Book Review-Strengths Finder 2.0

Do you know what you’re good at? What your natural talents are? Do you have any thoughts on how you might better leverage your talents to drive your mission and purpose? Well, Tom Rath’s immensely popular book Strength Finders 2.0 is designed to help you focus on your inherent strengths – your talents – and to improve upon them.

Immensely Popular

When I say that the book is immensely popular, I say that with conviction. The book consistently outsells every other book in the category. You’ll find that on list after list it consistently gets the top long-term spot. However, there’s a bit of a twist to the story. The book itself is an introduction, a listing of the talents, followed by a closing. It is in fact little more than the details of all of the potential talents from the Clifton Strength Finder test.

On the surface this doesn’t seem that interesting. However, what’s interesting is that whether you buy a physical copy or an eBook version you get a code that allows you to take the test which indicates the top five talents that you have. This means that in effect many people are buying the book to get the test. Still it’s quite impressive to have sold as many units as they have. I also have a deep respect for this book as a marketing tool approach because it’s the same thing as I did with the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users.

The Test

Taking the test is a series of comparative statements where you have to indicate which one your feel like best describes you on a scale from one to the other. These sorts of tests are frustrating to many people because they feel pulled to neither of the options – or both. It makes the tests effective at finding our core personality traits. (This is like the approach John Gottman uses to determine which couples are destined for divorce. See Science of Trust for more.)

The output of the test is, as I mentioned above, the top five talents that you have. The detailed report describes how you should respond and how you’re motivated based on the indication of these types of talents. The language of strengths was substituted for talents in the title – but it’s just different language for the same thing.

I’ve spoken about all sorts of other metrics that we can use to assess people including Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, as well as the work that Steven Reiss did in Who Am I?.

The Talents

One of the interesting things for me about the talents is that some of them seem clustered very close to one another. For instance, Input and Learner. These two talents seem very similar to me except that one is focused on the acquisition of data and experiences and the other one on – well – learning. They’re very similar but at least slightly differentiated.

Futuristic and Strategic are two other talents – that were both on my results that also felt very similar. One sees the future and the other plans for the future. I’d love to see the science behind the questions and how they arrived at these 34 talents because it feels to me as if several should have been collapsed.

However, the full list does accurately describe many of the different kinds of folks that I see.

The Results

For me there were a few interesting things about the results. However, the most interesting is comparing my result of Strategic and my Enneagram result of Reformer. The Reformer is under responsive to intuition. That is to say that they don’t listen to intuition as much as they should. However, the feedback from Strategic talent is to trust your intuitive insights as much as possible. This is an interesting space for me to consider whether I’m accepting my intuition as much as I should.

If I go back to the Enneagram it’s possible that I’m a high functioning reformer and therefore I’ve minimized the natural tendency to not trust my insights. Further as I look at my scores again I’m not substantially placed in the reformer category. If I took the test again my results might move. However, I found the discrepancy or apparent conflict between the two measures interesting.

The rest of the results include Learner, Futuristic, Achiever, and Connectedness. However, as I read the talents though I must admit that I believe that many of the talents apply to me – not because I want to be arrogant (or because I have the Self-Assurance talent). I could just identify with many of the things that were said for each talent.

The Short Route

There is one thing, however, that I take particular exception to in the book. That is the ideas that the traditional thinking that you can become anything that you want to be and that you should work hard to reach your goals aren’t right. Rath is careful to say that he believes that developing your talents by providing the raw materials for them to improve are important, he doesn’t believe that we should spend time working on our weaknesses. I find this to be inconsistent with folks like Carol Dweck’s work in Mindset about us having control of our own destiny and our own ability to grow. The argument Rath provides is that we should be focused on our strengths.

He’s saying that we can take the easy route and skip the 10,000 hours of purposeful practice that is described in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. Conceptually the idea is great. Only work on things that you’re good at. Improve your talents where you’re already gifted. Do what you enjoy to do. The idea is that success comes if you’re able to focus on just those things that you enjoy. However, I find that this is a bit too simplistic. While I don’t advocate beating yourself up on things that you simply don’t get, I recognize that performance comes through creating Flow and flow is a delicate balance between challenge and skill.

There have been plenty of books that I’ve forced myself through which have become very important over my career as a source of information. Diffusion of Innovations is one good example of reading something difficult but that was absolutely worth it. So I’m concerned that Rath’s message may be interpreted as an excuse for not working hard and perhaps more importantly not working on small skills that inhibit us from reaching the heights that our talents would allow.

Compensating Weakness

Here’s where it gets muddy like it did with The ONE Thing (which said you should focus on one thing then gave you five different areas of your life to find the one thing.) How do you know what your talents are and what you should and shouldn’t work on? Let’s say that I want to get better at stand-up comedy. However, I’ve got a bad habit of looking down instead of looking at the audience. If my talent isn’t connectedness should I work on this? What if it inhibits my real talent which is communication? See the rub?

Where do the individual skills that make up the talent end and where does the talent begin? Should I work on something that is difficult for me if it unlocks the potential of my talent? From my point of view the answer is yes – particularly if the skill is easy to acquire.

