I was watching the U.S. Open golf tournament the other day. I enjoy doing that because it gives me the chance to watch people who really know how to do their job which in this case is to play golf. Believe it or not I think I actually learn a little when I watch them as well. Not much, just a little. I feel the only thing that truly separates me from them is talent. They have it and I don’t. That and age, and flexibility, and focus, and drive and probably a few other traits that I am not currently aware of.
What I noticed about this broadcast was that they seemed to focus on the players’ recovery shots. The course was set up so that if you weren’t in the fairway you were in trouble. What I saw was a lot of miraculous recovery shots that were attempted from this trouble, and only a select few that were successfully executed. However, the guy who eventually won didn’t seem to attempt the miraculous on every shot. Truthfully he was probably not in trouble as often as the others, but when he was, sometimes instead of attempting the miraculous he just chipped out. He then tried to put the ball on the green and make a putt to save par. He did that a lot. The other guys didn’t. He won by like eight strokes, which in golf terms is the same as lapping the field, or a knockout.
Let’s get this straight right up front. Phil Mickelson is an amazing golfer. He has won forty two events on the PGA tour. He has won five major championships. He has spent over seven hundred weeks in the top ten of the world’s golf rankings. I cannot hit my driver as far as he hits his six iron, maybe even his seven iron if he decides to hit it hard. He is a crowd favorite everywhere he goes because of his demeanor on the course and his willingness to interact with the fans. So why do I think that he is ruining business? I think of him as the father of the miraculous recovery golf shot. He makes a lot of them and they are all highlight reel material. When we see what we think of as an “everyman” like Phil Mickelson pull off the miraculous recovery, we think we can all do it, and not just in golf.
David Feherty on the other hand, is a former professional golfer. While he did win five times on the European golf tour, he has never won on the PGA tour and may not have spent a single week in the top ten of the world’s golf rankings. He retired in nineteen ninety four to become a golf announcer. It is widely accepted that he is far better as a professional golf announcer than he ever was as a professional golfer. Why do I bring up David Feherty in responding to my question as to why I think Phil Mickelson may be ruining business? It is simple. David Feherty provided the following quote regarding Phil Mickelson:
“Watching Phil Mickelson play golf is like watching a drunk chasing a balloon near the edge of a cliff.”
We are now getting close to the point.
Phil Mickelson will hit some of the most incredible shots in golf that will end up getting him into some of the deepest trouble possible on a golf course. He has been known to get a little wild, or to make some foolish decisions at the most inopportune times imaginable. What is amazing about him is that he can then hit some of the most amazing recovery shots humanly possible and put himself right back in the game again. Notice that I said he “can” hit amazing recovery shots. That doesn’t mean that he always does. Sometimes it works and he is almost unbeatable. Many times it doesn’t, and then things only get worse. Golf, like business is very unforgiving of compounded mistakes.
While it is true that he has won so many times on tour, what is not so widely publicized is the number of times that he lost when he should have or could have won, due to the erratic nature of how he plays the game of golf. In 2006 Phil Mickelson lost the U.S Open on the seventy second and last hole. He came to it leading by one and needing only a par to win. It was not an especially long hole, but as with all major championships it was not easy.
Instead of being a little conservative, and probably winning or at worst tying, he went for it as he always does. He teed off and knocked his drive into the trees.
Instead of playing it safe and smart (as this year’s U.S. Open winner did on several occasions), and pitching out to the fairway where he could then rely on his well documented and much acclaimed pitching and putting skills to get his par, he went for the fabulous recovery shot. Mere mortals could not have hit the shot he was going to try and hit.
He was going to bend a shot around some trees and knock it on the green from more than two hundred yards away. It didn’t work. He hit another tree and the ball came rolling back toward him.
Now he is laying two, and he needs a four to win or a five to at least tie, and he is no better off than he was before.
He goes for it again because now he has to. This time he gets it around the trees, but misses the green and it ends up in a difficult lie in the greenside bunker. Now he needs to get it out of the bunker and in the hole in two shots just to tie.
He gets it out of the bunker, but misses the putt to tie and just like that he loses the tournament.
While Phil Mickelson is renowned for his miraculous recovery shots, there will always be the question of should he have avoided the trouble in the first place. Could he have played it smart and not hit his sometimes erratic driver, opting for a club that he could have more easily used to hit the fairway? Once in the woods could he have made a better choice that would have taken losing the tournament outright out of the equation, while still giving him the chance to win? Mistakes in golf, like in business can always happen, and when you do find yourself in trouble is it always the best course of action to go for broke on the recovery?
