The easier that it is for the reader to understand if you are a fit for the position or not, the better it is for everyone, especially you.
Quantify what value you have brought to previous positions and what value you can bring to this position. Value is relatively easy to identify. It is usually represented by an ordinal number, which is preceded by a dollar sign. If you can’t put a number and a dollar sign next to it, it probably isn’t of value. It may seem harsh, but it is the current business environment.
Don’t tell anyone that you led a cross functional team, even if you actually did at one time. Cross functional teams are management speak for some sort of committee that met on a regular basis. Mark Twain described a committee as a life form with at least six legs and no brain. Organizations seem to be increasingly fond of creating them, and people seem to be intent on telling each other that they were either on them or leading them, but I nor anyone else I have ever known has ever seen any value delivered in a quantifiable way to a business from a cross functional team. You are wasting valuable space on your two pages with this one.
Don’t tell anyone that you enabled anything. Leaders don’t enable things. They do things. I understand that enablement is a nice sounding concept. There are very few instances where it has quantifiable business value. You either did it or you didn’t. Please don’t try and convince people that you enabled someone else to do it. At best it sounds lame and at worst it sounds like you are trying to appropriate someone else’s success.
Many resumes like to make mention of the fact that the individual is a “team player”. When reviewing resumes, most hiring managers are not looking for team players. They are looking for stars. In sales they are looking for someone that will bring in orders, preferably boat loads of them. In operations they are looking for someone that will deliver revenue and control costs. Most of the time a team player is not the type of individual that can perform these functions. If you can do extraordinary things, tell people in your resume. Don’t tell them you are a team player.
Have someone else read your resume before you submit it. Most of us are somewhat blind to our own mistakes. We wrote it. We reviewed it. Therefore it should be fine, right? Unfortunately, no. Have someone else read your resume and provide you their opinion. When they do, don’t argue with them. I too have felt that people have missed both the obvious and the nuanced aspects of my resume. I have also come to realize that if they have missed it, probably so will the recruiter and hiring manager miss it. Take the feedback. A resume is a personal item, but it is for public consumption and may need to be adjusted from a specific individual taste.
The two pages that comprise a resume are precious real estate. All of your education, training and experience to date need to be distilled down into those two pages. You need to convey what you are capable of and the value that you can bring to a prospective hiring manager. With that in mind you surely do not want to waste space by relating banalities such as being a team player, enabling others to succeed or were on some sort of aggrandized committee.
As I said, resumes are a necessary evil. They are the convention that businesses use when reviewing potential candidates for positions. Unfortunately they are also the basis for the first in a number of decision criteria and hurdles that are designed to winnow out the perceived unfit or the perceived less competent for the position. Unless you are a Nobel laureate or some other similarly gifted applicant, chances are that your resume will not get you the job. However if your resume is not in the appropriate format and does not contain relevant content it can preclude you from further consideration for the job.
The Impossible
There comes a time in everyone’s career where you are going to be asked to do something that just can’t be done. It’s impossible, and “ask” is a euphemism for “told”. Like the game show “Jeopardy” where the answer is usually put in the form of a question. That doesn’t change the fact that just because you were “asked” doesn’t mean that you have the option to decline the request. You don’t. Regardless of how the directive has been phrased, you have been given an objective. On the first blush it looks like you have been asked to do the impossible. It’s time to get out the blue tights and red cape and get to work. The art of the impossible is an interesting study in business. When first presented with an impossible task most managers are at a loss as to how to proceed. And as with any major loss there are five stages of grief associated with impossible assignments: When given an impossible assignment it is good idea to remember a few things before you get started. The first is that managers are usually creatures of habit. Leaders are not. This means that impossible assignment managers are limited in their scope and approach when it comes to the types of goals they assign. They only think the assignment is impossible. That’s why they gave it to you instead of solving it themselves. When given the impossible assignment understand from where the assignment was generated, and then quickly dismiss any associated approaches or scope. Incrementing an existing process or method will not get you from existing status quo to new and impossible.
Remember that while most businesses are prone to prattling on about how they encourage and embrace change they are in fact significantly risk averse in nature and will only change when forced to, and then only after significant keening and gnashing of teeth. New ideas and approaches on how to conduct business are not usually rapidly accepted to say the least. There is always a desire to see the new proven out before the old will be changed. The accompanying desire is to usually see the new proven out somewhere else first.
