A Useful Exercise in Social (Network) Anthropology

One of my favorite truisms: it's not what you say that matters, it's what your audience hears.

Your audience reads, hears or sees you through a filter constructed over their entire lifetimes, aggregating inputs from their individual cultures, politics, languages, values, locales, experiences and so on. The words chosen by you with a certain intended connotation are heard by them through this filter. What they interpret from your words (and other non-verbal clues such as tone, body language and so on) may be quite different from your original intent.

It's easy to underestimate just how diverse and active the filters of those with whom you wish to communicate actually is. I propose an experiment. It's based on observing information flow in the opposite direction, inbound toward you rather than outbound to your audience, but I believe it illuminates the question at hand. Here's how…

If you're reading this, you likely have an account on one or more of the popular social networks: LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. (If you don't, get them; they're at worst painless and you can retreat to passivity or drop your account at your pleasure. Maximizing the experience while avoiding the pitfalls is the subject for a future post.) While this experiment can work on any of them, I believe it does best on Twitter, because of the frequency of posts and the way in which the 140 character limit condenses a certain "essential" aspect out of the authors' thoughts.

To do the experiment, you'll need to end up with a "Following" list that looks something like mine: a relatively large number of "discovered" / random participants beyond those that you've chosen because they're in your close circle of friends. It's the former group that's of interest. (For a while now I've been ignoring the "how to get ahead on Twitter" advice to keep your following list shorter than your followed list — which strikes me as silly, and adding a follow to just about any user that seems remotely interesting. I do avoid the online hookers, but even they would be useful for our purpose if they posted more than that one pathetic tweet!)

Now, finally, the experiment…

Take a half hour or so and watch the Twitter stream from your followed community. Look at the diversity of the posts, in terms of style, language, esthetics, topic, frequency, bellicosity and so on. Then try to peer through the patterns of those posts to the personality, character, interests and values of those people… As I've done that, I've found a cast of characters that include:

A young female writer at the New Yorker whose every other Tweet is peppered with profanity (what would Eustance Tilley think?);
A writer for the NY Times whose posts signal that his interests revolves around racial issues;
A famous pioneer in computer networking whose posts alternate between a logging of his current weight and aspirational goal (automated, via a WiFi scale no less) and conservative critiques of the Obama administration;
A well known IT marketer and pioneer blogger who's automated his tweets so that each hits three times, at eight hour intervals, so as to maximize the efficiency in driving readers to his blog (it seems to work, albeit at the cost of annoyance to some);
A health and fitness guru who informs us of her every workout completed, blueberry pancake breakfast consumed, departure for and arrival at work, and on and on;
The sports nut;
The narcissist twenty-something;
The expat transplant to an exotic corner of the Far East;
A significant number of aggressive "ReTweeters" who scour the blogosphere and social network domains for interesting posts, and then send those out to their followers (so as to add value to their online presence);

I think you get the picture…

As you're watching your Twitter stream, ask yourself, "would I post those tweets, in just that way, with those words?" I suspect that you'll answer "no" in a large number of cases. Well, they did. There's a difference somewhere, right?

Now, thinking about the following list you've been watching, imagine that you're behind a podium, and that these folks are your audience. Can you imagine how differently each will perceive your message? Do you see the challenge here to effective communication? Can you see how easy it is for people to talk past each other, and for misunderstandings to occur, expand and fester? And, without veering off into politics, how the current distressing levels of polarization in our country are grounded in this phenomenon?

So, what to do about this?

Well, even the simple awareness of this filter effect will make you a better communicator, by instinct. You won't as easily as before assume that your audience is made up of folks "pretty much like me" that hear my words and get my intended meaning.

Beyond simply being sensitive to differences, I believe that there are a number of specifics that can help:

Use simple and direct language. (It's good practice anyway, but it also has a lower probability of being misunderstood.)
Excepting when in a known homogeneous group of peers, beware of language that is tied to your particular industry, country or culture. It might not be in their dictionaries.
Consider communicating your most important points in several different ways: straight exposition, example and / or story, graphically.
Test your draft communication by imagining yourself a particular member of your audience — how does it sound?
Solicit feedback, real time if possible (easier in small meetings than in large groups or in writing), to confirm that they "got it", really.

