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Blogging vs. Podcasting

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Some time ago, Suzanne Lowe published a posting called The Myth of Intellectual Capital.  In it, she commented on a talk by Paul Dunay  , Bearingpoint’s Director of Global Field Marketing.

According to Lowe, Dunay sang the praises of podcasting over blogging, on the grounds that it required less time.

According to Dunay, who then commented, he was merely pointing out the higher return on investment of publicizing content.

Alan Weiss also chimed in, saying “First, it’s blogging, then podcasting, then video, then something else, with each one expected to take over the world.”

But it’s not a he-said she-said thing.  And contrary to Weiss, much more is at stake here than the latest fad and flavor of the day.

There are distinct parts of the human decision making process; and different media drop into different slots in that process. That’s true for old media, and for new as well.

Podcasts are aptly named. Like their cousins “broad-“ and “narrow-“, they are one-to-many media—non-interactive even in audiences of one.
Podcasts are also consumed in very constrained time limits—a 120-second podcast is going to take—approximately—120-seconds for someone to listen to.

Blogs are more interactive—you can hit “comment” right now in response to this blog, and get the instant gratification associated with seeing “you moron Charlie!” pop up and knowing it can be read in Thailand—right now!

We can also read at varying speeds, including—frequently—a whole lot faster than listening.  And the reader controls the speed.

Over to buyers.  Buyers want many many things, and at different times in their decision-making process. Sometimes they want to interact; sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they want information; sometimes they want visual and aural assurance.

If you’re selling to someone with a buying process more complex than getting a #4 at Burger King, you’ll want to match distinct parts of the buyer’s decision-making process with access to distinct media that help the buyer decide.

It’s not a trivial exercise, anymore than is a decision to buy billboards or broadcast TV or newspaper is for an ad agency serving any client.

Politicians are still sorting this out too. Watching on television as sound-bite based politicians “respond” to blown-up computer screens showing YouTube clips is a crazy mash-up.  Enough to make you agree with Alan Weiss that it’s all a popularity contest.

Except it’s not.  Smart politicians—and other sellers—will integrate media, using each for what it’s best at.

Kennedy didn’t beat Nixon just because Nixon looked bad on TV; TV was part of the package.  And people distrust the absence of a coherent package more than any particular package per se.  

It’s a Dog Eat Dog World: Isn’t It?

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My last posting—The Deeper Message of Financial Volatiilty—generated responses at The HuffingtonPost.com I also got a call from a TV interviewer, who posed the question:

How can you say competition is increasingly less relevant—it is, after all, a dog eat dog world out there—isn’t it?

This metaphor of cannibalistic canines needs a little deconstructing.

First, I think it’s pretty much only a metaphor. Outside Jack London, I doubt there are too many Donner Pass incidents in the history of dogs.

More seriously, I learned early on that if I rode my bike past a snarling, menacing dog and pedalled like crazy to stay away from it—the dog would chase me.

But—if I actually approached the dog and said, “good boy, come here,” the same dog would wag its tail and befriend me.

In my experience, this pretty much describes people too.

People often live up—or down—to others’ expectations of them. And if we can learn that about ourselves, then we have gained the keys to our freedom. We can see that we own our own oppression; that we empower what we fear. And escape it.

The parallel extends to business. If I expect the worst of my suppliers and customers, then I’ll throw lawyers at them, endlessly calculate their financial value to me, use need-to-know communications, and generally make sure I’m always in control.

At its best, this response gives us dynamics like union vs. management. At its worst, we get endemic inefficiency and cynicism.

Now add change to the equation. Decades ago, we had monolithic corporations with fixed boundaries, competing against each other. Now, as BusinessWeek describes in its August 20 & 27 cover story The Future of Work , we have something quite different:

The very idea of a company is shifting away from a single outfit with full-time employees and a recognizable hierarchy. It is something much more fluid, with a classic corporation at the center of an ever-shifting network of suppliers and outsourcers, some of whom only join the team for the duration of a single project…

The hard part for multionatinals is getting people to work well together…such pressures put a premium on recruiting staff who are globally minded from the outset…Nokia is careful to select people who have a “collaborative mindset…”

Exactly.

