Strong People Skills Are Essential to Negotiation Success

Negotiation is at the heart of a business. Winning customers, building partnerships, and securing vendors are all negotiation processes. The skills required to negotiate successfully are complex: inter-personal communication, sales skills, a bit of analytical psychology, assertiveness, and conflict resolution. In short, for a company to do well, the lead negotiator must like people and know how to deal with many different types of people.

Mayo615 Plans Live Interactive Webinars For French Tech Entrepreneurs

Seeking Your Feedback To Offer The Most Effective Program of Webinars

Now that I have a large number of weekly viewers, and subscribers, I want to use this update video to again offer a bit more about myself, and to give you advance notice of my plans for delivering more online streaming and live video content in the next few months. I am specifically looking for your feedback comments to assist me in making those plans most effective.

First, I am a Silicon Valley veteran, an Intel alumni. I have started my own companies in North America and Europe, and worked on both sides of the venture capital process. I was the Director of a technology incubator in Silicon Valley, and I have taught entrepreneurship and management at a major university.  I am now planning to offer more in-depth live Webinars specifically targeted for the French Tech entrepreneurial audience.  My plan is to begin offering 1 hour Webinars based on my most popular YouTube Channel weekly teasers beginning in early October. I will eventually be returning permanently to France to offer live seminars.  I am reaching out to you for your feedback on my plans, and your suggestions. Please comment here, and I will respond.

The Critical Role of Corporate Culture

 

Last week I showed a graphic that at its center had the words “the critical role of corporate culture.” Entrepreneurs need to grasp those words as the very core of the formation and development of their new business. You have a unique opportunity to build the culture you want, to build your team and the values you want your entire team to share.  The company will develop its own culture if you do nothing, so it is better to intentionally form it and nurture it.

Real Power and Influence

One of my Intel colleagues, a Harvard MBA told me a story of HBS students eager to take John Kotter‘s leadership class, at the time called “Power & Influence.”  The students thought that Kotter’s course would teach them how to become calculating and ruthless. He amusingly remembered that Kotter’s course taught them the exact opposite: managers must first learn to be humble, connect and gain the respect of their colleagues and subordinates, before attempting to lead, or they would be doomed.  Kotter’s book of the same name is filled with case studies of “ruthless” people who failed and those with humility who succeeded.

Mayo615 Has A New Look

Welcome To Mayo615’s New Look

I decided it was time to update the website with a new look. Most importantly, The Mayo615 site now supports Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), an open source initiative, enabling pages to display quickly and optimally on mobile devices. Have a browse and leave me a comment on what you think.

Mayo615’s French Odyssey Week 2: Networking Tips

Welcome to a bonus Week 2 Update of Mayo615’s Odyssey to France.

I want to talk a bit about networking with new acquaintances or renewing old contacts.  Networking is often dreaded because it sounds like being disingenuous or insincere. Good networking is genuine and sincere. I made the point in Week 1 that communication skills are crucial, and they can be learned. Warren Buffett has said that “public speaking” is the most important skill he ever learned.  So let’s discuss a few ideas on how to make networking less stressful and more successful.  In this video, I will list three key things to remember when networking and expand on why they are so important. My UBC Management students will remember this from my Management Communication course.

 

Connect… Then Lead: HBS Professor John Kotter

One of my most popular posts from July 8, 2013

Harvard Business School Professor John P. Kotter

Years ago I was invited to join a newly forming Intel marketing group comprised primarily of Ivy League MBA‘s, with a few of us Intel veterans thrown into the mix to create some cross-fertilization in the group. This was the famous period of Harvard MBA’s belief that they were all marketing gods, and needed only to be ruthless: greed was good. One of my Harvard educated Intel colleagues related a story of HBS students playing an allegedly “friendly” game of football on the green next to the Charles River. One player suffered a compound fracture of his leg.  While waiting for an ambulance, a member of the other team came up and demanded to know when the game would resume.  Everything was about competition and one-upmanship. To this day I remember fondly (believe it or not) that this was also the mantra of our Intel group.  Who got the girl on Friday night: who got stuck with the bar tab. There was a big scoreboard in the sky tabulating the imaginary results.  Perhaps against the odds, our group survived and succeeded famously.  Many of us are still very close personal friends. One is the godfather of my son.

Ray Rund, one of my Intel colleagues, and Harvard MBA told me another story of HBS students eager to take John Kotter‘s leadership class, at the time called “Power & Influence.”  They all thought that Kotter’s course would teach them how to become the meanest “sons-of-bitches in the valley.”  Ray amusingly remembered that Kotter’s course taught them the exact opposite: managers must first learn to be humble, connect and gain the respect of their subordinates, before attempting to lead, or they would be doomed.  The book version of Kotter’s course is now 30 years old, but is still as relevant as ever. It is filled with case studies of “hard asses”  who failed miserably.

