Quote of the Day

I’m currently reading Execute or Be Executed by Sam Geist and just came across a great George Bernard Shaw quote regarding communication.

“The greatest problem with communication is the assumption it has taken place.”

How many of us are guilty of sending out a companywide email under the assumption that  a) everyone will read it and b) everyone will understand your message?

For most of us, the verdict is GUILTY as charged.

If PowerPoint and MindMap had a child…

It would be called Prezi. Prezi is an online service which allows you to mindmap out the ideas you want to communicate, then link them in a logical order after the fact.

Here’s an example of how it’s done..

To Be Honest….

I do a lot of writing at work – email, memos, general communication.

The other day my boss was reviewing something I’d written before we published it.

He was stopped dead in his tracks over the phrase “to be honest”.

“Aren’t we always honest?” he asked.

I had used it as a throwaway phrase without thinking much about it. I was sharing the fact that a change in company policy benefited both our employees and (to be honest) our company.

Perhaps I should have said “to be clear” or perhaps I should have discarded the phrase entirely.

To be honest (wink) I wrote it without thinking.

When writing, brevity and clarity matter.

Messages to the Banks – Make Lemonade

The U.S. Banking industry is missing a HUGE opportunity. At the moment they’ve circled the wagons, admitting no wrongdoing, protecting executive bonuses. For them it’s business as usual – except for the fact that they’re receiving HUGE bailout money (mine and yours).

America has turned sour on all things Financial. To us it represents greed, betrayal, recklessness and dysfunction.

It is a huge opportunity for the industry.

Imagine how well an entirely new strategy would work if just one banking CEO changed direction.

Here’s how his press release might read:

America,

We at (insert Bank name here) would like to apologize for our part in the economic crisis in which America finds herself. Over the past decade our Bank has undertaken unacceptable risks in our mission to drive profits for our shareholders. Our compensation plans provided bonuses for those most successful at driving the very behavior that helped our nation into the crisis we now face.

We accept responsibility for our actions and from this day forward pledge a new beginning.

We are working hard to repair our balance sheets to balance our assets with our liabilities. We are movong away from a 35:1 debt/asset ratio and are working to achieve a very conservative 5:1 ratio. Our progress towards this goal will be monitored by independent 3rd party accounting firms in conjuction with the SEC and Fed. Today we are announcing a new policy of transparency, and will show each and every account holder how we intend to keep these promises.

We are announcing today that 30% of all future profits will be returned to the taxpayer until such time as the TARP money we have received is paid back. This may well take decades, but it is our commitment to every American, that we consider this money a loan.

Finally, we are addressing compensation. Our bonuses, if any, will be based upon both our profitability and our journey towards a conservatively structured, sustained balance sheet. Every customer of this Bank must be assured that their assets are safe and that all creditworthy customers have access to the capital they need to run their businesses and their lives.

If your current bank is NOT pledging similar response to this crisis, may we suggest that you open an account with us.

Together we’ll forge a healthy and sustainable economic future for America.

Signed,

Joe Moneybags,
CEO
insert Bank name here.

America has a huge capacity for forgiveness. It’s time that the Banks stepped up and admitted their mistakes and told America what THEY are going to do to fix things. I think for a “first mover”, the rewards could be substantial.

The Cost of Getting on the Same Page

It may surprise you to realize that the biggest part of any ERP project budget (in many cases 50% or more, of the total) is devoted to knowledge management – the extraction and migration of information between your implementation team, your consultants and your business community.

In the Planning phase, your team helps the consultants understand the business opportunities and challenges, the current processes, the desired future state and the (potentially new) organizational design.

Next comes the Design phase, where the process overviews are developed to make sure that the new processes meet critical business requirements. The users provide feedback to the consultants and your team to solidify the new design.

The consultants then Build (configure) the system and perform knowledge transfer (showing your team what they’re doing and why).

During Testing, your team then uncovers data, security, work flow, reporting and transaction processing bugs within the configuration and communicates these issues to the consultants.

Once the system is stable and reliable, your team devotes several weeks to system documentation, the development of training materials and the delivery of training in preparation for Implementation.

Throughout the effort, Project and business leaders are communicating the need for the new system, the expected benefits and how the new system will affect processes, tasks and the impact on the organization – all the Communication and Change Management tasks.

In some projects I’ve been involved in, the cost of all these knowledge management and transfer tasks is equivalent of funding four years’ college tuition for 300 students! That is a LOT of money.