The playbook that business schools still teach from is the one labeled Big Monolithic Corporation—and the chapter heads are all about Competition.

The playbook that hasn’t been written yet is about the Fluid, Shifting, Morphing Entity that BusinessWeek describes—and the chapters are not about Competition, but about Collaboration—with customers, with employees, with partners.

Dog eat dog? Why? When dogs eat dog food instead of each other, and figure out how to work together, life gets better.

And in an emerging business world that throws everyone together in constantly permutating ways, that old competitive nature we prized decades ago is becoming a bit of a millstone.

Business doesn’t need, or want, competitors and competitive talents as much as it used to. The emphasis will shift from competition to customers. Business needs more collaborators. Not in order to become more “competitive” or to “win”—but to become more successful.

The Deeper Message of Financial Markets’ Volatility

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The Dow swung 600 points (high to low) in two days this week—and the week’s not over.

Key stock market indices in Indonesia and South Korea lost over 6% of their total value yesterday alone. Seoul’s Kospi Index had its biggest point drop ever. 

Katie Couric leads the CBS evening news with tales of homeowners who can’t find lenders to refinance massively increasing adjustable rate mortgages they (stupidly) assumed.

What’s it all mean?

The short story is the same as the long story—but the long story is much more interesting.

The short story starts with a classic housing bubble. People start borrowing to buy real estate. It becomes musical chairs, flip the property, sell to the greater fool. And use leverage.  Better yet, OPM (other people’s money).  Best—use both.

Lenders, like good drug pushers anywhere, develop new products and pitches.  Finance the first mortgage with the second; “liar’s” loans, no proof of income required. Wall Street packages loans, slices and repackages them and resells them. No one is left holding the bag—-everyone is left holding the bag.

National Public Radio reports that you can purchase complete lies about your income and employment history at sites like verifyemployment.net  to help fuel the game.

The short story is that the world has become so connected financially that a housing bubble in the US can decimate the stock market in Djakarta.  Everything is linked to everything.  This isn’t like 1929, where wealthy people lost money in the crash and soon couldn’t pay their employees.  This is far more integrated, international, intertwined, interdependent—and fast.  Butterflies flapping wings and all that.

True enough. But the financial markets are just a piece of a bigger puzzle. 

In the long story, the growth in connectedness of all things  exceeds the wildest dreams of rabid conspiracy theorists from just a few decades ago.

Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat is, at root, about how the world has become interconnected.  Time and space are being obliterated by always-on, high-bandwidth,  voice, data and video connections.  Capital flows easily around the world. The internet’s inherent freedom runs roughshod over the desires of industries and nations alike to maintain boundaries.  Even labor becomes mobile—if not through immigration, then through outsourcing.

Six degrees of separation has for some time now begun to look like an overstatement.

The first level of business implications is clear.  Pick one thing and do it the best in the world; outsource everything else to whomever is doing those things the best in the world.

But even that is old paradigm stuff—competing in a global world and all that. Increasingly, that’s so five minutes ago.

The really, really big lesson is this.

The game of competition is over. It’s not about vertical corporations competing against each other anymore.  It’s about collaboration and connectivity—with everyone. He who can get along with everyone better than everyone else will succeed.

Not “win”—succeed.

In a massively connected world, corporate strategy is less relevant than customer strategy.  It’s your ability to cut agreements with customers and suppliers that helps you—not your ability to squeeze pennies out of them.

This is a huge shift for people raised in business in the last 50 years, weaned on concepts like sustainable competitive advantage and shareholder wealth creation.

The business-strategic value of trust was always high.  It’s about to get far, far higher.  Those stuck with mental models built on inter-corporate competition are going to get left behind those who "get" the simple idea of service to customers, employees, and partners.