History has shown that most attempts at miraculous recovery shots fail, otherwise it would not be considered so miraculous when they succeeded. If they always succeeded they would just be recovery shots, not miraculous recovery shots.
Too many times it seems that businesses can find themselves in a difficult situation and instead of playing to their own strengths and capabilities, play for the miraculous recovery. Most of the time when they try the go for broke recovery in business, the business does indeed go broke. There are examples of successes using this approach. They usually end up in some business school case study where they are captured and passed down to future generations.
I think they are more like lightning strikes in a rain storm. They are relatively rare, individual events, and as the saying goes lightning doesn’t usually strike twice in the same place.
Actually in golf getting struck by lightning even once is not considered a good thing. That’s normally why we go inside when it starts to rain. Getting struck by lightning of a golf course will usually ruin your round, and probably any future rounds you had ever planned on playing.
In golf a steady performer is known as a “grinder”. A grinder is someone who works at minimizing their mistakes and maximizing their opportunities. A grinder usually doesn’t have less talent; they usually just don’t take as many risks. When a grinder makes a mistake or does find themselves in a difficult position, they weigh all the risks and rewards with an eye toward realistically minimizing the downside risk. They understand that they may not be able to win the tournament with a good decision, but that they can certainly lose it with a bad one. Making par after a mistake is not a bad score.
Tiger Woods is a possible example of the ultimate grinder. He has been the best golfer in the world for almost as long as Phil Mickelson has been in the top ten. He rarely makes mistakes to the point that it is extraordinarily uncommon that he ever beats himself. The majority of the other top ten golfers in the world are probably best described to one exten
t or another as grinders also. This means that the riskier, more swashbuckling approach to golf that Phil Mickelson so successfully uses is much more the exception than the rule for the truly successful.
Miraculous recoveries are attention grabbing by their very nature. Few of the attempts are really ever successful despite the numbers that are tried. Those that are successful however are very widely reported and seem to take on an image and a life all their own. Miraculous recovery attempts seem to have become the standard against which we want to measure all performances, be it in golf or in business.
A business that finds itself challenged might better learn from this year’s U.S Open winner. He calculated when to go for the miraculous, and when to play it smart and just chip out of trouble and play on. Phil Mickelson has finished second six times in the U.S. Open indicating he definitely has the talent and capability, but has never won. This year he was sixteen shots back. Businesses are also always competing and need to understand that while the miraculous is usually widely reported, that by its very nature cannot be expected to regularly occur.
Setting realistic goals for each shot a business is going to take is a key to a business’s ongoing success. It’s better to leave the miraculous recovery shots to the golfers.
Category Archives: Performance
Every Day
I read an article about Jerry Seinfeld the other day. In it he was discussing some of the secrets to his success. Now obviously they can’t be secrets if he is openly discussing them, so maybe we should refer to them as some of the tenets he adhered to in the pursuit of his goals. Perhaps tenets would be considered too strong a word for describing his approach to applying himself to his comedy craft. However you would like to describe what he did along his road to success, he boiled it down to a simple phrase. He did something every day.
The example he used related to his writing. Whether he was writing for his stand up routines or the ubiquitous “Seinfeld” show, he wrote every day. That was his goal. He didn’t set the goal to write a joke, or even a good joke. He didn’t need to pound out a chapter in his book, or a scene for the show. He didn’t even need to make sure that what he wrote was good or used in any of his multiplicity of ventures. He just needed to write.
He knew that by getting started his ability and talent would take over. Some days would be better than others and the output of a higher quality. He knew that by the continued application of his effort he would continue to improve across the board. Eventually the output from his bad days would be better than the output of his earlier good days. The objective was the activity, not some specific amount of output. He knew the output would come if he achieved his goal of doing something.
I thought this was an interesting approach to doing ones work.
I, like many others am something of a goal oriented worker. I like to set the bar at a specific and acknowledged height and then either leap over it, or find an equally impressive way to limbo under it. One day it might be a graceful hurdle that takes me to the other side of the bar and the next might be a skidding face-plant that takes me sliding under it. Others are more process oriented where they can look to a prescribed set of steps that they can embark on that should result in them getting to the other side of the bar. The Seinfeld approach did not seem to fit into either of these categories. To extend this example it would almost be described as “start moving in the direction of the bar” and eventually you will be on the other side of it.
