Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

It’s my own most-overused word. It’s the ultimate noncommital — or coded — word to use in business meetings. Among its many meanings:

• “Not interesting.”
• “Weird.”
• “Totally unproven.”
• “Promising.”
• “Cool.”
• “CRAZY expensive.”
• “Horrific.”
• “Ignorant.”
• “Interesting.”
• “Oh, please.”
• “Crucial.”
• “Worth noting.”
• “Important for you to get through your head.”

What would you add to this list?

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(Image by M.J.S. Thanks to Karen, Kiley, and Patti for suggestions.)

What rabbit-hole could you avoid scampering down today? The hallway conversation that turns into a major gripefest, or into more work for you to do? The long, pointless trek around the Internet for something not-so-important? What?

Here are some suggested remedy phrases. Use them liberally — and early! — on yourself and others to head off any rabbit-hole journeys before you ever get underground.

• “Wow, sounds interesting, but I’m underwater right now. Good luck!”
• “Whoa — how long is this going to take? How many minutes?”
• “Okay, but that’s not what we’re talking about right now.”
• “Oh, sorry, but I’m right in the middle of something.”
• “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.”
• “Oh, man — don’t get me started.”
• “Ah, it’s not worth worrying about.”
• “That will keep until tomorrow.”
• “Hmm, probably not the best use of our time.”
• “Does it matter one way or the other? I’m thinking probably not.”
• “Well, that whole story doesn’t concern us right now.”
• “I’d love to talk more some other time, but . . .”

What would you add to this list?

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(Photo by Lee Coursey.)

The late Peter Drucker teaching a class

That was one of the penetrating questions Peter Drucker used to ask of managers at the companies he visited. It’s a classic “naive question” — simple on the outside, but easy to get wrong if you let yourself be led astray by the hurly-burly of business.

The question comes to mind because of this great comment Brenda Michelson made on last week’s post, “Let dead people solve your problems for you”:

. . . i was working with a company trying to move from retail silos — store, catalog, web — to true customer centric multi-channel retail. everyone was getting caught up in the enormity of each channel and the cross-interactions and then it occurred to me that as an organization “we sell things to people”. while there was variation in the sequence of actions and physicality, there was a simple common denominator. by recognizing the concepts of a common base and variations, we were better able to get our minds around the problem space and solution.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? “We sell things to people.” Yet the smart folks in Brenda’s organization needed that kind of simple lodestone to guide their work on that huge project.

My bias is like Drucker’s — and like Albert Einstein’s. Einstein, you may recall, said

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

If the ghost of Peter Drucker put you on the spot, could you give a simple answer to the question, “What business are you in?”

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Related posts:

• How will we know when we win?
• The power of naive questions.

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(Picture via Claremont Graduate University.)

Photo by mattfoster.

People don’t like having their mistakes pointed out to them. Sure, there are times when we’re open to feedback, and ideally, if we really and truly turn into grown-ups at some point, we’re always open to feedback, because feedback is how we get better.

But back in the world of imperfect people — the world we actually inhabit — it’s hard to get people to understand when they’re wrong. Those in the wrong can take all kinds of strategies for deflection, e.g.:

• “Okay, I hear you, but that’s just your opinion.”
• “You don’t have the knowledge [experience, training] that I do in this area.”
• “You’re blinded here by your own biases.”
• “You just can’t stand to think that I’d be right about this.”
• “There you go again, attacking my ideas.”
• “You and I simply have different philosophies about this.”
• “Where did you get that data? That can’t be right.”

And so on. Seldom do we hear: “You’re right — my fundamental premise was flawed” or “You know what? I’m gonna have to completely rethink this because of the evidence you’ve showed me.” For that matter, seldom do we say it ourselves.

We humans, as a rule, are not so great about admitting that we’re wrong in public, especially when it concerns topics about which we have sermonized loudly.

Photo by Nathan Borror.

I’m thinking of this for two reasons:

1. Last week I got caught up in a blogospheric tempest-in-a-teapot, in which a blogger (who shall remain nameless) and his readers disagreed fundamentally about some of the premises he put forward in a blog post.

It doesn’t really matter what the topic was or who the blogger was, because the point is transcendent: the guy posted his thoughts specifically to stir the pot, but then once the pot got stirred — and he was presented with explicit, specific evidence that tended to undermine his broad-brush pronouncements — he dug in his heels and defended his positions all the more devoutly.

It’s not that he didn’t have a leg to stand on, or that all of his critics were correct in their own views. Rather, the blogger needed to modulate some of the over-the-top rhetoric in his post, or at least to acknowledge that he was making generalizations that were broadly true (which they were) but not universally true (as he kept trying to assert).

Myself, I left a detailed comment offering some specific criticisms, then kept checking to see if the blogger would respond. He never did, and I let myself get worked up about it.