Back to the stand-up comedy example, what if my issue isn’t that I can’t make eye contact. What if the issue is that I don’t know how to use a microphone? Wouldn’t it make sense to have a friend help me use a microphone more effectively? Wouldn’t it make sense to ask someone to watch and remind me when I’m not using the microphone well? Most folks would say yes – and yet microphone usage probably doesn’t fit into any specific talent.

Ultimately, there are weaknesses that we all have which prevent us from reaching our potential. If we have poor vision and don’t have glasses or contacts it will have a substantial impact on our ability to be successful at almost anything. However, with vision correction the weakness is hardly noticeable. So how do we do as good leaders do and work around the weaknesses and support the development of the core talents of our friends, subordinates, peers, and superiors? (Learn more about this idea in Multipliers.)

Finding Value

Whether you agree that you should only work on your strengths or agree with me that you should focus on your strengths while making sure that you address any limiting weaknesses, I think you’ll find Strengths Finder 2.0 a good start at becoming

Book Review-The Success Principles

I started reading The Success Principles because it was the book that CJ McClanahan was going to do next in his book club. While that idea got redirected, I finished reading the book – several months after I started. Part of that is because the book is long. It’s not quite 500 pages. Where most business books weigh in around 200 pages. So there was more content here than in two average business books. Another reason is there are 64 chapters. I have a habit of reading a chapter at a time from a few books at the same time. So with short easy to read chapters this book ended up taking longer.

No matter how long it takes to get through the real question is was the information impactful. In a word, Yes. However, you know I’m not going to leave it at just one word.

Establishing Context

Before diving into the content of the book it’s important to understand Jack Canfield. Jack is best known for his co-creation of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books. These books have been a consistent encouragement for over 20 years to millions of people. As a result Jack has direct experience in being successful. Along the way he exposes that success is the result of your responses to events – and perhaps a bit of luck.

The other context that you need to understand about The Success Principles is that the book is over 10 years old having been first published in 2005. It’s not going to be about the newest fad or phase. It’s designed around timeless principles rather than the psychology of the moment. It is in fact, much like the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, a collection of best practices which may have been seen in other places before. That doesn’t make them less valuable – in fact it makes them more valuable. The Success Principles is frequently referring to other books and experts for more on a principle being revealed.

Talk and Action

Do you have friends or acquaintances who routinely complain about their circumstances to you? Do they feel underappreciated at their job or slighted by their family – and they’re telling you? It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to do anything about any of the situations that they’re talking about. However, they inflict their pain on you because complaining feels better than doing the hard work of addressing the problem whether that problem is in them or in the other person. Their ego (See Change or Die for my discussion of The Ego and Its Defenses) won’t allow them to see that there are things they need to work on like setting boundaries (See Boundaries and Beyond Boundaries for more on boundary setting.) While you can have sympathy for these folks, the fact is that until they’re able to address the barriers in their life – the barriers that they have the power to remove, they’ll likely be stuck complaining about the same things to the same people who can’t help them.

Every book on success has a component of its message which is action. This shouldn’t be surprising because it takes action to change the circumstances in which you live. However, sometimes there are recommendations to wait until you know where you’re going to go. There are sometimes four easy steps to figuring out your mission in life. Once you have that figured out then you can start to take action. I was recently reminded that I often say that I have no idea what door God is going to open for me but in the meantime I’m going to be putting on my running shoes. That means taking actions that lead me to the success that I want. Not that I don’t feel abundantly blessed – however, I also feel like there is more I’m supposed to do for humanity. So I take action to better myself and my environment every day.

The key to changing your life for the better isn’t in thinking about a better life. It’s not a dream that you can grab ahold of and suddenly reach. It’s a thing that you have to strive for.

Delegation

There are some things you just have to do for yourself. I recently reorganized the garage and mini-barn at the house. The unfortunate reality of this is that I couldn’t delegate this to anyone else. I needed to make the decisions about what to keep and what could go away. I needed to organize things in a way that made sense to me. It simply wasn’t something that I could delegate. Jim Rohn said “You can’t hire someone else to do your push-ups for you.” So this is a time consuming thing that I had to do.

Conversely there are still many things that I do that I should delegate and don’t. That’s one reason why I bought a stoplight for my office. Yes, a real, full sized stoplight. The goal was to help me to remember the rules for delegation. The reality is there are a large list of things that I can do. I can clean the office. I can mow my yard. I can go to the post office. These are the yellow lights. For me the things that I can do aren’t necessarily the things that I should do. The things I should do are a green light. These are things like reading books and writing blogs. They are the things that require me and not someone else. Finally there are the things that I should not do. Not that I can’t just that I shouldn’t. For instance, I shouldn’t do plumbing. I learned how to sweat copper for a little project – but just because I can doesn’t mean I should go replace a water heater. There are things that are better left to experts and I need to know when to hire those out.

Finding Your Mission in Life

One of the greatest aspirations of people is to determine their mission in life. The goal is to figure out what they should do with the time that they’re given. However, at the same time this is also one of the most elusive things. We hear of people going through mid-life crises knowing that they didn’t accomplish what they wanted to accomplish and realizing they need to make a change. So they buy a sports car or decide to run a marathon or make other changes in their life that they believe will move them closer to their mission. However, these changes are superficial and often don’t lead to the kind of lasting joy that people want.

