What does John Grisham know that can help us in business?

He knows that it's critical to engage his audience immediately. His goal is to grab and thrust you into the action in the opening scene, providing momentum to be built on page after page. (Driving home yesterday, I heard him explain this exact point, in an NPR interview.)

While the best selling author's aims are to entertain, a "start strong, get to the point" imperative also applies to business communication of all types, even more so I believe.

When we open a book or sit down to watch a movie, we're planning to spend hours being diverted. No so when reading an email or report, participating in a meeting or training session, or listening to a conference speaker. Here, we expect to use our time efficiently toward the achievement of a goal: to gain information, frame and decide on a question or seek alignment with others.

But as we all know, our expectations are not always met. Too often we instead get:

"Long wind up" beginnings to meetings, training sessions and presentations that drag on before getting to the important meaty material;
Emails that you have to read two or three times to unearth the author's point or intent (all along wondering if he has one).

Don't make these mistakes next time you plan a meeting or write a memo. Think like Grisham. Make sure that you engage your audience right from the start, and get to the point, clearly and directly.

If your communication is about sharing information, say that, and then lay it out.
If you want a decision to be made in a meeting, make it clear up front that's your goal, lay out the choices, any required background (essential material only), make a recommendation and secure the decision.
If you're providing training, get right into it; no long preliminaries.

In all cases, remember that your audience are human beings, not machines. That means you need to engage their emotions to secure and hold their attention. At minimum, this requires explaining or giving evidence right up front as to why your topic matters to them, individually and as a team.

If at all possible, find a way to reinforce your key messages with a story, which has the dual and related benefits of engaging your audience's emotions and of being much more memorable than a dry recitation of facts.

Learn to communicate like Grisham and you'll be a more effective business person.

Whatever Begins, Also Ends (Seneca)

Earlier today, Ellie and I were visited by John, the owner of the contracting company that gave shape to our dreams of how this house in Carmel Valley could become our home a decade ago. Our purpose was to arrange some fix-ups prior to moving on. John became family when he and his crew were a fixture for the fourteen long months of renovation. The meeting had a decidedly "goodbye" feeling to it.

Endings, even when paired with exciting beginnings, as this one is, are always difficult.

Sitting now in our living room, facing eastward, the direction that life has declared as "forward" for it's next chapter. Bright washes of sun, slanting under clouds, warm the right side of my face. I gaze out on a view I've enjoyed, in all of its changeable aspects, for these past ten years.

Below, a driver making his way from the adjacent valley to this one, pulls to the side of the road, gets out and takes in the scene framed from a prospect somewhat less advantaged than this and, after a time, moves on.

I think of my great fortune in being able to partake of this view for so many years. I'm saddened by the reality that it will no longer be mine, but then realize that we never really "own" a pleasing glimpse of nature — we borrow it, reflect on it, and carry it as part of us for all the days that lie ahead, even as we dream of all the scenes we've yet to take in.

Thoughts on Writing, after Reading Emerson

The way to start writing is to start writing. Not so much to take a first step toward a destination, as to begin a process.

Writing (as in art or any other creative pursuit) derives most of its value to the author in the doing, not in the final product.

In the thoughts and feelings that must be conjured, evoked and arranged.

In the discovery of fresh ideas whose seeds were always there inside you, latent and available, but that are only brought to flower with the application of effort to share some related thoughts with an audience.

In the sweat and toil of it, overcoming inertia, uncertainty, laziness, fear.

In striving to construct an architecture of ideas expressed in language that is honest, clear, compelling, complete and reaches for a measure of grace.

In learning how to advance your craft.

In learning something about yourself by exposing yourself to an audience.

In learning something about your audience by challenging yourself to know them well enough to ensure that what they read into your words is as intended.

In the satisfaction of doing something hard.

In answering the call, shared by each of us, to express and connect.

In the letting go that must come when it's time to put down the pen and allow your little creation to escape and succeed or fail on its own.

Thank You

It's a cold and rainy evening here in Carmel Valley. But I feel both warm and incredibly lucky.

In the past twenty four hours I've heard so many kind thoughts from so many of you as to leave me lost for words. (A rare state of affairs, as you well know.)

I've had phone conversations with three colleagues from past lives, with last contact dating back six, ten and thirty years.

I've been reminded of stories I have never forgotten, but rendered just that much more precious through finding that they hold special places in the memories of others as well.

