Seth Godin threw down a leadership challenge to get us started.  There was lots of stuff here from his latest book, Tribes. 

Key questions from Seth were:

• Who are you?
• Who are you connecting?
• Who are you leading?

Interestingly he used the story of Tom’s shoes - with Tom’s shoes, for every pair of shoes a person buys Tom’s gives one to a person in a poor country. What is interesting about this model is how ’sticky’ the story is.  If a person comments on someone else’s Tom’s shoes then quick enough the owner of the shoes is telling the story.  This is a fantastic way to get an idea spreading!

I’m bundling the next two speakers together: moviemakers Jake Ebert and Yann Arthus-Bertrand.  Both showed clips from their forthcoming movies…Oceans and Home.  Nice looking movies…the sessions themselves were not provocative or interesting enough to stop me looking at my watch.

Recently I’ve been on the wrong end of poor service from a couple of companies.  One is a professional services company, a legal firm, and the other has been providing some of our back-end accounts functions – primarily invoicing, payroll and debt collection.

So, this got me thinking…if I applied those things that I don’t like about the way these companies behave to my own organisation how do we measure up?

This was prompted also by Seth Godin’s entry Four Words in which he makes the point that if you fail to overpromise and under-deliver all of the marketing in the world isn’t going to save you.

Back to my legal firm…what went wrong?

·         Something that should have been reasonably straightforward became intensely complicated and way over the top for the scale of my business.  After four months, I brought my accountant into the picture who came up with a simple solution immediately that all parties agreed would work.

·         The four months!  In fact it has been even longer as we are now into May.  And we have only progressed at the speed we have due to constant prodding.

·         An under-powered junior assigned to my task.  Now, I can see the value of using juniors, especially if the saving is passed on to the customer.  But if it takes longer, and it uses more of my time, and the junior has to be poked and prodded then no thanks I’d rather pay the extra and get someone who knows what they’re doing.

And the accounting services firm:

·         Errors, errors, errors – again it cost us more in internal time checking, correcting and rechecking than it was taking us before we outsourced.

·         Constant reminders and things being missed.

What are the principles that should be distilled for us?  Here’s my top 5:

1.       Assign the right people to the job with the right level of competence. 

2.       Treat our customers’ business like our own – it has to matter to us and we have to get the detail right.

3.       Related to 2. Be proud of our customers.  If we can’t be proud of the work that our customers do and the things that they stand for then we shouldn’t be working with them.  Why not?  Because we won’t bring sufficient commitment and passion to the table.

4.       Our customers should never be chasing us up for deliverables.  That is not their job – it is our job to deliver on time when we say we will.

5.       Pay as much attention to ‘surprising and delighting’ our existing and past customers as we do to getting new customers.  Not just unexpectedly – to both us and them – but by asking ourselves for each assignment: “Is there anything extra here that I can give that would make a difference?”  We are not aiming for world domination, we’re not about grow, grow, grow.  We’re a team of specialists who pride ourselves in doing excellent work and making a contribution to New Zealand competing on the world stage.

Are we always going to get it right?  No…but certainly looking through the lens of these 5 principles will help us to get it right more often.

We are all familiar with the concept of icons - visual cues that tell us what to do or what something means.

Occasionally I come across a word or a phrase that makes it into my vocabulary of verbal shortcuts.  This isn’t something that can be predicted in advance.  It just happens when the phrase fits and feels right.  Like a visual cue it conveys much more meaning than is apparent at first glance/listen.

Seth Godin’s book The Dip has provided us with a phrase that has been the most powerful verbal shortcut that we have used in our business in the past year.  This is not a book review - ‘The Dip’ has been out for a while and many have commented - nor is it a synopsis of the key ideas.  For a succinct summary take a look at Andy Wibbel’s mindmap of The Dip.

Rather this is about how a phrase, that captures the imagination and is simple but conveys much more, can help individuals and organisations accelerate their thinking.

We talk about ‘The Dip’ in relation to where we are on the chart.  Common questions for us are:

• Is this helping us to be best in the world 
• Is this making it harder for others to follow - Seth suggests finding a field with a steep dip and then making it through.  Things worth doing have a dip
• Is this something we should quit - yes, sometimes quitting can be the behaviour of champions.  The key is not to quit when its hard (and emotions and challenges are both running high) but rather to know when to quit before the fact and then to apply that criteria when the pressure comes on - this tells us whether to quit or whether this is part of the dip and we need to persevere.

So, in our business when we say The Dip we’re asking all three questions and accelerating the speed at which we can get to the answers.

Another phrase that we use a lot is Big Rocks. I’ve got no idea who initially coined this phrase but was stunned recently when a group of people I was working with hadn’t heard of it.  Big rocks refers to getting your priorities in place first and then dealing with the other incidentals (the pebbles and the sand) that come up during the course of a week or a month or whatever time period you are considering.  Zen Habits has a useful piece about Big Rocks.  Of course, in my situation the verbal shortcut wasn’t because no-one else had a frame of reference for it so I had to start explaining about priorities and rocks and sand and of course the moment was lost!  Wise to this, I next used the phrase ‘big rocks’ in a training and preceeded it with a volunteer from the audience filling a beaker with rocks, pebbles and sand.

Using ‘big rocks’ in our business discussion helps us shift the focus quickly and smoothly to priorities.

What verbal shortcuts do you use?  Where have they originated from?