Viewing Category: Ideas
I couldn't say that I've been interested in learning how to sell, but I need to be.
Selling brings to mind images of pushy men with skins and eardrums of steel. They have steely eyes that don't see past the end of their nose, and they aren't interested in helping you in anything but signing that dotted line. I think of car salesmen, telemarketing scripts, and the occassional roving salesteam that feels no shame in interrupting your day with their bullshit and their viewbooks. Who wants to be like that? Not me!
On the other hand, over the past few years I've met amazing sales people who are damn proud of it. One of them, aware of my nacent plans to somehow "step up" my solo practice, loaned me her copy of Selling to VITO. VITO stands for "Very Important Top Officer". I've been reading the book 50 pages at a time, and it's been the missing piece for me as far as relating actual value to salesmanship.
Although I'm only halfway through the book, here are the core ideas that have resonated with me so far:
VITO is the decision maker. She could be the CEO. Or he could be some Vice President. They think very differently from other people in the organization, with no tolerance for bullshit or indirection. They are open to any benefit to their company if you can catch their attention the right way, can back your claims up, and not waste their time with empty bullshit. It's all in the way you do it: respectfully, intelligently, and by portraying yourself as a business peer.
Then there are what the author calls "Seymour": the analysts who always want to "see more" data. They're not the non-decision makers, can't really decide anything, but make recommendations. They don't think like VITO, and they're more interested in protecting their turf and interest than the good of the company. Of course, not everyone is a Seymour, but you'll know them when you see them. I can think of 2 or 3 of them.
When I used to think of selling, I used to get nervous because I thought myself to not be of the right mentality. I hate slinging empty phrases and trying to look like something I'm not, which seemed to be prerequisites to do the job well. I went solo partially to get out of the empty marketing culture, with the vague notion that somehow I could "build value" by myself and work that way. The jury's still out on whether that was a wise decision :-)
I'm also not, as Eric Sink writes in his article on Sales Guys, particularly like being motivated solely by money--what Sink says is a critical aspect of a good sales guy. But even as I write that, I have to admit that yes...I do want money. Without money, I can't build my future creative facility & resort, nor can I hire other amazing people to jam with, and then who's going to teach with me at my University of Design and Technology? Not doing any of that would totally suck. So OK...I am officially motivated now by money, but I still felt I lack the extravert qualities required of the sales role.
Or do I? Here's where the book comes in.
I am finding that Selling to VITO isn't so much a book of tricks as it is a book of finding the right mentality. The mentality that the author extols is be a businessperson and think like one. This book is a bridge between how to think like an executive and how to sell, and it is the perspective I have needed to make sense of some observations I've made regarding the critical difference between people who lead/build companies and people who just work in them. As a sole practitioner / solopreneur, I want to be the leader and the builder. It's extremely informative to see how a salesperson deconstructs the mentality of a VITO, and then proceeds to fabricate a package that meets actual needs in terms of company benefit. It's win-win. It's what being a business partner is about, and that's how the author sees himself. That's super cool, and I buy that 100%. The value is not the service or product: it's the person making that offering. A VITO buys into the person that will benefit her company. A Seymour buys into a service that will benefit himself. Don't be a Seymour!
Some of my favorite heresies in the book are not using your company logo in the initial contact (it's not important), and dispensing with the crap business writing "etiquette" that persists in plague-like proportions across the land. The book isn't an great piece of writing compared to other marketing / sales books you may have read, but it's the ideas are what count. Make of them what you will.
I don't know why I don't visit Creating Passionate Users more often. Those guys are awesome...I'm totally in-sync mentally with what they're doing.
I just stumbled upon their Ten Tips for New Teachers / Trainers, and it's fabulous. As I have been interested in teaching and educational software, this article is a great resource chock full o' tips. The applications go beyond teaching too...next time you want to throw a great party of some kind, the insights from this article would be applicable with a little creative repurposing. Teaching comes down to understanding the mind of your audience, and how to engage it. That's memorable and fun, just the way you want your party to be :-)
The mysterious S. and I are both interested in storytelling and narrative. I've been coming to the realization that this figures in strongly in the way I want to express myself professionally. And now that I've had this realization, I'm seeing the storytelling meme everywhere I look!
