If Your Event isn't Eventful, It's Just Another Meeting

The investor of today does not profit from yesterday's growth.

— Warren Buffett

Bundled tips. Distilled solutions. Condensed books. Expert panels. Industry roundups.

Sound like your conference?

You're preparing attendees for the last war. But they need to wage tomorrow's.

"Traditional conferences focus on finding solutions to yesterday’s problems," says conference designer Jeff Hurt.

Smart attendees (that's redundant; stupid people skip conferences) don't need more packaged information; they need results (remember, the word event comes from the Latin for result.)

"People no longer come to your meetings to get information," says planner Holly Duckworth. "They come to make sense of the deluge of information they already have."

If you're not transporting attendees to a future world, helping them adapt to new realities, and equipping them to thrive, you're not offering results.

To put it another way, if your event isn't eventful, it's just another meeting.

Resistance

When you're through changing, you're through.

— Bruce Barton

Resistance to change.

A psychologist would say fear of loss is behind it.

A Neoplatonist would say the devil is.

An inner voice advises you: Beware. Go slow. Back off. Give in. You're swamped. Next week. Next month. Next quarter. Next year.

What—or who—do you blame?

Boots

Here's to the bootstrappers, those entrepreneurs who make do on a shoestring. They sustain the American Dream.

Here's to the bootleggers, the copycats who ride the backs of first-movers and make them look good.

And here's to the bootlickers, without whose undying service there'd be no room for bootstrapping or bootlegging.

It doesn't much matter which pair you wear, but only that others will ask, "Who'll fill her boots when she's gone?"

Grace under Pressure

This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.

— Oscar Wilde, last words on his deathbed

Child therapists call the ability to avoid meltdowns when under pressure the executive function.

Ironically, some executives don't function under pressure—not well, at least.

You'll recall the Korean Air Lines executive who forced her plane back to the gate and kicked off the head steward after she was served macadamias in a bag, rather than on a plate.

Business isn’t always about growth, victories and celebrations over champagne.

Stuff happens.

Leaders unable to show grace under pressure exhibit the traits of the executive-type Tron Jordheim calls the "Spoiled Brat."

The Spoiled Brat thrives on barking orders and berating workers, caring only about productivity as she defines it. She mistakes herself for another executive-type, the "General," who thrives on defining missions, outwitting competitors, and "taking the next hill." But apply a little pressure and all hell breaks loose.

"The General will remain composed and keep the battle plan in mind even under pressure," Jorhheim says. "When under pressure, the Spoiled Brat overreacts and lashes out until someone offers a pacifier. The advantage the Spoiled Brat has is that people do react quickly and try to make this type of executive happy to avoid those tantrums."

Spoiled Brats are so narcissistic they forget they have an audience—workers and peers who expect them to display grace under pressure—calm, grit, insight, honesty, resilience, self-control and dignity. (Oscar Wilde's example of grace under pressure may be the ultimate one.)

If your management team includes executives who think eating nuts from a bag is roughing it—and who crack under the pressure—it's time to reorganize.

But You Must Act

Fantasy football will cost employers $16.8 billion in lost wages this season, according to Challenger.

Workers waste a ton of time not only during football season, but year round.

According to a study by GetVoIP, 80% of workers waste some time every day; and 20% waste one-third or more of each day.

Self-employment makes any sort of time-wasting unpalatable to me (I don't want to wind up living under a bridge).

But far worse-tasting is unconscious procrastination.

Procrastination comes in two varieties: conscious (you play fantasy football, instead of phoning customers) and unconscious (you answer yesterday's emails, instead of writing a strategic plan).

The former is foolish; the latter, fatal.

If you're addicted to unconscious procrastination, ask yourself: Am I too self assured?

That was Civil War General George McClellan's problem.

As you'll recall from your history lessons, Abe Lincoln put McClellan in charge of the Union army in July 1861 after the disaster at Bull Run. McClellan then took nine months to build up his army, swelling it to an immense size—121,500 men (at the time, the largest army ever assembled by a nation).

