More is Less and Less is More

In the professional world time is a valuable commodity not to be squandered frivolously.  Unfortunately, there is no shortage of time-wasting, mind-numbing tasks, meetings and people who insatiably devour this limited commodity.

One of the biggest time wasters is when people don’t get to the point.  When I get trapped into these types of conversation my mind always flashes back to the Seinfeld sitcom episode (http://imdb.to/1PzuQuQ) where Jerry, George, Ellen and Kramer spend the entire show wandering around a multi-level car park trying to remember where they parked the car.  Instead of Kramer (or any of them) investing a moment to note down the car’s location, which is both important and relevant, they need to search every corner, aisle and level for the vehicle.  Of course all sorts of others antics ensue during their epic search.   

If people spent even a moment to think about the importance and relevance of their point when communicating in a professional setting we would probably not get lost so often in irrelevant details and exhaustive explanations.

There is a tendency for people to admire and respect a person who is able to articulate their ideas in a clear and concise manner.  It not only shows consideration for another person’s time, but it shows their ability to have a meaningful and controlled conversation.

Taking even a few minutes to reflect on why you need to have the conversation, send the email, or call for a meeting can save you and those involved a lot of frustration and grief.

When working with clients with this particular issue I always ask them to equate their message with writing an article in a newspaper.  People tend to scan through the paper to see if there are any headlines of interest to them.  If they find one the scanning continues to the sub-headlines in the article.  If something peaks their curiosity then they can read the section for more details.  

People tend to ask 2 questions when filtering through the headlines in a newspaper:

1. Why is this important to me?

2. Why is this relevant to me?

When you begin a conversation in a work situation people will be asking themselves these same questions.  Invest a little time up front by knowing what the take home message is and then qualify it by answering the above two questions.

If your communication is an email, report or presentation then you might want to further consider the governing details, which are akin to the sub-headlines in an article.  They are the major points to your take home message.  If people are interested in the minutiae then they will ask. 

When it comes to communication at work the dictum more is less and less is more is both important and relevant.

Curious!  Please visit us at wwww.MINDtalk.no

Never, ever advise!

'We see the world as we are, and not as the world is. ' - Anaïs Nin

I admit that the title of this entry is a little over the top. Advice does come in handy, but we need to think about how and when we give advice. You may be a parent, a leader, a coach, a friend and so on. Regardless or your role or roles, I think this short entry is useful.

I want you to imagine that you and your significant other decided it was time to upgrade your computers. You make a jaunt down to the local GeeksRus and purchase two computers. They are completely identical software and hardware wise.

After a few months of use you one day forget your pc at the office. You borrow your significant other's. You find after only a few seconds that you cannot make heads or tails of rhe pc in front of you. Nothing is where it should be. It all seems so disorganized to you, but it makes complete sense to her or him.

This is an analogy that describes how each of our brains are wired. From a distance they look identical, but upon closer inspection each brain is completely unique.

Each of us has our own set of experiences and lessons learned that are unique to us. This forms a kInd of mental map, which influences how we each perceive and interact with the world. How each of us stores, encodes, organizes these lessons and experiences are also as indiviual as we are.

When it comes to us advising another person as to how to accomplish or tackle a situation, we are advising them from our perspective of the world. We are not taking into account their map of the world.

This is where a shift in thinking is needed. We may know from experience the best way to overcome an obstacle that is proven time and again to be effective. What we have to remember that we've had time to integrate this method into our map of the world. Someone confronting the same obstacle may be doing so for the first time. They have no map.

If we want to help them, it is best for us to allow them to connect the dots. So instead of advising we can ask well-engineered questions to help direct their thinking in the right direction.

Questions allow for the person to make the logical connections, and thus integrate the information into their mental map. An 'aha' moment usually soon follows. They see the light.

Questions that flow from the well of experience and knowledge is so much more valuable to a learner than straight-forward advise that flows from the same well.

- On the road with my iPhone

Twitter as a Business Tool?

