Furnish Your Brain with Care

Research by neurologists reveals multitasking clobbers the short-term memories of people over 60.

For a 2010 study, four doctors at the University of California, San Francisco divided adult subjects into two groups.

The individuals in one group were asked to examine a nature scene and, after a 15-second pause, answer a series of questions about it. These subjects had no trouble with the task.

The individuals in the second group were asked to perform the same task, but were interrupted. While answering the questions about the nature scene, they were shown a human face, and asked to identify the person’s gender and age. The doctors then resumed asking their questions about the nature scene.

The subjects in the second group who were under 60 had no trouble answering all the doctors' questions. But the subjects over 60 struggled to answer the questions posed after the interruption.

During the experiment, MRI scans of the subjects' brains revealed big differences in the brains of younger and older people, after the interruption.

Among the younger people, the brain-areas engaged when processing the picture of the human face shown switched off immediately after that interruption. But, among the people over 60, those brain-areas remained engaged after the interruption. The over-60 brains brains couldn't instantly switch back to the original task.

Besides concluding that multitasking erases the short-term memories of people over 60, the doctors also believe multitasking impairs the formation of long-term memories, because, to take shape at all, long-term memories require short-term ones.

Interruptions are inevitable. So how can people over 60 stay sharp, minimizing "senior moments" and maximizing long-term memories?

My prescription: Furnish your brain with care.

Leaf through any lifestyle magazine and you'll find an article that insists a serene mind requires a clutter-free bedroom (or living room, sitting room, den or home office).

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle thought a sharp mind did, too.

In A Study in Scarlet, Dr. Doyle's detective Sherlock Holmes tells his sidekick Watson the brain is like a "little empty attic."

The wise worker furnishes the attic with care.

"A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things," Holmes says.

"Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

Unless you're Watson—IBM's, not Doyle's Watson—letting trivia clutter the attic diminishes your ability to focus.

Literary man Dr. Samuel Johnson believed something similar.

"The true art of memory is the art of attention," Johnson said, referring to our ability to retain what we read.

"No man will read with much advantage, who is not able, at pleasure, to evacuate his mind, or who brings not to his author an intellect defecated and pure, neither turbid with care, nor agitated by pleasure. If the repositories of thought are already full, what can they receive? If the mind is employed on the past or future, the book will be held before the eyes in vain."

Why is So Much Business Writing So Bad?

Why is so much business writing so bad, irritating customers and wasting workers' time?

It begins with box checking.

In the race to "get it done"—and check yet another box—marketers and product managers flout good-writing fundamentals.

Foremost, as journalist Shane Snow points up, is simple diction.

Readers are impatient drivers. Simple diction lets them speed. They want writers to keep the highways open. And they prefer the ones who do.

To prove the point, Snow entered passages from a variety of popular writers—including Cormac McCarthy, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell—into five proven calculators of "reading ease."

The resulting scores showed:

• McCarthy, King and Rowling write for people with fifth-grade reading skills; and

• Godin and Gladwell, for people with eighth-grade skills.

Snow asks: Do readers love only these writers' story-telling abilities? Or do they also love their approachability—in other words, their simple diction?

With half the US population reading at no better than an eighth-grade level, the answer's obvious. 

Yet most business communications are written as if we all could read like grad students, who don't slow down for Latinate words, jargon, run-on sentences, and page-long paragraphs.

But unapproachable diction isn't the only problem.

Good writing takes time. Time and the determination to inform, research facts, and think critically.

It takes more than the urge to check another box.

All Hat, No Cattle

The world is filled with big, stupid companies.

When it comes to the customer experience, they're "all hat, no cattle."

A story to illustrate.

I encountered a bug in the software from one of today's top 10 providers. The bug is so serious, it prevents any use of the product. 

My first plea for help spawned this canned email:

Thank you for submitting your case. My name is Henjie from Support. I have taken ownership of your Case number 12483149. I understand that you need some assistance. I won't be able to call you. For now, I will need to have your case endorsed to a team to make sure that we will be able to assist you further with your concern. Thank you for choosing [name withheld].