The power went to McClellan's head. He mistook the office he'd been handed for an elected one, and began to behave as if he had a public mandate. He started seeing himself as God's instrument, chosen by Divine Providence to save his country, and even flirted with idea of dictatorship—an idea that flourished, because he surrounded himself with "Yes Men." And he held Lincoln in open contempt, calling him a "baboon" and "the original Gorilla."

But McClellan failed to use his immense army to win a victory of any size over the Confederates and end the war.

Instead, he focused on parades, supplies, campgrounds and paperwork.

He procrastinated.

An impatient Lincoln soon would fire him; but before he did, Lincoln sent McClellan a now-famous telegram that read:

Once more, let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act. 

Are you too self-assured?

Employers Want People Who Can Write

This just in: Employers want people who can write.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a survey of 180 companies by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) found 4 of the top 5 skills valued by employers are "hallmarks of a traditional liberal-arts education."

Clear-writing skill was ranked Number 3 (following leadership and teamwork).

“It’s easier to hire people who can write—and teach them how to read financial statements—rather than hire accountants in hopes of teaching them to be strong writers,” head recruiter for the investment firm Morningstar told The Wall Street Journal.

One Morningstar employee—the firm's expert on more than a dozen well-known equity-strategy funds—was a philosophy and classics major who earned a PhD in theology.

Want to improve your job or promotion prospects?

Go back to school and study philosophy (expensive), or read Writing Tools and The Art and Craft of Feature Writing (cheap).

HAT TIP: Thanks to Kevin Daum for informing me of NACE's survey.

Mission Improbable

A noble purpose inspires sacrifice, stimulates innovation and encourages perseverance.
                                            Gary Hamel

Only 4 in 10 workers strongly agree their company's mission makes them feel their job is important, and fewer than half feel strongly connected to their company's mission, according to a new study by Gallup.

You may not care. But Gallup research shows a compelling mission boosts profits and reduces employee turnover and on-the-job accidents.

Gallup analysts Nate Dvorak and Bailey Nelson say company leaders should:

Build a brand. Employees and customers should hear the same brand promise from leaders. The promise separates the company from rivals and makes it worthy of consideration.

Recruit purpose-driven people. High performers long to make a difference in customers' lives. Leaders should use purpose-centric recruiting ads to attract them.

Foster employee engagement. Profitability soars when the mission's more than posters in the lunchrooms. Leaders themselves should continually communicate the company's purpose, and help workers relate it to their jobs.

But why is it so hard for leaders to step up?

La condition humaine.

Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre spelled out the reasons people rarely rally in his multi-volume doorstopper, Critique of Dialectical Reason:

• Even when part of a group, Sartre says, people normally live lives in lonely crowds. He calls life in the primordial group the life of the series. While they work toward one goal (boarding a bus, for example), people in a series don't share common bonds or act in concert. It's every faceless, interchangeable man for himself.
  
  
• While the series is the primordial group, it's not the only one. When people in a series are threatened, they form an organic and spontaneous group Sartre calls the fused group. Everyone in a fused group rows in concert of his own free will; everyone trusts and inspires his fellows; and everyone's a leader. (Think of the French Resistance, for example.)
  
  
• When the outside threat diminishes, Sartre says, fused groups either disband or ossify. If the latter, they become organizations. People in an organization take the "pledge" to watch out for each other. But the pledge doesn't mean the group members won't seek to fulfill their own self-interests first. In fact, they usually do. (Think of any labor union.)
  
  
• To discourage members of an organization from "taking care of Number 1," leaders eventually emerge who put constraints in place. Sartre calls this "degraded" spinoff of the organization the institution. Institutions work to make sure to every member knows he's a cog that can be easily replaced. (Think of any of today's corporations.)

Delivering Bad News

Leaders can learn a lot from FDR.

A champ in many ways, he was at his most masterful where bad news was concerned—and there was a storm of it while he was president.

In April 1942, he told a radio audience that, due to war, "everyone will have the privilege of making whatever self-denial is necessary."

FDR provided no sugarcoating.

