Tim’s Blog

I read a lot about stress in the workplace. Apart from the fact I discovered that if you read too much about it you tend to become stressed, there are a multitude of solutions being proposed to beat it. From seminars to massages everyone is falling over themselves in a mad rush to zenitude. And why not? If everyone is less stressed then power to the people I say.

But overcoming stress is just one step in the way to fluid decision making and unless your stress is totally debilitating and you are reduced to a writhing mass on the floor, you can be stressed or not and no one really cares. In business what ultimately matters is if you can continue throw yourself into the fray and get the job done.

This act of going over the edge to make the decision is the moment which should be studied.

It’s the moment when you lose control. You have all the knowledge and facts behind you, you have prepared for this moment, you have stressed for this moment and when it comes you really can’t do anything else except enjoy the ride. It’s a jump from the high board, it’s walking in the rain, it’s that perfect golf shot. It’s letting go.

Think about this moment and learn to let go with grace. Practice letting go with the inevitability which comes with the final moments. Remember when you were a kid walking in the rain and the moment you realized you were wet and you weren’t going to get any wetter or the moment you jumped off that divng board and you realize you can’t crawl back up in the sky. You’re scared shitless but it’s a type of joy.

This moment is why you stress. This moment is what makes everything worthwile.

So, what do we do? Naomi Dunford at Ittybiz throws up the idea and I love games where I am the centre of attention so here goes…

What’s your game? What do you do?

Our company, Coote Libeau sells foreign language communication training in France. Mostly English but also Chinese, German, Italian, Spanish and French as a foreign language to non-French speakers (FLE).

Why do you do it? Do you love it, or do you just have one of those creepy knacks?

Probably both. Christophe and I fell into doing this a number of years ago coming from different professional backgrounds and apart from our linguistic capacities we have the creepy knack of reading the needs of the market and continually adapting our offer. Personally I love the contact with the companies and working with motivated professionals regardless of the sector of activity.

Who are your customers? What kind of people would need or want what you offer?

The kind of people who want us want to communicate more efficiently in a foreign language. Our clients range from a couple of the biggest companies in France to three guys in a garage with a cool business idea and some vague contacts in China.

We analyse what the company needs to communicate then come up with ways to do it with the least amount of pain. Communicating in a foreign language in a professional context inevitably touches on personal questions of self esteem and self confidence. It’s not as easy as just learning the words in the dictionary and that’s where we can help people.

What’s your marketing USP? Why should I buy from you instead of the other losers?

Our unique selling proposition is our crossover between training and consulting. The language training courses which the other losers are selling are constructed as products which may or may not correspond to the company. The companies buy a pack and then needs to mould what they might have learned to their own context.

We use the client’s context as our starting point to build an adapted training program around it.

What’s next for you? What’s the big plan?

Continue to adapt (I know it doesn’t sound like a big plan but still…). We aren’t experts in the sense of some being guys who study dirt for seventeen years then write a 200 000 word thesis about it and become known as the “dirt guys”. It’s probably tough for these guys to do something different because dirt is their thing.

This is our thing for now but we are flexible and curious and if we see the market shifting and the needs changing then I would love to think we would be intelligent enough to produce something different which could continue to help people.

So there you have it. Brief and easy to digest (kind of like a prune, maybe we should change our logo Christophe, we’ll talk more about it next week…)

Here’s something to chew on - don’t blow an opportunity. I’ll explain. I was invited to a round table-ish presentation and sat next to a guy I’d seen before. I knew he was the president of some regional consultancy thing and I took the time to say hello and even threw caution to the wind by saying I was interested to know more about his gig. I gave him the ten word pitch about what we do and waited for some sign of reciprocal interest and/or the possibilty of further conversation. What happened? Nothing. Zip. The guy clams up and tells me nothing which is the same as being snubbed.

Now let’s imagine I’m not the dashing professional that I am for a moment and pretend I was dressed like a bum with egg on my shirt. I was presenting an opportunity to Mr. Regional President of whatever consultancy thingy (I actually have all the details about this group and am being coy for those who haven’t caught on) and he chose to ignore it. His group makes money by making people pay to be part of a larger federated group to feel less isolated as independant consultants.

Now maybe the guy is incredibly astute and recognized immediately I didn’t fit the profile (not being independant with that vaguely crazed and wild look of the newly proclaimed consultant) but I presented him with an opportunity anyway. When presented with opportunity (or permission as some may call it) don’t blow it off. Blowing off a presented opportunity is worse than having no opportunity at all. Naomi Dunford (in serious mea culpa mode but still as witty as ever) looks at this from the flip side after snubbing someone she probably shouldn’t have because business is about people and all politicking aside, the business you end up with is the one you deserve.

Despite what it looks like this is not a post to vent my feelings about the aforementioned regional president bozo but to ruminate on how easy it is to lose business by not paying attention to the knocking of opportunity. Good luck everyone and be careful for whom the doorbell tolls…

Okay so this breaks every rule of good sense. It’s not ecologically friendly nor particularly intelligent but it’s cool. Aux armes, citoyens, Formez vos bataillons, Marchons, marchons… !

