This is the reason that behavorial interviewing works and why people who are successful in one arena, also are successful in others.

I read this quote on Chris Brogan's blog and thought it worthy of immortalization in a cartoon. Enjoy!

As with all the others you are free to use this drawing for non-commercial purposes. Give credit to Jennifer Davis and point folks back to this blog at http://jenniferbdavis.blogspot.com

There is a spectrum of emotion that is said to rule the stock market that runs from fear to greed. With the recent events in the financial markets making headlines, I have been thinking about the factors of fear and greed and how they affect our individual or organizational risk tolerance. If you have assets and resources adequate but not extraneous, the fear of loss may keep you in conservative investments. If you have an excess of resources or are investing with money you are prepared to lose, you can be driven by greed.

In other contexts, I prefer to draw the risk tolerance curve below.

When you are contemplating a decision, do you have more to lose or more to gain? This, more than any other thing, will determine your boldness, your willingness to accept risk, and the lengths to which you will go to preserve the status quo.

I used to work in an intrapreneurial group at a huge, multinational corporation. Although by the corporate standards it was a "start-up," I recognized immediately the difference between this group and the actual start-ups I had worked with. This was no scrappy start-up. As a case in point, we had a full-time attorney, PR professional and agency, and trained marketers making sure we used the brand appropriately. The company knew that at even the most aggressive projections, the revenue and margin that would be brought by this new business was less than the value of its brand in the marketplace. Thus, there was more to lose than gain. Which is one of the reasons why, in my opinion, these initiatives were not successful under that corporate umbrella? Start-ups work when there is more to gain than lose.

I see this curve playing out in the discussions about the use of "social media" in corporate contexts. Some companies large and small are jumping in and now have Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts, and active outreach by more than one "department" of the company. Other consumer brands are reluctant to jump in and lose control over the message, the brand, or the customer experience (all things that might be a false sense of control anyway). Tara Hunt's new book The Whuffie Factor outlines this well. When I met her last week at WebVisions, she said several times that her next book will be about the cultural change that is required to "do" social media and create social capital in the marketplace. I think she'll find that companies must create environments where they have more to gain than lose by their efforts to see the change take hold.

In fact, this even applies to personal motivation factors and change management. In Alan Webber's Rules of Thumb book, he says that there is a formula for predicting change: "Change happens when the cost of the status quo is greater than the risk of change." Said another way, change can happen when the risk of gain is more than the risk of loss.

I am amazed that over the years one of the most popular posts I have done was on the topic of "Yes, and", the tool used by improv actors to create realistic scenes and engage their audience and fellow players. It is worthy of a review.

After you do, I invite you to click on the graphic above. Download it. Print it out. Post it in your cube or office. Something Hugh from GapingVoid calls "cube grenades." Put it on your bathroom mirror. Make it a constant reminder of how to build teams, cultivate a culture of collaboration, and how to have fun.

If you post it or use it for non-commercial purposes be sure to give me credit and link back to http://jenniferbdavis.blogspot.com.

If you were to make a list of the most and least effective meetings that you have, what would your list look like. Here is my first draft.


I have written before about meeting effectiveness and I am interested in your thoughts about how to make this staple of the corporate life more effective (or how to effectively end of life the practice all together).

I find myself using made up words and one my recent favorites is "retwizzled." I use it to mean when I need to tweak, edit, or change something (usually a document) to reflect the latest thoughts or direction that it needs to go. I retwizzle it and then we are good to move forward.

When a colleague teased me about it, I began to think that the word has broader applications. It is not only documents, plans, or decisions that get retwizzled from time to time, but often it is our entire life. If something is no longer working. If the circumstances have been altered. If changes need to be made. It is your chance to retwizzle.

The doodle above reflects my renewed interest in drawing. You are free to use the image for any non-commercial purpose, as long as you give me credit and link back to http://jenniferbdavis.blogspot.com.

We've all been in bad meetings. Heck, we have lead them ourselves.

We've also been in great ones where people left with the tools and answers they needed. Where team members are aligned, where tough issues are tackled, and teamwork is demonstrated. These happen periodically so, the myth of the productive meeting persists.

At Intel they give classes on "Effective Meetings" (assuming that isn't an oxymoron) hoping to increase the hit rate of great meetings.

