Amaz-ing Introductions

February 3, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

You already know you never get a second chance to make a first impression—so there’s no better time than now to start taking advantage of every opportunity.

Within seconds of meeting someone, you’re sized up and put in convenient categories, so while that’s happening, why not nudge your new acquaintance’s thinking and feeling in the directions where you want them to go. (I’ve talked about the art of introducing yourself once or twice before.) As with everything you set out to accomplish, you need to be clear about what you’re after and how to move your ball down the field in a user friendly way. As with everything, practice improves performance.

Initial impressions tee up the next stages of engagement, when new people fill in the blanks that interest them about you. When you establish rapport and mutual interest, the returns are continued attention, affiliation, support, and collaboration.

Unlike a face-to-face encounter, first impressions are usually two-dimensional when you’re applying for a job. It’s submitting an introductory letter or resume. Or if you just want to announce your availability, it’s a flyer or on-line posting. As with real time encounters, you’re aiming to establish common ground while creating positive expectations about things not already known about you and what you have to offer. In other words, you want to make your two-dimensional introduction as three-dimensional as possible.

So I loved Phillipe Dubost’s recent job posting for the position of Web Product Manager.

Dubost provides all the key information about his years of experience, proudest accomplishments and his customers’ positive experiences. But what sets his job posting apart is his playful adaptation of the standard Amazon sales page to sell himself. It’s complete with “star ratings,” “product description,” his “frequently bought together” items, the announcement that there’s “only one left in stock—order soon.” and, even one of those “Add to Cart” buttons. You should check it out. (Many thanks to Loretta James for sharing!)

Dubost has attracted a lot of attention with his job posting (more than a million views to date), but it’s what it tells us about his ingenuity and playfulness, the things he knows about social engagement, that will land him the job.

Your introduction doesn’t need to be as distinctive as his. But it does need to pack as many of the positives about you as possible into it, and Dubost’s does that. If you have a personality and a sense of humor, figure out your own way to get them across too.

Maybe it’s a picture of you as a child doing some of the same things you’re doing now—and want to keep on doing. Maybe it’s a quote from somebody that captures a side of you better than your own words can. Maybe it’s . . . .

I’m profiling Dubost’s Amaz-ing Introduction to jump start you thinking about whole new ways to put yourself out there when you want to yield something amazing in return.

(When Phillippe finds the job he’s looking for, I promise to let you know. Or you can follow him yourself on Twitter @pdubost. In the meantime, welcome to his cheering section!)

Trial & Error

January 29, 2013 By David Griesing 6 Comments

Whenever I do something over and over again until I figure it out, I think of my first video game called MYST. The goal of the game was to wander around an otherworldly feast of an island until you “figured it out.” I still can’t believe how much time I spent there, totally immersed. It doesn’t surprise me at all that MYST is now called “a classic,” a “first.”

Twisting dials, wandering off the path to check out that glimmer over there. Detecting patterns, finding keys (or clues to keys) until the door opened or the book closed or the light finally came on. All you needed was your cursor, some bandwidth, and a stretch of time. It was the embodiment of trial & error, and you kept at it because with ingenuity and tenacity, you were always rewarded—sometimes delightfully.

My work everyday involves figuring things out. For example, my aim in talking about values and work is to find that slightly different angle that allows you to finally “see” how fulfilling it can be to feel proud of what your doing at work and clear about why you’re doing it. So I keep spinning the dials and pushing the levers until I think I’ve gotten it right, or at least better than I got it the last time.

Trial & error is what made some of the Goats such an inspiration (Just Plain Funny #2). They kept at it, got it well enough, grabbed the finish line, and were (I think) a lot better for the effort than those who glided or stumbled over it.

Gaining mastery at your work takes lots of trials and nearly as many errors. You’ve got to want to keep coming back, over & over again, and taking another shot–maybe 10,000 shots. But as we lay down new tracks in our brains along the way (check out Daniel Coyle’s wonderful book The Talent Code about these new tracks) mastery will not only come. It will feel like a breakthrough. New territory.

Because that’s what mastery feels like. A whole new world.

Oprah Winfrey, Confessor

January 15, 2013 By David Griesing 23 Comments

I wrote about Lance Armstrong in early October and later that same month for a couple of reasons that relate to the work we do.

When you make mistakes that affect your ability to continue working & your reputation, you need to “speak for yourself about what happened” if you hope to regain your productivity. First off, it’s looking in the mirror and owning your mistakes so that you have the chance to be trusted and have influence again.

Coming to this acceptance also involves seeking the counsel of wise people around you—if you’re fortunate enough to have them. It’s only after “the owning” and “the reflecting” that you tell those you’ve affected what you did, why you did it, what you’ve learned, and how you’re going to do things differently in the future.

