The Future of Business

By: Pete Machalek Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Back in the early 90s, I read an article predicting that the future of business was to follow the Hollywood model. Being a film guy, a was attracted by the headline, so I excitedly read the article.

It was an interesting piece that described the Hollywood business model as this:

Your Future Career

The future of business is more, faster change. The best way to survive and thrive in all that change is to flex with the flux.

  • A project comes into existence.
  • Independent professionals gather around that project to form a team.
  • The project goes into pre-production.
  • The project gets produced.
  • The project moves into post-production.
  • The project is released into the world.
  • The project succeeds or fails.
  • Meanwhile, all of the independent professionals that worked on the project break apart back into their independent elements again.
  • Those independent professionals move on to their next project.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this article, not only because in the intervening years I’ve become an independent professional, but because I’ve been seeing more and more evidence that the article was truly prophetic. More people are going independent, and those that aren’t are changing jobs more frequently, often having different responsibilities from position to position.

This trend is not solely because of the economy going sour, although I’m sure that this is an important reason.

More people are tasting independence and loving it. Pop culture has taken to celebrating entrepreneurs and entrepreneurialism. More and more tools are available for individuals to help them promote independent ventures. Business franchises modeled specifically for individuals operating out of their homes are sprouting up all over the place.

It’s an exciting time.

And for many of us, it’s a scary time too. The world is changing faster every day. Technology is moving faster than anyone can keep up with. And the business world is moving right along with it.

Fast Company magazine recently featured an article about “Generation Flux,” covering a gaggle of professionals who all share the trait of reinventing themselves serially over the course of their careers, sometimes for seemingly whimsical reasons, but ultimately because they are responding to the changes they perceive going on around them in the business world. Sometimes they are starting their own businesses, sometimes they are going into existing companies. Many of them say that they don’t have much of a plan. But by one measurement or another, they are all successful.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” — Charles Darwin

 

The article ultimately made a Darwinian point: The best way — maybe the only way — for us to not only survive, but thrive, is to change with the times.

This doesn’t mean we have to constantly change everything about ourselves to keep our heads above water. We don’t have to become anything we’re not. We don’t need to throw any of our skills away. We don’t need to constantly get training to learn new jobs that are obsolete by the time our training is complete.

What it does mean is that we need to be flexible in how we think, and let that flexible thinking inform what we do. We need to define ourselves not by what we do on a day-by-day basis, but by the change we make in the world, and whom we make it for.

Focusing on what we *do* is often bound by the specific circumstances of the moment, and therefore will change a lot. Focusing on the change we’re committed to creating connects us to bigger picture movements, and will allow us to follow consistent values inside of us while the specific nature of what we’re doing flexes with the flux surrounding us.

For many years, Deluxe Corporation could operate just fine thinking of itself as a company that prints checks. But as technology has made the use of checks plummet, it has needed to change course. And the only way for it to successfully do that was to stop thinking of itself in terms of what it did, and to start thinking of itself as to who it helped, and what change it wanted to create for those people it helped. The company is on better footing now, focusing on helping small business have what they need to run smoothly.

One of the seemingly simplest applications we do here at SagePresence is help people design their elevator pitch — a simple, concise way to communicate who and what they’re about.

It’s an incredibly powerful tool. Most of our clients want one because they want to have something both compelling and informative to say when people ask them what they do. Beyond that, the elevator pitches that we design for our clients help them tell people who they’re looking to help, and how they help them, so that the people they talk to are inspired to think about who they can connect them to.

So an elevator pitch is a vital networking tool.

But even more important than that, an elevator pitch is a simple and compelling message for us to hear. So that, every time we tell it, we remind ourselves what we’re about, why we’re here, what we’re looking to accomplish. In this way, an elevator pitch can also be a mission statement.