Four weeks, hours of my time, and 31 comparably inane messages later, no remedial action has been taken.

Disney likes to say, "no employee ever 'owns the customer,' but one employee always 'owns the moment.'"

At stupid companies, employees own neither customers nor moments. The only "owners" are the legal ones, who spend all their moments minding the share price, while buzz-talking auto-responders are left minding the store.

Entrepreneurs can take heart.

Mindblind

Why does every management consultant want executives to become "storytellers?" Why does every grammarian want businesspeople to "write like you're having a conversation?"

Mindblindness.

Also known as the "curse of knowledge," mindblindness grips you when you know so much about a subject, you can't see it through the eyes of anyone less informed.

When you're mindblind—when can't imagine life for those who don't know what you know—you can't communicate why or how others should follow your directives; and you can't write (or speak) with clarity or concision.

Mindblindness produces not only unrealistic expectations ("We always delight our customers!"), but blame ("You slackers, you disappointed our customers!").

Mindblindness is a primary reason leaders fail, and why so much business writing stinks.

It never occurs to the mindblind that others aren't up on the latest jargon and grasp the steps too obvious to mention. So they don't bother to explain the jargon, spell out their logic, or supply details.

Philosophers call extreme mindblindness "solipsism," the belief that nothing exists outside your mind.

Bertrand Russell said that, although it could be true, solipsism should be rejected because it's easier to believe the external world—including other people's minds—exists.

“As against solipsism it is to be said, in the first place, that it is psychologically impossible to believe, and is rejected in fact even by those who mean to accept it," Russell said. 

"I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd-Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician and a solipsist, her surprise surprised me.”

A Pen as Mighty as His Sword

In his masterful Mask of Command, the late military historian John Keegan makes the case that Ulysses Grant's dispatches were as much responsible for victory as his grasp of tactics and infamous determination.

General George Gordon Meade’s chief of staff Theodore Lyman once wrote, “There is one striking thing about Grant’s orders: no matter how hurriedly he may write them on the field, no one ever had the slightest doubt as to their meaning, or ever had to read them over a second time to understand them."

It was clarity, simplicity and directness that made Grant's dispatches so astonishingly effective.

Lyman said Grant's dispatches "inclined to be epigrammatic without his being aware of it,” chiefly because the general used “plain and unmistakably clear words.”

Three examples:

In February 1862, hunkered before Fort Donelson, Grant sent this note to Confederate General General S.B.Buckner:

Sir, Yours of this date, proposing armistice and appointment of commissioners to settle terms of capitulation, is just received. No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.

In April 1864, while advancing on the Wilderness, Grant dispatched the following order to Meade:

Lee’s army will be your objective point. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.

And after Spotsylvania, in May 1864, Grant sent the army's chief of staff, Henry Halleck, this note:

We have now ended the 6th day of very hard fighting. I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.

When your goal is clarity—to write so that your readers will understand exactly what you mean—write like Grant, with simplicity and directness. 

Clarity eliminates ambiguity and confusion, and makes reading effortless.

Machines Will Take over Marketing

Harvard Business School professor Jeffrey F. Rayport predicts that technology will soon take over marketing.

"What Salesforce.com did for sales management and NetSuite did for financial management, software-as-a-service providers will do for marketing, by automating much of what marketers do every day," Rayport says.

As ever greater dollars are shifted to digital from other forms of marketing, marketing technology will rise in importance—and spell doom for activities like planning, budgeting and management.

"Instead of setting advertising budgets on quarterly cycles, marketers will launch ad initiatives whenever opportunities emerge, and they will optimize them for efficiency and effectiveness on the fly," Rayport says. 

"Bidding on ad exchanges already happens in real time; enhancements in media placement and creative execution (for example, what image goes with what copy for a given recipient) will occur with similar speed. The 'budget cycle' is already a quaint idea. It will soon be a thing of the past."