I think I like this approach because of the daily activity goal. It seems that we spend more and more of our time on conference calls and in meetings and in other activities that might be considered to have questionable value-add in the conduct of our business responsibilities. We seem to have reached a point where we have to consider the output of these conference calls and meetings as part of our business responsibilities, even though we seem to achieve very little in the way of definable progress in them.
It would be at times like these where I would start to apply the “Every Day” business scenario. The idea here would be that leaders in the various disciplines that they are responsible for, would need to set a goal of doing some work in their discipline that is additive in moving that discipline forward.
For example, research and development leaders would need to make sure that every day they do something that furthers the research and development of the business. That does not mean reporting on their team’s progress, nor does it mean explaining to management what the latest development release is looking like. It means doing something directly associated with furthering an aspect of a products research or development. Sales leaders would need to spend time each day actually selling, not reporting or tracking, etc. Operations leaders would need to set time every day to work on how to improve their business’ efficiency.
This is obviously pretty simple stuff, but business in its proper form in not necessarily complex. After all, how many times have we heard people say that they are so busy that they don’t seem to be able to get their real work done? What Seinfeld seemed to have found was that the focus should not be on getting the real work done, but rather getting started on the real work. He realized that the getting done part of it would actually take care of itself.
On the surface this seems a little counter-intuitive to me, but the more I think about it, the more comfortable I get with it.
It seems that leadership roles have a tendency to attract a significant number of non-productive and “office-trappings” types of responsibilities. These functions usually take the form of making and presenting status reports, attending peer team meetings and calls to assure coordination, reviewing, approving or denying requests, and other similar such activities. I am hard pressed to find a way to associate these responsibilities with leadership, other than in how fast one can discharge and complete them and get back to the real functionality and responsibility of the business at hand.
Unfortunately it seems that as leaders matriculate up the corporate chain they may be judged more on how well they perform these attracted functions, and less on how well they actually perform their Research and Development, Sales or Operational responsibilities, to extend the previous example.
This is where “Every Day” would come in to play.
We should all look to find a way to make sure we perform some of the specific activities that are required to further the goals of the business, every day. This does not mean that we should be happy with making progress on the charts for the next business review. It does mean that we should work on something that would eventually need to be reported on in your business review.
Put simply “Every Day” means to me that we don’t need to report on something every day. Every day we need to do something that may need to be reported.
It may end up that it does not need to be reported. It may not provide the expected or desired impact. On the other hand, it might eventually turn out to be a game changing improvement to the business. The point is that none of those things will happen unless you are applying yourself to the objective.
Seinfeld knew that not everything that he wrote was going to be used, or maybe even good. He did however recognize that he would never have anything much less know what was good or not unless he wrote. He saw that the goal should not have been to only write good content, because he could not clearly discern the good from the not so good unless he had them both available to compare. Hence his objective was simply to write.
The analog to this approach that I would choose for leaders in business would be to focus some time every day on the non-administrative work that you and your team are responsible for accomplishing. I know this sounds silly to the point of almost being inane, but
having been through the days where it seemed that the administrivia and process ruled over work and performance, I think it bears repeating: It is easy to get lost in the busy of busy-work and forget to try and accomplish some real work. And it is the real work that needs to get accomplished, every day.
Thick Skin
A new year always brings many opportunities with it. The opportunity for both business and personal growth. The opportunity to break eighty on the golf course. The opportunity to break seventy on the golf course. The opportunity for our elected officials to step up, tell the public the truth and most importantly, solve some problems.
Some of these opportunities are more likely to occur than others, and are listed in no particular order of increasing improbability of happening.
The beginning of a new year also means that it is time to review the last year’s performance. That usually translates to year end performance reviews. I have discussed the need for, and various approaches to giving performance reviews in the past. Most of these approaches usually reduce down to: Be professional, be factual, be balanced (what was good and what could be improved) and most importantly, be brief.
Chances are that the person you are conducting the review with is probably enjoying the review at least as much as you are.
This time though, I’m going to take a little bit of a different approach to the joys of year end reviews and approach them from the point of view of the person being reviewed. We all essentially report to someone, and that someone is responsible for conducting our year end review.
I have tried several times to conduct year end reviews with my wife, but for some reason it seems that these meetings end up becoming her yearend reviews of me. Go figure.