Capturing Tribal Knowledge

Ancient civilizations passed along tribal knowledge in a variety of ways – through storytelling, apprenticeships, rites of passage.

Some documented their history and beliefs in hieroglyphs or cave drawings or in sculpture.

Rituals were extremely important.

In ancient times, sharing knowledge was essential for survival.

In modern times, it seems we’ve lost the habit of sharing. Perhaps we don’t see it as essential to our survival anymore.

After all, if we want food, we go to the grocery store. Want it prepared? Go to the Drive Thru at McDonalds. If we need shelter, we rent an apartment or buy a house. Need transportation? There are a dozen car dealerships within 10 miles.

The price we pay for convenience, is that we’ve lost our skills at capturing tribal knowledge. Skills learned within business tend to stay in our heads. We aren’t taught on the job anymore, we learn on the job. The wisdom of the skilled craftsman isn’t shared like it once was.

And we’re all the worse for it. As our population ages, many businesses are facing the growing threat of losing their “tribal knowledge”. The most experienced employees, who have long contributed to the company’s success through their individual contributions, have never bothered to share their knowledge with others. In some companies, sharing meant losing power, leverage or stature and so it was actually discouraged.

So how do we go about capturing our tribal knowledge?

Start by starting. Recognize the need. Conceptualize the business benefits. Make it a priority. Implement a sharing tool and develop a sharing culture. Position sharing as a win/win strategy rather than a zero sum game.

Corporate intranets have tried to serve this purpose, but many fall short. Intranets are used like the Yellow Pages. They’re there if you need them. But many times they’re like a one way street – a reference tool. True collaboration requires that everyone contribute to communal knowledge. Effective intranets facilitate a two way dialogue. Ideas are gleaned from every corner of the company and are surfaced for discussion and evaluation by all.

For some, this is a painful endeavor. Documenting ideas, participating in discussion boards, blogging are all time consuming efforts. It is so much easier to pick up the phone and tell someone your opinion. But the problem with this is the fact that you’re telling someONE. This process is inefficient and in larger organizations, one to one communication is never captured in the collective conscience.

Here are a few suggestions to try to engage your team in capturing tribal knowledge.

Provide an intranet where everyone can contribute. Co-locate access to business applications, reporting tools, news and discussion.

Position your intranet as the “Town Square” – the intersection of all your company’s activities – work, play, recognition (parades), initiatives and news.

Encourage people to visit. Where you used to communicate via mass email, instead, write a blog post and email the link. Instead of printing and distributing reports. Create a framework where project participants update tasks and projects in real time. Then make it easy for anyone in the company to be easily informed (custom email alerts, RSS feeds etc).

Develop rich, plentiful, interesting and essential content.

Avoid, where possible, content approval management routines. This places publishing burden on some individuals and discourages the capturing of spontaneous ideas.

Nurture, coax, encourage. You’re trying to create a new corporate habit. It will take some time.

But the journey will be worth it!

My Google Sites Test

I spent some time this past weekend, with Google Sites, the new FREE service from Google that enables Team sharing and collaboration. I’ve long been a huge supporter of tools that enable teams to collaborate and so I had to give Sites a try.

Now I’m not highly technical. I don’t code with HTML. And I had no trouble creating a sample company intranet site and also a Customer Site for a service business.

I was easily able to embed and use all the other Google tools (Docs, Calendars, Email, Picassa slideshow, Presentations, iGoogle gadgets) as well as the Sites tools (Filing Cabinet, Announcements, Dashboard and Lists.)

Here’s a screenshot of the sample customer service site I created.

Now I’ve only spent a couple of days with the application but I can see that it will begin to level the playing field for small to mid-sized businesses who simply don’t have access to the I.T. resources that their larger competitors do.

With Sites, companies with 10-300 employees could really support improved communication and collaboration.

And they could also use the tool to get closer to their customers.

Sites offer you the opportunity to create a variety of sites under a single account. So I created a sample company intranet and then created a sample customer service site, where my fictitious company could track and communicate issues resolution, share documents, push announcements and even IM with customer contacts.

All in all, my time was well spent.

If you’re involved in a small business, or work within a team setting, you’d be doing yourself a favor if you checked this out.

The One Lesson that is SO HARD to Learn

I’ve spent a good deal of my working life in I.T..

And if there’s one thing that has helped me maintain my sanity and enthusiasm, it’s that I try not to take criticism personally. I’ve developed a thick skin.

And I really never had a choice.