“The blunt fact is that every single person in the United States is going to be affected."

But he went on to say, "'Sacrifice" is not exactly the proper word with which to describe this program of self-denial. When, at the end of this great struggle we shall have saved our free way of life, we shall have made no 'sacrifice.'"


Americans responded patriotically.

Leaders are like that. From fails to fiascos, downturns to downsizings, they have the steady job of delivering bad news.

Georgetown University management professor Robert Bies recommends these 10 rules for mastering your delivery of bad news:

• Never surprise anyone. You’re shirking your duty by keeping bad news to yourself.


• Never stall. “Bad news delayed is bad news compounded,” Bies says.


• Never cover up. Withholding information will only lead others to draw false conclusions.


• Always put it in writing. A paper trail will one day be important.


• Always justify. Provide “specific and concrete reasons for the bad news.”


• Always give hope. Emphasizing the positive and temporary aspects of bad news can boost morale, as FDR knew.


• Always offer solutions. Solutions put the focus on future improvement. “Bad news without solutions is truly bad news.”


• Always consider every audience. “Remember when delivering bad news that the news never reaches just one; it reaches many.”


• Always follow through. “Bad news involves cleaning up a mess. After cleaning, let everyone know. Now the news is no longer bad; it is good.”


• Always show respect. You’re not just communicating bad news; you’re communicating it to human beings.

The last rule is the cardinal one, Bies says; and the one most often broken, as I can attest.

I was laid off, fortunately, only once in my career.

While, as an executive at the company, I was privy to the financial setbacks that preceded the event, when the bad news arrived, via telephone on the Monday before Thanksgiving, the very first thing I was told was that “the decision was easy.”

I grasped at the moment the words that were said (“Marketing is a luxury”).

I’ll never grasp why they they were said.

Bravado

My bravado is foolish; yours is funny.

Chaplin exploited that fact with The Tramp.

Funnier than the fool "is the man who, having had something funny happen to him, refuses to admit that anything out of the way has happened, and attempts to maintain his dignity," Chaplin once said.

He forever put his hapless character in jams, just so The Tramp could show his longing to be "a normal little gentleman."

"That is why, no matter how desperate the predicament is, I am always very much in earnest about clutching my cane, straightening my derby hat, and fixing my tie, even though I have just landed on my head."

My Chakra is Ferkakta

Fans of Mindfulness-Based-Stress Reduction (MBSR), which finds rays of Western science in Eastern meditation, have become saintly inside many Fortune 100s.

They've set up MBSR programs for employees of Aetna, Intel, Target and, naturellement, Google.

With all our Internet-induced stress, it's little wonder.

"We need this stuff right now," says New York Times reporter David Gelles, author of Mindful Work, "Mindfulness is an effective way to get off the hamster wheel of our minds."

But if your māyā detector just buzzed, I'm with you.

I've tried mindfulness meditation, sitting with a great teacher.

I learned enough to know it's hard work.

People peddling MBSR as an easy remedy to stress are selling snake oil.

There ain't no cure for work-life imbalance in one-minute meditations and cutesy memes.

After all, it took Siddhârtha seven weeks to work it out.

And he had a fig tree.

Innovation's in Our Bones

Whenever I despair of our species, I remember that innovation is in our bones and such a marvelous thing, as two case studies illustrate.

Case Study No. 1

For the past 15 years, UPS drivers have been forbidden to turn left.

That's because company engineers discovered in 2001 that left-hand turns were inefficient, as a UPS spokesman told Fortune.

Left-hand turns wasted time and money.

So the engineers used GPS software to re-route drivers, eliminating left-hand turns.

The move—annually—shaved 20 million miles off drivers' routes; increased deliveries by 350,000 packages; saved 10 million gallons of gas; and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20,000 metric tons.

Case Study No. 2

In 1940, film comedian W.C. Fields built an exercise room in his Hollywood home. 

He equipped the room with a stationary bike, a rowing machine and a steam cabinet, and hired a personal trainer to help him get buff.

Fields followed the trainer's instructions faithfully, but added touches of his own.

