you might have someone stay behind to ask questions after you give a presentation, have someone approach you after reading a whitepaper, have someone respond to an online posting, etc.. in all cases, though, it seems as though there’s a very short amount of time to actually do something with that attention.

if you wait too long, don’t follow up, or spend your time asking for permission you’re going to lose that person and your idea isn’t going to spread. don’t ask permission: JUST GO (and apologize later)

what was worse than being stranded in denver’s airport after a redeye flight cancellation fiasco was being stranded in presentation after presentation filled with slides of information and no real message. for some reason, it seemed to me that people forgot a very key aspect of any presentation: a clear, understandable purpose.

there’s no doubt in my mind that those people who presented their work at these conferences are smart, talented, ambitious people. i was honestly surrounded by some brilliant people — leaders in their field with more certifications and degrees of higher learning than they have the wall space for. but knowing what you’re talking about and being able to pass that information on to others is an entirely separate matter.

it’s imperative that you reach your audience. why are they there? what’s in it for them? you have to convey what you’re talking about, where is it going, and why they should spend the next 30 minutes listening to you speak. you have to connect.

each of my presentations started off with a reason for listening ['this is going to solve these specific problems that our clients are having'], and each ended with a call to action ['this is just one example, and it's only the start. let's build on this together']. i was shocked to see just how few followed the same approach and just how many presentations i felt lost in.

we’re better than this, and there’s no shortage of resources available to help us improve.

• resonate and slide:ology by nancy duarte are must reads
• nancy also has a collection of tools on her organization’s website you can view for free
• the naked presenter and presentation zen by garr reynolds are also canonical texts

even if you don’t give presentations in your day-to-day work, read these books or any of the hundreds of articles online devoted to making presentations better. at some point in time, the lessons you learn are going to be valuable; i promise you that.

bill mccreary image from nhl.com

some nights in hockey — especially if your team has a reputation — referees will blow the whistle a little more than usual. it just happens that other games are merely called tight with little room to interpret the rules. whatever the cause, you never want to have your players cutting ruts to the penalty box.

on the bench during those kinds of games, there’s a common saying that gets passed around among coaches and players: “don’t give them an excuse to put you in the box.” it’s a simple message. even if what would normally not be called an infraction earns you a 2 minute trip to the sin bin, as a player you have to be smarter than that and adapt. you can’t give the referees any excuse to call you for it. keep the sticks down, keep both hands on your stick, and watch the play along the boards.

business can be much the same with clients instead of referees. some might love everything you develop for them or the kinds of services you provide, but others may be insatiable still and find flaws with anything you bring to bear. if you know you’re dealing with the latter, follow the same simple rule: don’t give them an excuse.

don’t give your clients a reason to question the validity of your statements; be sure to practice each and every one of your presentations and always perform the proper amount of due diligence in defining answers to their questions.

don’t give your clients a reason to believe that your products are broken; test, retest, and test some more until you’re absolutely certain that your products or services are programmed properly, or mathematically sound, or have multiple research studies to support them.

don’t give your clients a reason to feel like they can go elsewhere and get the same service; go out of your way to prove your organization’s commitment to them by answering their phone calls promptly, replying to their emails the same day, and generally making them feel like you give a damn about them as customers.

if you’re dealing with a difficult client, don’t complain if they’re bitchy or a hard-ass or they’re calling bad penalties. just don’t give them an excuse to call one in the first place.

image by setlasmon, flickr artist

i’m a new breed of employee and, believe it or not, there are a lot more like me. we’re all over the place, and the best news — for us anyway — is that there are more of us coming. and perhaps the first thing that we could care less about is the traditional corporate structure.

to us, it doesn’t really matter what your title says. it doesn’t matter how old you are, or where you come from, or even where you went to school. what we do care about is what value you bring to the table… and what kind of computer you use (mac, for the win!). it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been around or how new you might happen to be because good ideas are good ideas, no matter who has them. and that’s what we gravitate towards.

we don’t want someone who sits at a bigger desk to tell us what to do, and it’s not about a lack of respect for authority. for us, we just have a different idea of who actually is the ‘authority’. for many of us, that happens to be ourselves. we want to work on what we want to work on, and it’s because — on some level — we have an attachment to it. we’re passionate beings, and we like to express and explore that passion. we don’t want to just go through life checking boxes.

we care about what we do and how we do it. employees like us don’t want email and we don’t want telephones; we want facebook and twitter. we want to be mobile. we want our office and our information in our pocket because we want our work to be anywhere. board shorts on a beach? no problem. off-site meeting with a client? no problem. we also want to have a voice in the direction that our tribes take. but beyond having a voice, what we really care about most is actually being heard. we’re not all stupid.

