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.

a lot of effort goes into making different types of work products. still more effort needs to be done to make those work products worthwhile for the end user. and, believe it or not, even more effort goes into making those work products easily repeatable and scalable.

it’s all about infrastructure.

but sometimes — even though you try to approach it from the right angle — people don’t care about the process, what it took to get where you’re at, or what vision you have for where you’re going to get to. sometimes people just want the beef.

and they want more of it.

so what do you do when leadership, the boardroom, the market, asks “where’s the beef?!” two things:

1. give them the beef
2. pray like hell it doesn’t come back to bite you in the ass

image by eqqman, flickr artist

it’s pretty easy when you’re working hard on a project to become engrossed in it.  all your energy becomes focused on one thing, and one thing only: delivering results.

be careful, though, because you might be delivering the wrong results.

when we get that kind of laser focus sometimes it’s hard to break free from it.  ”i have a deadline, i have to get this done, and i have to get it done right now.”  so, being the good workers we are, we start to work towards accomplishing that goal.  unfortunately, we sometimes go down the wrong path in getting to the finish line.  instead of looking at our available options, we pick the one we know will work even if it has consequences.  we’re not as efficient anymore.  our processes can be improved.  our tasks are disjointed.  our products don’t provide value.

these things happen, and they happen often.  it might start with priorities that all become worthless because every task now has ‘critical’ or ‘high’ importance.  it might start with a demanding client who asks you to turn a demo into a fully functional work product within a week.  but at the end of the day, it’s just something that happens.  that’s why i think — especially for those of us who work as consultants — that it’s so important we don’t forget to turn a consulting eye on ourselves.

what meetings are we having?  do they provide value?  has the mission of our project team changed?  do we still have the same goals in mind as we had 3 months before?  6 months before?  12 months before?  does our leadership structure still serve the client well?  does it serve the project team members well?

these questions and more are questions that need to be answered, but — perhaps more importantly — they need to drive tangible change.  it’s really simple to ask the question (i just did!); it’s a bit more difficult to implement changes based on the answers you get in return.

sometimes you just have to look in the mirror.

image by unclebumpy, flickr artist

i recently came across a post on wired.com’s science section about american bullfrogs and their leaping ability.   in short: when in the wild, bullfrogs have a certain expectation of maximum leaping distance which scientists have previously measured at 4.3 meters. however, at a county fair in california’s calaveras county their bullfrogs have been known to leap over 7 meters when involved in their frog jumping competitions.  that’s quite an improvement!

in business, it seems everyone is focused on collaboration; on finding synergies and maximizing productivity.   but what if we increasingly looked not towards collaboration on our teams, but towards competition?  how would the game change then?

instead of placing an employee or a team on a specific task, why not place two employees or two teams on a task and have each work independently of each other?  for the duration of the task in question, have periodic reviews — once every week or two weeks depending on the length of the overall task — where each presents their current progress.  they will see what the other is doing allowing them to recognize where they’re stronger, identify areas for improvement, and (most importantly) learn from the other.

this kind of competition may hurt burn rates on billable hours for a project but it might just be worth it when you take a look at the big picture.  this friendly jousting between employees working on the same task could lead to more innovation, better products for the client, different options for the client, and an incentive system that’s actually based on something (winning ‘competitions’).

i understand that this method might not work in all situations, but if you can find a way to implement it just think about how much your organization and clients could benefit.

don’t you want to find out how far can you jump?

sal — the owner of the store and my boss — wasn’t a young man anymore, and you could tell that time wore on him harsher than to most people.  when you work your whole life — from the time you’re 5 years old till you’re in your 60s — buying and selling produce for your family’s storefront and also a large group of independent restaurants, your body starts to wear out.  in some ways it sounds a romantic story — the american spirit lived out by italian immigrants: unquestionable work ethic.  uncompromising reserve — but here’s where the story turns tragic.

i write a lot on this blog about how to manage your time effectively.  how to work with others more efficiently.  how to communicate with others more.. gooder!  i spend a lot of time talking about how to make business better, and how to make yourself better.  in many ways, however, these same things that i talk about are the reasons that sal was — and countless others were —  forced to close up shop.