A good example of this phenomenon can be seen in the way most companies select their Chief Executive Officers. It seems that in order to be a CEO, you must have first been a CEO somewhere else. I look at this as the business equivalent of “Catch – 22” in its circular logic. The idea here seems to be that you have to have done the job in the past in order to be able to do the job now. It doesn’t seem to matter if you were an unsuccessful or ineffective CEO. The fact that you were a CEO enables you to be a CEO somewhere else. I think the same “you have to have done it before you get to do it” approach applies to just about every executive level in an organization as well, not just the CEO.
I have digressed, but only a little.
Impossible assignments are usually impossible only from the standpoint of the existing way of thinking or the existing process. In reality the impossible is usually just something that has not yet been done in the current organization, and because it hasn’t been done before it is assumed to be impossible. Impossible assignments are the genesis and catalysts of change in the organization. When management hits the point where the existing methods of business conduct will no longer deliver the results that are needed, an impossible assignment will result. Leaders should look for these opportunities. They are the opportunity to prove you can do it before you get to do it.
The impossible requires that you take a step back, before you start going forward. It is the desired end state of the impossible that is the key. Once the desired goal is established, it is the decomposition of the logical steps backwards from that goal that will enable you to breakdown what appears to be an impossible leap in the old process into a number of achievable smaller steps in the new method.
Decomposition in the business world is the breaking down of large and complex issues into smaller, more manageable and less complex issues. Once the impossible issue is broken down into its smaller component, possible and solvable issues, the solution can then start to come into focus. This process is similar to the solving of the complex problem of how do you eat an elephant? The solution is one bite at a time.
Now just because you may have solved the problem and put the plan in place that would appear to enable the impossible objective to be achieved, don’t expect it to be immediately or unanimously embraced. There will be those who either have a stake hold in the existing business structure now or those who were unable to solve the impossible assignment in the past that may be reticent to accept the new approach. They may actually want to fight you to the death before they will accept a change in what they are doing or agree with you.
This is the point where your tenacity and self belief will come into play. If you have done the work, solved the problem and believe in your solution to what was once believed to be but no longer is impossible, you will need to continue to push forward. It may take a sustained force of will to see it through. It will require you to risk your credibility on your belief in your own work. While achieving the impossible may in fact be possible, it is usually never easily implemented or rapidly adopted.
Look for a method to test your approach and solution on a smaller scale to prove it out. No one will have more riding on a successful outcome than you, so you will need to maintain personal oversight and involvement in the test implementation. Most importantly, do not take no for an answer. If you have just succeeded in doing the impossible, are you really going to stop short of success just because someone said no?
The impossible is assigned every day. Solutions to the impossible do not arrive every day. Of the solutions to the impossible that arrive, many do not get successfully implemented because their owner did not have what it took to translate the theory into reality. For those impossible solutions that do get successfully implemented, the owner has now proven that they are now qualified to do the impossible, and should expect more impossible assignments in the future, as a reward.
Budgets
Everybody lives on a budget. Well almost everybody. It seems the US congress hasn’t needed a budget for the last few years so they haven’t bothered to create one. I guess that comes from the fact that if they need more money they can just trot down to the treasury and print some more. They also have the added benefit that if they spend more than they actually have no one seems to mind. Aside from that one glaring exception we all must live within our means, and that means we have a budget. The same principle should apply to business. Organizations should have goals, and for the most part these goals need to be quantitative. In case you are missing the link here, goals and budgets should be closely related. Budgets are great management tools in that they provide goals, but they are goals that have a certain amount of variability based on business levels and directions. They provide both statistical as well as real number targets for leaders to manage to. This enables the business leader to have some leeway and variability of the budget goals based on the overall business performance. It allows them to make business decisions and to manage. Regardless of that, the budget approach is correct. If there is a good economy and GDP rises, then there is more money for congress to spend. If there is a poor economy and GDP stays flat or worse, falls, then there is not as much money to spend. And just like a business that sees its revenues fall, cuts in its spending must occur. All business groups or functions should have a travel budget. It should be expressed both in real dollar terms, and as a percentage of revenue terms. If times are good and the business is growing it should be expected that revenue will be growing and there will be more customers to visit and that the actual amount spent on travel may be more that the real dollar target, but it can still be in line with (but hopefully less than) the statistical percentage of revenue. The idea here is that you don’t want to limit your revenue growth because you decided to limit your travel to a fixed dollar level. Rewards can be provided for achieving budget goals and penalties or reduced rewards assessed for not achieving them. This logic can then be applied across the entire business against almost all cost categories as well as most revenue structures. If the business has time sensitive aspects then the amount of time that is budgeted per project or event can be used in the same manner. If the business is service oriented as opposed to product oriented then the number of labor hours, or the number of employees associated with conducting the desired level of business can be budgeted. Good leaders will understand the various trade-offs that will come into play with the various goals and budgets that they have to attain and work with. Leaders that consistently work within their overall budget constraints, either real dollar, statistical or both depending on prevailing business conditions and the accuracy of the initial conditions, should be rewarded both monetarily as well as with increased responsibilities over time as they have demonstrated good stewardship of the business. Those that don’t demonstrate these traits should not expect these types of rewards.