Canfield says that joy is your inner guidance system. It’s the thing that leads you to knowing where your mission lies. If you’re working on things that bring you joy whether you’re monetarily successful or not doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you’re joyful.

While it’s easier to reach a goal when you know what it is, if you’re like me sometimes the hardest part is figuring out what the goal should be.

Belief in Your Dreams

There’s a careful balance to be struck between entitlement – the belief that you’re due something – and availability – that if you work towards the goal you’ll achieve it. We live in a world where millennials have been conditioned to believe that they deserve things. Their parents wanted to make sure that their children weren’t being overlooked. Whether it was equal playtime in the junior soccer league, getting the lead part in the church play, or even just getting the biggest slice of the pie at the party. As a result we’ve created a group of people that as a whole believe that they’re entitled to a better life. I’m appalled to hear stories where parents are going to interviews with their children – their college graduated children applying for professional positions.

On the other hand there are far too many of us who are being held back by limiting beliefs that we’re not worthy or that we don’t deserve success and happiness. We believe that success can only come to those people who have something that we don’t. Carol Dweck in her book Mindset makes the point eloquently that we aren’t a fixed point that we can change, adapt, and grow. Sometimes it’s not that we believe that we’re not good enough but instead we believe that we don’t have the right circumstances. Perhaps you weren’t born to a rich family. Perhaps you didn’t go to college. However, these barriers aren’t real. We’re taking generalizations like more education equates to more compensation. We’re forgetting that buried into any statistic are the outliers. (See Malcom Gladwell’s book called Outliers for how to become an outlier.)

The fact of the matter is that 20% of America’s millionaires never set foot in college and nearly 10% of the Americans listed as billionaires didn’t get their college diploma. If you’re thinking that you can’t be successful without a college degree – there are some folks who would beg to differ. In fact roughly 75% of the folks that make their fortunes are entrepreneurs. Only 10% of the wealthy are executives – which is the way that we typically think of the wealthy. The entrepreneurs are united by a belief that they can do something. Their battle cry is “Let’s try.”

If you feel like you can’t then someone in your life has taught you self-limiting beliefs that have to go. The fact of the matter is that you’re never really stuck unless you give into those limiting beliefs. The only losers are those who don’t get back up on the horse.

Consider for a moment that 80% of lottery winners file bankruptcy within 5 years. That’s crazy. Their success wasn’t limited by money as we’ve been taught to believe. Their success had to be tied to something else. Perhaps it’s the way they view money or perhaps it’s their self-control. Whatever it is, it’s clear that their problem wasn’t a lack of money.

Converting Dreams to Reality with Persistence

If you can hold onto your dreams and never let go then you’ll eventually achieve them. Whatever you call it grit (in the language of How Children Succeed), Stockdale Paradox (in the language of Good to Great), perseverance (in the language of Seeing What Others Don’t) or simply persistence (in the language used by Emotional Intelligence) the fundamental point is the same. That is, that there’s a power in just being persistent. Persistence created the Grand Canyon. Water didn’t carve the canyon in a day. The Golden Gate Bridge was initially conceived in 1916 and didn’t finally open until 1937. The Sagrada Família started construction in 1882 and it’s estimated that the construction will be completed in 2028.

Persistence pays off. Consider that 44% of all sales people quit trying after the first call and 94% of sales people quit by the fourth call but 60% of all sales are made after the fourth call. So 94% of all of sales people aren’t eligible for 60% of the sales because they’re unwilling to invest in getting the four rejections they need to earn the right for the remaining 60% of the business.

Not every endeavor or every dream requires the level of persistence as some of the above examples but anything worth doing – anything that will be truly rewarding – requires a level of persistence to make it happen.

The Truth and Small Changes

The truth is that the difference between wildly successful and relative mediocrity is very small. Consider that in baseball the difference between great players (> .300 batting average) and the mediocre (> .250 batting average) is just one hit in twenty. The truth is that the differences that put someone at the top of their game and the rest of us are just a few small things. (See Three Plays in Launch!)

However, despite the relatively small changes necessary to achieve great success most people are afraid of the truth. They don’t want to know that they slouch when they speak or that they slur certain words. They don’t want the negative feedback. Their ego doesn’t want to be harmed (See Change or Die for more on the ego and its defenses).

The problem is that the truth is the truth whether you’re aware of it or not. Babies don’t suddenly float because they’re not aware of the law of gravity. The truth doesn’t hurt us less because we don’t know it. We just don’t understand its effects. (See Thinking in Systems for more on not understanding how a system operates.)

One of the challenges with finding the truth is understanding what the truth is. The problem is that we don’t get the truth. We simply get perceptions and feedback. I once was speaking in LA about abstraction and wrapping classes and I made the offhand remark that I had to be careful about talking about rapping on stage because I might get shot. At the time there were a lot of rappers getting shot. One of the pieces of feedback that I received (and I’m not making this up) was that I was a racist. It was that one comment that they believed made me a racist. The interesting thing about this is that one could say I was stereotyping rappers – guilty as charged – but saying that I was a racist didn’t make any sense.

