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communication

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Google apps are free. Not!

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I posted a comment about the new Gmail interface on a social media site. One responder said, “you get what you pay for. Gmail is free.”

Reading that, I realized that the “Google is free” argument used to work for me, but it no longer does. Google apps are not free at all. You’re paying in the currency of giving them complete access to everything you work on, so they can analyze it and target ads. If someone were to make that explicit and ask me, “How much would you charge to give someone the right to scour every email you send and receive and every document you compose so they can build a profile on you for targetting ads?” I would name a figure far, far, FAR in excess of what I’ve paid for desktop software in my lifetime. In terms of my own value system, I’m only now realizing that Google Apps may be the most expensive software I’ve ever used.

What do you think? What would you charge to give someone the right to analyze all your email and documents to build a profile of you? What would you expect in return?

Make It Easy To Communicate

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If you’re a businessperson, relationships and partnerships are a key part of getting things done. Communication is one of the most important components of successful working relationships. Yet all the communication technology we’ve invented has actually made it harder to communicate. We have so many options, we don’t know how to connect.

A friend and I decided to schedule a meeting recently. He has three phone numbers, four IM accounts, three email addresses, a Skype account, a Facebook, and a Google Plus account. It took an entire conversation using two forms of email to decide which medium to use for our real conversation next week. Too much choice is making it harder and harder to reach each other. This is not progress.

If you want to spend your time forging relationships and getting work done with other people, choose a single email address, a single phone number, and a single IM account, and give those out as your contact information. Of those ways of contact, decide which one you prefer and let people know. You can even put it on your business card: “Email preferred” or “Please text me” or “Voice is best.” That way, when people need to reach you, they know exactly where and how to do it. It also means you know where to go to process your inbox, rather than having to check a dozen different places.

The Power of Visceral Relationships

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I’m having a conversation on Google+ about social media, and it connected up with an exercise I did today to produce a rather puzzling realization.

Social media has certainly broadened who I know and how we connect. It’s because of social media that I have met some of the great in-person people I know. And I definitely use it to keep in touch with people I’ve met at conferences, etc. It’s just such a weird thing to me.

I’m working my way through a process of re-examining my life, and I did an exercise today of writing down my happiest memories. They mostly fell into categories of: “times I was hanging out in person with friends,” “times I was alone in a nourishing/replenishing environment,” and “times I was performing.” When I think about those memories, I feel really good. I don’t feel really good when I think about my social media interactions, however. I don’t feel bad, either. And that, I think, is why I raised the question. For me, social media relationships are cerebral, not visceral.

That’s great for work, accomplishment, and idea exchange. But it’s the visceral community that, as revealed by this exercise, brings me joy. It’s also the visceral community that make me feel supported, like someone’s got my back, etc. So I wonder how much my social media actually supplants or shifts my relationships from “happy-making” to “engaged-making.” Those aren’t the same thing, and I personally prefer the former to the latter.

Email Overload – Where the CEO of Xerox and I Disagree

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As you probably know, I’ve launched my You Are Not Your Inbox, so I’m revisiting some of my old thoughts about Email Overload.

Tim Sanders wrote a blog entry that references a Business Week article (“What’s So Bad about Information Overload?”) on information overload I commented on last week. The writer suggests that information overload might be good. There might be some valuable information, and besides, young people can handle it just fine.

Sure. In what universe? My Get-it-Done Guy podcast email and people’s reaction to my
What is Email Costing You Assessment, suggest many people of us feel our life force being regularly sucked from our bodies by information overload. It makes us jump from topic to topic. It interrupts us when we need to concentrate. And then we feel guilty that we still can’t keep up. Gee, that sounds like a resourceful emotional state for reaching our goals.

Yes, we’re getting more info. Yes, some of it’s useful. But that’s not the point! We need to ask: is it useful enough? Are the benefits—financial, social, or emotional—worth the cost?

For Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy (mentioned in the article), the answer is Yes. In email, they say things they would never say otherwise. Like that comment about the chocolate mousse, telephone pole, and garter belt. Who would ever say that out loud?

Of course, an anonymous suggestion box would fill the same function. Even better, the tipster could actually include the original garter belt. But apparently, those emails are amazing enough that Anne devotes a lot of time to her email. Since she’s gotten great results at Xerox, for her, the benefits might be worth the cost. (Assuming, of course, that her success is because of email, rather than in spite of it. Maybe a weekly suggestion box would be just as good.)

If you’re top dog, no one pays attention to how you use your time as long as you produce business results. The rest of us aren’t so lucky. Our pointy-haired boss gives us specific goals, and email can suck up a lot of time without moving us towards our real goals. That “Top 10 Reasons Working Here Sucks” email will only help you reach your goal if that goal is a new job at your major competitor’s firm.

When you’re deciding how much time to spend with your inbox, think long and hard about the benefits you’re getting. After all, there’s lots you could be doing with that time. Ask yourself if there is any other way to get those same benefits? If you hired a $50/hour assistant to read and answer your email every day, what would you tell him/her to process versus ignore? Are you following those same guidelines?