After sales service is stupid. Customers don’t want after sales service because if you are in the after sales service line it means there is some problem. In France the after sales service is a choice of pushing endless buttons on your phone at the demand of some computerized woman until you can speak to a real person who may or may not be situated in the country and who may or may not give you some real response to your problem or if you have a bought a product you find a little desk at the end of a dank alley somewhere in the store with a person ready to push a button which brings down the cone of silence if the conversation becomes too heated.

These companies probably congratulate themselves on the fact they are providing any after sales service at all and giving the boffin who managed to cut the cost down to the bone by hiring people in Marocco to do the phones for a third of the wages they would have had to shell out in France. This experience is going to dictate the image left in my head of your company. If you are under performing and/or cheap this is of course stupid.

Any money invested in making a proactive strategy of customer service is not wasted. Cutting into this strategy for the sake of rounding out the figures and increasing margins are the first steps to the death of your company. Sound severe? You bet it’s severe. And so are the customers who have the choice to give you money or not.

Bill Price from Driva Solutions who has just written this book cooks the problem down to seven tangible steps which can help companies fix service problems, cut costs, and improve customer relations all at the same time:

1. Eliminate dumb or avoidable contacts to free up capacity and slash costs.
2. Build self-service that works to free up even more capacity and cut costs even more.
3. Find ways to be proactive rather than reactive because it is often cheaper than waiting.
4. Engage the real “owners” of customer problems to work with the customer service team to fix the problems
5. Make it really easy to contact your business.
6. Use the contacts you get to listen closely to the customer, and act upon WOCAS (What Our Customers Are Saying)
7. Fix reporting metrics, processes, and the staffing side to deliver great experiences for customer contacts.

read full interview with Guy Kawasaki here

We are in an experience-based age. We want to know how things make us feel because it will determine our choices as customers in the future. If you are still worrying about how to produce your stuff more cheaply and how to hide from any customer problems through a smoke screen of badly paid and grumpy after sales service people whose task is to deflect and hide at all costs the chances are you won’t have to worry for too much longer.

Now of course this is getting the crap Digged out of it because it’s everyone’s secret fear. Some blow hard from Newsweek back in the mid-nineties ranted about how the internet would never change anything and even gave a couple of good reasons why at the end. I’m sure all the converted who are scrambling over themselves to put this on their blogs and are Twittering like content little birds somewhere deep inside hope they will never be caught out like this.

It’s a type of technophobia in reverse which petrifies the newly geeked propelling them to read blogs about obscure companies in Silicon Valley and to wade their way through applications and programs because they may just be missing out on the next big thing. Of course you must also be the first to poo poo the next big thing once it’s too big - a la Facebook. I admit it’s complicated.

Anyway, I wonder how many had conversations like this in the nineties and I wonder how many would have even sidled with our hapless journalist here. Happy nostalgia…

HYPE ALERT: WHY CYBERSPACE ISN’T, AND WILL NEVER BE, NIRVANA

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them–one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connectios, try again later.”

Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We’re told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you’ve got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

STOLL is the author of "Silicon Snake Oil–Second Thoughts on the Information Highway," to be published by Doubleday in April.

© 1995

This from Social Technologies which Dave Amarno has kindly put into picture form will kick-start some reflection in the soul of any business. Are you hitting at least five of these dots everytime? Good luck.

When I was a kid I used to fish with my father. I grew up by the sea and when we fished we fished out at sea in a boat. Anything other kind of fishing was (and probably still is) considered not real fishing and therefore relegated to amusing the tourists.

My father taught me early how to recognize the tourists because they were always better equipped than us and fishing in stupid places i.e. not in a boat on the sea. They would fish off of rocks or on the beaches in the surf or God forbid in lakes or worse in creeks (any freshwater fishing - or fishing in puddles as it was commonly known - is not even to be talked about, such is the disdain us locals had for it) and they would be weighed down with all sorts of crap which made them spend more time fiddling with their fishing rigs than having the line in the water hoping to hook a fish. Also their bait smelled and they wore the wrong shoes.

We had one line which hung delicately over a forefinger with two hooks on the end of it baited with local shellfish and a two ounce sinker attached to spool which stayed wedged under a rubber soled thong. The line was thrown into sand patches between the seaweed which you learnt to spot in the depths of the cold Southern Ocean after squinting like crazy since birth (I have the crow’s feet wrinkles to prove it) and we would wait.

The prize was the King George Whiting. The only fish which mattered. Sure there were other fish which we accepted into the catch but the King George was what motivated all locals to fish. The flesh is snow white and firm with a taste so delicate any local worthy of the name would happily eat at least one every day and no one ever asked why such a mythical fish would be named after a mad English king.

To catch a whiting is an exercise in patience and fish psychology and is not something you can acquire overnight. In fact most of the other fish we would catch didn’t really amount to fishing at all. They would just dart out and commit suicide on the hook and all which was left to do was to reel the poor things in. Tommy Rough and flathead and the hated trumpeter would all just bluster out and attack the bait so hard and in one hit the hook would embed itself in their heads. Any self respecting fisherman wouldn’t consider this to be fishing. But the whiting is a different story and any patience I possess today I owe to thinking like a King George whiting.