As directed, Fields dressed in sweats and mounted the stationary bike for long rides; but also drank several martinis en route.

He would work out in the rowing machine, but drink gin and sing sea chanteys while at it.

And he'd sit in the steam cabinet for an hour, sipping highballs the whole time.

"This is wonderful—these workouts are going to increase my liquor consumption two or three hundred percent!" Fields told the trainer.

How to Enter on a High Note

Two German psychologists arranged an experiment.

They asked respondents to watch a video of violinists and judge their talent.

Respondents gave the highest marks to the violinists who nodded at the audience—before performing.

"Stage performers are the consummate experts in making a grand entrance," Susan Krauss Whitbourne says in Psychology Today.

"Even classical musicians, whom you might think of as controlling impressions by their ability to perform the piece, control the audience’s reaction to their work by the way they first make their appearance in the concert hall."

Dr. Whitbourne offers these eight tips for making good first impressions:

Decide how grand your entrance should be. Tread lightly, especially in informal situations and those in which you know everyone present.

Be prompt. Don’t be the last to enter the room, if you want to appear reliable. It also helps to welcome others with a smile and handshake.

Show the appropriate emotion. Serious occasions demand a display of gravitas; parties, a show of pleasantness; negotiations, a poker face.

Pause to gather your thoughts. You'll benefit from a momentary mental rundown of what you’re hoping to accomplish in the situation.

Look around at the people in the room. Take your cue from the violinists: return people's gazes and nod at your audience.

Determine when you’re not the center of attention. When you're not the big cheese, be dignified, not grand.

Look like you’re glad to be there. You might dread the occasion, but if you show anxiety or disdain, you guarantee a bad outcome.

Don’t fret a botched opening. You trip as you walk onto the stage. You drop all your notes. You skip immediately to your last slide. The teleprompter breaks. "Oops moments" are common—and recoverable, if you don't willow. Just smile and get on with the show.

What, No Online Community?

Event planner: What, no online community?

If true, you're falling behind, says BrightBull's Ricardo Molina.

Worse, you are:

• Wasting money on attendance promotion. Like lists and media partnerships, online communities provide a direct road to your target audience. But unlike those roads, communities don't need as much maintenance. "Once built, a community will thrive with just a little care and attention."

• Letting competitors poach your attendees. First-movers usually win. "When your competitors start a community first, all they have to do is say that it’s there and people will join because it’s something new."

• Forgetting about brand loyalty. Communities provide value added. So members "automatically feel good about your brand."

• Failing to lead. "Why would they think of your event as being 'the one' when you don’t run THE online destination for your niche?"

• Skipping customer insight. Insights from a community let you read the industry's pulse, and drive product development, marketing and sales.

• Leaving money on the table. Exhibitors are eager to brand themselves year-round on communities. Why not offer them yours? One large international bank spends half its marketing budget on content partnerships.

Up to Our Eyeballs in Enthymemes

Enthymemes. We're up to our eyeballs in them.

An enthymeme, first described by Aristotle in Rhetoric is an incomplete logical construct. It's based on an unspoken premise shared between a speaker and her audience.

Here's a familiar enthymeme:

"Make America Great Again."

The unspoken shared premise:

"America used to be great."

An enthymeme's power comes not from what's spoken, but what's unspoken, Aristotle says. When a premise is left unspoken, the audience supplies it, completing the circle. So, instead of the speaker persuading us, we persuade ourselves.

For Aristotle, self-persuasion is especially effective because we take pleasure in participating in the exchange. We're tickled with our ability to connect the dots—to "get it" without handholding.

But self-persuasion is also self-absorption, Aristotle warns.

An enthymeme helps us see a resemblance—a likeness—and we like most what is like ourselves. "All are more or less lovers of themselves," Aristotle says.

The effective speaker exploits this self-love.

She knows that—when the audience completes the circle—it chooses to hear what it wants to hear.

Listening Hard

Forgotten genius Ring Lardner was a popular satirist of the 1920s, famous for the practice of "listening hard."

