October 5, 2012 by Ken Goldstein - 2 Comments

Debate Takeaways Tallied Tactfully

I try hard in this blog to leave out my personal politics, which isn’t all that hard to do since I consider the topic of business innovation and its various threads to be about as nonpartisan a subject as there should be. Business enterprise and creativity are as fundamental to a shared sense of values as I can imagine, and where we may often disagree on the “how” I hope we don’t much disagree on the “why.” Together we create our economy, our opportunities, and our experiment in progress called democracy. We argue as we should about issues of governance and legal particulars, but we should agree that following the law is our duty as much as evolving it with the times is our right.

What does all that have to do with the Presidential Debates? While I was watching the first of them this week, I saw as I often do a collection of ideas that can be applied to our business thinking, in complete abstraction of the of the candidates, what they said, or who won, if there is such a thing (anytime rigorous and important discussion is had in front of and with the people, the people win). Presidential Debates are anything but ordinary, like the Olympics we have to wait four years for the next staging, but other than reinforcing what we already believe or possibly swaying a swing voter, there seems a deeper construct evidenced and worth exploring.

During the first debate one of my friends on Facebook likened it to a supercharged job interview, where the applicants were down to the final two, and given the stakes forced to faceoff in front of a panel consisting of more than 65 million of their prospective employers. I liked that analogy a lot — I am not even sure it is an analogy — but I was thinking about the event a little differently. For some reason, the debate struck me as the ultimate competitive sales call, where rather than entering a prospective client’s office before or after your potential competitor, you had to handle the sales call in tandem. Many of us have been on more sales calls than we want to remember, but seldom have I heard people either leaving or entering the room thinking of the other guy as their opponent. Perhaps that is more the case than we think — if that were going through our minds, we might approach the business pitch a little differently.

What stood out for me in the debate was the immense amount of time both candidates invested in preparation for the 90 minutes they spent together in the public eye. That 90 minutes on the rarely shared dais probably felt like a lifetime to the candidates, or opponents, but once it was behind them, it probably felt like a millisecond. I am sure the time leading up to the debate never felt excessive, as every precious moment invested in preparation was clearly a tradeoff borrowed from some other critical activity. As they felt the pressure of the event nearing, those tradeoffs had to favor dedicated preparation pods over other pressing conflicts. Preparation time is always discretionary, but imagine procrastinating too long when you know in heart and mind that preparation is everything. Definitely reminds me of selling — if you aren’t prepared, you’re sunk, your client expects you to be prepared and has no reason to cut you any slack on a stumble.

Second to preparation, I was struck by its counterpart, the role of extemporaneous behavior, dancing in the moment, listening, reacting, evidencing spontaneity that reflected realtime analysis and response to the unexpected, to the extent anything said might be unexpected. You can rehearse a speech or pitch perfectly, and both candidates did for multiple segments, but how do you handle the moment when someone says something you believe to be wrong, untrue, or unsupported? I was wary going into the debate that both opponents had come with a quiver full of “zingers” to flick at the other, where I couldn’t imagine anything less dignified than a canned response played as in the moment. Luckily we were spared that disrespect, and I take it as a lesson. There is a huge difference between a heartfelt moment and a too cleverly scripted remark — no one wants to hear B material from an A level player. The balance of preparation and live playtime is the heart of sales as it was the heart of the debate. We can argue at will about who did it better, but in my mind I kept thinking how consistently hard this is to pull off, to balance preloaded preparation with inspired retort, the art of the pivot.

Holding the balance between preparation and extemporaneous response was the notion of authenticity. Each word a candidates says adds to an outcome, and as we all have so often experienced, style is content. Any debate coach or sales leader will tell you how you say something matters as much or more than what you say, and here again, you have to be careful at all moments under extreme pressure to keep your eyes on the prize. The presentation layer matters, its visceral nature reflects passion and deliberation, that which people remember more than words. Yet it can’t be an act, it has to be who you are. Surely you can say what you want, anything you want, and you can say it any way you want, but ultimately your goal is not to win the debate, it is to win the Presidency. Cut to the sales call; you need to make a good impression, often you think you need to say what the client wants to hear just to stay in the room, but after you leave the room those words and that style can haunt you. Are you being consistent with what you said before and what you intend to do after? Do people believe that is what you really mean? That is the authenticity of your belief set, it underlies every moment you are on your feet, and it matters.