For instance, my elevator pitch for SagePresence coaching is this:

Business professionals come to me when they’re stuck in their career and they don’t know how to move forward. I help them get clear on what they want, and give them the tools and the skills they need to go for that goal. When I’m done, they’re thrilled to be moving with velocity toward the goals they know they want to achieve.

I love to see this and hear this because it resonates with who I know myself to be. I’m all about self-determination. I’m here to help people be who they are and make the difference that they’re here to make, regardless of the economy, or their background, or who they’re worried they are, or what other people have been telling them. People are happiest when they doing what they say they’re here for.

So I want to give everyone reading this an opportunity to do this for themselves, maybe for the first time. And at the same time, I want to hear it from you. What are you about? Why are you here? What are you looking to accomplish?

Give us your elevator pitch. Tell us four things:

  • A description of your target market. (“Who do you help?”)
  • A description of the problem that you help with. (“What situation are they in when they need you most?”)
  • A description of the solution you provide. (“What do you actually do for them?”)
  • A description of the better situation that you lead them to. (“What better situation are they in when you’re done?”)

Let us hear it, and let us know how it resonates for you to put it into language like this.

And for anyone out there who reads one of these elevator pitches and knows someone in the target market who is suffering from the problem that a poster describes, follow your instincts and make an introduction!

6 interesting opinions, add yours

Leadership Communication Skills — The Art of the Possible

By: Pete Machalek Tagged With: , , , ,

I wrote a post last week about the difference between criticism and leadership communication, suggesting that criticism is all about describing a negative situation, and that leadership uses a negative situation as a “not-so-happy beginning” to start a story that you can lead with.

Communication Skills and Leadership

Leadership communication skills are cultivated when we start to speak to the interests of our audience.

So, from one perspective, a leadership story has a lot in common with criticism.

From another, they are miles apart.

When we criticize (or complain or whine, etc.), we’re doing it for us. The target of the criticism might be the weather or the president or the political party on the other side of the fence from you or the political system or the people over there or whatever. But the audience of the criticism, the person it’s for, is ourselves. It’s satisfying to hear our own opinion out loud. In some way it separates us from the thing we’re criticizing, and emotionally can even put us above it. Maybe we imagine some kind of moral superiority by voicing the criticism.

When we create and give voice to leadership stories, on the other hand, we’re going way beyond that.

Maybe we’re starting from a similar place we’re in when we criticize. We’re spotting a problem in the world and giving voice to it. At that moment, we’re doing it for ourselves.

Then if we proceed to develop it into a leadership story, we’re thinking about who the problem we’re describing actually hurts. At this point, we’re starting to do it for them as well.

Finally, we need to start thinking about how to craft the story to ensure that it resonates for specific audiences, the people we want to take specific actions in order for the story to be realized. When we do this, we’re doing it for these audiences.

So criticism is really just for us, while leadership communication is for us, the community we want to help, and the people we want to inspire.

This is valuable to understand for a few reasons:

First, we often communicate publicly when really the only relevant audience is ourselves. Distinguishing when we’re  complaining just to hear ourselves complain can safeguard other people’s feelings and our own reputation all at the same time. In this age of social media where we all have powerful megaphones, we need to bear in mind who is on the receiving end of our diatribes, and we need to ask ourselves, what do we want out of this? Do we just want to get it out of our system? Do we want people to chime in so we create a community of people feeling bad about something? Or do we want people to do something about it?

If the answer to that last question is yes, then that leads us to the second reason this understanding is valuable.

We all know that not everybody cares about the same things. If you want people to do something about something that you care about, you’re going to have to craft your leadership stories so that they speak to what your audience cares about. The story that you come up with that motivates you into action may not be the one that motivates your target audience.

You have the potential to be employing leadership communication skills and creating leadership stories all the time. Every message that you put out to the world should be put out there with your specific audience firmly in mind, so that you can speak to what they care about, inspire the actions that need to happen, and create the result that you’re after.
What do you think of this? Do you ever complain? Can you feel the difference between how you’re being when you complain and when you lead? What does it take to shift you from one to the other?
12 interesting opinions, add yours

Leadership Communication Skills: Leading Vs. Criticizing

By: Pete Machalek Tagged With: , , , , ,

We are living in the age of punditry and criticism.

