CRA Inc

Heh

A client forwarded this the other day …

Hyatt On PowerPoint

Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, offers his five rules for better PowerPoint. All good advice. We’d also direct him (and you) to our principles of PowerPoint, and many of the .PPT-related posts that have graced this page over the past few years.

History Lessons from Fred Smith

As I skimmed through the USA Today I found sitting outside my door this morning, I came across an interview with FedEx CEO Fred Smith.

The story of FedEx and Fred Smith has always intrigued me, so I checked it out. They focused most of the interview on Fred’s love of history and his view that you can learn more about leadership and business from history than from many popular leadership books. One of the leaders I admire most gave me the same advice a few years ago, so I thought I’d pass along Fred’s other tips:

Tips steeped in history from Fred Smith

* There are only about six business books worth reading. For enduring lessons, read history.
* The great conquerors of the past treated the conquered well. Remember that next time your company makes an acquisition.
* The most risky course is often inaction.
* When things go wrong, take responsibility.

The Value Of Values

Strategy + Business (the business magazine / PR tool of Booz Allen Hamilton) has an article up on “the value of corporate values.” It’s the reusult of a moderately robust research effort (300+ completed surveys but only 20 interviews) about “how companies are dealing with the challenges of managing values.” (Link here; PDF file here; free registration required.)

The findings are what you’d expect: lots of firms state similar values (”integrity,” “commitment to customers,” “commitment to employees”); the rub is in living them. Of course, we believe there’s another rub as well: not confusing value messages with strategy messages. At CRA, we encourage clients to communicate values as “how we play” or “how we work” and strategy as “how we’re going to succeed” or, if there’s a vision for the company, “how we’re going to get there.”

The challenge with values is that they’re not terribly actionable from a planning perspective. As a mid-level manager it’s hard to look at the next 12 months and plot (or articulate) how my team is going to “do” diversity or “do” integrity.

A strategy message fills that gap: If you tell me our strategy is to “improve customer service, improve reliability, and manage costs” … those are things I can take action on, whatever my level. I can then invoke values by saying: “And as you do so, act with integrity and encourage diversity.” Mission, vision, values, and strategy each have a linked but distinct space in the strategic message heirarchy. Strategy is the game plan; values are how we play the game.

Go See Fast Company Now

Several things worth noting over at Fast Company’s blog, FC Now, today.

The first is the blog itself: It’s a nice example of a single blog authored by multiple folks with similar but varying content expertise. It also reflects sound blog practice (first person voice, brief and pithy entries, links, un-spun and candid information … see Jeff Jarvis’ excellent take on blog ethics here).

Most interesting, however, is how the blog — which uses Movable Type’s standard software (as does CommLog) — incorporates so well into the rest of FC’s site and web branding. We’re often trying to convince IT and Corp. Comm. folks that they don’t have to use a $400,000 piece of content management software for blogging functionality – that the standard (and dirt cheap) software that’s out there easily allows for incorporation into nearly any existing site or page. FC’s blog is a great example.

It’s Not Just About Readership

Steve Crescenzo wants to slaughter the “fun page”. And in his sentiment, he’s right. Of course, making the “strategic direction” page the fun page … there’s the rub.

Welch On “How To Be A Good Leader”

My colleague Robin passed this Jack Welch-authored Newsweek article around the other week. In it Welch summarizes his eight “rules” of leadership, and it’s worth reading. My favorite line from the article isn’t actually one of his rules:

Before you become a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

It seems I express the same sentiment most often to folks entering the GM / Managing Director ranks for the first time. It’s a big shift to make, from superstar to the creator of superstars, but it’s absolutely one of the things that separates admired leaders from the rest of the crowd.

Track The Buzz @ Vault.com

We regularly keep an eye on Internet message boards for information about our clients of which they should be aware. Here’s one such site you might want to add to your list of regular web reads: Vault.com. Much of the site is subcription-only, but recent messages and other features are rich enough that it’s worth a regular visit.

“Write two blog entries and call me in the morning”

High Point Regional Health System recently began to prescribe weblogs for post-treatment therapy.

The research suggests that by expressing their emotions through writing, patients help to reduce anxiety and other ailments, said Anthony Newkirk, a licensed professional counselor in the hospital’s behavioral health department.