Warren Buffet, who is widely thought of as one of the wisest and most capable business men around, has also come out in favor of budgets, specifically with respect to the aforementioned members of congress. His approach to having congress set and operate within budget, and like the rest of us live within it was simple. He said:
“…pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.”
He was saying that the US government budget would be linked to the GDP measurement and must be within three percent of it. I like the sentiment, but the only problem with this solution is that those that would be measured and or limited by the budget, are also those that would have to “pass a law” requiring it. Past experience does not indicate there is a willingness within the congress for this type of behavior.
Lets again look at what has become one of my favorite discussion topics in business: travel. I have traveled a lot for business in the past, and don’t particularly relish the thought of future business travel, but I absolutely agree that some travel is required for successful business to be conducted. There is no substitute for face to face contact, either with customers or with other members of the business unit. I also understand that travel costs money and there is a finite amount of cost that any business can bear and still be both viable and profitable.
Just as in tougher business times you would not want your travel expense to meet the dollar level set in the budget when revenues fell short of their projected levels. This would cause travel to increase as a proportion of revenue to a statistically unacceptable level of revenue. This would adversely affect the business’ profitability. If the overall business levels are reasonably accurate, then both the fixed level and statistical level targets can be used as measurements.
I stated “over time” as a criteria as there will always be a stochastic or unpredictable aspect associated with business. That means that sometimes you can and will do everything right regarding your budgets and objective, but there will be unexpected events outside of your control such as disruptions in supply chains, natural disasters, changes to commerce laws, etc. that will preclude you from being successful.
It happens.
It doesn’t happen all the time though. Many of the issues can be predicted and de-risked. Those leaders that can predict and prepare for these unforeseen events will minimize their affects, continue to be able to perform, and progress. Those that can’t handle these types of events will need to learn the requisite skills if they wish to continue to advance.
Senior management cannot and should not try to both set objectives and then dictate how the business leaders are to achieve these goals or operate within these budgets. It usually neither works nor enables the next generation of senior leaders to grow into their future roles. One size does not fit all and differing leaders will have differing approaches to solving their specific problems.
Setting both goals and budgets enables leaders to understand what is expected both on an overall basis as well as on an individual or specific budget basis. It also enables those leaders to make decisions regarding tradeoffs within the specific budget structures as to enable the attainment of the overall organization’s goal. A rigorous reward structure with BOTH positive reinforcements and negative consequences needs to be in place regarding both goals and budgets to support this approach. It also requires a senior leadership team that understands that some leaders will succeed and be rewarded, and others may not be rewarded and will need to gain more experience, but that the overall business will benefit.
Presenting….