we care just as much about giving information away as we care about consuming it. why should anything be strictly mine? or yours? or anyone’s? you may be a great analyst and do great things with information that is provided to you, but when have you ever given back to the community that provided that opportunity to you? because if there’s one thing you should know about us, it’s that we’re relentless.

we don’t think that we can have an impact on the world — we know that we can. so don’t try to censor us. don’t hold us back. don’t act like you know what’s best for us. don’t think for one moment your ideas are better than ours just because you’ve “been there, done that”. don’t expect the same things out of us because you’ve gotten it out of everyone else who has come before. obedience without question. satisfaction over scraps of success. sorry, but we’re not interested. not anymore.

i’m part of the new breed of employee. i’m a 2.0 in a world of 1.0. so whatever expectations you had for me, go ahead and throw them out the windows 95/98/2000/xp. maybe the reason you’re having such trouble with me is because you’re putting artificial boundaries on me. it’s time for a paradigm shift; dare i say it’s time for a revolution.

so don’t box me in.

i’m glad.

it might be a complicated spreadsheet, or a really demanding client, or a piece of programming that the person before you built without any documentation. every time you feel like you’ve won, it comes back at you — like a final boss battle in a video game — taunting you, keeping you from getting to what you really want to accomplish.

but the thing about boss battles is that there’s always some kind of a trick.

next time that devil of a task comes back at you: survive when you need to, push back when you can, and look for the weak spots. find the critical piece of your spreadsheet (hint: it’s probably obvious), understand your client’s tendencies and tricks (hint: it takes more listening and less talking), and don’t be afraid to hit the restart button on that piece of programming code (hint: starting from scratch isn’t always a waste of time).

find the weakness, then attack. just remember to hit the ‘a’ button.

i wanted to do a quick and dirty case study on the “i want to go to the zoo with roy halladay” brand to see if we can figure out how all of this national exposure came to a simple bolg that someone created on blogger.com (it has since been moved to its own domain).

1. the bolg is really fun.
i think the first thing to look at is of course the fun factor.  things go viral on the internet for only a few reasons: (a) they’re absolutely hilarious, (b) they’re extremely inspirational, (c) it involves justin bieber.  the whole bolg is predicated on wanting to spend a day at the zoo with the phillies right-handed ace, roy halladay.  if that’s not funny enough, just read some of the bolg posts and tweets (especially drunk zwr tweets).  i’m not saying that it’s hilarious to everyone, but it’s comedy certainly has found a market — even bringing sam rosen and tim mccarver to laughter in the fox broadcast booth.  people love to share laughter, and it’s easy to share zoowithroy.

2. it’s over the top.
not only is it funny, but it’s over the top.  is zwr serious about going to the zoo with roy halladay?  yes he certainly is.  but he has taken something serious and made a farce out of it.  it’s not just ridiculous, it’s so ridiculous.  (it’s not just cuttered, it’s so cuttered.)  it’s not a woody allen brand of humor, it’s a will ferrell movie.  certainly woody allen has a lot of fans, but do you walk into a bar on a saturday night and hear people quoting small time crooks?  no.  you hear them quoting talladega nights and anchorman.

3. zwr lives his brand.  everyday.
this one is maybe the most important lesson that we can learn from zoowithroy.com.  its creator lives the brand he’s made.  he doesn’t have a name.  he doesn’t have a face.  he lives his brand — zwr — everyday.  when he tweets, when he writes his bolg posts, even when he’s on television.  it’s zwr 24/7.  everything you see and hear is consistent across every medium.

4. zwr has made his bolg a community.
there are a lot of key pieces to the zwr puzzle to be found in this arena.  everyone knows that a sense of community is really important for the success of a brand.  zwr builds a community around a central idea — going to the zoo with everyone’s favorite phillies pitcher — but he does so through the use of language and inside jokes.  terms like “donkey,” “so cuttered,” “so buttered,” and “moyer’d, yo” are common lexicon for phillies fans now.  the shirts he has created and sells in his online store only reinforce that sense of community.  you walk through the ticket gate and into a phillies game, see red zwr shirts all over the ballpark, and you think to yourself, “awesome, yo!  that donkey is a fan too.”

5. zwr interacts.
i’ll say this one until i’m blue in the face:  social media is supposed to be social.  if you’re not engaging your fans, then you’re not doing things the right way.  is it difficult?  it certainly can be, especially with the more fans you get.  you certainly can’t RT everything you see come across twitter from your followers, and you can’t post every email you get to your blog, but you can post enough that people still feel like they’re being heard.  the days of broadcasting information are over.  viewership includes feedback loops now, and if you’re not monitoring those channels and taking part in them then you’re only hurting yourself.

what can we learn from zwr?
we can learn a lot from zwr and the way he has built his brand.

