Archive for the ‘Empathy’ Category

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Slide decks and spreadsheets

March 26, 2009

This morning I came across an article in mocoNews.net about how Charmin is using a wiki to create a community cataloging the locations of public toilets in ten countries.  As the article points out, it’s not so much the magnitude of the initiative, but the direction it points for how a large CPG organization thinks about its customers and how best to engage them in a conversation about one of its brands.  It’s easy to see when they “get” this transformation and when they don’t.

There’s been a lot written about how brands should be thinking about social media, and our portfolio companies like Wetpaint, Smilebox, and Icebreaker are all deeply engaged in developing products or services enabling a richer interaction between consumers and brands.  I spend a lot of time digging deeply into the trends and subtleties driving and enabling this broader opportunity space, and understanding how important the “understanding of the audience” is to this space.

So a while ago I was asked to guest lecture at a “Top 25” university MBA program on the subject of venture capital and entrepreneurship.  It was at a time when I was travelling a lot, and was really, really busy (which is a cop-out, when are any of us not busy?).  I prepared my talk from a very “inside-out” perspective:  my observations, my points of view, my experiences.  What I didn’t do was spend time examining the course syllabus – admittedly, a brain-dead and inexcusable lapse in not just effectiveness and basic marketing but also common courtesy.

About half way through my talk I made an observation that my job was basically one of digesting information, and that it came in two formats:  slide decks (PowerPoint presentations) and spreadsheets.  I mentioned that between these two documents, you really get the essential information you need from the company, before you dig into the really useful information to help make a funding decision – your own research, your own contacts, your own scar tissue.  

A hand was raised.  The question?  What about business plans? 

I told these students that not only do I rarely come across these, when I do, it’s usually a sign that the entrepreneurs are first-time entrepreneurs, are “old school” in a not good way.  That extracting the salient information from within all that prose takes more time, and in my world, time is a  hard commodity to come by.  I thought this was a useful and helpful piece of “real world” insight.

Except that the class I was speaking to was a few weeks into learning how to write business plans. 

How was it that I was standing in front of 75 MBA students delivering a message that wasn’t “wrong” but clearly was not effective given the context.  Well, with the same arrogance and ignorance large brands who just “don’t get” social media have.

I had completely failed to understand my market and audience.  I hadn’t thought through my objectives for the talk from a perspective any other than my own. I wasn’t thinking “conversation” I was thinking “talking.”

I’m headed back to the same class to lecture again in two weeks.  I know how I will approach the development of my message: a clear set of objectives and a set of messages informed from my point of view and the context of the students and the syllabus.

But back to slide decks and spreadsheets.  As true as it may be that this business is all about digesting information, getting to the point quickly, and that business plans are no longer the mechanism to do this, communication is about by listening, not talking – whether you’re a brand engaging consumers or just someone talking to a group of students. 

I wish Charmin well; that’s not an obvious tactic they’ve chosen, and I hope it’s one based on listening, a lot.  I think it’s brilliant, and reveals an understanding of the audience, the medium, and thier brand.  I plan to be listening, a lot, when I’m in front of those students in two weeks.

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Posted in Business planning, Empathy, Failure, Intellectual curiosity, Self-knowledge, Venture capital | 2 Comments »

Effective networking – as easy as public speaking

March 19, 2009

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a series of conversations with people about what makes an effective networker, and following up my post about the Seattle 2.0 Awards event, “networking” seems like a timely/relevant topic.

To me networking is the ability to develop a real and sincere personal relationship with someone around a topic that the two of us find interesting, relevant, and important.  It’s bidirectional, about giving and getting.

No surprise it has nothing to do with LinkedIn or Facebook.  Just look at the About LinkedIn page: “We believe that in a global connected economy, your success as a professional and your competitiveness as a company depends upon faster access to insight and resources you can trust.”  This is under the heading Relationships Matter.

Wait a second, this is about stuff for you, it’s not about relationships. 

