It’s Time for Business Leaders to Step in When Government Fails.
Published November 20, 2011 | 
Howard Shultz, CEO of Starbucks, has it right. Government officials are digging their heels into their antagonistic positions and blaming each other for not enabling workable solutions and a consensus to implement them. He proposed that people boycott making election donations to politicians who seem to be using the money to attack their competition, rather than generate new solutions.
If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem. With government effectively frozen for the next 12 months until the 2012 election, he recently announced the “Create Jobs for America” program; he’s leveraging the power of Starbucks to reach 60 million people and enable them to contribute money ($5.00 or more) to be used to help create jobs by donating it to the Opportunity Financial Network which lends money to small businesses. His goal is to engage other businesses in this worthy enterprise.
But the real goal has to be larger. It’s time for business leaders throughout America to step in and create new solutions when government fails. These leaders constantly confront challenges that affect stakeholder’s lives – employees, community residents, investors, etc. They look for tried-and-true approaches as well as creative new ones, and then apply them to resolve the situation. When they succeed, everyone benefits.
Mr. Shultz re-assumed the helm of Starbucks after the company stopped growing due to
overexpansion, the economic recession and other causes. He challenged the status quo,
adopted new approaches and turned the company around. And now with the company
back on track for growth, he’s taking this no-nonsense problem-solving approach and
applying it to societal problems.
We need more leaders to do this. As Chairman of a local CEO group for Vistage International (www.vistagenewyork.com), I have the opportunity to watch these business leaders confront challenges with creative approaches and produce impressive results. Imagine unleashing the potential problem solving skills not just of the 14,500 Vistage CEOs, but millions of other business leaders throughout the USA to take the initiative and develop creative solutions to the challenges people face, without being dragged into party politics. It’s what we need to do.
Enabling leaders to realize their ability to confront business challenges creatively is the first step toward engaging them to step outside the business realm and address societal challenges. That’s one of the two driving forces behind the newest venture that I’ve co-founded, LeaderSolutions.TV. It provides a forum through which business leaders can share how they confronted challenges creatively, and allow others to learn from their experiences. Listening to the many varied stories will undoubtedly inspire one another.
As leaders increasingly recognize their abilities to creatively attack their company problems, I hope they increasingly will step outside their businesses, and apply their drive, insights and energy to address societal challenges – just as Howard Schultz has done. I chose to gain psychological, legal and management skills many years ago to work within the government sector to make this world a better place. Yet, after a few years, I felt I could better use my creative skills to create new solutions within the private sector and inspiring young people by teaching in universities to do the same.
However, today, with government frozen, and time to solve our economic, energy and other challenges slipping away very quickly, I believe business leaders need to take the initiative in developing solutions to the societal problems and gaining consensus to implement them. While government is the problem, business leaders need to drive the solutions.
The Psychology of Presentations
Published July 25, 2011 | A presentation is more than just numbers and facts. You’re dealing with people. Here are five helpful points to remember when working on your presentation.
- Provide Social Proof. Sharing how your clients are using your product provides confidence. Sharing with a prospect reference clients they recognize offers a kind of endorsement that facilitates decision making.
- Risk Aversion Beats Gaining Benefits. Sales 101 teaches us not to focus on the features, but the benefits. But sales 201 builds on the psychological finding that people are more likely to avoid risk than seek gains. Therefore, it’s more persuasive to show a prospect what he will lose if he doesn’t follow through on your action than what he will gain. (E.g., if your competitor buys our product first, he will have the competitive edge!)
- Provide benchmarks for success. We all look for feedback. Having a way to measure some level of success encourages us to believe that the situation is working – reducing risk and providing gain.
- Alignment for Sales Proposition. Demonstrate that the benefits of the product/service are aligned with the buyer’s goals, both personally and professionally.
- Let the prospect experience your product/service. If there is a way to give the prospect something in advance – such as free trial – it engages the person who can then internalize the positive feelings toward the product and your generosity, rather than be a passive observer.
What’s Your Biggest Public Speaking Fear
Published July 11, 2011 | Almost everyone gets anxious when they make a presentation. That’s why Mike Keller wrote the book I’d Rather Die Than Give A Speech! But not all of us are equally anxious in different situation. Speakers most often fear speaking in front of large groups. So, we thought we’d focus on techniques to handle these fears.
Why is speaking in small groups easier?
- We’re used to speaking one-on-one and in small groups, at home, in the office, at community functions, etc. We harness our normal conversational “comfort zone” when making such presentations. And that is the way it should be: a presentation really is nothing more than a focused (and hopefully rehearsed) conversation in which you can use visuals to complement what you say.
- All our lives, we’ve learned how to “read” other people and use their body language and verbal feedback to determine whether we’re “connecting”. Indeed, we often look for such feedback (eyes connecting, heads shaking, smiles approving, etc.) to encourage us through a presentation.
