Working at the Speed of Life

Authors:

Chip & Dan Heath

Premise:

What is it about certain ideas/stories that makes people remember them?  Made to Stick breaks down a number of different messages/stories and analyzes what makes them compelling enough to remember.  Breaking down the analysis in this way shows you how you can get your messages to STICK, so not only can you learn how others have done it, but how you can do it too.
The book focuses on six principals that help your messages stick.  Interestingly enough the acronym spells SUCCESs.  Leave off the last “S” for savings.  I know a really bad reference to 1-800-Mattres commercial.  Each principle has it’s own chapter.

Before I start, I’d like to say that this post should be not be used as a substitution for reading the book.  I’m not Cliff Notes, I am just trying to create interest so that you will actually go and read the book.

SUCCESs:

So lets discuss the six principals and why they work.

Simple

This principle focuses on identifing the core of your message, the single most important thing.  The core should be simple & compact.  In the book the authors refer to a concept called Commander’s Intent (CI), which is taken from the military.  The following lines are taken directly from the book.

“CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation.”

“Commander’s Intent manages to align the behavior of soldiers at all levels without requiring play-by-play instructions from their leaders.”

Examples:

Herb Kelleher (longest serving CEO of Southwest airlines).  ”We are THE low-fair airline.”, this was the CI used to make decisions for the company.  If it didn’t satisfy the CI, then it wasn’t done.

James Carville (key political advisor to President Clinton during his campaign).  ”It’s the economy, stupid.”, was the message that would become the core of Clinton’s successful campaign.

Unexpected

This principle focuses on getting people attention and then holding on to it once you have it.  They key aspect the authors talk about is to break peoples mental model of what they think you are going to say or what they think they know.  Surprise gets their attention, but how do you maintain it.  This is done by getting the audience behind the goal/message.  One way is to create some mystery around the message.  It’s in our nature to try and figure things out.  The local news uses this approach extremely well.

“Which local restaurant has slime in their ice machine?”  Find out at 11:00.

Concrete

The more abstract the concept, the less likely people are going to remember it.  Concrete ideas are easier to remember.  Experiments in human memory have shown that people are better at remembering concrete, easily visualized nouns than abstract ones.  People remember things that they can visualize in their heads.  A few exmples:

Abstract:  High-performance

Concrete:  V8 engine

Abstract:  World-class customer service

Concrete:  A Nordstrom representative gift wrapping an item from Macy’s.

Credible

Credibility helps people believe in the message.  There are a number of way to build credibility into your message.  I’m only going to talk about a few of them.  In an Anti-Smoking campaign that ran in the mid-1990s the main spokes person was a woman that had been smoking since she was 10 years old.  She had been smoking for about 20 years.  The campaign followed this woman as she struggled to live while slowly suffocating because of her failing lungs.  The campaign didn’t use statistics or a lot of data, they used what the authors call an Anti-Authority, they put a human behind the message.

Another way to establish credibility is to provide statistics in a way that people understand, in more of a human scale.  As an example:

“Scientists recently computed an important physical constraint to an extraordinary accuracy.  To put the accuracy in perspective, imagine throwing a rock from the Sun to the Earth and hitting the target within on third of a mile of dead center.”

“Scientists recently computed an important physical constraint to an extraordinary accuracy.  To put the accuracy in perspective, imaging throwing a rock from New York to Los Angeles and hitting a $0.50 coin.”

Which statement seems more accurate & impressive?

If you do the math, the scales are both the same, but studies have shown that more people, over 80% think that to achieve the second statement is more impressive.  This is because they can better comprehend the distance between New York and Los Angles than between the Sun and Earth.

Emotional

This principle is geared towards making people care about the message.  Making you feel something.  The beginning of this chapter opens up with a quote from Mother Teresa, “If I look at the mass, I will never act.  If I look at the one, I will do.”  This statement encapsulates the way most people behave.  Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University conducted test to prove this behavior.  You have to read the book to get the details.  The key thing here is to make your audience feel something about your message.

Stories

The final principal focuses on creating stories.  ”Stories are effective teaching tools.  They show how context can mislead people to make the wrong decisions.  Stories illustrate causal relationships that people hadn’t recognized before and highlight unexpected, resourceful way in which people have solved problems.”

The reason why stories are an effective tool, is that when we are listening to a story, out minds are creating a mental model of what is being told.  Our brains are visualizing the objects that are being talked about and how the interactions are being played out as the story unfolds.

Stories can also inspire us into action.  Most inspirational stories have three types of plots, Challenge (to overcome obstacles), Connection (to get along or reconnect), and Creativity (to inspire a new way of thinking).

My Thoughts:

For anyone that has to communicate ideas either verbally or in written form, I think this book is a must read.  This book is for professionals in the consulting industry, teachers in schools, doctors, lawyers, etc.  Basically it’s for everyone, since we all need to communicate in order to function in this world.  Go out and buy the book.

I woke up this morning tired as usual, again.

I got ready and headed out the door before anyone else woke up, again.

Another day another dollar.

I worked until late, again.

Got home after the kids were already asleep.

Yet Again.

Long are the hours you wait for her to come.  Alone you sit, waiting for her to come.  The harder you try to find her the further away she seems.  She is unpredictable, coming only when it pleases her and leaving just as quickly as she came.  When you do finally find her, it is the most intense sensation you can experience.  She allows you to open yourself to all possibilities you couldn’t have imagined on your own.  Your successes you owe to her.  Treat her well and she will be your companion for life, abuse her and you can lose her forever.