Only in high school are the trophies handed out after the tournament. In most of life the true impact comes much later — which means that immediately following the debate is the regroup. What went right, wrong, better or worse than expected, and how will that be factored into your next encounter. High stakes exchanges often reward innovation and quick thinking, playing it safe is unlikely to impress, and taking the right risk at the right moment calculated on the spot can be what it takes to close the sale. These candidates still have time to course correct or double down on their strides, and in the same way, an account is seldom awarded after an early high stakes encounter. To internalize the impact of your efforts and incorporate that into a subsequent approach is to know you participated in the event rather than performed. The real prize can still be up for grabs, which takes you back to the process, the cycle — preparation, extemporaneous interaction, authenticity, and strategic evaluation to reposition.

Landing an account of any size will never be the same as a Presidential Debate, but maybe with President Obama and Governor Romney at the podium fixed in your mind, your next high pressured sales call might be a tiny bit better.

September 9, 2012 by Ken Goldstein - 19 Comments

The Best of 75 Years

We just celebrated my father’s 75th birthday. At dinner I asked him to note the most profound change he had seen in his lifetime, technology or otherwise. I found his answer surprising, but not really.

Before the punchline, a little background and perspective. Surely you can do the math in your head, but to be 75 now you had to be born after the full resolution of World War I, but before the full onset of World War II. The United States was at peace, but not yet a Super Power. There were no televisions in homes; radio dominated news and entertainment, respectively starring Edward R. Murrow and The Lone Ranger. The suburbs as we know them had not really come into being, largely because our highway system was nascent. Automobiles were becoming common, but with gasoline prices crossing a dime a gallon, middle class families got by with a single vehicle that was mostly for work commuting. Flushing toilets were common in cities, but once you got out of cities, you could easily find yourself at a country home with a detached outhouse. The stock market crash was still pretty fresh in people’s minds, and the Great Depression was not over.

What followed in the ensuing three-quarters of a century was nothing short of astonishing. Adolf Hitler, a single individual of unimaginably maniacal influence, brought forth the Holocaust and World War II, ultimately defeated by an alliance that championed freedom and democracy as global standards. We saw the invention of nuclear power and its expression in the form of a deployed atomic bomb, the first true weapon of mass destruction. We saw the birth of Israel, the end of the British Empire, the birth of Social Security, and the end of the Great Depression.

In the United States we then experienced immense growth in our economy, reputation, and standard of living. The Interstate Highway system connected our nation in all directions for easy travel and access. Affordable single family homes in the suburbs became realities with the growth of tracts, sometimes referred to as Levittowns after their New York model in Nassau County. Radio gave way to black and white television, initially dominated by local programming (a good deal of it arena wrestling), soon after dominated by coast to coast live network broadcasts, eventually in color. Commercial air flight became real, first short hop prop planes with very cold cabins, then pressurized jetliners flying coast to coast in a quarter of a day (with decent free food even in coach). McDonald’s offered the same hamburger at about the same price in almost every state, going to college became accessible to the middle class, and entry-level business jobs for big emerging brand factories like P&G, Kraft, and Pillsbury were plentiful. There was Elvis, The Beatles, stereo cabinets for record collections, and revolving credit accessed via imprinted plastic cards to help pay for it all.

We fought a war with fighter jets over Korea and with Napalm in Vietnam. We stockpiled ICBMs in an arms race with the Soviet Union — they beat us into manned space flight, we beat them into orbit and to the moon. We saw personal computers take over our desks — first at work, then at home — and typewriters carted off to recycling. We got cell phones initially the size of briefcases, then the size of candy bars. We got 100 channels of cable TV, then 1000 channels of satellite TV. We got the Internet. We saw the dotcom bubble burst, then we got iPods, iPhones, and iPads. ATMs and debit cards have almost replaced cash, we don’t really need stock brokers or travel agents anymore, and talking about organ transplants is only tempered by available donors. Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Amazon sell us pretty much everything we need at real-time comparable prices, and we can travel to Russia or China without any real restrictions.

It’s a brave new world. It’s astonishing, truly astonishing, all that progress in one lifetime, a brilliant, beautiful lifetime still unfolding.