Criticizing is not leading

Criticizing is not leading.

Everywhere we turn, we’re exposed to an opinion that attacks, criticizes, and deconstructs. Our leaders don’t know what they’re doing, our system is corrupt, our institutions are broken, our laws are unfair — The targets of derision are all around us.

I don’t see this as a completely bad thing. I think it’s good that people are thinking about what’s going on. They’re processing it, and they’re coming up with an opinion about it based on their values and priorities. It’s good that they’re engaged and intelligent enough to formulate their thoughts.

But I do think what people are doing when they’re criticizing is incomplete. All they’re doing is describing a problematic situation. It’s almost indistinguishable from whining and complaining. I say “almost,” because I do think it’s more intellectual and reasoned than the typical emotional and knee-jerk qualities of whining and complaining. But the net result of criticizing, whining and complaining is all the same: It puts us as an audience into a negative place, and it leaves us there.

(And by the way, conscious or otherwise, I believe this is part of the intent of criticism. We’re in a bad place when we criticize, and we want others to join us in that bad place. So the payoff is in finding agreement, others of like mind, and in a sense, creating a community of negativity. Because misery loves company, right?)

I say criticism is incomplete because of the experience it creates for audiences. When we are exposed to criticism, it either resonates for us because we’re already in that bad place, or it takes us to that bad place. Then it just leaves us there.

Although sometimes we can experience a kind of communal enjoyment out of sharing a bad place with people, I think most of us don’t want to be stuck in that bad place. We want a way out of the bad place. We want a way forward. We want motion, we want progress, we want a feeling of improvement.

So it’s fine to criticize, in that it identifies a negative situation that others can emotionally resonate with. But it’s incomplete, in that it leaves people there.

So what happens if we don’t stop there? What if we proceed from the bad situation and talk about what needs to happen? What if we talk about what we want people to do? What if we talk about what we will do? And what if we then describe the better situation that will come about as a product of our actions?

All of a sudden it stops being just criticism, and it becomes something else. It becomes a leadership message.

This is the crucial difference between critics and leaders. Critics leave us in the Negative Now, while leaders only see the Negative Now as the beginning of something. Great stories start out in a negative place, so leaders actually appreciate problematic situations that we can agree on, because it gives them a place to lead us forward from.

We all can be leaders, just like we all can be critics. There’s no doubt that it’s harder to be a leader than it is to be a critic. It takes more work to envision a better future situation and to come up with ideas about what needs to happen, and who needs to do what, to lead us into that situation.

But the payoff is much greater as well. Rather than getting ourselves and our audiences stuck in a Negative Now, we’re moving people forward. We’re catalyzing something. We’re making a difference that we want to experience. We’re focused on where we’re going and on what we need to do to get there. And the Negative Now just becomes an increasingly meaningless background buzz that fades into history.

What do you think of this? What keeps people from stepping up from being critics to becoming leaders? What have you seen in others, and what have you experienced in yourself? What do you criticize that you could lead from? Share your thoughts below!

29 interesting opinions, add yours

CONFIDENT COMMUNICATION SKILLS: How to Get Over the Fear of Judgment

By: Pete Machalek

I’ve had a love/hate  relationship with judgment throughout my life.

Fear of Judgement

Our fear of judgment may be driven more by what's going on in our heads than in theirs.

As the youngest of a large, perhaps too-intellectual family, I got my share of the pain of criticism, and learned the joys of criticizing others — especially from a distance. There’s a perverse pleasure that comes out of picking things apart when you’re safely removed from the presence of whoever or whatever you’re criticizing.

So, I fell into a critical mindset at a pretty early age, experiencing the ego-boost that comes with that perspective.