The point of this story is that people only have their perceptions and can only provide their feedback. It’s up to us to find the truth – sometimes the hard truth – in what is being said. Jack Canfield quotes Jack Rosenblum as saying “If one person tells you you’re a horse, they’re crazy. If three people tell you you’re a horse, there’s a conspiracy afoot. If ten people tell you you’re a horse, it’s time to buy a saddle.” The point is that you’re going to have to ask for a lot of feedback to find the truth – whether it’s that you’re a horse or not.

Asking for feedback is an act in humility. (For more on humility see Humilitas.) It’s placing yourself in a stance that is willing to learn. Sometimes this is called a palms up stance. It’s a willingness to learn from what is around you like the Jesuits did. (See Heroic Leadership.) To act in a way that allows you to be that open requires a great deal of inner strength to be able to accept the feedback. For me that’s a stable core – knowing who I am and what I stand for. I talk about this in my post The Inner Game of Dialogue and how the martial arts core of centering is key to being able to accept the feedback of others.

Core Genius

What is it that you do better than anyone else in the world? If you can’t answer that then perhaps you can answer what can you do better than anyone else in your world? Or perhaps what do you feel like you’re the most naturally gifted or talented at? If you’re like me the question is still rather hard, however, I’m developing some answers.

I decided to purchase the Strengths Finder 2.0 book and take the Clifton Strengths Finder assessment. I scored top three talents in Learning, Futuristic, and Strategic. These talents lead me to not have one thing that I’m good at – one core genius. Instead, as a learner, future focused person (See The Time Paradox for parallels), and strategic thinker I tend to learn lots of things – sometimes well and sometimes less well.

For me, there are many things that I can do which are powerful. From my point of view the adaptability and deep reservoir of things I’ve learned over the years are my core genius. However, that’s like saying that your core genius is the next thing that you encounter – it’s not very fulfilling from the “find an answer” point of view.

If you’ve got a better, more focused answer, the question is how much of your time do you spend doing that thing – and how much time do you spend doing “everything else.” Even without focus I’m careful to consider those things I can, shouldn’t and should do. The things I should do are those things where they match key skills that I’ve developed or will energize me. The rest of the things that I do I need to try to delegate. It’s estimated that entrepreneurs spend only 30% of their time in their core genius. Can you imagine what it would be like if we could spend 70% on our core genius? Perhaps you would find your own Success Principles.

Book Review-Launch!: The Critical 90 Days from Idea to Market

Over the years I’ve launched a few products. Rarely have I moved from idea to implementation in less than 90 days. I tend to allow things to find their own flow. The Shepherd’s Guide initially took over 6 months to get done. In publishing terms that’s not so bad. In terms of the way that Scott Duffy thinks about product launches it’s quite slow. In the new phase of business growth we’re expecting to start to generate more products and launch them in a more rapid timeframe and that’s why when my friend Heather Newman suggested that I read Launch!, I decided I needed to pick it up and see what I could do to launch products faster.

The Role of Perseverance

Despite the title and the hype, there’s equally as much coverage in Launch! about persevering as there is about being quick to market. There are plenty of stories about people who managed to “hang in there” through some truly tough times. One particularly compelling quote is “Most entrepreneurs don’t realize how close they are to breaking through just before they decide to quit.” Jim Collins in Good to Great talks about what he calls the Stockdale Paradox “You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” In other words, you’ve got to be willing to change your course when you know you’re going to run aground but be willing to hold your course to try to find the new world.

Over the years I’ve considered whether I should continue Thor Projects. I’ve wondered if it’s what I should be doing. Financially the organization has always done fine. However, there have been many times when I’ve wondered if we were accomplishing our mission. There was a long time when I didn’t even know what the mission was.

On the SharePoint Shepherd side, I can tell you that the first year of the Shepherd’s Guide sales were interesting but not at all impressive. They weren’t even enough to do a second book. However, that all changed when I got a chance to run an email marketing campaign. In one day I got the same number of inquiries that I had received in the entire preceding year. Now the Shepherd’s Guide is a big part of the organization. I won’t retire off of its income but it certainly helps. I don’t know what would have happened if I had pulled the plug on it.

At the same time, I created a set of SharePoint training DVDs which haven’t sold enough to recover the investment in them. They still may but as of right now my assumption is that they won’t and as a result I’m not investing more time and energy in the idea of DVD sales. Could it be that this is the next great revenue stream that I’ve untapped? It’s possible but I doubt it. It’s an idea that I had to pull the plug on – and decide not to persevere so that I could move on to trying something else. (Here’s a hint. There are cool things coming from www.Kin2Kid.com )

However, I’ve not given up on the Video Studio or the belief that video is a powerful way to educate. I continue to make investments to improve it and make it better. I’ve started developing training for a number of sites including Pluralsight and Lynda.com. I had to realize the distribution vehicle and purchasing model were wrong with selling DVDs but fundamentally the idea that video content is a good thing hasn’t been abandoned.