I have had many different types of managers in my career. There have been those that clearly were uncomfortable with the review responsibility and only provided the most cursory of reviews. There were those managers that took their review responsibility way too seriously and scheduled two to three hour reviews in an effort to make sure that I obtained the maximum benefit of the considered and judicious input they had regarding not only my performance, but just about any other topic in life that came to mind while they were talking to me. And there have been those that did the bare minimum just so they could say they performed the review if they were asked.
There was a manager that once handed me his manager’s year end review form that he was supposed to fill out on me, and asked me to fill it out for him so that he could then turn around and conduct my year end review with it. This was interesting the first year it happened, and I tried to be pretty honest with him and myself regarding my performance. The face to face meeting was obviously pretty brief. The second year it happened, there wasn’t even a face to face meeting. The third year that it occurred seemed to me to be a call to action.
As in the previous years I filled out the form, but this time I added a “new” objective to the list. This new objective was that I be able to “walk on water”. In order to exceed this objective I would need to be able to walk on the air above the water. In order to achieve this objective I would need to actually walk on water (not during the winter on ice – frozen water, as this would meet the goal, but wouldn’t be note worthy). Anything else would be a “needs improvement” rating.
In this instance I rated myself as an “achieved – with an asterisk” in that I noted that I was not able to figure out how to walk on the water, but I was able to part the water and walk across the bottom without getting wet, which was almost as good. The only difference was that my shoes got a little muddy.
He never said a thing to me about it. I don’t think he even read it. I still smile every time I think back to that form and realize that it is a duly signed review archived somewhere in the human resource records of a major corporation.
Occasionally however, I have had the good fortune to work for a leader that took his responsibility seriously, and put the time in to conduct a considered and accurate review of me. They usually took the approach that we all want to do well, but that invariably there were areas where we all could do better.
I have discussed in the past the necessity that we all conduct “difficult conversations” with our team member when the time or situation calls for it. Now it is time to understand how to handle having an uncomfortable or difficult conversation conducted with you.
Being told what you didn’t get done, or what you need to do better is going to happen. You need to understand and accept this. It might not have been your fault or responsibility. It might have been unavoidable. It is conceivable that you might have actually not performed up to your usual high levels. There may in fact be no one on the planet that could have performed better than you under these circumstances. It doesn’t matter. Regardless, it is the start of a new year and you are going to be reviewed on last year’s performance.
The first thing to understand and acknowledge when being reviewed is your area of responsibility. The issues and the decisions that spawned them may have taken place elsewhere or in the past, but you are there now and for better or for worse you own the situation now. You are now the responsible party.
Don’t dodge it. Don’t blame it on past administrations. We have enough politicians doing this. Stand up and note what your area of responsibility is. Chances are that it is already recognized where the issues arose. There will be those issues that are not attributable to you and those that are.
Also remember that this is a review, not a “blame-storming” session. It is always difficult to not be defensive in a situation where those things that have not gone as well as anyone would like are being reviewed. As strange as it may seem, I have found that the less defensive that I am about difficult issues, the less accusatory sounding people are when they discuss the various points to be covered. I have also found that sometimes there is truly valid input available on what and how I can do better.
Always remember in a review that facts are your friends. Discuss the facts and how they may be interpreted. Do not try to modify or discuss opinion, yours or anyone else’s. Trying to modify or discuss opinion is called an argument. Having an argument as the result of a yearend review is definitely the definition of a lose – lose situation. Without the facts to support a different performance perception, a yearend review argument will generate a negative outcome on this year’s review, and a poor expectation will be set for next year’s performance and review as well.
No one likes to be the recipient of a difficult discussion or review. The natural reaction is to try and justify or argue the position. This approach invariably fails unless there are facts available to both parties that can modify opinions. And even then there is only so much that you can say or do. It is a very fine line.
When I have conducted difficult conversations or reviews I have been careful to address the behavior or performance and not the person. It is business and we are professionals. No matter what it feels like, it should not feel like a personal attack. I did not enjoy the conversation, but it was my responsibility to conduct it.
The same rules seem to apply when you find yourself on the other side of a difficult conversation or review. Do not allow it to become personal. It is business and you are a professional. It is difficult to do, but it is a must. Be professional, be factual, and be balanced as to what you can do to improve the situation. If it was felt that the issue needed to be addressed with you in the first place, there needs to be some sort of response provided that the message being sent was acknowledged and received. I said acknowledged. I didn’t say agreed.