I've been using Twitter for a few weeks now. I finally decided to to jump in and actively use the service for a number of reasons. One, it was to create a community around people interested in coaching, psychology, leadership and general business. Second, I found that it grabs the attention of crawling search engines, and subsequently, drives a lot of a traffic to my website. Third, (mind you it is only a very small fraction) it has generated business for me and MINDtalk, in the way of new clients.

Twitter is still a tool that I have yet to fully utilize. That is, there is still much about it that I can learn to use.

As I usually do, I crawl the latest blogs looking for new insights that can add to my knowledge-base. I found this one interesting blog entry from a tweet, and it's about Twitter as seen from a management model.

Please visit the original source at http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/115317. Enjoy the following entry by Gary Eckstein.

Twitter will not Survive - A Management Model Explanation

by Gary Eckstein

When consumers have little choice or when a product, technology or service is at the very beginning of the Product Lifecycle (also termed the Product Life Cycle), quality is not as an important differentiator as in mature products or markets. Quality becomes increasingly important as the product or market matures and moves through the Product Lifecycle stages.

What is the Product Lifecycle?

The Product Lifecycle (variously attributed to Levitt, Bartels, Converse and others) has four stages; Introduction, Growth, Maturity and Decline (the Lifecycle is sometimes presented as a five stage model; Introduction, Growth, Maturity, Saturation and Decline). A new product or service moves through the Lifecycle stages and each stage has distinct characteristics. The purpose of this article is not to explain the Product Lifecycle in depth but there are various excellent resources which explain this model.

What is Quality Management?

Quality Management is about improving the quality of products and services and ensuring that quality meets defined criteria. The quality of a service or product is a differentiating factor as may be seen with the success of Japanese Auto companies and the decline of the American Auto giants (e.g. GM and Chrysler). Japanese Car makers such as Toyota realized that competitive advantage may be attained through manufacturing Cars of a superior quality to those of American competitors. This quality focus has certainly shown its market relevance.

Quality Management and the Product Lifecycle

Quality becomes an increasingly important consumer decision factor as a product or service moves through the Lifecycle. In the Introduction and early stages of the Growth stage of the Product Lifecycle, consumers are ‘early adopters’ and are generally willing to accept quality flaws as a trade-off to being the first to own or use the new product. As the product moves into the Maturity stage and beyond consumers have more product choice therefore are more quality conscious.

As an example of this think of early Cellular/Mobile phone networks. Early adopters accepted poor reception however consumers will no longer consider poor reception.

Google Search, Quality Management and the Product Lifecycle

Here is a topical example of the importance of quality and how it relates to the Product Lifecycle: Google originally gained search market share quickly based on two quality basics; search speed and search accuracy. Before Google arrived, Lycos, Yahoo and other major search engines of the time offered slow and inaccurate results on the Search Results Pages (SERPs). Google appeared at the beginning of the Growth stage of the Search Engine product lifecycle and is a great example of the fact that being first to market is not necessarily as important as ensuring quality. Google Search is also a very good example of ongoing quality improvement. Google is constantly updating its search algorithms in order to best deliver the most accurate results to people as quickly as possible.

Twitter and impending Doom

Twitter looks to be in some trouble! Sure the number of Twitter users is increasing at an impressive rate however the micro-blogging industry is in its infancy (i.e. the Introduction stage). There aren’t many viable/realistic micro-blogging competitors out there. If Twitter is to micro-blogging what Yahoo was to Search in the 1990’s, then Twitter needs to concentrate on quality … and fast. Twitter is storing vast and escalating volumes of data. Increasingly low quality or ‘spam’ type data is appearing on Twitter and the recent ping attack on Twitter shows that it is in the sights of disruptive predators. Google is also making its search far more time relevant which has been one of Twitter’s key strengths up until now.

As micro-blogging progresses along the product Lifecycle consumers will want increasing quality in terms of relevancy of data. Just at a time when quality is becoming more important, the quality of Twitter content is subsiding. Micro-blogging competitors and new entrants must be feeling rather positive at present just as Google felt when they took on the giants of Search of the time in the form of Yahoo and Lycos.