Close Cousin Practice

The close cousin of perseverance is practice. I mentioned in my review of Primal Leadership about Walt Disney’s failures and how he learned something from it. How he did something small and used it as practice for the next bigger, grander project that he wanted to do. Sometimes perseverance is about more than just surviving. Sometimes it’s about learning, adjusting and adapting. There’s a hidden expectancy that we have if we’re working on something. We expect that we have to succeed or we’re a failure. We personalize the event into who we are instead of treating it for what it is, just something to try again.

I believe strongly that allowing yourself room to practice without the need to accept guilt or shame about not being successful is core to being successful in the long term. (See Daring Greatly for more about the impact of guilt and shame.) Malcom Gladwell speaks about the impact of practice in Outliers. He speaks about the number of hours of practice that experts get – intentional practice which leads to greatness. Howard Gartner expresses the same thing in Extraordinary Minds – how the great minds that he studied were deliberate with their practice.

It’s much easier to be persistent when you believe that you’re just practicing. You’re not ready for ultimate success yet. You’re not waiting on it. You’re just learning and developing yourself to become a better person and to become ready for ultimate success. (See Carol Dweck’s book Mindset for how you can change you and your skills.)

Long Term View

A student approaches a monk at a respected monastery and asks him how long he must study to become a master. The monk responds “ten years”. The student responds “That is too long. I have to be done in five.” The monk responds “In that case it will take 20 years.” Launch! describes the best short cut as a long term view. That is that you’re successful when you’re willing to take a point of view that you want to build skills over the long term.

We’ve all heard the parable of the tortoise and the hare where the tortoise wins because of his steady progress towards the finish line. I mentioned James MacDonald in my review of Seeing David in the Stone. James once mentioned that many people want his success but they don’t want the hard work that it took to reach his success. That’s the long term view. He did work that wasn’t glamorous or even profitable to build his skills and fulfill his purpose. The short term view is I want it now. The long term view is the view of building to success.

I mentioned in my review of The Time Paradox that my view is decidedly long. I am always looking for the answer which is the best long term answer. That’s a core part of how I’m wired – and a way that Launch! recommends that you view things.

Perfectionism

Barry Swartz in the Paradox of Choice talks about Maximizers and Satisficers. Maximizers have to have the best and the perfect. The cost for this is being perpetually late and more importantly perpetually unhappy. They’re focused on the trivial and meaningless and as a result they end up getting nothing done and frustrating themselves. So on the one hand we should take a long term view. We should look at each thing we do as both practice and a stepping stone for the next great thing that we’re going to do. On the other hand we need to make a decision about when enough is enough.

With the Shepherd’s Guide we have this struggle. We can always keep adding in new tasks. We can tweak the existing content. We can make it better. However, if we continue to do this we’ll never ship it. We’ll never make any revenue and as a result we’ll not be able to continue business.

The trick as Swartz discusses is that we all have a bit of the maximizer and a bit of the satisficer in us. We need to make sure that the areas of our lives that we’re being maximizers in is the right part. The part that ultimately will lead us to fulfillment and will support us in the way that we want to be supported. We need to choose when to choose.

Not Important

Part of the key to managing perfectionism (or being a maximizer) is in targeting it into the areas that matter. Duffy recalls a conversation with the CEO of an organization that was doing well but there was chipped paint and torn carpet in their offices. When asked the CEO responded that it wasn’t important – and in truth it wasn’t important. It didn’t stop people from getting their job done and done well.

Tom Peters in his classic book In Search of Excellence discusses some of the things that drive entrepreneurs to create products that are compelling. Whether its Frank Perdue talking about the three feathers that are hard to get rid of when removing the feathers from a chicken or an obsession with clean washrooms driving attendance at a baseball stadium. There is an attention to detail and a frustration with the status quo that is the life blood of some successful entrepreneurs. Truett Cathy – the creator of Chick-Fil-A – has a passion for helping people. That passion created a restaurant that people wanted to be a part of and that ultimately created Chick-Fil-A.

In my book review of Demand, I spoke of Hassle maps and how some small hassles have a disproportionate impact on success. There are some small things that get in the way of success. Whether it’s a web site that is easy to use or a phone number that people can remember, there are little barriers that can be removed to reveal powerful results.

Three Plays

One of the aspects of The Titleless Leader that I missed in my review was a comment that most effective leaders aren’t well rounded. They’re acutely aware of their talents and use them to their advantage. This is based on Gallup’s research and findings that leaders who tried to be effective in every domain often become the least effective leaders.

Bruce Lee said “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practices one kick 10,000 times”. Football talent scout Stephen Austin says that the difference between the average and the best players in the world is just three plays. “Three moments when the superstar does something just a little different than everyone else.” We don’t have to conquer the world. We don’t have to become the best at everything we do. We only need to get a little different at three plays to become superstars in our fields.

A word of caution, however, we can’t suck at anything either. We’ve got to be able to adapt and play the position that we’re in not one that we would like to be in. So while we only need to be great at three plays – we have to be able to at least execute every play in the playbook.

