Business Insight Zone

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.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

[O would some Power that gift give us
To see ourselves as others see us!]

~Robert Burns, “To a Louse”

It might be the hardest thing in the world to do.

We marinate in our own thoughts, we reinforce our own habits and beliefs, we wear grooves in our minds that accommodate our practices, whether they’re personal (do you check your calendar before your e-mail, or vice versa?) or collective (if it’s Tuesday, it must mean a staff meeting).

In business, though, we won’t thrive unless we can pull back and see ourselves as though from the outside. The vital questions are easy to say, but hard to answer truthfully:

• How do our customers like us?
• What makes a prospect become a customer?
• How do users want our products to operate?
• What problems are users trying to solve?
• How do the undecided choose between us and our competitors?
• . . .

We at Hoover’s have been asking these questions for a long time, and a loyal customer base suggests that we’ve done a solid job of answering them. But lately we’ve stepped up our efforts, which has led to major improvements to our platform — previously discussed in this post — to answer customer requests, and even to go beyond what customers have thought was possible. (Stay tuned for more on that front; I try not to be too much of a “homer” about Hoover’s products, but it’s hard not to get excited about a set of functionality that’s just so useful for our subscribers.)

As for myself, if you’ve been reading this blog for any time, you’ll know that I like to challenge my own perceptions, because I know how easy it is to get stuck in a rut with one’s thinking. With the start of the new year, I started refreshing my outlook on my work by a couple of simple expedients:

1. Reorganizing my e-mail folders.
2. Buying and using a new type of notebook — not a computer, just a nice bound paper notebook with grid pages.

No big whoop, to be sure — but even these small changes are enough to get me thinking differently.

But now, I want to pose the question to you:

How do YOU get yourself to view YOUR work with fresh eyes?

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Photo by Upsilon Andromedae.

It’s one of the big questions that emerged in the research for my article in the new issue of the UT McCombs School’s alumni magazine.

In Favor of Doggedness

Entrepreneurs must have endless determination to channel their passion into business success. In other words, there is no limit to how many doors they should knock on or how much hard work they should pour into their ideas.

Against Over-Doggedness

For the article, Gary Hoover, Trent Thurman, and Jay Drayer each volunteered stories about fellow entrepreneurs who stuck with a failed idea long after it was time to lay it to rest. These overly dogged businesspeople allowed themselves to be so stubborn that they went beyond persistence, to the point that they ignored clear market signals. In other words, they took a virtue so far that it became a fault when it clouded their business judgment.

The Takeaway

There’s a certain flexibility of mind required to succeed as an entrepreneur. Yes, you need a deep well of determination, but you must also be able to tell when your doggedness and passion needs a new outlet.

A metaphor: If you hit a brick wall and figure out that you can break through it, by all means grab your sledgehammer and start to work. But if you hit a solid stone wall that no sledgehammer will ever break, you’re better served to acknowledge it so that you can find your way under, over, or around it — or so you can address a different wall altogether.

Where do you draw the line on doggedness in business? When do you finally take “No” for an answer?

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Related items:

• “The Upside of Failure: Turning Uh-oh into A-ha!” in Texas: The McCombs School of Business Magazine
• Emerging from failure stronger than ever.
• When do you kill a business?
• When is it time to kill a project?

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Photo by sabianmaggy.

The way some businesspeople talk, you’d think they never encountered a setback in their working lives. Possibly there’s just no help for them. For the rest of us, though, it’s vital to learn how to come back from failures when they happen. But how?

That’s the core question behind my just-published article in the UT McCombs School of Business alumni magazine:

The Upside of Failure: Turning Uh-oh into A-ha!

WE ALL FAIL. Some of us linger over our failures, examining the wreckage of what might have been, while others sail on toward new ventures (and new failures) without being anchored to old regrets. Why do some people emerge from failure stronger? How do they recover from setbacks to reach new heights of success? What is the secret of the phoenix that emerges from the flames?

One of the pleasures of working on this feature came in getting to interview and learn from Gary Hoover, who founded Hoover’s 20 years ago and who has a wealth of hard-won personal insight for how to emerge from failures.

I’d love to have your thoughts on the piece, either here or in the comment thread attached to the article.

And, while we’re at it: How do YOU bounce back from failure?

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Related posts:

• How do you cope with failure?
• “You’re constantly on the brink of crashing, because that’s the fastest.”
• Book review: Mindset, by Carol Dweck.
• The benefits of failure.
• How well do you tolerate mistakes?

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Image via Donna Barber.

One of the topics that consistently yields the most hits on this blog is “deliberate practice,” a form of expertise-building studied by psychologist Anders Ericsson and laid out in books like Geoff Colvin’s Talent Is Overrated and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.