Sometimes it takes thick skin to accept the responsibilities that go along with being a leader. There are very few who can say that they have not erred or that their performance could not be improved. Sometimes i
t is not fun to be told this by someone else, but it does go with the position.
6 Business Lessons from My Son Mowing the Lawn
I have a fourteen year old son. I am very proud of him and I love him dearly. But that does not change the fact that he is a teenager and as such is prone to many of the activities and attitudes that come with that age. Like most teenagers he has almost unlimited wants and desires and has almost no money with which to pursue them. On the other hand I have a significant number of activities that need to be done around our house that I am willing to pay him to do. These majority of these activities are called yard work. You would think that with my cash and a need for labor, and his labor and a need for cash we would be able to work out an equitable solution. You would think. The following are a few business lessons I relearned from my son in this situation.
1. Set a deadline for all work to be complete. Make sure there is clarity of when your staff’s deliverables are due.
It’s always nice to start the new week with a clean yard, mowed lawn and trimmed bushes. I don’t know why that is the case. Perhaps it is what I learned as a kid. Needless to say though, as I am the nominal boss around my house (with the possible exception of my wife who I refer to as “The Most Powerful Woman in The Universe”) I set the objective for my staff (in this case my son). I thought I was pretty clear on this.
I learned the lesson of setting a hard deadline the hard way. I initially I just told my son that I would pay him at the end of the week to mow the yard once a week. I didn’t think I would need to specify when the week ended and when it began. He came in on Sunday to ask for his wages, and informed me that he would then mow the yard in “the next couple of days”. I informed him that Saturday and Sunday did in fact constitute the “Weekend” and that he would have to have the job complete by then before he was to get paid. He seemed surprised by this stipulation and development.
2. If it needs to get done, do it early. The job will just get more unpleasant the longer you wait to do it.
We live in Texas. In case you have not heard, it does in fact get hot here in Texas in the summer. It gets very hot. When my son agreed to mow the yard in return for money I suggested to him that he might want to mow early in the morning when it was only warm, instead of later in the day when it would be hot, or later in the afternoon when it would be approaching blast furnace status.
Mowing the yard early in the morning on a weekend would mean that he would have to get up early in the morning on a weekend. For those of you who do not have teenage children, you would not understand the absurdity of that last statement. Teenagers do not get up early in the morning of their own volition, ever. Weekends especially. This left the hotter part of the day and the blast furnace of the afternoon. To make a long story short, he procrastinated till the later afternoon, when the day was at its hottest (close to or above triple digit temperatures) and was miserable as a result.
3. Make sure your staff knows how to use the tools needed to get the job done. Just because you know how to do it doesn’t mean they know how to do it.
I showed my son where the tools were that he would need to do the yard. I was also pretty sure he already knew where the yard was. What more would he need? His objective was to take the tools, apply them to the yard, and then to let me know when his objective was complete. I would then applaud his ingenuity.
By my third trip out to the garage to show him how to start and operate the trimmer, the edger and the lawn mower, I suspected that I might not have set him up for success in his initial attempt at the yard. I had assumed that he had seen me performing the task often enough before that he would know how to do it. Perhaps if he had not been so engrossed in his video games he would have been better prepared, but I digress. It was my responsibility to make sure he knew how use all the tools. I also should have shown him when it was cooler in the garage.
4. We are paid for the job. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to do it. It is the completion of the job that counts.
Mowing the yard is not a difficult task. I have done it for years myself before I hit upon the idea of paying my son to do it. It doesn’t take an overly long time to do it. We live in an area where the lots are standard size for a suburban subdivision. It doesn’t take a lot of physical effort. Over time I have acquired all the automated and motorized tools (including a self propelled lawn mower) needed to accomplish the task. In short, I had a reasonable idea of how long it would take and how much effort would be required to get the yard done.
I had not however expected an underly-enthusiastic approach by a fourteen year old teenager (my staff in this instance) who would have much preferred to be inside out of the heat doing something else and just be given the money. By the time all the struggles and complaints were accounted for he took roughly twice as long to do the yard as either of us anticipated. As such he immediately asked for a raise. I reminded him that I was paying him to mow the yard, not paying him by the hour to mow the yard. If he worked at applying himself a little better to where it did not take so much time to mow the yard he would be much happier and realize a better return on his time investment.