Blurry Vision

Scott Duffy chides the CEOs he meets for not having a vision as to where their company will be in three years. I struggle with this not just because I don’t have a clear vision of where my businesses will be in three years but because of my awareness that we’re pulled along by market forces that necessarily drift us from where we started. Bob Pozen admits in Extreme Productivity that despite his drive and his belief that he knew where he was headed, he often ended up in a different spot because of life and market forces. In my experience this is the most accurate view.

The successful business folks I know admit that their success was due to a good deal of hard work and preparation – but also a great deal of luck. I was speaking with a friend the other day about retirement when he admitted that he was a structured saver creating a retirement program that was respectable but the real change in his life was an opportunity to buy a company being divested from a larger organization. His plans changed because of changes that were far outside of his control – and at the time of his desire.

So while Scott Duffy in Launch! believes every CEO should have a firm vision of where the organization should go, I believe that every CEO should have a clear understanding of the direction they want to go – their compass. I believe that having a clear vision requires a clear map and I don’t think that anyone who is exploring new territories in business can possibly have a clear map. Even if they did at the pace in which our world works I can’t imagine that the map would be useful for very long.

Money and Exiting

It’s fitting that Launch! ends with a section on financing and how to exit the business once it’s successful. However, for me neither topic is particularly interesting. I believe in self-funding as much as possible. I’m also years away from any desire to walk away from the business. As a result I’m not really able to fully process what is said here. However, there is coverage for those who need it.

All-in-All, Launch! can help you motivate yourself to make your product launches happen faster… at least it appears that it can. You can watch me launch new products – or you can read the book and try for yourself.

Book Review-Killer Web Content: Make the Sale, Deliver the Service, Build the Brand

Writing content is easy. Well at least it is for me. I learned how to become a production writer while I was working full-time at a consulting company before I restarted my company. I was responsible for 50 articles a year for a newsletter for TechRepublic.com (one a week). At the same time I was still writing for Developer.com and other publications. I was working full time and cranking out articles at the rate of over 75 per year. It was a crazy time and like a few other times in my life, sleep wasn’t easy to come by in large quantities. However, I learned how to make sure I was writing – and writing reasonable quality stuff – every day. So when it came to needing to rebuild my web sites I thought writing content would be the easy part. I mean how hard could it be?

Well, it doesn’t have to be hard – unless you’re super picky like I am and you want Killer Web Content. I want the kind of web content that helps people find me when they’re searching. I want to connect with them when they’re reading and I want to engage them as they’re investigating. While some of those skills are skills that are core writing skills, some of the skills are things unique to the web – in particular helping people find you when they search is a critically important topic and one that’s often overlooked.

Snakeoil and Search Engine Optimization

One of the things that’s been frustrating to me for years is how little people really understand search engine optimization. Too many people sell expensive packages to help people put keywords and descriptions metatags in their content and they tell them that it will make searching all better. It’s like we’re back before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the need to be able to backup claims that you’re making about what the product does. It is snake oil sales men telling us they can cure everything including cancer.

The reality is much different. First, Google was born out of a very simple idea. That is the most interesting research is the research that has been cited the greatest number of times. It’s positively simple. So in Google search (and other engines now), the more inbound links your content gets the more likely it is to be what people are looking for when the word they search for is on your site. Because people are trying to game the system there are all sorts of caveats and modeling and sophistication, however, at its core this is the truth about search engine optimization. The more quality inbound links you get, the better your search ranking.

Sure words that appear in the title are weighted more heavily. If you use words repeatedly it has more weight than it only appearing once. Keywords and description metatags are somewhat helpful for some search engines. However, there’s one small twist to this story and that is that the customer must be searching for the words that you use. Here is where the magic happens.

Imprecision Language

Whether you’re someone who reads and writes English, Spanish, French, German, or Mandarin Chinese our words are imprecise. No two people understand words exactly the same way. They’re all flavored, colored, tinted, and skewed by our experiences. If you’ve ever had to try to name a baby and heard “I don’t like that name. I knew someone with that name and I didn’t like them.” You’ll know how things as simple as names have different connotations to different people.

In my information architecture presentations I speak about how you can have synonyms – two different words that mean essentially the same thing. You can have homonyms – two words that sound the same but are spelled differently. You can also have words that are the same but have different meanings. For instance, consider nursing. This is a profession. It is also something that mammals do. If you’re searching for one you don’t generally want to find the other.

The point of all of this is that the search technology that has made our lives so much better is based on a rocky foundation. It’s based on the words we use not necessarily the ideas that we have in our heads. So as we look for search to be “magical” we have to realize that search is only as good as the words that we use – and the words that our customers use to find us.

Search Words

Since search engines work by matching, we want our content to match the words that users are searching for. Do they search for car, vehicle, auto, or automobile? Well, as it turns out they happen to search for car more than automobile. But how would you know that?

The good news is that you can figure out what users are searching for by leveraging Google Trends and Google Adwords keyword planner. Google trends allows you to see how a set of words have been searched for over time. It’s great for seeing how a term is becoming more – or less popular. For instance, you can see how knowledge management is getting searched for less and less over time.