I've heard from people I feel I let down. People with whom I've celebrated great success. People who are where I was a few short weeks ago, wondering what will come next in life's journey. People who are special to me here and now, but who took the time to record their thinking for others to see. People who have taken chances, and found that they've led to great promise. People who kindly suggested that my thoughts here have been of some help.

To all I say thank you, and thank you again.

And to those of you with whom I'll be embarking on a new journey, I promise to work very hard to create the opportunity for new successes, new memories, new stories… that we can share in the years that lie ahead.

6 Oak Meadow Lane
5:30 PM, 10 December 2009

A Private Letter, To Friends…

Just a short note to friends following this blog.

While not yet official, as many of you already know, I've decided to join NCR. I'll be serving as their Chief Marketing Officer and VP, Corporate Development. Part of John Bruno's team, my responsibilities will be to both help tell the story of what the company is about today and give shape to what it will be tomorrow.

From time to time, as appropriate, I'm sure that I'll find opportunities to share some thoughts on the progress we make as we strive to turn a grand old company into a great new one.

But that's not my purpose here. Now, I simply want to thank all of you with whom I've worked in the past for your friendship, your caring and for all of the incredible memories that we created together. They are treasures that I carry in my heart, and always will.

There were many possible paths into this moment. One led here, to what is. Many paths lead forward, and none of us know which we'll follow to what will be. All we can do is our best to live each "now" to the fullest. And that is what I intend to do.

But it seemed appropriate to pause here, to offer a smile and a warm "Thank you" to all of you who have been such an important part of what was. Please accept them with my sincerest gratitude.

Now, onward.

Downtown Sunday Morning

We're sort of uptown types by nature, but this weekend Ellie and I spent time in the lower reaches of Manhattan.

The original idea was a change of pace stop on the way back to CA yesterday. Plans for returning to our west coast home changed when, over the weekend, I decided to accept an offer to join a company based in NYC. (Pending formal announcement, I'll need to be coy and ask you to stand by for full details.) As I write this post, I'm sitting in a Starbucks, an hour or so away from starting my new adventure.

Back to the weekend…

We decided to keep to our plans for a NY night in the Flat Iron / Gramercy Park area, now repurposed as a mini-celebration. As it turned out, we did so early in the evening with good friends and former colleagues at both Symbol and Intelleflex, Steve and his wife Pam (a couple of very special people), and later with my brother John, passing through NY doing a bit of fund raising for Stanford, where he serves as Vice Provost, responsible for the undergraduate program. (He's pretty special too.)

Venue for our dinner with Steve and Pam was Craftbar, Tom Colicchio's informal spot on lower Broadway. Based on this, our first visit, I can recommend it heartily: great food, service, atmosphere and vibe. We had a terrific time…

…As we did later that evening with John, back at The Rose Bar in our overnight spot, The Gramercy Park Hotel.

I'm sure that readership clever enough to be on this blog can read between the lines (new job to celebrate, long dinner with great friends, late night toasting with family…) and figure out that Sunday morning was slow and fuzzy in arriving.

So, sometime around 11:00, a walk in the bracingly cold air seemed like just the thing to usher in a return to clarity. We pointed ourselves south on 3rd avenue, eventually ending up at DBGB, Daniel Boulud's latest restaurant. Named with a tip of the hat to a long time fixture in the neighborhood, the underground rock club CBGB, and specializing in all things sausage, the place has been a big hit since opening mid-summer.

Ellie chose an incredibly creatively prepared and presented upscale hotdog; I went with a sausage done in the style of Tunisia. Great old blues songs were played one after another. The place filled with an ecclectic collection of folks, united in their obvious enjoyment of the experience.

This all played out in room set as a stage to simple foods, prepared with imagination and skill. The kitchen was open to view, and the room was ringed overhead by copper cooking pots, each accompanyed by a small plaque bearing the name of the famous chef who gifted it to Daniel Boulud for placement here.

The manager, (who we know from his earlier service at another Boulud establishment) explained that they make it a practice to seat those chefs immediately adjacent to "their" pots when they visit. I smiled and told him how that reminded me of how my friend Steve is notorious for something similar: seating his guest following a round at his club at a table facing a board displaying plaques commemorating past club champions — his and his son's names prominent among them, where they can't possibly be missed.

I recorded a bit of the DBGB scene, as well as sights on the walk back to the hotel, and set them into a brief video, which will serve as a punctuation to this post. Turn up the sound, and please enjoy…

Saturday Morning Advice

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.