Do you have other ideas that might help? If so, leave a comment here. Also, please feel free to let me know if I've fallen short of my own advice in this article. (Wouldn't be the first time.)

And remember, if you want to be a great communicator, you don't want to be heard… you want to be understood.

Want to Learn Something? Teach It!

One of the best ways to learn something, or to significantly deepen your understanding of it, is to teach it.

What?

Well, in my experience, it's true, and powerful.

The trick, of course, is what teaching something forces you to do before you get up at the lectern, in preparation. (That's assuming of course that you take the teaching assignment seriously enough to prepare.)

Let's look a little deeper, starting with why this works.

1. Teaching forces a focus on relationships and patterns, not just stand-alone facts.

To teach something well, you'll need to go beyond simply relating the "atomic level" facts or ideas involved; you'll need to explain out how those building blocks form patterns, sequences and relationships.

True understanding of something is achieved when individual instances can be abstracted to general truths. By first parsing your subject into major blocks of knowledge, then arranging them into logical sequence and pointing out key patterns and relationships (cause and effect…), you'll not only be preparing to present the material in a manner best able to be absorbed by your students, you'll be teasing out new insights that will deepen your understanding.

Finally, this organization of ideas into a logical framework renders it much easier to remember. (It's how our mind works.)

2. Teaching challenges you to identify and use Analogies and metaphors.

People learn best when they can relate new ideas to things they already know and understand. So, you'll want to use them in teaching your subject. Which means you'll have to find or invent them. Which in turn forces you to think about those patterns mentioned above yet again, from a fresh perspective. All of which will result in a further deepening of your understanding. If you can't come up with compelling analogies to get across your ideas, chances are you'll need to dig into the topic a bit deeper to find those underlying patterns and relationships.

3. Preparing to teach identifies gaps in your knowledge.

If you go about your preparations with care, you'll likely find that your knowledge of the subject is complete in some areas, less so in others. In effect, you'll be forced to take inventory of your own understanding. Gaps will stand out, and can be filled with study or further thought.

4. Teaching engages more of your mind.

While I'm not a cognitive scientist, I've done enough reading on the subject to claim with confidence that the sort of active information processing the brain does when organizing information per the above, and again when actually presenting it verbally, graphically or both, engages parts of our mind not engaged in more passive activities such as reading.

5. Teaching creates positive and negative incentives toward learning.

Nobody likes to be embarrassed, a state all-too-easy to find yourself in if you get up in front of a class to teach something and aren't prepared, or can't answer questions in a satisfying manner. When we're agree to teach something, we instinctively get this, and so are motivated to put in the effort required to do a great job.

A Tip: regardless of the sophistication of your audience, when you're finished preparing your lecture, ask yourself if the main ideas are presented so that an audience of bright thirteen year olds could understand them, and be engaged by them. If not, you still have more work to do in distilling down the concepts and finding compelling ways to present them.

One of my favorite fellow bloggers, David A. Brock (@davidabrock), recently called attention to the physics lectures given by Richard Feynman, as exemplary of how very complex (and potentially dry) ideas can be presented so as to achieve both understanding and emotional engagement. I first read and listened to them a couple of dozen years ago. David's spot on, and this standard of excellence is one to aspire to reach.

By the way, these same learning benefits accrue whether you teach a course, write a serious paper, article or blog post (I'm learning something this way every time I do one of these) or step up to do some intensive one-on-one coaching for a promising team member.

Regardless of which vehicle you choose, in addition to deepening your understanding, you'll realize a powerful set of side benefits. You'll:

Improve your communications skills
Enhance your standing in your peer group, industry or community
Gain the satisfaction of helping others
Have fun!

So, next time you want to learn something, find a way to teach it. It'll be good for you.

Thoughts on Starting a New Job

I'm likely going to be starting in a new job (and new company) sometime before the end of the year. Perhaps some of you are too.

Beginnings are always important times. Early impressions matter, patterns once set can be difficult to change and establishing momentum early is important.

Here's how I'm planning to approach the process:

1. Get acquainted with the Team — As we know, business is a team, contact sport. Precious little can be accomplished without the aligned and active support of those around you. The foundation to build that on is trust, which in turn depends on the establishment of personal relationships.