Laying the foundation

Improve the efficiency of your team simply by changing the way you organize and think about your work. Organizations are typically composed of separate functional groups/departments that perform specific functions. Most organizations are setup this way regardless of their size or industry. Within these departments, there are the people that make the decisions (managers) and then there are the people that do the work (team). The managers are held accountable for the output of their team. Smaller departments roll up into a larger department. Those larger department then rolls up into another department and so on. Until you get to the very top, which is headed up by the elite executive team. The executive team is then responsible for the output of the entire organization. In this typical corporate structure, each department has it’s own management structure and team with their own goals & priorities. I’m sure that this isn’t ground breaking news for anyone, we’ve all seen this before.

So, what’s the problem?

The work within an organization is divided based on the function of the department and more specifically the role individuals play within that department. Managers define the work, the team executes on it. This is not to say that the managers don’t execute themselves, it just highlights that the team usually isn’t involved in the decision making process. Looking in from the outside, this all looks fairly normal and a good way to operate. You have people with specialized skills functioning within those parameters. This works really well in an ideal situation when there is enough work within each department to keep everyone 100% utilized.

Experience shows however that that there isn’t an ideal environment, there is always flux, especially in the services industry. All organizations experience this flux, which creates availability in one department while leaving a deficit in another. In most cases the groups that have an abundance of work will try to increase their team size, while the groups that don’t have enough work will either try to reduce theirs or will have availability which doesn’t add value to the organization. Availability should be viewed as inventory, you want just enough to service the current needs. Too much or too little inventory costs an organization money. There is enormous waste in individual departments continually trying to manage their own resourcing needs/constraints.

Well what else can be done, this is just the way it works. Every company faces this problem. The problem might exist for every company, but that doesn’t mean that you should try to solve it the same way as everyone else.

A different approach

The problem here isn’t how the teams/departments are structured, but how the work is divided and assigned. It turns out that this problem has already been solved, just in a slightly different context. Principals within lean manufacturing can be applied at the corporate/department levels. Instead of creating work based on functional groups/departments an alternative is to create and organize the work based task & priority. Many in the software development community have already embraced this new approach and have been applying it successfully towards their projects. Focusing the team on the tasks and priorities for the organization, puts the responsibility on the entire team not just the department heads. Teams will then organize around the task as opposed to their function, promoting cross functional collaboration. This approach allows the organization to leverage all of the skill sets of the team vs the specific function of their department. Not only can the organization take advantage of the untapped potential in their teams, but can prioritize the work based on what is going to add the most value to the company now. This now optimized the teams ability to add value and improved the overall organization efficiency.

The goal of this post is to create awareness of the problem. Subsequent posts will discuss specific things organizations can do to solve this problem.

I’ve recently been updating my resume, this is something I haven’t done in over 8 years. I’d recommend that you don’t wait as long as I did to get yours current. Let me tell you, it more difficult than I thought it would have been. I think there are a few reasons for this. The first issue is that I don’t think I’m a good writer, anyone see the irony here. The second issue was, it’s really hard for me to remember what I did last week let alone over the past 8 years. The third and most significant problem that I ran into was how the information was being presented. I’ve hired plenty of people over the years and have seen a ton of resumes. So my natural reaction was to copy the style and format of what I had seen in the past. The problem with that approach was that I didn’t like what I was putting together and I couldn’t figure out why. I was having a really hard time trying to articulate what I was really good at and what I wanted to do.  I then got a bit of inspiration from Garr Reynolds. After watching a few videos of Garr presenting and reading his book, I realized that my resume was a tool that I should use to present myself to others.  It’s really about showing who I am and what I am capable of.  Everyone has their own story and you should show off your uniqueness by telling that story.  I’ve tried to craft my resume in a way that tells my story.  Most resumes are just a bunch of bloated bullet points in which people are trying to cram in as much information as possible.  Hence the title of this post.  I am not a bullet point person, although my resume does contain them.  I am much more comfortable explaining complex ideas visually, drawing out relationships.  Why couldn’t I do that for my resume?  Why do I have to follow the same format as everyone else?  The key thing was to make sure I presented all of the relevant information.  The text of my resume now revolves around two diagrams that I created that for the most part capture everything I was trying to articulate in words.

My work history over the past 13 years

In a fairly quick glance someone will get a really good idea of where I worked and what roles I played at each organization and for how long.  

My growth as a professional from a technologist to an executive

The second diagram, which I think the more useful, shows the growth in my skill sets and the level of influence as my career evolved.

I am by no means saying that my approach is better than what has been done in the past.  I am merely showing there are alternatives than the status quo.  I’m always trying to learn so if you have any suggestions on how I can improve my resume please feel free to comment.

As I was putting this post together, a bunch of other questions came to mind.  I’ll talk about those in future posts.

I’ve finally made time to get a blog setup for myself.  Why setup a blog?  Well, over the years I have come across many concepts in various disciplines that I think are related.  I’ve never really written them down or tried to think through the consilience of those concepts. This blog is my way of trying to make sense of it all.  Hopefully others find it interesting as well.

This is the first time I’m using WordPress, so expect to see changes in layout and theme as I get more familiar with the application.  I don’t particularly like this layout.