Author: Mike

When the Right People and the Right Information Come Together, Expect a Masterpiece

“All knowledge is connected to all other knowledge. The fun is in making the connections.”

The remarkable man who said this quote, Arthur Aufderheide M.D. (1922-2013), certainly lived by these wise words.

Dr. Arthur Aufderheide

Dr. Arthur Aufderheide

Dr. Aufderheide was a medical school professor at the University of Minnesota who founded an entirely new area of scientific research: paleopathology – the study of the spread of disease through the forensic analysis of mummies (think of it as CSI: Ancient Civilizations!). He actively pursued his research with true passion for over 30 years, traveling the globe locating mummies, establishing best practices for their proper examination and extracting key specimens.

Dr. Aufderheide’s ground-breaking research was the perfect combination of his medical expertise with his personal passions for archaeology, outdoorsmanship and native world cultures. Simply put, he absolutely loved his work. His excitement and passion for his innovative research inspired his students and earned him widespread recognition from the global scientific community.

Dr. Aufderheide’s life work helps drive home two key points about successful, meaningful work and life:

First: Organizations with genuine passion for their mission will utilize technology and share information far more effectively than other companies.

Dr. Aufderheide’s career as a medical school professor was not his first. He had worked for decades as a hospital pathologist, a job he no longer found fulfilling. Had he opted to just count the days to early retirement, his remaining life work likely would have been mediocre at best. Instead, at the age of 55, he made a career change into academia, resulting in one heck of a “second act”: a highly fulfilling career and life.

Aufderheide’s tremendous passion for his work was key to successfully discover new insights from many far-flung sources of information that had been waiting for centuries to be discovered. Anyone else doing similar work just to blithely earn a paycheck surely would have made very few – if any – meaningful discoveries, much less establish a brand new field of scientific research.

Similarly, organizations with true passion for its mission will uncover more, better and faster business discoveries by collaboratively gaining new insight from big data analytics, enterprise search, enterprise knowledge management, and other silo-busting technologies. While dysfunctional organizations might actively resist sharing information, workers in enlightened companies are actively empowered by leadership to ask new questions about the business, while also being provided the advanced technology resources that enable them to find new answers.

Far from hoarding information, Aufderheide intentionally built a huge referenceable knowledge base of his work, including over 5,000 mummy specimens – the largest database of its kind in the world. And so Dr. Aufderheide’s work lives on today, enabling scientists to reconstruct the ways diseases behaved in antiquity, which can be helpful in controlling those diseases today.

Second: Organizations with a culture of genuine passion for their mission will outperform competitors that don’t.

Leaders with a true passion for their organization’s mission will insist on an open, positive company culture that enables everyone to pursue that mission to the fullest – free from company politics, turf wars or internal arguments.

Passionate leaders will also only hire people who will share their passion. At a recent roundtable event, startup exec John McEleney emphasized the need for start-ups to “have the right people on the bus” and keep mediocre players out of the organization by requiring any new potential hire to be referred by an existing employee.

Without a supportive company culture and proper hiring practices, an organization will reap what they sow, and end up with people who are just working for the money.

This all reminds me of Simon Sinek’s fantastic viral TEDx presentation – a must-watch (and well worth watching again!):

Well, that definitely describes the kind of organization I’d love to work for. How about you? 😉

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Beware the Curse of Too Much Knowledge

A great story from How to Become CEO, Jeffrey Fox’s first business bestseller, has stuck with me over the years:

One of the leading US automakers, desperate to improve gas mileage during the 1970’s energy crisis, called on its engineers to redesign its cars to be less heavy. But veteran engineers insisted that reducing the weight of cars would be unsafe, impractical and just plain impossible.

Of course, they were wrong. The automaker then brought in recent engineering grads who quickly proceeded to shed hundreds of pounds off the cars with no adverse impact.

The new engineers were successful because they were not constrained by preconceptions from years (even decades) of expertise. You can also say the veteran engineers failed because they knew too much!

This story is a great example of what my friend and product marketing consultant Neil Baron calls the “Curse of Too Much Knowledge.”