That takes time and dedicated effort. So, job one is to meet and spend time with members of my team, my peers and those members of senior management with whom I don't already have a relationship. In each case the goals are similar:

Get to know them as people
Introduce myself to them
Ask their inputs on what's most important to focus on in getting started (see below)

Throughout, it's important to remember that you're inserting yourself into an existing web of relationships, some links in which may have formed over decades. Coming to understand how that's working today, and about the cultural norms within which it operates, is another early key point of focus.

With their inputs, I should be able to lay out a prioritized plan for where and when to focus my attention. That plan will likely look something like the next steps listed below…

2. Immediate (First Week) Priorities — If there's a ticking bomb somewhere, I'll want to discover it fast, apply triage as required, and begin to develop a get-well plan:

Are any critical programs or initiatives about to come off the rails?
Major customer satisfaction issues (external or internal)?
Looming legal issues?
Budget blow-ups?
Critical people issues?

If any exist, it's likely that I'll readily find out about some easily, others make take some digging.

3. Mid-term (First 90 day) Priorities — After gaining confidence that something isn't about to blow up, these items will get my attention next:

Program Reviews: I'll be joining an up-and-running business. There will clearly be a good number of existing initiatives and programs that my team has going, either independently or on a cross-functional basis with others. I'll want to know how all of those are going, by attending already scheduled program reviews, calling new ones if required and spending one-on-one time with owners and other key players.
External Constituency Meetings: Since mine will be a market-facing responsibility, I'll want to meet as many key customers, as well as partners and suppliers, as possible, as soon as possible. The discussion agendas will be similar to those for the team meetings, described above. Listening here is more important than talking.
Establish a Local Management System: While the company overall most likely has a well-structured system of meetings and other processes by which it operates, it's likely that some local refinement and personalization will be appropriate.
Fill any Short Term Team Gaps: A thorough plan for Organization Development will come a bit later (see below), but it's possible that I'll find it important to fill critical gaps in the team early on. In some cases, I'll choose to don another hat or two rather than make a hasty hire or promotion before I know how to do so intelligently.
Refine and Align the Definition of My Role: Mine will be a newly created function. While I'll clearly have a good idea going in as to the definition of its responsibilities and accountabilities, it's also likely that some refinement of that initial conception may be appropriate. I'll want to focus on this, and secure alignment all around regarding any mid-course corrections required, during the first ninety days or so.
Homework: I'll want to lay out a learning agenda for myself: existing Business Plans, Industry Briefings, Analyst Reports, etc. Reading stuff for nights and travel time.

4. Longer Term (First 6 – 12 month) Priorities — Next, I'll turn attention to strategies and organization development:

Strategy Refinement: While the role I'll be taking is new, the team(s) I'll be responsible for are existing. They're executing current plans under some combination of company-wide and local strategies. While I'll want to understand what those are as early as possible (via the steps above), I won't be expecting to change them in the early going, if for no other reason (there are several), I won't know enough to do so in any informed way. Within the first 6 to 12 months though, it will be time to focus on refreshing, refining or extending those strategies. This is a team effort, and my preference is for broad participation. (More on this some other time.)
Organization Development: By now, I'll know enough to be thoughtful regarding how to build the organization I'll be responsible for so as to meet our responsibilities and challenges. Some of this may be done within the context of an annual planning cycle; some may not be able to wait that long. We'll see.

So, that will be my basic plan of attack. I will refine it as I come to learn more during the early stages of settling in. Should be fun.

Clear. Compelling. Credible.

Great leaders offer clear, compelling and credible visions of a future better than current reality. The teams they are responsible for follow and excel because they understand exactly where they are headed (clarity), develop a deeply emotional connection with getting there (compelling) and believe that future can be realized, even against tall odds (credibility).

I believe that every one of these ingredients are critical to a successful vision, which in turn is a critical foundation for all the other pillars comprising great leadership (ability to attract great talent, create and sustain a winning culture, excellence in execution, continuous improvement).

Clear, compelling and credible. Simple, right? It's not in practice.