Each step hard, but necessary.

While its taken 3 months (or at least as many years since the allegations against him started to build), on Thursday Armstrong is promising to come clean to Oprah Winfrey. In an intimate television kind of way, her backstory is joining with his. Afterwards, we’ll draw our own conclusions.

We care about all of this because we need role models in our work—people to show us how—and for many of us, Armstrong fit that bill. Disciplined. Motivated. Triumphing over hardship. We were fortified by his example.

We also care about this because we know that the moral training we have today often comes from such “teachable moments” (as the president once reminded us)—that is, as long as we take them.

So we’ve followed the arc of Lance’s story. It was hard to absorb the allegations about a doping conspiracy he masterminded, to see him fired as the spokesman for products we buy, and finally to watch him have to break ties with his LiveStrong foundation. We were saddened by his apparent betrayal and surprised by his retreat into silence. Was it embarrassment? Was it shame?

In recent weeks, there have been some odd, Armstrong-initiated pop-ups. A surreal picture of him reclining in his den below his victory jerseys with the remark “Back in Austin and just layin’ around.” Rumors that he was figuring out what he had to do to get back into the competitive sporting circuit, and how admissions he might make would impact the lawsuits & investigations still swirling around him.

The picture and its tag-line suggested denial. The rumors suggested the machinations of lawyers and media advisors instead of soul-seekers.

We’ll see.

Because what he’s looking for from Oprah is not merely a stage that’s big enough for him and his story, but also for a confessor who will help to change our perception of him. Facilitate our forgiveness. Lance Armstrong’s goes to Oprah’s mountaintop in order to be healed in our eyes.

When our turns come it won’t be about teams of advisors or media blitz, and maybe not even about a catch in the throat when you get to the hard parts. Because it’s not about orchestration. It’s just about telling the truth and being genuinely sorry.

Otherwise you shouldn’t bother.

Crowd-Sourcing Your Job Freedom

January 13, 2013 By David Griesing 4 Comments

Oftentimes, it’s the talented, motivated and grounded people who struggle the most getting to the work they should be doing. It’s like the burden of their gifts weighs them down, placing an unhealthy gravity on the decision to strike out and make a change for the better.

But beyond the over-complicated knots we tie ourselves in are the practical barriers that confound us. One of them is not having the financial freedom to do the kind of work that we need to be doing right now.

In this regard, there’s good news for everyone who has an entrepreneur inside of them, struggling to get out. Your pitifully small bank account is no longer a roadblock to your success as long as you have a good idea and an equally good story to tell. For the first time ever, millions of strangers are funding small business ideas that never had the chance to get off the ground before. All you have to do is sell them on your dream.

With crowd-funding, it’s the small amounts, quite literally “the seed funding,” that can not only get you off the proverbial dime, but also a cheering section of people who truly believe in you. Where once you needed a rich uncle or well-healed friend, the “kindness of strangers” now provides a way for you to get in the game. (I last wrote about crowd-funding in July.)

You always wanted to ____ (fill in the blank). You’ve never understood why somebody hadn’t figured out how to ___, so you’ve figured it out. Tell the crowd about your idea. Tell them how much cash you need to realize it. Tell them how they’ll get to share in your success. Convince them that you deserve their vote of confidence and they just might give it to you.

Historically, because tiny businesses rarely attracted outside financing, they just as rarely got off the ground. Today, a whole new class of entrepreneurs has a chance to strut their stuff. Spreading like some positive contagion, crowds are nurturing brave little start-ups everywhere there is access to a funding network. Years from now, when some of our leading companies can trace their origins to networks like Kickstarter, I think we’ll recognize that the true democratization of innovation began in our time.

What this gives you is an opportunity that simply wasn’t available five years ago. But you still have to believe in what you’re setting out to do, and get that cheering section to buy-in too. Indeed, it’s your ability to inspire (on the one hand) and the desire of total strangers to be inspired (on the other) that makes this bargain work.

In the world of crowd-funding, the desire to be part of an appealing stranger’s quest to succeed is nearly universal. She talks about how she’ll change the world. You learn about how he’ll make our lives better, easier, smarter. They share their stories with us, and we in turn see some of ourselves (and our hopes) in them. We like & admire them & look forward to sharing in their success. The ticket for the adventure is modest given the upsides, so we buy it.

For investors, it helps too that you’re not the only one who’s buying. It may be dozens or hundreds or even thousands of others who are similarly inspired. With crowd-funding, you find out early and often how many others are getting on-board with you. The infectious rush of fellow believers is essential to the dynamic.