The Dark Side of Trust? Not!

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This blog regularly sings the praises of trust. It greases the wheels of commerce, ennobles human interactions, and generally makes the world go round.

Could it possibly be that trust has a downside? Omigosh.

From the always-provocative Harvard Business School Working Knowledge series  comes another  case of good data, flawed interpretation. This time it’s about plumbers in Philadelphia.

The Dark Side of Trust  summarizes research by Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Victor Calanog, a doctoral student at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, in "The Speed of New Ideas: Trust, Institutions and the Diffusion of New Products."

They researched the introduction of an innovative new product (a plumber’s product called TrapGuard) to 596 plumbers and plumbing firms in Philly.

Now, some of those plumbers had strong relationships of trust with their suppliers—who presumably hadn’t told their customers about TrapGuard.  As HBSWK puts it:

The basic question at hand: Would TrapGuard encounter significant barriers to entry from plumbers who enjoyed trusting relationships with their suppliers? In other words, would plumbers be less likely to consider new products, even though innovative, because they were content with their current suppliers?

It should surprise no one that, indeed, plumbers who strongly trusted their suppliers were less inclined to pursue a promotional brochure for TrapGuard when sent one in the mail.

Here’s Oberholzer-Gee:

I wanted to see whether there was a downside to building trusting relationships between buyers and suppliers. In some sense, the study reveals a dark side of trust.

Trust is a double-edged sword. In the short run, working with trusted suppliers reduces transaction costs and furthers the buyer’s competitive standing.

But trust can also make you blind because it can make it harder to see opportunities that arise outside established relationships. The managerial challenge is to build trusting relationships without losing sight of outside opportunities.

Oberholzer-Gee clearly sees the double-edged sword nature of trust.

But presenting this as some kind of  “fair and balanced” offset to the positives of trust is at least a blinding flash of the obvious, and more likely disingenuous.

For example:

• The dark side of trusting your spouse to be faithful is you might not notice him consorting with that hottie;

• The dark side of a child trusting his parents is they might be homicidal maniacs;

• The dark side of loving (as any oldies station will tell you) is a broken heart.

Trust without risk is not trust at all. But of course. Trust is human risk management, a response to uncertainty—but one wholly unlike the rational, risk-parsing quantitative techniques typically taught and used in academia.

And here’s where it gets insidious.  HBSWK summarizes:

trusting relationships can also have a negative side that managers must take into account

HBSWK, and HBS, and Every Business School preach the Gospel According to Analytics. According to this gospel, managers “must take into account” some analytic cognitive insight at pretty much every turn, every transaction.

Never mind that “must” reeks of arrogance.  Note simply that if you subject every micro instance of trust to a micro-consideration of its worth, you destroy trust at the macro level.

Want a philandering spouse? Let her know every day how much you fear her infidelity. Want a suspicious, self-serving supplier? Constantly check them for suspicious, self-serving behavior.  Want thieving employees?   Give them all monthly lie detector tests. 

You empower what you fear.

Trust is a macro-response to life’s micro-issues.  You’d better evaluate it from time to time, like you would a marriage.  But if you constantly subject trust to the cognitive microscope, you destroy its essence.

“Must” you see the dark side of trust?  Don’t look too hard, you’ll miss all the glory, and ruin it in the looking.

Does Your Customer Trust You? The Acid Test

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Most salespeople will agree—there is no stronger sales driver than a customer’s trust in the salesperson. And, I suggest, the best way to be trusted is to be trustworthy—worthy of trust. You can’t fake it.

Is it possible to know if your customer trusts you? Is there one predictor of customer trust? Is there a single factor that amounts to an acid test of trust in selling?

I think there is. It’s contained in one single question. A “yes” answer will strongly suggest your customers trust you. A “no” answer will virtually guarantee they don’t.

The question is this:

Have you ever recommended a competitor to one of your better customers?