Being perfect in every way, I follow my own advice and am ultra careful with my email habits. Even so, I often get sucked in for up to 30 extra minutes a day. Since I’m perfect, that must be the perfect amount of time to waste. But there’s still a nagging feeling: that comes out to three weeks per year. If I’m going to spend three weeks a year blathering mindlessly, I’d rather do it wearing a bathing suit on a sunny Caribbean beach than sitting hunched over my computer in my basement office, looking like one of the Mole People. At least on the beach, I might get a tan.

So don’t take my word for it. Don’t take Tim Sanders’s word for it. And don’t take Business Week’s word for it. Your email time is productive to the extent it helps you get what you want out of life. Hold it to a high standard and if it isn’t performing, drop it from your life faster than that stalker you accidentally dated in college. With email, only you can take control; there’s no way to get a restraining order.

1 Step To Start Regaining Control Of Your Inbox

I spent a couple of hours today methodically unsubscribing from several years’ worth of newsletters, subscriptions, etc. It’s amazing how freeing it feels to see browser window after browser window saying, “Thank you, you will no longer receive these emails.”

I didn’t do this randomly, however!

Before beginning, I set out the objective criteria I would use: if I haven’t read an email from that list in over a year, I would unsubscribe. Period. I subscribe to many friends’ email lists. When considered one-by-one, I would never unsubscribe because it would feel like somehow weakening the bond between me and my friend. But make no mistake: there is no bond between me and my friend if I’m never reading their email. (And besides, if their email is mainly business, and we’re personal friends, a marketing email doesn’t keep me feeling a personal connection.) Using objective, pre-determined criteria let me make the decision quickly and cleanly.

And by the way–I kept the list of names of people whose unsubscribes felt personal. I’m going to call them, instead. On the phone. And establish a real connection, not the electronic fantasy of one.

The Power of Science to Solve Today’s Complex Problems

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They’re narrowing the streets in my neighborhood, and everyone is up in arms. People are freaked out, saying that narrowing from sort-of-1.5-lanes to 1 lane+bike lane is going to cause huge traffic snarls.

On the face of it, this sounds reasonable. After all, won’t fewer lanes mean less space for traffic, so traffic must go slower?

That depends. If all drivers simply stayed in their lanes, never made turns, and drove at constant speeds, yes. But they’ve been doing a *lot* of experimenting in Boston with alternative configurations. They’ve compared the results and found that sometimes narrower streets with curb cut-outs and bike lanes result in all kinds of unexpected benefits.

It’s long been known that widening a street won’t necessarily ease congestion because people simply drive more, until the congestion reaches prior levels. “Archie, it’s such a nice day, let’s go drive down the nice, new freeway.”

This is called science. We measure what happens, we compare and contrast, and we learn the world doesn’t always work the way we think it will.

If science always matched up to our intuition, we would have invented high technology 10,000 years ago. We couldn’t have technology until a relatively small number of people invented the scientific method and were willing to believe it’s results over what their intuition said. Intuitively, a 10-pound ball falls faster than a 1-pound ball, the Earth is flat, and the sun rises and sets. Science, however, shows that the balls fall at the same speed (acceleration, actually), the Earth is round, and it spins, rather than the sun moving.

Next time you find yourself getting defensive over some scientific study, stop. That’s a good thing; it means that maybe you can revise your beliefs to reflect reality. Read the study, consider with an open mind, and find out.

Science gave us ziplock bags. Who knows what might be next?

Your stereotypes may blind you to opportunity

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Today I visited a store where I often shop. The young man who cleans up and maintains the displays was there as usual, with a sullen expression on his face. My story about him is that he’s lazy and unfriendly, and does his best to do as little work as possible. Yet, I see him often. So today, I walked over to him and introduced myself.

His face lit up, he got a huge smile, and gave me his name. Suddenly, my whole conception changed. He didn’t seem sullen, lazy, and unfriendly at all. It struck me that he’s quite possibly shy, and given his job, ignored by virtually everyone who comes in. Far from wanting to drive people away, he wants to connect and be acknowledged. But my misreading his cues made me stay part of the problem until today.

A friend reported something similar after doing an exercise where he had to strike up a conversation with a stranger. Though he was in his 40s, the first person he found to talk to was a teenager who was present at a summer school program. He was astounded to discover how interesting this teenager was. Then he realized with a shock that his son was the same age, and he’d never talked to his son as a person, but always as “his son.”

Our preconceptions can help us. If they’re accurate, they can let us step right into a situation with a great deal of information. But they can also blind us to what’s really going on. The young man at the store was friendly and shy, not sullen and hostile. The teenage son is a whole person with a rich inner life, not simply a child to be disciplined or controlled. By double-checking our assumptions about other people, we sometimes find that things are very different than we think.

Challenge:

  • Find someone you don’t like. Talk to them and learn about them.
  • Find someone you’d never normally approach and talk to. Talk to them.

See what happens. The results may surprise you–or not.

