Business Insight Zone

Since I’m a heavy user of Twitter both personally and professionally, people often ask me for my advice on how to use it. To help answer them in detail without repeating myself, I’m putting up this post to link to some of my writing about Twitter and its use. I expect I’ll update it periodically to include new items.

• 15 January 2009 — Using Twitter for Business: my presentation to HIMA.
• 29 January 2009 — Hello, world! (Or, how to introduce yourself in the social media)
• 20 February 2009 — What Works Better than an Auto-DM.
• 24 April 2009 — My approach to FollowFriday on Twitter.
• 25 May 2009 — Twitter follow-backs: the 5-step lightning approach.
• 23 July 2009 — Complaining on Twitter: a minor point of etiquette.
• 28 July 2009 — An easy way to find relevant Twitter followers.
• 6 August 2009 — Don’t put all your eggs in the Twitter basket.
• 7 August 2009 — How to get people to follow you back on Twitter.
• 27 August 2009 — Can you judge a book by its cover? (On Twitter you can!)
• 10 September 2009 — What not to say in a Twitter auto-DM.
• 1 October 2009 — Dumb questions, redux: Twitter auto-DM version.
• 12 October 2009 — Why to be patient with Twitter follow-backs.

By the way, if there are other topics you’d like me to address, feel free to suggest them in the comment thread. Likewise if there are ways I can organize this information better for you.

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Photo by Lindsey Bieda.

For all I know, he even thought of it himself, without reading my series of posts on sports metaphors.

(That’s a joke, folks.)

Actually, in his current New York Times column, “The Sporting Mind,” Brooks gives an interesting overview of how some academics view American sports — and especially how the American sporting ethos partakes of older Greek, Roman, and Victorian ideals of athleticism. A tidbit:

[Prof. Michael Allen] Gillespie argues that the American sports ethos is a fusion of these three traditions. American sport teaches that effort leads to victory, a useful lesson in a work-oriented society. Sport also helps Americans navigate the tension between team loyalty and individual glory. We behave like the British [in our emphasis upon team play], but think like the Greeks [in terms of courageous individual effort], A. Bartlett Giamatti, a former baseball commissioner, once observed.

Brooks’s own sociological observation — about the solidarity of Wisconsin fans attending a Badger football game — feels a bit tacked-on, though I think the underlying point is sound: for all of its problematic aspects, American sport still does serve some purpose as a force that brings people together across social divisions of race and class.

The Business Application

It’s worth pondering how each of the three sporting ideals that Brooks discusses play out in American business:

• Greek: Many companies and business thinkers emphasize the importance of personal contributions to business success. The courage and endurance prized by the Greeks are (a) called upon again and again as companies ask employees to give their all, and (b) lauded by successful businesspeople as the bases of their own success. One problem with this ideal is that some individuals place themselves far above the organization, insisting upon disproprotionate rewards for themselves even when group effort was the real source of success.
• Roman: There is a distinct element of spectacle in American business, both in how stories play out in the business press (Lehman crashes! What will the Fed do next?!), and in how some companies actually behave, internally and externally.
• Victorian: Any manager who has ever said, “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’ ” was appealing to this tradition. (Anyone who ever muttered “But there is a ‘me’ in there” was exposing the weakness of that old chestnut.) And many business books have been written about what it takes to get an entire work team / department / company pulling in the same direction toward collective goals.

What do you think? Does this three-part sporting model fit with your understanding of American business — and of your own company?

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(Thanks to C. V. Harquail for tipping me off to Brooks’s column.)

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Photo of Camp Randall Stadium at the Univ. of Wisconsin by Royal Broil.

Let’s tell a story.

Here’s an old trick with a new twist: If you’re stuck for what to do next in your work, especially at those levels between “grand corporate strategy” and “which thing do I do in the next ten minutes?,” write a case study — starring you, doing the work you do now — that peeks into the future.

Give yourself an 18-month window for the actions involved, and assume that you’re writing the case study another six months later, so that the trend of (successful!) outcomes from your efforts will be clear. I pick 18 months because Peter Drucker, among others, suggested it as a good, workable timeframe for turning even big plans into reality. To put it another way, it’s a timeframe that bridges the quarter-to-quarter focus on earnings and the five-year windows that go along with many overarching corporate strategies.

At the top of a piece of paper, write “18 months.” Next to it, write the Big Outcome achieved by that point — “Breakeven” or “Patent Awarded” or “First Mentor Class Graduated” or “Sold the Company” or whatever. On a line under that, write “15 months” and list some things that led into the Big Outcome. Keep breaking it down by steps: “12 months” . . . “9 months” . . . et cetera. Chop the time smaller as you get closer to the start of the project, since (a) the tone of many projects is set in the early going, and (b) these are the steps you may be able to envision better from where you sit now.