As Neil explained for Fast Company [ 1 ] [ 2 ], the Curse of Too Much Knowledge happens when an organization has an abundance of product expertise combined with a shortage of experience in successfully commercializing a product. This mismatch in skills results in ineffective value propositions and product messaging that fail to resonate with prospective customers.

The Curse of Too Much Knowledge is most likely to happen, Neil says, when a subject matter expert is brought in to lead its product marketing effort. Big mistake!

As Neil explains:

I regularly witness product technology experts struggle to explain what their product does in a way that non-experts can understand. As a result, it is difficult for a product expert to understand what it is like to be a non-expert and communicate effectively with them. And yet, these non-experts are often the key decision makers vital to the company’s success.

Instead, companies must find people to lead their commercialization effort who have successful product launch experience, a proven track record communicating complex ideas and have the ability to question your assumptions about your product and your customer.

Here are three additional suggestions to help “reverse the curse” of too much knowledge:

Go to the periphery. In addition to existing customers, communicate with co-workers in different departments, distant geographic regions, business units exploring new technology and others who are not personally “invested” in the technology. Discover the disconnects between subject matter experts living your products every day and the “periphery” of the business.

Talk to the “nons”, as in speaking with non-customers, non-employees and non-suppliers; those who do not interact with the company, whether for a particular reason (why?) or simply being unaware of your organization. What are their reactions to your value proposition? Do they “get it” and express some interest in it? If not, why not?

Engage your prospective customer so they say to you, “Tell me more.” This is key. Your product’s exceptional features are only relevant to your customer to the extent that they deliver new business-building, problem-solving benefits. That means your first responsibility as a marketer – or a seller – is to lead with those benefits (the “what” and “why” of your product) and not your product’s features. Your second responsibility is to be ready with succinct, compelling details – when asked by your prospective customer (the “how”). Think of these two responsibilities as your fastball and curve ball.

In his breakthrough original Solution Selling book, Michael Bosworth wrote that the best salespeople “keep all their product’s amazing features in their pockets [until the right time] – because they don’t use their product to sell – they use their product to prove.” He also added this:

If you see your competitors [setting up a slide presentation about] the history of their company and their product’s amazing features, smile to yourself. They will be easy for you to beat. They don’t know how to create a buyer.

Using Michael Bosworth’s same yardstick, if a marketer begins any given product messaging effort by deep-diving into a discourse on features instead of customer wants and needs, that’s a red flag suggesting they don’t know how to create a marketing lead – effectively or at scale.

Simply put, The Curse of Too Much Knowledge is caused by being so knowledgeable, so brilliant about your product, that you can’t explain it simply and effectively. Organizations that understand the risks and implications of The Curse of Too Much Knowledge are much more likely to actively avoid it all together, while effectively marketing and selling their technology and other innovative products.

If you liked this article, you may also like:

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“Begin with the Beginning in Mind” for Content Creation

Why the Best Product Marketers Are “Intelligently Disobedient”

How to Play and Win the Product Marketing Game Like a Chess Grandmaster

I have played chess since I was 9 or 10 years old and to this day still play in chess tournaments, live and online. Anyone interested in learning how to play chess should check out The Game of Chess by Tarrasch. Written over 75 years ago, it is still one of the best books of all time for chess beginners.

2020-05-04_11-47-41

Me playing (and winning 😄) speed chess at Central Park, NYC

One of the best chess books of all time for experienced players looking to become chess masters is Play Like a Grandmaster by Alexander Kotov. Unlike many chess books which often become obsolete over just a few years, Kotov’s book is just as valuable today as when it was first published in 1978.

Kotov’s advice for winning chess bears many similarities to the best practices for winning the product marketing game.

From Kotov’s book:

Players who wishes to improve, who want to win in competitive play, must develop their ability to evaluate the current position… Then the player moves on to general assessment [and then] draws up a plan.

Evaluate the current position. Just as a player must accurately review the current status of a given chess position, so too marketers begin with an awareness where their products stand in the current marketplace.