Google Adwords, the way that you purchase search engine listings, has a tool called keyword planner that allows you to see how many searches a given set of words get in a month. Using this tool – or some of the third parties that process similar information for you – you can find which words people are searching for. Whether or not they’re looking for what you have to offer or whether they’ll buy from you or not may be questionable – but it’s possible to find out what people are searching for.

I’m not proposing that you buy Adwords. I’m proposing that you use the tools to determine what words your customers are searching for.

Carewords

Killer Web Content talks about carewords – that is words that your customers care about. While you won’t find it in the dictionary it’s an incredibly powerful idea. The tricky part is figuring out what the carewords are for your audience. This is left as an exercise for the reader. This process really comes in two flavors. First, there’s the process of finding the words that they’re searching for. That’s what we just discussed. The second exercise is what words they’re looking for as they’re reading your content. These may be – but don’t have to be the same words.

Sometimes the words that lead someone to your site are not the same words that will lead them to a decision to buy. Consider my situation. The factors that lead people to find my site are some variation of speaking and leadership. (I’m intentionally not being as specific as I could about the exact words they use.) Once they’re on my site, they’ll want to see things like I’m an engaging speaker and that I’m credible through testimonials and credentials including awards and years in business. They want to see enough to build interest in me as a speaker. However, one of the key factors that they’ll need to know is that I’m approachable. They might call this “down to earth” or “real” but they want to know that they can get to me and get me to come to their event.

So the words that got someone to the site (speaking or leadership) aren’t the same words they need when they’re investigating (interest and credibility builders). Those aren’t the same words that they’ll be looking for when they’re ready to reach out to me. All of these are their carewords. They’re all words that my customers will read for, scan for, and seek out. I just have to know exactly what they are so I can incorporate them into my writing.

Information Scent

In my Information Architecture talks I speak of information scent. This is outgrowth of optimal foraging which was put forth in the 1970s. Basically this says that animals seek to do their foraging in an optimal way and they leverage their sense of scent to help them find the best way. Information scent is the extension of this idea that people look for something in the content which leads them to believe that they’re on the right path. That information scent is whether they are able to scan and see the carewords they expected.

One of the things that we often see on the information architecture side is pogosticking. That is people go to search and hop in and out of the various results. This indicates that the information scent isn’t right. They’re getting to pages but these pages are apparently not what they’re looking for. Thus the information scent in the description or summary of the search result isn’t enough to help them decide that they don’t want to view the contents.

Driving Action

Of course all of the information scent in the world isn’t enough if at the end of the day you can’t drive action. No matter what the web site is the goal should be to drive some action in your world. Whether it’s furthering a cause or furthering a sale your content should be moving a prospect forward to something. While some may object to saying that a church or civic organization’s content should drive action, I counter with don’t you want them to join you in your civic or religious mission? Every web site’s goal should be to further the cause.

The problem with driving action is that it’s notoriously hard to do. We’re living in a world of information overload (See The Information Diet and The Paradox of Choice.) We’re overwhelmed and so even the tiniest barrier causes us to not want to act. The book Demand spoke of hassle maps and how small barriers can prevent action. Even small changes can create large changes in outcomes. Helping people feel comfortable, helping them believe that you understand them and are the kind of person they want to work with can change the results you get.

Tacit Knowledge

In knowledge management circles there’s a debate. It’s between the father – Polyani – who says that “you know more than you can tell” and the son – Nonaka – who says that “tacit knowledge is unarticulated knowledge awaiting transfer.” In other words one says that it’s not possible to capture every bit of knowledge from someone. There is no magic brain sucking device. The other believes that given time and effort you can get everything out of someone. While I appreciate the rather hopeful view, I can’t believe it. In part because of Gary Klein’s work.

Gary Klein discovered this idea of recognition primed decisions (RPD) that are based on our experiences and that we build mental models to simulate events. (See Sources of Power.) In his work he struggled for years to get fire commanders to explain how they made decisions and only after great pain realized that they made decisions by creating a mental model of the situation. The mental model they made was informed by their experiences. As a result looking from the outside in their decisions made no sense. After all, how could someone know how a fire was going to behave before it did?

It’s this problem that’s at the root of why carewords aren’t necessarily the words that people will tell you are important. We have beliefs about our beliefs. In other words, we want to believe we’re compassionate, rational people – even though we know deep down that we’re not. Whether you believe that our brains are lying to themselves (See Thinking, Fast and Slow) or not, we don’t know how to articulate everything that we’re looking for.

This is why the process of finding the carewords – and the process of writing killer web content is so challenging. You can’t write good content until you know the right words – and finding the right words is difficult. However, if you’re willing to find the right words then you can create your own Killer Web Content.

Book Review-Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

I read Atul Gawande’s last book The Checklist Manifesto and was impressed at the coverage of the importance of checklists in medicine – which had primarily proven their effectiveness in aerospace applications. I was expecting from Being Mortal was a similar treatise on another technique that could be brought to healthcare. I was, however, surprised to read a soulful account of how his family aged and the challenges faced when you have parents that are reaching an age where they’re no longer able to care for themselves.

