Business Insight Zone

Here are this blog’s top five posts of February, based on hits data:

1. What Works Better than an Auto-DM.
2. Customer ANYTHING.
3. Ten handy tips to build your inbox-fu.
4. Would you like a drink with that?
5. Build a brokered network around shared activities.

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Image by Kevin Dooley, used under a Creative Commons license.

Possibly you thought that “Ten handy tips to build your inbox-fu” plumbed the depths of that antique and hermetic art? Not so! Here are 11 more methods, culled from the illustrated scrolls locked within the hidden mountain fortress of the Dragon Claw School:

1. “Not My Problem” — Sweep the inbox for chores that could or should be addressed better by someone else. Delegate without remorse.
2. “Tete-a-Tete” — Group your inbox messages by sender. Pick one colleague; print out or summarize all relevant messages; set up one meeting to address all of them.
3. “Let the Good Times Roll” — Process your inbox in the evening, at home, on the couch, with a strong drink and fun music.
4. “Erosion” — Note how many e-mails are in your inbox now. Commit to lowering that number by a set amount (20? 50?) each day.
5. “Pareto” — 20% of your inbox contains 80% of its value. Act on those messages and file or delete the rest.
6. “Age before Beauty” — Keep it simple: find the oldest e-mail in your inbox and handle it. Repeat.
7. “It’ll Keep” — Don’t check your inbox before 11 a.m. — but when you do get to it, hit it hard. (This is the horde-defeating technique of Master Goodridge.)
8. “Luck of the Draw” — Choose one e-mail at random, and do SOMETHING to move on it. No skipping.
9. “Capture the Flag” — If you use flags (or stars etc.) to highlight e-mails, pick ONE of those and handle it to completion.
10. “The Brush-Off” — Find messages that can be answered honestly with “Sorry, but I can’t help.” Answer, archive, move on.
11. “Expiration Date” — If you haven’t looked at an e-mail in 6 months, archive or delete it without action. (Master Van Arsdale employed this defense in repelling the demon army of the Squid Emperor.)

There is great power in these techniques. Use them wisely, and share your knowledge with those whose hearts are pure.

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Image by Axel Bührmann, used under a CC-Share Alike license and filled with the fighting spirits of one thousand mighty e-mail warriors from days gone by.

Kara Moore is the Career Resource Librarian at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. I first made her acquaintance after she posted this glowing tweet about us:

Succesful interview prep workshop tonight! Factiva and Hoovers steal the show!

Turns out that Kara is a longtime fan of Hoover’s and what it can do for the students she works with — especially when they’re looking for internships. She was nice enough to answer some questions for us about how the Kellogg library staff and Kellogg students put Hoover’s to use.

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Tell us a little about yourself: what’s your professional background, and how long have you been at Kellogg?

I have been working as a librarian since receiving my Master’s in Library Science in 2005. I joined Kellogg in September of 2008 as their Career Resource Librarian, part of the Career Management Center.

How do you use Hoover’s in your role at Kellogg?

We have access to a lot of great resources at Northwestern University. Hoover’s Premium is a primary resource in our library. We use it to find general information about companies and industries.

How has Hoover’s helped Kellogg students land internships or other jobs?

In addition to individual appointments, we offer workshops on how to use resources to help students in the job search process. Hoover’s provides quick and easy access to learn about history, products, competitors, key executives, and financial data. We are currently in the midst of internship recruiting for the Class of 2010. Students will have multiple interviews with many companies (across various industries). Hoover’s provides essential information for their interview prep.

What’s your favorite aspect of Hoover’s?

The Build a List feature is heavily used. While a few other databases have similar functionality, Hoover’s Build a List is very user-friendly. Students will often have a handful of companies they would love to work for but need help finding other companies to widen their circle. Build a List has the ability to expand that list while keeping certain criteria (i.e. geographic location) constant.

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Thanks to Kara for taking the time to answer my questions, and for continuing to spread the joys of Hoover’s to her students!

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Photo copyright ©Jamie Padgett and Company, used with permission.

. . . and Hoover’s will be there!