There are many types of communication in the modern organization. This of course would be in addition to the ubiquitous use of personal and social media such as texting, tweeting and facebooking. Some forms of organizational communication seem to be falling out of favor, such as actually phoning someone and talking to them, and some seem to be on the rise, such as Instant Messaging. However, for formal business communications there are basically two methods, the written memo as generated by some desktop based word processing program, and the presentation chart as generated by some desktop commercial presentation program. I am going to talk about the presentation method of communication. Not the creation of it. The presenting of it. I have written in the past about charts. I have written about the increasing complexity of charts. When commercial presentation programs first came out they contained little more than the ability to draw some rudimentary objects such as geometric figures and arrows, and the ability to “draw” some text on the chart. It was great. You could now put some images with some words. There are a few presentation rules to abide by in order to avoid being considered the presentation making equivalent to the much sought after cure for insomnia. They are: Don’t read your slides. Don’t read your slide notes. Don’t read anything. There is a really good chance that everyone in the business audience will know how to read. They will be able to read your slides without your help. Trust me on this. If you are just going to read your slides to people, they will very quickly realize that you are not much value add to the presentation. Be familiar enough with the topic and content that you don’t have to read it. Stop and answer the questions when they are asked. Don’t tell people to hold their questions till the end. If you make people hold their questions till the end, they will forget them, not be able to ask them, and they will feel strangely unfulfilled at the end of you presentation. Answer the questions succinctly. A question is not an invitation for another dissertation. If you don’t know the answer, tell them: “That is a good question. I don’t have the answer to it, but I will find the answer and get back to you with it” And move on. Don’t dwell on it and don’t try to bluff through it. People will be able to tell, and you want to maintain and retain your credibility. Presenting is easy. Presenting well is much more difficult. It takes effort, preparation and knowledge of both the topic and the audience. A friend once told me early in my career that when you present you need to be brilliant and to be brief. He then looked at me and smiled and said in my case he would settle for me just being brief. I think wiser words I have never heard.
I have written about the increasing number of charts in presentations. When commercial presentation programs first came out overhead foils were relatively expensive and had to be generated specifically for overhead presentations. This limited both the complexity and number of charts that were in any given presentation. Ah for the good old days when presentations were short, simple and sweet.
Regardless of how long current business presentations have grown; regardless of how complex current business presentation slides have become; someday, somewhere you are going to be asked to actually present your presentation to a live executive audience, in person. With the increased cost of business travel, the proliferation of networked presentation sharing programs, and with the quality of desktop screens, the in person presentation is becoming a rarer and rarer internal to the organizational event, but it still does occur. Presentations to customers are still a mainstay of the sales function. If you want to be able to deliver a successful presentation, either internally to the organization or to customers, you need to know a few rules about presenting.
Even though I’ll be addressing the in person presentation scenario, much of what I’ll talk about is equally applicable to the on-line presentation as well, only on-line will be easier, since almost everyone will be multi-tasking anyway and won’t be giving you their full attention as they would if you were there in person. Besides, everyone knows how to talk on the telephone. We have all been doing that since the first time we picked up a phone and said “Hi grandma!” when we were two years old.
Presenting in person is something of an art. There are those that can do it without much thought or effort, and seem to be able to hold an audience absolutely spellbound, regardless of the information they are presenting. There are those who despite studied preparation and flawless slide content succeed only in convincing everyone present, once they regain consciousness from being bored almost to the comatose level that some people should never again be allowed to present anything.
Be dynamic. Don’t stand in one place. Don’t hide behind the dais or the lectern. Move around the presentation area. You don’t need to run in circles or do jumping jacks, but you do need to have a little mobility in order to force the audience to periodically shift their attention point. This will help to keep them from staring at one spot and starting to “zone out”. As strange as it may seem I have found that even moving around my office if I am presenting on the phone helps as with this as well. Perhaps this method is good for both the presenter and the audience.
Make eye contact. Not just with the most senior member of the audience, or the person that the presentation is for, but with each individual in the room. You need to make a connection and acknowledge their presence if you want them to acknowledge yours. You are not giving an acceptance speech where you need to list everyone by name, but looking each them in the eye at various times in the presentation will help them feel that you are talking to them and not talking at them.
We are in the short attention span, multi-tasking world. You need to learn how to get your point across on each slide in forty seconds to one minute. If you can’t boil down the slide information into that kind of time frame you will rapidly start to lose audience attention. The pace that you move the presentation along will be a key to maintaining audience attention.
Ask yourself questions. What is the primary piece of information you are trying to convey with each slide? Why is it important? What do you want the audience to do with it, if anything? Meandering and unfocused presentations are a painful audience experience. Too many presenters try to demonstrate how smart they are by trying to provide too much and too detailed information. Trust me. You’re presenting to executives. There is no doubt who the smartest person in the room is. If they were the smart ones, they would be presenting to you. Your job is to communicate what they need to know, not everything that you know.