Watch Your Language

The father of phrases like death tax (a.k.a. estate tax) and climate change (a.k.a. global warming), Republican strategist Frank Luntz employs focus groups to examine words’ emotional content.

His goal is to find words that will change people's visceral reactions to hot-button issues.

In a 2012 speech to the Washington State Chamber of Commerce, Luntz advised business executives to revise some of their pet phrases. He recommended they replace :

• Free enterprise with economic freedom; 
• Middle class with hardworking taxpayers; and 
• Business climate with healthy economy.

Luntz also recommended executives strike understand, accountable and important from their vocabularies, because listeners no longer have faith in these words.

You need not agree with Luntz's politics—I, for example, would replace his death tax with fairness reset and his climate change with planetary meltdown—to agree with his theory.

The emotional content of words makes them powerfully persuasive.

Novelist Joseph Conrad once wrote, "He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense."

Greening Your Event: The Impact of Destination

Part 1 of a 3-part series

Today's guest post was contributed by Cara Unterkofler. She is Director of Sustainable Event Programs at Greenview.

The environmental impact of an event can be measured using various metrics. 

One popular metric is the event’s "carbon footprint."

The graph (representing a large citywide event with a substantial expo) shows that the largest contributor to an event’s carbon footprint is the fuel used by attendees to travel to the destination (fuel represents around 80%). And don’t forget there's freight being shipped along with them, representing another 5-15% of an event’s total carbon emissions.

This means you don’t have to understand carbon footprinting and the science of greenhouse gases and climate change to make a huge difference, when it comes to sustainability; nor go digital; nor figure out if your printer uses vegetable-based inks.

It simply means you need to select an event location that is close to attendees and, ideally, accessible by car or train. 

You’re likely already doing that, so keep it up and feel good that you’re not only increasing your odds of greater attendance, but having a positive effect on climate change from the comfort of your office.

End Sloppy Emails

When I first entered the workforce, no one would dare send a written communication (we called it a "memo") without prior review by the boss.

Business ran according to military rules (in fact, many of the bosses were former military officers). 

Those days are long over.

"A new status symbol in today's generally more egalitarian business environment has arisen: sloppy e-mails," says consultant Keith Ferazzi.

Writing for Harvard Business Review, Ferazzi recommends these four tips for ending sloppy emails:

Empathize with readers. Too many writers lack empathy for their readers. When writing an email, "use respect, positive affirmations, and gratitude to set the right tone and proper context." Your writing will display more empathy if you "visualize that individual in his office as you send him an e-mail."

Appreciate different styles. "We all tend to prefer a certain 'language' for communications at work," Ferazzi says. Some people prefer numbers; some, pictures; and others, stories. Appreciating others' styles improves your ability to communicate and reduces the likelihood of misinterpretation.

Spell things out. "We often communicate less information than we think we are, a syndrome psychologists call signal amplification bias," Ferazzi writes. Make descriptions and instructions clear and complete.

Respond promptly. Readers care not only about content, but about the promptness of your replies to their emails, Ferazzi says. "When your reply is tardy, the other party is left wondering whether you value that relationship or not."

The 3 Keys to Public Speaking

At an after-dinner speech in 1887, General Sherman introduced Mark Twain by noting that "he could not make an impromptu speech unless he had four days for preparation."

You may never speak at TED, but performing in front of crowds is a skill every marketer needs.

Most acquire it by hiring a coach or joining a local Toastmasters Club.

Whichever path you take, you'll soon discover these are the keys to public speaking:

Preparation. As Sherman observed, a good speaker prepares, not just for hours, but for days.

Clarity. Listeners expect you to deliver a clear business case and a definite call to action.

Study. Good public speakers study the performances of great public speakers, such as Bill Clinton.

PS: Attire. Dress does matter. A tee-shirt and jeans may be some industries' uniform, but wearing that uniform while speaking in public harms your credibility. The rule-of-thumb? Look better than your audience.