5. Set the expectation of the quality of work to be delivered. Standards of performance differ and what may be acceptable to one may not be acceptable to another.
When I mow the yard I try to do the best job mowing the yard that I can. I try to take that approach with just about every job I take on, either at the office or in the yard. I like to know that I have not shortchanged myself or anyone else with my effort. Again I thought that since he had seen how the yard looked after I had done the work; my son would understand how I expected the yard to look when he was done.
He finished, came in, asked for his pay and then went upstairs to cool off and play more video games. All was good, or so I thought. Later my wife came in and asked me if there was anything wrong with me. I said no and wondered why she would ask. She said that the yard did not look the way it normally did after I mowed it and wondered if there was something wrong with me when I had been mowing it. It seemed it was time to actually go out and look at my son’s work product.
6. Hold a brief review at the completion of the project. When the project is done understand what went wrong and what went right. There may be differences of opinion.
Whenever a project is presented to you as complete, review it, then review it with the person that presented it to you. I had just assumed he would do the yard the way I did the yard. I had not gone outside to look at the yard because it was hot. If I had wanted to get hot I would have mowed the yard myself. When I did go outside I could see that my son’s objective was not to do the yard the way I would do it or to my standards, but rather to get it done to a level where he could in fact claim that it was indeed (mostly) mowed and that he should be paid.
I had neither properly set the expectations for the job, nor immediately reviewed the final project upon completion. I assumed that since he lived in the same house as me he would have the same pride of ownership and in his work product that I had. Needless to say we did go back outside (in the heat) and note the areas that needed to be edged and trimmed, and in some instances actually mowed since the objective was to mow the entire yard, not just the parts that are only visible from the street.
My son will get the opportunity to mow the yard again next week since I expect the grass to continue to grow. I hope he has learned what is expected of him and is aware of the ef
fort that the expectation will entail if he hopes to delight his management. I have relearned that just because I have done it and know what it takes to deliver a high quality work product, that not everyone else will know how to do it just because they have seen me do it. Management always needs to be clear about their expectation, guidelines, training and reviews.
Now if only these ideas would work with my daughter and her driving habits.
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.
Strategic Business
“Strategic” business is an interesting concept. It is normally used by sales teams to denote business that is believed to be so important as to be opportunities that are categorized as “Must Win” business regardless of the costs. This can be due to the size of the business, the desire to obtain market position or to keep a competitor from obtaining market position, or any number of other good, well meaning reasons. In my experience the one characteristic that all “Strategic” business has in common is that it is unprofitable. Strategic business is invariably the sales code phrase for “We want a lower price.” There may be competitive reasons for the desired lower price. There may be higher costs associated with the opportunity that customer doesn’t wish to absorb or pay for. There may in fact be increased competition. There may be expectations by the customer for greater savings. The list can go on and on. The point here is that none of these reasons are strategic. They are tactics, either by the sales team or the customer, to get a lower price.
The strategic business approach can also be seen when a large multi-product supplier is dealing with a large multi-product using customer. The idea posited here will be if a lower price is obtained for one product it will be to the benefit of all the other products that are being sold to the same customer.
Wait a minute, how does that go again?
I am of the opinion that all business is important and that all business should be profitable. It would seem in this scenario that some business is less important that other business. In this case it would appear that it is the Profitable business that is less important. After all, it’s not strategic. How do you decide which business is going to sacrifice its profitability for the sake of the other businesses? How do you prove the linkage between the unprofitable strategic business, and the profitable non-strategic business? Does the supplying company recognize that one (or more) of its businesses has been positioned and priced as a strategic business and measure its performance accordingly?
Strategic plans are those business plans where the growth and profitability for the business are mapped out over a longer horizon (usually 3 to 5 years). They provide directions and goals. They focus on the growth of both revenue and profitability of the business as well as the evolution of older products to newer ones. Strategic business, if there truly is such a thing, should also be focused on the long term growth of both the business revenues and profitability. It would seem that strategic business would only be associated with new products, new revenue sources and the new profitability associated with them.
Under these types of definitions for strategic business, it is very hard to justify any type of unprofitable business as strategic, particularly for existing products or services. I have said before that customers associate value with that which they pay for. If you provide goods and services to them at reduced prices then they will assume going forward that those goods and services have a reduced value. If strategic business is based on longer term future growth, do you really want to grow what has now been priced to the customer as an unprofitable business?