A whiting will come out of the weed and try to suck the bait off the hook. You could feel them down there moving on and off the sand patch waiting and circling and little by little they would play with you. The line which is balanced over your forefinger will tug ever so gently like little Morse code taps. One or two at first then they stop. Has the bait been sucked off the hook or do I wait? Move the sinker an inch on the bottom to make the bait come alive and wait. One tap, two taps and pull. If you are lucky all hell breaks loose and the line goes haywire. Right to the end you must pull the whiting in as smoothly as possible because the fact that they suck at the bait means you tend to jag them in the extremities of their mouths, or lips and if you try to yank them in too quickly they unhook themselves and disappear.

I haven’t fished for twenty years but last night whilst tossing and turning in a night of fitful sleep I remembered fishing for whiting. And what I remembered most was how to wait with the degree of respect we had for those dumb fish.

Sonia of Remarkable Communication posted about the annoyance of being bombarded by contemporary clutter especially by those who have no idea of what it means to wait and Naomi of Itty Biz writes about waiting and analyzing the Y’s and E’s in the road (read the post you’ll get it) and it seems like in an era of me, me, me, now, now, now I’m happy my cerebral cortex thrust me back into a boat off the coast of South Australia.

Sometimes waiting, for those who know how, is the best thing you can do.

If you don’t know how to present you could do much worse than to copy this. Stanford University professor Larry Lessig is the cream of how to use story and image to captivate an audience with a subject as potentially boring as the shortcomings of pre-digital intellectual property laws, and how bad laws beget bad code. There are no boring subjects there are only boring ways to present those subjects and these 19 minutes are pure pleasure…

I always have the impression I’m the last person to discover cool stuff but here’s something which I will pass on to non-native English speakers who want to read real articles from the New York Times. Just double left click on any word and a number of definitions are given in a new window and depending on the context of the word, you choose which is the most pertinent (hey, it can’t do everything). It’s a great tool for wading through an economic jargon-heavy article or to have a hook on something culturally specific. Simple but efficient.

You are to give a presentation. You know your material by heart. You know you are the best person to deliver the information (otherwise why have they asked you?). You have even booked a restaurant to concentrate on (and celebrate over!) what you will do after. You think you are ready. Sorry, you still have work to do but here is some stuff which may help put you in the starting blocks.

The delivery of your presentation, believe it or not, is not the objective. The majority of good employees think they have worked hard on the presentation, they know it backwards and the majority will sabotage their own success because they don’t understand the real objective. Here is the math - the percentage of information retained divided by the presentation time.

If you give a boring recitation of information you have memorized the retention rate, or what people will remember, will be incredibly low. How much does it cost to assemble thirty senior executives together for a morning? Think of a figure then subtract about
ninety percent of that money and throw it directly out the window. With particularly bad presentations less than ten percent of the information is retained. A twenty minute presentation can potentially have two minutes of major points retained and reused by the audience afterwards.

It is essential to state you objectives at the beginning of your presentation. It gives you audience an idea of where you are going to take them so mentally they prepare themselves.

Use the ten percent rule to help you prepare. The introduction should take only ten percent of your presentation – if you are presenting for twenty minutes your intro should only take two.

In your first two minutes make at least one powerful statement and don’t waste time on a long winded introduction. Everyone knows why you are there and want to hear what you have to say – so get on with it.

Be prepared and leave nothing to chance. Check and re-check everything so you are sure it works. You know the room, the seating, the visual and sound equipment, you know if you are working with a hand held or wireless microphone and if you have demonstrations to do you are sure you can do them and manage your equipment at the same time.

Remember…Imagine success by imagining yourself in the room and everything is going well. Fear of public speaking is the fear of humiliation and the unknown - because you imagine the worst in some horrible chain of circumstances. If you are familiar with the surrounds you can more easily overcome this fear and put yourself into a state of mind which is more likely to succeed.

And…Everyone wants you to succeed. Like I said it’s important to remember that there is a reason why you have been chosen to present. In principle, you are the best person for the job and are going to give your audience something they don’t know yet and they want to know. If this isn’t the case, change companies.

Well, I guess it had to happen - Seth Godin and his technicolor dreamcoat are going under the microscope and it seems there are loose threads to pull. I admit I don’t have time to follow five hundred blogs a day (who does?) but the handful I do follow have gravitated around the uncomfortable revelation of the seemingly untouchable Seth Godin’s having weaknesses.

Godin recently pointed to a page of color choices that would “change your life. A lot. For the better.” I clicked through expecting something at least mildly earth-shattering, and found about a dozen nice color palettes.

I mention this only because it makes me just a little glad that Godin is not great at everything.

This post from Sonia Simone is almost timidly thankful for Seth coming out with something which didn’t quite cut it whilst this post from Olivier Blanchard goes to town on the guy.

John Moore - whom I ran into yesterday - posted these very cool little Seth Godin vignettes on his blog. At first glance, I thought “Cool! This is a really sweet idea.” I set out to check each one out… and… quickly realized that although the action figure and quote montage thing was indeed very nifty, the selection of Seth quotes was… well, surprisingly bad.

