How leaders kill meaning at work

Senior executives routinely undermine creativity, productivity, and commitment by damaging the inner work lives of their employees in four avoidable ways.

As a senior executive, you may think you know what Job Number 1 is: developing a killer strategy. In fact, this is only Job 1a. You have a second, equally important task. Call it Job 1b: enabling the ongoing engagement and everyday progress of the people in the trenches of your organization who strive to execute that strategy. A multiyear research project whose results we described in our recent book, The Progress Principle,¹ found that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.

Even incremental steps forward—small wins—boost what we call “inner work life”: the constant flow of emotions, motivations, and perceptions that constitute a person’s reactions to the events of the work day. Beyond affecting the well-being of employees, inner work life affects the bottom line.² People are more creative, productive, committed, and collegial in their jobs when they have positive inner work lives. But it’s not just any sort of progress in work that matters. The first, and fundamental, requirement is that the work be meaningful to the people doing it.

In our book and a recent Harvard Business Review article,³ we argue that managers at all levels routinely—and unwittingly—undermine the meaningfulness of work for their direct subordinates through everyday words and actions. These include dismissing the importance of subordinates’ work or ideas, destroying a sense of ownership by switching people off project teams before work is finalized, shifting goals so frequently that people despair that their work will ever see the light of day, and neglecting to keep subordinates up to date on changing priorities for customers.

But what about a company’s most senior leaders? What is their role in making—or killing—meaning at work? To be sure, as a high-level leader, you have fewer opportunities to directly affect the inner work lives of employees than do frontline supervisors. Yet your smallest actions pack a wallop because what you say and do is intensely observed by people down the line.⁴ A sense of purpose in the work, and consistent action to reinforce it, has to come from the top.

Four traps

To better understand the role of upper-level managers, we recently dug back into our data: nearly 12,000 daily electronic diaries from dozens of professionals working on important innovation projects at seven North American companies. We selected those entries in which diarists mentioned upper- or top-level managers—868 narratives in all.

Qualitative analysis of the narratives highlighted four traps that lie in wait for senior executives. Most of these pitfalls showed up in several companies. Six of the seven suffered from one or more of the traps, and in only a single company did leaders avoid them. The existence of this outlier suggests that it is possible for senior executives to sustain meaning consistently, but that’s difficult and requires vigilance.

This article should help you determine whether you risk falling into some of these traps yourself—and unknowingly dragging your organization into the abyss with you. We also offer a few thoughts on avoiding the problems, advice inspired by the actions and words of a senior leader at the one company that did so.

We don’t claim to have all the answers. But we are convinced that executives who sidestep these traps reduce their risk of inadvertently draining meaning from the work of the people in their organizations. Those leaders also will boost the odds of tapping into the motivational power of progress—something surprisingly few do.

We surveyed 669 managers at all levels of management, from dozens of companies and various industries around the world. We asked them to rank the importance of five employee motivators: incentives, recognition, clear goals, interpersonal support, and progress in the work. Only 8 percent of senior executives ranked progress as the most important motivator. Had they chosen randomly, 20 percent would have done so. In short, our survey showed that most executives don’t understand the power of progress in meaningful work.⁵ And the traps revealed by the diaries suggest that most executives don’t act as though progress matters. You can do better.

Trap 1: Mediocrity signals

Most likely, your company aspires to greatness, articulating a high purpose for the organization in its corporate mission statement. But are you inadvertently signaling the opposite through your words and actions?

We saw this dynamic repeatedly at a well-known consumer products company we’ll call Karpenter Corporation, which was experiencing a rapid deterioration in the inner work lives of its employees as a result of the actions of a new top-management team. Within three years of our studying Karpenter, it had become unprofitable and was acquired by a smaller rival.

Karpenter’s top-management team espoused a vision of entrepreneurial cross-functional business teams. In theory, each team would operate autonomously, managing its share of the company’s resources to back its own new-product innovations. During the year we collected data from Karpenter teams, the annual report was full of references to the company’s innovation focus; in the first five sentences, “innovation” appeared three times.

In practice, however, those top managers were so focused on cost savings that they repeatedly negated the teams’ autonomy, dictated cost reduction goals that had to be met before any other priorities were, and—as a result—drove new-product innovation into the ground. This unintended, de facto hypocrisy took its toll, as a diary excerpt from a longtime Karpenter product engineer emphasizes:

Today I found out that our team will be concentrating on [cost savings] for the next several months instead of any new products. . . . It is getting very difficult to concentrate on removing pennies from the standard cost of an item. That is the only place that we have control over. Most of the time, quality suffers. It seems that our competition is putting out new products at a faster rate. . . . We are no longer the leader in innovation. We are the followers.

This employee’s work had begun to lose its meaning, and he wasn’t alone. Many of the other 65 Karpenter professionals in our study felt that they were doing mediocre work for a mediocre company—one for which they had previously felt fierce pride. By the end of our time collecting data at Karpenter, many of these employees were completely disengaged. Some of the very best had left.

The mediocrity trap was not unique to Karpenter. We saw it revealed in different guises in several of the companies we studied. At a chemicals firm, it stemmed from the top managers’ risk aversion. Consider these words from one researcher there:

A proposal for liquid/medical filtration using our new technology was tabled for the second time by the Gate 1 committee (five directors that screen new ideas). Although we had plenty of info for this stage of the game, the committee is uncomfortable with the risk and liability. The team, and myself, are frustrated about hurdles that we don’t know how to answer.

This company’s leaders also inadvertently signaled that, despite their rhetoric about being innovative and cutting edge, they were really more comfortable being ordinary.

Trap 2: Strategic ‘attention deficit disorder’

As an experienced leader, you probably scan your company’s external environment constantly for guidance in making your next strategic moves. What are competitors planning? Where are new ones popping up? What’s happening in the global economy, and what might the implications be for financing or future market priorities? You are probably brimming with ideas on where you’d like to take the company next. All of that is good, in theory.

In practice, we see too many top managers start and abandon initiatives so frequently that they appear to display a kind of attention deficit disorder (ADD) when it comes to strategy and tactics. They don’t allow sufficient time to discover whether initiatives are working, and they communicate insufficient rationales to their employees when they make strategic shifts.

Karpenter’s strategic ADD seemed to stem from its leaders’ short attention span, perhaps fueled by the CEO’s desire to embrace the latest management trends. The problem was evident in decisions at the level of product lines and extended all the way up to corporate strategy. If you blinked, you could miss the next strategic shift. In one employee’s words:

A quarterly product review was held with members of the [top team] and the general manager and president. Primary outcome from the meeting was a change in direction away from spray jet mops to revitalization of existing window squeegees. Four priorities were defined for product development, none of which were identified as priorities at our last quarterly update. The needle still points north, but we’ve turned the compass again.