Secret Sauce
Do you know what your business’ “secret sauce” is? Secret sauce is the differentiator that makes your organization better at something than another organization. It can be your people, your products, and the way you do things or a combination of all three. I really don’t know where the idea of secret sauce came from. Possibly it came from the old McDonalds commercial where they are literally singing the praises of the Big Mac hamburger and they mention “…special sauce, lettuce, cheese…”. Regardless of where it came from, the idea of, and the phrase secret sauce seems to be gaining traction in the business world.
Many organizations might say that their secret sauce is their technology. This may be true for brand new or green-field type products, but for most cases I don’t think that this holds true in the longer run. Let’s look at Apple for instance. They are an acknowledged leader in several product categories, but is their “technology” really better, or so different from any other company’s? I don’t think so.
I remember seeing a rare clip of an interview of both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, where they were both on the same stage answering questions. Bill Gates was asked what he envied about Apple and Steve Jobs. His answer was very telling. He said he envied Steve Jobs “taste”. He said that Steve Jobs had a way of looking at things and creating an elegance about his products that set them apart.
I think he nailed what Apple’s secret sauce was in that one discussion. There are many MP3 players out there in the market, but none really as cool as the iPod. The same goes for the smart phone market and the iPhone. iPads and MacBooks have also been lauded for their designs, capabilities and functionalities. It is interesting that Apple had problems after Jobs left the first time then recovered and became the most valuable company in the world after he returned. Now that Jobs is gone there is a question about what is next at Apple, and what is next from Apple. It seems the start of the recent thirty five percent decline from the all time high price of Apple stock coincides pretty closely with the loss of the keeper of their secret sauce.
Understanding what your particular organization’s secret sauce is takes some significant and sometimes difficult self analysis. The question is not just what do you do well. It is also why you do it well and how you do it well.
By staying in the computing market we can see another example of this set of questions with Dell. Dell was one of the pioneers of supply chain management and mass customization production. They didn’t just build personal computers; they built you your personal computer. They did it as quickly and as cost effectively as the other PC manufacturers built their standard products. This capability was widely regarded as Dell’s secret sauce.
Unfortunately, it really wasn’t such a secret. Many companies are now using many of the ideas and principles that Dell initially pioneered and employed. There is now a question if Dell has grown too large to efficiently employ the same concepts and precepts that enabled their growth and success in the first place. There is a concern that many of Dell’s competitors are now better at the Dell model and process than Dell is. It seems that this sentiment is also reflected in Dells current stock price which is only half of its five year high price, and about twenty five percent of its all time high price.
Now Michael Dell has led a leveraged buyout of the company bearing his name, and is taking it back as a private company. It appears that he may believe that he too was a keeper of the secret sauce at Dell, like Jobs at Apple, and will now be able to rework his magic. I guess we will all see if that is indeed the case.
Instead of staying at the market – macro level, high technology type of secret sauce examples, I’ll relate one of my own. I was once involved in an organization that manufactured metal enclosures and integrated technology components into those enclosures. We didn’t make the technology components, just what was in essence the metal box that we put someone else’s components in. I’ll simplify what we did greatly by saying we bent and welded metal and turned screw drivers.
Initially the organization thought that they bent and welded metal and turned screwdrivers better than anyone else. They were sure that these types of production capabilities were their secret sauce and that they were their competitive advantage.
When we really looked at what our secret sauce was, it became apparent that we were not better at the physical production of the enclosure or the component integration. We had an enclosure design team that was able to design enclosures that did not require as much material or welding for their production that made us more cost efficient. The enclosures were designed to enable faster integration and more dense packing of the enclosed technology components. This meant it took fewer of our lower cost units to deliver the customers desired functionality than it took the competition. The design team also created superior heat exchange and dissipation capabilities that enabled the cooling of the smaller more densely packed enclosures.
It wasn’t our production capabilities that were our secret sauce as was widely thought. It was our design capabilities that were the secret sauce that enabled our production team to create a competitively advantaged product. Knowing our secret sauce enabled us to change the focus of our business. We no longer tried to out produce the competition. We focused on out designing them.
We changed our business approach from pursuing large volume opportunities where we would try and provide products based on an existing enclosure specification, to pursuing opportunities where we could generate and use our own competitively advantaged enclosure designs. It worked great. We were very successful.
