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.

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.

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.

Why I Do This

So why, exactly, have I chosen to take to the task of recording words here, now on some regular basis? Related: what guides my choice of subject?

A few words on these questions follow.

While having had some experience in a like mode some years earlier, I only started this column in August of this year. It was a time of transition, and I guess that instinctively I felt that thinking some things through out loud, in public, would help me toward choosing my own path forward. I wrote about this in “Looking Back to Look Forward,” one of my earlier posts. I’ve found that it’s served me well in this respect.

I also, it turns out, like to write — I forgot just how much until taking up this project. Don’t get me wrong, this is work, sometimes painful. Writing, like any other skill, improves with practice. That of course directly implies that you have to subject yourself (and, alas your readers) with earlier inferior works, on the way toward those improved ones that your later self will hopefully one day produce.

In addition, I believe, humbly but with no false modesty, that I have some insights (mostly about the world of business) to share. I’ve lived and experienced quite a bit. I've been part of something great, and made plenty of mistakes. I have been very pleased to hear back in comments, a few public and quite a few more private, that at least some of your are finding at least some of my notes useful. I will strive to continue to earn your attention with offered value.

Finally, as one dear friend surmised in a private comment, I’ve found writing about some of the more difficult moments in my career to be genuinely cathartic. The process seems to bring that overused pop psychology word: closure.

Now, what about my choice of subject?

I didn’t really have a plan when I started this. A serial reading of posts from August should make this plain.

I’ve written about business, travel, politics, people, science and sports. (I’ve likely forgotten a topic or two.)

I’ve tried to be as honest and true to my feelings as my capacities allow. Where I’ve found myself editing out potentially relevant details, it’s been where I feared that they might bring unease or disadvantage to others.

I’ve not shied away from opinion, but of the gentle variety and have avoided turning this into a platform for polemics. (Way too much of that in the world today, and it’s not my nature anyway.)

I’ve written quite a bit about my past, but always with the intent that it illuminate the future, starting with the present moment. (I came across the Emerson quote in the banner above just this morning. I liked it enough, with exactly this thought in mind, to put it in place of the earlier one from Twain¹.)

Now, three months into this project, it seemed appropriate to step back and ask myself if a different, more focused plan for guiding choice of content in the future is in order.

I’ve decided not, at least for the next lap or two. If this column is not an effective reflection of me, all of me, then why put it out in the first place? I’m a guy with pretty wide, varied and eclectic tastes, interests and (happily) life experiences, past and (hopefully) future. This column will continue to reflect that, for better or worse. I hope that you continue to enjoy it. Thank you for your kind readership,

Richard Bravman

1. That earlier quote read, "A man's private thought can never be a lie; what he thinks, is to him the truth, always."

Now and Then

CASUAL, IN THE NY'R STYLE

I’m teaching myself ActionScript, a programming language used with Adobe Flash. Unless I flunk myself, the reason will appear in a post not too far into the future.

ActionScript is an object-oriented language.

OK, I know that I just ran the risk of losing 90% of you. Trust me, there’s a funny story to follow…

The term “Object Oriented” today refers to a concept in computer science where a programming language is structured so that building block “routines” written in it have very well defined and tall “walls.” For example, if you write a part of your program to, say, draw a rectangle on the screen, all the other parts of the program interact with the Rectangle Routine in very well specified ways. They don’t get to muck around with Rectangle Routine’s internal bits. They can only tell it where on the screen to draw it, it’s dimensions, color, and that’s it. Each routine is like a little castle; what goes on inside is its business.

Well, while Object Oriented Programming was around when I was working toward my computer science degree from SUNY Stony Brook. We learned about it as a theory, but I never used it. It’s application in common practice lay a dozen or so years into the future. (It took hold in the 90’s.)

But, at the significant further risk of terminally dating myself, allow me to explain that there were objects that were very much involved in my programming, back in the day.

They were called punch cards. One’s pictured right over there on the left. Real time access to a computer was a platinum-precious resource in those days. The way you typically interacted with one was to write out a program’s set of instructions, sit down at a console like the one over there on the right (that’s not me), and type out a punch card for each and every line of code in your program (the more complex the program, the more cards), and then take your “stack” of cards to someone who would feed them into a machine that would present them to the computer for processing. A few hour later, you’d get a printout (on “Green Bar” paper). If something didn’t work, you’d have to figure out what was wrong, fix your program, go back and type out the new cards, insert them in the right places in your deck (their order was as important and their individual contents), and hand it over to run again. Another three hours later, you’d find out if you’d fixed the problem.

Well, as you might imagine, this was pretty tedious stuff. Especially with very large, complex programs.

I labored through much of the fall and into winter of 1977 on one such large program, a Senior Project, with success in it a requirement for graduation. The program grew large, there were many, many retries to get it just right, and my stack grew larger and larger.

By the time I finally got it all right, on a particularly cold December afternoon, my stack of cards measured somewhere around eight inches tall.

When I looked down at the Green Bar printout, and all, excepting some minor formatting issue, was as it should be, I did some 70’s version of a Tiger fist pump, and rushed out of the building to drive home.

Finding my Mazda RX-3 in the parking lot, I tried to open the door. No luck — dead frozen. Fortunately, this was a known problem, and I had a can of spray de-icer at hand. I put the card deck and printout on the roof, and set about gaining entry to my car.

It took awhile, maybe 10 minutes. I was freezing and it was getting toward dusk. When my key finally turned turned in the lock, I jumped into the driver’s seat, flipped the ignition and cranked up the heat.

A few minutes later, I had warmed up enough to drive. I reversed out of the parking spot, turned toward the exit, and gunned it…

…only to see each and every one of my stack of cards fluttering behind, like their accompanying snow flakes, in the rear view mirror.