At another company we studied, strategic ADD appeared to stem from a top team warring with itself. Corporate executives spent many months trying to nail down a new market strategy. Meanwhile, different vice presidents were pushing in different directions, rendering each of the leaders incapable of giving consistent direction to their people. This wreaked havoc in the trenches. One diarist, a project manager, felt that rather than committing herself to doing something great for particular customers, she needed to hedge her bets:

The VP gave us his opinion of which target candidates [for new products] may fit with overall company strategy—but, in reality, neither he nor anyone in our management structure knows what the strategy is. It makes this project a real balancing act—we need to go forward, but need to weigh commitments very carefully.

If high-level leaders don’t appear to have their act together on exactly where the organization should be heading, it’s awfully difficult for the troops to maintain a strong sense of purpose.

Trap 3: Corporate Keystone Kops

In the early decades of cinema, a popular series of silent-film comedies featured the Keystone Kops—fictional policemen so incompetent that they ran around in circles, mistakenly bashed each other on the head, and fumbled one case after another. The title of that series became synonymous with miscoordination. Our research found that many executives who think everything is going smoothly in the everyday workings of their organizations are blithely unaware that they preside over their own corporate version of the Keystone Kops. Some contribute to the farce through their actions, others by failing to act. At Karpenter, for example, top managers set up overly complex matrix reporting structures, repeatedly failed to hold support functions (such as purchasing and sales) accountable for coordinated action, and displayed a chronic indecisiveness that bred rushed analyses. In the words of one diarist:

Last-minute changes continue on [an important customer’s] assortments. Rather than think through the whole process and logically decide which assortments we want to show [the customer], we are instead using a shotgun approach of trying multiple assortments until we find one that works. In the meantime, we are expending a lot of time and effort on potential assortments only to find out later that an assortment has been dropped.

Although Karpenter’s example was egregious, the company was far from alone in creating chaotic situations for its workers. In one high-tech company we studied, for example, Keystone Kop–like scenarios played out around the actions of a rogue marketing function. As described in one engineer’s diary, the attempts of many teams to move forward with their projects were continually thwarted by signals from marketing that conflicted with those coming from R&D and other key functions. Marketers even failed to show up for many key meetings:

At a meeting with Pierce, Clay, and Joseph, I was told that someone from marketing would be attending our team meetings (finally). The meeting also gave me a chance to demonstrate to Joseph that we were getting mixed signals from marketing.

When coordination and support are absent within an organization, people stop believing that they can produce something of high quality. This makes it extremely difficult to maintain a sense of purpose.

Trap 4: Misbegotten ‘big, hairy, audacious goals’

Management gurus Jim Collins and Jerry Porras encourage organizations to develop a “big, hairy, audacious goal” (BHAG, pronounced bee-hag)—a bold strategic vision statement that has powerful emotional appeal.⁶ BHAGs help infuse work with meaning by articulating the goals of the organization in a way that connects emotionally with peoples’ values. (Think of Google’s stated mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”)

At some companies, however, such statements are grandiose, containing little relevance or meaning for people in the trenches. They can be so extreme as to seem unattainable and so vague as to seem empty. The result is a meaning vacuum. Cynicism rises and drive plummets. Although we saw this trap clearly in only one of the seven companies we studied, we think it is sufficiently seductive and dangerous to warrant consideration.

That company, a chemicals firm, set a BHAG that all projects had to be innovative blockbusters that would yield a minimum of $100 million in revenue annually, within five years of a project’s initiation. This goal did not infuse the work with meaning, because it had little to do with the day-to-day activities of people in the organization. It did not articulate milestones toward the goal; it did not provide for a range of experiments and outcomes to meet it; worst of all, it did not connect with anything the employees valued. Most of them wanted to provide something of value to their customers; an aggressive revenue target told them only about the value to the organization, not to the customer. Far from what Collins and Porras intended, this misbegotten BHAG was helping to destroy the employees’ sense of purpose.

Avoiding the traps

Spotting the traps from the executive suite is difficult enough; sidestepping them is harder still—and wasn’t the focus of our research. Nonetheless, it’s instructive to look at the one company in our study that avoided the traps, a creator of coated fabrics for weatherproof clothing and other applications. We recently interviewed its head, whom we’ll call Mark Hamilton. That conversation generated a few ideas that we hope will spark a lively discussion in your own C-suite. For example:

When you communicate with employees, do you provide strategic clarity that’s consistent with your organization’s capabilities and an understanding of where it can add the most value? Hamilton and his top team believed that innovating in processes, rather than products, was the key to creating the right combination of quality and value for customers. So he talked about process innovation at every all-company meeting, and he steadfastly supported it throughout the organization. This consistency helped everyone understand the strategy and even become jazzed about it.

Can you keep sight of the individual employee’s perspective? The best executives we studied internalize their early experiences and use them as reference points for gauging the signals that their own behavior will send to the troops. “Try hard to remember when you were working in the trenches,” Hamilton says. “If somebody asked you to do a bunch of work on something they hadn’t thought through, how meaningful could it be for you? How committed could you be?”

Do you have any early-warning systems that indicate when your view from the top doesn’t match the reality on the ground? Regular audits to gauge the effectiveness of coordination and support processes in areas such as marketing, sales, and purchasing can highlight pain points that demand senior management’s attention because they are starting to sap meaning from your people’s work. In Hamilton’s view, senior executives bear the responsibility for identifying and clearing away systemic impediments that prevent quality work from getting done.

Hamilton’s company was doing very well. But we believe that senior executives can provide a sense of purpose and progress even in bad economic times. Consider the situation that then–newly appointed Xerox head Anne Mulcahy faced in 2000, when the company verged on bankruptcy. Mulcahy refused her advisers’ recommendation to file for bankruptcy (unless all other options were exhausted) because of the demoralizing signal it would send to frontline employees. “What we have going for us,” she said, “is that our people believe we are in a war that we can win.”⁷ She was right, and her conviction helped carry Xerox through four years of arduous struggle to later success.

As an executive, you are in a better position than anyone to identify and articulate the higher purpose of what people do within your organization. Make that purpose real, support its achievement through consistent everyday actions, and you will create the meaning that motivates people toward greatness. Along the way, you may find greater meaning in your own work as a leader. via Mckinsey

About the Authors

Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Steven Kramer is an independent researcher and writer.

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If you're not irate in the first 10 minutes of reading, if I don’t provoke you to revolutionize your management and leadership from think to execute, if you aren’t teetering on the brink of reaching for the Maalox, if you don’t innovate like a banshee, then I have failed you. 

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via mckinseyquarterly.com

 

Yep! This Clown Will Make You Pregnant

Tel Aviv native Nimrod Eisenberg had no intention of following in his parents’ footsteps and becoming a doctor. Although his childhood was spent mostly in hospitals—his mother is a midwife and his father a physician—he had career ambitions outside the medical field. So when he was just seventeen years old, he says, “I ran away and joined the circus.”

Not literally, but he did spend several years performing as a clown and juggler at circuses around Israel, much to his family’s consternation. And he eventually moved to Paris to study the clowning arts at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, a renown theater school. (He never wanted to be a clown in the traditional Western tradition. “In America, your clowns are either happy hobos or sad hobos.” His clowning personality, he says, is more like Charlie Chaplin.) Eisenberg soon found his way back to Israel, where he enrolled in the University of Haifa and graduated with a bachelor’s degree… in medical clowning.