I think it is pretty safe to say that most businesses like most hamburgers have the basics that are required to be successful. It is the looking for and understanding of their respective special sauces that will make them different. Understanding, protecting and leveraging each business’s secret sauce is what enables them to differentiate from the competition and be successful. The Big Mac still has its special sauce and it is still a successful product, but now other hamburgers now have their own special sauces as well, so its competitive advantage has been somewhat diminished. The same progression seems to occur with each business’s secret sauce. That would mean that new secret sauces, like new products need to be developed all the time to maintain an advantage.
It also means that regardless of how hard some businesses try, and despite what they want to believe, ketchup is not a secret sauce.
International Organizations
Not everybody gets to work for a foreign based multinational company. Many in the US may actually go through their entire business career without having every worked for one. I have had the opportunity to actually work for three different foreign based multinationals. I think it has provided a perspective on both the similarities and the differences associated with international and domestic business processes and practices. With the continued globalization of business and organizations, that may be a healthy concept for all leaders to be familiar with. While things are obviously done differently in North America, we need to understand the perspective that it is the North American business environment that is different from the rest of the world, not the rest of the world that is different from North America. I will attempt to generalize at least some of the differences I have encountered between the foreign based and US domestic based organizations that I have had experience with. This is always a dangerous thing to do. Generalizations are opinions that are applied to greater sample sets, based on limited sample sets. Having worked for three foreign based nationals means I have some experience with three specific instances of foreign based multi-nationals. It doesn’t mean I should generalize across all of them, but that sort of perceived limitation has never stopped me from rendering an opinion or article before. A good example could be seen in the various approaches to contractual relationships. In Asia and Europe it seems that a contractual relationship is the beginning or starting point for an ongoing business relationship. Once the contract is in place both buyer and seller seem to understand that some changes will occur and will work together to adapt and modify the arrangement in a mutually satisfactory manner. In North America it seems that a contractual relationship is the end point or culmination of a business relationship. Once the contract is signed it seems to be the arbiter of all potential differences of opinion that can arise, and it is hoped that every possible contingency has been covered. Despite these and many other business, organizational and cultural differences that can and will provide the grist for future articles, I strongly suggest and recommend that leaders spend some time in a foreign based organization. It will provide an entirely new perspective on how organizational structures, communications and cultures affect the business. In today’s increasingly global business environment, understanding business environments outside of what is considered the North American norm, and hence comfort zone, will help leaders deal with the complex problems associated with multinational business opportunities. It will enable them to understand and deal with the increasing number of non-domestic competitors that have entered or are now entering the domestic market. It may also help better prepare them for how to better understand, and deal with someone the next time they walk up and say:
Mark Twain is a favorite author of mine. I have quoted him in the past, and will probably do so again in the future. I am envious of his way of expressing things, and while I may not be able to write a good line, I know a good line when I steal it. Twain said:
“All generalizations are false, including this one.”
Undaunted by that fact, I will move forward with my comments regarding foreign based multinational organizations, and how and why leaders in North America need to understand them.
There is always the push-pull, love-hate, cats-dogs sort of relationship between the corporate offices and the field offices. In domestic based organizations one of the most feared phrases to ever be heard in the field is:
“I am from headquarters, and I’m here to help.”
I think we have all either experienced or participated in the horror stories that have ensued after hearing this phrase. It can make your blood run cold.
It’s even worse when you think you may have just heard the phrase but you cannot be sure because your brain is still trying to unscramble and translate what you think you may have heard because it was stated in such a heavy foreign accent as to make it almost unrecognizable. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Also remember that this is a person who is trying to communicate in English, which may be something other than their native language. That means that they have a working knowledge of at least two languages. It sometimes open to interpretation whether some people who were born, live and work in the US have a full working knowledge of the native tongue.
With domestic organizations there is at least a consistency of culture, value set and approach that can be a basis for working together. In North America we know how fellow North Americans usually tend to think, or not think as the case may be. European and Asian cultures and value sets, believe it or not, are different from North American ones. I have not had the opportunity to work for an African or Australian based multinational, but I suspect there will be differences to a lesser or greater extent there as well.
What I have found is that despite North America being one of the largest markets for just about every type of product in the world, it is also the unique market in the world. What I mean by that is that I believe there are reasonable and rational similarities between the European and Asian markets in the way they conduct their business and the way they treat their employees. It is North America that is different.