Storytelling is the method through which we communicate our imagination, our vision, and our feelings. Through stories we can relate people, ideas, time, and place in a cohesive narrative; otherwise, we just have a collection of uncorrelated facts: impressive and seemingly wise on the surface, but in actuality far too ambiguous to serve as a useful guide.
Here's an illustrative excerpt from Joel Spolsky's Introduction for Best of Sofware Writing, regarding a book for which he was asked to write a glowing recommendation:
The book started out looking promising. It filled a real need. I remember several times standing in bookstores desperately trying to find a book on the very topic, but there was nothing to be found. So I started reading the manuscript full of high hopes.
Bleah.
I could hardly bear to keep reading.
The author kept saying smart and interesting things.
He even wrote clearly.
But the book was thoroughly, completely, boring. And worse, it was completely unconvincing.
The author had violated the number one rule of good writing, the “Show, don’t tell” rule. There was not a single story in the book. It was chock full of sentences like “A good team leader provides inspiration by setting a positive example.” What the eff?
Pay attention. Here’s the way to say “a good team leader provides inspiration by setting a positive example” without putting your audience to sleep:
Go read the rest of the introduction to see how it ends.
I came across this article on a newsgroup about the mechanics and benefits of sleep...it's really fascinating. Some highlights:
Just about everyone does better with 8 hours of sleep. Statistically you live longer, make fewer mistakes, and have healthier immune systems.
Thinking about doing an all-nighter to cram for that exam? If it's a simple "recall the facts" test, the all-nighter will help. If you have to do any kind of critical thinking, though, the sleep deprivation will do a number on you.
Sleep seems to improve motor skills. Learn something in the evening, sleep on it, and you'll do better the next day.
There's also an interesting description of the mechanisms of sleep, and how caffeine plays a role in disrupting that mechanism. I found the discussion on circadian rhythms particularly interesting. They're periodic cycles in our body that, evolutionarily speaking, are possibly older than sleep. The idea that our body is running on a bunch of different periodic cycles is immensely cool and perhaps hackable :-)
One of my female friends has been going through an "extended pre-courtship ritual", for lack of a better description, with one rugged fellow she's met. Lately, though, things have seemed to stall...what's up with that? Flirting: check! Meaningful conversation: check! But where's the followup? So far, she's seen zero action on his part, and frankly she's getting tired of waiting.
So we've been chatting about the causes of this irritating lack of manly initiative on the dude's part. As a guy, I had some theories about this embarassing lapse of action by "my team"...maybe he's intimidated? Maybe he's just a boy and doesn't know what to do? Interesting to theorize about, but wasn't getting my friend anywhere.
A couple weeks pass, and my friend mentions a book by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo called He's Just Not That Into You: "The No Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys". My assignment: read it and report whether it was full of crap or not; when I mentioned this to the help desk women at Barnes and Noble, they nodded in recognition and grimly led me to its resting place in the "relationships" section.
He's Just Not That Into You is written by a consulting storywriter (Greg) with an executive story editor (Liz) for the show Sex and the City.
The general idea: If that guy you're seeing isn't moving heaven and earth to be with you, to be nice to you, or otherwise make a commitment...he's just not that into you. Move on!
I started with a healthy dose of skepticism, but as I went through it, it rang true. The book shoots down every excuse that you're likely to hear from a guy; Greg's premise is that if a guy is really into you...he's not going to let anything get in his way. He will act. He will overcome scheduling difficulties and fears. Commitment will not be an issue. If he doesn't, then that's probably not the guy you want, sorry. He's just not into you enough. So don't waste your time making excuses for him...find someone who is into you, who will will treat you the way you deserve. Greg doesn't want you to settle. Liz isn't so convinced...she provides the counterpoint to Greg's straight male perspective, and grudgingly admits that she sees how it's true.
