Jay Robb reviews business books

Book review: Talent is overrated (and deliberate practice is hard)

Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else

By Geoff Colvin Portfolio $28.50

When he's not conducting the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, the brilliant Benjamin Zander is inspiring business types on the lecture circuit. During his talks, Zander asks if anyone's celebrating a birthday. The birthday boy or girl gets called on stage and Zander tells his audience to sing a song. On cue, everyone spontaneously sings Happy Birthday.

Zander applauds and tells everyone they did a good job. And then he tells the audience they can do better. So try again. Sing the song, only this time, do it better. Now ... go!

Of course, no one sings. There's complete silence. After a few awkward moments, Zander explains why. When everyone knows what to do and what's expected, we do it easily, we do it together and we do it without being led. But when we don't understand what's expected, when we're only told in vague terms to do better, work smarter or faster, we're paralyzed.

And this, says author Geoff Colvin, is pretty much the approach most organizations take when it comes to innovation. "Leaders exhort the troops to be innovative, but no one understands clearly what that means," says Colvin, senior editor at large with FORTUNE magazine.

"Unsure where to go, they go nowhere."

Or we strike off and out in a million different directions that lead nowhere and waste a whole lot of time, effort and money. So here's the better idea. Try being specific. Tell us what kind of innovation would be most valuable. Link innovation to the priorities of our organization so we know exactly where doing something new, different and better will have the greatest impact.

Along with pointing us in the right direction, organizations need to clear away some well- entrenched myths surrounding innovation. Creativity is not some mysterious gift, a rare talent that only a select few are born with. Don't bank on spontaneous out-of-the-blue eureka moments to bring breakthrough innovations. And it turns out you can never get too close to a problem. Resist the urge to bring in outsiders and fresh pairs of eyes who know little or nothing about the problem.

"The evidence shows that in finding creative solutions to problems, knowledge -- the more the better -- is your friend, not your enemy."

The greatest innovators in a wide range of fields all share one common characteristic, says Colvin. "They spent many years in intensive preparation before making any kind of creative breakthrough. Great innovations are roses that bloom after long and careful cultivation."

So if you want to cultivate a culture of innovation at work, give folks the time, space and freedom to dive deep and gain in-depth domain knowledge. It's a knowledge that can only be developed through deliberate practice.

Neither work nor play, deliberate practice is all about staying focused on improving performance. Feedback on results is continuously available. It's mentally demanding and exhausting. And it's not much fun, which is why so few of us are world-class performers.

Not surprisingly, deliberate practice is fuelled by intrinsic motivation.

"If the activities that lead to greatness were easy and fun, then everyone would do them and they would not distinguish the best from the rest," says Colvin. "The reality that deliberate practice is hard can even be seen as good news. It means that most people won't do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more."

For organizations that are serious about innovation and world-class performance, find and nurture your resident experts who possess the drive and passion for deliberate practice. Point your great performers in the right direction. And then turn them loose.

Book review: Why your world is about to get a whole lot smaller

Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller

By Jeff Rubin

Random House Canada

$29.95

Could some serious pain at the pump be Hamilton's best shot at a whole lot of new jobs?

Brace yourself for record-high gas prices. We're already paying almost a buck a litre as we reel through the worst global recession since the Great Depression.

So just how fast and how high will prices soar when the recession ends and economic engines start firing again in China, India, North America and Europe?

We'll get hammered on more than just the demand side. Some big questions surround supply. We're depleting oil reserves faster than we're finding new source. All the easy oil's been had and we're going to pay far more to find and refine what's left at the bottom of the barrel. And then we have oil producers cannibalizing more exports for their own consumption. In the Middle East, around a third of a million barrels of heavily subsidized oil a day are burned to generate electricity and power demand keeps soaring. And more than a million barrels a day could soon be needed to run massive desalination plants as the fast-growing region faces a peak water problem.

Welcome to the end of cheap oil and the return of a much smaller world, says author and former Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce chief economist Jeff Rubin.

"Once the dust settles from the various crisis rocking financial markets, we are looking at the same basic demand-supply imbalance that we were looking at before the recession began," says Rubin.

"That imbalance took us to nearly $150 per barrel before the recession set in. In the next cycle, the same imbalance will probably take us to to $200 per barrel before another recession temporarily knocks back prices and demand." If that happens, look for record prices at the pumps.