“Yes, that’s a real thing,” Eisenberg laughs. “A lot of people think I’m kidding, but I’m a university accredited medical clown.”

In 2003, he joined Dream Doctors, an Israel-based organization that brings medical clowns to clinics and hospitals. It isn’t an unorthodox option that patients have to specifically request. In Israel, medical clowns are available to anybody who wants them. “We’re just another service provided by the hospital,” Eisenberg says. “We’re as integral to the medical staff as anybody.” He works alongside the doctors and nurses as a collaborative part of a patient’s treatment. “We try to be there for every procedure,” he says. “We’re there when they draw blood or change a bandage or do an x-ray.”

He has arguably the toughest job in medicine. Making somebody laugh while they’re stuck in the unhappiest place on earth is, unsurprisingly, often an uphill battle. “A hospital can be pretty grim and depressing, even for positive people,” Eisenberg says. “But if I can change their perspective, get them to reconnect with their joy, it can do wonders.” Clowns can be so effective in stress reduction that, in some minor surgeries, Eisenberg says, “a clown replaces general anesthesia.”

It’s a healing philosophy that’s also at the core of a new experimental treatment being pioneered by Eisenberg and Dream Doctors: Clown-assisted in vitro fertilization. “I only visit the patient after the in vitro procedure,” Eisenberg clarifies. The theory is, much like laughter contributes to the healing of sick people by reducing their stress, a little levity could have the same effect on fertility patients. There’s even research to back it up. In a study conducted by Dr. Shevach Friedler of the Assaf Harofeh Medical Centre in Israel, 219 women undergoing IVF were visited by clowns for 15 minutes after embryo implantation. 36 percent of them became pregnant.

“There’s a lot of unspoken tension and stress in a fertility ward,” Eisenberg says. “Once you start playing with that tension and acknowledging it and joking over it, it’s able to burst out and offer some relief.” One of his more successful bits with fertility patients involves a tea kettle with a red nose covering the spout. “I hold it like it’s a baby that’s crying,” he explains. “It’s my clown baby. I apologize for it, and I try rocking it to sleep and singing it songs, anything to make it stop crying.” Perhaps not a comedy routine that would amuse most audiences, but for a patient just coming out of IVF surgery, it addresses the elephant in the room. A tea kettle baby is the manifestation of all their hopes and anxieties.

“It’s a delicate balance,” he says. “You have to play on their fears without mocking them. You take those things that sit in the stomach and bring them to the surface so we can look at them and laugh about them.”

Fertility clowns have become more commonplace in Israel, but the rest of the world is still reluctant. Earlier this month, Eisenberg and fellow Dream Doctors clown Jérôme Arous toured hospitals in Canada, giving conferences and hosting workshops for fertility patients and curious doctors in Quebec City, Montreal, Chicoutimi and Halifax. They were met, Eisenberg remembers, with cautious enthusiasm. “I am not convinced,” Dr. Hananel Holzer of Montreal’s McGill Reproductive Centre told a local radio station about fertility clowns. “Not yet.”

Eisenberg is confident that the global medical community will catch on eventually. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that even his own family didn’t take him seriously. He was the black sheep who went into clowning instead of medicine. But he ended up in the family business anyway. He even spent a few years in residence at Hadassah Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, where he worked alongside his brother, an orthopedist.

“It was pretty easy to tell us apart,” Eisenberg says. “One of us dressed strange and talked funny, and the other was a medical clown.”

via businessweek.com

10 Ways to Instantly Build Self Confidence

Self confidence is the difference between feeling unstoppable and feeling scared out of your wits. Your perception of yourself has an enormous impact on how others perceive you. Perception is reality — the more self confidence you have, the more likely it is you’ll succeed.
Although many of the factors affecting self confidence are beyond your control, there are a number of things you can consciously do to build self confidence. By using these 10 strategies you can get the mental edge you need to reach your potential.

Talk to us about increasing your self confidence. 

Build Self Confidence

1. Dress Sharp
Although clothes don’t make the man, they certainly affect the way he feels about himself. No one is more conscious of your physical appearance than you are. When you don’t look good, it changes the way you carry yourself and interact with other people. Use this to your advantage by taking care of your personal appearance. In most cases, significant improvements can be made by bathing and shaving frequently, wearing clean clothes, and being cognizant of the latest styles.

This doesn’t mean you need to spend a lot on clothes. One great rule to follow is “spend twice as much, buy half as much”. Rather than buying a bunch of cheap clothes, buy half as many select, high quality items. In long run this decreases spending because expensive clothes wear out less easily and stay in style longer than cheap clothes. Buying less also helps reduce the clutter in your closet.

2. Walk Faster
One of the easiest ways to tell how a person feels about herself is to examine her walk. Is it slow? tired? painful? Or is it energetic and purposeful? People with confidence walk quickly. They have places to go, people to see, and important work to do. Even if you aren’t in a hurry, you can increase your self confidence by putting some pep in your step. Walking 25% faster will make to you look and feel more important.

3. Good Posture
Similarly, the way a person carries herself tells a story. People with slumped shoulders and lethargic movements display a lack of self confidence. They aren’t enthusiastic about what they’re doing and they don’t consider themselves important. By practicing good posture, you’ll automatically feel more confident. Stand up straight, keep your head up, and make eye contact. You’ll make a positive impression on others and instantly feel more alert and empowered.

4. Personal Commercial
One of the best ways to build confidence is listening to a motivational speech. Unfortunately, opportunities to listen to a great speaker are few and far between. You can fill this need by creating a personal commercial. Write a 30-60 second speech that highlights your strengths and goals. Then recite it in front of the mirror aloud (or inside your head if you prefer) whenever you need a confidence boost.

5. Gratitude
When you focus too much on what you want, the mind creates reasons why you can’t have it. This leads you to dwell on your weaknesses. The best way to avoid this is consciously focusing on gratitude. Set aside time each day to mentally list everything you have to be grateful for. Recall your past successes, unique skills, loving relationships, and positive momentum. You’ll be amazed how much you have going for you and motivated to take that next step towards success.

6. Compliment other people
When we think negatively about ourselves, we often project that feeling on to others in the form of insults and gossip. To break this cycle of negativity, get in the habit of praising other people. Refuse to engage in backstabbing gossip and make an effort to compliment those around you. In the process, you’ll become well liked and build self confidence. By looking for the best in others, you indirectly bring out the best in yourself.

7. Sit in the front row
In schools, offices, and public assemblies around the world, people constantly strive to sit at the back of the room. Most people prefer the back because they’re afraid of being noticed. This reflects a lack of self confidence. By deciding to sit in the front row, you can get over this irrational fear and build your self confidence. You’ll also be more visible to the important people talking from the front of the room.

8. Speak up
During group discussions many people never speak up because they’re afraid that people will judge them for saying something stupid. This fear isn’t really justified. Generally, people are much more accepting than we imagine. In fact most people are dealing with the exact same fears. By making an effort to speak up at least once in every group discussion, you’ll become a better public speaker, more confident in your own thoughts, and recognized as a leader by your peers.