The Microsoft Convergence conference, to be held in New Orleans from March 10 to 13, brings the whole world of Microsoft Dynamics — customers, partners, developers, et al. — together in one place.

We at Hoover’s are proud to be a Convergence sponsor this year. If you’re going to attend — or if you use Hoover’s and Microsoft Dynamics — we’d love to hear from you!

For more information on Convergence, click through to the official Microsoft site.

Meanwhile, the social-media analyst in me is going to go check out the Microsoft Dynamics community . . .

Aversion calls for action.

That’s the moral of the story in yesterday’s post on countering aversion. Because that post was about avoiding e-mails, my inbox has been the focus of my attention and action since then.

As I was thinking about all the ways you could attack an overloaded inbox, I started sharing some of my thoughts on Twitter. The feedback was excellent, and the process gave me a handy way to collect ideas in one place on the fly — I grouped them using the hashtag #inboxfu.

In hopes that these thoughts will be helpful to YOU, here are ten of the tactics I suggested:

1. “The Dose” — Highlight & open any block of ten messages, leave them open & rotate to them until they’re all acted upon.
2. “The Rule of Ten” — Start with oldest 10 messages in inbox. Do nothing else until you delete, file, or delegate ONE. Repeat with next 10.
3. “Four Corners” — Permanently take care of the oldest, newest, least important, and most important e-mails in your inbox.
4. “A to Z” — Start at the beginning. Go thru EVERY.SINGLE.MESSAGE in your inbox. Feel disgust. File/delete/answer in great batches.
5. “Beat the Clock” — Set a timer for 5 minutes. Eliminate as many e-mails as you can. Track results & try to top yourself.
6. “Lifeboat” — If you could save only ONE message from your inbox, which one would it be? Deal with that one permanently.
7. “Life Is Too Short” — If you could banish ONE message from your inbox, which one would it be? Deal with that one permanently.
8. “Categories” — Re-sort inbox by any category (From, Subject, attachments, . . . ) you don’t normally use. Whittle accordingly.
9. “Show Me the Money” — Pick the one e-mail that has the highest monetary impact — the most budget / revenue / cost / etc. Handle it.
10. “Bottleneck” — Eliminate the one pending e-mail that obstructs the most other projects / e-mails / conversations / tasks.

For extra credit, I did each of these as I put it onto this list. Even though I was already down to the last 40 or so nitty-gritty e-mails, and even though many more flowed in during the course of the day, I ended up with just 20 messages in my inbox — and produced a healthy stack of work while I was doing it.

Tomorrow: applying more bits of inbox-fu to those last, stubborn items that have so far resisted eradication.

What’s your best trick for carving down your inbox?

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Image by GGuillaume, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Ripped from the comments on the post “Customer ANYTHING”:

How is your company like the [bureaucratic] Gas company and who does the policy benefit? If the policy is about making it easier for you, for management, for reporting, for record keeping, then it is time to change your policy.

Thanks to Maria for putting it in such clear terms.

In his book First Things First, Stephen R. Covey used a diagram that has become famous in time management circles:

You should spend your time in Quadrant II, working on the valuable projects that are important but not urgent. Quadrant I is for genuine emergencies — the house is on fire — and Quadrant IV should be avoided at all costs.

The real source of poison, in Covey’s model, is Quadrant III, which is tempting to enter because the things in it are urgent, but which ought never be entered at all, since they are unimportant.

Maybe later we can discuss more of the implications of this, and ways that the model can be deepened. For now, a couple of questions for you:

• How does your working time divide among the quadrants?
• How does your organization’s time divide among the quadrants?

For myself, I spend too much time “below the line” in unimportant-land; my intellectual appetites tend to lead me toward what’s interesting, without regard to whether they move the needle. As for Quadrant II? Sheesh — maybe 15% of my time?

What about you?

Do you hate doing laundry? HATE-hate?

In the college dorm, my efforts to avoid doing laundry were . . . well, not quite heroic, but certainly strenuous — enough so that it would have made more sense to stage an intervention with myself and just do it.