Because the alternative, is not very productive. It leads to an “us vs. them”, mentality – describing internal customers as “stupid users” and mentally excusing ourselves from addressing the issue at hand.

Hey – they should RTFM (Read the F**king Manual) if they want the answer! Or I covered that question in training! What are they? Stupid? This is an easy attitude to adopt and unchecked, it can spread quickly, kill morale and poison the department’s reputation within the company.

The I.T. leadership challenge is in redefining success. Success ISN’T, turning the system on. Training success ISN’T completing the user manual.

Success is reaching the company’s business performance objectives – enabling your fellow employees to effectively use your systems to achieve process excellence. If they can’t do that at present, YOUR JOB IS NOT YET DONE.

Seth Godin nails this concept in todays blog entry.

If you can change the discussion from us vs. them, to “How can we (I.T. AND our internal customers) execute better?”, the entire dynamic changes, for the better.

It forces you to think more creatively. If no one reads the user manual, it won’t be an effective training tool. Okay, perhaps we should spend out time figuring out a type of training that people will want to use. How about trying video? Let’s show people what the process looks like. Let’s show people how to do the transactions. Let’s show people the critical steps in each process.
Let’s post the videos on our intanet so new employees can learn the same lessons. Let’s ask for training delivery feedback from our employees. Let’s adapt.

Let’s make our infrastrucutre more bulletproof and self-healing. Instead of telling users to backup their systems, why don’t we have their systems do it automatically? Instead of expecting our users to remember 20 different system passwords and to change them monthly, why don’t we implement single signon?

When we are told of an application error or a hardware glitch, let’s make sure we not only solve the problem, but address the source of the problem, so over time, we don’t have to fix the same issue over and over again.

The I.T. journey from internal adversary to corporate partner begins with a thick skin and a refocused definition of what our jobs are really about.

The sad truth is: If your internal customers tell you that you suck, they’re generally right.

I’m Sorry.

I’ve just finished reading Garr Reynolds’ new book, Presentation Zen.

Like his blog by the same name, this book is required reading.

Here’s a link to TEDBlog with more info.

And for all of you who have ever attended one of my Powerpoint Presentations in the past, I’m sorry.

I promse to do better next time.

Death to Death by Powerpoint

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently, reading about how to create and deliver a more effective presentation. One great resource is Garr Reynolds’ blog, Presentation Zen. I have yet to read his book, by the same name, but it’s on my wish list.

An affiliated resource is this Squidoo lens created by Seth Godin.

Garr’s mission in life is to eradicate those “Death by PowerPoint” presentations that we’ve all attended (or given).

I’m now starting to think that my presentations would be more effective if I flashed back to elementary school, where each of us had to conduct a “Show’n'Tell” class. We brought in something from home (our only visual aid) and spoke about it for five minutes. The success of each presentation rested solely with me and my classmates, not the “thing” we brought in for the presentation.

Later in life, somehow the roles got switched and we began relying more on the visual aids than our own verbal communication skills.

For many of us, PowerPoint became a public teleprompter.

And that’s when presentations became “deadly”.

It seems to me that one way of determining whether PowerPoint slides are “overwhelming” the verbal message is by showing the slideshow to a complete stranger. If they can glean the message from the slideshow, chances are your message is relying more on the slides than your verbal presentation.

If you take a look at slideshows of renowned presenters, without benefit of the actual live presentation, chances are you’d have a hard time determining what the message was. And that’s because the slides are used to punctuate a point, not make a point.

Words are scarce. Illustrations are simple. Graphics/photos are eye catching, sometimes stark and sometimes unexpected. Great presenters’ slides don’t tell the story. They serve to illustrate it.

Take a look at a slideshow done by Seth Godin in 2000, about his new book (at the time) called “Unleashing the Ideavirus“.

Without the commentary, without the “story”, this is simply a collection of eclectic slides. If however, you were able to see Seth’s presentation, I’m betting you would come away excited by his vision for marketing in a Web2.0 world.

Here is a short video clip of Lawrence Lessig talking about “Video is the new Democracy”. Notice his presentation slides as you listen to the short speech. Very few words per slide, written in an old typewriter font (his trademark). The audience focus is on him, his words, his message, not his slides. In fact, a copy of the slideshow wouldn’t be particularly helpful to anyone who had not attended the presentation.

Watch.

So the next time you need to present, think about PowerPoint slides like the garnish on a great meal. The “meal” is you and your speech.