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

Tom Perkins of KPCB, Another Silicon Valley Jerk. Where Have We Gone So Wrong?

This weekend, the media and blogosphere have been ignited with reaction to the open letter to the Wall Street Journal by venture capitalist Tom Perkins, founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and the blowback from Atlantic Magazine writer Jordan Weissmann. The overwhelming reaction has been disbelief and outrage at Perkins comments.

I am so angry and sad to see this article and interview of legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Tom Perkins. It is further evidence to my earlier post on the “Silicon Valley Jerk Conundrum.”  Mr. Perkins and his firm, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, better known in the Valley as KPCB, have spawned some of the best and most famous companies in Silicon Valley. Former Intel colleagues, Jim Lally and John Doerr partnered there. Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems made his mark there, and is now the leading clean tech VC in the Valley. But Mr. Perkin’s public claim in his interview with the Wall Street Journal that there is a “war” on the rich, which is like the Nazi’s extermination of the Jews, is just too much for any decent thinking person.  Where has Silicon Valley gone so terribly wrong as to create a plutocrat like this?  As the writer says, “This is the reductio ad absurdum of a rich-guy’s persecution complex. The Jews were a minority. The rich are a minority. Therefore, criticizing the rich is akin to committing genocide against the Jews.”

Read more: The Silicon Valley Jerk Conundrum

As a Silicon Valley veteran I am deeply ashamed of this man and his thinking.

Venture Capitalist Says “War” on the Rich Is Like Nazi Germany’s

War on the Jews

In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Tom Perkins makes the worst historical analogy you will read for a long, long time.

JORDAN WEISSMANNJAN 25 2014, 12:34 PM ET

Venture capitalist Tom Perkins (Reuters) of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers

Tom Perkins is known is a founder of one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms,  Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He is not, however, a very adept historian.

In a letter to The Wall Street Journal, he suggests that progressives protesting income inequality are today’s equivalent of Nazi’s persecuting Jews.

Regarding your editorial “Censors on Campus” (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.”

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?

Kristallnacht was a rash of anti-Jewish riots that swept Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland in 1938, in which ordinary Germans, with Nazi support, destroyed Jewish shops and burned synagogues. As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes in its online encyclopedia:

As the pogrom spread, units of the SS and Gestapo (Secret State Police), following Heydrich’s instructions, arrested up to 30,000 Jewish males, and transferred most of them from local prisons to Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and other concentration camps. Significantly, Kristallnacht marks the first instance in which the Nazi regime incarcerated Jews on a massive scale simply on the basis of their ethnicity.

This is the reductio ad absurdum of a rich-guy’s persecution complex. The Jews were a minority. The rich are a minority. Therefore, criticizing the rich is akin to committing genocide against the Jews. QED.

The Task One iPhone Case: A Case Study of Mobile Market Excess?

The Task One iPhone Case with Swiss Army Knife Features

Tonight I was channel surfing and stumbled on the Task One iPhone Case in a TV News feature story from an outfit called Task Labs.. Their website is up but not complete. It still has the Latin text of an incomplete webpage template, but you can buy it online if you wish.

Read more:  http://thetasklab.com/

I want to emphasize that I wish to be completely fair here.  I am a dedicated Swiss Army Knife aficionado and a dedicated smart mobile user. I have a simple version of a Swiss Army Knife with a corkscrew in my pocket as I write this. A corkscrew is one of my mandatory survival tools (smile).  I have followed the Wall Street Journal coverage of the merger of the two Swiss companies that produce the knives.  It is a great story and a great product.    I have the full Boy Scout version in my tool drawer.  The Task Labs people should also remember the tried and true publicity adage, “Any PR is good PR.”

But I also have to admit that it took me a minute to realize that the TV story was not a Saturday Night Live parody skit, with Dan Akroyd trying get me to call and give him my credit card number.  The Task One iPhone Case is a real product, though its website does not appear to be “ready for prime time.”  Nor does the product concept appear to be ready for prime time, IMHO.   I am certain that some of my readers will see this, and rush out to buy one, but other more discriminating consumers are more likely to start asking a lot of hard marketing questions about this new innovation.  To me this product is an extreme example of everything that is wrong with innovation.  Said another way, “Is that all there is?”  Another great existential phrase many of us are now using says “Hey, it is what it is!”

The market positioning of this product according to the TV person, was simple.  What do you do when you take your iPhone out into the woods with you on a hike, then realize that you have no cellular signal, no nothing. The Task One iPhone case is their answer.  Let me know your opinion on the Task One iPhone Case.

I could probably go on for hours compiling a longer list of issues with this product, but here goes:

1. Kiss Your Phone Goodbye Going Through Airport Security:  This one seems obvious.  I cannot count the number of Swiss Army Knives i have personally lost at airport security.  Then think about the number of Swiss Army Knives they have confiscated.