I have often explained Kotter’s point to others by using the example of an old WWII film clip of Lord Louis Mountbatten, leading the beleaguered British commandos in Burma against overwhelming Japanese forces.  Mountbatten was standing on a pedestal in some godforsaken Burmese village, with his troops standing at attention in rank. The first thing Mountbatten did was to beckon his troops to break rank and come up near him.  The old film clip speaks volumes about Mountbatten’s intuitive understanding of leadership.

Specialists in organizational behavior probably like to debate these points, pointing out the Peter Drucker “high task, low relationship” approach to change management. Basically, like the George S. Patton “school of management” in the film, kick ass and take names until the organization submitted to his will.  As the film shows, this approach has its drawbacks.

Ironically, I had learned Kotter’s lesson in leadership in my first assignment at Intel, managing 250 people running a semiconductor manufacturing operation.  On my first day, my manager introduced me to my people, half-jokingly saying to them, “Let’s see how long it takes you to break your new supervisor!”  Clearly, I needed to get with their program.  Just for the record, my manager, Dean Persona and I became fast friends. My employees had the knowledge of how to get the job done, and I did not. It is a valuable lesson I have never forgotten. I managed to get the respect of my people by respecting them. When an extra effort was required, I could ask for that extra effort, and it was given willingly.  Others failed miserably in their jobs while I rapidly rose to bigger and better things.

When I noticed this HBR blog post on leadership, titled “Connect…Then Lead,” I thought of Kotter, who is still teaching at Harvard.  I also see another potential case study of failure developing now.  For all of the good intentions of this manager, he is failing to understand Kotter’s lesson about leadership. This manager professes openness. This manager made a point to take a very modest office and leave his door open. But despite these superficial moves,  in reality, the substance of his management style is that of an austere, autocratic manager who isolates himself behind a wall of handlers who manage access to him, even reading all of his emails, which is offensive to many.  It takes weeks to schedule a simple meeting with this manager if you can successfully maneuver the gauntlet of handlers. Then the meeting will typically start late, only to be ended by another handler interrupting the meeting, tapping on their watch, to extract the manager early from the meeting, because he is so “busy” he must move on. He demands that his schedule is cleared for his own priorities.

The rudeness and distant behavior of this manager is obviously having a serious impact on the manager’s effectiveness with his people, but the manager seems more interested in his own matters. It has been noted by some that it is not uncommon for autocrats to view themselves as being open and welcoming toward their people when in reality the manager’s true behavior exhibits an extreme distance, lack of sensitivity, and the subordinates are intimidated by his overbearing personal style. This is all laid out in Kotter’s books and in the following HBR Blog article.  History seems to repeat itself.

Andrew Carnegie, a scion of the Gilded Age of Monopolists at the turn of the 20th Century, is noted for this quote about the importance of his employees…

“Take away my factories, my plants, take away my railroads, my ships, my transportation; take away my money, strip me of all these, but leave me my men and in two or three years, I will have them all again.”  Despite Carnegie’s megalomaniacal tendencies, he nevertheless seemed to understand the importance of having a strong bond with his people.

Connect, Then Lead

Reblogged from the HRB Blog

by Amy J.C. Cuddy, Matthew Kohut, and John Neffinge

Read More: Connect, Then Lead, HBR Blog

 Is it better to be loved or feared?

Niccolò Machiavelli pondered that timeless conundrum 500 years ago and hedged his bets. “It may be answered that one should wish to be both,” he acknowledged, “but because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved.”

Now behavioral science is weighing in with research showing that Machiavelli had it partly right: When we judge others—especially our leaders—we look first at two characteristics: how lovable they are (their warmth, communion, or trustworthiness) and how fearsome they are (their strength, agency, or competence). Although there is some disagreement about the proper labels for the traits, researchers agree that they are the two primary dimensions of social judgment.