Anyway. Long story short: The Fox Box turned me off in about two minutes flat. Verdict: I hadn’t stepped into an alternate universe. Ergo: Seth Godin had indeed lost his friggin’ mind.

So, what do I think? 1) Seth is untouchable. He went from conversational to untouchable at a certain point and once that happens you may as well paint a target on your forehead with arrows pointing to it. He freely admits he doesn’t accept comments on his blog which probably doesn’t help (you can read, but don’t expect any feedback) but he posts in as regular as clockwork and if you want to see him and interact you can always sign up for any of the conferences he gives I suppose but that’s really not the same thing. He repeats the fact he doesn’t consult either so in the end you take what you can get.

2) He passed from the realm of marketing advisor to marketing guru. If someone is advising me it is a rational act of guidance and my role stays neutral so I can choose to do what I want with the advice after. If I am following a marketing guru it is an act of faith with all the ups and downs of any belief which becomes inevitably as fragile as glass. Now as much as I thought I was sure Seth would have balked at the idea of being a guru the line becomes very blurry because of this…

And, 3) Seth brought out the stupid doll thingy. I’m sure this seemed like a funky idea at the time and even if all the proceeds from the sales of the Seth figurine go somewhere charitable, it’s post-modern overtones which I’m sure ninety percent of art students in the nineties would have found cool, don’t really cut it in the world of business today. The fact it’s called “Marketing Guru” is almost ironic in the sense that no one really knows how to use irony, Seth included apparently. Sure, I suppose there are desks over at Google manned by the adulescents there who have the Seth doll propped up next to the USS Enterprise over their computers or from time to time have a play fight with Bart Simpson but not every office looks like this.

Don’t get me wrong, Seth’s is a blog I read everyday and whilst it continues to be interesting I will continue to read it but there are groans. There are many fantastic and intelligent ideas being thrown around the fringes of the A-Lists which are fuelling my desire for both knowledge and interaction and in this world of conversation maybe there are limits to how high trees will grow. We’ll see.

Film Based Teaching Machine. Student pushes one of four buttons to give answers and his score appears on paper slip at upper right. Teaching machines, expected to boom in the next decade, usually operate on the principal of repetition until the pupil understands. They aim to speed up the learning process and relieve teacher of much paper work in the classroom.

from 1975: And the Changes To Come by Arnold B. Barach

I feel like I’m stuck in Back to the Future but this post scans some ten cent book called (you guessed it) 1975: And the Changes To Come by Arnold B. Barach which was written somewhere in the early sixties. The idea, if I understand correctly, was to predict some of the major scientific and social progress to come hurtling toward everyone in the next fifteen years. That’s to say before 1975.

Apart from the intended chuckle-o-rama which hit the spot a couple of times from Derrick’s well-intentioned blog post I stopped dead at the above image. Now, listen to me carefully because you know who you are. If you are learning a foreign language using something which even remotely resembles this method (and I don’t think you will need to stretch your imaginations too far) contact Coote Libeau for the love of God. It’s not too late to save yourselves.

All jokes aside thousands of people are still signing up to miracle language centres using extremely similar ‘learning devices’ in France to transform them into bilingual demons with absolutely no effort! It’s fantastic! Am I allowed to use any more exclamation marks in one post? I don’t care! There’s another one.

And all jokes even farther aside the reasons behind whacking students in front of a computer and prodding them with a stick from time to time so they don’t go into deep comas are not so removed from the ones given by Arnold B. Barach in the ‘relieving the teacher of much of the paper work in the classroom’ (translation - relieve the organisation from paying the teacher for anything which may constitute some real preparation to give a real course).

Nothing will substitute hands on hard work, close interaction, and relentless practice if you are serious about communicating efficiently in a different language. You need to listen and talk with a real person who is trained in targeting weaknesses, reinforcing strengths and using to their fullest all the other educational tools which real professionals pick up on the way to make their students succeed. There are no miracle injections, flashing goggles (don’t laugh this exists too), magic potions, nor any real painless shortcuts. Try to have some fun with your learning and don’t be afraid to try. We’ve never lost a client because they launched into a sentence they didn’t know how to finish (yet).

Thanks to Eagle Eyes Simone and her Friday stumbling for the heads up.

What is the point?

Why should I care?

The people listening to you are asking themselves these two questions from the moment you open your mouth. If you are presenting end of year figures or a presentation on saving the environment it makes no difference. These are the two questions you must provide answers to once you start to blab. Easy.

Here’s a tough sell - convincing people to sign on to the Spam Fan Club’s mailing list. Guess what? You receive information on the Spam family of products directly to your email address. After you ask to receive Spam they put a reassuring little message on the bottom of the sign-up form saying they won’t give away your address to any…well, they say third parties which is a delicate way of saying spammers (which may well be the name of Spam Fan Club members - Spammers).

Apart from the obvious handicaps (through no design of their own) Hormel is doing everything right. They are creating a community and it looks like they are having some fun with it (right down to the offer of playing the Monty Python’s Spamalot board game) so I say yay to Spam and good luck to them.

Dear Tim,

I have a sporting goods company and I want to make the strongest marketing statement I possibly can.