And here’s the thing: Who cares? The guy was wrong in some of what he said, but he’s (a) successful in his field, (b) correct, in broad outline, about some of his points, and (c) obviously unwilling to review his basic theses in light of what his commenters were trying so hard to tell him. The grown-up response to all of this, best I can tell, is “Eh, so what?” Let him be wrong. He’ll go his way, I’ll go mine, and we can both still have success and help others along the road.

The moral: I’ve got better things to do than to correct someone who’s not open to correction — especially when there are so many things about which I need correction.

Photo by ninjapoodles.

2. Recently a friend on Twitter called me to task — ever-so-gently, mind you — for acting peevish about others’ gaffes of spelling, grammar, and usage. I hadn’t realized that I was making so many of these comments out in the Twitterverse, but I guess I was. These are the kinds of things I’m talking about:

• When you’re praising what someone says, it’s not “Here, here,” but “Hear, hear.” It comes from an old British usage, “Hear him! Hear him!” — something like what you still hear in certain Christian churches when a parishoner hollers out, “Preach it!”
• It seems that I constantly come across misuse of “its,” either because people mistake the contraction of “it is” (it’s) for the possessive of “it” (its), or because they commit the abomination [wink] of tacking an apostrophe onto the end of the possessive form (its’). I shudder.
• In general, people put way too many apostrophes before “s” in words that are not possessive and that don’t include acronyms or numbers (e.g. “the 1950’s” or “learning the ABC’s”).
• Constantly — constantly — I encounter misuse of “I” for “me,” as in, “They threw a party for Michael and I.” Again, the horror of it all unsettles me.

Maybe I’m more sensitive to these issues because I grade a lot of undergraduate papers. Surely I’m more sensitive to them because I share the dominant copy-editorial “gene” possessed by every member of the Hoover’s editorial department (not to mention the copy desks of every newspaper in the country). And no doubt all of this intrudes on my attention because I read so many blogs and tweets and e-mails, which have made published writers out of a far larger slice of the population than ever before.

Also, by the way, I do have a deeper motivation than my own tastes to hope for a better grasp of usage: We get a finer-grained experience of a thing when we know more about it. This includes, by all means, the English language.

Given how many people are writing for public consumption these days, we all benefit when we use the language better. There’s far more richness in “Hear, hear” than in its misspelled, mis-perceived replacement “Here, here,” because it connects us to a deep history of English-language oratory. In my world, that’s a good thing.

And yet, if you want to be seen as the original jack– jerk, just correct the usage of an educated person. Go ahead, do it out in public where everybody can see it, and see what it gets you. (In my own defense, I never call out people publicly for poor usage.) The reality is that, even though more of us are communicating via the written word than ever before, most of us still aren’t — and never will be — professional wordsmiths like the aces who staff copy desks or my company’s editorial department. And that’s okay.

The moral: Let people communicate in their own way. Let it be l33t-speak, if that’s what they can manage and it’s suitable for the audience. Let the jargon flow. Let a hundred misspellings bloom. Not because these faults are unimportant, but because there’s seldom anything to be gained socially by correcting them. And communication is inherently social.

Okay, if by some chance your friend keeps saying “fa-KADE” instead of “fa-SAAD” when she’s trying to say “facade,” give her the pointer in private, maybe over lunch or something. If your junior at work is embarrassing himself with the misspellings in his e-mails, maybe you can give him a gentle nudge in the right direction, out of the public view. But in general, let it go and embrace what people are saying even when how they’re saying it is faulty.

Photo by victoriapeckham.

Believe me, whether we’re talking about ideas or the mechanics of expressing them, these things are tough for me to let go. And if I’m deciding whether to hire you to write for Hoover’s, you can be sure I won’t let them go. But except for those rare cases when I have a burning need to answer the question, “Does this person care as much about usage as I do?,” anointing myself Defender of Everything Correct just isn’t worth the grief.

When it comes to correcting people online, especially people you don’t know in person . . . well, XKCD nailed it better than I ever could with this cartoon.

What if we took our rhetorical questions and turned them into genuine questions?

My own experience tells me that, much of the time, we ask these questions to put an end to considering alternatives:

• How am I supposed to do that?
• How’s THAT supposed to work?
• Wouldn’t that be great?
• What made you do that? (What were you thinking?)
• What makes you think that?
• . . .

The problem isn’t that we ask these questions, but that we ask them in a way that forestalls debate, discussion, or contemplation. Consider: if you say, “What makes you think that?” is a rhetorical tone of voice, you’re really saying “You shouldn’t think that.” But if you ask it — really ask it — with an open mind, you might open a window into the thought process of a vendor, customer, or colleague. And from where I sit, we need every one of those windows that we can get.

What are your favorite / most dreaded rhetorical questions? Please lob in your own suggestions in the comments.

It’s Friday the 13th.