Eventually, my sister bartered with me; she ended up taking care of my laundry in return for other chores. Pathetic of me, thinking back about it now.

Laundry, at least, was a known enemy — a clear source of aversion. Worse by far are the hidden sources of aversion in our working days — the blind spots that keep us from doing our best work, or keep us from even realizing that we’re failing to do our best work.

What brings this to mind? My inbox — or, rather, the follow-up file that was supposed to help me maintain Inbox Zero and keep me focused on my most pressing tasks.

Heh. Didn’t exactly work . . .

By the time the haze cleared, there were dozens of pending tasks / messages / crufty-bits sitting in that follow-up file. The inbox was blissfully empty . . . but the aversion carried on unabated.

The remedy? Kill the follow-up file, shove everything back into the inbox, deal with the consequences step by step.

As of yesterday when all this went down, there were a whopping (for me) 109 messages lingering. Twenty-four hours later, there are 39 — even though new messages have continued to flow in.

In the interests of public service, my favored techniques for breaking down an inbox backlog have been going out over the Twitter wires with an #inboxfu hashtag. Some of the best may end up here as separate blog posts.

Please wish me luck on earning back my Inbox Zero merit badge.

What’s YOUR big source of aversion?

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Related posts:

• 60 weekend minutes that will make your week go better.
• “Workiness” is to work as “truthiness” is to truth.
• One big workflow.

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Image by Ingrid, used under a Creative Commons license.

Best misunderstood headline of the day:

US Airways: Free drinks in coach

For a second after I first read it, I thought that US Airways would offer a free alcoholic drink to each passenger. It would be easy enough, right? Imagine the flight attendant saying,

“We know times are tough right now, so for those of legal age who’d like one, please accept a glass of beer or wine with our compliments.”

But that would require innovation, wouldn’t it?

I asked around, and it turns out that at least one airline — the regional Canadian carrier Porter — already does this. Do you know of others?

More to the point, would you like it if an airline offered this?

My sense is that it could be a small, cost-effective way to show some empathy for passengers, especially those who have been stuck with checked-bag fees and long, pointless security lines.

What say you?

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Photo by Hawkins, used under a Creative Commons license.

Why is Sad Robot sad? Because so many Twitter users — who might otherwise be perfectly lovely people — continue to undermine themselves by sending automatic direct messages.

This post aims to show those folks a better way to go.

The core issue: some Twitterites use software that allows them to automatically send direct messages (DMs) to their followers — especially to welcome new followers. They do this even though most Twitter users, in my experience, don’t find it necessary to send DMs to new followers at all, much less via robotic methods, and even though sending an auto-DM is, for many recipients, substantially worse than sending no message at all.

Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with sending a DM per se. In fact, DMs are a key feature of Twitter, because they allow you to have personal, one-to-one conversations with people you follow on Twitter.

I stress personal and one-to-one because that’s what DMs are designed to be, and that’s how a large chunk of the Twitter population likes them to be.

It can be a treat to receive a DM like that from someone you’ve been following. It lets you discuss personal aspects of things you’ve been talking about publicly. It lets you exchange e-mail or phone information, or set up face-to-face meetings, so you can deepen an acquaintance you’ve started on Twitter. It’s the perfect place for catty jokes and sarcastic asides.

In short, trading DMs, at its best, is like passing notes in class.

And then along comes someone I just followed . . .

– someone who doesn’t know me from Adam

– someone with whom I may have very little in common

– someone I may have followed only on a lark.

And they use the personal, one-to-one DM channel to pass me — a business card.

A photocopied takeout menu.

A mimeographed flyer for their widget-grooming service.

A ill-edited brochure for a timeshare.

You get the idea.

Now, you wouldn’t send me a come-on for your service . . .

• “Hey, check out my blog at http://www.idontcare.com”
• “Thanks for following! Please enter my contest at http://www.mindlessnonsense.com”
• “Glad to have you along. Let’s hook up on Facebook and LinkedIn and MySpace and Whatchamacallit!”

. . . if you thought it would undermine your reputation with me — would you? Yet that’s exactly what you’re doing when you send me a robo-message like these.