If the answer is “yes”—subject to the caveats below—then you have demonstrably put your customer’s short-term interests ahead of your own. This indicates low self-orientation and a long-term perspective on your part (I’m assuming sincerity), and is a good indicator of trustworthiness.

If you have never, ever, recommended a competitor to a good customer, then either your product is always better than the competition for every customer in every situation (puh-leeze), or—far more likely—you always shade your answers to suit your own advantage. Which says you always put your interests ahead of your customers’. Which says, frankly, you can’t be trusted.

Here are the caveats: don’t count “yes” answers if:

a. The customer was trivially important to you
b. You were going to lose the customer anyway
c. You didn’t even offer a product in the category
d. You figured the competitive product was terrible and you’d deep-six them by recommending them.

The only fair “yes” answer is one in which you honestly felt that an important customer would be better served in an important case by going with a competitor’s offering.

If that describes what you did, and it is a fair reflection of how you think about customer relationships in general, then I suspect your customers trust you.

If not—well, then why should they? Would you?

Vacation Blog Links

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I’m in Maine for a few days. Not "the rock-bound coast of Maine," lobstah, and all that—I’m talking inland. Beans of Maine. No internet. Hard core.

Anyway, to serve the demands of addicted Trust Matters readers, I’m leaving a few links you might like. They range from humorous to poignant to practical. Enjoy.

Ed. at BlawgReview, who recently hosted the 3rd Carnival of Trust, came up with this gem defining trust—it merits repeating.

Phil McGee, more than anyone I know, practices a rigorous self-analysis. He digs into his soul with bare hands and raw fingernails, and dredges up whatever is there—which ranges from sludge to the beautiful. I think of him as defining courage—having the guts to face your innermost fears. This post—or maybe this one—are good intros.

In the vein of self-improvement, read Tim Sanders’ take on keeping promises—what if you tracked your own promises, as others doubtless do?

All for now. Back next week.

 

Don’t Believe What They Say About Listening and Sales

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Try Googling “sales” and “listen.” Here’s a sampling—look for the common theme:

Rhonda Abrams, from Gannett News Service, says:

When calling on a customer, it’s tempting to want to immediately launch into a sales pitch, especially if you’re nervous. But by listening, you can better understand how your product or service meets the customer’s needs and desires.

In Business Week’s Savvy Selling section, Michelle Nichols says:

Although speaking clearly, succinctly, and persuasively are crucial selling skills, sharp listening skills are equally important today. In fact, it’s the professionals who ask good questions and then listen hard for the answers who are closing more sales than peers who are stuck in the "smooth talker" era.

At SalesPractice.com, we get:

We have two ears and one mouth for a reason – we’re meant to listen twice as much as we talk. This maxim is never truer than it is in negotiation. It’s amazing what you will learn about the "true" negotiation position, just by listening better. Don’t do all the talking – keep asking questions and listen to the answers.

The admonition to listen is usually justified—as in these three cases—on the basis of the answers’ content. If you listen more—particularly in response to good questions—then you will hear answers that help you sell. That’s the received wisdom.

If that sounds self-evident, think of what is not being said:

that the larger value of listening lies not in the content of the response, but in the act of listening itself.

Q&A listening for content is the hallmark of consultative selling and needs-based selling. You got a need? I probe and find out the specs of that need; I tune my offering to meet it. And so forth.

Nothing wrong with that; but it doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of the power of a different kind of listening.

Needs are just mechanical specifications for stuff we gotta have anyway—toothpaste, audits, bicycles.

Wants, by contrast, are where the action is—wants are hopes, fears, ambitions, wishes, desires.

>Listening for answers identifies needs; but listening for listening’s sake gets to wants;

>Listening for answers generates a list of specs; listening for listening’s sake generates a connection;

>Listening for answers generates transactions; listening for listening’s sake builds relationships.

If your listening always has an agenda—to sell—then you’re not doing much to build trust. If your listening has no agenda beyond being in service to that customer in that moment, then you are potentially creating a trust bond with that customer.