Networking is about taking “what goes around comes around” to heart, and focusing on what you give to someone, beginning with an understanding of that other person.  It’s creating some durable residual value through a conversation, and the goal is to produce a lasting memory of you and your talent/intellect.  Along the way they’ll learn about you, but that’s secondary; it’s the byproduct.

OK, but this can be scary to do.  You are going to reach out to someone you don’t know or know well and ask for something.  In some aspects, this puts you in a situation similar to public speaking (and we all know how comfortable that can be for people).  You need to “perform” and expose some vulnerabilities.  It gets a lot less scary for me when I don’t view this as networking, and instead view this as a way to form and nurture a personal relationship.

Perhaps in this first conversation you do have a favor to ask, or maybe you just want to establish the relationship, or have this person keep an eye out for a role or opportunity relevant to you.  It’s this slice of memory that will provoke them to make the introduction you just asked for, remember your name and repeat it to a relevant contact, or to take your call and grant you a favor someday later when you ask it.

I do this all the time for people, and I don’t mind it one bit.  As a matter of fact, I love it.  I just did it while writing this post.  Someone I know has taken on an ambitious consulting project, and a former colleague of mine who has since become a rock-star marketing exec could help her out.  I loved connecting them, a good fit of two thoughtful, talented people –  who I have real and sincere personal relationships with.

This is taking your values as a person and applying them in a professional context (something I touched on in an earlier post) and doing this in an interpersonally “deliberate” manner. 

And then I thought, well there is networking I hate and am not comfortable with.  It’s the “forced” networking of work-related events – when you’re in a crowd and making the small talk that on occasion produces an interesting and memorable discussion.  This is perverse because in my role as a VC a big part of my job is to get out into the market, to attend events, and to “network.”  I am horrible at small talk, and I admire people who can establish ease and comfort quickly with someone new, and find some common ground.  I am still learning here.

But I approach this in the same way I had to learn to speak in public.  It doesn’t mean I’m always comfortable, it just means I’ve trained myself to do it.  And there are a lot of conversations along the way that just seem to fill space and time, but there are also those moments when I meet someone where we can establish an actual, meaningful conversation.  And then I’m right back in my comfort zone.

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Posted in chicken killer, Empathy, fear of not succeeding, Intellectual curiosity, Self-knowledge, Values | 2 Comments »

Ask, Tell, Help

February 18, 2009

How often do you encounter a a situation at work where your personal values inform how to solve a difficult/ambiguous situation?

In 1998 I had just joined RealNetworks, and was running the RealSystem G2 launch; it was quite an adjustment professionally.  Real had just acquired Vivo Software where I had been the VP of Marketing, and I now had a much bigger job, with much bigger company ambitions.  G2 was Real’s next generation internet media platform, and was intended to become essentially a multimedia operating system for the web.  We never spoke those ambitions publicly, but they were very, very much the ambitions.

We had the upper hand on the internet a/v market.  Microsoft’s Windows Media Technology (WMT) platform was embryonic and poorly integrated across their vast product/platform landscape.  We routinely pushed the Windows Media guys around like how the New England Patriots pushed their opponents around.

But these were the conditions that provoke a response from Microsoft, and I remember the day we learned that Will Poole had been moved to Windows Media from Internet Explorer 4 – the understanding being the “A” team was now on WMT, the same team that had just crushed Netscape. (The Patriots analogy is eerily relevant here – I’ll save that for another post).

Two years earlier we had licensed RealSystem4.0 to Microsoft, and their players could play back our content up to version 4.0, but not our newest G2 content.  This was intentional and was common practice back then – a way to “provoke” upgrades.  We’d get our broadcast customers to produce audio and video in our newest version, and everyone would need to get the new RealPlayer to access the new content – our players were explicit and helpful about how to do this.

Microsoft saw an opportunity.  They made the Windows Media Player automatically become the default player on someone’s computer for our 4.0 content without telling them, and when it got to our G2 content it stopped and produced an error message.  Microsoft made sure the error message was cryptic (a core competency, apparently), implying there was something wrong with Real’s product, and that was it.  End of the road.