He delighted fans by cloning the speech of ball players, barbers, cops and musicians in his newspaper columns, short stories, songs and plays.

Lardner influenced other, better known writers who followed, including Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and John O'Hara.

"Listening hard" is the secret sauce not only of good writers, but good salespeople, customer service reps, therapists, judges, spouses and parents.

Sadly, most of the time we default to "easy listening," where others' speech functions merely as elevator music during our ride to the top.

We're eager only to listen with the intent to reply, rather than understand, as Stephen Covey noted.

“When people talk, listen completely," Hemingway said. "Most people never listen.”

5 Sure-Fire Steps to Thought Leadership

Master marketer Edward Segal contributed today's post. Edward helps corporations and organizations generate publicity about their activities and shows leaders, staff and members how to deliver effective presentations.

What would you rather be: a chief or just another member of the tribe? A trail blazer or trail follower? Someone who helps determine and influence the conversation or a worker bee that waits for others to establish the agenda? 

If you’d prefer to help set the pace instead of simply run the race, then the chances are you would like to be a thought leader. Here’s how to do it: 

Be an expert

• Select topics or issues about which you have knowledge.

• Have or develop a track record of writing or speaking about your topics or issues to groups and organizations in the industries or professions in which you want to be considered a thought leader.

• Stay ahead of the curve by thinking about your field beyond today and sharing predictions or forecasts that illustrate your authority in the field.

Be a joiner

• Join or lead groups and organizations that are more likely to help establish your role as a thought leader.

• Volunteer to serve on committees or task forces that can bolster your expertise and add to your credentials as an authority.

Be visible

• Identify, create and take advantage of appropriate opportunities for you to be seen as an expert or authority, including speeches, presentations, and media, blog, and podcast interviews.

• Post on your website or social media platforms links to articles, interviews, speeches, etc. that you have done about your areas of specialty.

• Practice your ability to prepare and deliver short, pithy and memorable quotes that will be used by journalists and bloggers in their stories about or interviews with you.

Be a student

• Keep current on the trends and developments in the areas in which you are or want to be considered an authority.

• Study other thought leaders inside and outside your industry or profession. What can you learn from their successes that you can apply to your own efforts to become or stay a thought leader? 

Be persistent

• Identify or create new opportunities to position yourself as an authority and expert.

• Maintain a blog to which you post on a regular basis, and install a widget so that people can be notified about each new post.

• Reinforce your role as a thought leader in ways that you have not done before, such as writing a book, starting a blog, becoming a public speaker, or proactively seeking media interviews and speaking opportunities.

• Set monthly, quarterly or annual goals and milestones of important activities and accomplishments that can help you become and remain a thought leader.

Becoming a thought leader can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more you act like you are a thought leader, the more likely it is you will become one.

Trivial Pursuits

The CEO of a large corporation sought to parade his gravitas on LinkedIn this week by posting a lovely bromide.

Before deleting it, he inspired the multitudes to mockery.

But who, really, cares nowadays about spelling and grammar?

Truly, spelling and grammar are trivial.

Trivial comes from the Latin word trivium, "a place where three roads cross." In short, a "commonplace."

Medieval scholars borrowed the trivium to describe the first three liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric and logic. They thought grammar, rhetoric and logic were the very core of all learning.

What did they know?

The liberal in liberal arts, by the way, comes from the Latin word liberalis, "worthy of a free person" (as opposed to an ignorant slave).

Why trouble yourself with trivia, when you're busy being a thought leader?

Show your thankful.

How to Handle a Hard Presentation: 22 Sure-Fire Tips

Marketing maestro Edward Segal contributed today's post. Edward helps corporations and organizations generate publicity about their activities and shows leaders, staff and members how to deliver effective presentations.

What’s the most important thing you can do if you know that you will be making a presentation to a skeptical audience, at a challenging venue, or in an otherwise difficult situation? 

In a word: prepare.

While it is impossible to ensure that every presentation will go smoothly, there are definitely steps you can take to help stack the deck in your favor.

Here’s how:

• Don’t accept speaking invitations for which you are unqualified or unprepared. Don’t let your ego get in the way.