We often hear that listening is a skill that we should practice. But that’s Q&A listening they’re talking about, listening with an agenda—your agenda. And it’s got limited benefits.

By contrast, listening for listening’s sake is not a skill; it’s a gift—the rare gift of your fine attention. It’s also one of those gifts that gives back.

And—the icing on the cake—listening for listening’s sake ends up more powerfully driving sales than does listening to execute the sale.

It’s a trust thing.
 

The August Carnival of Trust is Up!

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The 3rd Carnival of Trust is up at the Blawg Review. The Editor of the Blawg Review has put together a fine selection which are more than worth your time to peruse.   (You can also read the first and second Carnivals.) The Blawg Review is also up and anyone who enjoys legal matters will find plenty of interesting articles to read as well.

The fourth Carnival of Trust will come out Tuesday September 4th and the submission deadline is August 30th. We’d love to receive your submission.

We’ve All Caught the Detroit Disease

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Ward’s Automotive was for decades a major US auto industry trade publication. Each year, Ward’s published a yearbook, with a one-page market share table near the center.

Each year the book detailed share stats for not just GM, but Chevrolet, and within Chevy, Impalas and BelAirs. Plymouths, Dodges, Ramblers—all got detailed at the model level.

Except for one line.

Imports.

From the late 50s until the late 80s, the industry lumped together Rolls Royces and Volkswagens and Toyotas in one simple category. Imports.

Not until the late 80s—when “imports” finally exceeded 25% of the US market—did they get broken out. Last week, BusinessWeek reported that GM’s US market share was at 22.6% A reversal of fortune (in 1963, GM had 51% of the US market).

Over the years, Detroit came up with dozens of excuses. They blamed “deathtrap” used cars (whose only real threat, of course, was to prices of new cars). Roger Smith blamed technology. Detroit blamed fashion quirks in California. It blamed excise taxes. It blamed Japan, Inc.

As recently as May 8, 2005 (on George Stephanopoulos’ ABC News show), none other than Jack Welch blamed labor—high health care costs, “negotiated at a time of no competition”—and argued for a break. Welch conveniently forgets who negotiated all those contracts—Detroit. Without a gun to its head.

The truth is, Detroit had—and still has—an American disease. It has a few key symptoms:

• Belief that we are the biggest, standalone market—immune from global competition—and that the Big 3 had dominant market share

• Belief that GNP growth drives auto sales, that growth means growth in market share, and that buyers are price-driven

• Belief that, in the immortal words of Lee Iacocca, brought back a few years ago from the taxidermist to re-appear on TV, “the most important thing is—the deal!”

The Japanese in particular always believed it was a global market, far bigger than the US, and that they—including Toyota—were small players on a global stage. For them it was always about growth, not share. And for them, price was not something you jacked up with leader models and white-walls and radios—it was something you set low, for growth, and built in all the quality you could, until you earned the right to sell at higher price points. It was not "the deal"—it was, profoundly, the relationship.

They were—oh, what’s the word?—right.

So, perhaps we should go outside Detroit? Maybe tap the American zeitgeist and come up with—private equity, and an industry outsider!

And so we have Bob Nardelli, late of Home Depot fame, coming in as CEO of Chrysler for Cerberus Capital, Chrysler’s new private equity owner. According to Newsweek, Detroit insiders say they expect Cerberus to shake up the moribund American auto industry. Private equity has a lot going for it—but long-term thinking tends not to be part of it. Industry expertise isn’t all bad—and Nardelli has none of it. Pardon my scepticism in this case—I don’t see this ending well.

True, Detroit is easy to pick on. But you’d think the rest of US industry would catch a clue.

On Wall Street, a new phrase was invented only a few years ago—IBGYBG. I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone—so let’s do the deal and let the suckers pay for it.

Now consumers are suckered into no-income second mortgages (“hey they wouldn’t lend me the money if they didn’t think I could pay it back, right?”) which are then sliced and diced and tranched and resold and leveraged and omigosh, looks like a credit crisis! The spirit of Iacocca lives.