2.  “Small” idea. The inspiration for this product is nothing new. It is simply trying to kludge together two things that work perfectly well on their own.  So the real question is why bring your phone into the bush, when you need to leave the phone home, and bring your Swiss Army Knife? I know that some people will adamantly say that you should bring your mobile phone with you for GPS, etc. Perhaps, but no mobile phone GPS system was designed for use in the bush. Take your phone with you on a long hike, and try to use your GPS and you will see what I mean.   Nor is a useful pocket knife designed to look like a phone. The Task One is a marginally useful appendage to a mobile phone, that will not fit comfortably in the palm as a knife does.  It encourages a sense of complacency in the bush, when serious backcountry experts would probably laugh.  Or is it for use to impress your friends, out on a Friday night at the local pub?  The accessories appear to include all kinds of cool extra stuff, like a battery charger (Huh?).  So as long we are brainstorming this product, it needs a compass.  A mirror would be good.  Remember all of the movies where the guy lost in the woods uses a mirror to signal rescuers? Any other suggestions?

3. Price. The price is $99. I can buy a comparable Swiss Army Knife for $30. Are you prepared to pay $99 for an iPhone case? Not sure about the price of the accessories.

4. The Market. The market may seem big, but wait a minute.  Most smart mobile phones have different form factors, even the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5.  So Task One and Task Labs must address a fragmented market with multiple products.  This is starting to sound very complicated and expensive.  Can I get one for my Samsung Nexus? No.

5. Marketing.  I think that this company, like so many of these giddy mobile market companies, is so full of itself that it hasn’t thought through the distribution issues, including a half finished website.

The very fact that when I first saw the TV story, I assumed that it was a spoof,  is a warning signal.

The knee jerk joke of “There’s an app for that!” isn’t really that funny. Many experienced Silicon Valley veterans have complained loudly about the current malaise of misplaced infatuation with mobile apps, as the apparent end all and be all of Silicon Valley. Vinod Khosla, Marc Andreeson, Max Marmer and a laundry list of others have asked rhetorically how Silicon Valley could have lost its way so badly? Silicon Valley was founded on Big Ideas.

I published “Silicon Valley’s Misguided Love Affair With An App For Everything, ” and “App Development Boom’s Depressing Underbelly” after reading a New York Times story on the topic.

Read more: http://mayo615.com/2013/03/04/silicon-valleys-misguided-love-affair-with-an-app-for-everything/

Read more: http://mayo615.com/2012/11/18/app-development-booms-depressing-underbelly-what-ever-happened-to-big-ideas/

Yahoo HR Case Study: CEO Marissa Mayer Ban On Telecommuting

This week’s decision by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is an excellent Human Resources case study, worthy of further analysis and debate by our HR students.

Silicon Valley is reacting strongly this week to Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer’s surprise ban on all telecommuting. The blogosphere is buzzing with posts about the new Yahoo policy, while the Huffington Post, and a host of other media outlets have also weighed in, most of it negative.  The coup de grace was Gloria Steinem taking a very pointed swipe at Mayer during an interview on PBS Newshour last night.  While affecting all Yahoo employees equally, it is being viewed as particularly insensitive to working women who need to balance their work and home lives.

Mayer is herself a new mother, but she has exacerbated the negative reaction to her decision, by having a nursery built for her baby next to her office.  Regardless of the justifications for the policy, it is unquestionably a Human Resources and Public Relations disaster for Yahoo, now being referred to as the Mayergate scandal on Huffington Post.

Despite the furor, Yahoo Media Relations has been silent on the subject for at least three days. Yesterday, Yahoo finally released a brief statement that only served to make matters worse. Its stance, in essence: Don’t project your office culture issues on our company.

“This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home — this is about what is right for Yahoo!“, right…
Read more at http://www.onenewspage.com/n/Business/74vpdrsn6/Yahoo-Finally-Responds-To-Mayergate.htm#x9aqhHsQ43LWWdud.99

Others have also pointed out that Yahoo’s move against telecommuting has also potentially damaged their brand, and more importantly may seriously impair Yahoo’s efforts to recruit the “best and brightest” new employees, which Yahoo’s competitors, notably Google, who lost Mayer to Yahoo, will be likely to pounce on.

There has been a minority of comment in favor of Mayer’s ban on telecommuting, which is worth noting.  But without a doubt this is a great real-time opportunity for our HR students to debate this, and to continue to watch this as it unfolds. The best minority viewpoint comes from my long standing colleague and friend Geoff Moore on LinkedIn, author of numerous books on entrepreneurship and management. Geoff argues in his post, “Misunderstanding Marissa,”  that “she had to do it!” 

Geoff Moore, Silicon Valley “Rock Star”

Read more: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130227181132-110300724-misunderstanding-marissa

As Geoff himself says, “What do you think?”