Don’t touch their dials!

Knowledge workers cannot be controlled; they must be motivated. Such employees must see a purpose more meaningful than personal profit. When the game is only about money, disparities in society get worse as the favored grab the largest share. - Peter Drucker

Such a pithy statement, with meaning far beyond motivating employees.

But, let’s start with how do we create a purpose more meaningful than personal profit. Where do we start? How do we do it? What’s the cost? What’s the ROI?

David Zinger may be a good starting point. I found this quote on his blog. David’s the founder of the Employee Engagement online community. He's create a purpose more meaningful than profit for over 1600 people on this site. Their purpose is how to engage employees, how to help each other find ways to create meaning more purposeful than profit, engage employees, create powerful brands capable of being sustained by the meaning they bring to their employees and customers, as well as from their employees and customers.

He’ll be a guest on my radio show, Friday November 6 at 9:30 AM, Central. Come and listen. A complete strategy for creating engaged employees is beyond the scope of the show. But, perspective and a few tips and pointers will be shared. These should help will point you on your way.

Here are the listening options:

LIVE:

1) Listen in streaming on-demand at this link.

2) Call in during the show at 646-915-9212. This also allows you to raise your hand using the touchpad on your phone to ask a question.

>LATER:

1) Listen in streaming on-demand at this link.

In the meantime, get to know David, at these resources:

* Twitter

* His blog

* Employee Engagement community

4 Favorite Ways to Destroy Your Tribe

Ed Welch, of Tribe Building blog, is the author of 101 Ways to Destroy Your Tribe. It's a PDF, free to download, from his site. And you should, too.

We spoke earlier this year about his book, what it meant to him, why he was so passionate about this list and why his book became so popular. You can listen to our conversation in streaming on-demand at this link.

During our conversation I asked him for his 4 favorite ways to kill your tribe of customers.

1. When you have a great product that is selling well, look for a way to make it cheaper, your customers won’t be able to tell the difference.



2. Make sure your employees care more about procedures than rules and customers.



3. Change the rules in the middle of the game, you customers will love it.



4. Customers should be like soldiers they should eat what they are fed.

Do you recognize any of them?

Are they practiced on your tribe by your vendors and suppliers?

Do you  recognize them as part of your company's strategy? It's ok, if you do. Well, it's not ok. But you're not alone.

But, there's your opportunity. It's a simple opportunity. Just stop. Stop doing the things that kill your tribe. Just say no. And that simple act makes you stand out from, I'm guessing, half if not most of your competitors.

Sometimes life is simple. Sometimes, we're reminded how simple it is by very smart and dedicated people like Ed Welch.

Thanks, Ed. Go OSU! 

Sports Wants to Control the Conversation

Sports. It's the ultimate word-of-mouth marketing machine. It's why we're called fans. Fans is short for fanatics. An enthusiast is the 4th definition listed for fans. The first is more telling. A device for creating a current of air, a breeze..

No greater breeze is found than that generated by sports fans and their word-of-mouth.

And industries worth billions of dollars have been generated from this breeze, from our word-of-mouth...And now, someone wants to control the breeze, claim ownership to the conversation, restrict it to certain hours or numbers of blog posts or certain voices. There's Ru-u-u-u-les..!

In effect, those who've made the most from fans and their free word-of-mouth, now want to say they own their fans conversations. It's a classic example of killing, by strangulation, the goose that laid their billion-dollar golden egg. 

Tension Over Sports Blogging.

Listen to your customer's story

I was reading this article Sunday titled Poison Pill. ( Sunday's I usually read about health care issues. That allows me to post about them on Monday for Health Care Mondays over at my other blog.)

But instead the article ended with the reminder to listen to your customers. They'll tell you what they need.  In this article the customer was a patient and vice versa. As a patient she was a customer of the hospital and the resident and his team.  After standard reports and tests had failed to diagnose the source of this customer's needs, the doctor asked the customer, the patient, to tell him her story.

Sir William Osler, the father of modern medicine, taught his students that the patient’s story will often contain the key to making a diagnosis. It was important advice at the turn of the 20th century, when few diagnostic tools were available. And it is still true, as research shows. Even now, 75 percent of diagnoses are based on the patient’s story alone. “Listen carefully to the patient,” Osler exhorted. “They will tell you the diagnosis.” You just have to pay attention.

I can't imagine the percent for solving a customer's needs, of delivering a product or service that best fits THEIR needs, is much different than with those of patient diagnoses. It's the same dynamic with customers:  Listen carefully. They will tell you what they need. You just have to pay attention.

Time's Top 25 Blogs

Interesting list. Time Mag's list of their 25 favorite blogs. Some I know; most I don't.

Fill in the blank

No. It's not a test format. It's how we create our personal reality. We conveniently fill in the blanks. When there's too much data to absorb, and there always is, we're forced to skip over much of it, instead back-filling in the blanks for our convenience. Some may say we maintain our sanity instead with this approach.

The article, this morning, Blind to Change: Even As It Stares Us in the Face by Natalie Angier,  brings this point to light with the example of our vision process. We scan quickly for anomalies and exceptions, filling the blanks we create from our limited ability to process all of that information in a reasonable sized brain.

Ms. Angier writes:

... the brain has evolved mechanisms for combating data overload, allowing large rivers of data to pass along optical and cortical corridors almost entirely unassimilated, and peeling off selected data for a close, careful view.

Too often, that's how we manage our business. We scan for anomalies, fill in the blanks for our convenience, and are shocked, shocked I say, by the change, imminent or pending, that stares us in the face.

There aren't any real solutions.  There are ways to manage this challenge.