Tweaking and Writing

Once you’ve done this all the way back to the present, you may realize that the timeline is wrong. Maybe you need less than a year to get your new product idea off the ground. (Heck, for some things you might need less than a month.) Maybe you need five years to write your multivolume history of the Internet. If you figure out that the timeline is askew, just fiddle with the durations until it makes sense.

Now for the kicker. Don’t just leave the steps listed in outline form: actually write the case study. No big whoop — 800 words could be plenty — but let your imagination soar. Make up ambitious-but-believable numbers for site traffic, revenues, users, donors, contracts, or what-have-you; fill in glowing quotes from you, your ecstatic customers, and suitably impressed industry watchers. Talk about how the model is being copied and adapted by other forward-thinking organizations.

Two Problem-Solving Approaches In One

What you’re doing with this exercise is:

1. Thinking like an engineer. After President Kennedy established the goal of reaching the moon before 1970, the space program’s engineers broke down the mission into its parts. Knowing that they had to end up with astronauts landing safely back on Earth, they could formulate both the components of a successful moon shot (achieving Earth escape velocity, accurately computing and following flight trajectories, adequate air supply, etc) and the sequence of the missions that would build up to a moon landing. You’re doing the same thing here, albeit at a smaller scale. (Then again, I don’t know the size of your ambitions!)
2. Using narrative. Humans are drawn to stories. We want to make sense of things, and our explanations become more powerful when they fit into a narrative flow: A happened; B happened because of it; to everyone’s surprise, C came along and threatened to ruin everything; but, thanks to D, they all lived happily ever after anyway. Writing out a story with yourself as the forward-thinking hero could be a good way not only to capture in words the engineering problem you face, but to convince yourself that it’s really possible for you to navigate your way through it.

Now that your engineering/narrative project is done, you need to run with it. What’s the first thing you can do to turn your case study into a reality? Make it happen this week!

And while you’re at it, why not leave a comment to share your own best tactics for breaking down big problems into manageable chunks?

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Photo by Marco Arment.

Much to my surprise, a few short posts about Will Smith that I wrote a while back continue to be among the most popular items on this blog, month in and month out. Here are the ones I mean:

• 5 December 2007: The work ethic of Will Smith: “deliberate practice” in action.
• 29 October 2008: The Talented Mr. Smith and His Money-Making Ways.
• 18 November 2008: The Basic Basics: Go the last mile(s).

I was thinking of these as I watched this montage video about Smith’s working philosophy at Trey Pennington’s site:

(If the video doesn’t work, try this link.)

Maybe some of what Smith says about the “flow of the universe” sounds hokey, but it’s well worth heeding his core messages about (a) obsessive focus on what’s important to you, (b) making the world better for others, and (c) an “unrealistic,” unrelenting work ethic.

Pennington suggests that we take Smith’s philosphy — along with that of the witty video blogger Jay Smooth — and apply it to our social media practice. It probably won’t surprise you that I want to take it one step further, into a broader consideration of how we work, why we work, and what holds us back.

Check out the video, then please tell me what you think: How can we in the corporate world emulate Smith’s approach to success?

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Other related posts:

• Deliberate practice in the working world.
• Deliberate practice in a nutshell.

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It’s endemic — and I’m not talking about the nation’s households checking to see what else in on during the commercials for LOST.*

I’m talking about the sometimes herky-jerky rhythms of our daily work, the constant mental channel-flipping between e-mail and IM and spreadsheets and meetings and drop-in visitors and . . . all of it.

It’s an old issue, and indeed I’ve written about it any number of times here. (Case in point.) I also read a good bit about how to combat it, especially at blogs like TimeBack.

But somehow today brought it all home for me. I got a couple of important things done by being systematic. Other things I interrupted by being distractable and unsystematic. But I also recognized a couple of key gaps in my work thanks to several bits of feedback that, taken singly, wouldn’t have amounted to much but, taken together, showed me where I’ve been missing opportunities — not just today or this week, but in the bigger picture.

Taking time to think, to stay on one channel, is a good way to spot those missed opportunities sooner and better. Channel-flipping, while it’s good for many things (diversity of intake, amusement, etc.), isn’t great for that kind of pattern recognition.

You think?