9. Work out
Along the same lines as personal appearance, physical fitness has a huge effect on self confidence. If you’re out of shape, you’ll feel insecure, unattractive, and less energetic. By working out, you improve your physcial appearance, energize yourself, and accomplish something positive. Having the discipline to work out not only makes you feel better, it creates positive momentum that you can build on the rest of the day.

10. Focus on contribution
Too often we get caught up in our own desires. We focus too much on ourselves and not enough on the needs of other people. If you stop thinking about yourself and concentrate on the contribution you’re making to the rest of the world, you won’t worry as much about you own flaws. This will increase self confidence and allow you to contribute with maximum efficiency. The more you contribute to the world the more you’ll be rewarded with personal success and recognition.

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Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group; a leading Strategic Management and Innovation Consulting Firm in Denver, Colorado. He is an author, speaker, and a strategic innovation and hypercompetition expert to profit, non-profit organizations and municipalities. He advises clients with an objective view of their competitive capabilities and defines a clear course of action to maximize their innovation return on investment to achieve profitable growth. Build a capability for ongoing competitive innovation across your company. Call 719-649-4118 or complete our form: contact us for more information on hiring Jim to advise or speak for your next event. Business, Career or Life Coach.  

The Steve Jobs Way and Leadership

Illustration by Jack Unruh

Steve Jobs’s business feats were legendary long before he died in October 2011. Apple Inc., considered a niche player for much of its history, is the most valuable company in the world by market capitalization as of this writing. Most business leaders would be thrilled to achieve Jobs’s level of market success, but should they aspire to lead like him? Before doing so, they should dig into his management style. Jobs the leader was at once dynamic and controversial, and his success relied heavily on the genius of Jobs the innovator.

Many other prominent leaders leave legacies that become clear only with time; however, we can evaluate Jobs’s leadership with tremendous clarity already today. This is thanks to Walter Isaacson’s masterful, eponymous biography of the entrepreneur (Simon & Schuster, 2011), a 600-page account that rarely feels flabby or boring. Jobs pursued Isaacson, a former CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time, for five years (the first of many examples of Jobs’s persistence in the book), and then gave him a free hand (a much rarer occurrence), promising: “It’s your book. I won’t even read it.”

The leader Isaacson portrays could have illustrated the Great Man theory popular in the mid-19th century, with its heroic leaders whose decisions and sheer force of will determined the world’s course. Steve Jobs was certainly a willful and driven leader, and the products and services he directed his companies to develop and commercialize changed the way many of us live, as well as the course of a diverse set of industries, including computing, publishing, movies, music, and mobile telephony.

At the same time, Jobs’s leadership style was complex. He was intensely focused when committed, confident enough to take risky leaps, and charismatic enough to enlist legions of employees and customers in the relentless pursuit of his aspirations. He was also interpersonally immature well into his adult life: impatient, stubborn, and hypercritical, if not downright cruel at times. Jobs may have been, as Isaacson says, “the greatest business executive of our era,” but he was a mercurial, demanding, and tyrannical one. All too often he was the antithesis of the “servant leader” model popularized in the 1990s (the giving, caring organizational mentor who in many ways contrasted with the hero model of a century prior).

However, Jobs’s seemingly destructive behaviors sparked peak performance as much as they undermined it, depending on where and how he applied them. They also helped shape the unique and powerful cultures Jobs seeded — twice at Apple, as well as at NeXT and at Pixar. (And few would have predicted Pixar’s runaway success in movie animation. Certainly not the Walt Disney Company, which eventually bought Pixar to secure its hit-making abilities, an action that made Jobs Disney’s largest shareholder.) Far better than most leaders, Jobs intuitively understood the power of cultural influence in sustaining the strategic capabilities implicit in his perpetual vision of creating, as he put it, “an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products...a company that will stand for something a generation or two from now.” It’s hard to argue with that aspiration; time will tell whether Apple makes it happen.

Jobs’s volatile approach to leadership is both fascinating and perplexing. For instance, Jobs had a fickle commitment construct — he fell in and out of love with people much too easily, both personally and professionally. In his relentless pursuit of top talent, he was able to create highly skilled organizations. But he also missed the potential contribution of many people who were not yet (and perhaps never would be) so-called A players. It is surprising, however, that many of the people Jobs abandoned along the way retained a grudging respect for his positive qualities — and a few even came back for more of his particular brand of abuse. via strategy-business.com

Want to bring new products and services to market faster? Want to be more agile? Need a compelling speaker? Hire Innovation and Growth Speaker Jim Woods. Jim works confidentially with start ups, governments as well as profit and for profit enterprises.

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Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective growth strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability.james@innothinkgroup.com

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Kickstarter of the Week: Instaprint Your Instagrams | Design

 

A pair of Instaprint printers. Photo courtesy of BREAKFAST

 

Everyone loves Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg loved it so much that he spent a billion dollars on it, which led other people who loved Instagram to write hilarious posts about the future of the service.

In the midst of all of this is Breakfast, a company that loved Instagram so much that it built a locative printer on top of its APIs.

Now it’s trying to take its prototype to market. We love the metaness of a printer that pulls faux-retro photos from the internet. We love it so much, we’re anointing it as our first “Kickstarter of the Week.”

Here’s how it works: You configure the printer with a hashtag or a location and connect it to the internet. It links itself up with instagram, looking for photos tagged with that hashtag or the location. When it finds one, it automatically prints it out.

Ever been to a wedding with disposable cameras on every table? Instaprint is kind of like that.

This makes it perfect for parties and special events. Ever been to a wedding with disposable cameras on every table? Instaprint is kind of like that, and also kind of like a photobooth, but for the 21st century.

“We all still love holding a photo in our hand from a fun night or special moment, but we don’t want shoeboxes of them laying around,” says Andrew Zolty, Instaprint’s creative director, “Being able to take a modern-day platform and give back a small piece of this retro love is just the right amount to fill that small space in our hearts.”

Say what you will, this is still the best interface for browsing photos. Image courtesy of Breakfast.

Breakfast first developed a prototype of Instaprint in 2011. It came out of a water-cooler conversation about what could be done with Instagram’s newly released APIs.

“With Instagram being clearly inspired by the old Polaroid instants, we started chatting about how it would be cool to be able to turn Instagrams into those old prints,” says Zolty. They gave themselves two weeks to bring a prototype to SxSW.

The company chose Kickstarter as the path to market because it enables it to maintain complete control over every aspect of its work. Breakfast was built to embrace “the roller coaster of emotions that goes with growing a company that way,” he says.

The other big benefit to Kickstarter, Zolty says, is that it allows Breakfast to test the waters and ensure there is a demand before throwing its full weight into converting Instaprint from a prototype to a consumer product. At the moment, that test looks daunting, as Breakfast is still under half of its $500,000 funding goal with less than 10 days to go.

Whatever happens, Breakfast has already started renting out the prototypes. Instaprint has made an appearance at the Grammys and concerts at Madison Square Garden.