Seth Godin had a recent post about how to "solve your meeting problems." It included some provocative ideas like setting the default meeting length to 5 minutes (instead of one hour), removing chairs from conference rooms, or even creating a public voting system where people rate meetings according to usefulness.

Some companies have banned meetings all together. No meetings - only conversations and decisions. Is it just symantecs or is there something fundamentally different about a company without meetings? How else does the corporate culture, physical office layout, and work itself have to chance to adapt to an environment without meetings?

What has worked for you?

Meetings may be an unavoidable part of our professional lives, but how can they be more productive? It is a better presentation. More preparation. The "pre-meeting" (heaven help us). Is it an egg timer or the insistance on agendas? Or, is it as artist Craig Damrauer suggests above...all about the snacks?

As if the crushing financial burden of Sarbanes-Oxley is not enough, now it is pretty clear to me that Generation Y employees won't probably work at public companies. The controls, approval levels, and other things that are nearly required to maintain good SEC status, smiling auditors, and shareholders (who might be assumed to be more worried about the companies in which they invest stealing from them, than they are those companies being successful in their markets), all lead to a corporate culture that is too old-school for this new batch of employees. No wonder this generation is highly entrepreneurial.

See repost of a portion of a blog post from the good folks at 37Signals and tell me whether or not the public corporate entity has a chance...

The traditional workplace is broken
(Show original item)

In the article entitled, "Want to attract and retain Gen Y? Better rethink everything", The Arizona Republic explains how employers can attract younger workers and talked about 37Signals.

President Jason Fried says today’s employers present the biggest roadblock. “Simply put, employees are treated like children. They are not allowed to think for themselves, and there are too many layers of approval, just too much insulation that prevents anyone from doing anything. The traditional workplace is broken, and until someone realizes that, there’s always going to be conflict.”

This suffocation by protocol is dead on and will never allow an employee to “go beyond” or achieve something extra for the company. This is a critical link that most organizations continually fail to acknowledge. They are too focused on ensuring employees do no wrong that they actually prevent them from achieving anything beyond status quo."

We love movies and books that are based on reality. No matter how fantastic or unbelievable the events in the tale may be, it instantly has credibility if it begins with "this story is based on a true story." We are immediately drawn in. Real truth, even if sensationalized or dramatized a bit, is so irresistable.

In contrast, I give you the financial forecast. For those of you not involved in these types of things, financial forecasts are models that people build, usually in Microsoft Excel, that show projected revenue, profit, costs, and the like in an effort to track the progress of a business, to make decisions regarding strategy or tactics, and to communicate to others about the business (whether they be management, shareholders, partners, etc).

The thing about a financial forecast is that the future is unknown. A fact that we sometimes like to ignore. We can not predict the future. And as they say in Princess Bride, "Anyone that tells you different, Princess, is selling something."

So, because the future is unknown, you need to make assumptions. More like "make up" assumptions would be more accurate, as all forecasts are works of fiction. Those assumptions about customer acceptance, revenue growth, cost reductions, or the like have a huge impact on your perception of the business opportunity. They can have a huge impact on the short-term decisions that might be made. Assume a healthy economy and low product return rates and you can convince yourself to spend more in marketing, only to find out later that these assumptions were horribly wrong and the money was wasted. Assume that 20% of your products will be sold with a unique feature and if it turns out being 50%, you could find yourself with product shortages and unhappy customers. You could be off by a little or a lot. Assumptions are a killer indeed.

The best assumptions are ones that have a high probability of occurance. That high probability based on some past perforamance. If you always have a slow first quarter of the year, it safe to assume that next year will be no different. If you have a trend line extending back into time that says that revenue is growing, you have a reason to believe it will continue. Distrust step functions. There has to be reasons to believe.

It is just like the movies and books. We are drawn into the story if we believe it is based on truth. Same with financial forecasts. This is true in business, but also in non-profit organizations, churches, and even personal finance.

So, how do you create good assumptions:

1. As I have said before, trends trump step functions. In other words slow and steady trend lines are more probable than things that immediately get better overnight, like someone flipped a switch. If you are assuming a step function improvement, you better know exactly what switch is getting flipped and be confident in the outcome.

2. Understand and measure the key levers of the business for real-time feedback. If your business is dependent upon selling service contracts along with product sales, you should know what your attach rate should be and what it has been. You should be able to see the actual attach rate trends as frequently as is reasonable and should share them with the teams involved. You should know where your costs are and the boundary boxes in which things should stay for the business to be profitable. As the good folks at GE taught us, "what you measure, you improve."