And yet none of that was Dad’s response to what had changed most. We talked about all of it, late into the night, sometimes with a chuckle, sometimes with misty confusion about the timeline. It was baffling how much he had seen, how vividly he could remember the primitive then, how normal the world around him with all its developments seemed now.

Yet with all that in mind, here’s what Dad thought had most changed — people’s acceptance of others.

Oh, that.

When Dad was a child, it just seemed so normal that most people stayed among people most like themselves. Ethnic groups lived in ethnic neighborhoods. People of the same color lived together, occasionally interacted in the workplace, but seldom mixed freely in bars or restaurants. Social and cultural diversity were occasional topics of intelligent discussion, but in everyday life for most people were in terribly short supply. Interracial and interreligious marriage was a very big deal, no matter where you lived — it happened, but it was not the norm. When Dad traveled to and from Florida in the days before Rosa Parks, there really were separate drinking fountains, separate lunch counters, separate universities. Jackie Robinson signed his minor league contract in 1945 and walked on the field with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Separate but Equal was not ruled out by law until 1954. That was change that really started the times a’ changing.

In 1960 John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic President of the United States. Cesar Chavez co-founded what would become the UFW with Dolores Huerta in 1962. In 1964 the first Asian American woman, Patsy Mink, was elected to Congress. In 1965 the reverent Sandy Koufax declined the honor of pitching in the first game of the World Series because it coincided with the most sacred of Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur. Jump forward to 2008 and the American people elected Barack Obama as President, on whose watch we quickly sent “don’t ask don’t tell” to the scrap heap of divisiveness. None of these milestones went unacknowledged, but with each the comfort level of individuals to be among those of different backgrounds became increasingly more common, increasingly more a cultural norm.

I don’t think anyone today can call our work done, but look around and you will see a heck of a work in progress. Our friends, our families, our colleagues, we are not uniform. We have seen a parade of civil rights, religious rights, gender rights, human rights. We are a blended society not because we are forced to be, but because it is wonderful and enjoyable and natural to do so. To study and embrace that which is different from our own backgrounds is to celebrate diversity as a shared value that can never be taken for granted, but increasingly warrants less special attention as it becomes more is than isn’t — less lacking, more present. That’s what Dad sees as most different from the days when it was not so, and hopefully what children today will never think twice about as they move through their next 75 years.

That’s good change, with a lot to do still ahead, but a world that looks different and Thinks Different because it is the very reflection of progress. We mix, we share our heritage, we worry less how we are different, we worry more about our common bonds in humanity.

That was a birthday dinner worth remembering, a real lesson in progress for us younger folks, a message forever.

Thanks, Dad. Once again, Happy 75th. You remembered well. You shared even better.

Live Together In Peace.

September 19, 2011 by Ken Goldstein - 4 Comments

Not Just a Test

Maybe we have so many problems right now that we’re simply at overload, so much so that there is practically no bad news headline that can hold our attention for very long. We don’t have enough jobs, we’re stuck in two wars, contractors are fleecing our government when they are supposed to be helping with the wars, we are at internal political gridlock, our tax code is horribly broken, our roads and bridges and pipes are giving out, home prices are going in the wrong direction and too many people are stuck underwater with bad mortgages, and mother nature has been serving up an unusual amount of natural disaster pounding. That’s not all of it, but it’s a lot. It’s a wonder we aren’t in a worse mood.

So when yet another negative headline comes at us, it is any wonder it’s a one day wonder, if that, and we just don’t have any appetite to deal with it? No, human nature at a certain point just shuts down, so it’s understandable. But I think this one is core, and we can’t let it go:

Last week we learned that U.S. SAT scores for reading and writing hit a new low, with math scores also declining. Here’s a quick summary as noted in the Wall Street Journal:

The results from the college-entrance exam, taken by about 1.6 million students, also revealed that only 43% of students posted a score high enough to indicate they were ready to succeed in college, according to the College Board, the nonprofit that administers the exam. Students had to score a 1550 out of a possible 2400 to meet that benchmark, which would indicate a 65% chance of getting at least a B-minus average in the first year of college, the Board calculated.