The Laws of Persuasion: Begin with Your Own Beliefs

Part 3 of a 5-part series

If you want to change customers' beliefs, remember to begin with your own.

So said American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay Spiritual Laws.

You won't persuade someone to believe what you don't believe yourself, he said.

Emerson asked readers to consider the attorney's faith in his client's story.

"If he does not believe it, his unbelief will appear to the jury, despite all his protestations, and will become their unbelief."

It's a kind of karmic justice, Emerson says: the attorney's bad faith stifles him and feeds the jury's doubt.

"That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say, though we may repeat the words ever so often."

Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle put it nicely: "Let one who wants to move and convince others, first be convinced and moved themselves."

The Laws of Persuasion: Facts Won't Take You Far

Part 2 of a 5-part series

If you want to change customers' beliefs, remember facts won't take you far.

So said German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his 1951 book On Certainty.

Wittgenstein wondered why we trust, for example, the facts in a physics textbook.

It isn't because we understand them (we may not), but because we know how textbooks are written (physicists repeat various experiments and report their findings to peers).

The facts in a physics textbooks reflect a set of beliefs that a community accepts as true.

But what would you say to someone (a shaman, for example) who didn't accept physics?

Would you argue that his belief is foolish?

If you did, you'd be offering reasons his belief is foolish based on your belief in physics.

That won't get you very far.

To win the shaman's heart and mind, you must forget facts and focus on your vision.

"At the end of reasons comes persuasion," Wittgenstein says.

10 Steps to Better Media Coverage for Your Association

Association executive Edward Segal, CAE, wrote today's guest post. He is CEO of the Marin Association of Realtors and the author of several exceptional books on public relations.

Associations face two important challenges in generating the publicity they want. First, it's impossible to know what stories every reporter, editor, or blogger is working on or may be planning. Second, if journalists don't know your organization exists, they'll never think to contact you for quotes or information for their stories.

Your association can quickly overcome these hurdles by becoming a resource to as many news outlets as possible. Here are 10 steps to help make that happen:

1.   Take stock and cast a wide net. Make a list of all the topics and issues in which your organization has knowledge, expertise, or information. With this list in hand, identify the news organizations, as well as Websites and blogs, that follow or might have an interest in these matters. To ensure you haven't missed anyone, conduct a search of relevant keywords and phrases in Google's Web, blog, and news categories.

2.    Initiate contact. Send emails to appropriate contacts at these outlets to tell them about the topics and issues in which your organization has expertise. Explain that your association wants to be a resource for their stories in these areas, and ask how you can be of help in upcoming articles.

3.    Stay in touch. Reach out to these reporters on a regular basis. By staying on their radar, journalists are more likely to think of you when they need you. But don't become a pest.

4.    Alert yourself. Set up Google Alert for the topics and issues for which you'd like to generate additional publicity for your organization. Evaluate the results and, as appropriate, contact the editors, reporters, and bloggers to offer your organization as a resource on future stories. If you contact them quickly enough and have something to contribute, they might include you in updates to those stories.

5.    Cast an even wider net. Join one or more online services that provide subscribers with inquiries from journalists, or help link experts with reporters. These sites include Help a Reporter Out, Muck Rack, PR Newswire's ProfNet, The Yearbook of Experts, and Radio-TV Interview Report.

6.    Don't wait. Respond immediately to all media inquiries. Whether reporters are on deadline or not, the sooner you get back to them, the more likely it is that you will have an opportunity to be a resource. Given the competition organizations face for publicity and the deadlines under which reporters work, the expiration dates of these opportunities may be very short.  

7.    Give good quotes. Journalists can be inclined to interview people who have demonstrated that they can give good quotes. When reporters see you've been interviewed by other news organizations, they may seek to contact you for interviews for their own stories. Consider your sound bites to be auditions that can lead to additional publicity opportunities.  

