Framing,Marketing, Spaghetti Sauce and Iphones

Yesterday I got the chance to see the above lecture by Malcolm Gladwell (here is a link to it, in case the embedded video does not work). I really recommend it. It is well worth the ~20 minutes.

A few after thoughts:

1. Today in class(the Full Time MBA at AGSM) we talked about Decision Making, Bounded Rationality and Framing. I think the story in the lecture is a great illustration of Framing and the inertia of our current thoughts. Instead of thinking about the best product that will satisfy everybody we should be looking for the best product that will satisfy groups of everybody (the last sentence is not a mistake. You need to see the lecture to understand it).
2. People don’t always know what they want. So much of marketing thinking is built on the premises that if we only ask our customers what they want, they will tell us. What the story behind the lecture teaches us is that although asking the customers what they want might be a good idea, sometimes we just need to create something that they will want. I don’t know about you, but if a few years ago somebody would have asked me what do I want my cell phone to do, there is no way I would have said: “”Oh, you know what, I want it to react to movements when I move it around so I can play games with it”“. I don’t know it for a fact, but I think the people at apple just put that quality into the iphone without people telling them that is what they want. And that is a one great quality for a product. That is a way to make it a purple cow.
3. We should always remember – people are unique. They want different things. They have different thoughts. It is true for marketing and it is true for management. If we treat people the same by giving them the average we get average results. The future is in the extremes. Going for the average is not safe. It is the riskiest business there could be.
4. People talk a lot about the fact that globalization leads to standardization. I don’t think so. What we discover is that there are no universal answers. We discover that standardization does not always work. Because people are different. They can be clustered into groups, but they cannot be standardized.

Think about the music industry. Has the global network created more or less music? It is true that globalization does help some of the big players, but the internet makes diversity flourish (just check myspace if you don’t believe me).

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The Right Side Of The Graph

In the last few days in class(at the Australian Graduate School Of Management in Sydney), we have been going through a phase of self reflection. This phase included surveys, inventories and questioners, as well as group discussions and self reflection, both written and mental.

The last day, our facilitator presented us with the following graph:

The basic idea is to think about our parts in teams and later about our jobs and pinpoint actions we employ daily to their respective places on the graph. I think this is a very simple but usable tool in order to self reflect.

But looking at it, made me think about how managers can use this. Because of this simplicity, managers can use this simple tool to know a lot more about their employees.

I believe good managers should focus almost all their efforts on helping people find their strengths and concentrate on them, because this is the way to help people truly excel. Thus, great managers should focus their time on their employees’ strengths instead of focusing it on their weaknesses and areas of improvement. That said it is important to understand that there are different kinds of weakness and different kinds of strengths.

If the weakness is a result of insufficient knowledge or skill, then the manager role is to supply the knowledge, teach the skill or get the employee to learn the skill from an outside source. This is true in a limited number of cases. Sometime people feel incompetent and dislike certain actions, because they don’t know enough about them and never had proper training although they truly have a talent for it. In addition, most skills can be learned to a certain degree.

But in order to excel in certain skills you need talent. And different people have different talents. And with talent I mean not only to quality of being good at something, but actually having the right mental state and the natural inclination for certain skills. And most of time, this talent, if used correctly, can help overcome any weakness much more efficiently then dealing directly with the weakness. Therefore, when a manager recognizes a weakness he should explore which kind of weakness it is and if training or knowledge will help the employee overcome it.

On the other hand, many times as managers, we perceive strengths of people but forget to ask them an important question: do you enjoy doing that role/action? Because some people are really good at something, but they hate doing it. if they don’t feel good when they are doing it, when they don’t reach a state of flow, than they would not be able to that for a long time and they would not be able to truly excel. And what great managers do is find ways to make their employees excel.

The MBA so far has been a really enriching experience and there is still such a long way to go. As leaders in the making it is important for us to have the right vision of the future and this was explained by an excellent quote by John Scharr,

The future is not some place we are going to but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.

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Breaking The Golden Rule – How Should We Incorporate Differences Into The Way We Manage People

The past week in class we spent a lot of time in Self-Reflection. The idea, which I strongly agree with, is that you should know yourself before you try to work with other people, not to say, manage or lead them. We did all sorts of activities aimed at discovering ourselves, including learning about our learning style (Reflector, Theorist, Pragmatist, Activist), Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to discover of types and preferences (I am a INTJ, by the way), etc.