there were days when i was working at sal’s that i didn’t have time to breathe, let alone restock the shelves.  sometimes, i wouldn’t even stock the produce in our cases.  i would be so busy that i would sell fruit and vegetables straight out of the boxes and sacks that we bought them in that morning.  unless you get it direct from the farm, it doesn’t get much fresher than that.  as i look back on it, those were the days that i miss the most.  i liked coming home from work on a saturday afternoon at 3:30 completely dog-tired and do nothing but shower and turn on the penn state game.  but as time went on and more of our customers began to either leave the area or — sad to say — pass away from age, my days got less and less busy.

why would people set aside half their day to head down to our shop to buy their fruits and vegetables, swing on by the bakery a few blocks away to get bread, stop off at the local convenience store for everyday items like soaps and shampoo, and head down to the deli for their cold cuts for the week?  supermarkets became more and more popular with younger people trying to maximize their efficiency.  ”i’ll stop by the acme this morning on the way to work because there’s an ATM there and i need peppers for tonight.”  2 birds with one stone.  get cash money for your pockets, and food for the dinner plate that evening.  it wasn’t that what the supermarkets were selling was any better than what we were — in some ways it was far worse.

each season brings its own produce.  tomatoes are always better in the summer, cantaloupes too.  cherries were best in the spring, and apples and pears delicious in the fall.  but these large supermarkets buy literally tons of food that they freeze in warehouses or import from vendors who operate out of exotic locations with a far different terroir that yields less abundance just so that they can stock their shelves full no matter what time of year.  you can find strawberries in the middle of winter now.  ever wonder how that’s possible?

the customers slowed from a roaring river to a sporadic stream.  people complained that his prices weren’t as cheap as the supermarkets that buy in bulk, or that his selection wasn’t as hearty as the shelves in shoprite filled with defrosted produce.  it wasn’t long after i graduated high school and moved to penn state for college that sal had to close his shop down.   a shining gem of what america was all about — a diamond forged under years of pressure — was cast aside by so many.

who killed mom and pop?  we all did.  every one of us in search of a faster way to get the same things done, not really caring what we got in return — as long as the price was right.  when we pursue ways to make ourselves and our businesses more efficient, faster, or cheaper — always remember what the true cost is:

quality.

don’t be mesmerized by the illusion that things are exactly the same wether your choose vendor A in china at price x, or vendor B in huntsville alabama at price x+1.  don’t think that the data analyst with 3 years’ experience that you pick from the market at $40k a year is going to produce as much as the data analyst with 3 years’ experience that you pick from the market at $65k a year.

everything has a trade off.  just be careful what you’re trading away.

image by HikingArtist.com, flickr artist

my first “5 reasons..” post seemed to be fairly popular, so — ever the entrepreneur — i figured i’d capitalize on that success with my second installment. this particular list takes a look at your presentations.

if you’re a consultant like me, you live in powerpoint. you may even begin speaking in bullets. you turn everything you touch into simple, easy to read, easy to understand outlines of information.. even when it’s probably better to choose some other form of communication.

hey! we all do it (don’t lie. just fess up already). the problem is that many of us were never given the proper training, or the education that we did get on giving presentations was a bad one. so i hope that you take a look at the reasons after the jump here and make the necessary adjustments for your next presentation.

reason #1: you use horrible colors
are you printing it? are you projecting it? is it being recorded on video camera? these are all important questions that you need to ask yourself. first and foremost, let me state that YELLOW should never, ever be used in a presentation. i said never! asking any of the three questions above, yellow fails in each and every circumstance. it doesn’t print well, it doesn’t project well, and it’s all but invisible on video.

the colors you pick should marry well together. powerpoint 2007 should help you out a bit as there are now palettes specific to themes, but at what cost? looking exactly like everyone else’s presentations — that’s the cost. and in a competitive business environment, it’s a cost that you just can’t afford to pay. be massive, be bold, be #1 — choose your own kuler scheme. learning a very little bit about color theory is going to go a long way in helping you create presentations that have an impact. as elvis put so perfectly in his song rubberneckin, “i like what i see, i see what i like.” people will naturally gravitate towards good looking things. it’s science!

reason #2: you choose horrible fonts
enough with times new roman. or “basta!” as we say in italian. next person whose presentation i see with times new roman in it is getting a pencil thrown at them. it’s visually offensive. it doesn’t project well, and it’s even worse if being recorded on video. find yourself a nice, clean, rounded, sans serif font. tahoma works perfectly well, and helvetica is for gentlemen. don’t like either one? find a font that you do like, and stick to it. don’t be a politician; no flip-flopping. any presentation that has more than 2 fonts is automatically purged from my mind.