But, I discovered, the downside of having a critical mindset is that you assume that when you get in front of other people, they are pointing their critical judgments at you. So, when I started presenting myself to others, I was absolutely debilitated by the idea that everyone out there was critiquing me, assessing me, picking me apart, and judging me. I was judging myself in the moment, which created a huge amount of mental static that made it really challenging to be in the moment with the people I was talking to.

But then something interesting happened.

I started working with Dean Hyers. Dean and I created an acting workshop and started working with actors, and right off the bat, Dean demonstrated how to build the skills of actors without saying anything about what they were doing wrong. Our actors invited us — some even urged us — to critique them, but Dean was absolutely resolute about how to work with them.

He got excited about what they were doing. He identified specific things that they were doing that he liked, and he suggested additional things that they could do as well. And the actors got better. Quickly and consistently.

But this post isn’t about how to get better performance out of others, it’s about how to get over the fear of judgment yourself. Interestingly, the mechanism for doing both of these things is one and the same.

The simple solution is to follow the words of the Bible: “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Or maybe it should be, “Judge not, lest ye worry about others judging ye.”

Judging, critiquing, criticizing — they’re all about identifying what’s wrong about something. I suppose we imagine that we’re helping someone by distinguishing between their good characteristics and their not-so-good characteristics, and letting them know about their bad ones so that they can shed them and just leave everything else about them that’s good.

What a wonderful service we’re providing.

Of course, it doesn’t quite work out that way, because we’re simply clarifying, maybe even magnifying, whatever we talk about. When we talk to people about what they’re doing wrong, those things tend to get worse, not better. It’s like whenever I consciously resist saying “um,” all of a sudden I can’t stop saying “um.” It gets worse and worse the more I try to stop doing what I know I shouldn’t be doing.

Maybe there’s no such thing as “bad” or “wrong” things outside of our perception. Maybe things just “are” or “aren’t.”

If that’s the case, then maybe we can completely abandon the practice of judging. Maybe we can just observe, and choose to focus on what works for us, what we like, and what excites us. And then we can communicate what we’re seeing, and in the process of that communication, we create more of what we want.

Following Dean’s lead over the years, I’ve been doing more and more of that. And you know what I noticed? The less I judged others, the less I worried about them judging me. And now, even when I’m presenting myself to a tough audience and they directly challenge me with something that previously would really rattle me because it sounded critical, it  tends to land more like an observation from a perspective different from mine, which is easy for me to appreciate exactly because it is different from mine, and ultimately it’s easy for me to work with.

Tell me what your experience of judgment is. How real is it? Does it get in your way when you try to present yourself? Do you think it’s possible or even a good idea to opt out of judging others?

 

16 interesting opinions, add yours

FROM VULNERABILITY TO POSSIBILITY: Communication Advice to Grow Opportunity

By: Dean Hyers Tagged With: , , , ,

It’s a bottom line world, but there are other lines worth looking at.

I want to speak to some of the really impressive wins I see that don’t have to do with winning, at least not directly.

The power of possibility lives in both our strength and our vulnerability. Our communication advice is to nurture the fragile voices and communicate to preserve an opportunity for ideas to be heard.

In the cracks of the big opportunities your organization’s representative face are all the day-in, day-out interactions that make up the fabric of your organization. They may not directly and obviously contribute to the bottom line, but each one can, down the road, lead to success or failure for the entire organization.

This post is about the little ideas that get shot down before they have their chance in the sunlight, and the smaller voices drowned out by the crescendo of aggressive competition and assertive energy.

These things happen largely for reasons related to communication. There’s always a voice with more communication skills, and another with less ability to articulate a perspective. But articulation is a rubber yardstick in the measurement of an idea’s potential, relative at best in an unequal playing field.