If there is value to your customer in the goods or services that you are providing them, then you should be entitled to a profit margin. It is the profit margin that enables you to pay your costs as well as look for new goods and services to supply your customers in the future. This is the basic tenet of business. Customers will continue to apply pressure for lower prices. Competition may also generate downward pressures on prices. As a provider of the goods or services you will continue to try and find new ways to reduce costs and to become more efficient. Downward price pressure and the ability to remove costs and increase efficiencies of the business will eventually hit the point of diminishing returns.
I have talked in the past about the need to prune products and services from the business portfolio when they have reached an end of useful life scenario. Part of that end of life decision is based on the time when either your customer will no longer pay you an appropriate price where you can generate a reasonable margin, or your costs are such that you can no longer reduce them to the point where you can generate a competitive price at a reasonable margin. As I said earlier, if there is value the customer will pay for it. If there is not enough value to the customer for them to pay for it, then the supplier should no longer provide it.
If you have an existing product, service or business where you are having problems generating the prices and margins that are needed for viability going forward, there may be a push to look at the “strategic” importance of the product, service or business for the “greater good” of the company. These types of discussions ring hollow. There is nothing strategic about unprofitable business for existing products and services. Each product, service and business needs to be able to stand on its own and justify its future viability based on its own revenues and profitability. Unprofitable “strategic” business is still unprofitable business.
One way to make sure that strategic business is in reality profitable business is to align the revenue objectives of the sales team with the profitability objectives of the business. Some business opportunities are more valuable (more profitable) than other business opportunities. If the sales team is rewarded for more profitable business, and is not rewarded for less profitable business, the focus will be placed on profitability and the more profitable business. Strategic business will either need to be profitable, or it will no longer be so strategic.
Expect What You Inspect
I was thinking back to some of the sales and revenue meetings that I had attended. These are normally meetings where the top line is the focus of management’s attention. This is arguably step one in any business process. One of my favorite phases is to state that in order to have a good bottom line you need to start with a good top line. This sounds pretty logical, but you might be surprised by some of the directions that some of these meetings have taken. Top line review meetings invariably go in one of two directions; if the top line is below the objective, you stay focused on sales and revenue and what steps must be taken to achieve the targets. If the top line is at or above the targets, the meeting will almost immediately begin to focus on the margins that the sales are contributing. The focus of the sales meeting then becomes margins. You are inspecting sales, but are expecting margins. This got me thinking further about some of the operations reviews that I have attended. The idea of these reviews is to see if the operations and service level objectives are being met. Again I recalled that these meetings invariably went in one of two directions, depending on the measurement attainment. If the operational and service objectives were not met, they stayed focused on service. If the operational and service levels were met, the meeting changed focus to profitability. They were inspecting service levels, but expecting profitability. The point I am making here is that you should only expect what you inspect. If you are only inspecting sales, then sales are all you should expect. Too many times we have seen the volume of sales go up in accordance with the attention it has received, only to see a change or reversal of course when the lower margins associated with those increased sales come to light. The same sort of events seems to occur when the incremental expenses associated with increased service levels come to light. Again too many times we have seen the service levels go up in accordance with management attention, only to pull back when the costs associated with those higher service levels come to light. If you are going to inspect both the volume and margins on sales, you will need to make the sales team responsible for both sales volumes and margins. If you have a sales team that is only responsible for, and compensated on volumes, then margins will continually be an issue associated with sales. If you are going to inspect both the operational levels and profitability then the operations team needs to have responsibility for both the service capabilities and the associated profitability. If the operations team is only measured on their operational performance levels, then the costs and profitability associated with those functions will continually be an issue. When metrics are provided to any team as a means of inspecting their performance, expect that team to focus on the actions required to attain the goals associated with the metrics. There are always tradeoffs in business. Lower margins may be required in order to increase sales. If the sales teams do not have the responsibility to evaluate those sales volumes to lower margin tradeoffs, they won’t. You can continue to have sales inspections with the sales team, but you will need to have a margin inspection with some other team. The same goes for operations. If service levels are the only focus that the operations team is to be measured on, they will do whatever is necessary to meet those service levels. If they are not required to evaluate the tradeoffs between desired service levels and profitability, they won’t. It will be left to someone else. Individual, team and business unit inspections need to be aligned with overall business expectations and requirements. If you only inspect one aspect of a desired performance, then that will be the only aspect that receives focus. If you only inspect the volume of sales, expect good volumes. If you do not inspect the margins associated with those sale, do not expect good margins. The same goes for operational goals and profitability. I suppose the same could be said for just about any function within the organization. If you are going to expect multiple facets of behavior and performance, you will need to measure and inspect each of the facets and behaviors collectively. If you inspect them individually, don’t expect them all to be met.