reason #3: you throw words and statistics around like frisbees
basta! enough with the slides that have more words and statistics than white space. if you’re trying to provide detailed information on something, write a document. create a report of your statistics. that kind of stuff doesn’t belong in a presentation.

presentations are supposed to be about YOU. not about words, not about statistics. anything and everything that you put on a slide should have a specific purpose; if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t belong in your slide deck. you, the speaker, should be the focal point of the presentation. when you have tons of words and outrageous amounts of statistics cluttering up your slides people are too busy reading and processing the information to pay any attention to you. so have documents and reports prepared to hand out if necessary. but you need to focus on 2 things: (1) is this important to what i’m talking about? and (2) what’s the main point of it?

reason #4: you ramble
people rely on their slides far too much and they don’t trust in themselves and in their own knowledge of the topic — no matter how many times they’ve given the brief. when you have a collection of bullets on your slides, you’ve essentially made yourself a script. “i need to talk about this, this, and this, then go into talking about this other thing..”

wrong.

you need to deliver a message. trust in yourself, and if you feel you’ve captured the message of the particular slide — move on. if you ever say in a presentation “as i just said,” or “as i mentioned a moment ago” in reference to something on the same slide, then you’ve made boo-boos. don’t rehash information that you’ve covered already unless it’s specifically there to drive home a point (and even this should be used in moderation). trust yourself — deliver the message — and take your bows. don’t ramble.

reason #5: you have no idea how much time you take
if you’re at a convention, or a camp, or a summit — or any of the various names that people give to large scale meetings with multiple speakers and multiple presentations — you only get a certain amount of time. the problem is, at many of the conventions that i’ve been to, people don’t know how long their presentations take. the worst thing possible is going over your expected time.

pro tip: just because you built the powerpoint doesn’t mean you know how to present it.

don’t make assumptions about how many slides it may take to present in the time given. know it. build your presentation, practice it, edit it, practice it, and edit it again until you get it right and within the time limit. it’s absolutely imperative that you practice your delivery. what words should you emphasize? what topics should you spend the most time on? does all of your media work? do your system demos work? what are your plans during loading times? what is your plan if your media/demo doesn’t work at all? these are all questions that you need to know before you step up to the podium.

yeah, your presentations suck. but don’t feel too bad, so do most others. but now you know that you can make your presentations better by fixing the mistakes above. heed my advice and stop the death by powerpoint.

photo by tiarescott, flickr artist

i couldn’t tell you the number of times people have said to me, “i wish i wasn’t in meetings all day; i’d be able to get some actual work done for a change.” if i had a nickel for each time someone moaned or groaned about having to go to a meeting, i’d have easily paid my student loans off by now. it’s no secret: meetings suck.

but they don’t have to!

if a meeting you’re in is ever boring, or uninteresting, or leaves you totally disengaged — you’re doing it wrong. read through these 5 reasons your meetings suck, and learn from them.

1) too many people
a major issue that many meetings have is the number of people that are invited to attend. if you can achieve the goals of the meeting without having someone around, then it’s probably a good idea not to invite them. for people development reasons, i can forgive this. for instance, wanting to bring a new hire into a meeting with the client to observe proper etiquette and what kinds of personalities he or she can expect to have to work with in the future is a great idea. it’s exposure that you can’t replace and experience you can’t simulate. including someone on a meeting for their “visibility” is just plain ridiculous. if you think someone needs to be at a meeting so they can absorb information, you’ve missed the point; that’s what meeting minutes are for! so stop inviting people to meetings who don’t need to be there.

2) not the right people
no meeting should ever take place if a key decision maker isn’t present. you can only get so much done before you’re going to hit a wall. you can talk all you want, but you’re only spinning your wheels until your manager, team leader, project manager, resource manager, or whoever drops the starting gate. similarly, include all SMEs (subject matter experts) on the topic at hand. you wouldn’t ask your bartender to cut your hair, would you? (if you would, you’re a seriously strange person — and i think i’d like to meet you) also, if you know one of your key meeting invitees can’t make it — or otherwise cancels on you — cancel the entire meeting and reschedule it. make sure you have the right players in on your meetings. every time.