It has been my experience that in North America customers want to see working products before they buy them. This means that all potential vendors must create a competitive product and the buyer will select the one that they feel best meets their needs at the most favorable price. Admittedly this is not the method for all purchases, but since I have already discussed generalizations and the pitfalls associated with that, I will continue to go with it. Even the US Air Force wants to see a working model of the next generation aircraft from each of its potential suppliers before it decides which one it will buy. I always wondered how it could be next generation if there was already one built.
It has also been my experience to witness in Asia and Europe that customers seem to be much more willing to contract to buy a product based on a specification, with no actual working models. In Europe, several countries got together to pool resources and jointly design and build their next generation Joint Strike Fighter with nothing but a set of desired specifications to work from. They didn’t require that a working prototype be built as was required in the US. Again this is based on a small experience set, but it runs so contrary to what for the most part is accepted practice in North America I had to bring it up.
“Ah yem fwoam haid-kwahtaihz, awn ah yem eah tew hehp yew.”
Do Something
The business world right now is a pretty scary place. It has probably always been a pretty scary place but I just may have been blissfully, no, euphorically unaware of it. Either that or I was just too dumb to realize how scared I should have been about the things I was doing. On the other hand, that may have been the unintentional contributing factor to some of the successes I was having. It also explains to some extent all the resistance that I had met along the way. I was doing something. I think we have all been party to those conversations where we as minions of those that inhabit the uppermost floors of our corporate buildings were discussing what we consider to be the oh so apparent solutions to the myriad of problems our business is facing. Words like “management” and “should do” and “ought to do” are thrown around like a baseball around the infield after a strikeout. Agreement is usually unanimous that management should do something. Imagine that. My final comment here is that currently 60% of the members of the US senate and almost 40% of the members of the US House of Representatives are lawyers, and we all know how well those institutions are performing in the solving of our problems. Enough said. Where I am going to go with this is to focus on solving problems. This is a dangerous road for many of us in business to take because it involves assuming responsibility, taking action, sometimes without even being told to, and doing something. And when you do something like that you will invariable make some people happy, and you will also make some other people unhappy. The hope is that you please the proper people. The objective is to make you happy. Regardless, taking a considered action is always the first step in solving a problem. Without action you don’t solve a problem, you just continue to cope with it. I like to work on generating quantitative (measurable) improvements in businesses and solving problems. I guess I got this from my dad. I also have a degree in physics, just not a PhD. I like making visible progress. I like learning new things. I think many people do. I like to work with and associate with people who operate in this way as well. I also think that there are many who are not comfortable in that change oriented environment. These events can entail significant changes and certain amounts of discomfort for not just me, but for everyone else as well. Not everyone understands or agrees with the fact that every job description and every job function should entail a certain amount of discomfort. People like to be comfortable. When people get comfortable at what they are doing, they tend to want to stay comfortable. As they stay comfortable, the groove they are in gets ever deeper and soon little change and no improvement is possible. If everything else in the business world would now just cooperate and never change, these comfortable people could stay comfortable. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.
I am going to give a little attribution to my dad here. He told me:
“Engineers solve problems. Lawyers dwell on them.”
I don’t know if he stole that from someone or if it was one of his own. He does have a PhD. In physics and is a really smart cookie in my book, so I prefer to think of it is one of his own comments. Way to go dad.
Now I am not going to get into lawyer bashing, although I do agree with about ninety percent of the quotes in existence as they pertain to lawyers. If you want to know what that means, just Google “lawyer quotes” and start reading. Now there are some creative writers.
There also seems to be plenty of people who could be described as problem dwellers in business. These are the people that seem to exist for the sole purpose of dealing with a known problem. You would think that with this sort of focus on a problem that it would be eventually solved. If that were the case, then there would no longer be a need for the problem dweller. What normally happens is that like your home dwelling that periodically needs updating and improvement, the problem dwelling at the office will be periodically updated and improved. And like you comfortably living in your home, the business problem dweller will go on somewhat comfortably working on the updated problem.
There are also those that either do not want the responsibility for doing something, or do not want to have to face those that will resist the change associated with doing something. These people are relatively easy to spot because they have a tendency to identify themselves as people who are not doing something. They call themselves “enablers” and “facilitators” and other such descriptors. What is an enabler or a facilitator? In today’s scary business world I would say that an enabler or a facilitator is someone who enables or facilitates someone else being able to do something.