Signed Phil

Easy, Phil. Print a logo on a golf ball. Get the best player ever to have swung a club to use it. Surround the 16th hole at Augusta with a few thousand people on a Master’s Sunday. Ask the aforementioned player to chip up to the green almost stopping the ball dead before it makes a ninety degree turn and rolls downhill for twenty five yards hanging on the lip of the cup so the cameraman has time to zoom in real close and let it drop in the damn hole.

Just do it? Pure genius.

I’m a sucker for things described as “deceptively simple” (I’m sure this says something about me) so when I came across this excercise I have been on the lookout for potential victims, er… clients to try it out on.

Bargaining is one of those activities we often engage in without quite realising it. It doesn’t just happen in the boardroom, or when we ask our boss for a raise or down at the market, it happens every time we want to reach an agreement with someone. This agreement could be as simple as choosing a restaurant with a friend, or deciding which TV channel to watch. At the other end of the scale, bargaining can affect the fate of nations.

Big-scale or small-scale, bargaining is a central part of our lives. Understanding the psychological processes involved in bargaining can provide us with huge benefits in our everyday lives. In a classic, award-winning series of studies, Morgan Deutsch and Robert Krauss investigated two central factors in bargaining: how we communicate with each other and how we use threats (Deutsch & Krauss, 1962).

To do this, they used a game which forces two people to bargain with each other. Although Deutsch and Krauss used a series of different conditions - nine in fact - once you understand the basic game, all the conditions are only slight variations.

So, imagine you were a clerical worker at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the late 1950s and you’ve been asked to take part in a psychology study. Every psychology study has a story, and this one revolves around two trucking companies…

Experiment 1: Keep on trucking

Before the experiment proper starts, the researcher explains that you’ll be playing a game against another participant. In the game you will run a trucking company. The object of the game is the same as a real trucking company: to make as much money as possible.

Like the real-life trucking company you have to deliver as many of your goods as possible to their destination in the shortest possible time. But in this game you only have one starting point, one destination and one competitor. It looks like a pretty simple game.

Here’s the catch.

The road map your one truck has to travel across presents you with a dilemma. You are the ‘Acme’ trucking company and your fellow participant is the ‘Bolt’ trucking company, although both of you have an identical problem. Have a look below.

Cycling
[Deutsch & Krauss, 1962, p. 55]

As you’ll see there are two possible routes you can take from the start to your destination: the short and the long. Remember, time is money, so the longer it takes you to get to your destination, the less profit you make, which is the aim of the game. Unfortunately the short route has a major shortcoming: it is one-way. Only one of you can travel down it at a time towards your destination.

It seems you’ll be forced to work out some agreement with your unknown rival to share this one-way route so that you can both make money. How you’ll do this is another mystery, though, as there is going to be no communication between the two of you during the experiment. You are to be seated in a cubicle from where you’ll only be able to see the control box for your ‘truck’ and the experimenter.

Threatening gates

You are to be given one method of communication with your rival, albeit indirect communication. Each of you controls a gate at your own end of the one-way road. The gate, though, can only be closed when your truck is on the main route. This will be your threat. It is reinforced by the experimenter that you are out to make as much money as you can for yourself - the other person’s profit is not a concern.

On your marks, set, cooperate!

Once the experimenter sets you off, it soon becomes clear you’re not going to make much money at all. In the first of 20 trials, both you and your rival shut your gates, forcing both trucks onto the alternative route. This is 50% longer and means you make a loss on the trip as a whole. In the second trial your trucks meet head-on travelling up the one-way road. You both have to reverse, costing you time and money.

The rest of the trials aren’t much better. Occasionally you make a profit on a trip but more often than not it’s a bust. You spend more time on the long route or reversing than you do chugging happily along the main route making money.

At the end of the experiment, the researcher announces how much profit you made. None. In fact you made a crippling loss. Perhaps trucking companies aren’t so easy to run.

Comparing threats

You find out later that you were in one of three experimental conditions. The only differences in the other two conditions were that in one there were no gates at either end of the one-way road. In the other there was only one active gate controlled by one player.

Before I tell you the results of the other two conditions, try to guess. One condition, which you’ve taken part in, contained bilateral threat - you could both threaten each other. One condition had unilateral threat - only one could threaten the other. And the final condition had no threat at all. What was the order of profit?

In fact it turns out that your condition, of bilateral threat, made the least profit when both participant’s scores were added up. The next most profitable was the unilateral threat condition, while the most profitable overall was the no-threat condition.

Here’s the first rather curious result. While the person who had the threat - control of the gate - in the unilateral condition did better than the person who didn’t, they were still better off, individually and collectively, than if they both had threats. What this experiment is showing is that the availability of threats leads to worse outcomes to the extent that unilateral threat is preferable to bilateral threat to both parties.

Experiment 2: Lines of communication

But surely a little communication goes a long way? You weren’t allowed to talk to the other participant in this experiment, so your trucks had to do the talking for you. Bargaining is all about reaching a compromise through negotiation - surely this should help?

To test the effect of communication Deutsch and Krauss (1962) set up a second experiment which was identical in all respects to the first except participants were given headphones to talk to each other.