• you need a good product, and — when talking about the internet especially — humor always wins out.
• don’t be afraid to take your content and your brand over the top because ordinary is nothing anymore, you have to be uncommon.
• building and maintaining your brand is an everyday thing.  to be really successful, your brand has to be on at all times.
• foster a sense of community through shared experiences, inside jokes, common language, etc.
• you have to be a part of your own community.  interact with your fans because they’re what make your brand successful.

i think that a lot of brands are afraid to go to some of these places for certain reasons.  they don’t want to use humor because that would seem unprofessional.  they don’t want to fully invest in their brand because they fear that they might appear to be ‘fake’ during those times they are willing to live their brand (or times when they’re not).  and they don’t like genuine, person-to-person, communication because they’re afraid of saying the wrong things.

if we take a look at those people that are successful, however, you’ll find the reasons why it’s worth taking chances and going to those places.  you’ll find the reasons why it’s worth going to the zoo with roy.

image by michael seljos, flickr artist

two years ago when i was laid off, a good friend of mine visited and gave me a book to read.  that book was paulo coelho’s the alchemist.  it’s a great tale about a shepherd who gives up the life he knows in search of a lost treasure.

at that time in my life, it was a story that i needed to hear.  now, two years later, i find myself re-reading it to remember the book’s lessons, and hopefully to learn a few new ones along the way.  while it’s easy to be wrapped up in the story of the main character and his journey, the secondary characters hold lessons just as important, like the lessons learned from the crystal merchant.

in the alchemist, santiago takes up a job with a merchant, cleaning the crystal in his shop.  with his help, the merchant — who had run his shop in the same exact spot for 30 years — begins to earn more business.  it’s when santiago begins to propose some changes to the shop to help increase business even more that we gain a better understanding of the merchant.

the merchant explains to santiago the 5 obligations of every muslim, the last of which is to make a pilgrimage to mecca.  he explains that that is the reason he started his crystal shop years ago, but that when he began to make money enough to take his pilgrimage, “i could never bring myself to leave someone in charge of the shop; crystals are delicate things.”

later, the merchant also mentions that another of santiago’s ideas will cause the shop to expand, “and then i’ll have to change my way of life [...] i’m already used to the way things are.”

these are two very important stories.  the first relates to delegating responsibility — something i’ve written about before.  sometimes, in order to accomplish what we want to, we have to let go of the reins and put someone else in charge.  people seem to be fearful of this — just as the crystal merchant — because what they have to delegate control over are “delicate things.”  a large contract with an important client, their old role in the organization, or a highly profitable project.  but the key to business is to focus on what only you can do; if someone else could be doing what you are, then they should.  learn what is important in reaching your goals, focus on that, and delegate the rest.

the second story is one about change.  we love stability (and by “we,” i mean “the stock market”).  if an organization can go on posting solid sales figures each quarter, produce billions in revenue, and stay away from the ire of the consumer public — they’re a solid investment.  they’ll keep trading at a constant level and produce dividends for its investors.  but what makes organizations great — what vaults the apples and zappos of the world into folk hero status — are the changes which they create, either through their products or through their practices.  you can’t be afraid to make a change because you’ve always done business a certain way before, especially if you know that change is going to be a good one for you and your organization.

somewhat of a spoiler:
in each case, when presented with a means to improve his business, the crystal merchant did, in the end, give in to the requests of the young man he found to be such a good omen.  because of those changes, the merchant saw business better than he had ever seen before.  he was not only very profitable, but he even added two more employees to help in running his shop to keep up with the pace of business.

just as the crystal merchant learned lessons from santiago, we have to be open and receptive to the lessons that our own employees can teach us.

image by sarahkim, flickr artist

i wrote not too long ago about the keys to an effective presentation.  it’s strange how sometimes you don’t listen to your own advice, though, john… seriously.

guilty as charged.

i found myself this week in a situation where i had three briefs to deliver to three different audiences all within the span of a few short hours.  it’s hard to ‘get up’ for those kinds of meetings, have a short break in between, and then recapture that tough mental focus again.  (oh, and then repeat that once more for the last brief of the day)  i was feeling confident, however (i usually do), especially since i was closing it out with the same marketing brief i had given dozens upon dozens of times already.  but i should have known better than to take things lightly.

just because a quarterback knows how to play football doesn’t mean he can skip film sessions to prepare for the week ahead.  and just because a hockey player knows how to shoot a puck doesn’t mean he can skip off-ice conditioning.  you need to be prepared.  you need to work hard at being good; it doesn’t just happen.

my first brief — which was luckily the most important since it was with the client and not my own project team — actually went rather well.  i hit my major points, i handled questions, and i kept to my time limit.  i did, however, prepare for that one.  i spent about a day working on my slides and building my story.  what was i going to say?  how was i going to say it?