While we're not about to run out of oil anytime soon, Rubin says we're nowhere near coming up with alternative energy sources that will allow us to carry on with business as usual in an oil-free world. Ethanol's a "head fake" and solar and wind power aren't yet up the challenge.

As triple digit oil prices become the new normal, Rubin says we'll say goodbye to dollar stores, drive-thrus and dining out, SUVs, two-car garages, hour-long commutes by car, road trips, regional airports and disposable incomes. Life looks especially grim in suburbia, where the lack of accessible public transit will carve McMansions into tenement slums before being salvaged for parts and plowed under for farmers' fields. And we'll be saying hello to inflation, slow economic growth, bus passes, a whole lot more train travel, and well-worn walking shoes.

So what's the good news as gas begins what looks like an inevitable climb to $2 a litre? There'll be no shortage of hometown jobs in manufacturing and agriculture. Everyone will be hard at work. "Globalization comes with a lot of verbiage these days, but it's just a fancy word for a very simple process: moving your factory to the cheapest labour market in the world," says Rubin.

"Even better, getting out of the factory business altogether and just buying whatever your factory used to produce from someone else's factory at a fraction of the cost."

But globalization only runs on cheap oil. Without it, higher transport costs cancel out lower labour costs. When oil went from $30 US to $100 US per barrel, the average daily fuel bill for an ocean-going cargo ship shot up from $9,500 US to $32,000 US and manufacturers got stuck with the tab. Instead of paying higher and higher costs to ship raw materials and finished goods around the world, look for those manufacturers to bring back jobs, set up shop in industrial heartlands and serve regional markets.

"From industrial pump parts to lawn mower batteries to home furniture, shipping costs are driving production back to North America from cheap labour markets in China and elsewhere," says Rubin.

"With transport and logistics costs soon to become even more important, padlocks will be taken off mothballed factories, and machinery that hasn't run for years will be getting a new greasing."

Toss in a carbon tax or cap and trade system that penalizes countries that run on coal and, together with triple-digit oil prices, North American industry and jobs will be protected like never before.

Along with more factories, expect more and smaller farms. Soaring energy and transportation costs will clear grocery store shelves of Atlantic salmon from Norway, lamb from New Zealand and strawberries from California. Instead, we'll be filling our fridges with what's grow locally. Everyone will be on the 100-mile diet and looking for deals at weekend farmer's markets. Also expect more back yard and community gardens as we try to save on soaring food costs wherever we can.

So today's baristas at Starbucks and the greeters at Wal-Mart could eventually find themselves working on factory floors and plowing farmers' fields. Jobs will be about the only thing not in short supply in our small, small world, Rubin predicts.

"This transition will not be a layup," says Rubin, who remains confident that we'll prove ourselves to be innovation rich in an energy poor world.

"The infrastructure, the technology, the training, even the work culture will have to undergo a massive overhaul ... Many people who have not seen a lunch box since middle school or who haven't had a callous on their hands ... may soon become reacquainted with both."

JEFF RUBIN LIVE

Economist Jeff Rubin will be at the Burlington Central Library June 15, 7 p.m., to discuss his controversial book, Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller.

The program is part of the Engaging Ideas series hosted by Burlington's A Different Drummer Books. Tickets: $10 (includes catering by Grinning Gourmand) are available at both the library and A Different Drummer.

June issue of Harvard Business Review a great read

Lots of informative articles in the latest Harvard Business Review on rebuilding trust, innovating in turbulent times and an assessment of Obama's first 90 days in office.

Some key points...

New leaders must do 3 things right within their first 90 days on the job:

• Secure early wins to build credibilty and avoid /mitigate losses

• Lay a foundation for accomplishing key priorities within the first year, starting with assembling a strong executive team

• Articulate a compelling vision for what they'll accomplish during their tenure so folks willingly follow

Innovative companies have both-brain partnerships running the show -- a right-brain creative and a left-brain analytical. "If you don't have highly creative people in positions of real authority, you won't get innovation. Many companies allow left-brain analytic types to approve ideas at varioius stages of the innovation process. This is a cardinal error."

To rebuild trust, create a culture of candor at work. And to create that culture:

• tell the truth

• encourage people to speak truth to power

• reward contrarians

• practice having unpleasant conversations

• diversity your sources of information

• admit your mistakes

• build an organizational architecture that supports candor

• set information free

And the best quote of the issue goes to a manager who said "the only messenger I would ever shoot is the one who arrived too late."