The results were quite extraordinary and very interesting on the personal level. One the group level, I think we discovered how different we are from each other and the facilitators were able to demonstrate our differences in many ways. But I think that this is not the important lesson. If I had asked most of the class before today’s class to predict the results of the class, I think they would have probably described it quite accurately even if the numbers would not have been precise. We all know, in some level, that people are different and that there are different styles and preferences.

But the problem is we are wired in the wrong way to deal with that knowledge. We have difficulties when we see someone who is different than us. More importantly, we have difficulties imagining how he wants to be treated. So if we make an effort, it is usually to treat him like we want to be treated.

We all know the “Golden Rule” because it is widely know across cultures and religions. For example, all Jewish people know that The Sage Hillel formulated the Golden Rule in order to illustrate the underlying principles of Jewish moral law as follows:

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn

This is a good general concept and at a religious (and maybe political) level it is a smart rule. But the problem is that if you move into the world of management, this well intentioned rule leads you to bad managerial decisions like much conventional wisdom. Because, if we do agree that we are all different it also means that we hate different things. This means, I may hate the way you like to be treated. And if I follow the rule, I will avoid doing just what you wanted me to do.

I know I made this mistake a number of times in my life. I tried to treat my teammates or followers as I wanted to be treated. But each of my teammates was (and is) different and unique. They don’t want to be treated like I want to be treated; they want to get individualized attention. The mad similar mistakes with building classes and presentations the way I wanted to see them. But different people have different learning styles.

In his book, “First, break all the rules“, Markus Buckingham describes what great managers do. One of these things is ignoring the Golden Rule:

The best managers break the Golden Rule every day. They would say don’t treat people as you would like to be treated. This presupposes that everyone breathes the same physiological oxygen as you. For example, if you are competitive, everyone must be similarly competitive. If you like to be praised in public, everyone else must, too. Everyone must share your hatred of micromanagement.

So, next time you get to work in a team or lead one, don’t make the assumption that although everybody is different, by treating them how you would want to be treated will be enough. You need to find out, how they would like to be treated for each and every person. Being a good manager is certainly not easy and whoever thinks so has certainly not been to Business School.

DP Health And Wellness – The Art Of Listening

A DelhiPlanet Health And Wellness Exclusive, In Association With Queen Yogini Kristin McGee

In daily life there are many occasions where people just don’t know what to do in spite of receiving clear instructions. This happens because many a times we aren’t just listening and are occupied with other thoughts or are doing something else. Just like writing and speaking, listening is also a very essential component of effective communication. People can avoid many problems and communicate very effectively if they just listen well. In today’s article Kristin will share her knowledge on how important it is to listen effectively and how yoga can help enhance that.

Sometime back when I was teaching my 12:30 yoga class at Clay and I gave the instruction “step your left foot forward and drop your right heel to the ground, lift up to warrior 1“, many students looked around for someone to make the first move so they could follow. Some of the students stepped their right foot forward instead and the rest of them were still in dog pose daydreaming! It made me realize just how much we’ve lost the art of listening.

We’ve become such a visual society and become lazy as far as how we learn. I remember taking a trapeze class down on the West Side Highway with my niece when she came to visit from Idaho. I learned very quickly that if you don’t listen and do exactly what they tell you to do when they tell you to do it, you’re screwed! My 12-year-old niece was a pro at it — she just listened and followed instructions. I wonder if we start to doubt ourselves as we age or if we get complacent and believe that hearing things is enough to get by instead of listening closely and absorbing things with our whole being. I think a lot of miscommunication in relationships could be solved if people truly listened to each other.

Yoga once again to the rescue. It is one of the few places where the teacher doesn’t do any demonstrating, but instead speaks the class through the poses and allows the students to experience the process. It is a wonderful way to redevelop all of our senses, especially our ears and truly listen. Once we give into listening we automatically are present and can no longer predict what will come next or get lost in what already happened. That is why music can make us feel so good — it puts us immediately in the moment and allows us to listen and experience things on a whole new level.

Note: The above has been published by DelhiPlanet in association with and with explicit permission from Kristin Mcgee and originally published by Kristin on findyourdetour.com. Any reproduction without proper approval and acknowledgment is prohibited.