Here’s the next curious result: allowing the two participants to communicate with each other made no significant difference to the amount of money each trucking company made. In fact the experimenters found no relationship between words spoken and money made. In other words those who communicated more did not manage to reach a better understanding with each other.

Like the experimenters themselves, I find this result surprising. Surely allowing people to communicate let’s them work out a way for them both to make money? And yet this isn’t what happened in the experiment at all. Instead it seems that people’s competitive orientation was stronger than their motivation to communicate. On the other hand, perhaps something specific to the situation in this experiment is stopping people talking?

Participants in the second study reported that it was difficult to start talking to the other person, who was effectively a stranger. As a result they were considerably less talkative than normal. Could it be that it was this situational constraint that meant little talking, and therefore little bargaining was going on?

Experiment 3: Forced communication

Deutsch and Krauss decided to test the effect of forced communication in their third experiment. Again the procedure is the same as last time but now participants are instructed that on each of the 20 trials they have to say something. If they don’t talk on one of the trials they are gently reminded by the experimenter to do so. They are told they can talk about whatever they like, as long as they say something.

The results finally showed some success for communication. Performance in the one-gate (unilateral threat) condition came close to that achieved in the ‘no-threat’ condition (remember the no-threat condition has the best outcomes). Forced communication didn’t have much effect on the ‘no-threat’ condition when compared with no communication, and neither did it improve the bilateral threat condition much. It still seems that people are so competitive when they both have threats it’s very difficult to avoid both sides losing out.

Threat causes resentment

The most surprising finding of this study is how badly people do under conditions of bilateral threat. In this experiment not even forcing communication can overcome people’s competitive streaks. Deutsch and Krauss provide a fascinating explanation for this.

Imagine your neighbour asks you to water their plants while they’re on holiday Socially, it looks good for you if you agree to do it. On the other hand if they ask you to water their plants otherwise they’ll set their TV on full blast while they’re on holiday, it immediately gets your hackles up. Suddenly you resent them. Giving in when there is no threat is seen by other people as pro-social. Duress, however, seems to make people dig in their heels.

Applying the brakes

Before drawing some general conclusions from these studies, we should acknowledge the particular circumstances of this research. Deutsch and Krauss’s experiment covers a situation in which bargaining is carried out under time pressure. Recall that the longer participants take to negotiate, the less money they make. In real life, time isn’t always of the essence.

The present game also has a relatively simple solution: participants make the most profit if they share the one-way road. In reality, solutions are rarely that clear-cut. Finally, our participants were not professional negotiators, they were clerical and supervisory workers without special training.

Real-life implications

Despite these problems the trucking game has the advantage of being what game theorists call a non-zero-sum game. In other words if you win, it doesn’t automatically mean the other person loses. When you total the final results, as you sometimes can in a financial sense, they don’t add to zero. In real life many of the situations in which we find ourselves are of this nature. Cooperation can open the way to more profit, in financial or other form, for both parties.

As a result the trucking game has clear implications for real life:

* Cooperative relationships are likely to be much more beneficial overall than competitive relationships. Before you go ‘duh!’, remember that increasing proportions of the world’s societies are capitalist. Deutsch and Krauss’s experiment clearly shows the friction caused by competitive relationships, such as those encouraged by capitalism. I’m not saying capitalism is bad, I’m just saying competition isn’t always good. This simple fact is often forgotten.
* Just because people can communicate, doesn’t mean they will - even if it is to their advantage.
* Forcing parties to communicate, even if they already have the means to communicate, encourages mutually beneficial outcomes.
* In competitive relationships, communication should be aimed at increasing cooperation. Other methods will probably create more heat than light.
* Threats are dangerous, not only to other’s interests, but also to our own.

Remember all these the next time you are bargaining with your partner over a night out, about to shout a threat at a motorist blocking your path on a one-way road, or even involved in high-level political negotiations between warring factions with nuclear capabilities. It could save you, and the other side, a lot of trouble

Curiosity, tolerance and flexibility are three things I repeated over and over a couple of years ago as being a mantra to succesfully negotiating the murky waters of mutilingual communication. The idea is as true as ever today.

Curiosity is the motor which makes people want to know more therefore being open to change. Tolerance is accepting this change when it comes up and slaps the preconceived ideas you had right in the kisser and flexibilty is the notion which means you won’t have a nervous breakdown once you manage to live through the first two steps. It’s the elastic which binds the process together.

It sounds opaque but isn’t. Put these things into your own context whilst looking at this neat little interview and maybe you will come out the other end a touch more curious too.

For the people who have discovered neither Guy Kawasaki’s nor Garr Reynold’s blog not only can you do both now but read an interview from one to the other. Garr Reynolds has blogged faithfully about presenting for a long while now and I have followed much of his advice over the years transposing presenting into educative contexts for my own purposes. I have also passed a lot of it on to clients and I am amazed how determined people are to stick to their crappy techniques when there are such wonderful resources so readily available.

Reynold’s analysis on the blog of different ways to present well is engaging and philosophical and he has now brought out the Presentation Zen book which is being hailed as a reference already. Enjoy…

Question: Who indexed your book? I know I’m in it, but I’m not in the index . Of course, it does say something about me that I would look for my name in the index.