Okay, so not everyone does great on tests, it’s an acquired skill, and not everyone is college bound. What’s the big deal? Quoting further:

“At the precise time the importance of a college degree is increasing, the ability of the U.S. to compete in a global economy is decreasing,” said Jim Montoya, vice president of the College Board. “We, as a nation, have to do a better job preparing our kids for college.”

Let’s go back to the litany of problems, starting with the one about which President Obama recently gave a special speech to a joint session of Congress and the American People. In that speech, the President said that right now, Job #1 is Jobs. Barring some untold natural or unnatural crisis on the horizon, I am guessing that Job #1 doesn’t change through the next Presidential election. After that, Jobs will probably remain Job #1 until unemployment is below 7% or so, which could be a long, long time — and there is no guarantee that it will ever be corrected, we have no natural entitlement to Jobs. We have to create them.

Is there not a little irony here? Is it possible we are trying to solve a problem in the short-term that was created in the long-term and can only be solved in the long-term? Do we not see a link between falling test scores and an inability to compete? Perhaps it’s fair to say that’s a little abstract, even obtuse — we all know plenty of well-educated, intelligent people who are out of work, so maybe that’s not the problem. But let’s try to roll the clock forward a generation or two, at which time it is likely yours truly and many of you will be but particles of dust and memories. Is there anyone who believes if a lot more than 43% of our kids can’t do better than 1550 out of 2400 that we are going to be the first stop on the investment train? I’m not talking goosing the scores through prep programs and gaming strategies, I’m talking read the paragraph and answer the question, add the numbers in a column, writing a few coherently linked sentences that make a point. That can’t be too much to ask for a high majority of the citizens of the #1 economy in the world, unless that doesn’t matter to us anymore either.

How did we slip? Well, just when we got a little too distracted by so many consumer options created by our magnificent economy, as Thomas L. Friedman told us, the World Got Flat. Competition for jobs become global. Demand for commodities became global. The internet and telecom made easy information exchange global. Industrial contracts are up for bid regardless of geography. Lots more people are attending many more years of school in places like India and China — and they are taking school very seriously, as an opportunity and a privilege, a gift that lets them advance the way we thought about education when our middle class was emerging over 100 years ago.

If we don’t think of education as a gift but instead a legal mandate to be tolerated, how do we compete in a world that is flat? If we don’t use the time we have to be here with each other to absorb the knowledge collective, how much of life have we missed? If our kids don’t learn math and science and history and language, what kind of leaders will they fall prey to electing? Learning is at the core of prosperity, fulfillment, and public safety. Why aren’t we treating it that way?

We can’t afford to let this be just another piece of bad news, another negative headline that just goes by because we are overwhelmed. If we want to fix the problem at its core, we need to think long-term. This isn’t unemployment, this isn’t terrorism, this isn’t social security or Medicare, this isn’t the banking system, this isn’t GNP, this isn’t an emergency brought on by the ground shaking or the winds howling or the rivers flooding. It isn’t even global warming or protecting our precious planet. I get it, we have a lot of priorities, too much to fix and not enough dough to fix it all.

I would still make our education system our #1 priority — because if we don’t fix that, the other stuff is just going to stay broken.

It’s not just a test. It’s an evaluation, a form of measurement, a benchmark, an early warning system. We’re getting bad grades. We need to do better. Shame on us for letting it slip to this level. We either get on it now, or we don’t.

I say hit the books — make that Job #1.

July 18, 2011 by Ken Goldstein - 4 Comments

On Polarization

In my last post I suggested that a good product development process was not democratic, it was the product of clear leadership, shared vision, teamwork, and consensus building. Given the unacceptable performance of our elected leaders currently chewing up news headlines, I wondered what application effective free enterprise might have on the product development process that is democracy. What can we expect of democracy in the laws and policies it creates if we think of that enterprise as group of employees whom we fund?

Imagine working for a company where you were assigned to solve an extremely difficult, hugely complex, mission critical project, and the best your team could come up with was a status quo stalemate where almost any way you projected various outcomes of the stalemate, the company was doomed to failure. Because of the stalemate, you were more concerned about whether you would have a job when all was said and done than whether you helped your company make any progress solving the problem. Your supreme tactic would be to blame the other side of the stalemate for the stalemate, and hope that enough people believed your story rather than theirs so that you survived and they didn’t.