Myself, I give little thought to common superstitions. I don’t avoid the number 13, or throw salt over my shoulder, or avoid black cats. As a figure of speech I might say “knock on wood,” but that’s about it.

Yet like most people in the business world — heck, like most people, period — I do carry around unspoken superstitions, if by superstition we mean an unsubstantiated bit of magical thinking that leads to avoidance.

Examples?

• “We have to grow top-line revenue constantly, no matter what.” (Bo Burlingham has documented great companies that have chosen to limit their growth in his Small Giants.)
• “We can’t do anything with the economy like it is.” (Some of the best companies of the world were founded under lean circumstances.)
• “Only we can understand what this product needs” — a.k.a. the Not Invented Here syndrome – or its converse, “No one here can solve this problem,” which is the fundamental belief that drives demand for management consultants.

What examples would you add to this list?

The most insidious superstitions aren’t as obvious as black cats and broken mirrors. They sneak up on us. They have every appearance of being true, simply because we don’t think to question them. And as any anthropologist could tell you, folk beliefs are hard to kill — even when they deserve to die.

What business superstitions are you carrying around?

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(Photo by miss pupik.)

How much energy do you expend trying to avoid failure?

You could be forgiven, reviewing certain early years of my career, if you thought that my main goal was to avoid ever being seen to make a mistake. This has been true even at times when I knew that forging ahead and making productive (or instructive) mistakes would have been much better for my career, not to mention my psyche. The psychology of human performance is a tricky thing.

Particularly if you have a record of achievement behind you (and you should have seen my high-school transcripts!), you can easily get trapped in thinking that you must always succeed. It’s a mindset that can keep you from stretching yourself to go after bigger goals: you aim at closer targets so that you can be totally sure of hitting them — even when that means foregoing more distant, more meaningful objectives.

Jo Rowling’s abject failure.

I’m thinking of all this because I’ve just listened to J. K. Rowling’s excellent Harvard commencement address, which focuses on the merits of failure:

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending Read more

Being both a stickler for words and a student of workplace issues, I’ve been paying more attention lately to the “crutch” words we use when we talk about work. I encounter these in my own office (not least from myself!), from my students, from my friends on Twitter, and in countless articles about the way we work today.

Here, then, is my nominee for Public Enemy #1 in the category of “crutch” words:

Busy.

Someone asks, “How’s it going?” We say, “Good — but I’m soooo busy” or “Ack — I’m SO busy” or just “Busy, busy, busy.” Often, we don’t even pause to think why we’re so busy, or why the busy-ness isn’t getting better over time.

The way I’ve used the word, and the way I’ve heard others use it, it’s like talking about the weather: “I can’t believe how rainy it’s been” turns into “I can’t believe how busy I’ve been.” As though busy-ness is something that just happens to us.

Well, UNlike the weather, busy-ness is something that everybody talks about that we CAN do something about. So in the interest of reminding myself that I’m responsible for my own working life, I’ve stopped using “busy” and started using expressions like these:

• “I have a lot on my plate right now.”
• “I’ve taken on too many commitments, and now I’m trying to figure out how to balance them.
• “My schedule has been hectic, but that’s my own fault.”

Sure, these are just semantic tricks, but the words we use shape the way we think. And I’d rather think clearly about the way I work, instead of acting like the universe has dropped a big pile of “busy” on my plate and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Down with “busy”-itis!

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Now over to you, dear reader:

What are the worst “crutch” words YOU hear at work?

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(Photo by wanderingseoul61.)

American has the right idea by posting YouTube videos like this one.*

Direct outreach — especially when used to accept blame — can help the company restore its image after this week’s debacle, when thousands of flights have been canceled because American Airlines planes didn’t meet F.A.A. standards.

But American chief Gerard Arpey and his lieutenants have a chance to make their outreach even better by the low-tech means of clarifying their language.

Hoover’s has always rejected jargon in its profiles. Indeed, you could say it’s our stock in trade. Corporate executives like Arpey would be better off if they did the same thing.

In the YouTube clip of his press conference, Read more

Kitty Genovese, you’ll recall, was the victim in a dark episode in modern urban history: she was stalked and murdered in Queens, New York in 1964 — not in silence or seclusion, but in the full hearing of her neighbors, all of whom assumed that someone else would do something about what they were all hearing. Horrified reactions to her death prompted not just intense media coverage, but a wave of research into what we now call the “bystander effect.”

Usually I try not to think about gruesome things like Genovese’s untimely end, and I would never make a straight-up comparison between the frustrations we face in the workplace and the murder of an innocent woman. But I was reminded of Genovese and the bystander effect by a short, powerful item by Francois Gossieaux that I came across this morning.¹

The Conspiracy Of Silence - how silence fails — and sometimes kills.

Before turning to the business applications of his thoughts, Read more