3) too many meetings
if you have a recurring meeting, for each instance of that meeting — make sure that it’s still relevant. there’s nothing worse than blocking off an hour or more of your time (which could prevent you from having some other meeting that is actually important), stopping the work you’re doing, and getting in the right frame of mind (i.e. caffeine to blood ratio) for a meeting, only to have the organizer say, “well…. we don’t have much to talk about today.” each and every meeting should add value to what you’re trying to accomplish. the good news is that this is often times easy to see in advance. if you know that you won’t have much in the way of an agenda for a meeting, then ax it and find some other means of delivering your abbreviated news flash.

4) too few meetings
on the flip side, if you invite a list of people to join a meeting, and go round-robin style around the table (or phone roster) taking inputs from each person individually, you’re doing it wrong. meetings aren’t meant to be token ring networks! meetings are supposed to be periods for collaborative discussion, not a one-to-one or one-to-few broadcast of information. if you need information from multiple sources, and those multiple sources aren’t interconnected, you should be having a meeting with each individual source. take the meeting minutes from those individual sources and disseminate them to the rest of the team as needed. remember this one key note: there ought never be a situation where you have invitees to an hour or two hour long meeting who only speak for 5-10 minutes.

5) you don’t wrap with action items
every meeting you participate in should have some kind of outcome. there needs to be a list of action items for people to follow up on (with dates!). a meeting should persist even after it’s adjourned — otherwise what was the point? the organizer should always recap what just happened in a meeting, and always make sure that action items are assigned to someone before they leave the meeting. action items should also be reflected in the meeting minutes and at least somehow addressed in the agenda for the next meeting.

fix these five issues above, and you’ll no longer have people decrying meetings in twitter posts, facebook statuses, and instant messenger away messages. when used correctly, meetings are “actual work.” your best ideas should be created in meetings, and your best analysis should be done in meetings — if not, you’re misusing your time… and everybody else’s.

in the business world, it’s important to realize that your prospects for money now can hurt your prospects for money later. investors know this. you don’t sell stock when the market is on an up-swing. your $20 a share stock can turn into an $80 investment. but when it comes to selling services, there’s not much indication of a trend. this is what drives leaders to rash decisions.

you also wouldn’t sell stocks when they’re at rock bottom. i learned a valuable lesson when i was young (young-er anyway!) about the value of honesty and how client satisfaction changes everything. i sold produce for 5 years and in that time span, the most important sales were the sales where i didn’t sell anything.

i’m somewhat of a cantaloupe expert. i can tell you +/- 1 day when a melon will be within prime eating conditions. one day a little old lady came in the store and said she was having some company over, and that she wanted cantaloupe to serve her girlfriends. i told her “i wouldn’t buy any of those. they’re not ripe yet. these won’t be ready to eat for at least 2 days on a hot [kitchen] counter.” she said, “well then i don’t want it.” so 2 days later, she came in the store again and got a cantaloupe and said, “i’m having some friends over, can i cut this tonight after dinner?” i told her “not this one,” and found the right cantaloupe for her. the next day she came back with 3 of her friends, and they all bought a cantaloupe each. and that’s a true story, swear on my life.

when you deal with customers, what’s more important than making a sale is making the right sale. you can sell a $400 pair of high heels in manhattan, but if they’re not of high quality you’ll be working out of the bronx in no time once word spreads around. so you make a sale that benefits the customer, and if you can’t make that sale, you’re better off not making any sale.

when you talk about clients and contracts, many companies will bend over backwards to win a new buyer. some tactics are sly, others completely unsavory. any way you look at it, money is an important factor. revenues increase stock price, and stock prices make happy investors, and happy investors make the world go round. but if you’re doing so at the cost of providing poor quality products or services, then you’re just putting lipstick on the pig.

it’s important to have the guts to turn down a sale — to turn a client with cash in hand away — in order to preserve your company’s reputation for quality and building relationships. if your client wants something that you can’t deliver on, then you have to tell them that you’re unable to meet their expectations. they’ll respect you more, and while you might lose money now — later on — when they need their next issue solved, they’ll remember how you didn’t sell them a low quality product. they’ll remember the honesty that you showed, and that goes a long way to building relationships that foster financial growth.

so when you’re working on that next “big lead” and you’re about ready to close the deal, or if your client is asking for something that you can’t deliver on, remember:

don’t sell bad cantaloupe.