Why are these traits so important? Because they answer two critical questions: “What are this person’s intentions toward me?” and “Is he or she capable of acting on those intentions?” Together, these assessments underlie our emotional and behavioral reactions to other people, groups, and even brands and companies. Research by one of us, Amy Cuddy, and colleagues Susan Fiske, of Princeton, and Peter Glick, of Lawrence University, shows that people judged to be competent but lacking in warmth often elicit envy in others, an emotion involving both respect and resentment that cuts both ways. When we respect someone, we want to cooperate or affiliate ourselves with him or her, but resentment can make that person vulnerable to harsh reprisal (think of disgraced Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, whose extravagance made him an unsympathetic public figure). On the other hand, people judged as warm but incompetent tend to elicit pity, which also involves a mix of emotions: Compassion moves us to help those we pity, but our lack of respect leads us ultimately to neglect them (think of workers who become marginalized as they near retirement or of an employee with outmoded skills in a rapidly evolving industry).

To be sure, we notice plenty of other traits in people, but they’re nowhere near as influential as warmth and strength. Indeed, insights from the field of psychology show that these two dimensions account for more than 90% of the variance in our positive or negative impressions we form of the people around us.

So which is better, being lovable or being strong? Most leaders today tend to emphasize their strength, competence, and credentials in the workplace, but that is exactly the wrong approach. Leaders who project strength before establishing trust run the risk of eliciting fear, and along with it a host of dysfunctional behaviors. Fear can undermine cognitive potential, creativity, and problem solving, and cause employees to get stuck and even disengage. It’s a “hot” emotion, with long-lasting effects. It burns into our memory in a way that cooler emotions don’t. Research by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman drives this point home: In a study of 51,836 leaders, only 27 of them were rated in the bottom quartile in terms of likability and in the top quartile in terms of overall leadership effectiveness—in other words, the chances that a manager who is strongly disliked will be considered a good leader are only about one in 2,000.

A growing body of research suggests that the way to influence—and to lead—is to begin with warmth. Warmth is the conduit of influence: It facilitates trust and the communication and absorption of ideas. Even a few small nonverbal signals—a nod, a smile, an open gesture—can show people that you’re pleased to be in their company and attentive to their concerns. Prioritizing warmth helps you connect immediately with those around you, demonstrating that you hear them, understand them, and can be trusted by them.

When Strength Comes FirstMost of us work hard to demonstrate our competence. We want to see ourselves as strong—and want others to see us the same way. We focus on warding off challenges to our strength and providing abundant evidence of competence. We feel compelled to demonstrate that we’re up to the job, by striving to present the most innovative ideas in meetings, being the first to tackle a challenge, and working the longest hours. We’re sure of our own intentions and thus don’t feel the need to prove that we’re trustworthy—despite the fact that evidence of trustworthiness is the first thing we look for in others.

Amy J.C. Cuddy is an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Matthew Kohut and John Neffinger are the authors of Compelling People: The Hidden Qualities That Make Us Influential (Hudson Street Press, August 2013) and principals at KNP Communications.

Management Communication: How Not To Embarrass Yourself

Some years ago, the British comedian and Monty Python member, John Cleese participated in a series of sales and management training videos. To this day, I still laugh remembering one of them, “How Not to Exhibit Yourself.” There are other videos in this series, all of which remain very relevant. “How Not to Exhibit Yourself” focuses on trade show behavior and particularly how to effectively connect with potential customers, but in my mind, the humorous lessons offered by Cleese could just as easily apply to networking with people in general. This further caused me to recall an equally relevant and recent Wall Street Journal essay, “Networking for Actual Human Beings.” My key point is that in whatever field you work, your ability and skill in relating to people and communicating effectively will be crucial to your success.

My UBC Management students and graduates know the importance I place on interpersonal and public speaking in management, and particularly also in engineering and entrepreneurial roles. I like to repeat Warren Buffett’s endorsement of public speaking as the most important skill he learned as a young man. No matter what you do, you will need to be able to clearly, comfortably and effectively communicate the ideas or projects you are promoting in order to succeed in life. Yet you may not know that speaking with others is the most difficult and intimidating thing for most people.

People I talk with often tell me how much they hate networking or simply meeting new people. The truth is, deep down, so do I and many other people. Recent research has shown that people feel that explicit business networking makes them feel as if they are insincere or manipulative. The result is that much networking is unsuccessful, and people will naturally gravitate to speaking with people they already know. I often convince myself that I have an excuse to not attend a networking event or to meet a new contact.

I have some recommendations on how I overcome these issues:

Persevere. Just Do It! This is the hardest part. I am at my core an introvert. Invariably I do not want to go, but force myself to go, even telling myself that I will find an excuse to leave early. Rationalize however you want, but do it. In my case, after the encounter, I surprise myself with the results. Suggestions to avoid networking events altogether and to focus on people you already know may make you feel more comfortable, but you will not grow in your self-confidence. You can still devote time to renewing your existing connections which will become even easier and productive.