8.   Get a room. Establish a "press room" page on your Website. Make it as easy as possible for visiting journalists and bloggers to immediately see your association's areas of knowledge and expertise and how to contact designated spokespeople. Keep press materials current and ensure that links to news stories where your organization is mentioned are working.

9.    Plan ahead. News organizations may post editorial calendars on their Websites, or will be glad to send them to you on request. The calendars can be an early warning system about future stories: armed with this advance notice, you might be able to position your organization as a resource to the reporter or editor and wind up with more coverage for your association.

10.  Be patient. Providing journalists with whom you've had no prior dealings with tips and information for their stories can be an investment in time and resources. Sometimes the payoff will be immediate, such as a quote, attribution, or profile. At other times, your efforts may take some time to bear fruit. But if you don't try, the payoff will be zero.

Nonprofits and Noble Cause Corruption

Washington, DC (where I live and work) is the cradle of cause-related nonprofits.

The majority do great things, no doubt.

But I've also seen the dark side of a few of these organizations.

Some never pay their bills and don't think twice about stiffing honest, hard-working suppliers.

In fact, I've seen so many defaults by cause-related nonprofits, I won't take work from them.

Call it holier-than-thou zeal, if you want. 

I think the better term is noble cause corruption.

Noble cause corruption is a form of "police crime" in which cops break the law in pursuit of a goal they believe will benefit society at large.

A common example: fabricating evidence to ensure a conviction.

Noble cause corruption may serve society. 

But it can just as easily lead to the punishment of innocents.

Do you work for a cause-related non-profit? 

If so, have you checked your accounts payable lately?

With apologies to Eldridge Cleaver, if you're part of a solution, you may be part of a problem.

Too Much Information. Not.

E-com exec Hiroshi Mikitani says you can't get too much info.

“If anything, to be successful, one must embrace all kinds of information, all the time.”

Mikitani cites a passage from the 16th-century Book of Five Rings, by samurai-author Miyamoto Musashi.

Observing a carpenter at work, Musashi sees ways for readers to sharpen their skills:

The carpenter will make it a habit of maintaining his tools sharp so they will cut well. Using these sharp tools masterfully, he can make miniature shrines, writing shelves, tables, paper lanterns, chopping boards and pot-lids. These are the specialties of the carpenter. Things are similar for the soldier. You ought to think deeply about this.

"Answers and ideas are often hidden within completely unrelated things," Mikitani says. 

To spot them, you must approach the world with curiosity.

"There is nothing in the world unrelated to your life. That fire hose of information that douses you constantly is a blessing, not a curse."

The point? 

Stay open for inspiration.

How to Succeed in Business without Really Spying

Ninjas were 16th century James Bonds who were tapped by their samurai masters for the dirty work of spying, sabotage and assassination.

Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Electronics Association, thinks ninjas created the die from which today's business winners are cast.

He draws out that comparison entertainingly in his new 250-page book Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World's Most Successful Businesses.

"Ninja innovation is my catch-all phrase for what it takes to succeed," Shapiro writes in the introduction. 

"You have to display the qualities of the ancient Japanese ninja, whose only purpose was to complete the job. He wasn't bound by precedent; he had to invent new ways."

In defining ninja innovation, Shapiro offers a quasi-memoir that might have been titled My Life in Consumer Electronics. 

The stories are fun and the major characters—including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban and Mark Zuckerberg—mostly notable.

From the book we learn that business innovators, though not literally given to spying, like James Bond are particularly single-minded. They don't think twice about breaking the "rules of the game" to win.

Shapiro scatters among the lessons lengthy gripes about US immigration policy, government regulation and unions, leftovers from his first book, The Comeback.

But the fresh material—especially his inside look at lobbying and the history of the Consumer Electronics Show—makes Shapiro's new book worth reading.

In an interview, I asked him whether business success demands that you play the tough guy.