In Bentonville, they learned the volume lesson, but not the price/quality lesson. WalMart is teaching a nation that anything worth having is worth having at half the price and one third the quality so you can get more things worth having—to replace yesterday’s list. Planned obsolescence lives.

In Washington, the courage to face long-term financial issues is in short supply, and the belief that we stand alone—politically, militarily, culturally—is the reverse.

We’ve ended up with: here-now, cheaper by the dozen, do the transaction, no money down, quarterly earnings—and get your buyout package just before you default on the schnooks’ pension plans.

We’ve learned well from Detroit—the wrong lessons.

Update: "We”ve All Caught the Detroit Disease" is a featured post at the the Huffington Post.  Trust Matters readers may want to check out the discussion there as well.

Juries, Courtrooms and Linear Thinking

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Three years ago I filed a lawsuit. It was my first, and hopefully last, experience as a plaintiff.

I sued a professional—there’s no point in revealing the profession. I sued him for malpractice and negligence, with a specific damages calculation. He, of course, said it was my fault.

This week, after a four-day trial, it went to a jury.

I’m not a lawyer. Don’t even play one on TV, though I’ve done seminars and speeches for some.

So other than jury duty (always rejected), I hadn’t seen courts close up and personal before. Here’s what I learned—one data point, one person. For what it’s worth.

The treatment of jurors impressed me. The judge spoke seriously about gratitude for their civic responsibility. The parties rise and stand every time the jury enters and leaves (which is frequently).

But most of all, the judge admonished them, “If anyone approaches you about this case—call 911. Ask for the Sheriff, and have the Sheriff call me. Any time of day or night.”

The power of the judge scared and impressed me. He made an almost autocratic decision, unilaterally. Then he changed it the next day, calling himself out on his own potential fallibility—I was impressed. A powerful blend of brains, charm and the need to make more calls than an umpire; almost all very well done.

The rules of evidence are extreme, and powerful. Lots of very relevant material never made it in, because it didn’t pass several tests—hearsay, standing, expertise, etc. The intent is to limit the bases of decision to distilled-clean facts, precisely stated.

The presentation of data relied entirely on the cognitive skills of the jury. They listened to days of bland recitations of data, numbers and legal concepts, without physically seeing the documents being described. Data, abstraction, words, concepts. That’s what you’re fed as a juror.

The charges to the jury were complex; a tax-like form with “if yes to 2a, then go to 6; else, go to 3,” which covered several issues of liability, damages and mitigation.

Finally—to the jury. Both sides expected a decision in less than an hour. It went four hours, despite one juror postponing vacation, others their work.

The verdict? Breech of contract, not guilty—but malpractice, guilty. Was malpractice a proximate cause (not “the,” just “a”) of damages—no. Therefore no damages due.

Both sides found this a confusing, almost contradictory, verdict—at least,that is, from the point of view of the legal issues that had been so exquisitely, carefully crafted by the legal teams and the judge. And of course the jury doesn’t get the chance to share its thinking—just the results.

Yet I think there’s at least one explanation—an emotional, human, commonsense logic—that makes a lot of sense. It goes like this:

We’re not thrilled with any of you. We want our professionals to behave better. We’re also worried about excessively litigious behavior—and besides there’s blame enough to go around. Judge, lawyers and court system—we don’t like sitting for days on a case that should have settled; and we don’t like being fed abstractions.
So if your legal constructs don’t allow us to express these deeply held opinions, we will squeeze the constructs, not our opinions.

I have absolutely no way of knowing their thoughts, of course. Surely I could be wrong. But I could see myself thinking that way in their shoes, and I respect it.

It’s another arena of life where society wants us to be rational, cerebral people, solving life’s problems with our brains; while our human hearts drive us through to a clearly seen and desired end, ever-reminding us that we’re not just brains-in-bodies.

It was humbling—for both of us. But I now believe justice was served, and served well. It just wasn’t served on the same platter the system had provided.