As for Instagram’s new owner, Zolty strikes a cautiously optimistic note. The prospect of access to Facebook’s 845 million users is “amazing,” but not if it changes the product. “Like most dedicated Instagram users out there, we hope the product retains its simplicity and is transitioned in the smoothest way possible.”

You can support the project and pre-order your own Instaprinter on their Kickstarter Page. If you just want to rent the printer, you can find out more at Instaprint.me. via wired.com

Want to increase growth and avoid more losses? Want to out compete your competitors? Want to bring new products and services to market faster? Want to be more agile? Contact Innovation and Growth Speaker Jim Woods. Jim works confidentially with start ups, governments as well as profit and for profit enterprises.

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Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective growth strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability.james@innothinkgroup.com

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Daniel Goelman on Leadership: Want Creative Workers?

Philip Glass, the contemporary composer, works on his new compositions only between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. That’s the time, he says, when his creative ideas come to him. When filmmaker George Lucas needs to write or edit a script, he sequesters himself in a small cottage behind his house where he gets no calls or visitors.

A lesson in managing creativity can be found in the work discipline of such inventive geniuses: A protected bubble in time and space fosters the imaginative spirit.

That notion challenges some prevailing wisdom–particularly the assumption that upping the pressure on workers will squeeze more innovative thinking out of them. Many managers assume that just calling people into a high-demand brainstorming session will get everyone’s best ideas out on the table.

That is dead wrong, according to new research on the creative process. In a knowledge economy, where competitive advantage comes from leveraging the most innovative ideas and executing them well, leaders at every level would do well to reflect on these findings.

In a study led by Teresa Amabile, a director of research at the Harvard Business School, researchers asked more than 1,000 knowledge workers–members of research-and-development, marketing and information-technology teams–to keep daily diaries. This data trove revealed a disconnect between how managers think they can best support creative efforts, and how those who are actually making the efforts assess what helps them most.

Small Wins Count

When the researchers asked managers to name the most effective ways they could encourage creativity, the most frequent response was praising people for good work. When they asked the workers themselves, the No. 1 carrot turned out to be providing ongoing managerial support of their daily progress. Only 5 percent of managers got this right. Daily progress toward a large goal, even small wins, primes positive moods and catalyzes creativity, the Harvard study found.

Members of creative project teams also described the most common ways managers unwittingly undermine creative work. These ranged from dismissing an idea out of hand to ignoring suggestions to torpedoing an employee’s creative project, for instance through an abrupt reassignment or a cavalier change of mind. The researchers advised managers to set clear goals and then let people accomplish them in their own ways.

Aha Moment

The Harvard researchers also recommended that supervisors protect workers’ time and resources so they can have periods of sustained focus on their projects. This advice–to manage staff time well–is supported by new brain research that reveals what happens at the moment of Aha! Joy Bhattacharya at the University of London has found that in the moments just before a creative insight, the mind is typically relaxed and open to new ideas, as indicated by an alpha brain wave.

As the Aha! approaches, there’s an abrupt shift marked by high gamma-wave activity. This indicates that far-flung neural circuits are connecting in a new network. A third of a second after the peak of this activity, a novel idea floats into the mind.

This finding indicates that creative insights can’t be concocted on demand; they need to ripen. The first step in the creative process typically involves immersion in the problem and current thinking, and then gathering any information that might be relevant. But in the next stage, intense effort should give way to letting what is known as the “cognitive unconscious” work on the problem by making novel connections.

Constant distractions interrupt the mental space where creative insights simmer. That’s why so many Aha! moments come in the relaxed space of downtime — when we’re doing something other than tensing to be creative.

Lessons From Google

Anyone whose work involves strategic thinking can learn something from the findings. The usual method for devising a competitive strategy is to come up with an idea and then analyze its value. The trouble is, no one tells you how to come up with that idea in the first place.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who created the innovative search formula that became the basis of Google Inc. (GOOG), know something about that process. They have instituted Google’s famous once-a-week day for employees to work exclusively on their pet creative projects. Long before Google existed, 3M set aside 15 percent of employee time for the same thing.

Another trendsetter was Xerox PARC, the legendary Silicon Valley research center known for insulating its creative staff from competitive pressures and giving them time to reflect, explore and collaborate. Xerox PARC is the birthplace of a plethora of computer-age basics including laser printing and the graphical user interface that gave us windows and icons.

In a day when the use of innovative ideas provides a competitive edge, it’s good to understand how squeezing time and people can unwittingly squelch creativity, hurting an organization’s future. The best advice for someone who manages innovative thinkers is to nurture the conditions where creative ideas can flow most freely.

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Want to increase growth and avoid more losses? Want to out compete your competitors? Want to bring new products and services to market faster? Want to be more agile? Contact Innovation and Growth Speaker Jim Woods. Jim works confidentially with start ups, governments as well as profit and for profit enterprises.

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Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective growth strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability.james@innothinkgroup.com

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Geoff Colvin: How American Express Put Customer Service Back into Customer Service

Jim Bush, American Express EVP of world service

FORTUNE -- Call-center customer service has become a finely honed discipline, but usually it seems honed to cut time: The agent is superficially friendly, but nothing can derail that person's mission of getting you off the phone fast. Service at American Express (AXP) wasn't much different from that before Jim Bush was put in charge of it in 2005. His basic insight was that breaking with industry orthodoxy by transforming those conversations into less structured, more human engagements would pay off. Instead of evaluating service reps mainly by how quickly they got you off the phone, as many companies still do, he switched to the net promoter score developed by Bain's Fred Reichheld. It's based on one question: Would you recommend this company to a friend? AmEx's score has risen significantly under Bush's direction, and he was right -- it pays off. Customer spending is up, attrition is down.

Bush, 54, majored in accounting at New Jersey's Rider University. As AmEx's executive VP of world service, he oversees some 20,000 employees, about a third of the company's total. He talked recently with Geoff Colvin about how the company has changed the way it trains service employees, the power of personality, turning collection calls into positive experiences, and much else. Edited excerpts:

Q: When you took over and overhauled customer service, what were the most important changes you made?

A: I thought about the opportunity of capitalizing on every interaction and moving away from being a cost of doing business to being an investment in building relationships. Every one of those moments of truth is an opportunity to make a difference to customers in a personalized way. So we moved from being transaction-oriented -- the investment and training had been all around how to complete the transaction -- to building on the relationship with the customer. We converted from a robotic, scripted environment to a conversational environment that brings the personality to life and brings one-to-one connections, which is what ultimately builds and sustains relationships.

So when somebody calls American Express, the person on the other end has a computer screen in front of him but doesn't have a script?

No scripts. Information is presented to the care professional -- we call them "customer care professionals" because that's what they are. They're not service professionals; they take care of customers. We present the profile of who that customer is and other information relevant to that particular interaction. That allows the care professional to be conversant and pull out their personality and match it to the personal needs of the customer.

We've also modified how we measure performance. We got less focused on productivity as measured by how much time you're on the phone and freed up our care professionals. We let the customer determine how much time they want to engage. That engagement drives value. We serve customers, not transactions.

How does the net-promoter concept work in your situation?