Evaluating a chess position, Kotov wrote, requires breaking down the position into its key elements, each of which he assigned one of two categories that product marketers can appreciate: permanent advantages and temporary advantages. So, winning chess first requires identifying your advantages, understanding how the advantages relate to one another and which advantages are most important.

This chess evaluation process is similar to the product positioning process: Identifying and documenting the features of your product that relate to the most important problems your target market/target buyer must solve, and how your product solves those problems in ways your competitors do not or can not offer.

General Assessment. After a chess player has completed a review of the key elements, she summaries her findings in her mind in the form of an internal monologue; e.g., “My opponent has two weak pawns, both defended by his bishop…,” and so on.  This is what Kotov calls the “general assessment.”

This general assessment is similar to writing a customer value proposition statement, which is derived from the product positioning process. The value proposition statement is your proclamation to the world what your product does, what benefits it provides for which customers and how you do it uniquely well and better than alternative products. There are many good templates for crafting effective value propositions; here’s my favorite.

Planning. Now a chess player is ready to formulate a concrete plan, linked organically from his general assessment; e.g., “I will force my opponent to trade his bishop for mine, leaving those two weak pawns undefended, which I will attack with my rooks…” and so on).

The road to a product marketing plan has further steps, of course, including the creation of:

  • Buyer personas (composite portraits of your target customers and their wants and needs your product fulfills)
  • Product collateral and other marketing assets, that are targeted to buyer personas and reinforce your customer value proposition
  • Go-to market strategy; which leads to the selection of specific marketing tools and programs

Still, the point remains that the selection of marketing tactical activities comes only after a strategic assessment process.

A Final Word: Avoid “Kotov’s Syndrome”!

It happens to the best of us… even Magnus Carlsen, the current World Chess Champion, World Rapid Chess Champion, and World Blitz Chess Champion.

Alexander Kotov also described a bad situation (now referred to as Kotov’s Syndrome) that even the best grandmasters have experienced: A player thinks very hard for a very long time in a complicated position, but just can’t find a viable move. Running low on time, (s)he finally and impulsively makes a poor move that loses the game immediately.

Kotov explains that this kind of blunder occurs from feeling cognitively overwhelmed by the complexities of the position. Players experiencing such a feeling should calmly recognize it is due simply to a misunderstanding of the key elements of the position and, therefore, an incomplete, useless general assessment. The solution is to simply step back and perform these steps again from the beginning.

Similarly, an effective marketing plan cannot be developed without genuine understanding and application of product marketing basics. Don’t just go through the motions of filling out product planning and customer value proposition templates with your personal assumptions just because you’re in a rush. Be patient. Go through those processes with care, using input from colleagues and existing customers to develop a well-informed, winning product marketing plan.

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Les Paul’s Electric Guitar & Unified Information Access: Two Platforms of Innovation

Les Paul’s Electric Guitar & Unified Information Access: Two Platforms of Innovation

Les Paul. Source: Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Without Les Paul (1915-2009), it’s safe to say that rock and roll as we know it would not exist. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, Les Paul was a virtuoso guitarist and pioneer in the development of the solid-body electric guitar. His innovations helped make the unforgettable sound of rock and roll possible.

There are some interesting analogies between Les Paul’s modern electric guitar, which ushered in a new era of modern music, and unified information access, modern technology that leverages advanced enterprise search for deeper analytic insights that go well beyond what traditional tools can offer.

Early in his musical career, Les Paul found his acoustic guitar was drowned out by the other instruments in a band. The acoustic guitar was simply too quiet. In its own way, text-based unstructured information (documents, wikis, email, social media) has also been too “quiet.” Quickly drowned out by more easily accessible structured databases, unstructured content was largely ignored by data analysts for decades.

Early efforts to use a microphone or an amplifier with a hollow-body acoustic guitar in Les Paul’s day resulted in poor sound quality and feedback. Similarly, unstructured content also defied initial efforts to integrate it with other information sources, such as trying to store it within relational databases. Unfortunately, most database methods do not perform full-text searching of content, and those that do require the content to be stored and organized in database tables. Effective textual searching requires linguistics and text analytics is commonly found not in relational databases, but in enterprise search technologies.