But what’s really unique (and special) here is that the entrepreneur’s energy & inspiration and the investors’ psychic & financial support are joining together for the sake of economic productivity. We’re building a business here after all.

Maybe it’s your business.

A Hero in a Poor Season for Heroes

January 6, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

We’re just about done thinking about 2012, but not quite.

As always, there were many small heroes this year, but Groundbreakers? Galvinizers? Healers? Those who stood before us with clear eyes and quiet confidence: there were almost none of them. Perhaps these men and women will come out of their private worlds when we’re closer to bottom, when our need will be great enough to recognize & welcome them & finally decide to stand behind them. This year, leaders like this were leaving us, not striding onto the stage.

Neil Armstrong left the stage he was never really comfortable on for the last time this past August. My post about him was one of the year’s most read, perhaps because it’s not just moths that are drawn to the brightest lights.

Surely, some of it was that his life recalled a different America when we were able to pull together to accomplish something amazing, whereas today we can’t even agree to come together and make sense. But it’s also about a man who took us with him on a great adventure, didn’t get in the way when we got there, and then gave everybody else the credit when it exceeded our dreams.

One way to take the measure of Neil Armstrong—in all his Mid-Western matter-of-factness—is to eavesdrop on an interview he gave in 2001 as part of the Johnson Space Center’s Oral History project. (His interlocutors are historians Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley.) His thinking is also a good way to clear our heads for another muddled year ahead.

On who gets to be the first man on the moon:

AMBROSE: It is part of the popular perception, I guess, and it appears in some of the literature that the other astronauts have put out, that there was a lot of jockeying for position.

ARMSTRONG: Yes.. . The goals, I thought, were important to not just the United States, but to society in general. I would have been happy doing anything they told me to do. It’s probably true that I was less inclined to be concerned about just what job I had than some were. I think they’re all different people, they all had different kinds of views on that subject. It wasn’t as obvious to me as some of the stories I’ve read have portrayed it. (49)

Foundation instincts: steady, confident & clear:

AMBROSE: But you made a decision [after serious technical problems] and you got back to Earth. I spend a lot of my life talking to men who have made big decisions, and in this case your life and others’ were at stake…

ARMSTRONG: Well, I can’t make too much of it. I think generally you try to keep going as long as you safely can and try to save the flight, the objectives, and try to put everything back together. At some point you just have to make the decision that, “I can’t take the risk of pursuing my goal further, because I have to go back to the foundation instincts”, which is save your craft, save the folks, get back home, and be disappointed that you had to leave some of your goals behind. (55)

The results also come from:

ARMSTRONG: I think it predominantly is experience over training. Training certainly helps, but having been in flying machines for many years and faced a lot of difficulty, [pilots] become accustomed to being required to solve problems as they arise …, and particularly test pilots who get a higher percentage of things going wrong than normal pilots. And I’m not saying that we did it perfectly in every case; I’m sure we didn’t. But the experience that we’d had in flying a variety of different kind of machines in difficult circumstances certainly enhances your ability to look at a situation, … analyze it and determine what your probable best course is and how much latitude you have to deviate from that best course. It’s not an easy subject to describe adequately, but it seems to have worked. (57)

The important things: the task at hand, the shoulders you’re standing on, and pride in your work:

BRINKLEY: …Apollo 11…was perhaps the most watched event in the history of….the world. [Y]ou didn’t treat it differently mentally at all, [only] as you would…one of your previous missions?

ARMSTRONG: I was certainly aware that this was a culmination of the work of 300,000 or 400,000 people over a decade and that the nation’s hopes and outward appearance largely rested on how the results came out. With those pressures, it seemed the most important thing to do was focus on our job as best we were able to and try to allow nothing to distract us from doing the very best job we could. And, you know, I have no complaints about the way my colleagues were able to step up to that.

AMBROSE: Let me interject here that you share a quality with General Eisenhower. When reporters would come to him during the war and want to get a story, he would always say, “Go talk to [General Omar N.] Bradley. Go talk to [General George S.] Patton [Jr.]. Go talk to a sergeant. That’s where the real story is. This is a team effort,” and he would never allow it to concentrate on him…And you just spoke about the hundreds of thousands of people that have been working for so long to make this happen, and I invite you to make a reflection on the team nature of the Apollo 11 mission.

ARMSTRONG: Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain reliability specifications, and far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I’ve been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about [1,000] separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, [substantially] better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have.

I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that’s setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, “If anything goes wrong here, it’s not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it.” And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that’s the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off. (78-79)

We give heroes our best because they take us with them to a whole new world.

Godspeed, Neil Armstrong.