Our aspiration is to drive advocacy, where we get impassioned customers to tell others about their experiences with American Express. For every servicing transaction, we ask, How can we get the customer to feel better about American Express and recommend it to a friend? That's a promoter. We've built a measurement system that surveys the customer and gets that feedback for every servicing transaction, and then we use that to measure [each customer care professional's] performance, complemented by some productivity indicators. Those two measures drive incentives in which we reward our customer care professionals, all the way up to me.

We've been able to show that increased satisfaction drives increased engagement with American Express products, and that drives shareholder value. Great service is great business.

You can really follow it all the way to shareholder value?

We track it all the way to shareholder value. For a promoter who is positive on American Express, we see a 10% to 15% increase in spending and four to five times increased retention, both of which drive shareholder value. In fact our operating expenses associated with service have gone down because we're more streamlined, and we limit friction points and errors.

Research shows that most people are far more likely to tell others about a negative experience than a positive one. You want people talking about positive experiences. What's key to making that happen?

We've all become frustrated by the lack of service experience around the world, and in fact when people think of customer service, they tend to think of problems. Customers have regained control because of the proliferation of information at their fingertips, and they benchmark their experience across their lifestyle. It's no longer enough to be good within your industry; you need to be great across industries. Compounding that is the influence of social media.

That promoter question we ask is actually viral marketing in its finest fashion. In asking it, we're influencing the customer to influence his friends and family, and that has become exponential with social networks. The power of that has turned this from a cost to an investment in our business.

People don't feel the same way about service as they did 10 or 15 years ago. What have you observed?

We field a survey annually and found that 7% of consumers feel they're getting good service; 93% are not getting the service they expect. It's an enormous void. We defined our business system to respect the fact that these are human beings. We unleash the power of personality and hold our people accountable to key objectives as measured by the voice of the customer. It's a simple concept. It's the Golden Rule -- treat others as you would like to be treated. But that simplicity is often overlooked by other businesses. Think of the power of the voice of the customer now. Verizon (VZ) introduced a $2 fee, the voice of the customer screamed loud, and it turned that around 24 hours later. We need to appreciate customer-centricity and the value it creates.

You've changed how you interact with customers, so your people need new skills. Do you train them differently now?

The training has changed. In the past, 75% of it was on how, technically, you complete the transaction. Now it's on how you create the relationship and build it through humanity, conversation, and engagement.

As I've traveled the world, I've always appreciated the people at the front desks of hotels who welcome you in. That hospitality is what we try to deliver through virtual means. So we no longer hire; we select. And by attracting that profile, people come in with the will. We teach them the skill.

Unlike other major card companies, AmEx both issues cards and also receives funds from customers and transfers them to merchants. Does that model give you a service advantage?

Yes. I'll give you an example that happened recently. I was in a meeting, and a gentleman joined us a bit late. He had lost his composure. I asked what was the matter, and he said, "I've never done this before in 35 years in business -- I left my overnight bag in the back of the cab." So I picked up my phone, and our customer care professionals jumped into action. He had used the American Express card to pay the cab fare. We were able to get in touch with the cab company, and he had his bag back in less than an hour. It's a very powerful demonstration of the power of data, in-the-moment relevance, and the power of what we bring. No other credit card company can deliver on that.

AmEx: Changing call centers one operator at a time

You're watching the spending of millions of customers globally. What's the state of the customer today in the U.S. and globally?

We're seeing cautiously optimistic signs in the U.S. In Europe they're suffering challenges. As we look at opportunities around the world, cash continues to be our main competitor. We're seeing that opportunity continue to help us offset some economic instability around the world because people still have the need for nondiscretionary expenditures.

Back in the early days of the recession, we saw the unprecedented phenomenon of the affluent consumer, the American Express customer, cutting back spending more than the middle class. More recently we've seen the affluent consumer coming back in a big way. Are you feeling the effects?

We've seen it consistently across our business. We're seeing very strong growth in use of our products, and more important, we're seeing very positive trends in our credit indicators, indicating the health of our portfolio. But it's not necessarily in the luxury goods sector. It's across everything customers buy.

When you got this job, you weren't sure it was a promotion. How has perception of this function changed?

I was asked to move into this job by Ken Chenault, our chairman. At the time I was thinking the way most people think -- that these are back-office operations. But as I thought about the millions of interactions we have with customers, I said, "If we can unleash the power of that customer-facing organization, think of the value we can create." We developed purpose, and we created energy around that purpose. When you unleash the personality of people to make those connections, the value is significant.

It's not that we strive to make everyone happy. There's accountability that goes along with this. Giving our people freedom, boundary, and purpose, combined with holding them accountable, drives economic value.

Do you encounter a lot of misconceptions about the nature of service?

The perception of service is that it's all about problems. Problems are actually a very small percentage of why customers interact with American Express. What we've learned is that the power of that interaction gives us an opportunity to expand the perception of the brand in a very positive way.

There's a tendency to see service as a sunk cost -- the customer is reaching out to you. So people say, "It's a cost. Let's look to eliminate it." And over time we can eliminate friction points, which eliminates the need for some customers to interact with us. But the reality is, it's a very powerful opportunity to build a relationship.

The Leadership Series
Formerly called "C-Suite Strategies," this is the latest interview with a top executive by Fortune senior editor-at-large Geoff Colvin. See video excerpts of this interview at fortune.com/leadership -- plus find Colvin interviews with Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, DirecTV CEO Michael White, Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, Humana CEO Michael McCallister, and many more.

This story is from the April 30, 2012 issue of Fortune. via management.fortune.cnn.com

Need an Innovation Speaker or Advisor? Jim works confidentially with start ups, governments as well as profit and for profit enterprises.

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Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective growth strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability.james@innothinkgroup.com

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Stop Blabbing About Innovation And Start Actually Doing It - Fast Company

These days, every established company is at risk of having its industry--and its own business--disrupted by a startup. Cognizant of this, companies devote a lot of time to talking about how important it is to innovate. But here’s the truth: most companies can’t innovate because everyone is paid to maintain the status quo.

This is the single biggest reason companies fail to do anything new or exciting. You and everyone else are maxed out making sure your company is doing what it’s supposed to do; innovation is what the weekends are for.

Despite the real risk involved, this actually makes sense. Companies are set up to do one thing very well. That’s the business they’re in. All of the roles in the company are defined and structured to create the best environment for doing that one thing as efficiently as possible. The number of people employed by the company fluctuates with the workload. More work, more people. Too many people and too little work means layoffs or mismanagement. Success is doing the same thing you’ve always done, just a little bit better, achieving just a few more sales or shaving a hair off of costs. Change is discouraged by time constraints and the stifling number of approvals needed. Failure is punishable by pink slip. Every day is the same.

Yet, today, your entire industry can change in the space of a headline. If your business can’t innovate, it won’t survive when the startup in the garage across town that doesn’t have to answer to your shareholders does all the things legal has been telling you that you can’t do, all the things that you don’t have time for. It’s never been more urgent to stop talking about innovation and actually start doing things differently. And, with digital, the opportunities have never been greater. Instead of innovating on your weekends, overcome the structural impediments and time constraints to real change by approaching innovation from two directions: outside-in and inside-out.