3. Everyone is in the business. This means giving your employers and partners visibility to the key metrics of your business will make you more successful, as choices are made at every level of the organization that greatly impact the success of the business and the factors you are measuring. Now, I am not talking about disclosing financial information inappropriately or giving away company secrets. I mean teaching all the players in the game how the score is kept, how to read the scoreboard, and their role in putting points on the score board. Remain open for anyone on the team to suggest a better play to call to reach the goal, once they understand the rules of the game. These kinds of conversations are the basis of true teamwork.

"For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three." - Alice Kahn

I love technology. I especially love database-driven, web-enabled technologies with great interfaces that make important things easier to do. Seriously, I really do.

But, I have become aware recently (or should I say "reminded") of ways in which technology can fail to deliver on its promise.

1. Stop-Drop-and-Roll When Technology Makes Something Simple More Complex

Forget scale. Forget extendability. Sometimes business needs are simple. You need to answer the phone and route calls, for instance. How hard can it be really? Incredibly difficult once you create phone trees, voice prompts, scripts, and queues. Add to that a hold music music track from Hades (a stress-inducing piece of classical music that is reminiscent of a battle scene from an epic film) and you have a comic combination of making something simple hard. Part of the problem is trying to fit all possible needs into one solution, when in fact a customer-driven approach would call for multiple, smaller solutions.

For example, some websites are packed with information for everyone which makes them hard to navigate, contain too much copy, and lose their purpose (for example see anything that the good folks at Microsoft post), so all technologies are prone to this kind of complexity. In contrast, stands very simple web page design where the text is a clear call to action, the copy is natural speech, and all of the content fits "above the fold" without making the user scroll to read.

Using the web page example and applying it to my telephony problem, I wonder if the solution is this. Replace the complicated phone tree with its 50 options (and the hold music that enrages already irritated callers) with a pleasant woman's voice who says "Thanks for calling us. We love to hear from you and want to make sure you talk to the right person who can help you the best. To skip to sales, press 1. To go straight to technical support, press 2. Or just hold and a real live, honest-to-goodness human being can assist you. On our website you will also find a directory of contacts that might help you connect even more quickly. Again, thanks for your business. Please wait a moment while we connect you."

If technology makes something more complex, you should stop it, drop it, and roll with something new. For instance, if your customer base is known and finite and if you have more than 2 options on any phone line, break it up and pass out new numbers. It could be that your business is too complicated for the technology to solve. This leads to my second principle.

2. Don't Pave a Cow Path (or Pave Only Cow Paths that Lead Somewhere)

A colleague of mine once told me a story about how a farmer sold his property to a developer and they decided to build houses along gravel roads laid down where the well-worn paths through the pasture land that the cows had cut over years of grazing. Years later, they paved those gravel roads and although the residents complained, only the old-timers remembered the someone hadn't sat down to design the best layout for the neighborhood, but had instead paved the cow paths.

How often do we do this? Come up with a great technology solution to a problem we don't understand fully, just because the technology solution is in hand or can be envisioned. I am guilty of this more than I like to admit (being generally optimistic about technology and life and having this natural impatience to get on with something already). We start building solutions for things that only work the way they do by accident. Or, we throw out a perfectly good "cow path" solution in favor of a more complicated one.

One of the most successful development projects I was involved with was an internal corporate application. Before writing a single line of code, I lived the workflow of the application (however painful it was) for several months managing an Excel spreadsheet. During this "alpha" phase, I worked out all the communication flows and templates, the policies of who needed to be copied on what, and started to quantify the benefits of automation. The core workflow changed quite a bit in those early days and got refined in this manual process, and I was able to articulate requirements for a little application that is still very useful and powerful (and has gone through numerous iterations as new needs and ideas were explored).

This reminds me that one must make careful choices about what gets paved and why. Living in a tent on a cow path for a while, while taking land surveys might be a perfectly reasonable way to "write" requirements.