Achieving clarity (and coherence) requires a deep understanding of your strategic situation(customers, competition, internal competencies, industry trends and dynamics and so on), the ability to formulate a winning strategy rich enough to inform the myriad of tactical decisions a business must make, and then to reduce that strategy to its essence, so that it can be understood by all.

When you or I look at a chess board mid-game, we see complexity. A couple of dozen pieces, as many or more possible choices of next move for each player, millions of possible ways the game might play out. A grand master sees with clarity. A current position with a certain balance of power, and several possible "lines" of naturally connected moves that link present situation with desired outcome. It's the same for great leaders — they have the ability to see and articulate paths forward through complexity, because they have developed a sense of the patterns and forces that constrain, amplify and shape such things in their industry.

Can you explain your strategy to a seventh grader? No? Not simple enough.

Great leaders connect with their teams on an emotional plane and ensure that the team vision becomes personnal. That's the only way visions can compel. Achievement of your goals has to become the personnal commitment of each and every team member. Not in some dry, institutional sense. It has to matter deeply to each team member whether you win or lose as a team. This happens when the leader can shape the aspirations at both team and individual levels. This requires emotional intelligence and the courage to use it. The ability to understand how other human beings think and feel about situations and possibilities, and the willingness to operate with the candor, sincerity and even vulnerability required to earn the trust needed to be heard and believed. More than any other attribute, this is what separates leaders from managers.

You think about your business at 4:00 AM. Does your team? No? You haven't connected with them.

Incredible visions don't become blueprints for success. Teams may be wowed by them, but never fully invest in them because they don't believe they can come true. Without that investment of belief and effort, the vision will not be realized. So credibility, in natural counterpoint to the mandate to be compelling (read bold, exciting, BIG), is the final required ingredient to a winning vision. Credibility is achieved when the leader shrewdly balances boldness with blunt realities and gets the team to be confident that they can accomplish more today and tomorrow than they thought they could yesterday.

Does your team deeply believe in your vision? No? Maybe they don't believe it.

Leadership is hard. That should be your inspiration.

Know Which Game To Play

Checkers and chess. Both are games of skill. Both have winners and losers.

While they share the same playing surface, if you sit down with a friend to play, it’s entirely clear which set of rules you should be using, based on the pieces on the board.

In business, it’s not that simple.

It’s Monday morning and you sit down at your desk.

Should this week’s focus be on steps toward securing the partnership that could be the key to opening up that new market segment that’s so promising (“chess”), or on how to fill the open slot on the development team who’s work is slipping (“checkers”)?

In some idealized textbook world, both happen in parallel: You as leader focus on the “big picture” strategic issues, your team on the executional tactics.

Not in the real world.

Here, what you focus on matters. It sets the priority. Your team notices, and that’s where they focus. (That's even before you get to the issue of your incremental experience and ability to contribute to the best outcome.)

If you meet with the hiring manager and her HR partner to discuss the open slot, their efforts to fill it take on a different level of urgency. If you meet with the candidates, you’re more likely to land the top prospect.

Conversely, if you leave the job of laying out the critical strategic partnership framework with your Director of Business Development, the deal is less likely to come together than if you are a hands-on participant in the process.

Substitute any set of “checkers” and “chess” issues, and the challenge as to where to focus is the same:

The design review, or the new product strategy meeting?
The customer visit, or the next generation go-to-market innovation council presentation?
The current parts shortage or the long term cost reduction initiative?
The compensation plan or alternatives for opening up South America?

Just as in the case of whether to view a glass as half empty or full, and of through which end of the telescope to look, there is no one right answer.

As a team, you need to win at both strategy and tactics, chess and checkers. Which means that as a leader, of a team large or small, you have to lead in both.

My purpose here is to get you to think about that. To think how you’re balancing your time. To realize that you don’t win big in the long term without a well conceived strategy — but that you never even get to the long term without excellence in execution.

Chances are, you’re naturally drawn to one game more than the other. Me, I’m a bit more of a chess guy. I know plenty of more natural (and skilled) checkers players. That’s why, a couple of years ago, one early morning in a Starbucks, before my first cup of coffee, I bought a small, brass-covered magnetic travel game of checkers. It’s sitting on my desk to this day, to remind me to make sure to think about playing checkers each and every day, with at least as much effort as playing chess.