The methods for accessing unstructured content and structured data remained divided for decades: enterprise search engines being used for finding unstructured content and relational database systems for retrieving structured data.

Applying his musical talent and inventor’s mind, Les Paul built one of the very first solid-body electric guitars, culminating in 1952 with the classic Gibson Les Paul guitar. Thanks in large part to Les Paul, the guitar was definitely no longer the quietest instrument in the ensemble!

Les Paul with his Gibson Les Paul solid body electric guitar and 8-track tape recorder. Source: les-paul.com

Between his electric guitar and breakthroughs in multi-track sound recording, Les Paul created a platform of innovation that enabled entirely new types of musical expression that were previously impossible. Indeed, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame rightly honored Les Paul as an architect of rock music.

Similarly in the business world, we have seen unified information access – a new technology platform of innovation – enable new ways to inform, educate and entertain people, through a single interface, portal, website or device, replacing what used to be dozens of individual products or standalone software packages.

UIA is helping transform businesses by freely integrating, joining and presenting all related enterprise information – structured and unstructured, internal and external alike – and building amazing new business applications no one has ever seen before.

Marketers: What’s Your Fastball? What’s Your Curve Ball?

I’d like to share an intriguing baseball story that also happens to complement some fantastic marketing advice from a work friend of mine.

First, the baseball story:

Steve Dalkowski

Steve Dalkowski: The fastest MLB pitcher you never heard of

Until just a few years ago, I had never heard of Steve Dalkowski (1939-2020), the fastest pitcher in baseball history. He routinely threw a fastball well over 100 mph (161km/h) with top speeds of over 125 mph (201 km/h)!

But there was just one problem: Steve Dalkowski’s incredible fastball was just as incredibly wild and unreliable.

Dalkowski began his career in 1957 in the Baltimore Orioles’ minor league system. Despite high hopes, five seasons later, he was still stuck in the minors with no improvement in controlling his fastball. From 1957 through 1961, Dalkowski struck out 1,137 batters in just 661 innings of play; a huge achievement… Unfortunately, he also walked 1,221 batters and won only 27 of his 123 games as starting pitcher.

But there’s much more to Steve Dalkowski’s story – with an important related marketing lesson as well.

Steve Dalkowski

Steve Dalkowski’s performance improved dramatically in 1962 while playing for Earl Weaver, who was then manager for the Baltimore Orioles’ double-A affiliate. It would be the best year of Dalkowski’s career. For the first time ever, he gave up less than one walk per inning. He also had an amazing 52-inning streak in which he notched 104 strikeouts and only 11 walks. Dalkowski was finally called up to the Orioles’ spring training season in 1963. After pitching six straight innings giving up no hits, Dalkowski was told by the Orioles that he had made the team. He was finally heading to the majors.

How did Steve Dalkowski finally transform his performance; and so quickly after five seasons of no progress? Earl Weaver realized Dalkowski just got confused and pitched more wildly than ever while coaches tried to teach him how to throw a change-up, hold a base runner or execute other unfamiliar plays. Weaver concluded if the team was to ever capitalize on Dalkowski’s potential, they would have to keep things very simple. So Weaver had Dalkowski focus on nothing but throwing his fastball and maybe an occasional slider. Two pitches. Just throw strikes. Nothing else. It was perfect advice from Earl Weaver, and an early sign of Weaver’s leadership strengths and future career as a legendary major league manager and member of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Keeping it simple is also game-winning advice for marketers as well. Buyers are smarter than ever, and less likely than ever to bother trying to figure out what your technology does. If they get confused or distracted by your message, they’ll simply move on.

Which leads me to that simple yet powerful advice my marketing friend shared with me. He had recently met a true rock star of a technology sales manager. Asked by my friend how he became so successful, he answered, “Because I know my fastball and I know my curve ball.”

He explained his ‘fastball’ was the #1 product of interest to the vast majority of his prospects; his ‘curve ball’ was his second product. Whether he opted for the fastball or curve ball depended on the needs of his prospect.