3. Nothing Replaces an Outside-In View

Companies love to create Inside-Out solutions. You need to know how many product returns you get and why products fail, so you adopt a nifty little service application to manage the transactions. It works great. Unless, a customer wants to see all their transactions and the status of each. Maybe that gets a little tougher. Or unless a sales person wants to see all their transactions and the status of each, across multiple customer accounts, geographies, product lines, or departments. Then the transaction system doesn't quite serve the purpose. Before you rush out an implement a fully-integrated CRM package (which can be wonderful by the way), remember the problem you are solving and the points above. It could be that the outside-in perspective would tell you to keep the transaction system and implement a report instead. It could be that a fancy, automated report isn't needed, but rather a regularly scheduled phone conference with a key customer to walk them through any open issues and assure them of your attentiveness to their issues. It could be that you have back office communication or coordination challenges, that once solved through better roles and responsibilities, the issues are minimized and more manageable.

It is good to keep in mind that most customers don't really care about the efficiencies of your business overall, how the same phone tree helps them and their competitors, or what you are doing to solve problems for everyone. They really want their problems solved. And, it is always easier to solve one issue than ten.

Technology can be a part of that. It can help coordinate information, make dispersed and diverse team act together, and can provide feedback loops in real-time. It can be game changing or tactical, but it is only a part of the whole solution.

I just received a great little article by Patrick Lencioni, an author who I highly recommend. You can sign up for their newsletter here. It was about the design of office spaces and how it affects employee interaction.

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance." - Kurt Vonnegut
Is this true? Or are some people "starters" and others are "finishers"? Some people are idea generators that can kick-off any number of great projects, but lack the skills or perseverance to see it to the end and maintain it. Are there folks that are actually better at maintenance and continuous improvements? Is it a flaw of human character or a personality test?

Would people rather build a kit car than change the oil? Would people rather build a house than clean it? Would people rather build a server, design software, or create a company, than join something that is already a success?

Love this story from the blog by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (can't wait to finish their book which I have been carrying around for several weeks).

"Dell told us (the story’s in Chapter 8 of Groundswell) that when they started their most recent support forum, 1999, they knew they’d need moderators. They pulled 30 support reps off the phones and converted them into forum moderators. Those support reps answered questions online, just as they had been on the phone. Already, Dell was getting more efficiencies, since each answer could be read by dozens or hundreds of other people searching for it on their support forum. Now, five years later, the support forum is many times larger than it was then. And the number of moderators is no longer 30. It’s five. And that’s because the members of the community are moderating it themselves."

What in your business could be made more efficient by turning over the reins to a larger group of people? Other employees? Customers?

A former colleague of mine and I were chatting today and I was prompted to pen these two laws that in our mutual experience apply to businesses or projects of any size or scope.

• The Law of Customer Service: Friendliness and customer empathy play crucial roles, but in the end it is all about setting expectations. Making and keeping promises, is the key.

• The Law of Analysis: Anyone can make an Excel forecast look good. In the end, it is all about the accuracy of your assumptions. There must be robust and defensible reasons to believe.

I'd be interested in your experience with these laws (or related concepts). In my experience, there is no use fighting these laws...the laws will win.

This might be the first of a whole constitution of laws that I might compile. I would love your contributions.

"The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky." - Solomon Short.

At Intel and other large companies a lot of effort is spent on creating and fostering the right ecosystem of "fellow travelers" who have complementary technology offerings that together create markets, foster solutions, and refer each other to their customer bases. This is the network effect in application, but is also a lesson for each of us about the power of network effects, tangential legacies, and unintended consequences.

There is a group of companies and ideas that get pulled along in the wake of a business success. How many companies today make their living from selling iPod accessories? Case in point. Some are more obvious than others, but if there is a business success, you can point to dozens of related industries or companies that benefited. The invention of the car lead to fundamental changes in our national character, but also created huge fuel distribution networks, after market services and products, and a whole set of media outlets dedicated to the product category. Even something a simple as the invention of wall-to-wall carpet, meant the creation of carpet laying jobs, carpet cleaning services, and a host of home applicance innovations. No one would buy a Roomba today if there wasn't modern floor covering options. It is always a wise business strategy planning tool to think about who else would succeed if your business succeeded, and look for active ways to partner.

As the quote I started with illustrates there are even connections made to unsuccessful intiatives. No one remembers who battled in the War of 1812 (the US and the UK), but there isn't a Fourth of July celebration that doesn't include the playing of the epic anthem. This is an important lesson when facing disappointing results or an outright "train wreck" of failure. Who would benefit from this failure? Who would be best served by the education gained by this experience (however painful)? In the case of the composer, the war itself was an asset. Your failure can be your greatest asset as well, depending on your ability to learn from it.