Think about it.

Oh, and yes, also know when it's time to stop playing, and time to sit down with your wife for a glass of wine… which it is here, and now.

Love Your Channel, But Don’t Let Them Crowd You Out Of Customer Dialogue

Love your channel. Feed your channel. Help them get rich. But don’t let them block you from having a regular and robust dialogue with your end use customers.

A very significant percentage of B2B commerce is conducted through third party channels: Distributors, VARs, SIs and OEMs. A well developed channel ecosystem, properly supported and managed should, over time, become a major asset and differentiator for its manufacturer principal. Often the company with the strongest channel wins.

Strong partners also wield considerable clout however. They, almost by definition, have naturally closer relationships with end users than do their principals. They will often seek to build on and then leverage this control over the customer to their advantage. Up to a point, you should be OK with this: you want your channel to have great relationships with your shared customers.

But you make a serious mistake if you allow your channel to be your only connection to your customers. If this happens, whether by lack of focus on your part or by allowing your partners to elbow you aside, you lose.

You lose the ability to deliver your story, your positioning and other key messages, clearly, accurately and with maximum impact.
You lose the ability to establish credibility and authority with your customers as a thought leader capable of articulating a vision for how the forward trajectory of your business can help theirs.
You lose the ability to engage your customers in your innovation process. (I wrote about this here.)
You lose the opportunity to hear, directly and unfiltered, the “voice of the customer” — what they think about you, what’s working, and what needs improvement.
You lose the ability to establish human relationships with the very people will determine your future success or failure.

All together too much to lose.

Thoughts of this came to mind recently in a discussion with another tech CEO. He was explaining the current problems he and his team were tackling. They sounded like they were related to the sort of “losses” I listed above.

I asked, “How often do you, personally, meet with your top end user customers?” His hesitation alone told the story, but he went on to answer, “hardly ever… our (SI) channel is very powerful, they pretty much keep us out. Further, we’re only a relatively small part of the solution that our customers’ actually buy.”

I pointed out the perspective shared above, and suggested that, even in cases such as his where your products comprise only a fraction of the total solution, it is possible to create and sustain a meaningful dialogue with your end customers.

I suggested a few specific ideas:

Develop a narrative that is centered on exactly how the distinctive characteristics of your products have impact on his business, expressed in his terms.
Expand that narrative by developing and articulating a vision as to how your future products will enable your customer to create strategic advantage in coming years.
Aim high: find out what your customer’s CEO cares about and is working on. (A visit to their web site, and some time on Google should make this pretty straightforward.) Make sure your narratives link to these C-level issues.
Then, as CEO of your company, reach out the theirs, and suggest the benefits of a one hour meeting to share ideas about his goals can be furthered by what you’re enabling today, and tomorrow. If you’re small and the customer’s large, you may get pushed down a level or two. That’s OK. With the CEO’s blessing, a meeting with middle management can be very effective. But try to secure participation by the most senior business owners possible.
Suggest that such meetings should be held no less frequently than annually, given your pace of innovation and other dynamics in the business.
Finally, involve your channel partner in the meetings, so that they don’t feel cut out, and you present a coherent and aligned message.

I know from personal experience over many years that these approaches work. Try them, you'll see.

What does WiFi have in common with Whale Sharks?

I was asked to say a few words at Fred’s retirement party. Without more than a moment’s thought, I knew just how to approach the task.

So, when I got up in front of a packed room a few weeks later, I began with the quote that had immediately sprung to mind earlier…

“All progress depends on unreasonable men,” I said, paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw. “Fred Heiman is one of those men. When I plan a vacation, thoughts run immediately to poolside Margarita’s in Maui. That’s reasonable. Fred? He heads straight to the western shores of Australia to scuba dive with giant whale sharks. Not so reasonable.” That reference was apt both with respect to Fred’s then growing (now full fledged) passion for underwater exploration and videography (see his web site), and the evening’s venue: the Monterey Aquarium.

But it was also an apt quote to describe Fred’s accomplishments and nature.

Fred could drive you crazy. Opinions? Fred’s got em. Compromise? Not in his vocabulary. Gray area, perhaps? Nope, that’s 100% white. I mean to tell you, the man is totally unreasonable.