In a broader sense, I wonder if the same underlying principle can be applied to business practice. Some relationships are built on hope: that we can find "enough of a match" so we don't end up being alone. Can the same thing be said about business relationships, rephrased as "we work together, finding enough synergy so we build a product that works"? Milton Glaser, the American Graphic Designer, said once that he can only work for people he likes...perhaps this is in the same vein?
I suspect, in either Love or Business, figuring out what's more important to you--reaching for the highest and maybe not reaching it versus finding a compromise that works--will have some degree of correlation with how one perceives He's Just Not That Into You. Sure, there are exceptions...but read this so you know what signals you're putting out there. Unless you're my sister, who finds the whole idea of this book absolutely appalling :-)
Saw this on BoingBoing today: the transcript of an address by Milton Glaser regarding 10 things he's learned as a designer. The transcript itself is thoughtful and filled with insight, so you should read it, but here's the list:
- YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE.
- IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB.
- SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.
- PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT.
- LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE.
- STYLE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED.
- HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN.
- DOUBT IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY.
- SOLVING THE PROBLEM IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN BEING RIGHT.
- TELL THE TRUTH.
I've felt a lot of these thing, but have not seen them expressed so clearly before. I particularly liked his toxicity test for people:
[...] the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible.
Yes.
Been reading a bit about "The Rise of the Creative Class", by CMU business profess Richard Florida. The general idea is that there's this class of worker (the aforementioned creative class) comprised of people who do creative things for a living: artists, programmers, designers, and so forth. After the original article was published, a book followed. Since the idea was put forth in 2001, urban planners have been debating whether the whole affair holds water or not.
Although views are split over the economic veracity of Florida's claims, the upshot is that he's done a lot of work to define the living factors that are attractive to those of us in the creative class. You can see how your city ranks at the creative class website. The larger question is what role do creatives play in the economic machine; urban planners who jump on this bandwagon without critically understanding the economy of their region are probably going to waste a lot of taxpayer's money. It's a hard problem with competing perspectives.
Sportsmanship: this is a concept that I associate with athletes and team competition, not new media or graphic design. But maybe that's just what we need.
I was listening to On Point on NPR, listening to a story about a couple of people who were members of competitive marching bands. One of them commented how the experience of good natured competition and sportsmanship shaped his life. They started a musical group called Soul Rebels that fuses New Orleans music with Hip Hop.
So here we have a couple of what might be called band geeks doing cool stuff, shaped by their early influences. This reminded me of my own days as a budding nerd, except that I was never part of a group activity if I could help it. I abhored clubs and committees, thinking them to be authoritarian ego trips on the part of advisors, or well-intentioned-but-ineffective wastes of my time. As an individual, I felt I could accomplish more...or at least be annoyed less. My aspirations did not run very high back then.
Fast forward to grad school: I was loaded with skills, but had no real team experience. For shy artists and programmers, this is a major challenge to face. I'm not sure if everyone has experienced this the same way as I, but I found the whole idea of team to be somewhat abstract and mystifying. With hindsight, I can see the connection between that experience with the feeling of unease I felt during PE; always picked last and always "offsides" no matter the sport. Not being good at sports, I never really experienced sportsmanship and teamwork on a successful level. This is an advantage that jocks have going into business, conditioned responses that help build functioning (if not always successful) teams.
Positive role models are not entirely absent from my nerdly upbringing. The hacker ethic is one example, basically saying that "information should be freely accessible". The necessary mindset for this requires that you're helpful to your comrades. I think it is a form of "good sportsmanship". And the idea of "team" does exist too, in the form of underground hacking, demoscene, crypto, and computer security groups who are out to build a name for themselves. You see the team instinct in game clans and MMORPG guilds too, though these are sometimes just social clubs; sportsmanship exists here on a more individual level (perhaps "chivalry" is more accurate). On the group level, building a level playing field is not in their interest. If you want to be the best team ever, you're not likely to give away your tools and your tricks.
What does this mean for New Media and Interactive Design?
I think we've seen the impulse to form teams in groups like the AIGA, but as individuals I think we lack that team instinct. Maybe it's difficult to define an appropriate group agenda, given our highly invidualistic tendencies. I think that a general sense of sportsmanship here might go a long way toward making organizations like AIGA into more of a dynamic entity. On an individual level, cultivating sportsmanship leads to improved communication between designers, and also with non-designers. I believe sportsmanship is a pre-requisite for building a good team. And by extension, this is how you build a better society.