Begin by going off topic. Be conversational not business focused. Think of some topic bound to be of conversational interest. Literally, avoid discussing business or the other person’s details. Before you enter the event, take some time to think of some conversation starters unrelated to all the obvious “groaners”: your job, goals, education or the other person’s details. This is also a crucial key to successful public speaking. What is your opener to grab the audience, one person or many? “Did you see that post today by Larry Page on Internet privacy?”

Let the conversation evolve organically. Don’t force it. Just enjoy the moment, and if the person opens up to you, you can seamlessly move into direct business. If not, you may still have made a new friend.

Whatever you do, be yourself. Be candid. You will feel better about yourself in the process. It may not always work, but if the person doesn’t appreciate your openness and honesty, you have just saved yourself a lot of valuable time.

Know that not every encounter will work. That’s normal, inevitable and perfectly OK. However, if you do suck it up and try novel new approaches to speaking with people and building their interest and trust, you will improve your success, and success breeds success.

I don’t agree with all the points in the following Wall Street Journal essay, but I accept that there are other points of view on the tough topic of fear of networking and public speaking, and some of the discussion below may be helpful to you.

Source: Networking for Actual Human Beings – WSJ

Catherine Deneuve defends men’s ‘right’ to hit on women and warns of a new “puritanism” – BBC News

Legendary French actress Catherine Deneuve and over 100 other prominent French women have today written a poignant editorial in Le Monde, warning of a new era of “puritanism” in the wake of the current wave of sexual harassment charges against women.  It should force all of us serious thinkers to reexamine the current very valid wave of outrage against sexual harassment and as well, the dangers of excess that hark back to other periods of ugly history.   A link to the Le Monde editorial is included here for those who read French or wish to translate the editorial in their browsers. The letter begins by declaring that violence of any kind against women is utterly unacceptable, but makes its point that we are in danger in this era of Trumpism of going into extremism in the name of virtue.

The open letter to Le Monde will undoubtedly spark denunciation by feminists, as has happened in the earlier criticism of women writers like Christina Hoff Sommers, who spoke out about the false claims regarding domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday. The letter raises questions about truth and freedom of speech, especially among women themselves. It will hopefully ignite a monumental ethical and philosophical debate like nothing since Germain Greer debated William F. Buckley at Cambridge.

Read more In Le Monde (French language) : French Women Decry New Era of Puritanism

Source: Catherine Deneuve defends men’s ‘right’ to hit on women – BBC News

Catherine Deneuve defends men’s ‘right’ to hit on women

 

Catherine Deneuve has been in more than 100 films in a career spanning decades

French actress Catherine Deneuve has said that men should be “free to hit on” women.

She is one of 100 well-known French women who wrote an open letter, warning about a new “puritanism” sparked by recent sexual harassment scandals.

The letter deplores a wave of “denunciations” after claims that US movie mogul Harvey Weinstein has raped or sexually assaulted dozens of women.

Mr Weinstein has denied all allegations of non-consensual sex.

However, he has admitted that his behaviour has “caused a lot of pain”.

• Harvey Weinstein scandal: Who has accused him of what?

What does the open letter say?

The letter by French women writers, performers and academics was published in France’s Le Monde newspaper on Tuesday.

“Men have been punished summarily, forced out of their jobs when all they did was touch someone’s knee or try to steal a kiss,” it said.

“Rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or clumsily, is not – and nor is men being gentlemanly a chauvinist attack.”

Harvey Weinstein has been expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the body behind the Oscars

The authors argued that there was a new “puritanism” afoot in the world.

They said that while it was legitimate and necessary to speak out against the abuse of power by some men, the constant denunciations have spiralled out of control.

According to the writers, this is creating a public mood in which women are seen as powerless, as perpetual victims.

“As women we do not recognise ourselves in this feminism, which beyond denouncing the abuse of power, takes on a hatred of men and of sexuality.”

Ms Deneuve, 74, has recently spoken openly against social media campaigns, which, she says, shame men accused of harassing women.

Women and men from all over the globe who have been sexually harassed have been sharing their stories across social media using the hashtag #MeToo.

In France, Twitter users are using #Balancetonporc (“rat on your dirty old man”) to encourage women to name and shame their attackers.

• How ‘MeToo’ is exposing the scale of sexual abuse

Ms Deneuve, an Oscar-nominated actress, has been in more than 100 films, making her debut in 1957.

Silicon Valley Is Suffering From A Lack of Humanity

Deep Down We All Know Silicon Valley Needs The Humanitarian Vision of Steve Jobs

The genius of Steve Jobs lies in his hippie period and with his time at Reed College. With the deep ethical problems facing technology now, we need Jobs vision more than ever.