This caused a furor for us and our customers.  Competitive technology geopolitics at Cuban Missile Crisis levels.

So, I got called into a meeting with all the senior execs at Real to sort out what to do.  Our president (at the time) has an incredibly insightful mind, and summarized the problem as if he were explaining it to a child.  “Look, during installation you should ask the user if you can play other media types, then you should tell the user if you encounters one you can’t play, then you should help the user locate a player that can.  Pretty simple stuff.

But he wasn’t talking about a solution to this geopolitical skirmish, he was talking about his values, and applied them to a situation at work.  It was so simple; you ask for something before taking it, you tell people if you have a problem, and you help people.

So, I got tasked with spearheading the Ask, Tell, Help initiative, and spent the next six months rounding up industry support for this, eventually causing Microsoft to sign on.  The legacy is visible today to anyone installing iTunes, Rhapsody, or Windows Media – the application asks you for what media types you would like it to be the default.

I think about Ask, Tell, Help pretty frequently.  It reminds me that my values are my values regardless of whether at work or home, regardless of how charged or ambiguous the situation is.  And keeping clarity about those, and a tight grip on them, enables successful navigation of difficult circumstances.

Don’t you think, or rather don’t you desperately hope, that the folks who had a hand in the mortgage/banking crisis would have made different decisions if they’d have applied their personal values to the ambiguous and charged landscape of credit default swaps?

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Posted in Business planning, Empathy, Intellectual curiosity, Self-knowledge, Success, Values | 3 Comments »

Heartbreak and principles

February 7, 2009

Sometimes what we work so hard to accomplish and produce, even in the face of relevant experience and exquisite talent, just doesn’t materialize. How sad to view that as failure. Or rather, how sad to view the outcome as the only measure of success, when you have the opportunity to measure success by examining how you are working along the way.

One of my favorite short stories is “Ball of Fat” by Guy de Maupassant. It concerns a group of six citizens fleeing the oncoming Prussian army by stagecoach, attempting to find safety in a town far away. One of the characters is a plump prostitute nicknamed “Ball of Fat”. The others in the carriage are a range of upstanding citizens who view her with equal parts contempt and curiosity.

As they make their way the group gets hungry. The other five become irritated and cranky, hoarding what little food each has brought. Eventually Ball of Fat produces a veritable travelling feast, and generously shares the food she’s thought ahead to pack. A change in her status takes place, that day’s journey ends with the group treating her almost as an equal.

They don’t make the progress they expected, and have to stay the night in a town that they discover is occupied by the very army they’re fleeing. Circumstances are dire. Will they be held for ransom? Imprisoned? It turns out Ball of Fat is well known to the commander, and when he indicates he will set them free in exchange for an evening with her, the group takes a principled stand protecting her. But time wears on, and it becomes clear there is only one way out of this town. So Ball of Fat, against the protests of her carriage-mates, agrees to this bargain for the good of the group.

In the morning, all is well, the carriage is provisioned, and the group boards, but unlike the sense of shared destiny of the day before, the group shuns Ball of Fat, passing severe judgment on a woman who would “sell” herself. The atmosphere is cold and harsh in the carriage. They make their way along, and members of the group get hungry.

This time the others have planned ahead, and produce a wonderful array of food. Except Ball of Fat, she had no time to think about food (she was busy securing their freedom).  But no one offers food to her, in fact, food is shared liberally to everyone else, but her. The scorn heaped upon her is overwhelming. She slowly begins sobbing. The story ends.

Well, one reaction is “jeez, how bleak and sad”.  But is it really?  Ball of Fat acted generously and bravely, with a clear sense of herself and her values. She made her way through uncertain and ambiguous circumstances making clear decisions and tradeoffs based on principles that were transparent and honest.