An NLP hint on writing and emotion

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NLP has taught me a lot about how people experience words. By carefully considering your words, you can change the whole mood that people get left with.

I recently posted a Facebook update: For those that missed it, here’s my popular ‘Modern Vacation’ video spot (don’t worry – just 36 seconds!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt0Bs0frEnM

Once I’d posted it, I re-read it and realized it used language poorly. The evocative words in the post are:

  • popular
  • worry
  • just 36 seconds

As people read each word, they access the meaning of that word and any associated feelings unconsciously. What then comes to mind is a gestalt of those meanings and feelings. How’d I do?

  • popular – evokes ideas of something desirable
  • worry – evokes the sense that something’s wrong
  • just 36 seconds – implies that it’s fortunate that there’s not much of it

Once through the reflection process, it makes sense to ask what feelings I’d like to leave the reader with. Excitement, curiousity, and a desire to see the video would be a better frame of mind for the reader. Here’s my rewrite:

For those that missed it, here’s my popular ‘Modern Vacation’ video spot (the best 36 seconds you’ll have all day): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt0Bs0frEnM

Try reading both versions back-to-back and notice which images and feelings each one leaves you with. It’s subtle, but it has an impact. When you’re writing a longer piece of writing (like a podcast episode or an article), what you write will move people through a series of images and feelings. Think carefully about the sequence! The emotions you evoke may be positive (desire) or negative (fear), but if it’s negative, you probably want to lead somewhere else, like hope or resolution. The feelings people have when reading your material get connected to their concept of you. That’s called branding.

Go forth. Write with emotion. And make sure the emotions leave people in a good place. Giving people nice emotions is good for them, and you’ll find it’s good for you, as well.

Google, building better bosses. I doubt.

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In this New York Times article, the reporter explains how Google is using data to “build better bosses.” Their first amazing discovery: bosses are wanted not for technical skills, but for management skills. Wow. That’s an eye-opener. I’ll bet no one’s ever observed that before. Actually, last time I checked, companies often promote people to management based on technical skill, give them virtually no training, and then those managers do a piss-poor job. This has been going on for decades, and don’t think I’ve ever met an engineer over 25 who would find this surprising. Of course, I haven’t worked at Google.

Fortunately, they’ve now hired statisticians to analyze a gillion pages of interviews and measurements. What I love about statisticians is how they’re known for making keen, non-obvious observations and distinctions in human behavior, and measuring them. Excuse my incredulity, but … really? No sociologists? No psychologists? No cognitive behavior people? The human race knows an incredible amount about ways of understanding and measuring human behavior in data-driven, statistically significant ways.

Are Performance Evaluations Examples of Their Management Expertise?

By the way, Google has four performance evaluations a year. Frequent feedback, right? Maybe. There’s increasing evidence that performance evaluations serve almost no function except to stress out everyone involved. If an employee and their boss communicate well, there should be no surprises at such evaluations, rendering them unnecessary.

And if they really believe performance evaluations are valuable, do they bother to quality control them? Do they make sure that their managers are trained in an objective way of evaluating behavior? Performance evaluations are measurements, and the managers are the yardstick. Measuring something with a broken yardstick produces a meaningless measurement.

Are They Accounting for Cognitive Biases?

They go so far as to mention cognitive biases in the article but don’t seem to have considered whether or not there’s a halo effect in interviewing their employees about what makes a good manager. Perhaps if you ask someone what makes a good manager, they always give you the same answer, which would imply we have a built-in explanation that may or may not even relate to external reality. And if that’s so, turning a description like “listens well” into actual teachable behaviors is a trick in and of itself. (I’ll bet some of them don’t know how to rigorously realize that a phrase like “listens well” is too vague a concept to be teachable.)

Just look at the field of leadership research; pretty much every leadership book says the same thing about what makes a great leader. Yet with 80,000 leadership books on the market, we still suffer from a terrible lack of leaders. Maybe we’re wired to think about leadership in terms that aren’t specific-enough to be useful or are simply wrong. There’s ample evidence that people are extremely bad at predicting their own reactions. So asking someone “What kind of boss would be good?” may produce well-meaning but inaccurate answers.

I admire Google’s desire to be data-driven. And I also envy and admire their persistent desire to give their entire company the intellectual freedom and comfort of a college campus. Yay!! More companies should do this. (And more high tech companies have done it in the past, as long as they were pulling in the kind of gross margins Google pulls in. Most such companies abandon those cultural artifacts and revert to more traditional and soul-destroying modes when under economic pressure. I hope if it ever comes to that, Google has the fortitude to hold on!)

But at least as much as I love what I’ve heard about their culture, at least as reported in this Times article, their attempt to build a better boss is high on data manipulation and gathering, and very low on data quality.

Facebook’s new UI: Productive? Failure?

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There’s been much ado about Facebook’s new profile pages. Facebook noticed people like pictures. So they added lots of pictures, hoping of course to hijack our attention completely, while they slide ads into our peripheral vision. But just because it’s more compelling, does that mean the new interface will actually work? I think not.

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