my second brief started off a bit like bambi standing on the ice for the first time.  i did regain some fluidity in my presentation once the audience began asking some questions, though;  overall it was an effective brief.  was it the best?  certainly not, but i got the job done.  i prepared for this presentation as well, but didn’t spend nearly as much time as i should have to storyboard everything and prepare a voice track to go along with it.

then it was time for my last brief, and i was stumbling all over myself.  i repeated far too many words and phrases making everything i said seem disjointed, i unintentionally skipped all over my slide bullets with no regard for flow, and even a few times didn’t even remember what slides i had used in the brief.  i left that meeting thinking, “wow!  could i have done anything else to mess that up even more?”

perhaps if i showed up late… or without any pants on.

knowledge of a topic is no substitute for hard work.  if you want to play with the pros, you’re going to have to hit the gym — every day.  sit in those film sessions, and ride that stationary bike.  you never know when you’re going to have to go into overtime in a game 7, so are you going to rely on your knowledge of shooting free-throws, or are you going to spend 15 minutes in the morning shoot-around knocking down baskets from the stripe?

hopefully i won’t be blogging in response to this lesson any time soon.

image from mypartyshirt.com

with some recent events in my life, i’m reminded of the final lesson that mr. feeny taught me growing up.  he said,

mr. feeny: “believe in yourselves.  dream.  try.  do good.”
topanga: “don’t you mean ‘do well?’”
mr. feeny: “no, i mean do good.”

life never plays out the way you want it to — but the best that we can do is to do good, no matter what the situation.  we might lose our jobs, our loved ones, our marriages, or we might just find ourselves in a town or place we no longer want to be in.  despite what ills may befall us, doing the right thing is something that we should always try to do.  there really is no excuse for not doing good.  there are always ways that we can help people — you just have to believe in yourself, dream, and try.

grandmom clara, grandmom theresa, pop-pop frank, pop-pop anthony .. uncle cholly, aunt rosie, aunt lena, uncle domenic..

i’m trying to live as best as i can.  i want, when people see or hear my name — the name you gave me — to say, “you know, that scardino is a good guy.”  i certainly hope that i’m making you proud.  even though i know you’re looking down on me, i wanted you to know that i’m doing good.

i love and miss you all.

image courtesy of the herb brooks training center

“you can’t be common, the common man goes nowhere; you have to be uncommon.” — legendary hockey coach, herb brooks

of all of herb brooks’ quotes, i love this one the most.  i don’t know that it’s something i do intentionally, or if it’s something in my natural programming, but i don’t do common work.

over the last week or so, i’ve heard some pretty high praises from my client.  the program manager said of me in a management meeting, “john scardino, that dude is phenomenal.”  and just about a week after that comment was made, another member of my client’s organization said, “not to put any pressure on you, but you’re going to save [this project].”

i only know how to do things one way: the best way that i know how to do it.  so, to me, i’m not so sure that i’m really doing anything that’s truly special.  i see coworkers all the time logging long hours and doing a lot of great things.  the stuff my officemate, m. gregory white I, is doing makes me shake my head in astonishment.  i say it no matter where i go:  there are better people than me.  but there’s something that seems to separate me from the rest.

i’m uncommon.

i do a lot of the same things that other people on my team do.  i build models (sometimes fairly complex ones) in microsoft excel, just as they all do.  i build powerpoint decks, just as everyone else in booz allen.  what i don’t do is use default formatting.  and what i don’t do is take the easy way out.

i could create models that illustrate how things will work once in the system, but i don’t.  i create models that work now, outside of the system.  if you expect drop-down menus with options online, you’re going to get the same features in excel.  i could create images in powerpoint that use the default formatting, but i don’t.  i create slides that present information in a way that makes more sense, keeps clutter down, and looks good in the process.

having recently passed my 1 year mark at booz allen, i’ve been trying to reflect on what i’ve accomplished over that 12 month span — something that i can look at and say, “you know what, i’m doing something right.”  and i can say that the one thing i can hang my hat on is influence.  i’ve been able to influence the other members of my team.  my supervisor has learned as much from me as i’ve learned from him, and every day i’m seeing my officemate and other coworkers on the team starting to introduce bits of my work into theirs.  i see them starting to become uncommon.

i hate two words more than any:  ”default,” and “common.”  because it means that you’re being wholly unoriginal.  you have to be original.  and honestly that’s the best thing that i can say about a person — that they are original.  because as herb brooks said, ‘the common man goes nowhere.’

i can sit around and do common work, but frankly booz allen pays me too much money to do so.  they deserve better from me, and i deserve better from myself.  i do uncommon work because in the end, that’s what separates me from the rest.  there are other people who are smarter than i am, who are better than i am, and who are more talented than i am — but i’ve been able to reach the levels of success that i have strictly because i do things differently.

and because a year ago, there was a man who took a chance on hiring me.  thank you, brian.  you’ve helped entirely change my career and my life.  i am eternally grateful.