I don’t know about you, but when it comes time for my annual reviews I like to be able to point to specific actions and say I did X, Y and Z, not I enabled someone else to do X, Y, and Z.
When you do something in business, such as solve a problem, it now means that everyone will now have to do something else. If they were working, or dwelling on that problem, they will now have to find another problem to work on. They can no longer be comfortable doing what they were doing.
This is called progress.
It may be a little disconcerting to associate discomfort with progress in business. I don’t think this should be the case. Progress, even incremental progress will require change of some sort. In physics, a force is said to do work when it acts on a body so that there is a displacement of the point of application, however small, in the direction of the force. Thus a force does work when it results in movement. In physics changing a system requires that you apply a force or impart some work into the system. To do that you have to do something.
If you don’t, in business as in physics the system will not change. And as I said before, change is usually not comfortable, but I am not going to dwell on it.
Good Advice
The topic for this blog was suggested to me by my good friend Chris D. I thought it was a great suggestion since I think we have all been through and around the “advice” circle in one direction or the other. Thanks Chris. Advice is a funny thing. Almost everything about it seems to fall into one of two categories. There are those people that ask for advice and those that don’t. Those that ask for it can either use it or not. There are those people that offer advice and those that don’t. There are those that only offer advice when asked, and then there are those that offer advice even when they are not asked. People who fall into that last group are usually referred to as “annoyances”. I am willing to help just about anybody in business. I am a big believer in Karma. What goes around, does usually in some way come back around, and I never want to miss an opportunity to try and put the Karma universe in my debt. That being said there is also a physical limit to the number of things that I can do or help with at the same time. What that means is that I don’t like to be exercised unnecessarily on business topics. If someone is going to ask me for advice and I am going to put in the effort to try and generate a reasonable and workable response on their behalf, I would like to see at least some of my “advice” effort implemented. Otherwise, why have they bothered to ask me, and why have I bothered to respond. Advice also comes with a couple of strings attached and they involve feedback. If you ask for advice, it is usually assumed that you will use at least some of it. You need to let the provider know what you used, and it is normally good for to say “thank you”. By the way, saying thank you seems to be a lost art. If you did not use the advice there is an implied obligation and you owe the provider an explanation of why you didn’t use it. This is a common courtesy. It is particularly important if you ever want to ask for that person’s advice again.
I once heard it said that there are two types of people: Those that divide people into two types and those that don’t. I think we can all safely say that we fall into one of those categories. I have also heard it said that there are actually three types of people: Those that know how to count and those that don’t, but I have digressed a little here. I think there are also two types of people that ask for advice: Those that are genuinely asking for help with a topic or issue, and those that are not.
Usually when someone asks for advice they are indeed looking for help on how to execute one of their responsibilities or assignments. Their requests are usually reflexive in nature and pertain to how they should complete their tasks. You are asking someone “what should I do?” Some may see asking for advice as a weakness. It’s not. If you know someone that has experience or expertise in a function you need to perform, it would be foolish not to ask their advice.
If you get in the habit of asking for advice and then either ignoring it or choosing to not implement it, people will stop providing it. This is similar to the story about the boy that cried “wolf”. Eventually there really was a wolf, and after so many false alarms, no one came to help. Sometime in their business careers, everyone could use some advice. If you have the reputation for asking for advice and then ignoring it, don’t be surprised if it is not available when you really need it.
The idea here is to not unnecessarily ask for advice. It communicates that you may not know which course to take and vests the person you are asking in the outcome you choose. If you think you have a potential solution in mind but may want a little more information, or perhaps some suggestions on a topic then don’t ask for advice. Ask for an opinion. Everybody has an opinion on everything. I heard a friend once say that they had an opinion and that everyone else was entitled to it. When you ask for an opinion you are essentially asking “what would you do?” You are not directly investing them in the success of the effort, and are not usually expecting the same depth of response.
Asking for an opinion doesn’t seem to invest people in the solution the way asking for advice does. I don’t know why this is. I would guess that requested advice is deemed valuable where a requested opinion is just that; an opinion. People who ask for advice are saying that they need help. People who ask for help usually receive it. People who provide help usually like to see it received and utilized. People who are asked for and provide an opinion usually assume that you probably have some clue as to what you need to do and will not be as put off if and when you ignore their opinion.
At least in my opinion.