(It’s even more embarrassing when your robo-DM’ing software accidentally sends me, say, eight verbatim copies of the same message. This has happened to me more than once.)

And hey, maybe some people don’t mind the auto-DMs. Good for them. But is it worth it to alienate those who do?

What if one of the people you alienate has 4,200 followers and is getting increasingly impatient — and publicly vocal — about those who ignore the “DO NOT AUTO DM me” message in his Twitter bio? Is it worth it then?

I say no, and I’m here to show you a better way.

Read on . . .

What to do instead — a step-by-step list.

1. Once a day, preferably at a set time so you can enjoy the benefits of batch processing, go through all of the e-mails Twitter has sent informing you of new followers. (Bonus tip: set up a filter in your mail system so that all of these notifications go into one folder automatically. Saves a ton of time.)

2. Using a tabbed browser, click the link in each e-mail to open up a separate tab showing the Twitter profile for that new follower. (Delete or archive the e-mails to get them out of your way.)

3. Go to the first tab and look at the page for that user. Make a decision about whether you’re going to follow back. How to make that decision is a subject for another time, but it will likely involve reading their bio, scanning some of their recent tweets, and maybe clicking on the URL they’ve provided.

4. If you feel you MUST send the person a welcoming DM — and please remember that it isn’t standard procedure and isn’t expected — click on the “Message” link right there on the Twitter profile AND THEN SAY SOMETHING THAT’S TAILORED TO THEM INDIVIDUALLY.

Good examples:

• “Hiya, David – thanks for following. I’m sure I’ll learn plenty about IT security from following you.”
• “Sharon, thanks for following. Your blog looks great! I’ll have to show it to my wife; she’s the real cook in our family.”
• “Thanks for the follow, Jim — and I have to say, I’ve been reading your stuff for ages. Looking forward to talking with you on Twitter.”

If you want, keep a text document with some boilerplate phrases handy. But honestly, if all you can muster in your first DM is boilerplate with the person’s name inserted, you’re probably better off just sending nothing.

5. Optional bonus step: If you’re followed by one of your heroes or close friends, tweet something publicly about following that person, like this: “Wow! @communicatrix has joined the Twitter scene. Good times ahead!”

6. Close the browser tab for that Twitter profile.

7. Repeat steps 3 – 6 until you’re done.

Simple, eh?

Why is this better?

• Your DM says the follower’s NAME. To quote Dale Carnegie, “Remember that a [person]’s Name is to [them] the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”
• The DM builds a sense of SHARED INTEREST. Its recipient isn’t thinking “Who is this clown?” but “Hey, he’s interested in network security, too!”
• Because enough Twitterites do keep sending auto-DMs, your personalized message will stand out because of its TAILORING. Just as a tailored suit flatters its wearer, a tailored message flatters its recipient.

Wouldn’t you rather stand out for good reasons?

By this point, this shouldn’t be an issue.

Chris Brogan already explained why you’re hurting yourself with “robot behavior.” He said it well, he said it for a big audience, and he said it two months ago:

Social Media is No Place for Robot Behavior

Amber Naslund said it even more eloquently, she said it at length, and she said it three months ago, which is like three years in Twitter time:

Thanks For Following, Now Click On My Junk

It’s not that Chris and Amber think that they can make up rules for you to follow. But they DO get how the social media work, they have legions of passionate Twitter fans, and they’re trying to keep you from embarrassing yourself — just like I am with this post.

The crux of it all: we just met.

• I can find your site easily through your Twitter biography.
• I am not going to watch your welcome video.
• I don’t want a free e-book in return for following you.

As we get to know each other better I may well read your stuff, buy your stuff, praise your stuff to the high heavens.

But that’s as we get to know each other — not right off the bat. Give it time.

The floor is now open for your comments.

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[Special thanks to Elizabeth Hannan, Jenn Van Grove, and April of Sweet Leaf Tea for their feedback while I was writing this post.]

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Robot imImage by Steve Keys, sandwich board by Michael Coghlan; both used under a Creative Commens license.