• If you spoke to the same tough group or in the same difficult setting before, ask yourself: What did I learn from the experience?

• Think twice about giving breakfast speeches if you are not a morning person, or evening presentations if you like to retire early.

• Do your homework about the audience (demographics, knowledge of the subject matter, special interests or concerns, etc.); ask the sponsoring organization if there are any red flags about the audience you should be aware of (forewarned is forearmed).

• Ask others who have spoken to the organization what it was like, and what you can learn from their experience.

• If you accept the speaking invitation, know what you want to accomplish with your remarks.

• Know the basics about the speaking opportunity (format, length of your presentation, time, location, etc.).

• Arrive early so you can get a feel for the room where you will be speaking, greet and chat with people as they arrive, etc.

• Make sure that the layout of the room is to your liking and meets your needs (classroom-style, theatre-style, roundtables, etc.).

• When you arrive, check with your host to ensure the arrangements, purpose and topic of your presentation have not changed.

• Know where things are, such as lights, microphones and audio controls, AC and heating controls, water, restrooms, etc.

• Ensure that you and your audience will be comfortable by checking the heat or AC settings, microphone settings, lighting levels, extraneous or distracting noise, etc.

• Check out any that stairs you must climb to get on or off the stage. This will help you to avoid tripping over unfamiliar steps.

• Don’t tell jokes unless you’ve already proven that you can tell jokes well. There’s nothing funny about no one laughing at your jokes.

• Make sure your audience can see you. Don’t hide behind the podium.

• Do not hide your gestures. Keep your hands up where your audience can see them!

• Maintain a good posture when standing or sitting. No slouching!

• If audience members do not have access to a microphone, be sure to repeat questions before answering them. This helps ensure everyone in the room hears what was asked.

• Respond honestly to questions. It’s okay to say "I don’t know."

• Don’t allow one person to monopolize the session. ("Let’s meet afterwards to talk about this.")

• Summarize/rephrase lengthy questions for the audience. ("Let me make sure that I understand what you are asking...")

• Do not allow Q&A sessions to drag on. Signal to your audience that the session is almost over. ("We have time for one more question.")

7 Rules to Rock Your Content

Scale your brand's voice… 

Master the social networks…

Ignite likes and shares…  

And pocket more money than you ever thought possible!

No kidding.

Content will rock your bottom line.

But, you ask… How? 

How do I rock my content?

It's easy.

Follow these 7 rules.

They come courtesy of maxi-marketer William Claude Fields...

1. A thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for. 

Is your goal to grab millions of eyeballs? Stuff your stuff with keywords.

2. If you can’t dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit. 

Great content takes hard work. Why bother?

3. You can fool some of the people some of the time—and that’s enough to make a decent living.

Every platform delivers a different audience, so repackage every piece of content you create. But don't spend a lot time at it. 

4. Start every day off with a smile and get it over with. 

Cheery content's contagious, so publish drivel daily before 9 am. Then head to the beach and relax.

5. I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally. 

Don't discriminate: treat all audiences with the same low level of respect. Pretend you're United Airlines.

6. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it. 

Fail fast, fail forward.

7. A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.

Take the 6 rules above. 

Rinse. 

Repeat.

And have a happy April 1, my rich friend.

Happy Accidents

Christopher Columbus discovered America while seeking a sea route to Asia.

Alexander Graham Bell was hoping to help teachers of the hearing impaired when he stumbled on the telephone.

Three PayPal employees built YouTube to compete with the dating site Hot or Not.

Objectives feel good, but accidents often outshine them, as researcher Andrew Smart says in Harvard Business Review.

"Our objective obsession might be doing more harm than good, causing people, teams, and firms to stagnate," Smart says.

Statistics and stories about inventions prove that.

"Reports indicate that half are the result of not direct research but serendipity—that is, people being open to interesting and unexpected results."

Smart says we should ditch all the goals for "detours" that might lead to "something new and interesting."

"The more time we spend defining and pursing specific objectives, the less likely we are to achieve something great."