I’ve discussed deliberate practice here many times, and I’m always interested when new conversations arise in the comment threads of those posts. If you’d like to join one of these in progress, check out the lengthy exchanges between “tallison” and me in the comment thread of the post “Deliberate Practice in a Nutshell.”

How do YOU think we develop our abilities? And how much does talent (or “talent”?) matter?

Please chime in!

Let’s start with the moral of the story: If you want someone to take a particular action, remove friction everywhere along the way.

It applies to sales cycles. It applies to getting someone to go on a date with you. It applies all over the place. But in this particular case, the idea came to me because of an exchange I had this week on Twitter. (Don’t worry, you’ll get the point even if you’ve never used Twitter.)

Context: If you write something useful on Twitter, you might see it “re-tweeted.” That’s when I read your tweet and then send a copy of it along to my followers, with due credit to you. (This is easier than it sounds — it’s one click of a button using tools like TweetDeck or Seesmic.)

The other day I passed along a basic piece of advice: if you want people to re-tweet something you write, keep in short in the first place, because whatever you say will now be prefaced by “RT @YourNameHere,” and you only had 140 characters to work with in the first place.

One Twitter correspondent pointed out that there are tools that will shorten tweets for you automatically. These mk yr tweets luk like lyrix 2 a Prince song. Personally, I’m enough of a wordsmith (read: writing snob) that I don’t like to write or read messages is l33t-speak, but the underlying lesson about friction goes way beyond my grammatical elitism.

Here’s the exchange I had with my Twitter interlocutor:

Me: Sure, somebody *could* abbreviate to [re-tweet] (automatically or manually) — but why make it hard for them?

Her: That’s hard?

Me: No, it’s not hard, but *any* friction in [the] process makes it less likely you’ll be retweeted.

How do I know this? Because I’ve bailed out on re-tweeting something interesting if it looked like it would take more than a few seconds.

Let’s review that for a second. I’m a pretty fast typist, I’ve sent more than 20,000 tweets over the past couple of years, and I have access to all the technology I need to make sending tweets really easy. Oh, and I’ve been a professional writer for many years. And yet I still bail out when something I thought would be really easy turns out to be less-than-really-easy, even when it would take, what?, 30 seconds of work.

Again, the lesson: remove friction.

Somewhere or other — sorry that I couldn’t find the reference — Paul Graham has written about his early days of building his Web startup Viaweb. There was a setup process for new users. Too many of them were bailing out. From looking at the stream of clicks users were making, page by page, Graham figured out exactly where they were bailing out most, and he had a good guess as to why. He simplified that page, made the navigation clearer, and even inserted a message that told them they only had a couple of steps to go in the process. The abandonment rate plummeted.

It’s a simple concept. People are busy. They don’t know what they want, and they believe they don’t have time to figure it out, especially if the figuring looks remotely like it will be laborious.

So remove the labor. Loosen the brakes. Eliminate friction.

What’s your best example of business friction?

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Image source: Richard Masoner. Used under a CC-Share Alike license.

This is what I get for waiting to do a job “the right way.” For months now I’ve been meaning to write a review of Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. It’s a good book, albeit with flaws, that has lots of important ideas about “deliberate practice.” But the review I have in mind would probably rival my Russian-novel-esque treatment of Edward Hallowell’s CrazyBusy, and who has the time for that?

So, for now here are pointers to three items on Talent is Overrated that I’ve found useful:

1. You don’t get better at writing essays by writing more essays. In this post, G. Brett Miller draws on his U.S. Army experience to confirm Colvin’s observation that the military, at least in peacetime, does a much better job than the mainstream of corporate America at performing deliberate practice. Key quote:

When I left the military and joined the corporate world, what struck me most was how little practicing — and how little learning and improving — anyone did. For anything.

It’s worth pondering Miller’s comparison of the typical corporation to the military in wartime.

2. Software coder Mark Needham offers a straightforward summary of the concepts of the book in his detailed book review. Although he uses some examples from the world of computer programming, nontechnical readers will also get a lot from his clear exposition of the book’s principles.

I particularly like Needham’s call “to create shorter and more effective feedback cycles for individuals to help them to get better.” This is a real challenge for companies that are married to annual reviews as the main (or only!) means of regular feedback, but it’s a challenge that must be overcome if the principles of deliberate practice are to take hold in an organization.

3. At his Three Star Leadership Blog, Wally Bock takes Colvin’s book down a peg in “Talent is Overrated is overrated and overpriced.” Bock praises Colvin for laying out important precepts — talent is overrated, and you will need a lot of time working on your skills — but suggests that readers might be as well served to read Colvin’s FORTUNE articles on the subject (to which he links), along with a related item from the Harvard Business Review.