Book review: Personality not included

Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity And How To Get It Back

By Rohit Bhargava

McGraw Hill

$28.95

So have you lucked out and found the next Jared Fogle?

You remember Jared. He's the guy from Indiana who dropped 45 kilograms in three months by eating turkey and veggie subs for lunch and dinner at Subway. The local campus newspaper ran a profile on the slimmed down Fogle and his self-styled Subway diet.

A franchise owner saw the story, sent it to Subway's ad agency and a star was born. But Fogle's 15 minutes of fame almost didn't happen. Subway's national brand manager wasn't keen on turning Fogle into an official pitchman and didn't believe you could use the healthy angle to sell fast food. And the legal types worked themselves into a frenzy over potential liability issues over the health benefits of the Subway diet. So the agency offered to shoot the first ad for free and run it only as a regional spot. The ad took off, spawned a national campaign and Fogle became the face of the franchise and an advertising icon. Subway's annual sales jumped by 18 per cent and went up another 16 per cent the following year.

Why was Fogle such a hit?

"He was a real person who had an authentic story and people believed it," says author and social marketing guru Rohit Bhargava. "He was certainly not a celebrity, but he was real. He may have been discovered by chance, but he was deliberately cast in the role of spokesperson by an agency unafraid to take advantage of the good fortune of finding him."

Authentic, believable and real spokespeople such as Fogle give otherwise faceless and forgettable organizations a much-needed personality transplant. And according to Bhargava, personality is the missing ingredient that prevents most organizations from becoming great.

"Personality inspires trust and trust builds loyalty," Bhargava says. "Personality is not just about what you stand for, but how you choose to communicate it. It is also the way you reconnect your customers, partners, employees, and influencers to the soul of your brand in the new social media era. Great brands and products must evoke a dynamic personality in order to attract passionate customers."

Bhargava defines personality as the unique, authentic and talkable soul of your brand that people can get passionate about.

It's accidental spokespeople, ambassadors and enthusiasts such as Fogle who talk up your brand with family, friends and strangers. What they lack in polish, they make up for in passion.

The good news is every organization has a Fogle. Search among your customers or employees, retirees, suppliers and community partners. You're sure to find some true believers are tirelessly building a fan base just for you. And thanks to the wonders of social media, they're now blogging, sending out Tweets, singing your praises on Facebook. You simply couldn't buy that kind of advertising.

But here's the bad news. Not every organization wants a Fogle. Fearful organizations with control issues layer on the policies and procedures to stifle and silence accidental spokespeople such as front-line employees.

Only designated and trained talking heads are officially sanctioned to deliver well-rehearsed and wordsmithed party lines drained of all personality.

"The flaw in this logic is that employees are already your brand spokespeople to a degree because they are already talking about the organization they work for in their own personal interactions," Bhargava says. "Compare how a message-trained communications professional describes his or her company with the way it is described by a passionate employee who has spent years developing a product and believes it is the greatest invention in the world.

"By silencing these individuals, many organizations have lost their best chance of creating authentic dialogue and of having real people demonstrate their brand's personality."

Along with supporting and sharing the stage with accidental spokespeople, Bhargava recommends coming with a compelling back story that personalizes your organization and capitalizing on personality moments. These are make-or-break moments where you win or lose with your customers. You have dozens of these moments before, during and after you make a sale or provide a service.

Get these personality moments right and you build a stronger bond. Screw up these moments and you risk losing your customers.

Along with a step-by-step guide for building personality, Bhargava offers up more than 100 success stories from smart and savvy organizations that have found their own Jared Fogle and figured out how to connect with customers in real and authentic ways.

Building a speaker's bureau

Pulling together the framework for a speaker's bureau here at work. The bureau would coordinate, support, promote and evaluate speaking engagements by the leadership team. We'd respond to and proactively seek out engagements to connect with key audiences.

Two great online resources for corporate speaking engagements:

Ragan Communications (check out the speechwriting section) and Nick Morgan's blog.

 

Is it right?

Cowardice asks the question "is it safe?"

Expediency asks the question "is it politic?"

And Vanity comes along and asks the question "is it popular?"

But Conscience asks the question "is it right?"

And there comes a time when one must take a position

that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular,

but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

The TED Commandments for public speaking

Check out The TED Commandments on Presentation Zen. Here's the rules every presenter at the annual TED Conference must follow. Worth adopting in your own workplace if you're plagued with really bad and boring presentations.

• Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.

• Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before.

• Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.

• Thou Shalt Tell a Story.

• Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.

• Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.

• Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.

• Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.

• Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.

• Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee.

A cool idea to engage kids in math using mobile phones

The latest issue of Fast Company has an article on apps for iPhones and Crackberries. Seems everything's migrating to mobile phones and there's a fortune to be made from $2.99 downloadable applications.

So here's a really cool idea from the Virginia Department of Education -- it's a competition to create an iPhone app that engages middle school kids in math.

I went to Disney World and all I got was this really cool book

Picked up Be our Guest: Perfecting the art of customer service by the Disney Institute. The salesperson (cast member) working the register at a store in Downtown Disney seemed geniunely surprised that someone actually bought the book.

Review to come. Here's an online tool to measure the ability of your organization to deliver Disney-like customer service. And Jeff Kober has this summary of Disney Service Basics -- guidelines for how to treat customers and how managers are to treat staff.

Book review: Social media, collaboration and collective action

Here Comes Everybody

by Clay Shirky

(Penguin Books, $17.50, pb.)

Procrastination and laziness wound up getting me connected with an audience of more than 2,100 people.

It was late afternoon. I'd just finishing pulling together a PowerPoint presentation for a talk I was giving first thing the next morning. I wanted to run the slides past some colleagues who were also part of the show. Get their blessing and some honest feedback for last-minute polishing. But the photo-heavy PowerPoint was too big to e-mail.

And I was too lazy to walk down the hall and remember how to work the fax machine, a piece of equipment I hadn't used in about nine years.

So I decided to give SlideShare a shot. I'd just discovered the website, billed as the world's largest community for sharing presentations. You can find information on pretty much any topic, courtesy of PowerPoint and Word files culled from conferences, consultants and resident experts.

I uploaded my PowerPoint presentation to SlideShare and e-mailed the web link to my colleagues. I got an e-mail later that night from the team at SlideShare, congratulating me on being chosen as one of their presentations of the day. The next morning, I discovered that, along with my colleagues, several hundred people had checked out the presentation. And the numbers have kept growing. By last week, a PowerPoint presentation I delivered in person to about 100 people has been viewed 2,170 times online by a worldwide audience. Uploading the presentation to SlideShare took five minutes and didn't cost me a cent.

Author Clay Shirky, an expert on the social and economic effects of the Internet, says social media tools such as SlideShare, Flickr, Wikipedia and Facebook are fundamentally changing the way we get together, get along and get our jobs done.

"When we change the way we communicate, we change society," says Shirky. "A revolution in human affairs is a pretty grandiose thing to attribute to a ragtag bunch of tools like e-mail and mobile phones. E-mail is nice, but how big a deal can it be in the grand scheme of things? The answer is, 'not such a big deal, considered by itself.' The trick is not to consider it by itself. We now have the communication tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities, and we are witnessing the rise of new ways of co-ordinating action that take advantage of that change."

It's getting easier by the minute for like-minded folks to meet, share ideas and information, co-operate, collaborate and take collective action. And we no longer need to rely on traditional institutions and organizations to make it happen and provide managerial oversight. Social media tools are stripping out the complexity associated with managing small and large groups, driving down the costs of getting together and removing barriers to greater collaboration.

Remember life before the Internet? If there was a presentation you wanted to share with a group, you ran off photocopies. Stuffed envelopes. Wrote out addresses. Licked stamps. Walked down to the mailbox. It took a lot of time and effort. Now you can fire off an e-mail with a link to a presentation. Better yet, you can post it on the web and have 2,100 folks find you.

"Our electronic networks are enabling novel forms of collective action, enabling the creation of collaborative groups that are larger and more distributed than at any other time in history. The scope of work that can be done by noninstitutional groups is a profound challenge to the status quo," Shirky says.

The transformations won't happen overnight. But Shirky says they're coming: "The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn't until they have a critical mass of adopters, adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear."

So maybe we need to lay off those teens and tweens who are forever texting, tweeting and blogging. They could well be our next generation of innovators, collaborators and community-builders.

Now's also a good time for traditional institutions to start asking what will happen when customers and clients, patients and parishioners, voters, students and employees start connecting, collaborating and taking collective action with or without you. Shirky's book is well worth a very careful read.