“Outside-in,” when not based on acquisition, often comes in the form of a skunkworks project. It’s colloquially defined as a startup funded by the parent company, but kept separate from the dysfunction and sluggishness of the whole, in order to incubate great technological advancements. I’ve referenced this tactic before, as the first step big businesses should take to evolve their organizational structures. Google, JetBlue, NBCUniversal, and News Corp. have all used the strategy.

Here’s the recipe:

Set the right goals. A skunkworks project should be tasked with developing a new, specific tech product or service.

Give the team freedom to create. Bureaucracy, office politics, and the aforementioned requirement to keep the ship sailing straight ahead all slow down and inhibit big advancements. To succeed, the skunkworks team must be kept free from these deterrents.

Appoint separate senior management. Management by committee is not an option. The quickest route to failure is slow decision making. The skunkworks team should report directly to a senior-level executive who is authorized to green-light initiatives that are separate from the company’s main purpose and to implement these new solutions.

Choose a separate location. The team should not be housed in the corporate headquarters. Ideally, it should live nearby, but in some cases, it needs to be in a completely different location to be able to access the right talent. When Johnson & Johnson decided to build a unit oriented to design, creativity, and technology, the division planted a flag in an old industrial building in a trendy neighborhood in New York. Its corporate headquarters are in suburban New Jersey.

Mix up the staff. The staff should be a healthy hybrid of high-performing internal employees and newbies, so that some participants are familiar with the company’s core business while others have an open mind and fresh ideas.

Give it time. Really well-developed products often take a year from the time people start working on them until launch. You can get things done in six to nine months, but it’s unusual, especially if the team refines it with iterative improvements.

Bring it back into the fold. Once the project is complete, skunkworks team members should move back in with the parent company. They either become a distinct department or are dispersed throughout the company, in order to effectively run and manage the particular product.

On the other hand, “inside-out” innovation is all about incentivizing existing staff members to be revolutionary within their own jobs. The most important ingredients are largely cultural:

Freedom to fail. Traditionally, companies are averse to risk, so if you fail at something, it hurts your career. But to innovate, you need to be able to try new things without risking your livelihood. As Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I've just found ten thousand ways that won't work.”

Free time. Performance evaluations for managers should include assessment of the volume and quality of new ideas they brought to the table. If the company’s priority is solely productivity, no one will have time to think about creating something new, let alone bring it to life.

Training. An office that encourages and facilitates education openly admits there’s room to grow and inspires people take that leap.

The risk involved in these changes is less than the risk of not making them. Innovation is outside the comfort zones of most businesses--but so is Chapter 11.

Aaron Shapiro is CEO of Huge, a global digital agency based in Brooklyn, and author of Users Not Customers.

[Image: Flickr user Derrick Collins]

via fastcompany.com

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As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth. 

 If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118. 

The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs

His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large: Steve Jobs cofounded Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned to rescue it from near bankruptcy in 1997, and by the time he died, in October 2011, had built it into the world’s most valuable company. Along the way he helped to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. He thus belongs in the pantheon of America’s great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney. None of these men was a saint, but long after their personalities are forgotten, history will remember how they applied imagination to technology and business.

“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” —Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997

In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it. Some of those readers have been insightful, but I think that many of them (especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality. The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business. He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism.

One of the last times I saw him, after I had finished writing most of the book, I asked him again about his tendency to be rough on people. “Look at the results,” he replied. “These are all smart people I work with, and any of them could get a top job at another place if they were truly feeling brutalized. But they don’t.” Then he paused for a few moments and said, almost wistfully, “And we got some amazing things done.” Indeed, he and Apple had had a string of hits over the past dozen years that was greater than that of any other innovative company in modern times: iMac, iPod, iPod nano, iTunes Store, Apple Stores, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, App Store, OS X Lion—not to mention every Pixar film. And as he battled his final illness, Jobs was surrounded by an intensely loyal cadre of colleagues who had been inspired by him for years and a very loving wife, sister, and four children.

So I think the real lessons from Steve Jobs have to be drawn from looking at what he actually accomplished. I once asked him what he thought was his most important creation, thinking he would answer the iPad or the Macintosh. Instead he said it was Apple the company. Making an enduring company, he said, was both far harder and more important than making a great product. How did he do it? Business schools will be studying that question a century from now. Here are what I consider the keys to his success.

Focus

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. After a few weeks of product review sessions, he’d finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a Magic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a whiteboard, and drew a two-by-two grid. “Here’s what we need,” he declared. Atop the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” He labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he told his team members, was to focus on four great products, one for each quadrant. All other products should be canceled. There was a stunned silence. But by getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he told me. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”

After he righted the company, Jobs began taking his “top 100” people on a retreat each year. On the last day, he would stand in front of a whiteboard (he loved whiteboards, because they gave him complete control of a situation and they engendered focus) and ask, “What are the 10 things we should be doing next?” People would fight to get their suggestions on the list. Jobs would write them down—and then cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much jockeying, the group would come up with a list of 10. Then Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce, “We can only do three.”

Focus was ingrained in Jobs’s personality and had been honed by his Zen training. He relentlessly filtered out what he considered distractions. Colleagues and family members would at times be exasperated as they tried to get him to deal with issues—a legal problem, a medical diagnosis—they considered important. But he would give a cold stare and refuse to shift his laserlike focus until he was ready.

Near the end of his life, Jobs was visited at home by Larry Page, who was about to resume control of Google, the company he had cofounded. Even though their companies were feuding, Jobs was willing to give some advice. “The main thing I stressed was focus,” he recalled. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up, he told Page. “It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.” Page followed the advice. In January 2012 he told employees to focus on just a few priorities, such as Android and Google+, and to make them “beautiful,” the way Jobs would have done.

I encourage you to continue reading this article via hbr.org. 

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 If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118. 

 

How Social Media Is Fueling the Food Truck Phenomenon

The Social-Savvy Food Truck Series is supported by the Ben and Jerry’s Scoop Truck. For more information on the scoop truck and where it stops, click here.

Sitting at the window table of Rickshaw Dumpling Bar‘s Flatiron restaurant, it’s hard to see why they need a food truck. The restaurant is nice, well-located (they have another in Midtown Manhattan) and the food comes out quick and tasty. Why ruin that with what is essentially just fancy-pants street food?

The answer is, because it works. Food trucks experienced a boom just as the economy started to tank. Restaurateurs who were hesitant to drop serious cash on launching a restaurant turned to mobile trucks as a less expensive way to sell food in a down economy. Social media has played a large role in not only making the trucks more accessible, but allowing them to cultivate the crucial element of community.

“It’s the social aspect,” says Kenny Lao, Rickshaw’s co-founder. “It’s really about shared experiences around food. I think what we’re doing with Twitter is an electronic version of that share.” He sees his restaurants as an older, established sibling living uptown, while his truck is like the younger brother fresh out of college and living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — different energies toward the same purpose.