Here's a link to something called pad++, a "zoomable interface" that was put together sometime in the late 1990s. The gist: With infinite zooming power, one can have documents at different scales and browse amongst them.
Jef Raskin, the user interface specialist who did early work on the Macintosh UI (though apparently, not involved in the actual final product) is doing some work on his humane interface. There's a demo of one concept from it, which bears resemblance to the Pad++ concept.
Hmm. I'm curious to see what this turns into. After a cursory stumble through the documentation and demos on the raskin project homepage, one can see that the concept is simple enough, but execution is what will really make the difference.
The adoption of of a new user interface depends at least three things:
- You have to get something done on the computer
- You're forced to deal with the GUI
- Positive progress overrides frustration level with the GUI
There are extenuating factors too:
- Does it look "nice"? (this is a loaded term)
- Does it jibe with my expectations? (aka it's "intuitive", another loaded term)
- Do I have a choice to use this GUI or not?
- Perception: Is it worth my time to learn this GUI, or go do something else?
The zoomable interface is one of those solutions looking for a problem. Neat idea, but it's only part of an entire solution. Personally, I'm not that convinced it would be as usable as I want without introducing overlays of some kind, like a Heads-Up Display providing additional navigational cues as your explore your mega desktop. Orienting and referencing other landmarks in your document is a pain in the butt, something well understood by graphic designers using Photoshop and Illustrator at zoomed-in magnifications. It sucks. Making zoom control more accessible has not solve the problem.
The ZoomDemo also suggests that using the mouse buttons as your primary "zoomin, zoomout" controls would be far easier and more natural. Yah, if your primary task was exploring. When you're actually working on something, you want those mouse buttons to be doing something more important. The mousewheel might be a better substitute.
On another note, Apple's Expose works rather well by implementing the idea in reverse...you start from your window focus, and expand into a zoomed out overview of your desktop.
There's a kind of computer use that I haven't seen addressed: piloting versus potato digging. By piloting, I mean performing multiple subtasks as part of the overall task. By potato digging, I mean the focus on getting one of those single tasks done. The focus on singular tasking and simple intuitive commands is fine for people who are just trying to do something for the first time, but quickly we want something better, faster, and more powerful as defined within the context of the specific task we're trying to get done. I am doubtful, given the myriad of different tasks that are out there, that a single "human environment" can productively address them all. Which is why we still have Operating Systems, not OpenDoc... this is the structure that supports differing approaches to problems without imposing a lot of simplifying-but-ultimately-time-wasting conventions.
I was chatting with Alen today about my goal to do 10 games this year as a way of maintaining momentum and learning some stuff in the process. He congratulated me on making the insight, and related two foundation art school exercises he did at (I think) University of Michigan:
30 Drawings in 30 Minutes -- the idea is to make a whole bunch of drawings every session. Eventually, you amass thousands of drawings, and some of the best stuff you'll ever make will come out of it. My thought is that the more you do something, the better you'll get at it. Letting go and just doing is probably another good thing to master... it's something I've traditionally had trouble with, being prone to overplan and detail contingencies in a meticulous manner...
Ugly Drawing -- the instructor asks you what you think is ugly, then you are made to make it! About halfway through, you are then told to somehow "rescue" the picture. The resulting tension in the drawing, Alen said, made for phenomenal results.
I have some equivalent ideas, but they're not so poetic:
If you do something 10 times, you'll know how to do it. If you do it 100 times, you'll be pretty good. If you do it 1000 times, you'll have achieved some form of mastery. Or expressed in D&D terms: 10 reptitions = level 2, 100 repetitions = level 3, 1000 repetitions = Level 4. Or even geekierly expressed, your level of mastery = log(number of repetitions) + 1.
When you're stuck, practice extremes far beyond what you think is suitable or applicable. The very act of stretching will yield new solutions. Or what you didn't think was acceptable before trying is actually quite suitable after all.