But he’s also the reason Symbol Technologies entered and emerged as a leader in wireless networking and related enterprise mobility products. Fred saw that the world was going wireless earlier than just about anyone else I know. I can still picture the slide he presented to that effect at a product strategy meeting sometime around 1988. (Remember, this is what a cell phone looked like that year, and that it cost $4382 in inflation-adjusted dollars.) His was not an obvious or reasonable position to assert.

Also not reasonable: to base our design on an RF technology previously only used by the military (spread spectrum), and to propose that the project be tackled by an engineering team that largely didn’t yet exist, and had no prior experience in wireless product development. But that’s just what Fred insisted we do.

Well, the wireless and mobility technology we developed became the basis for what is now a billion dollar plus business within Motorola (who acquired Symbol), and our ideas are woven deeply into what we all now know as WiFi (we were one of six companies who drove the first round standardization efforts behind the now ubiquitous wireless LAN technology).

Fred has a habit of doing things like that. Earlier in his career, he was one of the principal inventors of the MOSFET IC, one of the key founding innovations that has led to our digital world.

I tell this story not just to tip my hat (again) to Fred, but to remind us all that we had better do our best to attract and keep around “unreasonable” men and women. They’re the ones that don’t recognize and accept present conventions and realities, they invent new ones. Yes, they can drive you crazy, but they are your future. Look around your team. See any? If not, better find a couple.

Saturday Morning Musings…

Saturday morning turning afternoon, Carmel Valley. I’m working on “Create Something” alternatives, against the possibility that none of the several “Run Something” opportunities I’m now pursuing mature into a good fit.

The old saw about necessity and invention is prominent in my thinking. I have the former in abundance. I’m trying to summon up the later.

In an earlier post, I commented on how the boundary area between the realms of atoms and bits is an interesting place to do business. I still very much believe that. But I also see opportunity all across the flow of digital content, by adding value as bits are captured, stored, shared, aggregated, transformed, searched, output and acted upon. I’m thinking about those in particular that are software centric (and therefor likely the basis for a business that’s not too capital-intensive) and enhance the value of data streams through re-combination and presentation in new contextual frameworks designed to provide new insights.

The developments of the past decade or so present what I believe to be unprecedented opportunities for new business formation:

The ecosystem for creation, marketing and deployment of applications is incredibly rich, across environments and platforms. Think App Store and cloud-based computing paradigms. In addition, digital content is being created, shared and consumed in prodigious volume. Recent evolution in popular culture, worldwide, has paralleled and complemented enabling technology trends. Facebook’s rise depended as much on us deciding, en mass, that we wanted to share thoughts, photos, movies, location and online discoveries with extended networks of our friends as it did on any of its technology building blocks.

Throw in a global recession and its resulting liberation of talent from previous bindings, and the picture is complete: a rich brew of components for a new enterprise.

I’m thinking about how those elements might be combined to create the basis for something interesting and valuable. Stay tuned.

A True Story (Featuring: Drama, Tragedy and a Boiled Frog)

It was wrong. That’s important to get out up front. It was wrong, and by the time it was done, I knew it was wrong.

It was a wrong that flowed from inexperience and a misplaced sense of duty on my part, rather than from any hope of personal gain. Doesn’t matter.

It started out as something else, entirely legitimate, but, while only slowly, eventually evolved into something wrong.

Not then, but over two years later, it had a profound impact on my life, and on the company I loved.

I continue to live with its consequences today, and likely will for the remainder of my years.

It began one Spring day, in early April of 2001. It was only three weeks into a new assignment as leader for the Western Area of Symbol’s “The Americas” sales region, a position into which I was placed by our newly minted CEO, Tomo Razmilovic. I had tried to discourage the move, but, having turned down a posting to run the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region some six months earlier, Tomo was adamant. The entire conversation, by phone, lasted perhaps ninety seconds. Tomo didn’t like hearing “no”, and didn’t leave room for debate.

It was the first time in my career that I held a straight-out sales job.

“Rich, can I see you a moment?” That was Paul, one of the sales guys from the Western area, at the door to my office in San Ramon, California. (The office in fact still felt like it belonged to my predecessor, Mark, whose sudden decision to leave the company triggered my assignment. His artwork hung from the walls, not mine. Ellie’s picture hadn’t yet made it to the desktop.)