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* Given (a) the furor over tonight’s season premiere, and (b) the extreme confusion I’ve experienced every time I’ve accidentally watched the show, I’m glad I’m not a LOST fanatic. Maybe I’ll rent it on DVD so I can watch it back-to-back when it’s all over.

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Photo by Francis Bijl.

(I’m warming up for my March 16 South by Southwest Interactive session by trying out various metaphors that bridge sports and business — and especially the use of social media in business. Feel free to chime in with your own metaphors in the comments!)

Lou Gehrig, Glenn Hall, Cal Ripken, Brett Favre: all of them gained fame not just for the skill with which they played their sports, but for their durability. Game after game, year after year, they put up with all kinds of punishment, yet still kept coming back for more.

(Since I was reared in Texas and my parents grew up in the South, I didn’t grow up understanding hockey. But a friend of mine who grew up in New England and played every available sport in his youth said that the hardest athletic thing he had ever done, by far, was to tend goal. It’s hard to imagine the toughness of Glenn Hall to play goalie for 502 consecutive NHL games.)

Some people do the same thing at work: show up every day, no matter what, and work hard. But is that enough of an analogy? In social media, the closest thing might be to blog every single day. But the most diligent blogger, like the dedicated sales rep or A/R clerk, doesn’t face onrushing linemen or a puck/baseball traveling faceward at a million miles an hour.

So, you tell me: What’s the business equivalent of Lou Gehrig’s streak?

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See also:

• Sports metaphors: the All-Star lineup.

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Gehrig photo via Wikipedia.

As the date of our SXSW Interactive session on sports metaphors for business approaches, I’ll be posting more here on that topic. I thought it would be useful to have a single omnibus post that collects all the other posts in one place, and that points to sports-metaphor articles from other sources.

Here’s what I’ve written on the topic so far:

• Jan. 7 — Enter the arena . . . of sports metaphors.
• Jan. 12 — Sports metaphor: “a captain’s innings.”
• Jan. 13 — Making lemonade in the bottom of the 9th.
• Jan. 14 — A little sports retrospective.
• Jan. 15 — An intemperate analogy: Wall Street and steroids.
• Jan. 19 — Sports metaphor: “a nose for the basket.”
• Feb. 1 — Sports metaphor: “consecutive games played.”
• Feb. 5 — Sports metaphors: David Brooks gets in on the act.
• . . .

By all means, if you have your own sports metaphors you’d like to share, feel free to enter them in the comments here. And if you know of other posts and articles that could be listed, please leave a comment or drop me a line to let me know.

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Photo by Joel Dinda.

My friend Tyson Goodridge, who runs his own social media firm, has assembled a cast of social media marketing worthies (plus — full disclosure — yours truly) to answer a set of seven questions about their work practices.

Here are the seven questions:

1. What one trait or habit got you to where you are today?
2. Your work day just started, what’s the FIRST thing you do?
3. What makes you efficient with your day?
4. Your Favorite Business book of all time?
5. 3 things on your desk right now/ 3 things you can’t live without
6. Habit you want to kick in 2009
7. Habit you’d like to form for 2010

You can read Tyson’s explanation of the project — and see the full list of participants — in this post:

7 Habits of Highly Effective Social Marketers

So far, he has interviewed Powered CMO Aaron Strout (a good friend of mine whom you may remember from several of my previous posts) and Kate Brodock (whom I know slightly via Twitter).

If you’re interested in knowing how some very savvy people* in social marketing think about their work and organize their days, you’ll be well-served to check in regularly as Tyson posts more “7 Habits” interviews.

* Plus, and I repeat this just for the sake of fair warning, me.

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An open message to all P.R. people:

If you want me to read your press release, please do me the very simple favor of starting it with “Dear Tim . . .”

You could go a step further by indicating some familiarity with this blog, but I won’t put my foot down about that.

I will continue to delete unread any press release blasted out with no personalization at all.

Regards,

Tim

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Yes, I’m basically asking for a level of personalization that has been possible with mail-merge features since the 1980s — but I can assure you that setting up this one simple hurdle will allow me to continue to trash half of the pitches that hit my inbox.

Yes, I’ll still get lots of irrelevant pitches that have nothing to do with what we discuss here — but I’ve given up hope that the can’t-be-bothered P.R. flack will pay attention to something as strange and provocative as relevance.

And before anybody complains that I paint with too broad a brush: I know many outstanding P.R. people who are a credit to their clients and their industry. It’s just that knowing these people — and counting quite a few of them among my friends — makes the gross failure-to-grasp-the-clue of the bad ones all the more cringe-inducing.

Here endeth the rant.

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Image source.