A good communicator (leader or team member) needs to do two things simultaneously:

  1. Continually develop the skills of articulation and presence, for their own articulation going out.
  2. Use their communication skills to rise above communication itself and seek the meaning behind other people’s imperfect articulation. (That’s how you level the playing field.)

Not all ideas are articulated equal. Not all professionals can articulate equally. You want to build communication skills while remembering that value lies only in the meaning which delivery is an attempt to transfer.

When I work in companies, I’m going for the win, but all around me I see other potentials. So I operate in a dualistic mindset. On the one hand I stick to the  mission, staying on task to justify my price. I never stray from the task at hand. For me, that usually means maximizing the star performers. I think of this focus as the melody.

On the other hand, I treat all potentials as equal, and never stop looking and listening for the quieter voice, the one holding back, and the forces at work that might be keeping them from standing up and being counted. For me, that usually means ignoring the star performers and focusing on the smaller players. I think of this focus as the harmony.

Is this landing to you as a contradiction? Well it should. It is a dualistic mindset, as both melody and harmony are important in the chorus of your business. Ten years in business as an owner, and ten years in businesses as a coach and consultant, I’ve seen clearly that melody gets far more attention than harmony. If it’s not cut and dry, it’s cut out and left to dry.

It seems to me as I look back at both my career and my life, I’ve been the protector of everything and everyone vulnerable – a shepherd of the delicate moments in my businesses and creative ventures. Somebody had to be in the circles I’ve walked, otherwise great potentials – both people and ideas – would never have gotten to shine. Fastest isn’t always best. Strongest isn’t always right. Most persuasive may not be better than least.

I realized only recently that that is the role I play in the room. Any room. Every day of my life. I am a bodyguard to the fragile idea, and to the weaker articulation that could be worthy of strengthening, not to mention the people themselves, who may be well worth it, but whose legs aren’t yet strong enough to stand on their own.

In that spirit I’ve saved a thousand lives – the lives of good ideas nobody was hearing, the career lives of those still working their way out of the cocoon, and the work lives of leaders, or would-be leaders, who need someone’s permission to consider that they should stand up, and that maybe someone would listen to them.

I’ve recently discovered that I’m not as alone in this undercover occupation as I thought I was. Of course Pete Machalek and I have been a dynamic duo together in this vigilante fight for the unheard voices. But there are others. Many of them are leaders who nobody recognizes as leaders at all. Unnoticed, they are the “one for all,” to whom nobody is their “all for one.” I always look for that person when I go to a new business to build their speaking skills.

Then there are the more visible, more recognized leaders. Julie Gilbert of Wolf Means Business is a visible protector of the vulnerable. She built an entire business around harnessing the power of under-recognized voices – most notably those of professional women. And for her contributions to a better future with respect to business culture, some people miss the point, seeing that it’s “nice” to focus on professional women, but missing the idea it’s driven not by altruism, but by an unwillingness to sit and let great potential go to waste, when one crop could double its yield by tapping more fully its very own resources – the ones right in front, on the payroll!

This is what I’m asking you to consider being in your work environment. Be the one who can stand strong enough to stay on mission, while keeping a watchful eye on the vulnerable people and possibilities on the periphery of that mission.

Right now, most working environments are flowerbeds of potential, with huge feet clumsily stomping on opportunities and resources they don’t recognize as having value. The clumsy feet are the classic business virtues of strength and competition, which have their place but are incomplete on their own, and all too often damage anything vulnerable.

I’m going to explore this topic further in two more posts, including specific examples of what I’m talking about when I say, “protecting the vulnerable possibilities and fragile voices.” And I’m going to explore how that plays out in the daily world, but I want to explore it with you, not at you. This isn’t our usual SagePresence blog topic. What does it mean to you? What does it say?

Share with me your thoughts on this so that we can pull  the subject into focus  after we’ve heard something from you. Please comment below, and check out the followup to this post, which focuses the concept on the vulnerability within people who already seem strong.

15 interesting opinions, add yours
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