"Absolutely not," Shapiro replied. "In fact, that's a recipe for not being successful. Instead, you have to think like a ninja. You have to be clever, creative, and think outside the box. You have to set a goal and relentlessly pursue it. You have to have a plan and a strategy and you have to be focused."

5 Scary Social Media Trends

Pity the corporation. In an obdurately unfriendly world, it has to maximize shareholder value.

A little thing like a broken guitar can bust millions in market cap. And batter a reputation as well.

Blame it on social media.

"Social media and the technology behind it—Web 2.0—has forever changed how corporations 'manage' reputation," writes Ogilvy PR's John H. Bell in Corporate Reputation in the "Social Age."

The danger, Bell says, lies in "the explosion of consumer-generated media found in more than 150 million blogs, social networks, consumer opinion sites, video and picture sharing networks, and worldwide message boards."

Five big trends affect how corporations manage their reputations today, Bell believes.

Hypertransparency. With 150 million active social media users, there are "thousands of forensic accountants, social watchdogs and activists watching your company," Bell writes.

Viral crises. When a crisis hits, the word spreads quickly, "often with the accompaniment of YouTube videos."

Demand for dialogue. One-way messaging—news releases, robotic spokesmen, TV ads and customer-service scripts—are out. Conversation is in.

Louder brand detractors and employees. Social media well arms the corporate critic. "It doesn’t take a Goliath to become a formidable adversary for a corporate brand," Bell says.

Uncontrollable brand fans. Even happy customers can blacken your name with their online antics. With friends like this, who needs enemies?

Marketers must be authentic and transparent, Bell says, because "conversation is competing and often winning as a communication channel online."

The Economy is Broken Because Trust is Broken

A "trust deficit" is hampering an economic recovery, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Public trust, "an essential lubricant for economic activity," is broken, the paper says.

"You don't have to look hard to find examples of fraying trust in American society today," the paper says.

"Lance Armstrong admits to cheating to win seven Tour de France titles; Democrats and Republicans can't seem to work with each other; Wall Street keeps delivering new scandals."

Besides Wall Street and the federal government, large corporations, labor unions, newspapers and TV networks are among the most mistrusted institutions in the US today.

But there are glimmers of hope.

Last year's Edelman Trust Barometer "showed big increases in measures of trust toward government, media and business compared with a year earlier," the paper reports.

How can your organization combat mistrust?

Learn from my free white paper, Path of Persuasion.

The Role of Chance

Business is frightfully competitive. So we tend to believe only the fittest survive.

But success may take more luck than pluck.

Investment strategist Michael Mauboussin thinks so.

He claims we're too quick to discount the role chance plays in business.

“People attempt to extract lessons from what is mostly a random process,” Mauboussin tells readers of Inc.

“Once something has been successful, we start to believe it was the only thing that could have happened.”

By idolizing business winners, Mauboussin says, we forget there were others who followed the same strategies, but failed.

Remembering those failures helps you “keep your mind open to other possibilities,” he says.

Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould observed the same thing in nature. Gould thought chance was a deciding factor in the evolution of life on earth.

He based his conclusions on fossilized animals discovered in Canada’s Burgess Shale.

The animals in the Burgess Shale were all exquisitely suited to their environment. But none left modern descendants.

From the fact, Gould concluded that fitness is no guarantee of survival.

Survival is really a matter of luck.

Office Spaced

Office supplier Herman Miller introduced the Action Office 1 in 1964.

It featured wall-less work spaces of varying heights that allowed freedom of movement. 

The designers believed Action Office 1 was ideally suited to small professional offices, where managers and employees often interacted using the same furniture.

But the product was expensive and flopped big time.

Herman Miller quickly redesigned Action Office 1 and re-released it as Action Office 2.

The redesign was a hit. 

Today we call the product a "cubicle." 

In 1970, the designer of the Action Office 1 wrote that Action Office 2 was perfect for "planners looking for ways of cramming in a maximum number of bodies, for 'employees' (as against individuals), for 'personnel,' corporate zombies, the walking dead, the silent majority."