Then the proverbial *$&# hit the fan.

Would this somehow be a justifiable position? Ethically, emotionally, or logically? Would you feel good about yourself, that you had acted within the bounds of expectation for which you had been given authority? Would you really think you were safe from the temporarily ducked wrath of those who put you in the job?

I don’t think so.

Ringing any bells?

It is essential that we always remember in a democracy the government works for the people. That’s makes every taxpayer an employer, since we fund the operations of our elected officials and those they appoint. Think of yourself as a traditional employer. If your employees were acting in the way our government is acting — posturing and manipulating and behaving with a level of dysfunction that would never be acceptable in any corporation — would you continue to tolerate it? I would not. I would demand cooperation, collegiality, collaboration, and progress. Most of all, I would insist on honesty over spin, humility before ego. That is only right in exchange for the trust of authority, plus salary and benefits.

How do we lose sight of this? Because we fear government? Because we don’t understand government? Because we have become cynical and weary listening to rhetoric in all the media channels it now flows, endless noise absent of substance that drives us to the refuge of silence? Because we are overwhelmed by the process of government where change seems so elusive we find it less painful not to engage than to engage?

Hegelian dialectic encapsulates a framework where the evolution of ideas and events is resolved through history in a process of thesis meeting antithesis resulting in synthesis. Any reasonable person can understand this even if he or she has never heard of Hegel, who may be attributed disproportionate credit for the model. The concept is as much observation and interpretation as it is construct, opposing opinions are always present and result in outcomes, intended or not. Nation A and Nation B do not have a shared belief set. If they resolve their differences amicably, change occurs. If they do not resolve their differences amicably, they go to war. One point of view slams into another point of view, one largely prevails, and change also occurs — much of it unpredictable. We can only hope that the change is for the better, we cannot ensure it. Consider the consequences of knowing attempts to drive change for unsound motivation — we get what we get.

We know that change happens when the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the same. If we accept the status quo of the current process, the pain will remain. If we demand better, we will get it. Self-serving entrenchment is not a strategy of public service, partnership is. This requires more than a letter or two to our elected officials threatening the loss of your vote, it requires a consistent communication loop that makes our expectations of consensus building a mandate, a necessity rather than an abstract goal.

It is an honor and a privilege to serve in elected public office, not an entitlement and in democracy not a power grab. It was never meant to be a career, it was meant to be an opportunity for those with some hard-won bits of knowledge, experience, and wisdom to give back to the community through a period of public service. That is the beauty and brilliance of representative democracy, the leadership is expected to evolve and turn over specifically for the public good. When we all forget that and allow the political landscape to exist as an ecosystem unto itself — an inorganic bureaucracy that feeds and fuels its own self-aggrandizing perpetuation — we abandon good business practice and invite shenanigans.

I don’t expect the government to make a profit, it is a service organization meant to be self funding for critical needs, thus the true practices of free enterprise cannot apply. Yet the basic behaviors and expectations of executives and managers that any responsible and passionate business owner or employer would demand must apply, or dysfunction will continue, and the business owners will suffer the consequences. If you have ever been part of an enterprise where management allowed dysfunction to take over, you know how quickly the tables can turn and the potential devastating outcome. It can happen quickly, without enough warning, and without a path to correction.

We all learn in grade school that the framers created a series of checks and balances specifically to ensure that one set of ideas did not permanently crush another. However they did not design our legislative product development process so that it would bring stagnation and impasse, anymore than a business would want checks and balances to impede innovation and growth. Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill showed us just a generation ago that we can have our cake and eat it too, so there is a proven model in recent memory. We need to embrace that now or we all lose.

Good managers do not leave the most important problems to the last second.

Good managers appreciate the differences in the points of view around them and strengthen their outcomes with a mix of ideas.

Good managers talk to each other, not with poorly staged sound bytes to third-party forums to relay messages to each other.

Good managers put the enterprise and those they serve first, their teams above self-interest, and only accept reward when those conditions are met.

This isn’t hard, it is standard operating procedure for anyone who has ever worked in an important company role under time sensitive and otherwise impossibly difficult circumstances.

Demand better as an employer. We deserve it. We’re footing the bill. This we have in common, all of us.