“Sure Paul, come on in.”

Continue reading →

Use Stretch Goals to Stretch Thinking… But Commit to Make Plan

We all set goals as a central feature in our business planning. They declare direction, focus everyone on what's important, illustrate what success looks like, and allow us to keep score on our progress. Setting them is a bit of an art though, and can be tricky. Read on…

On the one hand, there's a pretty clear consensus about most features of what makes a well-articulated goal set. It should be:

Aligned with your priorities — Goals must clearly indicate to your team what's important, now and over the planning horizon. Call out too many goals, and your folks will likely be confused as to where to focus. Go for the minimum number that define what success looks like at each level of the organization.

Specific — The more precise the better. Don't be fuzzy.

Time-bounded — Not just what's to be achieved, but when, exactly.

Measureable — When it comes time to assess performance against a given goal, there should be no ambiguity: you made it, or you missed it.

So far, so good, right?

But what about how ambitious to be in setting the specifics? Do you go for the most aggressive goal that could possibly be achieved, lay-ups that just about can't be missed, or somewhere in between?

As in so many other aspects of judgement in business, there's no magic formula to apply, and no one right answer. You'll certainly want to consider many factors about your specific situation on the way to deciding, ranging from matters of pure fact (how much cash do I need to generate so as not to trip a loan covenant?) to ones related to human factors (will the team respond better now to being challenged to a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal, or one they're confident in blowing by?). There's no universal right answer (that's why they pay you the big bucks), but…

…There is however, in my experience, a framework that defines the merits of setting goals closer to one end of the spectrum of aggressiveness vs. the other.

Stretch goals, those that lie at the outermost extreme of what's possible, are a powerful instrument to get your team to think outside of the box. I've often found that a goal such as "Cut costs by 10%" yields either cries of "it can't be done — we've already cut to the bone," or the most pedestrian of possible initiatives. Counter to intuition however, setting one that challenges, "cut costs by 80%," after a "you've got to be kidding" initial response, often leads to a breakthrough approach to the problem, one that in fact achieves even more than the "impossible" goal.

When Jerry Swartz, Symbol Technologies' founder, set a "pole star" goal (see here for more on that) of designing a high performance bar code scanner with a cost of goods of under $50, at a time when the current cost was more than five times that, our engineers initially thought he was crazy. But the challenge made clear that incremental tweaks to their design wouldn't do. A fundamentally different approach was required.

Some years later, not too many, those same engineers had in fact (far) surpassed Jerry's goal. As importantly, throughout the intervening period, we pushed the cost envelope further, faster and perhaps just a bit more creatively than our competition — a major factor in our ability to sieze and maintain leadership in our space.

So, if they're so potent, why wouldn't we always set stretch goals?

Because there's very important value over there, toward the other end of the aggressiveness spectrum too…

That value lies in what happens when we step back, after the fact, and ask ourselves, "Did we make it?"

A good friend, investor in Intelleflex, and sage venture capitalist, Bob Pavey of Morgenthaler Ventures, is fond of explaining that in his experience there are two kinds of company, those that "Make Plan" and those that don't. Companies that make plan, always seem to do so. Ones that fall short, do so all the time too. Bob's on to something very important in that observation.

All of us who enjoy sports have seen it. Winners win, and losers don't. Winning is a habit. So's losing. Why? Because at the base of it, winning is about sustained purposeful effort and overcoming adversity. That's hard. It takes commitment and belief.

If your team consistently falls short of its goals, implicitly that becomes the norm. In effect, it becomes OK to fail. The effort required to prevail will not be mustered up by your team, and you will lose, time and time again.

The opposite is also true. As the saying goes, nothing succeeds like success. When your team gets a taste of winning, they'll want more. They'll push themselves, and each other, harder and longer. They'll be more confident. They'll step up, even to stretch goals, with the belief that, "of course we can do that."

My advice: be a leader whose team "makes plan." Use stretch goals selectively so as to stretch your team to think creatively, but set goals that you and your team are 100% committed to achieve. Get in the habit of winning.

A graphical summary of these ideas can be found here.