The company had other products, of course; and while he didn’t ignore those products, he knew his ultimate success depended on his ability to deliver a clear, compelling sales pitch for his top two products – his fastball and curve ball. So he focused right away on practicing those two sales pitches and made sure they were strikes.

Sales and Marketing Fastball

While that rock star sales person described his fastball and curve ball as being two different products, the logic still holds for other scenarios. If, for example, a company offers a single technology platform or solution as opposed to multiple products, then the “fastball” could be an engaging value proposition to answer the question, “What is it?” The “curve ball” could in turn succinctly answer, “How does it work?”

Marketing’s single most important responsibility is to define the company’s fastball and curve ball and then clearly communicate it – internally and externally – to set up your marketing campaigns and sales team for success.

In a cruel twist of fate, Steve Dalkowski severely strained a tendon in his elbow while pitching relief in the Orioles’ final 1963 pre-season game. With his post-injury fastball topping out at only 90MPH, Dalkowski never made it to the major leagues again and was out of baseball for good in 1966. One can only wonder what his pitching career might have been had he not languished for years, no doubt being constantly told to “try harder” before Earl Weaver’s wise leadership guidance.

Similarly, if current marketing messaging is not working, “trying harder” in a multitude of ways and directions will not help and instead merely waste time. The future is now. Business circumstances and technologies all change without advance notice. Marketing leaders must be willing to allow trying something new, starting by focusing on answering two simple but critical questions…

What’s your fastball?

What’s your curve ball?

How to Write a Case Study (Without Shooting Your Eye Out with a Red Ryder BB Gun)

A Christmas Story is a must-see classic movie. A lot of people apparently agree, as the 1983 classic is featured on TBS as a 24 hour TV marathon every Christmas.

A Christmas Story even offers an interesting product marketing-related lesson about case study writing. No, really! After all, Ralphie wrote one in the movie, remember…?

Ralphie-Christmas-Story

Chances are you have seen this classic Christmas comedy, featuring Ralphie, a 9-year-old boy living in 1940’s Indiana who desperately wanted an Official Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. Unfortunately for Ralphie, whenever he even hinted about getting one, his mother always said, “You’ll shoot your eye out!” 

Of course, Ralphie refused to give up. For a school assignment, he wrote an essay (aka case study) all about the Red Rider BB gun he yearned for and why it was so important that he get one for Christmas. Ralphie was certain his teacher would be so enthralled with his essay she’d give him an A+. He could then triumphantly show his parents his grade – and essay – and surely earn his BB gun.

Suffice to say Ralphie’s teacher was less than impressed with his writing:

Poor Ralphie felt the same frustration experienced by anyone who has ever written a case study that failed to gain the interest and curiosity from the intended target audience.

By following a customer-focused, time-focused template when researching and writing case studies, we can instead impress readers with our customer’s success, and motivate them to learn more.

When developing a case study with an existing customer, I work through a simple series of questions focusing on the customer’s experience at three key points in time:

  1. Before your product or service: the drudgery your customer had previously endured.
  2. The customer’s “moment of epiphany”: when the customer realized your product or service was the right one.
  3. After your product or service: the old drudgery is gone, replaced with success!

First, what was the customer doing before your product or service? The more intolerable drudgery we can genuinely convey here, the better. Quantifying the drudgery our customer experienced in this “before” stage is also essential: how many dollars or personnel-hours were being lost by your customer? Less tangible but no less real consequences of this drudgery are welcome as well; for example, what business decisions might have been compromised due to the unacceptable status quo?

Next, ask your customer how and when they realized, “Yes! This is the right solution for us! The dark days of our drudgery are over! Help is on the way!” I’m only half-kidding here: we must convey to the reader what triggered the customer’s decision to buy; what led the customer to confidently conclude that our product or service is uniquely capable of solving their problems.

Identify the unique features and functionality relevant to this moment of epiphany, and how they translate into providing business benefits – a process Pragmatic Marketing calls marketecture:

Marketecture matches the key features of your product with the problems your target customers need to solve. (Concept from Pragmatic Marketing. Image by MU)

Now, focus on the “after” phase: your product or service has been implemented for the customer, leaving a trail of roses in your path. Again, I’m only half-kidding: we must convey that the customer now knows their decision was a winner. What new success has replaced the old drudgery?