To his understanding of technology, Jobs brought an immersion in popular culture. In his 20s, he dated Joan Baez; Ella Fitzgerald sang at his 30th birthday party. His worldview was shaped by the ’60s counterculture in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he had grown up, the adopted son of a Silicon Valley machinist. When he graduated from high school in Cupertino in 1972, he said, “the very strong scent of the 1960s was still there. After dropping out of Reed College, a stronghold of liberal thought in Portland, Ore., in 1972, Mr. Jobs led a countercultural lifestyle himself. He told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics — even people who knew him well, including his wife — could never understand.

Decades later Jobs flew around the world in his own corporate jet, but he maintained emotional ties to the period in which he grew up. He often felt like an outsider in the corporate world, he said. When discussing Silicon Valley’s lasting contributions to humanity, he mentioned in the same breath the invention of the microchip and “The Whole Earth Catalog,” a 1960s counterculture publication. Jobs’ experience rings with my own experience in the Santa Clara Valley at that time. Jobs and I were both deeply affected by Stewart Brand, the visionary behind The Whole Earth Catalog.  Stanford professor Fred Turner has documented this period in his book “From the Counterculture to Cyberculture, Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. 

For me this journey also began with the extraordinary vision of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian professor of communications, who literally predicted the emergence of the World Wide Web and “The Global Village,”  like some kind of modern day Nostradamus.

Stewart Brand is also featured in Tom Wolfe‘s book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” along with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and The Grateful Dead.  I had the great good fortune to formally meet Brand at a COMDEX Microsoft event in a hangar at McCarren Airport in Las Vegas and was immediately impressed by him, as was Jobs. Not surprisingly, Brand was an invited guest at the Microsoft event, having already seized on the importance of the personal computer and the prospect of a networked World. Recently, in another anecdote on that time, Tim Bajarin shared a wonderful story about Job’s counterculture friend and organic gardener who remains the manager of the landscape at the new Apple campus, retaining the feeling of the original Santa Clara Valley orchard economy, that some of us can still remember.

It is important to think back to that time in the Bay Area and the euphoria of the vision of “digital utopianism.”   It grounds me and helps me to understand where we have gone so terribly wrong.

Digital utopianism is now dead. I have written about its sad demise on this blog. The wonderful vision of digital utopianism and the Web has been perverted by numerous authoritarian governments, now including our own, resulting in a Balkanized Web and a dark Web pandering all kinds of evil. This is the problem we face and the urgent need for greater emphasis on ethics. What about human life, culture, and values?  So many areas of technology are on the verge of deep philosophical questions.  Uber has become the poster child for everything that is wrong with Silicon Valley. I ask myself, “What would Steve Jobs have said about Travis Kalanick and Uber?” I think we know the answer. Ironically, Silicon Valley has a center for research and study in ethics, the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Mike Markkula was an Intel marketing guy who quit Intel to join with two crazy long-haired guys in Cupertino.

I am a Liberal Arts & Humanities graduate myself, including graduate study at Oxford University. When I returned from England I asked the obvious question: Now how do I make a living?  As it happened, I very improbably landed my first real job at Intel Corporation. When I asked why I was hired, the answer was that I was judged to have the requisite talent and aptitude if not the technical knowledge.  I later developed a reputation for being very “technical” by the process of “osmosis,” by simply living in a highly rarified technical culture and receiving whiteboard tutorials from friendly engineers. I was thrown into a group of Ivy League MBA’s. We wistfully shared a desire to have the others’ educations, but simply working together made us all more effective. Amazingly my career grew almost exponentially and I attribute my success to that cross-fertilization.

While with Intel in Hillsboro Oregon, someone approached me to represent Intel at a talk with Reed students. I was cautioned that few if any Reed students would be interested in working for Intel, but they would be very intellectually engaging.  That proved to be a significant understatement.  In the end, I believe that perhaps two dozen “Reedies,” as they are known, joined Intel, one of whom went on to a stellar career as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.  A significant part of my later career has been devoted to using my Humanities education background to assess and translate deep technology in human terms for the benefit of both management and potential customers.

Today, nothing of my story would ever happen, but the influence of the Humanities and Arts in business seems more sorely needed than ever.

Read more: Why We Need Liberal Arts in Technology’s Age of Distraction – Time Magazine – Tim Bajarin

Read more: Digital Utopianism of Marshall McLuhan and Stewart Brand is Cracking – mayo615,com

Read more: Liberal Arts In The Data Age – Harvard Business Review