Bock also says that, in the book,

There’s too little attention paid to other factors that influence success like coaching, family support, developmental assignments, and luck. There’s virtually no discussion of the fact that for leadership and other business skill areas, learning and doing intertwine.

I liked the book better than Wally did, but I do agree that Colvin didn’t do as much as he might’ve to explain specifically how his paragons of business deliberate practice, Jeff Immelt and Steve Ballmer, used deliberate practice to ascend the heights of corporate success.

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I’ll give a more detailed critique of the book soon. Meanwhile, what are your thoughts?

• If you’ve read Talent Is Overrated, what do you think of it?
• Even if you haven’t, what do you think of the premise that deliberate practice can improve business performance?

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Related:

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

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. . . as I slump to the end of a tiring — but inspiring — week.

1. Quoth Bill James:

People take information and build knowledge. When you give them new information they will create new knowledge, absolutely and without question.

I take this seriously, not particularly in its baseball context, but because Hoover’s has worked hard for many years to bring high-quality, relevant information to businesspeople. All the time I’m thinking more about how we can do this better, not just in the sense of supplying information better and faster, but in the sense of helping you turn it into new knowledge that fuels your business.

That’s just a sketch of a much bigger idea — more to come.

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2. You may know that in many cases I’m a foe of business meetings, but I had a great one today. After I came out if it, I tweeted this, half in jest:

A good meeting is one you come out of with a hit list in hand.

After discussing it with a friend — who rightly stumped for the benefit of having a clear meeting agenda — I followed up with this:

Sharp clarity going in, severe clarity coming out should be the goal of a meeting.

If a meeting doesn’t exhilirate you, or scare you a little, or give you relief by answering some of your burning questions . . . what good is it?

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3. Something to think about if you find you’re having a hard time thinking:

The ability to attend to our environment, to our own feelings, and to those of others is a naturally evolved feature of the human brain. Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life. . . . Our brains can generate only a limited amount of this precious resource every day.

How can you improve your own attention? Or your customers’? Or your employees’? It might make a big difference to your business.

Related:

• Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.

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Photo by fauxto_digit, used under a Creative Commons license.

Jakob Nielsen raises a very good point in this BusinessWeek piece about businesspeople’s use of Twitter:

If you care about productivity, don’t check your Twitter feed while you’re trying to get work done. Disruptions are deadly for productivity because it takes several minutes to reorient the brain every time you go off track looking at something else.

It’s a point I’ve hammered on before, one that grows out of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research into “Flow”: we don’t — we cannot — sink down into a piece of work until we’ve spent at least 15 or 20 uninterrupted minutes on it. This is when we get “in the zone,” lose all track of time, and lose any self-consciousness about the work we’re doing. We just work.

Much as I love Twitter, using it heavily makes you prone to exactly the types of interruptions that are likeliest to diminish your ability to do your best, deepest, most “Flow”-driven work.

But . . . right after the snippet quoted above, Nielsen said:

Stick to checking updates once per day — for example, during lunch. All the tweets will still be there.

Not so — at least not for many power users of Twitter. Many of the heavy users who extract lots of value from Twitter do so by dipping into it throughout the day, and it doesn’t work for them to check it once per day. By dipping in frequently, they can sample the current flow of tweets and engage in active-but-transient conversations that won’t be current later on.

So, good use of time or bad use of time? Or, to put it a different way: do you let the brain win, or do you let Twitter win?

I don’t have the answer, but I have two questions that I’d like YOU to answer:

1. How would you decide whether frequent use of Twitter throughout the day was a worthwhile use of your brain, in business terms?
2. How many areas of your everyday work besides Twitter violate the concept of “Flow” along the lines of what Nielsen describes? (Hint: e-mail.)

I look forward to your answers in the comments. Hit me with your best shot!

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Related posts:

• Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.
• Book review: CrazyBusy, by Edward Hallowell.
• How Flow is like a good cup of coffee.
• Fewer meetings should lead to more “Flow.”

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Photo by Laszlo Ilyes, used under a Creative Commons license.

Climb that hill!

Is your mindset fixed, telling you that what’s so is so and unlikely to change?

Or is it attuned to growth, leading you to look for ways to do things differently, make things better, try again?

The growth-vs.-fixed dichotomy is at the heart of Prof. Carol Dweck’s book Mindset, which I reviewed here last year, and which I recommend to anyone. Many years of painstaking research by Dweck revealed that a growth mindset was the common denominator for many high performers across diverse fields of endeavor.

My guess is that the state of the economy has driven a lot of people into fixed-mindset-land. But I’m sure that we would all benefit from a society-wide conversion to the growth mindset.

• What are you doing to prevent the fixed mindset from taking hold?
• What can you do to promote a growth mindset for yourself, your team, your entire organization?

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Photo by Rudi Riet, used under a CC-Share Alike license.