Take the time to carefully walk through with your customer one or more specific,  formerly costly and frustrating business processes. How has your product or service resolved the drudgery that once plagued this business process? What measurable savings in money or time has the customer since realized? What plans does the company have to expand the use of your product or service? 

When writing the actual case study, quote the customer directly wherever possible. Direct quotes from the customer declaring in their own words how valuable your product or service is to them will always earn more attention and credibility from readers than any narrative text.

Also… please avoid using those generic case study sub-headings; i.e., The Problem, The Solution and Results. They provide zero value to the reader and offer nothing in the way of SEO (a Google search for problem solution results as of this writing yields 1.4 billion hits). Your case study sub-headings should be written such that if your reader reads only the sub-headings, they still get a TL;DR understanding of your case study. Here is an example from some previous work of mine. Just read the main headings and you’ll see what I mean!

Did Ralphie still get his beloved Red Rider BB gun despite of his unsuccessful writing effort? Let’s put it this way: if he did, it was no thanks to Santa. Of course, product marketers must rely on more than luck to get the favorable attention of potential new customers. Compelling case studies are a one of the best means to do so. By asking your customer time-focused questions and actively listening, the customer will essentially tell you what relevant information belongs in the case study – before, during and after their wise decision to purchase your product or service.

“Begin with the Beginning in Mind” for Content Creation

Many people are familiar with Stephen R. Covey’s bestseller “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” (although I much prefer Dale Carnegie). One of Covey’s “7 Habits” is to “begin with the end in mind.”

However, when crafting product messaging, I suggest you “begin with the beginning in mind.”

When writing a datasheet, web copy, case study or other collateral piece, I start by thinking about what the first paragraph should say that will make the reader want to keep reading and learn more. For a new website, I think first about what the home page splash screen should say and what graphic should accompany it.

If the first impression of your messaging is not compelling, is not engaging, your audience will probably tune out rather than bother to continue paying attention.

For a presentation deck, I like to define a really good “icebreaker” slide first before anything else. It might be a compelling – even alarming – stat with a strong supporting graphic. It can be a quick story or interactive game, as long as it is directly relevant to your presentation. I once attended a breakout in which the presenter led off with an awkward “tell to your neighbor something interesting about yourself” exercise that had nothing to do with his chosen topic. It merely distracted the audience from his presentation.

My friends and colleagues know I generally like to go with humor; for example, I recently led a presentation on replacing expensive commercial software with reliable, supported open source technology. My icebreaker slide was this excerpt of a classic Calvin & Hobbes comic strip. I wanted to convey, in an engaging way, the core message that no one likes to feel like they’re being ripped off, forced to pay too much for something, and not being treated fairly… and that includes paying too much for commercial licenses with pricing accelerants and legalese intended to lock in their customers. Notice too how Moe, the bully shaking Calvin down for a quarter, is now in the minds of the audience as a symbol for their unrepentantly high-cost commercial software vendor taking too much of their money.

From that intro, slides presenting the proof points for smart and substantial open source savings and how to get started flowed naturally from that icebreaker.

“Begin with the beginning in mind” also applies to demand generation emails. Even before the intro paragraph, come up with the subject line. I have received three emails in a row from a vendor, each with the same bland subject line of “[Company Name] Newsletter — New e-Book”. I can’t imagine the open rate for these emails is anywhere near acceptable. I don’t accept the notion that email marketing is dead; only that poor email marketing is dead. During the company’s recent Boston World Tour stop, Salesforce.com agreed. Going beyond A/B testing, SFDC proceeded to present new features to make it easier to personalize email subject lines to optimize engagement as soon as the email hits the inbox. Begin with the beginning in mind.

As frustrating as it is, if the beginning of your message is not engaging, the end and middle of your collateral, no matter how fine, scarcely matters. But if you spend the extra time up front by beginning with a great beginning, a great introduction, you’ll find the rest of your message will flow from there much more easily – and your target audience will be much more willing to receive it and act on it.