Never slowed down, even a little. When you screw up, you gotta move on.

The next day, I sat for God-knows-how-many hours, retyping each and every one of those objects. I passed the course.

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.

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 →

Alternate Perspectives

In an earlier post, I suggested that it's important sometimes to focus on the "half full" aspect of "your glass" and other times on its "half empty" portion. Here, a few related words on telescopes…

When thinking about a business challenge, and making related plans and decisions, I believe it's valuable to force yourself to view it through both ends of the telescope: Both the "right way" around, magnifying and examining the involved issues in all their fine detail, and also the "wrong way", so as to step back and see the big picture, condensing the specific question at hand down to its essential elements only, and examining them in context of your overall situation.

The former way of looking at a new product development effort, for example, yields questions such as:

Do we know how to implement "Feature X"?
How much more will it cost us to increase performance by 10%?
Have we considered alternative ways to organize this development?
Is Company A the best partner with whom to work on this?
How can we shorten time-to-market?

And so on.

The later, "wrong way," view through the telescope yields these:

Should we be doing this project at all?
Do we know how we'll make money selling this product?
Are we proliferating too many product variants?
Would the money we're about to spend here be better used adding more sales people?

Both sets of questions are valid, and important to ask and answer.

You should challenge your team to turn the telescope around regularly, looking at the issues they're facing from both perspectives. They'll make better decisions and waste less time and resource along the way.

When coaching on this point, I often also recommend that folks try to think about the questions they're tackling from the perspective of "Their Boss's Boss" Why? Because it forces them to think about "their" issue from a bigger picture perspective. How will various approaches to the problem impact not just their project, but the overall business? It challenges them to ask broader-based, and often more relevant questions.

Beyond injecting a higher order perspective into project team thought processes, this advice also has the salutory side effect of lessening silo thinking and organization politics. A focus on how to help an entire business unit displaces the narrow focus on personal or team issues that can all too easily consume the thinking of middle managers.

Half Full, or Half Empty? It Depends…

The product manager presenting his case for approval of phase gate passage on a new product development project was pitching the merits of the prospective new offering for all he was worth. If they believed the slam dunk advantages it would offer versus their pathetic alternatives, our competition would have no choice but to fold up tent and surrender.

Smiling, I saw an opportunity to make a point, and I did, along these lines…

There's a time for looking at the glass as half full or better, but also a time to see it as half empty, or worse.

When presenting to prospective customers and partners, it's clearly important to focus on your advantages, illuminated in their best possible light. Your claims must be true, supportable and credible, but highlighting them over your possible shortcomings is common sense and fully appropriate in that context. It's "Half Full" time.

However, when engaged in an internal planning or decision-making process such as the one we were in the middle of that day some years ago, I believe that it's important to force yourself to consider the half of the glass that isn't full:

How might your competition offer and position advantages that you don't see or fully appreciate?
Could they be about to launch a new offering that trumps the one you're planning to develop?
Do your customers see the relative advantages of your respective products the same way you do? Do they care about the features you're spending money and time to develop?
Might there be greater technical risk in your planned development than you're acknowledging?

Only by soberly confronting these questions, and answering them honestly, will it be possible to make a decision intelligently of the sort we were confronting that day. Only through a process of healthy skepticism can you emerge with both a solid decision and a basis for confidence in how you'll move forward and win — a confidence much more secure than if you falsely see a full glass. Because, more likey than not, it's your own cool aid you'll be drinking when you pick it up, to the laughter of your competition.

A bit later in that same meeting, I offered up a somewhat related point, involving telescopes, not glasses. But I'll reserve that story for another day.

Mental Toughness

Jeter is adept at reducing the clutter that often engulfs players, especially perennial All- Stars who play in major markets like New York. He is a master at keeping things simple in his world. He is strong-willed enough to disregard things that do not concern him or to wait to address them until they do concern him.

via www.nytimes.com

Tiger Woods has it. Derek Jeter has it. ARod just found it. And it's the reason they're winners. "It" is mental toughness and the ability it gives them to focus on the task at hand. To prevent the noise and distractions around them from getting in their head. To simplify and execute, again and again, what they're capable of doing.

It, not their raw physical skills, is why I watch, often with chills of wonderment, their exploits. Believe me, it's easy to allow thoughts (of doubt, consequence, worry, anticipation…) to enter your head when you're standing over that big putt. I know. It's hard to shut them out, completely. Tiger does that.

A few games ago, I sent a text message to a close friend and fellow Yankee fan, that the Yankees "…have 'The Look'." What I meant was that the entire team had started to carry itself like Jeter. Quiet, focused, confident and in the moment, like there was no place else in the world that they belonged.

Mental toughness and the ability to focus pays dividends in business as well as sport:

It gives you the ability to concentrate on what's really important amidst the clutter.

It gives you the ability to do the right thing when temptations to take shortcuts present themselves.

It gives you the ability handle that difficult conversation with calm, professionalism and even grace.

It fuels the perseverance required to push through difficult times.

It provides confidence in your ability to handle extreme challenges

It is contagious.

One of my mentors, Ray Martino, a tremendously effective president at Symbol, had it. He used to stress that at any particular point of time, only about three things in our business really mattered. "Focus on those, get them right, and the rest will be OK." He also regularly explained that sometimes it's not worth worrying about a decision until it needed to be made. "Don't clutter your head with things that just might take care of themselves." When it was time to make that decision however, Ray made it firmly and with confidence. Ray had mental toughness, and was a winner.

Do you have the mental toughness to play on the big stage? To win?