My former assistant thought it was “the worst blog idea she’d ever heard”. And she’s partly correct. The message – it’s not about the destination it’s about the journey – is obvious and well trodden. Except because it’s so familiar, I think we spend a lot less time examining this than we would like to admit.

It’s easy to focus on the journey when the terrain is familiar, with familiar unpleasant junctures.  But when truly severe shocks occur, it can be hard to hold onto those principles to guide you. 

This is why I love working with people who have experienced spectacular failures.  You learn a lot about yourself and those around you when the product you’ve been developing and counting on doesn’t work and you miss your revenue plan, strain or destroy customer relationships, and all you know is only time and more hard work will solve the problem.  How you respond then matters a great deal.

Because Ball of Fat is so heartbreaking, it’s too easy to focus just on the heartbreak, and not on how she navigated the heartbreak.  Those principles produced honest and generous responses in the face of stingy and uncomfortable circumstances.  There’s no heartbreak in that.

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Posted in chicken killer, Empathy, Failure, Intellectual curiosity, meaningful failure | Leave a Comment »

Shaping your sense of giving

December 18, 2008

Where does our sense of giving come from? How is the act of giving shaped and sized?

One of my family’s holiday traditions is an open house we put on in the second or third week of December. It’s an opportunity to bring our family’s “community” together; all walks of life, people who normally might not run into each other. This followed us from Boston to Seattle, and when we moved to the small town in the Midwest we live in, it found a home here too.

With a backdrop of a worldwide financial crisis and looming hardship in the New Year we asked ourselves “what would be appropriate this year?”. So, my wife rolled up the expenses for last year’s holiday activities and we called a family meeting to talk this through. As we walked through the numbers we saw our party accounted for 20% of the holiday budget last year.

It was gratifying to see our children balance what they knew was happening in the economy with their own fondness for the party. Our fourteen year old son was the first to verbalize what they all seemed to be thinking: “Let’s not have the party and donate the money to the food pantry”. There was a lot of back and forth, but that’s essentially where everyone ended up.

So, instead of sending out an invitation, my wife created an “Un-Invite” in the same invitation format as in years past. It told people we wouldn’t be holding our holiday party this year due to the hardship many are or would be facing and we’d be donating to the food pantry instead. We put instructions on the back letting folks know that they could drop off their own donations with us and we’d deliver these to the food pantry as well.

We got interesting responses. The people at the upper end of the income brackets seemed to hear “You can’t afford to put the party on this year” – and told us so either outright or indirectly. The people on the lower end of the income bracket seemed to hear “You’re focusing on the needs of others” and mailed us checks or dropped off food. Those who gave generally have little to begin with – but found a way to mail $10 or $20.

This range of responses shocked us.

I did some digging and it looks like this is more the norm than not. A paper on charitable giving in America written for Google’s philanthropic foundation makes some interesting observations:

  • “Average” income folks (<$100K) are generally the greatest dollar givers or the most active givers as a percentage of the population, representing 36% of total giving.
  • “Above Average” income folks ($100K – $200K) are the least giving and least active givers than any other income group, representing 8% of total giving.
  • “Average” income folks contribute 49% of the giving to meet basic needs of the poor, while “Above Average” folks contribute 13% of the total. “Wealthy” folks ($200K – $1 million) contributed 28% of the total given.

How does one’s giving “call to action” get shaped and sized? Do some people see a need and respond with an action shaped by the nature of the need? Or do some people see a need and shape their response by their own circumstances (budget, social status,…)?

Why is it that folks closest to feeling the needs of the poor found it easiest to hear the rationale for canceling our party? Is it as simple as realizing they could be there too if circumstances changed? Are folks on the next rung up on the ladder more cognizant of the distance they’ve created? Is that why the focus shifted to “affording a party or not” – which is really a social status issue that has little to do with the needs of the poor.

If it was gratifying to see how our children realized we should cancel our party this year. It’s been equally gratifying to see them ask these questions with us – none of us know the answer.

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Posted in Empathy, Intellectual curiosity, Self-knowledge, Success | 1 Comment »

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