Intuitive Reasoning, Effective Analytics, Success: Lessons from Dr. Jonas Salk

Jonas-Salk-MemeApril 14, 2015 marked the 60th anniversary of the Salk Polio Vaccine. On that day in 1955, it was publicly announced that human trials confirmed Dr. Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided effective protection from the polio virus. By 1957, new polio cases fell by 90% from epidemic levels just five years earlier.

A fascinating interview with Dr. Salk on the Academy of Achievement website sheds light on his key personal attributes and values, which are vitally important for success in any line of work. And the best analytic tools will play a leading role in fostering that success.

1. The most successful people practice intuitive reasoning.

Dr. Salk explained how he could identify and solve problems more easily and effectively than others by following his intuition (perceptions, spontaneous creative thought), guided by reason (hard data):

Reason alone will not serve. Intuition alone can be improved by reason, but reason alone without intuition can easily lead the wrong way… both are necessary. For myself, that’s how my mind works, and that’s how I work… It’s this combination that must be recognized and acknowledged and valued.

It was Salk’s intuitive reasoning skills that ultimately led him to his polio vaccine research. Several years prior, as a second year medical student, Salk realized statements from two lectures on immunization techniques contradicted each other. He never got a straight answer as to why, which he (thankfully) could not accept:

It didn’t make sense and that question persisted in my mind… I just questioned the logic of it… I just didn’t accept what appeared to me to be a dogmatic assertion in view of the fact that there was a [medical] reason to think otherwise.

Intuitive reasoning requires not taking “because it is!” as an answer, and “actively pursuing a question and seeing where it leads.”

Continue reading →

You Do Not Need Permission to Innovate

Bootleggers K turnI read a great blog post written by Brooke Allen describing how a chance encounter decades ago with an ex-Prohibition-era bootlegger provided a key life lesson that served him well throughout his business career.

The ex-bootlegger – Brooke Allen called him “Jeb” – began by chatting about such tricks of the bootlegging trade as the “bootlegger’s K-turn,” a driving tactic used to escape hot pursuit by police by quickly reversing direction.

When FDR brought an end to Prohibition, Jeb needed to find new work. He finally found a mundane job working as a factory drill press operator. To deal with the monotony, he would think about how he could improve the drill press.

Finally, Jeb mustered up the courage to ask the factory owner if he could share his ideas:

After a few years he screwed up the courage to ask the owner, “May I ask a question?”

The owner laughed, “You don’t need permission to ask a question.”

… It turned out Jeb’s idea made the drill-press much more efficient. Jeb was about to go back to work when the owner said, “Why don’t I put you on another machine and let’s see what you come up with.”

In short order he’d invented all kinds of better ways of making things and soon he was even inventing whole new things to make. The owner gave him piles of money and Jeb was very happy.

“I never asked for permission to be a bootlegger because I knew it was the wrong thing to do,” Jeb told Allen. “But, I didn’t become [an inventor] until I learned that I don’t need permission to do the right thing.”

Brooke Allen took away that key life lesson: You do not need permission to do the right thing. Knowing this simple fact is essential for any true innovation to take place. Innovation, by definition, is an act of “intelligent disobedience.” It is unafraid to question the status quo; it unashamedly asks, “What if…?”

I’d also add a big thumbs-up for the factory owner who had the sense to not only listen to Jeb’s idea, but to also encourage Jeb to discover new ideas and share the financial rewards with him. The owner demonstrated business sense that is lacking in too many corporate “leaders” today.

An empty suit of a “leader” probably would have just used Jeb’s first idea to make or save money without so much as a thank you (just like this example); or simply marched Jeb back to his drill press saying something like, “We don’t pay you to think!”

A bad boss can indeed go a long way to discourage innovation; however, that doesn’t change the fact that you don’t need permission to innovate. Lousy leaders who think nothing upsets the status quo without their blessing are kidding themselves. Under their noses, innovations are taking place in the form of secret skunkworks projects, workarounds and hacks that enable workers to sidestep red tape and self-important gatekeepers while also keeping their personal sanity!

Gatekeepers and Workarounds

Now imagine how well such a company could perform if innovation wasn’t driven underground by its own “leaders.”