Answer: I was horrified when I saw that! A thousand apologies. I since learned a good piece of advice for new authors: Always do your own indexing or at least be very involved in it. The indexer did a very good and quick job, so it was my fault for not checking and adding a few names and page numbers to subjects. The index was designed to be light to save space, but not that light. Live and learn.

Question: Okay, now that we got that out of the way, what is the “Presentation Zen” approach?

Answer: Presentation Zen is indeed an approach not a method. There are many paths and many methods to presenting insanely well today. At its heart Presentation Zen is about restraint, simplicity, and a natural approach to presentations that is appropriate for an age in which design-thinking, storytelling, and “right-brain thinking” are crucial complements to analysis, logic, and argument.

The goal of the book was not to offer panaceas and rigid rules, but instead to encourage people to think differently about their visuals, the way they present them, and how they connect with audiences. My hope is that people find some things new in the book that stimulate their creativity–helping them to discover a more “enlightened” and more effective approach to presenting.

Question: How did we get to this place where most presentations suck?

Answer: There are many reasons. First of all, presenting exceptionally well isn’t easy. In fact it’s hard. That’s why we find great presenters—and great communicators in general—so remarkable. They are all too rare. Many professionals simply have never had much practice and just follow conventional wisdom and do it “like everyone else” instead of doing it effectively.

PowerPoint and Keynote are both pretty simple tools, but there has been too much focus on the tools themselves. If people want to learn how to make better slides they should study good books on graphic design and visual communication to improve their visual literacy.

When it comes to designing appropriate visuals, there is a hole in our education. Concerning quantitative displays, for example, very few people have had proper training in how to design graphs and charts, etc. The great master Edward Tufte has written many useful books in this regard.

Question: Are PowerPoint and Keynote part of the problem or part of the solution?

Answer: There is no question that PowerPoint has been at least a part of the problem because it has affected a generation. It should have come with a warning label and a good set of design instructions back in the ’90s. But it is also a copout to blame PowerPoint—it’s just software, not a method.

True, the templates and wizards of the past probably took most of us—who didn’t know any better anyway—down a road to “really bad PowerPoint” as Seth Godin calls it. But today we know better, and we can make effective presentations with even older versions of PowerPoint—often by ignoring most of the features. Ultimately it comes down to us and our skills and our content. Each case is different, and some of the best presentations include not a single slide. In the end it is about knowing your material deeply and designing visuals that augment and amplify your spoken message.

Question: In a nutshell, what makes a good presentations stick?

Answer: If you want to know how to make better presentations, buy Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The Heath brothers found that sticky, compelling, and memorable messages and ideas share six common attributes: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories. Ask yourself how your presentations rate for these elements, and you are on your way to crafting presentations that stick.

Question: Specifically, what makes Steve Jobs’s presentations so great?

Answer: Steve Jobs makes it look easy. He’s comfortable and relaxed. This in turn makes the audience feel relaxed. His keynotes usually rate very high on the Heath brothers’ “sticky scale” above. Steve also speaks in a manner that is conversational, and even though he practices a lot before the event, his words never sound scripted.

Steve uses the slides to help him tell a story, and he interacts with them in a natural way, rarely turning his back on the audience because monitors in front show the same onscreen image as well as the next slide. Steve uses visuals, his own words, and a natural presence to tell his story. His visuals do not overpower him, but they are an important component of the talk. Steve also demos his own software. This is much harder than giving a presentation, but he pulls it off well. How many CEOs can do that?

Question: Do you think that Bill Gates (a) knows his presentations are lousy and doesn’t care or (b) doesn’t know they are lousy at all?

Answer: Who knows? Historically, Bill has been a good contrast in styles to Steve Jobs. In the past we said, “Do it more like Steve and less like Bill.” The thing is, one-on-one Bill seems very engaging and very likable, but he has always struggled with the keynote address. The awful slides behind him usually do not help.

I wish Microsoft would call Bert Decker for some coaching and hire Duarte for the visuals. If Duarte can make Al Gore an extraordinary presenter, think what they could do for Bill. Bill is a remarkable man, not just for his software so much as for his philanthropy and his work with his foundation. So it would be nice for a remarkable man like Bill to be a remarkable presenter too. His CES keynote was better—not great, but an improvement. Perhaps Bill will abandon the all too common common “death by PowerPoint” method in future.

Question: What’s your version for the optimal number of slides, length of presentation in minutes, and font size?

Answer: It really depends on a great many things, but if I was going to make a pitch to a venture capitalist, I’d probably recommend your 10/20/30 method. That is, the presentation should have about ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than about thirty points. I especially like the twenty-minute limitation of this method.

There are myriad types of presentation situations and the actual number of slides and the time may vary greatly depending on the specific circumstances and method. However, the audience should have no idea how many slides you have. Once they start counting slides all is lost. As far as text goes, I say as little as possible on slides, but when text does appear it should be large and serve to complement your words. People did not come to read; they came to hear. Any speaker can read bullet points. The audience wants to hear your story not read it.

Question: How many slide transitions should a presentation contain?

Answer: It’s good that PowerPoint and Keynote have many transition options, but people need to exercise restraint and use a very few effects. I suggest using no more than two to three different types of transition effects per presentation and not use transition effects for every slide. I use a fade to black between the major sections of a talk to communicate closure of one section and the opening of the next one.