“It allows patients who are going through a medical situation or crisis to put things into perspective,” he said. “We get more and more truthful through writing and we gain insight into who we are and our situations.”

The Marketing Department hopes that it will draw attention to their website.

For more information, check out the article from the Greensboro News.

You can view the blogs here…

Things To See

A couple of things today worth seeing. The first is this Fast Company article on change. I was picking through FC in the concierge lounge of the hotel tonight when I came across this attention-getting intro:

Your own life or death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you didn’t, your time would end soon — a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?

Yes, you say?

Try again.

Yes?

You’re probably deluding yourself.

You wouldn’t change.

Don’t believe it? You want odds? Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That’s nine to one against you. How do you like those odds?

It’s a great summary of the current research on change, and it also reinforces advice we give all the time: it’s more compelling to communicate about change by introducing a new metaphor than by introducing a crisis (or “burning platform”). The article discusses this under the header “Framing Change,” and it has this nice passage:

Pioneering research in cognitive science and linguistics has pointed to the paramount importance of framing. George Lakoff, a professor of those two disciplines at the University of California at Berkeley, defines frames as the “mental structures that shape the way we see the world.” Lakoff says that frames are part of the “cognitive unconscious,” but the way we know what our frames are, or evoke new ones, springs from language. For example, we typically think of a company as being like an army — everyone has a rank and a codified role in a hierarchical chain of command with orders coming down from high to low. Of course, that’s only one way of organizing a group effort. If we had the frame of the company as a family or a commune, people would know very different ways of working together.

The big challenge in trying to change how people think is that their minds rely on frames, not facts. “Neuroscience tells us that each of the concepts we have — the long-term concepts that structure how we think — is instantiated in the synapses of the brain,” Lakoff says. “Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact. We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise, facts go in and then they go right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they mystify us: Why would anyone have said that? Then we label the fact as irrational, crazy, or stupid.” Lakoff says that’s one reason why political conservatives and liberals each think that the other side is nuts. They don’t understand each other because their brains are working within different frames.

The frame that dominates our thinking about how work should be organized — the military chain-of-command model — is extremely hard to break. When new employees start at W.L. Gore & Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex fabrics, they often refuse to believe that the company doesn’t have a hierarchy with job titles and bosses. It just doesn’t fit their frame. They can’t accept it. It usually takes at least several months for new hires to begin to understand Gore’s reframed notion of the workplace, which relies on self-directed employees making their own choices about joining one another in egalitarian small teams.

Getting people to exchange one frame for another is tough even when you’re working one-on-one, but it’s especially hard to do for large groups of people. Howard Gardner, a cognitive scientist, MacArthur Fellow “genius” award winner, and professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, has looked at what works most effectively for heads of state and corporate CEOs. “When one is addressing a diverse or heterogeneous audience,” he says, “the story must be simple, easy to identify with, emotionally resonant, and evocative of positive experiences.”

Indeed.

In another corner of the Web we find MindManager, an absolutely wonderful mind-mapping tool by MindJet that I’ve been using under trial. It’s a winner, especially if you’re a visual thinker, and if you’ve not yet been party to its tools, check it out.

MindManager isn’t the only thing to see here, though. I also want to point to MindJet’s corporate blog, The MindJet Blog, for two reasons. First, I think it’s a great example of a good corporate blog: first person, honest, well written, and intelligent. Second, amongst the blog’s recent posts, I found this entry on the pros and cons of using PowerPoint and 2×2 matrices. It’s a great summary of the For/Against PowerPoint arguments. A particularly nice passage:

Persuasion by the means of entertainment: James Gilmore and Joseph Pine, authors of The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage, would certainly back this requirement in the business world, and so would Jeremy Rifkin whose catch phrase states: “There is no business without show business.” Seth Godin, the marketing guru, put it more provocatively: “If you’re not trying to persuade, why are you here?”

Fine, but what if persuasion occurs at the expense of precision and sharpness in thinking? According to Schrage, organizations such as Sun Microsystems and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Armed Forces have banned PowerPoint from their meetings, assuming that the software is a “poorly tailored cognitive straitjacket” rather than a solid analytical tool.

I hadn’t heard the straitjacket line before. Of course, frequent readers of this page know our PowerPoint positions well. We’re in the “use it to do certain kinds of things” camp, and would always take passionate-person-as-message over slideware-as-message any day of the week.