* Maybe a great big, much bigger, brain? Here's another area where size matters. But unlike baseball, steroids won't help.

* Changing your routine can help. That forces you to interact with your world differently.

* Talk a lot. It allows you to process the data more completely. On the other hand, you can get self-obsessed and then you're an universe of one...walking the streets.

* Write a lot. Writing forces you to think (or it should. There's some doubt if you watch network news.) It slows the decision-making process. You make fewer decisions. But the decisions are better from having processed more of the data.

* Diversity. Diversity in your life keeps the brain open and expansive and flexible. But then it also adds volumes to the input you're forced to process. On the other hand, you'll process more data...maybe.

We're successful in life to the extent we can avoid being blind-sided ( or facialed if the change is staring back at us) by data we conveniently overlook. That brings happiness, dignity, success, ok money and affluence and influence to our lives and those around us, our family and those we lead.

Ask John Jantsch a Question

John Jantsch will be available on a one-hour conference call tomorrow, August 29, 1 PM Pacific (4 PM Eastern, 3 Central, 2 Mountain) to answer your marketing questions.  This Duct Tape Marketing Blog channel is but one of many brilliant solutions John's delivered over the years for small business marketing needs. Scrolling through his blog you can see the many awards he's received for his small business marketing wisdom.  And his near daily blog post offers resources for small businesses you can put to use...immediately to grow your business.

And now you can have your questions answered by John, live.

John's conference call is brought to you by our friends at QuickBooks Community. John serves as their small business marketing resource at the QuickBooks Community Forum.

You can register here and include your questions for John.

Disclaimer: We're big fans of John. He's kindly included this blog in his Duct Tape Marketing Blog Channel. We host his podcasts.  I also serve on a rotating basis as a small business marketing expert at QuickBooks Community thanks to Mr. Scott Wilder who posts at Small Biz Wiz.

[Cellphones] on A Plane

Oh boy. If you thought your experiences flying on commercial planes was bad, ok sometimes nightmarish, kafka-esque, being caught in an airline terminal that never ends with flights that neither leave (the airport, not the gate),  nor arrive, nor their passengers able to leave....the FCC announced today that cellphones's use will be allowed on commercial flights. This will start  early next year using one of the airwaves to be auctioned off.

So now, the airlines' passenger-rendition program has expanded outside the terminal to include hours in an airplane sitting on a tarmac for hours, with no food (not that you'd want the premium pretzels...), with the airline patting itself on the back for on-time departure as the plane left the gate but not the airport...and your neighbor talks, ok shouts, the entire time on their cell phone....at their family member  or employee or partner.

The sequel to Snakes on a Plane will be called Cellphones on a Plane.

10,000 Tomatoes Separate Us

You say tomato; I say ToMAHto.

Men hear 10,000 more words from women than they seem to want to hear.

Women await the 10,000 words they need to hear from men.

Maybe what's missing from that conversation is listening: ( patience, compassion, more patience, understanding, tolerance, repitition...discretion in battle choices...). 

I'm not particularly good with any of these.  Ask my wife; Ask those in the company. I tend towards impatience, bluntness. Oh and a smidgen of sarcasm. Maybe you've detected that tone in my blogs. (Or maybe you haven't....:))

On the other hand...I'm learning. I'm swimming to shore. I've seen seagulls in this metaphor.

Take for instance our It-Guy Extraordinaire.

We have the same problem. He speaks in Tech-speak; I speak in user-speak. About 5000 words separate us now. Used to be well over 10,000.

We're making progress. 

We go 'round and 'round while we figure out who's not saying what the other one needs to hear. Either I'm not explaining what I'm not hearing...or I'm not hearing what he's explaining. After a few years of WWE-like steel-cage matches...we A. knew we were both at fault and we  were both right, so what difference did it make; B. knew ultimately most of the time we were able to communicate; C. trusted and respected each other; D. Knew we had to figure this out as the company's too small for this to hide...kinda the remote-island model for developing communication skills. 

We both learned to listen, be patient, listen again, be patient, lose that patience with discretionary wisdom...SMILE...and now we're down to a gulf of 5000 words. Maybe 4999.

I guess my point is...you say tomato, I say toMAHto. ( Honestly, I say it right: It's tomato...but I'm willing to accept you say toMAHto and it means the same as the correctly pronounced...toMAHto. Just don't throw it...)

Some links to the the recent research on the gender-speaking, volume, issue: here, Science, Univ of Pennsylvania, Church of the Customer. There are more. I just can't find them. Michelle Miller, at Wonder Branding, has a post on You Say Gray Matter, I say White Matter that offers a nice bridge on this subject. Basically, it's the neural pathways that differ between us. Thank goodness. SportsCenter gets boring after 4-5 hours.

A Day in The Life: Podcast series

Theresa and Cindy, aka TCW, our customer service mavens share their tips for better conference calls and stories of serving our customers.

  (right click this graphic to subscribe.)

In their first recording (mp3 file) they share their number one tip for customers: *0. Contact the operator. When anything goes wrong on your conference call, press *0. An operator will come on the phone immediately with the means to address any technical problem real or perceived, even if it's user-error. (Our customers are always right. But sometimes it may appear a feature is incorrectly used.)

The point here is less to discuss our services and the features available for our customers use. It's more to share my excitement about this new podcast series. The initiative for this came from Theresa and Cindy themselves. They want to use this resource, podcasting, to share their stories and help our customers.

They're a delight! Our customers love 'em. We do, too. And...and...now with podcasting we have a resource where others can have a sample of these 2 people and why they're such an  asset to our company: our customers and each other.