I often use a smooth dissolve to gently move from one visual to the next as I continue speaking. Using no transition effects is also often appropriate. When you watch a film or a TV show you are not usually aware of the transition effects from one scene to another–that would be distracting. Audiences should not notice the effects we employ between slides too.

Question: Why do you think 2-D graphs are better than 3-D graphs?

Answer: 3D charts and graphs are very popular with consumers, but in almost every case it is preferable to use 2-D graphics to display 2-D data. Charts with 3-D depth and distortion usually make things harder to see, not easier. Some of the precision is lost. There is beauty in the simple display of the data itself, there is no need to decorate with distorted perspectives. If the graphic is just for showing the roughest of general trends, then there is nothing really wrong with a 3-D chart I suppose, but when you are trying to show a true visual representation of the data in the clearest way possible, a simple chart without 3-D adornment is usually better.

Question: How many times do you think a person should rehearse a presentation?

Answer: You should rehearse at least three to four times all the way through and rehearse the first three minutes at least ten times or more. You also need to do a formal dress rehearsal in front of a real audience such as coworkers who can give you constructive criticism.

In some ways good presenting is like good writing, you’ve got to pare it down and dump the superfluous and the non-essential. But since we are so close to the material it is hard for us to see what works and what does not, or what is repetitive, etc. This is why you cannot only rehearse alone. You’ve got to rehearse in front of others so that you can experience the nerves, the blank stares, etc.

The more you rehearse the more the fear of the unknown is removed. The more the fear is removed, the more confident you will become. As you become more confident you will feel more relaxed and your confidence will shine through. The thing about confidence is that it’s impossible to fake, but with practice you will indeed become a confident speaker. And yes, it is possible to rehearse too much. You want it to sound natural and fresh, not mechancial and memorized. Usually three to four full rehearsals will get you there.

Question: What is the single most important thing people could do to enhance their presentations?

Answer: Turn off the computer, grab some paper and a pencil, and find someplace quiet. Think of the audience. What is it they need? What is it you want to say that they need to hear. Identify what’s important and what is not. You can’t say everything in a twenty-minute talk—or even a two-hour talk.

The problem with most presentations is that people try to include too much. You can go deep or you can go wide, but you can’t really do both. What is the core message? This time “off the grid” with paper and pencil or a white board is where you can clarify your ideas and then get them on paper visually. After your ideas and basic structure are clear, then you can open up the software and start laying out the story in the slide sorter view.

If the computer ever freezes in your live talk you need to move on. The work you did in the preparation stage “off the grid” and away from the computer will help make things concrete in your own mind so that you can move forward sans your Macintosh in the event of a technical glitch. By the way, if you ask the audience to bear with you as you try to make the computer work, you might as well stick a fork in it because you are done. Keep moving forward in the unlikely event of a technical glitch.

Question: Who are the ten best presenters?

Answer: I have pointed to many on my site over the years such as Seth Godin, Steve Jobs, you, Al Gore, Lawrence Lessig, Tom Peters, Hans Rosling, and many more. Recently I have come to think that US senator Barack Obama is an amazing speech maker as well. But more than anything, I point people to TED where they can see some really good presentations and speeches by some very smart and creative people who are all trying to change the world in their own way. Each case is different, but really, if you’re not trying to change the world, what is the point of making a presentation?

Are you doing too much? Is all the effort you put into deciding if the brochures should be blue-gray or gray-blue worth it? Are your clients going to appreciate any of this anyway? The answer is…maybe. I don’t want to let you all down here but there will be a percentage of people who just couldn’t care less about all the effort you are putting in to making your company the best it can possibly be. There will be people who won’t even notice the changes to the website you spent eighty hours working on, nor will they care if your company is the only one who will give them a service which is twice as adapted as the competition.

But the good news is I will give you the real question you should be asking - do you want these bozos as clients anyway? The answer is of course - no.

Continue to create and innovate as hard as you can, striving for excellence because it is one of the rare values which knows no fashion. The clients you want will notice you and the clients you want will talk about you. The clients you want are the reason you went into business in the first place so aim high. The evergreen Seth Godin smacks the idea home if anyone is still in doubt.

“Our readers won’t understand this.”

“Our customers are too busy and won’t get this.”

“The people who come to our restaurant want red meat.”

“No one is going to want something this good…”

Think about the stuff you hear on the radio or read about in mass market publications. When they attempt to cover something you really know about, they seem pretty stupid, don’t they? Oversimplifying to the point of getting it completely wrong. They’re busy pandering to the masses, dumbing things down for the lowest common denominator.

You’re under pressure to do that with your restaurant and your spiritual advice and your stump speech and your non-profit pitch. There are gatekeepers pushing you to dumb it down for the average.

The thing is, when you dumb stuff down, you know what you get?

Dumb customers.

And (I’m generalizing here) dumb customers don’t spend as much, don’t talk as much, don’t blog as much, don’t vote as much and don’t evangelize as much. In other words, they’re the worst ones to end up with.

I’ll take the smart customers/readers/prospects every time, please.