In large groups:
- We lose the ability to harness the “conversational” comfort zone, because our brain thinks of this as something different a “scary presentation”
- We’re insecure about the quality of the presentation: do I really know the content?; is the message succinct or longwinded? is it compelling or just another boring presentation? will my presentation make me proud or embarrass me?
- We’re not able to get feedback, especially if the audience of 50-1000 is in a darkened room
Tips for overcoming the fears:
- Do your homework and be competent about your presentation topic, structure and design.
- Identify a few people in the audience before the event to speak to and put them in the first few rows. Alternatively, at the beginning of the presentation, use eye contact to connect to a few people scattered through the front rows until a few subconsciously give you feedback (e.g., shake their head, smile, etc.).
- Tap into your “conversational comfort zone” by talking to these people and use their feedback to reinforce you. Since they are scattered throughout the audience, everyone near them will think you are talking to them – and many will start giving you feedback, further making you feel more comfortable presenting.
- Remember, a presentation is simply a focused conversation.
How do you deal with your public speaking fears? Reply in the comments!
Cross-Cultural Communications
Published June 27, 2011 | Think of all the miscommunications you experience in an average week – and realize that most are with people who share your culture. You can then appreciate how much more complex it is to be an effective communicator in a world where we interact with people in China, India, Latin America, Russia Mideast, etc. who don’t share your cultural norms and business traditions.
Different cultural values, beliefs and norms
Every culture has its own set of shared values, beliefs and behavioral norms. For instance, while Americans generally value individualism/independence, focus on time to control the future, tend to be direct, open, honest and practical, other cultures are more concerned with the group’s welfare, respecting the past, people’s rank and status, indirectness and ritual. People’s value of time, deadline, accountability, etiquette when engaging others of differing ages and characteristics, all impact on direct and indirect communications, relationships, decision making, motivation, leadership and organizational structures. Most of us develop our personality and communication styles as we grow up within our culture. But when we interact with people from different cultures, conflicts can occur unless each party is sensitive to the cultural discrepancies and language differences, and adjusts to them. For instance, when doing business with people in India, it’s advisable to be properly attired (wearing non- leather products), avoid beckoning with the palm up, wagging a finger, whistling, winking or pointing one’s feet at a person, and know when and how to use words like “no” and “thank you”.
Each medium has its own communication dimensions
In face-to-face situations, what you say, how you say it, your physical appearance, body “language”, listening skills, and manner of response all play a role. In phone conversations, the importance of verbal and listening skills is magnified, because there is no visual feedback. In e-mails, the power of each word or phrase, the document’s organization and formality, response time, and how you use technology (e.g., instant messenger) all have meanings. Finally, how each party interprets the use of the medium is based on cultural values (e.g., urgency and importance), also determines the impact.
Are You Perfect?
Published May 9, 2011 | If you’re like most people I know, you’re not perfect – and therefore susceptible to the common causes of failure.
In business strategy and leadership courses, we often focus on Best Practices to help guide students. Some courses now also focus on the flip-side: why leaders commit key errors. For instance, Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right, includes a chapter on “The Six Habits of Highly Unrealistic Leaders”. I thought I’d share it with you.
According to Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan there are six common causes of failure to confront changing realities. I add a seventh:
- Filtered information. Given the increasing complexity of life and the overwhelming amount of information available, filters help us avoid overload. But in doing so, key information challenging basic assumptions may not get through.
- Selective hearing. As humans, we do the same thing: we filter the information to which we attend and often seek information to corroborate our initial decisions
- Wishful thinking. In a world of complexity, doubt and uncertainty, people sometimes resort to wishful thinking. The Bay of Pigs fiasco of 1962 is an example.
- Fear. Facing uncertainty and the unknown, Kahneman and his fellow Nobel prize economists proved that people prefer to avoid losses than seek out gains.
- Emotional overinvestment. Adopting new behaviors and attitudes means giving up older ones; when people are emotionally overinvested, they downgrade the logic of the argument in order to resist change.
- Unrealistic expectations of capital markets. Capital markets focus on quarterly changes, even though true changes, such as a product branding or business development effort can take much longer.
- Inertia. Human nature, like the real-world, resists change. Once we’re comfortable with what exists, it’s hard to recognize that change may be essential. Think of all the companies that were successfully making a nice profit on products (e.g., floppy disk, buggy-whips and netbooks) while other companies were building new products (flash-memory, cars and ipads).
One of the reasons I agreed to chair a CEO group for Vistage, is that the 12+ members of a typical group know that their job is to provide each other with:
- Objective perceptions when a member is falling into one of these traps
- Creative new solutions to overcome business challenges
- Accountability for taking steps necessary to get quality information, avoiding these psychological traps.
My CEO group, which calls itself the Game Changers, is especially focused on avoiding these causes of failure and facilitating adoption of best practices. If you’re in NYC and want to join, feel free to contact me.