Bottom line, you do not need permission to freely assess the way things are and envision the way things could be. Recognizing this universal truth might be the bootlegger K-turn you need to make a clean getaway from a “potted plant” organization and towards organizations and true leaders that actively encourage and reward innovation.

If you liked this post, you may also like:
“I’d Like to Have an Argument, Please” – An Innovation Message from Monty Python
The Impact of Imagination Level on Product Marketers and Managers
Product Managers and Marketers: Ever Feel Like You’re Being Treated Like “The Fighter”?

When You Have an Analytic Hammer, Every HR Challenge Looks Like a Nail

Back in 2014, IBM announced a new consulting practice offering several new technology services that would apply big data and analytics processes to human resources problems.

From the above-linked article:

One service, predictive hiring, would use large volumes of behavioral assessments and other employee data to better understand the traits that are characteristic of top performers, and then comb through candidates to identify potential hires.

A predictive retention service would analyze workforce data — exit interviews, for instance — to identify those employees most likely to leave.

What struck me when I first read this article is the flawed assumption that job applicants bring high-performance traits with them through the door, or they don’t. And if an employee is looking to leave the company, it’s due to some shortcomings on their part.

It sounds like an example of Maslow’s law: If your only tool is a [analytic] hammer, every [HR] problem will look like a nail.

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“We’re here today to identify the unique traits of our top performers.”

Since existing leaders will decide what the “traits that are characteristic of top performers” are, they may well end up defining the ideal employee profile in their own image – a clear example of confirmation bias.

Analyzing the traits of perceived top performers who have a long history with the company runs afoul of survivorship bias. From David McRaney’s blog-turned-book You Are Not So Smart:

You must remind yourself that when you start to pick apart winners and losers, successes and failures, the living and dead, that by paying attention to one side of that equation you are always neglecting the other…

When a company performs a survey about job satisfaction, the only people who can fill out that survey are people who still work at the company. Everyone who might have quit out of dissatisfaction is no longer around to explain why. Such data mining fails to capture the only thing it is designed to measure…

The reality is that workers’ attitudes in the workplace can and do change significantly over time in response to the organization’s own traits, for better or for worse, depending on whether the work environment is proactive or risk averse, collaborative or politically charged, collective or exclusive.

Liz Ryan, former HR VP and founder of Human Workplace, hits the nail right on the head (bad hammering pun; sorry not sorry) in her article:

In order to hit our goals in any organization, we need to build positive energy in the workplace. We need people to be excited about their work…

Can you measure that excitement level? You can’t measure it, but it will show in the results that you do measure, from customer satisfaction to turnover to earnings per share. Anyone in your organization will be able to tell when the excitement level is high, low, or nonexistent. We’d have no trouble reading the energy waves at work if we remembered to stay human on the job.

To her credit, Liz Ryan doesn’t pull any punches in rejecting impersonal, technocratic measurement of employee engagement. I doubt the predictive analytics described above would fare any better with Liz than the hollow ritual of the annual employee survey:

If we really care what our employees think, it’s easy enough to find out… We could ask them how they’re doing… We can be human at work…

We don’t have to insult our employees by having them fill out surveys so the people charged with employee engagement can go to the leadership team and say “Look! The employees are 68% engaged. Look how well I’m doing my job!”

Give up the employee engagement survey, drop the junk-science patina on stupid HR practices and learn how to be human at work. You’ll be amazed how the team’s energy will power your success once you let it start flowing.

Analytics, when created and used appropriately, can be a powerful force for success, but there are also many new technologies that help actively engage employees and cultivate employee positivity and productivity. Gamification platforms are just one such example. Here in Boston, for instance, the WeSpire platform engages and energizes employees around company sustainability and social responsibility programs.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it” is an old saw, but it still rings true – especially when leaders choose to seek out genuine, human interactions and build an energetic, collaborative work culture, which should yield much better employee outcomes and improved individual and team performance.

P.S. – On a related note on hiring decisions, what often passes as “common wisdom” within the HR function really isn’t all that wise. Well said, Natasha Bowman!! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️:

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