Information…or Punishment
Business and project reviews are good opportunities for leaders to get a view into the business on how it is performing. They need to be scheduled often enough so that topics and trends can be identified before they become issues, and not so often that they become onerous and drain time and resources away from the business in preparing for them.
How often should you have them? Monthly? Every two Months? Quarterly? I think that it depends on the actual cycle time of the business. By cycle time I mean the amount of time that must pass before the results of an action can be recognized in the business’s financial reports. Hi-tech business cycle times are normally on the order of months.
However, we have all been in organizations where managers have uttered the immortal phrase “We will have weekly reviews on this issue until it is resolved…” It is good to let the team know which topic is a high priority and what is not, but a leader should not take this approach for several reasons.
If you are truly committed to this approach you have to be prepared to attend every one of these reviews. As soon as you fail to attend, or send a delegate, you are communicating to the team that the issue is no longer as high a priority to you. The team will also take that into account as they set and work their own priorities.
The other aspect of this action is, what are you trying to achieve? If you understand your business’s cycle time, and you know it is longer than the periodicity of the reviews, what do you hope to gain, or learn from the more frequent reviews? It is in this area that information transfer becomes perceived as a punishment. You are in effect telling your team that you did not like the information that they provided you, and that you will hold repeated reviews until they provide you the information that you do like.
A better approach is to take and assign action items at the initial review. The action items can and should be specific and should have response and delivery objectives that are well in advance of the next regularly scheduled review. That way changes and actions can be taken quickly, feedback can be obtained in advance of the next review, and enough time can be provided to recognize the financial impact of the changes. In this way you can communicate the priority of a topic, the actions that you feel need to be taken, assign time lines and monitor progress, without turning what should be a useful communication session into a perceived ordeal and punishment.
Remember, if you are perceived as punishing people for bringing you what you feel is bad news, they will stop bringing you the issues. By taking the action item approach you can encourage the early discussion of potential issues and help work to avoid them. The team will appreciate the leadership.
The Black Swan
Have you ever seen a Black Swan? I had to go out and Google it to see if they really exist. They do. All the other swans that I have seen were white. When someone mentions swans I think of white ones. It was a common expression in the early U.K. as a statement that describes an impossibility, from the old world presumption that “all swans must be white”, because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers. The Idea of a Black swan was outside my initial perception set. I guess it shouldn’t have been. If we can have white (albino) tigers, why can’t we have Black Swans?
So what?
A gentleman by the name of Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a book in 2007, by the name of The Black Swan. Taleb asserted, “What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable. I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability.” He goes further to state “A small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives.”
I think we need to apply this theory to business. In looking at the various corporate cultures and methods of business conduct that I have been associated with, I see many, many white swans. When I look back at the various roles I have had throughout my career, I find that I was my most successful when I decided to operate outside what was then the expected norm and go my own new/different way. I had my highest impact on the organization, and I was my most successful.
The Dallas Cowboys Are Starting to get it Right
I think there is a very good lesson to be learned from the recent success of the Dallas Cowboys football team. Much had been made about their poor record and poor performances in “December” in the past several years. This year they have done well by winning some of their high profile December games.
All of the sudden all the analysts and critics are back on the Dallas Cowboys band wagon. They are riding high. The team is riding high. The fans are riding high. Success makes life good. I too am impressed by their recent performance, but I also remember the words of one of their previous and most successful coaches, Jimmy Johnson.
He said to enjoy the success, but to remember that you were only one week from humility.
What he was saying is that past performances and successes would not guarantee future successes. You had to continue to work hard, and continue to perform at the levels that generated your success if you wanted to be a success in the future. The competition is always going to try and beat you.
The challenge for you and your business is going to be to look forward and continue to try and step up your performance, and fight the urge to look back and bask in the glory of previous victories. You have already been paid for those.
As for the Dallas Cowboys, we’ll see how they do. They may have found the key to improving their December performance, but they still have not won a playoff game in 14 years……..