The Role of Medicine

Medicine fights a losing battle every day. We all know we’re going to die and yet our health care system sets out to fight that very central reality of our existence. While we can ultimately improve the quality of life for many and can forestall the inevitable – we can’t cheat death. Death will win the battle every time. This central reality is at the heart of the struggle. If we know that death is the ultimate victor how long and how hard should we struggle against the inevitable.

I’m no fan of death as I mentioned in my review of On Death and Dying. However, having had several dogs over the years, I’ve had the unenviable task of yielding to it for my friends several times. Each time I knew that I could no longer maintain their quality of life. I knew that the right answer was to help end their suffering. Doing this with a dog is one thing. Doing this for a human is quite another. While few places allow for human suicide, the “right to die” is something that deserves its own consideration. However, this is the end of the story, where the end is obvious. What do you do prior to this point to preserve what matters in life?

What Matters in Life

Over the years I’ve written a few times about the things that seem to matter – things that seem to elevate people from their position. Change or Die notably spoke about the need for relationships and community and how that provided a buffer to life’s challenges. Bowling Alone spoke about the malaise that we face as a society as we become less connected with others through social clubs – including bowling. How Children Succeed talks about the long term impact of relationships and feeling safe.

A funny thing happens when you’re forced to confront your mortality either through a near death experience or because of old age. Your focus, your attention, and your priorities become clearer. When you don’t know when your last day will be you try to do only the things that matter most. As it turns out for the most part what matters most is connecting with the people in your life with which you’ve forged deep relationships. Family and close friends are key when your days are near.

However, we’re working our way back from the very end of life. What matters “long after the threat of living is gone” as the John Melloncamp song asks? The answer may be that being needed is a part of the answer. It became apparent after some experimental living situations in care facilities that assigning a relatively trivial responsibility to elderly patients such as caring for a plant or an animal improved their lifespan – and their happiness.

What is Happiness?

Happiness is another recurring theme that comes up in our reading. Stumbling on Happiness and The Happiness Hypothesis both clearly seek to illuminate the path to happiness. However, Happiness is woven into the very fabric of our being ever since the framers of the declaration of independence said “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” we’ve been seeking out happiness – despite being a relatively new concept when it was first written. There are books like Hardwiring Happiness that seek to teach us how to be happy. With all of the talk of happiness one might conclude that we know what makes us happy.

Unfortunately, we struggle to figure out happiness. Even our wants are fickle. We believe that we should only have certain wants. Thus we have desires about our desires. Despite this as already stated the need for connection is key. We’ve also shared that having responsibilities matter. However, of central concern to Being Mortal are the related topics of freedom and autonomy. We all want to live our lives autonomously. We don’t want to depend on others for transportation or our basic needs.

One of the challenges with the traditional “nursing home” model for warehousing the elderly is that it removes a great deal of freedom and autonomy – more than the limitations placed on the elderly by age itself. Residents are told when to wake and when to sleep. They’re fed meals when it is time to be fed. In truth they retain very little of their freedom – if any at all. If happiness depends even a little on the freedom which so many aged persons seem to agree – then nursing homes must be a miserable place.

A Nice Cage, but a Cage None the Less

Some nursing homes are nice. They have pretty atriums and nice lobbies. Their community rooms are spacious and well decorated. However, the truth is that the residents are not free. As mentioned above, they’re told when to do things and where they can go. If they’re not trapped inside of their own bodies, they’re effectively isolated from society in their nursing home world. Gawande cites several potential residents who say that it’s just not home. It doesn’t have the right feel. So what would it look like to feel like home?

There’s No Place like Community

The short answer is that the best substitute for home is a small community of people who live together. The attempts have been done with less than 20 community members with some supporting staff. This arrangement seems to reduce anxiety and stress and lead to happier more connected lives. Community members build the relationships that allow them to care for one another – if not physically at least emotionally. These pods seem to work because there’s someone to share your life with.

While these communities are less common – they’re growing in popularity as fewer people want to be warehoused during their final years and are choosing instead to retain as much of their quality of life as possible.

Quality not Quantity

Ultimately it’s the quality of our lives that is the most important. It’s the ability to live a life worth living. That’s why alternatives to nursing homes are interesting – and the reason why hospice care turns medicine on its ear. Typical medicine makes small sacrifices today for the hope of a better life later. For instance, a surgery to replace a joint introduces pain and risk today for the hope of having more mobility with a replacement joint. However, hospice care sacrifices length of life (quantity) for quality. It’s more important that people be allowed to live with dignity and to be with the people that care for them than for their lives to be artificially extended.

Hard Questions, Important Answers

Ultimately for all of us that will face a loved one who is nearing death we need to know what the person’s wishes are. We need to know what they are and are not willing to put up with. Are they interested in resuscitation? Do they want feeding? What are the things in their life that are so important that life without them isn’t acceptable? These are hard questions for sure. It’s hard to accept that there may be a point where the loss of a loved one is the most human thing to allow. Two thirds of patients admitted they’d have a procedure that they didn’t want if their family wanted it. How do we turn this on its ear so that the family does what the patient wants instead?

Gawande doesn’t have answers to every hard question, but there’s certainly wisdom in the conversation about Being Mortal.