But Lao, like other food truckers, is hesitant to give social media too much credit. We spoke with the proprietors of four prominent food trucks — Rickshaw in New York, Dante’s Friend Chicken in LA, Kogi BBQ in LA, and Grill5 Taco in South Korea — about how social media helped drive the mobile food revolution, and what to look for next.

Why Trucks? Why Now?

Food trucks popped up in a perfect storm of low-cost marketing. Restaurants are extraordinarily expensive businesses to open and maintain. Food trucks, however, are far cheaper and carry far less risk. The barrier to entry is cheap, and the location can change daily (not selling well in Midtown? Move to Brooklyn or the Financial District.)

The real problem was trust. Food trucks have been around forever, but people naturally have an aversion to “roach coaches” and “street meat,” thinking it of a lower quality and lower standard than a brick-and-mortar restaurant. The influx of high-quality restaurant brands to food trucks timed well with the social media boom.

Not only were trucks striving for higher quality tastes, but they were talking to their customers, building what digital marketers call “brand loyalty.” That brand loyalty also played into the food truck ethos of “community first.” Each successful truck is a community unto itself. Social outreach helped to grow these communities and make them feel more participatory.

Still, no amount of social media can do the cooking and design work necessary to make a successful food truck. Much of the “social media” narrative is driven not by the trucks but by social media advocates themselves. Here’s what we learned from these mobile entrepreneurs.

Rickshaw Dumpling — New York City, USA

 

 

The Rickshaw Dumpling Truck serves a pared down version of the restaurant’s fare. Lao, a bit of a social media skeptic, acts as a begrudging social media manager, tweeting out the truck’s daily locations. “If everyone stopped doing it tomorrow, I would be the first one leading the charge,” he says. For him, the food — and not the marketing — is the first priority. He’s frustrated by businesses that start tweeting before they own a truck, have a permit or have cooked their food. “You can’t make a shish-kebab with an iPhone.”

Lao sees sites like Twitter as a way for food trucks, especially ones without a physical location, to feel like they have a stronger sense of permanence amidst an inherently transient business model. Building that base of followers has helped Lao seal partnerships and sponsorships while also giving a voice to the brand.

To that end, the account is a place to talk not just about dumplings but things that his audience also cares about: new songs, interesting links and cool bikes Lao sees on the street. Timing is also important. Lao likes to tweet in the morning — he figures people like to look forward to their lunch and want to track down the truck. He says sweet trucks, on the other hand, can tweet later in the day as people are wandering back to the office looking for a snack.

Now, Lao is proud of his truck and its followers. He regularly bikes to the truck to check up on it and rides along when scouting new locations. And as for social media? Nearly 10,000 followers can’t be wrong.

Dante Fried Chicken — Los Angeles, USA

 

 

Dante Fried Chicken started out as an underground dance and dinner party in New York. It quickly built street cred and uprooted to LA where the crew — lead by the brand’s eponymous chef — cooks up chicken for the masses. Joey Rubin is Dante’s CMO and friend. We caught up with him between innings at a Milwaukee Brewers game to talk shop.

Social media was a way for Dante to break into the food press. They reached out, tweeted and built a following, quickly drawing in top journalists. “Through Twitter and Facebook — through creative campaigns and the tools that we have — we made it from being completely underground New York kids throwing really awesome innovative parties … to being on the cooking channel in a matter of a few days,” Rubin said.

The truck went from a humble Gmail account with a few hundred messages to more than 2,600 followers on Twitter. The tone is still off-the-cuff and erratic, but it matches the brand perfectly. “Social media is just an extension of your brand and your persona,” Rubin says. “You can use it like you use any other tool. It’s like the tongs that Dante uses to put stuff in the fryer.”

The account stirs up the feeling of a backyard cook out, an atmosphere their fans have embraced. “Our social media is tied directly back into the experience for us,” he says. “Meet Dante, you’ll get it. Meet any of us hanging out around the truck, you’ll get it.”

Grill5 Taco — Seoul, South Korea

 

 

Korean fusion is all the rage right now, and well, the team at Grill5 can say it seriously pre-empted the curve. The South Korean truck specializes in, you guessed it, Korean-Mexican offerings. We got in touch with Ban, one of the truck’s originators.

Right now, the truck only uses Twitter to stay up to date with its followers. However, after having the cops called on them several times for causing a scene, they’re now considering a traditional storefront. “At first, I [used Twitter] to tell people just where we will be, but soon I recognized that people unfollow if someone is [talking strictly about] business or is boring,” Ban says. “So I started to tell people about my daily life, talk about movies and introduce quick recipes that I know, just like normal Twitter users.”

Social media played a huge role in the truck’s inception, and Ban doesn’t think he could have had the same success without it. Still, while Twitter was a revolutionary way to market, it has become just another tool in Ban’s belt: “I’m not saying it became less important, but social media itself became just another tool to let them know about our food. The people who communicate through it are more important for us.”

Kogi BBQ — Los Angeles, USA

 

 

Kogi BBQ has seen huge social success on the West coast with 87,000 followers and five separate trucks to do its bidding. Fittingly, it serves up Korean-based Mexican food with a healthy dash of social media. Alice Shin is Kogi’s creative director and chief tweeter. Kogi, like many of the trucks, has a website where fans can look up truck locations by day and hour. This takes some of the social media load off. Still, Shin uses Twitter when there’s a last minute change or for privately reaching out: “Twitter is great for the private DM, ’cause I don’t want to blast people with a bazillion replies a day,” Shin says.

She breaks down the strategy into sections. “WordPress for blogging, Twitter for scheduling/emergencies, Facebook for running a temperature check and just interacting with beautiful strangers.” Having so many outlets has also narrowed Kogi’s Twitter use. It is mostly for updates on the truck, while the blog is home to more general (read: esoteric) updates. One, for example, was a post about a joke tin of “Unicorn meat.”

Much like Lao, Shin says the social strategy ultimately came down to the food: “Social media does not put meat on the grill, it does not chop over a hundred pounds of onions a day or guarantee that people will be happy with our food or help us with calculating orders or cleaning down our stations and throwing out the trash.” Instead, it is a tool to spread awareness about the fundamentals of running a kitchen, whether or not that kitchen is on wheels. “Look, if you don’t have a great product to sell, if you don’t have a deep love for your work, no amount of retweeting, hashtagging or following will help you grow your business,” Shin adds.

It’s important to listen, to find out what your specific audience wants. Some may want to know your favorite band, others may just want to find your food and that’s it. But has social media actually helped Kogi? “I don’t know. I mean, I get the feeling that when asked this question, people want me to either trash social media or praise it. But when you ask a cook, ‘After all that, has your chef’s knife actually helped you?’ Sure it has! But the knife is not the food. The knife is an important, integral tool for a serious cook, but it does not imagine or create the dish itself,” Shin says.

As she put it: “Food is my business. Culture is my department. And social media is the bridge that allows for me to let those two worlds talk to one another.”

What food trucks have you seen? And why do you think social has become an important part of the mobile revolution? Let us know in the comments below.

Series Supported by Ben and Jerry’s Scoop Truck

 

via mediasharkllc.com

 

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