I have often marvelled at how much good Jimmy Carter did after he left the office of the Presidency. Despite being what most consider a lack luster president, he went on to become a respected diplomat and philanthropist. His contributions to causes like Habitat for Humanity and others is significant.

There are a number of folks I know who are actively looking for a new job. I have heard about a number of new tools and sites that might be worth checking out. If you also think of HR staffing as a marketing job (ie, finding prospects, convincing them to apply, educating them, etc), these might also be inspirations for other types of recruitment efforts.

Finding a Position

There are always Monster.com and the local newspaper (yawn!). There are jobs available from your network on LinkedIn. There are some categories of jobs posted on TheLadders, SixFigureJobs, and NotchUp, where you get paid to interview and have to be invited (send me your email). Better yet, just tell your friends, former colleagues, or even your boss that you are looking for a new challenge and, as they say, let the universe raise up the resources you need.

If a picture is worth a thousand words...what about a video?

My Mom tells me that when she graduated from college, she got professional pictures taken to attach to every resume she sent out. These were the days before paralyzing political correctness and apparently employers wanted to see your pearly whites before they gave you a call. Now, technology is enabling the same sort of thing, but even more so. Beyond the pictures on Plaxo or your Facebook page, prospective employees, can post there video resumes several places (including VideoJobShop or CareerTours) or post taped responses to interview questions at HireVue. Now, before you rush out to do a video resume, read this helpful article from Dice.

Conversely, employers can now post videos to VideoJobShop or CareerTours describing the work and benefits they offer (something that many people have done on their own career/jobs pages for a while). They can create more rich-media job listings at StandoutJobs. I would highly recommend HR professionals and recruiters read this article from Penelope Trunk before taping their videos. You might include some things like a commercial for the hiring manager, an action movie style trailer of career path options at your company, and find ways to get your videos out on the web in more places.

Profiles and Resumes

So, let's say you are old school and don't want to record an amateurish video resume. There are lots of places that you can go to create profiles, post resume highlights or details, and actively network with potential employers. These include some of my favorites like LinkedIn (my profile is at www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferbdavis), FaceBook, MySpace, and other social networks (TechCrunch has a list that I think is over 40 different companies that allow you to build your own social network if you haven't found one you like).

You can create/update your automatically generated profile at ZoomInfo. People search sites are becoming more and more popular with folks link Wink, Spock, and BigSight.org, who claims to be the world's largest people directory (they tap into FaceBook data). There are other ideas on how to get your name "out there" on this previous post.

You could always write an ebook on a topic that you consider yourself an expert (or at least better than average) and start your own viral marketing campaign.

Doin' Your Homework

So, now you can find compensation profiles for positions you might be considering at PayScale, SalaryScout, or Salary.com. PayScale has a new service called GigZig which tracks the career paths of folks applying for or getting the jobs that you might be interested in. Very interesting, especially if you want to tune your resume to the sweet spot of the position or highlight something that may set you apart from the masses. What is telling is that in most of the searches I did for CEO positions, the most popular title held 5 years ago was also a CEO. The more specific the title (ie, Vice President of Marketing and Communications versus the more generic VP of Marketing) made it harder to create a path to senior level positions. This might be a data tabulation problem or a larger issue on career diversification and specialization.

Even more research should be done before you head out on your entrepreneurial own.

Your Dream Job

If you are considering a change, you might want to read this article by Brian Kurth, author of Test Drive Your Dream Job and founder of Vocation Vacations. Has some great ideas to expand the range of things you might be thinking about. I have long thought that most people wait for permission to get the "dream job" they want, when indeed more things are within a person's own control than they might realize.

Great post today from a former classmate of mine and now freelance writer, Jennifer Jeffrey on the importance of journalists, editors, and cultural commentators taking the time to connect the dots, even within their own publications. Apparently these guys (who each independently made a good point) needed to have the dots numbered for them like those activity puzzles you did as a kid. Otherwise, they missed the connection!

I too often find irony and insight in adjacent articles, blog posts, or tweets (for those of you not familiar, those are those micro-posts on Twitter). Some of my favorite bloggers do the same. I guess that makes me a synthesizer of sorts. I guess the thought process more closely resembles the dot-and-blocks game you might have played, where the dots are not numbered, but you try to create meaning out of the field of dots. The one with the most blocks wins!

Note: This is probably why I always feel so horribly behind with my blog posts.